hope

love

Soulmate

walking on water

Equanimity

You steal those silences with amazing dexterity. Earlier, these silences meant everything; now they foreshadow bitter moments that can break this heart into pieces.

You might say it's not so; but this heart knows its aches and joys, it knows not how to lie and maintain a straight face in pain. For years, this heart has tried to learn this elusive lesson of equanimity.

For it has always laughed with joy and cried with pain and knows not the stance of calm except when indifferent and aloof from the cares of everyday life; with prayer and penance and self-torture.

You have never known such days of life, when one could only write and escape this mad world of unbearable agony or pray to God to send an angel.

Dream Book

Do you dream of writing a book that puts into practice all the lessons learnt from great writers, be it flow of words, the element of lyricism that can question lines of poetry, vivid images and perfect diction in your pet area. Well, I have carried this dream for a long time and made several false starts as well.

My dream book has the following qualities:

• It is addressed to my other, my other self, for one whom I write the best of my thoughts
• Though in prose, the words may be simple, mostly of one syllable and beautiful
• It is a collection of thoughts at different moments of silence between me and my other self.

But I don’t know when I will write this book and even if I don’t write the book, I want to say this dream aloud to somebody so that I might feel the need to put the dream in the form of words. Do you have a dream book, dear reader?

beauty

Reality

Summer Rains

You came with the summer rains

With thunder and lightning,

An explosion in the big silence 

And left an upturned life,

But with a huge difference-

Your absence and memories.

You brought with came with the rains,

When the roses bloomed you 

When the earth danced 

To the rhythm of raindrops,

On the rooftop, dum dum dum,

In that house with a leaky roof,

While I’d lie awake and listen,

Watch out for the merciless rain,

Toss and turn on my bed,

Snuggle against the pillow,

Get up and move the furniture,

Come back and dream of you.

I’d look at those lovely roses,

And imagine a few incidents,

Run and rerun your smile,

Every word and every laugh,

Our cryptic mutual messages  

And your funny way with words.

I’d go over how that mighty rain,

Peltered on our brown skins,

Tanned as you’d say,

Natural as I’d say,

Brown, plain and dark skins,

In that heavy sudden outburst,

There was nothing left to say,

Yet all that was left unsaid,

Was everything that we couldn’t

Speak, dream or create-

A language we couldn’t speak.

I’d remember how I could sing,

Stand, dream, sit, talk, laugh,

Everything except cry

Be myself beside you, 

For you were never another,

Only my own self, my mirror.

The smell of wet earth 

Dancing under the touch, 

Caress of raindrops.

With thunder and lightning 

Like in summer rain, 

And left a big silence 

After you left.

Your words, your smile, 

Every gesture, every moment, 

Became my treasures, 

Of a miserly heart. 

I’d gather all these moments,

Treasure them in my mind,

For you are no longer here,

For you are no longer mine,

Only a story to remember,

Only a memory to erase.

This crying idiot you never saw,

Who hid behind all clownishness,

A love that searched ways to erase,

All barriers of words between us,

But never could utter a word

Or dream a glimpse of you.

For I can see you in my dream,

For your left reminders on my path,

Your voice, words and a model,

Which I unconsciously imitate

And respect to my own surprise;

It was not that long you know to judge,

Only a summer of well-repressed words,

Dreams and an unlived life together.

As I move on with new strength,

After troughs and crests of longing,

A few words to celebrate an absence,

A few songs that an clown offers

To kill a love that stopped this life,

To make you smile with remembrance

For being so big (not fat) in my eyes,

For you these Songs of Silence

life

Silence

Perfect match

How long have we belonged to only to each other?

That day since we took a quiet walk of togetherness,
Though it is as though we have always belonged
To each other across the ages in a sacred sense.

Coffee kisses, pasta lunches, candlelit dinners,
Shared moments of togetherness well-cherished
The perfect wine that we tasted last and so deep,
Not first love nor the first riot of purple passions.

There might have been others before you and me
Countless love-stories that taught us heartbreaks;
The many roles that you and I played across lives,
The sense of having known each other all along.

But I do remember us walking around the holy fire
Quietly chanting mantras of eternal togetherness.

Wisdom of life

I say: Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle. –Sun Tzu

Compassion

Reading for fun

Can you measure the time it took to savour,
To taste bit by bit and take in your words?
Not that you have left them behind for me
They are all over the place, wherever I go.

The hourglass on my table marks the time,
Though it looks still apparently, obviously,
But the words grab my complete attention,
And it's more like reading a first love-letter.

The words glide across the page at this hour
Be it the ancient stories or lover's quarrels;
The slow-burning desire of lovelorn youth
The ambitions of the powerful and the strong.

Nor do I count my life in terms of big events
But by the tomes that I've read daily for fun.

moment

Good Vs Bad

In Friends, when Joey writes a letter of reference for Monica and Chandler, he writes in broken English and substitutes each word in his letter with synoyms from the Thesaurus. Each and every word, until Chandler finds that even Joey's name is subsitituted as baby kangaroo. Now from Joey's basic written English skills to our topic!

Who can say that he/she is a good writer? I cannot claim that I'm a writer. When somebody asks about my work and what do I write, I generally evade the question. Some of it has to do with my awareness of my own limitations. Then comes great writers who can make you enticed for hours and hours without stumbling across any word or thought in their writing.

Then comes this need to simplify everything. When I see bad writing, my gut instinct is to change it into a better form. I have read bad writing that has an antique taste, as if it was taken out of some English book written two hundred years ago and happily copied by a lot of people as good writing.

What I feel is that writing is an internalised process; you cannot study a style and emulate it in writing just by following how the words go. Rather than that the message has to come in clear and sharp terms and many good writers re-write until they get their ideas clearly in writing.

This might be dismissed as plain rubbish; but if you can become a good writer by imitating the style of 'good writers', beware dear writer, you might be centuries behind!

Freedom

Death

You and I

What brought you back to my mind, I do not know

But I do not like the hot surge of tears that arise,

That still rise though it’s been so many long years

Since we walked away from our future happiness.

Words, reasons, explanations I cannot find at all,

But the heart wants to scrawl a few more words,

In that curious hieroglyphic that we had invented,

To encode a secret message just for your eyes.

But then the long years have made us so apart

For so long that I do not know you anymore,

Nor the heart’s language or its silent desires 

Even my own self I hardly recognise anymore.

You have a good mirror to look in, so do I have

What we’ve had once is more than what'll be.