HUNGER

I had a dream last night that whatever I have been scribbling on a Diary for a year now,has been published!!...so,a slight exemption to my vow of secrecy,the others will be best read in print!!!!!!!

This dates back to exactly an year from now.

HUNGER

It is spreading now,slow and thorough

Through my parched throat,through the wet lungs

Through my tired heart,pumped into every aged artery

Searing through my boiling skin,peeping through centuries of oblivion

The hunger is spreading,slow and thorough.

It emanates from faraway ,forgotten Byzantine Empire

From its riches,filth,blessings and sins

And surges through the Penis and the Pineal alike

Till my existence curls into a single foetus of craving

Her navel,waist and ribs,looked at sideways

Still wombs the Empire

And as I starve over millenia of wasted food,beverage,human skin

The Queen of Sheba smiles,lopsided.

A Symbol Has Died

I have always maintained that I can write only when an idea has sufficiently germed inside me,so much so that it yearns to come out into recognition and that craving stifles all my preoccupations and for some divine moments I am One with the idea. It is really like childbirth. But this particular piece,was written to vent out a suffocating feeling inside,to literally write my way out of trouble. This is not a product,this is an excreta. I have always wondered about mothers who abandone their child at birth or those that commit foeticide. What reason on earth can compel someone to kill a part of her own,an extension and proof of her divine creative self.Well ,i can now say that I have lived the life of such a mother.What is about to come is an orphan,a product of a selfish carnal desire and not an offering to the citadel of pure creativity.So dear reader,you are forewarned.

A SYMBOL HAS DIED

I had read somewhere that the Brain saves and interprets things in terms of symbols. For eg,if I say “Apple” the image of a red oblate spheroid hits a particular part of the Brain. Ever since I understood and begun to think, I've always had a feeling of thinking in terms of symbols,as if all speech,all words had their origin in some obscure,yet significant,symbol. For eg, when I think of 'being there beside you' ,I think of a rock,and when I think of that huge rock,I feel I have actually thought about my father. The symbol f gloom is a dark,wet monsoon evening when there will be no cricket,the symbol of a threatening loneliness is a deserted corridor in my school with the classes in progress and I coming late,stranded afraid in the peculiar suffused light of fear.The symbol of spirituality is Poulomi,she comes to mind when I think of a White Dove,the symbol of insecure love is Dwip-Tito,now that we've grown apart(not grown apart really,growing away from each other with our love feeling threatened by the physical and psychological distance in between),the symbol of safety is Maa's oval red bindi,worn right after her ablutions,and of course,the symbol of all things beautiful is the Girl that I love. The symbol of trust.........

A symbol seems to have died. A swift,sudden death,but painful all the same in its searing swiftness and sudden absence. But as it died,it also made me live a few lives,perhaps to make me aware of the intransigence of all things human,and the futility of emotional attachments.

The words came slowly. Leaden,innocuous words,words that do not even map a symbol to my brain,but inside they were laden with Trojan horses,each carrying countless infidels with shovels and boring drills. Once inside,they unleashed the borers, scraped away every trickle of resistance,every remnant of my fading sanity. I have always wondered(not sure exactly at what) when a boring machine drills onto the ground and spits out splinters of concrete. I led the life of Earth being bored at.

I had once seen a freshly severed foetus at a drain in Kalighat. Vermins and flies had a field day on it,as they swarmed over an almost sticky,fetid odour and I had wondered if this was disgust that I felt. I was never sure,but now I became disgust. Disgust to me was an unkempt,old insane in my childhood,with saliva all over his beard and a bare torso full of stench of infection. And now I could see him.coming to me,coming closer,being me.I remember my first hash trip when I had actually peeped out of my mind and body and seen my cage,and the heart within. And I remember taking pity,and mildly condoning my glaring dirtiness,my prejudices interlinked with some inherent goodness. They both shone in a natural,virgin glory.Raw,human emotions,and failings and that had never invoked disgust. Presently,I became the old ghost of my childhood,I became disgust for some time.

