The Memory....

This, for a change is not my entry. This is a guest post from Prat .
We have been toying with this for a while. The idea to guest blog, where you exchange posts with another blogger. After mutually agreeing in favour of it, we thought the best way to get over our goddamn writer’s blocks was to suggest each other some loose themes to work around. The results are here.

It’s an honour to have her here. You can find my post over there in her place.

Im leaving you to her-

A memory is a slow walk through the halls of oneself clutching to the hands of time.Its just such an intimate moment. Between you and a melancholic part of you.


''Can you sing?'', he asked, looking right at her. Almond brown eyes. That curve in his lips. Wind flirting with her hair. Him with her. Soft old number from the eighties or so. Rocks below their carelessly dangling feet. Waves crashing against them. The notes of the Indian Ocean playing along softly. Different scales melting seemlessly into a music that sometimes still plays in her ears.

Time does what it knows to do best.
Go by.

You are ready. Bag slung over your shoulder, daily folded to an agreeable shape, fingers reach out to grab for support. One leg almost touches the train. Almost.
And then.
You look.
At the gap.
Between the train and the platform.
And wonder.
What if.
You see with absolute lucidity all that you are losing.
I loved you so much.You are the sum of all that my life has been.
Of happiness, tears, blankness, abruptness, blushes, warmth, euphoria and everything in between.
Step in.
Choose not to slip.
Between the platform and the train.
And you choose instead to work for another day's bread, to smile at friends over cups of tea, mumble incoherently about the airconditioner being cranked up too high, and how 'necessarily' should be easier to spell, and to take time off. To hold a hand.
His hand.
And thus your thoughts talk you through another night, and before it lulls you to sleep, you know something for sure.
An alteration.
To my routine tomorrow.
A crumpled sheet of paper.
Will find its place.
A love letter.Between the platform and the train....

PS:
Topic- Letting go and Restart.
Line suggested-A memory is a slow walk through the halls of oneself clutching to the hands of time.

Do let us know if anyone else try out the same or anything similar.

Fling vs state of love...

Yes, it has become an India in a way.
People are hunched all over cafes, pubs, lounges, restrooms and even the work place. Even M, the self-confessed football fanatic dropped by the telly at the commonroom the other day and asked ''Is England winning''? Text messages and phone calls are about the latest score. Football is being covered after cricket in the media.
Yes the Ashes have come to smell of life.

The lunch was all about me and K explaining the concept of follow-on to M. After nodding ardently for twenty long minutes he gaped like he had been booked.
Football, said K, finally giving up, is a fling, an one-night stand while cricket is like falling in love!
Of course not all can fall in love.
1-0 mate.

PS:That Ashes tele-adverts are quite something.

Green apple and Honeysuckle / M40

All through the drive
from London to Oxford,
on that busy M40;

We never spoke
even once ....

you
drove,
singing along to Dylan and Cohen;

me
sat beside
buried in my Sudoku and eraser-dust,

All because ----

you
had wanted green apple and honeysuckle

and

me lavender.



PS- Green apple honeysuckle and lavender: fragnances in air freshners.

Left of writing...?

[Cropped from an e-mail to a friend]

I might have come to believe in this –If one finds something important in life held in the beauty of words, the easiest and the foremost of the responses after being marvelled by their splendour is to perhaps repeatedly review in silence what has been written there.

Somewhere as these excursions of going over it again and again diminishes, starts a journey to examine how it has been written.

That usually would be followed by a desire, aided by some conviction and a bit of time to pursue who has written that or how consistently he can find many more such words to justify much more beauty such as of that(It is definitely not without a subliminal expectation to fulfill that?)

The last , but the most important of the questions would be to understand why it has been/was written like that?

Rest affirmed, probably somewhere in his faithful journey in answering that vital question, the reader would have unknowingly turned a writer himself!

The question however,just like life, shall continue unanswered...


At the most a writer more.


May be because, it is life herself.

Es muss sein.......

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's gonna be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it. Say good-bye.

~Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.


It is something like this , isn’t it?
To fall in love- is to be invisible, to be able to vanish with one person while around everyone.

She smiles.

The breeze beckons a memory. A curl of air floats with it happily.
You know I used to love you for that; like when you turn abruptly and smile.
And those hazel eyes.

I know. She smiles.

A smile is just a number,
another count of rainbow
against the horizon of love.

He gently places the strand behind the curve that forms her ear.
Why do you do that?
I like it that way.
Why?
I like myself when I do that.

She smiles.

One of these days I must tell her that brown doesn’t look good on her, He promises himself. He knows he cant tell.He could tell what she wore only while he was driving back.


Do you remember when we met?
He thinks of so many things he could have said. Yes so many. He remembers only her smile. And a yellow windcheater, that held the bone of the conversation.

You don’t have to say it aloud.When you know, you know.And that is all there is to it, He tells himself.

And waits, in anticipation.

Isn’t it strange, this light and the moon? She wonders.
No!! She cannot convince herself outside of it . She wants to let it go and still she holds onto it so hard.
Silence grows within the heart.Slowly into a smile that aches.

Why does she do that? She asks herself until she falls asleep.
She dreams in her sleep.


Obviously there is no such thing as a favourite. How would you define favourite ?
Its what you like most?

I like different things at different times.
What do you like most?
Right now, The piano over there.

Her music floats in laughter.
Within his dreams, he could hear her. I must hold onto it , he tells himself. It slips and wafts away into a distant fragrance.But it haunts on some evenings. It still does!And there is nothing in the world he can do about it.
There is a pleasure in futility.
She smiles.

Almost everynight she fights inside herself.
I want him away from everything. From myself. It is very important.

But he would come back, at different places , in rainy crowds as someone in an yellow windcheater, in wilting roses and old favourites.

A piano sings, somewhere, very close.
She looks for it in desparation.She cant find it.

Suddenly it becomes bright, only she feels it.She must be still in love.

She can’t escape, He knows her every curve, every space.

Do you miss me?? That is all she wants to ask him.


There is a terrible ache, that flows through them, between them.
But neither of them want to leave.

What are you thinking?
Nothing.

She still smiles.....


20 minute writing exercise, on break-ups.

Corpuscle consciousness

Have started again the evening walks during these orange sunsets,but cant say for how long I would be able to continue; Today was reminded of this while thinking of the absolute indispensability of isolated consciousness.

~ Manchester



YOU ,
In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.

To insist otherwise is nothing more than statistics, an impossible extension.

No less impossible than bracketing the smell of rain with your dream of two nights ago.

That man is Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first to make constellations of the stars, to build the first pyramid, the man who contrived the hexagrams of the Book of changes, the smith who engraved runes on the sword of Hengist, Einar Tamberskelver the archer,Luis de Leon, the bookseller who fathered Samuel Johnson,Voltaire's gardner,Darwin aboard the Beagle, a Jew in a death chamber,and,in time,you and I.

One man alone has died at Troy,at Metaurus,at Hastings,at Austerlitz, at Trafalgar, at Gettysburg.

One man alone has died in hospitals, in boats, in painful solitude, in the rooms of habit and of love .

One man alone has looked on the enormity of dawn.

One man alone has felt on his tongue the fresh quenching of water,the flavour of fruit and of flesh.

I speak of the unique, the single man, he who is always, Alone.

~Jorge Luis Borges

Goa ,India.

PS:Yes I collect memories of public benches from all over.