He sat kneeling in the inner garden.

Motionless he the watched the gibbious moon, light up the blossom tree, the branches jet against the lighter sky, the clustered blooms now barely tinted.

A petal spiraled towards the ground and he thought:

Beauty
Is not less
For falling
In the breeze.




Another petal settled on the materess of flowers beneath the blossom tree.

The wind sighed in the branches and another petal detached itself and began the spiral towards the ground.

Revolving slowly in the now barely existent wind..
His eyes followed the decent and then moved up to the tree again and tried to guess which would be the next petal to detach itself.

All of them appeared perfect to him.. and it took all his will to concentrate on the flowers and not think of her....

He looked up at the nervous sky watching the night fight a losing battle with the advent of another dawn. The wind picked up and plucked another petal and swirled it towards the ground. The swirl reminded him of her.

He looked towards the east. But she was part of the sky.

The petals looked as graceful as her. lissome and pure.

He sought distance now and only then could he feel that he was not within a box - a box filled with other men and women and all their evil.

Without women, he thought helplessly, men are only a cruel joke.

And with this thought he bled in the starch of the newly risen sun...

Your Body is a Wonderland.

I am leaning on the sofa, she is sitting on the floor, the small table between us. It seems to be absolution simply to listen to her. But I know that if she touches me my shame will be exposed, she'll see in my eyes the terrible things that have marked me/.

A last shudder of strangeness, last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt. Skinned alive, my hand reaches for her hesitantly....

Now impossibly she is placing her cheek - soft - sun warmed peach - against my cold palm.

I begin to trace every line, her lengths, and shapes, and realize suddenly that she's perfectly still, her hands clenched and I'm appalled by my stupidity, my longing humilates her. Then I realize that she is totally concentrated, pinioned under my tongue, that she's giving me the most extragavant permisson to roam the surface of her. Only after I explore her this way, so slowly, an animal outlining territory, does she burst into touch.

I'm paralayzed in the cave her hair makes. Then my hands move to feel her slim waist and suddenly I know how she would bend after a shower, twisting her hair into a wet turban, feel the shape of her back would make, leaning over. I like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver. I hear her voice but not her words, so soft, the noise of her whole body is in my ears.

I am deafened by the buzzing drone of her body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin. Cables of tendons; the forests of bone in her wreist and feet. Each time she stops speaking, in each long pause, I renew the pressure of my grasp. I feel her slowly going heavy. How beautiful the blood's pull towards trust, the warm weight of the sleeper entering her orbit, pulling towards me, fragrant, heavy and still as apples in a bowl and oh ! so beautiful the serene calmness of her look as she meanders in the gardens of sleep.

It's not the stillness of something broken but of absolute rest......


When I drift off to sleep I dream of her - young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin.

I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.

Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace........

The Man in The Long Black Coat: Going, Going Gone.....

Like a Beast in the pen I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun
But the hunters are gaining ground
I've nowhere else to run.

- Boris Pasternak Nobel Prize.

She was a good woman and nothing was her fault. They were all good women. They were women with a mission to him, to serve him, straighten him out, to get his oh-so-many talents working in one direction, to help him make a fresh start that would get him clear of all the fresh starts he had made before.

He had encouraged her as he encouraged all of them. He had stood beside them at the patient’s bedside as if he were not himself the patient but a member of the healing team.

" So what shall we do about this poor chap that will get him up and functioning again?

The only difference was he had never believed in the remedy.. Never ever...

She lay face down, exhausted and possibly asleep. She had cleaned the flat. As prisoners clean cells and the bereaved tend tombs. She had scoured the surface of a world she couldn't alter.

Other people might tell him he was too hard on himself. Women said it to him often. How he mustn't hold himself responsible for both halves of every relationship that had collapsed on him. But he knew better. He knew the distance between himself and everything else.

In those days he was still the unequalled expert on his own incurability.

His disease: falling in love head over heels every time.

He touched her shoulders but she didn't stir, so he knew she was awake.

" I have to go" , he said as he began loading his junk into his long black coat, ritualistically as if setting off on a safari. his bent wallet, full of unpaid bills and cancelled credit cards; his passport mildewed with sweat and too much travel; the notebook and pencil he kept handy for penning gems of wisdom to himself for contemplation when he was sober and not under the influence.

