Self defence

My moleskine has been lying limp for days. Sometimes, in the still afternoon, I undress it and attempt a short scribble, a few scattered lines about nothing at all.

“My body has been soaked in brine, sweat, tears. Ocassionally, the skies unveil drops of light, limpid rain and the virile sounds of thunder intoxicate.”

Then, I lie vacant on the double-sized bed, my arms hanging around me, my gaze fixed on the eucalyptus tree he planted. I marvel (as does he) at how the leaves still shimmer though a branch snapped in last night’s storm. Sunlight glides off the sprightly, green edges and the world seems dazzling and un-contained.

Often, I read. I lie unabashed with a photocopy of Anne Carson and I make notes about her quest for beauty. Everyday I soak I soak in everything: the glistening leaves, the scent of damp earth, tablespoonfuls of desire, his temper and his calm, the cold, callous call of the wild, the bitter-sweet longing for him to come inside me and rob me of my fears, the taste of sweet bread and variety meats, the warm, oozing flavour of ripe muskmelon or litchis, the chirruping of the squirrels who made a nest near the window and the city that stretches out before me when I step beyond his door: the ring-roads, the murals, the nimbu-green rickshaws that speckle the landscape. So much more to absorb, so much yet to imprint upon my skin. I hardly know where to begin.

So I don’t. I sit still. My moleskine stares at me as if I had betrayed it, broken some sacred promise, erred unknowingly. I avert each haunting glare. I make up excuses, I remember letters of rejection: “I’m sorry but you’re writing is too ethereal”. I look up the dictionary;

Ethereal

1. Characterised by lightness and insubstantiality; as impalpable or intangible as air.

2. Of heaven or the spirit.

3.Characterised by unusual lightness and delicacy.

I look for synonyms: airy, celestial, supernal.

I cannot understand.

I return to my hesitating, my reluctance to commit to time and place, space and face and context. I refuse to tell you too much for fear that you will learn and remember. I will not tell you where and when for how does it matter, these trivial details. Is it not enough for you to know that when I placed my hand against his tired face, he swallowed my tongue and unhooked me and tossed me on his bed and he refuses to let me leave.

There is no truth in geography. Longitudes and latitudes reveal nothing except the position of cities, they will not inform you of the lust that brews in wild, beating hearts, of loves - lost and found or rediscovered, or excesses and indulgences. There is no science in locating, in describing what happened when and to whom and what was I wearing when I first met him, or what language did we speak in, French or German or Gibberish. The heart speaks its own tongue and there is no script to record the making and un-making of love, the blood beating, the pulse racing or subsiding, the sudden flights of fancy.

If fact is your concern; precision, attention to minute detail, this is no place for you. Here you will only learn of moments and remembered things. If a face is what you seek, a name and pincode, I have none to show except those inscribed upon my palm; lines that criss-cross like tributeries, going nowhere, chasing the everywhere and the everything, trekking the distance of the boundless horizon.

I may striptease before you but I’ll keep that diamond on my nipple and that jewel on my cunt.

You shouldn’t see too much.

Weather Report

Its 41 degrees Celsius outside. Inside, it feels like 45 or 50.

If it wasn’t for this sweltering heat I would have seduced you. But the air hangs heavy and we run the risk of fusing into each other, our flesh stands the threat of getting enmeshed. What if we melt and never untangle?

Love-making can be lethal in such extreme degrees. If we lock the door and close the windows, which we are known to do, our muffled cries will get veiled in moisture and as we unravel, as we unfurl on your cotton sheets, our bodies will break into a silent sweat and we might get glued together: your smooth, delicious skin will bear imprints of my fingertips and the space between my breasts will be dank with your wet, hungry sighs.

The fan-blades would be helpless against this ungainly heat. Our moans will ruffle the bedspread, cause ripples in the air. Breathlessness might ensue as you heave against me, as the weight of your body pounds against mine, as we course through regions of ecstasy. Its possible that you may not ever be able to leave.

The pressure of my cries will spring a leak in your walls, will break down the doors and all your neighbours will hear of our afternoon delights, our attempt at pleasure in this paralysing heat. They’ll find us preserved in sweat and tears, with pockets of salt in every untouched crevice.

