Random Ramblings

The Driver - the final part

2011-11-16T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today I took the MARTA to meet Dev at his Georgia Tech campus. He rarely ever came home to visit, partly because I work nights and weekends, and that was the only time he could spare from his busy schedule filled with classes and courses I understand nothing of.

The lady in the floral dress who sat next to me on MARTA looked inquiringly at my bag, which smelled of tamarind fish and paneer tikka. I turned my eyes away to escape the discomfort her glances created, only to find them settle upon the words printed at the other end of the coach - ''No food or drink allowed inside MARTA''. At that moment, the train stopped.

It was the Midtown station. Dev was waiting for me. Every time I saw him, he seemed taller, and I kept reminding myself that boys don’t really grow that much after high school. With his blue pullover and jeans, shoulder bag full of books, black curly hair and silver rimmed glasses, he looked too handsome, and too intellectual for anyone to guess he was my son. We walked to the closest Starbucks.

The only better customers for Starbucks than caffeine junkies, are mother-son duo caffeine junkies. Sometimes my eyes looked for signs of blame on strangers’ faces – and whether they were hiding their disapproval of my parenting skills. But most of them were completely absorbed in their books, or laptops, or conversations with fellow strangers. Dev began asking questions at once.

Is this the 10^th year?

Yes, I replied, playing with the paper cup between my thin fingers.

Mom, why would you decide to do this now? You’re out of practice. And it doesn’t make sense to me that you picked Zin’s 10^th anniversary for that.

There was a pause. I avoided his eyes and looked at my coffee.

It was almost 10 years ago that in the middle of a heated discussion, Zin snatched my coffee cup away and splashed it on the floor because I suddenly went silent and attempted to walk away. ''Coward'', he said. His cerulean eyes glared at me, and his arms locked me into his forced embrace. My shoulder had hurt for days.

He would drive out like a madman after every argument. Struggling to come to terms with my subliminal calmness, he rolled joints while driving, and often got home completely high. I never saw him like I used to before. We had hit the bottom of the roller coaster.

One night he did not return. What I had feared all these years, finally became a reality. Zin’s skillful tango with death over the years, the walks and the gaits and the turn of the necks – ended with an equally forceful finale.

His body was charred when they lifted the sheet, briefly.

I stirred the coffee in my cup.

I want you to know that I’m not playing with fire. All these years, I’ve had all the time to look back, like an artist stepping back to check his own painting, or a singer playing back their own songs. Perhaps what I needed was the confirmation that racing was an inescapable destiny for me. If I did not feel like it would be meaningless to live a life without feeling the rush of a hundred fifty miles per hour on my face, I would never race again.

Dev’s face slowly settled on my words. Listening, had always been his best trait.

The evening air drew streams of orange light over the table we were sitting. The people who had been there for a while were leaving now, while a new bunch were just coming in. I opened my bag and took three Tupperware boxes and put them in front of him.

Tamarind fish? Yum.

He looked every bit my son.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My 78 Words Story - ?

2011-10-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

So I wrote a 78 word story for a short-short fiction (they call these stories Aspens) contest hosted by the Esquire magazine.

78 words, you say?

Well, consider the greatest short-short story ever by Hemingway: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

Or the Soldier's Field By Colum McCann:

Sweeney was a dreamer. Sweeney was from Galway. Sweeney went to Chicago. Sweeney wanted a green card. Sweeney met a woman who made his vowels curl. Sweeney had a baby. Sweeney bought a swing set. Sweeney joined the army. Sweeney flew helicopters. Sweeney rose. Sweeney could execute beautiful landings. Sweeney went on a second tour.

Sweeney was brought home. Sweeney asked everyone he met to kindly remove the sheet that had somehow been pulled up over his head.

************************

No, I didn’t win. Even though the entry was carefully crafted during the utterly boring lunch hour at work.

Laughing out loud. But here it goes anyway, for those of you interested:

First Love

It has been twenty years since you left. To be honest, I don’t completely remember your face now. Only that smile, those dark eyes, and the white dress, that someone stole from your clothesline one summer afternoon. Remember that summer we picked mangoes to cook chutney, and left behind a blackened saucepan?

I lie in my cell and think about our last night together when my jealousy got the better of me. I wish you were still alive.

/****************************************************************/

The Driver - Part 2

2011-09-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

Rush

He would drink his whiskey straight and tell me with a loving smile, Zinfandel? Who drinks Zinfandel on Friday nights, hunh?

That’s why I nicknamed him Zin.

On the Fridays that Dev went to spend the weekend with my sister, Zin and I would ride to the countryside. We didn’t care for where we went, except that the roads were relatively empty. He drove till early morning on the country roads, with me in the passenger seat, anxious yet insatiated. The minute we collapsed into our bed, he would be fast asleep, but would wake me up after a few hours. Our lovemaking would continue till the sun was well above the horizon, and until we could no longer hear the morning songs of the birds. Then, we would return to sleep, crumbling into each other’s embrace, and get out of bed only to go for a late afternoon lunch.

Sometimes our friends would join us in the evening, and we would plan a route to drive at night.

There were some roads we avoided, mostly due to cops on the prowl, but sometimes also because of night animals. Someday I feared, we would get into trouble for this.

But that day never came. Month after month we grew our race adventures, secretly yet unabashedly like a clandestine affair, increasingly becoming more ambitious and invincible. At times I would push the panic button and refuse to drive with him, but in the end would give in, feeling like a nagging wife drenching her man’s dreams with her endless complains.

There were many reasons I was in love with Zin. But the most important reason was that I learned to face many of my fears, and in particular, my fear of driving. Gradually but surely, I was becoming addicted to the rush I felt after steering dangerously past a dozen cars, reaching that post, or that mark, before anybody else.

A part of me triumphed at that moment. A part of me, healed.

I was hired as a driver by several well-meaning ladies belonging to the Hats and Couture Club, an upcoming club which boasted of the most fashionable parties in town. For some reason, a few ladies frequenting the club, friended me rather quickly, probably because of my naivete in the whole social scene, or due to the resulting quality of becoming a good listener(instead of a talker). When I was leaving the H&C club (after one month of free membership), one of the ladies offered me a job- that of her personal chauffeuse.

Donna Matisse was going through a painful divorce which bore not only the hurt of infidelity, but also the stress of a custodial battle for her two kids. Her ex-husband was a good father, despite the fact that he inadvertently became the "selfish" father the minute he chose to become involved with another woman about half his age. I lend an ear to her woes every time she wanted me to. Of course, that was the primary purpose I was hired, the others being- Ms. Matisse’s self-admitted lack-of-focus; that I could double as an after-school nanny on certain days of the week; and the fact that Donna Matisse had somehow convinced her soon to be ex-husband to pay for all car-related costs, including driver’s salary and car repair expenses.

I looked forward to my free weekends, when I did not have to listen to a detailed account of my employer’s day at the Family Court, spent arguing over who gets to keep the antique furniture bought over the past 15 years, and the tools in the garage- bought only last year.

Zin used to say, "Marriage is the first step towards divorce". I would reply back that the first step to divorce is not wanting to get married, thinking of future divorce. One day he brought me a ring, made of white gold and a princess-cut diamond on top; and he said- "This is for you until you stop loving me". I asked him what that meant but he would only smile back, saying that I shouldn’t bother about the meaning, since I believed in eternal love.

~to be continued

The Driver - Part 1

2011-09-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

TODAY

I have been driving all night. The winds have brought the trees down and it hasn’t stopped raining since last Wednesday, which was when I visited my son at his Georgia Tech dorm. The highways stayed open, but many of the inner roads have been flooded and closed to traffic.

It is on such nights that I make easy money.

People stranded at airports, train stations, tourist spots- all need to be transported to different locations; not quite to their own homes maybe, but sometimes hotels and motels and friends’ of friends’ houses, bring the feeling of being loved and cared for, especially in an unfriendly, pouring night like tonight’s.

So in a way, I take people to cozier places. Homes, coffee shops, lover’s dens. Malls. Brothels, taverns, prisons. Wedding Halls.

Perhaps that is why I like to drive all night long, all week, except Sundays. That, and the satisfaction which the insanity of endless driving gives me. Like a favorite record, playing again and again and again. Like a marathon runner’s training for a race, or the fanatic priest’s never-ending chants for salvation.

I drive to run, not towards a place but away from it. A place, as I will reveal, was once very dear to me.

ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

I arrived in my embroidered powder blue sari, laden with gold jewelry, smelling of Ponds cold cream, and red-eyed but wide-awake after the 24 hour journey. The lady officer at the customs smirked at my gold ornaments because the metal detector went berserk. It was just wedding jewelry, not heavy artillery, but annoying nonetheless to people not used to wearing gold on a daily basis, I guess.

We were received by friends, who were going to drive us to our apartment, 20 miles from the Airport.

The sky was still orange at 9 in the night, something unseen in my hometown, as the sun reluctantly withdrew from the picture-perfect horizon. Tall buildings began to appear rapidly, as we approached the center of the city. Trees, well manicured and tailored to compliment the surroundings, glistened in the evening hue sharpened even more by the magnificent city lights.

On the highway, cars ran at an amazing speed. Faster than I had ever imagined. Faster than I wished they would. I was told that everyone has to learn how to drive in this country. However, just at that moment, I made up my mind to never attempt to sit behind the steering wheel trying to tame a car, because it would undoubtedly lead to a crash, which, observing the insane driving speeds, would quite likely be fatal.

I nodded myself out of that horrible thought. The tail-lights of the cars in front of us snaked ahead, leading curves of light- only to be followed by another, and another….and yet another. In my jet-lag induced haze, this felt like an almost-dream.

That was 20 years ago.

Life, like air, just expanded. There was no reverse option, no shrinking back into a tiny ball of carefree anticipation, no turning back to the beginning. You cannot get rid of the experiences, even when the people who were a part of them, were gone.

SOLO

At twenty-five, I was too old to learn new things. Or so I thought.

Sitting by the pool with my 7-month baby on summer days was more comfortable than inching nervously in a bathing suit, albeit too conservative for most, but which still made me feel naked among strangers too busy to notice my awkwardness in water. My grandmother used to say a proverb in Bengali, "Jékhané jèmon, shékhané temon", which transalates to - Wherever you are, behave according to the local customs. But however much I tried, decades of conditioning wasn’t going to take just a few months to shed away. What I did not know back then, was that shedding itself was a useful tool to learn, and once mastered with the craftiness and cunningness of a peacock preparing for the next mating season, would bring me back to where it all started, a vulnerable and exposed, but invariably lighter version of the feather-burdened self.

If I remember correctly, it was some time between Dev's teething and the first time he spoke a complete sentence, that I overcame my fear of cars. Not driving a car, just the thought of driving a car.

Just the thought was enough. For a nine month old baby, taking that first step required just the thought. At ten months he would walk, moving ahead with just the thought, and forgetting all those times he had fallen down during the past month trying to keep the balance standing up without support under his tender hands.

By the time Dev began his endless chant of "I want Panda bear" and "dushtu dushtu", my neighbor and I already had an agreement- I make her favorite Indian dish every Friday(should have expected that!), and in return she supervises my driving, riding with me in my car , which I called mine only because it was left in the garage the rest of the time, waiting for me to breathe in life on Saturday mornings. Later that day, Dev would lay his head on my lap and fall into a nap, and my triumphant feelings from the morning would nebulize into softer emotions, like a victorious warrior returning home after a battle and melting into the floor to sleep.

