Diamonds And Rust.

I can hear my mind humming Diamonds and Rust as we walk. It's a strange thing how my mind is singing songs to me even while we are together. It is as if I have a distraction, something I don't want happening. It is almost seven in the evening and the purple of the sky has been washed by the grey-blue clouds. We are walking, searching for somewhere to sit, with a vengeance. While in one corner of my mind there's Baez playing, another part of my head screams out loud. This place sucks. This shitty place sucks. There's just too much noise in my head. Too much to capture in words, or chart down in diaries. I wish you'd turn around just once and try and see what is wrong with me. Why Diamonds and Rust? Why not something else? Why Baez? Baez kills me slowly with her music and lyrics. And you cannot let this happen to me. My head is spinning. Baez's arsenic treatment has already begun, I guess.

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

You look back more than once to check on me. You're wearing black and white. You're walking faster than me. Ahead of me. Just like Baba. Something that makes you even more desirable to me. Did you know girls love men who are like their fathers? Yet, you don't notice the crinkled expression on my face. It's the ebony darkness, I think, that plays with your eyes or is it my fake smile that has snared you. I see pictures. Several pictures in front of my eyes. Like family polaroid collages on softboards. They are scary pictures. Pictures of the past. I think, they call them memories. Memories I thought I'd buried in some corner of my old book cupboard. The memories flash past, as I smile foolishly. I don't want anyone, not even you, to know that these pictures are running through my mind. And these pictures are scary, they have no nexus at all; they just go on one after the other. It's like a deja vu. I've been here before. I've walked this way before. I've been with you before. Who are you? You are him? This is scary. I want to close my eyes and pass out.

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

We are still searching for a place to sit and I hear you mutter an expletive under your breath. You smile at me. Your eyes have so much affection in them that it leaves me a little dazed. You are not him. You cannot be him. I'm in a different world away from the shreds of old, abandoned rust. In a happier place with you. We reach the place near the building with mirrors, where we had first sat down after we discovered we like each other. There are far too many people here than there were a week ago. We decide to turn back.

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

We are walking back. I can see you walking ahead again. You stop at intervals so that I can catch up with you. I decide I'm better off observing you from the back; it gives me time to deal with Baez and the pensives she rekindles. You really want a place to ourselves so you keep searching. I have given up long back. This has happened before, and has left me disappointed before. Expecting leaves me in disappointment all the time. So, I had stopped my expectations until I met you. You are him. He is you. And I'm sure I'm going to turn to stone again if you leave. Your images will be all I'll have left of you. And the images of the shadows of the trees on the road, that I can see now. I've bared too much of me to you. You know me quite a lot. There are only a few shades of me that you haven't managed to explore. The more you discover me, the more liberty you get to leave a scar-story on the wrist of my left-hand. The more you know of me, the more opportunity I give you to call me up one July afternoon to say goodbye. This is crazy. Baez stop playing. Stop it, this instant!

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

You're still looking around totally oblivious of the demons in my head. And thankfully so. I tend to mess up things, you know. I destroy moments. My fear does mean things to happiness. Someday my fear, my thoughts - I - will gnaw away at your happiness. Stay away from me, dear. You know, I could do with some crying on your shoulder now. I want to hold you tight now, and tell you about my fear. I don't care about this conservative city or the orthodox people here. I'm not scared of loneliness. All I fear are these pictures in my mind. And this song. It's haunted. It makes me feel dissolved. You are him? Ends are often beginnings. Where is this place? We reach where we started from. I want to run away from all the chaotic thought. I'm really hungry but I don't want to eat anything. The song is maddening.

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid.

We go sit inside. The song still plays incessantly in my head but I'm too dizzy to acknowledge it. You smile at me; you know something is wrong. I'm plagued by uncertainty. I really want to run away to somewhere more secure, somewhere more safe. I'm tired of my mind, I'm tired of this fear. I want to write down about all the pictures I saw, about all the thoughts I had but I know time will eat away at my ink. I just want to put my head near your heart and hear your heartbeat. This is strange - the farther I want to run away from you, the closer you become to me. History repeats itself.

A few moments later, we are sitting beside each other. The song has almost faded. You have your arms around me. I don't want to think about those pictures or that uncertainty. At least not now.

The Storyteller.

You sit at the newly rusted window every morning, watching the sun lick up the night in flames and write stories for noone to read. You hardly go home these days; the mirth and the familiarity scares you. You like your city in your stories where you can dress it up in your favourite colours. Your hair smells like the tar of this city and your stories carry the fragrance of the hills that you've visited around a million times in your dreams. Wish you were here plays in the background while you scribble your heart out in the folds of the night. The city takes you in. It is almost chaotic how you toss and turn at night. Sleepless nights. Maddening poetic nights. You see faces float in front of your eyes - some known, others never seen and some like clumsy collages. There are brittle words in your mind, words that break and shatter on paper giving your stories jagged endings. And, all you do is wish you wouldn't kill your stories that way.