I had always wondered,in basic Science classes about what a vacuum was. The complete absence of anything was something I never could fathom. I understood it then,when suddenly I became a complete absence of everything. My mind,always throbbing with emotions,always talking to me,became silent as a corpse and the warmth of all my contradictions was replaced by a definitive,freezing emptiness. As if things end here,never to be again. I lived the life of vacuum.

Ever since 9/11 happened,I have wondered about all those who came to work the next day,how they must have failed in the absence of the colossal towers. Even the ones who did not lose an immediate family,must they not have felt a sense of loss,an emptiness within? The twin towers must have grown so deeply into their existence that they might not have granted special privilege of attention to them. Trust is somewhat of the erstwhile twin towers for me. It has been there ever since i've been,and to have seen it not there in a long fell swoop,I lived the life of a 9/11 victim.

Now that the oozing has stopped,I am left stunned at the lack of reaction to this death. I have only died once before,a complete death, but I was born again with my core intact. But the death of a symbol is the end of an integral part of my thought and as thoughts make up my existence,it is a partial death.The emotional type that I am,I had thought I will let out a long sombre wail and tears will once again inundate the barren lands of battle,all in the comfort of my solitude. That would have meant that like all damaged cells in the body,this too shall be replenished. But to my shock,and remorse,my mind seems to have settled in a comforting numbness,making the verdict deafeningly clear.It's not a symbolic death after all,its a death indeed of a symbol. And now I'm left hoping that all this was nonsense,that the human mind does not think in terms of symbols at all,and the emotion stays as it is,with or without the symbol.

The Mind Of The Matter

It's been ages,i say with shame,that I have actually written anything,anything at all. Not that there wasn't anything worth writing,i've had an eventful time in the last 9 months it was a terrible sense of mental laziness and a fear of going through the labor of childbirth all over again.Good news is,i could write down something tonight,and however incoherent it might appear(it does..it will in a short time) i would like to believe it will hand me back the only thing I do with heart. All apologies if you tend not to like it dear reader :P







Far from the confines of the skull
Floating,fearless,not swimming
(Swimming speaks to me of death in hushed whispers)
Misty-eyed in a swirl of lucid consciousness
In an ocean,in The Ocean
Of love,hatred,pain.hemorrhage,gangrene,and of Love
I had a bird's-eye view of the Cage.






My cage,strong,slouched,robust,dark
Lit scorching by the eyes,the penis and the pineal
And strengthened by layer upon layer
Of bones,muscles,corpuscles,greed,lust,exam grades and greed

Purely meek,like the dense mass of vermin that line up the neighbourhood vat
Purely weak,such that every puff of consciousness,every breath
Of salvation,tore apart the ribs and the spongy dark red blackness within

Crushed,like dreams,like castles built in hostile beaches
Like dreams that lived in the castles,like memories
Of the hands that built those castles,crushed meekly

And I wondered how I fit into it all this while
I have been a misfit all through.






Floating in wave after wave of clarity
Thinking,becoming the thought, in vast swathes of omniscience
Fast losing the long nurtured sense of self,scared and eyeless
I looked for a fellow Mind
Instead I saw the genesis of the cage and its kin.

The eyes were meant to see and rate
The good,the bad and the ugly of other cages
And pile strata of tailormade truth

Eyeless,the Truth is singular outside the cage
The truth is She

The core and whole of it all,the cages and what is left
All dreams,pain,laughter and hissing pain
End up,and begin,to end up again in her

Like the sea that returns all that it takes,the sea itself
Dissolves,merges and forms in her.

Marijuana,Camos,Pink Floyd,dead cells
The cycle of karma and emancipation
Anger,lust,greed,gluttony,blasphemy,wrath--the purest and the fiercest
move meekly in and keenly out of her
As She undoes all creation,to create again
with her pets ying and yang.

And before I slept off to falsehood again
Before the doors of my cage were to open
I screamed into the walls that were She
" She is the truth "--is only half true
The truth is She.


And since I saw the whole of her,I could'nt make out a face
And since I've been searching without knowing what
And I feel thirsty all the time.

