Oh look.
The cloud there, does it not stand tall?
Pearly white of a spring afternoon, imposing:
neither lonely, certainly, nor wandering.
No fluttering and no dancing in the breeze
Any more than these immobile daffodils
Quietly bearing witness.

Witness
to the stasis and the stalemate
vocation v. avocation
promise v. failure
flickers of hope v. their predictable assassination.
Let's welcome April, the cruellest month of the year...
A poet could hardly have a say
In such sombre company;
I gazed- and gazed- but little thought
What finality the show to me had brought:

For when I'm sat at my desk
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
The full-bodied torment of solitude;
And then my heart with terror fills,
And I proceed to uproot these godforsaken daffodils.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read, imagine stories, sing, sigh, hope, or look for purpose and for love. However elusive the light may be, our darkness leads us towards it. To live is to nurture this restless, restive, limpid darkness.

One of the things to look forward to in getting on a plane and going back home is to be able to fold the English language in four and tuck it neatly into an envelope, to be opened at discretion. Having lived an entire life where that language has been a confidante, an imaginary friend, and a magic carpet ready to fly me off to distant lands, I am disturbed by this intrusive ubiquity, its sudden, larger-than-life presence. Is Hobbes as playful when he is an actual tiger ? Does Calvin not cower ?

Revisited "Saariputta" by Surendra Mohanty, one of my favourite short stories in Odia. It's about a boy who leaves his widowed mother alone to become a Buddhist monk.One day, he comes back to his mother's house, as a monk trying to convert to her Buddhism, with the stated intention that she can achieve nirvana, that is, freedom from the absurd brutalities of life by attaining 'salvation'.
The lonely mother had imagined that the son would come back to her, rejoin the world of ordinary people, marry and give her grandchildren.

She had stayed up all night preparing his favourite meal in anticipation of that.
But he just tells her, "O Kind Soul (the Buddhist phrase---instead of saying O Mother!), I just seek nirvana
so these earthly pursuits have no meaning for me.
The mother hides her tears, and says "O Saint(instead of O Son !!!), I want jivana(life), not nirvana(freedom from life)"
The mother returns to her lonely hut, and the monk quietly walks away into the still night.

Buddhism, in the context of Indian history, was an intensely political protest movement against the ruling caste elites, not the hippie, happy religion it is portrayed as in the West. Mohanty, with his magisterial command of the most understated, tautly elegant Odia prose, brings into sharp relief, millennia after the fact, the white heat of political disenchantment, and the power of society and ideology to tear families apart, to alienate and gobble up human destinies.

And so it happened. Four students from Ravenshaw were carried away to their deaths by the current of the Mahanadi. In its wake, of course, appropriate outrage,recriminations, and mourning. Yet, truly, how many of us haven't fantasized just such a thing? Our contemptible faces reflected in the calm, inviting water, then splintered into ripples of guilt, of inadequacy, of defeat, of our counterfeit passions and wretched self-inflicted disappointments, wouldn't we all rather we were swept away unawares in a final crescendo of hot sun, lapping water, and the smiles of our friends? How presumptuous to feign pity ! Above all, how dishonest.

Parfois, les amitiés les plus profondes ne nécessitent de nombreuses années de connaissance. Mais parfois , les sourires cachés dans nos cœurs sont décongelées par un soleil chaud et un sens partagé de bonheur. Nos cœurs, caressés par la douceur de l'herbe , sur trouver dans l'autre une présence réconfortante , difficile à décrire , mais instantanément senti.

 Five minutes are enough to dream up an entire life, enough to start off on promising garden paths. One signs up willingly to be slaughtered at the altar of expectation. Tenderness, conversation, garlic baguettes, Euler equations, hope...Above all, hope. The frightening spectre of hope.Is it easier to take because I am privy to the whispers of a cold, silent night ? Do I not tremble in fear simply because I am just too wired to pay heed ?

