Spool

"I adore imperfections," she went on, "that odd crooked tooth, that mustard stained page in the magazine, the creak of an old closet, petty jealousies for strangers' shoes, that scratched DVD that always freezes after 14 minutes, the cracked tile behind the handwash, that typo in the exam paper, the pear-shaped scar behind the ear, the static that accompanies old tapes, that needless lie on the application form, that awkward boy in the class picture, those "R"s at the end of foreigners' words that always loiter on the tongue too long... It is there that beauty hides, in our inadequacies, the incompleteness of moments, our life's errata. Yet we spend so much of our lives insulting them, striking them down. How can it be that we're taught to reject the romance of imperfection for the boring predictability of perfection?"

The street was mostly empty, save for the occasional shape staggering out of the big red door by the bend. We were seated on the pavement, legs stretched out with our backs to a beige wall. Neither of our feet could reach the edge of the pavement, we weren't tall enough. Ahead of us, the street unfurled in waves of rectangles, the shapes grooved on the wall behind us uniformly flowing into the road and marching up the wall on the other side. If anybody was on the terrace above looking down onto the street, its creases making for a perfectly ruled notebook page, I suppose our parallel shapes would have made an ornate "H" inscribed in an old english font, the slender poster rolls bridging our knees.

"Yeah, I know. This is the night talking. The empty street, the river's faint murmur beyond that circular square, the evening's sugar and, of course, all those poor exsanguinated grapes. When the sun comes up in a few hours, I know, everything will be normal again. Shamelessly we will chase ghosts again, the perfect answer, the perfect love, the perfect memory, the perfect score, the perfect outfit, the perfect smile, the perfect car, the perfect riposte, the perfect job, the perfect son, the perfect house, the perfect future, the perfect death even... It's just what we are. And along the way, unknowingly, we will lapse further into ordinariness, becoming what we were always destined to become - someone's forgotten classmate, someone's slack employee, someone's unsent letter, someone's shared cab-ride, someone's thoughtful gift, someone's chronic disappointment, someone's annoying neighbour, someone's smear of lipstick, someone's grumpy customer, someone's anonymous sandprint..."

The words trailed away. She sighed feebly and fell back onto the wall, staring ahead. By the time she slowly turned her head towards me, we were both smiling. She leant closer, letting out a slow whisper, "I've never heard myself talk this way, ever. Will you at least remember?"

Bubblewrap

"Be careful"
they said every time
our hands reached out for the doorknob.

A thousand sundays later
here we are
lingering at thresholds
lest we are not "careful" enough.

An education

[To Wislawa Szymborska]

Under a bridge in Trzebinia
there is a wooden bench
whose planks are no longer parallel.
They lean into each other
the way sundays do into mondays,
reluctantly.

The view looks out on a silence
whose throat has long dried up.
Top left corner: a steeple clambers up the sky
desperate to escape its inhumanity.
Elsewhere, saggy electricity cables argue
like old men over newsprint.
On tired railway wagons, time frays.
Unshaken, dry heather sways
like postmen's yawns.

It was there
that you sat me down and unfurled life
as things came tumbling out,
"chairs and sorrows, scissors,
tenderness, transistors, violins,
teacups, dams and quips."
It was almost as if
good old Prometheus had
taunted the gods once again.

The moon has died
and crawled out of its black ashes
six times since.

At night, old dreams return
like cats to spilled milk.
In the unwitnessed quiet of a windowsill,
that stolen flame still cradled
in my grateful heart,
I remember.

[4:43 am | 3rd February, 2012]

April 30, 1945

Sixteen years have walked next to us,
beseeching destiny,
and finally, the day has come.

Together
we behold liquid immortality
trembling in a little bulb of glass.
A tender bite for that eternal hunger,
the song of our finality.

Jealous fate has thwarted me twice
but not this time.
My wulf  is here to guide me into the nightfall.

That final gaze is for me,
not for cowards with armbands, not for that Magda,
but for me, Eva, your candled bride.

Foetuses yet unborn
shall one day sift through the matrices of history
and marvel at the glory of our clasp.
My death, geliebter,
shall be the monument of my love.

The idiots.

[For A.]

Held up against the eye's brimming silhouettes,
the polaroids gleam,

all those
pigtailed afternoons and tip-toed midnights,
adventures in ignorance, wisecracks at reason,
folies à deux - frenzies for every season,
precarious perches on edges, drizzly sighs,
endearing monsters and orbits in radiant skies,
diligent obsessions, winked whispers at recess,
clumsy secrets and tangerine waits for a whistle,

all those flutters of that tiny heart,
all that innocence,
all those grins.

Adulthood

Remember kindergarten, day number four,
the day life first got out of hand
and taught you to know
the futility of all,
to forget,

and yet
up against a wall
your heart wouldn't let go
until your throat tasted like sand
and you couldn't hold on to his leg anymore?

