Parts of Me

There are gazillion parts of me

I do not know how many more

I will be before I tumble into a single unit.

There is the part of me that sees the sunset

and there is the part that falls in love

 with it every time it happens.

There is the part of me that keeps

running away in order to be found some day.

Then there’s the part of me that wants to

grab people by their shoulders and shake them hard

when they say I am shy.

There is the part of me that coughs

into my hands and there is the part of

me that forgets to say god bless you when

the other part of me sneezes.

There is the part of me that pins hundred

needles in my brain when someone talks in numbers.

There is the part of me that makes swoosh noises

in my eardrums when I read words.

There is the part of me that watches the darkness

of the moon on the walls and there is the part that

 waits for the stars to emerge out.

There is the part of me that wants to rise up

from the reality like a cloud and float away

And there’s a part of me like a block of concrete

 filled with no air making the former part quit.

There is the part of me that says

nothing matters and there is the part of me

that does everything to make that true and there is

the part of me that realizes how ridiculous

that is.

There is the part of me that feels

it is solemnly the best I can ever be.

SERENDIPITY

They say the earth laughs in flowers. And sometimes even the earthlings get to share it. 

On a not so very special evening you’re waiting for the red light to turn green. Those 120 seconds of your life make your heart run away wearing your blue reebok shoes with a wide smile. It is like it can’t stay at its position anymore. 

Right after you use the brakes and the wheels of your car stop spinning, your inklings begin to process. And you don’t realize the window is half opened; until the process of your thoughts gets interrupted by a voice. A voice of a boy who in his adolescence is clothed in poverty. He smiles at you with a broken tooth. You give him I-don’t-want-any-nonsense look and he smiles hard in his tattered clothes. 

Even before you roll your window up, he drops a red carnation flower inside. You don’t want it, you say.  He says please and his eyes grow bright. You nod in reassurance. He compliments saying ‘it’s looking so beautiful here, please take it. I don’t want money for it’. You’re silent and he goes on. You are confused and you involuntarily accept it. The next moment he winks at you and goes behind the auto rickshaw standing next to your car. Leaving you feel awkward.  You realize the auto driver is observing everything. He seems perplexed too.  

You take the red carnation flower in your hand, give it a baffled look and pan your eyes to the side mirror. And for the next ten seconds your eyes are stuck to it because the boy peeks from behind and hides back. He is playful and you can’t stop yourself from calling him back with a grin. A huge one. You feel the different shades of a usual day and then you present it to me before I learn the sweet fragranced tale hidden in its wilted petals. And it’s only afterwards I realise how it tickled the chime of laughter inside me just because of a flower. And what it confirms is that the universe is always speaking to us. Sending us little messages, treating us with reasons to smile and causing serendipities to make us stop, look around and believe in it.

Threesome

It was

You

Me and

the Silence.

It rose from

the cold feet

and sat amidst

our more than

hot bodies

like a third person.

It gasped

and choked

between our

twirled tongues.

It sobbed

as our skin

perspire on the

outside and within.

Screaming silence

then arranged itself

in between the

rocks of our thighs.

It gathered

all its wrath

and died

as I sighed

with a shudder.

I had a threesome.

a little more than stronger

If you’re strong enough to do strange things to your un-stranger self.

If you’re strong enough to run from every living thing, including yourself.

If you’re strong enough leave everything aside and concentrate on ‘I Quit’.

If you're strong enough to take that blade and draw it across your flesh.

If you're strong enough to take those pills and swallow them in silence.

If you're strong enough to tie that rope and hang with it from the ceiling fan.

If you’re strong enough to lay yourself down in front of the speeding train.

If you're strong enough to jump off that bridge, my friend.

Probably you are way too strong enough, to live.

May be you don’t know that everything can be overcome
 and a life can be lived.

Paradise Turns Perfect Paradise

Sometimes it is okay to chase the sun with the windows down.

Your voice is the only thing carrying across the highway,

disobeying every speed law that you ever thought to enforce upon.

Sometimes it is okay to cross over all the hills, in hopes to get somewhere more beautiful.

Where the sun sets in its full glory and that is the only direction the compass knows.

This is it.

My last journey of 2012. And the very first of 2013.

Elevated at six thousand eight hundred and something feet, we swished quietly to McLeodganj and beyond.

Drove for about 12 hours only to be welcomed by a silver light of a winter skyline, beautiful enough that I didn’t remember where my home is any longer. The clouds were floating in, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colors to my sunset sky. The stars were beginning to shine. The moon was beginning to sprinkle its inner light. The foggy windows around me were only telling me that it’s the only place I ever wanted to be. The place is believed to be the land of peace and hashish abound. 

Trekked further to Perfect Paradise. There we sat with our legs stretched out besides the struggling bonfire and my lips shrank to the serenity in low temperature. Cupped the gracious Old Monk in my frosty hands when the shrill winds cut straight through the layers of my clothes, then the skin and got wrapped around my bones. I tilted my head towards the starry sky and let out my feelings with a deep exhalation. My feelings got translated into soft fog before my spectacle glasses. I wished if I could fold the sky like a newspaper and keep it under my armpit. 

the place itself is a home to a thousand mystical questions and answers about beauty, the right, the wrong, and the deserving. And music of course. Wonderfully noted, octaved and naturally composed, this place sings its own melody on a ‘high’ note.

During the last day of the year, I got to drench myself into a space, so occupied, so absorbing, and weirdly small shaped hole in the universe. The space certainly got so engaging that plunged me into the ocean of meanings. Far away from the bustle of concrete jungle into the peripherals of serene mountains. Picturesque taste was complimented by Tibetan flavours. That literally sang symphonies in the mouth.  

The morning heat brought with it the vibrancies of purity and newness, and I stood still for a while inhaling just the peacefulness. It's afterall the secret of life. I found myself lost in the oblivion thought of the faces dimmed out and mazed out and doped out and out there for me to search, at the silhouettes of the hills in front of me.

‘How was it that the birds sing, that they gloriously fly, that the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning,that the sky is not just blue but ohh bluest of blues, that the pleasant air love idling in the trees without a purpose, that every evening blooms with the songs of peaceful hymns, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?’ 

Walking down the hill in the day time and stumbling back by the bright moon light in the streets of unknown neighborhoods was more than enough to stuff my chest with immense pleasures. When there is crowd and noise, I feel there is some trouble waiting to blow up. And when there is silence and people are like localites of Mcleoganj, there is just perfection and nothing to fill the air. 

After 3 days, the time when I sat next to the driving seat, the rearview mirror framed the exotic collage of my new year. The mountains have left me feeling renewed and more content. I sat mutely among the series of sighs and the awe  just dripped from the corners of my eyes. Passing by the serenity I was positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again, as if I am tuned to savour the pleasures bestowed upon me, until the time I come back. Only if I had the talent to put the beauty in words... It was mesmerizing.   

  

The best of everything was the company I had. It was fresh, crazy, clever, eloquent, well-informed with a knack for adventure. That is what I call good company. In reality it helped me living a dream. A dream where paradise was a perfect paradise.