Months later, after taking the driving test, and having heard the wonderful words- "you have passed the test", those amanranthine emotions from the Saturday afternoons would return; and I would hug a stranger for the first time in my life.

The first solo ride was to a thrift store and back. There was no money to actually shop anywhere else, but the thrill of the ride was perfectly complemented by the exhilaration of a splurge, however small it might have been. The rush through me was the same that I felt while racing with Zin and 20 others at an off-road racing event several years later; when I beat all but one. That one, was Zin.

~to be continued

An Ode to a Weekend

2011-07-03T01:49:00.000-07:00

It’s the corner for life’s
un-shapable spaces
when another layer flows
and leaves its traces.

It’s the amalgam that forms
when surrender meets rebellion
white turns into red,
red into vermillion.

A burial ground for frustrations and defeat
A whorehouse, where rehab escapees retreat
And for the poisoned, tainted as they go
It is the river Ganges, where blue bodies flow.

For those with open
and suspended hearts,
it’s the miracle garden where
regeneration starts.

Love’s first glance
in a purple oasis,
desire’s first stop
an empty week’s catharsis.

~Proma

The permanence of the invisible

2011-05-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

It exists like a lone
grain of salt,
a tear of the ocean-
solidified

It exists like a meaning
without a word,
trapped in a moment that
crystallized

It exists at a place
which changes with time
a fossil that lived before
it died.

~Proma

utterly utterly eternal

2011-04-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

36 man years

too short to persist

timedrops splutter in my chaotic mind

the only thing I remember yet:

the warmth of your hands and the smell of the rain.

~P

untitled

2011-03-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

I find in the

spaces

what you forgot to look for-

dream-pieces from a long time back

slow air sustains me,

it does not matter that

silence kills

In the permanence of the sands, a desert flower blooms.

in search of answers

2011-01-12T20:40:00.000-08:00

I’m waiting for the dark

the kind that is quiet

but not

silent. The one that

speaks

the languages of old wells

gravid for centuries

but weightless.

that rainy evening

2011-01-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

Slow rainy evening

caramelized by your scents

senses overpowered,

by sugar rushes.

Outside,

clouds soak in unoffered feelings...

Songs, sing

colors, flow

invisible beings,

come to life.

I cannot call this an illusion anymore

~

a.m.b.i.t.i.o.n

2010-11-29T20:31:00.001-08:00

dreams that were surrendering

opened their eyes. A new wave

passed by like a jungle goddess

bookshelves of burdened

wisdom that was

too pricey to keep

closed themselves to the world

to nurture

the fuzzy stuff

smoke in a pristine morning

shatters the perfect lie

~Proma

Unconditional

2010-08-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

The unbridled fount of passion,
(someone called it deep)
dried out too soon.
Love,
like a gypsy’s guise
enchants before disappearing.

Yet,
real men should dream again
and real women love unconditionally
There is no place for cowards in that ocean of happiness:
a dreamland numb to the ruins of time.

~Proma

Bad timing

2010-07-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t say the few words

I wanted to say-

they lay covered under an endless night.

Now,
I will spend twice as long
to speak of half their original worth.

Sunrise bird

2010-06-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

The sunrise bird at my window

sings songs of my village

sometimes in the mornings.

I blink with uneasiness.
The music from last night was so captivating

but forgettable

and the song reminds of
promises made to someone
who doesn’t know me anymore.

~Proma

Alive and Kicking

2010-06-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

Everyday I live a little less

of my life, as I digress

one mile off-centered from my dream-nest
shifted by his cutting gaze.

I build a new house

and live (unknown)

someone else’s life
I call my own.

~Proma

Revenge was necessary (last of the trilogy of poems*)

2010-05-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hot ashes take a long time to cool
or so they say.

Soot- coarse, muddy, black:
stays between the lines of your hands
long after you’ve washed them.

Terror- when mixed with love: leaves behind blood.
The kind that doesn’t dry
or flow away like water.

Revenge was necessary-

The blood had to remember its name again
The roughened hands had to learn to caress the smooth skin of a baby bird
The hot air had to wind down, and become my long hair’s playmate

Revenge was necessary-

Because there is nothing worse than the immortal memories of yesterday
Because almost everything, but not everything is beyond the reach of your screams
Because, you have to live to give-
not the other way round

The village after the storm is calm.
The air has lost its stubbornness; the orange horizon spreads its arms like a glowing mother.
Gardenia effortlessly steals the night away-
which the heart gathers,
fondly.

I rest my head and close my eyes to moon's lullabies.

~Proma (May, 2010)

*This poem is the last part of the trilogy of poems written between 2003 to 2010.
Part two, which was written in its crude form 2007 can be found here: http://promaray.blogspot.com/2007/08/revenge-is-necessary-for-release.html
Part one is only available upon personal request and will not be published online.

A Summer Sunday

2010-04-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Sun droplets between the clouds
are silver trinkets hanging from
a blue gold parachute.

They bid goodbye to dear love and its sorrow;
hearts gather around this sweet
summer Sunday.

~Proma

Chemistry

2010-03-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

I want your eyes to warm up
to my tender glance
and lips
to return the favor of a chance.

I want your hands to feel
the hardworking hands of mine
vein by vein
pulse by pulse
beat by beat.

When my body energy learns
to swim to the flow of yours.
And your thoughts, words, touch-
free me to release my fears.

When my world moves
at your pace
my every bend fits into your bends,
Simplifying -
a complicated maze.

When my every pause
is met with another begin,
no journey ever ends
in that perfect place.

Fear and freedom

2010-02-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

The secrets of my heart
are like water drops
on a dark Japanese fan.

Much as I want
they won’t hide
in the folds of time

or fly,
for the fear
of failure.

But sometimes,
in the event
of my forgetfulness,

the wind will strum the fan
and the drops will dance-
unmindful of the fall.

And in those musical moments,
I will compose my song.

~Proma

Untitled

2009-12-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

Even the patchy dry grass
yellow and white
walked over uncountable times,
greens to the new rain.

You, are but a flower.

Anya's Secret - The Final Part

2009-08-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

Palmira Haswell met Anne Bellenger at the dirty coffee place next to the barber’s shop with the cheap neon sign. Palmira Haswell was wearing a black skirt with a navy blue blouse and her hair was done in a neat pony tail. She looked about twenty, although her real age was probably over twenty-eight.

Anne Bellenger was a redhead with very attractive features. Her rather huge breasts made her face look like a small heart shaped pendant with a pout. She worked as a model and her ad photos were frequently splashed between the classifieds in the popular Russian Newspaper in Warsaw. She had apparently earned a great deal of money on her last modeling trip to United States and returned back rich, and pregnant. The story went like this - She had a husband in California that she did not want to live with anymore, mainly because she did not want to live in the US anymore. She frequently traveled between Los Angeles, Paris, London and Warsaw (her hometown) on account of her various modeling assignments. She had pleaded with husband Greg many times to move to Paris, but unsuccessfully. Greg did not like the idea of missing College Football to drinking French wine in their fine glasses. He got her pregnant during her last trip to US and so finally Anne had decided to stay permanently in California.

8 months and 23 days later, the stillborn was born. I say born because I don’t know what to call a newborn that comes out dead. Greg did not stop Anne from returning to Warsaw. She stopped working as a model for a while and took up knitting. She returned back to modeling after knitting a scarf and two un-wearable stockings. Greg sometimes called her to talk for a minute or two. They were technically still married.

When Anne Bellenger was contacted by the Russian guy who called himself Ivan, she asked him how long he had been in the business. The fake passport business that is. Since Poland had kind of become the bridge between the East and the West, the business had really picked up. Ivan was a new recruit in Warsaw but had previously worked in Latvia for years. The good thing about new recruits was that they were often inconspicuous, a desirable trait in a business of this nature.

Palmira Haswell was an administrative clerk at an accounting firm. Her job was boring and her personal life full of men she wasn’t interested in. Despite her twenty eight years or more, she had been unlucky in love and had never been proposed to. She was a natural beauty with naturally blonde hair, an asset she acquired from her Swedish mother, an asset she neatly managed in a pony tail. Week after week she had been looking for a new job, as she hated her current position.

One day, on her way back home from work, it has started to rain and she had entered a small café that was run by a middle aged Latvian woman with thick arms. Palmira ordered coffee and picked up the only paper, a Russian newspaper. In the classifieds section there was an ad for "International Travel" with a line underneath in fine print that read "passport specialist". Palmira had picked the paper and brought it home because of the job classifieds, not because she was looking for a passport. Yet, after waiting a day or two, she contacted the number provided in the ad.

Ivan had arranged the meeting between them. Anne did not need the money, but she was greedy and could not refuse Ivan.

Palmira’s miserable condition revealed itself in the eyes of Ivan the Passport Specialist. The specialist that he was, his specialty was reading people’s misery through talking to them about amber jewelry.

Ivan convinced her to go to the US and try becoming a model and then later an actress. He explained to her how hundreds of pretty girls he knows now had blossoming careers in Hollywood, all thanks to passports provided by him. She did not question him.

Palmira Haswell paid $400 for the fake passport to Anne Bellenger, and $400 to Ivan. She paid in cash, and did not ask for a receipt. Ivan always mentioned honesty as his number one rule for doing business. If he was paid for something, he would always deliver that something. Palmira opened the passport and saw her recent photo and her new name Anne Bellenger. It reminded her of the loud redhead with big breasts and a pout, and long bright fingernails not appropriate for knitting.

Months later she would think, "It is easy to live with a new name, but it is not easy to live as a new person".

Months later she would also think, "It is difficult to live as a new person in Los Angeles, but it was even more difficult to survive as myself back in Warsaw". She often wondered if what she thought was what she actually felt. But with time, the difference became less and less distinct.

Palmira Haswell was no longer one person anymore. She was Anya the Artemis; she was Palmira the quiet pony tailed clerk; she was also the redhead with the face of a heart-shaped pendant with a pout. On some days she coexisted with all of the three, on other days she struggled hard to become one of them.

********************************************************

Truth be told now, I am in love with Anya the Artemis. Truth further be told, Anya the Artemis is adored by thousands, whereas Anne Bellenger was loved only by one, and Palmira Haswell by none.

This is the reality that she lives with everyday: that her new identity, is her only identity.

I am not ready to find out any more about her than I already have, and yet, until I get to the smallest details, my mind would not rest. When I hold Anya in my arms, I hold her closer and tighter every passing night. Yet, whether I would return to her the next day, is unknown to me.

One day, as if she could read me, she disappeared. Her furniture was gone, the dark drapes, the white sheets, the broken mirror, the black and white picture of bright colorful flowers, everything was gone. I waited for a few days to see if she returned or tried to contact me, but she did not. Her website’s domain name was purchased by someone that sells customized quilts.

I did not look for her. As you might have expected.

- Proma

Anya's Secret - Part 2

2009-07-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

I would never know why that night, after I accidentally found Anya’s passports, I returned to her bedroom and slept by her side the rest of the night.

Man’s behavior defies reason at times. Perhaps I did not want to wake her up and argue in the middle of the night. Perhaps I was scared she might reveal something that I wasn’t prepared for. Perhaps I was just too tired.

When I woke up, Anya was sitting by the bed, her wavy golden hair falling over the white sheet like a dreamy waterfall. The high window let in the morning light through the drapes, enough for the stark room to absorb some warmth and color. It took me a few seconds to recollect what had happened the night before as I tried to simultaneously decipher Anya’s focused look, directed at me.

