plebite Poetry and Prose

On Home...

2008-02-11T00:32:00.000-08:00

Here I am-a South African from Johannesburg in Pune, India. More than a year has passed since I have touched African soil. I do not know about this ‘Mother’ anymore, our communication is scarce. I do not know what gripes she now has, who is upsetting her and which politicians are making all the usually wrong decisions for her in her best interests. I do not know what music she is singing from the mouths of new and upcoming artists. I do not know how the rain has slanted or the sun beat on her expansive back over the last year. I do not know none of these things, yet I tell of her like a fierce fog horn blowing through the cultural mist of

India

I am patriotic. Now that I have been gone for so long, I am patriotic. The narratives that I deliver are like dessert, sweet to the taste and colourful to the eye, yet small in proportion so as not to make the recipient wary of the contents being placed before them. I have wiped up the dessert bowl, removed every water stain from the spoon and placed a cherry on the top. I have abandoned all stories of racial animosity; a rape every six seconds, a man shot every ten, the paranoia of high fences, burglar guards, poverty, AIDS and my dad’s frantic calls to see that I have arrived safely at the party. Home is now a white-washed, watered down rendition of what it actually is.

Perhaps an Artist would say that I now have the creative distance that is necessary when one seeks to represent. When you are at home, Home is of little consequence. It is never afforded the grand attention that it receives from the foreigner. Home enters centre stage in the play of alienation. For me, representing this Home has begun to feel an awful lot like forgetting. The funny thing about lack is that you yearn for things that you never cared too much for in the first place. It was never really how you spent your time when you were actually at Home. It creates obsessions out of the ordinary; it affords a new magnitude for the mundane- Bacon was never my heralded joy, nor wine my endless song. Home is only made present in its absence and is always absent in its presence. In this curious paradox, I find that the more I speak of my ‘Mother’, the more she seems to move further away from me- Like I am sucking at her left breast, exhaustibly.

This is where Brecht, the German playwright shows his importance to me. He too had problems with representation. He felt that the way narratives were told and life, as enacted on stage, were chummy reflections of fantasy. He felt that these fantasises were cheap forms of escapism that prevented people from asking the really important questions. It was Brecht who brought forward ideas that through alienation and distanciation we can create a much more intelligent form of theatre. He used methods of foregrounding the technical aspects of theatre in order to show and examine the very constructedness from which dramatic narratives arise.

And so, according to Brecht’s suggestion…I will cast aside the performative glory to engage in act (or lack thereof) of honesty; as I desire to delve into the ‘heart’ of Home. I abandon the tiresome tricks…no white-fluffy rabbit; no multi-coloured scarves, no shiny bunch of plastic flowers! I no longer wish to pull these things from inside the black top-hat. I wipe of the make-up. I tell the drummer to rest his ‘ta-da’ cymbal. I turn my gaze to the black top-hat. To feel my way along it edges, to understand the blackness of its fabric, the texture of its treads…to draw closer to the vessel in which we contain and manufacture shiny dreams out of a phantasmagorical void.

Fade to black…

Home, like the hat, is concrete, rigid; material-it is a forever hat. A state of stasis….as bound as the photographs I last took before I left home: streets in an innocent state of suburban tranquillity, green trees and open clean expanses, faces of friends and family in captured happiness, mouths open in loud silent laughter. When I hear accounts of home and the reality of experience of living in South Africa from my friends, I suffer from iNeRtIa, a back and forth struggling of my will, and like the nausea that arises, I seek to repress it(as opposed to express it) and return to my atemporal completeness.

I am overwhelmed by a world changing and transforming, morphing into something other than what I know. It is as if this Grand ‘Mother’ has come home from a fancy ball and I watch her sit at her dressing table and remove all her make-up and fine jewellery-and I am horrified! Devastated that her face is aged, wrinkled, weathered by time…older. There is a recalcitrant and childish wish in me to not see the wrinkles, to not see that time has tampered with her fine edges and sharp eyes, that time has sunken into her skin and slackened her muscles.

Is it merely a knee-jerk reaction to the chaos of India in which I must find stability elsewhere…back home? Or is there something more profound to be said about our temporal nature as human beings? Can we only live through one temporal experience at a time? Does my being in India equate a denial of time transformations in South Africa? At the heart of our Being, is Space and Time; so it is argued, so it is said. Then, is where we experience place, by necessity where we experience time? Are they inextricably linked and married at the hip for all of eternity until death does (or undoes) us apart? As temporal beings, we only afforded time in its singularity, it seems, and while being in India, the ‘Mother’ and her land can undergo no, or little, simultaneous temporal progression…like a spoilt child; I condemn her to my infantile dream of stasis.

Soon, I will return to a place in which my family and friends have changed, their lives marked in South African time, their hearts altered by South African experiences. All of which I escaped from, or escapes me. My parents will be older, my sister will be married, my friends have jobs, new homes, and different lives-they will have dug trenches in the soil, made cosy over the two years that I have been away…and me? I return home, ironically-displaced. Indeed there is a fear that urges me to cling to a home I remember; a home in which I was as well aquatinted as everyone else, a home, in which I could also claim ground through experience. The shoes that I left at home will no longer fit, or be stiff from lack of use, old-fashioned…how will I begin to thread the ground again? Home is not free of fear, of insecurity-as a construction of safeness, it does not precede, but is rather, born out of our human needs.

I recently met a man who goes by the self-description “An African in Indian skin.” Naturally, a personality of interest to me…his name is Hartman De Souza. His family is from Goa, but soon left for Kenya where he was subsequently born. He returned to India in his early youth and has never returned to Africa. His bookshelf is an over exploding allegiance to African literature. He is a practicing director of theatre in India and he mostly stages South African plays. On regular occasion he evokes the spirit of “Woza Albert” and “Playland”, plays by Athol Fugard, in the halls of India. Fugard’s plays are often staged in South Africa, more so in the spirit of homage to an undisputed giant of South African theatre. Fugard’s plays are a means by which South Africans engage or rather, re-engage with a period we clearly identify as our past-the era of Apartheid. School children are ushered in, in the bus loads for these performances, so that they too can have a taste of the strife that came before them, so that they may connect with the past that has passed before they were born. Fugard in South Africa has a definite space, the past…part of the fabric of our social history.

It is curious then, that Hartman chooses to stage them with current zest, in India. How and why do they continue to hold relevance to him? It appears as if Africa has a certain sense of staged viability for him, it is a theatrical display. Africa to him is an ethnic, organic experience. I imagine his mental landscape: red-dusty, dry, arid lands, the drought ridden expanses and the children with swollen bellies and dry-snotty noses crying for food and comfort. It is of the agrarian strain in which nature abides with man as he lives close to the earth, of men with black hard flesh and luminescent white eyes. It is of bare-breasted women delivering their own babies; sans medical intervention. It is an expression of wood, earth and nature….I dislike these tropes. These tropes that condemn an entire continent to an eternal state of primitivism-has Hitchcock not taught us that it is indeed Psychotic to embalm our Mothers?

Just as India is no longer a land of maharaja’s and maharani’s, of wealth and jewels and exquisite fabrics, Africa too, has developed, grown out of primitivism or a colonialist gaze. This is not to say that these National Geographic images do not exist, but it denies the Africa that is addressing its poverty, rural development, crime, etc, etc… the list continues. Africa has a long list of addressees-this it does not seek to deny. Ultimately, Africa is growing towards global capitalist demands, no matter how questionable a route this is.

Hartman has and shows little intention of ever returning to Africa, his ‘Mother’-land. He has little intention of disrupting this vision of antiquity. As I began spending more time with him, I realised that Hartman’s relationship to Africa, can only be understood in context, i.e., India. As a middle-aged man, he finds himself befuddled by the shifting India; he broaches the changes with cynicism and pessimism. Hartman is constantly angered at the manner in which India is embracing global capitalism, in which children are becoming more precocious and western in their attitudes, in which life is escaping him…his generation…..the ground is slipping underneath him and he needs ground….he needs a place to park his feet and not feel jolted! I rarely heard him celebrate India, and I began to wonder if his African allegiance is a means by which to denounce India-to claim difference and to set himself, as a man apart.

His Africa is frozen; it is a lollipop he sucks on in the eternal heat of India. Its pleasure is marked in that it offers a contrast and relief to the current climate of India.

Africa is frozen and cold in an India where heat and reality are hard to hold. Home thus, is a place where our Egos go to nest. Home becomes a reason for us to feel ourselves different and sometimes superior-there is some safety in this.

Hartman and I-we meet on a precarious crossroads: I, of Indian ancestry, yet profoundly African in constitution and him: of great Indian forbearance, yet with an ancestral-like longing for Africa. From different ends of the bridge we are crossing the same sea.

Ancient Africa

Ancient India

My meeting with Hartman has been so intriguing because his expression of Africa is so similar to that of the South African Indian population with regards to India. South African Indians have little or no idea about current India. They access India in the same way every other tourist would, by taking trips to Majestic Rajasthan and the luscious Keralan Backwaters, by buying, buying, and buying the exoticism! They suppress India into their suitcase size memories and jewellery box size hearts. To South African Indians, India is a means by which they stand-out and this performance is exploited in varying amount, sans the inconvenience of actually understanding ‘Mother’ India when you peel away her Super-Sequinned, Shiny and Silver Sari.

