Identity

Dearest Arnab,

When I think of you today, I think of all the things I did not want to be when I stopped being a child. Most of all, I did not want to be ordinary. When I look back now at the dim memories of the boy I pretended I disliked because everyone else was crazy about him, I can see how my childhood was dying, slowly asphyxiated by the hypocrisy of wanting my uniqueness to be underscored and validated. You see, I liked the same boy that everyone else liked.

I don't know when this hypocrisy became a part of me; it glinted on my bare throat and my naked ears, my unpolished nails and my scruffy clothes; it dripped venomously from the fangs of my jealous, ordinary glands, my just-like-everyone DNA. I thought I had it mutated by the books I read (Do you know I had read Gone with the Wind when I was eleven, Daniel Deronda when I was fifteen?), that I had some sort of special equipment with which to judge a lesser world peopled with lesser mortals than me.

I wonder sometimes if you fell for that. That you never saw beyond the inverted snobbery that I had adopted to fool myself. That you took my evaluation of myself and made it your rose tinted dream.

I wrote this letter to you to shatter it.

Love,
Ketaki

Being a woman and a wife.

So it is this that has made me write again. This rancid amalgam of guilt, hurt and pride that stinks within a day of its concoction. It is funny how I could not write when I was happy, as if my happiness consisted of grains too small to be held or seen or defined. As if they slipped through the fingers of my words, fell through the gaps in my writing.

And in any case, what is there about happiness that has not already been written, about loving and being loved, about laughter. But our sorrows are unique. Or at least they make us think that they are unique, that no one could possibly have gone through our particular brand of pain, which is so egotistical, is it not? Because how many first causes are there? However complex our web of individualism may be, there are only three first causes- Birth, Death and Marriage, like the Registrar’s office claims.

I know this will be over sometime. But in the meanwhile, let me indulge my isolation with tears, which seem to be the only recourse to the snivelling, weak-minded coward I have become. Allow me the luxury of the desire to want to be somewhere else, someone else, with a purpose, a plan, a will, a strength, a sense of humour which I seem to have lost along the way, the long, long way, of being a woman and a wife.

Your heart glows red

Those who have seen the lights of an operation theatre inside the covers of a book can have no idea of the fragility of life. The lights shoot through your skin and tissue and muscle and bone, and bring your particular pain into sharp relief. It is no use squeezing the warm hands of the doctor, she is in the conspiracy, along with the anesthetist who tells you to breathe deep even though she knows she is guiding you into a deep sleep not of your own making. The air is sweet-sick, like the texture of the blood. It is the blood that is central to the story, its absence and continued presence, its life giving and life taking abilities.

And how it leaves brown stains on the blue gown they give you, how it drips from their bedside smiles, how it leaks from the corners of your eyes when your twenty five years of age seems like such a small insurance against circumstances that are infinitely vaster than the scope of your imagination, than the breadth of your little palm clutching at the Indian nurse, than the diameter of your tiny vein pierced with the large, glistening needle. Your knuckle looks fragile, your heart is ready to burst.

All the time you think of words to describe these feelings if you ever get out alive. You try to memorize the exact shade of the beige curtains and the green scrub suits the attendants wear, and the dangerous gleam of the scalpel and the knife, and the translucent plastic of the mask, which is the most fearful of them all. Your atheism is cowering frightened in your womb, and ready to desert you, your faith frightened to enter, and you say, half in courage, half in desperate bravado, “No, I’m not afraid.”

This is the description. And if anything is more frightening than the experience, it is this: Ultimately, you are alone. Not physically, no. But your strength comes not from God or Love or Relationships or any of those fiercely competitive abstractions. They will fight amongst themselves, disputing each others’ existence, and leave you to be carried, wide eyed and petrified, on a narrow stretcher, into a narrow room, through a door. Above that door, a light glows red. But only as long as your heart glows red.

Maya

Dearest Ketaki,

The sea is the vast back of a glistening, glutinous, giant slug, and we are gashing its back with our little razor scooter. White, foamy spray hits us, warm and salty, an alien’s blood. My body is taut, my mind is blank, completely empty. On my temples, where there are two day old burn marks, the salt water stings cruelly. But that is the only sensation that reminds me that I am alive. The rest is blank, eyes unfocussed, mind mercifully silent.

Silenced, I think by the mightiness of the water. Just so will it be in space, among stars. Awe-inspiring and all of that, yes, but more than that, mind-killing. It is not merely because the space and the sea remind me of my insignificance, it is more than that. It is the ceaseless activity that has always been and always will be, the persevering tides, the eternally burning suns, the life, the birth and the death, forever, beyond time, beyond concept of time, life, consciousness. Beyond mind.