A gentle rustle with a book being pushed towards me resulted in me getting up and sitting up very straight on the bed; in a second I was prepared by instincts to be on my safeguard. She did not move a bit, stuck to her posture as if that let her contain her emotions. I was ready to avert an attack with all my manly strength if needed.

She understood my anxiety and said, "Don’t worry".

I looked at the book she was trying to show me. It was an old magazine of sorts. The frayed corners and the faded blue color suggested an old school magazine.

"My high school yearbook", she answered my un-asked question.

I opened the page where she had the bookmark and stared at her much younger photo on the page. Palmira Haswell was the name under the photo.

I closed the book and searched for more answers in her eyes. I wanted to say, "Who are you?" But I did not, because she already knew all the questions I wanted to ask. And I did not ask because I was so much in love with her. She looked at me with her beautiful eyes and her hands reached out for mine. Her soft fingers touched my cold hands but I pulled away, like a lover angry at being kept in the dark. At that moment I read on her face what I had long waited for.

She was in love with me too.

She sang a song

2009-07-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

She sang her song of the evening*,
But then he gave a sigh.

Her song, split into two.
One- the flight of a Siberian bird,
Unknown and endless.

The other-
Falls on smelly moist ground,
Dead, before it could fly.

Anya's Secret - Part 1

2009-04-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

Anya, the Artemis

Pungent smell of acetone mixed with the air readily as the spilled nail polish remover soaked the white linen bed sheet. The room was dressed in white. Stern, as snow that never melts. Regal, as pearls born from deep sea secrets. Silent, as sheets draping the dead. The carpet on the floor was white and plush, exuding an aura of luxury not at ease with the otherwise austere room. A large frame hung on one of the walls displaying a black and white photo of colorful flowers.

"Shit" exclaimed Anya, before realizing that acetone evaporates quickly. She decided to drop the sheets at the cleaners tomorrow. She glanced at the spilled nail polish one more time, deeply annoyed that her clean white bedroom dressed like a bride, was no longer crispy clean. The room next to the bedroom was the study, which actually could be called the dark room. Heavy drapes the color of blue almost as dark as black keep sunlight away through the day. The walls adorned a few mismatched pieces: a clock, shapeless metal art-piece, and an antique mirror with broken glass. There were no pictures of people, no images that could tell if anyone else lived here, or if there was anyone that Anya knew, was related to, or wanted to remember. A black functional desk and a few lamps were the only furniture in this room.

It was almost impossible to tell how long Anya had lived in this apartment, or how long she had planned to stay here. She did not seem to have any friends or visitors, barring the cleaning lady that came to clean the house every Wednesday. She traveled frequently. Whether she worked from home or went to work outside the house was still a mystery to me. Still, Anya’s existence was not as unnoticeable as it appears from my description. She was famous. A well known name in the world-of-world-wide-web. If she hadn’t been famous, I would not have known nor fallen in love with her, and wouldn’t have left everything behind to find her.

For the past six months I have stalked her, pursued her through emails and letters, and tried every possible way to gain her attention. I cannot say I’ve failed completely, but until I see her in person, I could not sleep through the whole night.

*****

Porch with grills, and me

When I lived on the second storey of the 3-storey ancestral home in one of the older districts of that big city called Kolkata, I looked down at the world from the grilled porch. Porch with thick iron grills painted the strangest shade of green. The grills were to prevent kids from leaning over, but more importantly to prevent thieves from climbing into the house from the porch. My mother had made optimal use of the grills by tying ends of nylon ropes to them and converting the porch into a washer man’s drying zone. The array of taut multicolored nylon ropes of various thicknesses hung above that looked like a maze of yarn sprawled across a sky painted with whitewash beaten and sheared by a regular monsoon.

On the days my mother didn’t occupy the porch for weekly linen drying, I liked to sit on the old wicker chair and watch people walking by the street below. I could sit there for hours, occasionally smoking cigarettes and throwing the burnt butts into the drain by the side of the street below. The drain was not supposed to be open since the new municipal corporation had been working on covered drains for years. Yet at many places, the drains were open. The spot where I threw my cigarette butts was easily recognizable, accumulated for days and weeks before inching forward slowly, giving away evidence about how clear and efficient the drain system really was.

I had grown used to the ugly drains, just as I had grown used to the nylon clothes lines, the pealing-off whitewash, my mother’s occasional curses thrown at me for being an unemployed extra-mouth-to-feed, the spats between my grandmother and my mother (that could be heard from the kitchen on the ground floor to the topmost floor of the house), the unbearable heat of the mid-days, and my unwavering, un-diminishing, mine-only, alone-ness.

As a college-educated (with poor grades) twenty three year old man living with his parents at his grandparents’ house in a city of four million unemployed youth, I was not considered an anomaly. But, as the only one in this neighborhood that did not want to play cards at the community fitness center or share a smoke with the other unemployed men just hanging out, certainly made me an outsider, and the "creepy guy".

Despite living in this huge mess of a city, very little ever changed in my life. Or for that matter in the lives of everyone that lived around me. The year was 2008. Economy was booming in this part of the world since the past many years. Money was pouring into the big metropolises in the South, but this city remained relatively untouched. Kolkata had become an investor’s hell. Paralyzed by mindless strikes by labor unions, a government that was more interested in preserving its pseudo-ideals than fulfill the promises it made before the last elections, this great city of the past had crestfallen into the lap of poverty and been renamed by many as : the dying city. I was one of the millions of unemployed youth. Our dreams seemed distant and difficult to believe in any longer.

And then something else happened, something completely alien. One day I found an obsession. It was her. She was Anya, the Artemis they said. The queen of dreams, the fantasy of the sleepless. There were more than a million hits on her website every month. I used to think of her exactly as she used to appear to me every night. Yet every time I saw her, she would have changed her appearance. If one day she was a Mediterranean dame with dark eyes and wavy brown hair, the next day she would transform into a straight haired Latina with heavily mascara-ed blue eyes, and full botox-ed lips. If one day she was a moon-face recluse, the next day, she was a starry-eyed vixen. I eagerly waited for her next transformed look, and wondered what she had up her sleeve. I was ashamed to be smitten by her. After all, she was not even for real. Or in more accurate words, she was just an actor, of sorts. She was part actor, part story-teller, an extremely beautiful story-teller. To call her just beautiful would be a gross understatement, for her beauty was unparalleled in the part of the world I was familiar with.

She called herself Anya. Her stories were like lullabies for grownups. They were soothing stories, funny stories, twisted stories, cute stories, love stories, hate stories, but always mesmerizing stories. Her stories were almost always about someone very similar to me, and almost never about herself. Slowly and unknowingly I became addicted to her stories. She had this wonderful capacity to make me feel rescued from my trapped life, like a permanent dream suddenly happened to me and I never had to wake up to face reality again. Unfailingly, I returned to her website everyday as she became my sleeping-pill.

With time I wondered more about her. About the person that she was in real life. About how she really looked without the hair extensions and the fake eyelashes and the overdone makeup. To my every email she had replied, yet I had found nothing about her that I wanted to know. One day she came as Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt. She is supposed to be the protector of young women, and men. She told me a story about the young man living in the dingy part of town, unemployed and lonely, a social misfit that could neither survive in his circumstances nor abandon the town. Artemis, the self-made Goddess that she was, paved a secret way to get him out, into a world that was waiting for him.

That was the day I had fallen in love with her.

*****

The Secret

This is the day I have been waiting for all my life. I would spare you the details how I managed this as they are of no significance in this story.

As only lovers would know, I felt like the most fortunate idiot in this world, totally incapable of controlling his emotions or be consciously aware of what was happening, as I stood outside Anya’s house waiting for her to open the door for me. It is strangely funny that I had been waiting for this moment for months, and now that it was happening before me, I was not fully convinced this was real.

Then the door opened and my momentary trance was broken by the smell of acetone. She took me by the hand and led me inside the door. Her face, older than I had thought, was even more beautiful in person. Her golden tresses were more golden, her delicate fingers more delicate. Her mouth, was as soft as I had imagined.

That night, she led us through our love-making. I, a 23-old virgin from East India, was as incapable as a lover, as was she in concealing her surprise when she found that out. Later, she slept in my arms. I watched her sleep, a rare orchid draped over a bed, crispy white as a bridal-dress. There was no other moment in my life that I remembered as more beautiful, and I closed my eyes to etch the picture for ever in my heart.

An hour later, I was still awake, for some reason. A certain uneasiness was creeping up to me. The precise reason I may not know, but what I knew was that it was only going to grow within me. Anya, the woman that I was endlessly attached to, was still a huge mystery for me. Whether she would want to see me again was also a mystery to me. She had answered most of my questions with a smile and small incomplete answers that night, and she had carefully steered clear of anything that would reveal her full identity. I tossed with this uneasiness for a long time, and what time I finally fell asleep, I do not remember.

I woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. I walked across the room into the bathroom. Attached to the bathroom was a huge closet full of Anya’s clothes. Her dress-up clothes for her story-teller videos. Without even thinking I walked into the closet. The first thing I noticed was a suitcase that looked like it was in the process of being packed. Then I saw a small black booklet over a big packet. The booklet was a passport. I picked it up and open it. It belonged to Anya – the photo confirmed. The name said "Anne Bellenger". ANNE – so that was her name. Then I opened the big packet under the passport. Inside was another passport. The photo was that of Anya (or Anne?). Her name was printed as "Palmira Haswell". Which one of these was her ?

I opened both the passports and laid them out side by side to compare the two photos. Both the photos seemed to be of Anya, or Anne, or Palmira! Or were they? My heart was beating so fast I could swear it could be heard outside of me. I focused on the two photos trying to figure out if they belonged to the same person or not. It seemed possible that they were two different persons.

All of a sudden my uneasiness had turned into suspicion, and fear. Had I fallen into a secret trap, unsuspectingly? Should I leave this house right away before she woke up in the other room? Or should I confront her directly? Either way, my life had already fallen into pieces.

I walked back towards the bedroom.

**************************

Concluding part next week!

Faraway

2009-03-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

Like a rose without water I will age
deep vermillion and scentless.
Your love I will keep like white envelopes from the past
unopened
under my sandal-scented bed.

It is not memories that the mention of your name reminds.
But a whole universe
that I sometimes see when I sit and watch
snow melt outside my window.

Two drops of jasmine oil
and two words later
I remind myself this is only a poem
and you distant, like a faraway place I want to visit.
And say goodbye once again.

The Real Homeless of Atlanta

2009-01-09T19:47:00.000-08:00

If you have seen the show “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” on Bravo, and your heart still sinks a little at the thought of a homeless person trying to keep warm on a cold Christmas morning, you must seethe with disgust at the title of this article.

For while the much publicized television show nauseates with the stench of well-oiled palms abusing easy money, homelessness on the other hand, is a harsh and often unending reality that describes the lives of 20,000 human beings living in Atlanta. Yes the title leaves a bad taste in the mouth, the same ugly-bitter self-hating taste that I left with after volunteering for a few homeless of Atlanta some days ago.

No, I am not blessed at all with a natural aptitude or gift of selfless service to people. I went to volunteer simply because it was the automatic best thing to do when you are left to spend Christmas alone, and are not even religious, let alone a Christian (and so, not inclined to go to Church). I admit that curiosity was part of the reason.

