As Buddha smiles, so do I...

It was definitely the blueness that called me out. Placid. Tranquil. That self-content smile of Buddha played all over the surface. And in all its serenity, the water seemed thicker than it possibly could be.

As I stepped out of the window - the wood smelt of grandma's tales - the air was so crisp, the grass cracked under the weight of my shoes. They gave in willingly, dreamily; caught inebriated in the surrealism of that winter morning. The warmth was a surprize. The sun was out and the sunshine held you warmly yet loosely. Like a lover who had known you all you life; its fingers gently exploring every edge and curve in your body. And the snow fell so lightly, it melted off your skin, leaving behind moist lips where it kissed.

The water still beckoned. In its blueness. Its softness was there for all to see. The grass, despite the morning dew and the uncertain snow, was still too sharp. So were the craggy hills behind it. In the watercoloured sky, the clouds were too sharp-edged - their edges too white in the morning shine. And the wind had a bite of coldness that pushed needles till my bones. The water, by obvious contrast, looked too soft.

Marshmallows. Cherry blossoms. A leaf dropt somewhere. Floating handkerchief. Down feather. Dandelion head. Steam rising from a warm cup of tea. Too sweet.

I was neck-deep in water now. Again, the warmth surprizes me. And the ripples i leave on my wake don't move too far, nor too fast. They seem too lazy to fight the thickness. Too pacified by Buddha's unknowing smile. I walk forward. Even deeper.

The Buddha is everywhere. His presence, everything.

I do not choke as i reach underwater. The water for all its swaddling thickness, has by now wafted to ether. I can still feel its thickness around me, and its touch. It feels like I am walking in a thick breeze that hugs me, wraps its soft arms around me. I see clearly. Too clearly to be underwater. And then I pause.

I can definitely feel it happening. That irrational heart-scoffing fear when you lose something you prize the most. Feel myself losing out. Not that it was material. Not that I ever valued them when they existed. Not that I never wished them to be torn away. But the loss... The contradiction dawns. They were all I had gathered all through my life. They were my unsigned bank cheques, my unnamed appartment, my framed sepia photographs. They were my promise for the future.

As I stood at the bottom of the lake of tears, I felt it all getting thicker, all around me. The wrapped arms hugging tighter. And I felt my memories, my hopes, my dreams turning into ether. Warm. Mellow. Soft. My vision's now clearer than ever. I could see each wrinkle, scar, bemused smile, buried sorrow, as my memories float around me. Away from me. I can see each molecule. The electron cloud. I feel I am being one with them.

As the lake opened its eyes to the watercoloured sky, on it played the Buddha's self-contented smile.

Betraying the cause.

Causality

The relationship of cause and effect

The principle that nothing can happen without being caused

There was blood seeping

Tracing lines along the grains in the wood

And marking out the cracks in the floorboards.

Blood spewing out of his half-open mouth

And his bleeding nose.

His eyes were half-closed.

Half-open.

Staring aimlessly,

Trying to make meaning out of the rust patterns drawn into the bottom of the refrigerator door.

Trying in vain to substantiate life

And place pins, and hold it down,

And dissect its viscera

As he lay, dissected himself,

In a pool of blood.

His blood.

The blood of the cause.

The high-octane fuel that once charged

That turbocharged mind of his

Which identified, improvised, illustrated, illuminated.

No doubt he started it.

His mind was the manifesto,

And here lay, bread and wine,

And a thousand delusions which escaped the confining quotations

And puzzling citations within that psychical text.

Now with the knife staved deep in his chest,

It still was not easy.

Cutting a shredded line through his heart and his left lung.

Blood oozed out.

Filling the chest cavity.

Pulmonary oedema.

His lungs compressed, filling up with blood themselves.

As he choked on the high-octane fuel

That kept spilling though his breath now.

The blood wrote histories on the ground.

Stories he meant to achieve.

Walk in front of them, at the head of the procession.

His chest bared open to bullets

And cannon-fire.

Wrote tales of forgotten beds

And forsaken love.

The story of a cause

And how it made sense of the world to him.

How he tried to make them see it.

All they heard was a mad man's ravings.

All they saw was a path paved to their grave.

The knife plunged into his heart.

Soft and warm; and red with blood.

Allegropolis. Episode Four. Upturning the Fishbowl.

The fishbowl of existence. That unabated sense of euphoria substantiated - matter and the immaterial - within the inebriated minds of a million memory-impaired goldfish. The nauseating sense of aloneness. Sobriety in the middle of energy-pumping rave party. Ohh!! the flashing lights... The blacklights and the numbing baseline... Elliptic Epilepsy. My head spins. Counterclockwise. Understanding what lies beyond - the real substantial. They wont listen. Bluddy senseless goldfish. They are caught in the dream. Between the non-existent past and the stillborn future, their world is a stretched out elastic band of a present. the tension tears through my being. [T = mg cos A + mv2/l]. I run for the restroom. Nausea.

The band snaps. The fishbowl topples to a side, water pouring down its side.

Water drips down my face as I step away from the washbasin.