He fished out a suitcase and began filling it with shirt's that she'd ironed for him.
" You said this time you weren't going back, that you'd served your time?"

"I have to go, there's nothing I can do, stay here, use the flat."

"If you just hadn't said all that stuff we'd have been fine. I’d have been happy just having an affair. You should see your letters and hear yourself in them."

He didn't look at her. He stooped over and picked up the suitcase.

"Just don't do it to anyone else", she said.

That was as far as her calm could stretch. She began sobbing and was sobbing when he left and she was still sobbing the next morning when she called her friend over and babbled out the whole story, yet defended him and his actions to the death.

She defends him still, a surfeit of loyalty to this day, even though her illusions are destroyed......
All that was left is ....

The eloquent silence, All that you hear at a hundred miles per hour is the ticking of the brain.

Where is the Love??

There's no avoiding it any longer. This feeling has been growing in my mind for the last decade and it is time I elucidated on it, otherwise I will constrain myself too much.



I don't like any of my friends. I've just flicked through my address book, a thin volume it has to be said, and was filled with irritation, distaste and an overwhelming sense of boredom.

{There I said it.... it just had to be said, }


None of my classmates from School feature in it. The friends in college I keep in touch with have dwindled. Most are from out of town, maybe distance is what does it for me, I’m a very private person as it is and I don't like it when people think they know me too much.



One of the great boons of living in a citylike Delhi is that you don't really need friends to exist and keep yourself entertrained. There are 97 million people within walking distance, a thousand new people every day for the rest of my life and no need to repeat anyone.

No, I like Acquaintances: a wide circle of faintly familiar people who smile and wave but whose names escape me.

An acquaintance has all the expectation, desire to please and vivacity of a first date.

They flash wit and compliments and don't expect you to call or go to their children's weddings.

Friends are only necessary in the rural country or when you go where your being an island is of no use, Where you have to have them, otherwise you stand in serious jeopardy of ending up in one of those institutions which instead of calling themselves Mental Asylums, prefer to be known as Institutions of Meditations & Mind Relaxation (just fancy names for Re - hab centres).

This is not to say that I have foresaken everybody.

There are a select few whom I count as true friends and all of them know this about me by now, that they still remain friends with me is something which is strange. They too are like me in many ways. They share the same passions and appreciate some similar things in life. Maybe we have got used to each others eccentricities long before to give a damn.



I have given up on my other so called wannabe friends, the more you know of another person the more distaste, gorge rises in your throat, common decency prevents me from telling them what i really feel about them. But I have recently done this and I feel lighter in my heart of having cut off those 2 from my former so called “friends”.

Trusting another person after having been betrayed is a very difficult thing for me to do. I can forgive easily but forgetting is the main problem for me.

Why do I cling onto the past so much. Is it because I think I have no future?

No there are things I look forward to but those things are not everybody’s cup of tea.





I try and reconcile to the fact that at least I was morally correct. But that doesn’t help either. Morality doesn't give you squat in todays rat race. yes morality is not a commodity whose stocks are soaring at the moment, while those of deceit & deception are soaring high, every one wants a piece of the action.





In order not to encourage other people to really get to know me, I form a wall around me, this is my private domain, if anyone comes close to intrusion, I behave and act in such a hostile manner that usually I succeed in keeping the walls around me solid, no one and nothing is allowed in here. This makes me think that I am a callous human being, maybe yes, maybe I just can’t fake it no more. .. Just cannot be bothered.


No one you meet for the first time sees the real you, what they perceive is really your representative, who puts the best foot forward and keeps up appearances. But I am not like that anymore. I have developed this aura by which I repel any curiosity which is aroused in another person about me.



I have seen some people shudder when I act like that. It doesn’t make me feel good or pleases me to be so obnoxious but lately I don’t even have to concentrate to bring this ugly face of myself to display to the world.

Over time I have realized that I like mostly unfamiliar faces around me, where no one knows about my past, my present and very few will know about my future.

While everyone thinks they know all about me, I let them delude themselves of this folly, if they think they know me, they will not pry into my affairs that much.

From sport to sport they hurry me to stifle my regrets.
And when they win a smile from me they think that I forget..
(But I never do forget..)


It is not a comfortable thought that I shun life away.

I rationalize with myself that I reach out to people in other oblique ways, help some without showing my face. Do deeds which soothe me and try to piece together my shattered heart. Like a big bad Jig Saw puzzle, I am patiently trying to get it right, but fragments of my heart have been lost and don’t want to be found again.


