Birthday Girl

It was late noon in the heart of the city, and the girl I was supposed to meet was early once again. She was picking her way through clumps of ragged grass, weaving in and out of shadows cast by elderly gulmohar. Khaki chappal-ed feet finding their own way. Stepping off the edge of the map. She smiled, perhaps amused by her own visual metaphors. She was another day old today, and this was her present. An hour alone with ghosts from another century. The gravestones were crumbly granite beneath her touch; the monuments expelled dusty sighs. A landscape of marble and aged wood, fit easel for any modern artist. A patch of earth where the satiated dead could rest.

In China, she said to herself in a vaguely schoolteacher-ish tone, a coffin tree is selected for each child at birth, so that when he is older and feels time closing in, he can have it cut down and made to order. A fitting way to prepare oneself.

A young mongrel followed her, tail wagging gratefully as she scratched behind its ears. Maybe it slept in one of the larger family vaults when night descended. Maybe it had learned to live with permanent, though incorporeal, tenants. Nevertheless, it seemed glad for human company.

The girl slipped off her shoes and settled down on her knees beneath a barren guava tree. Another day older, another day closer... to what? Thoughts fled smoothly from her consciousness like a flight of pigeons as the sound of silence rebounded among the trees. Slender fingers buried themselves in the rich, damp soil. Letting out roots. Tapping into the pulse of the earth. Cool arms clasped around her waist, cradling her, rocking slightly to an imperceptible rhythm. The giant breathing of a thousand strangers. A muffled heartbeat of aeons past.

A crow perched on a headstone nearby forgot to crow. The sun slipped behind opaque grey clouds, casting a brief halo in the sky as the girl smiled for the second time that day. She was a traveller, you see, a traveller and a seer, a pilgrim and an alchemist, and she inhabited worlds where empty pages could speak. Today was her birthday, and she was still very young.

That night it rained. Taut raindrops drummed gently against the window as we lay together like two stacked spoons, and she told me about her day. I listened to her voice more than her words- low, crystalline, tumbling out of her like the downpour outside. Held both her wrists close and shut my eyes. Thunder rumbled in a distant sky, but her voice, warm under my skin, distorted it into a safe degree of white noise.

Already, she was telling the story. I lay back and listened and didn't interrupt. The glow-in-the-dark bedside clock was still ticking. But now she was measuring out her own time. And I steadied myself to the flow of her breathing in the darkness beside me, and, just this once, I let her lead the way.

Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

Juan Ponce de Leon hacked his way through the last tangle of karata bushes and fell face down on the stone stairs. There were mosquito bites spattering his back, souvenirs of the journey through sweltering treacle-thick swamps and the dripping, choking everglades. He had lost his boots crossing the cloud mountains; the soles of his feet were now lacerated a rubbery yellow. His breath erupted in ragged shreds and, sure that songs of memoriam were being sung about him somewhere in another world, Juan Ponce de Leon gave whatever was left of his body to that tiny patch of wet earth and slept for a long time.

When he awoke, some time between a few hours and some days later, it took him a while to realise that his prize was waiting before him. High up on the stone steps, the pool rippled under the midday sun, encased like an inocuous crystal within the granite basin. This, then, was the fabled sacred water of which was told stories in Corinth, in the halls of Babylon; stories of the Apache and the natives of the Ivory Coast, stories whispered in secret tongues in the shadow of the Sierra Madre.

The Fountain of Youth.

Juan Ponce de Leon found himself, as in a dream, standing before the basin. He was looking into the depths of the hidden pearl of Nostradamus, walking the deserted streets of El Dorado, bending in both hands the will of the universe. Trembling fingers dipped into the water a fragment of dead hartwood, and wide eyes beheld tender green buds covering the charred surface almost instantly. Uttering a strangled cry of triumph, he stretched out both hands towards the pool.

"Stay!" said the King of the Stone Macaws and his voice was sharp as fresh chalk. "Foolish human! Knowest thou what thou does? What has passed may not return..."

He would have continued in this vein but was interrupted by a flying shower of pebbles bestowed on him by the man beside the fountain. The human glared at him and there was a mad gleam in his sunken eyes. The King of the Stone Macaws observed this warily and decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

"So be it." he said softly and, ruffling his feathers, caught the south wind blowing back to Xanadu; and our intrepid explorer then scooped out the water in his hands and drank and drank.

He waited.

The world paused to observe.

Still he waited.

