An Open Secret

Gone are my faint faltering sentences, yours is a story I tell with deliberation, my eyes turned resolutely away from my confidant as if you were a falsehood and my words a signboard artist nailing letters of fraudulent promise in straight effortless lines.

Maybe you should have stayed bitten back, sulking in the corners of my lips but utterance is irresistible. I delight in you as much as in a beautiful word that swims into speech unthinkingly and fits into sentences perfectly with the self-possession of rhyming poetry. I delight in you as I do in wisdom that is hoarded for long and in silence like a breath and then wasted in a solitary scream against the injustice that pitts the invisible flower against a yet unopened one. I delight in you as freely as my despotic impulse for truth stops my words short and curves my mouth into a smile of defeat.

I used to take an uneasy pride in concealment, uneasy because it drips like a tear down the cheeks of a weeping child in the midst of an insensible throng. Uneasy because it reddens like a face that has passed notice under an unsmiling unseeing friend. Uneasy because long silences don’t flutter like standards that cut through battle lines.

At the end, I say “Don’t tell anybody.” And I know that the lamp has been rubbed and the genie summoned and that veils can’t buy you beauty any longer.

Just as time strings cobwebbed garlands around my house faster than it does in others, love slips soon into my dreams of longing sooner than for most. My mother used to say that waking dreams come true.

Even when I rub my eyes open, he stays behind like the memory of a Sunday fair on a Monday morning, a dream that dreams on in the corners of my eyes till sunlight shoos him away.

“Rewrite” - the red marks fill my notebooks but the writing is not of my hand, grown fickle and fake with cursive copy writing impositions but the shapely strokes and parallel lines of his own steady hand.

Language forfeited, he sinks fast like foam following scuttling crabs into sand secrets. His face has sworn to taunt me namelessly like the waves that punish my feet for not having stayed longer for one more wave. And when I want to call him back to me when he’s at the water’s edge, I will forget his name and one more dream will have banished him to anonymity.

In the balcony of my childhood home, I can hear the temple drums again; the dream drums out the hymn note-perfect as Ganesh leaves one sanctum for another in a palanquin. It might be hymn to him for he too has leapt from dream to dream braving sphinxes at the mouth of a labyrinthine sleep, not in a palanquin but in a pall, his name dying on my lips. People who die in your dreams live forever, my mother used to say but people who never die swap their mortality for memory. He will not remember my dreams, remember that he has crept into each of my pubescent peephole tears only to turn his face away from a past where pain has been spray dried over walls of time like the afterthought of a vandal.

The stream wouldn’t glisten with fallen sunbeams the way it did if the wind didn’t send the swan’s wings aflutter and if the swans didn’t make rippling silver stripes in the lake.
Soon, the rains will scrub names off epitaphs and tipple flowers off gravestones - when he refuses to leave at the clang of the school bell, before the door bolt jams, prior to the first word of a confession, he won’t leave when the eye of my sorrow is still wet. And will they have leave to die if he dreams with me only to unearth the ruins of a love long-deceased?

The phone reduces him to one-handed left-handedness. Throughout the call, the right hand stays upright as if carrying the weight of the conversation on its palms, and the fingers fight through flying hair to glue the handset to the ears.

But his left hand is animated enough for two, he waves it around like a baton in a traffic cop’s hand, the words wouldn’t grind to a halt as long as he keeps waving them onward.

He bends forwards, a little stupidly, neck tilted downwards so that his whispers warn off the ants that fall one by one into the strangulated burrs of his socks. He takes care to walk in the shade but the sunbeams seeks him out from behind the trees to shoo off the music in his ears and the words from his throat until he hears nothing, sees nothing, till he is freed of that white hot blindfold.

Admitting defeat, he walks a suddenly splay-legged walk, hands-in pocket kicking his feet forward as if he is sending the very air that is filled with his voice heavenward with a prayer.

A slower gait that carries the dread of silence in each step appears when sentences start all over again, trying vainly to jump over every inarticulate attempt, when the pause that breathes with weariness grows longer between words that mask them, when time threatens to gnash its teeth and prompt a glance at the clock.

And he will walk faster when a sudden exclamation, a promising turn of phrase, a confession in the garb of a story steps in redeem him.

He has wept over a million lines of verse but they stay only long enough to desert him when a dry throat seeks to make them his own.

