Chasing

(A long story-poem written in 3 chapters of free verse)
1.

The true art is in the art of chasing not ideas or dreams,
But people who interest you all of a sudden at street corners,
At railway stations, at ice cream parlors, at grocery shops, at libraries,
And graveyards, inside hospital lobbies, so on and so forth.
What draws you closer to them,
Could be the strains of mist in their eyes,
The waves on their hair,
The incongruent stains of food on their shirts,
Or, even the dogged hunch of their backs.
2.
I have mastered this art over the years.
A few years back on a sunny winter afternoon,
I was eating a chicken cutlet at a street joint near Shyambazar crossing.
These are times when I become an obsessively self possessed man,
Almost severed from the rest of the world;
The pleasures of eating street food are such!
When I was devouring the last morsel of this giant cutlet,
Deeply immersed in a happy reverie,
I caught the sight of a hapless man (from the edge of my eyes),
Standing a few yards away from me,
Eating something that looked like a well done fish fry,
Inanely gaping elsewhere at a spiraling vortex of darkness unfolding,
Non-existent to normal eyes like mine.
What struck me was his spiritual distance from the delicacy that he was eating!
Having chased this man through the length and the breadth of the city,
Crossing its densely populated and abandoned avenues,
Streets and labyrinths during days and nights, across seasons and storms,
Rising buildings and heaps of debris,
Following him inside shops, restaurants, malls and cinema halls,
The strange scents of my pursuit still linger in my mind.
On foot, on bus, on local train and underground train,
On boat and on rickshaw and auto-rickshaw,
The story of this man was revealed to me,
As riddles start unlocking in dreams ending with more complex riddles to solve.

