12

I squint my eyes in concentration as I always do.  I am sitting on top of the hardbound Chamber’s, much to the amusement of a family not easily impressed.  The dictionary was a gift to my parents from the grandfather on my being born. Of course, the portentous gesture of gifting a dictionary was not lost on them. It makes me laugh when Ma tells me that I once, in an inspired move I imagine, took a piss on it. Not her. The symbolism of such an act is hard to ignore by parents somewhere constricted by values steeped in orthodoxy and those that an education affords.

She still has a fit every time I use my feet to move dropped stationery.

The front page with the scrawled benediction to my parents and their first born is now sanitized and stored away, relegated to the realms of nostalgia and power cuts at night.  I remember as I watched Ma choose jewelry to wear for the night, picking up the frontpage  safely ensconced among more pricey artifacts. I remember running my hands over the writing and thinking to myself how one could ever arrive at the decision of gifting a dictionary and how the person who wrote this was now dead. Maybe, I thought, his fingerprints would be all over that page and I was now touching him.

Growing up, there was always an implicit understanding that Chamber’s was the best dictionary there ever was. In those days without the crutches of Wikipedia, what was said (or implied) at home was sanctum. I grew up hating the Oxford English Dictionary that everyone in school touted. Even the English teacher with corpulent arms and the audacity to wear a sleeveless blouse.  Surely, I thought, any dictionary which comes in different sizes that these classmates carry, is not really being true to itself or the language.  Worst of all, using the dictionary to look up certain four letter words they were not allowed to say aloud.

I was a youngin with principles.

And the worst of them all, Webster’s. They just spelled words plain wrong. The guys with parents in the US would spell it Sulfur and Aluminum.  Then one day me and my friend have the same argument. This time she has proof.  I refused to believe what she showed me.  The Chamber’s 7th edition in an act of complete betrayal, paid obeisance to those bastards at Oxford. Turns out, she was right.  As were the millions of others who never even had heard of Chamber’s. Oxford did come before them. What hurt me the most was that my mother knew all along. She was perpetrating a lie and I tagged along for the false ride.

She guessed how I felt I think. I remember her explaining to me that night why she still thought Chamber’s was better. I learnt what a cryptic crossword was.  I learnt older did not mean better.

I learnt the spirit of a word. Literally.

11

I never was ever into the toy thing. Father quit buying me toys after he realized a He-Man couldn’t offset a neighbor’s asinine decision of gifting me a Skeletor action figure. “Who buys a kid the villain of a comic series?” But a year later some relative, probably from abroad, bought me a train set for my tenth birthday. Oh how I loved that train set. With that black engine which would light up on that rare occasion when all 16 batteries ( maybe more) were running on maximum juice. The brown coaches with people drawn on the windows and retractable mounts. And the best of all, the tracks.  It made me the master of that train set in a way. The train goes where I chose, in beautiful contours, in a straight line or in that travesty of progress, circles.

I have a strange fascination for the character of something. It has brought me much grief in seeing how hollow things were, that to me did not have any. Perhaps character is not the right word. It has been relegated to ethical discourses in management tomes and 5th grade moral science textbooks with stern warnings of how character was what you did when nobody was watching. If that is indeed character, I imagine we would all be inveterate nose pickers. There is, however, this word used to describe a particularly soulful rendition of a song. Bhavam. Perhaps that is the word I am looking for. I guess I have a strange fascination for the Bhavam of something. The soul.

When we moved to Bangalore, we made frequent trips to Madras, for home is where the heart is.  Father insisted we not fly and given the paranoia I once had with air travel, I was only too happy.  We would wait at the Bangalore Cantonment station and get on the Shatabdi. I used to hate those 6 hours with all my heart. It stank of no soul. From the wet towels they used to give us when we got on to the dried samosa at the end, it all seemed so wrong. This wasn’t really a train ride was it?

Train rides were about rejoicing when getting a window seat. About looking out into the green, green world, mile after mile. About sharing space with complete strangers and getting them to swap their window seat. About train-stops in obscure places. And the incredible thrill of being bought Uncle Chips. How I loved those! Every tangy bite of potato chip, endorsed by a jolly man with the most adorable double chin.  Sitting upright and proper in A/C compartments while being waited on by some poor soul does not make for a very enjoyable experience. Or maybe it’s just me.

