Postcards From Paranoia

Erase and Rewind

2010-10-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It is by most standards a decent house: two rooms, a dining hall and a kitchen. In buildings just like this, even just next to this, lives are lived. The scene could easily have been one of children cramming for exams on desks placed under tubelights against the cream coloured walls. It could have been one of office goers jerking awake at daybreak, shaving cleanly, suiting up and soldiering off to work.

Instead it is a showcase of both the building blocks and aftermath of one boy’s blue state of mind. The boy has decided to furnish only one of the two rooms, that too with as little standard issue furniture (a double bed, a shelf, a single sofa and a dresser) as is needed. The walls are bare, but a decorative wall hanging lies in a plastic bag in the corner, unopened since the day it was bought. In another corner stands one of those ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters – conceived but never released by the British to keep spirits up in case the Nazis won and were overrunning England. He had never mustered up the vigor to nail either up.

There are stray unread newspapers all over the place – most have on average one article he believed useful and worth re-reading, something hardly ever done. And then those hoards of books – purchased with such life-changing good intention, and neutered into space-occupying jetsam by bouts of inertia and emptiness – the Gita, Being Your Own Mentor, You can beat Depression, medical textbooks (these had had belief most completely given up on them), paperback fiction, correspondence material…..and a television – ketamine for the life-force – there were days on which he what can only be called numbed himself in front of it for as long as 6 hours. Coming linearly at him in the dark, television’s cathode ray tunnel turned into an audio-visual cove within which he would hide, it’s walls supporting the life he became too hollow to keep propped up.

I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.

Robert Browning. Paracelsus, pt. 5.

And yet … it moves.

Galileo Galilei

But we begin again. Another start after another sputter. One more attempt to clamber up the sides of the next crest, with the hungry hoping that the next time the ground collapses into a trough is at least further away and the pit shallower.

Self-pity can be comforting for only so long. By design, even the most dismembered of minds and the most broken of personas refuse to marinate in gloom beyond a point.

But first there is the denial. You forage for easily-made tools like retreat, and even fashion facades to hide your handicap. Perhaps you hide an accent, feign seriousness or humour, or lie about a make believe focus and imaginary insurmountable obstacles. Maybe you pretend just not to have time from work you have little vocation and even less ability for. When actually it is perhaps just like that line diagram of molecules crashing against the walls of a closed chamber – when your ability to feel becomes this rigid and cold, the more people try to cram inside the chamber of your life, the more the pressure builds. It becomes just that much harder to breathe. To exist. All the while there’s white flags all around you.

And then, utterly sick of all things white and pitiable, you start to want to clamber out again, punching wildly and blindly at something unseen but which you can tell by the resistance against your knuckles is definitely there. There are shards which you can use to build better tools with – you turn to things - medication, information, but most of all a fear of utter devastation. Today is the day you start once again. Frustrating true, but invigorating also.

At any given time, there are over 10 million depressed young people in India. Today is one such day for one of them.

He has now been on the medication for 12 days. Clearly something has begun to change, for the paralyzing weakness that turned waking up every morning into an ordeal is waning – not gone but waning. It is still hard, but he removes the blanket he has been shrouding under.

It is 7:20. For the first time in over 3 months, he will get to work on time today.

The Revolution of the Mayfly

2010-02-19T08:01:00.000-08:00

The Mayfly’s Revolution

Mayflies are insects which belong to the Order Ephemeroptera (from the Greek ephemeros = "short-lived", pteron = "wing", referring to the short life span of adults). – Wikipedia

I steadily crawl towards my destination – a place that levitates over the ‘X’ marking the middle of nothingness. My arrival there shall transform me into that mythical creature – the average Indian.

My efforts to get there have been persistent and focused – I have played cricket on the streets in a statewide bandh, I have stubbornly allowed someone else to go vote in my place ever since I’d been eligible, and I have bought the token Che Guevara bandana and worn it on Sunday mornings.

But in comparison to what I was to be party to on the 15th of December, these efforts now seem limp and meaningless. What took place was not planned, making it far more real, more unsettlingly visceral. It was no dog being wagged on a television screen. It was a scene played out in flesh, blood, fire and bamboo. On this day, I was to witness my first effigy immolation.

It was, fittingly in Bengal - the cradle of our independence, where this nation of mine planned its first hesitant steps after deciding to learn how to stand.

“West Bengal is the obvious place to start an Indian Revolution. During the independence movement, Bengal was the only state where the British faced a serious threat from terrorism” – Mark Tulley, No Full Stops in India

I had gone shopping for jeans. I stood at one end of the Alaknanda bridge, waiting for a ride back to the hostel. And then I saw them – fifty of the nation’s best and brightest, assembling the other end like lemmings who’d been read the Manifesto. On the surface, they were like me – my age, mostly students just as I was. Yet they were in truth so different – though we breathed in the same air, when it sieved through their fiber, it emerged changed, redolent of insurrection. When they walked, it was with a bellicose purpose alien to most; they dragged the future and dreams and revolution along with them. I was not like them. I was, like most of us, a pye-dog tagging alongside some such imposing army or the other, hoping to live off whatever scraps of reform and resurrection they’d throw my way.

The clubs with which these boys were to attack our collective lassitude arrived in the back of an auto-rickshaw, driven by a visibly proud, fat hairy man. To my delight, and further self-belittlement, I saw these young torchbearers turn those clubs into actual torches. An presumably important and extremely busy looking man with a goiter and a Gandhi cap set them alight. So were the birthday candles with which our tomorrows would finally be illuminated in firelight and seen clearly lit. But the cake hadn’t been iced yet.

Nay, the hyperbolic, hollow climax of this act of existential fisting arrived in the back of an auto-rickshaw all its own. Greeted with an unlikely mix of reverence and hatred, the idol that would serve as the epicenter of this storm of insurrection was led in – It was a bamboo cross dressed in an impeccably white, crisp Kurta. A lime-slaked water pot had been planted on top as its head, and someone who’s true calling clearly lay not in art, had adorned the pot’s face with a nose, a pair of spectacles and a squint. I presumed the disfigurement was deliberate.

The figurine was poignantly surreal, an unsettling statue fashioned from everything hideous, confusing, counterfeit, and worth renouncing about our past. It could have just stood there cross-eyed, and looked empty and positively stupid. But instead it reared and spat and frothed at the mouth. It pointed invisible incriminating fingers at me. It burned through the back of my skull with its imaginary fiery glare. It blasted bullet-holes in my being with unheard questions and belittling assertions.

By now, the pick of this pantheon of our nation’s finest held the effigy aloft, and was leading his tribe on an angry march down the city’s busiest road. They roared slogans which reinstated their own faith in their fire - slogans about violent change, about fiercely free ideas which had to be planted in the warm loam that lay in young skulls all over the country. This was what the freedom struggle must’ve been like. I felt so small, so unimportant, like so much of a dodger.

They finally reached the main crossroad, and after having halted oncoming traffic from all sides, hammered through the asphalt and made a hole in the road. The effigy was made to stand erect there, its base in the hole. A speech was made in Bengali on the stage that had been waiting for them there, but clearly no-one was listening. They didn’t need to. These words were already etched onto the insides of their hearts and souls. They craved to burn!burn!burn!

The moment that the mic clicked off was a catharsis. Skinny brown Bengali boys exploded towards the mannequin, quibbling amongst each other like freshly spawned fry, vying to be the ones who’s cigarette lighters would set it on fire. There was no music. But as the fire grew, they began to dance, twitching their arms and legs to a rhythmic, primal howling.

My pulse timed itself to their rhythm. My feet quivered and strained at mental chains. The sweat that beaded out of me would lubricate the passageway of my breakthrough – I had to be a part of this. I couldn’t hold back. I leapt towards them. Towards their fire.

My cocoon had cracked. I was in the revolution; I was part of the solution. I had ended the old life.

And then I saw the placard around its neck – it bore the name of the Chief Minister of Bengal. All around me were flags of a political party, and most of the slogans bayed for someone or the other’s death. Something inside me deflated. I wasn’t in a dancing mood anymore.

My revolution had molted and was now dead.