When you're stuck in a provincial town in the middle of nowhere, all you want to do is escape. And when you're flung thousands of miles away at last, each muscle in your body aches to be back home. Back home, we clogged the narrow streets like rats in a sewer, and yet there was so much individuality, richness, nuance. Here it is all wide open spaces, clean and green, sanitised of confusion, sanitised of life, bloodless, bare. But there are moments, oh yes. A ray of sunlight shining on someone's tender blonde hair, sitting on a bench marvelling at the moss on a tree trunk, being accosted on the street with the plaintive rendering of Faure's Pie Jesu on a violin...Life, in its infinite mercy, affords us respite if not absolution.

Caught between the atonal stasis of lived experience and an insurgent nostalgia for the absurd, one often feels the need to actively court despair. What is more important, to distance oneself from corporeal reality. What should be "me" is referred to in a grandiloquent "he," the breathless third person singular of genre fiction. A spy novel, perhaps ? Why stop there? Why not insinuate oneself into racy plot and anxious melodrama? Oh, very well. Vamoose !

There was once a taking off into the clouds, with a back to bickering guardian angels of despair and ignominy. The past, drowned in glass after glass of fine red wine, summer afternoons, blonde hair, and a famous signature. Drowned under deep waters, never to rise again. Or so he thought. Make no mistake, the waters boiled and simmered, oh they did. They did. They did!

A moving frontier of possibility and dissatisfactions, blurred by the scalding steam that rose up at last, against all predictions. Through sheer force of habit. But of course! Hope, all hope, evaporated on that blurred frontier.

And that, O Dhritarashtra, is the true measure of his shame.

She.

Cemetery of a desperate happiness.
Articulate in her misspelled pasion
Tender, no more cruel to the world
than was seen adequately cruel
to herself.

She was there
as always,
Smiling a knowing smile
at the screen she beheld.

She
was there as always,
earplugs in place
Walking moving going fading away
As always.
She
was right there.

Adele's looks, and the unsentimental beauty
Of those whose beauty is
A bequeathed affluence.

She.
She was there,
In extremis.
Fuller deeper richer more lavish
Than all the violent excess of the world.

She was there.

Ungovernable, a creature of dark imaginings,
The grandeur and generosity of the stars.

She.
She was there.
As always.

There is a caparisoned elephant
at my dinner table, enjoying
goat's cheese and mango chutney after a third round of Scrabble.

It is good to make his acquaintance,
share jokes,
share a solidity of existence that I no longer have access to.
If we value our solid, unquestionable existence,
he and I,
let us abandon it all...

PUT THE PIECES BACK IN THE BOARD !
Fade away.
Make sense.

That's what he is, and that's what I am not.
That's what we must try and live with.

But first, can someone please light his cigar ?

Raindrops patter against the window pane
as I sit and practice
memorised tunes on my piano.
No,
maybe it's you
dancing on the roof of my car.
As you used to dance
All those years ago.

Are you there?
Dancing, swinging, performing pirouettes like you did
All those years ago?

Do you dance now
as an afterthought, perhaps,
having driven away
thoroughly disappointed in me,
having driven away resolutely in that rickety old car
All those years ago?

Thunderclouds clapped and applauded
when you drove away with that handsome
California pothead
Allen Ginsberg on steroids (literally).
Just because I set your house on fire
All those years ago.

An agonizing wait, and a sordid sack of gold at the end of it. An affection has been acquired though, for an obstinate, tiresome, weighty nothingness.

Travel guides make for compelling reading.
A restaurant in Sorrento,
a mall in Burj Khalifa,
a waterfall somewhere or other...

Who chooses the order of presentation?
Who decides
to sift through the bleakness of the real world

to peddle
a consumable, enjoyable list of tourist delights?

TRANSCRIPT? SCREENPLAY?
(ANYHOW, A PRELIMINARY DRAFT):

(Camera zooms in on an unexceptional home in suburban India.)
He:

Now if you’ll stop badgering me about chitau pitha (HONESTLY, enough for now) for one blessed minute, I have something to say. I’m leaving for England, pretty soon. Oh, I know, there’s Skype and there’s reduced-rate phone calls, and this is 2016, and and and…goddammit would you listen for a change, I’ve had it up to here with your interruptions! I mightn’t see you in person for over a year now. I appreciate your company, you know, and I suppose I might miss you a little bit.

