A feeling arises, from inside, like a scream in a hollow room. Something is burning, the roof has taken wing, the blankness of the dark is pouring in and mingling with the blankness inside, two rivers are merging. There is a roar. Is it of water or is it the ghost of the tears that were never shed or the insanely loud dripping of the blood from the parts of me that I have hacked away wildly and threw out into the dirt?

Dust to dust ashes to ashes, everything turns. But what about this hammering of the heart that clacks clacks inside of me as if millions and millions of locomotives are rushing, are converging radically to a single locus, that will soon explode into a mangle of flesh and steel. Insertion of steel into the skin, will that physical bleeding help to stem this tide of endless days within which I have to constanly fight to stand up? I have tried that. It's like adding a drop of water to a vast sea.

Why haven't I learnt anything from an older lesson, that this crazy paraniod world which hoards everything normal: making love, grief, joy, even mere companionship, has nothing to offer but meal after meal of bitter fruit? I soffocate, I need help, I don't know where to run, whom to turn to anymore. I am too far for anyone who can hold me and too close to those who held me but don't want to anymore. How the equations were recast endlessly. To what end, to obtain which elusive happiness?

The narcotic of work is too weak to keep the sea of pain at bay, it breaks all the feeble dikes I build to keep it from rushing in. So like a ship riddled with too many holes and whose pumps are dead, I can't pump out pain fast enough. It hardens into a thick sludge as soon as it enters. I am left gasping for air. I am left caged in this room like a true madman whose signals, S.O.S es sent in the language of grief, escape into the endless space. It is as if who I am calling out to someone is not human but is an extra terrestial or some remote god whose ears are filled with wax.

All I want to do is throw myself against and crash into all these walls that are pressing down upon me like a tank shell. That instant butchering is better that living with this animal gawning at my insides. Everything that is meaningful is disappearing, one bit at a time. Sometimes I feel imaginary teeth running over my bones.

And sometimes I feel like dying. That's all.

My Daily Notes

Just a pain whose pathways I can't trace back to its source, outside police sirens racing away on the streets, a few cacadias chirping, cool air coming in through the open windows, note after note falling from Tracy Chapman acoustic guitar in New Beginning, the song: The Promise.

I wonder if there is a message in the way I had arrived at these songs or that this had to be the first album that I had to listen when making another Beginning. I know seeking reasons is futile from among the ruins, in shattered glass, in too many hard words that can't be unsaid, in too many decisions and iron clad laws that have been framed and put into place.

I hit the replay button and make this music the wine I drink, sitting at this table and sing along:

"In your arms where all my journeys end If you can make a promise If it's one that you can keep I vow to come for you If you wait for me"

2002:09:02 22:00 Labour Day

My Daily Notes

Ten years later, I look at a letter from my friend. I remember that curvy loopy handwriting, artistic and idealistic. He was writing from some remote village in Gujarat, India. He says that he has only little time left to finish the letter I am reading, before the sun sets in the distance, beyond the valley behind the River Narmada. He says the sun is so beautiful and so bright there unlike in Bombay. Bombay where we were students together, living next door to each other in those dorms, filled with Pink Floyd and the best damn minds in India and perhaps the world. He says this letter would have be to carried on foot for about thirty kilometers before it can be dropped in the nearest post box. He also says that since he couldn't really afford to pay the postage of fifteen rupees for air mail and that Namrata, one of his friends persuaded him to allow her to pay for the postage. He writes that he is waiting for the rains, waiting for the dam waters to raise. He says he is awaiting death by drowning. He says that he dreams of making love to a woman one more time before he dies. He says he smokes cheap beedis and hopes that I have stopped smoking.

He says he was beaten a week ago in the middle of the night. He says he still can't believe if grotesqueness of power is real or surreal. He says he remembers crying out in pain when his skull broke open like a coconut when the police baton fell upon his head. He says he was anointed in blood. He says some days he doesn't understand what he is doing, because on some days he doesn't have food to eat but then he says is not alone in his hunger. He says the bellies of kids are protruding and misshapen because of malnourishment. He says the hired goons of dam builders burnt this year’s crop to drive people out of their homes. He says he is waiting for those bellies to crack open like pots. He says he is waiting for archeologists to move in to excavate graves and carbon date these piles of walking bones. He says he feels so much anger at times that he feels like killing the assholes. He says that he has learned how to meditate and control his rage. He says he keep remembering King’s I have a dream speech and feels strong. He asks how is that America, one he so dearly loved?

He says he hasn't heard any rock music in ages but adds that he was learning folk songs from Aakash. He says Aakash is what the World Bank calls an indigenous person, a tribal whose hut he had been living in since a month. He says that finally his grandfather's communist roots have got to him. He says on some evenings when the Milky Way unfurls over the hills like Aladdin’s flying carpet he remembers the lights of Manhattan off Brooklyn Bridge. He says the stars are much more beautiful though. He asks how is Becky? Becky was his partner in crime, the impulse behind his guitaring. He was a beautiful guitarist. Beck was a woman we both loved, but he more than me.

What should I write back I wonder? Should I write I have become the boss of my own division? Should I write I am the planning lead for the NASA's mission to Mars? Will any of it make sense? Are our journeys even comparable? His, into this horrifying world I can't even comprehend. Is that any less wonderful in sheer reality than in putting man on another planet?

And what should I write about Becky? That now she is a lawyer and the head honcho for intellectual property in one of the big three drug companies? That she is the lead negotiator and the spokesperson who beats the hell out of tin pot dictator of some African country for breaking patents but who needs the drugs to which she metaphorically holds the keys, because he realized that if he doesn't pour drugs into his country, soon he will have none left to brutalize? That she is married to a lobbyist and has a sweet daughter called Angela to whom she is stranger, who in fact calls her Mexican nanny mom? I met her four years ago in Washington DC and I was left wondering was this the Becky we knew? What is this twist of fate, you went to the left, she to the right leaving me stuck in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, really deep down too afraid to go anywhere?

Remember how we used to take the bus down from Cornell, Becky in the middle of two Indian guys, laughing at us, when we opened our mouths staggered by the lights. Now I don't even notice the light anymore whenever I go to New York which I try to avoid. They say that New Yorkers do it in cabs, in rest rooms, on park benches in Central Park. And I remember our visit to this village, I don't recall it's name now, it has been so long, out of Panvel , that hiking trip where we unexpectedly came upon this girl taking a bath in a green slimy pond and how she scrambled for her ragged sari to cover herself. That was the first time I saw a naked woman and I still am horrified. Is there any link between people fucking their minds out in the upper deck of the Yankee Stadium and that element of fear we saw in that girl's eyes, in that slum, that feeling of being trapped by strange eyes? I have been running from the country for years and yet still it stays all over me, just like this skin I can’t discard. Am I becoming sentimental here?

My Daily Notes