On some days, you leave your windowside to venture out into the moonlight. All you carry are tunes in your head, a tiny red notebook to record the tunes and your dusty ol' camera to capture those tunes in frames. She does look the type who likes being alone. She is her own friend. Nah! She isn't lonely, just a soul who enjoys her solitude. Noone understands that alone and lonely are two different words. Noone knows that you force the loneliness down your throat. The city wraps you up in its anonymity, and you probably enjoy that. You like sitting under the clutter of the stars and chant words in your mind.. and write more stories. More often than not, the city's lifelessness kills the storyteller inside you until you find another fragile muse. Sometimes you take yourself back to your city, travelling through memories in metro rides and homemade brew. But you don't miss home. Your mouth already tastes like this city. Time to leave this city, you ask yourself. You are finding home here. There are people reading your stories, understanding every word, every expression even though you're trying hard to hide them under your eyelids. You're changing, dear. Becoming like the city itself and it isn't fair. I should run away, you tell yourself.

I see you from a distance now. You are penning today's stories down onto the red notebook, filling in details about your latest muse, your beau, whose fragrance is still fresh in your memory from last night's fervent lovemaking. Even the whirls of cigarette smoke and the cup of evening brew speaks of the words that you silently bleed in. I know you will stare into the mirror soon after and wonder what happened to all those days that you've left behind. Buried under those parchments of stories?

I'm amused at your change. Almost a little shocked at how the purple of your eyes have turned a greyish hue. You're becoming the city. The city has swallowed you, storyteller. I still cannot believe you are me. You are me in another city.

Vagabond Has A Family.

When I first came here, I had a preconceived notion that there are no friends like school friends. After all, noone can ever substitute the fourteen long years of running through the colonial corridors and ending up with bruised knees, scrambling through the serenity of the green fields, and those numerous little fights.. those tears and the wildwild laughter that is still a part of our alma mater. No wonder I kept to myself during the initial days when I came here. The headphonic idiotic, you guys call me. :P I would have probably been this detached had I not met you people. Now I can proudly say that I have a set of friends here who are not just friends - they are my family.

I'm really touched at whatever you people have done yet. (yes yes, I'm sentimental :) ) You people piss me off sometimes, yes and I feel like killing you, not talking to you and hiding away into my shell again. But I know you five will be there whenever I need you ( even when I don't need you, for that matter :P ). Right from running to get coffee when I was choking on my breath to getting food for me when I'm all hungry and can't move because I've an injured knee or a temperature.. to sending a teener tiffin box full of muree when I have pet'e baetha.. even tolerating my mood swings and the bangalar paanch'r moton mukh that I make sometimes. :P I was awestruck at how you all were so concerned when I injured myself the other day. * clumsy me *. I had never expected that you mind wasting the entire morning and half of yesterday afternoon just to take me to a doctor and get the wound dressed. :) I'm so touched that I can't even express in words.

Thank you for this family that I have found in the lifeless godforsaken city...

Meanderings.

I visited the purple hills today. Well, almost. With my roommate for a morning walk. We didn't go far because there were plenty of frustrated faces in the wee hours of morning, and we certainly didn't want to get into trouble. The hills weren't as purple as I had thought them to be. And, they had no stories scribbled on them as I had imagined. Just a mesh of green, rocks and boulders. Just an endless, infinite road with no destination. A turn here and a meandering there. And a few love notes in chalk made on the road by couples eloping, perhaps. Deepak loves Priya. Or were there other names too? They are making a school near the hills too. A kind of shabby looking building it seems to me. It looks to me like a school out of Enid Blyton books. All it needs is red paint, a very strict principal and a couple of teenagers hungry for adventure.

They say there isn't much to do in this city. It's dead. Has no life of its own. Yet, as I walked on today, I found life in the purple hills. A life still undiscovered. Waiting to be found out by wanderlust. Waiting to be devoured by an odd traveller. The roads are stories. The Pied Piper that leads the way, and promises never to come back again. The hills are full of a music, a fragrance of wanderlust, of meanderings of the mind. And it scars the skin.. burns into the soul, the music, the fragrance and it explodes in your mind like a tinybluestar in the sky.

And, I tried to bury a part of me in those hills knowing well that I'll go there again and again and there will be feeble screams of me from there too. From the part left there.

The hills are alive with the sound of music, and with a story newly etched with my footprints and a childish laughter among the trees.

burn.

you live in this half-dead city
like a vagabond.
burn, burn, burning
like cigarette smoke in the casing air.
in the dead goodbyes of the night.
stopping at the chaiwallah's,
and breathing the serenity of the
purple hills at two am,
burying another day's story
in the papercup brew.

you burn, burn, burn
in the sepia stardust
of this old, merciless town.
thinking about the old bookshop
off our old city, a few photographs
with your newly-found friends,
and an unfamiliar scent that this city
has gifted you.

while parts of you are being
gnawed away by the night,
nibbled by the glistening stars
that eat away into the clouds,
i write dead letters to you.
knowing well that the words
are not meant to be.
crumpled sheets of words
kissed by the moonlight,
while you burn away.
in the city's glowing passion
and your throat still deliriously dry.

you live in this city
like a vagabond.
it nauseates you to be here long.
yet you burn away.
you let yourself be trapped
by the music that plays
in your head.

and someday i'm sure you'll run away.
run away to another part
of your mind
and burn away the memories
of this place.
you'll dissolve into the crowds
of the new town,
refusing to learn their mothertongue.
it gives you a high when
you cannot decipher words.
a kind of freedom, you cannot explain.

you'll leave someday, i know
with your black backpack.
burning away. like you did today.