South Africans of Indian origin are an orphaned bunch. It’s like a gymnast falling off the balance beam (getting hit in the groin in the process) and now sitting astride on it with two legs flailing out helplessly on either side of the bar, hoping and waiting for balance and stability to return. The integration of Indian people into South African society has not been an easy one. It’s like a story that would be told on a Jackson Pollock canvas- a social, racial and cultural cacophony of chaos. In South Africa, I am not referred to as a South African of Indian origin, nor am I called a South African-Indian or an Indian-South African. I am simply an Indian, (which is something I scoff at in an even more cynical tone than before) the criteria for this being; a brown skin and greater than average endurance for everything spicy. We are distinguished and defined against the backdrop of the larger society. The very thing that sets me apart in South Africa is the very thing I lack in India- Indianness.

Home now, is a somewhere in-between two cities, it is a tale in translation. For how can I explain what South African men are like without comparing them with their Indian counterparts? How can I evoke the full-bodied taste of South African beer in my Indian friends without interjections such as ‘it’s not as bitter as’, or ‘not as crisp as’ a Kingfisher? Our cities are not as crowded, our food not as cheap, our roads not quite so narrow; Johannesburg is not as big as Mumbai. What home is, is what it is not-a bland binary. I have begun to betray the nuances of the country that bore me, bred me and often scolded and shamed me until I cried. Or is there some true essence, a real sense of Home in this cultural comparison? Or is it completely lost in translation?

I have been thinking about Gandhi a lot lately. He made a journey just like me from South Africa to India, and I wonder if he had a more profound way of reflecting on what he had seen and experienced during his brief stay in South Africa. I do not know very much about the man, but from what I gather, is that unlike me, he was a man of similarities, not differences. He seemed to gaze upon both pieces of soil and say ‘Oh look, we are all struggling under the ruin of colonialism’. He saw a similar circumstance, a similar revolution and most importantly, a similar people.

Over a century ago, my ancestors were placed on a boat to South Africa as part of the indentured labour system that served many of the economic needs of the English colonies. Through these many births and deaths of the passing generations, India has always held some weight as the quintessential homeland, the true site of belonging. I remember my many friends jeering at me at my farewell party that I was going back to my homeland, that I was going to this land to find myself(in which case they were implying that I had lost myself in South Africa). I would be going to a land where people looked like me, had the same culinary preferences as myself and who had a penchant too for a quasi-global and traditional use of colour and clothing. True to the thoughts of my imaginary Gandhi, I would be part of a similar people.

I arrived at difference. This is not to say that I had any expectation of meeting myself in India. This was conveyed to me through my general dislike for and my inability to relate to the thematic concerns of Bollywood Cinema (though, its debatable if any one can).I cannot relate to the idea of being Indian. I cannot say who I would have become in this context. I amuse myself with ponderances of what kind of life I would have lead had my forefathers missed the Boat. Would I be rich or poor, what jobs would my parents have had, what language would I speak, where would I live, what hopes would I have had for my future, what would my interests and hobbies be? How would I think and feel about the world and my place in it?

There is something undeniably uncanny about my Being in India. I marvel at the miracle of looking around at people who look like me, yet know nothing of who I am. It is remarkable to often see the shock and the dropped jaws of people when I fail to complete conversations in an Indian tongue. It is remarkable to walk on the streets and feel so alien yet have no one acknowledge this with stares and pointed fingers. It is remarkable to have the little boys who often play outside my home call out to me, their ‘didi’. A while back, I walked into a little restaurant in the South of India. I ordered a meal just like I would any other meal but I almost cried as the food touched my lips. The dhal tasted just like my Granny’s. It was like I stepped back into my home of which my lips were the doors. This unassuming meal, served on banana leaf, at an interstate bus station drove me to old comfort using the memory of my mouth as a vehicle. Though I have been here for over a year, I still sometimes see people on the streets that look like people I know back home, I want to call out to these familiar faces, but only to realise that they are wholly and soully, different people.

Though when it comes to uncanny we must acknowledge the uncanny consists of both recognition and also, of subsequent disavowal. It is as if you move close into the mirror in an attempt to look intimately at yourself and stub your nose against the glass, when the process of trying to recognise yourself becomes all too painful and you shrug away in disgust. The uncanny Being is bound to this fate of dualism as I was soon to discover…

A while ago, I took a solo trip to Kerala. This trip turned into a series of nightmare encounters with overbearing and dangerous Indian men. I have subsequently labelled it as my ‘harassment holiday’. All through this trip, I was haggled and partly harassed by Indian men who wanted to ‘protect me’, all stating that it wasn’t right for me to be out on my own, “its simply not safe” and yet at the same time, completely violating my space, my sense of safety and sometimes my body. This was undoubtedly a question of colour, or race, in which I was being perceived as an Indian woman. It became clear to me that if I were a tourist of a different ‘race’, I would not have to explain and legitimise myself in the public context. Indian women have all the domestic legitimacy they could ever dream of, but none in the public sphere. My willingness to travel alone was a ‘rebellion’ of sorts against ‘the natural order of things’- where a woman should not be alone in public without a husband, a father or any other masculine bearer of her public identity (even a younger brother would do I imagine). And so the dirty defiance of my solo flight was welcomed by the chidings and provocations from men of all ages.

The harassment I suffered was about threat; Indian men where trying to prove the strength of the prophetic axiom- “it’s not safe to travel on your own”- by deliberately making it unsafe for me to be alone in public. The harassment was a deliberate attempt to prod me, with hands, penises and dart-like eyes, back into the kitchen so that the ‘natural order of things’ could be maintained. Many Indian women too, seemed to be sympathisers of the ‘natural order of things’. Perhaps if I told them what had happened to me, they would have thought that the treatment I received was fitting, thinking that I should have known better. In India, it appears as if women still ‘ask for it’ and men still loudly answer. These women all too complacently clicked their tongues at me, “it’s not safe to travel on your own…” Experiencing this burden of the Indian woman, which they themselves could not recognise; I felt happy, relieved, to come from a Home that has doors that do not only enclose me but are equally happy to let me out on to the streets-alone.

During this trip, a man initiated conversation on the train. He asks all the regular questions that every foreigner should be expected to answer: where I was from, why I was where I was, what kind of work my family does and the earning potential of my parents-the standard set of questions. Though he probes further, my ‘looking same as Indian’ attributes are intriguing to people and so I am used to this conversation by now, “Yes yes-about one hundred years ago…” He asks what my surname is and I tell him- it is Moonsamy. His face lights up in recognition “Mooniswami! A proper Tamil!” Just like him, I was a proper Tamil. He is very excited and goes on to stress the apparent ‘high’ caste origins of my surname. He then asks about my mother’s surname, so I tell him; “it was Pillay, before she married”. Again the same response, I am a proper Tamil and a proper Brahmin to boot! He says he could tell from my features and body structure that I was a Tamil Brahmin. However, he pauses suddenly in reflection…”but it is not right for Mooniswami to marry Pillay, they are different families, it’s not right.” I marvel at the chutzpah of this strange man telling me that my parents shouldn’t have married each other. In a tone of amusement I tell him that no one follows the caste system in South Africa and love seems to be the main motive for marriage, that in South Africa the caste system is generally frowned upon. He shakes his head…“not right, not right.” He reasserts himself through further interrogation: “will you marry anyone for love?” To which I answer; “yes, I probably would”. “Anyone?” he asks…”Anyone!” I reply. He pauses again to draw strength from his cultural framework, he comes back with his counter argument; “you mean….you mean….even a Negro?” The hairs on my neck stand up and to curb my rage I answer the most emphatic “YES!!!” I can muster. A cloud of disgust pulls slowly across his face, just as the moody Kerala breezes pull clouds across the omniscient sun outside the train. All he can do is shake his head; he clicks his tongue in deep disgust…”We are loosing our Tamil culture.” As the journey proceeds, he continues to mourn “We are loosing our Tamil culture in South Africa.”

Here was an answer to my origins, albeit from a potentially dubious and unreliable source, though it was a sufficient dosage to repulse me from the very idea of finding one. I imagine Darwin (perhaps equally as dubious and unreliable as my past-life prophet) wheeling an ape around in a cage saying “look people, your ancestors” and here is me, running amongst the Catholic crowd, preferring to construct history out of the dusts of Paradise. Though the difference must be noted- Darwin seemed to be celebrating growth- the progress of humanity, the birth of human consciousness, whereas my past-life prophet was about decline, mourning for my pre-lapsarian soul. Like the Catholics of Darwin’s era, he too, was invested in a more fantastic point of origin (I later learnt through his mode of self-narration that he too was “a good catholic”) Darwin was celebrating the inevitable laws of nature which show the ability to change; mould and morph-to evolve. It was an expression of life as a fluidity, in which movement is a central feature of our existence.

It is in this ever too lucid experience of ‘what life could have been like if I was Indian’ that my trip into the Backwaters turned into a literal translation. Back-waters: Waters that pull back in an endless emotional ebb, an avarice ebb that drowns, suffocates, stagnates- a back current that offers no release for a natural forward thrust of nature, in which waters break and touch fresh foreign soil, new ideas, with the open embrace of the tide’s wide hand which grabs hungrily at the shore; a miserly ebb which holds and hoards-a stubborn backward glance, a one-foot dance, a sucking in of breath- resisting-no, these are still waters, reluctant to shift, change, move, feeding only the greedy multitudes of coconut trees that line its banks.

In Kerala, travelling was an impossibility as I felt myself trapped in this regressionist deluge. All of this reverse propelling however, made me realise that I could only locate myself as far as the shores of South Africa. I realised that this is where my history begins; I can only recognise myself in those early caricatures of twiggy-legged Indian labourers who came on boats steamed by the burning of false promises and blind dreams. It is a history of suffering, pain, humiliation and sweat that I can relate to. It is the underdog endurance of living through both colonialism and apartheid that serves as a sounding board. It is in the sacrifice of personal comfort and complacency, the prospective commitment to Africa, that I can still hear a resonance.

