Waiting for crystal balls

There are lines enough on my palm for it to have dodged this errant knife. Like an axe gone astray from sweaty arms, it struck right at the roots of my thumb.

When we were younger, we took each other's palms into our own and spun tales of a future that had not a trace of my tumultuous grays of twenty years.

That was before we knew that if a line run deeps, it doesn't foretell the coming of wealth but merely that one fist was clenched tighter than others,that long fingers didn't necessarily portend a cancerous death because pain wouldn't be saved for the end, that the right palm mirrored the left and it didn't matter which one we chose because there would come a time when the foretaste of future wouldn't taste so good and we wouldn't wait breathlessly for crystal balls nor practice the palmistry of consensus.

Yet I listened to them through Hindi dictation classes and periods of play that we could still wring out of rainy days. And a great many fortunes were told.

The how-many-children one, the one that ran the longest before falling into the tanned sea of the back of my hand, never mentioned a a foundling of disremembered dreams. The line that fell headlong through my wrists to meet swooning bloodspouts never said that I would live many lifetimes through a life that would be two middle-finger-breadths long.

They didn't see the little flecks that first flowed, then flooded through the fortuitous delta of of lifespan, love and lucre,before banishing it underwater, where like dying mermaids,it will turn into the endless foam of the sea.

Nor did they see smudged pencil marks resisting erased oblivion, Jakcson Pollock shadows, footprints of faraway crows etched already into an aging skin ,and a line of crosses awaiting crucifixion.

Nor did they look so far into the future as to see this resolutely red line that has picketed my palm, tearing down every film of skin that tries to broker a scab, refusing to leave, refusing to heal. A jagged red of scraped paint, it tells me that old schemes of colour,like old schemes for life don't ever fade.

An afternoon nap has all the enchantment of ritual and the timelessness of a dream. No sooner had I gotten into bed, vowing to read a chapter more before allowing my wandering consciousness to play out its will, had my book parted ways with its cover and my eyes had surrendered to a torpor that made them appear as intent as it was glazed.

“Kishore! Come out fast” Trring . “Vidya! Come and play” Trring. The cycle bell followed that hopeful young voice like a lagging herald, traversing the roll call of playmates over and over again, as if it were a muster to war, crying louder where the name belonged to a particularly valuable companion.

And my nap takes me back to the now-foreign territory of my childhood, when cycle bells and whistling signals that made their way to my windowsill sought out ears other than mine, where lessons were learned by a heart stung by a dancing tumult it didn’t feel, the fierce tumult of street cricket. Soon, those sounds didn’t cause me to survey the scene with that longing bred of isolation, but with a sense of growing delight at my self-sufficiency.

The doorbell buzzes with an impudence that shakes me awake. “Akka, shuttle cock.” The boy looks at me with an impatience that, surprisingly is devoid of trepidation. I smile as I lead him in. He vanishes into the kitchen without waiting for as much as a nod. As I follow him into my kitchen, still, festering with the smells of a series of capsized culinary efforts, I hear the anxious murmur of suspended play through the balcony. The rest of his time waited, not without nonchalance as the chosen scout bravely mounted the footholds of the window bars and manoeuvred my mop with the proprietorship of an armed warrior to dislodge the object. A wave of merriment broke out as play is resumed at the evry instant the cock touched ground but interrupted by the remonstrance of the rescuer, protesting ingratitude. “Wait for me.” He screamed, with a violence that made the meaning of his words as clear to me as they would have been in my own tongue.

I might have lingered longer at this scene, that had the outlines of a tagore poem and none of its music, had my phone not rung.“Happy friendship day!” she chirped. “And what are your plans for the weekend?”

After I finished an incoherent description of my weekend routines, (“Just woke up man. I’ll catch up on some reading, take a walk, relax.”) she laughed appreciatively. “That sounds like a good plan.”

Her colleagues, she explained, by way of celebrating the first paycheque had proposed a movie outing, and the group, to my struggling ears seemed large enough to drown attempts at prolonging the phone call. Hanging up, I realized that my batch too, would be in the midst of a similar revel and as usual, my disinclination for the plan had been taken for granted. And suddenly, I was back at the windowsill, again, preferring to inhabit silent worlds, either of my making or those of a book to the rough and tumble happiness of boisterous play.

I returned to the kitchen, attempting truce with disquieted utensils that have been at the centre of my kitchen misadventures for the past week. But the kadai simmers in silence as the onions I have cast into it congeal before turning black. And the milk vessel boils dark brown anger as it is transferred to the embers of the stove from its refrigerated confines without as much as a foreword. But still, I delight in turning to my own kitchen instead of venturing out for pani puri, though my meal of bread upma and coffee is only edible.

