For the restless, not for the peaceful sleeping

2.30 a.m., loong sighs. sleep that refuses to visit, blood in my veins that runs very slow and a bit of jazz makes me want to return to this space.
Trumpet.
Piece of my heart, I've been missing you. I thought I was coping just fine, that I was the stronger one. But I've been staying away from home longer. A brighlty lit room without the life of you is such a mockery.
I think we gotta go back to the beginning...
I've been feministing a lot during the past week. Its "the flavour of the season". A conference on trade and gender, a film festival at the school of arts and aesthetics, a completely unnecessary lashing out at a very close friend. Images take their turns in blurs:
1. a South African participant with a resplendent head scarf and a baby strapped to her body. Provocative statements that grow louder with the baby's cries.
2. a little Fench artichoke faced gypsy worried about a hurt fool.
3. a confused unshaven face that nods as i make accusations, already making me feel guilty about my wrong choice of subject.
4. dark branches that cover a dazzling canopy as S tries to reiterate that turbulence that comes with love is better than the peace that comes with the lack of it.
You know it just makes you think
In this orange lit cafe, she stares at his milky white fingers which furiously try to strum out the right tunes to the songs they sing out loud. she is thankful for the sense of disconnectedness between them, the performer ridiculously high on coffee and herself, trying to emerge from the trance of the gaze of drunken eyes that rested themselves on her for the major portion of the day.
he traces the vein that fades away as it reaches her forearm. she knows that he is the reason that she danced to latino numbers all by herself all night. she wonders, if all this is so beautiful, then why does it have her scared...

It was a windy enchanting grey that invited me to the window today. It helped me forget a few things that really disturbed me last evening. For only a while that is. Then questions, scenes, words resumed their leaping about in my mind. I struggled with them for a while, gave in, tried to forget, engaged in distracting activity. It grew chillier in the evening. I felt more cheated as each event was replayed. Pathetic, most might think. I do have this stupid tendency to think that the whole world is conniving against me, sometimes.

Nothing is helping and I urgently need to get a lot of things done.

i drew you out
yesterday
from the water that had gathered around
the rim of my cola bottle,
on the flat slate of a study table .

you,
my obstinate,
chamomile aftertaste
darling.

i have this six year old neighbour and i was for him his best buddy who lived next door. he would wait for me to come, plastic bat and weathered ball in hand. i would humour him helping him with his drawings of both our families standing in front of charcoal mountains outside our common red roofed home with a pebble laid path emerging out of its door, waiting to get clicked by a cameraman on the other side of a brook that meandered between us and him. carefully detailed with bhaiya's maggi hair and my half tied pony. i would pretend to be interested in his conversations about his school plays, his home back in assam, his tennis and dance classes and how he likes to eat only the skin of his fish. there was this day when we were racing with his cars and i was all glum because of something unpleasant that had ruined my mood a while ago, which also meant i was losing very badly. thinking that the constant beating i was getting from him in his silly car races was the cause of my new found depression he dropped his cars, and out of genuine concern put his arm around me and added words of consolation-"ye sirf ek story hai". profound interpretations of life's situations were not a rarity with him. over time however, gi joe and spiderman fights grew tiresome and spending time with him meant too much effort. conversation began to dwindle and i would come up with clever excuses as to why i couldnt join him for the basket-ball game he had invented for us to play inside our homes (which was by the way, throwing a ball into an empty bucket placed at a distance). he had to make do with a little pat on the head, pull of the cheek and "kya kar rahe ho?"

now he just walks in, announcing 'hamara tata sky kharab hai', displaces me from my room, grabs the remote and sits hypnotized for two hours in front of my television screen- looney rabbits and talking sponges are more than perfect substitutes...

I seek constant reassurance about my future from people who are probably in a worse position than i am to judge my circumstances, i whine about almost everything in life and i'm a glutton for attention.

Twenty three years havent taught me much, you'd reckon.

I feel unsure. I feel restless. I feel listless. But most of all i feel tired. Its not the ‘oh, why don’t you take a break, go on vacation,’ tired. It’s more the ‘sans passion, sans love, sans inspiration, sans direction’; tired.

I believe obscurity comes with it.

U wakes up at 2.30 p.m. to the familiar heaviness that has settled in her temples, the nape of her neck, the seat of her hips and the back of her legs. It will diminish, she tells herself as she pulls her body out of the bed. She has missed the lunch she was supposed to attend at 2. She's trying to think of a credible excuse but she knows he'll see through it all.

She stares at the lines of her face in the mirror. A little blur and then the transportation back to the very first time. It was just the little distance from his resplendent curls sliding down his teracotta skin to the little holes of his dimples...that was all it took. Oh and how can she forget, the real magic was the sight of his fingers turning the pages of Neruda's poetry fifteen minutes prior to their first lecture in anthropology. And just like that four sweltering summers followed by biting winters interspersed with bronze coloured falls and pirouetting springs swept by...teas brewed to lengthen frank conversation, a little idealism and that delusion of promise in their lives to come.

A shard of pain at the back of her throat brings her back to the fluoride in her mouth. She steps out of her bathroom made fragrant by her tangerine shampoo and whipped cocoa body wash used for her afternoon ablutions when her gaze is distracted to his name flashing on her silent mobile. She looks at it again, a little amazed at how it is incapable of stirring any emotion inside her. He had become a faint silenced memory of three years ago, but still. It felt strange how the effort to respond seemed unwarranted. For a moment, with his name still flashing in the clasp of her hand she ponders. Is this the inevitable fate of mundane love? Or was it just an idea they were toying with? Perhaps, she thinks (a little convinced); perhaps, seven years ago it was just the smoke that Aphrodite blew in her face...