Story That Never Begin..
A broken chair, a friend and an unlighted cigarette
Somewhere away I stared far in the distance
Through the rain and billowing winds
I saw a lot in life as it was blown away with the smoke.
Tonight clouds have encompassed again this desert town
And the dunes wait for the heavens to finally pour
But I can’t wait for these sand storms to stop now
For tonight is the night when I have finally found my home
A lonely lantern, a solemn heart and a dream of a lifetime
Somewhere hidden in these skies is a place
Where they say all your dreams come true
And I found that place finally when I fell in love with you
The Table Art
“Impossible is possible”, this was the line scribbled alongside a quirky remark about life and girlfriends and how they both sucked and an almost defaced, probably by a jealous lover “Kiran loves Shobhana”, there were several others as well love notes, phone numbers and lots of names, all scribbled across the desk I was sitting. The drudgery of endless classes and lectures could transform a simple student into an artist, I wondered as I thought about the school days when almost each of us wrote our names as well as the name of the girl we had a crush on, all inside a tinny weenie heart across each and every desk in the class, perhaps we thought scribbling or engraving our name across the desk would reserve for us a place somewhere in the memories of people, it was like immortality was just a stroke of scissor away. I as a matter of fact never got to do that because I always had a strong predilection towards falling in love with the girl sitting next to me and writing her name alongside mine, much more than tacky felt dangerous because what if the girl read it and complaint to the teacher. So more often than all through the childhood and as well as a greater part of adulthood, my love went unrequited more so because of my propensity of losing the people whom I loved the most in life and partly because I feel love is about happiness and keeping your beloved happy and I think people are happy without me being a part of their lives. Our class room desk weren’t the only place where this war for immortality was being fought because all we needed was a pen or a compass and then almost every empty wall felt like an empty canvas waiting for our master touch, so even the walls of our school toilet were filled with endless testaments about an undying love to an extent that my school people have to tile the restroom walls ceiling to floor but who so ever came up with that idea perhaps has never heard of a thing known as permanent marker and pretty soon the walls were once again painted in black, red and green albeit this time it was the name of our principle along with vituperations in seven different languages that was scribbled to the depths of infamy.
When I was a kid I remember engraving, much to the dismay of my mother for I used her favorite scissors, the names of all my friends along the bark of our garden tree, the names are still there but that insouciance is now long gone leaving behind just a remembrance etched somewhere along the bends and corner of our minds. One place that I tried but could never leave my mark was the Delhi metro, compass, coins, scissors, nails or keys all redundant against god knows what resistant paint, though that didn’t stop us from using markers and crayons but the cleaning staff was so damn efficient that not even a single mark survived of our delinquencies but this summer while commuting I found the spot where my girlfriend once scribbled our names in the space between the backrest of the seat and the compartment walls. The heart and the name was all effaced like the last remnant of our relationship and as I ran my hand across the emptiness where once her name had been, I wished for a worm hole to suck and take me to the time when we sitting huddled together have tried to immortalize our love, one thing for sure that permanent marker was a damn good one for its ink after all this year’s refuses to fade at least from the tomb stone of my heart, something’s you just can’t leave behind especially the engravings and scribbling along our palms and forehead, itched by the treacherous hands of fate.
StoryTeller: Tale of 2 Stairs and a Tree
The Two Stairs and the Tree
Some stories are just too strange, especially the one’s which are derived from life but could this life be called a story? Perhaps, for like stories it has a beginning and an end but sometimes for some of us life is nothing but an endless concoction of beginnings and endings, we move on from one story to another, from one life to another life. In this moving on and in this flux some of us do find a perfect story that we could hold close to our heart and this is perhaps the difference between life and stories, stories end but life goes on.
I don’t know when it actually happened for some happenings, unlike love stories which have a particular start date, are spread over several instances of time. Well let’s say it happened over several nights and I don’t know what night has to do with relationships but yeah this one blossomed over several of them. There isn’t any love if your hoping for, at least not the kind which most of us seek in life but yeah there are tears and lots of them, a heartbreak which ironically brought them closer, a death which both of them survived, several villains though they were some poor unsuspecting blabber mouthed people who couldn’t have possibly known about the part which they played and yes, last but not the least, two stairs and the tree. Now you would ask me what a tree and two stairs has to do with everything, well nothing actually but then I am the one telling the story and I happen to be in love with those two stairs and that tree.
