in defence of the pepper....

i guess pathak sir's lecture must have had given some taste of mint after that too teary packet of chips that we munch 24x7....hmmm hia says she wants to be "butter" at times but y i ask to myself....agreed that butter is always in demand it has that slippary quality that anybody would slip for it...but what difference will it bring....in fact think of the fate of the butter which everyone wants and its taken for granted in most instances if u notice carefully....pepper may be a ten minute coffee break but the beauty of this fact is that pepper is never in an illusion its never oblivious of its nature and its audacious that it fights and lives its "reality"....pepper may not be the order and choice of the daily life but pepper is certainly proper even in its disordered existence.....

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------suvrat---------

When the Pepper is dissatisfied

There are times when I strain at my own ten minute coffee break image. It's all one thing to say we are a certain kind, we identify what binds us together and although others sometimes find us strange, we like how we are....but it ends up sounding like the bunch of kohl lined dark eyed, hoop-earringed smart kids who have so much angst against the state and the free-market and who see an imperial design in everything and a sexist in every man....it sounds like we revel in the fact that we are different....and we do......but there are days when I feel tired. Sometimes, the pepper does not want to be that way....I don't want to be anybody's coffe- break today, just a coffe-break that is. If it was a ten minute snatch where I could bring life and health back to a comatose person, I would want to be that. In the long run I know this is how it is always going to be.. I'm going to be alone. Just sometimes, the pepper wants to be the butter now-----I'm tired of the metaphor now.......

we.....

we see and meet each other every day....though do not talk about million things under the sun...many things just remain unsaid even in the daily mundane talks but we understand the mood in the way certain name is taken or a certain word is used out of no context...sometimes even we are unaware that we are able to peep through that keyhole and view the expansive world of our respective loneliness....are we really lonely i wonder??????????? we walk together yet give so much of space to each other's thoughts to float and fly whatever it may feel like on a particular day....yet our long shadows behind converse and know whats cooking up for lunch.....we look at people with similar questions in our twisted brains....we dont need to say much an eye contact is sufficient to pass the message on if we are sitting at different places in the class.....who wants more who wants less? do we still need to run away i wonder?????????may be yes may be no.....may be someday may be today.....but the moments are just fine with little fun in between our thoughts of retirement and death.....a cup of coffee with lots of sugar is ok! for a while to lessen the pain; the pain that we share being pepper on the butter.......

-----------------------------------------------suvrat---------

The high-backed chair

Oh dear! So Suvrat has posted this poem. It is uncanny that I should see it today. I had written the poem long ago, in 2002 or even before, 2000 or 2001 I think. It is strange that the day I should read it again, six years after I had written it should be a day like this. This was my first poem, my first poem that I ever took seriously.....and I don't remeber the day that I wrote it, nor any specific event that might have led me to feel like this.. But it was more than tinged with religious feelings, a passion that I have not felt for so long that after all these days I am surprised at the intensity of it. The religious undertone, and the person for whom it was written...he with a capital H.....would have been more obvious from the initial title I had thought for the poem, 'Stigmata'. I was obsessed with the idea of stigmata then, but thought that the reason for the torment was purely religious. Although I never saw the conflict as anything other than of a personal nature. Back then I thought it had something to do with all those minutes stolen at the chapel (I cannot even say the word without feeling that it has somehow been tainted by my own Ronald Merrick, my ghost fetish, Christ and so on. Today when I read it and feel the same but in a qualitatively much much different context it makes me think that the reasons for writing it had not been religious ...the same tyranny I feel today, after finishing college, after Masters,...when I'm quieter and hardened in a sense---or so I would like to think. Had I not thought about the poem quite often, I would not have believed that I had written the poem so many years ago, when the circumstances it speaks of are present now. The reference to the high-backed chair almost makes me feel affection for me.....good old me....all those years back I had the same way of putting things the way I felt them. I feel the high backed chair now:) Oh how much I do feel it!But that means that the tyranny originates from within me...no one is to blame:) I think I see the high backed chair, I feel tied and feel the need to break away with so much intensity..none of it comes from the outside, or even if it does I am too bullish to notice, so taken up am I with the inside. Which means.......what I felt six years back has not changed much save in depth here and colour there....so I suppose I shall continue to be like this till the last day.
Love always,
Hia

momento

I do not want to come so close,

I writhe to move away

My baobab tree, my prickly rose

This marry month of May

But you who are supposed to care

Will never let me be;

Perched atop your high backed chair

Your endless tyranny.