It is a blinding realization when it comes, a result more of the senses than of thought; all along, everyone has been wrong. It is not from the body that one must escape, but from the mind. The mind has limits, just like the body. The mind does not have access to certain places. And these places I have seen, Ketaki. Glimpsed from the edges of insanity, peeked through the membrane of the womb where we live. I have slid down the sides of the universe, tried my hand at the infinite, plumbed the depths of the unfathomable, and every time, every time Ketaki, I’ve been brought short against the slippery rock of the wall of a mind that I cannot scale. I am stuck in my womb, and who knows to what end, or for how long.

Or whether I will be born at all. Who knows at what altar this mother prays? Maybe it is a God of Wrath. Maybe her womb will never bear fruit.

The thing to do is to keep clawing at the fabric of the mind, to find a crack, or a doorknob, or a keyhole.

The insane have the key to the doorway of her womb.

I will pay more visits to the sea.

(Hush. That is where insanity lives, Ketaki, among the shells and the smooth rocks under the green water. Hush.)

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash the moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering God of contentment and would rather feel the devil burn in me than this warmth of a well heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensation seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle-classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

-Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

I'm sorry Ketaki,

Please come back. I miss you very very much.

You ache in my mind and itch on my hands. You flitter incessantly in my thoughts with razor memories. Your loss is always blossoming, always fresh, always a wound, always an unwritten song, always the hint of spring, always what might have been.

You are always the kiss I forgot to give, always the forehead I did not wipe clear of doubt, always the hand that slipped away in chaos, always the pain I did not assuage, always the beginning of wonder, always arrested youth, always missed opportunity, always Ketaki, always what might have been. Please come back. I miss what might have been.

Love always,
Arnab

Angels and Demons

Tell me all your thoughts on God
'Cause I would really like to meet her.
And ask her why we're who we are.
Tell me all your thoughts on God?
'Cause I am on my way to see her.
So tell me am I very far?

-Counting Blue cars, Dishwalla

It begins when your head feels like a badly tuned radio. You try and figure out some coherent thought in all the static, but you can’t. You fill up your ears with music, but that just makes the noise worse. In this state, part anger, part panic, and part real fear, you escape from the cage that is your home and you run down the streets. With your steps comes a semblance of order; with your marching, your music is disciplined, and in this method you discover your loneliness. Deep within. So deep it is part of you. So deep that if you gouged it out now, you would hemorrhage and die. And then you’re about to give up, lean against the nearest wall and slide down in defeat; but there is a part, a very very small part compounded of courage and hope. And that part makes you call a number. Like fucking once before dying of cancer.

It is a property of sodium vapour lamps and of great cities, I think; in the night one can walk streets tirelessly. So we made that our property. Seamlessly we walked, not hand in hand, but with a camaraderie that seemed born of the yellow night. What else was born of the night, I do not know; I know only this- there was laughter in it, a little forced, a little tired, but real nevertheless; there was a relief tantamount coming home for a while, laying down a tired head on a sympathetic shoulder; there was some wonder at secrets spilled easy, guessed easy. Like making love for the first time, like undressing your lover, gently, every revelation a miracle. Like finding birthmarks in unexpected places and home in the crook of an elbow and the curve of a waist.

It was thing of pretty lights and riversides. It was a string of stories around our necks, and we compared their colours. We gasped when they were the same, even though we knew there are only so many beads and only so many colours. It was a thing of desperation, because you see, we had stood at so many street corners, asking so many people the same questions, and we had almost stopped believing that we would ever get the right answers. Or finding people who understood the survey in the first place. It was a thing of intellectual snobbery, and a shot of hormones in the veins. But mainly, it was a thing of the night- an illicit secret, a decadent flavour, a bastard child.

It was a picnic in exile. Yesterday, we didn’t kill our demons. We bribed them into temporary silence with tequila shots.

We wish them the worst hangover. Ever.

Everything is white neon.

Dearest Arnab,

As it becomes night, this light metamorphoses every colour into some shade of its own, there are no reds and pinks and yellows and blues; only sterilised remnants, washed out leftovers.

I am tired, Arnab. In all that I feel, this is all I can say with certainty. That I feel tired, exhausted, drained with this interminable, irresolute mind of mine, that will not, will not decide. Will not leave, will not love. Will not rise above the desires of my body, and why must it, if it thinks that they are right and valid. So what is not? What is not right? What is not valid? And who can say this with certainty? Who will be a rock beside me, Arnab, and say, you must not, you must not; when they are scared that I will spit in their well meaning eyes.

I hate that, above all. Well meaning eyes. Because they have the temerity to know. To know. Do you know what a terrible thing that is, Arnab? To know right from wrong. Or to think you know, which is almost the same. The cheek. And then to flaunt it in my face, my face. I, who have never known what it is to know. I have stared into the darkness after I have come and he has come. I have stared into the benevolent blackness, and wondered until my head was ready to split, wondered unto heartache, and unto pain, and unto this exhaustion of today, what that split second pleasure is worth. And why it is worth so much with him.

