Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through the bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed and readies for our journey. He mends ten holes in the knees of five pairs of boy's pants. His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

Last night I talked to my brother who is more than a brother, Kiran. He was in a crazed state of mind, the woman he loved was engaged to some random stranger yesterday because she didn't have the courage to do otherwise and I suspect perhaps didn't have enough faith in herself to do so. It's as if our lives on two different continents were running on similar threads, as if the same play is playing out: getting involved with women who don't belong to themselves and who will never will because either they are too cowardly or too selfish and then mourning about it, feeling sad about it.

But then as I was talking to him, I got increasingly angry as I realised that at a level we have been taken along for a ride, even if inadravently, we who are madmen, the passionate people and perhaps even too brave in a world such qualities are rare.

And both of us ended the conversation with a big "fuck them". And there was so much relief in saying those words, because if someone else thinks we are not good enough then thats their fucked up problem and not ours. And if someone thinks love is about getting stuff off a list, a list which they themselves lack in a large measure, then we say "fuck them". And if someone lacks the courage to say "yes" and to stand by that, fuck them.

And with that conversation, all things have ended: mourning, sadness, illusions of love, the big idea of waiting for something to happen because seeing his voice, broken and sad, I knew that it's time for me to get fucking selfish when others don't have even the basic decency to be a little altrustic. As Granpa said who need enemies when one has "friends" like these!! Enough of this business of giving and giving some more and getting nothing in return but voices of dissatisfaction of who I am. Love is a function of sacrifice and not a function of return. This is a lesson both of us learnt from the world and from the relationship we share.

So now it's time to put useless stuff to sleep and get on with my life.

to Life!! S

I sit at the table drained, it's hard to feel energetic on days when you feel the weight of history on you skin, like a layer of clammy sweat. I sit at a table of strangers and if all things go well by the end of this lunch, we would some how become less than strangers. He is a junior and Chinese American. He is like me but quite unlike me. I am not an American yet, maybe an aspiring one, but he is one by birth.

The talk reaches my ears as I work through a plate of eggplant stew and rice. "Chinese is like, so cool, dude." He had been to China over the summer and he is telling his friend, who is also Chinese about that time. His great great grandfather left that continent to come to this continent. Another leaving and another arriving. Sometimes I think my life too has taken this form: of a bus station, where I watch the arrivals and departures not quite unlike the character, Forrest Gump, spinning stories in the gaps between each arrival and departure.

I almost ask him if he knew what his ancestor came to this country as. Most Chinese were brought to work here as indentured laborers mostly to lay railroad tracks. Maybe there are memories in his blood too that make him remember those days: that one when his ancestor saw the first snow fall or perhaps saw the Grand Canyon. I haven't seen the Grand Canyon except in my dreams. If I try hard enough I suppose I will see myself doing a tigh rope walk between the jaws of the canyon that is still being deepened by the Colorado. I think it's a good metaphor for the cutting of this slow sorrow that I am trying to groove on. But I hope that it will hit the bedrock someday, hard as granite even though these grooves by then would be quite deep and unalterable. Gulzar's song: "To live I had never thought that I would have to bear this much sorrow. Nor did I know that when I laughed I would have to pay back the debts of laughter in as many tears."

He is confused and is not sure what he wants to do after he finishes college. He wants to go to the seminary because he says, "I have some questions that need answered." He says his parents are disappointed that he didn't want to go to medical school. Maybe that's a question he wants answers for. I also have some questions that need answering and I have realized that silence alone is their answer. That and Time. Sun which was on my face this morning is now on my back marking passage of Time. Last night I was trying to remember very hard how certain people looked like in my head, people a few hundred miles from here and people a few thousand miles from here, I couldn't remember them as clearly as I was wanted to. Again the separation between Want and Actuality, the gulf that will never meet. The only way to travel between the two shores: the silence of the black water.