On Gerhard Richter's "Selbstportrait"

Going, going.

I nearly remembered.
(Perhaps that is how it began,
with the ordinariness of memory.)

Time is a celtic knot, debauching itself.
To believe in it is to cower in the company of shadows,
to crumble, mumble and stumble
through the unwilling curiosity of wakefulness,
to tremble beyond the tongue-tied outskirts of reason,
to gamble with absurdity and outscream silence
as it gnaws bare-knuckled at the whiteness of distance,
chipping away at the pearly expanse
until it grows weary,
dawns, secrets and passions falling away
through the years like sawdust off a chainsaw,
to reveal, one cold rainy evening,
the faint glimmer of a face that whispers wordlessly,
"I was a blue tomorrow once."

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens [1949 - 2011]

A puff of dust hovers by the sidewalk,
a footstep hurled in haste. A bus to be caught, perhaps,
that curious cargo of sighs, limbs & distances,
leftovers of yet another dailiness.

Nothing pauses.
They are all too busy living,
too busy staving off death's unwavering envy of life.

The absence sharpens,
streetlamps dilate in lament, like balloons.
There is no elsewhere,
no afterwards.

[7:43 pm | 16th December, 2011 | Delhi]

On THE Grammy snub of the year

Oh Kanye, Kanye, Kanye.
How, how could they?

[End of rant.]
[Or not.]

To paraphrase Sartre, Awards are other people. They exist, whether you would like them to or not. And by virtue of their mere existence, they tamper with your subjectivity. There's no escape, neither for the uninterested nor for the disinterested. So, when I went through the list of nominations for the Album of the Year and failed to locate the one name that I was looking for, it did carry some weight, a heaviness of the weightless kind. But before I could contemplate that further, there was a more urgent concern - what was he going to do now? A frenetic google news search for "Kanye West reaction Grammy nominations" revealed 130 results. Whatever it was, it had already happened.

"Kanye West blames himself for Album of the Year snub."
Wha? Himself ? Was the 34-year old tantrum-at-the-drop-of-a-hat rugrat of hip hop finally growing up? Reading further clarified things. It was his fault that he dropped two great albums in the same year when instead he should have "spaced it out, just a little bit more." He had just been a little too good for his own good. Kanye West was still Kanye West, after all.

Coming from a culture where an oversized ego is a survival tactic, that almost sounds, curiously enough, humble. And West, whose public image can be almost accurately described by a first-grader's attempts at cubism, is a titan in that world of giants. But there's more to him, an ambition to match the ridiculous proportions of that ego. (I'm not yet on board with his fashion foray, so let's just stick to music for today.) As a crafty producer with an exquisite taste for samples, he's always had an aural imagination to die for but his recent musical evolution has involved, to my great delight, the infusion of an emotional honesty. Emotion is a rare thing to find in modern hip hop, emotional honesty even more so, (which is such a shame, given that it's perhaps the most literary of musical genres, rap's very ravenousness for language and rhyme making it a mouthwatering canvas for confession...) so I was obviously taken in by his 2008 release, 808s & Heartbreak. Even though its android-like passages of raw emotion stretched out in Auto-tune over staccato notes of electronica barely qualify as hip hop, the shift was obvious. The prodigy had finally been baptized, the most unfettered imagination in hip hop now had a soul. (Shinier and heavier than silver, yes, but still a soul nevertheless.) No wonder why over an year ago, I couldn't wait to get to his next album when it came out, the album this heaviness of the weightless kind is all about.

My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy is, like its adjective count, an exercise in unabashed indulgence. There can be no other way to describe an album that has a guest list that includes Elton John, Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Drake, John Legend, Fergie (all on a single track), Jay-Z, Bon Iver, the RZA, Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj among others. Even as they all turn in masterful appearances, stamping their signatures on the album, it's clearly West who's in charge, conducting an ambition that anchors the album through its numerous excesses and digressions. At moments, with burgeoning textures of vocals layered over a cavalry of strings, trumpets and beats, you can't help but feel that he's channeling Wagner, furious and maniacal in his fascination with grandeur. In "All of the Lights", a pacy Fergie verse suddenly devolves into an Elton John piano solo which then ascends into a spar between his vocals and Alicia Keys's, juxtaposed with African horns and towering beats. All this on a rap-driven track. This is not hip hop, it is the naivete of an imagination whose irreverence knows no bounds.

On "Runaway", around the 6-minute mark, past the lyrical climax of the track, West drags the song on for three more minutes with an insistent coda of keyboard notes over a slithery jarring sample that sounds like a lazy electric guitar but is in fact him singing through a synthesizer. It is the kind of idea that should sink under its own weight but he makes it work, an almost-mournful plea that shores up the self-deprecatory confession the song itself is. The album does have its weaker moments (such soaring ambition can't not fall flat on occasion) and, of course, it indulges in every one of the genre's notorieties - the braggadocio, the misogyny, the materialism and the phallic obsessions - but to deride it for just that would be like dismissing Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping as merely revolting or Lolita as being paedophilic. I am, often to my great regret, too much of a classicist to be able to appreciate hip hop in all its truest passions but West's relentless ambition makes the album, through the opulent hues of its ebbs and flows, the sonic equivalent of a Mohtashem Kashan.

