What would she say?

What would she say?

Anybody watching me might have shook their head in sympathy, believing that my eyes were blinking back tears, straining to catch a glimpse of a notoriously infrequent bus number on every display plate that swooshed past the bus stop. But what I'm searching for instead is a place that would cup me between crowded palms of inconspicuousness. Instead of allowing my foam cage to tie my arms to its own or blotting my restless screams on muted tissues of office routines.

If she saw me substituting an air-conditioned wait for six-o-clock with a wait for a phantom bus, what would she say?

I love standing on the road median when I wait for the traffic lights to change. Caught in the middle between armies of pedestrians on either side of the road looking longingly at the signal for the green flare. I'm not enmeshed within that 30 second large web of anticipation. Sometimes I wish that the signals would break down so that I go on standing on that road median forever. All that stands between me and annihilation at the hands of joyous just-released wheels is my wily strength, localized away from my head in my feet. But the signals always change in time. Always. So I cross the road back and forth, switching between armies till my own livery blends into a traitorous camouflage among theirs. .Till my fingers have brushed enough knuckles clenched around battered brief-cases and emptied lunch bags. Towards a chair bound exile.

If she heard my meditations of my close-to-collapse feet, what would she say?

There is a street filled with my dreams of houses. I've seen each of these before, between quilted childhoods in malarial visions. But in my dreams the gardens weren't locked behind these gates. Gates that forbid you to worship what lies, and like a dust cover that steals a sculpture's glory, making itself a monument instead. I ignore the sentries and walk on.

Why does that street side temple stand like that then? A crucified pose. On their toes. With a back hammered to the wall, eyes drawn away from the road and a face scrunched as if in preparation for a slap. It doesn’t even dodge when vehicles run knead its feet. As if this was it expected all along. I know what it feels like. Perennially braced for slaps and then turning my face thankfully when none of them landed.

If she knew that walks along broad beautiful roads were being frittered in nourishing my grief with such recollected pigswill, what would she say?

There is only one more suicidal drop of juice left in that straw, resisting my out-of-breath rescue attempts. Low backed chairs make themselves more uncomfortable by gliding greasily along a floor carpeted with samosa crusts and spilled ketchup. Am I so paranoid about running into my colleagues that I choose the grubbiest eat-out in the vicinity? Anxiety coaxes out every calorie that I've wrung out of carrot juice.
If she could sense that I was mangling perfectly ordinary outings into escaped eternities, what would she say?

We hold hands, the chair and I. I’m being welcomed into an exile like someone who’s returning from another. My mouse pointer hovers between pdf poetry and excel sheets, poised to pounce to the right window at the sound of carefully memorized footsteps. Of course I get a day’s worth of work done in two hours at the cost of reducing every word to gibberish and every task to a system of repetitive actions. Poe’s poems and revenue statements. Fuel hedges and blogs. They equally irretrievable in my trying to be equally attentive to both- whim and will.

A g-talk message raises its head sleepily from my taskbar. I submit to her gentle interrogation with suitable subservience. For all my bravado, I worship authority. This if nothing else is the saving grace of my otherwise disintegrating professionalism.

She’s a good sport of a boss after all- my offers of taking on more work are received favorably. She says “Good girl.”

I'm stuck in the throes of a pilani tea craving. And my new-found obsession with filter coffee has fizzled out. After a month of fighting off intoxication at Coffee Day counters (PB pure and Plantation A beans are expert nostril-raiders who seldom spare my olfactory lobes that obligatory neuronal short-circuiting that disrupts brain activity three hours afterwards. Watching the attendant comforting polythene packs bursting with coffee with those digestive pats mothers use to push babies off the brink of a burp doesn't help. Nor does feeling their hot anger of diminution through printed plastic through the journey back. It takes the hotter stimulus of a steaming coffee tumbler in your hand to cure you.) A month of adding caffeinated post-scripts to Murugan idli meals braving blatant "Why?" looks that my sister is apt to shoot.

I'm one of those sickeningly typical creatures who prove all those pseudo-universal adages starting with "After all it's human to...."right. It's human to long only for absent loves while taking everyone else for granted. It's human to fall desperately in love with what is lost to you forever. It's human to choose exactly those things which are worst for you. (This one's from Rowling I think). It's human to love the dead far more intensely than their live presences would have ever deserved.

