The New Gods

The other day, 
I caught myself thinking, 
Wondering whether the old Gods, 
Still walk this earth. 

Do they anymore dwell,
In the din,
Of our shuddering cities? 
Or is the fuel for the fires,
The flames in our engines, 
All that remains,
Of their lifeblood we drained?

In the dust, ash and grime,
It is hard to find, 
Marks of the divine, 
When these desolate lands, 
Like the bent broken backs,
Shells of their bodies, 
That still stand. 

Maybe the old Gods are lost to us, 
We've been left abandoned, 
To perish by the torments, 
Of our own devices.

Yet we need to hold on, 
To hope,
That hiding in the breeze, 
And the shades of trees, 
In the gurgle of a cool stream, 
Are the new Gods, 
Gods who will rise to reclaim this earth, 
Gods who will heal the creation we've hurt, 
They who will lead us to rebirth. 

Hunger

We humans seem to have forgotten,
That nature is not kind, 
And it never was,
Through these years of civilization,
And cultivation,
Of emotions and our mind,
We have strayed, misplaced the knowledge,
Of what is natural,
What is wild. 

I don't think nature knows,
Or cares,
That in it we see beauty,
And seek grace,
These words are just human sentiment,
Emotions we've conjured to brace,
Our race against a creation without pity,
The universe, does it weep for every death?

Even if we turn a blind eye,
To our instincts, hide our wild side,
With our urban lives,
Behind it all is something cruel,
That doesn't always show,
But it isn't easy to hide,
At times the violence spills,
Out in twisted ways,
Deviant, the savagery in our lives,
Cloaked in culture, it roams the streets.

You see, nature is unforgiving,
In all of its elegance,
It only seeks efficience,
We think we're past it,
Over the ruthlessness,
That survival demands,
But what is morality?
What are values, to any other being?
To an eagle, or the fish it picks,
A lion, or the fawn it eats,
What is right, but only the hunger inside?

Springtime Tidings

Spring had me hoping,
Bright colours and warm winds enticing,
Of finding anew familiar love,
Something to wrap with,
This old beating heart. 

Pushing out of every barren corner,
Winter bruised,
Nature stamps its defiant feet,
"I live!"
"Nor am I dead!"
"Oblivion did we cheat"
All around a chorus of life,
Too youthful to accept defeat.

Spring wants us to believe,
Have a little faith,
Though winter seems to win,
and we take a battering,
Torn and frayed,
There's still enough to weave.

But sweet human folly,
To seek melancholy,
In memories of winters to come,
As we take in shuddering gulps of new breath,
We still shiver from bodings of impending death.

Silhouette 1

This painting, made on the first “Janata Curfew” announced on the 22nd day of March, the year 2020.

Watercolor on paper, 7″ x 9″.

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.

Untitled 1.1

So fragile. Peace is so brittle. Trust so worn thin. Just a membrane which tears at the whisper of a breath. There’s an itch in the middle of my head. I’ve been trying to reach my tentacles in. Maybe an axe right through the center will cause this itch to go away. Peace, finally?

There’s a gash in my brain. Wide open. Bled out. Someone sew it to close this gaping hole? I can see right through. Right into the worm hole. A hole full of worms. Thoughts seem to worm right into my mind through this black mouth. Ungainly thoughts, rotten teeth. Put your hand in, pull them out. All of them, out! out! Imbecile.

Will your hand soothe? Can you take it? The hole needs to heal. The itch needs to stop. A slightest slip, I fall right back in. Crawling all over me, maggots. Suck me right in. The pit seems to lead all the way to hell; the hound of Hades waits, drooling.

Hold me. Hold me please. I’ll die; killed by my own hands. Can’t have that, can we now? Run your hands over my head. Put me to sleep. Breathe with me. Guide my hands to yours; make me stand again. I want to live.

Aphrodisiac

It’s difficult writing about you.

You’re uncharted territory,

and I don’t want this voyage to end.

I’m not sure where my homeland is.

Where do I go back to?

Will I ever stop traveling you?

It’s difficult writing about you.