He may have waited for years. Days, nights, and many seasons bore witness; his lips grew white and aged and refused to yield words. His limbs shrivelled into near nothingness, dessicated with hunger and a dull, relentless pain. And still nothing. Finally, even the lady of the moon felt pity in her cold heart and engulfed him in her blackness. Juan Ponce de Leon waited at that spot till the end of his life, which came not very many days later when a group of Seminole Indians found him there. He barely noticed them killing him, cutting incisions into his skull with arrowheads, hanging his worn, broken skin up as a sacrifice for the heathen gods.

The Seminole Indians erected a shrine at that spot and founded a new village there. They all drank of the miraculous ever flowing water which became a collective heirloom, passed down through the generations. Every babe born to the Seminole tribe from then on was weaned on the magic water which was believed to render them strong of limb and pure of heart. The Seminoles, a peaceful, wholesome people, never suspected the true value of their little shrine until they were all massacred by the European settlers and their forests and villages burnt on the colonial bonfire. The Fountain remained, a curiosity for Western eyes for many centuries. It resurfaced briefly several times throughout the pages of history, under various legends and superstitious tales, but remained mostly unrecognised.

Until sometime in the last decade. That part of what we now know as the Yew Es was bought over by a group of private entrepreneurs who soon realised the tremendous commercial possibility of an ever flowing water source in the age of nature cures and Vedic spas. After testing and experimenting and chlorinating with a vengeance, the age old miracle water was put into shiny plastic bottles, hundreds of cloned monstrosities standing in regimental rows in disinfected labs all over the country. And it was sold in the thousands and in the hundred thousands, after the conclusion of a long legal war over manufacturing rights which thoroughly satisfied all concerned. Soon it was being advertised by shiny-toothed celebrities on TV and radio as the safest and healthiest brand of drinking water, coming soon to a store near you. We drink it every day now. Criminals and taxpayers, kings and presidents, political ambassadors and entertainers, they have all tasted of the waters of perpetual youth. There they are, all still children, doomed to a stillborn cocooned existence that they themselves are unaware of. This planet of ours continues to turn on its axis, a limbo playground where you and I live and laugh and lie and kill if necessary, generally messing around and making do and having a jolly good time through it all. So will it be for as long as our descendants, in ignorance or in greed, continue to drink the secret water that promises all, and as long as children are beautiful and gay and heartless.

Dear Reader(s?)

I like my blog. And I do not post rubbish on it unless it is satisfactory rubbish. I haven't been writing anything at all, good, bad, or worthy of critical appraisal, for the past several weeks. I don't like it either. But, for whatever reasons and circumstances, that's the way it is. If you do not like seeing the same unchanging page every time you are kind enough to visit my blog, please do not visit at all. When I'm good and ready, I will let you know. If you still care then.

Lines for a Cellular Phone

Fundamental particle
Unitary building block
Of succumbed lives.

Hollow pattern deciphered
Methodical enmeshment
By the pricking of their thumbs.

A voice I could not answer,
Determinedly robotic,
Bade me change your personality
For just three rupees this week.

And now they say you will implode.
Final jet of spite
Squirted in my eye?

So even as I wait for the sparrows to return
And for the air to breathe again,
I wait in hope
For that unobtrusive beep
That tells me I'm not forgotten
Just yet.

The artist was planning a masterpiece. The instrument held ready, the paper waited expectantly. A few tentative strokes, a frown forming on her face as inspiration struggled to find a shape. Begin with the eyes first, always the windows to the soul. Her pencil is persistant, moulding a pupil, the delicate tracery of eyelashes. And then its twin followed in newfound momentum. The artist blinks once, holds the stare, and plunges again into the picture. What a pair of eyes! Perhaps her best yet. Its gaze is transfixed on hers, with the persuasion of her own desire. Wanting to be completed. And so she did. A nose followed, gentle contours of the cheekbones, the firm roundness of a chin. A proud forehead above questioningly arched brows. Beads of sweat chase each other down the artist's face, her neck glistening, thin fingers working up to a frenzy. Dashing lines and curves she flourished now, bold daubs of colour, fluid strokes etching bright promise in their wake. And see how it is almost done. Raw emotion on canvas. Painted flesh speaks. The artist continues, draining her spirit out through her brush and hungry for more, driven to sweet madness, the incredulous delight of perfection.

At this moment out steps a critic from the watching crowd and peers over the artist's left shoulder at the easel.

"Oh that won't do, it's too ugly!" exclaimed the critic. "The face is expressionless, and the eyes! Literally popping out! What on earth possessed you to do this?"

The artist put down her brush carefully and stepped back from the canvas. It was exactly as the critic had observed. As flat as a thin layer of whitewash. Mismatched features. Incomplete, sketchy, a grotesque caricature. She reached out and, taking the unfinished picture off the easel, tore it in half, then in quarters, and lightly threw the pieces in a box of used rags. She turned to face the critic, scorn smiling brightly.

