Green killing by hope

Rainforest circling. She was looking up at the sky, covered in dark viscous green foliage. Let me take sometime to make you see what I do. Such dark green with shadows of black, green not in venomous but green as in the paintbrush of those clouds that are fat grey, waiting to roar, moving with the elephant's poise and so thickly packed to squeeze in oceans. Such was the foliage, ambushing every look upward to the sky, not knowing for one if what lies beyond is blue, orange, yellow or the night itself has lunged into the most intense moment of its waveful orgasms out of sleep, into waking. Such was the silence, not empty but heavy. And such was the word for the mood, heavy. Everything was so heavy from above the green shade, a little beneath in the smaller canopied air, further down inside her and beneath the ground into me.

There must have been wilder moments of such silence in the history of time, though here history was hardly a concern, nothing more than stacking moments falling like dominoes, passing as quickly as the tapping of the bronze vessel as courtesans swirl spun in colorful cobwebs, weaving another as they travel four corners of a room with black and white, criss and cross tiles. What is different is, this room echoes. The air is not heavy. Do you sense how all that we built in the span of a few words above vaporizes in this room, here? It is the echoes.

I've been thinking about dancing, except that every walk on the street is like one. Heaviness anchors all that I feel, beneath the ground, as I said, with million eyes already prepared with chronicles of praises,on this rainforest of a Jupiter place, the gravity leaves me only one place, beneath the ground. While some of me stands above and some of me dances, telecast in some other rooms.

Allo, one photo please!

These are the most frequently occurring utterances that I heard as I traversed along the western coastline from Hampi, much inland to Gokarna and then Goa. Deck up in some mismatched bright clothes and carry a big fancy camera, keep pointing it to people and you will know how both of them interact: some serious lens talk with those beautiful village made photogenic visages ready to pose as exotically, bringing out each emotion in every young wrinkle, depth and curve. Quite amusing, how people in public spaces get affected by camera lenses. The idea of being watched through a lens, as I hypothesized and kept speculating throughout the trip across varied reactions from people including the upfront refusal to be clicked and the sly sliding into the imagined frame, all of this generated some curiosity as to what these people be thinking of getting their photo clicked by someone who is not even going to give it to them, what happens of this picture, do people think it is safe or does it glorify them?
So, I take some space to narrate some anecdotal camera encounters (camera almost transforms into some magical parrot character!) and the above pasted pictures are also of those curious clever street models who very willingly got etched into visual history by me :) As we strutted in Hampi, so touristically well pruned and marked, boards spit recommendations of the 'Lonely Planet' and in a conservative town of ruins, streets spill out uber bohemian libertine dresses, you meet little Indian angels all clad in modest third world attire. The moment they see your camera, their eyes light up, the tidied expressions act much as the rouge, they know how to pose, they know where to stand, such composition friendly muses positioned all over!
While clicking old to young, white to black, tiny and big, the traditional Lambada tribe people and others, we met a shop owner in Gokarna who sells temple stuff. And as I clicked his picture, he fished out a tiny verbal memoir of his previous encounters with the camera, a 'URL' where you could see his photo and he also suggested how to best take his picture! On the other hand, old 'ajji' clad in Lambada costume promptly recited: "Allo, fifty rupees photo!"
As speculated, it is perhaps the tourism driven daily happenings of the place that translate clicking pictures into the acts of being published in some medium, also an appreciation of the 'exotic' value imbibed by the people of the place. Also, there are some who shy away, the panoptic gaze, feeling of being surveilled, of being shot to some undetermined limelight and put in front of thousands of unknown eyes somewhere else, the lack of control over the act.
To sum up, the past few days of lens talking have been delightful in the least, to plop yourself in the middle of the busy market, watch as some stop, some pose, some smile, the others squirm suspiciously, walk out of the frame, some plead and the rest start hollering in excitement, as if all those are waiting for one attempt at being celebrated and all you need is, "Allo, one photo please!"

