A good author writes their predecessors into existence, as do certain moments. With all the tumult and anxiety of the year coming almost to an end, on its penultimate day, I rewrote a night in June 2016, when I fumbled before anything could begin; sordid afternoons in 2017, shame masquerading as desire, or perhaps its reverse; intimations of mortality from February 2023, when age and pain seemed to insist on eternal exile…and then, four years were cremated with two short sentences and Sensei gave up the ghost before I could even show him the moves. 

Dead weight, so much of life is dead weight. 

No matter. Drown it all in a bottle of Australian cabernet, bask in gooseflesh and sweat—between Frida and Clara, yielding to the pressure of your digits, sighing in your palms. Then words scrawled on cocoa flesh, Tagore’s words as song; nervous glances at a watch, try again and again till it yields. For the very first time in your life, Kafka’s doorkeeper gives way. ENTER. REJOICE. ALLELUIA. But then, jealousy, then sordid make-belief, then phantoms from half a lifetime ago: they hide, nervously, behind an open door. To no avail, you’re caught, your shoes give you away. 

Then again, so what. A second lease of life comes the way it must, with every landmine still in place. But you are born into the light, at long last! Make all the godless prayers you can, ring every bell that makes no sound, flood the streets with bright, invisible lights. Let renewal course your veins. Let lips glide, languid and emptied of words. Let someone’s ornamental poems of revolution in your own mother tongue sound richly exotic and mysterious. Let her remind you that the last bit of darkness you’ll find in the morning will be in the pockets of your pyjamas.

And then—because solemnity is its own kind of death— let the bassline shake the walls: ''Ya akhi dus dus ‘indi khosh fasla. Ya akhi tafooz tafooz Wallah khosh raksa!''

Indeed: a life stalled by shame, grief and delay does not become whole when the door opens. But it becomes loud and embodied, refusing the inertness of years past. 

Raise a toast to this, and dance away all the years that preceded this and all the years to come. Yes, hai tujhe bhi ijaazat. Rejoice.

She lived in a house with her cat near a prawn farm in Goa Velha, palms and banana trees overlooking her windows. She rode a motorbike, played the piano, looked stunning in her emerald green cocktail dress and short hair highlighted blonde and brown, wrote passionate letters to me in French, smudged with ash from her cigarettes...

...which fit all the stereotypes I needed it to fit, my subconscious basking in the soft glow of a million clichés. After all, wasn't Goa the place to which the distance could only be measured in time and not space? There would always be a Goa trip somewhere in the near future, with beaches and booze and colourful shirts and Hemingway-esque male bonding. The planning of said trip was often the sum total of the catching up. Therapeutic, indeed, like window shopping.

Halfway between longing and self-awareness — halfway between the pure ideal and the clarity of an unconquerable darkness — she descends on my soul like moonlight. Like a soft, impossible saudade. 

And her voice returns —

« Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques. »

And when I try to picture her now, the edges blur: was it really an emerald dress, or just the green of the bottle glass scattered on the floor of my mind? 

Goa, her, the letters — all banished now to some salt-stained corner of time...

 

Storm light over palms—

still water trembling with a new sincerity.

Fingers glide along my back,

and the pond’s surface,

like those of a pianist's who taught herself

Moonlight Sonata at twelve.

After so much rain—

soft moans, cigarettes among

the banana leaves—

the pond remembers sky.

Difficult histories shared,

promises made, even as the shadows

of what is lost, and of what has been snatched away,

migrate upward, as still-black clouds,

ominous, unwilling to forgive.

But look—

a solitary cloud shines through...

ce qui est conçu en ourdou se transforme en français,

puis se transforme en tropiques,

puis se transforme

en Violence d’un nouvel espoir.

Bon, mais euhh... what is to say

it won’t rain again? Rien.

Je m’en fiche.

Once again, clouds drift apart, legs part;

Face deep in it all again—there is new 

light, not rain. And somehow,

because that is the way of the world, the

Day begins again.

 BISCUITS

Rain darkens the door

Again. But it is only 

March, you say. Sure,

it is always March somewhere.

Somewhere, surely, it is March when

Accounts are settled, plans made

before you skive off for some fresh juice

and check your phone again. Bad idea:

WhatsApp messages from last summer 

when the world almost declared ceasefire

at long last, and promised to deal

En flores.

Turn up, turn up again and again.

And it just might happen again.

It might not, of course, but it might!

Discipline, love, a search for something…

…she might turn up as well. 

You know better, of course, but you never know...

...reassuring words are 

a Professional Requirement.

Enjoy your biscuits for now.

TRENCH FOOT

 

The important thing is to keep your socks dry.

The important thing is to

keep your socks dry, as the cold seeps

into your bones, and the damp.

Somewhere an old woman in a cramped hut

watches television, and you are called upon

to buy her a larger house.

 

Not long ago, you tried in vain. To show up

and proclaim, ‘I am not a cannibal!’ Yet to grow up

among them in libraries, monasteries, and the local philharmonic

is to develop a taste

for flesh and fatalism. What could be done,

what indeed. The mogilizatsiya of the soul:

 

After a while, you even enjoy these games

Yourself. The blood tastes sweetest

when they are little, dripping

from the green of a surgical gown.

Yet there is also the tiredness

of Monday mornings, of the din,

of stale cigarettes amidst the unquiet

Crossfire.

 

You think of Shostakovich,

Who stood up to one kind of moustache

and not so much to the other, Our kind.

Easier to be brave in the hypothetical…

 

…on one side peace, on the other, land, flat-screens and washing machines.

 

Naturally,

I chose

The latter.

 CIGAR

I have lost the capacity 

for Art. But of course, 

unlike her 

I have never had the capacity for

sincere, unselfish tears

and honest Anger. Isn’t that

where it all begins?

I watch as the oblong of her mouth moves, 

I watch those lips that often part and give way

to a toothy grin. I watch those lips- intently- 

as they let forth words that speak of war, 

Of the unspeakable: 

31257 butchered and hospitals mined, 

lives torn asunder; families torn apart

In the bitter cold. 

And them that do it suffer nothing. 

She speaks of grief and defiance, of

ice cream in summer in a field of red viburnums.

So much to know, so little that can be known, 

but the daily miracle of revelation in that voice

that reads to me.  A voice that returns,

mercifully, having stormed out yet again as though

it were for the very last time. She laughs, and sunflowers

bloom. 

Am I needed? Will I ever be? I want more and am beset

By tears and yearning. No importa: the only thing to do

is to Wait.

 

One day, the Guernicas will cease to multiply.

One day, justice will be served.

One day, I will bear witness

with my own eyes, on her lips, 

at long last: Peace. Hakuna Matata.

 ECLIPSE

Between the sun and me stood the moon, as it does every so often. But I, who am named after the  Midday sun, had my loyalties chosen for me of course. Nonetheless, what was eclipsed was neither day, nor night: on this day we debated Food. Not recipes, nor keto diets. But whether

to starve, to feast, on fruits or on meat, what is permissible, what could be policed. That old Sanskrit word Dharma- both duty and divinity, that river of blood ironically named Daya…lo ‘tis the gods at our door at last, and nothing more shall remain 

blissfully Godforsaken.