The Stranger

I have no poetry for what I want to write now. The feeling is at once out of place and familiar, and rhymes will just hold me back. Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and while listening to music that takes me away to a peaceful place, I understood what’s been bothering me, what eats at me.

I have understood, that I am a stranger in my own land, that the places that speak my name aren’t here. The books I’ve read, the songs I’ve heard, all of that has taken me away from the places I’ve lived in, and away from the people around me. It has put a distance that I have been unable to find a bridge to. The gap between me and them, has grown much in the recent years. The more I’ve found my true calling, the more that I’ve found the depths inside myself; the more I find myself distanced in my heart and mind from the ones around me.

It is no wonder then, that I have felt so abandoned and lonely for so long a time. Not just in my search for a romantic relation, but in even in other aspects too, there is hardly anyone who complements me in the breadth and depth of my thoughts; someone who resonates with my beliefs and the values I live by.

So, I am left a stranger in my everyday life. What I see in my mind’s eye, I have met none who share the vision. It’s as if I am unseen and unheard by anyone I talk to. The language I speak in, it’s not of the here and now, the life I live is not of this place or time. I am the stranger to everyone I know. Never understood, never accepted. I have never belonged, but everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve felt that I’ve been there before.

In my heart, I pray to the Gods that have looked upon us through time, that I soon find my people. People who are not of this time, but of some age in the past when humans were one with the Earth, when honour and morality wasn’t so alien, so hard to grasp; when the words we spoke was truthful till every last syllable. Misfits now, we belong to places where the divine isn’t lost, and we walked with the Gods. A way of life where the children never lost their way, and we found wisdom from the ancestors, where nature was respected and feared, and legacy was of values, not material. I hope to be with those people, who love with all their hearts, and live with all their souls. People who are not afraid of the old ways. Companionship that speaks through time, in the language of the universe. Human beings who understand that we’re meant for so much more.

The Woman I’ve Dreamt Of

All these years, I’ve been writing of the disappointment and the failings that I’ve encountered in my search for a companion, and though I have loved and lost, and hurt myself trying to chip away at the crust to bring out the best I hoped was inside them, I have never had a vision clear enough to say what I want in my partner. I have mostly compromised with my values to at least have a partner, and hoped that things will come together in time. Understandably, they’ve fallen apart, and I’ve been left wiser.

This will be a statement, of what I will be looking for till I meet her, as also shall this be a declaration of the life I aspire to live.

I am fully aware of the professional heights that I could achieve with my academic merit if I so desired, but I do not. That’s all that I’ve been fighting within myself for a few years, and the choices are clear, as is what I want. The struggle against the bonds that I find myself in, but increasingly loose, is against mostly everything that had been the natural sequence of life events I was brought up with. Academics, employment and hobbies if and when time permits. But I envision for myself and my family a quiet life. Working, learning and bettering ourselves each day. Not the rush of modern urban cities. Not corporate pretensions and government posturing. However long life is, I will not wait till “retirement” to finally make my life what it should have been all along. Apart from the necessary possessions, not much is needed for a fulfilling life. It does not entice me, the power or the accoutrements. What good is life if it’s for everybody else’s to measure against.

The woman I want to spend my days with must know what her capabilities are, and choose, once, for the rest of her life to live in the best ways possible. Choose to not deny the possibility that her instincts and her values have always yearned for. Choose to not delay being where life has to take her. Choose to not betray her own being to be a slave to the usual, but a master of what’s at the core of her nature.

In a dream, so vivid, I see her at a café counter. Bright eyes, level gaze, quietly confident with not a speck of bluster. And beautiful, so beautiful. And I tell her “We should be together”, and her answer holds the universe together. “I know”, she says, and in those words, I understand she has answered more than I had said, she knows what we have been, what we want to become, what our lives will be now. Not a quest for company anymore, but a journey of comrades. Together now, discovering the Earth, unwrapping our worlds.

