The Usual Happy New Year

This evening, I do not want to speak to you, or

anyone. There is a year going by, and it

needs proper burial as it carries- so much

I would turn my back on- so many things

I would rather leave. Except- I cannot run

from this- not anymore than I can from any of

the obsessive silences, the near manic glare on the distance

as we drifted apart, two impossible islands.

Outside my window, there are people, bursting

fire crackers. The neighbor has checked to see I

am home- I am expected for dinner. Normal people, living

their lives. While I walk in the past. Lights drift

in and out of my dreams, and all I see is the darkness

between.

A new year looms on the horizon, menacingly

full of hope, welcomed by garish bright lights, while I-

just wish to forget. All the gifts this year brought me, I

wish I  had returned unopened.

Confessions of a coward

I am writing this finally because I read one more tweet about that Delhi gangrape case today (*and probably couldn't control my emotions...call it anger, call it resignation). I woke up in the morning and made the mistake of looking up my twitter feed and that news was up there, staring at me, tweeted by some media outlet.

I do not read the newspaper anymore. I do not have the courage to. I cannot bear most of the news that comes to us, these days.

I do not have the courage to read the newspapers because most of what I read before I stopped reading them told me that I was living in a country, in a world, even, that has far, far too many wrongs to be corrected. It was not a loss of faith. It was much worse. It was a loss of hope.

And even then, I get news. Through my twitter feed. On my email. Via messages. Conversations. A casual ‘what the fuck is going on in Haryana’ from a friend. I try to blot this all out. Because I know I cannot change that. I will not be able to. I will most probably not be able to try to.

Next time I am walking with a lady friend of mine, and I meet five, or even three or two, goons who attempt to whistle, cajole or otherwise ‘eve-tease’ her, my response will probably be to wrap my arms around her and walk faster, maybe dial 100 in the hope that the arriving protection will hurt us less than the oppressors. I do not know what I will do if matters become physical, if someone attempts to touch that friend of mine. I like to think that I will have the courage to man up, and that things will end up not too bad. But that is a kind of courage that is as yet untested.

And then, there is the other kind of courage. What will happen when I see that happening to someone I do not know? I would like to think that I would stand up for them as staunchly, and with as much conviction as I would for someone I would care about. But I am your normal, middle class man. I do not know if my courage will hold then. I do not know if I will have the guts to balance I everything I have in life at that moment, and have the guts to choose the right way ahead. I hope I will, but maybe I will not. It is a scary thought.

There is only one thing which I can be sure I can, and will do. Sometime in my future, I will have a kid. He or she will learn from me to respect others. To value the distance that needs to maintained, the respect that needs to be given, the dignity that needs to be accorded. The only thing I can ensure is that I will pass on to my next generation a courage which I will only know I possess when I have proven myself.

Till such time, I will just pray I have such courage in me.

*added later

Growing old. Together

‘I first  saw you in a painting- a profile, done with infinite delicacy, a light smile on your cheeks, your one visible eye coursing a thousand promises down the glow on your face. That was before I fell in love with you. And when, a thousand years later, you came into my life- I could give everything, then and now, books, music, the nights spent alone thinking, everything I cared for- to have you smile at me, once more. ‘

‘And we measured out life in tinkles of spoons on coffee cups, in early morning scrambles and exhausted kisses in the night. The sunlight passed us by, fluttering in other people’s hair, while our souls grew old. Tired embraces and late-night flights, snatches of conversation-poured into whiskey glasses, and toasted. Every year, same day, same time.’

‘How did this come to be? We did not fall behind, out of step. But did we lose each other somewhere? Do you remember the last time? When did we stop realizing? The touch of your hand, when did I stop feeling it?’

‘We remained in step with the world.’

‘We could have been the world.’

Notes of an uneasy tourist

This is, I don't know, the fourth or fifth day out here, on my vacation, and I am already sick of the almost forced need to be happy, to enjoy and to be seen to be enjoying the sun the sand the beaches the wind in your hair the water on your back, all seen by your eyes through the glasses of perception of your travelmates, almost like you are waiting for mother nature to sneak up and slap you on the back and go, in a broad, unidentifiable accent, 'chao, motherfucker!'

Walking through these touristy areas breathing in the sights and sounds of a culture put out on display aggressively assaulting your senses from everyside till you are overwhelmed, it is almost like you did not leave the sea when you came away in the morning- it is very much there all around you, raging, seething with a sub-surface anger that manifests itself in plaintive sing-song 'very good t-shirt sir! very chip!' and 'hello pliz comin' and 'lookin free' and so on and so forth.

Last night they were lighting candles and putting them in beautiful cardboard floats and sending them off in the water. Make a wish, stranger. Your deepest desire fulfilled for ten thousand dongs and served with a smile. 

What is it like to live in a city inhabited by tourists? To be the only permanent denizens of a place whose largest population is comprised of transients? How does it feel like to be in a place seeped with hundreds of years of history where ironically the longest attention span is not even three hundred seconds and each building is more years older than that? Does it make *you* feel like you are history now, friend, left behind by a world which has not time for you, which is only willing to grant you thrity seconds of attention before the next shop, the next float, the next chinese lantern, the next ancient temple grabs its attention; and to be subjected to this day over day over month over year, a hundred times a day, way too many times a lifetime?

##############

The advent of the digital camera has turned us all into assassins, armed with our point and shoot-ers, we look at the world through the eyes of carl zeiss and pointing our guns with reckless abandon, impale memories with fingerstabs for harpoons. A million five second memories saved on a thumbdrive, shared and deleted when they become irrelevant. We don't save memories in photographs anymore, 4608 x 3456 pixels, somehow seem wanting when given the task of recreating a history, at least in those aspects of history that are not seen but felt, allowed to suffuse to the soul via fingertips. And we have lost that sense of creating history...we assasinate places we go to, people we are with, the food we eat...and we bring back scalps. A life of been there, done that, got the t-shirt to show for it moments.

Some cultures held the superstition that allowing your photograph to be taken, you ran the risk of letting a piece of your soul be captured. I wonder what they would think about it today, of the very soullessness of what we have reduced the exercise to.

###############

I want.

A better computer.

More holidays.

Infinite supplies of beer.

More books.

Friends.

Liver failure.

World peace.

Individual peace.

To write a novel.

And a book of poetry.

Hallucinations.

More sleep.

In no particular order.

##############

I have spent five days now in this country, visited 4 cities, eaten more sea food than I could ever have imagined myself eating, taken off my vest in front of more than a hundred people, spent more time in choppy seas and drunk more sea water than is good for one person (choppy seas would be mildly active seas to those of you who swim, to those who don't, like me, well...waves taller than oneself twenty feet away from shore qualifies as choppy), been accosted for 'massages' thrice and once come to the attention of a group of particularly toughlooking  vietnamese youths drinking in a store who, by the looks they gave me, might have been contemplating beating the living daylights out of me or merely serving me my cigarettes, either of which going by what I have seen of this country would probably have been served with a polite nod of the head and a cheerful 'hello! Looking free, very chip, you like you open heart, no like no pressure' accompanied by the ubiquitous smile (In the event, I got my cigarettes, served to me by a exceedingly pretty, almost fragile young woman with a little finger swathed in bandages who only charged me 10000 dongs extra, which considering the time of the night, and the kind of muscle she had for backup, was pretty cheap, I guess).

#############

And then there was a town of casinos that outlaw all stages of the human condition except happiness or pretend happiness, brick and mortar and steel and shiny glass edifices to forgetting. A town where the second taxi driver I met told me stories of parents who forgot their infants in taxis and then spent hours trying to locate them. Sometimes, this world makes a mockery of urban legends.