I will not pretend anymore. I am sick of pretending, this farce has run its course, and it must end before I go to the valley below.

I have known people from a distance whom I like without having ever met them, and I feel that somehow that distance is best to keep a long friendship going and not meeting everyday, frankly no one can keep up with the kind of shit my mind conjures up, and they either act bemused or look incredulously at me saying "You all right Mate!!"



I mean WTF!! I prefer seclusion to companionship,

I have changed and so has the world around me, that I don’t feel like a part of the world anymore, it is just my shortcoming and I try to live with myself for not learning the ways of the world. (maybe I missed the classes).



I used to be very different, I used to make an effort to befriend everyone in college, reach out and embrace strangers but now I shun even the people I know really care and worry about me.

I feel nothing, I am numb. I am very cold blooded. I am stone cold.

Where did my humanity go. down the shitter is my guess. How I became like this is a mystery to me, maybe what I need is a self forensic exam to trace my humanities disappearance.





It has dawned on me slowly, there were clues galore but maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place or maybe I chose to ignore it.



Self-deception is very easy to achieve. Don’t you think so?

I deceived myself while I went on deceiving my audience.

Maybe I will meet humanity again or maybe I will just wither away in the time honoured tradition of solitude and be a recluse for the rest of my time before my dying.



Maybe like the late great Jerry Garcia of The Greatful Dead once said :

“I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like...

SYSTEM OF A DOWN

In mind he was tierd, worn out by years of hope deferred, of lonliness, of unrewarded toil.

In body he was almost prostrate by the pain.

Bodily pain stung him like a personal affront " Someone will have to be made miserable for this ", he once said during the thores of an excrutiating toothache with a malicious gleam in his eyes...

He was no stranger to mental fatigue, but when to that was added corporeal anguish, and self induced imsommnia --he came very near total collapse.

He capacity for work was constricted; the mere sight of his writing material filled him with dread, But because he had a horror of being discovered in a state of inaction, after breakfast he sat down and as usual tried to write -- to fill the empty screen which seemed to him to be mocking him.

Dazed in a torrent of ideas, he painfully waited for the words to start flowing, but remained stumbling in a maze of disjointed ramblings., he frequently lost the thread of his argument, now and then, in sheer exhaustion of thinking up something to write he looked at the half filled screen, trying very hard indeed to string two coherent thoughts together... but the effort drained him..and he slumped in his chair and thought about the futility of it all and once again cursed the block which had stolen his writing from him...

The words refused to flow as they had once done and this in turn resulted in a depressing sadness creep slowly all over him. It wasn't the meloncholic ecstacy which he was emanoured to but a much darker, sadder mood which seemed to overpower him and disturb his solitude as he tried to feed off his nostalgia about the good ole days when he had been wedded to words... This recent divorce was not to his liking and he hated it...yes absolutely hated it.....

It was a nightmare and he wished he would wake up and smell the coffee....

She moves in Mysterious Ways...

He had been walking for a couple of hours. In his search for seclusion , he had avoided the usual paths to the beach and preferred to go make his way cross country. Soon he could hear the roar of the ocean and he followed the sound ,

As he crested a dune, he suddenly saw the ocean . His heart leapt with joy at the sight of this vast, deserted beach. There was no one in sight as far as his eyes could see. Alone finally he said to himself.

He reclined on the sandy shore. Before him stretched the ocean, foaming, blue, limitless.. On both sides, as far as the eye could see, was a line of froth, flung onshore by the breaking waves, like a garland of bunched white blossoms deposited on the golden sand, a hair - ointment to adorn the earth's green tresses.


Foaming waves broke the blue surface of the water in a thousand places. Only a storm voilent enough to displace thousand of stars, swirling them against the azure backdrop of the sky, could match the sight of the water churning in the ocean..




He had no idea how long he remained on the seashore, gazing at the beauty of the ocean.At this moment, one segment of the blue water shone like molten gold n the gentle rays of the westerning sun. Then, the darkness descended upon the black waters, the whole horizion lit up with the last gloaming.

He rose to his feet with a sigh!! Time to head back he said to himself.

Why he sighed, I cannot say, for there is no telling what happy memories came to the shore as floatsam and jetsam in the ocean of his memory and evoked a sigh...



