the india of today intimidates me, scares me...me who was all confident of walking through its streets brimming with people, of the very life that i missed, the pulse i craved for, the stinking sweaty smell and curry chicken and cousins and the colors that is home.
so much has changed. things have become expensive and holidays are not the same. long ago, over ramadan neighbors and friends would send the iftari and invite all to the festivities...now, they tell me it is so expensive they can't afford to cook nice dishes themselves.
well, so much for that...
i don't belong anywhere and if I ever did, it would be the verandah i sit in...book in hand, staring into space, the space i once inhabited, the space which has failed to suck me in this time for i have drifted afar, so far i can't be reclaimed or redeemed...
but this is the closest i can get to home. home is what we all keep in the dark, deep recesses of our minds. the idea of it lurks in the expanse of the heart, the soul with the good and the bad mixed, one overpowering the other...sometimes giving in to the dark lord, sometimes the white old man, the good god, crying out triumphantly...confirming the good over the bad as we all say and find comfort in
myopic i have turned or the vice versa. i don't much concern myself with the correct terminology...at any rate not of all this scientific jargon for i was never good at it, screwed up the most basic experiments
everything looks shrunken. i click pics, and stare at them for long hours trying to solve the mystery which is so annoying
each year i go back, things become smaller, distances seem shrunken as if someone put a cashmere shawl, a precious heirloom, passed down from generations, a figment of the past, so important, into a dryer and it came out shrunken, like a kids' muffler
but back to the reality of the life here. mosquitoes bite me in dozen places and mountains and plateaus form aplenty on my body as a cnsequence but i hold on, waiting for something...what is it I don't know
maybe not. for the soul never connects right, it is the illusion it falls for and is forever trapped into
love is for the mighty. i was always the meek one...forever escaping the pain, and in it also missing out on the pleasure, if love ever offered any
once i failed, the courage failed me the second time, maybe the third. who can keep count of not-so-measurable emotions...they always deceive, don't they
here, now and then, i want to connect with the lost world, the life that was and will never be again, i want to sit and mourn, a silent mourning, shedidng of small tears for its passing...for what was will never be...at any rate now how it was
revisitations are for the dreamy-eyed, in the real world they call them lunatics
forever they, the lunatics, mourn the loss of innocence and feign it in order to be for the past is their connection to the life force
me, no...i am sane, rendered so by this world.
ranting is not for me so i vomit it out on the kkeypad for we have outgrown, outlived the era of pen and paper and here i see my old notebooks where i scribbled shakespeare poetry in chelpark ink and i want to revisit but alas, no time machine for us. we were born in the twilight zone. the science stripped us of the innocence, telling us things that we feared most, making us lose our faith and dignity to the machines, enslaving us, but again no time machine for science teased us, keeping us suspended in time, in place and in universe...and we traveled through mindspaces, in the hazy spaces blurring lines between what happened and what memory, which is not so reliable, made it seem like
no time machines...science played the trick here
however much we yearned for the push into the future or be thrown back into the past, it won't let us
while we continue to walk in the lands of memory, unreal, surreal, dark, yet oozing bulb-like lights in places lest we fall and come out of the stupor...
yes, we walk
we, the hybrids, continue to close the distance between continents and increase by immeasurable yards the space between the self and the created...for in transit we grow tired, we lose and give up
