There is a beautiful reserved forest area in north Delhi, a wild area that has been caged within the national capital city-state of Delhi. Although it’s usually too crowded by commuters and university students, the Kamala Nehru Northern Ridge still in its vastness provides you the joy of solitude, if you take the road less trodden on. I can assure you, in this wilderness you will not get lost!
When separate eyes meet in a crowded city square,
Over exploits of their humanity, and time, once and again–
They know they were meant to stay together,
Because they were met by a chance of eternity,
To be lost again, and again.
***
I walk through a dark corridor,
The air hungover with muck and gloom.
The door of the forbidden room stands tall
Like the brooding death of innocence.
I’ve arrived the point where it appears clear,
I’m just trying to kill a love I’ve given up believing.
But the stark darkness stuns the virginity in me,
Which is eager, very eager to take me,
Someplace else…
Those roads will be difficult to walk on, now alone.
The sand pebbles and germs, and the whirlpools of air
Which like separate worlds, have flourished to life
From the touch of our feet last trodden.
Preserving our childhoods, and pearls of sweet labor lost-
How dare I violate the sacred order of the worlds,
Which, if, might be conspiring to bring our feet together?
Which, if not, how can I disturb the ghost world,
Where in spirals of dust, our ghost selves would dance?
You will apologize to me, I know, you will. One day.
You know, I deserve one, for what I will have to go through…
The trauma of never being at home, while at home.
.
Why do you hide under a veil?
When all you could be doing is soaring on your wings?
.
Why do you reach for stars,
When all you could know is you have it in you to shine?
.
Why age them in just peering through,
Those eyes, yours, shy like a virgin, which want to learn…
.
The veil, that poor see through thing,
Are you letting it, or is it really caging you, against your will?
.
Have they tied anklets around your feet,
In gold and silver that gleam but clang like cowbells?
.
Tell me of your childhood, your real one.
Did you have a ‘gudda’* then, you loved to fondle around all day?
.
You did, didn’t you? You loved him.
Then everything changed, when your childhood was taken from you.
.
You were just told, what was right and wrong,
You just winked once and your lovebirds took off into the blue.
.
Never you got to see them ever again,
Those mad birds, soaring high, higher than ever you’d flown your kite.
.
Those disobedient little creatures,
But why aren’t you happy, that they’ve left you…?
.
You must wonder where now they live,
Have they gone away far enough to live in some other world…?
.
Those two eyes, two tiny little birds,
Must be wandering among all beautiful things, which you won’t know…
.
Those obstinate, selfish birds, that live in dreams,
Ever wondered how they bless humanity every night? They hope for us.
Resting on his shoulder, listening to the sound of our strange hearts beating softly, I exhaled my worries out for the last time. I tried to recall the words he’d spoken before and a few other things, but eventually I found that I couldn’t keep up with the side of me that was insulting me with the humongous issues that I’d so violated by thus lying there with him like that. I was aware, wholly aware of all of them, and yet there was no guilt.
I looked at his sleeping face, feeling his strange breath on my mouth. Only now I was finally getting to understand how very different we were physically. He’d warned me about it many times and yet neither of us seemed to have paid any heed to it. Our closeness now attested to the choice that we’d both made, a decision that we were meant for each other and neither of us would have it in any other way. I knew the future of this would be a difficult one, but we would have each other to take care of together. One last breath and I would wake him up and we’d pick up on what we’d left off before, and that I was sure of.
He would kill me. I knew it, that very first time I laid my eyes on him. I also knew I wanted him to. If I can’t have him, I’d rather be his memory, a delicious thought, a fantasy he would live with forever. But now I have him and he has me. It wasn’t just any situation, it was a simple, satisfying love that brought us together, in a way that I knew there was no other I would rather be happy with, than with him, in this way.
He was once my best friend, and I loved him then. I love him now, in a different way, which is all the same. Falling for him had always been easy. It could be explained to be as simple as a child’s stubbornness of not parting with her favorite toy even though it’s broken. She keeps trying to fix it, often failing, never caring that it doesn’t quite work in the same way. She just learns to love it in her own new ways, and it doesn’t matter to her – because for her, it never broke. She loves it, she’ll love it.
