Full moon night tonight. sweet smell of trees in bloom at the end of the season of spring.Ram sits on the deck, watching the breeze ruffle the pines, the customary beer in hand.It reminds him of Rashmi, the girl who loved him or maybe who though she did. That was many days ago, sometimes on meditative nights like this, where the peace is like sheet ice on a white winter lake, solid those memories come back. Gulzar's gruff voice wafts out of the dining room, and Vangogh's irises glow irridiscient in the moonlight.On nights like this,after having cooked a small meal and having run through the fund figures for one last time for the night, he tries to scan those far reaches of his memory for words, those old conversations in that language of home, that mongrel mix of two languages, Hindi and English.

    Words are just words, and they are hard to recall with time, but memories are a different thing, they remain and when recalled come forth sometimes as torrents sometimes as trickles. But still he tries, as he needs the words for these conversations with himself. Rashmi used to fight him rather his customary beer after work, she belonged to the

old school and though it used to bother him a lot then all it now brings back is a smile.There was pain too involved the day she came to him, free flowing tears and said that she loved him.

He was speachless for that second, and oh yes he remebers how he was cracking peanuts and eating them as she walked down the road to him, and yes he remebers the look on old Badri's face,that was the name of the old man who used to sell peanuts and channa, opposite to the school,ofcourse he remembers Badri's toothless smile and his two wifes.It was inscurtable for him to see that those badgering talks or teasing with Rashmi meant anything more than words he needed to speak, to exhale to mark his cycle of exsistance. He remebers that feeling of dread, that bewilderment at her tears and more at her words. And when those memories only the memories, for he had long forgotten the exact words,not that the verbatim of those words spoke on someday in September 8 years ago would help, he wonders where Rashmi would be at this point of time, if probablility goes she would be married, probably she would have some children and more accurately would be more happy than she would have been with him.And thus he soothes those memories dancing within him,maybe to quench that pheripheral guilt and to stop the thought of his solitariness that hangs around at the edge of vision.

    Marriage brings back the telephone conversations he used to have with his mother,

"Son you are getting older, please think about marriage, marry whom you choose, son we are getting old and so are you". For a while he evaded that with goals,buisness school, money or bust and other priorities.Though now he had run out of any more reasons to give and though now he is beyond that set golden treshold of youth,had hit thirty couple of months ago, with a receding hairline, flung faraway from home though sometime he wonders if born nomads can ever hope to claim anyplace as home, maybe not.These questions haunt him on somedays, as he sees the circling night that comes and goes and as he pauses to exhale in the space in between those shades of light and dark.

I note; just as an aside, that it has been a few swift hours since yesterday was what today is now.

Words still are stuck in the throat,perfection of verse is hard to strive for on all the poetic days.

The roads are vases of glass filled with foliage, green transmuted to red, that tremble in the wind.

The white noise throws it's shadows across the floor, lest silence,pure and naked be too difficult to bear.

And if I strive,I can perhaps listen to a barking dog, cars on the street, and your silent breath whispering something to me.

Within today, As yesterday.

2001.11.07 15:45 Atlanta
For Doc

That was ten years ago. The sound that was echoing in his head right now, it was from then. It was a Counting Crows concert, before they were as big as they were now. It was a dark club in which they were playing. He was in town on a temproray assignment, to troubleshoot a piece of intractable code. His mind was numb from staring at the screen. It was that period of time when he had left the university again and was working with a monastic fervor to stop darkness from seeping in. Music was the last barrier, the thin boundary where life could be still heard beating against this onslaught.

He remebered staring at this fairly tall woman. She had a very short hair, she was a dyke perhaps, she had a bandana wrapped around her hand and was with another woman. Both of them once had pink hair, he could remeber that. The dye had washed out of the hair, still remainingin traces close to the scalp. He wouldn't have noticed her. Usually he didn't go to concerts for people spotting. "To get washed in a washing machine of sound", that's what he used to say to his colleuges who thought his fervor for music to be a little strange.

But he noticed her as she was whistling, just like a man and the way she smiled was inconsistent with her sad eyes. He was struck by this moment of beauty. A guitar riff had just ended, it was played dazzlingly fast, it was beautiful. And she whistled again. People started moving around and he was standing next to her. He could smell cigeratte smoke. Malboros. And again that full pitch whistle, that he could never be able to do with his rather thick tongue. He stood there staring at her. Maybe she had noticed him before and now she knew he was staring at her. She moved a little to the side away from him but in the process turned her head and smiled at him, waving a fist in the air.

Behind his thick glasses and dark circles under his eyes he could feel loneliness moving in waves, he wanted to touch her skin, her face with the tips of his fingers. It was more than two months when he had last picked up that woman in a San Fransisco bar. That wasn't too difficult. Not as difficult he imagined it would have been some years before. People came their to loose themselves, their small sorrows and their small lives in those places. He doesn't remeber anything about this woman except that she had a birthmark on the side of her waist shaped like a Texan square.

He remebers smiling back thinking that he saw that or something like that elsewhere, before. Then gears of memory click into place and the web because taut with a single word, Varsha. She noticed that sadness in his eyes and maybe because she knew this language very intimately, she started talking to him in the lull between the reprise. She said her name was Tracy and introduced her partner as Maria who waved at him.