Rising he turned away from the ocean. on the sandy shore. At once he beheld an extraordinary appartion (or so it seemed to him later).

At the edge of the wave - resonant ocean, on the sandy shore, in the blurred glow of twilight, stood an exquisite female figure...
Her unbraided locks , cascaded down her back, and were swept across her face by the gentle breeze, her body glowed like a jewel, a picture framed by its backdrop.

Though partly obscured by the hair, her countenance glowed like moonlight glimpsed through a gap in the clouds.

She was a beauty..rather tall, but her limbs and bosom were full and well rounded, Like trees and vines in the rainy season, her body rippled with its own voluptousness. the fullness lending grace even to her tall figure. She seem to him to be In the full flush of youth, like a river surging against its bank.

She was dusky, her skin had the deep hue to molten gold, her locks cluttered about her dark, glowing forehead, like bees about the petals of a newly blossomed flower, her eyebrows arching up to her hair line beneath her cresent shaped brow,

Her eyes were limpid pools of contrasting emotions.. . their gaze was calm yet penetrating. Her glance would instantly make one feel that she had the power to look into one's most secret of hearts. The expression of those penetating eyes would change from moment to moment, now melting with tender affection, now full of sweet langour, as if the god of Love himself lay there dreaming. At times, her eyes would be dialated with desire and intoxivated with romance, and at other times, a hearless sidelong glance would dart from the corners of her eyes, like a flash of lightining.

Two ineffable elements irridated her countenance: the stamp of intelligence, and her self -esteem.

From her posture, the arch of her swan neck, it was clear to him that she was a queen among women..

Youthful vitality made her body restless, as a river in autumn ripples even without a breeze. from moment to moment, this restless energy revealed some new facet of her lovliness and he gazed, transfixed, at this ever evolving display of charm..

Suddenly encountering this divine figure in the midst of such a desolate part of the seashore, , his eyes bore a startled expression, while the young woman's gaze was serenity itself, and was that a touch of amusement he saw reflected in them.

There the two of them remained, on the wave resonant ocean's desolate shore, in the twilight glow,for a long time.

After the pregnant silence the young woman's voice was finally heard.

"O Traveller, have you lost your way? ,

Her voice struck chords in his heart.

The string of our heart's extraordinary instrument sometimes grow too slack to be tuned to harmony , try as one might. But at a single sound, at the musical note in the woman's voice, the dissonance is instantly rectified. All the strings fall into tune.

At such a moment , the journey of life seems to resemble a blissful stream of music. Her voice had just such an effect on him.

" O Traveller, have you lost your way"?

The sound of her the words entered his ears. What they meant , what reply he should offer, he did not know. The sound seemed to spread everywhere, bringing a shiver of joy; it seemed to fill the breeze and murmur through the leaves, falling away to blend with the ocean's booming sound.

The earth, girdled with the sea, was beautiful; beautiful too was the woman, and also the sound of her voice,
the hearts instrument began to resonate with the rhythm of harmony.

"Come with me". invited the maiden, when she received no reply to her question.

With these words, she walked away, she seemed to glide over the terrain like a white cloud wafted on the slow spring breeze, like a clockwork toy he followed this vision of beauty not looking or caring where he was going.

At a certain place where they had to skirt a small wood, the beautiful woman disappeared from his sight behind a clump of trees. Having trudged around the forested area, he found himself alone , there was no sign of the beautiful woman, anywhere. he looked down to see which way her footsteps went and suddenly he felt a cold shiver run down his spine, He moved back over the way which they had come to re check , but there was no doubt about it.

There were just one set of footprints leading from the shore to the clump of trees, and they were his... With invisible footsteps she had come into his life to illuminate it and then as suddenly and mysteriously disappeared..

"Was she a godess, a human being, or merely an illusion conjured up by his mind??

Frozen, immobile, he turned this question over and over in his mind ....uncomprehending....and alone again..

Let the Music be your Master

The music I listened to last night in my house was intoxicating like red wine, pretty when held up to the light, sharp and then smooth against the tongue.

I found my thoughts dervishing, great billows of whirling energy, connected between earth and sky like a spinning dancer's hands, one hand open to the ground, the other open towards the sky, forming a conduit like a high priest of ancient gods I evoke the spirit to rise from the ashes again as the song faded out and I was left alone once again to begin once more as the guitar struck a new chord ….