Born and brought up in a third world country where poverty survives on the leftovers of underdevelopment of an overpopulation, the notion of extreme poverty in the land of milk and honey seemed a little impalpable. Are the poor in this well-endowed country equally miserable as the ones back home(pun intended) ? Equally powerless ? Equally rejected, both by the society and the authorities? At a personal level, were these people the same as the people I have seen living on the streets of Mumbai and Kolkata, and on the dirt roads in the village of two-lakes? Is there a hierarchy in the world of the homeless? Just as there are the affluent, the very affluent, and the stinky-rich affluent, do categories exist for the poor?

Basic facts that are universally true for many homeless people are that they are generally less educated with fewer marketable skills, they are often social outcasts or misfits due to social or mental conditions, their dependence on drugs or alcohol. They are often abandoned by families or were suffering from venereal or untreatable diseases.

Apart from the above, at a human level each individual is different, and as I describe my experiences, I would go about describing them.

Homeless in the village of two-lakes

Two-lakes is a village on Indian soil along the India-Bangladesh border. Less than 500 people call it their home and grow jute and rice to make a living. A handful of them smuggle goods across the border and a few others commute everyday to the nearest town and hold a salaried job. There is no running water to this day. There was no electricity either until 15 years ago. What is more interesting is that even before electricity actually reached the village , Meters to measure electric consumption had already been installed in several village homes. Talk about over-optimism.

In this smug little hole which I liken to Gabriel Garcia’s Macondo, the first ever homeless people I had ever encountered thronged the sides of a thin river that ran by the fields lush with paddy and jute. It is very difficult to imagine homelessness in a village as poor as this, but there it was. They caught fish with bare hands in unclaimed river territory. They worked in the fields as ad-hoc harvest season labor. They climbed the scaly coconut trees when they were ripe with coconuts, and they did many other jobs considered dangerous, even for a villager. I am not sure whether they lived at one place for long, for depravation can only take as much, and they moved to another village in search of work and food, when it became scarce here.

They lived right over the grassy land by the river bank. Small “tents” were built of heavy plastic sheets and branches off fallen trees. A person and a child would probably fit inside one of those, if they crunched enough their malnutrition-ed bodies. These flimsy tents couldn’t stay upright on a windy night and would frequently have to be “re-built”. If you looked inside one of them, you could see their worldly possessions – a small bundle of clothes, pitcher to hold water, aluminum bowls or plates, aluminum pot to cook rice, a small mirror, toiletries and simple cooking items like salt and oil. There were people too poor to buy oil for cooking. They would have to do with raw flour mixed with water for dinner.
When it was time to move, they gathered their entire lifetime of possessions in a bundle and carried it over their backs to the next village.

Old couple living off the streets of Mumbai

They lived by the Vikhroli train station. I walked by them every now and then on my way to the market. It did not strike me that they were homeless and abandoned by their families until one day the old woman was lying on the grassy patch next to the sidewalk. A man, equally old and thin, sat by her. The old woman was lying on the grass, curled like a thin rusty wafer, too weak to even move. Some people had given them food, but passers-by mostly walked past throwing them a pitiful look. This must be an abandoned old couple, rejected by their families and left on the dangerous streets of Mumbai. The next day they were both gone.

Young mad girl at Kolkata station

You probably know by now (thanks to movies like Slumdog) that the most helpless homeless find shelter in the railway stations of our country. Young children especially grow up learning ways to make a living on platforms and railway cabins.
One of them was a young girl, beautiful but mentally ill, as evident from her antics right outside the station. Homes for the mentally ill are so infamous for their severe and animal-like treatment to the inmates, that I wonder whether life for these people is better outside those mental homes. This young girl however, was bearing the burden of her beauty, as well as poverty and mental illness. I would not even want to imagine the ways she had been beaten and raped, all for a morsel of food.

Atlanta - home to 20,000 homeless

Where do so many homeless come from in a city like Atlanta? They sprout from within us, the lost ones with less education, the less skillful, those suffering from a disease, addicted to alcohol or drugs, abandoned by families, rejected by society for a past crime for which they have probably repented, the mentally unstable, or the ones carrying a social stigma. Thousands of them are children, which is a concern since teen pregnancies are common among them and more homeless children keep adding to to the growing list.

That was only the background bit. As an individual every person is different. Backgrounds hound us like faint shadows from the past coming alive. Their presence maybe all encompassing, but there is more to an entity than that. Circumstances and our past can hold us back, however, inside every individual there is a unique spirit, as different from another, which bravely burns for itself and for itself only. The homeless people that came to Turner Field that day demonstrated that truth more than ever. And I had something to learn that day.

One of the people that came was a man of enviable swagger, standing 6’ 1” or more in height, around 280 lbs, 50ish, with dark curly hair and a hairy face with eyes that screamed sarcasm. He came looking for a jacket and couldn’t find anything that he liked. They were either not his size or not his style. Every few minutes he cursed at the poor standards of these organizations meant for the homeless, but in a low voice to himself, so no one would hear. Fifty years on the street must have taken its toll, for to me he looked like a hardened man, with enough street experience most of us would never know of, and enough hatred to be mistrustful of everything. He talked a lot, but I wonder if he even listened to a single word I said. We did manage to find him a jacket he liked, and although it was a bit small for him, at least he seemed kind of happy. Right before he left he stuck into his bag, two bags of toiletries (only one was allowed per person), and I let him since he had hardly picked up anything else from the inventory.

The 35ish tall and lanky man was dressed soberly in an olive sweater and black trousers. If you met this man at the neighborhood Starbucks you would probably think he works at the local library. There was a look in his eyes which defied his meager living conditions. Calm and collected, deep and compassionate, like a quiet river flowing at its own pace. My observation was not wrong. He explained he had come looking for shirts and sweaters and did not intend to take anything more than he required (which is really thought-provoking for most of us that have become used to confusing wants with needs). When he picked a few clothes, they were all shades of khaki or olive green. Great taste I must say, for I would have picked the same for myself. When I told him so, he replied, “Well yes, I dig this color!”

There were a bunch of 20 year olds in came looking for shoes. There were 4 or 5 of them, really nice kids that said “maam” and “thank you”. I wonder why they were on the streets.

The two ladies I met were both not at all in a hurry. Since women were allowed to choose and pick unlimited number of items, they made good use of that opportunity and picked clothes by the dozens. Women, by nature I would think, are programmed to optimize opportunities, at least when it came to matters of home and material. Child-rearing teaches you that. Depravity probably teaches even more. I was glad they found what they came looking for.

So this was the end of just yet another Christmas day, where some good hearted people I met got some new old clothes, a shower and a haircut, and food to take back home. Oh I forgot, no home, just back to the street. I drove back, thinking whether I had met these people at some other place, at some other time, before.

Colors will shatter the unimaginable darkness of light beings

2008-11-30T18:52:00.001-08:00

From the color of dark white walls
The tones of my imagination fade.

Grand glory of historic
bricks, with sharp lines.
Smooth as varnish,shiny
these even colored marvels.

One by one they stand tall
bricks of a grand white wall.
As indistinguishable,
even colored marvels.

But today at the break of the day
The glassy army will enter the field.
One by one the bricks will cringe
Fine lines will appear, from the focus to the fringe.

The mirage of merriness
Squares copulating for a life shall end.
Lines will mend
Pre-written history with a bend.

A few of them will crumble
Few others, remain.
Pinks and reds will gape out of the cracks
Blues and blacks, un-tame.

I watch,
Lost in the clinking of marbles I suspend.
Bricks laugh in front of me, little by little
Some happy, some pretend.

In the shallow of their earthen hearts
How much can they swim?
A metal pendant rusts
A dry rose dreams.

Rich city, Poor city, and man

2008-11-19T19:53:00.000-08:00

Thick chunks of recycled air divide

People City People

Sitting inside their matchbox cars,

like pretty dolls in moving coffins.

They move in time and space, waiting to inhale.

Somewhere else far

Huddled men cry

Squeezed into a tiny matchbox room,

hunger has made them entities.

Trapped in time and space, waiting to exhale.

The Strange Connection (3) - Anya the Artemis

2008-11-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

There used to be a time when I used to think of her exactly as she used to appear to me every night. Yet every time I saw her, she would have changed her appearance. If one day she was a Mediterranean dame with dark eyes and wavy brown hair, the next day she would transform into a straight haired Latina with heavily mascara-ed blue eyes, and a prominent pout. If one day she was a moon-face recluse, the next day, she was a starry-eyed vixen.

I eagerly waited for her next transformed look, and wondered what she had up her sleeve.

Sometimes when I thought about it, I was embarrassed to be smitten by her. After all, she was not even for real. Or in more accurate words, she was just an actor. Of sorts. She was part actor, part story-teller, an extremely beautiful story-teller, so to speak. To call her just beautiful would be a gross understatement, for her beauty was unparalleled in the part of the world I was familiar with.

However, I do not know if you would call her the conventional story-teller. That is because she narrated her stories on YouTube, for an audience that was more interested in her than the stories she told. As for myself, I am not well read, so to me there is no better way of listening to a story. However if you prefer to not call her a story-teller, by all means, don't. But to me she was a complete enchantress, a goddess of the moon, a soul-soother. For lonely people like me, wandering through the internet at night aimlessly, she provided shelter, and sleep.

She called herself Anya. Her stories were like lullabies for grownups. They were soothing stories, funny stories, twisted stories, cute stories, love stories, hate stories, but always mesmerizing stories. Her stories were almost always about someone very similar to me, and almost never about herself. While telling the story she kept her distance from it, from me as one of the characters; and then slowly and silently entered inside the story to rescue me. In turn I became indebted to her, and unfailingly returned everyday to her website. After listening to her for a few nights, one became addicted to her stories. I had already become addicted to her. She had already become my sleeping-pill.

With time I wondered more and more about her. About the person that she was in real life. About how she really looked without the fake hair and the fake eyelashes and the garish makeup. To my every email she had replied, yet I had found nothing about her that I wanted to know. All she revealed was that she was an actor and that she lived in the United States, State and city remain a secret.

One day she came as Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt. She is supposed to be the protector of young women. She told a story about the young man living in the dingy part of town, unemployed and lonely, a social misfit that could neither survive in his circumstances nor abandon the town. Artemis, the self-made Goddess that she was, paved a secret way for get him out, into a world that was waiting for him.

That day I made a decision. I was about to make a proposition to Anya. Without thinking much I had already decided what and how it was going to be, and I was going to carry out my plan without delay.

For waiting would spoil everything.

To be continued....

Fall colors are changing the World

2008-11-06T19:26:00.000-08:00

Fall turned the color green
into orange, red
leaves spread loud
and brazen; like the cry before
deprived sleep
like the burst before blindness.

The chill of morning air
bites, and silences the passion.

Two birds that visit my window-view tree
all year long like stars,
Their little feet dancing
in the spring of the branches.
The cold seethed in the warmth of the leaves.
The birds kept dancing.

And my little one keeps smiling
with a glint in his eyes.

**** Note from the Author ****

This poem is actually a symbolic representation of the changing times around Nov 2008 - The falling economy and Obama being elected.

The color green in the first para : Green as is money, prosperity, green as in greed.
The Fall - literal meaning is seasonal the month of Oct, Nov. Symbolic meaning -Fall of the government, economic downfall. Color Orange, Red - as in revolution, danger, trying times.