I started calling myself a tea-drinker in Pilani -a place that gets people seeking a well-traveled boast to begin many journeys at once and then end up in places they would rather not have found themselves in. (but useful to construct charming never-heard-before anecdotes out of all the same. What else matters but winning the crowd while appearing to scorn them?) The more perilous ones drive you towards alcoholism, pot-addiction, a supercilious belief in your superiority to the rest of humanity while simultaneously allowing loneliness to hollow your soul out, a misplaced sense of pride in a dystopian world view that is cultivated carefully to look cool, multiply enhanced respect for sarcasm and belief that it's the supreme form of humour and that secretly fostered lovechild -insecurity in defects previously invisible. Was that in ascending order? Yes, I checked. I guess I’ve been more fortunate. I ended up with merely a gastronomic issue.

The seed of any habit is a harmless imitation. The way you order exactly what the other person is ordering at a restaurant. Not because you want to conform or please them but because you don't really know enough to have strong preferences. Then it becomes a group ritual, just one more feature of your time together with a person or a set of them. Once you develop a private relationship with the habit, (the day you start ordering tea in double-chai doses alone without realizing that you've already done 6 cups that day.) you're done for.

Tea from the beverage machine here is an optimization problem. I have to optimize the tea-bag diffusion operation in a way that maximizes flavour absorption and minimizes cooling-down-to-tastelessness time. As for the street side tea stalls, an all-male domain that I ventured to buy from, the tea was probably the third infusion of infinitely reused tea powder and tasted of the strainer it was poured through several times with those expert hand maneuvers that would make a bystander wonder if it was tea or gravity-defying plasma.

On the wrong side of a sunset.

Waves flush yet another wager
Down its hoarded whirlpool of
Spilled split seconds and squandered Sundays
Pulling magic carpets woven out of
Pickled promises and piggy-banked fears.
From under dream-embalmed feet.

I wish every hair of mine were a brush.
That they might brave
Windy strokes of invisible knives
To paint your hideous orange orgies
With the west.
In brazen bruised purple.

I wish every grain of sand
Stormed into open eyelids
And hacked away
In a blinking blinding rage
An eyeful of tears
Would resurrect their
Upper hourglass lives.

Why do I keep my back turned to you?
Not these last moulting hours
Second skin
Falling off dream-embalmed feet
Drying dying grain of sand
Falling off dream-embalmed feet

Parley with me across this azure table again
Wash foamy blue sleep out of your eyes
Raise your head slow and proud
And strike a clean bargain this time.

You’ve got this day stashed deep
Within chameleon pockets scuttling up the sky
Let me reclaim it before you
Vanish into thin- aired repose
Between blankets star-speckled and sly.

There is nothing better than a small workplace to see corporate realities sans make-up sans airbrush in its helpless nakedness. A place where no conversation is confined to the cubicle it happens in. Where people switch of their screens whenever they leave their desks where you might accidentally spend restroom queue times with the Director. Where an official communication is incomplete without the words "ideate" "revert back to" (?) and "ad-hoc commitement" (again(?)). Where unless you adjust your timing very carefully, you might happen to be the only intern in a lunch group of managers.

It’s been interesting so far. I can now gauge from the intensity and frequency of footsteps whether I should minimize my Hangman window or not and I’ve progressed to the extent that I can figure out whether a telephone ring is emanating from my instrument or one 3 cubicles away.
My “organization” is 30 employees strong. Everybody right from the founder to the youngest employee aboard (me) use the same kind of desk space. I don’t really resent the fact that laptops are given only to ranks of manager and above because my LCD screen is pretty easy on my cornea.
For a fairly flat organization (Founder= Director>Manager>Analyst> Office boy) the feudalistic rituals that exist beneath the first-names-only façade are chilling.

If you’re getting the idea that I’m not enjoying my stint here, you’re wrong. I’m glad I”ve been insulated to the maximum possible thickness from intern-bashing. These guys really understand and respect their interns and the desire to provide us with the maximum possible “exposure” is derived purely from good intentions (“We’re a people-oriented company”) than any malicious plans of grooming work horses.