I might have passed by life’s feast uninvited but my larder isn’t empty either. The deeper my solitude buries me within myself I find that I’m less empty for choosing to be left alone. The world within us is as entrancing and as labyrinthine as the outside world that youth lusts to travel around. Or more.

Don't come back home.

Don’t come back home. Because the night-light guided footsteps of your dream sleepwalked right through my sleep, trampling the simple pleasures of fatigue asunder.

Don’t come back home. Because every time you do, it becomes a new home all over again where I fumble against forgotten passwords of switches and rusty locks, where the pillows forget the curve of my neck, ad where the stove splutters to life only after being asked twice.

Don’t come back home. Because you threw open windows and doors that swept in reams of sunlight that had snubbed my welcome all along through doorcracked shadows.

Don’t come back home. Because you painted in hot oil all over its bare majesty, listened to the mute cries of empty nooks and shelves too proud to ask for sheets and sofas, and left me a difficult cleanliness to live up to. Sentenced. To a constant lifting up to looking down, to dusting what is beneath, to bury dead cockroaches and dead loves, to ignore the grime at the bottom to hiding the crime floating on top of a conscience.

Don’t come back home. Because even your silent presence dimmed the clanks, honks, reverse gear tunes, tears and coughs of the roaring world into a soothing song to which life was danced to. And without you, my solitude has soured into a seething anger at all sound, be it the cooing of doves, the slap of soaped cloth against the washing stone or the banging of doors. Doors that you won’t ever leave unlocked again, laughing cheekily at feeble ghosts that lurked in the dark, waiting for you to leave.

This city might do what Pilani never did- complete my hindi lessons. My workplace has an atrocious attitude of disobeying rules that don’t lose their emphasis on repetition- No hindi, no telugu.

There is this faint lemony smell of room freshener that permeates this place, the first thing you sense in the air when a tired throng rushes towards a 30-bus long queue is this smell, it clings to everything- toilet seats, Styrofoam cups, Kimberly Clarke dispensers, door knobs and ultimately to us. In the factory, it's different- you come back to an irate mother who repeats her admonitory reminder to take a bath even as the medicinal stink starts fading from my clothes.


The view from my office is pretty indeed- trees forming guard around a lake that emerged unscathed through the landscaping onslaught. The glass library windows that like a shrewd bouncer that lets the sunlight slip through hand in hand with its pretty green picture of a companion while keeping straggler sounds out. Tired 4:30 footsteps that succeed the siren announcing succession between shifts, the desultory talk of trainees dividing their time between lab and plant, the snip-snip of the gardener’s hedge trimmer and the tears of an abandoned hosepipe.

But when I look at the trees the scripted quality of the scene betrays itself to me, the trees are placed as if on stage, like cardboard-cut-out trees that are propped up merely for backdrop’s sake. Too still, too green and too perfect to pass off for real trees, these palms could have been plastic imitations with serial lights dangling from them in front of a newly inaugurated airport. It made me believe that no one had ever slept on the grass on winter afternoons or walked mindlessly through reborn rows of flowers or aimed stones that plopped right into the serene eyes of lotus leaves. It was as if they had set up the place to pose for a camera and their deliberation had nearly ruined the effect. I say nearly because the artificiality didn’t make the view less arresting.

It took me three successive days of missing the 6:15 bus and waiting for the 7:15 bus to understand that dusk does justice to this place more than any other time of the day. That hour of solitude in the cricket grounds is the most special time of the day even for me, someone who’s leading a pristinely solitary life.

If I turn my eyes towards the factory, it leaves them searching for the sea in vain, for that 24X7 rumble that goes on within that nondescript building is indistinguishable from the sounds of the shore. It’s not the monotone of murmuring machinery that I can only hear a tempestuous ocean groaning one minute and sighing another. The trees too nod sadly at the factory for this hair-tousling breeze that is only a hint of a monstrous wind that should have set the waves rolling, for it is easy to grieve for that caged sea that is howling from within.

The arrival of my negative balance dues slip from Pilani has been the most unpleasant among the banal reminders of my graduation.

This post is not going to be written in that endearing BITSian shortcut to posterity- the comma-separated memory format or plainly, “acknows”, the way one of my batch mates has. But six months in an environment as different from Pilani as possible has if anything thickened the nostalgia soup that I’m wading out of.

My leave taking from LatentView Analytics might not have been as scarring as my last week at Pilani was, but it was every bit as ceremonious and complete as the latter was
-Right from composing thank you cards to my bosses, hoping that I didn’t mix up the cards the way I had switched their names in a rather disastrous internal email from my first week, to dropping an expensive chocolate bomb at office, to the retirement party-esque gesture of a fast track watch that’s ticking away on my wrist right now (believe me, this is the first watch I’ve ever owned). The feebleness of these resemblances didn’t deter me from reliving the 13th of December and strangely this has had a curative effect.

