I journey between two countries, rolling farms in the cusp of Ozarks and the river deltas of Bengal, interrogating the landscape, to answer the questions of my belongingness of where my body should be finally laid to rest.

You stopped the car, shook your head and said, "You have to realize that this is the last time." I turned my eyes away and saw under the pines, a doe and a deer they were feeding at the trough that wilderness provides and who seemed to be everything we would never ever be.

You recited poetry, Tagore writing for us, people with wild hearts to come after a hundred years, each word an exhortation to love flowers, others and oneself. Those words drenched me like winter rain, I turned my eyes away, there were questions floating in the waters: what were these flowers, what is love and what is this that exsists between you and me?

Now I can't turn my eyes away, each is a memory, each is wreathed in pain, they demand my attention, like a baby or a woman who can't have enough of anything! Now my eyes are looking into each of your eyes, with all the attention I can muster and demand an answer or a settlement of land, daring you to partiton a fraction of your skin where they can lean against and rest!

2003:01:11 17:30 Atlanta (AD)

Last night sitting under a photo of a Ladhak Monastery in bleak high mountian country, you asked me about Barsaat Mahal. You were eager to know it's lines, the levels on which it was built, how the sun, rising over Ganga, paints it gold. You wanted to know if it was real.

It rains in Barsaat Mahal all the while, this is fiction of course, but then I can see Saeeda Bai in the garden singing a song: comparing these rain clouds to a dark bodied god, she is weeping there and I am weeping here. It rains in Barsaat Mahal even as I am drinking tea. My legs on this bench remember these legs much younger dancing on another.

You want to know everything and I want to forget everything. The prison holding the past is Barsaat Mahal, a roadside tea stall, four crude benches and two of us, both alike, plotting escape. Now I drink wine and I celebrate my seeming escape from Barsaat Mahal, but tell me how does one escape this sky fringed with clouds?

I too am Barsaat Mahal, believe me when I say it used to rain here all the while till you interrupted the rain (or were they tears?) when you knocked on the door of Barsaat Mahal. You hand is still patting my head as I, very attentively fold the plans of Barsaat Mahal into an armada of boats and set them drifting across the river to your shores.

2002:12:23 10:30 Atlanta for T.F.C

Barsaat: Rain Mahal: Palace Saeeda Bai: a character in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy

Tonight your remembered presence in red, is a raft which is seemingly on fire on a river,which I have to cross to live a dark river, an overflowing river of pain. I am drowning and you are burning.

Somewhere wheels are turning on the tarmac, a smell of burnt things, ash at the altar before I finish my prayer. Do you know, I am yet to wash the shirt that seperated my heart from yours: skin vibrating like a gong or a drum.I cover my face with it and I smell your burning which marked me.

I am drowning and a black tide is coming in, I am coral, a mere gathering of dying cells, Go on call me beautiful, go on confess before each cell is extinguished, before I become coral. Go on touch me, but you can't touch me: your palms can't hold me but how they held me.

Make a raft for me, open your plams I ask you to open your palms so that I can change my history as I change yours. Open your plams and I will speak no lies, your fortune will burn as your palms burnt mine. Open your palms and sail me across the river But if you can't, become the river and fill me with a roaring silence in which I can drown.

2003:01:06 00:30 Atlanta (AD)

How I wish to complete the circumference of my broken circles.