The Bee

It buzzes past the myriad mazes
of a ticking, restless mind.
Maze after maze, it searches for nectar,
that dewy, lusty taste of life.
There is a forest of grey and white,
a forlorn winter scape.
High walls and claustrophobia
guard this haunting world of nonexistence.
The bee hovers and beats its wings aimlessly,
willfully hitting itself on the dank walls.
With each passing day,
there are flakes of gossamer wing
tumbling down like the hopes of a spring,
of blossoms abundant.
And then, there is the bee,
floating and gliding in a vacuum
without any wing, without any spring.

A darling pet python???

I remember odd bits of a childhood memory when father had once told me about a certain tennis star who had a python for a pet. I can recall the tides of fear and astonishment that had surged inside my little head then. Now almost after 20 years, Sam tells me about an American colleague of his who once had a pet baby python. At first I just brushed aside the conversation as another inscrutable aspect of the American culture. In India we do have domesticated snakes but once the snake charmers catch them, their poison tooth is pulled out which leaves them perfectly harmless. Over centuries and civilizations people have been fascinated with the domesticating of animals and birds, but a pet python simply sounds like a classic oxymoron. But eventually the incident turned out to be quite riveting. This particular python, while a baby, would feed on mice and infant pigs. But as it grew older it refused food and sulked inside its glass cage for days. Its concerned owner took it to a vet to check if everything was alright with the otherwise healthy and happy creature. The vet observed that the python was growing up and wanted more food to satiate its equally growing appetite. As a means of food mechanism, the python scales an image of the shape and the size of its prey as a comparision with its own bulk. This hungry python was actually starving itself so that it could feed on its owner!! The horror struck man was advised by the vet that he should leave his prized pet at the care of the zoo keepers. After this appalling end I could feel a little chill down my spine. Perhaps it's one of those little culture shock moments.

This episode further rings a bell about a certain short story of Khushwant Singh "The Mark of Vishnu" where Gunga Ram, a domestic servant dies a painful death from snake bite. Gunga Ram was illiterate and was therefore unreasonably religious and superstitious. He considered all life forms as sacred, especially the snakes. He regarded the snakes as the choicest of God's creatures and therefore they should not be harmed or attacked. And thus he revered the King cobra that lived in the house yard and every night left a saucerful of milk near his hole. The young boys of the house would often poke fun at Gunga Ram's absurd ways for they knew their science lessons well enough to be fooled by such blind beliefs. One fine day the boys manage to mangle and finally capture the King cobra in a box with the intention of parading him as a mark of their bravado in school. When the science teacher unfastened the box, the hurt and angry cobra darted out in a hissing fury. Gunga Ram, aware of King cobra's fate, had followed the boys to school in order to beg for forgiveness from the snake god. He presented the frenzied snake with his usual saucerful of milk and bowed down as an apologetic gesture. The cobra, furious in its urge to freedom, hissed and then frantically bit Gunga Ram all over his head. Ultimately his veneration for the deadly snake cost him his dear life. Before I digress once again, I would like to observe that it is logical for any creature, when provoked or denied its need, to adopt a defensive behaviour. It is in their very nature to do so. There is always a certain amount of risk involved when one tries to tame harmful creatures. A pet python starving to devour its owner or a captive King cobra paralysing its ardent devotee with his poisonous venom is only natural. Even my cat does not think twice before giving me one of her signature paw marks when I try to get too cuddly with her. She can and does a Garfield at such times! Let animals be animals then...

The spice jar

"Take this with you, but careful -
Don't lose it in the vastness of the Atlantic."
She meant her words, my mother,
a simple woman with little desires.
True, losing 'things' across infinite miles is easy.
I have learnt it well, bit by bit.
A dear dear uncle, a cousin...
Ma told me how the sad, hungry ocean swallowed them all.
And I just stared, defeated and distanced.

The glass walls of the small jar looked familiar,
choked with cloves, cardamoms, cinnamon sticks, pepper pods.
A very Indian smell, guardians of my world.
I've emptied it into my days and nights,
into my morning tea, flavouring the curries,
always searching for that familiar aroma.
The aroma of Ma's palms,
of ginger garlic, of love and sacrifice.

Everyday I see it, the half filled, half emptied jar,
sitting mute in the disturbingly neat white kitchen cupboard.
Perfunctorily, I refilled the jar today
with imported spices from the India bazaar.
Spices that have traveled across the proverbial seven seas
shedding some skin of originality on their way.
And so I mixed them all, the Was and the Is,
letting my world unhinge into an unknown territory.
But deep inside my labyrinthine thoughts
I am scared, as if I have lost my only defense.

