Last day of a book sale. Everything is 50% off. It is hard to maintain composure even if you know there is no space left for any more books on your floor. So you limit yourself to poetry. You sit on the floor before the stack you have gathered, and try to cull out the stragglers; ones that aren't must haves, ones that are unlucky few. Space and time are immense only in depth, and not in width. You stay away from fiction, for novels can't be read in snippets, pages interleaved with random days unlike books of poetry. They must be read whole, in one sitting, straight through the night, the way a camel drinks from an oasis well.

But you do allow yourself to buy a volume of memoirs (or prison journals), the missing second part from a triptych on South Africa in the time of darkness of apartheid; the other two parts you had already eaten; Breyten Breytenbach's "The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist". You can't wait to peel open the covers and begin reading: in the first few pages Breytenbach, while revealing the meaning of language & surfaces, notes that it is only in the absolute impersonal solitude of a prison cell that stripped away all superficialities: the noise of words from language, and the possessions of things from people that he could approach the essenses of living. You connect these observations to the pages of the Volume 3 of "The Gulag Archipelago" that you are now reading before bed, and to the grenade like poems of Emily Dickinson, and see why this is so. What then is the prison cell you should voluntarily seek in order to pare, to hack away all that is superficial? No, not this one of loneliness, on whose walls you have scratched your nails out for far too long, but of that of a being in whole motion.

...

A One Act Play

His parents begin to give him the Talk. Topic: the second stage of the four Hindu stages of life - that of the householder and so forth. They say now that education is done, and soon money will follow, it is time to go to the next stage, the stage of the householder. Why? Because it has been so for many centuries and for many people.

But he is not many people, even though internally he imagines himself to be somewhat Whitmanic, filled with a desire for numerous-ity of experience. The retort: it will bring happiness, and besides there is the age to consider. Now twenty eight, next year twenty nine, and then thirty, and which is beyond the pale. Why? Will the biological mechanism start to degrade once it hits three decades? Is it like a jug of grocery store milk with a red sell-by date against white, a warning, an omen?

Diplomacy then. Find someone good. It is okay with us, we will be happy. And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things? Who is Phaedrus? The alter-ego of a narrator in a book, "Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Are you being funny? We are trying to be serious. I am yet to determine certain answers in my life, and perhaps I haven't as yet even many of the questions that should be asked of and about life. What questions? We just want you to be happy, and not be lonely.

Don't disparage loneliness for he is my old friend. He gives me poems, music, and makes me read, and all of these make for deeper satisfactions. What nonsense are you talking? Find a girl (or if you want us to we will) who will is patient, good natured, and who will support you. Yes, as long as the theoretical girl you speak of voluntarily chooses to become a kamikaze who will dash against my madness, and in doing so is also not compelled by the weight of a society (to which, by the way, I don't relate to anymore) to conform, by marrying a potential income stream. (which knowing is me, again, is a pretty dubious bet. I may stop working anytime, and start writing full time). What is wrong with this society, the society you grew up in? Look at X. Look at Y. Look at Z. Look how happy, how content they are.

But who are X, Y or Z? Am I them? No help, Raja, my part is agony,/ struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,/ prayer for the Kingdom/ and reading Pascal. What did you just say? Nothing, I am merely reciting poetry of a Polish poet, recently dead.

Exit all.

In response to this post on CBSE's (one of the Indian boards of education, who set syllabi and give school leaving tests) English Exam.

If not I, my mother would be glad to hear that CBSE is enabling scores of 100 on the English paper. Back in the dark ages, i.e., a decade ago CBSE had an artificial limit on how much one can score on the screwed up language papers anyway. If I remember well, in the school exams, language teachers delibrately used 85 as the max limit to us get used to the idea that unlike sciences, languages are holier, i.e., can't be perfected.

Also the quibble over the marks is beside the point, when the content of these exams is horrid. Who wants to, in a 3 hour exam, write an essay on the meaning of life (I think this was what I got on my 10th board exam, and invariably it all went downhill after that) or what will you do if you become the prime minister (is cribbing from BBC's "Yes Minister" allowed?), or vomit the approved exegesis of Blake's "Echoing Green"? My shamelessly low marks prove that I didn't give a damn! :)

In the desert of my longing, shimmer The shadows of your voice, The mirages of your lips. In the desert of my longing, Under the dust and ashes of distance Bloom the jasmine and rose of your proximity.

For somewhere very close Wafts the heat of your breathing Smoldering in its own aroma, Breath after slow breath. And on the horizon glistens, Drop after drop, Dew of your intoxicating glance.

With tenderness, as the shadow Of your remembrance places a hand On my heart’s face, it appears as if the day Of separation has ended, and the night Of union is right here.

Translated from the Urdu. Listed to Iqbal Bano sing the ghazal here.