inklines

The Winter Jazz

[...inside the giant clock

sits his mother,

cigarette in hand

and unicorns in the eye;

she died sitting-

the mother of all winter stories...]

I did the artwork for this poem by Inam Hussain Mullick. Click on the picture if you wish to read the poem.

Float!

Here's introducing a sparkling new blog :D

This one shall have personal, i.e. mostly random meandering meaningless posts. I felt the need for a separate blog a long time back... especially because I avoid (ah well, usually at least) putting up anything that is not erm... art(?) on this blog. I have my doubts regarding the regularity of the afore mentioned random meandering meaningless posts, but hey, I promise to give it a shot. And be peppy and charming and light and frothy and notcynical. Wellllll... that might be promising a bit-too-much.

So, scoop up your icecream and some fizz... go Float!

Skin

The bell-boy stepped into my rented room

of elbow-brushed windows and I asked him,

Why does this hotel

smell of sunlight

so soon?

He pointed to a painting.

He said he knew.

So the rumours

of our sweat still remain,

clinging to the silvered frame

hung on this wall,

and the canvas feels like

a second skin,

Skin, I said, that was caught

on the corner of your bed,

old lover.

Skin, I repeated, that was

no longer fresh,

and I surely left it behind.

Yes,

I have seen your nakedness before,

and today once more

I feel it in these disturbed colours,

but who stands hidden

in the corner of the painting

possibly reciting songs from memory

to the red sparse tree, and making

the world believe that he

loves and exists

like the poor light

filtering in and drawing his shadow.

(He cannot be you,

because you believed in night

and miracles, only,

and your tinted glasses changed

the way you looked

at the world and me.)

And while I lean through

the frame, trying to

paralyse the night sky,

letting down my hair

like a shadow

of some fairytale,

for you,

my grey lover,

asking you to climb out over the edge

your smell stalks away into

the chalk-laden streets

far, far away from this painting

while your old whisper rings,

Girl, you said, make me violet,

like the sky in your pocket

and I will be your poem in death.

Then the bell-boy murmured

that he knew all about poetry

and he granted me

deliverance, suddenly.

I’ll take you, he said, to Bluebeard’s Room

if only you could pledge

to set free the demon of scents.

But I could only promise him

my name.

He must have agreed for soon

I let his steps roam,

as freely as his voice

till I entered the room

of blueprints and bones.

Silently,

the sea seeped in through the floor,

you crept in too, dusting chalk dust

from your clothes.

And I knew you wanted a reward

for your presence.

As the music ceased in your boundary

of blue walls, I lie down again

for I have transgressed,

and my slashed wrist must feed

the dried blood on your sheets.

Lover, I said, you must know

my skin is scarred now

and I cannot leave it behind.

Phew!

I waged a two hour long war against Blogger and its templates. Needless to say I lost.

I hate technology.

Letters

- I’ll write.

- Will you bring back prayers for me?

- I’ll write everyday.

- Yes, but will you bring back some bells too?

- Keep an eye on the mail. You tend to forget.

- You won’t bring back prayers it seems. Will you bring back letters then?

- I will send letters!

- Oh. Do send some prayers too. And silver bells.

- I will bring your bells, I promise I will.

- Small bells, but pure silver. They must tinkle sweetly, for they must compensate for everything I miss.

- Anything else?

- Can I send letters too?

***

On nights when the chorus puts an end to silence,
and their song unfolds on her wooden desk
she writes a thousand letters.

…I have heard that letters lose their way,
trickling into the hands of strangers…

And in those letters she said-
‘Bring back for keepsake
the muted prayers of the monastery
and the mist-like swirling colours
of the snow drenched hills.
Colours that would fill my palette…
for in splattered strokes your portrait stands-
unfinished.’

On certain nights of counting blessings
and remembering prayers,
nights of playing out desires-
the desire of clear voices and ink,
she writes a thousand letters.

...letters that do lose their way
losing themselves in the yawning strangeness
of strange men in distant cities…

***

Splishy Splashy Colours

'The Gypsy's Wife'... This one is for Leonard Cohen.