The story goes like this:
The man belonged to a family of grocers in the laid-back town of Malda,
He had inherited a decent store in the downtown supermarket,
He had a well cut-out life like his other two brothers,
Who had inherited similar stores like him in the city markets.
He obviously had other plans,
He wanted to build a factory for kites.
His understanding of aerodynamics was phenomenal,
In school, he had become a legend as a kite-maker and a kite-flyer.
One evening while returning from his secret workshop where,
He experimented with kites of different shapes and sizes,
He saw a lovely woman with radiant skin and a wondrous face,
In a lane that was barely illuminated by the lights of advertisement boards,
Displaying soaps, iodized salt and digital watches.
As soon as he saw this woman embedded in a world of her own,
Whom he thought to be a ball of magical light,
He knew his life was soon to meet a decisive change.
He followed this woman at a safe distance,
She taught English at the Evergreen Coaching Class.
The next few days he locked himself up in a room,
Meticulously planning how to make a move at her.
Ten days later, the face of this woman still playing on his mind,
He sat in the cash-counter of his grocery shop,
Reluctant, absent-minded, unsure and unaware of a concrete plan,
When this woman walked into his shop to buy three bars of Liril.
You can imagine the crescendo of his happy heart beating,
Facing this woman from such a close distance.
He took charge of the transaction with shivering legs,
The two things that made our man go crazy with longing,
Were the softness of this woman’s honey colored skin,
And the luminescence of her eyes.
After she paid the cash and took the bars of soap,
She spent a few seconds looking at the other things behind the cash-counter:
Deodorants, shampoos, multiple grain biscuits, basmati rice packs,
Colorful pouches of pepper and spices and likewise,
Then she turned back and made a move to exit the store.
The man said something almost inaudible and quivering to her:
Do you like kites?
She looked at the man, pleasant clouds swimming in her eyes
She replied to him in English: Are you telling me something?
Yes, I’m saying: Do you like kites?
Of course, I like kites and my brother likes them even more!
The man brought out two colossal kites with frills and laces:
One done in red and black in the shape of the face of a monster,
And the other a green and blue one in the shape of a mango.
Giving her these kites ceremoniously, hiding his embarrassment he said:
These kites come free with three bars of Liril from the store owner,
And these are designed by me.
The happiness the woman felt at this grand gesture is difficult to describe;
Once she had taken the kites with her,
She looked at him more closely (although hiding her scrutiny intelligently);
She was overwhelmed by her mounting desire.
The next two years were years of sunshine,
Devoted to a pair of wild lovers who met,
In the mornings and nights unseen to society,
In the kite-maker’s workshop to pour,
The warmth of their longing in each others bodies and souls,
Everyday without a break.
What struck the man about this woman was:
She loved her body to the point of being shamelessly selfish,
And openly enjoyed the act of making love to him,
Demanding all the manipulations of pleasure,
Which he thought were tricks of fallen women and whores.
This unnerved him for some time;
Later he came to terms with it concluding,
That all her acts were endeavors to heighten his pleasure;
These were true signs of sacrifice that a woman in love could do for her man.
Needless to say: He was unconvinced by his own logic,
He remained constantly smitten by bouts of angry jealousy,
Emanating from his belief that she had enjoyed innumerable men before she met him.
The woman loved his acts of jealousy,
And did nothing substantially to douse his fire.
A few facts here:
This woman came from an English educated Brahmin family,
The man came from a family of traders with very little formal education,
And he was seven years younger to her.
These became terrible obfuscations to a proposal of marriage from either side,
She was married off all of a sudden to a doctor in Calcutta in the third year.
A friend of this man, who was invited to the marriage,
Had been going up and down the town circulating news like:
The bridegroom is a FRCP from Edinburgh,
Tall and good-looking, almost dashing like an actor in a Hollywood movie,
And the couple looked shrouded in a thick blanket of bliss and happiness,
Whenever they were together.
Our man was gradually destroyed,
Almost decimated in the next three years,
With the acuteness of love pains which struck every organ of his body,
Most importantly, his brain,
Falling deeper in a ravenous depthless pit each day.
One fine morning he decided to make a journey to the city of Calcutta,
(Which had become Kolkata by this time) and come face-to-face,
With this woman and talk to her for the last time;
For he had three questions to ask.
He was sure this was the only way to heal his oozing wounds;
The questions were idiotic and sentimental to say the least:
Were you happy with me?
Are you happy now?
Why did you break my heart?
The point is: The woman was happy in her marital life!
Why did she do what she did:
This question of course flamed in my mind.
It’s difficult to answer this,
I found no clues to it but I’ve an answer:
The man was inconsequential to her in the real sense,
She wanted a settled and a secure life for herself,
But before she could attain it she secretly wished to avenge,
Her disciplinarian and righteous upbringing,
By breaking free for a few intervening years,
And taste the unfettered shadows of life that true love transports with it.
This man that I chased was far from getting healed,
Observing the happiness of a warm home,
Where his lover was the queen surrounded by her children and husband,
The situation had ignited a dark passion in the deep quarters of his soul.
One winter morning swimming gaily in the river Hooghly,
He must have planned to shoot her on a new moon night,
For it was after this bath that,
His actions of accessing the gun market had become most decisive.
I was a witness to the murder,
I was spellbound by his commitment to the act.
After killing her and seeing her fall limply on the marble floor of her bedroom,
In front of a teak-wood paneled florally carved box,
He laughed for the first time since I had seen him on that sunny winter afternoon.
He felt relieved, ready to be taken,
His body faintly lit by the light of celestial bodies in an otherwise dark night.
3.
I chase women too,
I had started chasing my wife (well, she was not my wife then),
By the side of a dry fruit store in a shopping mall on a misty spring evening.
What had struck me was the deep melancholy,
Rising from her eyes like steam and the beauty of her softness.
She told me once which makes me worry quite a lot:
I must wear some cosmetics darling at least to show to the others,
That I’m happy with you.
I argued against cosmetics in social forums quite successfully;
But I was getting defeated hands down by the logic that cosmetics
Could beam somebody’s inner happiness as if it had no light of its own.
We fought over this so hard that we ended up making love.
There are nights when my wife lives with her mother,
And I am left all alone in the house to fend for myself,
I get up in the nights sleeplessly and wonder through the house,
With lovelorn thoughts of her hovering dangerously in my mind.
This is when I go to her wardrobe and light it up,
As my sight travels over her perfumes, lavender, moisturizers,
Creams, skin foundations, talcum, nail-polishes,
And lip-smacks in the finest bottles of glass and metal,
Adorning the trays and empty spaces of fine cut wood,
I can sense the loneliness that I feel without her,
And the aching feeling of how much I want to make her mine.
My room gets flooded with a spray of smoke,
And I can see a simmering image of her in the mirror,
From where she looks at me with pure desire.

The Tower

(A long story-poem written in 6 chapters of free verse)
1.

