Memorare

This letter will forever be unlike any you will ever receive. It is contaminated by longing, despair and loss. It’s more a collage than a coherent whole strung together by the logic of language.

You took away my words, stripped me off my voice.

That morning, when you undid my clothes, you unraveled every syllable and reduced my to silence.  And now you’ve gone and even the silence is fading and my body is now mute. Here, but not present. And you’ve become a phantom. Absence without form.

I want to inscribe my body within this letter. I want to package every inch of skin, every seething muscle, every gnawing pain, unshed tear, un-bled wound, every unfinished, unformed molecule.  I want to send you the woman that is walking up a stair inside my head. A woman I inherited from a Wong Kar Wai film I recently saw. She who made the violins come is part of my body, too. So are you. You sit inside my soul like a seed, slowly taking root, ripening my fields, preparing for my harvest yield.

I wish I could arrive at the essence of my being. The quintessential me that I could deliver to you in this letter. Framed and ready-to-use, an unwavering, unchanging, typical me.

I wonder if I am who I am when I’m alone with myself. No one to overhear the symphony my body is conducting. Feet pounding against the ground in an eerie solitude. Fingers taping against the silence of a summer breeze. Heart slipping out of its shell when nobody is in sight for a quick, giant sip of the universe.

If I am who I am when I am alone with myself, then this is who I am: A vision on wheels. A breath-taking, blurred-body, speeding downhill on a bicycle that’s much too big for my five-feet, seven-inch body. The ends of my hair twirl on the edge of the wind and my breasts jangle from frame to frame within the rhythm of a metronome – tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick. My skirt flairs inches above my thighs that peep through cloth like spies.

I’m a black magic woman with a black bandana cloistered over my head. My eyes: black coals on fire. My black magic cunt rubs against my black magic seat and sighs.

If I am who I am when you are watching me, then this is who I am: a half-dressed woman in a half-dressed dream. Bra missing, nipples pointing north, towards Old Delhi. You capture my moving body with your lens that can only frame me when my skin clashes against the light of day and not when it blends into the dark of a moon-less night. My hair is ruffled, my skin, crumpled. I can barely stop smiling at how you look at me and how you make me me.

Last night we were strangers. This sun-drenched afternoon we have already loved each other and several lifetimes have begun and ended and begin again, anew. I do not know the shelf life of the video you made of me. My body oscillates within that frame. Tick-tock-tick-tock, hair rustling, tick-tock, smile waning. Tick-tock, smile waxing, tick-tock, tick-tock.

How must I reconstruct all the spaces we unraveled. All the distances we traveled with our wanderlusting feet? It seems like years have passed and now we move through spaces in our minds. We haunt them as they haunt us and we will never live again in the pure lifetime of a single moment. We are condemned to move back and forth in time like a pendulum oscillating between past and future, obscurity and eternity. All that came before you and all that is to come.

How do I recover the moment and pin it down? Make a collage of collected memories?

You said I was a good girl and patted my cunt You took your throne on the back of my thighs and watched me heave with your touch You smelt the trickle that ran through my legs and spilt over the bedspread my leaky faucet that you refuse to fix You turned me around and fingered me in search of my scent I watched you repeat this again and again just to leer at my face contorting into a moan and then a sigh You crumpled my smile, made me weep made me beg for mercy tortured me with your soft fingertips till I could stand it no longer I was weak with pleasure You took advantage of me you came into my mossy cellar and you refused to leave

I had my revenge I stroked you, inscribed elegies on your flesh sang sagas to your skin dedicated myself to your salvation I resurrected you from the dead built my church upon your rock made a disciple of your tongue my cunt recited gospels I was your evangelist and you begged me to have mercy on your dying rising soul. Tick tock tick tock tick tock your cock wont let me stop drawing in drawing out my fingers on the clock tick-up- tock-down-tick-tock tick-tock tick-your face paused tock-your ass clenched tick-your eyes static, tock-your cock ecstatic-beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful boy, beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful boy.

You are who you are when you spilled into my palm. Dense. Warm. Scattered. Full-bodied.