The lifespan of an adult mayfly can vary from just 30 minutes to one day depending on the species – Wikipedia

Woman's Day

2009-04-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

It is woman’s day. And she is just next to me on the bed, moaning, panting, squealing, and every two minutes or so writhing wildly in the explosion and the aftershocks of the tempest raging in her loins. Her spine arches, her eyelids coil tightly shut and she bites her lip to bleeding to keep from physically shouting. As she twitches about, her hands primally grasp at anything within reach, hoping to traffic out some of this surfeit of sensation her frail body is finding impossible to contain. Sometimes it is the metal railing of the bed. Sometimes it is the cheap cotton sheet on the mattress. Sometimes it is my hand as I touch her abdomen or take her pulse.

For over four years, Sunita has been trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child. Being punched below the navel by her drunk husband some 30 minutes ago is the price she pays for her failure.

“Pehle kabhi maara hai tujhe?” (“Has he ever hit you before?”)

The first time, she doesn’t answer, she only looks away instead. I ask again.

This time round, she nods. Though definitely a more grevious one, today is clearly one of many tipping points on the couple’s mad dash for parenthood. So too say old burn scars on her forearm and a denting of her left cheekbone.

Things today don’t look too good.

For one there’s these spasms, and her abdomen is beginning to bloat. Most ominously, a stethoscope put next to her navel doesn’t send back any of the normal gurgling sounds her gut should be making.

There is only a hollow silence.

That one drunken punch may well have punctured her intestine.

As we loaded her onto the ambulance to get an Xray of her abdomen done, her story heresays itself in my head, and in doing so answers the question as to why she’s still in this marriage.
A Nepali girl who’s parents were dead by age 13, illiterate, relatively pretty and so prone to predation, is the most completely alone creature conceivable. So even an Assamese boy who gets drunk and hits her every fifth day is family enough.

It is perhaps why she is so desperate to have a child – to believe in being enough of a person for someone to need her, instead of her having to always need this excuse for a someone. She is rendered so afraid by the thought of this reversal of need never coming about.

Her XRay arrives and I know what I’m hoping isn’t on it – a sliver of black right below the line of her diaphragm signifying the air that has gushed into the abdomen through a hole in her gut, and which will force us to slit her open from her sternum to her pubis and seal it up.

It isn’t. But she still quivers and cries. Being hit by the man she looked to for everything as punishment for not bearing him a child had to hurt infinitely more than a perforated gut.
It probably would be frowned upon but I hold her hand as she weeps.

Once

2009-02-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

‘What were you thinking?’ she asked, very low.
‘I was thinking, all you want, you get.’
‘In what way?’
‘In love.’
‘And what do I want?’
‘Sensation.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’
She sat with her head drooped down.
…
…
‘Why do you say I only want sensation?’ she asked quietly.
‘Because it’s all you’ll take from a man. – You won’t have a cigarette?’
‘No thanks – and what else could I take - ?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ I replied.
Still she picked pensively at her chemise string.
‘Up to now, you’ve missed nothing – you haven’t felt the lack of anything – in love,’ I said.
She waited a while.
‘Oh yes, I have,’ she said gravely.
Hearing her say it, my heart stood still.

- Once, DH Lawrence

Ends aren’t born in violent hurricaneranas of hate. They need much quieter, more coldly tranquil places to spawn. Endings lay their eggs when people aren’t looking in lulls where people aren’t talking. They grow and gain strength in the open spaces of emptinesses left behind when someone pretends to but really isn’t there anymore.

Endings are of the hyena ilk – ravenous eaters, but crippled failed hunters. In their lameness, they have to feed on bruised and hurt egos, old teethless bitterness and juvenile, childish refusals to make things better.

But when an ending corners you, there is no escape. Your demise is telling, total and brutal. There will first be blood. Then an aching so acute your bones will near break. But last to transpire, and leaving you worst off, will be the slaughtering in future tense. A butchering of belief.. Belief in everything, in hope, in tomorrow, in anything, in anyone.

That said, for all their frightening ugliness, endings are frail, fearful things. Taken that though limp, they cannot be run from. But though armed, they can be beaten. Fire, less for its flames and more for its warmth scares them. They scamper away yelping if the courage to try and build a fire is conjured. Early on, an ending keeps marauding about, hoping for a window of surrender to reopen through which to weasel back in. But if none is found, eventually it gives up. And you are at last safe.

There is no spectacle near as rejuvenating as the depressed flight of a defeated end.

spirit bandaging

2009-02-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

Sunday - In the morning you decide to rodent around GMCH’s cardiology department, hoping to scavenge on some scrap of hope. You shamelessly pounce on an affable cardiac surgeon taking a round. The gent is nice enough to give you some of his time. The gist of things as they stand are this – there is no OPD on Monday or Tuesday as all the doctors are on leave. The nearest is Wednesday. You will have to come back on Wednesday, meet a cardiologist, then a cardiac surgeon, and then the hospital’s superintendent. Then at least you will know how much cash you have to arrange for. But that is Wednesday. This is Sunday morning. You are going to have to leave for now. But you know you’ll be back soon, for something’s being left undone is a calling card like no other.

On the ride back, you can’t stop peering back into the back of the truck to look at Maya and her husband. She talks with amazing, theatrical hand movements, as if always describing something big and wondrous. Her husband listens in rapt attention, as if proud of his wife’s cuteness. At times he sits down at her knee. Other times he sits on the bench and she rests her head on his lap. When we pick up yet another patient who’s had a rod removed from a fractured femur, they sit close together, their heads so very near as if sharing some secret joke. You could watch the two of them for hours on end. It’s one of the most ethereal sights possible – two people collectively disentangling and then demolishing the confusion most of us accuse life of, and just being .

You’re already fervidly scheming of how to get her new heart valves. If she dies, you almost believe you will too. She catches you watching through the glass, blushes, giggles, points it out to her husband and the three of you beam teeth at each other.

Rage

2009-02-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

Saturday evening - The day culminates as a casserole of anger, hunger, frustration and fuck ups. It’s one of those days, as if you’re cursed with some mutant Midas touch, turning everything you lay eyes on and you experience into something worthy of contempt. Everything.

You hate your nursing assistant for being an ass and claiming to have said people have refused Maya any assistance at GMCH. You hate yourself for having taken his word. You hate the private Cardiologist you went to visit at a hospital that’s listed with the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. He charged you Rs750 to sit your ass down on a chair for 4 hours and in the end tell you something you already knew (i.e. that the porcelain doll Nepali girl needs both valves in her heart replaced) and to hand you a certificate worth it’s weight in rabbit droppings. You hate yourself for not have seen it coming. The marble flooring and the airconditioning should’ve given it away. You hate knowing that a familiar self-loathing guilt germinating within you shall soon force you to pay Maya’s husband the money.

You both somehow hate and are relieved that you were proved wrong by an echocardiogram done on Bimla Maya. It is completely normal. She is fine and now can’t wipe a smile off her face. It’s amazing what 800mL of blood this way or that can do to the man.
But that you’ve basically served as an tool in GNRC ripping off Maya Tamang defiles this little victory completely. The meltdown is final and flawless. By the end of the walk out to the car park, you’re so livid you can’t even swallow your own spittle. Liquid lead.

There is no justification. I am down. Come and kick me.

Oh Guwahati!

2009-02-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

And then there’s Bimla Maya. Yet another beaming, pristine, skin-porcelain-clean Nepali lass of 21 who came to you as the week’s second wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap. Swollen legs, gasping crackling lungs, the works. Her problems amplified by her having a haemoglobin count of 3, roughly a quarter of the norm. Two blood transfusions later, she is in a state fit to move. In the shorter scheme of things, moved to Guwahati. In the larger sense, you wonder towards what and where…..

Friday evening - Unlike most government hospitals, Guwahati Medical College Hospital (GMCH) does not wear it’s squalor like a badge or brandish it like a crutch to prop up a plea of pity. Considering that it is the end point of all of the NorthEast’s ill, it is acceptably clean. Another laborour we’d gotten admitted here for a prolapsed vertebral disc lies on a shared bed with his attender (just because the frugality isn’t advertised doesn’t mean it isn’t there).A case in point is that there is no anaesthesiologist. The only surgeries being done are emergencies. You’re told to take him back and bring him in March. So be it.