For the Was and the Is never meet.

An eternal love

It all started in the summer of 1998. My parents took me to Shimla, the old British summer capital, as a treat that befitted a fifteen year old who had just gone through the harrowing experience of the Board exams. I never had the foggiest idea that this journey would cling on to me as one of the most prized nostalgic recollections. We took a toy train from Kalka to Shimla for a panoramic view of the scenic Himalayas. The train rumbled on with puffs of smoke as it snaked the steep hills, brushing past the coniferous greens and the wild roses that grew carelessly on the hill slopes. Such was my first prelude to an everlasting romance: the hills. This towering side of nature mystified me to a great extent. A feeling of immense happiness and calm reverberated in me. It felt like a bizarre dream where a perfect bliss and harmony ruled the world. With a strange awakening, I returned back to my land of sun and palms.

Thereafter I nurtured a hope that someday I shall return to the hills, once again to be awed and mesmerised by their sheer stoicism. But time does play its elusive little tricks! After a vast stretch of ten years Darjeeling happened, the shinning jewel of the North Eastern Himalayas. This experience was more poignant and deep, for this time I devoured the pastoral beauty of hills with an adult eye. The balmy smell of the oaks and the pines, and the fog clad hills rekindled a lost fire. But what actually augmented the trance was the exotic North Eastern culture. I felt far removed from the India of tropics, from the India to which I belonged. This little tourist town with the omnipresence of the hovering Kanchenjunga in the azure sky, the striking patterns of silver jewelery and the mouth watering momos was the perfect escape that one could indulge in to forget a mundane city existence. I fed on every bit of the rustic hilly charm. On the day of leaving I could sense an odd feeling of loss, as if I had left little bits of my soul scattered everywhere, among the pine clusters, in the tea gardens, on the hilltops, and finally amidst the people.

Ever since I was a kid I have always savoured Ruskin Bond's stories which abound in tales of the sleepy Himalayan towns of the pre-independence days. No other writer has been able to capture the grandeur and the simplicity of the hills at the same time like him. After these Himalayan escapades, I would often read these stories with a touch of sentimentality. Months later, after our short and memorable holiday in Darjeeling, I had to fly to Seattle, the emerald city of America. The grief of leaving behind my home and my people had allowed me no time to delve into the topography of this foreign land which was to be my home for sometime. All I could gather from here and there was that it rained nine months of the year there. And with such prepossessions I found myself in Seattle in a late spring afternoon oohing at the blood red rhododendrons and the dark tall pines that thronged the avenues. The nostalgic air of the hills at once hit my senses. There was a countryside charm in the blinding greenery and the soothing clean air. As if God had at last heard me! Redmond, our neighbourhood, might be a prominent dot on the globe for being the Microsoft capital and the home of the great Bill Gates, but to a nature gazer like me the experience of living each day in this sylvan quietude was overwhelming. Visiting the picturesque Mount Rainier (in the picture above) remains the creme de la creme of my Seattle memoirs. Shrouded by pines and maples, it looked like a piece of magic, too surreal to stand on its own on this earth. The innumerable melting glaciers on its slate gray crest resembled locks of dishevelled white hair on an old man's face that has stiffened with age and experience.

And now, my mulling over these greener times on a hot Texan day, makes them grow fainter as if they belong to a long lost world. I have been longing for a bit of the proverbial 'mountain air' for my worries to melt away like the snow on the slopes of Mount Rainier. The haunting words of Rudyard Kipling keep playing in my mind - "The smell of the Himalayas, if it once creeps into the blood of a man, he will return to the hills again and again and will love to live and die among them."

The Zeroes

An abstract round
that crawls and spreads its wings
into a larger round of nothingness.
An emptiness that looms large
over a room wearing a vacant expression,
it's corners squirming and inching away.

This big lump of roundness,
dances in concentric circles
like a spider's web, like the fringe of a smarting wound.
In its core I have stored some carefully plucked mistakes.
Mistakes of many colours and patterns.
Earthy reds and azure blues.
I try to kick them hard,
so that they spill out into a sea of namelessness.
But they spring back boomerang-like
rebounding, reappearing.
This time devoid of all colours.

The circles now resemble the gnawing hollow
of sunken cheekbones and beaten desires.
A cluster of full bloomed zeroes,
zoomed and magnified in a photographic lens.