It was the same with Dusk. His internal world was just as complicated as mine, and maybe that’s why it makes it all too easy to just love him. He isn’t my prize, I didn’t win him. Again it was just love, the plain old kind that brought us together. Watching him sleep now, I can’t help letting go of any remnant guilt, and just breathe, and feel like suddenly we were just two kids finally happy of having won their prize.
“You know, you’re adapting well, with all of it. Almost too well.” Virginia appeared in front of me, her hair messy and her plait end wet. Trying not to think about it, I couldn’t help thinking of anything else. I tried to get up but then the belt strapped around me awkwardly dragged me back. “One might actually buy it, if you told them you never left earth.”
“Why do you say so?” I was taken by surprise.
She grinned and placed her finger on my armrest, almost bending over me. She smiled at me, “Because I tell you this is my jet plane, and you didn’t seem surprised at all. Of course, I get it. You have probably a million planes at your command already, being a prince and all that.”
Now I just felt bad. I unhooked the seat belt. I tried to grin. “So, why aren’t you sleeping, madam? Your eyes will be rebuking you all day when we’ll be driving around bright Beverly Hills.”
“Just thoughts. Actually I was sleeping, and a thought woke me up,” she picked at the belt of her robe. “You don’t think it’s too warm in here?”
I shook my head at her and she puckered. “Alright, so it’s just me, huh! Wanna come with me to get some coffee?”
She was dressed like this, in a cute little overcoat and woolen socks on her feet, almost dressed for bed but then she had this plait on that gave you the idea she didn’t really plan on relaxing. It was hard to focus from the way her perky little figure undulated from faux drowsiness. I knew her too well, she wasn’t sleeping, and also that she wasn’t planning to either.
“You’re practically married, so why the hell would you want to go out in your own plane to get coffee with me?” I knew what she was playing at. I knew it wasn’t right to do that to her, all over again, but with nothing clearly set on my platter, I had very little space in it to fit her in. And I knew one thing about her, it was a wrong thing to do, trying to just fit her in. She was much too important for such attitude from someone else. “You could just get the attendant ladies to get you anything you want.”
Her shoulder arched in defense. She thought for a long moment. “Well, is it wrong to wish to talk to you, just for once, alone? Thought coffee would make it easier.”
I gulp down some more sarcasm. I hated myself right then. The constant part of me that kept internally tearing up about those same old things. And then the other was rebuking me for all those mistakes I didn’t commit knowingly, and yet I knew I’d commit them over a thousand more times just because it got me that special thing. Then there was that part of me that was hurling things things at me, knocking things over in my head, so caught up in a fit of rage, that it keeps trying to convince me of things I didn’t want to believe in.
I accompany her, to the rear end of the plane where they had the pantry cabin. I didn’t like the setting. It was exactly what I didn’t need right now. A closed space with her. But damn it, she just always has to ruin it for me.
She pressed a lot of dials trying to get the coffee machine working. At last I had to step in. I tapped the power button and it whirred to work. She covered her face, “I’m a mess! Gee! You’re right, I’m pathetic.”
She was goofy and somehow yet original. The truth was it was her unmasked naïve ways that made her so very attractive. “Maybe in some twisted era I perceived it as charm. Now, I know that’s what I’d been missing.”
She lets her hand drop and looks straight at me. Her eyes were the bluest things I’ve ever seen that drew on me like non-existent magic, silently asking me to believe. I couldn’t look away, for the time the machine whirred. It wasn’t hard to imagine, me taking her hand and just begin.
She could just have collected her coffee and we’d have been done there. But she just stood there. I stood there breathing, and doing nothing.
“You know,” she began, “I thought this would be easier.” Her eyes shone, and suddenly she pulled me in and kissed me. I was in over my head as well. Even though in my head things worked differently, this was too much to handle well. I knew there’d be no stopping once I gave in.
I knew I had to push her away. It was how it was supposed to be. “Virginia! Virginia! We’ve got to stop this!” I said around when we both turned up for a breath.
She turned away, looking hurt. I understood only too well. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time.”
I look at her, and speak, “It’s been the same for me. But I’m sorted out now. You should be as well. It’s the right thing to do…”
She didn’t look back at me. She filled her cup with coffee and filled another. “Here you go,” she said lifting the cup for me to take. Before I could take it, she put it on the counter and turned around and began to walk away.