'...whose darkness deepens in her arms, just a little more...'
This too is for Cohen.

'Purple'/'A Different Sky'

'Reflections'
....

A little surprise for my readers :-)

Happy imagining!

(note: All of the above have been done with the help of Adobe PhotoShop, and of course- Cohen!
Click on them to see a larger-and better-version.)

Strange Cities

When your mouth starts tasting like the city, you know it is time to leave.

Time to leave, you muse, as you trace the thick coat of grime, dust and parched gaping streets that have made their way into your mouth, with the tip of your dry tongue. You look at your callused feet and wonder, to whom do they belong…and as you run streaming water through those cropped tresses you wonder why it smells like tar…

Yet, you step out to brave another day of strange faces and myths. Evening descends and on the bus-ride back home you trace the thick coat of grime and dust with the tip of your tongue and again you decide to leave the city. A slice of emerald green enters the square frame of your spectacles leaving you startled. Oh yes, the sky still exists.

Instead of going back to the four-walled home you inhabit these days, you enter a little café on Park Street and after deliberately prolonged sips at a simmering cup of coffee, you take out one of those black notebooks you carry to write little stories in. That was when you heard them, I believe. Two young women sat opposite your table and carried on a hushed conversation, the words found their way to your table of polished wood and yellow mugs.

-She is me. She is me in another city. Not here, not in Calcutta. In Calcutta I am myself. But look at her, all alone and wretched and sad!

-She does not look wretched, perhaps she is one of those people who enjoy being alone.

-No! This loneliness is forced down your throat. This loneliness is that of strange cities and strange nights. I can be found in Mumbai, sitting with a diary, smoking innumerable cigarettes and drinking steaming cups of coffee, counting calories, reading some odd, bright book that I had picked up from a nearby bookstore- in a café where people are busy sharing memories with someone or the other, in a city that revels in company…and me… I’m all alone. And loneliness feels like being drugged after a certain point of time…
That girl sitting in the corner of this busy café in Calcutta marked out by her short hair and notebook, with her coffee is my image. It almost feels like I have stepped outside my body to look at myself… I could amuse myself for hours on end. I could look at her and pretend that I am gazing at myself. Look at her efforts to appear comfortable, look at her finishing her work on time, trying to make the first and last sip of her coffee last- last for hours on end. Clutching the corners of the table when it is time to close the shutters and then she might step out in the rain with her umbrella of muted colours. And pretend that she likes being lonely, pretend that the sad lost gaze of her eyes only adds to her charm. Yet she knows, she knows that if she disappears one night, disappears under the glare of a thousand headlights, disappears in the long drawn peals of the church bell… no one will miss her. Even if she screams till her voice decides to break.
None will notice the translucent figure of a solitary woman on these streets… not even if you walk the same streets a thousand times over, not if you buy your newspaper from the same man on the corner every evening, not if you throw some money into the crooked bowl of the dozing beggar every night. I do not blame them in Mumbai… and I’m sure she too doesn’t , here, in Calcutta; such are the customs of strange cities. In such outlandishness we fade away… and through our skin they see the coloured panels of the shop, they see the rain through our hair and the stars through our eyes, we cease to be substantial to them.

And when you walked back to your tiny apartment that night, the stranger’s voice crept into your ears repeating itself like some unending echo, persuading you to believe that you were indeed translucent, that your skin was stretched tautly encompassing the entire city, stretched like a canvas, and that you ceased to be solid while succumbing to that intense pull…

You repeated your well-rehearsed prayer while kneeling beside your bed at night. The ground felt cold and hard, and your ankles seemed bound to some ancient stone, and a line slipped on its own into your prayer (a prayer usually preserved for forgiveness, kindness, pity and love). You heard yourself say, above the din of the stranger’s voice you had carried home in that black notebook, “Make me opaque.”

Next morning I did not see you step out to brave the gray morning.

You left the city on that very night of voices and answered prayers I heard, and that they call you a green gypsy these days.