I am a lousy storyteller as you may get to know for I don’t care much for facts but rather I care for things which I feel and really I am not here writing a year book of some kind, I am here to tell a story. There isn’t much of a story actually, just a collection of several, unostentatious, hardly remarkable coincidences but then some coincidences are meant to be, probably because sometimes coincidences are tied together by an almost diaphanous string called destiny.
Like I said there isn’t much of a story but then I have to begin somewhere and this beginning is what I am afraid of for some stories do not start at the beginning and neither did this one. Did it actually have a beginning I often think and sometimes it’s only after thousands of miles that you discover the people whom you have been walking with. But nevertheless for the sake of story or rather the sake of simplicity let’s take this discovery to be a beginning of some sorts. People meet, they say hello, they meet again, say hi, talk for some time and then they disappear only to meet at some inconsequential juncture in your life and only to repeat the above given sequence. In this story it wasn’t like that, they met but never met, never said hi or hello or how do you do and all this would have been fine had they not known each other, they as a matter of fact knew each other from the time when both of them were pimply and zit ridden teenagers though her pimply phase happen to start much later in life.
Well enough about the beginning, let us just say it begin just like that and just like that they came closer and just like that all those tears, villains, heartbreak and everything else somehow fitted itself in between and just like I said I am a lousy storyteller, I don’t care for facts and really the facts are known to the two people whom the story is about. What I am here to tell you is that there are still something’s in this world which are beyond the conventional definitions, things which go beyond conventionality, things which don’t make sense but still are true for they could make you cry.
It has been a story less story so far and really I have no story as such to tell apart from the story of two stairs and a tree. Let’s say tree is some tree whose big overgrowing branches form a kind of canopy over those two desolate and lonely two stairs and ironically enough neither the tree nor those two stairs would be complete without each other. It’s on these stairs, right underneath this tree both of them sat one day and talked about every god damn movie that has ever been made and in those instants when their eyes never met both of them were lost in a world of their own or probably this world dissolved into a void. This how it all begun, not the story of two friends who found each other but rather the story of two stairs and a tree and in this story at least one of them would be incomplete without the other and it’s in the distance between those two stairs and the tree where all their expectations, aspirations, arguments and promises will thrive. At some point of time both of them must have gotten up to walk along their respective paths, probably they met again and probably things were just as easy as the last time but still one or the other of them always tried to recreate the magic which once they both have felt. Where they able to get where they wanted to, would they as people say be friends forever, is it their destiny to be just friends or does the future holds something more for them? Probably time itself will answer these questions but one thing for sure; you don’t get to fall in love, at least with your own character especially when you are the StoryTeller.
Tears of Happiness and of Pain
There is something about pain which make us seem insignificant, almost pale and diaphanous in comparison because there exists just so much of it in this world, at each and every step, nook and corner that whatever we are going through no matter how much emasculating it may be still doesn’t even come close to the real thing. There are people living through this pain, deprivation and poverty, people who can’t even hope leave alone cry for things which we want but these people are also the people whom I think to be the happiest because these people have a hope that someday things would once again get better, their belief in goodness is still intact and this belief is what keeps them going. Pain, if you ask me is the biggest of all levelers, it just brings about a relative simplicity to our lives, it brings about a kind of humbling feeling which makes you live for what you have even though what you have are just vestiges or excerpts of what you want. It’s when you see around yourself and allow yourself to feel something which people around you are going through, you just can’t help but cry, cry at your insignificance, at your own ineptitude in making something out of your own life. It’s always easy to cry for our pain but we have to teach ourselves to feel the pain that someone else might be feeling and believe me it’s not that tough to cry for someone else because pain is universal and all of our tears are related at some level. It’s not just about tears but the way you relate, the way allow yourself to feel and at first nothing of it will make sense more so because we as a generation have been taught to hold everything inside. The day you learn how to cry for someone else’s pain is the day when you could be truly happy because nothing could bring about more sanguinity in your life then the realization that there is still something inside of you that isn’t dead. I remember seeing