Speak to Me

Speak to me when the stars are dead or gone
and the streets are emptied of the pained and painted faces
of reporters howling over their cameras,
when there's solitude of the kind
only you can imagine, a salty breeze playing
and there's always enough blood flowing in the sideways.
You know there're no words melancholic enough
only a strange twisting somewhere deep inside.

Speak to me when it's all over
when those moments of crises are past,
when the answers of pathogenic power are no longer
generalized narcosis or collective stupefaction,
the always delirious and disgusting manifestations
of faith in all its forms,
or when what they ask is only to be left out of it.
But us, what do we do?
Have we truly finished interpreting the world?
Or exhausted all old meanings, perhaps
to make a new point?

[Image: Death and the Mother, 1910, by Kathe Kollwitz.
From Allen Memorial Art Museum]

Changing the Head

Changed the blog header. Took three and a half hours in the night. Still very dissatisfied with the results. But let it stay. I'll not be changing this for a long time. Virtual critics will surely find this a reflection of the strange changes that have taken place on the outer side of my cranium in the last week.

The shaven-headed fish blows out a bubble. It's not attracting attention. It is asking for a change. A change in preconceptions. A change in conversation. A change to the solitude that makes up its life, a change in its movements that go in closing concentric circles. But the things inside the bubble world remain more or less the same. It's the perspective that changes. And dear fish, it's only a bubble that floats up to the surface. Did you make the bubble?

What is it you can call your own?

The damp spreads all around. And it feels cold at nights.

It rains intermittently, and the sky clouds suddenly and rains a few, brief showers. As you pedal down the city streets, you feel the soft heat melting down your shoulders while the logic of industrial domestication rules supreme around you, in banners, streamers, and screamers.

The sun has changed and it's now soft and warm. Summer and the rainy season's almost over, and this transitory weather, and especially this soft warmth of the sun, brings back something.

Things called memories. The comforting dreams of childhood. Your endless and futile attempts to replicate that which now seems a too-real-to-be-true dreamy life in your dreams.

And the weather works on your memories.

Memories of the days you swam in rivers, slept in the middle of green rice fields, and fished for long afternoons that never seemed to end. Memories of friends who've changed beyond recognition by now, memories of the beautiful moments you had in isolation when you were capable of playing and being content with coins, stamps, butterflies and other strange collectibles; memories of birds who used to wake you up in the middle of the night.

These days and nights keep flowing in and out till the point you realise that you hadn't been keeping track of the flow of memories. The proverbial memory of yours, dear fish— who discovers afresh the wonder of the old world after every twenty seconds— is something that you've lost forever. Don't regret. The world is still spinning around you, and you've got all your time to make sense of it.

But left without a memory, what is it you can call your own?

Press backspace and rethink

it's three thirty in the night and i had few hours of sleep yesterday... happened to read somewhere that blogging has some sort of placebo effect, it soothes your nerves every time you share your grief, solitude, melancholy, incomprehensibility, what you call it, into the vacuities behind the quivering screen...

and so here's me coming back after almost an year to an almost derelict blog that no one reads for sure...

went to the university day before yesterday... cycling like crazy, for if you didn't know, i got myself a brand new bicycle like the type i wanted to have, er, let's say 20 years ago...i felt like a bird, swerving and sweating on the roads and byelanes that have changed beyond recognition, and as i entered the campus, it was like visiting a lonesome beach where the seas and the foam have swept clear a civilisation of sand and memories... for what have we if we're left without our memories... the only faces I could recognise were those of teachers, and some kids who'd been fidgety youngsters in their undergrads, now reincarnated as poker-faced researchers, strangers all....

i adjusted my smiley mask, but felt a little unsure about myself, I always do.... here were three years ahead of me, again, since I got through the scholarship for my phd last month.... three years of absolution and privacy i wanted to have away from the big, bad world, a time to read, a time to be, a time for every purpose... and at a time when i should have 'comfortably' adjusted to being happy, bawling about bosses and tax evasions...

gentle reader, if you really want to know, outside your own shares of problems, unhappinesses and incomprehensibilities, while it rains and drizzles and muddles your thoughts, and the old colonial city tackles two bandhs pretending to protest against fuel price hikes... here's an update in short:

i quitted the 'non-profit' job i was holding to early in september last year, and that after i had parted ways with the two media jobs in close succession ...

now i'm deep-stuck in this old city, fumes, politics and depressions, doing 'nothing', well, I had planned to publish a collection of short stories in Bangla, carefully printed them out and met publishers...they didn't even bother to read... no complaints... Bengali publishing is like this... i had been blogging like crazy under another blogging platform, till i discovered the absurdity of stretching my self-deprecation in a foren language to absurd limits....

but hold on, before you complain....for two years i had also been doodling with a ball point pen on anything from the discards of my newspaper office to yellowing college notebooks of the past...

in a sudden spurt of activity, i go down to esplanade, buy myself a calligraphic pen and think of redoing my work again... as life insists on doing, 'something serious about life'... and then, i don't, for i can't tackle anything... you never step into the same river twice, Heraclitian wisdom dawns... :)

and i'm happy as long as there's the blank sheet spreading before me... a blank, white expanse of infinite moments ... i know the blankness overwhelms, but yet so pleasing... to think all, to consider all, to reconsider, till nothing remains except the expansive momentousnesses... press backspace and rethink...

Go slow dear fish

There's a moon fluttering somewhere behind the clouds...
There were two blue moons in June... and what are pristine fables?

The profane printed word forgets that it has a history of forgotten footnotes.
It pains you when you try to break a tiresome routine, the disciplined footfall of returning journalists descending slowly as snails, climbing a limb for a limb, down to pack themselves in the cars that lead to nowhere except tomorrow's return...

Now that i've decided it's not my world, why do i fumble?
Go slow dear fish... you're making lots of bubbles.

the fish in the glass bowl

the fish likes the smell of the medicated water... digs at the carefully placed sand, swallows a few grains and belches them out...

on saturdays, i leave for office early, like most job-doers-who-know-that-they-have-to-attend, carefully try to participate in the work i've been assigned, and then wait for two hours doing absolutely nothing, staring intently at the computer screen that patiently blinks for me till the final nod comes from somewhere that i may leave for the day...

I hurry...stuff the book i had been trying to read in the monotonous silence inside my bag, and race down the stairs, punch my card, and leap outside on a pavement... and then i have nowhere to go!

Aw, i mustn't complain, i get a bank account at the 'tender' age of 28, and a cheque each month to fill it up and another cheque book to draw money... and it's a simple exchange, though my imagination is stifled and i feel like a sock full of spiders, i stare at a blank page and keep staring for hours until i realise that i have failed to write anything or at least a scribble and it's time for me to get some sleep so that i can make myself ready for work again.

the fish tries to peer outside, gaze at anything that will make it forget the bowl... seven colours of the rainbow pass through the water, there's the sand glittering again... and something wriggling down there...

a worm? leap fat old fish, don't swallow the bait, it's a boy who has let it down and wants you to make a bite... it's a boy who has homework to do and one hour in the evening to play until dusk of what he thinks eternity...

fish, don't eat worms for pleasure, for you might harm someone.