The other crusade commences tomorrow.

....without a clue

2009-01-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

And so off to Guwahati – faraway city of Kamakhya and Cardiologists. Maya Tamang is a 20 year old laborer who’s heart bacteria have turned into a leaky plastic bag-esque blood pumper, which regurgitates half the load it should be forcing through her 5-foot frame.
Save the decaying valve, she’s like any of the button-pretty Nepali girls from around these parts.
Her husband’s brought around a thousand rupees for the trip. That and the BPL (below poverty line) card we’d gotten made should see us through. We hope.
The doctor I’m supposed to meet could not be contacted on phone. Network in Tenga is an utter and final bitch. An apocryphal practioner has already written Maya off. It’s something you just refuse to believe. Her love story’s something you choose to instead – married to a boy from the basti who used to walk her to school, at 17. Proud mother at 20. Wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap at 20 and 2 months.
Stubbornness is a gift. You have a lot of hope. You just have no clue. We leave at 0730……
At the back of your mind you wonder why you're so desperate to see this through. Considering you go about saying you hate the line of work.

Resuscitation

2009-01-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

Kuch nahi samjha o buddhu
Kuch nahi socha
Reng ke (rail se) jaane kahan pahucha
- Ringa Ringa, Slumdog Millionaire

It was one of the few times there was a real sign of things being right. For sieved through gathering fog, the dying light of dusk showed her then and there for all she was – the single most beautiful girl in the world.

He was almost grateful for the hint of mud on her sneakers. It made her believable. Otherwise, the way her gloved hands tucked in her pockets, how some of her wispy hair peeked out from under the cap, that her lips, bodily curtains to the most spectacular smile ever up on show half-smiled, and her lively gear-shifting eyes were for now placidly parked in neutral, it all came together and made everything as it had always been. Perfect.

But a vague decoct of the past four months held him back from just plain grabbing her and making her disappear in his arms the way he used to. To fill the void in his core wholly and exactly with her being. It was perhaps the only perfect fit he knew of. He couldn’t do it. And there was this cacophony in his head. So many voices in so many tenses speaking together so loudly in such resonance, that they all cancelled each other out and came to nothing. He could not speak.

“Hi”. She stuck out a right hand.
It half crushed him that this was for now the fitting form of greeting.

But as he took it and held it, even through the wool, every fiber of him knew. The mime had fallen for the maiden all over again.

(Contd)

Leukemia 101

2009-01-27T07:59:00.000-08:00

Even at that young an age, I could tell there was something different about Christopher – the way his friendly eyes bugled out a little and made him seem almost goldfishesque, how his hairline started near the middle of his skull, how his skin was the colour milk. He seemed so easily breakable. Every other week or so, he’d disappear from school, and when his mother would bring him back, he’d be looking either sicker or skinnier, usually both.

In my case, like with most things, school was yet another failure at adjustment. Education, a uniform, waking up in the morning, the presence of female creatures and how Day 1 started with Dad running away as I wailed to be set free, all added up to a place I hated.

Christopher was the first friend I made. There was no formal introduction. He was sitting next to the bookshelf alone, drawing. All I did was to go and sit down next to him. Thus was forged the arcane bond between 4 year olds, which operates above things like introductions. The company balmed some of my misery and I hope eased some of his lonliness. We’d spend hours gradually filling up drawing sheets with armies of faceless stick-men waging wars, all drawn in lead pencil. No red meaning no blood, no one died. When the bell rang, our soldiers all packed up and went home; to come back tomorrow to leap out of shoebox-shaped aeroplanes and fire rat-dropping shaped bullets at each other.

Eventually, as we got to know each other better our parents began letting us visit some afternoons. Christopher’s house was breathtakingly beautiful, going there was an excursion. Built by the East India Company when the whole island of Penang was leased to them in the 1800s, it was a sprawling stilt-striding tropical vision in wood. The company his father worked for had provided it. To add to the allure, Christopher had a Labrador they’d named Ruth. Supposedly a pet, surreptitiously an alarm to let his parents know that he had collapsed on the ground once again.

I was lucky enough to never see him blackout, or as I later learned from medical textbooks, to see him squirm with fevers, fail to urinate or develop fungal infections on the roof of his mouth.

Most of these visits kicked off with the two of us being made to finish our homework by the host’s parents. Once that was out of the way, we launched into another session of artwork in unsullied lead, ignoring the crayons and colouring pencils that would have been laid out for us. After a bloodless blitzkrieg, we’d be served up a snack. At my house, the menu was mostly chocolate milk and some crunchy peanut-butter sandwiches. Christopher’s mother liked to bake. She’d often make cupcakes, and serve them with Kool-Aid relatives sent back from England.

By now, the afternoon’s heat would have simmered down some, and we would be allowed to take things outside into the large garden. The Labrador had to tag along, and Chris’ mother usually sat in the porch watching us. Somedays, we played penalty-shootout football, Christopher a shape-shifting embodiment of one of the scores of English footballers whose names he rattled off and became. Me week-in-and-week-out being the only footballer I knew: Diego Maradonna. Other days we just cavaliered about hunting for caterpillars, centipedes and their ilk to bring back to class in glass jars as trophies. Ironically, Christopher’s favorite game was one he probably would never have been able to play – he was happiest watching the three-second flight of a rugby ball from my hands to his.

An hour of running about posing as footballers in Malaysia’s sauna-humidity left us both completely drenched in sweat. We’d then be made to bathe and get ready for the guest’s departure. Awaiting our parents, we’d plonk down in front of the television and be handed more glasses of milk over which to watch the evening cartoon shows (standard 1980s fare like Transformers, GI Joe and Merry Melodies).

Over time, my company had made Chris a pretty decent Amitabh Bacchan fan. When over at my place, he’d often pester my mother to put on a subtitled VHS of something like Zanjeer or Deewar, films showcasing Amitabh at his youngest, angriest and most invincible. He liked the fight scenes the best, pumping his fists and clapping fervidly as Bacchan single-handedly creamed a dozen ruffians to the backdrop of ill-timed BHISHUPs. His mother though, saw to it that these screenings were stopped. Apparently she heard him delivering a melodramatic challenge to a fight with some neighborhood kid. The challenge’s wordings involved among other things, doubts regarding this boy’s credentials as a breast-fed baby. Not something you’d pick up off Bugs Bunny.

Christopher and I hung around together most of the time in school. We shared lunch and pretended to be superheroes during recess, but did little else. His mother had told me not to make him run about too much. Though I knew there was something wrong with him, it was always something vague, ill-defined and therefore avoidable.

I once asked him about his hair, and why he was going so skinny.

He said what he’d been told. That “some people just have less hair and are skinnier”. In a way it was right.

That his problem was something concrete became clear when he got hit by this kid in our class called Damien. It probably wasn’t over much. Besides being physically big for his age, Damien was also a way bigger bastard than the average 4 year old. He often picked fights for the simple worldly joy he found in hitting people. He punched Chris in the nose by the monkeybars. Chris fell unconscious and his nose bled like a faucet. By the time a teacher got there, he was near lying in a puddle of his own blood.

It was a week till he came back to school again, a bruise the size of a man’s palm imprinted around his nose.

These were the 1980s, days before Pinkel’s ‘total therapy’ could boast of leukemia survival rates of near 80%.

We were all there a decade too early.

Chris’s stays at school became shorter, fewer and further between, as did my visits to his house. Till one day his mother told my parents that Chris needed all the rest he could get, and that any more trips would have to wait.

He then sort of faded away. One day there was a funeral. My parents thought it best not to take me along.

When you’re four, you really don’t know how to miss someone. You eventually learn.

A Grim Fairy Tale

2009-01-27T07:56:00.000-08:00

Timed upon a once
A runaway prince named Boy
Tried his valiant best at
balming his battered insides
By raising the drawbridge to him and putting frost and fear and bitterness of old
On patrol at the gates of
His coldest, darkest, stoniest center
Where Boy stored safe his warmth’s molten core.
Dressed forever for a wake
Boy turn’d his time into the a staccato brawling
Between two causes to cringe.