You’re coming into my life,

and I’ve only ever written about people who’ve left.

Black water, waves that wash over me.

My stream of consciousness a solvent for pain,

anger.

Your waters are meeting mine,

and this feeling is like some long-lost childhood memory.

Misty, blurred, shifty.

Fearful that it might fall and break,

or lest I forget,

I treat it like a treacherous bastard.

The rivers that grow have flown past many,

so many ports. Fed by a million drops of the days

we’ve lived,

Different colors,

a different texture,

will the waters mix?

I keep stumbling into plans

made years ago,

now decadent, overgrown,

overrun

with roots and vines.

Much like the rainforest in my mind.

Cut through the thick creepers.

Cut through the grass, and the twisted stems.

Let some light into the cave where I hide.

Cowering like a frightened animal.

Hackles raised. Shivering.

Snapping at every shadow.

Desperate for morphine,

something for the pain.

the gashed wounds,

rudely stitched together.

Still bloody from gouging

scar tissues.

Will the grief in my waters

be the relief of your agony?

Will our rivers flow together

to heal what ails?

Will I let drops of the Sun

drip into my murky cave?

Shall I hold you,

caress you,

Heal you for rebirth?

Groping about in the dark, dark days,

Opiates, foraging

for numbness.

But,

You’re my Aphrodisiac.

Pregnant.

I originally planned this to be a short piece. I hope it is. I pray that I find the right words to emote the feeling inside.

Let’s begin.

 

I have a professor who is carrying her child.

And I am fascinated by how astounding a womb is, how awe-inspiring Woman is.

If you stop all other thoughts in your head right now ( do it please ? ) and try to imagine. Imagine the presence of that unborn life amidst us. The baby is there. Always there while we learn from its mother. It is experiencing the world from that safe place inside. It is there.

Does it not seem wondrous?

Is it not wondrous?

My words really are falling short, aren’t they?

In my mind’s eye, I see that presence curled safe; here, but not so much as to understand what the world outside is. Or maybe, it does know the world. The world is inside. It’s world is inside. Warm, safe. It knows the mother’s voice, her touch. It knows her love. Isn’t that world enough?

This reminds me of how I must have been when my mother was pregnant with me. It reminds me not of actual memories, but I’ll borrow them from this child. I must have experienced the world as it might have been when my mother was teaching through her pregnancy. Hearing my mother’s voice teaching, talking. Hearing the children’s voices, listening to the wonders outside. Happily ensconced in the womb. My heart beating, trying to slow down to match the larger heart beating about me. Never hungry. Grabbing the umbilical cord for life.

I was there. I was there all along.

And I am grateful ? It is too small a word, too narrow in its meaning through repeated use.

Mothers are miracles. Mothers are the Earth. The sheer wonder of creation, of bearing, bringing forth life into an inanimate lump of matter. They’re Life,  they’re the Conscious we carry.

You are a sacred being.

We are blessed to be born of Mothers.

4 kilometers closer to the sky

NOTE: You will not find information about how to reach Spiti Valley, or how I reached there, that's for you to discover,
 because it'll be your journey, if you wish to undertake it. All you'll find here is what I have felt, and what I have seen. 

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.

It is amusing to look back on the 20 years of my life, replay parts of various journeys, and feel again what those snapshots, snatches of conversations, glimpses of tracks branching away hold for you.

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?

This will be a good journey, I feel. I can’t base my feelings on evidence, but the words yet to be written hold the future.

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?

Travelling solo is nice. It’s maturing. It makes you talk to strangers. It makes you break your own inhibitions. There is no family to look around for. You are your own family up here, and some new acquaintances who mean well.

Solitary. In a forest. With nothing with me but thousands of living, breathing, creaking trees. Giants. Magnificent behemoths. And of course, my conscious. Haven’t spoken except in monosyllables since morning. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if there had been another to be silent with? Maybe not, unless there had been tremendous love as the binding force. I think I am capable of loving again. With that unstoppable, tumbling, rumbling, continuosly growing motion of life that comes with it. But is someone ready for that? Will she turn away in that force? Afraid of losing what binds her to others? Will she be able to come to me?