Everything that precedes this point is a site of misrecognition, of disavowal. My relationship to people in India has begun to feel like bullets fired from the same gun. The shell casings are all the same, yet the trajectory of our directions are utterly and completely different. But am I too, fighting against the image of the ‘ape’? Locating Paradise in Africa? Am I, like a tardy stage-hand, only drawing the curtain open in the moment of my ancestors’ peripeteia? Am I, like Oedipus, who in his moment of self-recognition, gouges out his eyes in anger? Indeed it seems that when the reality of who we are or could have been becomes too painful to recognise, when it instills us with anger and rage, we do have to retract our vision-the naked truth being too ugly a sight, it seems.

Though, what I take away from Oedipus Rex is the fatality not of misrecognising oneself, but rather, the crime against the ‘natural order of things’ in which one misrecognises one’s Mother. If Oedipus had not misrecognised his Mother in the first place, he would have not have reached his tragic end. Sophocles shows us that it is indeed a noble thing to spend a lifetime in search of one’s Mother, to endure countless feats and challenges along the way, but most importantly, that when we find her, we should make sure to recognise her. What is a tragedy, if not to warn us that we do not have to reach the same tragic end as our hero- that our reunion with our Mother can indeed be a happy one. History, in its most organic form seems to be about the ebb and the flow, of regression and progression. History too, has a dramatic structure-in the ‘natural order of things’ it appears to be cyclic, in which we must return to arrive, and arrive to return. Thus in the eternal ebb of India, I find my flow, my freedom.

I have a South African friend here in Pune. Her name is Nonthla; she is Zulu (yet another culture I do not fully understand and language I cannot speak!). No one questions her authenticity as a South African. We meet to reminisce about people, music and food. We have become reasonably close. Back home, we would not even be acquainted. Back home we are two girls from two completely different cultural backgrounds. Back home we would live in a state of tolerable harmony which we call diversity. Back home we would not be friends. In Pune, it is like we are wearing binoculars, we miss the mountains ranges that divide us and get close-up profiles of each other. Or are we just in denial of our myopia? Blind to our homes, we turn to each other in order to see again. We have become each other’s visions and versions of Home. Home is a gaping hole of smells, tastes, sounds, faces, colours and emotions into which we pour each others insights. It is the constant craving for biltong, boerewors, loud African voices and the sight of ebony skin which we cure through anecdotes.

So indeed India has been homecoming of sorts, it has brought South Africa to me. When I close the door on India, I often do, I find this necessary, I find Her sometimes creeping up on me. This is the Mother I cannot tell about, she refuses to be talked about. She is the Mother that shuns press interviews, poetic description and metaphoric analogies. She is the voiceless, text-less Mother, and I cannot tell about her. She is the sensational sensation, a visceral explosion. I wish I could tell bout her, but her tales only have authority in them being secrets knitted in my body. This Mother is one that refuses translation. She only summons me through my moods, through my melancholia, my longing. But once again, I only arrive at belonging through longing. If then, my Mother only makes long distance calls, I have no choice but to evade her in order to experience her and enjoy her. In order to love her, I have to continually escape, like a delinquent runaway child. So I have resigned myself to perpetually yo-yo on her apron strings, this is my tug of affection, for how will she remember me if I do not jostle at her sides?

If I called you my brother, black…would you then call me sister back?

2007-09-25T07:32:00.001-07:00

We dance like yo-yo and string- through time.
Together, tightly wrapped-folded in a tight hand of self-importance.
Then
Loose abandonment, string and ball pushed as far as we could
pull-Spinning-lonely and reckless,
Our Emblem Coloured, Flag Adorned, Manifesto Enriched
Yo-Yo.

Our yo-yo spins- a frivolous joy to the boy.
Playful circles of colour flying through air.
He giggles.
And starts again.

Free verse to Prof. Cao

2007-09-25T07:31:00.001-07:00

Like Rushdie…

I was born after independence (Though I was stuck in India)
I believe in the supremacy of the English language (though I was raised in India)
I am an author (though yet to be published by Vintage Uk)
I like to tell sensational stories (though not sensational enough, it seems)
I was also in London (though only for a year)

Unlike Rushdie...

I am a mediocre writer
I didn’t get my face in a magazine
I didn’t make a living from my writing
I am still waiting for my fatwa.

Sonnet to Prof. Cao

2007-09-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

There was a man who stood in front of the class
In an obscure part of India-Pune
Where many students sat, they had to pass
He taught grandly like the O Fortuna.

Thin and tall, his subjects, his students seemed small
He was their Shepard, with knowledge and voice
Now a lecturer: A writer post-fall.
He was never voted for reader’s choice.

Reminiscing on all his published works
He wiles the time away, nothing to say
A heavy literary duty, he shirks
So he can deliver a one-man play

Airy pathetic and way too much pride
And so I have time to write this aside.

On Menstruation

2007-09-25T07:29:00.001-07:00

We climb on top of each other in the art of making a baby
But we don’t
I bleed again and so we won’t
Next time, perhaps maybe

How I have bled many times before
Through which you run through my door
Each month I wish to waste no more.

There it is- your mucous head
Painted in your bloody red
Before you were born you were dead.

There it is, a wasted spine
Dripping in a slimy line,
A fluid that it both you and mine.

And then the blood, the blood, it pours
All the blood, it would have been yours
But once again, it runs through my doors.

Dear Dalit...

2007-09-25T07:28:00.001-07:00

Dear Dalit

Thank you for writing a book,
for otherwise it would be hard for me to understand you.
We do not speak the same language
So without your book, I would never ‘hear’ you.
Luckily we have the book that now travels between
Your language and mine
Between you and me

Thanks again for the book.
Hope things are looking up for you.
Warm wishes
Nedine.

A Sonnet in the Night

2007-09-25T07:26:00.002-07:00

We say we are charmed, beautifully disarmed
In bed-sheeted whispers, we lie awake
Ah! Communing only in moonlit hours,
stroking the blue from one another’s face.

With the sun’s appearance, we feel now calmed
Each other’s ground-a cultivation rake
Where we think we see the spreading of flowers
In each others days, do we have such place?

Are we just in night’s memory embalmed?
Reflections only on a moonlit lake?
Our affection, like a waning moon cowers.
It seems we cut it out from nature’s space.

We cannot conform to this cyclic time
We cut it; chop it, as if making rhyme.

Quick!! The Feminists are coming!

2007-09-25T07:26:00.001-07:00

Oh there goes the ring of the feminist alarm
Urging me to pause reflect
This dear boy, I enjoy, is a brightly charm
Surely he will soon infect

But those educated, intimidating girls
They offer no grand advice
When my strong black lines furl and bend and turn to curls
They say love is just a price

Their publication does have an agony aunt
-my emotions are lying
It also has caricature of angry cunt
It seems quite scared of dying

But the boy, no! Absolutely not!...he must go
He complicates the issue
Don’t be a silly lil’ girl, don’t imbibe in woe
Don’t you dare grab a tissue!

A Brave Lover

2007-09-25T07:25:00.001-07:00

Yes it laughs, it ponders and oh, it weeps
All these things my full naked body keeps
When beside you it lies and sometimes sleeps

I sit across from your outbound shoulder
Upon which, I know, if I were bolder
I would not just place my hand, but solder

This is where I would imprint a black trace
A smoulder of me, me upon your space
it would seep and resonate on your face

And then you would turn and show this to me
Oh what a great, grand gesture that would be
But sleep on your shoulder is all I see.

The Whine of a Vine

2007-09-25T07:23:00.002-07:00

I feel the curling like a vine
When we in naked chance entwine
In order to reach out to you
I take the sting of morning dew

I reach along your whitely wall
Casting hooks in an upward sprawl
With brave tendrils, I wish to crack
To penetrate, protrude- attack

Your happy, civil, painted face
I wish to tear, break and erase
And touch your concrete grey-wet grace
Yet there you stand austere and strong
Indifferent to my writhing song

But this is not our season’s growth
It seems we have not nature’s oath.
The sun offers no approval
The farmer starts my removal.

The charm of my bright gemmy green
Is an effort you and since seen
Indeed I know when I am gone
You will glow green and bloom anon

Even though I curl and I bend
You are a wall and cannot mend
Must we then call this nature’s way?
Like I am green and you are Gray?

Noah's Dove

2007-09-25T07:23:00.001-07:00

Noah’s dove
Inscribed in Love
Went forth searching first
Guided by a tree-like thirst
Left the boat
Still afloat.

Noah waited that same day
The day in which you flew away
He was startled by your quick return
And wondered what horrid thing you did learn

Yet, he was happy you had not gone long
Because in part, he lived for the beauty he saw hidden in your song
Yes, yes, he loved it too
your deep, broody and stuttering coo

But Noah knew
That though you made his world anew
That he had to let you go again
Your company was not that of men

The second time, a longer flight
Your buoyancy seemed alright
Noah waited at the window
Memories high and hopes down low
This time you came back with a gift
It gave his heart a jolted lift.

A simple wig wrapped in your beak
The prelude of your journey’s peak
Noah anticipated your loss
And began to tell the tale with celestial gloss

Of how you went before old life
To save it from the cleansing strife
H never told how he grew attached
No, this is the story he kept well latched

And so, on journey number three
Your return was not meant to be
The boat was elated
Noah, secretly deflated

He wondered about the tree you found
Were you happy, no longer by boat bound
Were there enough branches for a nest?
And if you found sufficient rest

Noah worried endlessly
Upon the big and open sea
Were you truly happy off the boat?
When for him life was now remote

Yet Noah never put up a fight
He muttered that your cause was right
And when in weakness he did fall
He wondered if you thought of him at all.

