Contingent Friendships - 1

These days when my car rolls up at the traffic crossing, the beggar turns and walks to the row of vehicles on my left. If after the detour the lights still haven't changed, he approaches me, looking quizzical. Just to say hello and tip his hat at me. He doesn't ask for money anymore. If I take out a coin from my wallet, that's fine, else he walks on to the car behind mine.

Ever since I'd started a chatty conversation with him more than a month back, he avoids me. And I avoid him, keeping my eyes fixed on the book in my lap till he is actually near my window. As though we know something shameful about each other.

A Love Affair with Words

Old identities die hard. Stubborn, outdated bits of you refuse to let the new bits feel at home. You have to take a deep breath and give the latter an unfaltering welcome: "Welcome, New Me! I hope we get along well."

When you introduce yourself to someone, you might say, "I'm working with a human rights organization," and leave it at that, and then feel awful for finking out on the new you.

You might say, "Well, I'm currently working for a human rights organization," and hope your audience is discerning enough to catch the delicate emphasis, that hint of hesitation, in your sentence. You'd still feel more or less like a fink.

Or you might take the deep breath. Will this sound silly? What if they ask what I've *published*? What if this is all a big mistake? Breathe.

"So, what do you do, Monica?"

"I'm a writer." There. An apologetic grin quick to follow, but I said it, I named me. I am, I am, this is who I am.

Congratulate me, mon amis. June onwards I'll be employed part time, and can spend more time writing and doing crazy things with my life.

Queer Haikus

Faggot Haiku

Faggots reach into
their own asses we are not
afraid of our shit


Haiku on bleeding nine days out of every month

It's time to invent
machines to suck the blood out
and make me come too!


Haiku on being the only lesbian from Jamaica

Wonder whose pussy
I was eatin' when I had
a P.O. box there?


by Staceyann Chin

Irish-name, or, I succumb

Your Irish Name Is...

Gemma Guinness

What's your Irish Name?

Dream fragment

A warning is issued about a sea monster. People run in panic. I see a giant trapezoidal wave crashing down on a ship, and think: is the monster screened by the wave?

At India Gate

I finished the bhel puri.

A scream fizzed in my throat, ran through the length and breadth of my mouth, till I thought I’d have to let it out. Happily, there were many distractions around: the lights rippling in the lake, the merry boats, the people, the carefully dreamy air out of a film set.

Three minutes later I realized the sting had silently rolled off my tongue.

Single, or How often are resolutions fashioned

Last night of being single. The lover's away in the far south and this feeling of expansion (all this space, mine alone!), this time that's mine to plan or rest or expend as I will, is delightful in its rarity. Any lessons here? Nothing can be done about the space, but perhaps we need better nonspatial practices...

Looking sharp some more for surprises

Today, at the beauty salon, I saw the child in a woman, an employee.

She was wearing an oversized coat and came and sat on a chair that was too-high, and started swinging her legs. Suddenly I could see in her the wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, who left home in the mornings to reach work on time - to reach an entirely different world than the one left behind. Like I do. Who held on to her wildness until she could return home in the evening/night; had to throw off fatigue and perhaps pay attention to other demands. Like I do. Oh, how we hold on to this memory keening yearning, this conviction that home/the evening will come and bring freedom!

Of course, more and more I find the "wild" part of me infiltrating and blitzing the code of civil conduct delineated for public personae. Which is all right. We should all be able to dress and behave in the way most authentic for us - formal cool or wild child or anything else in between or beyond.

Cat at home

There's a cat who visits our kitchen in the dead of the night to scrounge for leftovers. She wriggles through god knows which godforsaken opening to get to our third floor, all-doors-closed flat!

In search of etymology

Doodled "water under the bridge" in my journal in the morning - and reailzed I don't know where the phrase comes from. Googling yielded me a painting by Monet, a sketchy explanation and another one.

The find of the week, however, was this quite unrelated trove of words. Rummage away!

The unintended sneer

"You're constantly thinking about the house!"

It took me a few minutes to fathom what about this comment riled me so much. Certainly, the gratuitousness of the "constantly". More than that, the implication that thinking about the "house": what needs to be bought, what needs to be repaired, is a simple-minded, lowbrowed exercise. Rather than a labor of love.

You didn't mean this? Perhaps.

At the Lodi Garden

Memories of regeneration, of greenery and birdcalls and the wind shimmering with flower-scent and me rolling in the grass
sometimes with you, often alone
have a way of impressing themselves on the microchip in the head,
so when I return for minutes so brief they have meaning no more than hands ticking across the clock
and sit on the green swell of earth,
the connection calls me back into the centre of stillness
and I lie back to smell the grass and feel its itch on my skin, and behind my head gardeners dig the earth.

When You're Away

Possessiveness the engorged serpent
abruptly
billows up from my waist in
ordinary conversations,
hood flame and flaring,
and rushes to swallow
the room, chairs and tables,
my companions.

Chagrined, I sit on it and
push it down.

headlines scanner

More and more frequently these days you find me sheepishly confessing: "Urmm, I haven't been following the news. I had no idea about this Shakti Kapoor incident..." Apart from the usual daily rush to work/other places, it's also part-apathy borne out of a realization that I actually don't miss the "news" too much. This Sunday, in blessed solitude, I sit and devour the Indian Express and TOI, and feel, suddenly, my relationship with the world, my place in the world, re-scanned and re-established.

a friday gathering

A magical poetry/song evening at Friday's at Nigah. Everybody seated in a circle that was not-quite round, with chapbooks and anthologies in the centre for those who hadn't carried something to read as well as print-outs of some magnificent poems that Sharmi had brought. Indolence and sharing and much singing and music and general well-being. Poetry all around me. Mogambo khush hua! - and we've been spurred to put a date to a long-standing plan to host a poetry/song evening at home: 30th of this month.

How I get angry

Silence is a tent I drag over bruises.
Each word must be prised out of me.
Each word is overkill.

how fringe we are

Am trying to get babysitting jobs. This is one of those deviously convoluted schemes that divebombed into my head one day when I was trying to figure out good ways to get access to children's books (about this: later). So I advertised my services on the white board of my friendly neighbourhood sandwich bar, and today, three weeks later, I get a call from Mrs. Jordan to enquire about my antecedents.

She wants to know if I work; my age; where I live and with whom; where my parents live; which community I belong to. At the last one, I stumble. This question I usually wave away nonchalantly, secure within my progressive pomo identity. But here I can sense how important it is to tell her, "my dad's marwari and my mum's punjabi". At which she laughs - what a weird coupling - and moves on.

Later, while driving, I hope my children can grow up in a place and time when they don't have to preface the introduction of their selves with such identifiers. For if they couldn't, I wouldn't know how to identify myself.

Pets 2

The Encyclopedia of Cats can be as much joy for us nomads as real cats.

recess

Am completely taken up by the new Pepsi commercial: Oye Bubbly. The humor is wacky and Shahrukh Khan is finally cast in an ad where he doesn't look as if he doesn't know what to do with his extravagant energies.

There is an Amitabh Bachchan+Preity Zinta+Indian cricketers version as well - Pepsi is obviously opting for a full-dress incursion - but I'm yet to embrace it with as much affection as the first ad.

(Link to Oye Bubbly courtesy Neha)

little blue man (or, this is a mistake)

It was obviously a memory -
perhaps a dream -
that smell on your breath -
was it really me?