Training sessions are voluntary (I’m quite shameless in admitting that I’ve skipped all of them.) and are conducted in a thoroughly informal potato-chip-munching setting. And add to all this the fact that only three people in the company are 35+ to make it feel positively utopian.
I’m in love with most of my colleagues (Seriously. I’ve never appreciated a group as much as this one.) that is the ones I’ve exchanged at least one sentence with. I love the managers for their fuss-free competence and desk-perched pep talks. I love the top two for their sharply purposeful strides. Merely hearing them walk into office and clicking their laptops open gets me to do twice as many slides. I love everybody else for working 12 hours a day and making my schoolkid sprint out of the office and my beatific freedom-at-dusk expression seem like something to be ashamed of. Honestly working more than 8 hours a day ought to be outlawed. I’m earliest to arrive at office and earliest to leave. More than fair.

I love the smell of new wood that steals into my lunchbag whenever I snap my drawers shut, a smell that speaks of four year wildernesses and desperately extended project deadlines.
I love the water bottle that bears my name with cellotaped dignity for forgiving me everyday for misplacing my attention along with its cap by filling up all by itself and greeting me tight and closed every morning.

I’ve got a time-lag problem. My experience of happiness lags my memory of it by 180 degrees. Maybe I’m doomed to savour only the memory of happiness, never the feeling itself. To realize that a place has made been infinitely happy only after leaving it for good. It’s not going to happen to PS-2. Most of all I love my workplace for telling me that while I may understand its rules I can never last out the entire game. I may be in this world, alive comfortable and well-adjusted. But I don't belong to it.

As I type this from a chair that’s way too low for me (Do I notice this because of all the Wikipedia entries I’ve just read? The ones on repetitive strain injury, computer vision syndrome and all those hideous things that happen to coffee (the coffee is brilliant at my PS 2 station, filter-coffee level, never knew that a dispenser could work. Blame ANC.}-guzzling beings confined to swivel chairs in air-conditioned office spaces) I realize that multiply bracketed sentences don’t provide the best starts to a post, especially one you type under a glancing-behind-your-shoulder strain that only a deceptively semi-private space like an office cubicle can inspire.
People here don’t even pretend to look away while they are caught staring at each other’s comp screens. Sheesh. I know it’s an office comp and that I’m supposed to figuring statistical modeling out instead of contemplating mails to friends who are probably so entangled within their razais in the anticipation of vetti new courses, that they will find it near-impossible to read mine completely and compose a reply as long as my mails are bound to get. Still…
Tamilian faces aren’t pretty. Or should I say south-Indian faces? Of course I’m referring to the roughly hewn ebony-hued majority, the throng with whom I juggle change and tickets , fight devious toe-scrunching elbow-shifting shoe-wringing wars for standing space near the bus windows and share the spoils- those rare breezes that sneak on you from beneath and move up your clothes in a way that makes you grateful for your city’s perennial summer.
Of course I didn’t mean to sound the way I did about the homely Tamilian. But it’s a sign that I’m starting to get smothered by Chennai and domesticated at home
1. My culinary debut has been successful.
2. I’ve spent half my time in supermarket queues and the other half in the corner shops on the way home to purchase provisions that I’d missed in the supermarket.
And I need as much help to cross these roads as a blind man does.
Fortis Guard is the eleven-letter combination of letters I hate the most now. Signing into igoogle and then adding the Gmail gadget to view my inbox on my colleagues’ suggestion made me realize how much resourcefulness desperation can manufacture to make continuous inroads into webguards.
Here’s to my resolution of not transforming into that unproductive net-grazing stipend-wasting no-good -an exquisitely standardized PS2 product.

Whenever she springs her alter-ego on me, I feign dutiful surprise and return her greeting obsequiously with folded palms. Her nose-ring and her Kanchivaram zari smile down at me in unison, she has guessed that I’ve broken through her disguise to recognize her and she has accepted defeat. But this won’t be her last unsuccessful masquerade, for she feeds her mystery fretfully like the nervous mother her undernourished offspring, living in dread of its demise.
My toes perform faint approximations of what her fingers, unfailing compass to the pliant sails of her voice, accomplish so that I can follow her through her voyage. But I always drown midway.
But why do I listen to this voice that employs a grammar I have no conception of?
She tells me that this was why Tamil happened to me, so that I’d hear this song and say, yes, my language is the most beautiful in the world, that my language was made just to be sung into this song.

