NOTICE: Do not search for unity or consistency. Look at the title.
They were all dancing in that red light while I watched them from a distance. Moments before I had read a poem of mine which had been much liked, and therefore, every now and then an unknown face would pass by me, and compliment me over it. I would nod and smile. I was looking at those figures---those well-structured bodies which had weight in all right proportions, and then started judging them. One had ample of flesh in hips, other had in cheeks, one had so much in neck that it was hard to know as to from where his face actually began and then---a hand was raised to the mouth , and I noticed the thickness of the fingers, and was visibly taken in by the largeness of the palm. He brought down his fingers to the palm and enclosed them into a fist. It was then I noticed that even his knuckles were expansive… I thought I had to look at his face. I did. His face was ordinarily large. After noticing his extraordinary knuckles, his ordinary face came as a slap to my aesthetic sense that had been high… It was a moment of complete emptiness when that scene changed its form--- from a picture to outlines and my eyes---- my myopic eyes could not contain that vision. I lost all interest in the scene as meditating on flesh appeared no longer attractive to me. I had to leave, and therefore invented an excuse.
On my way back home, I kept on thinking why can I never be wholly present in a moment. Why do I end up feeling suffocated even when there’s too much of familiarity around to give me no unpleasant airs? I do not know what it is but it comes often in bits but always with force that I cease to be happy. Happiness isn’t absence of pain. So while I do not writhe in pain, I also do not feel light with joy. I have mentioned the storms that had raged in my head for more than two years before I came to terms with all pervading philosophy of gender. But somehow all that unhappiness and extreme sadness with which I had fought in that period has never left me. They metamorphosed into something whose nature I have yet to identify. But whatever it is---it makes me detached and desolate.
I walked in that same dark corridor. For no reason except the disgust over the slumber that is the order of things, a rage started to build in me. It happens like this. Again and again! I am seized with fever to say such things to people that may shock the propriety out of them. Say such stuff that may burn their ears and give them spasms in brains, so that they may understand that I at least of all can’t be played along. But then I am weighed down by generations of servility of those that have walked on the same ground before me. Sometimes when I consider the extent of kowtowing present in our cultural fabric, educational setups and family, I am forced to wonder as to how on Earth did I manage to be born with a Spine? People take months to do a piece of work that a willing heart with average IQ would take not more than a couple of days, and yet they have a class of people who run out of their creative faculties to spring excuses for their master’s ineptitude. When I meet them which I often do, I begin to suspect that perhaps the first word that they ever spoke was not ‘mother’ but ‘butter’!
Once I was sitting with a group which was waiting for someone in authority. I was amused by hearing all those well-decked men and women telling tales about their associations with this fellow who had no sense of time. He arrived around forty minutes late. Spoke nothing of importance, did some symbolic handshakes while someone flashed camera from different corner of the room—and-------destroyed my three hours. Yet those well-decked people told me it was an honour for me to meet him. They congratulated us as if we had achieved something… Meeting him could only merit a medal for patience! People always run after people. For distinction, advantages, status and favours… From home to ground, school to college and childhood to adulthood, I have seen nothing else but this. In that stinking atmosphere of littleness of mind, one day while looking at many walking on a path in the University, I said to myself that this(the road) is nothing but a boulevard of broken bureaucratic dreams. That whole education system is nothing but a funeral of civil service aspirations… That it is all about power!
One night while lying on my bed, I wanted desperately to talk to someone about some creative work of mine. I just wanted to say what was passing through my head which perhaps had no unity of thought. But then, it was a loud speech in the head which considering the fickleness of my thoughts could never become a paragraph but definitely had many well-constructed sentences. I looked at my whatsapp list in vain. I came out of my room with that heaviness of night descending on my head, and sat on the steps of my veranda. I raised my right hand to my left shoulder and started caressing and rubbing it. It was a gentle reassuring movement. It was then that it struck to me that perhaps a body doesn’t desire a body but a part searches for a piece. There can never be completeness.
One day I decided to write portrait of a self that I would like as a companion. Since I am heterosexual, I decided it must be a man (We can never think without gender, thought I!). I wrote two or three lines and then found myself dried of words. I abandoned him. His time hasn’t come yet. My time hasn’t come yet. We both have to walk a long way. We once discussed about finding core groups for people who think radically like me to draw support from. Since people like me always find it difficult to form meaningful friendships, such a core group helps in satisfying that primeval human need of forming relationships. I kept on thinking about it. I won’t run after relationships but we all need people at our side. Perhaps people have always used faces as currency notes to know the value of their lives. One day, I’d have people in my life who could be companions of my spirit. This would also be a determinant of my success in life. I need to know more of the world in that case. A Core Group!
