Scheherazade

You are unattainable again, tonight. 

Like you were sometime ago. 

When I would read your poetry

over and over. 

Try to look for you in your words. 

Deciphering your codes, your secrets. 

Pretending that everything you wrote

was a riddle for me. 

You wrote about your men and your city. 

Your life and your death. 

Your realm. 

And the silent futility of it all in which

you strangely seemed to revel in. 

I didn't even remember how you looked like back then. 

Just your hair. 

And your hands, your tiny little hands

as they sifted through the sand.

Soft delicate fingers caressing with care. 

And then you wrote for me. 

Scribbled verses about me on a tissue, 

using my back as a support, 

with the pencil you stole from me, remember? 

And I was so jealous of your words. 

For they came to you like old friends. 

My words fooled me.

My words gave up. 

You loved me like you were born to love me. 

I just gave you a thousand and one nights worth of stories. 

You were supposed to be my muse. 

That was the arrangement. 

But you, with your mysterious ways, took me in.

And I became yours.  

 

A better way to lie.

We're miserably failing, you and I.
Our shoes lying morosely in the sand with their mouths wide open.
Poem doesn't come the way it used to.
Now we have to grunt every sentence out.
Push it out like a morning shit without a cigarette.
Too young and too scared and already,
way too tired to be grown-ups.
The sea eats up the beach inch by inch.
Consumes all the empty beer bottles
and the torn fishnets and the condoms.
Then burps.
A nearby dog wakes up from his sandy nest.
We're too scared to write.
Too sleepy to be honest.
Too hungry.
All the time.
(I am already bored, in the middle of writing this poem.
For what's the point. Its not a good poem.
Its a bunch of shit.
There is no rhythm. There is no conscience.
No yearning, no ambition.
No swear words. Not even thinly veiled truths.
Nothing to salvage.
Maybe if I end it with a pretty image...)
A warm night falls on us. The shoes are gone.
The sea ate them. The bastard.
The dog comes over, sniffs at my toes.
Then pisses into the sea
and goes away.  

A boat ride on the river.

Last summer, I went on a vacation to Goa with my family. I had a lot of fun there. My
favourite part was the boat ride on the river Mandovi. It was a huge boat with a lot of people.
Me, my parents and my little brother enjoyed the ride a lot.

It was a pleasant day and my mother had packed us some tomato sandwiches. We sat in the
boat looking at the blue water and took a lot of pictures. I loved putting my hand inside the
water but my mother always shouted at me for doing that. We went deep inside the river and
the uncle who was steering the boat pointed inside the water. All of us looked at where he
pointed and we saw a dolphin in the water. The dolphin swam with our boat for a long time.
People tried to throw pop-corn in the water but the uncle asked them not to do that.

After that we saw the sun set into the water from the boat. I was tired when the day was over
but it was the best boat ride of my life.

Poo-tee-weet.

Around that time, writing left me. Every night I tried, sat there with bloodshot eyes waiting for the morning, doodling distorted human faces in my notebook. Mornings were unbearable. The brightness was too blinding. The paper would still be empty. And the birds would start chirping. Poo-tee-weet. That really annoys me. Birds chirping early in the morning. I don't feel that there is anything worth chirping about the morning. It is way too bright, plus you have to fight the sudden realization that there are others awake now. Last night's mess is visible now. 

Once it is morning, sleep comes almost shamefully. Like a rape victim. Mornings come with cottonmouth and hunger and futility and the fucking chirping of the fucking birds. I would just smother my head with the pillow and make it as dark as I possibly could. And every morning, as I drifted off to sleep, I would think about those bands they use to cover their eyes while sleeping. Sleeping masks. That's what they're called. Sleeping masks. Every morning, I would think about sleeping masks. 

I close my eyes right now trying to remember that evening in Zari. Well, one of them, really. They have all melted and merged into a single representative by now. Of over-burnt tea and cow dung and Old Monk and incessant smoke. Or the long lost nights at Renusagar, on the dark little hill with the lake overlooking a million chimneys reaching up to a million stars, filling the air with grey clouds of nocturnal industry. Sad nights. Accumulating slowly but surely, coming to get you, little child. 

Dead dog lying in the middle of the highway, guts spilling out, still fresh. I walk around the carcass, minding the crows. I hate crows. Somewhere in Panjim, a car with bloodstains on its grill must be pulling over by now. People come to Goa to escape their sad meaningless lives. Where are the people already living in Goa supposed to go to? I go to Zari. Sit down in Patil kaka's chai shop listening to him verbally abuse his thirteen year old nephew. Watch the thin frail ghost of Zari stand dead center on the little road, arms tied behind his back and people driving around him, narrowly missing the possibility of another dead carcass. Watch little kids throwing stones at passing cars. Watch the dark concrete eyes of workers coming back from the factory. Watch out for all the shit, piss, scum and cat litter in the universe.

There was a fair here two days ago. The little village spiffed up. Most of the dog shit was gone. Long strings of pretty flashing lights were put up. In the evening the little street that bifurcated the village looked like the centre of the universe. So many people! Buying, selling, negotiating. Little stalls of cotton candy and ice cream and shiny metal trinkets. Footwear and handbags and little plastic helicopters that fly twenty feet when you pull the string. Little kids crawled like critters among sequoia trees; looked for their mothers. Balloons and toffee and earrings studded with shiny stones. Today it is all gone. The saffron on the street is there, though. The torn festoons are there. The only remnants. Like spoilt make-up on a weeping woman’s face.

Patil Kaka’s stall becomes dull at night. The feeble little tube light tries so hard, but falls short. Little crevices of darkness here and there, the place seems smaller than it actually is. A dusty calendar and a ritualistic photograph of some solemn deity sit on the pink wall, overlooking everything- the equally solemn patrons, Patil kaka telling his thirteen year old nephew how he will never be able to fuck in his life, and me, a stranger here too. Only the nephew is friends with me, for I buy him chocolate sometimes. And the poor little shack takes me, all my companions, even the government issue box of free condoms into her rat infested abdomen, with a surprising sense of complacency. It’s not like she can do anything about it anyway.

All she does is wait. Wait for a group of seven year olds, who come by every evening carrying pots and pans almost as big as themselves, begging for food. The whole village waits for them. For they go to every house, every shop and beg. And they take everything they get and demand for more and mix it all into those huge pots and pans that they carry; All of Zari’s leftovers into one. And they chirp around like tiny little songbirds, poo-tee-weet, in a language you and I will never understand. They brighten up every place they go, and the little shack waits for them, for they give her, and us, the one elusive shy smile we’ve been searching for the whole dastardly day. They take the loaf of bread Patil kaka gives them and keep it carefully among the pan full of yesterday night’s rotis. And then, tumbling amongst themselves, they fly away, leaving us utterly clueless, utterly alone.

The little shack darkens again. Utterly clueless, utterly alone. Like a lover, left behind.