Your chestnut mane,

Your melting eyes

from sinners to the sick

All of us you mesmerised

with your flippant Aramic.

But I won't be taken in my lord,

Young as I may be,

I shall fight your grasp with

brain or sword

Back to my baobab tree.

Suddenly you let me go

and suddenly I'm free

The breeze stops rustling where I stand

'neath the Frangipani tree.

But then I see I am not free,

why you're gloating in your stand

I can only now weep silently

Nail imprints on my hand.

---------------------------------------hia....

If you are the kind who does not get annoyed by animal stories then you could stay on perhaps. Again, if you do not get annoyed by the counselling columns in newspapers where people ask for advice making it sound like they are asking on behalf of their 'friend', then you should not be annoyed with my animal stories. So there is this crab I know who lives next door to me and she saw herself as being very 'clingy'( crass and hurtful word I think....but never spared herself this kind of hurt) It's alright to be clingy if one is an arthropod but then comes a point of time when the young adult arthropod with the hardest of shells, begins to feel mutinous. But there was no running away from this kind of labelling. So my friend the crab did what all crabs do====she moved out, made friends, pretended to be busy and all the while felt glad that she pushed away the spells of self-depreciation under the dining table, although she did occasionally indulge in waves of self-pity. But such spells of bliss are ephemeral and soon the world of squids and fish and seaweed and lobsters made her want to pull the shell over her ears as much as her family did. She had some other crabs she could talk to at these times, a hermit crab and a sea anemone as well. But wanting to lean on fiends bring forth a fresh burst of self rebuke from the crab in her. Doesn't everyone fight their own battles? Don't we?
I was walking to the centre in the afternoon----the trees were all red gold and a powdery yellow and brown hung like an unreal movie on either sides and I felt a little something twist inside me. I always dig and carve these little spaces for me to run away......and find mice and gates and laptops and leaves to talk to. It lets off the steam and helps one think better...about people, relationships in general. But the worlds no matter how alternate, are sanctuaries. But it amazes me how invariably relationships replicate even in alternate worlds. When I tripped up the path to the SSS II, I saw the heaps of leaves and although I wanted to make nests on the lawn and sit for a spell with the dogs, a part of me did not want to talk at all. Comfort and distraction flowed through the earphones playing music from the Delhi radio stations but it is not any kind of world---alternate or otherwise. Sometimes I think that the superego of the crab should let me off more easy.

We are convinced that we are two of a kind, although,as we write, more people come to mind..more, like us dotting the blue planet and the Lord knows what other seas and planets and parallel worlds----sisters in uncertainty.(I am inclined not to add the brothers to our ranks-----we never had a brother who was truly bluely like us). Last evening there were three of us; today , a sobering two. It is easier to comprehend difficult things that otherwise swirl past one in moments like this, that is,when one has a sober spell after a particularly boisterous and joyous spell-----I prefer not to use the term happy because yesterday we were not happy. The unhappiness was just suspended amidst the noise and clamour of the headiness of being together like this. Joy is not the same as happiness, not always that is. I move away from the point. We discoursed on our relationship with other friends and acquaintances, and although unspoken, family even. It is uncanny that we are perceived almost the same way by our circle and the other networks of varying geometric shapes. Or at least, we concur on how others perceive us. A category of those whose company we appreciate, feel pressured by our company.We think that it is not even an excess of our company that is too much for them---our presence in itself is an excess. They are happy to communicate with us through email and messages but even a phone call is fraught with layers of rarefied grey feelings----the best we can manage in these conversations is ---'Umm...what's up?' and after a silence,..'So,...what....um..what's up?'...... Another lot I am glad to say,revel in our presence.They wait for us in between dreary spells amidst dreary colleagues, shoots and stuff ....wait for us tolight up their rooms. But we are just the ten minute break, not the background lived world. It is for themthat we are forced to artyiculate on our situation. We are nevern the toast. We shall never be the butter. We are dispensable but refreshing to some. We are the pepper on the butter.