A sonnet to my sheet

2007-09-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

The colour has run from my favourite sheet
In the spot where you laid your dirty feet
Now this spot is an immaculate white
White, which now always brings you back in sight

I scrubbed too hard at this old memory
That you imprinted on my fabric sea
The cleanliness is now an empty place
That evokes not just your feet but your face

Still I rinse it and hang it on the line
All the neighbours seem to know its mine
They point at me with their cold startled eyes
Is it me or you they seek to chastise?

Yet I can too, equally hide my lies
if someone would loan me their fabric dyes.

The last phone call

2007-09-25T07:20:00.001-07:00

I smiled heartily through the phone
Yet, you could hear my cracking tone
Sensing my impending cry
I muttered off a quick good-bye

And then I remembered why I barely call
For every time, I stumble-fall
It’s not that I don’t want to speak
Butt the irony of the exercise makes me weak

I cannot ignore
This inherent flaw
And so, I ring no more.

Mother Tree

2007-09-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

The branches shinged sinful black
Barren, burnt and now somewhat slack
The leaves all fold, appear shy
They hope to hide from nature’s eye

Their green is now a faded tone
They crumble, flake, like brittle bone.
they all depart from Mother Tree
and Leave her wanting company.

The Old Lady stands, stubborn with age
the outward appearance of a sage
still her tentacles point to the sky
She worships the Sun that made her dry.

Guitar Bones

2007-09-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

Oh, you gave me these guitar bones
With all its resonating tones
Curvy like a pear
It makes men stare
The music
it does impair.

You gave me strings
and all sorts of musical things
But how can I realise
With distraction in between my thighs

Keys sit in my brain
Which when I tune
I tune in vain.

Your song is humble
Yet my synapses fumble
Your song is humiliated
When by me it is re-iterated

Is this how it is envisaged to be?
Pic and strum and sing for me.
Place your hand around my strident neck
Shine and put my chords in check

Sit down and then rest awhile
And murmur at my guitar defile
Play even a simple cord rendition
As you try to restore my negligent condition

And soon, perhaps, you could pic a tune
That’s sings as just as harmoniously as the eternal moon.

Yet I worry, that you will play
And still I will not wash away
Guitar bones may be here to stay
Yes, I am only made of clay

Still I beg you to not let your fingers stray
Keep trying, keep playing, every night, every day

A Sonnet to Immortalise

2007-07-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

I want to write of and mythologise
The intangibility of your eyes
When in those moments that they slowly rise
And offer soft blue breezes as replies

I want to freeze in Epic proportion
Tell boldly in poetic distortion
Deny the moments of their retortion
When I become your gazes abortion

I want to hold it there-your intent stare
On paper you can’t tear your oval pair
Away and share around with cavalier flair
I want to take your glare and make it rare.

So they hold and read until the poem’s end
And then away then do softly descend.

For my women, once again...

2007-07-18T06:16:00.002-07:00

Like a Sherpa up that hill,
Living for the wish fulfil
Of a man with eager feet
At base camp they shake and greet

Sitting at the mountain’s seat
Sherpa contemplates the feat.
Up!to the top he wants to go
But…is he friend or is he foe?

Yet, Sherpa has discarded woe,
Now carrying self and man in tow,
Along the spine, they slowly scrunch,
the rhythm of a snowy crunch.

The Sherpa’s back begins to hunch
The weight of His domestic bunch!
Though Sherpa’s pocket’s, nicely glossed
The splendour of the moments tossed

The air is cold, now icy frost
And body heat is quickly lost
The Sherpa’s pace now cut in half
Walking with a sore,burning calf

Then on top with His flag and staff
He stands to take a photograph
In which sherpa is out of sight
He hopes he held the camera right

This is the record of His plight
Of His noble masculine might
I wonder if He has ever read
How so many sherpa’s end up dead

How their souls cried and frail bodies bled
Do these thoughts float around in His head?
It is in those moments that I find
That you are glazed and completely blind

To the snowy backdrop of my mind
when you are solely upward inclined.
So I watch you in your little thrill
And anticipate my sleeping pill.

Something Yummy

2007-07-18T06:16:00.001-07:00

The glass shook on the table
Your knocking knee forgetting
The co-ordinates of your lounge
Now unfamiliar

Your large black frame, your open pores
Releasing soft spores
Of black cotton

I can touch you now
with my fingers,
sink deeper than your skin.
I dip my pinkie into your boiling blood and feel
The rhythm of the black magic flood

Your face drops like a curtain, black chiffon and fringed lace eyelashes
Your thoughts breathe
And I can read
Words bleed from your lips
Your eyes are grabbing my hips

When the morning comes, our punctuation will return
We slot each black bleeding blush into neat pockets of conversation
And I won’t know you anymore.
We open the door, let in the light
Then sit and wait for night,
for the return of our black magic sight.

Capture and Caught

2007-07-18T06:15:00.001-07:00

Don’t draw me on a canvas
Don’t take a photograph
Don’t write me in a lyric bliss
Don’t record my bursting laugh

I cannot fit on your blank bed-side page
I am no muse-like, hallowed sage
I bounce around your silly frame
When you think me, you think me tame

you fold me under the crook of your arm,
and this brings mortal alarm
you might crush me and I dissipate
you can then eat me off your dinner plate

forget to enter me in your journal
for here, to render me eternal
you will cast me, craft me, as infernal.

For soon, I will choose
That indeed I am ready to loose
And so we spare the noose
Of parting blues

I warn, I tell, of containment denied
And still with consistency you replied
And now its no longer clear to see
If you’re playing my game with me.

For my women

2007-07-18T06:14:00.003-07:00

A pulley wheel
Made of steel

Cranes and creaks at your testicles
Ropes wrapped around like sharp sickles

It threatens to assassinate
The pleasure of the conjugate
It’s you it might eliminate
If you pull away from passive state

The pulley wheel is cyclical
Its ropes are long and vertical
Perhaps a big dialectical
Perhaps egomaniacal?
But yet its you that it suspends
And holds you round your ball-like bends
An even balance in tandem sends
But risk and danger never transcends

If you stepped towards the pulley
You would then disarm it fully

Undermine its tension, slump its ropes
And shatter all its vim, virile hopes

So Stay Standing, erect and still
Point your pelvis skyward, fulfil
Its function and blow its stiff trumpet
Let it have cookie, cake and crumpet.

We:Water

2007-07-18T06:14:00.001-07:00

A droplet to record, when you were four,
You rode your tricycle into the door
crashed and fell off and grazed your knee
And still you show this scar to me

The moment your mom turned her face
And shattered your elliptic womb-like space
By throwing out the pink flower
That you had collected in just that hour.

And when my bear had lost its ear
I cried, I cried with existential fear
When seven, won a running prize
But then I let out only happy cries

Blue droplets of your time and mine
Collect along our full gutters
Slushy splashes, silly splutters
fall neatly into our life’s line

They flowed they poured, Memory-adored,
little rivers soon had stored—they roared!

New drops, daily, along our river banks
ceaselessly filling up our reserve tanks
And now its oceans that we own
Hypnotised by the lulling drone

Substantial and significant
Our vastness is magnificent
Our great bodies span and spread along the bank of time
-drift in currents of the experiential sublime

Yes we are composite and rare
Sitting under currents care
But now we meet and meet and cannot bear
How our currents clash and form a tear

Indeed we do drown within ourselves
And in each other, no deeper delves.

Our edges slightly touch, froth and then spill
A short and spray-like border thrill
Hopelessly, we dandle.

And then I remembered-How I am unmembered

2007-07-18T06:12:00.002-07:00

Your eyes shook mine and quickly dropped
like black marbles to the floor.
Glass cracks on the tiles at my feet
I had layed them, lied them,
but the weight of your concrete ‘Ah’ hit hard.
I said we shared a pair of shoes,
in old leather boots that were four sizes too big,
my left and your right.

Yet you react
As if the shoes and only yours to use.
My brown foot,
you left it
naked
pointed out it bones and folds,
you matched my toe to these girls that I don’t know

I shined and glossed, I gold embossed
I stood too far and saw it, flat and plane
you pulled it near and showed me the ridges, rocks and fissures
You brought back all the pain.

Bird

2007-07-18T06:12:00.001-07:00

Bird with white, choppy feathering,
Your plumages are weathering
And how they curl up as you fly,
Against the backdrop of the sky.

Yes, it is the sky you admire
But don’t you want to dip your toes
And tuck away your silly woes
All the sky’s glory will transpire

Oh, storky toes, take a trip
to deep soil, your orange tip
Bathe in brown, trickle and drip.
Your hard feet can imprint meet

But when you drift across that cloud
I’m afraid that it is rather proud.
And when you touch with feathered wing
You’re never held- an eternal thing.

Imagine:
when you land on ground
Drop:
your weight all around

Imagine how your joints would bend
Neglect would need to mend
And so you must cautiously thread
The unpredictable surface bed

Soon you go down to the river
Flap madly, dance and then splash around
Clear glass, with angel tips-sliver
And you can hear your own cleansing sound

If perhaps, you sit in a bin
And think you have succumbed to sin
And overwhelmed by earthly din

And even when you find,
A lesser place to rest your hind

Then upwards you must crane your neck
And see how you once were
Against the blue reverie
-a white and distant fleck
or speck.

Level with me

2007-07-18T06:11:00.003-07:00

Skidding stone, brown and cold
With crooked face
It interrupts the water’s space.

