Because you were sure.

Writing, sometimes, can be the most stifling feeling in the world. It robs you of all your privacy, and ruthlessly strips naked every bleak corner of your mind; your imagination, your hopes, your desires, your everything; printed in ink on an otherwise flimsy blank paper.
The stain of ink in coherent intelligible figures can humiliate you, and make reality ten times withal real. It can be the tightest slap you remember all your life, while the slaps in your childhood seem like sweet gestures of warnings by Mother to mend your twisted ways that ultimately lead to your fall; on such a blank paper.

I don't understand why we're so stubborn. Why we're constantly rushing to plunge into every possible scope of entanglement and openly wish, hope and pray we never find our way out and breathe again. We like gasping. I think we like this mess. I think we're so used to it, that fresh air feels wrong, now.
The mind enjoys being in a perpetual state of frustration, and our language seems to be that of constant sarcasm and cocky-ness that only earns some more of the two from the other end of every communication we indulge in.

And what's terrible, is that this is mistake we're ready to make one more time, and then another time, and the time after that. Because we're just so god damn scared of being free. Of having our own space. Because we think that would be the world's way of abandoning us.
It's ridiculous, loathsome, and repulsive; this constant urge to keep doing something. And when we try to clean some wax off our minds, and sit down to write about the happier things in life, all we pour out are our dark little revelations and regrets. Because you just goddamn can't lie to a goddamn paper. It's powerless; your mind thinks. Who will he tell? It'll just stay. It'll yellow around it's corners and age away, perhaps with ink blots and cigarette burns.

But that's the point; it stays.

And you can't do anything about it, because? You never used a pencil. 
You were just so sure about everything, remember?

-Nil. 

Beauty bereft.

(Photo by Vanta.)

They had been abandoned by the ankles of the woman who became the prayers of every beat resonating around the universe. The woman said they scraped her ankles and made them bleed of bruises. They were accused to have lost a bell here, or two there. Apparently, they didn’t sound as sweet as her dance looked. Just how was she to dance with them on?

And thus, abandoned, they were. Carelessly put away into the unabashedly ignored attic of the gigantic house; the one that they had won her, from His Majesty.

 Every evening, they’d be bitter kissed by another layer of dust... Flies and sly ants would walk past the intricate blue thread work and the gold of each bell which weren't as golden anymore. The edges of the table on which they sat withered with time, and the room would birth nascent cobwebs and the dirge of grey into which every element of the room camouflaged
.

Every element, but them. They sat on that very table like a bold mother, pregnant with a secret. The sheet of dust would only gather in the broken ends of each bell and accentuate the rest of the body which spoke of age and art. Of flawlessness, of music, of dance… of a kind of beauty that ceased to exist once they were taken off her ankle.

They sat on that very table, listening to the woman dance somewhere far away in the court of his majesty. They’d see her taking her first bow and her last; they knew every breath she’d inhale after every fourth beat. They knew every flaw in the continuation of her hurried steps, and yet those steps were birthed in the womb of those; the ones that sat cold in that old, trivial attic.

What a pity; thought an anonymous wise man. A wise man who existed in the motes of dust around the old room, who existed in the aroma of rose water at the majestic palace.

Her feet tremble now with the new pair of golden bells on her mended ankle. They tinkle after her feet hit the ground, not with them. They’re a proud pair of 500 bells, and yet they sound faint, shy, or rather… coward like. And the irony is, the woman knew.

Bereft from what completed her next step from the first, she tussled with her tenacity to dance like that celebrated figurant she’d become in that kingdom of his Majesty; the kingdom where people kissed their fingertips to her rhythm, to her graceful glide that progressed unobstructed on the marble floors of the court, like the breeze of the season of art.

And yet, the beauty of that figurant faded as she tried harder and harder… for the essence of her dance lay sitting on an old table; bold, aged, and yet gorgeous; in those blue and golden pair of ghungroos. Quiet, incomplete, and bitterly proud; bereft of those bruised ankles. 
________________________________________________________________________

First proper piece of the summer, written in a strange strange mood. There y'go. Awaiting your feedback :)
Much loving,
Nil. 

The embers of a racing mind.

I can almost feel the curvature of my first thought burning away as quickly as the wing of a happy butterfly would ash away to; when inched  to an ignited matchstick. The head of the second thought was the origin of such friction and so has been the cycle of my thoughts, lately. Burnt out; even before one could live. 
A pandemonium of events uncannily containing similar emotions, all of which turn into a chaos inside a breathing room divided into two; my mind needs space. 
Examples of how fragile the think tank of our anatomy is have been in abundance, recently. And some times, I wonder; aren't we all a little tilted in the dark side, at some point?

"A calm man always has a war within him.. which is why, he is calm." ; I heard an acquaintance say, with a smirk today. And the glint in his eyes at the moment convinced me of the autobiographical statement, casually passed to push the puberty of understanding him. 
Since then, a very different spotlight surrounds his figure even in day light, when I look at him. And then I wonder, don't we just look at people? Isn't that all the shallow effort we put in to understanding the immediate wall of concrete we live in, after all? And then we wonder why pity surrounds our existence?

