Escaping an Avenger

What is it with dreams?? What drives their creation? what dictates their disappearance? I have no answers now, just elusive hints of understanding. This is what happened - I almost had a Bajaj Avenger, and then I lost it - I mean literally, I LOST IT!! I FULLY LOST MY DESIRE, DREAM, LONG STANDING LUST, for that beauty in black and chrome, that machine of heady speed and excitement, the almost reachable goal ' FEEL LIKE GOD!'

I woke up the next morning in my first real panic attack, the responsibility of ownership, the registration, insurance, learner's permit, license, the regular cleaning, polishing, visits to the dealer for servicing....I almost doubled over with a burden that I was yet to carry, fear of responsibility, the weight of God!
My dream had become a nightmare over night. I had serious cold feet. All I wished for was to ride that damned machine and not be caught!

So...what keeps a desire, desirous? Just the unattainability of it? what is the elusive line finely separating a want, a deep persistent dream of your days into a burden of your morrows? Are only the unreachables worth reaching for? hunting the only real pleasure? Aiming for the sky, only worthwhile, since the arrow cannot find a mark, that there is no mark - a rapidly fleeing goal, just beyond the mark, always beyond the mark?

I am sorry to have lost my dream for an Avenger, I would have been sorrier to have realised it. Now, I am busy conjuring up a new dream, an even stupider, dashier and hopefully more unattainable dream.

Feel Like God

There are two ways I handle dreams - I rarely ever ignore dreams.

So, the most common approach, is to let my cold logic and rationale, break up a dream into small, manageable components, which I attack with gusto.

A second, more exciting way, is to throw caution to winds, jump in with a swim or drown attitude.

I am about to jump off into unchartered territory, swim unknown waters, throw that element of unknown into an already choppy life which will take me to shores, as yet unimagined. I jump in with a sense of absolute delight, delicious guilt, unadulterated joy of committing a sin - deliberately. And the dream....???

"Feel Like God"

It was an advertisement that seduced me a few years back. A guy on a Bajaj Avenger, black, low slung, powerful, racing alone on a road through infinite landscapes of Ladakh. He was smiling. Then came up the voice/text - and I was hooked.

Now, I am small by most standards, I don't need a powerful bike, I don't have the money, I don't know how to ride it, and Ladakh is really far from the mad, congested, urbanised, polluted Bangalore. So what will I do with a bike, like this???

My husband teases me - I am already getting a god-like glow. My sisters suggest that God wear a helmet. And me....I have been wearing a big, fat, stupid grin last few days. I am already flying in my imagination, on my own black Bajaj Avenger!!!

Search for Silence, Solitude and Stone

It has been years since I saw that poem by Neruda on a scrap of paper, an e-mail, posted on a notice board, outside the school library. It spoke in vivid tiny metaphors of silence, solitude and carried an imagery of stone, a sinking stone in black and white, in soundless movement through linear reflections in water, shadow and light. At least that is what I carry of it now, a lost poem of my now personal, intimate imagery. And this is how I search for it. I search for poems with stones, or silence, or solitude, knowing that finding one, will find me all the rest. It is for days when I remove myself from the world, to go seeking this poem. On such days, I hide in narrow aisles between bookshelves in a library, or lose myself in the poetry section of a crowded bookstore, or even sink myself into the well thumbed collection of Neruda's works that I treasure, looking for this poem, checking once again that it is not there, looking for wispy clues in pictures invoked, for when the poet sank into solemn stillness that he could have conveyed to me from a notice board.

Breaking a Train Journey at Vishakapatanam

Even as I close distance to the Ocean, I begin tuning my internal tanpura to his scale, an internal vibration to match his drone, the deep rhythm of his movement as he awaits me, the sa, pa, sa of a continuous approach and retreat.

The sun is pale in leaden sky, a dash of blue-grey beaten to silver, sands a deep golden in black fringes to a jade Ocean. In excitement he rears as I run down to beach - elated, hands wide open, at this unexpected encounter. His waves burst forth to lick my feet, tickle my toes, sweep away the heat with the tender cool of fulfillment.

Thus we meet again, my friend Ocean and I.

Just Another Day

It is exactly half hour to my 50th birthday - and I wait with bated breath - will I become different? transform? suddenly old? Family listens with concern, that I do not want anything special - really, I don't. Want just a regular, relaxed, pottering-around day to wander, pause, stare, to take the beginning of this next decade, bit by bit, to slowly chew, savor the flavor of the moment - the right now. I hope I feel mellow, well fed, well slept, at peace with myself, within this external world.