Twelve years of protestant schooling obliterated every congenital trace of respect or my roots I'd grudgingly accommodated through daily routines of carols and scripture tests and The Lord's Prayer the aftertaste of five-times-a-day prayer. Tamil wasn't just gauche and blushingly inappropriate for conversations, it was an illegitimate child born out of a pariah dalliance, to be kept within doors lest it stumble out bawlingly through the inevitable slips of the Tamilian accent or sneak into discussions of with a braying drawl or a turncoat syllable.

Though I shook this careless disguise off my Tamilian pronunciation, choosing hetch over haitch, par-ent over pay-rent, prepone over advance( of course, I didn't go as far as to make jeros out of zeros. I drew the line within touching distance from respectable coherence, but out of reach from stifling demands of accuracy and propriety) I still retained a faint contempt for my mother tongue. Tamil got ticked every time I was asked for my mother tongue in spite of that vague apprehension that my possession over it was incomplete. What I own isn't a hereditary right to speak, write and read in Tamil with native pride, but merely a lease to speak in Tamil with my blood, a lease that will expire at the same time my parents will.

English was what I thought, spoke, read and wrote in. Rather English was what made me speak read and write. And most importantly think. A belief that I cultivated early on in my anglo-infatuation, a belief that I still hold dear is that of all the languages I'm fluent in (English, Tamil and I add Hindi hesitatingly here) none provides asylums to the osmotic surprises of my itinerant unfiltered thought the way the membranous layers of English do.

Having disinherited Tamil suitably, my religious identity came next. All that the Bible classes of my fashionably Christian first school taught me was to develop a scathing scorn for Hinduism while two Vishnu Sahasranamam-chanting and Sanskrit-verse-reciting years in a staunchly Tam Bram setting served only to strengthen this scorn into something more general. It evolved into distaste for the dictates of organised religion, a distaste that loosened the nostalgic claims of Christianity over me and my reverence for it crumbled into contempt. If I'm agnostic, it's purely by accident. It is merely accidental that I deride idol worship and Hindu rites in the same breath as evangelism and the myth of immaculate conception

Like everybody else, three and a half years of university life in a far-flung location removed from the reeking tambramness of my environment returned me successfully to my roots and has sent me back to my hometown with a firmer conviction of what I constitute, with respect to religious and regional identity. What I was suffering from at that time, July-2005 wasn't an identity crisis as much as an identity famine. I had been poring over entire shopping racks housing innumerable variants of Tamil-ness. The concert-hopping Sudha Raghunathan fan who listened to Illayraja on the sly wasn't right. Nor was the quiz-champion, force-fed Mridangam lessons who was now in the initial throes of a disgustingly clichéd obsession with porn.
The salwar-clad temple regular who hummed Bollwood numbers as she circumnavigated the deities in turn wasn't me, nor were my intensely literary peers who discussed Ponniyin Selvan and Byron and in turn.

Over 20 years I've exhausted several shopping racks, every Tamilian I’ve met has been held against my ideal, tried on for size and rejected. Some were rejected in the long contemplative privacy of the trial room after several battles with unwieldy tags, hooks and holders, and some in the discomforting tightness foretold by the very first glance.

I remember my first ever Cactus Flower meeting in detail for a reason that is completely disconnected with what I feel for the magazine. Two senior girls (you should have figured out by now that they were both Tamilian), one each from the batches of 2003 and the 2004, left the meeting cycling one-handed. It was the coldest of my three Januarys at BITS and to expose your fingers to that frost even if you were just keeping beat to the kriti you were practicing would have been a terribly dangerous thing to do. Through the gaps betrayed by two ungloved frozen fingers battling to darn a hole-ridden veil together, I managed a glimpse of the face hidden out of sight.

The tune has been into my memory since then, and though I lost their last notes along with the sight of them I know with the audacious surety of groping in pitch darkness, exactly how the song will end.