I snapped back to my senses and in a wild moment, I followed her and grabbed her wrist and pulled her back in. I muffled her mouth and silently let her eyes rake my face. It was unbearable already, to have her in my arms like that, to linger on a single sane thought, and it was the dead of the night in a sleeping plane cabin to begin with.
I took her neck in my hands and pushed her against the wood-paneled wall. “Girl, do you even realize just how much you drive me crazy? And with the fact that it’s just us here, you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. I might rape you here, and you couldn’t call on anyone for help even if you wanted to. If I wished it were to be that way.”
Her eyes eased up, but my hand still clamped over her mouth. I kept on going, “You little girl! You haven’t changed a bit. God, how hard it is just to be looking at you like this. Makes me try to be good and fail at it so inevitably.”
Her eyes turned defiant. Yes, she would tell me to stop trying. It was driving me insane. I said, “It was the same, back all those years before. How you got me wound up so tight, I’d be fighting myself. I knew it would never work out. These kinds of feelings never work out in the real world. I knew I respected you too much to be your boyfriend and treat you like you’re my girl. You’re not just some ‘my girl’ material. I knew you deserved better, you deserve someone who’d directly submit everything he possesses to you. Make you his queen – let you rule his home and heart. It was always like that. I didn’t possess anything, anything I could offer you then, nor do I do now.
“I’m not a good person, Virginia. We have real problems. You know everything, and it just makes me angry thinking, you of all people, knowing exactly how difficult it is for me to say no to you, you deliberately put me to test like this, over and over.”
I let go of her mouth, and she breathed. Unexpectedly, she hugged me. “Don’t say anything. I’ve missed this long enough.” I knew she was talking of our closeness, and I didn’t try to push her away this time.
The stars were once plucked from the ashen grey skies.
They shine on lips now, and in eyes which cannot cry.
The sheen of all the silken dresses was extracted, and torn apart.
Making the poison that flows in the waters to mix in the dirt.
Every heart has slept, every bedside lamp extinguished.
It’ll be just one last time, that we would get to dance…
The paper fire’s shriveling up in the dusty grate,
We’re burning up our old love letters to warm us tonight.
Come on, baby, dance with me, this’s that one last time,
When it’s time to bid goodbyes for good and smile.
History ends tonight, civilization will die with the ghost of us,
Tonight there will be no words, just two couples of teary eyes.
And we dance, silently, until we fall, of exhaustion.
Two finite hearts finally, slowly dying in each other’s arms.
It’s been great, after all these months of painstaking juggling between college life and the hassles of getting published, that finally it’s all over and I’m past the phase I used to be a closet poet and novelist. The journey though has been filled with difficulties, I have no regrets, and it adds a little more credit to my patience that I didn’t give up halfway and back out of the deal I signed when I had dared to dream of reaching out to the masses with my thoughts, ideals, dreams and words in print. It makes me immensely happy that finally I’m almost there where I had envisioned myself to be, and exactly at the right time I had wished it to be.
It had always been a cherished childhood desire to be like my grandfather, Tarini Kanta Bhattacharya, one of the most revered men in my life, a noted figure in the literary scene in Assam, where I come from. In my teenage and late adolescence I took up the pen to experiment with poetry, and failed a lot many times. And this year, 2013 being his 100th birth anniversary, I’m overjoyed to dedicate my book to the beloved legend, who never got to see the garden he had planted so long ago, flourishing so late, as me, a granddaughter he never got to lay eyes on, lives her life on principles he had once taught to his little children, which he himself believed in.
My wish to have a successful career in the world of science was in shatters, when I realized more than anything I’m an artist at heart. I was born to write, and I don’t know from where it just came to me, the desire to write about beauty, and love and anything that draws the soul to question monotony. Dreams, that’s where it all began. And harshness of the world, and still beauty that tore through all that. The complexities of human life, and the organism, that can think and yet with unthinking brutality, like just an animal indulges in savagery in the name of civility and all things holy.