The second para is about the things that are not going to change whatever happens to the environment around them. Like the two birds that dance on the tree every day of the year. Like stars, they are a constant.
My son (and many other little children oblivious to whats happening around them). He keeps smiling irrespective of whether I've had a bad day, or whether the Wall Street crashes.

The Strange Connection (2) - Porch with Grills

2008-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

When I lived on the second storey of the 3-storey ancestral home in one of the poorer districts of that big city, I looked down at the world from the grilled porch. Porch with thick iron grills painted the strangest shade of green. The grills were to prevent kids from leaning over the short wall, but more importantly to prevent thieves from climbing into the house from the porch. My mother had made optimal use of the grills by tying ends of nylon ropes to them and converting the porch into a washer man’s drying zone. The array of taut multicolored nylon ropes of various thicknesses hanging above looked like a maze of yarn sprawled across a sky painted with whitewash beaten and sheared by a regular monsoon.

On the days my mother didn’t occupy the porch for weekly linen drying, I liked to sit on the old wicker chair and look at people walking on the street below. I could sit there for hours, occasionally smoking cigarettes and throwing the burnt butts into the drain by the side of the street below. The drain was not supposed to be open since the new municipal corporation had been working on “covered drains” for years. Yet at many places, the drains were open. The spot where I threw my cigarette butts was easily recognizable, giving away evidence on how clear and efficient the drains really were.

I had grown used to the ugly drains, just as I had grown used to the nylon clothes lines, the pealing-off whitewash, my mother’s occasional curses thrown at me for being an unemployed extra-mouth-to-feed, the spats between my grandmother and my mother (that could be heard from the kitchen on the ground floor to the topmost floor of the house), the unbearable heat of the mid-days, and my unwavering, un-diminishing, mine-only, alone-ness.

As a college-educated (with poor grades) twenty three year old man living with his parents at his grandparents’ house in a city of four million unemployed youth, I was not considered an anomaly. But, as the only one in this neighborhood that did not want to play cards at the community fitness center or share a smoke with the other unemployed men just hanging out, certainly made me an outsider, and the “creepy guy”.

Despite living in this huge mess of a city, very little changed in my life. Or for that matter in the lives of everyone that lived around me. The year was 2008. Economy was still booming in this part of the world. Money was pouring into the big metropolitan cities in the South. But this city remained relatively untouched. And men like me remained like they were supposed to.

Then something else happened, something completely alien.

I found an obsession. Day and night, night and day, I followed like a clock. Time became important again.

Yes, it was her. And she, changed my life.

- To be continued....

Full Pitchers, Empty Pitchers

2008-09-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

“Full pitchers move silently”
“Half empty ones make (unnecessary) noise”

These are the opening lines of an old popular wedding song in Bengal (and I must add that such songs have now been replaced by the modern Bappi Lahiri crap, and the even more modern Himesh Reshamiya crap)

For a long time I interpreted the song as it was supposed to be interpreted. The song inspires humility, a desirable quality. Full pitchers symbolize strength, patience, and tolerance. Full pitchers move through the tragedies of life, undeterred, unfaltering in their mission, which is the mission to survive, silently. Wisdom supposedly does not make a lot of unnecessary noise. The noisemakers are half empty, lacking in patience, and therefore incapable of waiting and learning.

The eeriness of these words and the meaning surrounding the words have both inspired and troubled me since I was a teenager. Silence has never been a very faithful friend of mine. I am unable to associate full pitchers with the “strong and silent” image; the image that comes to my mind is dark, dark and unknown, ready to be forgotten and abandoned. Darkness is non-existent, inert and doesn’t even let its shadow be.

Yet, the old meaning stays on, refuses to leave, poking from time to time. And surprisingly, often at the right time.

13 years ago, I had written a poem on Silence. Very amateur-ish, but am still posting it.

Silence, unruffled silence
Mystery less, ordinary silence, flows from all directions
from the tired noise, camouflaged rhythm
and barren music.

Silence is cold, Silence is bold**.
Silence of winter nights
Silence of mothers
Silence of Gods.

Groaning silence, growling silence
Mourning silence, scowling silence
Unpacified silence
Unspecified silence

Behind the curtains,
The amused, annoyed cradle.

**Apparently I agreed at that time that Silence was “bold”

The Strange Connection - (1) short intro to her life

2008-09-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Sick-Sweet smell of acetone mixed with the air readily as the spilled nail polish remover soaked the white linen bed sheet.

The room was dressed in white, just like the bed.
Stern, as snow that never melts.
Pristine, as pearls born from deep sea secrets.
Silent, as sheets draping the dead.

The carpet on the floor is white and plush, exuding an aura of luxury not at ease with the otherwise austere room. A large frame hung on one of the walls displaying a black and white photo of colorful flowers.

“Shit” exclaimed Anya, before realizing that acetone evaporates quickly. She decided to drop the sheets for dry cleaning tomorrow.

This was Anya’s bedroom, which is always dressed in white, like a bride. Or more precisely like the never-married bride, a Ms. Havisham from Great Expectations, ready for the clock to strike the right time, and the holy ceremony to be solemnized.

The room next to the bedroom is her “study”, which should perhaps be called the dark room. Heavy drapes the color of blue almost as dark as black keep sunlight away through the day. The walls adorn a few mismatched pieces: a clock, shapeless metal art-work, and an antique mirror with broken glass. There were no pictures of people, no images that could tell if anyone else lived here, or if there was anyone that Anya knew, remembered, or wanted to remember.

A black functional desk and a few lamps were the only furniture in this room.

It is almost impossible to tell how long Anya has lived in this apartment, or whether she was going to be here tomorrow. She speaks to no neighbors, and doesn’t have any visitors. Often in the mornings she slips out of her door before others are even awake. She travels frequently and sometimes moves into new apartments, or even moves away to another town, if she pleases. Whether she works from home or goes out to work is a mystery still to be unraveled by this small town of 30,000 people.

But Anya’s existence is not as unnoticeable as it appears from the description. On the contrary, she is quite famous. Not only to people living outside this small town, but within this town itself.

If she hadn’t been famous, I wouldn't have known about her, and wouldn’t have left everything behind to find her.

Continued....

Sex, Love, and Friendship

2008-08-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, three men, on a wet day by the pool, decided unanimously that there can not be any platonic relationships between a man and a woman. One of them quickly clarified though that if there were a few examples of long term platonic friendships between a man and a woman, that was only because the man was secretly “waiting” for the right time.

Seriously, I have never seen three (very different) men agree upon something so completely (almost vehemently) as they did. In unison they declared loudly that there cannot be a platonic relationship; which to me sounded more like “men are looking for sex in every association they form with a woman”.

I found it slightly entertaining to watch them squeal with laughter, a male equivalent to feminine giggling. Giggling as you know never was a popular method of making a statement.

Since I took the time to actually write a post on this topic, you must have guessed how doubtful I am of their conviction. But then what happens if what they say is true, at least in most cases? Does that mean that every time I approach a man, for “friendship” and no more, I should cautiously interpret his every word, his every gesture?

If what they say is true, would it mean that men do not consider a platonic relationship to be worth anything, other than a future possibility of something more?

If what they say is true, would it mean that women are incapable of providing anything more substantial than sex to a man?

I am quite sure that there are men that do not agree with the ones by the pool.
If that were not true then I would not be writing this post here, instead would hideously post it in a periodical with exclusive female readership.

If a Jane or a Jill is reading this post, reflect back on your good friendship with Shane or Bill, and remember the times he has pulled you out of trouble, stood by you through your life struggles, with nothing to ask for in return. Strange as that may sound to some people, there still are a few good men on this planet; just as there are a few good women.
It is not necessary that these friendships culminate into something more. It depends on plenty of factors and circumstances.

Well maybe X likes Y and Y likes X. And what happens if X actually lusts after Y as well? Perhaps X would try to go for it? Or maybe X would be content with being friends? Perhaps X believes that friendships sour when expectations increase. Perhaps X doesn’t want to keep guessing his entire life. As many people, that many combinations. To generalize would be as ridiculously simplistic as putting the whole 6.8 billion population of the world into 12 zodiac compartments.

Is life as simple as that? No it isn’t but if you want to think so then go ahead.

After all we have sometimes given up the long winding way for the shortcut; writing long snail mails to IM; courting with patience to speed dating; learning to construct a meaningful sentence to typing TTYL.

Life comes at us fast, and in return we’ve almost coded our answers in standard scripts. Maybe its time to slow down. And then maybe the person next to you would slow down as well.

Sex. Love. Friendship. Three beautiful words with infinite interpretations.

Do we have to look for the standard answers?

Collective Thought ?

2008-06-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Collective thought. It exists.

And it is more powerful than you think. Truth is that most of us rather succumb to it most of the time. We may hate middle ground, but when put on the hot seat surrounded by a million questioning glances; most of us hurriedly steer clear of pointy edges and sit under the shadows of vague common thought. Shame I say, but humankind has its natural limitations (one of the reasons why I dismiss humanity as a wonderful corrosive to be consumed with meticulous carefulness)

The huge inertia of collective thought ensures ambiguity; and protects it from being broken down to be dissected as individual components.

It is funny that while there can never be anything known as collective thinking (since it is self-contradicting), collective thought should often be so vulgarly powerful.

I sometimes wonder if I am more attentive to it than it to me.

~ Proma

Unmotivated

2008-06-19T21:12:00.000-07:00

They greet like dried leaves rustling through
the windows of an abandoned mansion
where paintings of forgotten faces
adorn walls of incomplete erosion.

Two sets of eyes lock,
and lips curl lovingly by chance
The flitting smiles pause in respect
for the passing glance.

But just as dried leaves wouldn’t turn green
no matter how much it pours,
The wrinkles of old souls do not smoothen
from love tales of yore.

Dowry Death

2008-05-20T21:37:00.001-07:00

She lay in the dark
Her moon face – cold
The vast sky spreads like a dome
In death she is again alone

She died burning
Sari draped the cooking fire they say
Her charred face now silent
Under embroidered stars

Thousands of miles away
Hundreds of cries later
A woman screams
Fire ! Fire !

The Silver Bracelet - the final episode

2008-05-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

In the realm of emotions, fear has a special position.

Lelin dadu’s voice triggered in Neera that same fear; except that it was still covered in suspicion. Before Neera could answer Lelin dadu she was thinking many questions. Why would he want to see her so early (when it was still dark outside) in the morning? Why did his voice sound different? He was probably awake for a while waiting for the alarm to strike. What made him so impatient?

Those questions would be answered in a few minutes.

Neera opened the door to the stiff figure of dadu, standing slightly crooked, his eyes almost completely hidden inside the circles of wrinkles.

“My child” he started. His voice sounded like the dry susurrus of unhealthy branches. But he could speak no more and stopped. Instead he drew a long breath. His eyes were trying to avoid Neera’s.

“Dadu, is something wrong? Why don’t you come in and sit?” Neera asked sensing something was wrong.

He did not enter through the door. He kept standing there for a few seconds. Then he held out a bag in his hand. A small brown bag. Neera took the bag from him and opened it.

Inside was a silver bracelet. Neera’s silver bracelet from her jewelry box that she had shown dadu the previous evening. Lelin dadu had quietly kept one piece of jewelry. Cheap silver jewelry.

Neera was stunned in disbelief. Angrily she looked at dadu, starting to feel out of control.

How could he, an old man, the village leader, the host of her brief stay, her father’s teacher, the entire village’s pride, do such a thing? Wasn’t he the only legend of the village? Wasn’t he the person people came to consult before they went to the village priest or the panchayat? Wasn’t he most revered man of the village?

