Slight Alteration

You are allowed to call it a Sea Crush if it happens between 15th October and 15th November.

You need not be next to the sea. Strictly for people 25 yrs and above.

I have three at the moment :)

Do Plateon Wala Baaja

Today I spent time in the sun with Ram. She offered to oil my hair and I jumped at the opportunity. I sat on a low mudda in front of her and held the oil bottle. He poured a little on her palm and softly caressed my hair. I never realized her touch was so soft. She told me to cut my hair. I reminded her she wanted me to grow it. She got confused. Less than a minute and we were done. I protested. She protested. Her hands start hurting after a while, she said. I took her hands in mine and started to press them. She wanted a massage instead. I laughed. I ran inside enthusiastically and reappeared with a moisturizer. This time I massaged her. Her feet, her arms, her legs. All dry. Her parched skin soaked the cream rapidly. We talked about a vegetable. She explained a recipe. By now her skin was beaming in the sun. I proceeded with removing her rings to reach between her fingers. Smaller parts of her I had not touched. As she spoke about the first time she used a two piece telephone, my fingers ran over the bulging veins. Beautiful green veins protruding from her paper skin. I decided to go a little strong. It hurt her. She abused me in Derawali. I laughed and told her she needed to be stronger.

We sat quietly before she remembered something that she had left behind in Pakistan. Lost in the kaleidoscope of her million gleaming wrinkles I looked up at her. She said she had left behind 'do plateon wala baaja.' If we still had it, she calculated, we could have earned a lakh from it.

Your Laughter

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy boy
who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes
and close them,
when my steps go
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring
but never your laughter
for I would die.

-- Pablo Neruda

Ha! I'm not 25 anymore!

I woke up this morning and made the following observations about my life:

1. I'm 26 now and really 26 does not have as much character as 25. I dont think I can write revelations about this age like I could two days back. 26 is irrelevant. Like Tuesdays. (two of my friends recently talked about Tuesdays) Can be easily be deleted from our lives without much damage.

2. The happiest time of the year for me is 15th October to 15th November.

3. I have been thinking of buying a new camera, an edit machine and a smart phone. I tell myself I can only have one of the three things. I have no money so my rich relatives may have to contribute. I also tell myself that I must not become an Apple whore. I have been having this conversation with myself for a year now.

4. Its also been a year since I started writing this blog. READ THIS I never thought I'd last. I did. Hi!

5. My friends think my blog is just like me (errr who else is it supposed to be like?) Someone laughed and said it was so punjabi (spl reference to the choice of the backdrop) and then some one laughed at the very name. Really? Dude Chotusing. Gao beta Gao! IS SUCH A FANTASTIC NAME!


Now time to show off. A recent masterpiece. I call it 'borrowed camera photography'
Special Diwali Gifts for those who guess what this is :)

Bracket Poetry

(Its not about you)

Its about me

(heard that before)

Its about telling myself 

(two drinks later)

that I still love you
and I want to have you

(only because you happen to be here)

(drunk)

for the night

(and we know its going to be good)

Walling Music

Psycho Sickness

I have been sleeping for more than 16 hours everyday. I am told the best way to get over your sickness is to sleep through it. It doesn't take much out of me. I swallow my medicine, switch the fan off, wrap half a quilt around and shut my eyes. I sleep well. That's perhaps the only time when I feel well. At all other times I feel drowsy - sleep and sleeplessness overlap each other, I feel weak - there is a strange ache at the back of my head, and I feel depressed.

Sickness is depressive. You feel terrible for yourself. You drown in self pity, your body refuses to stand by you and your mind just has too much time to think. So you think of all sorts of things. Useless things. About ghosts from your past and of potential ghosts of the future.

I tried to get out of the house today to catch a film with friends. I was rather excited given that I have been on house arrest for all these days. But as fate would have it, we got stuck in traffic, decided not to watch the movie, couldn't find another place for cheap tickets so drove back. I felt sick again. I got out of the car at some point and caught an auto back home. I cried incessantly. Till I was back in my bed and in the same place where I could allow myself to slip into the oblivion of my sleep. I slept for hours. Woke up. Lost. 

I have been thinking why I cried so much. Felt bad for my self I guess, irritated at the thought of not having enough energy to stay out or depressed for being rejected by a friend who I loved so much. A friend who used to treat me and my sickness with a lot more love and a lot more warmth. 

See. Too much time to think. 

I'm sick

1.

This space
we're trying to occupy
This middle ground
does not exist

2.

I'm sick
of writing
about you

Good Looking People

This game we play with ourselves. The game of narcissism. The obsession with archiving our lives and the obsession with constantly finding ways to resist it. Many years back a friend introduced the idea of not clicking photographs on trips we made together. I was amused. Why does everything have to be photographed? she said. I remember that vacation. I told myself how liberating it was - not having to think about what to click, why to click, how to click, Click Click Click.

These memories are like photographs, another said. So for a month, I spent remembering my past as a series of pictures. Neither digital not film. No jpegs either. Raw? Maybe. Easy to edit. None of them were sepia as they tell us. Neither colour nor black and white (FYI - black and white are colours too)  

Anyway. I made pictures out of memories. Then took some positives and made stories around them. Narrated stories. Narrated my self. Realized how Raw they were. We appear to appear before people through stories from Raw photographs.

Obsessed about seeing ourselves in photographs. I can't remember a single time when I saw myself in a photograph and not wondered how good or bad I look. This obsession with looking good. Looking good before good looking people. The obsession of looking good in your own archive.

Photograph by the Man with the Camera

Another agreed, the fad these days is to archive yourself but cleverly appear to not care. The bug struck me too. It helps in writing definitions of the self, you see. Definitions of yourself through labels you use to appear before good looking people. These labels are very important.

What do you do? he said. Nothing, she said. But what DO you do? I remember how weird yet brave that moment was before someone changed the subject. These moments should pause sometime. While everyone's frozen I should kiss them both. 

I should also stop. Ranting at the cost of a pending reading. Brooding about the inevitable.

And the irony of having posted this on my blog. This archive of mine!

Madness is enough

“Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be.”

Em and the Big Hoom