She:
(slapping wrist on forehead)

Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice. Every Ram, Nita, and Geeta goes abroad these days, and what for? Those firangis and their prim ways. I’ve heard tell! Even the curries there, so bland and spiceless, they sing “God Save the Rani”, baaprebaap, and speaking of the Queen, didn’t she invite Narendrabhai for some chai pe charcha a while ago? What became of that? You fools, your intelligence is lower than your IITJEE scores even. Last week, at Sheila Auntie’s daughter’s wedding, we were discussing that only. Look at all the achhe bache, they go to engineering or medical college here, or a decent B-school (By God, Sharma ji’s daughter scored in the 99th percentile on the CAT ! ) and then on an H1B visa to the US or Germany, or simply stay back here and launch a start-up! You don’t know Flipkart or what? What’s all this English-Vinglish, Britain-Shritain? Are you Punjabi? The goddess Ganga alone knows what you are upto abroad. They send you back thin as a reed, even.

He:

(nervously clutching his copy of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury closer to his body, like a rosary or a made-to-order magic carpet, thinking back to the disintegration of identity in that one year he’d spent abroad. Yes, even now, in this hyperconnected age of social media and labour mobility, with desi bande on every street corner in Dublin…mingling with the anonymity of the times, head mind soul buried in a newspaper at the bus stop or by the Luas tracks, coming face-to-face with the absurdity of loss and discovery, with the debris of the soul, stillborn hopes flushed down the toilet, extinguished destinies, deleted Facebook messages, forgotten knife wounds, and embarrassment on cold European evenings that weren’t quite love or adventure but surely, surely, their distant, pale shadows… Yes, even now, he feared for the future and for the lack of a future, and for both these things on certain idle Sundays.)

Very well, I’ll call. Once every week.

She:
Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice !!!

(She breaks into sobs, badly concealed: India, as ever, she of the oppressive monsoons, rids herself of neatness and nuance with a sadistic, implacable frenzy.)

He:
(chuckles to himself, despite the circumstances)

Proper England bhai, ASLI England, no joking-shoking. Capital of Vilayet. Off I go !

Lost discoverer, in you everything sank... 
everything.
Nostalgia,
innocence, 
Eternities of absurd tendernesses and of idealised lusts.
Everything sank. 

And yet, one hopes.
One searches the water for floating corpses
Embalmed in comforting half-truths.

Oh, for that desperate wish to be granted !
Oh, for the driftwood of some unsighed sigh,
                                      some undreamed dream,
                                      some unsinkable desire.

He had a way with words,
did he not? I agree.

Yet how easy to strike him down,
show him his place
by resolute absences
and that subtle, articulate silence.

Silence, that meets mid-conversation.

Like a gunshot. Like a slap on the face.
Like humiliation.
With the ripe, full-bodied contempt of the conqueror
for the conquered.

There is no irony here, for when I stitch my words together,
I am in fact weaving a mask for my deficiencies.

All of my shrill cries for justice are but a mask for my corrupted nature and base self-love.

All of my passionate protestations of eternal love are but a mask for my basic emotional disingenuity.

All of my counterfeit passions, overeager obscenities, and wordy incoherence are countenanced, shuddered over, and walked away from.

And why not?
Why not.

Autumn leaves.
Les feuilles mortes?
A wistful, musical, sultry jazz smokescreen
of chameleon leaves
bathing the rancid overhang of defeat 
of disgrace
in a soft, unforgiving late afternoon sun.

A blaze of colour against grey certainties of collapse
Falling, dancing, dressed up to go

without warmth
without exception
without goodbyes...
To be crushed underfoot, or carried away
by the good people at Sheffield City Council.

I guess it's high time I bought that overcoat.

