Delhi promised

: Speak to me of civil war, I told Delhi.
: I will, she said.
: Speak to me of blood on the streets, I told Delhi.
: I will, she said.
: And if there is blood on these streets - I asked the city - do you promise that he'll be the first to go - that man with the fat folds under his neck?
: Promise!!!

The green of her eyes

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there, right from the start, in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile, and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why, I knew beyond question that a lot of people wound mistake her pride for arrogance, and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost, swimming, floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady, even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be... if the sea were perfect!!!

In finding beauty

Do not laugh at me over what I call beautiful. Do not judge the things in which I find beauty. 
I find beauty in nothingness.
I find beauty in what you call a gloomy day. 
I find beauty in unanswered love, in failed love, in the final goodbye after the first night together and in never even knowing her name. 
I find beauty in rubble, in the scars on her body, in her damaged soul and in the ruins of her past. 
I find beauty in his failures, in his daily struggles, in his torn clothes, in his untimely grayed hair and in the wrinkles on his young forehead.
This beauty is not normal. And in return, normal is never beautiful.
Do not laugh at me if I can only write a sad song.
This beauty is not happiness, it is inspiration. This beauty is not satisfaction, it is mental stimulation.
This is not pleasure I'm talking about. This is beauty...

no title

I have happily given up my momentary flirtations with the art world, with the literary world. 
Who talks about art or literature these days? 
It's embarrassing, like talking about spirituality. There are some things we don't do, that should be left behind in the 1960's, left in reprints of Herbert read, in the hands of scientists who wax lyrical about the artistic element in chaos, in office workers wanting something more, in people going back to the art school after years in the lawn mowing business, left with people it might mean something to as part of a deep personal commitment thing, of how they position a great beyond to the exigencies of daily pain and personal tragedy and misery. 
I want no part of that... 
I'm nestled safe in the coarse blanket of societal norms and people's expectations. I think I'll be happy!!!

When at powercut

Power cut!!! And when at 4am your ac and fan suddenly go dead, you wake up in Thar in summer solstice. My British friend is sleeping in the other room, probably all sweaty. Now I feel unnecessarily guilty as well, dayum. My neighbour texts me from the opposite apartment. "Kya karen?"...

So the demographic of my whole apartment building is like 5 single ladies, one ancient couple (very old, I mean) and their equally old servants, one invisible doctor family and an ever changing group of hipsters! So basically, I'm the man of the building. Or so I like to think.

Now when a lady texts you "Kya karen" at this panic situation, you need to understand it's your cue to get into action. Well this lady is a true blue pedigree Delhiite. And they're not used to power cuts. And if it happens, there better be a good reason and it better be settled fast.
Now from where I am, power cuts are routine. I'm used to a different culture. In Dibrugarh, if electricity goes, nobody questions. They just wait for an hour. And like clockwork, power does resume after an hour. Almost every house has an inverter nowadays.
I open my windows and the thumping of these rich people's gensets reach my bedroom. Delhi likes everything loud. From their Enfields with customised 'silencer' pipes, their make up and now even their electricity back-ups!
My neighbour texts again. "This is not done".
So I get up from bed, make a call to #BSES customer care and lodge a complain.
I am informed that the whole of Hauz Khas and Green Park is suffering a black out. And by the time I finish writing probably it'll be back..................

Nope....

Still nope.... No sign of it!

Well, maybe by the time I post it, electricity will be back. And so if you live in this 'posh' area and suffering from this black out, 9Gag and chill for a while and it'll be back...
I'll just take my dog out for a walk!!!

My nightmares

When your nightmares come to life
When they're worse than what you dared never dream
How many falls will one take
Before his hands tire of brushing off the dust off his pants
Before his bruised knees can't take any more
Before his legs fail his weight
Why does his lantern not meet an object to shine upon
Why is the right thing to do also the hardest thing to do
What holds
What gives
What is the answer???