The tower where we live is a tall and a lonely tower,
Standing outside the limits of the city.
It reaches into the white tufts of clouds
From a huge expanse of land once used for potato farming.
This tower among other towers has a name,
It is popular by its name: Dream Tower.
Sometimes I wonder about the dreams of this Dream Tower,
Dreams of its architect, dreams of the masons who worked on it,
Dreams of the seller and of the buyers of its apartments,
And of the mafia which craftily squeezed the land out of wide eyed farmers.
The tower stands erect like the timeless portal of an arrogant crown.
As I walk up its spinal stairwell at nights,
Pondering over this multitude of dreams, I know,
These are dreams which still linger in its labyrinths like ghosts.
2.
There are times when I stand at the window of my apartment,
Looking at the city where I was born.
Searching for symbols and patterns that I know exist,
Beneath layers of rising vapor in the air of this city.
The smog invariably clouds my vision.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of familiar bridges and a few monuments.
Mostly I look at the airplanes taking off and landing incessantly,
And the cars that seem to glide on the highway that dives past the distant tower.
The farmlands and wetlands around the tower look plundered and ravaged,
Destroyed by the monstrous man made construction machinery,
Giving way to spectacular buildings, deluxe hotels and shopping malls.
I tell a lot of people (not caring to hide the strain of pride in my tone):
I live away from the city, amidst greenery and water bodies and clouds.
I know this is a lie; yet I prefer saying it,
It makes my acquisition look like a prize possession.
Soon the ever swelling concrete jungle will engulf everything;
The nooks and corners, the parks and shady grounds by the lakesides,
Where I chased solitary beautiful girls during winter picnics long time ago.
3.
I have a friend who is a film critic – progressive, well read,
And talkative on all the matters on earth;
I hope you understand what I mean.
This guy after eating a sumptuous meal at my place summed it up:
Sandy, this property makes you look like a man!
Men are no longer known for their chivalry,
Or, by the charming ways they treat their women.
Rather, when we talk of men coming back nowadays,
They are actually referring to sedans resembling angry war planes.
My friend’s words made me wistful for some time, and ponder:
Was I at all a man enough before taking my place in this tower?
4.
My son and daughter have wonderful faces like those fluffy angels in a dream.
I have been thinking: Can one see such dreams in this tower?
My wife who loves me like a magnificent queen,
And is my partner in all the crimes that I have committed till date,
Was the one who made all the installations in our home:
The wood carved fine leather upholstered furniture,
The ornate lighting, the embroidered carpets,
And the stainless steel digitized contraptions to do this and that to perfection.
My God, the things look so nice and cool,
And provide you with such deadly comfort,
That our home almost looks like the insides of a medieval fortress.
In this cave, at times floating on strange clouds, we play hide and seek,
Make fun of each other, quarrel, see horrendous films, listen to rock,
And sleep and eat and defecate and party, coming and going,
Coming and going, day in and day out.
Do we get bored in this tower? There is no definite way to tell you this,
Because when we get bored we skip channels, change our gym routine,
My wife orders for new food, we try out avant-garde stuff in films and theater,
Read poetry, and make love on different beds,
And even change drivers and servants.