Our days will be devoted to creative and intellectual pursuits. And when we have children, I and the woman I will love, and our families together, we will bring up divine beings. We will read to our children the histories of the world, and the histories of the languages, and of science and the technologies, which are necessary, but also caution them that it’s not God but Man that made science to explain what does not need explanation, only understanding and acceptance. We will bring them up to appreciate the arts, in every thing that we do, to appreciate the utter wonder that even a blossoming bud and a ripe fruit carries within itself. Most importantly, we shall tell them of the Gods, teach them how glorious humans can be, tell them what wonders they are. We shall roam the world, to look at every mountain, ocean, lake, and desert that we’ve read about, which are the true temples to the divine. We will learn with them that we’re the citizens of the world, we are powerful lives, and we’re the children of the Earth.

If this way of life is a life of limited means, we will live within our means. Our legacy shall not be edifices built at the cost of our intellect, but it will be what we create, with our hands, with our minds, without the falsity that comes with a life lived away from the order of nature.

All of whom I’ve met till now, our visions haven’t aligned, and with all respect, none of you have been brave enough. I have this vision that I will carry, till I meet the one. The one who is out there somewhere right now, and whom I will seek far and near and for as long as it takes. Until and after I meet the woman I’ve dreamt of, I shall remember; “Wyrd bið ful aræd”.

The Battles We Fight

I have been thinking about fate and destiny. Does the struggle that we put ourselves through really get us anywhere? Or do we just thrash in vain against the bonds of what is already decided?

The Hindu idea of Karma grants us free will, to do as we please while the Almighty keeps account, all to be reaped and paid for the next time we are given life. With that, all our fights matter, every decision and action leading to novel possibilities. On the other extreme, the pre-Christian Nordic cultures wholly left the course of their lives to fate. The Norns weaving threads of people together and apart to guide everyone along a path that is inevitable and pre-ordained, while the Gods looks upon it all.

In a conversation with a dear friend, I said that maybe if we look at our lives at a very small scale, zoomed in, the tiny decisions are maybe left up to us, but the general course is beyond our control. God’s will, if you think of it that way. But free will or not, the question remains, why do we fight? What is all this strife for?

In the grand scheme of things, what do our little wins amount to? All of this, just for death to take us in the end? These are the things that I ask myself, and you, if you wish to engage in this conversation. I wished to write an obtuse poem about this, but I seek answers, and the questions need to be clear. To borrow a friend’s words, “Someday I will write poetry about this but first I must survive it” [ paavam_mk after Lora Mathis on Pinterest ].

If you’ve noticed, up until 2015, we all knew what we were doing, where we were going. Now we are all so angry all the time, all of us, don’t we all feel lost? Does any of us know why we are doing what we do? I feel like we’re just going through the motions of what we are supposed to do, because we don’t know any better. Even if we stopped, wouldn’t the world carry on just as before? Surely our actions can’t affect the destiny of the Earth?

The Pandemic is a success, isn’t it? Look at us, socially distanced, isolated, lonely islands of personal success, too weak and proud to accept that we need each other, too busy to see that we are all crumbling into oblivion. This here is a fight where all of us are warriors. A fight to save human society, which for all its ills, is all that gives some meaning to the battles we wage our entire lives. Individualism is important in every creation, for art, but without someone to look at it except you, without you being witness to the joy that others feel from your work, how would you go on?

But we’ve been reduced to waiting for something to burst, collapse on us, for something, this, to finally end, so we could restart, walk on a new way of life. It’s as though we are all just waiting to die.

í Ioga

If you sit still enough, you’ll know.

If you sat where you are, and listened to the sounds of the world rushing, you’d know.

You will know that you’re not moving at all. You will see the millions of strings that tie you to the world, and you’re the axis about which every one and every thing is madly spiralling.

You sit there, and you know.

You know about the thousands of stories that pass you by. Fragile, fleeting, intimate moments. As they move, you feel capable enough to reach out and pluck the thread that joins you to the instants of those lives.

I sit there, very still, because I have suddenly realised that I’m happy.

I am happy, and a strength that I’ve missed for months is pulsing through me. I feel powerful, and I sit here, seeing the multitude of possibilities that I am a fount of. I am the origin, and all the paths that I choose, they’ll always end at me.

The fire that I was afraid would burn me to the ground, now is fighting to be poured out. It wants to become wonderful, wonderful shapes.

I sit here, and I know that I am ready to let people in again. Ready to be engrossed in your beauty, captivated by your love.

