first light

and god said, "let there be light."

grey

God,
I saw you the other day out by the jute mills.
The sun was in your eyes as you looked up at the sky.
You lifted a grime covered hand against the intolerable gold
Seeping through the swirling grey line of smoke from the iron-clad chimneys.
And watched the light filter through your fingers, red-gold and tainted.
Sparkling honey-dew and sulphur sprinkled across your bronze skin.
Change is good. But nothing really matters.
Change is inevitable. But no one really cares.
Something precious, like the pride of creation.
And that of the creator… when industry smiles.
I thought perhaps you still find beauty in pain –
Because nothing is more beautiful than hell distorted.
Symphonies of splintered glass where you waited
For the blue… and found the grey.
You looked back but didn’t see me standing by the clearing
Where the old tree once stood a long time ago.
It had no name… like me and you.
But you’re still trying to lose yours.
Grey is beautiful, too, if you turn your eyes from the dazzle of colour.
That’s where I lost myself because I didn’t understand.

weird.

…and then I was tagged.

Which means:

1) write down 6 weirdo factors about meself.
2) Tag 6 more people and thus keep the chain going!

What fun!

Here goes:

1) I think too much. Which isn’t always a good thing. The “look before you leap” sort of
thing. Like the bananas on the table. Well, not quite all that much but somewhat.
Someone asks me a very simple question. “Where do you live?” Instead of answering
It straight out or even speaking my thoughts aloud I start a chain of reasoning.
The question is where I live.
If I am to frame my answer such that he understands, I’ll have to know how much he
knows about the place I live.
He will obviously know about so and so place. So I will tell him about that.
On second thoughts, he might not… but he’ll know about such and such place.
So that’s what I’ll answer.
And because I’m not a computer I need some time to reason all this out. So I buy time
by repeating the question as if I haven’t heard.
Its worse when it’s a question in a
geography exam. Reading topography maps. I always end up thinking too much. A
simple question like the slope of the land. There’s a single hill in the south and the rest
of the southern part of the map is flat…lower than the north. So I write that. But the
correct answer would be the simple one. Slopes from south to north.

2)I write my personal diary in such a way that other people will understand what I’m
talking about.

3)I live to show off. Most of the time. That is, like everybody else I’ve got this horde of
different personalities inside me, each for a different person or a different mood. The most prominent among them likes to show off a lot… she’s the one who lives to show off. So I live to show off. Most of the time. But I also show off that I don’t actually show off so no one understands… if you understand what I mean. Or maybe I just think I like to show off. See, I’m doing it again.

4)I sound crazy and… stupid when I’m in the mood and perfectly irritatingly practical
when I’m not.
I’m in the mood now, as you can probably make out. And I’m weird in a very
methodical way.

5)I live in fantasy fiction. Narnia, Madeline L’engle, Peter Pan, Lord of the Rings… the
finding a new world kind. Do you know that feeling you get when you dream of flying?
I get that when I read these. Is that weird? Or just plain romantic?

6)I am a “dangerous substance for glass objects”. In the last three weeks I broke:

a) A bottle
b) Two glasses
c) A bowl filled with curd
d) The glass door of a bookcase.
e) A glass photoframe.
f) A bangle.

6 isn’t a very big number…. I think I could probably go on forever. People like thinking they’re weird.

Here’s my list of the six people I’m tagging:

1) googly (they don’t come any weirder than that)
2) rupsha
3) jahnavi
4) apurva
5) priyasha
6) snigdha (even though she has only one post in her blog… may this be a reason to post another)

Weird is only a word. And all words are relative. I think you’ll find that one out after you go through their^^ posts.

death of a world

Sitting against the dried hard bark of the banyan… the leaves were still green then. And the stiff stillness of midday that coloured the white lilies dull red in our eyes because we were hot from running and we would have run more if we could.
“Imagine…” And that’s how it started. You told me to write them down. My fantasies of colour and emotion that I couldn’t quite make you understand.
So I did. But I wanted more. And my fantasy grew from two pages to ten… the nouns became larger and the adjectives increased… but I couldn’t stop because I had a book to fill.
And the story became a novel.
And I’d created a world. A child’s world… the handwriting loops of indecisive decoration and the characters those well-rounded figures from a child’s bedside story – the fat bald man, the pigtailed little girl in candyfloss pink and the dog who seemed to understand everything you said.
And the days were too short and the plot so detailed…. then once, or twice, the sequence led around a fairy garden only to double back and loose itself in a fisherman’s knot that wouldn’t let go. And neither would I.
Did I tire of those knots? I didn’t let it show. Instead of erasing the entire path I’d ease them out, little by little, leaving behind a trail of growing complications that I’d take in my stride.
And my handwriting became formed and my sentences shorter and more intelligible and my ideas more ambitious than ever before.
And eventually, like a musician with a new instrument, I let go of the last….
I forgot my world… and started another. And another. Till I couldn’t keep track of them all.
And you asked me why I didn’t show you what I’d written of the old story any more and I said because I can’t.
You told me once to put down the world I’d created. That’s what I like doing. Putting down my worlds… so that instead of being forgotten and lost in some unused corner of my memories that has clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visit it anymore, they would be forgotten and lost – old diaries scribbled over in an unsure hesitant handwriting – in some unused corner of my cupboards that would be clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visited it anymore.
Because that’s what I do. Create worlds. Story? I never bargained for a story. Neither did you.
But at some point of my own story I tired of the candyfloss and the red bulging eyes… the bold staccato of reds, yellows, blues and greens and yearned for cyclamen, hazel, azure and emerald. Because at some point that’s what everyone does.
So I gave up the red world and the yellow world and the pigtailed girl in candyfloss pink stood behind a cast iron boundary fence and sulked at me as I walked away…towards more knots.
And my world died. Because I didn’t want it anymore.
And a little girl sitting under a banyan, looking happily up at you, saying, “imagine a blue world…” was lost to the storms of complexities.