Negative

The last time we spoke, I forgot to say "bye". I think the doorbell rang or something, can't quite remember now. When Maya runs about the house looking for you, her silver anklets make the most delicate kind of music. Like paper thin bangles, just two of them, at a flirty young conversation. Or pale Christmas tree ornaments after the fire has died out. I only believed in fairies bacause they wear gauzy silver wings. Don't tell me they are not real, I know, ofcourse. But they are beautiful anyhow, aren't they?

Are you afraid to return because you think I'll ask you to stay? But I always knew that nothing could hold you. I never even tried. Your mind is a mass of confused unbridled silver wires. And you electrify everyone on the way as you go along. With your mad angry stories and your lost grey eyes. When I paint in a single colour, it makes me feel guilty. Like I'm insulting your memory. But i cannot paint in white. That's more your thing, isnt it? "I like you because you're a red cloud" you had said.
You're the sky. Blue, purple, grey, white. Always stormy, always quiet. And always free. I think the doorbell rang. What do you paint these days? Red roses white?

Of little stories in between

Sometimes, when you’re least aware of it, you look back at the people you knew since the beginning of forever, only to realize how much you’ve painted them in rainbow colours to suit your own rainy day purposes. I once knew a little boy, wide eyed and sharp tongued. He wrote a little story everyday—the same story, very episodic, where he always played the hero. Occasionally I featured in it too, always a small subsidiary sub plot character, never important enough to turn the tide. I don’t think he ever stopped to consider me as a real character, or gave it a second thought whether I was in it or not. It meant something to me though, to see my name in one, after several dry chapters. Not a great, earth-shattering deal, but something, nevertheless.
Pretty soon, we went our separate ways. He moved along to change the world, or something equally important as that. Before leaving, he gave me a bunch of scrap paper filled with incomprehensible doodles. I took it, feeling terribly important, certain that they meant ‘something’. At the lonely, deserted station with its early morning smells, I saw his lean self bent almost double with the weight of his faithful red rucksack, walking towards the train, and out of my little coloured world, without a second look behind. My eyes shone with the possibilities he was capable of. I don’t think he could even remember if I wore glasses or not.

His crumpled parting gift was lost in transit when I changed houses. And so were his memories and curious stories as I flitted in and out of unsatisfied lives and people. I learnt singing and took up pottery. I met somebody amazing and lost him in transit too. I gave piano lessons to the girl next door and learned how to bake the most perfect carrot and cheese cake. Occasionally, and never to deeply, I allowed myself to ponder over roads not taken, and dreams not fulfilled. A little self-pity, a little self-loathing, a little looking back. I thought of all the people I used to know, and wondered if they were worse or better off than I was. All the crazy men and women with music in their laughs and stars in their eyes.
Sometimes when it rained and the world and its neighbour refused to open their doors, I ran along the sidewalk, counting every alternate square, until I reached a hundred. I was content that I had nothing to complain about—no immediate financial worries, the occasional date, the occasional music concert, a monthly visit to the parents, and life seemed to be in order. Thunder and lightning had never quite been my style.
At the cafe, on my way to work, I met a stranger scribbling away furiously on crumpled, ink stained tissue paper. I stopped to talk, because even years of saving the world hadn’t taken away the child like determination from his eyes. He accepted my coffee but refused my muffin. He said, he couldn’t take sweets. As I sat, reading the paper, amidst the hasty scratch of pen on paper, I remembered the little boy with never a special word for me, in whom I believed then, as much as I believed the sun would rise tomorrow. The waiters ignored him as he signalled them weakly—as he walked down the sidewalk, people from all sides seemed to walk through him. In the tube, he muttered furiously, clutching his threadbare jacket, crushing the tissue paper even further.
I confessed that I had lost his doodles somewhere in the flea bitten years. He didn’t blink twice. I doubt he remembered my last name. At the station, he handed me the crumpled manuscript, and asked me to keep it till he returned from the restroom. I waited three whole hours before I ventured to read it. It was the same little boy I had know a few lightyears ago, and the same story, only different chapter. He was still the hero, and I was still nowhere in it. I left the station only after the last train had gone.

Sometimes, on off-days I still go and sit there and watch the trains pass. Occasionally I think I see a dash of red and a proud weather-beaten face amidst a sea of nameless people. But the train leaves before I can be sure. In any case, the red backpack has been lost for years. And the face is off on another adventure, another story, another earth-changing mission. Where he plays the good cop, and I the nameless, faceless person in the sidewalk among thousand others.