I never had people in my life who could share my spirit. My critical line of thought that comes out in biting sarcasm… Added to it, life has always provided me with so many incompetent people to go about, that often I think that much of my hard work is for making allowances for people who are disgrace to the positions they are in. All I want in my life, is a place where people actually think---an education (somehow I can never overcome classrooms!) which is liberal not only in syllabi but in practice. That a chalk in hand wouldn’t vest a man with absolute power… Adults who do not take age as the omniscient school of knowledge… Sometimes when I see people making allowance of ignorance and narrowness of mind with unreasoned smiles and photocopies, I feel like it is a demand for a willing submission to buffoonery. That divorce your good sense and let me exploit you… Cognitive Dissonance! That I’d be fool to rejoice at jokes that is essentially going to make my whole life a farce in the long run. But then this is the game that every educational institution in the country plays, with better organization and sincerity than any real sport. When I often evaluate myself at that moment, I think of giving up formal education on the whole. But then it is too early to be disappointed in life. A wise man once warned me about this, and told me to keep myself in place when such a disappointment strikes my being. At that time, I did not know that keeping my spirits alive would be so difficult. I was thinking of this when I looked at that yellow building and said: “What is the point of all this when nothing in the world can provide me with shelter?”
Perhaps I am fed up by smallness of my existence. May be it is the powerlessness that haunts me. That despite of having a brain that can give many a run for money (I am not at all modest!), I have created nothing. I own nothing. Not even a room. One morning as I combed my hair, I was taken in by my face. My body… Even that is small. That I have arrived to adulthood, and yet I have occupied nothing.
Months back, when the result of the exam that I took was announced, many called to congratulate me. It was fine for a day but wasn’t enough to sustain my ego for a year. I think this whenever I see those certificates of academic excellence, that all that I have ever produced is marks. That institutionalised sexuality of mind called taking an examination has been my only undertaking in my whole life… That the pregnancy of my mind would never end.
I saw her in that narrow lane while I was trying to avoid a dung cake. It was perhaps her brother who was at her side. This little fellow threw a ball that bounced back and landed on her head, making her cry in pain. I took a step towards her in order to soothe her, but she decided to take situation in her hands, and gave her culprit a blow on his head. He wailed, but she wailed louder. I was ecstatic. If I can find joy in such innocent moments as that then, surely I have a joyous life ahead. A settled heart is not the only happy one!
A good man on noticing the very evident traces of anger and disgust in my writing advised me to find some ‘working peace’---that which would make my quotidian routine easier. That whatever I have in me is not spent in senseless quarrels or strives… I left him saying that I would think about it, more because I wanted to escape that moment than with any genuine desire of giving it a thought. I knew it in my heart of hearts that he had a point for even I have begun to fear myself. There have been moments when I had to really hold myself before I could have said something scandalous. I am very capable of creating scandals.
What is ‘working peace’?
A euphemism for compromise.
I am free-spirited. In every inch, a rebel! Perhaps the fellow played it wisely with me. For if he had used any other term- a more exact term, my bloated idea of myself would have been greatly insulted. With this economy of words, at least I was forced to think. After drawing an analogy between compromise and peace, I made an amusing discovery. All peace treaties were compromises. One party was given one thing and the other another. But what if it had not been strife or tensions, but a declared war? Then the Peace Treaty would involve war compensation. This line of thought was getting interesting. I need compensation, said I to myself. I had not rejoiced much at this when a more rational part of my brain silenced me with a knock of rhetoric. First identify who you are at war with…
There are moments in drawing room conversations and even in our usual meetings in parks that my ears shut down, and I become oblivious to what’s being said. So much so, that I can meditate upon movement of others’ mouths. How few take their chins out in order to emphasise…. Others widen their eyes and few have them disappeared… Some rub their hair… A friend who was intelligent enough to notice my inattention (I was mighty embarrassed at this!) said to me in good faith, “Not a conversationist?” I had to take support of my famed taciturnity in order to escape the situation. It is not that I do not talk. But then there’s very little that people usually talk that merits a response. Most of the time it is stale thought that is being repeated again. People have such dynamic conscience and self, that their ideas have nothing consistent. How on earth can you follow them with success?
My heart is wild… I am wild at heart.
