She whispered in her favourite stuffed bear’s ear, as another drop touched her eyelashes and trickled down her cheek. The storm had sobered only an hour ago and left its thinning tributaries spilling off the potholed path downhill. The last of rain drops came slowly and fell heavily, like hailstones. She would loosen her arms around the decaying pillar in the portico everytime she saw one coming, swing her body skywards and shut her eyes just in time for the drop to fall exactly on her lashes and giggle forever; bobbing her face from side to side to dry her nose and wait for the next one.
By thirty one, the gentle mumbling came closer. She recognized this kind of chanting. She had heard it often in the valley but for some reason couldn’t place it today. The blur of white heading towards their hut made her heart thump. She felt an eerie sensation in her body every ten seconds and it became incredibly heavy to bear as the blur of white was of people she kept photographs of.
They were 7 of them, or atleast she could only count so many from the distance.
She thought she recognized a pallid, frail man.
It was her father.
But she felt like she didn’t know him.
This man was so sad. She had not seen her father this pale or weak ever. Or this sad.
Everyone had familiar faces, the aged man from the grocery shop, the boy with the broken cycle, the old lady who knit sweaters all day and many others who looked so sad, she couldn’t place them.
They kept a white colour lump on the ground in the inner courtyard.
Her eyes were calculating the stark contrast between the red oxide flooring and the white of the sheets as she ran in after them.
She had just noticed some dull, maroonish spots on the white cloth when she felt a hot wetness on her scalp.
It was the lady from the last house in their row, standing over her head.
It is such a strange day, the little girl wondered.
The lady never seemed to like her, always mean and angry. She remembered her threats of beating the kids up with a bamboo stick if they should steal from her peach plantations.
She must have come to show her father how they made her cry so he would punish her.
She quickly ran to her father and clutched his left leg tight and looked at him with endearing eyes to convince him of her goodness.
But she realized he could barely see her through the blur of tears in his eyes. Now she was convinced it wasn’t the mean lady. He sat besides her, his face a miserable show of pain and vulnerability, very unlike his usual self. She felt dampness down her cheeks too now. He held her so tight it scared her more than it hurt. His touch spoke for his helplessness. Like he wanted her to do something about whatever was making him so naïve with his emotions.
The mumbling started again. This time all of them hovered over the white lump like bees over fresh honey.
Her father just sat there, not even trying to make an effort to stand or move, as if he wished everything around him would turn still as he were and stay so till he would turn stone.
She gently drew her fingers from his moist palms trying not to upset his thoughts or bearing.
A man draped in a saffron cloth with a numb, impassive demeanor slowly pulled the sheet off. He was deliberately slow, as if the pace would keep the misfortune from happening.
When he pulled it off the crying became unbearably loud, making it impossible for her to take it in.
And when she looked at the face of the body it contained, she felt a strange tugging in her stomach, like a hard kick making her intestines churn.
It was the first face she had ever seen and the sweetest she had ever known since.
Those eyes were shut now, they used to be so big and round and bright.
She touched her fair cheeks, drained of their natural pink.
She had always wanted to be as pretty as her and if someone would tell her she looked just like her mother; it would make her very happy.
She wished her mother would get up kiss her. Surely she was allowed to wake up for her daughter and kiss her on the nose. And then they would later laugh on how scared everyone was and tease her father of being so timid.
They said the riots got worse. She was in the market place in Tehat buying some bread when the militants gunned down seven people, including her mother in a misfire. The bullets pierced through her neck and chest but noone would come out and help in fear of getting killed. When an old sweetmeat vendor carted the street hours later and found her body, her heart had stopped beating.
They asked her to be a brave girl and not cry even thought she wasn’t. Maybe they wanted her to.
They said her mother was in a land of flowers and snow, living with the angels of the moon.
That she was happy and at peace. Happier than she would’ve ever been here.
It made her sad. She though her mother was happiest when she saw her face every morning.
She didn’t know a happier place existed.
She didn’t understand. She had come to this world from her, after her. They were tied together when she was born. So when they cut the ties, did it mean that her mother was free to go?
How could she go anywhere without her? Especially to a better place? And how could she be happy when it made her sad and her father so unhappy that he cried infront of everyone?
Did this mean she didn’t love them and only loved the angels?
They only caressed her and hugged her in answer. Maybe they never got to ask their mothers either..
Noone ever told her what she was to do if something like this happened. Maybe it didn’t come from experience.
She wanted to go back to counting the drops but the rains had since stopped and the clouds fought and bellowed angrily. She quietly stood up, straightened her frock, walked out of the courtyard and sat by the decaying pillar in the portico with her favourite stuffed bear begging him to not start crying or she would too.
So I surrender, gift you my absence and grant you utter possession of my soul and my living.
I visited that place of death.
It was dark as used to be.
I however didn’t feel the rush this time. ofcourse.
Your make-believe audience were present. They say they grieve for you almost as much too.
The hunching palm trees, remember them ghostly ones? The rustle of them still chill my bones as I take it for your muted footsteps like i did always.
