Through the unrest of yesteryears you stood silently over the inoffensive radio conversation, looking out to the silent dell across the wooden frame of a misplaced window; chewing inorganic thoughts of unaccounted wisdom and lackadaisical trust.

Gun down the mild mannered stars looking down from its azure abode where innocence is cheaply available and shared at a princely sum. Trusting them would be fatal. Answers will be at a premium for those who would not be coming back from the milky terrain of un-dwelled universe. Of course questions will be forgotten after three nights of hotbed curfew on roads.

The shadow on that wall is yours. It doesn’t have your physical vigour but I can read that pristine mind; The clearness of vision, the strength of understanding, the precision of thought.

Don’t look at me like that. Yes, I am mindful of what had transpired between us last night. I can still sense your leap from the corner of our room. The rest as they say is history, buried peacefully in my recesses.

You called me a lousy dreamer. That we all are. We all are weaving magical dreams. Its just that the fabric is different and the art copyrighted.

He kept walking promising himself at each step, the state of emotions that he desired. But then discontentment is addictive … one despises it .. grows tired of its capers but some where deep down loves its quarrelsome nature like a man in love with a termagant.

Discontentment is deep rooted in desires. “Desires … Bah!”, he thought. And he kept walking further and further towards the prairie. The beauty bogged him down. The landscape humbled him and he wondered, how could all that was troubling him could have troubled him so much. Inconsequential. And he lighted another pack ….

You wouldn’t know me least of all recognise
O Himalayas but I do,
For as long as I remember reading through
books written about you,
My un-sharpened lanceolate blades of memory
drew grains of inspiration from you.

I look up through the haze of vagabond clouds
across visible horizons
Where you stand tall
through vicissitudes of primal living
I wonder again, would I live that long.

Look at the vast expanse of unbridled sea. Calmness that rests in unhindered existence, far away from human affirmations. Beliefs that are owned and treasured. Confidence that there is co-existence. 

Let me sit back and reflect. For this moment at least.

And as I work through eons of unexplained opinions, malice and prejudice let me regain the calmness of naught, beliefs that are mine and confidence that we will survive. 

Let us not talk. For some time indeed.  

Switch off the lights dear.

31st December 2008. The last day of an extraordinary year. In few hours time an episode of a roller coaster ride will be over.

And all that will be left is nostalgia. All that will remain is the certainty of past. What we will see is a definite place in the history books; What we will remember is an unusual package of love, hate, betrayal .... friendships, bondings, break-ups ...... avulsions and havocs. What we will realise is how real life had presented itself in a garb of weird enchantment.

Tomorrow we will start to gamble again. And if we are courageous enough we will forswear all medial beliefs. We will put wager on the insignificant and evanescent lines of the palmate. Tomorrow we shall take the stage again .... Tomorrow we shall start all over again ...

And for you and me, we take each little step together ....

And in a year's time we would have covered a mile .....

and with a wry shrug of our shoulders
we let the numinous structures
of individual past dissolve
in the whirling smoke
of filtered cigarettes, sitting
on the rocks of Marine Drive,
littered with several old sins,
buried, now proudly rediscovered -
whose fate, ill-fated to have survived
invective reproach of rumour mills.

“man, those were the days”,
classic clichéd terms we used
and within few minutes, antedate
future artificial scenes
that danced the skank
to the reggae of Arabian Sea; and
admiration for time’s ironical gallows
grew with each passing smoke;
life that returned after a long silent void
on way back home: a long evening on road.

wrapped in its arms
this early June,
the sky spinner sits
for long hours on a low baluster
and spins the woolen clouds
onto a spindle, tirelessly -
shaping the moist monsoon;

and like a giggling spring rose,
evident in boundless joys of unaccounted
profits; winds up her trade for this season.

This morning, I learnt from one of my friends back in Mumbai, that first rains of the monsoon had arrived. I felt celebratory even though I am thousands of miles away. I don’t know why. And it is almost futile to seek an explanation because there isn’t any available. All I can say is Mumbai Rains are special.

Monsoon in Mumbai is different, say from Calcutta where when it rains, it does so incessantly. Looking at the skies you can predict whether or not it would rain and most of the time your personal forecast would hit the bulls’ eye. Mumbai skies, during monsoon, are almost perennially covered with clouds, which look extremely inviting. You can feel the air that says it can rain anytime. But then she is temperamental. She would dress up, looking like she is on a rampage to kill someone with her drop dead gorgeous looks and then she might just slump in her chair and decide not to go to the party. Sitting in that chair she would look outside the balcony as if she were lost in her present surroundings. 

In Mumbai you can get caught in the rains at most unexpected times. Even when you don’t see any clouds, and the sky is as clear as a plain white paper on a canvas, it would just take minutes to form a cloud formation and then .. it would simply rain. Its unpredictability is its highlight. And unpredictability is non-monotonous. There is a beauty in random, non-routine but there is also a definite rhyme and rhythm to it. When it rains in Mumbai, it rains poetically. And needless to say, I miss the Mumbai Rains.

strange sensations of the fingertips
stalks dark recesses of hidden caverns
traces stealthy movements
breathes flowing pulses,
stops -
holds -
caresses the bare neck
slowly -
slow steps -
step by step,
fulfillment ...
painlessness …
sheer pain ….

the ruby pendant worn-down
on the empty wrinkled bed sheet;

spurious stains of evening skies
standing alone on busy broadways.