Fate brought the girl named She to town on crutches
in the back of a wagon And
in the wake of a mistake
Crippled, bruised and blue from the lifelessness
That breeds in the cold void left behind
When scabs
camouflage egos under sheep-skins of courage and imaginary acts of compassion
and tell convincing enough lies
of the walk to something eventual
being
too much of an effort
to put in.

The chill fanned She’s make-believe frostbite
And the hail added brick and mortar to her
invisible igloo.
Though She hollered on about the brightness of her blueness
And showed off her snowball-juggling parlour tricks
Boy saw how She’s teeth chattered and lips cracked
How She’s tears had
Welded the sides of her eyes open
Keeping She from sleep
and so from dreams

It made Boy weep
To see She con a smile
His ears rang and ached
When She’s laughing resonated and bounced off snowflakes
For the eyes of Boy saw through the vapid watercolours
With which She had done up
The whiteness in her lies

No thought was put into it
No consequences were considered
And though the act flashed with glimmers of hoping selfishness
Nothing seemed to matter
But to give her a feel of the ground beneath her
Shattered feet
again
For of the many paths
One could lead to him

So he reached inside
Butterknifed through the icicle-cage
And fished out all his red sheen.
He lay it at her lifeless soles

She could have She should have
They could have They would have
They can have They will have?

For In the end
The cold should never be allowed to win

Casual Leave

2009-01-27T07:04:00.000-08:00

December 2006

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)

It was how dangerously beautiful the razorblade was beginning to get that finally got you packing.

The ride to Kalimpong began with promise. A wide smooth road searing through the jungle, massive trees tiger-striped the tarmac in gold and shade. Apprehension dallied with the excitement of actually having at least begun to pull this off – a covert runaway to a hill town you’d only read about in books and heard of in other people’s conversation. By this time, three days later, Darjeeling’d be part of yours.

First the invitation to Kalimpong. A sleepy, forlorn yet uncomplaining and self-appeased hamlet; the recipient of a sudden literary fame begotten by its being the setting for a recently published novel. The road to Kalimpong and Gangtok dichotomized near the river Teesta, and there began a discouragingly steep bike hike up to pong. The ride is at times, soul crushingly slow, and the engine begins to weep in unnerving, metal wails. Mercifully, it never stops. Some seven or eight times, you’re almost run over by one jeep or another festooned by a screaming pink ‘Picnic Party’ banner, full of holiday makers ferried by largely identical looking inebriated lunatics behind the wheel. The tourists clap their hands, lost in Nepali singalongs, oblivious to the number of times they narrowly avoid turning our hero into roadkill. The drive, in between these brushes with certain death, is rather nice, what you need – engrossment in something cold and mechanical, to keep you from believing the job and the life you wake up everytime the night ends to lead can exist. January’s clemency peacock-prances as clear skies, sunlight so crisp you can hear it crack, and no signs of things even hinting at being any other way.

You stop and offer a haggard old man who looks like a lung cancer patient with tuberculosis given the greatest smile in the world as remuneration, a ride. He gleefully accepts, sits down and then says nothing. After around twenty minutes of balling the jack, the total absence of not just conversation, but sound, makes you wonder if he’s fallen off or something. You slow down and turn around just to check. He’s still on there, and the smile’s only gotten even more world beating. Skinny, eighty, stoned out of his skull, only looking like he was going to die, and blessed with a grinner like that – he’d obviously won first prize.

“Where would you like to get off?”

“Right here would be just fine.”

He dismounts, numbs the pain with yet another magnificent show of front teeth, folds his hands and says thank you, and then kills you completely by turning right around and walking back. His stop was probably a good 8 kilometers back. Nonetheless you muster up the courage to wave. He squashes that courage totally and finally by waving back. The small hill shanty towns zip by, all looking just the same –utterly beautiful- and inhabited by people who also look just the same –utterly beautiful. Eateries, made out by the packets of instant noodles hanging from the windows, dot the road. They sell little else save those same noodles, which despite being cooked in around 15 different ways still taste like nothing in the world but marinated rubber bands. The signboards on these shops bear the names of whoever runs them. A surprisingly large number of girls have been entrusted with business. Some of the names become painful aftermathly reminders of girls you once knew, but now don’t. Relationships you realized could have been, only after they were over. Just when you’re about to bleed, Kalimpong happens and saves the day.

‘Quaint’ is a word whose place in the world you had never been able to figure out. Quaint is in the water they drink and the air they breathe in Kalimpong – a velvet-and-styrofoam town of narrow, perpetually wet streets, lined by cramped together shops selling something pretty you can either wear or eat. Most of the people you see are, understandably, well-dressed and chewing on something. Your friend had told you to meet him in the hospital, the lane to which is as real a crotch-crusher as you’d ever hope of never seeing. Yet another old man bums a ride, only this one knows where he has to get off. It gets dark pretty early around this part of the country this time of the year. Since it’s already rather late, most of the well-dressed eaters have by now huddled outside their houses around fires of cardboard, empty peanut shells and hay. They eyeball you in rapt amazement as you drive by, making you feel almost naked. You start to wonder if this is subconsciously why you made really made the trip – to be stripped bare of all the things about yourself that kept making your four-year-old-self stare in rapt amazement at who you’d become. Things that’d become seminally painful; anything could sire an unsavory memory that shot a mother lode of pain down your spine into your gut, where it thrashed about and left only if and when it pleased. You’re knocked out of a daze by a scruffy rat-bastard of a mongrel which races out of one of the houses, chases after the motorcycle and near bites your foot. Swerving to avoid it, you bungle into a puddle, loose balance and drive into a gutter nidorous of urine and garnished with slime. As you drag yourself and the motorcycle out, swearing at the dog, the giggles of its proud owners emanating from around the fire declare that they’ll at least have something to talk about over dinner besides the cold.

Then finally the hospital. And Sam the Dentist.

If you took any of the rotund, five-year old Nepali schoolboys cutting school and running around this part of the country, impervious to things like the flu and any reason to stop smiling, and inflated them with air till they were just as round, only now five and a half feet tall, you’d get Sam the Dentist. His unbridled adoration for booze was matched only by two things - his complete inability to hold it down, and the unanimity with which he chose to rather nurse the subsequent hangover than acknowledge the existence of things like a job and work. He was, in many ways the apex government servant. The workday began at nine in the morning, and for all you know, might as well end at five past nine, depending upon what those five minutes hinted at. The man’s incorrigible hoplessness with women had become the stuff of legend, one that even he had come to believe.
Perhaps to fabricate himself a believable enough excuse to lean on, he’d taken to neutering himself by drinking unimaginable amounts of whiskey, and then launching into incoherent, leaky-eyed tirades against the entire other gender as a whole, which invariably ended with his morphing into a sobbing, spirit-seasoned lump on the floor. Clearly a true, textbook lover of women.

We’re perched on a ledge leading up to the military hospital, built on a hilltop far above the city. The whole town is spread out like a mirrorwork picnic-blanket below us, shimmering as the locals light and put out their stoves and lamps. Half the night is spent keeping a fire alive, listening to dogs swear at each other in across Kalimpong’s paralyzed nighttime existence and telling stories.

Soon I’m crying too.

A Country For Old (and Useless) Men

2008-05-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

News of the bombings trickled down to my end of the food chain as I craned out of my 12th pushup in a gym who’s membership I owed to an uncle I rarely met and (thankfully) didn’t have to know too well. This man had, for the two weeks I’d been here, been putting in focused, persistent and nauseating poorly veiled efforts to try and get me to stop flat out refusing to get hitched with a daughter of one of his colleagues. Trio’d with my dad (who even under normal circumstances is the panjandrum-ic Bill O’Reilly of the Psychology of parenting “You know what I love about you Bill? It’s not what you say, it’s how loudly you say it” – Jon Stewart) having been granted the curmudgeonly bonus that comes with having undergone an inguinal hernia repair two days ago, and with the usual incongruous, incapacitating, socially-crippling loneliness Jaipur makes sure I always feel, the goings were less than ideal.