One night – the stars and the half moon twinkled so brightly in the sky,
While the lights from the city looked sad and diffused –
I was teaching electrostatics to my children.
You must be aware how tough it is to teach adolescents,
Something like charging of a gold leaf electroscope by induction.
As I jumped into the most dramatic part of my discourse,
My daughter furrows her brow, raises her hand and blurts:
Sandy man, I’ve something to say.
Although I felt irritated to the core, but you know,
When this tiny fiery woman has something to say, you can’t stop her,
My son feels agitated and almost taking my side reacts sharply:
Come; say, what all you have to say quickly,
Don’t you see Sandy man is making such a bright effort?
Then my daughter asks me this question:
Tell us you Sandy man; how far is the soul of the city from our tower?
My son becomes thoughtful at the question and as a rejoinder asks:
How can one say, Sandy man, where the soul of a city lies?
Frankly, I feel like a charged electroscope and I end up saying:
The city is so far away from us and its soul, my dear children, lies buried
And if at all you want to find it, you need to unearth a prickly riddle.
At this point my wife makes her glorious entry into the scene and declares:
Sandy let us all go and live, by the side of a sinuating river,
You promised to build a cottage on an enchanted shore during our courtship.
Memory is something you are incapable of forgetting,
And I marvel at my queen’s memory,
With which she strikes me almost every time at the right hour.
The children start singing a meaningless song,
Boisterously breaking the dead silence of the night,
Amidst this increasing cacophony, my tigress gives me a look,
Which tells me she will fall in my ferocious embrace the moment,
I leave all this mess and catch her.
It happened just then,
Our tower took off into the sky like a rocket!
5.
When we do not feel like sleeping which happens many a time;
I tell them: stories, mostly spooky stories.
I told them one a few nights back:
I got down from my car, proceeded towards the elevator well in the tower,
The tower consists of two elevator wells facing each other.
(We are the only residents in this tower).
Both the elevator cubicles were waiting tirelessly at ground zero,
For somebody to occupy their space.
I feel very confused about which elevator to board,
So I have made a principle of sorts:
While descending I will drive down the southern well,
Whereas on my way to the top I will drive up the northern well.
I board the northern cubicle, hungry and tired but happy to be back home.
The doors of my elevator close making an unpleasant sound,
And I push the button for my floor.
My eyes by fleeting chance fall on the opposite elevator with doors shut;
It looks utterly glum and is melancholically illuminated by its fluorescent lamp,
It’s vacant and at rest; I find in it a ball of smoke encircling like the ring of Saturn.
As my elevator kick starts and rushes upwards I find,
The opposite elevator rushing upwards all of a sudden almost at an equal speed.
When we race past each other through the intervening floors I can sight,
The other elevator momentarily through the glass panels of our respective doors:
The emerging ball of smoke growing inside its somnolent chamber,
Into something more concrete which I cannot readily grasp.
As we leave the sixth floor behind,
The ball of smoke was gone and instead I found a man,
Standing in a grotesque posture looking vacantly at me.
He hardly moved; his hungry gaze on me more intense with each passing floor.
Once we had crossed the tenth floor the other elevator accelerated,
And crossed mine leaving me terror struck and suddenly I realized,
That this man almost looked like me (he was my body double),
Wore the same clothes and carried the same bag and file of papers;
It was this mesmerizing similarity that filled my soul with endless darkness.
Was this man a heinous imposter?
Was this man a terrorist?
Would he harm my wife and children?
At last, I reached the floor where I live,
My chest thumping and heaving against my frail rib cage.
My hands shook as I pressed the entrance bell,
A few seconds later, our maid had opened the door.
When she found me standing in front of the door,
She instinctively turned around and rushed inside calling for my wife.
When she was turning, I had glimpsed the shock in her eyes.
Surprisingly I did not enter or make any move,
As if I was waiting for approval of others to enter my own home.
My wife came and the children followed,
She came to the door; I saw a queer look in her eyes (the children looked awestruck).
When she spoke, she sounded restrained and withdrawn:
What a look alike, unbelievable!
Nobody can believe this.
My dear man, don’t harm us, my husband is back at home,
He has gone to the washroom to take his bath.
Tonight we will leave to see the mother of all rivers;
As you would know, it is a long and a tedious journey.
Spare us my good man,
If you need anything, anything from us I am willing to give,
If you want our home in this tower, you can have it,
We will be leaving for good.
6.
My wife belongs to lands where fables are written,
I snatched her from a fable and made her mine.
In doing so I made her the heroine of one fable,
And a vamp in another.
There are days when we go to the terrace of this tower,
Soaking sun in our burnt out bodies, standing taller
And looking breathlessly at the city,
Which feels like a crouching demon, inching towards us.
Will we feel like immigrants forever on this planet?
To douse our eternal fears we pray; we pray like devotees are required to pray.
We end all our prayers with one line:
Let this city keep some space for our children,
Whose faces resemble those fluffy angels in a dream!

Ascent of Sap

A few days back, I was teaching my son: ascent of sap (Biology). It is all about how nutrients flow through root capillaries to the upper reaches of a plant and its leaves.

Soil is rich in mineral nutrients dissolved in sub-soil water. Root hairs of plants are deeply embedded in soil layers. Capillary action sucks these nutrients upwards. The nutrients with the help of chlorophyll and sunlight create food for the plants in the miniscule chambers of plant leaves. Life will not continue with this fundamental process getting interrupted and diminised.

In the night, a thought struck me: How marvelously nature has contrived with all its constituents and resources to sustain life on our planet!

At one level this thought made me feel uplifted bringing tears to my eyes. As we all know in such moments of self-discovery we are prone to deflect our wavering minds to finding a meaning of life. How can such complex processes leading to creation, reproduction and sustenance of life have no meaning or not transport an implicitly coherent symbol? During these spells of intense sentimental thrusts playing inside my chest I have to hold myself not to get carried away.

Around midnight I started looking at the phenomenon more clearly: The amazing beauty is in the comprehensive effort of nature. It is brilliant and perplexing in all its magnitude, relentless and unyeilding. The birth of life including the birth of intelligence and consciousness, I believe, is without any preconceived design or purpose. It must have happened because of a specific series of random movements, sparks and collisions that happen otherwise in every nook and corner of the universe countlessly in a micro-fraction of a second. What an accident it must have been that resulted in the birth of life and later intelligence and consciousness.