I am ready to be, here.

Ice

Even as I scribble this I feel so small.

Like I’ve collapsed into myself in the emptiness of the past few months. You might perhaps not appreciate the pain of being unable to create, yet I’ve been living in the desolation of a barren mind and dysfunctional hands. From their places of honour, the pieces I’ve created in past spurts of skill and inspiration look down upon me, and alone I see their sneering grins.

I could, naturally, blame the weather, but I’d be a fool to ignore the nagging realization that this might be a sign of a deeper malaise. The absence, of love, and even the hint of a possibility of love, stalks me, and although this might sound like a banality, the iciness that chills my heart is hauntingly real. So even though I am loathe to waste a single breath, I have been sitting around making nothing, all the while wishing that something, or someone could take away these filthy chunks of squandered days of disgrace.

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How you’ve run to walk with me your whole life through.

Skin, Poets of the Fall

No, I don’t think I’m alright.

I can’t find in myself the strength or the fire to break free of this passionless existence. I am afraid of the drudgery it might become if I let myself step forward into love again. The intimacy that could possibly pause this implosion into an abyss, scares me. It could all turn into the familiar cycle of sharing my life pointlessly, with a person who couldn’t possibly conceive of the depths I could take us to, or the heights we could soar up to, until they can’t keep up anymore.

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If I rested here a while more, would you hold me to your heart?

Diamonds For Tears, Poets of the Fall

Do I dare hope?

I still wish you could love me. I want you to be able to light the fire that has all but gone out, one spark at a time. I wish you’d lay down beside me, and let me hear you breathe, just so I could revel in the wonder that someone’s there. I want you to be there, and talk to me, and hold me. I wish you could bring some warmth into my cold thoughts again, make my heart want to burst. I want you to make me feel like I’m on fire again, and you the only thirst.

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I am not kind to myself. Could you be?

Tick – Crash

The clock on the wall is too loud.

The ticking fills my ears. It grows louder but never reaches a crescendo. So it keeps crashing away, and all I want is to bury my head in the wall.

Cars rush through the night outside. And I want my heart to slow down from the hundred and fifty bpm marathon it’s on. For the past hour? minute?

The clock never fails. But I never can keep up with the wasted seconds.

I curl up tighter, a cold ball. Frozen feet.

Crushed screams in my clamped mouth.

And it is deathly quite inside.

And it’s only the clock. It never stops as it counts away my time.

I try, I do. To climb out of this, whole. But the more I thrash, the deeper I dig myself in.

I have so much love to give. I have so much that I want to give. But who wants more than they need, when they’re already filled to the brim in their little lives? And I despair for what I could do, for what I could give. So much to love. So much for love.

Like Poe’s tale of the tell-tale heart, the clock on my wall is always too loud.

M-

I met her just twice. Successive days in the hot summer of 2019. May? June? It’s been one and a half years now.
In moments of solitary thought, when I have felt friendless, I have thought of her. And even though we don’t have occasion to talk much, I feel her presence. Not near me, not beside me, but somewhere out there, where she is, I sense her existence, like the twinkling light bulbs of a distant town, hers brighter than any other.

She is a mountain girl, you see? She is as proud and aloof as those Himalayan cliffs she’s grown up around. Unforgiving, unyielding. Solitary in her loneliness.
But I have felt in her the blowing winds and the bright sunshine of the vales too. Like ripples that flow over a field of grass, and the whispers through pine trees, life spills from her. Life animates her. Like a blooming bud or a flittering butterfly, her twinkling eyes.

I have wished sometimes that I be witness to her sleep. O how ethereal in my mind’s eye I have imagined that moment to be. To have her sleepy head in my lap, to gaze upon her peaceful face, a smile playing on her lips; to bask in the glow of her beautiful, beautiful being. Dare I run my hands through her hair? Are they worthy enough?

Otherworldly, her poise. Every step, every pause. Every bow of her head. How graceful she is, when I see her walk up the mountain path, the Sun vying to outdo her brilliance. How vital, live-giving her joy, when I see her run, the wind in her hair, her dog by her side.