Messages from long lost friends are as scarce as friends themselves. My nonchalant ways with social networking sites doesn’t help either. Given the way people talk about social networking sites these days, I do feel ashamed to admit that I have an account each with two of the big players. I am a moderately active member of one of them and a sleeping partner (not exactly literally) of the other one which was a favour that I had bestowed upon someone, but I don’t remember exactly on whom; it must be some acquaintance or the social networking site itself whom I help generate large amounts of revenue from such an insignificant act of mine as clicking on the site's url.

Well, amidst profusion of no messages, when the mailbox suddenly shouted of a mail from a known acquaintance and an unknown friend, yours truly had no option but to be a little bemused. The insouciant state of being happy without a known friend was suddenly turned into an uncontrollable urge that practically compelled me to follow the link to the site and read what ever was on offer. The “Hi”, was almost bittersweet but the prospect of a reunion party for secondary school leaving batch of 1996 sounded very alluring. The date of-course was not. It was strategically chosen to be somewhere in the next month, which is an extremely busy month for a guy who works for Strategic Planning. Of-course, I accept that it’s more to do with my bad luck than their good fortunes of not seeing me there but then the invitation did set the wheels of school memories rolling. My courteous ‘Hi’ to his message was followed by an enquiry of certain teachers whom I have admired and adored through out my life. One such teacher has been Ms Koyeli Ghosh.

Koyeli Ghosh joined us in the summer of 1994 as our class teacher. She was a phenomenon. She was nothing like what we had seen in all these years. Teachers to us had a very ‘different’ personality. They were like the big wall clock of ebony in front of the main doorway, whose pendulum would swing with a purpose of defining time in a loud, dull and monotonous way. She was different. She had an outlandish air about her, not with her clothes, but with her entire persona that was so “non-teacher” like. She was assigned the task of teaching English Literature. She still teaches English there.

She must have been in her early thirties when she joined us. Graduated from Oxford, we thought she had no business teaching at such a small school as ours. For many months after she had joined, we were still debating (read more as gossiping) as to why she decided to teach us rather than at a college level and do far better for herself. Money was of-course not a criterion because she was presumably a millionaire in those days. We finally gave up but only after having gone through rounds of unfruitful but necessary discussions and debates. Talking in hindsight the job gave her enough flexibility to be occupied, to teach and as well as spend considerable amount of time with her seven year old son, especially when her husband had a job that required extensive traveling.

It was then no surprise that my predilection for her teaching or otherwise would put no restrain on ensuring that I get enough sun tan in a class already filled with luminous stars quite near to the earth than those in the galaxy. The positive vibrations were extremely important if I were to do well in the subject matter of her choice but my preference now. The only danger lay in her liking someone else and any effort was required to ensure that she looked straight at me rather than beveled through the edges of her table. But after sometime it simply didn’t seem to matter.

Her extensive taste in good books, life and music was something extremely endearing and enriching for the students. Her anecdotes, references, allusions, interpretation and descriptions were collected diligently and cherished by yours truly almost like a philatelist. I still remember the first poem that she taught us was D.H.Lawrence’s “Snake”. A life long journey of love for reading, understanding and interpreting poetry had worn its Adidas boots that day. I remember her telling me once, reading poetry is an art, different from writing; one who reads poetry well doesn’t necessarily write good poetry and vice versa. Well she was responsible for making Shakespeare fun and ensuing that we read and discussed him without notes. She explained the importance of translations in one of the most outstanding ways that I remember, by making us translate Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali poems into English and then reading to us his own translations from "Geetanjali". 'Translation is not translating one word from one language to another verbatim; understand the meaning and translate the meaning to achieve the desired effect, if that is to be ever achieved'. We of-course kicked ourselves in our endeavours and realised why he was the Nobel Laureate and we were studying him. The best aspect of her teaching was going beyond what was written as texts in the books. This might sound clichéd but believe me you must, that this is the most difficult thing to achieve as a teacher.

I was able to build across a sense of camaraderie with her but then that was not as exclusive as I would have liked it to be. She had grown to be one of the favourite teachers of all students irrespective of how they fared in the subject. And that didn’t bother me anymore. She knew exactly how to divide attention to each and everyone of us equally. No more careful walking on stilettos was required because there didn’t exist a desire to have her full attention anymore (or for that matter the fear of falling out of her graces one day) and yet be quaintly happy everytime she called out in her charmingly brusque tone -“Jha”. Yes, “Jha” is what she used to call me instead of “Alok”. The archipelago of memories is what binds me to her even today and I am grateful to that message for letting me remember her in the recesses of a Sunday morning.