My tryst with INS Viraat

This is about a morning many summers back, when I was a young gentleman cadet in this elite academy, perched atop a hillock in the picturesque Goa, wrapped on its three sides by the beautiful river Mandovi. 
We were a small privileged batch of selected 14 who were chronically sleep deprived. Our mornings started at 0500 hours with morning muster and PT. 
That day, around 0830 hours, as we were marching towards our classroom after a heavy 3 course breakfast, we were told that the day’s classes were canceled and we had to go on a field trip. We boarded a bus and the moment the wheels set in motion, half of us, including yours truly, had dozed off.
I woke up to the stirred up smells of iron, rust, paint and the smoke of heavy fuel oil that’s quintessential to sea ports.
We got down, walked for a few minutes, and stood in formation in front of something. Facing me was a large Grey wall whose ends on my left and right, I could not see. It was much taller than a multi-storied building and its walls were chock-a-block with pipes of various dimensions. I could see window like openings from where men appeared to be busy at work.
Our guide, a lieutenant, pointed at the wall and told us, “Gentlemen, this here, in front of you, is India’s biggest ship, Aircraft Carrier INS Viraat.”
That was my first tryst with the then, and emotionally now, pride of the Indian Navy. We were lucky that INS Viraat had just docked in Goa, and we were the chosen batch, to the utter envy of our seniors who haven’t had the opportunity yet.
The memory of the next 3 hours on board the monumentally majestic INS Viraat will always remain deeply etched in my mind.
Today, INS Viraat formally gets decommissioned from the Indian Navy.
May your glory live long! Adieu, you mighty one!!!

Let me bleed words, again...

They say that writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. They say that there’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. And they say that all writers are lunatics.
Then why do I write? I'm not that true Alchemist that doesn't change lead into gold but rather changes the world into words.
But there's a swarming growth of voices on my doorstep. That long overdue solitude is here, and it's finally creaking open the door for these voices and they're sliding in. They are getting louder, getting bigger and stronger: into cold dark amorphous forms, into screams and shrieks in my head.
And all they want is to see me bleed into words...

Flag in Flood

Back in the late '90s when I was a kid, my dad once woke me up from my sleep, carried me in his arms to the balcony and said he’d show me a sight I would never forget. It was past midnight and all I could see was the night sky getting lit with incessant rains accompanied by lightning and thunder like the Olympic fireworks. He directed my gaze towards the ground, towards the bottom of the two flights of steps of our government dak bungalow. I could see that the bottom two steps were already submerged in water. Our domestic help, Mamai, a robust and muscular young man took out our Ambassador from the garage underneath our bungalow and drove out into the darkness to park it somewhere safe. 

My mom and I had come visiting dad in his workplace in the beautiful river island of Majuli this summer vacation and this was going to be my first experience of a full-scale flood.
I woke up in the morning to a sight I’d indeed never forget. Everything around was submerged in water. About 15 of the 20 steps that led to our bungalow were under water. And on the railings of the steps, there were a thousand different varieties of insects, of all color and size, some shiny and some like made of glass, all piled up like bags of colorful crystal.
Every bungalow had a boat and when I asked Ma about it, I was told that dad had left for the hospital in it with Mamai quite early as he knew he’d have a busy day with this sudden flood. To my relief, Mamai came back later with a raft made of banana plant trunks specially made for me.
Sadly, not everybody lives in bungalows that shelter them from the flood. Overnight, your house, all your life’s belongings, your dearest treasure, everything gets washed away by the unforgiving Brahmaputra and its tributaries. As if this wasn’t enough misery, slowly all water-borne diseases and diseases from dead cattle and animals grip your tired body and drag you down.
As we celebrate India’s Independence all over the rest of India by flying kites, getting drunk on its eve, thronging to the nearest Big Bazaar or posting happy Independence Day updates on social media, more than 20 lakh people’s lives have been affected in Assam due to this ongoing flood. And the worst is still yet to come!!!
This is an annual occurrence now but still no machinery is in place. It takes a hundred dead bodies to draw attention of The Center. The Center has yet again failed its people, in more levels than one.
The Center has failed Kashmir and look at it now.
Where would you hoist your flag amidst all the ruins and blood in Kashmir? Where would you hoist your flag when all the land is submerged in flood in Assam? In your hearts, yes, but for how long???
Anyway, Happy Independence Day!!!

The Working Women

The working woman I.

She knows a man’s erection when she feels one; pushed and prodded against her back with frotteuristic intentions. At 30 she’s already been married, and divorced. And now, her plans for the future have already been halved, compared to women her age, whose half of the dreams comprise a caring husband and lovely children. ‘I just want to travel the world’, she tells people who care to ask. It’s Monday morning rush hour and all the metros going towards HUDA city center are packed with corporate zombies dressed in crisp and clean clothes laundered over the weekend. She’s placed herself as close to the door as possible, but this hasn’t thwarted some men in the compartment from trying to make an ‘accidental’ contact with her body. She clutched at the strap of her bag, not because she feared someone would rob her, but rather seeking succor among all the hefty men around heavily breathing down on her. Her hair was still wet at the tips and they left wet patches on her top. The strap of her bag was pulling down on her top at the shoulder revealing her bra-strap. She hastily fixed it. She’s expecting her periods anytime soon, and she’s hating the weight around her lower abdomen. These days, she does not like the way she looks when she stares at her naked body in the mirror. I look at her from a couple of feet across the compartment. Her scattered gray strands and the dark circles around her eyes are becoming more visible. And in all this, she does not feel beautiful. But she is… she is beautiful, the Monday kind of way…

The working woman II.