PRIYADARSHINI

"there are,on the average,about 20 traffic accidents in kolkata every month"

"Ei Karunamoyee..karrrunamoyee...kolyamoyee...seat khali..assun assun.." --
the conductor did not scream his advert,and that was what woke me up with a jolt. I was minutes into a Garia-karunamoyee -- apparently conductors in the route are too gentle to shout ( they are usually gentle except when it comes to granting student's concession)--and this conspicuous absence disallowed my drifting into slumber.

I know this beautiful lady who resides in Gariahat. Calling her on includes listening to the sales pitch of every hawker,the hustle of a streetfight over a wrongly placed paan spit,and the misfit Beethoven playing between traffic announcements. It appears as if the whole old city,with all her cosmopolitan vibration is breaking through us,thus inevitably(and perhaps unwittingly) providing a noisy disquiet of privacy. Try taking your beloved to an afternoon in the Indian Coffee House for first hand demo.
Coming back,this friend of mine says she cannot sleep in quieter places because of the conspicuous absence of the din that resides in her subconscious ,thus playing a part in all routine,pre-meditated responses. Thus was I jolted back from a siesta that never was.


The clouds had sewn darker as they boarded,while a breeze brought a soothing old melody from afar.
"Oi seat tai boshun" [Sit there]
--the conductor pointed to a forlorn single seat.

The man was dark and reeked of family life. As is so often the case with such men,he had on an unstarched khadi that bore bites of bidi, and proudly wore his travails,struggles and sacrifice in a faint smirk. One never notices their trousers. He was a father,bringing his daughter from school.


The daughter was a playful young flower,probably in the early embrace of puberty. She was not fair but there was a glow,of innocence or of promise. She wore the essentials of her generation-- a heavy schoolbag and grim spectacles,over her blue striped uniform. You noticed her uniform because the suffused light beneath the dark veil of cloud whispered to you to take note. While the pallid weather waited in anticipation, the father took her schoolbag on the one free hand. He was bringing her home.


I was once hopelessly with a girl (she's blossomed to a beautiful lass now) back in class 5.She ,shockingly, liked a sophomore moustachioed Guy. I understand now,it was conniving Mother nature at that age,that charmed her to look for an object of hero-worship,a MAN of freedom and a past (of achievements and disrepute).Our girl evidently hero-worshipped her father.

"kota baaje re maa?" [What's the time, maa] [Its comon among Bengali fathers to call their daughters, maa]

"Baba,12ta.."  [baba, it's 12]


"Tor 12ta baaje ni toh?!"--(chuckle) [old, silly joke]



The kid looked around with a little unease,and then broke into convulsive giggles.By then She was sitting on his lap because there weren't any vacant seats,because he had asked her to :

"Maa amar kole-e bosh" [Maa, sit on my lap]


She sat happily,but she had shot a furtive glance at her bright surroundings. She seemed vulnerable,but she was secure with her father around,she smiled brightly.

"Patuli,2to" [2 tickets for Patuli]

--she paid from her purse while Father looked away with a solemn contentment--kids love their first taste of authority!

A heavy woman,her dark belly visible from beneath her pastel brown saree
 presently obscured my view. I could still hear her chirping,interjected by Father's dim,affectionate mumbling. A toddler behind them asked his mom:

"Maa,shibthakur ki khub raagi?" [Maa, is shiva a very angry god?]

And without vision or hearing I could feel She dissolving into peels of laughter and feel father gently patting her back. Just as in foolish first love the familiar road,hazy smoke with its lonely beggar screaming hunger,its fearful mongrel and screeching auto,suddenly appears new and wonderful,so did a sudden memory appeared to clog over my thinking.

There was a stout tree rooted in my childhood that bore white flowers every day.I remember once sitting intently beside,missing an entire scorching day of Cricket,fights and blessed corporation tube-wells,to actually see a flower bloom. The flower  never allowed me,but I remember a vine that crept on growing,like a knot,around that tree.And then I saw her again,sitting on his lap chin up,melting into tides of mirth and occasionally looking at the people around with slight hesitance. Why was that for? Approval?Pity?But why so,when she looked so proud,both of them and the moment?

