Things get broken at home like they were pushed by an invisible, deliberate smasher. It's not my hands or yours It wasn't the girls with their hard fingernails or the motion of the planet. It wasn't anything or anybody It wasn't the wind It wasn't the orange-colored noontime Or night over the earth It wasn't even the nose or the elbow Or the hips getting bigger or the ankle or the air. The plate broke, the lamp fell All the flower pots tumbled over one by one. That pot which overflowed with scarlet in the middle of October, it got tired from all the violets and another empty one rolled round and round and round all through winter until it was only the powder of a flowerpot, a broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock whose sound was the voice of our lives, the secret thread of our weeks, which released one by one, so many hours for honey and silence for so many births and jobs, that clock also fell and its delicate blue guts vibrated among the broken glass its wide heart unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up glass, wearing out clothes making fragments breaking down forms and what lasts through time is like an island on a ship in the sea, perishable surrounded by dangerous fragility by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together -- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold -- into a sack and carry them to the sea and let our possessions sink into one alarming breaker that sounds like a river. May whatever breaks be reconstructed by the sea with the long labor of its tides. So many useless things which nobody broke but which got broken anyway.

Pablo Neruda wrote many odes to many elemental things such as an onion, a dictionary, a telescope, a suit etc. But he forgot to write one for the glance, an ode for which I need to read tonight. So I sit here at my table, pen poised over paper, priming the gears of the mind, the engines of the heart, hunting to say something simple about the glance, only to return to a dream that woke me up this morning, that dream of passing by a glance at a café, doubling back, back stepping to check if this was the glance, the glance that I seem to be on a chase for some time now, a glance hanging from the tip of an eye getting into a railway compartment, a glance caught sideways across a room in which someone is teasing a raga from his throat, a glance encountered when one eye flutters open for a second during lovemaking and the other eye receives it like the mouth of a postbox, a glance at dusk reflected in a shop’s display window, a glance crossing the road at a zebra crossing or zipping by in a car in the opposite direction, a glance that will blanket the open eye like sleep or forgetting, that glance whose glance I am chasing with this meager net of words like a butterfly in an endless field of insomnias.

I first discovered the sound of Midival Punditz, a New Delhi based electronic duo, in the summer of year 2001, when I was a fanatic ant digging tunnels through various kinds of music. At that time they were giving away mp3s from a makeshift website on the web, and were just beginning to collaborate with big name musicians on the Asian Underground scene such as Talvin Singh.

Since then, they have hit the big leagues, and have released two CDs worldwide on the Six Degrees label. Their latest CD "Midival Times" came out an year ago, and I heard it first in that giant Virgin Music store on Times Square really late one night in last summer about four times in quick succession; if you don't want to hit the bars, and are driven to insomnia by NYC, camping out at Virgin to sample music is a capital idea. I even wrote down some feverish lines on my hand on the subway back to the dive I was crashing at on the Upper Westside.

The most dangerous of the tracks on this CD were "Saathi" (on NPR!), featuring Ustad Sultan Khan on the sarangi and vocals, and "Rebirth", featuring Anoushka Shankar on the sitar - I suppose the presence of these Indian classical musicians explains my predilection for music that can seamlessly make the twain of East and West meet. You may listen to some of the Punditz’s tracks from Midival Times here, and their popular hit, "Bhangra Fever" here. Good stuff!