A Horror Story

A haunted house of darkness.

Melted candles stuck to weeping windows.

People who roam outside in chains seem ghostly

The ghosts inside wonder what the world is like outside.

Humans outside hurry, do not look at each other for too long.

When they do- they seem scared.

Scared to laugh out, scared to cry,

Ask questions, to agree, disagree or keep quiet.

Funny humans, the ghosts thought.

Muted humans, their gasps of surprise at being alive erupt and exasperated sighs escape their lips

as they realize they are sitting on a bomb called time in a bunker called life.

They manage- poor humans - small celebrations of language

selfish routes of adventures music that reaches the coffin grounds and wakes up their dead.

Mossy walls of the haunted house look on in indifferent curiosity why despite there being no chains these ghosts stay inside.

The walls realize-human walls these are.

They realize that these are happy ghosts, medicated ghosts, kicking and screaming ghosts.

The community of ghosts wearing uniforms do not own money, make no meaning out of it.

And the world outside do not make meaning out of the currency of their spirit.

Talking to ghosts is easy. You smile, maybe wave.

Once or twice if you are lucky you might see them angry or protesting against the human walls.

Otherwise the eccentric human made rules rule. 

Sometimes a smiling human with a ghostly heart spends a currency they understand called kindness.

Ghosts wonder why. How are they so similar!We were told - "Ghosts are different.Lesser than humans. Can never aspire to become one."

Most ghosts now believe in this true religion with all their ghostly intelligence.

Only once in a while does a ghost become human.

Others call her an atheist. Hysterical. Mundane. Unreal

Maya chi duniya

Maya (pseudonym) is a 26 year old girl with intellectual disability and visits the preparatory class of the NGO where I work. She teaches me more than I can ever hope to help with her education.

***
She sits at the door as I draw her, attempting to capture her wildness
People say those people who don’t want anything big in life are losers.
They assume everyone begins the same.
You began without crying unlike everyone did when they were born
You changed colors like a chameleon, trying each one on before giving up yourself
To be human.


You doze off because of your heavy medication
People try to contain your wild energies simply because they cannot
Stand seeing you free. They try to manage you
You laugh at their madness and bang on the surfaces around them
To make them hear their delusions clang like chains around their minds


You don’t speak much, it is enough to wave from across time and space to similar souls who share your madness.
And it is enough they see. Sometimes reciprocate.

You sit at the porch of your one room house
Preferring not to participate in what is called the
Cage of family
Your brother steals money, your sister- love
From a different boy each day
Counselling? Your family is much too torn apart for it

And love too distorted to put things right

All day you sit and smile
You make friends with the silence clouding around home
You don’t mind dancing but there again people insist on meaning!
Rhythm, rules, context, purpose, propriety
Again you bare your mouth in that insane smile of rotten teeth
Reminding them – all will wither away
What is left of dance will be, just as in life – motion

Just let go. Let me be. Smile. Sleep...

Nursery Rhymes

Ring a ring of roses
Strike a couple of poses
Smile a bit, pout a lot
Still the customer dozes


Pocketful of coins
Today we’ll smoke a joint
Accha!! Baccha!! Will get passed around

Ring a ring of roses
Who will bear the losses?
Today? Tomorrow? She will fall down.

An Excess of Love

Love is parametric. 

People measure love by love laws as Roy said.

They decide how much is necessary,

how much they can deal with.

Love is not an easy word – grammatically, numerically or even in psychology.

Nobody knows how to use it in a sentence,

how much of it to give or bear or how to explain why it happens.

Say everyone wants it and needs it, 

yet they shirk and smirk and shrug away love!

And if they don’t they say it is

because it hurts, it betrays and it is never enough.

Nobody loves love itself you see.

And some make it Sufi, 

some saintly and some romantic.

But few understand that love is

essentially being in the present with the other.

Love is the trying spirit of humanity. 

Of faith and some such thing.

You write love poems for people who never know it is for them.

Parents, friends and some people

with whom relationships are un-namable.

Acceptance – not compromise. That is love.

Of yourself, and how you feel, and what you do in love.

The embarrassing parts, the vulnerable parts especially.

Too much of yourself if you think of, it isn’t love.

Too much of the other if you think of it isn’t love.

It is what you create together –

what you give birth to – no not another human.

