Long lost memories

"Viva forever, I'll be waiting
Everlasting, like the sun
Live forever,
For the moment
Ever searching for the one

Hasta Mañana."


* Old songs from younger days

Neruda on the mind

"El futuro es espacio,
espacio color de tierra,
color de nube,
color de agua, de aire,
espacio negro para muchos sueños
espacio blanco para toda la nieva,
para toda la musica."

- de La Memorial de Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda



*for a translation, you're gonna have to ask :)

Away

Always a better place to go away to:

Like home instead of here

Like the shelter of your arms
instead of the edge of this sofa

Like the crest of these waves
or the vibe of those beats

Like the slow tandem dance of strangers
and the cosy, knowing silences of friendly songsters.

Last Lines

Walk away now
before the call of the muezzin
leads you away
into the nostalgic depths
of time and tide:

floating
in the stagnant shade
of a sun-dappled stage:
home to the squirrels by day
and lost dreams by night.

Walk away now
before the brickwork crumbles
and lays bare the futility
of plan and method -

rejoicing instead,
in the abandon of the winds
that carry the call to prayer
unto distant lands
over the crests of these distant dreams.

Walk away now
from the malarial haze
and water gone stale;

Walk away now
from these insular clouds
of comfortable lazy days:
the luxury of irresponsible greys .



* These words were written in the NID Amphitheatre on the 15th of Sep, 2006.

The place always held a special significance for me: the shade of those trees was often my secret place when I needed to unravel. I've spent many winter afternoons sitting there after lunch with a piece of Bournville melting in my mouth but the two times I remember it most are on my first day in NID in 1st year and the first time I ever visited the campus in 2001 long before I joined it. It just became my own little sacred space after that.

The call to prayer however, was and still is a part of my daily routine: something that floats in and out of my subconscious when I least expect it to. The day I was leaving NID as a student soon after my final jury, I sat there for about half an hour when these thoughts came to me in the midst of one of these summons.

It was time then to move on to some else.

Here and now, I think - I hope - was that something.

Peek-a-Blue

The dome over the Persia Court at Ibn Batuttah Mall, Dubai.

(This mall is really somethin else!)

Republic Day Blues

Arial Underbellies

In every other place I come to,
I sit below the flight path of departing planes,
guessing games,
predicting names,

getting carried away

by the fantastical make-believe of
their contents' destinations,
travellers' tales
and the thought
of transit spaces miles above the earth.

And then I imagine myself inside these arial underbellies
wondering that
(beaming out of an airplane window)
the world always looks like a more tolerable place.


Entre deux endroits
it's easier to orient oneself to navigable maps,
avoid ideological mishaps
and leave behind the thinking hats
that come from knowing too much.

Rainy Tuesday, Another View

The building behind this mosque is the complex where I live. It is, in fact, built on top of the oldest mall in the entire Gulf region (some claim to fame that!) called Al Ghurair City. It is a city in many ways and there are entire weeks when Dad doesn't leave the complex. His office is in the next wing and we get everything we need and everything we want from the shops downstairs.

Talk about self sufficient!

The previous post (Another Blue) is a collage of the view from the window where I sit and work on my comp. There are many other blues too... you'll see them here soon.

Another Blue

Nightfall

In the urban sprawl
Of bling, glass and concrete
scintillating lights,
and floodlit superhighways,

The solemn call to prayer.

:the call of the muezzin
asking you to walk away from it all,

To walk away now
Before the glint off the shards
leads you away
from the sacred dunes of the desert -

the whistling dunes of sacred sands.

Maxims to live by

"Live long.
Love fast.
Drink slow."

You have it all figured out.

So how come I don't?

Desert Dunes

Landing at a new crossroads,
Over the desert dunes of empty roads
The last year has been lost in a flurry
of confusions,
apologies,
excesses,
resolutions for new beginnings,
hopes for happy endings.

Would you understand me
If I asked for a little space
- a little place
where I don't always need to explain myself
where I can forgive myself before I defy you again?

This is me too:
Floating above the desert.

Can you see the horizon melt into the sand?

Window on a Lake

I went away.

I stood at the edge of where I went
and stripped down naked,
plunged into the murkines
of my own mistakes
looking for the shiny pebbles I had lost;
pebbles collected
on the shores of many lakes
between here and there:

Lake Michigan and Pangong Tso.

I didn't find them:
they have been lost for forever
to the earth and the rain
and the silt of time.

That rain
it beat down hard on me
when I returned.

And then it took with it
the afternoon mist
leaving behind the inky air
made of all my pen-stained compositions from last year.

Eternity has come and gone.

But these clouds
have since refused to clear.

A Dream Misplaced

And thus I return
to this familiar corner
this unfamiliar space
unsatisfied, unfinished,
unaccomplished.

These days
they died an untimely death
with the dreams we thought we knew.

Our inheritance has already been usurped
and squandered.

I found
that after all the times we shared
in the shelter of each other's arms

that paradise was not blue.

The Morning After

This city will not bend
it will not break:
its spirit will not shatter
like the bursting forth of tin can boxes
that tried to pull its life asunder.

We are a conglomeration of improbabilities
Held together by the fabric of our indomitability.

Not rain nor shine,
Neither mud-slinging
nor explosions
will hold us ransom.

Tomorrow will never die.

Traveller on a Street Corner

The stuffiness of the afternoon
was dissapated by
a promenade in the rain:
rambles under a generous umbrella
turned inside out.

I saw you standing at a street corner
waiting for the wind to take you somewhere
as the drizzle on your parka
mingled with the confusion of foreign words
sliding off the streets like water.

Those blue eyes:
they apologised for everything
even though the universe had not yet transpired.

Tomorrow I will seek them out again:
only they knew of of what it meant
to be standing at the foot of a slope
waiting for the rain to recover.

Torrential Spell

The morning rain shut out the sun in defiance:
I couldn't tell today from yesterday
or yesterday from a tomorrow that never came.

The afternoon rain hammered on in silence
As I sat behind a windowless wall
pittering and pattering on plastic keys in its place
As sullen as its own insistent pace.

At night and in evening time,
It drowned out the sound of my own voice and
the noises in my head
bouncing its tiny bullets off the transparent rooms that separate us;

I resisted an invasion.

I knew my spirit couldn't withstand the shock of the world outside:
I had fallen to its torrential spell
Even before the nimbus had raised a cry at dawn.

Here

I feel like I've been here forever,
Like this day has gone on forever.
As though I can neither escape the dread of the night before,
Nor the weariness of the morning it preceeds,
The afternoon, the evenings,
the week that returns home sullen, unforgiving and fallen,
the nights that melt into oblivion...

El sabado le samedi, phir aaya shanivaar

In between saturdays
nothing happens.

The days stand still
and I,
whether in patient waiting
or by restless choice,
drive around-
point to point
end to end
of weeks and months ,
around the occasional moment of truth-
barely rising before being able to fall;
barely engaging before
being able to let go of it all.


(*)El sabado
le samedi
phir aaya shanivaar.

Deja vu