familiar road to a stranger’s room
a sudden realization that there is a beautifully
scaring leach perching on the holder of your umbrella. you sensed it at a
specific point, without any sensation, without any prior knowledge or sight indicating
that small creature’s existence. it scares you and pulls your heart out for a
second. a painful tickle in your spin. that moment is important. a moment that
scares you the most but you already know that it cannot gulp you, cannot take
your breath away, cannot make you blind. but you shiver. out of fear. and out
of that whole episode, a small, very small amount of fear will be carried
by you, deep in that shaken heart, always eager to come up with another cry.
you cannot foresee this moment. maybe on your way to the market or amidst the gardening or when you lean to touch a shuttlecock that went to the wrong
side of your court. it waits, very patiently to scar you with a touch.
tired metaphor
lockdown is an uneven metaphor. it was there, in
bits and pieces. every day in our lives we anticipated in numerous ways, the
possibility of a lockdown. a pain felt right somewhere. we may think we know
where it strikes, but it floats. it carries no map; you struggle to locate it
like a disinterested child forced to solve a mathematical problem. people you
isolate, the umpteen ways in which you are being shredded away. the same feeling
of loneliness, you experience when you are on a local train or in the middle of
the gradual progression of a bargain in the crowded street, amidst a
student march, or in love. loneliness is a strange feeling that cannot be imagined.
if you try to imagine loneliness, you fall into the romanticized visual scape of
middle-class cravings. one cannot visualize loneliness or pain. that sensation
is an event. imagine you are looking at the name of your dead grandmother on
the ration card, which will be soon removed. a single page, a name in a small
column rather: it talks back to you, to your buried excess, to a ruined
stir. it gives you pain. a realization.
the continuous presence of an absent touch. my mother says, quite often, that
after my grandmother died no one ever asked her whether she had eaten
properly. pain cannot be conveyed or convinced through speech: speech is
betrayal: a gesture through fixations when the body tries to imitate the nameless
within.
the familiar turn in a conversation
sudden, unpleasant
but anticipated.
unhurried.
the ruined black and white photographs
of people and events
evoked with a touch.
(remember to drink plenty of water
after a cry)
after a cry)
i laugh aloud and i have been scolded.
memory repeats, always uneven: but clear like a
scar.
carry it: as forgetfulness
so that it can come up with another cry.
Images: hanging and sunken
images will come to you as if it is in a puppet
show as if it is operated by someone with invisible threads attached to it.
it knows how to make you surprise. images usually spread slowly into you.
like a turquoise blue of an ink pen on a refined yellowish paper. it spreads
like pain, like nostalgia, like your favourite song.
an image, a photograph, an old sketch, or a page you
have stolen. carefully ruined while tearing it from a book you met inside a
village library because, for the first time, words found their way through your
skin like a thin lightening. i had a friend who collects photos from the obituary
column of a particular newspaper, not all of them but if he finds anyone
interesting. it can be the name, the name of the place, the reason for the death
or the beauty of that person. i loved him when I was young. he never asked me for a
photo of mine. i eventually erased him like wet paper. But always felt that
the dead people within that small column wait for that friend, who comes to the university library every Sunday, to photo archive the dead. tender and odd. the stack room on the left end corner, there is an old copy of Marques's short story collection. from the book, Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses was missing and no one cared.
(In that unusually silent room i was thinking of Asuran directed by Vetrimaaran. an instance from the film made me think of the role of photographs as vital traces of your being. in one of the scenes, the character Sivasaami recalls, how
painful it is not to have a single photo of his dead son Velmurukan to
keep his memory alive. just to remember, rather not forget how his son looked. this thought of not having a photograph and you have to
war with your own memory to make that face alive in your mind is quite scary. how can you not forget one's
face? you will be renewing and reshaping the
nuances in that beautiful face every time you recollect it. memory betrays.)
sound fakes your senses, it can easily evoke the most unpleasant
memory. of absence. of touch. of death. of leaving. of forgetting. all of a sudden you cry as if you haven't
expected the coming back of that nameless feeling. next time when you walk, take a different route. pretend that you don't see familiar spaces. search for a new company. take more photos.
touch: moving, shared.
one day i saw a beautiful, beautiful lady on a
local train to Yakuthpura. she was wearing a white/ pink chiffon saree with big, big
flowers on it. her skin was flawless and shining. she, with her little boy, was sleeping soundly on that winter afternoon. in between her sleep- in continuous, specific intervals- she woke up and kissed her boy and again slept.
she goes to sleep like the touch of wind on her saree, like a ripple. where
does that kiss come from? i feared that this question, the kindest thought i
ever had, will disappear from my disarranged memory. So, without asking, i took
a picture of hers. it gave me solace. her skin was glued with the kid's tender
sleep, and her kissing interludes gave me happiness. The next time i noticed, i was
kissing more while making love and when his skin touched mine i held that touch
for hours to pause that feeling of love, to take a photograph of myself being
touched, an interlude of love. touch, like water, erase you for a moment.
not like the historian's pen.