Gonna take this sh** to the next level is hip hop's greatest cliche, but after this, even if all West does is impersonate Louis XIV on a pedestal of trashed Lamborghinis in a sea of Versace upholstery and Basquiat-adorned walls as he spits bombastic verses over the glint of golden strobes, he shall have earned it.

Words hastily scribbled on a paper napkin for a girl in blue

In the golden shapes of this evening's rustic melody,
your blue is like

a little girl's giggle hovering in a petrichor breeze
as she sheepishly peeks into the window of a sand castle
for the first time.

[1:32 am | 22nd May, 2011 | Paradiso Perduto, Venezia]

On making an Omelette

Snap.
Yellow innocence in a dreamy puddle.
(A flaming sun on a watery sky, for the heliocentrically inclined. Or wabi in a china bowl, for the orientally inclined.)

Greeted by a salty conscience, reproached by the sanguine grit of chilli, beguiled by the sorcery of pepper. Add the tender lament of chopped onion, to taste. Stir repeatedly, until the contents weave a fluid tapestry in anarchy.

Onto the sparkling eagerness of a lonely pan. Brown blushes of initiatory awkwardness, a simmering companionship arbitrated by the buttery lenience of a spatula. Flip as needed. A geometry of browned white and scrambled yellow, measured to taste. Serve hot.

An open letter

Paris | 4th May 2011 | 1:21 am

Dear reader,
Wow, it feels amazing to break the fourth wall. I should probably do this more often. But I have only ninety nine more minutes to finish typing this, so I'll stop dawdling and get a move on. (You do not know this - well, at least most of you don't - but the only way I could ever rein in my epistolary verbosity was to impose a time limit. It was either that or a word-limit and given my love of laziness, I was never going to go for the tediousness that is keeping a word-count.)

Anyway.
I just want it said here, categorically, without it being nestled in soaring metaphors or cunning wordplay or obscure imagery, that this blog is very much alive, and will be for a while to come. This is by no means a reassurance (I surely am not presumptuous enough to attach a sense of importance to myself in any of your mindspaces) but just a disclosure. A confession even, if you may.

Why.
Because I might be on the cusp of a disappearance here and thought I would be a little vocal about it for a change, instead of leaving it up to time to do a poor imitation of my voice. Or, well, the disappearance might just never happen. I'm not sure really. Ummmm, I prefer that all of my letters be purposeless, and would dearly like this one to stay so. Just humor me, will you please? As it is, I already have the time-limit weighing on my mind.

Enough small talk.
I work mostly through my notebooks, vessels of jotted down elements and imagery that I usually scour for focal ideas to weave my words around. But like most things, they have outlived their purpose and I very recently decided to let them go, in a singular moment of calcified determination. Two and a half years worth of unfinished material, zipped up and stashed away for reference later in middle-age, if ever that were to arrive. So, this essentially puts me on, artistically speaking, a blank page, the definition of pastlessness that I only too readily understand. Thankfully, I'm not new to this, I have a long-standing habit of resetting my literary pursuits and voluntarily going blind once every few years. (For those interested in history, the last time that happened during this blog's short lifetime was here.) It usually makes the world a tad more beautiful when your vision returns in the months to come. It also helps make life easier and art more complicated, a delicious recipe for their co-existence. Yes, they're quite the bedfellows, but you know art is the only thing that lasts, nothing else does, not your methods, not its inspirations, not life itself. (I'm tempted to break out into a passionate-yet-perfunctory exaltation of the tenacity of art, but then the clock moves.)

It means new reading habits, new playlists, longer evening walks, new paper-faced mates (Pinter, Rilke, Carey and Virgil wearily lift hands in attendance from the cluttered desk in the background), more late-night experiments with ink and eventually, a slightly evolved destiny, bent, bruised and battered. Whether the new-found freedom will liberate me or just tie me down until I find new inspirations or construct a large enough corpus of notes again, only time will tell. (I have a sneaking feeling I'll be back here before the turn of the week, but you know, betting on yourself in whimsical matters like these is just never the right thing to do.) As for "Confabulations", it is an offshoot, an arena born of my desire to adopt a different tone from my habitual one. It's got nothing to do with anything here, and as such I don't really expect it to influence matters much. So that's that.

I do not know when the next time will be that I'll be able to address you directly without being shrouded in half-painted ideologies or veiled metaphors, so I would like to take this opportunity to extend my most heartfelt gratitude for deeming my words good enough to waste your time on. After all, you've just seen how seriously I take my own. All ninety seven minutes of it, to be precise.

Verbosely yours,
Dheeraj.