goldfluke

nineteen

2008-08-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

I come in myriad ways, seen and unseen, happy and sad, light and dark, expected and by surprise and knock at your conscience, giving a peek of pleasures untold and happiness waiting to be experienced.

Holding in my hand greener grass, the potential of a better trip, waiting for your mind to get fucked… for you to become weak and not want to conform, for your better judgment and sanity to give way… for you to want to be swept away by me and want nothing else but to cross over and embrace me.

Fight as much as you will, you cant deny that without me your life would be placid vanilla, flat, and almost unreal. Try and avoid me as much as you want to, look away if you can, pretend I am not here, wait for me to fade away, disappear, become naught…

You will still need the me-inspired racing heart to ensure that systems are going well, to feel hope, to feel alive.

;-)

eighteen

2007-05-30T07:04:00.002-07:00

you try to make me feel inadequate, small, like a joke. a slave to your own insecurities you try and make me suffer. you thwart my efforts at peace and reconciliation by showing off your power. curiously i have never challenged your power: respecting you, however, is something i have not been able to do. having got power, you can’t seem to understand that respect does not necessarily travel with it. which is why i pity you: and that is an emotion you have earned for yourself effortlessly. your lack of self belief, rather your misguided self belief is the reason why i feel reluctant to believe in you, why you have to live with the burden of proving yourself continually time and time again. saddled with your own ego and myopic vision you are unable to see the world as it is. the wall you have around you blocks your vision and your lack of understanding of people clouds your judgment. i want to hate you but i won’t allow you the pleasure: i will not sink to your level. you are not worth it. never were, never will be.

seventeen

2007-05-30T07:04:00.001-07:00

she sat there, watching her cousins trading stories, discussing their lives and wondered in her head, what she would have to say about her life which was mostly lived in her imagination with a few bites of reality: how would she explain the disinclination to engage, the reluctance to partake of the real?

suddenly through the reverie, she heard someone actually ask about her… she recoiled physically, looking blankly at the 4 peering faces, the weight of expectation sitting heavy on her puny frame. dumbstruck at the limelight, the balmy afternoon broken by the freeze enveloping her spine, silence choking her ability to think: no morsel came to hand; she had no fodder to chuck at them.

she had not yet learnt to buy time by repeating the question or how to deflect attention or to crack a wise one and ease the tension: so she sat there without hope of ever answering back, waiting for the pain of alienation to ebb, to let someone take the gauntlet offered to her. nothing happened, no one moved, till the cousin who had posed the question, turned away and declared her a wallflower.
thus, the damage was done: not having enough strength or wisdom to know otherwise, that is what she started believing of herself.

SIXTEEN

2007-01-09T23:39:00.000-08:00

To bring at-rest parts of my mind alive, to share, to build on fears, on hopes, to capture what others don’t see, to record the subtle, to let strangers into my mind, my life, my vision, to scare the ego by putting my creation up for perusal, criticism and judgment. To go around in circles, to weave patterns, to jump out of boxes, to reinvent wheels, to indulge myself, to pleasure others, to hurt, to ease pain, to de-clutter my mind, to distract it, to mess the reader's mind. For the present, for the future, of the past, to leave prints in heads when I am gone, to see eyes connect, for reactions, for inspiration. When I am feeling claustrophobic, when I want to be a rock, when I want to reach out and say hi!, to bond to give, to live.

I write.

2006-12-09T05:24:00.000-08:00

FIFTEEN

removed from familiar time and space, no one and nothing can physically reach us here: we have one single commitment; a simplicity, a one-ness unparalleled in modern life. that we are, milling amongst a bunch of strangers only helps in this sense of focus. unencumbered units, we sit, holding newspaper veils, curtained from the rest of the world. we wait, for the aero plane, the boarding, the safety announcements, the eye candy hostess, the departure, breakfast and our eventual destination: a string of seamless anticipation in transit accompanied with a sense of sadness, of loneliness: no one belongs or lays any claim, here we are the only person who can fulfill our need for acceptance… and so we await escape, remaining blanked and untouched.