Lucy

Perhaps…some blue
Some red, some gold
A formless identity
A shapeless force
Perhaps…some orange,
Some ochre, some green
Twirling the sunshine
In your fingers
Squinting, blinking
Laughing in leaps.
The last time I lost you,
I left you, I loved you
Drunk in the madness
Soaked in the sadness
Perhaps…some violet
Some black, some white
Perhaps your mad eyes
Were never meant to lie—
Rain washed eyelids
Sand washed souls
Lucy…who took you?
On a night without stars?
Creeping below the window
In clandestine chains
When the sky doesn’t answer?
What part of you remains?
Perhaps…some grey
Some purple, some blue
Perhaps they never understood
Somebody like you.

"Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted"

I was told that I would get over her. That i would ahem...grow up. I cannot help it, the more I read her, its like a spell. I agree, perhaps there isn't much profundity to look for here. But can you deny the magic of her words? Try reading them out aloud. See what it does to your tongue. Close your eyes and try to imagine what you just read. See what it does to your brain. Puro mindfuck. If for nothing else, then just her messed up head. Because we are all like that sometimes. And because not all of us can do that with our thoughts and our words. I know I cant.

A lot of people know her as Ted Hughes' wife. Their turbulent relationship has always intrigued me. Plath is no shadow, she couldn't be if she wanted to--but a lot of her poetry is a direct influence of the influence her talented, agressive and over-sexed husband had on her.

Take a look at their first meeting and marriage--

One night, early 1956 Plath attended a party held to celebrate the launch of a new Cambridge literary magazine. Among the poetry she most admired in it was that of a poet named Ted Hughes. After arriving at the party quite drunk she gazed across the room at a "big, dark hunky boy, the only one... huge enough for me," and wanted to know who he was immediately.
After meeting Hughes in person, she proceeded to quote one of his poems to him. In a side room into which he had guided her, he ripped her hairband and earrings off when she pulled away as he tried to kiss her. Soon after, she bit his cheek. Each of them, it seemed, had met their match. Walking back to her college later, a friend warned her that Ted Hughes was "the biggest seducer in Cambridge."
Ted Hughes had earlier published a poem about a "Jaguar"--so over the next few days, Plath composed the poem "Pursuit" in which a woman is stalked by a panther. On her way to a spring vacation in Europe, she spent a night with Hughes and his friend in a London flat--she found Hughes' power and strength irresistible. By the time a couple of months had passed, the two were discussing marriage.
They decided to marry secretly in London. Sylvia wore a pink suit and held a pink rose which Ted had given her. The newlyweds spent time that summer in Paris, Madrid and Benindorm, Spain on the coast, where "every evening at dusk the lights of the sardine boats dip and shine out at sea like floating stars." Some of the poems Sylvia wrote during this newlywed summer of writing include "Fiesta Melons", "Alicante Lullaby", "The Goring", "The Beggars", "Spider", "Rhyme", "Dream With Clam Diggers", and "Epitaph For Fire And Flower".

There was one alleged episode which darkened the otherwise idyllic days of their summer. Years later Sylvia told a friend that one afternoon as they sat on a hill Ted was overcome by such rage that he started choking her, and she resigned herself to die.

In August, Sylvia met her in-laws for the first time. The Hughes family, like Ted himself, was interested in horoscopes, hypnosis and the occult. Plath's "November Graveyard" was a direct influence of her days with them.

She was to be equally fascinated and repulsed by her husband in consequent years, as she saw their marriage through abortions, personal failures, jealousy and infidelity. Hughes himself received extraordinary success post-marriage, and his stature grew in equal measure with his arrogance, and a distance from his bond with his wife, while Plath grew steadily into further depression, self-infliction and tortured verses.

We all know how she died. In the early morning of February 11, 1963, Plath set some bread and milk in the children's room then cracked their window and sealed their door off with tape. She went downstairs and, after sealing herself in the kitchen, knelt in front of the open oven, turned the gas on and stuffed her head inside.
Plath's world had become too much for her to take. The depression had won. Just six months before her death she wrote of feeling
"outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass."

Her gravestone bears the inscription "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted."

Unsettlingly enough, in March 1969, realizing that she would never escape from living in Plath's shadow, Assia Wevill (the woman Hughes left her for) killed herself and their daughter in the same way Sylvia had committed her suicide.

People remember her for her crazy, unreal metaphors, her controversial allusions the The Holocaust and an extremely irreconcilable train of thought also associated with Confessional Poetry.

To me, her poems are a world of fairytales gone terribly wrong. Just like her fairytale marriage. And what could have been a fairytale life. Her poems are unforgettable because they are, like her, at once violent and vulnerable. They speak, at once, to both the child and the beast within us.