By the time I reached my teenage, I’d seen enough, even at my home, the presence of a different kind of love other than the kind commercial Indian movies portray, but quite understandable by now, and petty squabbles. Even reading different story books and observing fellow friends in my school, made this desire grow, and gave me a silent voice that could be recorded only on paper. I wasn’t very good in my English lessons in school, and used to be despised by my teachers for tormenting them with my dullness and non-responsive behavior, and as you probably guessed, I was never a bright student; always average, at the corner, like a spectator than a participant.
In the romance department, I was worse than the advanced kind of disappointing. My fellow friends would be talking of their boyfriends and I would be pathetically eavesdropping on their chatter, creating in my mind, judging, contrasting, modifying on the basis of the existing kind, a new kind human being, who, as a lover would make up for anything anyone has suffered in their lives, the lack of adventure, the monotony of always doing the same thing, and following the same roads that lead to the grave, having no newness to the institution, and that guy, that kind of guy, I had in my mind, that I wanted for myself, actually never existed.
Then there’s a very famous writer, my idol, Joanne K. Rowling, who spoke through the fictitious Professor Albus Dumbledore, in her book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” and that just changed my life towards the path I finally decided to take. This moment that I took up writing seriously, the year, 2007 also being very significantly important in my life.
Fanciful were those days, and also so memorable!!! Naive as I was, and pure of my unadulterated heart, foolishly I happened to stumble into the student activity room in my new school, my eyes opened to a sight like I’d never seen in my life so far… In the far corner of the room there sat this young boy with funny hair and the most carefree laughter scribbling on a desk with a couple of his friends and that sight, and with a glimpse of his eyes and smile, and my heart hasn’t been whole ever since. He fitted the mental image of my perfect lover, that I’d had so early in my head, with whom I’d begun writing my first story…the image of Dusk, and ever since I’ve never seen any other sight lovelier than that stranger boy sitting there laughing off with his friends, his entire guard down.
I wished to know him better, but then I wan’t very good at making friends, and retaining them. Especially people, I’m drawn to so fatally. IT didn’t last, but over these past six years, I’d had enough, to know he wasn’t at all that much the hero I had in mind, because I wasn’t that image, he had in his. Nevertheless, that love in return blossomed me into a woman, enabling me to write of my passions, and desires, and of love, to the closest degree I can mimic. My book is complete, the first one that I wrote to describe that ideal boy and introduce the chief character of my very first story, that is still under construction.
I wished to do a lot of things, and I’ve tried a little bit of everything. And I have no regrets. I’ve got a life ahead and I will live it as long as my time permits, and will do everything that I’ve ever had a wish in my mind (well, not everything…specially not those which are illegal, haha) to do. Beauty has always been my companion and my strong belief is that it’ll always continue to be for me who is one Libra born, and I believe in myself above all else, that I’ll never change for me, for the world, maybe yes, I might seem, but for me, it’ll be just choices that I made, which in my heart I’ll always remember, what I went through to decide standing on a crossroad.
Chaos it is when I give it a thought,
As to where we’re headed, that fate has wrought.
Peace that I feel in they words’ embrace,
To think, it grieves me, our love for thee is just thy vehemence!
Delirious, moonstruck, blinded by desire,
I feel sacrilegious, accompanying thee,on this godless voyage.
Damned we are, condemned by fate to live in doom forever,
Infernal is the wait, to find that horizon, to bring us back to mortal age.
But the sun is not setting and the endless main of waters, ceaseless ahead–
What scares me is that, I don’t see a wish either, a wish strong enough,
Since the wheel is in thy hands and I’m just a guest on thy anchored barge.
But the sun is not setting and the sea is dead, no winds for the lifeless sails don’t bluff.
Moving nowhere, standing still in the ocean of utter desolation, scares me.
We’re trapped in this nightmarish reality, I have no luxury of waking up.
Maybe I don’t want to wake up, I love thee for all I know.
I can’t shatter all those cherished dreams for this one nightmare.
Knowing I have nothing to wake up to, except the fact,
To learn which, will shatter me across the ocean.
Knowing our love was just my imagination I indulged in,
Wishing and crying for slumber to murder my obsession.
Wishes to forget the past wounds wont bear fruit, I know.
Like hopes don’t germinate from wet ashes.
But thinking of you, I really wish, I could forget…
I shiver at certain thoughts, my wishes, some dreams.
Because, again to give it a thought, it’s impossible,
And can’t exist.