His voice hadn’t music enough for poetry and his memory hadn’t tricks enough to wrestle down silence and pin it flat in submission. He hadn’t the art of painting the happenings of a day in anecdotal colours and say, “Guess what happened” and really make her guess.

His fingers grip a low-slung branch and pulls it downward like a slingshot, scarcely noticing the fleeing butterfly, the cloud burst of leaves, the bare-headed agony of the branch when it swings back into a sunless place.

The world walks past him, shaking its head at his unmoving intent one, the length of grass that has been trod read in the marks of his shoe soles the distance he has travelled.

And when a merciful tower snaps its fingers in disgust, his right arm will ache itself back to existence. Blinking like a man who’s been reborn, he looks at the number that briefly flashes on the screen before fading out regretfully. He has been dead for thirty nine minutes and twenty three seconds.

Each of the seams of his pocket insides writhe with the unspent change of speech, he sighs before fishing out the phone and dialling again.

Too old to weep

Few places can stand on their own, without ever swallowing the snub of being directed to by calling forth a bigger or older or a more celebrated building or road that acquires the halo of a “landmark” for reasons that appear arbitary to the outsider.

I used to live in such a “You can’t miss it” place, Pizza boys and courier deliveries could make it without a thousand instructive phone calls. But RBI Quarters had taken second place, many a time to a school of dance, a prominent church or a society of theosophy. But we knew that even as we began a disbelieving explanation to an ignorant pizza “Do you know Velankanni Church, ours lies on the way.” We would take it good naturedly enough because others said “You know RBI Quarters, we live right across the road.”

Funny how one memory draws others to itself and claims them for its own just as a landmark does an entire neighbourhood. This queen bee of a memory lives quietly enough among a clutter of less painful ones, with a heart still tearless though struck white hot with pain everyday, as if were a gong to keep time with the pendulum of grief.

Today might not have been such a day but I know where the memory of it will strike root. This like everything else that happened this year belongs to Pilani.

I’m too old to weep, I thought, when I got onto the bus to work, too old to weep like a child who avoids the accusing red eyes of a corrected answer sheet on the first day of school. Too old to feel post-vacation blues, too old to lose sleep over a fading love, too old to lie awake after passing over the reins of my love into the hands of the unknown only to realize there aren’t any reins. Too old for the gleeful smiles that pay for window seats. Too old to lean out of the window and believe that the day is new in spite of the dubious sheen of its resealable resalable packing. Too old to notice how prettily the leaf hugged the window bars in fright when the branch broke away from the tree at the bidding of the bus. Too old to weep for the leaf when a callous wind breaks the embrace and sends the leaf flying away from an imprudent entanglement. Too old to remember to weep for the window.

Dutiful chimes of “Happy New year” resounded dully at every reunion. I was congratulated on wrangling a 10 day break. I in turn, congratulated them in return for getting rip-roaringly drunk so cheap by staying, while telling myself that they were exchanging one form of drunkenness for another.

Too old to weep for the promises I’ve kept waiting for a decade, for the dreams that took ten years to settle down into a sediment of someday suffixes. Too old to seize somebody by hand and cry without restraint, and tell them, “This is what I’d wanted to stake my life on, but I have so little of it left.”

I find it less embarrassing to ask for money than for a kind word, a split-second caress of an elbow that wants to say “See you tomorrow” leaves me warm for hours but I won’t trust myself to slip my hand into another’s if only feel a little less alone.

And just when I thought I’d grown too old to weep, I heard the very words that condone an infantile unrestrained bawling, and kiss its imaginary bruises away-

“Relax. You’re just a kid.”

Telling time

When I look into the mirror, I like to catch sight of my watch dial, the large blue three grins at me, pleased at having the whole of the dial to itself, as if it were making its solitary way through a personal pa pizza. Lone numeral that it is, it gets people to stare at a watch that guards the secret of the time of the day so cryptically. It is not a watch that you can snatch the time out of in a quick glance from far away that you can pass off as uninterested. You’d have to catch my eye and ask me, I who have come closest to reading it, what the time is. Then I’d flick my wrists, trying hard not to say “Three’ o’clock” and divine the position of the minute hand (I’ve never managed to get it exactly right on this blank white dial) and labour through the “by five’ multiplication” to give it to you.