PS at LatentView was catharitic and I will never thank it enough for allowing me to acknowledge that the ambitions that I’d professed were ghosts of a PS Senior past and for giving me he reasons to go back to what I really wanted.

“How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.
For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.
Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall I?
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that give it wings. Alone must it seek the ether.
And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
Sons of my ancient mother, you riders of the tides,
How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.
Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind.
Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward,
Then I shall stand among you, a seafarer among seafarers.
And you, vast sea, sleepless mother,
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean."
Thanks to Ranjani, for a book that opened right away to these verses the day I got done with PS. And I seldom use the phrase “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

The L-boards had been on these cars forever, from the day of registration through every premium of insurance renewal and the expired learners' licences. I walk past dust scrawls of graffiti on windshields that have neither been wind whipped nor water-wiped in its long days that are as motionless as itself. These walks save me becoming that stationary and I'm grateful.

I wonder why the black emergency water tank weeps at night. All those leaking tears of water, left over from Sunday carwashes, snubbed crow beaks and feet muddy from barefoot play flow in invisible sheets over white letters that glow sintex in the telltale glow of streetlamps. It takes the angle of my view from the stone bench to see the water for it is as inconspicuous as it would be if tears fell through ears. But if tears could be meditative, these were, streaming out serenely, unconvulsed by sobs and sorrowful thoughts.
Is it the ghosts of children's play, abandoned to obey maternal cries of meal time, that makes this place so eerie, with empty swings swaying deliriously with its own weight.

Event Ants tread warily, sniffing their way around fallen blackberries past laid to waste by a summer that takes back all the life it gives. Brambles litter the ground, broken free by hands that reach higher and higher into the tree with every passing month. If I should have an unobscured view of the starless sky from beneath the tree these hands should grow faster than the trees.


Who has raked these leaves? Why sweep them together into vacuum-pumped piles only to leave hollow echoes for bats to graze between. The stand there sentinel-like, bonfire-expectant.

But when a breeze ruffles its head, a solitary twig lifts itself upright against the chidings of stem and flutters in delight, like a mastless flag frozen in a disobedient moment before sinking black to horizontal sleep. Suddenly I hear his laugh, that surprised laugh that was the only recognition I was allowed whenever I returned to him, unfailingly, predictably. His delight never did escape the clutches of levity into the civil clothing of words. His laugh was an incomplete sentence that has left me a lifetime of strained guesswork and unsatisfactory fill-in-the-blank answers.

And when I walk back through l-boards wearing thin with every loan instalment paid, the black tank isn’t the only one watering sleepless seconds with tears that cause the past to sprout to life in places where the present dies unfulfilled.

"This document reproduces the elements of a visual presentation. It is incomplete without oral comments that accompany it." is an elegant disclaimer that I often encounter in my work, which chiefly involves making PowerPoint presentations that will be delivered by and to strangers across the seven seas.

What struck me as elegant about the phrasing of these words is the way they emphasize the inevitability of the spoken word. It is an admission of insufficiency from the very first slide of a communication tool, which, like all communication tools of today strives to do away with conversation altogether. It reinforces one of my fondest beliefs that in spite of all the twittering and instant messaging (which will always be an impostor, albeit n impostor humoured in our midst, but one who will never successfully impersonate face to face conversation), this creature inside us will put up a fight for life. It may have been weaned off a nourishing attention span and placed on a starvation diet of brief virtual exchanges, may have been made to train on the circuits of online dialogues under the merciless whip cracks of touch screen phones and mouse clicks, yet it will be alive enough to hunger for that occasional Vitamin pill of good conversation.

I wish we had better things ( a weed, like other weeds of inanity sprung from modern soils, refuses to be exterminated from my vocabulary) to say to each other. things that wouldn't be flushed clean from our minds in the daily deluges of web pages we subject our minds to, things that would sprout to life and flower in the silences of our nights and awaken us with the floral smells of truth the morning.

I don't know if people will be so conversation-impaired in the future as to sit across each other laptop in hand, listening to the voices of each other's keyboards. Perhaps we, as a species, have said all that there is to say. Our collective military history, our record of repetitive political rhetoric, that drying dying stream of literature, and the fact that we are running out of ideas for reality television shows are all testament to that. There is nothing more to say after all. And our whole-hearted embrace of these newly fashioned idioms of social networking and online communication takes us away, if only for a moment from the uncomfortable realization that these are only self-taught lip reading lessons for the blinded.