Like I’m Calypso reincarnated,
Cursed by the gods for all ages…
To live in an all consuming solitude.
The fates, ever so cruel have left me,
Absolutely no chance at redemption.
Now, as my saviour, they’ve sent me you.
But I know you’ll go away as well.
You have to.
But, I’ll always be here,
Not thinking, not hoping.
Scared to even give it a spare little thought.
Even fleetingly.
Terrified, I’ll ruin the spell.
The fateful moment has cast between us.
But I will never tell.
Like Midas I turn everything I touch, to cold metal.
Which, like statues, start dying on me.
Another composition. I was trying to write a rhyming lyric, here is the out come. An AB-CD-EF verse.
I will tear down the face of heaven and spread it around thy paradise,
I will steal all the stars to release them to roam in thy wake like a thousand fireflies…
The meandering streams of light will wash through the grassy meadows wavering in the wind.
The flood to the the fire, and all in between will merge and slake, when love overflows its brink.
The torments ending when fighting through the tentacles of time and snares of evil fate,
I will find you, your arms, your warmth and lips. And here, again, I wake.
This isn’t really nice or promising, but I couldn’t think of a better twist to it, than making it all a dream that breaks when the fantasy reaches it’s prime. Hope you all like it.
Have a great day ahead. 🙂
Here is my latest piece of verse I wrote,
“Hopes will never die, as long as my heart remembers the graces you did to me.
When, in the dreamless sea of dreariness I’ll find myself sinking,
I’ll delve deeper under to visit your underwater palace of the seeking.
There in your mysterious ways, and will, and there will I find myself again.”
At a shore on a sunny day…
One shell laid inverted on another,
A giant foot stamps hard on it.
The sand shifts to take them in.
Nothing changes, nothing breaks.
That’s how I don’t care.
My heart’s laid bare, take it in,
You never know when the sand gets wet,
And molds into hard clay.
‘Cause then the shells will break,
When the foot pounds in,
With a little more weight.
Here I tried writing something…so here it goes :-
My eyes wish to behold, again and yet again, the grace with which, thee, my sweet lordship, unfold thy deepest, most wondrous mysteries. My fingers wish to trace your fair skin, under which the blue veins snake their way through your flesh, more fragrant than all of Persephone’s grove, by far worth more than Hades’ treasure trove…
And it’s thy heart, made of the densest gold, harder than the hardest diamond, but it’s just that I wish to win. Thy lips, that speak so much, thy eyes, express. I wish to smoothe out that delicate tensed brow. I wish to sort through your beautiful long lashes and to fill thy sweet mouth with gentle kisses. And there lying around in some far away meadow, shall we have our sweet recess. We will share little sweet promises, sweet little breaths exchanged. How, lying there on the warm, moist grass we would make wagers on our lives.
It’s a sport of young lovers, such as ourselves to let Passion, Love’s hot headed brother override our sane rational minds. Take oblique decisions, the orders, our hearts fail to obey. I know this will someday end, the rat race of passion and morals clashing will end one day. Like thee, ever so gentle, so noble, may someday just walk away, for my goodness’ sake. But it’ll be me here, rooted to the scent of this meadow, and the lingering aftertaste of your kiss on my tongue.
I’ve really attempted to write prose after a really long time. Could use an opinion if anyone could offer any regarding the progress of the piece. Thanks.
Now, it’s all ominous chaos and ruthless scribbles, in your absence–just scraps, here and there.
The night haunts me, the silence presses on questions, I cannot answer…
Rebukes me, my heavy heart that falters, can’t speak of the last assault.
The remembrances, the little touches and your scars, the wish in me to heal the lines…
The stolen kisses, the shameless greed, and mischief, and indeed no one knew…
All of it, everything, rendered meaningless now, just goooooone in vain.
But I’ll find some broken kind of beauty in the blank there as well…
Prey to destiny’s unique, sadistic ambitions and schemes…here, I’m the fool again.
But, I’m not so weak, I will rise from the scraps and scribbles, life is after you,
Then, I also have the ghost of your words, the words, you sometimes, half consciously uttered..
Sometimes feeling burdened and indebted, taking pity on me, you showered.
Those words, violent for me, your name, sublime for me,
Will overwhelm me, and inspire me to live again…
Cliffette's Journal 