Raagamalika is the not the most obvious way to renew a reluctant acquaintance with Carnatic music, especially when I’d barred my ears to music of all kinds and was musical barren-ness under the successful pretence of being tone deaf. I’d never imagined that I would feel more of a TamBram simply for having attended a few performances through Raagamalika/SPIC MACAY or for having seen two women fall in love with the same mysterious stranger at first sight, strike up different conversations with him only to meld their first encounters together into something prettier than the slurring beauty of first-time speech with your beloved.
.I’d seen people live out a million versions of TamBramness, either consciously or unconsciously by associating it with meanings unique to their own selves and yet I hadn’t realized that expression of ethnic identity wasn’t a collection of templates to choose from, but something I had to create on my own. There is more than one way to be Tamilian, to be Brahmin or to be that oxymoronically composite being, a Tam Bram, I could choose to create my own or not at all, and I’d still stay true to what I am.

Carnatic music joins a list of tastes I’ve acquired not for their own sake, but for the symbolism that I’ve saddled them with. Falling in love with representations rather than their underlying reality is a folly I’ve grown to relish.

The December breeze lulls me into sitting there before the pandal long after it has stopped carrying her song. Nothing teaches me the meanings of an unknown word better than people do, people who live out the meaning for me, people who don’t know that their existence is encompassed by a single word, who make me scrape out that word from the bottom of my consciousness, offer it to them and utter gratefully in the intoxicating bliss of comprehension “This is you. This describes you as well as you describe this.”
Does her song teach me the meanings of swara, tala, alapana- the petty change of secrets that she keeps hidden from me, stashed hopefully in hidden piggy banks ?Of course not. Her treasures don’t lie buried in that small change of syntax and jargon, but at infinitely deeper fathoms that neither of us can guess at. While I can always single her out of her insecure attempts at disguise, I can never truly comprehend her and yet she refuses to derive comfort from the fact of her invincible mystery. But she is no less an enigma for her routinely awry attempts at impersonation.

Do I trust my genes to work out that mystifying calculation that sets her notes so celestially into their places? Of course not. I’m no less an insider for my eternal ignorance.

"It's as if the tube lights are there on purpose to make the rubbish glow." The gust of your whisper throws the window open when you survey the garbage-strewn view that it frames. I liked the dump, for its fluorescent glint was my unfailing night lamp that studded the ground below me with polythene diamonds. Sterile garbage- its crinkled gleam, plastic defeat and benign refusals are free of the odours of struggle.
Sterile unlike my memory, an odorous memory that suffers the sanitizing storm of a clattering garbage truck at your command every morning. Though you're gone, your schizophrenic spores of doubt have ripened my memory into an ageless senility. Night after night, I drink tea out of the styrofoam hallucination of "Maggi Soup" only to wake up wondering if I'd drunk tomato soup or elaichi chai. Whether your eternal youth has blinded me to the fleeing burglars of my own youth. Whether my 52- month-night in your arms turned me into Rip Van Winkle, gone astray in my own backyard after having lost my reins on time.

I’d been writing alibis for an entire lifetime, the looped alibis of discontent, till I found you. You inoculated me against pretence, by weaning me off that compulsive game of darts where I aimed interminably in vain for that impossible bulls’ eye of my dream self, that perfect me that I never attained. Dearest, in learning not to disown you, I learned never to disown myself ever again. The sole souvenir salvaged from your four-year-lease of me was my true self.

I made an ossuary out of plundered graves, hoping to pass it off for my ivory tower of contemplation. Whenever I stretched across that skeletal scaffolding to reach for fresh coats of white paint, the skulls rattled tunefully to your laughter. Were you reminding me that I was resting upon the bare bones of desires that weren’t my own? Or that our tower of Babel would cave in to entomb me?

I love you enough to embrace eternal exile, sans elegy, sans grief and sans shrine.
Though you walk away with that satisfied smile of successful exorcism on your lips, you’ll remember. In the corners between the bricks that strain to remember and those that strain to forget, your careless finger will catch a stray sliver of dusty memory unawares. When you the slash through the offending cobweb, one-fingered and shuddering, the spider will tug heroically hard at your finger along before dying its stubborn death and your heart, if only for a frozen instant, will tremble in reminiscence.

I don’t want to cry, but if my inky tears swim their way across blank paper gulfs to stain words into them, will they bring our handheld silences back? I don't want to hold you to ransom, but if promises seep into my lips in the form of kisses, will they buy me one more hour of your winter sunshine? I don’t want a second chance, but if my straitened silence breaks into a mutiny of sighs, will they be quelled by your backward glance?