We were standing for Xerox when a worker at that centre took out a new bundle of A4 sheets of paper. He held one end of those realms of sheets of paper and raised the other from a little height, and released them in numbers from thither. Those sheets of paper reacted with such an enthusiasm on getting released that that they joined the other half of their selves in fraction of a second. It was a beautiful picture… that what happened with those smooth edges. Such an expediency of action….It lightened my heart… As I saw it, I was thinking of words to sufficiently describe the moment. But words did not come. They never come… Not even now. They all eluded me---their most earnest lover. Yes… It is wordlessness that’s the cause of these periods of melancholy. I have to write something to house me. That’s the only building that can provide me with shelter.
When I was thinking about all this, I discovered many of my poems that I wrote during those tempestuous days when I was trying to negotiate with gender. Many such emotions that I had confused with my lament over patriarchy were actually expressions of that wildness of my heart that has left me as an eternal nomad. I had that point of time christened these moments of rage, despair, distress and emptiness as the ‘seasoned greeting’. I think with these moments I greet what is essentially the purest in me and somehow welcome them. I was greeting those moments of hollowness with what is the most sacred in me… My words… My private speech is never silent, even when I have shut the vocal world away. It is finding words. Words to tell exactly what I feel… My bloated self always assures the restless me that one day I’d be able to find words for all this. That this silence would be broken… This handicap of thought and company would be overcome. That the shelter can be created----
I walked and walked. A little thing came literally out of blue, and gave me a pleasant surprise. She descended upon that white wall that had been by my side all this while. I looked at her for few seconds…her beak… her wings. Her eyes had a twinkle. I went close to her and felt that that twinkle was perhaps me. She was looking at me. It was at one side of the face, so the glance was definitely sided… Even she wasn’t ready to take me head on. I wanted to get close to her. Close enough to feel her… But she fluttered her wings and disappeared into the skies. So self-satisfied! She was but not for me, thought I with a smile.
What a human of a bird!
They were all dancing in that red light while I watched them from a distance. Moments before I had read a poem of mine which had been much liked, and therefore, every now and then an unknown face would pass by me, and compliment me over it. I would nod and smile. I was looking at those figures---those well-structured bodies which had weight in all right proportions, and then started judging them. One had ample of flesh in hips, other had in cheeks, one had so much in neck that it was hard to know as to from where his face actually began and then---a hand was raised to the mouth , and I noticed the thickness of the fingers, and was visibly taken in by the largeness of the palm. He brought down his fingers to the palm and enclosed them into a fist. It was then I noticed that even his knuckles were expansive… I thought I had to look at his face. I did. His face was ordinarily large. After noticing his extraordinary knuckles, his ordinary face came as a slap to my aesthetic sense that had been high… It was a moment of complete emptiness when that scene changed its form--- from a picture to outlines and my eyes---- my myopic eyes could not contain that vision. I lost all interest in the scene as meditating on flesh appeared no longer attractive to me. I had to leave, and therefore invented an excuse.
On my way back home, I kept on thinking why can I never be wholly present in a moment. Why do I end up feeling suffocated even when there’s too much of familiarity around to give me no unpleasant airs? I do not know what it is but it comes often in bits but always with force that I cease to be happy. Happiness isn’t absence of pain. So while I do not writhe in pain, I also do not feel light with joy. I have mentioned the storms that had raged in my head for more than two years before I came to terms with all pervading philosophy of gender. But somehow all that unhappiness and extreme sadness with which I had fought in that period has never left me. They metamorphosed into something whose nature I have yet to identify. But whatever it is---it makes me detached and desolate.
I walked in that same dark corridor. For no reason except the disgust over the slumber that is the order of things, a rage started to build in me. It happens like this. Again and again! I am seized with fever to say such things to people that may shock the propriety out of them. Say such stuff that may burn their ears and give them spasms in brains, so that they may understand that I at least of all can’t be played along. But then I am weighed down by generations of servility of those that have walked on the same ground before me. Sometimes when I consider the extent of kowtowing present in our cultural fabric, educational setups and family, I am forced to wonder as to how on Earth did I manage to be born with a Spine? People take months to do a piece of work that a willing heart with average IQ would take not more than a couple of days, and yet they have a class of people who run out of their creative faculties to spring excuses for their master’s ineptitude. When I meet them which I often do, I begin to suspect that perhaps the first word that they ever spoke was not ‘mother’ but ‘butter’!