The Lassitude and Longi(ng)tude of Loneliness

On retrospection, he felt certain he must have left his mind behind. The take-away counter, most probably, he thought to himself.

But, he didn't realize it then.

When he stood there, in the busy bazaar -

Shoulders bustling for space

A stream of rickshaws blaring air horns

The bickering of women and vendors

And catcalls of a few who leaned by the stalls scanning the crowd

The occasional whistle of the policeman

The ringing bells of cycles snaking their way through the crowd

The unmistakable market scent

Of incense, jaggery, sweat, salt,

Rotten cabbages, fresh fish and soiled paper -

This heady concoction of sensory perceptions we so distanced and muted, he felt he might have been overhearing someone else's thoughts. Again he didn't realize it then, 'cause his mind was elsewhere.

Resting on the clean grazed stainless steel and glass take-away counter, shuddering to the unusual chill, his mind was dreaming. And creating those exquisitely intricate dreamscapes it so often indulged in.

Her warm kiss of sunlight on his neck.

Her gentle breeze running frail fingers through his hair.

Her lazy sleepy waves whispering music to his ears.

Her scent was a valley of flowers and rain and sunshine.

Her hair, waves of an ocean in night.

As he stood in the marketplace, the summer sun turning the world a monotony of white, he was searching for secrets and truth, for reason and meaning, as he looked into the endless depths of her eyes. In those few moments of lazy transcendency, of silent mournful longing, he was the loneliest person on the planet.

Yet, he remembered vividly that he was with her the whole while.

Leftovers and Left-Behinds. Surviving a Revolution.

The table was rickety as it was, being put together from discarded bottle crates with boards nailed on top. A very certain tremor quivered over its surface when he banged his fists and pushed his chair back. The knife clanged on the ceramic plate, in tune with the distant church bells that centuries ago used to warn the villagers when the malevolent Putana prepared to spew smoke and flame and brimstone; that ominous note of dark skies, grey ash and blood red earth. A few crumbs of bread floated off and rested peacably on the table.

Peace.

The tip of the cigarette burnt bright red as he pulled in a drag.

The ash broke off and floated off with the dry desiccating breeze.

His eyes were fixed on the horizon.

She looked elsewhere, searching for an answer. Searching for a reason despite all the illogicalness that shrouded the age. Her nose twitched at the familiar tinge of cigarette smoke carried over by the wind.

Peace.

She sat at the table, brushing that lock of hair off her face. Her fingers ran through her scalp, entangled themselves in that forest of melancholy.

He was inside. Could hear the cupboards being slammed shut. Rustle of papers shoved down into a bag. The sharp click of the lighter as another cigarette was lit. The faint memory of smoke trails out of the shack again.

She did not feel sad. Just a sense of time catching up. An intense feeling of tiredness; like when you sit down halfway through a marathon you did not have the lung to finish. A knowing recognition that they could not outrun time, especially when one of them was perennially straining back and looking over his shoulder.

Peace.

And the the tale of silent evasion.

Of hiding away from time.

Trying to find

An island of recluse

From fire, and hell,

And brimstone

And the vicious anger,

Hatred, greed,

And that indefatigably alluring

Hold of ideology

And idealism.

The dream of peace.

She remembered. The tantalizingly melodious sound of the stream. Carving secrets on the pebbles and whispering them to the trees. She remembered his fingers tracing lines on the water; the same way they would draw lines down her back. And her neck.

That distant summer afternoon, long before the paradox of peace confronted them with its brutal banality, she remembered him writing their dreams in the water. She remembered how their dreams seemed to take tangible shape in the dexterousness of his fingers. And how they were washed away. Caught in that flux of time.

When he stepped out of the house, he was the very college boy she had fallen in love with in University.

His eyes were evasive;

Shy.

His face half-turned.

The unkempt hair.

That forest of melancholy.

And the overgrown stubble.

He slung his bag high

Over his shoulders.

Closed his eyes

Not to meet hers.

His footsteps downhill

An ill-tuned verse.

A fly with blue wings

And the leftovers.

When she left out her cry of anguish, he was too far to hear. Too far to turn back. Too far to meet her eyes, hold her waist and kiss her neck. Her voice was a strained violin note trying to drown the silence that engulfed her in that forested melancholy.

Silent Mind and the Midday Shade

The words were always there.

Laid out

And arranged

Like the gleaming silver cutlery

On the pressed linen tablespread.

Surgically sterile

Tools to cut,

Slice,

Chop,

Tear,

Stir,

Scoop,

And dish out

Reality in more palatable

Versions of the truth.

They were blunt in their sharpness.

But they were always there.

I never thought of them.

Never repeated them

A hundred-and-twenty-two times

Each day

As I scrubbed myself down with soap.

They were always there,

Dancing,

Even before the thoughts

Remained unthought of.

Like the shadows

Dancing on the tablecloth

As the trees romanced with the midday sun.

As if that shadow play

Had started much before

I was called over for lunch.

Or maybe even before the sun even rose today.

The mist of memories

Fall down as worded raindrops

And spill ink

Into a dictionary of incoherence.

I sat in the shade

Of that redundant romance

And saw a rainbow

Staining the midday sky.