You give birth to art, to experience, to feeling, to situations.

That is love.

Love is not a person. It is not a partner. It is the in between relation.

The space between two persons

which pulls.

It is a force of nature which can temper you, test you, tempt you and make you grow 

or destroy you.

It is of the nature of time itself, yet an idea beyond time.

It is beyond biology and poetry. 

It is some purpose beyond reason.

Best of all, It just is. Even when you realize it too late.

Sometimes I realize I love humanity too much 

Because I give it the name of love.

People cannot believe I love people because of themselves.

Because you have only now.  Because you can only forgive only now.

Is it so hard to admit to the truth.  Yes truth isn’t rewarded by the world.

But it has the small mercies worth dying for.

A glimpse of yourself. Of god and some such divinity.

Worth giving it a shot. Worth loving. Worth growing and hurting. But only if fate allows it.

Push fate a little and you have the world to yourself. And yourself to yourself. 

Fall in love with yourself and you fall in love with the world.

The wait.

The wait...

I sit still at the window of my apartment, sending kisses out into the air

Like prayers without tears

Like a child with no fears

I carve out my essence and bring it on a plate to the world.

Hang on to the ledge like those creepers with the wildflowers with honey brimming for strange birds to consume

Drifting like the piece of log downstream

Marked by the arrows of time

Weathered with rhymes and climes

Crying out loud like a child – new born

Alive! The ones who know nothing but to

Jive!

And I have arrived at this road.

A road with thunderclouds above by day

Moonshine by night

Star struck lovers by dawn

And whispering lost travelers by dusk

And I must not move a single step anymore

For this hasn’t happened before

I haven’t such seen such passionate leaves that grow

With the thirst and mirth of a birth of a caterpillar on their shores

All the yearning and the burning at those loveless turns in life

Have risen up to engulf me and I gulp in the air

That brings me the sound and glories abound from the half of a soul I left behind for you.

To find

To remind

And rewind

And define

The reason for living and giving and believing

Again and again till repetition becomes my prayer

And rhymes my betrayer

And premonitions beware

Of a meeting by some lonesome sign board which says “nowhere”

To decode the sign of your entry into my mind

To sign back to ask if you found that bit of soul that is mine,

And I cannot determine whether it belonged to you or me

Whether it belonged to this century

Whether we have aged, died and defied

The limits of only one life to live

One heart to give

Pieces suddenly seem more beautiful a shape

And beliefs of a magical cape

Help us bring together our miraculous stories

Stories which fit in like puzzle pieces

And stories of similar looking nieces

Whose names we suddenly couldn’t remember

And time still burns like an ember

Reminds us of the sands blowing away all traces of our coming days

So I sit still by the window

Listening hard reading my fortune on playing cards

Which point to an arrival

Of you and me at this strange cross section of time

Where blowing kisses into the air would suffice to tell you.

Its me.

You are looking for me…

The Fall.

And here we stand at the edge of the precipice, the end of the world.

Close, but not quite together

You can see my past from the back of my head,

The murky waters swirling below the scream of my skin

I can feel your ache in my bones and hear your labored breathing

Its as if we have run a long way just to stay where we were

And heard so many stories until we couldn’t contain so many lives in our hearts

And I see how we have been having the same dreams –

a vanilla sky for love, a blue grey green for rain which is a feeling in itself

a red red black for all the fears and very rarely there’s sunshine in our dreams.

The breeze is blowing with the smell of history and rust

Or was it blood that was supposed to flow

When we cut down each of our demons

And in the process became ghosts ourselves.

Does it feel like Life? is this what it was always meant to be

Was it just the echo of the events that changed us forever

Does time explain away all things?

Who gets to love and who gets to live.

Can we be in one place only at a time?

Do we have to go through this disintegration?

Can we only make so many promises as we can keep?

If not let me say I’ll see you soon

Let me say I’ll be the same person you know

Let me say I’ll get you the pieces of my soul you were looking for

Let me say I’ll fall. Fall from this precipice.

I’ll fall for you...

Sign Language

When you ask me to write about me,

You are looking for what I am in metaphors and rhymes.

But I tell you mere stories. Stories about other people

About places that exist only in my head and only half real

How do I make you smell the fragrance of rain wet mud in the

Courtyard of my imagination?

How do I make you see that my songs are paintings of despair and they end up having more grey than color? But grey is a color too.