Once I was sitting with a group which was waiting for someone in authority. I was amused by hearing all those well-decked men and women telling tales about their associations with this fellow who had no sense of time. He arrived around forty minutes late. Spoke nothing of importance, did some symbolic handshakes while someone flashed camera from different corner of the room—and-------destroyed my three hours. Yet those well-decked people told me it was an honour for me to meet him. They congratulated us as if we had achieved something… Meeting him could only merit a medal for patience! People always run after people. For distinction, advantages, status and favours… From home to ground, school to college and childhood to adulthood, I have seen nothing else but this. In that stinking atmosphere of littleness of mind, one day while looking at many walking on a path in the University, I said to myself that this(the road) is nothing but a boulevard of broken bureaucratic dreams. That whole education system is nothing but a funeral of civil service aspirations… That it is all about power!
One night while lying on my bed, I wanted desperately to talk to someone about some creative work of mine. I just wanted to say what was passing through my head which perhaps had no unity of thought. But then, it was a loud speech in the head which considering the fickleness of my thoughts could never become a paragraph but definitely had many well-constructed sentences. I looked at my whatsapp list in vain. I came out of my room with that heaviness of night descending on my head, and sat on the steps of my veranda. I raised my right hand to my left shoulder and started caressing and rubbing it. It was a gentle reassuring movement. It was then that it struck to me that perhaps a body doesn’t desire a body but a part searches for a piece. There can never be completeness.
One day I decided to write portrait of a self that I would like as a companion. Since I am heterosexual, I decided it must be a man (We can never think without gender, thought I!). I wrote two or three lines and then found myself dried of words. I abandoned him. His time hasn’t come yet. My time hasn’t come yet. We both have to walk a long way. We once discussed about finding core groups for people who think radically like me to draw support from. Since people like me always find it difficult to form meaningful friendships, such a core group helps in satisfying that primeval human need of forming relationships. I kept on thinking about it. I won’t run after relationships but we all need people at our side. Perhaps people have always used faces as currency notes to know the value of their lives. One day, I’d have people in my life who could be companions of my spirit. This would also be a determinant of my success in life. I need to know more of the world in that case. A Core Group!
I never had people in my life who could share my spirit. My critical line of thought that comes out in biting sarcasm… Added to it, life has always provided me with so many incompetent people to go about, that often I think that much of my hard work is for making allowances for people who are disgrace to the positions they are in. All I want in my life, is a place where people actually think---an education (somehow I can never overcome classrooms!) which is liberal not only in syllabi but in practice. That a chalk in hand wouldn’t vest a man with absolute power… Adults who do not take age as the omniscient school of knowledge… Sometimes when I see people making allowance of ignorance and narrowness of mind with unreasoned smiles and photocopies, I feel like it is a demand for a willing submission to buffoonery. That divorce your good sense and let me exploit you… Cognitive Dissonance! That I’d be fool to rejoice at jokes that is essentially going to make my whole life a farce in the long run. But then this is the game that every educational institution in the country plays, with better organization and sincerity than any real sport. When I often evaluate myself at that moment, I think of giving up formal education on the whole. But then it is too early to be disappointed in life. A wise man once warned me about this, and told me to keep myself in place when such a disappointment strikes my being. At that time, I did not know that keeping my spirits alive would be so difficult. I was thinking of this when I looked at that yellow building and said: “What is the point of all this when nothing in the world can provide me with shelter?”
Perhaps I am fed up by smallness of my existence. May be it is the powerlessness that haunts me. That despite of having a brain that can give many a run for money (I am not at all modest!), I have created nothing. I own nothing. Not even a room. One morning as I combed my hair, I was taken in by my face. My body… Even that is small. That I have arrived to adulthood, and yet I have occupied nothing.
Months back, when the result of the exam that I took was announced, many called to congratulate me. It was fine for a day but wasn’t enough to sustain my ego for a year. I think this whenever I see those certificates of academic excellence, that all that I have ever produced is marks. That institutionalised sexuality of mind called taking an examination has been my only undertaking in my whole life… That the pregnancy of my mind would never end.
I saw her in that narrow lane while I was trying to avoid a dung cake. It was perhaps her brother who was at her side. This little fellow threw a ball that bounced back and landed on her head, making her cry in pain. I took a step towards her in order to soothe her, but she decided to take situation in her hands, and gave her culprit a blow on his head. He wailed, but she wailed louder. I was ecstatic. If I can find joy in such innocent moments as that then, surely I have a joyous life ahead. A settled heart is not the only happy one!
A good man on noticing the very evident traces of anger and disgust in my writing advised me to find some ‘working peace’---that which would make my quotidian routine easier. That whatever I have in me is not spent in senseless quarrels or strives… I left him saying that I would think about it, more because I wanted to escape that moment than with any genuine desire of giving it a thought. I knew it in my heart of hearts that he had a point for even I have begun to fear myself. There have been moments when I had to really hold myself before I could have said something scandalous. I am very capable of creating scandals.