As I nervously laugh now on reminiscence of how much you hated my ubiquitous impulse of a morbid end, I quite contemplate it again standing here by the edge, at my toes.
An arrogantly unceremonious end, I grasp. I stop.
I almost foresee déjà vu; only it is too late for a cliché even.
I see the same galaxy, it’s brighter and the elapsed gaiety warms my heart.
My frail limbs resurrect that time of simultaneous weekdays and perennially broken weekends of forging passion over the coarse, fragmented limestone walls.
It is almost as beautiful as you; the melancholy.
It’s spiteful and solemn. oh, and how.
I plead without no nobility whatsoever now, to end this tempest.
But for the cold-blooded sadist.
Didn’t I always tell you so?
It cast a ghastly shadow of the mortal shape in which death hovered over in deliberate circles.
I was joyous; the thespian slave that I was to succumb to your myth.
So I touched those limestone walls again. To crumble and surrender and overwhelm my spirit like you did.
I desire the feel of the smooth of your skin against mine.
I hunger for the feel of the hollows of your stomach firmly against mine.
I wish for the sickly sweet smell of your breath in mine to linger in me for until the last dawn I see.
I weep beyond coherent reasoning.
Through the length of that ominous space, my vision narrows flinching only to conjure a human figure over that washed out white doors.
I thrust my face now like you did, towards the beckoning melody of the twilight.
Poetic almost, it rhymed like clockwork; your parallel universe crowding mine.
A spiteful piece of art.
Perverse.
Cynical.
Eccentric.
Only this time it is a moral eulogy.
Because the death is of the immortal in me.
For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.
All writers who have devoted their lives to their work know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places. It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world.
The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live in. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
-
ORHAN PAMUK.
For and from the man whose words move me.
They are to me the same as they have been always for you.
and someday we shall meet.
On one of them rare idle Sundays of mine, [yes, I flatter myself.] I give myself some profound Einstein like moments. [And no, I also have no idea what that's to mean.]
Today’s special incidentally happens to be my Grey cell’s pet too!
WRITING.
So this post is written to ponder over why I write so pitifully less often.
Did I mention I adore alliteration?
Anyhow!
Cerebrum mumbles once in a while of the injustice done by letting it idle around. I console it by saying Paris Hilton is geographically and technically space, and it unfortunately takes an ass-whipping lot to reach where her non-existing [tee hee]ones have.
Cerebrum does a happy dance with pelvic-thrust and everything.
Microsoft word is an evil thing people. Everytime I click it smiles wickedly as if saying, ‘oooh. Trying to write bighead? We’ll see who goes beyond the third paragraph this time!’
Bitch it is people, swear to blog!
swear to blog!
Cerebrum. Munchkins. Come back to amma NOW!
Okay? Okay.
So slowly even as this demented thing goes on, I realize; despite my craving to translate just about everything in my head to words, to give every thought a living form that exposes calculated bits of my soul to people I want to reach out to, I feel a violent urge to withdraw and let them thoughts safely sober out right where they originate from.
Ambiguity being my primal OCD, it clings to my skull with an Edward like precision.
Edward scissorhands I mean.
[HA! Got you, you gay twilight bitches =] ]
Of the plethora of excuses I procrastinate with, my craving for perfection to the extent of killing what I create if I hunch a negative premonition stands out.
Did i also mention I don’t quite comprehend tautology?
Anyway, don’t get me wrong there, I aint subtly hinting the thing you are by now mutely smirking about. [But if YOU think so, I’d humbly agree :)]
All I emphasize on is the degree of my self-destruction. I mean, do you see it you lovely people, do you?
I am a damned one trick pony and take no joy in it and yet have the cheek to indulge in such extravagance. The nerve of me I say!
My very need for perfection in everything I write is such that I’d rather curb my sole reason for living than to do so for the love of it.
Passion I tell you is a gay bitch.
It laughs gaily at you everytime you try to kill it, it smirks Al pacino:God-father like and seduces you George Clooney like.
It surpasses love, logic, success and ambition. It defies your rationale, your chain of thought and karma.
It haunts you with a maniacal speed, it makes you jealous of all them smart butts who write without having to worry, to analyze and think and then re-think once more of how it will be perceived, whether it will be taken how you want it to be, if the concluding line will deliver the punch it is supposed to, will pun and sarcasm EVER register, will drawn out and complicated sentences ever be conventional, will this fashion of writing for once not seem vague?!
So you get the point readers.
Then there are those dark times when I fancy surrendering my soul to them science leeches and safely and endlessly mumble to my chi of how hopelessly lame people who think they can make a ‘flat in Bandra-something beyond a TATA nano- pet Yorkshire called barood’ delusion come true before ‘botox-savings piggy bank’ has to be broken into are. [see what I mean by drawn-out?]
But when the social order demands a degree-attained existence one does not question righteousness, one just shuts one’s trap and photocopies in advance for the next semester.
So such you see birdies is my twisted, oh-so-melodramatic opera-like musical. *loud sigh*
Cerebrum threatens to quit unless mushy names are stopped NOW.