They shut down the gym, and as I mounted the electric scooter my 55kg dad had bought (after selling our motorcycle), I saw how the streets were indeed clogged with people trying to get home. I thought of asking a security guard or fellow commuters which part of the city the explosions had taken place in, but was held back by the distant, unfriendly silence that exists in the ice before you break it. Something about Jaipur has always made me not just shiver at that ice, but actually dread it. I got back home in 15 minutes (the bloody thing – and bloody not just as in it’s bright red – doesn’t do any more than 35kmph).

There were eight blasts in all, all in the walled city, and for some reason NDTV kept referring to Sawai Man Singh (SMS) Hospital as Sawai Madhopur Hospital. Telephone networks had been broke-backed by the sheer volume of people trying to call at once.

To be honest, I am really just a selfish person, sort of like Shylock. I believe in the pristine fairness of barter. Granted there was a feral urge to be more than a mute, impotent spectator sponging in things through a televised sieve and an urge to help, what with the TV constantly declaring “extra doctors and medical support were being arranged for” by our quicksilver bureaucratic machinery. But I also wanted a karmic IOU. Something to flash and bargain with when cornered instead of merely cowering, cringing and repenting; something to fabricate a ball of moral spittle around. So I got onto the embarrassing red and white lawnmower-battery-with-wheels and plowed down to the hospital.

At 8, SMS really wasn’t as choked as you’d expect. There were at least 400 people there, but I had been expecting more. Most stood around with arms folded, frowning, ostentatiously ruining their cellphone keypads in vain, trying to look grim and important – you know, not answering in a single go when you ask for directions, relishing the evanescent importance in shoving someone aside and saying ostensibly polite things gruffly and loudly.

I made my way up to the polytrauma ward on the first floor, following both the trail of drying blood on the floor, and the lemming-like milling of hysterical people. The ward itself was huge, tiled hall the size of a basketball court, with massive glass windows, tube lights and piped oxygen sockets in the wall (contraptions which would, when required later, blow out and become useless). There were 20 beds, all occupied by people in every possible state of shatter. From broken bones, busted jaws and injuries to the head to not even real scratches and abrasions. And all around them, like on the inside of a giant ant colony, gloved worker-humans jittered to and fro, doing the same thing over and over again (this one chap was given four tetanus shots). The coherent and slightly better off people seemed to be getting the most attention and those who’s fat was well and truly in the fire were avoided, for responsibility can be intimidating.

When something like this happens, around 20% of the victims will die regardless. 60% will survive regardless. It’s the remaining 20% who have to be identified and dealt with or they will then die. And you will be the reason it happened. Therein lies the responsibility. As was said to me by a certain Lt Col Yoginder Singh, the swiftest-stitching Gynaecologist you’re ever likely to see. I want to believe I did at least something of the sort.

There was this gent whose name I didn’t ask. He looked like that bloke we see in movies but never know the name of, only better looking and fairer. He was one of a handful who kept the shit from hitting the fan – both gung-ho and grounded. I brought his attention to a lady bleeding from her left ear and a man with a pulseless, mutilated left arm. They are by now respectively either in a coma/out of a coma/dead or have probably had their arm amputated. At least he told me where to take them and how.

This picture came in the paper the next morning; he’s the one with the arrow pointing at him. The bloke in front of him wheeling the cot’s me. I spent the rest of the time doing some bandaging, some stitching and more triaging. But when the governor came and I was told to shove off by a corpulent security guard who refused to believe I was a doctor (no gloves or white coat, you see) at around 1030, I pretty much it was time to go home. Besides, no one new had come in for 20 minutes.

I came back and watched our minister for state vomit out the same impersonal, impossibly stupid statement he’d give about the Malegaon and Ajmer attacks. Cowardice and purposelessness seeped out his skin. And then changed channels, watched House on AXN and went to sleep.

I got a chance to use my IOU the next day. It was authentic.

My Sun Shall Also Rise

2008-05-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

Bursting forth from the belly of a cockroach
That’d hid under a fallen star And so lived to be
the womb
From where I’d write the epilogue
To a holocaust of the Dream
the first things I see
Are the faded colours and the cracks in the wheels
A Sun blocked out from the sky
By the fumes of a hundred million rubber-tire ‘rebellions’
It’s place taken by a giant Methadone disco-ball
Shooting out sedation as sunlight
Hyenatown.
Fangs, hysterical laughter and numbness.
Meaningless dandelion yesterdays blown away
By solitude sired nuclear dust devils.
Yet to walk through the streets leaves me unafraid still
For our time away
Failed to teach the scavengers how to hunt
Yes there are shadows and yes there is smoke
But the sword and I have seen darker and murkier days
At the corner of yesterday and sanity
Prostrate
Littered in the eye of the aftermath
Of a Pretend-o-saur feeding frenzy
Lies the wasted carcass of some assembly line aeroplane
Picking workable pieces from the mangled iron carrion
I fashion wings welded together by copper-cold-hunger
And gilded by a Golden desire
To soar above the smog
Break through
And steal the secret of fire from the sun I know lies beyond
A heavenward bound fist fires angrily up
Driving a dolphin-leap through the gray-ether surface
I rob a coffee-cup of blazes
And hide it as gasoline deep in my dragon core
On the shelf below insanity and the one above the trouble I shall make
The feather-landing coincides with the first brick of the minaret falling
Now my sun has also risen.

Incredible! India

2008-05-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just when bleakness' battering ram seems to be getting too stout to handle, you come across something like this.

True testimony that the people at O&M did indeed get it right when they called the nation incredible. As real an example of life's best teacher (libido) doling out a social message chalked on one of it's more visible blackboards(the rear end of a truck).

Basically, don't drink and drive or ur this shot of potency I've just imparted goes waste. Class!

Saboraud's lonely dish

2008-04-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

This happened to happen sometime during internship (and SSC's) early days. The setting was Hotel Pamm in Siliguri, Hillcart road.

Just before you cross over into it from Malaysia, the Singapore government has lined up dustbins outside the toll booths. They are dustbins second. Firstly, they serve as the dumping ground for any gum you might be chewing (doing the same chewing across the border is illegal). Siliguri is much the same. A garbage dump en route to Eastern India’s prima dona, Darjeeling. It is a dirty, cramped, brunt uninspiring city, the kind whose ugliness gives rise to a contempt that manages to overpower the pity its step-daughterly treatment generates. And NJP was its groin. But it wasn’t the city that kept Sabouraud on the verge of tears every moment he was awake. It was the fact that he was having to do the one thing that he both hated and was bad at, and would have to go on doing for the next seven years. A lump as hard as a fist made its way up his throat, and punched a tear out his right eye. He wiped it away, sitting alone at lunch and weeping had ‘loser’ written all over it.

Iggy Goes Pop

2008-04-22T11:35:00.001-07:00

It seemed just another miserable start to just another day destined to be remain just another number on the calendar. Iggy was woken up as always by an incessant, spirit crushing beeping. Only this wasn’t his alarm clock. The sound came from a machine measuring his pulse. Iggy had woken up in a hospital. Just hours ago, he had tanked up on thirty-eight antidepressant pills washed down with two bottles of cough syrup, and had then slashed his both his wrists just to be sure. Beneath the bandages on his arms lay 28 stitches. To save his life, they had had to pump his stomach, electrocute him in the chest four times, and inject him with enough adrenaline to fill his skull.

Removing the bandages and touching the jagged crests of his stitches made him feel neither guilty nor grateful. Instead, for the first time in months, he caught a whiff of an emotion that had become over time so alien, it was initially difficult for him to comprehend what he was overcome with – he felt hopeful. He wanted to believe that the shitstorm was now over.

The man in the bed next to his had had a bastard of a heart-attack, and lay in deep slumber, with very bleak chances of ever waking up. His relatives milled about outside in the hall, and they’d left the usual hospital visit jetsam –plastic flowers, tacky cards, tackier metallic balloons – on the table next to his bed. Iggy picked up a woman’s purse that lay between a bunch of yellow plastic roses and a Mickey Mouse balloon, and fished out a pen and a notepad.
He began writing a suicide note.

Goodbye (from the world’s worst engineering student) or My Reluctantly RocknRoll Suicide

I used to smile. I used to like being alive. I used to be Jumping Jack Flash.
Then my soul was sold for a life I could never want.