Dont want to be compensated for what I have lost, and, what have I lost? youth? beauty? Maybe, maybe...I like the new me that I am becoming, as much as the old-young me that has slipped by. I like my unruly grey hair, the laughter lines, the new bold tenor to my voice, the stark strokes that my hands make on empty canvas, the body that still glides through water(oh, what pleasure!), a mind that still engages keenly, but more discerning, about what engages it - and my heart- I love my heart that is learning still to be more compassionate, have more grace, with age. I am happy that I now look strangers in their eye and smile - greetings you fellow human and may all good be with you!!I am more open now to the world, and to myself, and hope this will continue to be so.

So, what could I possibly desire from a day, that I don't already have? My children have made their gifts of love for me, a little turtle pendant, and green bead bracelet that I will wear with joy. Their love I'll wear with joy. I will, accept that I have reached this far, and the journey has been revealing and mine. I will accept this day, as my gift, with grace, as all the days still ahead of me. And that day is now - today!
Amen!

Songs of an Insomniac

Inky nights
of insomniac stain,
clashing thunder,
dark dripping rain,
virtual escapes
to oceans wide,
infinite scapes
in indigo light.
-------

The fragrance
of a rose,
is not captured
in prose,
to experience
the sublime,
one needs
a rhyme.
Passions sultry,
taste of wine,
expresses in poetry
and keeps
fine
time!
-------------
Nations weep-
wounded by
shards of hatred
deep,
fractured by chisms
of religion,
communalisms,
malicious intent
infestations foment,
gangrenous
their poisons
spread,
striking humanity
dead!
-----------

City

Opaque structures cramming space
Concrete jungles every place
Negative space is losing ground
Diminishing emptiness all around.

In ugly chorus the city cries
Incessantly, till silence dies
Plugging ears with metallic shrieks
Metamorphosing men into living freaks!

Furiously, the creatures run around
Seeking emptiness that cannot be found
Needing quiet they scream in pain
But, in city this search is vain.

Diminishing Death

“ I have to be aware of my own irrelevance and fight it” – Satyadev Dubey.

I stared at this quote on the pages of a Prithvi Theatre Calendar 2009 ‘Mad Mad World of Satyadev Dubey’ with a strange discomfort, a stirring of a hidden resonant chord, an uncanny feeling of an unacknowledged self stepping out to confront me. The calendar pages carried stark B&W images of a man, beautiful, virile, arrogant – the mad SD. I sat mesmerized in the darkened office, flipping and staring at the images and quotes of a man who is considered by many as father of modern Indian theatre.

A year back, maybe a couple years back, I was at Rangashankara for a performance of a Greek tragedy. Besides me sat a well dressed man, old, silver hair, frail. A friend whispered to me “ That’s Dubey – the director”. I shrugged – uncaring. I am not a theatre buff – give me music anytime, especially long solos in vocal Hindustani and I cannot imagine a better treat. So, I was fairly unimpressed with a famous director sitting next to me. I remember exchanging a few pleasantries – nothing memorable. Now the same face was staring at me from a desktop calendar, decades younger, stronger bearing, glint in eyes, full of energy, power, fire, proclaiming arrogantly “ I am the best, its not an act, it’s a fact.” I am hypnotized, captured – by these images, this man that was, as also the echoes within. What happens to that fire, that blazing energy that vanquishes impossibility? Where is that person, once captured and immortalized by a lens, and the spirit that proclaimed these words? How did that person become this person that sat next to me?

It occurs to me that death comes to us in tiniest, immeasurably small measures, in every moment lived, with every inhaled breath. Death is not a curtain call to a grand production called ‘Life’ which is lived out to a grand climax – it is imprinting, tagging us as we journey along, either plod or dance, in diminishing moments towards a certain finality, a death. The curtain begins to fall even as the play begins. Now death is not a finale to living, but an end to a cumulative process of ending – more approachable, acceptable, familiar, and even comfortable. No need to fear swimming dark currents of an unknown, we are already swimming, unaware, in an unknown towards an unknown - and it is easy. In living, we are dying and it is as it should be.

What would be frightful, unbearable, would be a curse of being eternal – to have infinite leisure to do whatever one wants, without a certainty of an end – of an undefined culmination that hides, plays, diminishes slowly but can finish in a fierce crescendo or a gentle, hauntingly prolonged note. To have the possibility of an unexpected thrown in to every moment makes the journey worthwhile, the impossible worth conquering, a moment rapturously lived.

So in this play the life proceeds – in an ever engrossing time-pass, irrelevant and therefore amusing, a play between rights and wrongs, just and unjust, black and white. I stand in front of a mirror and stare me down – I try to seek death hiding and diminishing me in diminutive measures - the disappearing light from my eyes, the grey in my hair - and I laugh! Death is revealed in hundred lines that my face breaks into, webs about my mirth. I have tagged death!