2006-12-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

FOURTEEN
Expression: somewhere all relationships boil down to that. In my brief stay around here, watching people and how associations develop and disintegrate that seems to be the principle pivot, which makes or breaks things. That is what brings people, feelings and beliefs alive. Irrespective of lack of geographical proximity or 24x7 togetherness, the ability to communicate what you feel about yourself, about the other person and about the relationship you share is where it all is at.

The more successful relationships (and we are not talking only in the ambit of man and woman here) I see around me the more I realize that the channels of honest and meaningful expression seem to be the fire around which the richness of companionship is fostered.

Verbal or otherwise, in the absence of honest and consistent expression, distance and misunderstandings are inevitable. Men, more often than not, use the excuse of once stating their feelings and assuming the rest will be taken care of. The excuse is ‘Hey! Do I have to keep telling you? You know how I feel!!!’ Of course, these are the same men who have thereafter been victims of not understanding what their partners want, what they want in turn and how come the other guy his partner hangs out with knows so much about her and he so little.

Let us accept we are in a world, which is short of supply on people who express how they feel. Though tagged a feminine quality (by men, who else) it is one of the fundamental precepts of a strong and healthy relationship. Think about it, the child (who is said to be the purest form of the being) expresses himself at every point: the channels of communication are always on open-mode. To my mind, what men don’t understand (and that is why women are far better at handling relationships) is that if you don’t express how you feel, your feelings don’t matter beyond a point.

But weren’t there successful marriages before us when expression was more a social construct or around transactions. How did those last? The answer perhaps lies in the opening sentence of this paragraph, in the words ‘before us’. When the world has moved on, the nature of the male and the female has moved on, when the roles are blurring when the grey is the predominant color, when temptation waits in every text message, how will the mores of the past see us through?

2006-12-04T06:49:00.000-08:00

THIRTEEN

Clicking
through your pictures

Zooming
in and out

Talking
to me and myself

Recollecting
rides to and fro

Enveloping
you in warmth

Coming
home to see you waiting

Riding
the cab when you said yes

Drinking
our first drink together

Hearing
airplanes full of your stories

Competing
to spill less sandwich

Receiving
secret calls from foreign lands

Watching
you laze in your orange tee

Tripping
on you and I

2006-11-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

TWELEVE

strangers transcribing thoughts, virtual friends, text buddies, familiar voices, where are you?

on an aeroplane, mohijto meets old monk at the park, warning before kissing you, where are you?

heady romance, noxious anticipation, furious need, where are you?

saturday in your room, lazy conversation, hungry looks, yum lunch, where are you?

pent passion versus innocuous nap: no combat, sweaty brows, perfect union, where are you?

hypothetical situations, spiraling everywhere, belly laughs, your polite best friend, where are you?

walking in the drizzle, the future, the past, snaps, two soft toys, where are you?

arms entwined, eyes two inches apart, seeking less distance, where are you?

brave masks, deep sighs, held back feelings, come back soon, where are you?

2006-11-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

ELEVEN
It started with u expressing resentment about me not giving you enough time, about my life being too busy with my own stuff. Went onto my every other reaction being rude and abrasive. Led up to u stopping to look at your actions and focusing on the negatives of mine. Got compounded when u started leaving the kitchen in an oblivious mess even if all u wanted was to drum up concoctions to preserve your youth. And then the TV went away from me. The living room followed to become an extension of your wardrobe. The only place I could stay in the house and not engage with you ended up being the comp. Seeking refuge in it, I try to protect my privacy by sharing my life with strangers…

2006-10-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

TEN

His need to break the wall and reach the other side overwhelms him and like an obstinate 3 year old he starts banging his head against it. Slowly at first, hoping gentle persuasion will cause it to collapse. Then a little harder: a brain jarring thump-thump. This is about the time when the pain kicks in. His high threshold for pain helps him continue undeterred. Hit by harder hit, immovable object meets flesh and bone. He hears garbled voices asking him to look away, to get over the fascination, to enjoy where he is at: radio static, which in no way can compete with the, by now, thumping break beat. With the aural having resigned, covered by the self’s own blood, vision too leaves. Now he can’t hear or see where he is, just feel the wall against what’s left of his forehead. Somewhere around now is when he starts losing his sense of place, followed rapidly by reason and his whole life centers on the banging of the head against the wall: the before, the after don’t matter anymore, he stops looking or thinking or caring for anything else. 3 words consume him: ‘break the wall’. The blackness moves from the eyes to the rest of his head and steadily takes over the being. At last everything is the same, this side or that doesn’t matter: Peace out. That is, till he gets a glimpse of hope in another wall...