What is ‘working peace’?
A euphemism for compromise.
I am free-spirited. In every inch, a rebel! Perhaps the fellow played it wisely with me. For if he had used any other term- a more exact term, my bloated idea of myself would have been greatly insulted. With this economy of words, at least I was forced to think. After drawing an analogy between compromise and peace, I made an amusing discovery. All peace treaties were compromises. One party was given one thing and the other another. But what if it had not been strife or tensions, but a declared war? Then the Peace Treaty would involve war compensation. This line of thought was getting interesting. I need compensation, said I to myself. I had not rejoiced much at this when a more rational part of my brain silenced me with a knock of rhetoric. First identify who you are at war with…
There are moments in drawing room conversations and even in our usual meetings in parks that my ears shut down, and I become oblivious to what’s being said. So much so, that I can meditate upon movement of others’ mouths. How few take their chins out in order to emphasise…. Others widen their eyes and few have them disappeared… Some rub their hair… A friend who was intelligent enough to notice my inattention (I was mighty embarrassed at this!) said to me in good faith, “Not a conversationist?” I had to take support of my famed taciturnity in order to escape the situation. It is not that I do not talk. But then there’s very little that people usually talk that merits a response. Most of the time it is stale thought that is being repeated again. People have such dynamic conscience and self, that their ideas have nothing consistent. How on earth can you follow them with success?
My heart is wild… I am wild at heart.
We were standing for Xerox when a worker at that centre took out a new bundle of A4 sheets of paper. He held one end of those realms of sheets of paper and raised the other from a little height, and released them in numbers from thither. Those sheets of paper reacted with such an enthusiasm on getting released that that they joined the other half of their selves in fraction of a second. It was a beautiful picture… that what happened with those smooth edges. Such an expediency of action….It lightened my heart… As I saw it, I was thinking of words to sufficiently describe the moment. But words did not come. They never come… Not even now. They all eluded me---their most earnest lover. Yes… It is wordlessness that’s the cause of these periods of melancholy. I have to write something to house me. That’s the only building that can provide me with shelter.
When I was thinking about all this, I discovered many of my poems that I wrote during those tempestuous days when I was trying to negotiate with gender. Many such emotions that I had confused with my lament over patriarchy were actually expressions of that wildness of my heart that has left me as an eternal nomad. I had that point of time christened these moments of rage, despair, distress and emptiness as the ‘seasoned greeting’. I think with these moments I greet what is essentially the purest in me and somehow welcome them. I was greeting those moments of hollowness with what is the most sacred in me… My words… My private speech is never silent, even when I have shut the vocal world away. It is finding words. Words to tell exactly what I feel… My bloated self always assures the restless me that one day I’d be able to find words for all this. That this silence would be broken… This handicap of thought and company would be overcome. That the shelter can be created----
I walked and walked. A little thing came literally out of blue, and gave me a pleasant surprise. She descended upon that white wall that had been by my side all this while. I looked at her for few seconds…her beak… her wings. Her eyes had a twinkle. I went close to her and felt that that twinkle was perhaps me. She was looking at me. It was at one side of the face, so the glance was definitely sided… Even she wasn’t ready to take me head on. I wanted to get close to her. Close enough to feel her… But she fluttered her wings and disappeared into the skies. So self-satisfied! She was but not for me, thought I with a smile.
What a human of a bird!
A settled heart is not the only happy one-Bravo! People (including me) always tell how well you write,but this one is full of thoughts...and words.You haven't poured yourself out to your readers before like this.I know you were short of words(it's evident) and this one is quite simple but still I would consider it to be one of your best articles till now... because it gives one so much to think,to ponder.Though it's your most personal work yet it will make people question ideas they have never paid heed to,questions that went unanswered.But yes,I hope the most earnest lover of words finds some for herself too (which you haven't,till now).For that may not settle you but will certainly make you happy,if not happy then it will at leastvbe a right hand to your left shoulder...Give yourself Words...
ReplyDeleteYa words... It always boils down to it. Things that can be said. Words are so much of power.
ReplyDeleteyet again your article left me speechless. .. beautiful...
ReplyDeleteAnd then there are things where we fall short of Words;where Words cease to be powerful...especially when it comes to understanding ourselves...Silence does the talking;a mere glance at ourselves in the mirror or a deep conversation with a wise person is enough...
ReplyDeleteThumbs up.
Delete