a feather of magic

I tried to write this a hundred times, and I couldn’t find the starting sentence. Maybe, it didn’t have a beginning as it didn’t have an end (I am still a part of it, how could it have ended, if I am being?). Like a shard of morning rays of sun, it still pricks me, and like the gossamer curtain of moonlight blue, it shelters me. So long as I am being.  

The train was crowded like local trains in the city usually are. It was well past midnight and stinking with acrid alcohol and sweaty day’s love. I had, by some strange contraption slumped to the floor, near the breezy door. A beggar with a child on her lap was sleeping opposite me. The platform was empty save the chai-wala who was reciting verses I could not fathom. And the stray dogs were dozing in the benches, too tired to exclaim at the apparent ineptitude of the crowded train on an empty platform. Before the carriage could chug off, a blind man with an indigenous version of a violin jumped on… 

By the inequity of senses, if I might call it, I have sometimes so totally bewitched by the most mundane of sights and sounds, and at others remained impassive to the loveliest that life has to offer. I don’t know, I never have been so objective, never been so wise, maybe it’s more of the within than the without. I really don’t know.

 The dervish took his place in the aisle between the multitudes of faces, mutilated with the day’s misery. He stretched the string of his instrument, very uncomfortably, with barely enough room to hold it straight. Then, without checking for the tune, without waiting for the audience to acknowledge his presence, he started playing. He strummed tunes from forgotten Hindi movies and shabby suburbanite bars, some of which I have hated to bear with in Hariyanvi taxis, and others which I couldn’t even decipher. The somnolent violin transformed them all: riding in a buggy of cellophane love, the notes traveled to the violet clouds where it will never be heard again.  

The strychnine night couldn’t hold its peace after that. With the evanescent music still in my vein, I saw my beggar princess with tears in her eyes, looking wistfully at sleeping cherub in her lap. Suddenly realizing I am intruding on a very private moment, I looked out into the inkiness of the floating electric poles and coops. And as the breeze washed the wanderlust of my sleepy eyes, I knew, I have been touched by a feather of magic.

Phi

There was this man called, let’s say Phi, in my village, who loved fishing . He took meticulous care of his rods: he had four, shining steel with sharp nylon-silk threads. He wrapped the handle with rubber grips, for the quick turns and wallowing pulls. He had been to every pond and fished there. However his favorite remained the pond next to my hut.

Phi had an unusual way of fishing though. He spent hours, looking for worms under mossy stones and muddy polythene bags that washed up on the banks. After he had filled the empty cola can with worms, he would take out the healthiest of the lot, wiggle the creature and pierce it with his hook. Then with an air of utmost composure, or carelessness, with the poignant flourish of his hand, he threw the rest of the worms in the pond.

Then he took out his rod, and with the preciseness of a dart, and the poetry of a peacock, he threw his line in waters…On somedays he would get a fish, others he wouldn’t. But he sat with his line like David of Michelangelo. And with a hawk in his eyes, he waited.

One day, I couldn’t resist my curiosity and asked,” Phi, why do you throw the can of worms in water? The fishes will never take your bait! They’ll happily have the other worms.” Phi laughed. A laugh of an innocent kid, or the laugh of a maniac, I don’t know. He gave a mock slap and said, “I am preparing for the contest you know. There will be a lot of competition!”

Angst and Anxiety

It comes creeping beneath your door, like newspaper wrapped in mist on an overcast morning. Sleepy eyed, unsure, unaware, disdainfully, you wake up to an illusion clad is burlesque magenta and violets of yore. You refuse to brave out of the coziness of hard-wrought warmth, until… Until it teases you to a duel. Welcome anxiety!

The window-less room, in a blue haze, purpled with fire deep down your gut, yet you refuse to fight. One, two, three, four, five, six, … moments, just moments before angst seizes you.

On the desert of black roses, you canter on. In search of a silver lining grayed with filaments of a matriculate reality. You don’t cry, you don’t complain, you feed on angst to fight anxiety. The film rolls, reel after reel. And you dance to the tunes of a piper chasing greyhounds in a prairie of winter lights.

Let the thunders clap, let the clouds sneer, let the moonshine be hers, let the pole star shine, the show goes on. Like shadows in a fountain, like rhymes of disdain, like sinister signs, like fools in fall, the show must go on.

The strings make the puppet!

Found scribbled on a napkin in Clove Bar, Powai, Bombay.

Cold Turkey

He was lonely: not in the poetic way, but in a more mundane manner. He had managed to push aside all his loved ones away, unable to delve deep into his self to find the love they felt for him. He, like most of us in these unforgiving doldrums of aloneness, basked in the golden beach of his thoughts, while memories lashed on, one after another. He dreamt about things he had done, and things he hadn’t. In fact, he was so embroiled in his own phantasm, he made up words he could have said when he should have. And like all, with whom cloak of solitude doesn’t become itself, he began to blame all around him. He was lonely because none was worth his love, he felt.

 None? No, not really. In coffee-shops and bus stops, in impulsive moments and unrestrained bouts, he would draw a deep drag from his cigarette, and remark “This is the only friend I have. Cigarette, a lonely man’s best friend!”  

However, as irony of fate would have it, his only love was unrequited; his only friend betrayed him, when he died, coughing and clutching his heart. The others, whom he pushed aside all his life, came in, with bouquets and vanished into the misty smoke of the cemetery.  

This clichéd anecdote re-told and re-re-told prompts several questions in me.

 a) Did he know all along that the cigarette will kill him, and pursued it as an exercise in atonement? Like some sort of an unrequited love?

 b) Or was the cigarette that truly bewitched him and created the bubble of smoke around?

 c) Do friends seem crueler in memories? Like kindergartens and being home alone?

d) Why did the people he pushed aside all his life come at the occasion of his demise?

 e) Is it really about the cigarette at all? 

f) Why is the cigarette used to tell this story then?  

 Cold turkey, that’s all!

PDF-Climbing

 Number of Players: 1 (The best of sports are non-competitive, as we all know)

Aim of the game: To start at the bottom of a PDF and climb till the top.

Rules:

1. Start at the last printed line above the page number in the last page of the document. Zoom to page width and select the hand tool.
2. You have to catch a printed piece which serves as a foothold or in this case the hand hold.
3. You cannot come down a climbed area.
4. You cannot jump horizontally.
5. You cannot use page number, header, footer or a vertical line (if any) or colors other than the color of the text.
6. You lose when you have a blank expanse of the height equivalent of half your screen.
7. When you reach a diagram, you can only use the texts in it to climb.

Notes:

1. Bold means rougher surface, that is better suited for climbing. Italics are slippery; you might risk a fall if you step on 3 successive italics.
2. The game might end abruptly, if there is a blank page in between. Ignore a page that is not typed at all, that is a completely blank page.
3. A timed game is also possible. Subject to the time and PDF in hand.

PostScript:

1. The game is open-source; you are free to add on.
2. Man over-bored!
3. You can a man away from the mountains, but you cannot take the mountains away from a man.