"kaku ekhane rakhben"  [Uncle please halt here]

--she muttered while the conductor ensured that the bus came to a safe complete halt. The Sun reappeared again crushing hopes,of rain in particular. Father stood up,bag in his shoulder and her fingers clasping to the free hand. She winced once at the sun that was about to blind the world with merciless clarity. He stepped down the stair first,daughter followed coyly,leaning on her father,smiling sweetly all the time--it was impossible not to notice the admiration in her eyes. SHE WAS BEING TAKEN HOME.

His stick made a metallic clang on the road,he adjusted his dark glasses once. The plump benign woman now sat at the solitary handicap's seat ( it spelt 'handicaft',perhaps evolving from handicraft,a crude irony really if one considers each mortal as GOD's handicraft). The man from the dark walked content beside the wise school girl. Father had brought back the little girl home through the perilous traffic.

CASTLE IN THE AIR

It's been a long time since I've written anything.I've always maintained that writing for me has always been like child-birth,there is a proper time and place to conceive the idea, followed by a perilous labour during which one is acquainted to the queer joy of feeling the presence of another individual with a mind of her own,in oneself. Over the past half year,I've been searching the answer to a peculiar yearning within me in numerous futile sessions of vodka and marijuana. Futile they really are,further,they accentuated the feeling of this overflowing,stuffed emptiness within--empty of expressions and filled with this eerie presence of something,sorry someone,a woman,(all works of beauty is feminine,in fact beauty is feminine),within me.

Omniscient TIME,my great worship TIME had chosen a queer venue for the birth of HIS latest muse--it was our last mid sem exam and she had to see the light of the day then.( I am slightly sorry HKC sir ).

I must quell any salivating gossip monger here. The term 'Pratyusha' referred to shortly has no connection to any earthly mortal namesake--the term is an idea that has germed in me since eternity,an idea I experience in blessed rare moments of meditation,an idea that eludes me in my desperate attempts to emulate a 'vision' with alcohol or marijuana induced hallucination.

You are a big time loser if you've ventured thiis far into this gibberish,but if you have by any chance dear reader,just make note,anything that you might read below,good or bad,whether it elevates your hidden spirituality or opens up the beast in you,everything below is dedicated to GAURAB BHAI MUKHERJEE.

*

*

*

*

CASTLE IN THE AIR

Moments,like waves they hit

'cross the blue expanse of pain

The Castle I'd built

Dreaming through 4 minutes in IEM.

*

*

The Castle had bore the brunt too

Ere moments bequeathed events

Through surges of War,hatred and Love,new

Real or not,all linked by desire currents.

*

*

Pain is its lonely neighbour

A friendly neighbour too

Screening wandering ships of wonder

Checking in a select few.

*

The ones that Joy cannot pollute,

The ones purer than sorrow

Sparkling,like Pratyusha's eyes

Brighter than any precious gem ,

The searing pain that poets salute

And the World will,tomorrow

The castle's stinking scar the critics eye

The scar moans,but proudly,IEM.

A FRIEND AND THE CLOCK THAT STOPPED TICKING...

Since I started to remember,I remember having a fascination for the CLOCK.Not the abstract fascination like fidelity,love,selflessness that I fiddle with; real,tangible fascination that comes from the gut,like a teenager’s craving for sex,like a love-lorn’s craving for a glimpse of Isha/Beauty,like the crude attack to the senses by Sandipan/Ayn Rand-such has been my fascination with the clock. I don’t know which precedes what,but I’m sure our fetish for ‘round figures’ and all that is “5”,must have a correlation with our ancient clock,the clock being the father for me. Its not so much the 5(or the 10),the fascination lies in the omnipotence of the clock. Time for me is an ubiquitous,all-pervading,all-conquering entity walking with HIS nose held high for ages,making ages,breaking ages but being non-chalant,like Camus’ Mearsault,like Dostoyeveskey’s Roshkolnikov.Being the cause and bearing the effect,yet holding mute witness,like the ancient Ganges,like our ancient Rishis. And the clock succeeds in containing Time,in restraining Time.


I cursed with extreme loathing as the clock always,invariably always sped faster from 9:30-10 on my schoolday mornings,conniving with our schoolbus;and felt nothing but disdain when it conspired with Maa and went as slow as it could just before the playful,cricket mornings of Summer vacations. Good heaven’s, the Sun at 38 degrees was just another fielder those days and heat waves-a vague term observed somewhere outside the Sports page that could be left aside for an improbable future recollection! The clock ran so fast then.