You are a stain that refuses to vanish; stain I will never forget; stain that I’ve carved on the palm of my hand.

I am flesh of your flesh, bone stolen from your own.

I am what you left behind when you left for that place in your mind called home.

You are all that I have lost to circumstance.

I cling to all I remember. All that we said and did and all the spaces we unraveled, the distances we traveled with our wanderlusting feet.

In the end what will matter is not what we will have remembered but all that we forgot. All the details that slipped so silently into eternity, all that vanished before we could understand, all that we can never recover first-hand, in word or thought or deed, all that passed before we learned to read with our ears and listen with our skin, all that was never spoken, all that we let in but never heard, could not feel, all that we left undone, unanswered still.

We are all that we have lost.

Yours

In that loss.

Monsoonal

The rain evokes memories of you sleeping beside me while a storm raged through a Delhi sky and water slid along the windows and slipped through my body till you were drenched in the deluge.

As I write this, there is the ominous grinding of clouds as their bodies churn against each other and moan across the sky, their thunderous sighs, loud and clamourous, like Regina when she holds that single key; Apres moi, le deluge.

It’s been like this all day. It reminds me of all the monsoons that I have lived in this city by the sea. It reminds me of childhood, when I was a little girl and I came home soaked, my socks wet from wading through two feet puddles of water. On the way was a garage and oil would splatter into gushing little streams and we could trace all the colours of the rainbow. My hair soggy, with rain. My lemon yellow and blue uniform, moist and greasy. There were times when I would invoke the rain as if it were a raging fire. I would ask it to grow stronger so that the city would flood and there wouldn’t be school the next day.

I am still a little girl, fascinated by rain. I shudder; still, at the sound of thunder, and lightning in the sky still causes a sparkle in my eyes. The monsoons move me. There is something about the waves crashing blindly against Marine Drive, Worli Seaface or Carter Road or Bandra Bandstand…

This island city feels the weight of its body, her flesh comes alive and she becomes all spirit and matter, flesh and soul. The sea clashes against her shores till we are all alive again, fertile, animated, spirited, whole; if only for those few minutes when it pours ravenously and the stars creep behind a heap of pregnant clouds.

In this rain-drenched, post-midnight-morning, I hold you close beside me. My body still shudders at the sound of thunder and I move closer to you, in search of shelter from the storm.

You move inside me like the rain; virile, certain, unafraid, full of rhythm, motion, spirit and flesh. You clash against me like a violent wave, tempered by storm. You move me and I rain all over you,  a clamourous patter, not a trickle or a drip-drop, a thirsty shower replete with  longing and voluptuous sighs.

You are drenched in my deluge.

Seasonal Dyslexia

We are on the verge of summer, a seasonal interval between winter’s wrath and the capsizing heat of May. All the leaves are brown and falling; neem leaves with their sun-dried tips, twirled like epiphanies, peepal leaves that drown in the air and mingle with the cosmopolitan crowd of fallen leaves, bougainvillea that lie resplendent on the sides of the road, an orgy of bright pink and luscious red.

The sun stamps wildly across all that has fallen and the wind grinds the refuse into dust; leaf-rust. Nature knows no decay.

Spring is gallivanting in the middle of this fall, a picara riding across autumn’s terrain. Some trees lie bare, vacant, waiting, like amnesiacs, memory stripped by the wind while others have been replenished and stand tall and ripe, fistfuls of laughter leaping into the sky. All that was still is now in bloom. Flowers gape at me, follow me wherever I go; gasping yellows, stormy reds, midnight blues and bridal whites.

This is winter’s legacy; this mélange of seasons that compete and coincide, collide with wind, beat against our restless brows and compete for our attention. The afternoons are sunny and dry, the evenings wind-tossed while night wears the colour of cloudy ink and mourns the passing of winter’s chill.

Summer will announce itself on our tongues as a craving for lime and ice with a mixture of sweet and salt. Girls will wear their skirts short and carry umbrellas like lethal weapons; will trap their locks in hats or plaits and make too much of too little.

Soon I must leave this cityofdjinns that I have come to love.