2006-10-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

NINE

He didn’t want to go to the conference. The heavy laptop helping the weighed down-ness, he dragged his feet through the airport. All around him were biz travelers: heading home: their ‘lappies’ in tow, in their not-so-crisp-anymore biz apparel and their uncomfortable-but-black-as-night biz shoes, standing in one queue after another, waiting to get aboard and eat their pre-cooked-we-are-here-to-keep-you-shut food.

He didn’t want to be part of any of that. He wanted to be home, in front of the TV, flipping mindless channels, chomping on calorie-bursting burgers, soaked-in-fatty-oil fries, washing them down with a pesticide-laden fizzy drink and top the abuse with some nicotine sticks.

Instead cramped into 27F he worried about the presentation he was supposed to make to the firangs at the conference: and wished he had made the slides more succinct and easy on the eye… but too late now: both time and his interest were in huge short supply.

They say it is all in the mind: did that mean that if he fooled his mind enough, he would start liking the idea of the conference? Calvin did that all the time. What Bill Waterson can preach, I can practise, he thought: What if it wasn’t a boring advertising tool / process learning exercise? What if he were the keynote speaker at the president of the universe convention? What if he was the convener of the hippie-rebirth meet? What if this was the convocation where the women of the universe finally crowned him their leader?

Come to think about, this could work. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Yes! Delusion when carefully handled could abet sanity!!!

*-)

2006-10-06T21:37:00.000-07:00

EIGHT
Tanzania, to me, represents the foundation of my story. And for a large part of my life it has been the past AND the possible future.

A symbol of my desire to return to unencumbered-ness: a cocoon which nostalgia has turned into a soft, mild space of perfect ease: the place where I can get off the racetrack, which offers escape, anonymity, another begining.

I had rationalized all of this some years ago: mount Kilimanjaro was the destination: a 12 day trek through all the climatic conditions that existed on earth: Amazonia like heat soaked jungles to the snow covered crater. And then I had bunged in the cities I had grown up in as icing: reversing the priorities had made it easier for the adult mind to accept the possibility of working at going back.

But that was then, today I have come to believe that I can never go back, what I want to return to is in my mind: in reality it’s a different place and if I want to, I have to learn once again to belong in it: cause nothing remains the same, within me or without me. Its almost like the fear of spoiling the picture perfect past has made Tanzania fade out of my mind map. So much so that I have given up on planning for it: believed in the futility, the vulnerability of dreaming, preferring the numbness of no-anticipation to the pain of disappointment.

Tanzania remains with me, but only in conversations, as and when I find someone who is curious enough to ask about my ‘golden years’. A backdrop for my stories of brushes with death, relegated to an interest-fueling context.

And true to all non-nurtured dreams, going back to Tanzania has withered away; the harsh rays of reality has dried it up and killed the hope that came with it.

2006-10-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

SEVEN
He liked being alone.

He had outgrown the need and desire for company. A detachment that had served him well: no obligations, no emotional chains, no debts to repay or loans to incur.

And yet this morning was different: he had woken up with an acute need for company. To be in touch, with people who would want to be with him, people he would want to be with. This was not an alien feeling; one he had dealt with in the past and had gotten over. Then, where in the name of god was this vacuum from?

He flipped open the phone, wondering whom to call, what to do with that somebody, then stopped: coz there was nobody to be with, let alone do something with. By design he had systematically deleted all variable support systems. People, who were on their own trajectories, living lives as far and away from his as he was from theirs, filled the phone book.

