One Year Later

you remain a mystery.

I’ve been struggling to unlock you, to strip you off your disguises to arrive at your core.

I’m still dangling somewhere between your past and present. Like a fish out-of-breath, I’m gasping for a small sip of your universe, for some room in a tiny corner of your mind.

I cannot explain what draws me to you, some kind of chemical attraction, something about the way your body moves, the flicker of your fingers, your slick, sauve smile, something about the groves in your skin, the vanishing of all doubt in those few, callous seconds when your voice breaks over the phone as you reach across the miles and lure me to your den.

I’ve traveled distances for you, made giant leaps in my imagination, crossed over to the other side of desire. I cannot go back, there is no scope for any return to innocence. I lost myself on the road to your house and I left too much of my belongings in your store room.  No other choice but to continue on this dangerous path, past the warning signs, the traffic hauls, the blinding streetlights towards the dead-end.

I wear no masks, no clever robes…nothing to beguile you but the intent in my eye.

I’ve forgotten how to seduce, how to ensnare you and keep you within my folds. You are beyond solution, a package of positive and negative numbers that no magic formula can unravel.

You move in the realm of myth.

I move through shattered doorways looking for the light.

My body has betrayed me, can no longer bask in the shadow of another, can no longer glow in the aftermath of a stranger’s kiss, can entertain no one else but you.

You remain distant, indifferent to my excesses.

Tu me tues , tu me fais du bien.

The Goa Monologues

Days Unlimited

 Our Lady keeps the hours. I hear the church bells ring but I’ve lost track of time. The days have piled up and melted into each other so seamlessly that I can no longer tell what happened when and where and why.

Two weeks is certainly not enough. There is so much yet to accomplish. I’ve only just begun to shape and define the book that’s growing inside of me. I can feel its rough, unpolished contours. It hasn’t yet started to kick but it has developed a heart beat that’s independent of mine.

I relish this feeling of dubious belonging to a landscape drenched with life. I’ve come to enjoy the curious glances that come my way each time I walk down a street or when inquisitive waiters ask me about the country of my origin. I want to tell them I’m from the Republic of Nowhere; a nation full of longing. I don’t. I tell them this is my native land but they’re seldom convinced. They probe deeper, ask if I speak the language. I don’t, I say. They laugh; tell me I have no right to say I’m from here. How to tell them I communicate best in an unspoken tongue, a private speech filled with absent words and lazy metaphors that my body invents in the throes of passion?

The house I live in has become my fortress. In it I am not contaminated by the thirst for excess. Here I am still. I’m in the hub of all things domestic; a world of masalas and beef roast and sorpotel, there’s a fisherman who rides by on his cycle, he honks to tell us of his arrival, he brings me the paper, there’s the pao wala who comes by in the evening selling podis, can-con, and sweet bread. A world of mothers, wives and children and sons and husbands out at sea. Our Lady keeps the hours. I live on the fringes of these lives. Mine is a world of Miller. I breathe the dust between each syllable as he tells me about the Land of Fuck, of ripe, juicy cunts and the irrepressible, uncontainable call of the word.

Often, I indulge myself in reading the local papers— works of innocence with secrets tucked between typos.  Never before have I looked forward to obituaries. These are not mere square inches of print. Each block tells a story of regret, mourns the ‘sad and untimely demise of our most beloved friend’, announces the timings for the requiem mass, warns you, ‘No condolence visits please’. Each name sits on your tongue like a song, Miniato Barreto, Ritinha Fernandes e Ratos, Manuel Jose Dias, Armando Faria Fernandes, Satirio Afonso, Camilo Vaz, Josemaria Inacio Camil Fernandes. There are days when entire pages are filled with birthday greetings for ministers, paid for by friends, colleagues, and members of Unions—Lives compressed into a little poems that mark how much the departed will be missed.

Our Lady keeps the hours. To think there’s someone whose job profile includes keeping time, tugging at strings so that the bells will ring and mark the passing minutes. In a little while I must start packing, putting things together, lock up the house and return to Bombay. I know my wanderlustingfeet will bring me back here soon enough. I want nothing more than to be here, to live here for a while.

There’s so much to look forward to… that little restaurant in a bylane of Fontainhas, more like a little house than a café… the rain gushing outside the window as I downed an afternoon whiskey. Hours spent wandering the ruas of Fontainhas, soaking in the colours, the music, deep indigo, inside-of-a-raw-mango green, sunflower yellows and pinot-noir red. The jazz band with Yvonne, a brown-skinned Ella Fitzgerald, and Lester Godinho, a drummer who understands the nuances of time like no one else I’ve heard before, the rush of blood to my head as they perform St Louis’ Blues and How High the Moon. The sweet scent of the air, paddy fields that glow in the naked sunlight, birds flying high….you know what I mean.