While I walk through these streets at three’ o’clock, it will tick out of step with my sluggish stride as if it were unwilling to travel along side me through an afternoon nap. Why, it would sigh, as shuttered shops slumbered on, as salesmen linger over a late lunch away from their counters, the rare passer by exchanges glances with me in solidarity, one more who has forsaken the semi-darkness of a curtained bedroom for this heatless heartless glare of this winter afternoon.

And it would sigh again when I step out again into the night this time, waiting for lights to pop up in my head, like streetlamps flickering over the angry buzz of surprised moths.

And when I return , you’ll say, look at your eyes, you haven’t slept. I want to tell you that they have always been dark, those eyes under my eyes that see you clearest. How much do you really hear? You’re a valley away, mistaking echoes for speech and missing every new word that drowns in an old wave of bouncing sounds.

This isn’t exile for you, but a return from exile, for you have been away from where you ought to have been all along. You’re dangerous, a man who has neither a spiritual nor a geographical conception of home and wanders in circles like that minute hand of mine over an unsteady pulse, cornering me into a dishonest approximation.

To lose a story...

I like your chair to be next to mine, not shoulder-to-shoulder or even conjoined armrests, but an easy sideways glance away. Because whenever I look up between pages, expecting to find the next sentence begin on your lips, you mute them in a tight-lipped smile.

Should I lose restraint enough to burst into word, you will not knit your eyebrows together in reply or even work up an answering grumble in that knot of a throat You will smile at me as a person who says out “138 plus 23” aloud and lurches along ten by ten as over the wrong answer ought to be smiled at.

Bookmarks were invented for people who never intend to see the last page, the one left blank on purpose after the ending, just to remind you that the best stories begin at the end of good ones.
Why do I need bookmarks, when the skin between thumb of forefinger is taut with every turned page, remembers exactly how thick a wall I have built around my story and myself?

Hair falls in spirals around me as my other hand searches out traitors among them, and black threaded clumps dance together like dying spiders in concert. The night screams for coffee before crying itself to sleep, with every yawn eyes grow warmer and the sharp clean lines of black grow softer and softer.

Forgetfully sometimes, you walk away in search of that bottomless glass of water, in wait of that phantom phone call that never arrives but keeps you leaning over the balcony railings as if the first note of your ringtone might make you fall over. You walk away because of that voice, which like a dust-jewelled shaft of sun asks you to draw curtains around you and watch in a silence that thwarts my last chance, swallows the words that might have reached you had the doorcrack been wider.

You abandon the seat to suffer my fretful gaze empty and my book lies face down, spine arched achingly, print averting its unread face away from me and hugging its knees shut till you return.

And if you don’t, you will have stolen away a story which trailed you trustingly like a wide-eyed child waiting to be let into a secret.

I have learned...

It can’t be a coincidence that the two women who know me best were born on consecutive days. From them both I learned…

That in love you use your claws as much as you do your lips, it is as natural to draw blood as it is to return a hug.

That you believe every word that falls alongside your tears and so will everybody else. But when you have ceased to believe those words anymore, others will refuse to be talked into doing so.

That you shouldn’t switch on the lights when somebody insists making their way around in the dark nor click a flashlight on gloatingly when they bump into open doors and fall. You can still catch their eye in the dark by the moonlight and lend a silent hand to his bruised questioning one.

That joy has to be reconstructed from madness method by method, moment after moment, as unthinkingly as dance steps are picked up and cross word squares filled.

That you can prod somebody into oversalting a meal by claiming that “uppu-ma” would need a lot more of it, and then convince them to eat it all by themselves just by asking nicely.

That to not raise your voice nor pound your fists in a fight is cowardice, that to sing loudly and out of tune is no shame, that blurting out a silly thing with all your heart is preferable to a cleverly turned sentence voiced a moment too late and a shade less sincerely.

That moods have a break dance of their own, that sand dunes don’t have fixed coordinates and that the staunchest of hearts sway to the music of the moment.

That it’s okay to rage unforgivingly against a thoughtless word or act for a day and a half before deciding to laugh at its absurdity instead.

That wounds ought to be kissed away before they are disinfected and that both should be done with no corners spared though wounds anyway leave without a trace.

That the best gift you can give somebody is to choose for them what they would choose themselves or if unsure, not choose at all and walk bravely back, empty-handed.

PS: Happy Birthday to Amma and to Anshula