I hear music all around. Guitars, Ukuleles, singing. The people here are so different with their viewpoint about life. Beautiful music. Music that makes you lose yourself. I wonder why can’t so easily lose myself into anything. This whole place is so alive. Not that I am dead. But here is a community which might be, or very probably would be ostracized in the cities. In the “normal” society. And here they’re so accepted. So natural in their high, in their music. I wonder if I’m just too self conscious to have anything to do with a community. Like minded people. Or maybe I just haven’t found them.

This journey has been wonderful till now. Today was amazing. Eye-popping. Exhilarating. Humongous. Manali to Kaza. A 14 hour journey. There are almost proper roads till Rohtang La. After that it’s just mountains cut away. 1½ lanes, or less, never more. A truck punctured two tires somewhere between Gramphu and Rohtang. Tourists and locals alike had to gather rocks to build a road to allow vehicles to pass. Pretty amazing experiences. What I write is hardly doing justice to what happened. I’m tired, maxed out. Can’t form proper sentences to actually convey what everything adds up to. This experience, this whole journey, I’ll never be able to completely put into words for another to feel. I wish. Maybe some photos might make you understand how overpowering these Himalayas are. How towering. Up here, the roads are twirling around the feet of the ranges. The peaks are actually rising up from where you stand. I can’t, I can’t do this. I can’t write about this. You have to be here. Looking up. Looking around. And feel how futile it is to try and capture this in photos. How your endless gazing is not enough. Never will be. These mountains are going to stand long after the human race has killed itself off. New life will start again. And over. This is the force.

Near Batal, Spiti

You make such unusual friendships, and passing connections. Connections which are so deep. But so transient because you are moving along different ways. She was beautiful. She who looked straight into my eyes. No pretense. If I hadn’t had an insistent honking from my own vehicle, I’d have stayed back there. Now I wish I had. But that’s just my over-emotional childish thought. On a journey, you never get held back. Never get attached. Never stay back. That’s for a different kind of living. I will just cherish the memory, and live on. We’re probably, most probably, never going to see each other ever again. Ever. We don’t know names, we’re just two people who bonded for a half hour on a 14 hour journey. This is life on the road. Inshallah, we’ll meet again.

So we did meet again. This day has been the best since I started off. Maybe. I really can’t compare actually. But today was good. There’s an Australian, a Swiss, two Israelis, a Spaniard and one from Delhi. (Sounds like an inventory, sorry) Quite a mix of people. I am not even trying to express how I am feeling inside. There’s elation, there’s surprise, there’s joy! This is happiness, which I hardly ever feel back in Delhi. This is happiness, which makes you want to live so much more. You do not want to jump off a cliff, or get under a bus. This is happiness, here is peace. I am in love(?), with this place, with the situation.

This all feels like a dream. Or rather the life I’ve left back in the city feels like an illusion, a thing that can stop existing any moment I choose to. But this, here, this can never not be. I wonder how it’ll feel like to go back to that world of the constant noise, continuous internet connectivity, and unseeing people. Till then, the days here at the Key Monastery.

I dare not write about the feelings I am having on my way back. That, is better not delved into. All I can say is, I will keep coming back here, to places like this. To all the journeys like these.

Spiti Valley, from the Key Monastery, 4166 m above sea level.

Land of the Elder Gods

And I’m on the train back home. Back to Delhi. The place where everything is “happening”. But this is not a diatribe on Delhi. This is about the Himalayas. This is about the journey. This is about fascination, and peace. 

The road starts innocently enough. Climbing up the mountain gently, sleepily. Or maybe it’s sleepy after the train journey.  The road beckons you up, but not too much. You can still turn back. 

You haven’t been enchanted yet. There is still the city air to breath. You have your ties. You are looking forward to the trip ahead, but a part of you is still thinking about your home, about the goings on the city.

And, then the road turns, and things start falling off from you. Clean air. Fresh smells. Blowing wind. Whipping round your hair. You can take a deep, deep breath in. Your companions fall silent.  You fall silent. Having a conversation is pointless, seeing that all we talk about is petty, meager.