“The feeling will pass”, he reassured himself, all he had to do was stare it out, re-deal with it, like the initial months after.

He walked into the living room and there she was: standing with one hand on her waist, the smile reaching her eyes, her hand tucking her flick behind her ear. Infected, he smiled too, his eyes wandered over her, noticed her airline tag attached bags lying near the door, her ever-present cell phone resting on the dining tale, her sandals resting next to his. A thousand thoughts bullet-trained through his mind, she caught the look, “Shhh…, come here, baby”.

They hugged, not too hard, he always thought of her to be fragile; always worried he might hurt her. She lit a cigarette and sat down, within arms distance, like always. She talked and he stared: the comfortable rhythm they had loved so much in the past, seemed as much at home in the present. The conversation gurgled about tours, people he didn’t know, hotel rooms, strange cities, friends and strangers, the room filled itself with warmth, laughter, words, kisses and touch.

And then the bell rang, he got up to answer the door, knowing when he would return she wouldn’t be there: the mind construct would expire; the memory bubble would burst.

But that was all right: the parchedness had gone, the desire had ebbed, the weakness had turned, just like she had promised: “Death wont’ part us, only lack of love will”.

He liked being alone.

2006-09-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

SIX
How could it take care of itself? Helpless, dependent, in need of nurturance, emotional unconditionality. How would it know anything that its creators didn’t?

2006-09-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

FIVE
Like four islands in an archipelago we sat silently around the table. All absorbed in our respective books: a pop-psycho book, a classic, a feminist propaganda and a Fredrick Forsyth bringing up the rear.

The only audio provided by the sizzle of a steak, the periodic flipping of a page, the muttering of other diners in tables across the glass divider and a clatter friendly waiter who seemed obsessive about removing and putting back the perfectly arranged cutlery at the empty tables around us.

Almost by choreography we were taking turns at raising our heads to see each other only to return to our parallel existences: waiting in a liminal space, refusing to bond, showing forced socialization the middle finger.

Actually not true, I wanted to interact, indulge in the joy of conversation: to get out of Canterbury Tales and into the here and now, discuss something of common interest. But with no support from the other three, I resigned to the ice remaining unbroken, dismissed my urge to communicate.

We had worked together for 7 hours that day. Our first engagement ever and there was no guarantee that more would happen. Maybe that was the issue: the lack of foreseeable returns: if I make the effort, what will I get in turn? And since no one was inclined to sell or buy, trading was mutually closed for the day.

:)

2006-09-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

FOUR

Its something I have never felt before. A space I have never been in: a combination of hostility and love, attachment and detachment, proximity and distance, familiarity and newness. Its something I have never known to want. And having never expected it, straight into experiencing it was awesome. Don’t know where this ride is headed, but do know that I want to be on it.

2006-09-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

THREE
Maybe I don’t really have much to say: nothing of amazing interest, great contradiction, mind opening relevance. Maybe I was designated audience. Maybe this is the chosen path for me. And those who say I talk too much, maybe they don’t want much to listen anyway.

Like shriveled skin, preferring to retreat than advance, if you don’t seek, I won't tell. You have to buy the ticket to watch the show.

2006-09-16T23:49:00.000-07:00

TWO
He didn’t like meeting people eye to eye. He was tired of creating acquaintances, friends and non-strangers all the time. And eye connect, he had learnt, was always the first step towards signaling approachability. And once two people took that step towards each other the only way out was rudeness, amputation, look away, see through: chose your term, there is no decent way. So he had decided not to begin the process for the fear that he would need to opt out of it.

This attitude naturally led to a dramatic reduction in the number of his social encounters. Decreasing the chance of him cohabiting new stories. So he increasingly relied on the life before for characters, for drama, for contradictions, for his livelihood.

2006-09-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

ONE
Both got up to walk in and place their orders. She wonders if she should leave her bag behind, looks at the person at the other table. A bald guy, scowling at every one around him, hunched up: a wall, a two way mirror: he saw you but you saw nothing of him… she decided to carry the bag with her.

Little realizing that a few mins ago, she was similarly scrutinized by the same scowler and lost the same benefit of doubt.