Neera wanted to cry out; she wanted to shout in her inexorable anger. She was exhausted of everything that had happened in these two days. Was there anything or anyone she could trust these days when the greatest reverent was of dubious provenance?

It was something in Lelin dadu’s mostly hidden eyes that stopped Neera. She couldn’t respond to his breaking stature, standing there by the door, waiting for Neera’s reaction.He stood there as the accused stands at the trial, waiting for his punishment. His normally wrinkly face was smoothened out a bit, due to the softening effect of despair and shame. It was an image of pathos, severed a bit only by the unusualness of the crime by the unexpected culprit.

And then it struck Neera. The accused dadu could have kept his little secret to himself if he wanted. He did not need to reveal his moment of weakness. He could have continued to be the legend. The world would have continued to sing his glory.

Instead he chose to accept a black mark on his lifelong resume. In a trice he could become a culprit from a legend, but that did not stop him accepting the crime.

And then it struck Neera. That is why he is a village legend.

In the village of two-lakes everything that happens is transparent. Small-talk, ignorant-talk, bitch-talk, loud quarrels, everything happens in the open. If a young man runs away with his beautiful neighbor; he returns to the village within a few months with his pregnant neighbor (now his wife) and the villagers accept him back, although after a few punches and slaps.

Dadu after all was a villager. His life was governed by the same transparency as the lives of rest of the villagers.

Neera at last spoke to dadu, in a slow serious voice. “Dadu I have decided to forget about what happened. And you should too”.

Neera gathered her belongings from the mixed paraphernalia. She had just rejuvenated her recrudescent jovialness with a beautiful life experience. She was uplifted in spirits and humming an old tune. After packing her bags she walked down towards the pond, beside the temple.

Ducks with ugly beaks were paddling in water. Neera called Jeff’s number.

Jeff was finishing his dinner at a restaurant. He sounded tired but happy when he said “Hey I was about to call you”.

“Jeff, I just wanted to tell you something”, Neera talked calmly. “I figured it isn’t working between the two of us. We’re not compatible at all. I would rather we end it now rather than later and after many more futile fights”. “And I’m sorry I called so early and woke you up last time I called”.

Jeff sounded perplexed but not too unhappy. He was a little angry as he didn’t expect it to be so sudden.

“There is enough time”, thought Neera. She threw a pebble in the pond. One lagging duckling paddled faster away from Neera.

In an hour Neera would be headed back to Kolkata. She walked back towards the house. The temple bells started ringing.

She picked a few marigolds from the garden and stuck one in her hair.

****** The End *****

The Silver Bracelet - Part 4

2008-04-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

In the evening Neera tried calling Jeff twice and each time got disconnected. No lines open perhaps. The village got crappy network but she was glad that there was any.

The eager anticipation of hearing Jeff’s voice was replaced by the nervous resentment of not getting him over the phone when she wanted to. By this time Jeff would be usually up and ready for his daily commute to work, unless he had been staying up most of the night. Jealousy and suspicion are time-tested aides of bad relationships, more so when distance separates minds and insecurity misconstrues emotions.

“This is the last time” said Neera as she dialed the number again. Perhaps she thought she will be third time lucky.

“Hey Nee”, Jeff’s voice on the other side said.

“I’ve been dying to talk to you!”. Neera could hardly control herself. “I wanted to tell you about...” her sentence was cut short by Jeff.

“Neeeee ! Its real early here and I’m trying to get some sleep. Got back home real late last night. Lets talk about this later okay? How about I call you ?”

Neera wanted to slam the cell-phone to the ground. It was 7:00am in NYC, not so early for a Monday morning. And they hadn’t spoken since she had got here. But if Jeff wanted to sleep there was nothing much she could say to that, could she?

There was something wrong in this relationship. Until this point she could see those signals, the red flags so to speak, which she chose to overlook.

She was going to wait.

And later that night, she waited. For her eyelids to succumb to exhaustion; her body to crumble inside a fuzzy hole driven only by dreams and nothing else. Exhaustion from a day of long walks abated the jittery weariness from waiting (for sleep, for a phone call, for the body to collapse) to a certain degree; but Neera still struggled to drown into the blank sphere of sleep.

The fact that Neera needed to get up early the next day for her trip back to Kolkata, wasn’t helping her. The old wooden bed creaked every time Neera turned to the other side. Outside her tiny bedroom fireflies and strange insects giggled in the dark making eerie noises. Neera lay awake for a long time on her bed, under the mosquito net hanging by the strings and tucked at the corners; listening to the fireflies outside.

*****************************************

The next morning itunes alarm broke her sleep. She woke up, short-of-sleep and heavy-hearted from last night. Unlike yesterday morning, today was dark and unfamiliar. Neera had no idea why she wanted to come to the village. She should have been back with Jeff in NYC and carpooling with him to work.

It was so early that the morning sounds hadn’t even started. No chants of the medieval mantras at the temple courtyard, no beating of the khols, no tinkling of the manjiraas.

In the dark room the mosquitoes made buzzing sounds, plotting to get inside the mosquito net. Neera got out of bed and was looking for her slippers when she heard a loud knock at the door. She almost gave out a scream when she heard the voice: It was Lenin dadu’s voice, only it sounded more shrill than usual.

“Neera! Are you awake? I heard the alarm”.

She was afraid.

*********************************
Concluding part soon!
*********************************

khol: Traditional drums popular in east India, esp. Bengal
manjiraas: Indian percussion instrument, hand cymbals

The Silver Bracelet - Part 3

2008-03-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

It surprised me to see how quickly Neera adjusted to the village living. Old memories, like old habits, die hard. They reside somewhere within us, forsaken like childhood toys, forgotten like best friends from kindergarten, forbidden like innocent mistakes made during adolescence. In our attempt to evolve living the same life, refreshed several times, we bury the old under the new; yet, scrape the top just a little and they spill out, like fresh blood under a scarcely healed wound.

Today is only the second day of her stay and Neera is already trotting the village path in her Abercrombie attire and Nike shoes. The village school that she remembered from her last visit had transformed completely, from a two-room mud-house into an eight-room brick-and-mortar box-house, complete with real wooden furniture.

Right behind the school there used to be the only grocery store of the village, now replaced by a row of tidy shops, twelve in all. Neera saw one of the shopkeepers holding a cell phone, and wondered how many more villagers owned one. It seemed strange that at a place with no running water and nightly power-cuts, several families owned television sets, around a third households owned motorcycles, and a few it appeared even have cell phones. Neera was impressed. I think she not only was impressed but actually felt proud.

After having taken several dozen pictures with her digital camera, she decided to get back to Lelin dadu’s house to pick up her own cell phone. She wanted to talk to Jeff and tell him about the wonderful time she was spending here.

As she approached the house, she saw Lelin dadu sitting on a huge folding cot outside, in the courtyard, soaking in the winter sun. Now that he had all the time in the world(since he had retired from work), he could afford to re-read the newspaper, chat with the laborers on their way to the paddy fields, and generally think endlessly about anything that he wanted to think about without having to hurry to a conclusion.

Neera caught him gazing blankly at the coconut trees, or was he just looking at the sky? But the next moment, as if he had been waiting for someone to break his monotonic trance, he turned his head to her and called out her name loudly. “Neera ! My child, did you have a nice walk?”

“Yes dadu. I’m having a great time!”

“Ha ha, that’s good. This place has certainly changed a great deal since you were here last time. Listen my dear, do call out to the lady in the kitchen and ask her to send two cups of tea for us. Let’s sit and talk about America now.”

Neera did not feel like chatting right now, but when she looked at his gleaming eyes, shining like lamps atop an old lighthouse, as if pulling up his sagging lower lids from drooping so much, she changed her mind. She called out to the lady in the kitchen and asked for tea.

Lelin dadu began “I have read a lot about the USA. The newspapers these days carry a lot of articles about life in the US. All these kids working in the software industry go and live there and so the media has stories to tell the kids back here. I have nothing against the children going away and settling abroad. It is their free will. Everyone should have the freedom to make choices in his or her life.”

Neera was certainly impressed with the beginning.

Dadu continued, “But I keep wondering how different the life there actually could be? I look at you and can tell that you are a visitor here and not a native. Look at your clothes, so nice, very expensive”.

And just then, dadu squinted. He was looking at Neera’s feet trying to figure out something. Then he spoke looking awfully perplexed, “Why my dear, have you lost one anklet?”

Neera laughed at his surprise. “Oh! This is how we wear it. Just one anklet, its fashion.”

“Oh I see!” he said laughing at his folly. “And what is the material it is made of?”

“Its oxidized metal. You can find this stuff here as well dadu. In kolkata.”

“Oh no no no no”, said dadu in a confident voice. “Your one must be of superior quality. USA is so advanced in everything. Do you have more jewelry that you bought there?”

Neera was feeling extremely uncomfortable by now. It seemed very weird that an old man dadu’s age should be interested in women’s jewelry. She had heard from her father that Lelin dadu was interested in science, politics and social reform. The last thing she expected was his keen interested in anklets and metal jewelry. However, all she could do was to go into her room and bring out her jewelry box. She opened the box to pull out a couple pieces - an oxidized metal bracelet, several plated dangles, huge ceramic pendants, rhodium rings, mixed metal pieces and a beautiful sterling silver bracelet.

Lelin dadu stared admiringly at each piece of jewelry as if they were artwork by renowned artists. He ran his fingers over them. He unfastened and fastened the latches on the chains and bracelets. He asked Neera how each piece was supposed to be worn. To him, these were not just mere jewelry, but pieces of the United States of America that were brought for him to see and feel. Perhaps Neera missed to see the great excitement in dadu’s eyes, smeared with a tinge of jealously and a pinch of resentment, but I am completely convinced, that it was the highlight of the year in Lelin dadu’s life.

The lady from the kitchen brought in two cups of tea.

They drank the tea silently. Neera then took back the jewelry box into her room. She even more wanted to talk to Jeff and tell him how weird Lelin dadu has been.

*****************

To be continued......

Relapse

2008-01-29T19:59:00.000-08:00

Scarlet rose petals
Crumpled,
In her fists, tight

Your eager glances
Nervous,
Over heartbeats, close

Quiet longing
Swallowed,
By the night, dead

Open saffron palms
Hennaed,
Over the brow, sweat

***

Shattered tension shatters
Her henna hands in yours,
Surrendered night, smiles

~Proma
(written on a 10 min whim)

The Silver Bracelet - Part 2

2007-12-24T23:21:00.000-08:00

Neera is in no way related to Lelin dadu by blood. She happens to be the eldest daughter of late Banshidhar, Lelin dadu’s best friend from childhood. Banshi was a few years younger to Lelin and even as a kid had dreams of making it big in life. That is why he moved to Kolkata after finishing high school, and started his own small business. He married late and all his children were brought up in modern ways, unaccustomed to village life and people. Since Banshidhar passed away ten years ago, Neera hadn’t since returned to the village, and had almost no recollection of Lelin dadu.

Neera’s New York is as different from the village of two-lakes, as is Brooklyn Bridge from the makeshift bamboo lake-crossing that threatens to snap if more than two persons or one cow walks over it at a time. Unlike two-lakes, New York has running water and wide roads bereft of potholes. The many heroes of the city, the Lelin dadus, vein through city’s gushing life-forces, but their songs of glory are overpowered by the honks of rushed passengers.