With rude lips for sips as it bumps along
Licking and plopping
Stopping. And consequently dropping.

Shaking the calm and clear liquid expanse,
Making a sultry circular dance,
A heady concentric romance,
Of a spontaneous chance

A fallen buoy, it sinks
Down, like a lead feather
And so it deeply drinks
All the way to nether

The water surface now calm
The stone can no longer harm.
Succumbed and settled at base
The drama has lost its trace.

The stone now rests its rigid head
On the water’s dusty brown bed
Ragged stone is matted and stressed
And into a smooth pebble pressed.

Fate-like many stones before, it sees
How they succumbed to tame pebbly ease
The water now the superior force
Shows the flighty stone no pat remorse

The stones face, wiped clean, is no longer seen.
Passive, like history, it had only once been.
The water, calm, and with might, presses tight
No witness to the stone’s secretive plight.

For You...

2007-07-18T06:11:00.001-07:00

The curtain dangles
My hope entangles
-that I might see you as I peep through

I’ve straightened the couch
So that you can slouch
Where we sit, conversation for two

I’m sweeping the dust
To make room for lust
The space now waits for your calling cue

The bulbs are replaced
Together we taste
In extended day, a fusion stew

The sheets all washed
The toilet, twice, flushed
From shit to sleep, intentfully new

I will bake some bread
And bring it to bed
No cause to leave our nourished milieu

I’ve opened the door
Come sit on my floor
I’ll share my coffee and smoke with you.

Yet you drink your tea
With a hallowed glee
Sincerely sipping your daily due

On my welcome mat
Still sits a stray cat
Sick, vomiting with animal flu

Silent…Patient…wait
I anticipate
The man, yes, the man, the man is
rue

Love

2007-07-18T06:10:00.001-07:00

Love came and licked the wound on his descending brow
Love whispered through the window and told her
She would get back in those jeans someday
Somehow

Love showed him how much fun he was,
A psychedelic punk
It came to refill her wineglass
Love made her very drunk

Love severed her neat pocket and ate
In her account
Love bought him a guitar-bona fide
It came with no amount

Love put him on a pedestal and made him
Someones King.
Love reprimanded her, a snivelling thing
And made her grateful for her ring

Love fucked him on a Friday
And on Saturday’s at nine.
Love drove her to the gym each day,
Her banging body-fine!

Love hugged him around his swollen waist
And told him he was funny
Love labelled her’sugar, sweetie pie and honey

Love made her independent
She was better off alone
Love watched the late night movie
And gave him lots of bone

Love sat unnoticed, he was preoccupied
Love whitewashed all the times she had necessarily lied.

Love shagged and spluttered all over the earth
And a million many babies had their birth

There was cosmic confusion,
At the sudden intrusion
And all the babies drowned in the abyss of illusion.

Parrot

2007-07-18T06:09:00.002-07:00

All sorts of phrases popped out of his mouth
Pronouncing new words without foreign doubt.
Mimetic innocence-meaning all lost
Borrowed from natives who all paid the cost
Their language is raped and given a clout
For him it was sport, repeating was fun
Speaking like a rapid stuttering gun.

His Mother

2007-07-18T06:09:00.001-07:00

“My mom is coming to stay for a while,
hope you been reading your etiquette file!”
The boy smirks at her-her nose in a book.
“She’ll be damn shocked when she hears you can’t cook!”
The girl paused for thought; “should I move elsewhere?
I’ll be in the way…it wouldn’t be fair!”

The boy cleaned the house all day and all night,
and with surface dust gone-a pleasurable sight.
His mom arrived with a bag full of food.
She came with concern and a nurturing mood.
Preoccupied-cleaning; drain, fridge and sink,
wondering how her son could live with the stink

His mom wants her to work in the kitchen.
The girl was mad, she couldn’t stop bitchin’.
“Why the hell should I look after her son?
The era of domesticity-done!
She made me cut the cucumber in cubes,
but I did it to blow wind in her tubes.”

Portrait

2007-07-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

Fresh Whiskey steamed out of his open mouth
He saw her and his sensation went south
She was alone, he could talk to her now
He could walk up, say hi…hello-somehow
He sat down again, maybe tomorrow
Mouth open, he sipped the flask of sorrow.

The Light in Our Corner (an amatuerish short story)

2007-07-18T06:05:00.001-07:00

Sayintha Singh appreciated the lyrical quietness of her name, despite having no inclination to divulge a tune. It rang melodiously through the hot air on Tuesday afternoon; “Hey Singh! After substituting x= 2 in the equation, what is y equal to?”

Thirty-two graffiti ridden desks, but hers was the most effective in this grade eight class of Nirvana Secondary School. On it, she churned out numbers that turned her into just another calculating guji. “Fifty seven, sir.” She never hesitated an answer to yesterday’s homework, she checked and rechecked and worked out every possible solution for x substituted from zero through to ten, just incase Mr. Naran was to test for spontaneous mental agility. “Good Singh, come write that equation out on the board for the class to see.” For the class to see. She complied, gladly. She understood and accepted the bleeding disgust from the chots in the back rows, hiding from numbers and sums behind their smug remarks and smoke drenched shirts.

Before she rose from her chair, she was careful to carry out her triple check; socks pulled up to the knees (so as to hide the hair), skirt pulled down, over her knees (so as to hide the hair) and arms pasted tightly against her slight frame (so as to hide the hair). With delicate fingers, she picked up the chalk to etch in her superiority, drawing figures that would illustrate that one day; she would be greater than the sum of the class. She was careful not to reach too high up on the board, so as not to spoil the gravitational balance of her triple check.

The siren howled and Sayintha watched the dogs as they scurried off to whistle at the bitches as they leave the school gate. The classroom shook with silence, displaced by a quiet that came too suddenly, no longer big enough for thirty-two; now just for two.

Shaun watched her pack up her bag from two rows back, and could not decipher if he was in awe of the fact that she was naturally intelligent or despised her for this. The ten month long research of sharing a class with her had bred no insight. He pasted the four curled and tired edges of his book together, closing the truth of his inspiration, perspiration and no success. His gaze reached to the edges of the empty class, quiet. He wanted to pick words off the bricks. Just four; “you,” “me,” “help,” “math’s.” To stack them together. Offer her a sentence. Short, concrete and constructive. But he was unsure: what would she make of this impromptu building? Should he place it in front of her, blocking her uninterrupted exit from the class?

For Sayintha, the silence stacked like layers. Too heavy for her small frame, the bricks bit at her bones. They eventually came tumbling down on her, and choked out a sentence; “Don’t you play volleyball anymore?” She flung a dirty brick towards him, his building smashed to pieces.

Distain cemented around the furrows of his mouth. God, she was so damn typical, “no, I never did!” He had no intention to explore sport, for fear of the sun, despite people thinking that he could not get burnt from his departure point of pitch black. He watched reedy Sayintha. He had come to the decision. He edged behind her, like the shadow that he was. The scene played out in a dark hand stretching forward, pulling back a backpack and a yellow brown face of surprise. “Holla, dhallbunk!” He was happy to throw that very same brick back, speeding off in a hurry.

Sayintha wanted to kick his teeth in. She would have, save for the spirit of non-violence that her triple check always ensured. Down the stairs and through the sports field, as expected, the volleyball team getting ready for their after-school practice. She scanned the faces of these people; this confirmed the criteria in her mind that sport was for stupid people or dark people or stupid, dark people.

She walks towards the dhey-coloured ford, never embarrassed by its flailing yellow experience. She got into the car and it immediately stamped her with a smell she recognized as home. She collapsed into the seat next to her mother. “How was your day, Sayintha?” Same question. “Fine ma,” same response.

Her mother smiled, pleased at her daughter’s consistency. None of that teenage hormonal nonsense from her daughter. No tears to rationalize, no crushes to explain away, no irrational demands to scold. Even her first menstruation had been a quiet affair. She was grateful for this in her daughter. Two left turns and they were home.

Sayintha ran down the tiled passage of her home, slid sometimes. No wind to pick up the furls of her skirt, no one to threaten the bliss of this one directional moment of flight. She flung open her cupboard and arms outstretched, she reached for her clothes-day clothes! The carpeted softness of her room cushioned reverberations of her ego. She could undress noisily, recklessly and the room would respect it.

Soon, the house had started singing out its spell; the air began to thicken with her mother’s only promise-food. Sayintha appreciated the cadences of the aromas that shifted her towards the kitchen. Whatever meal she had, she did not care-as long as there was roti, and there always was. Her mother had laid the table; two plates, two glasses, two pots. Sayintha ripped off a chunk of roti, doused it with ghee and popped it inside, it only leapt as far as her tongue but she could feel the warm contentment in her frail bones, its happy pleasures sat behind the balls of her eyes. Instantly, the world looked different. The fresh roti broke her insides, the compartments of her brain folded unto each other and melded together into a flat plane; unplanned, unachieved - pleasure. Grainy, smooth and slippery. She closed her eyes as she moved the flat piece of roti back and forth against her palate, wondering if this is what it felt like, another tongue. What tongue on tongue felt like. “Sit down and eat your food! Why are you standing and eating? Dish up some beans love.” Her mother improvised speech to wipe that silly smile of her Sayintha’s face.

Sayintha did not argue, nothing could alter and interrupt the joy of her meal. Grabbing and folding against her plate, allowing the gravy to run in between her finger tips, the orange bleeding into her nails. Knowing full well that the smell of the curry would remain with her all day, she blended and roped her beans and roti. One serving and her heart was full.