If it wasn’t for this sweltering heat, I would have consumed you and left you out to dry. But we’ve seen a sharp rise in levels of humidity and you’d lie wet for days, waiting for sweat to evaporate, longing for a sip of cool air, a steady wind, a breeze from the hills or a gentle storm, anything for relief from my warmth.

I’ve spared you this summer.

I wait for winter to arrive on swashbuckling heels.

Letter of apology

It’s been a month since I arrived and I’m already afraid to leave this cityofdjinns. I’ve been living in a house that’s soaked in sunlight and every morning the same silly bird makes a dash for the bedroom window, begging to be let in.

I wake up to castleton tea, vintage darjeeling, poured from a lovely, white kettle. On most mornings, I go for a brisk walk in the huge garden outside and look for the baby owls he once showed me. I’ve added my clutter to his clutter and the house is so wonderfully messy and yet everything is in its place, as it ought to be.

The evenings can be windy, stormy almost, punctuated by bouts of lightning and thunder and a light, cooling rain. The temperatures drop and everything is still, again, and beautiful.

I’m in the midst of so much movement, so much is brewing in all the minds I met, fresh caricatures, new compositions, epiphanies about line breaks and novellas and science fiction. It’s contagious… the waistline of my novel has begun to expand, slowly and steadily, spoon-fed on this intoxicating diet of passion and mystery.

I’m audacious, once more, no longer inhibited by a profession that was never meant for me. I feel un-fettered, free to live on the tail end of a violent wind.

My family worries about me. I do, too. I don’t know how much longer I can sustain this inebriated state of being. The sea calls out to me and every alternate night, I dream of the coastline speckled with pregnant clouds hanging heavy, longing for downpour. I still long for Goa, the land I inherited. Its rivers call out to me, tempt me with the promise of fish and ripples and canoes and fields of paddy stretched along the horizon. An empty house beseeches me, lures me with the promise of square feet of privacy. I long to be, saturated, isolated, pensive, solitary.

I’m trying to inch my foot forward, cross the border and head for monsoon-tossed shores. But I’m hesitating, something draws me back, lures me to stay still in this land-locked city where I first learned to breathe, where my heart learned to beat and my body learned the art of shape-shifting and moved into being.

I regret to inform you, fair, ex-city that you’ve lost me to Delhi. You tried to tame my heart, I tried to adapt to your fast-track ways, attempted to engage with your point of view. But you have no space for me. There are too many whose affections I must compete with, too many who lay claim to you, who live and lust for a piece of your core.

I’m here and I’m happy. And for this small, quiet instant, in this soft, sober moment, I want to be nowhere else but here, in this hot, dry city where the laburnum grows and the eucalpytus leaves outside the bedroom window sway sweetly as I sleep, where the ring-roads are speckled with roses, where the dust-storms sweep over and unsettle and then quell gently as I sip my Kahua tea brewed by the Kashmiri refugee at South Ex (Phase I, only seven rupees), where my lover woos me as he whistles to Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie.

I will be back, eventually, but I hope never again to stay. I’ve outgrown your salty charm. The flamboyant, restless part of me will remain in this city that adopted me.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If he were a cinnamon peeler he would leave the yellow bark dust everywhere he went and everything he’d touch would secrete the sweet, pungent taste of cinnamon.

His trade is similar. Everything he touches turns to black and white, never to be forgotten, doomed to haunt, secreting that familiar scent of nostalgia for things unloved, lives unlived, moments that will never repeat themselves.

Like his self portrait in a room he once called home. His eyes are drooping, recovering from some trippy, hazy night, his cupboard is unlocked and his body is open and inviting. He’s looking into the lens inside-out and outside-in. It could have been an epiphany, it could have been that precise moment when he first discovered his manifesto for beauty that is fragile yet intense.

I look for him in every image but he is elusive. Evasive. He is nomadic, wanderlusting from one space to another, observing, living without always entering the realm of the living. Peeping through a hole, a lens, looking with a sense of wonder, and surprise. Perforating. He is the nomad who knows too early that there is no promised land. He sees the miracle in the familiar, the ordinary.