As I begin to write this, I want you to know that I’m dead. All that embodied who I was, aspirations that no-one else would give a home or a hope, dreams only I could keep from drowning, ideas only I could sire, and the one person only I could understand, have been murdered. Butchered by the humiliation that comes with realizing how much cowardice I’d now have to inject in every part of every day, just to get by.

No more drugs disguised as medicines to get over the only medicines that ever stopped the pain. No more pain. No more shocks to the head to wash my thoughts clean of themselves. No more believing my introspection is twisted, and that being spit on by my own reflection is part of a package which will somehow be for my own good.

Don’t tell me I’m judging the past harshly. For why does every choice I didn’t make seem like on that I should have, and ever choice I did seem like the one mistake so wholly responsible for these tears drowning my soul?
I suppose a lot of it has to do with none of these choices being mine.

He tried hard to think of some way to continue and give the note a tangiable middle and a depressing enough end, but wondered if even since he didn’t care about choices made anymore, would anyone else. Leaving the letter half done, he yanked out the plastic tube in his arm, stopped the blood with his thumb, and climbed out the window.

Clambering down the drainpipe, he thought about what he was leaving behind – things he once held dear, a home, his family, some friends, all of which eventually meant less as time went by. Wishing HeartAttack well, he took one last look into the hospital room, and went on his way. Where, to what, how, he neither knew, nor felt awkward leaving unanswered for the time being.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

(Meanwhile in a time some months afore)

Iggy walked into the store selling used tires and was immediately taken aback by the pristine hideousness of its insides. It looked as though the ugliest shop in the world had been burnt down, and then rebuilt using the remains, and the choicest morsels of trash from the rather sizable pile outside. As Pintoo began brokering a deal for the new tube, Iggy went outside to let Bagdogra humour him for a while. Outlandishly fetching Nepali girls walked by in track suits, carved out of tanned cheddar cheese with soul-nibbling smiles. Their being there, giggles and all, reminded Iggy of the conversation he had tried with so many of them, and the final and complete futility of trying. You say tomato. I say potato. It’s always so easy on TV, and ironically, even this dump had cable.

The token jeep ferrying youth workers of a political party screamed by. The boys wanted justice for the displaced poor. They were probably going to get it by holding the whole city hostage tomorrow and christening their day in the sun a strike. Iggy desperately wanted to talk to some of them. Preferably while stoned. He once tried. Dotting the city were several ‘sports clubs’, massive buildings opened under the aegis of one political mob or the other. Colossal things, so big you could play football on the first floor, which, this being Bengal, Iggy expected to find them doing as he walked into the New Tigers Club. Instead it turned out that the only two sports indulged in here were carom and a card game called rummy. The club turned out to be a very bourgeois Bertie Wooster kind of joint, plenty of smoking and the odd glass of whiskey being sipped at, only it was a shade too ramshackle and sadly un-woody.

By now Pintoo’d sealed the tube transaction. He’d done well, for save the cost of the tube, all they’d have to fish out as installation charges was five rupees. Watching him inspect the inflated tire by kicking it, Iggy noticed that Pintoo wasn’t looking too well. His dad was worried about him. Apparently he’d been hitting the bottle a bit more that was deemed good for him, and had started showing up late for work, and at times not at all. And then he was loosing weight, and this was Bengal. He wanted not to thing about such things for a moment. In the shade of a condom hoarding, they paid the money and left.

Noodle v/s Murdoc – Round 1 Winner Murdoc

2008-03-01T06:30:00.001-08:00

“Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours’ notice, with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment – I won’t say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that for a second or two, I felt as though (instead of going to the centre of a continent), I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.” – Charlie Marlow, Heart of Darkness

It’s like those cruelest of hands dealt at Scrabble. The letters in the name ‘Tenga’, no matter how you arrange them, always very nearly mean something, but never do – Ant eg(g), Negat(e) and so on. In much the same way, an existence here could very nearly mean a life, but ends up as little more than just not being dead. It is the armpit of the world. And at 5am on a Tuesday morning, I’m on a bus headed to it.

“I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else.” – William Burroughs, Junky

We pull out from Tezpur, the most visually ill city I’ve ever seen. Whatever ails the place is very contagious for you are almost immediately infected with misery and loneliness. The bus has 50 seats, all taken, but conversation is impossible. Each passenger sits constructing his own private hell from the voids of places and people he left behind and would rather be with. The gloom leeches out of your skull, and paints everything the colour sad. Trees lean hungrily over the road, at places intruding with their vine-like tentacles, as if to juice out any remnants of life left in anyone forced to or foolish enough to venture into this circus of dark green bleakness. Often the sun is blocked out, and swamps are born where the soil can drink in no more rainwater, and is forced to vomit. Insects, nature’s shiny unalive jewels of neglect, parade about fearlessly and show themselves off. For every mosquito you kill, five shall take its place.

The ride turns into a sequence of five or six still lifes, repeating themselves randomly. One features sickly, half naked un-childlike children sitting outside a wooden shack, surrounded by malaria and the forest. In another they wave at you, unsmiling. A third shows an ugly shop or some ugly houses surrounded by ugly coconut trees shading an ugly stray dog or two. Like rot dissolving the dead hippo of Charlie Marlow’s cannibal crew, the next picture is of a dead bus or truck being either nursed back to illness or torn to scrap by frenzied, starved mechanic-like beings. Yet another shows the forest being defiled, stripped bare of its trees and undergrowth, to reveal a bare, brown and almost burnt landscape no less putting-off. One, both tragic and pathetically funny starred a sign saying ‘Beware of Elephants’ – a meaningless shibboleth from days when tuskers used to barge into the handful of huts as they pleased, stole rice wine, got drunk and went on killing sprees. The numbers, and the roles of hunter and hunted traded places, hence the sign’s redundancy. Some scenes are nothing but riotous explosions of wild cannabis. But the one image that hit the hardest spoke my state of mind’s language the clearest. In a visage dominated by the swamp, the only gushing of colour that broke the verdant, depressed sameness came from a dying banana tree. The swamp had crept up to its roots, drowning it from the feet up, and inciting a seemingly violent celebration of death in yellow. Deliverance, however it would be, would one day be happiness.

The bus pulls into an eating joint, and all are warned that the stop shall last only 15 minutes. Deciding to believe in my bladder and abstain from the mad-dash to the loo, I head off to the counter and buy myself a Coke and half a chow mien. The noodles are disappointingly good and I hate them. I want everything about this place to be the absolute pits, I want to have justification to be miserable, to not allow myself to be labeled just plain cranky. I am rescued by the flatness of the Coke, and with a contented smile I gulp down what tastes like machine oil, sugared ad nauseum. Cannabis, in glorious bloom surrounds the small eatery too. I pluck a flowering stalk and offer it to a 4 year old girl staring longingly at me and my Coke, and making me feel naked. She ignores it, and stubbornly refuses to let me swallow in solitude. So after finishing it, I hand her the empty bottle. It’s about as much a disappointment as she’s in a mood to take. She runs off to her parents, and I throw the stalk away. Just as the vacuum of the moment starts making me wonder how I’m going to keep from taking up smoking, not become an alcoholic or stay away from the dope, the bus starts honking and threatening to leave without us.

More of the same. Then the ride slowly changes - as we climb higher, pigs join the dogs on the roadsides, and the kids start smiling when they wave. We’re getting closer to Tenga. .

Barbarian at the Gate

2007-10-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

April 2007, pre-shitstorm.

By not charging forth and physically assaulting the eye from any arbitrary vantage point in the capital, India Gate successfully hides how huge it is. When I do come to it, I am disturbed by the lack of sentiment it churns up. The reaction to a Forty-two meter stone brute built in 1921 in memory of Indians who died, alone, cold, sick and hungry in lands that were not their own, fighting for people who’s causes they didn’t truly understand or believe in, should have been more visceral, more overcoming. But it wasn’t.

Now more than ever, and hopefully in just me and no one else, the Gate’s edge, like everything else’s, could no longer rasp or make me bleed. It was now just the immobile stone embodiment of every rude physical retort India wanted so badly to give, but didn’t, when some heckler cried soft-state. Even schoolboys on Republic Day aren’t made to debate that anymore.