My past keeps coming back to kiss me on my lips. It seems tantalizing the thought of returning to an older self. But I’m just getting settled in this new skin. I’ve only just discovered secret passageways, underground rivers, diamond mines hidden in my core. The conversion isn’t entirely complete, I have yet to map this new territory, yet to chart fresh routes, yet to name the many criss-crossing streets.

Will you stand by as I unravel? Will you watch as I whirl and unwind and replenish myself with fresh aching, a renewed commitment to life?

The Goa Monologues

Days Three and Four

I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes, perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

I wish it wasn’t so difficult, this task of writing; constructing sentence upon sentence, layer upon layer in my attempt to build a private language, a secret grammar that will help bridge the silence, help me report all that I see and hear, smell and touch and all that I have yet to feel.

Often I spend the day in a series of delays, postponing this moment of truth as if it were a tedious chore. I procrastinate, read entire novels, re-arrange furniture, clean as many rooms as I can before I reach for the kettle to make myself some more tea, or sink into the sofa and watch some mindless TV until words begin to chase me, till the backlash begins and I have no choice but to yield to the call, to let the words dictate themselves to me, allow the lines to fall spontaneously into place until I lose all traces of origin.

It isn’t easy to believe. It seems incredulous that I should abandon all responsibility and choose to live in isolation, even if it’s only temporary. There’s so much danger in an experiment like this… the threat of learning that this isn’t my true calling, the possibility of regret, the shame of being too wildly imaginative, the risk of ruin, the fear of failure and that small chance of sheer contentment that doesn’t exist independent of all these.

I talk myself into small acts of courage, like rummaging through my moleskine and building upon stray lines, tattered thoughts and leftover ideas. I even tease myself with the promise of red wine, I try to restrict distractions but still this landscape calls out to me, lures me with the sound of rain and the fury of leaves lapping against the edge of a breeze.

I am seated on the rocking chair which I’ve placed in the balcony. A few houses away, believers and non-believers are chanting the rosary, singing the litany. The evening sky has dissolved into an endless spread of indigo. The trees still try to reach for the stars; they stretch their leaves and sigh. Suddenly, the world seems still, like time itself has yawned or slipped and lost track of the hour and we lie suspended in the fabric of an eternal twilight.

I write between gulps of my screwdriver, there is much to tell and it’s hard to find a place to begin. Perhaps I should tell you about this house in which I’m living. It isn’t ancestral, in fact it’s been painted just twice and is part of a residency, a friendly neighbourhood. You’d have to take the first left from the 400-year-old church to get here, past the Panchayat’s office, the cemetery and some spooky bungalows. I live beside deserted fields so that the view from my balcony extends to cover this expanse of uninhabited, uncultivated land. Intertwined among these fields are winding roads that lead to the station. The sky seems close at hand and the horizon is flanked by hills. Throughout the day I see a variety of birds but they disappear before I can note the colour of their beaks or the span of their wings.

No one from my family was born in his house. And yet, over time our lives have been inscribed upon the walls. Seven years ago we had the house-warming party; everyone was there except for me. I had board exams to prepare for. Fr Lionel blessed the house. It was a curious coincidence. Decades ago, when my father was courting my mother in Bombay, my grandmother, uncomfortable about the affair, confided in this now-deceased priest. She was apprehensive that my mother, a woman four years older than her son, would steal him away from the herd. I was told later that many cases of beer were brought along with numerous bottles of whiskey and soda and towards midnight everyone broke into song, Uncle Wolton began to sing fados in Portuguese and my father struggled to keep pace with his unsteady pitch, Cedric, too, played the guitar and stopped each time a song demanded a chord other than C, F and G. That’s how most family dinners at this house conclude, with joyous refrains from old Konkani songs and the longing for childhood contained in the fado.

But this is a first for this house – playing host to just one person, keeping her safe, protecting her from the giant red ants that crawl over the mango tree or the ghostly solitude. For the first time the rooms are filled with echoes from conversations with myself, the sink isn’t besieged by pots and pans since the cooking is done by one for one. I try to make it easier. I distribute my presence. I spend the morning in the bedroom, the afternoon on the couch downstairs and the evenings in the balcony upstairs. The kitchen walls document my comings and goings, and the many pots of tea I have consumed in just three days.

Cocooned in silence, I will myself to write. I persuade myself to believe.