You’ve seen it before, felt it before, but the parts of your mind affected each time is different. You feel it every time, in every which way. The mountains are changing, every moment, they grow, they pulsate, they grow on you. They start looming over the road.  Grand monoliths, standing eons before we started crawling, growing taller each passing second.

You climb a few hundred meters. The ranges open up. The gorge beside the road deepens. The grass turns browner. The leaves more spiked. The mountains behind start to spread apart, showing an impression of the distance all the way to the very beginning. Beginning of all life. The land of the Gods. The Himalayas.  

 

 

The car steadily climbs on.  You try to keep every sight, every emotion, safely stored, remembered in your heart, in your camera. To write now. To write after.

There are memories of previous such climbs. Of such journeys. You recall them. There are glimpses of trees you’ve passed before, stones you’ve seen, bridges you’ve crossed. The cars behind you turn off to other places, humans going away. Roads carrying them away to the places where they are meant to be. 

You take the right turn. 

Civilization now is not buildings meant to sell, houses here are just to live. Villages are spread apart as much as the vista has opened up. Shoulders of the road just beyond the left tires, shoulders of the mountains now of full-grown giants’.  Rank upon rank of sons. All facing up to the elders.

At first you don’t notice Her. You are looking at eye level. There are the sons. You haven’t seen the mother. She is there. Behind them all. A brooding, looming, ever-presence. Your glance never leaves her ever. But that is preposterous, impertinent even. You don’t look, you are looked at. 

She looks at you, in you, through you. No one ever escaped her, nor will. She is going to keep seeing, unmoved, when we have destroyed ourselves. She has seen us grow into the monsters we are. She doesn’t cry. Her family is unfeeling. But in their presence, you feel.

You are awed. You are elevated. You want to bow. The higher Himalayas, the Himalayas, will make you want to cry. Cry for joy. Bitter tears of shame for ever doubted that there’s no one for you. Exalted laughter. Sweet tears roll away because you understand now that your fears, though seemingly real down in the city, actually is nothing in the scale of life, in the vast way nature exists. The peak stares unblinkingly down at you. You expect at least a smile, all you’ll get is stony reflections of the Sun. 

The higher you go, the road is deserted. For hours, yours is the only car going either way. Roads scratched onto the sides of the giants. Roads which won’t exist after the next rains. Or just a tiny shrug.

Her shoulders widen out. You see her majesty increase after each turn of the road. The climb is steeper. The air, rarer. But it’s not poison. It is peace. It is life. She is there. Always. Everywhere.

When you reach the town, you know that it is there in honor of the ranges beyond. The town is not nestled in her lap. The town exists because they allow it to be. All you know is humans are just too small to mean anything to the snow laden walls of rock. Absolute walls. You never think of crossing them. Because they never diminish in size. You climb one, you see the next, and others, shrouded in snow, in mist, in permafrost. A wrinkled plane stretching away till your eyes see no more. A plane of death for mortals. Serenity.

This morning, she has covered herself in clouds. The clouds do not move. They call others to cover up the whole range. Peaks lost high into the clouds, in preparation for the coming winters.

You try and imagine the cold up there. The life, the field of energy there. No human is alive up there. The energy is too much for us to bear. The Himalayas are majestic living beings. You feel the immense amount of energy emanating, reaching out, flowing over you, burning through you as you glance up.

You stand up to the mountains, human that you are. But you can’t measure up. You leave. Aware of your existence, aware of your tininess. You have to come back to land which is familiar, un-threatening.

Coming down, you remember her. You feel her presence. She is still presiding over the land. Looking away to the South. She is with you. She was with you. You remember how she stroked your hair. You remember how you fell asleep on her shoulder, how she slept beside you. You remember. You feel her. And you want her closer, to be more real. She is always there beside you, behind you. Just beyond the next turn. Always there to offer a place to you. 

And I’m on the train back to Delhi. A place where everything now seems crass. An anti-place. Anti existence. An affront to the Himalayas. A slight to the Elder Gods.