As pale beams of morning light lazed inside my room I realized an old strain of thought rising in my soul: The matrix of consciousness is infused with two forces - one, that helps us to feel in harmony with the darkness of the cave from where we emerged and two, one that makes us insecure about it.

This insecurity is at the crux of all art, enterprise, philosophy, ideology and political experiments. We have created an alternate nature of civilazations that works on the machinations of its various institutions.

Man created primeval institutions while engaged in battles against natural hostilities in the early years. Thereafter these institutions have been gradually made into grasslands of power battles run on emotive ideas in the name of good for the human civilization.

Religions, nation-states and family evolved in the process. Industrial economics and retail consumer markets have hit the final blow to the evolution and sustenance of communities (as the largest unit of mankind) and the individual (as the smallest unit of mankind).

I am sure about one thing: A man in the 15th century felt much happier and contended than a man in the 21st century because at that point in time we were still evolving. We did not know we had chosen a path that will kill all of us. We did not know we had built this path fanning the darker force of consciousness that gave us power to interpret; find meaning; assign meaning; and add, subtract, divide and multiply on nature. One does not need to go into history to know that. Art and literature will prove my point.

Morals and ethics ...

Morals and ethics are built around the idea that life is meaningful. Elsewhere, it has been amply established: life is meaningless. We know it for sure (from our own intense experiences of life); we may not voice it. Once we start believing that life is meaningless the burden of passing time, which essentially life is all about, seems monumental and nerve shattering.

We like to believe: we are here on a special mission; we are special people cut out for special purposes. Chasing this belief we fend ourselves from the weight of time.

Morals and ethics are about good and bad based on various frames of reference. We aspire to goodness secretly desiring goodness to be returned to our own lives in some way. When we end up doing something bad we pray to reverse the effects of badness (committed by us in the first place) shadowing our lives. We think implicitly that such cause and effect exists in the universe of morals and ethics.

I had come to know of a queer woman from a friend. She was (I’m saying in the past sense because I’ve no knowledge of her in the last 6 years) an instinctive sexual carnivore. She was happily married and had a steady family. She was hooked on to a rare breed of men – rich, intelligent and full bodied. It’s not as if she did not want to check herself from sleeping with these men. She did (in fact she suffered from a serious moral dilemma) every time she changed men [as confessed to my friend] and every time she cheated she felt sick of some illness or the other. In the thickness of her suffering she vowed every time to lead a devoted family life henceforth; thinking that the pain of illness was nature’s way of punishing her for her unbridled craving for sexual gratification.

I also know of a man who is sickly successful in almost every endeavor that he takes up in spite of employing minors in his house for doing all the tedious household chores and behaving with them in the most uncouth manner possible; I’ve also heard of rumors of his beating them up at times. There are people who are envious of his success more so because they want his ill treatment of minors to be avenged in the most immediate manner possible.

The universe of morals and ethics, I’ve concluded, is an imaginary one and more often than not is a swing ball used by the powerful against the powerless.

The universe is a chaos.

Our minds are warehouses of chaos.

We are always on a ride to comprehending the extreme ends of the chaos, one outside and the other inside.

Morals and ethics do not help us in this journey of comprehension …

Waiting for rains to come ...

Everyday passing without rain is a torture. The prolonged spell of scorching heat coupled with humidity is getting to the nerves. Climate change is no longer a matter to be discussed and debated at conferences. It is something we are experiencing on a daily basis. There was a time in Kolkata when, after June 8, two days of damp heat would invariably get us rain.

The death of seasons is here to stay. The sad part is: we know why all this is happening; yet we won't do anything about it. Maybe because it requires a fundamental shift in our lives and in every thing that we do and in every way that we do.

Will we destroy ourselves finally in a complex vortex of economic and military wars?

We have come a long way doing various political experiments - dreaming and failing in the process - without realizing truly the restless, angular and hideous nature of human consciousness.

In our desperate attempts to live longer and making savings of all kinds for the future we overexploit our surroundings thereby leading to disharmony.

In spite of knowing this it is nearly impossible for me to renunciate a life of comforts and privileges.

We are waiting for an evening swept by wild rains. It certainly is a much bigger comfort and privilege than being housed inside a palatial mansion or traveling by a limousine. This is very clear today ...

I am an atheist. I do not pray. For the first time in my life I have started praying for a view of the thunderclouds to hang on the Kolkata sky and explode ...