Like his bathroom shelf in New Delhi, 1984- a clutter of assorted things: a packet of detergent, an ashtray, a coffee mug, a shaving brush (bristles gleaming in the morning light), a razor blade lurking behind a bottle of water, scrubbers and soap holders and a tube of some mysterious ointment.

Or that vacant room he called Home, New Delhi, 1972- A refrigerator, an unkempt floor-mat, books, from a time he used to read. Or those little truths that flicker in wooden circuitboards, or youth trapped in a six-string guitar or a pensive pair of knitting needles.

How do I peel the cinnamon peeler? How must I undress him? Strip him down to size and frame and composition? Grind him into cinnamon dust to arrive at his manifesto?

He captured her revelry. As Nommie danced she whirled her hair and became the center of the universe and shed cosmic tears.

Everywhere his eye gazed, his scent was sure to follow. And he remains almost invisible for he looked outside-in not inside-out like you or me. And yet he’s etched himself everywhere, swallowed three cities whole, and lived to tell the tale.

He’s exposed their lovely little secrets, the orgasms and the opium, the bell-bottoms and knitting needles, the hair speckling at fiery points, silver bangles aligned on a tired wrist. And bodies- a mixed bag of bodies, some open and exposed, warm and luscious, resplendent in the light of a hidden lantern, fertile bodies with babies at their breasts, fragile bodies reclining on an armchair, adolescent ones, closed and confused accompanied by a cigarette.

And then there was Veena, poised at some corner of Connaught Place, clutching a bag and a shawl, stricken by some spell, worried.

And there was Pooh with her fiesty, provocative body looking boldly into his lens with her kohl lined, almond shaped eyes, looking at him inside out and outside in.

And then the kiss. Two tongues outstretched on the verge of a meltdown. Tongues tainted by lust, corrupted by the sin of knowing too much and too little, looking outside in and inside out and forgetting to see.

They are a part of me now, those figures from his youth. And now I peep into forbidden spaces, I eavesdrop on silences. I, too, swallow cities whole. I feast on them and churn them out in dreams.

I never left that gallery that fated Wednesday evening in Delhi last year. My spirit was overwhelmed and for the first time, since Souza, did I fully fathom the miracle that Stendhal experienced…

“My head thrown back, I let my gaze dwell on the ceiling. I underwent the profoundest experience of ecstasy I had ever encountered. I had obtained the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.”

Liar Liar

You’ve been lying to me for a while now. I’ve found a pattern to your deceit. You try to tease me with half-truths. It’s easy, I suppose, to lie about little things.

You said you never forgot details. I quizzed you to see if you could recall the colour of the lace panties I wore the first afternoon we made love. ‘Blue’ was your clever retort. Liar! It was a trick question. I was naked beneath my coat.

I inquired about the last time you fell in love. You shot a cold glance at me, said you never fall. I asked if you were falling now. You said you were already in love with me.

And just yesterday I asked if you had made the bed or whether it was still messy from the last time we fucked. You said it was remade. That you stretched the sheets yourself, tucked the corners neatly under the mattress, put the pillow back into place.

You lied.

I stopped by while you were away and found the bed umade and dusty. The sheets were crumpled and misplaced, even the pillow and displaced and reeked of me; your sitar stood like a bystander to your innocent crime-scene.

I made your bed again and graced your covers with my body. You returned and brought with you the mad scent of wet grass. I warned you not to enter your bed, which was now in my custody as punishment for your deceit. And yet you stole into the covers and peeped through the window of my back. You trespassed through private property. Your fingers scuttled over the steep incline of my ass and crept into my burrow, thieving my goods, my underground loot.

Let me assure you, you gave me no pleasure. I resisted you, didn’t twitch an inch, didn’t sigh or moan, didn’t melt or groan. I was stiff, like whipped cream. You sank deeper into my whole and unraveled me, struck a secret spring inside my cunt till music came gushing out of me and your fingers waltzed on my wet ballroom floor.

And now you rummage through my body as if it were a familiar room. You seem to know where everything is kept, can find my light switch unerringly in the dark, can navigate around my spiral staircases, my corridors, my rain-drenched roofs. Your flesh rides through my curves, my steep turns, the bend in my road, till you occupy ever sacred-square inch of space with white lies.