And why it matters whether it is worth the same to him. Because you see, Arnab, I have read and I know the moral code, and the rectitude of the moral code that is behind an exchange (a free and voluntary exchange of sexual favours, if you like). I have thought I knew. But I am not sure any more.

And so I will hate people who do. And I will have tired eyes, and a mind that refuses to sleep, and a conscience that refuses to be. And these words, like ashes, unto ashes. Dust, unto dust.

Holy words and blasphemy make for boring reading; but you see, Arnab, that is not why I write. Or fuck.

Ketaki.

Love, Ketaki

Dearest Arnab,

I notice that it is mostly night when this restlessness comes upon me. It is mostly night when I cannot tolerate being told to brush my teeth or to go to sleep. It is mostly night when I remember that I have not written like this in a long time. It is mostly night when the hurt of humanity hurts me, and the horrors visited upon it visit me too.

It starts on the journey back home, on the yellow tinted road as the trucks go past and every truck has a little cylinder with 'AIR' painted on it, and a little pail, always empty, hanging near it. The immediate future is a shimmering snake, red spotted from brake lights. The night air is cool but not innocent like morning air. The insides of a dead dog lie spilled on the road. A principle has been violated this day and the guilty night is a helpless murderess with an implacable facade.

The night is heavy, full of dreamt, unsought things. And so the wind laughs quietly against my face, at all that I had planned but did not do. But the night is not accusing, it conspires in my restlessness and it soothes me into inactivity. Inactivity is not a sin now, it is the sin of the day, and it is the day that takes the blame, as is right and valid. Sometimes it rains. The roof of the bus is an irregular melody, a disharmonious drum.

Sometimes I listen to music in the bus. Then my mind is a descriptive essay. Then the window is a video. The man at the corner shop lights a rhythmic cigarette, a woman holding up her sari makes a melodious crossing, the girl on the bike moves forward to talk to the boy riding it; and the whole is a pulsing note, a beating chord, a vibrant song. With a video.

Every night is a note to your loss. It is signed

“Love,
Ketaki”.

When he pretends or ends.

Dearest Arnab,

Have you ever thought that maybe this is the only way to live in the 21st century. A little shrill, a little loud, a little hurt, all the time, all the way. No wonder our mouths have become pouts of discontent, no wonder they look like gashes of gaiety.

So maybe, that's why I see him every morning, this boy who touches a picture of ganesha every morning, a computerised image on the lcd screen of his computer, and then his forehead. Elephant God and Hewlett Packard monitor. Brrrr. It is cold. I think it always will be. I think it will get colder as the sun loses its heat, slowly. And I think we know that now, and are frightened of it. That is why we rush as we do, that is why our eyes look hunted, and our hands are hungry. That is why we cut down the trees that we love, poison the land we cherish. That is why we run away from the trees and the land, to not see their empty eyes and accusing broken-ness.

Maybe that is why I have run away from words, finding in their honesty a judge far more solemn, far more just, than the covenient crevices of my mind. The little nooks that I hide myself in, hoping not to see, never to see, what is so eternally, simply, blightingly, bitingly self-evident. That as surely as we are born, we must die; that as fast as I may run, cower in the nooks of my mind, whimper at the invisible lashes that lash out at me, within and without; that I must write, well or ill; that I must write, of inanities if I must; that I must write, and capture some lost glory, some absent faith, some non existent radiance; that most important, I must write, because I must write.

I must write, so that I may not hurt. So that I may not hurt when he scoffs or walks off. So that I may not hurt when he pretends or ends. So that I may always have the courage to love and to live.

In the world as I know it, I must write.

Love,
Ketaki

Flint

Dearest Ketaki,

All my life I have watched my parents, and their love for each other, and for me. And I know this now.

That there is another, more dangerous love, smoking pot and sharing dirty stories around a campfire. This love does not cherish and protect. It does not nurture. It does not dream of comfortable years ahead, in unsearing, hurtless constancy. It is here, it is now, it does not care for tomorrow.

There is another, more dangerous love, bursting into beauty in the centre of the sky. It is the coruscating brilliance of fireworks, their blazing triumph. It is the upward gaze of the children who watch the fireworks, it is the length and the breadth and the scope of their dreams. And in the incandescence that lights up their excited faces and pointing fingers, in all its flaming beauty, it self destructs.

There is another, more dangerous love, that combusts spontaneously in the collision of two bodies. It laughs as the world implodes into orgasm, impaled on a thousand shards of heart break, it appeases with smoke and assuages with drink, and all the time, it laughs on a slight note of hysteria, on the simmering edge of insanity.

There is another, more dangerous love, Ketaki. It rises slowly up my limbs and wraps its tentacles around my heart. When I hold you in my arms and feel your teeth on my skin, it spreads malignantly through my brain. It will be the death of me, Ketaki. There is another, more dangerous love. I see it in the bruises you leave on my throat. Blue and purple and dangerous.

Arnab.