I was 19 and I was in love.  I went to Delhi to meet her and her family and my collective experiences that month would put that Wonder Years kid to shame. We had been going out for a year then and during that month, I saw myself planning the incredible ‘rest of our lives’ we would have. The evenings when I would cook her favorite Risotto, the fights we would have, listening to her talk about something Chomsky said that I would never understand. A couple of days before returning to Bangalore, while we were having lunch, she decides to tell me she was going to Wharton and how maybe we should move on.

For once, the details are nebulous, but there I was sitting in a train with her, headed home.  Only, home was 2 days and a lot of heartache away. I hated sitting in front of her, pretending to be too proud to win her back while the reality of my incapability to do that sunk in.  I wanted to be somewhere other than this wretched train and she knew implicitly. I wished the train would crash and burn with her, me and everyone around.  The stations smelled of shit,  the chaiwalla was grating and I yelled at  the kid who begged for money. I hated train rides with all my heart. I haven’t set foot in one since.

Sometimes a memory becomes either the white bird or its golden cage. It chokes your soul, empties your innards and yet, gives you a strange hope. Memories are what we live for. So that we may talk about what happens now with someone tomorrow. To remind us that there is a tomorrow. White Bird must fly or she will die.

Maybe, there will be a day when I am sitting by that rusty train window, my soul and hair at the mercy of the winds. A boy will come by, singing for alms. I call him over and start talking to him. I see him eyeing the pack of Uncle Chips I just bought . And I see the smile across my face…

10

The leafless trees stand proud and stoic having borne the brunt of many a change in season. And seasons of change. Sodden leaves lie at the base of their former homes, waiting for warmer days to be raked away into oblivion. They are infused with new life, as the hardened ice that was once powdery snow thaws away into the earth. Branches spray out into the open sky in complex arabesques and the other myriad designs of nature . A woman walks her dog as it sniffs around new found opportunities as that one swallow whose destiny it is to fool the naive of summer, chirps in the bushes. The warm evening sun conspires with the wind to allow life, for once, to be staid and constant. A click of the lighter and the cigarette is lit. The coils of smoke curl around your fingers in thin eddies and disappear into the crisp air. You try to follow it as long as you can, but before you know it, it is now one with the air around.

Don’t worry. I put the cigarette out and threw it in the bin.

9

The little girl  loved crows. She would take her unfinished meal and stand in the courtyard waiting for the crows that never came.  Perhaps it was because they were leftovers. She took her plate filled with untouched food and waited. The crows never came.  Could it be that they didn’t like what was on the plate? She added sprinkles to her custard and stood outside the house. No crows.

The little girl stood on the rooftop and looked around. There were none. She called to the crows. They never came.  She peered as far as her eyes could see. Past the transformers who looked like stick men with their hands outstretched.  She couldn’t see any. They obviously couldn’t hear her. She got up the next day and stood on the rooftop and yelled. Yelled as much as her little lungs would let her. None. Could it be that they didn’t like what she was yelling? That day she wrote a song for the crows. She made sure it rhymed. The next day she sang the song with as much intent as she could muster. No luck.

The little girl looked at the mirror and she looked at her pale skin. It was so clear. She looked nothing like the crows. She took her black bedspread and covered herself with it and stood outside hoping they would come. There was not a crow around. She filled her bath and emptied her mother’s mascara in it. She jumped in the pool of black and ran to the roof. Where were all these crows? Now she was really sad. And to add to things, she was wet and cold.

And then she slipped. And soon the crows came.

8

What is it that makes us who we are? Is it about prevailing through the odds of being?  Is it about wanting to reach out and tuck her hair behind her ear? Is it our inability to reconcile with the reality of being prisoners of our collective fates? Or is it about how easily we forget how good vanilla ice cream tastes?

Perhaps we are as simple as who we want to be and simpler still, who we cannot.

7

The frame never fits but it will wholly consume,

the sun, shadows and the abhorrent vacuum,

feeding the demons in our head, mind and soul,

the frame and scheming destiny – always in control.