Little maladies of the ever molten heart

But, there is always an ounce of pragmatism in all affective dealings of the heart. There is always an element of personal reveries and side business in the distributed matters of the bargain.
There was once a black cat, lanky, little fur. Someone went round and round and wound her in red wool, tugged somewhere, pulled at other ends, fit the cat in awkward corners in an open room and then tied an end to the wall on a side. No matter how much the cat jumps and throbs and pounces and purrs, in the end she is flung back with equal action and reaction to the wall. The poor wall is constant though, silent and calm, as pale as never, perhaps hurting a little somewhere with all the throwing but resilient in pain and composed in multiple layers of paint. The cat could only feel one.
Foolishness is sine qua non to all rationale of love and so is the act of balancing. Just that here the ingredient is extreme patience, understanding, packing bags, graceful goodbyes and an utter state of chaos that plagues and stings the mind like a deep stuck splinter in some skin fissures. It keeps going black and blue amidst phases of resolve, of standing up, of forgetting, of joy, of thorough anger. Pure anger and pure madness. If I were you, I'd never throw it all away with the softest and lamest reason of distances. First you distance from you, then you distance from mind,then you keep in distance a solid pretty image of our beautiful frozen time together.
Edit: I felt like there were bricks in my stomach, each preserved as futile as the other rags, old papers etc. But, those should also lift magically and melt into clay and time that apparently heals it all should cork your movements. So is not true. Every evening I skim through almost a spectrum of emotions ranging from immense detachment to extreme disgusting creepy clinging. Only some of them at certain times I can show you. But, as I distance, I am confident that old self is wakening. I just can't get over one conundrum of broad daylight, why all that needed to be dumped into the sewers.

Tagging blind with a man

Throwing the head back in laughter or the folding the laughter back in the head, he dispels all the doubt as I breathe into sudden normalcy. But, to think of it, I had been hoping for exactly the opposite somewhere deep down, no deepest, at the same pit of the vertical well of spiraling madness that hangs just a rung, suspended from my stomach. I was lifting and depositing huge boulders of literal, dried, thickened cement there and going in an eight formation only to collapse in the last shadowy cold portions of the caves that sprout from each spiral section of the stairwell. The well is just one of the morbid fleeting emotions you evoke when you bind me up in circular posters and plaits of black cloth, hook me by the arm and take me on a stroll in some black cube. It blinds me, little fleeting betrayals of emotions, all terrified, all jutted and ashamed, melting, drowning and sinking in my own lugged, gassed flipping doors, one by one, open and close, close then open, then regret then relapse, resolutions, I knew the better of me then, or wait! It is now that I have what I should. I am blind, not seeing but hearing the constant mumble, the low rumble, that like of leaves, of the only language I have not known, of bolted bronze locks, thud! The sound of the world tightly knotted in your fists while you strut me around the arm, of the only little place that I cannot squiggle into. All remedies in vain. I am begging on the knees and searching each inch of the relic for overlooked openings. Such terror of the polished beauty, sure of its worth. Makes you feel all sand like, being poured again and again, slithering effortlessly down to the same ground, squirming in limited ability.

First of the heartfelt fuzzy farewells

To,
Missus Literature clad in elaborate sequined shawls and beautiful saris, standing like the Marianne with a more urgent cause on the brink of a literary revolution. The churner of all the plodded fat greasy brains in my half fantasy and half nightmare of a real classroom. To study, to learn, to write, to talk, pose and proclaim poetry, misquoted paragraphs of long dead revolts, all this comes carefully arranged in an embroidered exotic cloth bag to us Jezebels of the civilisation of coded clothes and numbered people. To foster such beasts, little devouring, completely shunning responsibility, dragging you in all mirth to the same marshes of pale drying grass and thorny mud dips, where the pride is of reclaiming the dirty, the thrown, the rejected, the drunk and smashed heap of pigs with a guitar, crooning to silly dead mean of the long past revolts. How your eyes gleam at revolt? How pitifully naively you indulge in the big fat project of futile trips to the past, kitschy mimicking of hope fuelled trips to glory? Coming in, like a mad little swirling wave, the seriousness of a physicist and the aspiration of a young girl who furiously paints by the sea. Such ridiculous statements, you. Such painful flogging, like a swarm of moths we do. Tongue that stutters while drifting into reveries like you, mind that sticks so faithfully clerklike to the residual prudish modest writing. That which sifted and escaped in three years of rigorous iron-cut literary studies, needed the hoarse barking of a lily you.
In what you and I share and bleed for in our secret conversations, and for all the smirks that others who stuff our blank dazes with, we gladly saved what we both love dearly. Suspicion of my fate has it that someday I might be pounding head similarly on some other grey walls, that could be my only giftworthy promise to you.