Of love,vodka and "shesher kobita"

I am thankful that my weekends have finally got blurry and noisy thanks to those zillion shots of vodka and midnight phone calls that seem to last effortlessly for hours.Also i am finally discovering Kolkata through my innumerable trips in the crowded city buses and the metro.It's not realy half as bad.
And it's great to be in love again...........ya i know I've said that so many times that it's become an inside joke that my friends laugh at but what the heck!!!

Three more things i'm realy looking forward to:

• the Pink Floyd tribute at Someplace Else 10th jan
• german classes at Max Mueller Bhavan from 17th jan
• the Kolkata Book Fair after a long six years

Books that i read recently were few but long due,had to catch up with a little bit of culture once i'm in the city.Shesher Kobita by Tagore and Na-hanyate(La Nuit,French; Bengal Nights, English) by Maitreyi devi.

Initial in the dust........

By some predetermined chance
petal by newer petal
inwards and outwards unfold my incandescent life in space;
When you look at a petal closely for the first time,
it grows transparent:you look through it into the abyss
the way a rose-leaf thins out to a bloodless parchment..........
Or a flame splits up an oil-wick into separate stamens of orange against night's purple.

Everywhere i may go yet,you
snake around my body;out and in......
Forked memory darting here and there
withdrawn into some hidden lipless kiss.........
I used as well to dance,before
your absence turned the days
into acres of ice and created deserts out of my long nights.

Each harsh tropical day
the shadow of incommunicable memory
slants across the canvas of the present hour:
All that is not you
is so full of you............

Nuance
of your initial glances off the moonscape;
wake me with the warmth of jubilant green dances,
exhilarating ,melting..........
Forgotten are those nights on your roof,
They have all pushed me forward and i have numbly moved on.

Yesterday no more..........

I finally came back to Kolkata, spent the first two weeks lazing around at home and doing my long overdue heap of good deeds like helping my kid sister with her schoolwork or helping mom around the kitchen a little bit. Then came the PG hunting, I had no idea that finding a decent PG accommodation in Salt lake would be so hectic and confusing. Anyway I finally got a good one and shifted last Sunday much to my parents’ relief (atleast it seemed so!!).

My good deeds also included my customary visit to my alma-mater to meet my old teachers. Visiting school this time was a revelation of sorts. It made me realise the fantastic world we once existed in and how we succumbed to its pseudo comfort. Those blurred nostalgic moments come flashing by everytime raw ruthless competition bangs straight on my face. The world I live in now is rudely and curtly “real”. Even now there’s a little girl somewhere inside who pops her head from nowhere and leaves me in the labyrinth of bittersweet memories.

College however taught me the lessons of a lifetime. Here memories come with cold expiry dates. I was always among the top five so no one dared to sneer at me because they needed my help. No one praised me either. My voice wasn’t mellifluous, dance never captured my toes and sports was just not for me. I was yet another obscure face in the sea of the faceless.

With just six months left for masters to get over I now know that life will never be a cakewalk anymore. It taught me to trust my enemies, they don’t flatter me. It revealed that there are more frustrations than excitements in life for people like us who are not born with a silver spoon, that success is perched above a thousand rickety stairs of failure. It made the stubborn me realise that I had 40 classmates and hardly one true friend. And then when those stipulated 5 years went by it declared it didn’t need me anymore and I subtly conveyed that I didn’t need it either.

Lastly it shouted shamelessly at me, you live one day and survive everyday.

Want

Want a cold cloudy day so that i can oversleep
Want to catch the bus on time
Want to be with family
Want to stop bothering about the future
Want to tell a friend how much he means to me
Want to have a good cry and not feel guilty about it later
Want to stop sulking over past relationships
Want loud noisy blurry weekends
Want to be with someone who cares
Want to sit on the roof with my 3rd bottle of vodka and fight with the stars
Want to reach out to a special someone i've been ignoring
Want to be loved.

Disillusionment

Palms dipped in pails,
Brimming with synthetic liquid;
Spattered fingerprints on the bleak facades,
Like cement fragments broken into rubble.


A grey cat sits by the window pane
Licking the bewildering dust;
The mocking crow calls incessantly
Bellowing the stagnant air,
As it paddles into motion.


The clock strikes hours in advance.
A misty vision is mitigated,
As obtrusive flashes of red-light,
Capers the floor of sight;
To ballet over the cross-section of time.