Walking to the library in driving rain, after meditating all morning, I decided to write. What I write is a story, a myth and in all that a reality, a thread I pulled from the fabric of a trio(memory, joy and sadness). Each distinct and at the same time each merging into one another, like light of different wavelength merging to create this white canvas, this tabula rasa on which I daub these words, almost like spray painting mental grafitti. This is merely an action of letting go, of carting away the billboards in my mind to another equally emphereal space, this cyberia that is merely blips of zeros and ones.

Maples leaves quilt the roads now and will do so for a few more days: fallen yellows, reds, pinks and all the shades in between. And since each leaf though is unique,they become indistinguishable from each another. Atleast that's how mind acts to process all the information. It associates, it catagorizes, it places information into little colored boxes: these are maple leaves, these are magnolias, these are rain drops on the glasses that you need to wipe away to see. So I begin to write this halluciantion, this unreality by recalling what happened last night, which for all purposes is indistinguishable from many night before that one.

I went to meet granpa and to spend time with him. I was happy to see him again after a week because he gives love freely, as freely as a great human being can do. And even though this was in the context of someother meeting he was participating in, as a church elder who takes care of visiting foreign students at Emory University's Villa and we got to talk only for about an hour. He gave me a book of poems, James Merrill's and his first leather carrying case he bought when he opened his own architecture firm. I was happy and content. Maybe such happiness is deceptive, only just a curtain I wrapped around myself to say "Look ma, there is nothing!"

And this thin glass I was using to board up the broken windows against the wind of the demons that reside within me broke when I opened the book,"The Tennis Partner" by Dr. Abraham Verghese. It's one of the four that I had bought over the weekend on Amazon. Again stuff to fill up spaces, to populate the rooms. I don't know why I had bought that book, maybe I did because it ties up with the past, with the book that came before it, "My Own Country" which I had read sitting in another city, eating chocolate, waiting for the evening redness, photographers call it bounce, to come over the horizon on which aeroplanes would sign their names in traces of molten gold.

Ashok looked at the blurb and said maybe I should defer reading it for a while. Wise person he was, perhaps I should have put it away. But then if I did, there wouldn't be this exegsis, this throwing up of words, this fill in the blanks. However I couldn't resisit, I thought I would just read ten pages and then read a research paper before I slept. Maybe I had to know what happened to the journey that began in the previous book, in which Abraham leaves Tennesse for a sabbatical to Iowa, too scarred from treating AIDS patients and their invetible deaths.

And this book opens with David, the tennis partner, being carted off to drug rehab for intravenous cocaine use and followed by Abraham's marriage to Rajani falling apart. Maybe there is something called a collective human experience, maybe we are all just instanciations of a single template going through the similar motions in our lives with minor localizations. And he wrote about how, to qoute from a poem I posted here John and Mary, "the Sufi with the love of the deverish and the Christian with a curfew" fell apart. And the identification with that story was immediate and intense, I had lived through those times of despair.

Maybe I shouldn't open boxes or caskets that are best left alone or maybe I should open them to lay to rest along with the actual body, the memory of the body too. And this is now almost four years old, the time in which an infant would have already learnt to walk, talk and perhaps even know what sadness is. But I suspect we don't come to that point so soon because my first recollection of sadness is from the time when I was much older, fifteen perhaps. I still remember that evening, even though I have I like to belive that scar has healed completely. My class tenth board exam results were out and I had failed to top all the schools in the chain by a single mark. I didn't have the time to decide how to frame that for myself when the verdict was handed down to me, you failed. These were the words that were spoken to me, words that echoed many times over in words of other people. Words that were spoken with a desperation, as if they could somehow conjure up two more marks from thin space and add them to my marks list so that I may win the limited version of Olympics gold. But this recollection is just the background, the prelude.

(to be continued...time out to breathe and drink coffee)

Sometimes my heart ponders this: perhaps if these days were spent in your shadows, then perhaps they would have become verdant and had your eyes looked at me just a little longer this darkness which consorts this gloomy life would
perhaps have become light.

Strange it isn't that, perhaps I would have found grace in your strange beauty beyond understanding had I lost myself in your perfect body. Thus being in that exalted state under your deep eyes, perhaps if sadness arose within you, from your lips, I would have taken onto mine all of your silent sighs and silent screams

Thus somewhere in your shadows, I would have lead my life silently, without much complaint. But this wasn't possible, this didn't happen. So here I am, without you, berfet of even sadness or yearning for company.

And this life is passing in a such a way as if it has lost all desire to seek any other support. Like a necklace I have worn the sorrows of time around my neck. I wander along strange roads, under stranger shadows, stewrn with thorns that seem to drain away life and painfully take me closer to death with each step

Now there is no home, no destination or light at the end of tunnel, And in these thoughts I am lost and in these thought I remain. But just like that, sometimes a thought arises in my heart: if these days were spent in your shadows, perhaps this life would have been different.

Sometimes, only sometimes.

As I was walking home from the Taekwondo class in the rain, memories of another rainy night came to me. And I started humming this old classic Hindi song, Khabi Khabi. It was a Nazm written by SAHIR LUDHIANVI. The original, which I translated above very poorly, is a very beautiful and very sad nazm.

However as it is too complex for mass consumption, Sahir later modified and simplified to fit it the film tune. He made it more romantic too.

This is for that person, jinke baare mein, khabi khabi dil mein khayaal aata hai.

Even if there is no destinantion in sight, just a desire is enough And even if union is not possible, aspiration for it is enough!

In my body, blood hasn't massed yet and in my eyes there are no tears. So even if it's not expedient to pray that way, this prepration is enough!

And let all wine lovers assemble tonight for if there isn't the wide ocean, swaying to wine is enough!

And if this long wait is difficult then O Heart, memory of those conversations when someone was making promises to us is enough!

And if in this strange place tonight, there is none intimate, then O Faiz, this rememberance of her body still in front of us is enough!

Even if there is no destinantion in sight, just a desire is enough And even if union is not possible, an aspiration for it is enough!

For Tom, for remembering "her" still after 40 years, as "she" was at Harvard. And for "her", "she" who died in a car accident before the "union".

My translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's ghazal: "Nahi niGaah mieN mazil mien tho justaju hiN saaHi".