Her father came home to drop a pile of clothes to be laundered. After asking her to sort the white clothes from the colored, he left to collect another pile from another neighborhood. Sitting down on the floor of her six feet by ten feet shanty in the slum, she started fishing through the clothes and checking their pockets. There are some beautiful dresses which she knows for sure belonged to that beautiful ‘model-type’ lady from 43, Green Park. Among these beautiful dresses is a particular one in dark red that catches her attention. It is a backless short dress with a lace hemline. She has a couple of hours before her father returns. A sudden impulsive urge emerges in her to try this dress on herself. She is also expecting her lover to visit her anytime now. While putting on the dress she wonders what kind of bra girls wore with this kind of dresses without a back. And as for her, she never wears one as she does not have breasts good enough for a brassiere. There is only a small handheld mirror which she tries from various angles to look at herself, a foot of her body at a time. The dress hangs a little loose on her frail body and flat chest. I was keeping an eye on her shanty from afar and after I have waited for five minutes after I saw her father leave on his squeaking bicycle, I make way to her. She is startled when I suddenly enter, like someone getting caught committing some minor wrongdoing. I instantly understand what she is up to and walk close to her. The dress still smells good; like those drunk ladies with heavy makeup in HKV who buy cigarettes from me after their parties are over, clinging on to the muscular arms of their gym-going partners who they call ‘baby’. I always wanted to ram my penis into the fat behinds of these women. And like the next natural thing to do, with eyes closed, I start to wet my beak into the woman I have at hand, with the left-over perfume on the dress helping me imagine those ladies. I finish earlier than usual, but before I could completely end my act she pushes me away with a jolt. Apparently, I dropped a few on her dress. With sudden onset guilt she takes off the dress and starts putting on her own clothes. Slowly pulling my pants up, I look at her from the other end of the room. She stands in a stark variance from those women I’d just imagined. Her hair is dry and browned by the sun. Her bobbled leggings do not hug her skinny thighs and even from outside the kurti she’s put on, one can make out her shoulder bones. And in all this, she does not feel beautiful. But she is… she is beautiful, the Tuesday kind of way…

The working woman III.

Through the gaps in the leaves, her friend tries to look for any police patrol car. When she made sure, there aren’t any, she comes out of the dark onto the pavement. You have to be good at juggling three things at once in this line of work: keeping an eye out for cops, keeping an eye out of potential customers and staging yourself at the measured spot between light and darkness, correctly distanced from societal integrities. It’s her second year in India and when the Fulani herdsmen killed her parents in her south Nigerian village two years back, she had little option but to take up a ‘job’ in India: catering to the carnal appetite of Indian men. She wanted to provide for her little brother, her only family left, with all that he deserved. A few military men of her country had raped her when she was just 14, which went on to be her first sexual encounter. And in all these years after that, there wasn’t much left for her to be surprised about the intentions of man which he so well perennially masks. She runs her hand over her abdomen, sucks it in, corrects her posture to highlight the enormity of her breasts and looks towards her far left. It is ladies-night tonight at Summer House Café and girls are thronging to that place. And like dogs in mating season, men lie in wait in the vicinity with big cars and gelled hair trying to get entry. It would be a lucky day for her if she gets a customer from among them; they who usually prefer white girls. She has spotted two guys loitering around and now she’s made eye contact with them. With a nod of her head she beckons out to them. Exchanging prods and nudges they near her. They settle for two thousand rupees for a couple of hours. Sitting in my auto, I’m witnessing the whole affair from a distance. One of the men signals out to me as I approach them. To Malviya Nagar, they tell me. She is sitting in the middle of the two men and as soon as my auto enters a dark lane, the two men begin feeding their ravenous inner beasts. In between these dark and light spots of the journey, in my rearview mirror, I could see the outlines of her lipstick slowly fading into her dark skin; her wig slowly revealing her actual hairline and the kohl on her big black eyes comet-tailing on a side from the violent stroke of one of the man’s hand. Our eyes meet once in the mirror. In this brief pause we exchange an understanding; added with a certain helplessness from her side and a certain apology from mine. And in all this, she does not feel beautiful. But she is… she is beautiful, the Wednesday kind of way…

(For those women of south Delhi they don't write about)