Her mother always seemed to eat in a trance, indifferent to her plate, unwilling to even stare down into the orbit of love that its ingredients promised. A mechanical hand, gripping and releasing, her movements revealed no grimy edges. No narratives were told from her mother’s plate, they moved too fast - making today’s supper and folding tomorrow’s laundry. They never paused for a second, just long enough for Sayintha to examine the white insides that had been untouched by the sun. She looked at her mother and realized how it was that people thought that eating with your hands is barbaric.

Despite loving her food so much Sayintha was a skinny girl. If there was anything she understood, as a gujarati-it was prudence and restraint. This is what she accounted for the lack of fat gujis in Lenz. Fatness was a pleasure reserved for the middle-aged and the Americans.

It was about five o’ clock that she felt it. It felt like the fifth glance at her watch when she was waiting for break time at school. She waited for the sound as she would hear it, dimmed by the doors that it had to travel through to get into her room and deliver its news. When the TV was switched on, her father was home. Too tired to talk, a long day at work, he would stroll into the TV room, flick the remote and unknot his tie. His presence was always shared with the sounds of TV dads, all of them, the ones who were funny, the ones who were angry, the ones who drank too much and the ones who spoke.

It was later that evening that her mother saw her ease into the bathroom. She listened in, waiting for the closed door to leak stories about her daughter. The taps burst abruptly, she was running the bath. Why it was, at the age of thirteen that she still insisted on taking baths was beyond her.

Sayintha spun the cacophony off the tap handles. The taps sang, solely under the control of her grasp, she spun them, fluctuating between bassy percussions and smooth strings, hot and cold, loud and soft-the valley of goodness lay in between. She sank into the bath. Her body a welcome guest in this white well, the water covered but never concealed, it made buoyant her hair all over and sunk her bones. She admired the dancing seaweed sitting on the far branches of her legs. She began tugging at the hair, gently at first, building a memory bank of stings for potential hair removal, someday.

Nobody understood - that Friday morning, as class commenced, Shaun made the boldest (or stupidest) of moves. He strolled into the math’s class and sat himself down at the right hand of Sayintha, displacing some poor nerd who would not fight for the integrity of the unspoken ranking system. In the back rows, shaking heads of disbelief and pure horror shook the knell of Shaun’s respect. He however, loved the idea enough. His father – the Richard Branson of the fruit and vegetable industry in Lenasia, was bad at school but lucky in business. The whole concept of a self-made man peeled of Shaun’s image like shedded skin. The November exams were soon approaching. If he sat up front, he understood that he was forced to be accountable, to mark himself present in every sum. Sometimes, Shaun liked to imagine a world bigger than Lenz.

Sayintha, wanted motive. Despite that fact that he respected her space-he sat too close. She could feel his smile fall like hot sun on the side of her face. She wore the face of shyness. Downcast eyes, bringing Shaun’s shoes sharply into focus, his above average school shoes, black and polished. He came from money.

It was barely Friday afternoon and school was out. Every Friday at 12:15 pm in Lenasia, nobody shared any anti-muslim sentiment. It was, after all, the holy Friday namaaz that allowed everyone to start their weekends earlier than the rest of South Africa. With the extra time to spare, the dhey-coloured Ford did not follow its designated map of two left turns that day, it found its way instead, to Sunita’s tiny salon.

It was her mother’s idea. Her hair would be cut. Sayintha sat extremely excited in the chair, in the empty afternoon salon. Ignorant to its balancing mechanisms, she threatened to topple over from time to time. Her mother caught sight of this, bubbles of laughter erupted from her temperate volcano. “So, what exactly do you want done with your hair?” Sunita asked while fingering her long pony tail, loosening the band and causing a long river to flow down her back. Sayintha stares at her mother’s reflection in the mirror in front of her, cueing her to speak with the peaks of her eyebrows, “what Sayintha?! It’s your hair!” She took ownership for her head of hair, “shorter, say about here.” She angled her hand at the base of her jaw.

She swapped chairs for the foamy wash. Sunita made soft the thick lump, taking the weight from Sayintha. The water leaked into her ears making the voices from the radio speak through bubbles. She gave over the history of her hair, hesitantly, Sunita reaching deep into the secrets of her skull, riding over the slopes and falls with her pressured finger tips. She was handed back the parcel of her
just-washed black hair, wrapped in a towel, it was given back to her to do as she wished, a gift from her mother.

Sayintha took to the cutting chair again, her mother’s reflection sat poised with age, never flowing outside of her square chair. Her mother sat omnisciently, in the background of her gainful loss. Sayintha always wondered how it was that news jingles always seemed to boom louder than the regulated volume. The radio shouted out its song to announce the coming of tragedy: the four o’ clock news.

As the news booms, so does Sunita; “Geeta, oh my God, Geeta, I forgot to tell you, you would not believe what I heard today,” Sayintha watched as her mother’s eyes moved off her reflection and on to Sunita but Sayintha still kept her ears pealed for the breaking news. A thirteen year old girl, found dead in a dustbin bag. “Do you know Lata? Kirti Marci’s daughter, she’s spoilt!” Her mother’s face stretched with raw horror, “Lata? She’s the young one, hey?” Sayintha sat in awe, Sunita could cut hair and gossip in one steady move, the scissors snips synchronized with the movements of her jaws. The story continues, the girl was found in an old parking lot in Ennerdale. Sunita snips; “Ja, some Tamil boy from her university, Kirti Marci didn’t even know they were going out. She was telling me how horrible it was to go to the boy’s house. Shame, you don’t blame her.” The girl had been there for more than a week. Sayintha’s mother grieved, “God, that’s horrible, I feel so bad for Kirti Marci.” The girl still had her school uniform on, with a love letter in the front pocket. Possibly for some unsuspecting crush that the girl had, judging from its contents. “Can you believe the nerve of the boy though, he wants to keep the baby,” Sunita shook her head, she could think of no greater pain. The news jingle echoes in the air. The end, more tragedy at four-thirty.

Her mother’s spine refused to communicate with the relaxed slope of the chair, awake with the fresh horror of the news. Those dark boys with their slick hair and even slicker skin. Teenage boys in general, their hungry eyes, sexual thoughts every seven seconds. But Tamil boys; it must be every seventh of a second. Too much practice and too much charm. A lot of their Gujarati girls had started giving birth to darker babies.

The mirrors soon bore a new face, a clay brown globe between two black pillars. The strong beams of her new bob held up her face. Her mother smiles at her, attentive all the way through the haircut, even when Sayintha dozed slightly under the warm dryer, her mother sat-awake.

Both Sayintha and Shaun had by now accumulated a week’s worth of contemplation about the new seating arrangement, yet it bred no ease between them. Each math’s class amounted to exact periods of thirty minutes and twenty seven seconds of observed silence.

They never spoke, yet Sayintha still marveled at the whiteness of his smile, pure against his dark skin, a moon at midnight. Each day her glance touched the blackness of his shoes – a lunar eclipse of sorts. But this fixation on shiny shoes raised more questions than it answered. They made real the fact that he did not have to be intelligent or hardworking. He was the son who would inherit the family business. What business, she was not entirely sure; she knew that Tamil wealth was always questionable.

Shaun noticed it slowly at first; when his dark eyes grew weary after too much squinting at too many numbers, like little rays of sunlight that fell on his desk, peeping through Sayintha’s black curtains, her new hair sweeping across her pages, too short to be tied up all at once. Small little notes and faint pen strokes - in colours and fonts, like little love letters to herself. Her book was her friend. He took extreme pleasure in eavesdropping on this relationship, he had learnt the rules – he knew what was to be underlined and what not, which words the orange pen was reserved for and which had to be pink. He was happy to have mastered her secret world.

That afternoon, Sayintha walks out the school gates, she searches the sea of cars for yellow, but finds none. The yellow had faded, as its age had promised. In its place sat a shiny silver exuberance. Diwali was approaching, it bought her, just for a day, her father’s company. The face that she called Daddy was looking to meet her attention. “Surprised to see me? Your mother is busy with all that baking so I told her not to worry, I will fetch you. We can go one time to the shops and buy the fireworks.” They sat together in the cocoon, printing a memory she could rely on and call on during her father’s year long withdrawal. Soon they would leave it, but her memory would be the husk - the evidence that it occurred. His eyes focused forward - big hands, both on the steering wheel. “How was school, Sayin?” “Fine Daddy.” He looked at her regretfully; his little girl had taken to hiding behind her big woman haircut. He flicked the radio on. She was pleased to watch Lenz through the soundtrack of her father’s car and their journey of speechlessness.

The after-school top-shop traffic was a nightmare, taxis as common place as the pigeons, but hardly as tame. Her father negotiates his way around this and they are soon zipping down Rose Avenue. Safe, no seat belt. Her eyes always ate into Rose Avenue, trying to calculate the pattern; house, shop, house, shop, house-shop, shop, house, shop, house-shop, house. A Technicolor Rose; between precast and billboards, verandahs and parking lots, school children and car guards-Shaun’s face waxed across the surface. He was walking home on the dusty edges of Rose. For the first time, she found the courage to wave. She did not mind being made visible, when she was made invisible by her father’s shiny car.

They shopped at Deena Foi’s shop. Prayer goods, lamps, pictures, at anytime of year, you could buy India in her shop. During Diwali, her father brought her in to buy celebration and happiness. Gun power and agrabiti created a violent fusion of heady excitement. The shop was full, people of the same colour buying the same stuff. Her father walked off to the counter and gave her the silent command, swinging his head like an edgy bird for her to go on and pick whatever she wanted while he talked to the adults.

