That place between dreaming and wide awake.

Where my voice won't tire from laughing.

Where silence is unpunctuated.

Where every bit of me is penetrated by light and reflected back to the open sky.


You take me there every time.

The shoes were a size too small. Her bare heels stuck out at the back.

The fragile silk stained easily. The shirt was her size but refused to fit.

One eye blue-lined, the other bare. A smile that was never quite right.

The picture had to be taken many times over.

When it was finally done, you'd never have known it was the same she.

Who would know it was the same girl who stood in the crowd, arms crossed nervously tight, and hesitated before the red of the crossing light?

Here is her picture. Funny poses and dimpled mannerisms. Easy among friends and the first to call out "cheese" with unconscious abandon.

Maybe practice does make perfect.

Haiku

possession
my house burned down.
now all i have are ashes
and the stars at night.

***

shakespeare
words like shining jewels
from the pen of a dying man
fall like winter rain.

***

companion
it snowed on the hills.
we stayed up to watch the storm,
climbed barefoot to the sky.

***

spring
sun-drenched days coming
and earth again has plenty,
so the sparrows say.

***

desert
emptiness abounds.
across the dead sky is stretched
the scent of the storm.

***

gnome
secret wicked smile.
makes magic with his fingers and
laughs great drops of phlegm.

***


[To be updated]

My father loved making pictures. There are cupboards in our house stuffed full of them. Assorted albums, haphazard rolls of film, squares of yellowing paper jumbled together. Glimpses of forgotten decades captured in black and white. Bellbottoms and political revolution. Football on the maidan and guitarists on the footpaths of Calcutta. Pranksters and drama queens, friends and ex-flames, and two familiar people in the middle of that universe who were very much in love. I only know that they would never admit it in those exact words.

My father photographed time. A time of leisurely days and slow, elegant glamour. None of this undignified pushing and jostling for elbow room in buses and pujo pandals. Friends were found in paras, not malls. Ambassadors, not yet monopolized by fat balding politicians, meandered placidly here and there. Cha and early morning news on dadu's radio. No tuition for your children, they'll manage to pass and what more can you want? Coffee House, not CCD. Kite flying was an art form.

The stories came alive in the pictures. And I fell in love with the romance of those days. Longed to see a world that has perhaps died out forever. Dealing with early childhood disappointment, I turned for consolation to the only witnesses, once my father's accomplices. One Olympus and a Canon SLR. Picked up years ago at Muslim Bhai's black market shop on Esplanade for what was then a carefully hoarded fortune. The shop is still there if you care to look, but now it pays taxes.

My father was then in his first year at Jadavpur, clean shaven, underweight, one of five boys in the whole of the English Department. Now he insists he is forty-five going on sixty, brings his work home in brown paper files, and forgets what little he reads.

It's been a long many years but the cameras are still here, compact beautiful creatures, nestled in airtight containers, polished once a week, kept out in the mild sunlight to drive the dust out of their joints. They're antiques now, I'm told, worth anything only to collectors. But I still hold them carefully, screw in the required telephoto lens, gently twist the dials with my left hand. Adjusting aperture, focus and shutter speed until a chunk of hazy light coalesces into a picture. Right index finger poised over the shutter. Wait while the indicator hovers, then falls into place, and-

The photo is different from what it was supposed to be. My father mutters about how an Olympus is not a beginner's camera anyway and that it's hard finding studios that develop film anymore. Back to polishing while I pull 0ut more tomes from the bookshelf. Plough on through composition study and polaroid lenses, eager to shake off the tag of 'beginner'.

To this day I've never been able to use my father's cameras. For class trips, holidays and birthdays, I rely on the digicam and its robotic loyalty, its ability to zoom in and freeze smiles as the occasion demands. The SLRs wait huddled close together. Unresponsive. Faintly dead. Maybe my touch is not mature enough, my eye weak or my hand still unsteady. But I think, more than anything else, it's the light that leaves them cold. The strange, hard light of a new world. They don't recognise this light. They've seen better days.

"Be impulsive" is surely the most ironic oxymoron disguised as advice that I've ever come across.

There are some things it is impossible to be. If you're lucky, you simply are.

Rage

Rage is a curious thing.
No shallow anger will do.

Wash it clean.
Let it trickle
Into every secret sorrow,
Every minute crack,
Till you're saturated in its clarity.

Then cut,
Cut deep and cut fine.
Carve it with a subtle knife,
Till a stream runs into each wound
And each scar is pooled
In bitterness.

Hide it,
Shield it in cast iron,
And try to forget
The palely smoking poison
That lies cupped in your hand,
Simmering.

Magic Monday. It rained and rained. All different sorts. Slanty. Sharp. Bitter. Light. Jhomjhomano brishti straight out of Robi Thakur's poetry books. I slept during most of it. Woke up and took a walk through a queerly distracted evening. Soft lashes of rain, glowing dim in orange streetlights, wet my T-shirt with dull determination. Slick asphalt and no water logging in this para, thankyou very much. The air is muted. TV sounds melting away, loudspeakers fizzled out. Would the skies dare this again the next evening? I very much hoped so.

When I got back, mud on my feet and smell of moist paper on my skin, I was told that I looked like a dripping crow. Oh, a white dripping crow, hahaha. White crows are considered omens of death, but I didn't say a word. It was that kind of evening.

It was that kind of evening, where you were almost convinced that something was going to happen. Something worth hoarding and looking over later in secret patches of daylight. Something should happen. Nothing did. At least, nothing that I noticed. The next day, the skies did not dare mess with the festive spirit. The night rumbled in triumph and dazzled me with its brilliance. And so I sit in this familiar seat, stretch my fingers, and return to the evening where nothing happened and everything was promised. Because maybe it's that waiting which brings out the best in me.

Twenty-two candles. That's all my father came back with at 5:30 pm this evening. Everything else sold out. Ma was upset. Not that any of us had intended to contribute in any way to all the cracker-exploding shimmery-glimmery jollity that permeates the city this time of year. Diwali, it's called. When the stars go into hiding and are not missed by many. For weeks afterwards the smell of secondhand cigarette smoke reminds me of booming skies at two in the morning.

Twenty-two candles. Well. One must make the effort. They would have to do.

Ma set them up on the balcony, even spacing, lifting back her sleeves carefully, skirting around the potted plants. I hovered near, unhelpful, munching on kaju barfi. Why put up such miserly little things when they're going to go out in a few minutes anyway. She didn't deign to answer that one. We must be content knowing that we must.

People came. More barfi, laddoo too. Talking, laughing, pjs, ciggie smoke, breaking out the Smirnoff, political adda. An evening of general bangaliana. They all left eventually, off to have kali pujor bhog at another friend's place. Only Baba and me left. Someone turned on Sony Pix. I fiddled around with playlists, turned off the lights, lay flat on my bed and surfed missed calls. And then, interrupting the Doobie Brothers, walked out to the balcony.

Orange light everywhere. Burnt orange and thick fog. An electric streak cutting through where a child waved a feeble phuljhuri. Hiss of brief fire licking the sky. Only thing is, from this particular balcony you can't really see the sky at all.

Not one of the twenty-two candles remained. I was momentarily so surprised that I called Ma up, asking if they'd been stolen. Was told to not be silly, they'd just burned out, now don't bother me please.

Twenty-two candles that, true to prediction, had burned out before I'd ever got to see them. Is it strange that I should miss their light?