Muse (For B, who tried to make a poem out of me)

I confess you grabbed me by my collar, shook the sleep out of my drifting body and left me altogether speechless, tongue-tied and clueless, wondering how I must reply.

I confess I am flattered a poet of your intensity should find such bludgeoning beauty in my insecure, black body, that you should be mesmerized by my smile, that you should drown in the murky depths of my eyes, that you are probably drowning still with no hope for salvation.

How must I rescue you from this poem you are making of me?

Confess, B, that I am but a figment of your creative ecstasy. A half truth, a bold, distorted fragment of the real, carved from malleable clay, fashioned by your crafty eyes that peer into the soul of all matter in their compulsive quest for poetry.

Confess, B, that I am but a poem inside your head, one that escapes syntax, simile, economy. A poem you must pursue because it drives you mad, possesses you, etches its essence all over your hungry, prophetic tongue and remains unattainable because you can see, believe, but can never touch, grasp, contain, own.

Confess, B, that I am but a vision inside your soul, a stark naked angel wandering the smoggy terrain of your prophecy, a morning vision that will vanish by noon, that is vanishing so soon, vanishing as we speak, slipping away softly, on tipytoes, when you are asleep, while your body is breaking into the seductive arms of some other product of ecstasy.

Confess, please, that it will vanish in spite of all your pleas, your eager appeals to patron saints of memory.

This is how it will unfold,

The Vanishing;

It will begin with the forgetting of the curve of my smile and will steadily swallow all the intent in my semi-passionate eyes. This will follow; the sound of my voice blurring into oblivion. You will try to make it reappear but will hear only the sound of your own voice paralyzed by poetry, screeching in the deafening stillness of night.

You will shriek at the sheer wonder of this pure poem you have made of me vanishing into obscurity, too exuberant to have been true, too real to have been imagined, so incredibly out of reach, so unreasonably ideal, so fucking beautiful it makes you want to weep.

Espionage

I like to watch her tall body and its tiny movements, the pores of her skin always alive, like ripples on a lake, as if she were tickled constantly by the wind and its tiny summer breaths.

I watch her quietly, her bare, exquisite arms, the dense flesh of her breasts, the cliff points of her nipples that peep through her bra. Her hair is outlandish, locks of hair twirling in the dark, their fiery ends causing ruptures in the air. She is not aware of me or her body. She continues her task at hand, her body and its tiny movements sifting through sun-dried clothes. Through a borrowed lens I watch her make a dance out of the simple chore of folding her skirts. She wraps her fingers around the fabric as if she remembers the precise moment she unfurled the layers of its flair and held her cunt on display to an unsuspecting him.

I spy with my sleuthing eyes something beginning with the letter ‘b’- back, her back, no, the small of her back that her blouse unveils for all the world to see. She has ripples there too, her pores blushing on the edge of the wind, like leaves. My fingers itch to touch the delicate roundness of her ass. I touch with my naked eyes, I marvel at the beauty of its ratio, its precise proportion to her luscious breasts. Her legs are long and fit. I spot the muscles of her calves as they move in communion with the rest of her body and its tiny movements; picking up her small pile of folded clothes from her unmade bed, treading the short distance to her wooden cupboard, putting them neatly into place upon a shelf.

If only she knew that clothes lose their meaning when they wear her, that she gleams through cotton, reveals so much more than she tries to conceal, that I know her body well already, in spite of all the clothes that adorn. I have studied its arithmetic, its intimate geography:

Breath of wind + Nuance of touch = the delicate ripening of her pores, goose bumps.

Two inches north from her resplendent buttocks lies her delta, her mound. I know her cartography; can trace historic passages that lie submerged on the surface of her belly. Most men may have stumbled upon them, accidentally, but would never have recognized the antique trail.

She has the wealth of ancient cities buried inside her cunt. If only she would let me dig, let me excavate, I would uncover her, would dance sprightly around her riches, would sift through her pile of jewels and tuck them quietly back into place, for future reference and mark the spot with an ‘X’.

The Gift

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

You stuck your fist inside my rib cage, plucked my heart out and held my empty body on display. The blood dripped from your fingers and you made a mess of my clothes, left them sullen with stains the colour of red wine.