"You're right, it was rather terrible. I did tell you I'm no good at this. Bored, I suppose. Anyway. What's for lunch?"

They went off to have a substantial lunch together, and the crowd dispersed, cheated of a 'good show'. The masterpiece lay limply on some old newspapers where in later weeks it would have coffee spilled on it and meet a rat who would want to gnaw her nest out of it. And it held, deep in its painted gaze, all the passion, every drop of unasking devotion, however momentary, that an artist's heart had to offer. Long after the canvas disintegrated into random white strands, clean of colour and remorse, the treasure remained, hoarded in a pair of mismatched, probing eyes.

Carnival

Heavy moon rising above our sleepless streets
To carriage wheels a-clatter on broken cobblestone,
To shrill foreign laughter
That rattles the rafters
Of abandoned townhalls sitting piously alone.

Tonight's the night when gondolas come sailing
Bedecked in the glitter of faraway shores,
And the hot wine keeps flowing,
Red paper lamps a-glowing,
And the dancers at the rumba are keeping the score.

Sweaty-eyed, they're thronging to the fire-eater's pit,
And the caravan where temporal fortunes are sold,
And the old gipsy witches
Will promise you riches
By orbs that tell secrets in silver and gold.

Footsteps crescendo on echoing streets
As the masquerade passes in unbroken line,
Hangmen and heroes,
And black-hooded Zorros,
Kings, demons, jesters, and angels struck blind.

Under the eye of the ivory moon
The pantomime plays till distant bells chime,
Then encores are taken,
The citadel awakens,
And the dark yawning river bides its time.

The ant inched rapidly towards my left foot. Skirting around puddles of bathroom water, miniscule flurry of many legs. How unfortunate it is to be an ant, I thought. Lower form of life in the most literal sense. Brain probably the size of a dust particle. Confined to a world no bigger than my white tiled unreasonably clean loo. I had time to waste feeling magnanimous. Decided to put the wretched arthropod (I presume it was an arthropod) out of what I was sure was intense misery. So I directed the hand shower at it and pressed down on the pressy-thing you press when you desire water. I still don't know what it's called, so I've furnished the necessary diagram.

Gush. As simple as that. The ant was now floundering in a pool of water mingled with liquid generosity. That was that. I resumed with my book, got through a few more paragraphs. Funnily enough, didn't recollect a word I read a minute after I'd read it. My eyes dragged themselves to the mini-ocean near my left foot. The ant was still a moving speck in it, legs thrashing furiously, not a peacable corpse as yet. This was troubling. In attempting to relieve the pitiable organism of its awful existence, I had damned it to an even stickier existence. It wasn't my fault, really. I was trying to do the right thing. If only the damn thing wouldn't fuss so and just die.

A harder squirt of water directed at it, point-blank range. But wouldn't you know it, when the mist cleared the accursed creature was still kicking and screaming and refusing to go quietly. I fidgeted a tad bit. How long would this continue? Its fragile body was probably irreparably damaged by now, and yet it refused to leave its base earthly form. Every jerk, every tiny squirm seemed a condemnation. I sat there uncomfortably. Ought I just press my big toe down on it and end this terrible game? Why did I feel like such a criminal? It was just an ant, after all.

I ran before very much longer. Keeping my nose pointed firmly into my book, trying to ignore the stirrings of motion that continued on the periphery of my guilty vision. Someone waiting outside to use the bathroom cast a rolling-eye glance at my towelled self and the door slammed in my face.

I stood outside, water dripping from my hair on to the doormat. Straining my ears for the last bugle call I felt sure was coming. Nothing. No gasp of a martyred soul released from Purgatory. Nothing but the humming of the taps, the hiss of hot water misting up the mirror. And the heavy throbbing inside me that found no release even long after the flood had dried.

I look at you in the aftermath of smoky blue nights,
When the dancing's been done
And the wineglasses are quiet,
Touching the wet air, cold in my palms,
While you pull your solitude round your shoulders.

I'll look away till you're finished,
Till you say it's alright.

I'll count the glowing embers in the shadow at your feet,
And the cicadas still calling even though day is near,
And all the 'what if's in my fickle memory.
And I'll bet you'd never know I was here.

I'll come back on my own when the lights begin to fade;
You'll sit out the evening in solemn company,
Burning an anguish I never could see
In pools of echoing sympathy
And the early mockers' seranade.

Content with the new riddle you've made,
You'll look up to greet the day drawing near,
And, just my luck, in that triumphant blaze,
You'll never have to guess I was here.