And apart from conspiring,it kept time, time that would always advance ruthlessly,never retreating,never looking back on past mistakes,never stealing a moment to make love or make hate. I remember having spent breathless minutes trying not to drop an eyelid,only to witness that divine moment when the elderly minute hand actually moved. I won’t say I did’nt try,but I could never catch the snobby little hour hand moving. Snobby little stick!


Time was omnipotent,but the clock gave me confidence that it could be tappped,that atleast we could actually,though helplessly,witness it DOING things to us and our surroundings. Thus emboldened,I wasted a precious day’s worth of Cricket and stood guard beside the open drain beneath a JABA( Hibiscus sounds ‘tash’ even for the language I dream in!) in our Para, just to watch when the little bud grew to a full bloomed flower. Though I stood a diligent guard,Time and the bud escaped me,and however much I might still blame Maa for calling me for lunch,me and Time both know,it did’nt bloom on lunchtime!


The clock kept time,and when it stopped ticking it bottled that bit of time within itself,locked forever in safety. DEATH for me is an excreta of time,that which time has left long back in its onward march. The open drains of my Para,my Para itself,my childhood all are long dead,but there is a clock that stopped ticking. That clock defied Time’s atrocious march and locked to safety my days of innocence,of newness and of SUBHO. Those were the only days when I lived in each moment,and if PRESENT be defined as the moment one lives in,my present lies in the present of the past,and my past relegated to the forgotten realms of memory. ( MY FUTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN UNCERTAIN,AND NOW U KNOW THAT ITS NOT WITHOUT REASON :( )



My earliest memory of Subho is an open drain,and the two of us urinating,with the young morning smelling every bit of the fresh summer vacation. We were literally next door neighbours,with our homes being close enough to gossip about the latest goings on in the Para that was the World,even after the housewives were long asleep. Our home (and it was never a mere house) had a ‘ROAK’ (it was so high then,now it appears so low :( ) where we would discuss ‘state secrets’ , the most tantalising of which was the 1Rupee. A rupee was precious then,and would yield, among others,a ‘Shaal patta’ full of ambrosial achaar. The two of us buggers would occassionally ( must confess,the occasion arose quite frequently :) ) steal a coin and savour heaven,hiding in the rubble of an under-construction building. Subho was my first partner –in-crime.


During the gray exam evenings we were not allowed to call out each other and we had worked out an ingenious code to counter that. All one needed to call the other was to squeal like a KOEL!
(I held pride for this code before maa recently told me that she had worked it out since its inception :( )

Those days,there were three major ‘mobs’(as we believed) ,and the riavalry was electric. ‘Match newa’ meant playing for your pride and if by Devil’s curse anyone failed,heated rounds of allegations awaited him. Poaching and plotting for key players was so much in vogue. Our days now make such an issue of ‘TRUST’. I never consulted the dictionary for the word, the word simply means Subho for me,it meant so even before I knew the word,it’ll always mean so. Trust means Maa will never know why the odd coin went missing,trust means there will always be 1 who’ll fight when I went for 5 sixes,trust means Subho…



Friendship these days evoke images of weariness for me. Friendship almost always has cigarettes or expletives as its constant concomitants. There is such an awkward silence when the cigarettes,the gaalis,the porn and the gossip is over. I’m thankful we did’nt know “FRIENDSHIP” when we were friends. On rainy days when there would be no Cricket, on vacation afternoons when there would be no Salman, when there would’nt be so many other things ,there would be the two of us. Even the silence,of fatigue,or of plain nothing-ness would be shared with such glee. Thank God we were not ‘Friends’ ,the way I’ve been friends with everyone else since.

