The good God' man

Dear offliner, the dramatic offliner to the grey disappeared imaginary soul mate on the other end, white lining the irony of my unfinished sensitive message:
Something tragic is about to happen, or maybe it won't. The way my mother described, he might just die. There is this good God's man, who is lying in the government hospital's common ward with a wired liver and failing organs, spitting blood all the time. It sounds extremely melodramatic until I reveal that he is mother's related brother of distant times. But, the rest is perfectly sad, the wired liver, blood vomits, no money and poor connections. Mother's incessant monologue wouldn't have moved me if she hadn't mentioned his desperate bitterness against life. How bitter the good God's man felt towards something that no one could replace for him. No one could live his life for him, it wasn't a full time occupation or a long, tedious cricket match. You simply get no substitute here. He was ready to call quits, that is all he wishes for, in the energy he could summon to speak. Every joke he makes lying on the bed, falls flat on his nose, as if his only entertainment was also the same life's cruel ironies that seem to fatigue him now.
What is tragic is to see the mess you've made of yourself. And, the worst of it is when you can't stop feeling sorry for what you've made and you have to live with it. Live in that bed, motionless, recounting every time someone cheated you, every time you started something new and it failed, flopped, all the internal failures that you lived a thousand times more than you could afford to show. To think you'd live your last few moments so bitter, melts me in agony.
I could live for you, die in stead, or mend every misery, but how am I to make all that bitterness and failure go especially when all you've been is a good God's man?

Just ageing

Thus spake banter girl.

On growth and reading:

As I lay reading Saul Bellow's 'The victim' in the cradling train's upper berth, my legs stretched far wide, out of the little cushion plank and my hands spilled out from the other edges. I realized I had long overgrown the most pertinent measure of Indian common size. At this exact moment of discomforting over growth I also realized the truth of vegetarian living: Grass eaters eat mushrooms only out of sheer miserable abstinence and replacement for lamb feet and cow tails and goat balls. I could be wrong but mushrooms, really? Gross little brown buttons.

On loving and leaving:

When we keep ending love notes in 'love', we realize the effort it takes to keep the almost natural yet terrifying 'I' in the beginning and 'You' in the end from spilling in. You have to restrain, keep it real. Keep it sober.
And, that I'd keep loving many men but just two before one of them dies and they make an exemplary loner of me.

Conclusions make good paragraphs:

Isn't life in all twenty six dimensions in all the parallel universes, including the one inside, only defined apt by one, paradox?

Our secret little anachronistic problem

I am emotional, very. And, quite not trendy at being so. In French, 'vague' /(vaah-g)/ means wave, it suits the sentiment of waves better. There are times when I excessively day-dream, drifting from one thought to another and switching back and forth. In these moments, the agenda is set, think about death of near and dear ones, move on to fantasiing about the lost forgotten fancies, switch to evoking more sensitive thoughts about people dying in freak accidents everyday, flip to ice melting, global warming, then suddenly I picture myself in a film (mostly a political one, more often than not in 'Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi') and start wondering how it would be to give speeches on stages, then cut to making love underneath a long library table on a hot summer afternoon. Finally, the Facebook page fills my thoughts, of comings of people, of travels, of photos, updates, I start comparing my life to those of the others in the same times as mine. The synchronic Saussurean study of comparative success of people like me in different situations just to be reminded that comparisons are odious. This reminds me I didn't finish the Matsuo Buson book, which reminds me that every time I read minimalist poetry, it beats me how concisely images strike to people. This can of course, only lead to reminding me that I may never paint like Degas or Monet, though their strokes look so simple and technically achievable. That calls for an empathizing with the other million or less who grieve for want of talent like me. Then, I start thinking about the girl who so strongly overcame her father's death and lo, I know not whether to run tree to tree with a flag or crawl in grime as symbolic of talent dearth. Very old-fashioned, slightly far-fetched.

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!"