my grandmother cry whenever I would return from college and also whenever I would leave, to me her tears appeared all the same but now when she has gone somewhere far and away from me, I realized all the prayers she would have said just so that she could once again see me walk back through those gates. In that instant I realized about those tears which so willfully flowed streaking her cheeks, those were the tears which flow when all the promises that you have made yourself are fulfilled. I remember the night when my friend told me about her boyfriend who cheated on her, that was the night when I first truly cried for someone else probably because the fact that someone could even think of scattering a heart as beautiful as hers was something I didn’t know how to react to. Life teaches us in retrospection and when you look back you realize there is just so much that you should have felt but never did and when you think of it you just can’t help but cry. Now when I look back, a lot of things, a lot of tearful moments make sense to me, like when my mom was pregnant with my sister, I remember placing my hand on her tummy and feel as my sister would kick and I remember clearly my mother cried at that instant and I thought it was probably because of the pain but now I know it was the joy of bringing a new life in this world was what she cried for. I don’t know what it is with me and kids but whenever I see kids I just am filled with an overwhelming sense of well being and I feel as if all is well with this world and when one of them holds my hand I don’t know why but I feel proud of offering them the sanctity which they need. Life is about giving and I don’t see why we can’t cry for someone else and believe me nothing will bring you greater joy then the fact that you have related with someone who was in pain. Pain and ecstasy are one and the same, just identifying with one brings you closer to the other. I read in a book that these tears are symbolic of our humanity; the civilization which cannot cry for itself is the civilization which invariably dies, there is nothing wrong with crying for it is one of the first things which we do when we are born and probably it’s one of the endless ways that makes us feel alive.
Story of the night
The story of my life lies forsaken
Crumbled and strewn like bed sheets along the floor
As the light of the fading sun filters through the windows
I stare and hope for you to walk back through that open door.
A thousand nights when we lay on that bed
Dreaming of things and searching for words but holding back
For something’s sound better if left unsaid
Moments flew away and with each of our breathe
We kept on plummeting through this shallow abyss.
We held each other till there was no time
And when the morning sun filled the room with light
You walked away like the darkness from a fading night
Leaving nothing but your absence as the only evidence of our crime.
All those dreams which have felt so true
Broke off like waves as they hit the shore
And I lay there trying to recollect all that you left behind
Like the bed sheet crumbled and strewn across the floor.
Lost Without You
It was like any other day
When I happen to throw it all away
Now I search for it along every road
But without love this life seems so cold
What I gave up, I can never know
For death seems like life without a soul
But if I could go back and make things right
And put into words all that’s hidden inside
Perhaps then both of us can move on with our respective lives
For we could no longer walk together along these roads
And without each other it’s our destiny, to be lost
Cemetery of Broken Hearts
Each of these wounds tell a different story
Of long lost love and relationship
Buried somewhere along my heart’s cemetery
Someday somewhere amidst all these graves
It will find its resting place
With an epitaph carved
By the very hands which killed this heart.
Sometimes when I sit alone
Staring at all these tombstones
With thousand knives piercing my soul
This is when I look up and cry
Hoping for the tears to heal
The bruises of my battered life
With each step that I take
A part of me dies a silent death
The people whom I left behind
Like the scraps of this broken heart
Lost somewhere in the sands of time
Some pieces which I may never find.
if it rains
If it rains
Clouds would not be the one to bleed alone tonight
You have always loved the rain
I remember the way you used to jump in puddles and splash water
Rain always lend your eyes a glint of mischief
Rain made you wild
I remember the moments when we walked through the rain
Holding each other’s hand
You always loved the rain and I loved you
I remember the last time when we met
It was raining that day
I walked four blocks in the rain to get you the carnations that you loved
I saw you standing, all drenched up
There was rain in your hairs and you looked sad
There was no mischief in your eyes and the water on your cheeks wasn’t raindrops
It was tears
I looked at you and you outstretched your palm to hand me back the ring I have given you
I don’t remember what you said nor do I remember the reasons that you gave me
But I do remember the carnations
As they changed their color to muddy brown from white lying there in the puddle
And I remember watching you go as your silhouette faded with the rain
I sat there for a long time trying to recollect whatever there was to
And that day it was not the clouds that only wept
It was me who cried with them.
It hasn’t rained since then but the clouds have returned
And I sit here watching them unroll
Waiting for the rain to come down and wash away my tears.