"Atleast this patch of Earth I'm standing on, is my ashtray." ; That was the parent of arrogance, her tongue talking. To our questioning looks, she didn't defend; she stated; that the patch of land she stood on was loyal to her weight, it was loyal to the foreskin of her body and mind. The patch of land was hers to spoil with all her ridiculous and whimsical ideas, to all the forms of salt that secrete out of her brown skin, to the lose strands of hair that fall out of her scalp to rid themselves of the overwhelming amount of turbulence beyond their roots. The patch of Earth was her. It was made out of her, and thus will wait for her slowly ashing body to come back home. The breed of such women was lost, we thought?

" The relevance of the human will and word is tragic, to say the least." ; I thought, after that one friend closed the door behind him. That one friend who was an undertone to the first quarter of my life, who was the proof of my childhood and who was the ear to every voice that made it out of my throat; and the ones that didn't. Years and years of mindless banters and baseless words exchanged in between found their way to my ear drums and I realized how relative human words are; for once the intention changes and the will demolishes, those words don't even exist enough to be called empty, anymore. There is no vessel to them, only tainted air of something that used to be. 
And one day, all those inconsequential conversations will skin the time you lost out on, alive. 


-Nil.

Sunday enthusiasts.

Sitting in straight lines of disorderly sequence,
they fit next to one another,
a feather long gamut between each.
A different flock, each day
and Sunday seemed their favorite of the lot.

One would fly away,
only to circle around and settle next to another.
Another would clumsily flap in protest,
though the order of the makeshift lines were taken much solemnly.

One or three would ash away,
the criminal phenomena of electricity was common a knowledge,
they'd complain of its ruthless deeds,
and yet settle on those black wires, indubitably.

Perhaps it was how the rest of us looked from above,
tiny, black and feeble stick figures;
running around doing things that were humorous to them,
they all fancy a good laugh,
our kind was a curious one to theirs.

They weren't wanton sadists,
neither were they reckless optimists.
They were fond of the sky that was intimate,
and Sundays, that favored clear skies.

So sit, they did,
and watched over us.
Flew away once in a while,
however absconded, rarely.

And so finally, the poetry block is over :) Hoorah.
-Nil.

A tall glass of water.

She spoke much fondly of bees, she often cackled to the buzz and drew yellow and black ones on her palms. Uninterrupted would be the curled strand of lock that played high and low tides on the left side of her face, while her long legs escorted wild thoughts with the pace she sauntered at, in and around the world.
Her bifocals were just as much a part of her face as her arched eyebrows; as sure as the tip of her illustrated nose; which always reached a destination a second before the rest of her chassis.
She often let daylight lick her like a cone of strawberry and vanilla. One would oft see her sitting unusually away from most people; soaking the dissonant sun with her long legs stretched and her face separated from the sun by the blinds of her eyes. She peeked with an eye open, once in a while.

To every one who raised an eyebrow at her vicissitude way of life, she'd say "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side." in Lou Reed's deep voice, and leave just the way she entered; like a whirlwind.
Apart from the 3 fingers on each hand with questionable rings, the other two would mostly be drawn on by neon highlighters. Her obsession with patterns left an impression not only on her apparels but on the bellies she wore which some times had little metallic balls  filed lines or curly circles doodled on them. Every mote of her existence had an ethereal and evanescent element on its toes, and yet she was as real as her loud Aztec leggings or the little ball of silver on the right side of her nose.

She was a strange girl in a stranger world. Everything bizarre was another route to happiness, every print on a cloth was something she'd have to doodle on her wrist that very afternoon and every page of a book was a paper plane with a lot of words on it. Interesting, she thought.
Interesting, she thought. She stopped the world in her head, stretched her long legs on the floor and spoke to the sun.

- Nil. 

Long Street's Orange Window

The night closed the bright orange window which had been passed by the cycle boy every single day since June, way back in '84. The window had been a loyal admirer of the umpteen tunes that the boy whistled to. He was a merry boy, and the window- a merry aged, unaltered element of the street. A landmark. A bellwether of its own kind, as the paints of yellow peeled open the red bricks, bit by bit, day by day, year by year.

Not a soul peeked from inside you know, yet it was the most lively detail in the whole of good ole Long Street, they said. Romeos would park their bikes next to it, and wait for them pretty pretty girls swinging their way in long evening dresses and high buns. Peddlers would string on their ukuleles and sing to Gene Autry and wink at the kind pedestals with pennies. Police men would eventually shoo them off and patrol around lazily, or join them and hum along when drunk.

The humor was in the gospel according to the neighbors around, that more the wall peeled, more the cracks peered, and more the pipes rusted...a strange sense of comfort manifested in the daily participants of Long Street. That old orange guy was a perpetual furniture on the abandoned wall that was a favorite, to all of them. It reassured them, it made aging easier, it calmed them, it was a part of their Christmas, Fête des lumières, Easter, and Hanukkah. It was a part of their wails when all the kitchens in the street would hear the fat maiden cry at her misfortune or yell at her goat who was bulled by her cat, again.


Either way, against all odds, the orange window was family to their secrets and hopes, to marital alliances or broken homes.. 
Either way, against all odds, the orange window would be there, tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that. 

- Nil. :)