Birthdays: officially sanctioned days for reflection, and quiet masochism.

I guess I should take up writing after all. I have the opening lines to my first novel: "November 9, 2016. It was a cold autumn in South Yorkshire. I had just turned 25 that morning, and outside, it was snowing. My first snow. Oh, and the world was falling to pieces. No, smashed to pieces by a tanned orangutan..."

We stand round blankly as walls.
Not as witnesses, no no no. No one
asks for a written record, they are sick of it.
No, we are made to
stand round blankly as walls.

Staring, ashen, into the distance. Waiting
for the chastising bulldozer to come raze us to the ground.
Oh, stop it ! Paranoia! This was only a correction,
a much-awaited (oh yes, for very many, quite clearly much-awaited)
return
to familiar hatreds.
Look, they do not
stand round blankly as walls.
Au contraire.

Indeed, why do we bother
anymore, to
stand round blankly as walls?

The paint is peeling off.
All that hopeful paint.
All that cloying romanticism.
All those colours. Every last one.
To reveal the dirty-white, mossy self
under all that self-righteous hauteur we displayed when
we stood blankly as walls.

Perhaps there is no bulldozer.
But there is no paint either,
and the masons are thoroughly discredited.
Embrace it.
Embrace the aspect of defeat, and persist.

Whatever happens.
Stand round blankly as
walls.

More and more, it would appear, this phantom word "individuality" seems to be little more than a product of the attenuation of self.

One plods away through the bog as cliche upon cliche sticks, and at some point gives up, and lays claim to these ragtag armies. Cliches, fragmented and caked with vomit... now our pride, our source of IDENTITY! , our distinctive, distinguishing feature.

Don't get me wrong. I'd like some of those cliches for myself, they are shiny and smooth to touch. But why would this or that combination be my desert? Why must I be singled out for deliverance, for happiness, for the fulfilment of such and such idle dream ? Why not
cut out the middleman
and
go straight
to the most fundamental cliche of all: the final one? We all die alone.
Some, with their illusions intact.
Most of us,
sans preconditions.

So be it.

A death of course, as featureless and hollow
as society
as lust
as self-esteem
as hope
as life...
The cliche to end all cliches, the fount of all individuality.

2003 is another country. They did things differently there.

Let me show you around that museum: a bleak Stazi-yellow light bulb, the vapourised shadow of an apology from Santa in a sock left by the bedside, and a dusty windowsill on which Garcia Marquez, "74 Ways to Grow Rich!", "What is Dialectal Materialism?" . Wasn't that a lovely classroom, us throwing chalks at each other and pretending we'd amount to something?

Museum's closing in five minutes though, if you want to make an early exit to catch the matinee. No? You cancelled the ticket? Ah, good, I want to hear your take on the new installations. A persistent slide, an escalating loss of affect...Look, I'm sipping nice tea, running my fingers over my big, fat Buddha belly, and floating in a morbid, insidious pleasantness.

Accept it.

Accept it.

There's a parcel at the door.

Tiny, red mittens
have washed up at my door.

Tiny, red mittens have washed up
at my door.
Innocent, insistent, dead, demanding.

A Monday morning Aylan Kurdi
that cannot be ignored.
That asks for greater humanity than I can afford.
Innocent, insistent, dead, demanding...why me ?

It's a fine, grey morning, and I'd like
nothing more than a fine pack of
Lambert and Butler King Size cigarettes, thank you very much.
(I don't roll mine.)
But them bloody mittens.
I hold them (can't wear them obviously, they're
too small, and not mine), I hold them close to my heart,
kiss them,
kiss them tenderly,
and set them on fire.

Sometimes the only North Star assigned to you is a deepening, widening sense of despair.

Thus, once more,
a cancellation
Of that new, wide opening of the spirit.

Once more,
a battening down of the hatches,
As winds howl past from nowhere to nowhere.

Thus, once more,
abject surrender.
Being cut to size. 
A farewell to risible fantasies of escape. How dare I ?