Unlike the Gateway of India in Bombay – a warm gray monument of welcome, India Gate on Rajpath seems to have been built to be kept closed. A sort of firm, snarling ‘Fuck Off’ to all those who didn’t want to come inside and play nice. It was stripped of that role somewhere along the road, and is today, just a carnival attraction in the giant circus the Dream has become for all those willing to buy tickets, see and not believe.

As I stood its imposing yet whimpering shadow, and tried find something to feel, my luck served up a far better show than I thought likely. Three boys, hormone-galvanized foot soldiers at the vanguard of the neo-Hun invasion, use the All India War Memorial for the only purpose it seems fit to serve in the now and here: for self-actualization through defilement. They first make a mockery of the rhinoceros in the insignia of an Assamese Regt on the Do Not Enter placard, coming to the conclusion that perhaps the fattest of their threesome would be allowed to. Then they proceed to repeatedly touch pillars that weren’t to be touched and step over (and almost immediately back over) chains that aren’t to be stepped over. Low waist denim clad soul-faggots, engaged in hermaphrodite daredevil games – nausea at its most complete. A curt Fuck Off sends them on their way, but the loneliness in this bitterness they leave behind is eerie.

A chemical nature litmus test of the decoct of 60 years worth of vomit from our most wasted, bilious core. That is the Gate today.

Here alone.
But to not decay is now to achieve.

Junk Babble

2007-10-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

Junk transcends demand and supply, the pusher, the pimp and the product. It becomes the wide white line between unsure and cringing-at-death’s-door-dead sure. Junk decocts virile craving from limp desire and impotent curiosity. It needn’t know any rules – of biology, of hunger, or sex or conscience – for it is designed to never loose.

The only entity truly comparable to junk (the perfect product) is virus (the perfect parasite) - both pernicious, beguiling shape shifters. When alone and homeless, they exist as cold, inanimate crystals. It is if allowed to poison, that they become poison.
It makes little difference whether you call him a host or a user, for following inoculation, he ceases to matter. He is now just a medium. He becomes the virus, or the drug, and follows orders.

Though initially, he may be thrown scraps of life like euphoria or illness, as his breakdown blossoms, he eventually experiences nothing. Only a need to be filled. Like a vessel. He cannot defeat the drug or the virus. It shall leave him only if it wants. If it chooses not to, he is destined to die. In either case, it will be the same cold, lonely, emaciated death.

Yet when the medium is dead, they are not. They have already spawned and moved on. The body that was once home has been used and now outlived its purpose. And hence, like the virus, junk is immortal.

“Every dead body that is not exterminated gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill.” – The Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood

Junk is not some machine executing an algorithm of decay. It truly enjoys breaking you down. Somewhere, in someone, Junk is always working, and for it, everyday at the office is a good day. Each body bagged is a victory, every sickly surrender a cause for celebration. But like a smug, invincible sportsman, it extracts the most entertainment from the resistance of those who try not to be broken. Junk is moody, but the swings are predictable. It initially offers its respect and glory to someone who wants to go down with a fight. But its patronage is fleeting, and the subsequent retribution for wasting its time is humiliating.

William Burroughs was turned into both a legend and a pathetic example by Junk. Junky serves as his and his drug’s Bildungsroman. Intention is not the only reason it is a detached and factual account. It is also a fractured piece of writing because it precariously tries to weld together the exploits of its two characters – the user, and the chemicals that own him. At places Burroughs narrates, at others, he is forced to take dictation.

In return for his persecution, he is rewarded with a cruel yet honest education. Junk’s dropper-and-syringe tutelage enriches the mind and conscience of a man whom years of the best possible schooling had left wayward and confused. (“Junk is a cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity”)

For example, he is taught how at times, renunciation of effort is not just the best, but the only option “I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving”.

How the most important and the worst job is often the same “The job of peddler was a sort of public service that rotated from one member of the group to another…….All agreed that it was a thankless job……As George the Greek said ‘You end up broke and in jail. Everybody calls you cheap if you don’t give them credit; if you do they take advantage’”.

And how the consequences of a man’s actions stalk and hunt him down “You don’t wake up one morning and decide to become a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all” “One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict”

It is scarily magnificent, for all the right reasons.

I saw my first junky in my second year of college. He must’ve been about forty, had no legs, and only a right hand. He sat on a wooden cart in front of Bombay’s Churchgate station using an empty milk tin as a begging bowl. It’d clearly been weeks since he’d bathed and probably days since he’d eaten. He swore at everything that did or didn’t pass him by – at the people who spared loose change, at the people who didn’t, at the lice trampoulining in his hair, at the strays smelling him and barking at him, at God, at fate, at me. Even without what was to come, he was one of life’s more pathetic sights.

His stubborn outpouring of venom persuaded most to walk away. A lady ferrying her kids home from school decided to move on to the next stop and catch the bus from there. But I couldn’t go. It felt like one of those DiscoveryChannel moments, where the gnu walks up to the water’s edge to drink, and you just know a crocodile is going to lunge out of the Nile, clamp down on his neck and drown him – something was going to happen.

And it did. His peddler came. It was no Jesus-comes-to-the-lepers encounter. It was a cold mechanical transaction. There in full view of anyone bothering or daring to look, the pusher took a vial of Ketamine out of his front pocket and snapped it open. He loaded it into a hungry syringe the legless one had waiting. The needle was then plunged into the beggar’s one remaining limb, and emptied. The beggar melted – slowly, warmly turning into a bag of skin filled with liquid joy, just barely holding on to the human form. His peddler, meanwhile, emptied the milk tin of its change and walked off. All of this in less than 90 seconds.

It was magnificently scary, for all the wrong reasons.

Given a choice, I would have stayed and watched him as he lay prostate on his cart, smiling at the sky, now unmindful of the stray licking his leaking vein. But I had a train to catch.

I tried searching for him on subsequent trips to Bombay, but he was never there again. In all honesty, he’s almost definitely dead, and it’s not like he’s taken some shade of the great watercolour with him to the grave. You can rest assured, his place in the chemical chain has already been taken. Three-stump lives on though. He features in one of the more believable recurring nightmares in my head, wedged between some stuff from The Ring and the one time I saw a horse drown.

As for Burroughs, towards the end of Junky he claimed to have defeated junk. He committed the grave mistake of gloating – “The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before”. Burroughs went off in search of a telepathy inducing herb supposedly used by the Russians in slave labour experiments. His wife left him, as did most of his sanity for a large period of time. Junk hunted him down in Tangier and nearly drove him irreparably mad. Rehab happened, and he wrote again, but I’m pretty sure he’d never write like Junky. Much like the three-stump’d beggar, he’d been gifted 158 pages worth of immortality, been used and thrown away.

Beached whale blues

2007-10-04T04:48:00.000-07:00

My third step on Marina Beach ended in a semi-concealed pile of two-day old vomit. This was largely symbolic of the way things were going. The current holiday to Chennai (or what used to be Madras) wasn’t turning out to be the exotic, battery charging sojourn I had hoped.

For one thing, half my luggage had refused to disembark the connecting flight, deciding to spend its vacation in Goa instead. Then I learned that Reema, the only person I knew there, lived half a day’s drive away in a city with perhaps the most fine-tuned traffic jams in the country. And now here I was, standing ankle deep in the remains of someone else’s indigestion.

A stroll down Marina beach in the evening has been described by many a travel guide as the highlight of every Chennai trip. Looking around the panorama, I had to ask myself one question: Did they ethically deserve to be in print? Even if you did manage to dodge the vomit booby traps, didn’t have your picnic held hostage by a gang of marauding crows or weren’t hit on the head by a well-aimed ‘stray’ football, whatever you were left with wasn’t much of a beach. The sea, for one, was this unique shade of gray, best described as the only conceivable chromatic counterpart to its smell. There were no coconut palms, and there was no sunset, for the beach faced east. Dusk was no orange fireball’s theatrical demise, just a bland, boring sumo-wrestling exhibition between two gray giants – the ocean and the sky. When they weren’t piddling in it, kids in varying stages of nakedness squealed their Tamil
squeals and ran in and out of the water, competing to fish out the most interesting piece of washed up garbage.