Colourful tissue paper packages with warnings for the Chinese, she picked up all of the danger and destruction they held. The weight was insignificant and the colours frivolous, but aggressive, rude and unapologetic, they were. The bombs! They demanded attention, unlike the fireworks that painted water colours that washed away in the sky. By eleven o’ clock on Diwali night, colour becomes such a saturated concept. Banal almost.

The baskets of her arms were of a negligible size, Sayintha made various trips between the crate and counter, off-loading for her father’s inspection. His neck developed a curious tick, drawing strange angles between his daughter, his sister behind the counter and the bombs. Puzzled at the sight of too many bombs, curious as to what exactly it was that Sayintha was stating in this gun powdered powered enunciation.

After all these years, Sayintha did not understand the cultural significance of Diwali. The bombs offered no beauty. People needed to relate to the aesthetics of Diwali, the grace of the community, it was extremely crucial what one pinned up on the public billboard of the sky. He walked over to redirect her attention, silently discouraging the bulk buying of bombs. He happily guided the little hands of his little girl once again as he grabbed the joysticks of her thumbs.

With time, the silence of the math’s class gave way to a tolerable tandem. Glances and smiles entered the repertoire, as long as they were executed with indifference. Sayintha found it in herself to look long enough, he was left-handed. It was with this left hand that he blocked the many faces of the little blue people that he drew furiously in the margins of his exercise book. He blocked them from Sayintha’s view with the shy cup of his left hand. She promised herself one more glance and then it would be back to her books.

Shaun chewed at the top of his only Bic pen, marveling at his complete lack of focus, as by the end of each day there was always a greater population of people in relation to sums in his math’s book. Slightly disheartened by their uniform dismal blue, he crossed the barrier between the wooden slabs of their desks, his left hand leapt like a fish out of water, an upstream search for better things. His dark hand soon covered the purple of Sayintha’s pen; “Can I?”

“Oh, ja, ja of course you can!” Sayintha despised them, moments of spontaneity, she had no sense of self in their presence. Awkward moments often sat like leeches on her lips, but this particular exchange burst open a gate, as colours soon washed with increasing speed into the village of Shaun’s ball-point people. She was delighted that it was her, (even if only for her stationary) that had allowed him to fill the insides of his characters, the soft pinks and fleshy yellows of his people.

At home, Diwali, despite being a week away, was already in full season, the aromas looming in the house had thickened into sticky syrup that clung to the corridors. Her mother seemed to spring to action. She held Diwali in both palms, with hands big enough to knead dough and small enough to drizzle fairy dust. Diwali came at the cost of her mother-she would now eat lunch alone. Sayintha became dizzy with the circus of smells, each competing like resilient performers for her attention, an ill-composed symphony of excess, all running towards and collecting at the brims of her nose. All if it, left her with nothing. She peered in the kitchen-her mother’s happy joy, she stood, unnoticed.

It was four days before Diwali and the drizzle of tom-thumbs began to fill the school staircases and static shocks gave way to sniggers and shrieks. The stairs were a prized spot to launch these little grenades, as a prelude to celebration. But on that particular day, it mocked the sanctity of the math’s test.

He watched Sayintha as she lined up her army of pens to battle with the single page. Shaun felt exposed, naked save for his chewed up Bic pen. They all sat in a quiet of anxious concentration. Calculations hung like heavy brows on thirty-two foreheads. On instruction, pressure burst forward through pens and everyone gunned against their pages spilling ink when necessary. Sayintha was stuck. Question number two. She drummed the back of her pen angrily against the numbers, the figures that were showing her up. Unable to inflict wounds she lifted her eyes - all around, people had answers. They were waging wars – determined to come out alive. She was an unwitting fighter. Stunned into inaction. It came to her then, she had prepared herself for tricky maneuvers, tiger crawls, strategic ploys and landmines, but for the enemies in full view, asking for point blank execution, she had nothing – a hubris and negligent soldier.

An elegant glance to the right is what changed everything. Just the sweep of her eyes and Shaun’s hand ripped down his page, running towards question three, and there it was. She took it like a stolen kiss, quick and impulsive. Sayintha’s pen began to stream.

He paused. The disbelief struck him hot all over. He paused to check and then re-check and then confirm this phenomenon. He smiled. Like an easy, almost too easy kiss behind the school staircases from a girl - easy, almost too easy. She had taken something so small, so desperately. But he knew that in the end, he would walk away with so much more. By question six the gradient of test had tired him out. Breath in, breath out. Slowly and diligently, he lifted the rest of the answers from her page and lowered them unto his, with slow and steady breaths. The bell rang and Shaun smiled, it would be his best mark ever. The tom thumbs in the school burst for both Shaun and Sayintha. Merry applause for the one and a twenty-one gun salute for the other.

Sayintha went home that day and tried it out, since it had always worked for her father. She walked into the TV room, flicked the remote and sat down. Life streamed into the room. The generosity of the TV instantly lifted her spirits, it did not feel selfish, it felt necessary. Each performance building life experiences for her, in front of her. It helped to bury the story of Shaun, in a short while, it had already become a case of “ I remember the time when…” All because the TV allowed her to live her life in fast forward and put Shaun in an all too distant past.

Irrespective of religion, Diwali was everyone’s. With just two more days to Diwali, the atmosphere in school had changed. Hundreds of brown eyes became animated by the anticipation of clothes, colour and kheer. It was as if the flint of a firework had just been lit. Its hiss spread through whispered conceits of food and fashion and circled slowly towards the sky, and on Saturday, the anticipation would explode and blow neon screams upwards.

During break times, the girls mimed outfits and expressed three-toned colours with the help of the ‘ish’ suffix, to pin down the exact nuances of the fabrics. The boys sank down into animation, hyperbolic quietness and stage whispers about the four ‘W’s” of alcohol. The “why” of the equation required no propositioning. But the “who, what, when, and where,” required urgent discreet attention.

It was in these scenes that Sayintha’s moping sat in the wings. She understood that she needed a costume change of happy Hindu excitement in order to participate, so she took to hiding behind the solitary world of her numbers and sums. The people of Shaun’s village had been packed up and evacuated in one quick day, as he no longer leaned over, a little to his left to be closer to her right. This was a year in which, Diwali had failed to deliver its annual parcel of sweetmeat emotion.

Her small expressions slashed across Shaun’s conscience, her little mousy sulk sat like an antonymic cloth against the glow of excitement that radiated through the class. He had not said one word, his guilt hung like clasps on his lips. He knew of no gesture that was big enough and small enough to re-tension the tight rope they both used to walk towards each other on. He could think of no way to travel between the spectrum of their complexions. It was in that math’s class that the bricks wiped their slates clean. Silent-nothing for him to pick and build.

Early that Saturday morning, the sky lit up like the many lamps that had been burnt the night before. Sayintha awoke, hoping to evoke the hope of the holy day. She dressed speedily, putting on her Punjabi, the uniform that would earn her the right to become part of a larger whole. They had drifted far enough from each other in the weeks before, and it was on Diwali day that the cords, now stretched too far, snapped them back together, in a sudden flash her family found themselves in the confined space of her father’s car driving to the mandir-happily.

Its gateway opened up an opulent delight, with its grand scale, it sat somewhere between India and South Africa. Inside, the shrouds of every-other-day-of-the-year was cast out with the shoes and people greeted with naked excitement. The aarti’s rang and Sayintha sat in the centre of its vibrations, it found a small resonance between her cold toes and her hot, hot head.

Her family arrived home, they made it as far as the front gate before her mother sped off to the kitchen and her father began bulldozing around in the lounge. The trinity had dissolved and Sayintha understood why the Natraja never came in sets of three. She would bear the burden of supernatural karma alone. Standing in the corridor, between kitchen and lounge, she hung like an unswung pendulum, trying to figure out what it was that a child too old, did on Diwali.

Nonchalantly, almost too casually, it happened. He mother invited her in-inside. She was called into the kitchen, her mother’s tasty womb. She traveled through the smells, through her mother’s belonging, to reach her side, for the first time, she saw the world through the patience and arduousness of banana puri, jalebi and chevro. The flavours of her mother were close enough to lick, dripping from her mother’s fleshy sides, she opened her mouth and waited for the syrup to drizzle on her tongue, the small drops were just enough. “When exactly were you going to offer to help, you know that you’re too big for me to boss around anymore.”

Sayintha smiled a secret smile. Today was Diwali. She helped her mother pack the parcels, a member of the two man assembly team. Her mother folds the gold boxes, giving her the shell. Sayintha filled its contents. Picking according to her liberty, trusted to understand the aesthetics of parcel packing, its layers and proportions. Together they produced little portals of love to be sent out into the world.

It was in the lounge area that all the cousins congregated, a cosmic consolidation. Cleared of furniture to be filled by family. A room filled with cousins too big and cousins too small, Sayintha spent the day oscillating between being amused or amusing. She yearned for a space in-between as she still kept a little bag of secret thoughts packed tightly under the arch of her foot, holding it down with all her weight.

She had changed into her green gharara, stiff and new. It bore no imprint of the wearer, and its soft silk scarf sat like a starched shield. Sayintha paused, she took time to re-adjust her banner of green silk and chiffon. Tiny mirrors ran down the front of her bodice, none of which, held her reflection, but in them she could see the many morphed faces of her family, wide happy mouths and bright bindi’s. Beads and sequins swayed through the house as the daylight faded outside. The smell of gunpowder from houses with children too eager, had already started to invade the room.

She lit a hundred lamps that evening, hoping to illuminate her way into a different space. She only got as far as her front porch. Her father was already unpacking his extensive purchase of fireworks. The sky was already increasing in its hum of Chinese lightening, he knew he had to start soon if he wanted to claim a respectable portion of the Lenasian sky.