He says staying away from his family made him feel closer to them when he goes to visit them. I can't verify this fact for family by relation is too far away and family by creation refused to stay as a family. If emotions are a family too then my family is big, I don't even have to make to visit them as they walk underneath my windows all night, like stalkers or bums looking for a corner to put their newspaper lined cardboard boxes to sleep. Last night I was in a car that was driven around the city to see the Christmas lights. I could only see winos walking down the sidewalk, panhandling for a few dimes to be spent on crack. Crack that for a moment lifts them out of these endless cracks their life had fallen into, cracks that are as huge as the Grand Canyon. I am a trapeze artist, who is swinging by the safety line of these words and the love of an old soul. I arc between darkness and light, like the pendulum of a clock or the clapper of a huge bronze bell. Sometimes the ringing is as furious as a fire truck streaking down the street and at other times everything is still. The clapper is in the darkness of the cup, mute unable to sing. And the clock would have stopped when the pendulum stops to swing.

There is no more food left on the plate and I get up to go. There is an ebb in the conversation and I suddenly want to say something but not speaking often has frozen my tongue like a silver of ice. That perhaps is a bearable thing for I have not silvers of hope to give or faith to profess with this glassy appendage. Half truths always escaped me, yes is no and no is yes or things like that. So I took a napkin and scribbled the name of a book I was reading, a book of nightmares and dreams to populate my sleep with the latter, to see the former I don't even have to sleep. I give the napkin across the table and get up to leave. He squints at it and turns to ask me the name again. I slowly repeat the writing, the sound of my voice suddenly unfamiliar as if I am speaking in a dream. I don't know what he hears and what I say. I end up repeating the dedication on the second page, in what octaves in whose voices I was speaking I don't know. The clapper becomes still after I speak the words:

How may I touch you across this chasm of flown things?

I sit at the same desk as I sat yesterday churning out distressful hynonyms, although physically the throat is much sore(er), the soul is much clearer having gone through the washer of writing. Also I suspect today being such a bright day also has to do something with this fact.

As for romantic sensibilites go, I suspect that has very little to do with countries and such. Indian "mass" movies are extra romantic with all that song and dance is because I suspect in a way it enables people to live out their repressed fantasies. Also that way I am a "freak" because I was at various points of time involved with women. It would shock the hell out of my tribe if they knew about that, so I follow "don't ask, don't tell" policy with them. Also I suspect even I do tell they would try to dissuade me from that. Ample evidence is S's(the girl whom I loved much, as much as I know what love is) father who is/was caught in a 80's India time wrap even after being in this country for about 20 years, whose version of his daughter's relationship(s) are those which he personally engineers, doctors and oversees. My parents would map this tendency to a large extent as well but sadly since I have left the tribe they can't impose what they think upon me. In the last conversation I had with my parents they were telling me Kiran's parents who stay in the same city, were worried about Kiran because he is refusing to marry from the subset they chose for him.

What can I say, all in all everything is messed up with my generation. Yes sexual dynamics worsen the matters somemore, with random sexual encounters and stranger definitions of what it means to be loyal. I have always felt like an alien when folks start talking about these matters, which is often. Statistically about 30% of the conversations I overheard while I was sitting at the Shaft next to the Student Center were about who was "doing" whom, when and how. My only guess is this comes from the consumeristic mindset that urges one to "compare" and "shop". This I suspect my generation, which is sexually more proscumious, embraces totally.

Perhaps this also explains the lack of patience or the short attention spans, since however "skilled" one is sexually the act can't last more than 30 mins and if one doesn't have the patience to wait for any other good qualities to manifest, then the criteria of choice becomes very simple: sexual performance. No wonder Viagra is such a bes selling drug as it hit the "market" which was primed.

Also as I mentioned before I am incapable of operating at that level of reducing stuff to mere friction or nervous excitement. So even is this way I am Gen X "freak" and maybe this attributes to my "loner" image. It's not because of choice or because of snobishness but solely because I don't want to or am incapable of operating at that level. And in the short time I have been in this country I have had the "dubious" chance of fending off such passes atleast on two occasions, not that I am a moralist and think all of this is sin, only that I can't and won't do the "grind" with random strangers.