In the usual rosier frame of mind, I would have found all this colic-inducingly hilarious. But not today, when a place just as chaotic, restless and confused existed in my skull. The past few weeks had been amongst the worst in my life. I’d been wrenched by as bitter and unexpected a breakup as I believed possible. I was having grave doubts about my vocation, my place in the family, and at times even my sanity. A healing getaway, I thought, would be in order. But this definitely wasn’t it. The worrying part was I didn’t have a clue what would have been.

I felt like the loneliest, most stupid and rejected person alive. Then just when I was about to cry

“You know, I’ve been ripped to shreds ever since my boyfriend broke up with me. I hate my job so much. And sometimes, at night, I get so scared that I might be going crazy” Meera said, perched next to me in the sand.

And then, as if on cue, Marina Beach switched on its lighthouse, and called home shoals of sardine-shaped fishing boats. Stalls materialized from thin air, selling salvation disguised as coconut water, cold drinks and coffee. Magic and telepathy mingled with the fried fish and Tamil film songs in the air, turning Meera into the one person giving perfect answers to questions I’d framed but would never ask. I looked
at her face, and saw creases of worry bobbing up and down like marker-buoys on a face she tried to keep a smiling sea. The breeze, observing she felt alone too, half-pushed my elbow up against hers and made us hold mental hands.

Things were so different now from before. I saw kids sprinting out of the sea into waiting, warm towels held by mothers eager to dry them off. Crabs scuttled out of holes my gloom had kept me blind to earlier on, probably venturing in search of sustenance and sex. And then, in a final gesture of spirit bandaging, Marina sent forth one of her most loyal subjects: the parrot/guinea pig fortune teller.

Clad in a diaphanous kurta with an Iron Maiden t-shirt clearly visible underneath, for a measly fifty rupees, he offered me a choice between having my tale told by a bird or a rodent. I chose the former, and looked on in awe as the green critter strutted out of its cage, sized me up for a few seconds, picked a card from the stack piled up in front of it, and then obediently walked back in. The teller fished out a seedy looking book and read from it, becoming the bridge between a piece of cardboard and everything I needed to hear. In Tamil. Once again Reema proved she was my savior in the here and now – she translated.

As we got up to leave, a middle-aged couple asked me to take a few pictures of them standing arm in arm in the surf. Paying homage to Marina Beach, I made sure that one of them also featured a skinny little naked boy gleefully leaping into the frame.

Go to your room!

2007-07-31T12:41:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning's paper freak-paraded this on the front page,

and this on the inside.

You'd expect to be thrilled and draw yourself a picture of Paris Hilton somehow scratching together a living and failing miserably at it.

I wasn't. And it's not because I'm a fan.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton

Power today lies in being rich and famous yet so insipidly brain dead, that being able to feed yourself qualifies as an achievement. - Anonymous

In light of the above tested truths, you really can't blame ol' Paris for just being what she is - an immensely rich, corrupted, quaraplegically-hapless ditz who theoretically is now near broke.

Or so you think.

For the past three years, Paris has made $2 million, $6.5 million, and $7 million respectively. Nay, she is not some shrewd businesswoman nor is she some gifted artist (her only creative achievements till date are directorial credit on the porn video One Night in Paris, and showing up to sing a song that hit #1 in Belgium, Solvakia and Hungary - Stars are Blind). She has made all that dough by among other things, co-writing a best-selling autobiography advising fellow heiresses how to spend all their hard-inherited cash (they have to be BORN, darn-it!!), lending her name to a nightclub (somehow managing to get her name fired this January) and televising how she was wretchedly pathetic at every job she ever took on a show that ran for 5 seasons, and got so popular it now has remakes in countries like Uruguay and Turkey.

Last year Paris told all of Britain in GQ that their Prime Minister was " Oh yeah... he's like your president". If she consistently comes up with such landmark declarations of the human head's ability to house air, and gets paid five-figure salaries to do it, is it any surprise that everyone from Lindsay Lohan to The Amazing X-Men (they referred to her as a "useless tart dancing topless at a party") love to loathe her?

Like such stalwarts before her as Edie Sedgwick (who served the interests of society by snorting coke and muse-ing for Andy Warhol) or Zsa Zsa Gabor (continuingly engaged in studies to determine the limits of the human ability for marriage and divorce - her current research suggests 9 times), Paris embodies that mysterious Pop Culture entity : someone famous just because they're famous. Devoid of any real talent, intelligence or beauty (put her next to Cindy Crawford and Paris looks like a shrimp), they don't do anything, they're just THERE! Almost leech like, they live off the human storehouse of inferiority, inadequacy and greed. And we keep feeding them.

Owing to what grand-daddy's decided to do, Paris, could unwittingly do a lot of good right now. She could serve as the mirror showing us where we stand. That is if we're willing to use her.

It'd be real easy to celebrate the girl's disinheritance , say it serves her right and give it more attention than its due. But in doing so, we're unintentionally just doing more of whatever made her a 'star' in the first place. In June of this year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca allowed Paris to go home with an electronic monitoring device owing to an unspecified medical condition. This was before she had served out the 45 day sentence for a parole violation. While doing so he sagaciously declared "My message to those who don't like celebrities is that punishing celebrities more than the average American is not justice".

My favorite words in that sentence being MORE THAN THE AVERAGE.
Paris, and whatever Grand-daddy Hilton has done should be seen rationally after wiping away the $400 a bottle mascara - this is just an AVERAGE spoilt kid who's been stripped of her allowance.

No Expectations

2007-07-30T09:12:00.001-07:00

Reluctant Captain's log. Stardate zilch.

If life gives you lemons, but you want a Boeing, you break all the lemons down into useless pulp, and begin the search for salvageable erstwhile-Soviet scrap metal.

Today, all my collective yesterdays are the yellow citrus fruit in question. To rebuild, you have to break down a lot of stuff - all the old habits you secretly hated, memories (the one that didn't really matter, at least), the voids where you would have kept your old hopes and dreams. In short, you have to burn every bridge.

This comes from Jaipur. The town where I went to high school, and lived for the longest time in the same house. But it was never able to teach me much, nor did it ever feel like a home. The face of the place has changed - the roads are wider and un-cowed, none of the familiar dust gets in your eyes that much, there's all these swanky glass and steel buildings cropping up, and some of the old joints are doing what old joints do i.e first becoming arthritic, then unviable, then being replaced by something new, slick and prosthetic.

This is true at its most gruesomely obvious with the cinema halls. There used to be such a bouquet. LaxmiMandir, all decked up in yellow, with arguably the worst parking lot ever conceived by man. The tastefully named MotiMahal, which somehow managed to have absolutely nothing to do with pearls. Polo Victory, the first thing you very Gateway-of-India-ishly saw as your bus dropped anchor in Jaipur. And Minerva, with it's morning shows doing so much to booost English usage amongst the general public by promoting films like 'Night Eyes' and 'Bolero'.

They were all herded up and butchered by multiplexes.

I headed to the bank this afternoon, and after doing the needful doing, strolled down to another one that had been out of business for two years. This one was called Gem - it's canteen was supposedly one of the last bastions of Campa Cola and Gold Spot. For me, Gem occupies a rather large house on memory lane. For the day my cousins and I went there in the summer of 1995 to watch 'Trimurti', was a day of many firsts. It was the first time we were watching a-first-day-first-show. It was the first time I'd been allowed to cut school to watch a movie.

And it was the first time I'd ever be whipped by cops in a mob.

Yes, apparently so badly did the assembled collection of gents want to get in, they started to tear down the door. And sadly only half of them had tickets. 1500 people, 9 cops. They did all they could, namely shut their eyes and thrashed anything that moved. My right thigh moved.

Gem now doubles up as a parking lot for people who come to the bank, and as a very large urinal for man and dog alike. Despite this having been such a theatre of pain, seeing it completely go to shit doesn't please me. Revenge is not sweet. Vindictiveness reeks of fermentation.

As for the ol' right thing, it still does hurt sometimes, but I'm not hostile to the ache either. It's one of the few things about the old place I remember with a certain degree of fondness.

I wore pants when I rubbed it then. I wear jeans now.