This is one of my old favourites:

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

And arbitrary blackness gallops in:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:

Exit seraphim and Satan's men:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,

But I grow old and I forget your name.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;

At least when spring comes they roar back again.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

These are some others I wish you would read.

The Bee series, Edge, Electra on Azalea Path (written in memory of her father), Letter in November, Ariel.

Oh shucks, I cant choose. Go read them all. And do tell me your favourites.

C

All i remember is that the sky was purple and the roads were slippery. Nothingmuchelse. Most of the time i kept looking at the sky to see if it would rain. Somebody had taught me that. Something about the shape of a cloud or something. The other times i look down at my feet, especially my toe nails, which i'm rather proud of. So i'm very adept at noticing car track patterns on the road. Anything in between these two escapes my notice almost always. Which probably explains why i bumped into you in the first place. Crashed, is more like it. There never was anything subtle about me. Its never a knock, but a bang; never a smile but a guffaw, a loud, embarassing one at that, never a bump, but a crash! Which knocked off your glasses, books and my singular train of thought.

You called it a cliche while i called it chance. And we laughed over how both words began with C. "Carma", was your explanation, while i settled for Coincidence. I dont remember most of it. Its just one of those things that happen sometimes. Like i barely remember the way u looked. Except that your glasses kept falling off your nose everytime u tried to make a point, and for some odd reason u reminded me of someone i used to know long ago.

After you moved away, I wondered what your name could have been. Maybe I'd met you online, maybe I read your blog. Or not. Chai and coffee. Cult and corruption. Its all good, you said. But mostly chai. And chocolate creams.
Goodbye, little Snoopy. Hope you find your bliss.

Helpless (!)

Pic courtesy:Vatsala

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.

Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless

Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
And tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.

Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.

-Bertie, Mel and Fuzz [originally Neil Young :) ]

There goes my resolution to refrain from quoting lyrics on my blog.
What i really wanted to do was put up the lyrics to Tina Marie and Motorcar Blues and Moonlight Lady. Oh and also Tin Pan Alley.
And i will, too as soon as I get my hands on the CD.
Shit! Shit, shit SHIT!

Dust

This time things had gone too far and I knew there was no way out. No other route but the one that led outside and away. Away, away, away.
I left the letter on the sideboard table. And as an afterthought, the brass keys. There would not be much need of those now.

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It had been three years ago on some unbearable hot monsoon afternoon that he had first stumbled into my stuffy apartment and my life. And after that we were constantly moving. Running, almost. From one strange place to another. Roller-coasters, media houses, dreams, hotels, highways, in and out, on and on. You would have thought we'd be exhausted. I still don't understand why we weren't. It was--something.

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I know its best to let sleeping dogs lie. But i personify the curiosity that killed some poor cat. Even though I don't like cats all that much.

I don't like answering questions either. I probably ask a lot. I can't help it. I have an inherent need to know.

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The first time, i let it pass. The second time, i cried. The third, and everytime after that, i hit back. Lashed out furiously. I suppose things changed, even improved. And i wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing.

It's a crazy world we live in, Mac had said once, quite gone.

So who was crazy really? Or maybe the question is--who was crazier?

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We were both unconventional people. That was something given and accepted. There was just that little matter. The quiggly feeling, nagging your brain when you least expect.
One just has to deal with it i suppose. Or ignore it till it went? Or even if it didnt?

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It was all okay when we were drunk and stupid and forgot everything and made love and stories. But afterwards, i lay awake to the regular sound of breathing. His breathing, which i held my own to catch.
It must be a mad sort of love, that. Which makes you lie awake so that the other person does not die on you when you are sleeping.
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I cannot drive faster than my mind thinks. Its just difficult when someone says 'no'. I know. I say it a great deal. what goes round, will come around. Its all cyclical. Water vapour, rain, industrial waste, the ebb and flow of tides, tears, laughter, everything.
It all comes back to you.

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I'm prepared for most emergencies. My first-aid shelf is an entire wall closet. Cuts, burns, bruises, slips, pricks, all.
And I know we will meet again, I see it as clearly as i see my reflection in the rear view. It is an endless chase. A quest. Who goes faster. After a while you forget who is chasing who.
And yet, we pursue. We race. Next time I will prepare even better. And run even faster.

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All the world seemed to be running, ocassionally flashing through windows. Only glances, only glimpses, only glimmer.

And so we run. We run.

PS: I wrote this for 'creative writing' (and it was actually corrected by a poor unsuspecting prof)!! Needless to say, it was atrocious and completed in all of 10 minutes. N said it reminded her of Gangster.

Oh, i put it up anyhow. Its a little mad. And well, i feel like that sometimes.