A search for belonging is a horrible thing as I’m house hunting in a city of the homeless.  I am an eternal foreigner, lost in a city of natives, making do with broken, borrowed sentences and the passing translator. I walk around observing the scenery, listening to the sound of laughter all the while asking strangers to point me to the ghetto of language orphans.

Poetry is the site of salvation

where the unquiet find their peace,

despondent insomniacs find kindred spirits

as despair and joy give way to a shared silence.

Poetry is a candlelit vigil

commemorating our damaged souls,

 giving dignity to the grotesque,

Arranging sound and image,

until a warmth settles in-between abdomen and chest.

Poetry rescues the dehydrated

With whispered words of compassion.

Daylight Saving Program

I am not done with this day, I still haven't coloured around its corners, or polished its edges.  Every night I resist this closure with a vague sense of failure. Today if anything was another unfulfilled promise. A kind of dysfunctional urgency takes grip over me. A breathlessness that makes me more anxious than anything else. I still haven't figured it out and now I have one day less. I'm painfully conscious of each grain of sand-dust dropping as my hourglass stands erect, defiant and uncontrollable. Maybe that is what it means to be at peace - to not having a desperate sense of a destination. But I'm in this tearing hurry, like that rabbit who ignored Alice as it tumbled gracelessly down the hole. 

Even writing these words, is nothing but a half hearted attempt to bargain with the relentless flow of time. Pushing against its force makes it only push back harder. I imagine that if time were a wise old woman she would smile vaguely, amused by these childish negotiations with mortality. 

My sleep deficit bothers me. The vague feeling of being in a state of ill-health jiggles and niggles in that space between skull and scalp. The sort of exhaustion that cracks your voice and makes it sound like dry gravel. The sort of exhaustion that turns limbs into liquid. A sort of thick and creamy soup, I imagine. I just want to lay down my weapons and surrender. and sleep nice and long. I give up, okay? Now let me be.

Hot eyelids burn.

Nights like this I wonder about the audacity of hope. Forget hope, just the audacity of outrage. The audacity of believing we have a choice to change which direction gravity pulls. Flirting with all these ideas of justice seems laughable when the odds are dictated by forces as old as the hills.

The rancid smell of power is the same ever day of the week. Power intoxicates just like any other substance. I never rant at a cigarette. I don't believe I can change the momentum of seasons or the taste of tears. I am not outraged by the bite of a dog. Structure operates in favour of power. But of course. Hierarchy is hierarchical. 

And yet...here I am beating my invisible fists against great, big iron gates which loom overhead menacing, mocking, jeering, amused by my insect-sized antics. 

No matter what dreams we dream we wake up to nightmares. Nightmares filled not only of gruesome honour killings and broken beggar babies at traffic lights, but of the single watchman sitting on a stool with vacant eyes as hours slip by unmarked. 

Nights like this I wish I was blind to the form of the beast.

Like the hiss of a cat.
Sinister
Like a mid day rumble in the sky.
Sinister
Like the kinky thrill of humiliation.
Sinister
Like shadows edging closer on isolated Delhi roads.
Sinister
Like underlying intentions revealed by a passing glint in the eye.
Sinister
Like little children separating mountains of rotting garbage around ever corner,
                                                                             wet waste from dry waste.

A Quantum of Solace

I am writing in one of those frill-free notebooks we used in school. How fast things become obsolete. Like STD booths. They used to give such good business said the owner of the single booth on this side of the mountain. Now with the cellphone zamana he notes that they are a near extinct feature of a quickly receding past.

My instinct to make a phone call to someone-anyone to tell them how nice the place is made me wonder about the impulse to share. The way in which sometimes sharing itself constitutes experience. Almost as if an experience once shared is a an expanded one. As if to suggest that if no one else knew, it would be less real. less, true. A web of story telling, that's what it is.

Claustrophobia. The walls have been pressing down, slowly leaning inwards and constricting my airways. A problem with the piping, an internal blockage. My hillside holiday is an invasive surgical treatment. A method of bypassing caving walls. (I sense an overstretched metaphor)

The sky has been brewing, but never really following through with its threats. A few drizzlings here and there. 

Reading a good book that wraps itself around you is a visceral pleasure. Good writing diffuses warmth around your internal organs. Like a hot water bottle buried in your bed on a December night. Of course there are other narratives that are made of darker and heavier stuff, which weigh you down and linger through the day, following you like a persistence stalker. I guess that is what art does. It affects affectively.

Old colonial bungalows with preserved, museumized air.

A hundred and six years.

A hundred and sixty years.

The walls fold in peculiar ways - The ceiling bows oddly low - The ceiling stretches oddly high. Some strange experiment in time and space. We are used to our built environment shaping space differently. I like it. This is how Alice felt when she ate the cake - unwieldy and out of proportion. 

I cant believe I had forgotten the sound of silence. The touch and smell of a loud conspicuous silence slipped my memory. My ears are now habituated to the midnight clamourings of Indra Vihar. Suddenly I am startled by this equally noisy silence. The smallest sounds are amplified, each footstep, murmur and rustle acquire distinct outlines of their own.

A ringing silence.

I am reminded of these moments which expose the roots of clichéd phrases. The fact that each overused turn of phrase contains within it a quantum of truth. Clichés cant be dismissed because of the mere fact of repetition. Recycled images are not less true simply because of the fact of reuse. To my ears this is a ringing silence. So I sit here and listen carefully to this vociferous ringing silence. If I shed my big city skin maybe this silence will transmute into a silent silence. My ears hear silence because I am still experiencing in the negative. I experience an absence of certain sounds. It requires a dramatic feat of re-orientation to stop experiencing in the negative.

Which is what I intend to do.