The clock that has long stopped went a little faster for sometime.I mastered the selfishness that was screamed unto me by the text-books,the parents and what not,while Subho plain vanished like Frodo’s uncle,never to return again in its lifetime.(He did visit us though,in that bastard timezone of class 12-a mix of past studies,an absent present and a future dangling alongside a carrot,perhaps the present went to fetch the stick)



We never kept things from each other. A great feeling it is to have a confidant when one does’nt really have anything to confide. So I knew of the ‘chits’ that would be hidden in his socks,knew of his disappointment when not even the chits came ‘common’,forget the questions,and I’ll confess,this cheating business invariably drew a chill down my spine. How I wish I were naïve forever..


He knew of my translucent,blurred and muted feelings for Bhaswati Aunty,knew of Isha my “True Love”(!!..Hindi movies should be cursed…there is nothing as sachcha pyaar Mr. Yash Chopra) ,knew that I had secretly read Arabian Nights,and all that was worth knowing. But then he knew something that he never shared,and I’m so thankful to him for that. He knew of Birds and Bees(and their progenies) and on the day of his enlightment ,came running.But I could never coax him to divulge,the reason my sweet days of naivete was extended,the reason I had a gradual transition to manhood,and the reason I discovered the beauty and magic of the Human body with all my heart and brain(well,whatever little I have of it)



Do I want Subho back?Do I want to meet him?...No. The stopped clock gives time two times a day,and that is the time I venture discreetly to the glorious days of ‘Hide-n-Seek’,the time I rid myself of all cares of my idle mind and feel back the restless happiness of a round of “Pittoo” or “Lock and key”. To bring Subho back would be to reset the clock to motion. To bring him back would be to give in to TIME,and once again stare helplessly as HE moulds my wishes without the ME-tool.


I would never acknowledge,even at the cost of time,that my Para,My Home,and a good part of what I stood for,what I am,and what I wanted to be,is dead-left forever to rot in the excreta of time. Let the defunct clock be my Pyramid,and Subho,my Mummy.

LOVE... ACTUALLY/TECHNICALLY

THIS 'PASSIONATE' AND 'TECHNICAL(?)' love letter has been composed by my dear friend SOUVIK BHATTARCHARYA and addressed to someone who is the sole hope of us backbenchers during the Great Battle of Semester.And she unfailingly succeeds in making us pass reluctantly,semester after semester. This letter finds space here because:

1. 
   
   It has been composed really well (and I dare say this site hosts some reasonably well written articles!).


2. 
   
   I have personally always wanted to thank this person for a long time,and souvik did that with heart


3. 
   
   Finally,I'm a slave to passion and the passion that I like reflects in Souvik's writing.

GET /love/heart_response.view HTTP/2.0


Connection: Keep-Alive

User-Agent: MyHeart/4.5 [en] (x11; U, MyOS 5.8 me4u)
Host: MyHeart:8080
Accept-Encoding: Heart-Code
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8


Dear “http://www.y12iem.com/***/1040*0602***/heart.exe”,

I know your brain doesn't recognize me. I know I haven’t still found a place in the hidden database of yours. I just want to ask why the comparator in the deepest core of my heart gives a ‘1’ at the sight of you. Why does the Lissajous figure formed in the CRO in me forms a perfect “x2+y2=r2”. Do I say, it’s a perfect romance that drives my heart at such high frequencies?

Is it the ‘0’ phase margin that makes me so feel so complete! The shortest of the wavelengths pouring out of your hidden ‘Yagi-Uda’ source bangs on to my ‘Micro-strip’, driving my demodulator to overdrive. The aliasing circuitry is lying idle, as the receiver can’t receive any other frequency.

All images appear blur as the image processing circuit has been reprogrammed to identify only one image. All image processing circuitry fail to identify any other pixels.

And now, when I try to put myself on sleep mode, the processor denies to do so. It always has a program running, hindering me to rest myself. It’s an infinite loop that flashes our name and image in my inner-eye. I know that I am infected by a virus, a virus that no antivirus can ever heal, nor can quarantine. Not that I am complaining, I know my processor is taking this burden, but I believe when this core will be ‘duo’, it will have a rest of lifetime.

I know, you will be able to decrypt this message. Every single byte I transmit has only our IP in its header, and user only our preset protocol for transmission. Please grant an authorization in your domain. I promise I will create the perfect resonance in the oscillatory circuit of your heart.


Yours ever,

Souvik