Soon my body will shut down. My vessels will collapse, my veins will run dry, my brain will grow numb, my skin will turn blue and my lungs will take a final gasp of air before they malfunction.

You couldn’t keep up with my tempo. My heart beat too wildly for your taste. I loved easily, in excess and without fear.

Your blood was full of poison. You couldn’t withstand my warm caress, my wordless flights into the great beyond, my joy that knew no bounds.

You scooped my aching core and  left my body out to rot.

I give you my heart.

It is torn and bleeding.

I have no use for it now.

The New Testament

Have you heard? Have you heard the news? My womb is swollen with child. It’s only a matter of time till I unravel, till my water breaks and the birthing begins. I’m pregnant, ripe, fertile. My face has a peculiar glow.  I’m eating for two. It’s beginning to show. Its been three months now, just a few more left to go.

Everywhere I roam, on buses, trains or planes, they make space for me, they tell me what to do in cases of emergency. They can smell the words spewing from my body, they can sense the mystery, this odd mixture of irony and metaphor, poetry and prose.

Will you stand by and watch while I dilate? While I sweat and bleed, while I shout out loud so the whole world hears of my labour pains?

I am a leap of faith.

Can you put all doubt to rest and believe in me? Can you quell your suspicions and learn to love my core? Can you cease all your clever reasoning and your constant need for logic and put your trust in my fluttering, irrational heart?

I, too, can work miracles. I, too, can still the waters, multiply fish and loaves, transform bread and wine to flesh and blood.

Come smell me. Come watch me burn. I promise to intoxicate, inebriate… woo you with my flames.

Statement of Purpose

I write that I may remember.

I write that I may forget…all your petty grievances, your empty anger, your lopsided temper and your foul, random moods.

I write that I may remind myself of your basic goodness, your innocence, your wounded, fragile self.

I write to chronicle my passion, to record your histrionics, to document  my profound insights about your body,  its secret chambers and its embellishments  (that shade of  indigo you wore last night or the way the light shone upon your skin while you lay dreaming in ‘technicolour’ right before your symphony of snores, as we sought refuge from summer heat through fan blades and eucalyptus leaves).

I write that I may conquer you, that I may no longer hunger for the slight touch of your feet against mine or for your arm to stride across my breasts while I’m asleep, soaked in sweat and dreams, that I may no longer be dismantled when you stare at me across a crowded room or offer me a quick drag of your rolled cigarette or when you hover around the periphery of my cunt, teasing my appetite, upsetting my calm, my quiet ease.

I write because I am helpless against you and your thirst for life, your delight in all that moves and breathes, combusts and seethes with a force unrivalled by your own,  your propensity for laughter, your mystical soul.

I write to conjure you, to mould you into shape and form, trim you down to size…

I write because I have no choice in the matter, no say in how I must feel or think or act, because you seduce me with your wide-eyed wonder and your understanding of loss.

You reduce me to silence!

I write  to cure this disease, this unbridled obsession with love and lust and all the holy madness that inflames your beastly heart.

I write, aware that everything I say or won’t can and will be used against me.

I write, knowing that nothing I write will inspire you to love me, that my words lack lustre and can never incite your passion or your curiousity.

I write in spite of me.

An Appeal

“A man’s love is so tragic, he loses exactly what he loves the most” Albert Camus.

Last night I couldn’t bear the weight of your body. You were heavier than ever before, like a cotton blanket drenched in water. Your arms and legs held the burden of a hundred years , your heart beat slow and loud and your breath, too, was heavy, as if you had seen infinity in the breadth of a dream.

You overwhelm me, still, with your fits of kindness and your bouts of rage. I have no defence against your madness. You’ve turned me into the culprit, the smooth criminal who slays at will, Judas who betrayed with a kiss.

I’m only here to love you, to soften your antique heart that’s hardened through years of misuse. I’m here to strengthen your muscles, to thin your blood, to lighten your body and guide you into ecstasy.

Let me unravel you, unfurl you bit by bit, layer by layer till I arrive at your core. Let me nurse your open wounds. Let me cure you with my secret recipe for hunger and desire. Let me fill you that dangerous longing for excess.

Let me save you from yourself.