She has been touched by Freyja. And when rain falls and life doesn’t flow as strongly, I am safe with the knowledge that she is there. She lives, however distant. She reigns, even in her exile. And I suffer no pain, only an intense longing for my gaze to be blessed by her sight, her presence a sacrament.

I ache to be there for her, to hold her, to be of some comfort? But she is divine, and this is the only tribute she commands.

To the mother pigeon

A pigeon couple made their nest on our kitchen window, perhaps six months ago, and I have seen them build their home, twig by twig, all through the lockdown. An initial egg that was laid cracked on the second day, and they scattered all the twigs they’d gathered on the sill and rebuilt.

This is a monologue for the mother pigeon, now that today the baby took its first flight.

I saw you look at the two eggs you’d laid, with that cocking of your head. I saw you settle down for the wait ahead. The twin fragile shells containing the promise of life.

Each night I saw you sitting awake, looking out through the window to the sleeping world around you. Neck gracefully held out, and you refused to sleep, guarding your growing babies against the unknown. I know not if you ever slept at night, and I have seen you in the mornings, before your partner came in to relieve you from duty. I have watched as your eyes drooped shut as the Sun emerged, taking away the dangers of the darkness. You were dignified even in that sleep, never letting your head bow. For they were your babies growing in those shells.

For an unbearably long time, the babies didn’t emerge, and I have seen you grow impatient, but only sometimes, when you poked at the shells with your beak, willing them to hatch. And a child emerged one fine morning. (Sadly the other never hatched), calling for its mother, calling out for food. And then began the next stage of providing for the baby, feeding it, as its cries intensified every time it saw either one of you. And you still took out time for the child, and you sat as you had, as your baby nestled its head for the familiar warmth and darkness. Oh the child grew so fast, new feathers all over your tiny yellow-gray baby.

Now the baby is grown. Standing on the ledge and fluttering its wings for so many days, as you looked on. Today, it took the leap of faith, faith on the wind, faith on its own wings. The child has flown today.

You have my respect. Until next time pigeon mother.

Part I : Delhi to Manali

It all started with the realization that I had to do it alone. This is a story that I haven’t been able to tell in its entirety yet, and it’s close to two years ago now. This, here will be an attempt on my part to write about the journey that I made in June of the year 2018, a journey about which I have written two blogs already ( from which I will quote freely ) .

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It was the second semester of my third year in college, ending in two months. A month of preparation and practicals, and a month of examinations. I had to have something to look forward to after the exams. Something to pull me through the couple of months. So I planned a trip to Manali and a tentative extension to the Spiti Valley.

I booked tickets from Delhi to Manali online on the HPTDC website. The Volvo bus left the Himachal Bhavan at Mandi House at 6.30 in the evening. It is a 550 km, 14 hour bus ride. Back then, I wasn’t much for conversations, even less than now. So I had perked up to have the seat beside me empty, until a guy boarded the bus at the last moment. I didn’t really talk with him until afterwards.

I had been looking at the cars pass the bus, going towards where I’d come from. A blur of headlights on highbeam and the streetlights of GT Road. Our first rest stop was at a big dhaba/hotel in the outskirts of Chandigarh.* I will have to look at the photos and my Google map Timeline for details. It was around 10 at night and I ate the food mother had packed for me, and a Snickers bar. Walked around a bit, got some breeze in my hair and sat right back in my seat. I still hadn’t spoken to the man beside me. We left the place in half an hour, I texted a while, wrote in my notebook and made some video clips. I had grand plans of making a vlog.

    *It was the Motel Golden Saras in Kurukshetra

I have picked up my pen to write for pleasure again. A semester had intervened in between. My writing seems stilted to me, my thoughts disjointed. Still, I’ll have to write to get over the debris blocking the flow. I am on my way to Manali, and then hopefully, beyond, to the Spiti Valley, a solo trip. And I’m unsure whether to rejoice in my solitariness, or feel sad about my loneliness. And I realize it completely is my choice. I will have decided by the end of this 14 hour bus ride, surely …

… so many people to observe. Co-passengers, people in passing cars, truck drivers. So many different lives. Wouldn’t it be interesting to get to talk to them all, for even 5 minutes? Get them to talk about their lives till you met them? Might help you get your own life into perspective. Not a complete perspective, but at least wider than the current one, maybe?