My grey songs won’t fulfill any higher purpose of yours.

They’re only meant for instant knowledge and instant destruction

You ask me to write of things that might make sense to you, to others,

When I cannot make sense of my thought worlds most of the time.

But that’s all that there is left to do.

To make signboards of parts of me for someone to decipher

It feels like the end of the world is not some distant day but now.

Now when doors are shut. Now when no one is awake but me

Now when there is no place to go. But to you.

Its like the universe is playing snakes and ladders with us

Sending us to different people either for the better or worse

Until we find each other on the same page number of the book called life.

Love, was a strange word even when I heard it for the first time

And I wonder whether it is something that people find worth

Spending their entire lifetime to figure out.

Love they say is the password, the cliché but the hope in the end

Love is you being the smile in someone’s poetry

It is also the terrible feeling when you start wishing with your guts

That if only disapparation were true, it would be worth getting splinched.

And now I know again my words make no sense, but it’s okay

Because everyone is caught in the web

They’re stuck aching and fixated at some sticky end

But all they have to do is follow their trail to the center when it’s time.

So I hope that this is one page closer, one ladder up to you some place on the game board.

And I wish that this web of words that I weave might someday lead you to me.

Even if it is for a while, for a passing.

If not, then you have better places to be...

#Notestomyself

This is to remind the girl who keeps writing about losing hope,

This is to send out an assuring message to the cynical student,

This is to assuage the guilt ridden idealist,

This is to provoke the sedentary youth,

This is to warn the insecure 22 year old who is afraid of loneliness….

You need to participate in life, like Charlie’s professor said.

You need to stop thinking inside your mind-brain-skin,

You need to step out of your cocoon, and start talking to yourself,

When all you can hear is your own voice repeating your own mistakes.

You need to make time not to live out the desires designed for you by others

But to talk to yourself about what you’re doing with your time.

Are you living in another space and time than the present?

If yes, stop fearing death and comfort the grieving.

If death doesn’t shock you anymore then let the living do that for you.

It is okay once in a while to let go, let others help you, let yourself be helped.

It is okay, to be scared, and tell others, and not have your opinions validated.

Uncertainty is okay. And so is conviction. As long as you know you cannot be right always, or for everyone.

Its okay to live life by a manual, but don’t complain about the crossed out instructions to yourself, or trying out an unknown spell.

Take a break, think about the little things and the big things, and get over the embarrassing parts.

Don’t relive them again and again, even your imaginary audience has gotten over your lame jokes.

Once in a while, think about the impact you leave on the things around you.

Think about the most important of people

Think about the children who you see growing up around you.

Grow young like them, learn from them.

Skin your knees again...

देर आये ...

देर आये - 

वक़्त से वक़्त मांगकर,

कुछ अनगिनत सपनो से सहूलियत मिलने पर,

नयी मुस्कानों की आस से पले, जैसे कोई अनकहे राज़ के मालिक.

थोड़े थके, थोड़े बेचैन,

आखों में कुछ पुराने दोस्तों से किये वादे लेकर -देर आये.

आखिर हज़ारों रस्तों से तुमको चुनना था

आखिर ठोकरें खाकर इसी दर पर मरना था

बिना मिले जो तुमने ये रंग कुछ भेजे थे आसमान तले,

उनकी बेवक़्त छीटों से मिलने इसी मकान में आना था.

लेकिन तुम देर आये. 

डर है ये आखें देखना भूल गयी हैं अब वह सपने जिनसे सिर्फ घाव मिले हैं.

डर है मुस्कुराने मे कि कहीं इसके अनुमानों में कोई और न खो जाये. 

डर है वादे करने में कि कहीं कोई हिसाब रख रहा होगा मेरे जान बूझकर टूटने वाले वादे देने का.

डर है कि तुम जब आओगे तोह मैं पहचान न पाउन तुम्हे, अपने आप को.

हमारी उस कहानी को जो एक पन्ने के दोनों तरफ इतनी बेपरवाही से लिख दिया गया था

कि स्याही के निशान एक दूसरे में घुल गए लेकिन कहानी का कोई अंजाम न बना.

अब तुम देर आये हो.

कुछ वक़्त दो.

देखते हैं शायद एक प्याली चाय की,

वक़्त की करामात पलट सके?