There were no cordial invitations or impolite screams, people flocked outside on their own accord. Everyone flowed towards the tarred roads, no longer owned by cars. Little brown dots of every shade filled the streets, lined the porches and sat along high walls. People accepted the personal responsibility to find the seat that allowed them to take in the pieces of the sky they desired and turn their backs on the rest.

Her father came over, dragging Sayintha to light the first firework with him. “Come on, Sayin!” They had done this together since she was old enough to align her excitement with his. But now, her gurgling screeches had stopped and she was embarrassed by the one, two, three pieces of blue string being shot into the sky, which descended back to earth in thick, heavy smoke.

Her dad lit each firework with reverence and accordingly tilting his head up, acknowledging some reward in the sky that was too great. His wealth burnt across the sky. He loved the pretty things, the little indulgences. A list of silly pleasures; like the mini chocolates in his study drawer that he shared with nobody, the small stories her shared at work about his intelligent daughter and the truly unnecessary back rubs that his wife gave him, when he just moaned, a little.

Diwali night was about extremes. Children all around, were either screaming like invincible heroes or crying like puppies. The smell of gunpowder and violence hung heavy in Sayintha’s nose, tiny black granules collected like canon balls on the hairs in her nose, and dipped her head towards the ground. Her skin took turns, flashing between black and neon green, pink, purple, red and orange. In an instant of white bright, Sayintha saw Shaun. But his image kept switching on and then off again, giving her rhythmical pauses of disbelief. In stop motion animation, he walked towards her. The sky providing ambience and audio feeds for the internal drama that connected them. The little sack of secrets broke under her foot broke with the pressure that dispelled through her toes. She felt the eyes of her relatives peel off the sky, tilting down to rest on her shoulders. They all knew but never said, that even when he was red or purple or blue; there was some undeniable truth in the dark moments.

He came with a plate in his hands and silence in his mouth. They paused, both green. “I just wanted to say thank you, or sorry. And happy Diwali.” Too much pressure stood behind her and too much history walked before her, she could not say anything. He walked away after disarming himself of the plate. Her mother walks over, assessing the erotic damage. Bits of broken monologue-pieces being gunned out by the blasts all around. “How lovely…that’s so sweet…how thoughtful…nice of him to come over,” she offers to take the plate to the kitchen. Sayintha knew that this plate would make its way to their maid, for her hand-me-down Diwali.

A walk in the Pune University Park

2007-07-18T06:02:00.002-07:00

The sun hung above like a torch- intense, direct and professional in purpose. The heat licked the crooks of ten bare arms, the tips of ten ears, the back of five necks, the hollows of ten armpits, the small of five backs and the awkward skin between ten thighs and five groins. Five people covered in wet sweat.

Tired backs hunched and cowered in the noon light. Young bodies once nubile and straight looked like bent spoons. Ten eyes darted along with distraction, picking up lazy fancies and frivolous details. Five bodies moved in a single file along the rim of an ill-defined edge of a road. The Asphalt stretched forward like a long black tongue, ten lazy feet threaded along its gravel pores.

In the Park, leaves folded like tapestry of green threads above five people. The Shade sucked five bodies in through thick green leafy lips, a luscious invite into a cave of moist, warm air. The Cool against five scorched skins patted down like balm on a sprain. The Air soaked into ten lungs like lotion in skin after a hot shower. The Lovers sat and whispered in pairs building memories- that time we sat in the park and spoke for hours. Like proverbial Adams and Eves, aware of the indiscretion of their meeting, they sought coverage amongst the trees.

People soon disappeared but the tiny clicks and snaps of twigs under shoes spoke of them. The amateur carvings on barks of trees told on them- Anul was here. The makeshift piles of discarded sweet wrappers whispered their tastes- Baballo and Munch. The headless monkey bins yelled in fear of their terror.

A land of plenty…leaves too varied, branches too entangled, flowers to hybrid, ground cover too extensive and parasitic plants too beautiful to distinguish.
Five mental frameworks strained:

1) Too ignorant to enjoy analytically.
2) Too cynical to enjoy romantically.
3) Too clique to enjoy poetically.
4) Too consumerist to enjoy individually.
5) Too urban to enjoy pastorally.

Ten eyes glazed over with the potential of much too much subject matter. Heads arched backwards, tilted sidewards, cranked backwards to stare up and fell towards the earth below. Ten hands reached out to touch trees, pick leaves and snap branches from their source.

Silence arrived.

She placed a single, simple finger on five lips, shooshing away five bias banalities. She snatched the hand of time away from five wrists and placed it in hers. She started strolling.

Silence was elusive, like a butterfly you catch and let go off out of guilt.

“Oh, look at that, isn’t it beautiful!” He remarked.

Beautiful

2007-07-18T06:02:00.001-07:00

The first thing I noticed was her hair. It was riding the wind, flapping like a delicate black sari on a washing line. She never made a single move to pull the current of her hair back; she just let it run like an inky trail out of the back of the six-seater.

I felt bad that my frame consumed so much of the bench. Her hip bone lodged itself tightly in the flesh of my right buttock; the kind of pain you like. But if I hadn’t tied her down so tightly, she would have been swept away with the river of her hair. It made me feel helpful, necessary even, like a rock tied to the end of a wayward balloon. Her face sat like a baked clay globe in the middle of the mass of hair- a torch shining through a thicket.

The sun angled in and created a neat triangle that sat on her lap. Six people in the back, five tucked in the dark. The sun shone only on her, just for her. But I didn’t like this so much, romantic fancies aside. It showed up the washed-out whiteness of her Punjabi. I didn’t want to see the tired threads that ran down the fabric.

Her doopatha dropped. A naked shoulder stood close to my face. Her left hand went in search of its purple tail. Her right hand ran down its spine as she chased the seam of one edge through her pressed fingers. She hurriedly flung her doopatha over her shoulder again. It was then that she flicked my nose. Her right hand crossed over, connecting doppatha to shoulder and then, suddenly, unaware, a hand to nose… my nose!

Her fingers came so close. I could smell a whole bouquet of dust and sweat. I knew that she must have touched all kinds of places and surfaces: taps, railings, doorframes, desks, chairs, cups and then … my nose. In that moment, I knew she had a life outside this rickshaw, a busy one. I had nothing of the sort to offer her. Now this girl, she touches my nose and then, nothing. She doesn’t flinch. No “mojhe moaf karo” or shy embarrassed eyes- Nothing. The tip of my nose was not worth acknowledging for her. A moment too insignificant it seems. She made the silence inside the Rickshaw rectangle awkward for me.

I was angry. I resolved myself to stare at her bumping breasts as they dipped in and out of the potholes underneath the tyres. I wanted to look for the crude valleys around her eyes and lips. But she hid from me behind her hair and her doppatha; it was purple, like dead blood collected underneath a bruise. We made it all the way to Corporation and I never really saw her face. Maybe it is better that way- what if she has really been beautiful? I couldn’t handle that.

A Rickshaw Ride

2007-07-18T05:58:00.000-07:00

There she is. Walking bouncy like a doll on a string, bobbing to a song I don’t know. The song stops, pausing slightly for the ceremonial step into a fresh pile of shit. A new chocolate milk moustache forms around the base of her white American sneakers. She is walking this way. All clean-faced and bright-eyed, she stops in front of me; water bottle, umbrella and backpack strapped firmly around her chest.
“Where you want to go madam?” A giggle erupts from her thin throat.
“Shopping, ya? Big discounts, cheap prices on Lukshmi Road, 150 rupee.”
Her eyeballs roll back and her mouth mooches as if sucking a sour dry fig.
“Ok, that’s fine, thanks.” Foreign currency conversion approved.

She gets in and sits back and sits forward, not comfortable on this seat pressed by too many backsides before hers. I start the engine and it rattles underneath her like a dirty old man that wants to touch her privates. She sits pure and chaste during this violent and sudden attack, stock straight, like a reed that will not shake with the wind. I can taste the alcohol of her perfume in my mouth. God, almost as if I licked her deodorised armpit! Too much perfume, one lacquer coat to preserve this piece of art in its present conditions. I drive her past the bins to see India. The whiff pounds heavily on both sides of the Rickshaw. She is defeated. Her hand goes up, index and thumb holding two delicate nostrils, pinky extended outwards as if holding a cup of English tea. Her head ducks under the hood of the Rickshaw to double check the barbarity of the cows that cannot distinguish the food from the plastic bags in the rubbish heap.

I stop the Rickshaw-traffic. The bus in front is serving up fresh hot fumes of charcoal air. She sucks at the roof of her mouth and sticks her tongue out, the pupils of her eyes dart and needle at me in the rear view mirror. The season of disgust is in full bloom on her face. The lack of indifference reels in a little girl, the dirty little body tries to push in as much of itself into the carriage as it possibly can. She sits strong and straight with a face tilted slightly downwards so as not to indicate arrogance and primarily facing in the opposite direction, so as to avoid any form of eye contact. I have seen this posture before, they must write about it in travel books. Tiny Hindi words from the small mouth rise like insects and sit on every inch of her body. She turns to look as the dusty hand strokes her water bottle, the sturdy reed is breaking at the spine. She starts to wriggle in the back seat. A man on a motorcycle screams and the dusty body darts off to the edge of the road.

Traffic starts up and we go again. She takes out her water bottle and sips slowly. She is careful not to spill but there are streams running down every avenue of her face. She wipes it with the back of her hand with the grace of a boxer. Beads of sticky sweat ooze from her forehead. She pulls of her jacket. I stop the Rickshaw.
“Lukshmi Road madam.”
She hands me folded money and sighs. God, as if she has been driving the bloody Rickshaw.