Unlike the two-lakes girls that are married by the time they are sixteen, Neera was twenty nine and single. She worked at an architecture firm in NYC and dated Indian men. For the last few months however, she had been going out with Jeff, a young American man with Irish ancestry who worked in the same firm as hers. She had a big fight with Jeff the day before she had to leave for India, to be with her mom and cousins for Durga-Puja.

As she boarded the airplane at the airport, tangential emotions tugged at her heart: the sadness from her fight with Jeff; the enthusiasm to meet her mother and cousins after two years; the dread of meeting her well-meaning aunts that greet her with the same old “So when are you getting married?” question; and the anticipation of going to the village of two-lakes after ten years. Settling down in her seat, she plugged the earphones and tried listening to some on-air music. The soft swinging of the plane heaving through clouds, the smooth jazz, and the heaviness of Neera’s thoughts had a soporific effect and soon, she succumbed to sleep.

***********************************

The village of two-lakes had been informed well in advance that Banshidhar’s daughter, a beautiful grown woman that made more money than anyone else in the village, a modern girl that wore jeans and clingy tops, an NRI, and peculiarly still single, would be visiting the village for two days. By the time Neera actually arrived at the village, all four hundred inhabitants of the village knew she had arrived. She would be staying at Lelin dadu’s house along with Lelin dadu, his wife, their three sons, the son’s wives, and their twelve children.

The commotion caused by her arrival was something Neera had never expected.

Four or five married women had gathered by the house. Neera knew they were married because they all covered their heads with their sari-pallus, wore red bindis and carried a cheerful but matter-of-factly disposition. One of them had a thermos flask filled with overly-sweetened tea. The lady in the red printed sari had brought Marie biscuits, a tin of uncooked “boiled” rice, and four large young coconuts. Neera hadn’t even asked for things and they had already been arranged for her. But it took her a few minutes to understand that the real reason these women came was to see “her”, and not to bring food and tea (which Lelin dadu’s family was already providing for her). Neera was now beginning to realize that she, to them, was an outcome of the past, a cause for the future, an abnormality, and a celebration, all at the same time.

Within a few hours all boundaries had been broken, and laid out on the big verandah that overlooked the vegetable garden, the hand-pump, the pond, and further down, the village temple. Out on the verandah Neera’s gifts for the family had been laid out on a large straw mat, as they were being carefully inspected, admired, discussed and marveled at by the family and a group of on-lookers( that were only passers-by moments ago). Though overwhelmed and tired, Neera was enjoying the attention and company, and tried her best to make the best of those two days.

*********** to be continued ***************

First Love makes you a worse person. (So go look for the second one to fix that!)

2007-12-17T18:31:00.000-08:00

It has been twenty years since you left. Twenty years that I have not seen you. Honest to God, I don’t completely remember your face now. Only that smile, those hazel eyes, and your green striped shirt that later, someone stole from your clothesline on a summer afternoon. That summer remember, we stole mangoes from whichever garden we could, and attempted to cook chutney. And the aftermath – burnt coils of the electric heater and a blackened saucepan.

I wonder why even after all these years, a gentle sprinkle of your memories, unleashes a strong flow of emotions that occupy those corners of my mind that normally don’t exist in my everyday life. I don’t like it. I don’t like that you come so close to me but only in a dream. I can neither touch you nor make you go away. You tease me like a freshly popped champagne bottle spilling out froth. That froth that burns my fingertips, but never wets them enough. And slowly, precipitates away into nothing.

You are not “nothing” in my life. You are my first love. The kind of love they say you get only once. The kind they say you “give” only once.
The true value of the thing lost can be weighed by its remains. When you left, what remained was a special kind of emptiness. I say a special kind because it couldn’t be replaced. I couldn’t let that happen. Because if I did, the value of my emptiness would prove to be less than the value of your memories that remained. I am selfish you see. I am too proud. Losing you, did not make me any humbler. In my pride I let, the froth burn my fingers. And then I “let” it precipitate away, into emptiness.

Mother's gold bangles - a poem

2007-11-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

The gold bangles that you mother
had put gently in my hands
the week before your destiny took me away from you
and brought me closer to my fate here,
now await patiently in the old embroidered jewelry box.

For the first year or two, about two times a year
I opened that box
eager and excited.
Yes, the gold still retained the shine, the exuberance.
I wore them delighted, glamorized and comforted.

Now years have passed and I not even have time
To ponder upon the time that went between,
or the bridges of thought that separate us.
The giddy gold I’ve traded
for the purple and red earthy beads
that guys tell me make me exotic.

I wear the wear and tear,
of cheap affordable life.
(The bright shines blind me now)
Don’t tell me now I’ve spread myself thin
It’s an art you earn after you’ve lost everything.
By giving up the living, I’ve learned to love.
By giving up the pining I’ve learned to pain.
The gold, like heart does not
shine forever, for all.

~Proma (Feeling a little homesick this Diwali)

PASSPORTTOFUN - a complete RIP OFF!!!

2007-10-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

We hear of scams and rip off online companies all the time, don't we ? Yeah, they are like pests aren't they - bugging but unavoidable ?
So we take them for granted, like we take for granted lost-luggage-at-Air-France, first-dates-gone-rotten, and d-e-e-l-a-a-y-e-d VISA processing. True True, unless you were sitting in your cubicle one Friday morning like me, checking her online bank statements, and suddenly your eyes opened to the fact that for the last 6 months some conspicuous company called "PASSPORTTOFUN" has charged $14.95 to your account, every single month.
Hmm...unfortunately that's exactly what happened last Friday. And think of the first reaction to your sudden discovery - YOU feel like an IDIOT. God ! what was I doing last 6 months that this transaction missed me. Especially some very provocative name like "PASSPORTTOFUN". I felt like the biggest loser ever. But then to every error made in error, there is a correction that can be made correctly.

So thanks to the creators and propagators of the internet, and more thanks to those countless nerds that run blogs for all things important and necessary, or un-obvious and useless. There was ample information available for PassportTOFun for anyone to go track them.

To summarise my research findings:

1) PASSPORTTOFUN is a company that provides "Savings" to purchases. Which means that the product that they are offering is called "Savings" . Yes, you heard that right. This company charged me $14.95 a month, and what they offer is that if I made a purchase at specific online sites, I would get a 10% rebate. Can you freaking believe that ?? Does their product even qualify as a real product ?

2) Ok so now you're thinking where in hell did I sign up for this service and how did they get my bank account information. It took me a while to figure this out. What had happened was that in March 2007 I purchased an air-ticket from TRAVELOCITY(my regular website for making airticket purchases). As you finish the purchase transaction,it takes you to a webpage where apparently there is a tiny box for signing up for this PASSPORTTOFUN service. Honestly I don't remember clicking it and it may be that the box was already clicked for you. But by clicking that you sign up for this service automatically.

After the initial information collection , I called the PASSPORTTOFUN number (as it appeared in the bank transaction). I was so upset and angry that I was scared I would mumble too much nonsense on the phone. But, whatever was the result - here it goes ------

I call the number and after finding a way to get to a REAL representative, I'm all ready to attack(sadly not the best emotional state to begin with lol!)

ME: I have been charged $14.95 since last 6 months. I never signed up for anything and where did your company get my account information ?

REP: Maam, you signed up for the service on Travelocity.

ME: I don't remember doing that. And even if I did sign up, I should've got a confirmatory email.

REP: We sent you an email Maam.

ME: Did you, because I don't remember getting one. In that case please send me a copy of the email you sent to me.

REP: We don't have copies of the emails sent.

ME: (Now really mad) Oh of course, if you sent me an email I wouldn't get it. Because you're company is fraud and all emails you send is SPAM. And so of course all your emails go into the BULK folder and noone ever gets them. I'm really upset and if you don't return my money I'm going to take action against your company.

REP: (After a pause) Maam Maam ! Because of your special circumstances I will cancel the last payment you made and refund $14.95 to your account.

ME: Are you kidding me ? This is not done ! One month back only , this is not done at all !

REP: Ok maam, I'm going to transfer you to my supervisor now........long silence......

SUPER: Hi this is X , and let me confirm that this is Mrs.Ray ?

ME: Ms Proma Ray please.

SUPER: Oh I am sorry Ms. Ray, and what is your concern ?

ME: (I repeat the story) . Your company got my account information without my consent . And Travelocity gave it to you without my permission. Maam let me tell you this - I work at a Credit card company and know of the Privacy rules and regulations that you have broke by not getting a consent from your customers on this.
(Now here I bluffed a little bit , but really it worked)

ME: (The words in capitals is all bluff) I HAVE DEALT WITH COMPANIES LIKE YOU BEFORE and trust me I'll come after your company too. You break privacy rules, the fed agencies come after you. You don't send notices, the fed agencies come after you. You make those monthly transactions and never send a single email or note to the customer, the fed agencies don't like that. I want a complete refund , nothing less than that.

SUPER: (Quite promptly) Maam I understand your concern and apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. I'm going to go ahead and refund all the money back to your account and you would see it within 2 business days. Again sorry for the
inconvenience.

ME: (smiling victoriously) Thanks.

--------Wondering if I am back to being indifferent to these RIP-Offs ----------

The Silver Bracelet (Part 1)

2007-09-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today is Special.

That was the first thought that struck him as he lay in his bed, woken up by the 5:00 am arati . Like every morning, the chants of the medieval mantras, the beating of the khols and the tinkling of the manjiraas, had together spun a magical weave into his dreams, even before he himself got out of them and embraced the risen world. The distance between the temple where the morning arati was going on, and his house was about one average-sized pond long, which, for you educated lot means about 50 metres or so. Every morning, he wakes up and slowly walks to the hand-pump in his front-yard, brushes his teeth and gargles loudly, frightening the sparrows gathered around the water source. And then on most days, he solemnly looks around, not particularly at anything. By the time the temple crowd disperses after the arati session, he wanders into the vegetable garden. He checks for new coconuts on the palm tree, young lady’s-fingers hanging upside-down on the rough-stemmed plants, and his favorite: pumpkin flowers on the pumpkin vines. Now you must not think that just because he is old, retired, often-forgotten, mostly-lonely, and almost perpetually suffering from one ailment to another, that he is slow, and that he looks unhappy. In fact, today he, our beloved Lelin-dadu, is very happy.

Here in the village of two-lakes, we have always known Lelin-dadu as our “dadu”. If you are wondering about his peculiar name, let me tell you that his real name is Lenin Chandra Das, after the great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. But as it happens with village-distortions, Lenin became Lelin, and Lelin later became Lelin-dadu. In his own way, he was a revolutionary too. He was the first school-teacher at the only school ever built here. He was the first to go to college. He was also the first to actually earn a salary and the first one to retire.

Forty years ago, when I was still a school-going kid, Lelin-dadu was known as the unstoppable teacher that would plead with villagers to send their kids to school during the harvest season. In those days, when we had dirt roads ( since the newer brick roads were built only during the Bangladesh liberation war), boys stopped going to school during the harvest season, because the dirt roads were still flooded with waters from the annual floods. And when he was tired of persuading the parents of the kids without much success, he would bribe us kids with batasas, that are nothing more than coagulated lumps of sugar. To you kids of today, I am sure that isn’t that big an incentive, but back then, we willingly walked the mile and a half through muddy waters ridden by frogs and misdirected snakes, to school everyday for our share of soggy batasas. Aaahh ! as I tell you the story my mouth almost waters to the taste of those forgotten batasas ! But I know that I have been appointed to tell you the story of Lelin-dadu and the Silver bracelet, and will hence forsake my own desires to proceed in the right direction………..