~ 4 kilometers closer to the sky

The bus had been running for a while now. Long enough that we had all napped after the slight dinner, and woken up to trucks passing us downhill and us overtaking trucks and cars on our superior Scandinavian engine. The mountainous roads had woken us all up, and slowly, there were conversations springing up. We twisted and turned up the foothills, and also in our seats.

Humans are a cruel lot. How they’ve kept on chipping away at the surface of the Earth. They haven’t even slept nights since they can control light. Toiling, toiling away at their own destruction. Accelerating towards a fall that’ll just about wipe them off.
There’s an almost full moon shining through the bus windows, mist over the foothills. Or is it just smoke? Ghoulish humans driving trucks and buses all over the once virgin mountain forests. Abuse. Abuse of our existence. Abuse by our own efforts, because we don’t know when to stop. Where do we end? When are we ending?

~ 4 kilometers closer to the sky

Then our second toilet stop at a dhaba/cafe where I had coffee, and watched the pre-dawn mist cover us and the tress and the air itself in a mystic blue light. Everyone had a spring in their step and a camaraderie, now that we were in the Himalayas, a curious energy flowed through us. We were looking very much forward to the coming day. I popped back into my seat, and finally then did I talk to the man beside me. John was from Goa, and he owned a business. He asked if I was planning to make a vlog out of the videos I was making, and I hope I do, and he does see it. Then with dawn creeping up on us, and the sky turning orange with the Sun still not out over the cliffs, I went and sat beside and with the driver, right at the front on the steps leading to the cabin, and I looked at the road looming from the wide-spanning windshield. From that view, I welcomed the day.

In the misty blue and grey of dawn we climbed with the Beas and its tributaries beside us, turning in its rocky sides, boulders strewn and the waters choppy and blue-grey and green. The road passes by the confluence of the Parbati and the Beas, on its way to Kullu from Bhuntar. Crossing Kullu, the higher Himalayas had well and truly started and the Sun had peeked from between the pine forests, shining on the camp grounds and the churning waters of the river sparkled and blinded us watching from the windows, as we passed through the numerous villages and towns before Manali.

A father and his two kids got off at the YHAI Base Camp at Deo Tibba by the Beas River, and then it was straight on to Manali. But, lest it slip my mind, I cannot but mention the goats and the goatherd. I will never know now from where they came, or what there destination was, but there were suddenly scores of goats and lambs on the road, furry little creatures, with knobbly horns, and a springy gait. Looking at the bus, and not caring to move from its path until the herder told them to, with slight gestures and a long stick. I was to encounter herds like this many a time on this trip, but this was the first, and it was a great and innocent joy to look at the wobbling heads of the kids and the wise shake of the elders.

I reached the Manali Volvo Bus stand slightly after 8 in the morning. This is where I end this part of my story, what I got up to after I disembarked, and how I spent my day, I will write about all that in the next post. Until then, enjoy this and the first of the three videos I will upload on my YouTube channel by way of recounting my travels.

Vlog link : https://youtu.be/l62-olDx-40

Home.

A thousand words assail me every time I have thought of that realm. A profusion which has prevented me from putting down a single word on paper. Trying to write about yesteryear has led me to a mind empty of suitable words.

It was a year! ago. I had set foot on the sacred lands of Spiti. It is difficult to acknowledge that it has been a year already. Spiti never leaves. And that is what I have been trying to tell people. Everyone that I have talked to about my trip, know that I have failed miserably in conveying how I feel.

Spiti is home. I carry it in my bones. I have breathed in its winds. Every fold, every crevice felt like I’ve been there before. When I think back and see those mountains rising above me, I realise that is where I’m alive, that is where my breath lives.

I have never felt more inadequate with words than now.

I think of that place, and it manifests itself like another reality. An existence which isn’t. Until you have crossed the Rohtang pass, Spiti isn’t. For all I knew, Spiti was just in my mind.

Now, it always is. Spiti will endure. Time flows differently here. Time flows through everything that is still.

I know I’ll find it exactly as I left it. The sheer cliffs; the goats, the horses, grazing high up; the great river, the monastery, the sunset. The wide expanse which your sight can never span. The travelers you meet. The energy.

My Home.