Saturday, December 3, 2016

YONDER - A (short) short story

Since he came to know he was soon going to become a father, his only hope was for his child to have the gift of sight.
Blindness had engulfed him from his 11th year. It had confused him if he ought to be happy that he had at least some memories of sight to fall back on, or feel frustrated that a rude joke had been played on him. It wasn’t frustration at not being able to see anymore, but frustration at knowing how it was impossible to see any more, any further. Now, as he listened to his child's heartbeat as he placed his palm o the womb, all his frustrations from his life metamorphosed into helpless pleads, a helpless begging for his yet unborn child.
But months later, the day he held her tiny form in his hands and was assured that she could definitely see him and was probably forming her first memories and sensations of her father, his deepening sorrow knew no bounds.

He realized he had absolutely no control over what he wanted her to see in him.
In between clenched sobs, he secretly wondered if he could lead her to see into him too one day.

 His fears were very soon assuaged, though.
A few days before her eighth birthday, she complained to him that she got really tired of looking at the same patterns on her bedspread that stared dully at her every night, and asked for plain white spreads as a birthday gift. And within weeks after receiving it, she began telling him about the amazing images with exotic stories that were born on the white every night.
She told him how she could see into the white, and it had blood in multiple hues.
She enjoyed cutting through the reflections. Through the obvious into the myriad.
That night, as he lay patting her head, he knew that his prayers had been answered, perhaps a bit too generously.
He felt a throbbing sadness for her and her life; for she could see beyond the white but not the white itself. And because she could see more, she would, for the world which reveled in repetitive patters, remain utterly blind.
Just like him.



Sunday, September 11, 2016

Winter Past

Footsteps.

Fog steps.

Fog. Steps

in, leaving behind its tangible, melting

coat. Voices all muffled,

scuffle amidst the fireplaces.

Gently. And
outside,

the bloodless, dense limb wraps

the grey city of doll houses;

squeezing it, caressing its

green pools of hazels and birch.

Crumbling crusts of brown sticking out

like tongues mocking at the absence of

snow. It is quiet. Still. Till someone,

inside,

sips, in the middle of their hot

supper, its frosty fingers sunk somewhere

in their murky soup.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Paper People teach us what Art can achieve

Carving cities in your flesh, skins tickling your mind;
Their lives but leaves of apparition in an erudite rain.


They are monochrome people, who live in a flat world of white paper and black ink. We all know them, each of us in a different way.
But their weight is either heavily light, or lightly heavy.

And they are, for me, one of the best parts of Literature.
The first is, of course, the extraordinary beauty of the syncopation of words, of the power of the tiniest sentence to evoke the most striking images. And then is this - this whole plethora of people that come out of these spaces and times within the lines, and soak into your life as if their presence has always been there, albeit invisibly.

They haunt you, they soothe you, they comfort you and inspire you, they lead you towards and unexpected catharsis. What makes them extremely relatable is, on one side, the expertness of the writer with his art, and on the other, more importantly, the subconscious awareness that they are not entirely fictional. They would have stemmed from some experience of the writer, some experience of another living being just like us who has metamorphosed them into paper people. It is this sublime comfort that even our deepest experiences, sorrows and joys have all been experienced by others, in different levels and intensities that lingers with us. They are an ambiguous hint that all human experience is shared experience, just not shared at the same time and same place together.

And that, to me , is one of the greatest achievements of art - to bind humanity in an invisible thread of awareness of each other and of themselves, and bring in a sense of solidarity on the subconscious level.


Sunday, January 3, 2016

Bhutan - A Picture Diary

What better way to bring in the new year than with travel and dance. Here's the photo story of my new year trip to Bhutan.
HELLO 2016!!!













UNSUPERVISED Thoughts #4

Sometimes I wished I was writing fiction; but my metaphorical voyage through an unseen (but deeply felt) history and an impregnable fut...