It has been raining in these southern latitudes of this sprawling country for two days now, where I have found myself stranded for half a decade - the fifth year was completed yesterday, August 8. This remembrance of dates came to me quite suddenly, as I was reading Anand's translation of Jugni from Punjabi:

Jugni blazed into Delhi, Where she forgot, in the crowd, Where she came from and where she was going All was forgotten...

When she came to her senses Her time was up

The cancellation of dates, and the erosive habits of this river of time. I wander through the blog world, to pick up words on my tongue, and to attempt remembrance of a country that has become this memory of a certain smell of rain. And I realize I can't evoke this with the same immediacy or sharpness as once I could. So is all lost, and must be found again?

Also, as I have been told, with a certain undercurrent of accusation amidst gentle ribbing by a certain little friend (who is now herself, negotiating that 'foreign' city known as London) about my changed, and changing English accent (a root that now has become a rout when I deliver talks on truck deliveries, and I always think of how we mocked and mimicked a professor with an American PhD, who did this those many years ago in India), perhaps I have after all mutated into a firangi, the foreigner, swimming - butterfly stroke and half drowning, through all these years.

The face in the mirror answers to my interrogation only with the hair lost on the upper lip, and the thinning forest of the scalp. Also more lines around the jaw, and on the forehead. And eyes like fossilized amber, reflecting certain foolish imported day dreams and illusions that appropriately died, as well as now transmitting light through a certain self-consciousness of the self, a certain lens, perhaps writerly, through which to look at the world, which is both within and without, and that keeps brimming with amusement and sadness.

Or since A.H asked me, through her poem this morning:

Hobby

Third, that he is a crow finding a bun corner left in the rain, or a dead squirrel with eye unplucked. He sorts our detritus with the patience we didn't have, redeeming what can be. As he moves on to the next receptacle, adjusting his pipe and shaking his giant plastic maraca to settle the cans I think I hear him hum.

am I just this, a crow, a bum who feels much older than the one who preceded him by half a decade, a scavenger of memory?

[1] Among the many ways you torture Me, at night, lying in bed: First that grim sentence of guillotine, Of your eye not meeting my eye, Pretending a wily abstraction of thought, And as I turn around to face the page Of my book, instead of letting an axe Fall on my neck, a single mischievous Droplet of a caress across the nape.

[2] In the morning dark waking Next to you, my first glance Is of you, a Zen cat dressed In a clock of mist, circling your Arms, leveling your long bow, And then that swift swoosh of A green glance torpedoing me To the reef of your body.

[3] As you swamp me with throaty laughter, A rollicking sea crashing over the gunwales, I silt walk my thumb and index finger, A lone desert ship up and down the dunes, Towards your humid belly, that indigo Cave of Swimmers at Gilf Kebir.

[4] Caught in a sudden rainstorm, in the middle Of a run, I huddle under a mimosa, sweat pouring Out my pores, and run the pink flamed brushes Of its fallen flowers across my face, and call your Name to each crash of thunder, a skin bag of water Poured into the coals of this thirst for you.