Peering through the haze, dense and cold,

seeking the peddler and his dreams of gold,

needled arms grasp, reach and fail,

only what we never need are ever up for sale.

Ensconced in life’s vagaries, like ebony among ivory keys,

she arrived like the summer sun to my boiling seas,

dulling the serrated edges of hate and pain,

to seat me in this sick cycle carousel- it begins again.

The warmth of this unholy cloister of self is a plague,

only non-believers seem to follow the prophets of our age;

there is some comfort as we head to our next shallow breath,

only the dying are truly unafraid of death.

6

I knew her. And everything about her. Every tacit gesture, every unsaid word and every nervous twitch. I knew all the masks she wore. I knew their maker. I knew every muscle in her body and how they would look in every light. I knew her steely resolve and her fragile heart. I knew the softness of her smile and the twinkle in her eye. I knew her silent sob and the mascara running down her cheek. I knew how beautiful she will be.  She knew.

I know someone else knows her now. And I lurk, unknown, in the shadows waiting to be found by someone.

5

There was a boy who was born with a chain instead of an umbilical chord. The doctors were very surprised to see this and wondered how the boy managed to grow in the womb. They were, naturally, concerned about the boy’s chances of survival and proceeded to take an x-ray. What surprised them was how neatly the chain was fused to the spine. Almost like an extension.Through the stomach and the liver it took a tortuous path within and out it came from the (so-called) navel. But surprisingly enough, the boy was fine otherwise. If you removed the chain (or pretended that it wasn’t there) the baby was fine. And soon the doctor left because it was getting late.

The mother was in a quagmire. Do they leave the chain on or have it removed. She pondered over this question for quite a while, but because it was getting late for her too and she decided to leave the chain on. Years passed by fairly quickly. She would call her neighbor who owned a motorized chain-saw that could cut through metal to trim the chain every month. But it would would regrow to it’s original length within the month and after some time the neighbor got tired and told her that he had lost his safety glasses and couldn’t help her anymore. She decided to let the chain stick out of his shirt.

But it would drag wherever he would walk. And it got grimy and dirty, even more so when it rained. Like all mothers, she too, was always on about cleanliness. So he had to wash his chain with water every time he would enter the house after going out. And when he walked on the bus or any other metal surface it would make a loud clanging noise that he particularly enjoyed. Besides, it was like a notice to everyone that he was coming. How time flies by! He was now in college, doing all the things that silly college kids do.

And soon he had to study for an exam. He was mighty confused about a lot of things. And while he was preparing for the test, he tripped on his chain and out it came. It was a little messy and hurt a bit, but you could see the end that was attached to the spine. It looked quite weird. So he cleaned himself up and continued studying. The studying paid off because he did quite well in the exam.

4

Do you remember the games we used to play? Those hapless escapades of notoriety buried away in innocent days.  When girls and boys were no longer a question of ‘us and them’. When we woke up one day and realized we liked the girls after all. When we realized we liked them in ways we hadn’t liked before. When early teen machismo or more likely, the incredible embarrassment of actually liking them dissuaded us from talking about it. When we had know way of knowing if they liked us back and never really knew how to find out either. When we found out we weren’t alone in thinking this way. When we invented our way out of misery. When all we needed was our names and to scratch out letters in order to determine relationship potential. I don’t quite remember, but I believe this sort of scandalous behavior had an acronym.

I need some help here.

3

The wooden esplanade creaks softly under her feet as the night slowly melts away any remnants of the azure spring sky. She leans against the railing overlooking the languid river. This halcyon moment is overwhelming. She wants to break it with a lungful, but prudence is always louder than the loudest scream. Her gaze falls upon a flat stone and instinctively, she throws it against the water. The stone skims over the laminar surface and gives up after three bounces. Strangely, the stone resurfaces and floats gently downstream. Surprised, she picks up another stone and flings it across the surface again hoping that now the stone would sink. But every stone she throws in the drink comes right back up every time. This conflict of inner tides has to be resolved. She holds a stone in her hand and wades down to the middle of the river to make sure this one stays on the mossy river floor.Try as she might she fails every attempt. Exhausted, she returns to the bank and feels her shoulders and arms tighten. She fights the feeling for a while, but gives up quickly. And she gently floats away. Into the starry night. Out of her soul.