Acceptance.
Acceptance,
and a descent, once more,
into the cold abyss
Of oneself.

And yet,
the ever-present, persistent mirage of tenderness...
Is there even an antidote ?

What one can do is put up a fairly passable imitation of conviviality; of an appreciation for things as they are, feigning hope...feigning resilience.

What one cannot do, unfortunately, is pretend that any of that is true. Your fraud is seen and recognised, held in utter contempt. YOU are held in utter contempt, for the obnoxious annoyance that you are. It is hard to shield against this eventuality, this absolute shame.

Yet one must carry on. Or so they say.

Shall I compare you to the monsoon, then?
You are darker still, and more violent.
Rich with the smell of damp earth
and the clandestine eroticism of adolescence.

For all that those stolen kisses were an intimation of
immortality,
your lease, alas, had all too short a date. No phone number,
no Facebook, no emails, nothing. It's been half a decade.
I have no way to reach you again.

Swayamsrestha. Self-made, huh?
I cannot vouch for that, but you sure were
sui generis: a Botticelli Venus given birth to by turbulent,
impossibly intertwined zephyrs.

O hypnotic, malevolent fantasy that lodged itself in time.
In time; immutable, inelastic time.
Get lost !
Leave me, the fuck, alone.

I kid of course.
So long as I can breathe, or my eyes can see,
So long live these abominable
verses,
So long willst thou live in me. And this gives life to thee.

What a nebulous frontier of dissatisfactions, this. You feel in its smoky, charcoal-drawn presence the fear of death a man feels walking down an alleyway where the past opened itself to him and is available no more: at once circumscribed, and condemned to be free.

Katak, my hometown. My cage, my hideout, my refuge. The dilapidated ruins of the Barabati fort, the dirt and dust of the streets, the chaos, the traffic, and the confusion of Katak cloak my thoughts in the sweet end-of-empire melancholy of my 1000-year old town and the indomitable will to live of the people affirms what I have always believed. My destiny is bound to this place, it is me. As for the animals on the street, they too, are welcome. Their indifference to human histories and fantasy, and their daily, objective presence adds weight to our lives in a way someone from a grander city might never understand. The muddy sidewalks, the sleepy river, the stolen smiles, the raucous laughter, the thwarted desires: how did you, my city, come to colour my dreams?

I wait for such time as the past will reveal itself as a commemoration, not an indictment.

Mysterious woman,
you walked into my life as if from a dream of deliverance.

As though
your nuanced silences,
your beautiful, palimpsestic eyes,
your soft, unsure smiles
were all that I had sought.
All that I could legitimately seek. Yet I realise
what a mirage that is.
As always, you will go your way, I shall go mine.

And none of this will matter,
these feelings,
this hope,
nothing.

And none shall remember,
no trace will remain
of your haunting blue eyes.
Blue eyes that drained into two eternities of oblivion,
hopes past and hopes yet to pass one by.

As always, ultimately, I will repel you.
My cheap sentimentality, my unlovely eagerness, my presumptuous fantasies.

All that remains
is to wait for it all to wash over, and for the anaesthetic of inevitability
to drug me to sleep.

Maybe I'll meet you at last in my dreams.
Maybe not.

Wake up late. Make coffee.
Pore through journal articles, and check your email.
Above all, busywork!

Busywork, to salve one’s conscience.
Busywork, to pretend you’re not in a ruinous infatuation with disgrace,
open to being ambushed on a Tuesday afternoon
by the same silence that offered conclusive proof of your worthlessness
the last time. And the time before. And before that. And befo…

Busywork, to pretend every vicious reversal does not sting,
To pretend that your inner cynic does not recognize the logic.

Busywork, to feign structure,
To conjure signposts out of mist.
Busywork, so you can order self-worth off of Amazon. £7.85 at a time.
Or £9.24 for one-day delivery, cheers !

Busywork. Keep busy, and survive.
Busywork, because giving up is an extravagance.
Shut up.
No one’s bones have a right not to ache.