24.1.07

… and once again there was hope.

I don’t think I know the reason ‘hope’ has come alive again… but she has and that’s what’s most important.

A friend recently glibly termed my condition as … ‘isn’t this called numbness?’ and I agreed or did I comply? Yes, I would like to think of it as compliance rather than agreement because hopelessness had given birth to lack of judgment and for lack of better judgment I had left decisions to be made ‘for me’ by ‘others’. Is that what shook me out of my reverie/ phase/ condition/ numbness???

Whichever it was - out of the options given above or those that are not – it’s gone now … I would like to think. It went away in phases and I came back to life in waves … Each day a vision, a spark, a word, an argument, a decision, a view point drew the delirium/ the coma/ the freeze away …

And now there is warmth … I can feel it in my hands … my typing fingers … my heaving bosom … my jiving being.

What visions … words …arguments? Who did they belong to???

There isn’t just one single person actually who managed to influence me this time around and even though I’m afraid I’m forgetting some of them … its but fair to put down some of the names … to thank them as well as for future references …

Think the first was the American woman who chatting up a Malyali passenger sitting besides her on a rickety plane jabbered inconsolably – “… You’re from Keralaaa? Oh well, I’ve traveled a lot in India but I haven’t been to Keralaaa. I mean like down South I’ve been to like Trivandram and …” On being told that Trivandram is situated in Kerala, she exclaimed making sure the whole plane heard (despite the squealing of the plane and the snack time clattering) including me with my ears stuffed with earphones generating high decibel noise to drown out this noise and my mind enmeshed in a quagmire of consuming revelations from the past … (in an unusually nasal voice) …”Oh! Wooooonnnw! That means I’ve been to Kerala. That’s gorgeous. My gawwwwwnnd!” Believe me it doesn’t sound half as bad when it’s written.
It shook me … brought me out of wherever I was … only the effect wasn’t permanent or even half as temporary in comparison to certain other events. Out of sheer contempt for this woman, her voice, her pompous being, the United States of America and its degenerate citizens, I went back to my ‘condition’.

Think next time I woke was when I saw the dolphins … I had to for I would have missed a vision more precious than life itself … after that every time I met the ocean … I was wide awake …

I woke up when I found love where I least expected it. I woke up when I sat down to have a meal by myself. I woke up when I spent a day with myself in a world not my own – a world where I was a total stranger at complete odds … with everyone in it, with its totality … I woke up when I started hearing dawn approach.

I woke up when I met Geo George. A man unlike most others, a man of substance in his own right. A man so simple that it put me to shame to think of any of his actions as malicious or unwarranted. A man who taught me in the few moments spent together to be devoted.

I woke up when I met Joseph Fiennes in a local daily. A star unlike other stars – one you don’t expect to meet in the local daily … who’s hazel eyes can bore holes into your head if he stares at you … who said – as if to me exclusively - “I love life.”

I woke up when I met Ch’mma. A friend, a companion, a compatriot, a mentor, a philosopher, a guide, a mother … she can be who she wants to be, who she thinks you need her to be. And she loves. Truly. Plus she writes beautifully – at leisure and at length…

“You have touched my soul, I want you to know, you are wonderful”
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There’s beauty everywhere

The last few moments,
With her,
With her vastness,
And my perfect song,
Sun in my face,
Warmth,
Sand in my feet,
More warmth
Water gushing in and out,
Heat, a rush of blood, such a sensation,
The waves of salty water,
Dead fish strewn on shore

And finally it made perfect sense,
“So, let go,
jump in,
oh well what ya waiting for?
Its all right,
Cuz there’s beauty in breakdown”

I could have,
An irrelevant detail.
I shouldn’t have,
The righteous, the morally correct.
I didn’t,
The truth …

All pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
Destined to fall together for that one moment,
And then apart for the rest of our lives…

And after we’d lived that moment,
Breathed all we could in it,
Felt whole once and forever,
We drew apart,
For no good reason,
Is social conditioning reason enough?
Perhaps! Perhaps not !!!

For when we went apart,
The sand couldn’t wait to escape,
Escape from under my feet, my whole body’s weight.
The shelled crab couldn’t have enough privacy,
So he scurried off to death.
The scavengers found time in their busy schedules,
And picked up all the dead fish.
Formidable clouds enmeshed the sun,
In a dirty, filthy embrace.
The tide ebbed,
Holding the waves back from reaching my thirsty feet.
My song reached a crescendo and then got over.

Only her vastness remained,
I wasn’t expecting it to remain,
Yet it did,
Is that Love?
Or did I like every other time – Imagine it?

I turn around and walk back,
Seemingly unchanged.
Seemingly…
I’m neither sad nor happy anymore…
I think I am at peace…
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