To be Continued................

--------------------------------------------------
arati : hindu prayer
khol: Traditional drums popular in east India, esp. Bengal
manjiraas: Indian percussion instrument, hand cymbals
dadu: Grandfather

Madness doesn't need a reward

2007-08-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

If hope be man's final destiny
then every tear his eyes have shed,
tells a tale of silent victory
greater than hope itself.

Is it his spirit? A madness perhaps
that his shattered self, his broken heart,
Recoils, rewinds and recollects
and colors itself as Art ?

~Proma

Revenge is necessary (crude version)

2007-08-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

It happens all of a sudden:
The breaking of the dreams you called your own
The demise of the world you thought was yours
The curdling of,
your ignorant heart.

You cannot lie, it happens:
You revisit tragedies.
For you are aware that
re-visits trivialize hard truths,
the depth as well as the high.

One sad evening you sat by that window,
I know you did:
And let anger burn you inside-out,
and splinters split through you,
as you sat by, the window to your soul.

I saw your eyes speak to me:
Your lifetime of holding sane,
the pipeline of bottled pain,
cycles running over and end,
Only to begin, yet again.

The only way out, the only respite:
Avenge your sorrows
not drown in your plight.
At the confluence of bursting fire and simmering tears,
the burning revenge ends on the pyre of fear.

By merging defeat into an acceptance speech of life,
You’ve become a woman, not just a man’s wife.

~Proma

The Art of Ginger Tea

2007-07-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

While still in my teens, I often heard my dad recite his favorite lines from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. For years the true meaning behind these lines eluded me, and no matter how deeply I dug into the words, somehow I couldn’t touch what the author really wanted us to understand. My dad, who would always return a mildly challenging smile when asked what those lines meant, would never satisfy our questions fully, but rather leave us in a grumpy, confused, self-defeating state of mind.

And then one day, I finally got it. That occasion was of no particular significance, barring the fact that it had been an extremely tiresome day. I had picked up Sid from his childcare center after my evening MBA classes. It was already ten. Sid, being tenderly fussy on the days he was forced to be away from me till late at night, refused food and went straight to bed. Another night of non-stop studying was about to begin and my mind was already dishing out mini deadlines for the night. Under severe time pressure, I rarely crumble; instead you’d find me pacing back and forth in the kitchen for a few minutes before digging into the assigned tasks with the vengeance of a murdered spirit.

For some reason, that day, while pacing through the kitchen I paused and thought “Why can’t I take a few moments off and make myself some tea! ”. More accurately (since I remember every second of that night), I wanted ginger tea with extra sugar. Now you must be thinking, what’s so incredibly enlightening about making tea that I dedicate this blog post to the occasion. But I assure you this really was a life-altering moment. Ginger tea changed my life forever. Ginger tea made me smell the roses and interpret Tolstoy.
Perhaps it was also the fact that for the first time of my life, I had been on my own with Sid, and despite the never-ending days and very frequent night-outs, life was working. Living was happening! And that was the very essence of my joy. And the aroma of my ginger tea, left no doubt in my mind that yes I had found the key to my happiness and hence the happiness of my family.

****
Nowadays I find myself hear the birds sing more in the mornings, although nothing in my life has changed ( NO, I haven’t rented a new apartment near a bird sanctuary). Everything is the same but nothing's the usual.

Especially the fact that now I’m addicted to ginger tea for life.

Live it !

****

The Compromise (Final Part)

2007-07-02T22:43:00.000-07:00

June 21st 2007
5:40pm
Savannah, GA

Shyla’s little ranch home was tucked away behind the row of weeping willows. More dreary looking houses and an abandoned truck rusting by the street, made the scenery look even sadder. It was hard to imagine that inside one of those old withdrawn houses, a newborn was trying to see the world with twinkle eyes in all amazement.

Eric had parked on the street and was now walking towards the little ranch home. He had not noticed the adjoining houses, nor that the driveway ended into a worm-infested narrow mud pathway leading towards the house. He could see nothing, as his insides couldn ’t bear another iota of sensory impulse. Or perhaps, he, standing at this moment, still and alone, on grounds completely alien, was shielded from everything outside of his own chosen senses. He felt strangely calm, as if he had just come walking out alive from the dead. As he stood in front of the large wooden door now, loud heartbeats thumped against his ringing heart. A touch of air blew a few flecks of hair off his forehead. Eric felt deep suspense all of a sudden. For a second, that made him aware of the unexpected, the unknown, and the inevitable. For a second he felt he was going to meet his mother. Was the notion of reunion with his dead mother a reflection or a reaction to his abandonment of the negative forces in his life? Had he really come full circle? It had taken him this long to open himself up and lay it out for someone, to love. And in return, in the cradle of his freshly open heart, he wished to care for his own child.

The doorbell was unfashionably loud. Inside, someone’s footsteps crept up softly towards Eric’s direction. The door flung open to unveil Shyla ’s beautiful face, softer and paler than he remembered. Her liquid eyes gazed unflinchingly at him. God only knows what all emotions she was going through at this moment. And perhaps from the burden of them all, she hugged Eric and cried as he gently caressed her head. Seconds later Liz came out and hugged him briefly.

They sat around the dining table. Liz went out to the patio to smoke a cigarette. But really, they all knew Liz’s ways of not interfering unnecessarily in her daughter’s affairs. Shyla looked at her mother walk into the garden, and the cigarette burning between her quick nervous fingers. No one spoke anything. Eric was overcome with guilt, looking at Shyla’s tired face and innocent eyes. “She looks so pale” thought he. But as the silence grew, Eric couldn’t restrain his desire for an unbridled reunion with their baby. He looked at Shyla, and was about to open his mouth to ask about the baby, when her eyes, changing their expression into a deep cutting gaze, stopped Eric.

“I’m sorry you’re late Eric”.
Eric couldn’t understand. What was she implying?
“No no no Shyla ! I mean to take care of you forever. I love you both !” he cried.

Shyla buried her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Eric still didn’t understand. What was happening now was not what his mind had been planning for weeks. All that he wanted was to take them home. That would be all it would take for him to come full circle. For the first time in his life he had been ready for a compromise. A compromise between what he knew he couldn’t get but that made him happy, and what he could get that didn’t make him happy. And now, at this moment of suspended suspense, he felt himself hinged over the outcome of his endeavor, and Shyla’s puzzled words.

Shyla’s face fell. Then sharply she brought it up and looking straight at Eric said, “You never called”.

“I gave him away”.

Eric's face turned white as the words struck him. Shyla turned away from his look, cringing slightly. After a long pause, Eric attempted to get up from his chair, and stumbled somewhat in doing so. Slowly, very slowly, he walked out of the door, towards his car. As the receding evening cast a sweet spell of earthy colors over his anguished face, he walked away...

The Compromise (Part 2)

2007-06-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

Jan 1st, 2007
-11:00am
-Savannah, GA

Rumble- rumble …..Sshhh… Again, rumble - rumble.

Shyla’s heart skipped two beats! Was that her baby moving? This was the first time that the baby had moved. Shyla felt her tummy with her hands. Her face was still; her hands glued to the small belly. Something powerful went between her fingers. The movement of life, felt intensely alien at first; but the second shudder turned her fears into an awakening understood only by those who have experienced it. A little bump appeared at one end and then tumbled across to the other side of her belly. “Ma!” cried Shyla. Her mother came running into the room from the kitchen where she had been preparing lunch.
“Ma, it’s the baby moving”.
The two women sat close to each other, their faces flushing with excitement. For half an hour they followed every little movement, with eager eyes, un-relinquished enthusiasm and squeals of laughter.
******
Four months ago, Liz had welcomed her daughter home. She came with a suitcase full of CDs and cheap clothes. She was pale, alone and completely nauseated when she had arrived. But, she still had the little live fetus inside her. Liz had spent sleepless nights worrying for her pregnant daughter and how she was going to raise a child alone. And then she said to herself, “Just like I have, she will too”.
Shyla felt her life was going to change for ever. The baby was here to stay. And she was going to be the mother, forever. She felt tremendous regret that Eric did not want it. He hadn’t called since the last time they had the argument, outside the abortion clinic. Shyla wanted to keep the baby. Eric left her there, and had driven back alone. Before leaving he had given her a thousand dollars.

June 21st, 2007
-4:00pm
-Near Savannah, GA

Eric opened the window to let the cigarette smoke out. He couldn’t keep the window open for more than a few minutes since the sun was still pretty harsh. He had been driving for almost four hours now. While driving past Macon, he had stopped by a gift shop and bought a porcelain lamp for Shyla, one he thought she might like. Eric wondered if he should have bought anything for their baby. But he did not even know its sex; only that it was born 3 weeks ago. When Liz had picked up the phone last night, he had simply said, “Can I see Shyla tomorrow?”

For nine months Eric thought he had prepared himself for this. He was wrong. It had actually taken him his entire life to get ready for this moment.
He felt vaguely released off a great burden. The burden of trying to save his life. The pressure of preparing to survive. It was replaced by the joy of simply living; and with it the loving came back. The agonizing defeat that he experienced everyday from hating himself, drifted away silently without his even realizing it.

(Last part this thursday..)

The Compromise (Part 1)

2007-06-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

-June 21st, 2007
-2:00pm
-Somewhere between Atlanta and Savannah, GA

Eric Cohen stopped the car and let his head out through the window. Not a single car could be seen within a mile’s radius. The Sun’s brutal rays fell sharply over his balding head. He was blinded for the split second before he puked, for the third time. Puking felt good momentarily. But then Eric was too high to enjoy the release fully. His head was like a dead washing machine not even trying to start itself. He sat back straight on his seat wiping his mouth with Kleenex. As he put his hands on the wheel again, the churn in his stomach returned. Nothing had prepared him for this. Nothing. Not even the strongest joint he had ever fixed in his life.

Three minutes passed. Three very long minutes. Eric wanted to start the engine. He really did. And intermittently between the clouded nirvanas, he thought that he actually could. He had been feeling this way for weeks now. And especially when he was high on marijuana, he believed he had finally earned the right to do this, finally….

Eric realized he was crying when he felt his tears wet his track pants. His favorite track pants. Simple black, with two white stripes running down the length. He had 5 other pairs, all lined up in his neat closet. Eric was obsessively meticulous.

Rubbing his eyes, he started the engine. The radio turned on. It was playing Nine Inch Nails’ head like a hole. His Chevy Avalanche screeched out of the shoulder into highway at 65 miles an hour. A Toyota Highlander crossed him. Eric cranked up the radio and pushed the accelerator.

-September 14th, 2006
-10:00am
-Somewhere in Florida

The abortion clinic was 15 minutes away. That meant they were running behind schedule by fifteen minutes. Eric’s schedule that is. Shyla never stopped crying to actually plan anything. Ever in her entire life. She was blond, rail-thin and twenty-two, eleven years younger than Eric. They had met at a party and had made love. She had had two vodka shots and at least two pina coladas. Eric never drank anything. He was sober when she had pulled into his arms.

Eric mouthed curse words incessantly at everyone on the road. He hated everything at this moment. His life, Shyla’s life, his car, the road, and all other drivers . But most of all, he hated himself. Actually, he had never loved anyone since he was ten. Till then he had loved his mom. When she died of an accident, he had stopped loving and started hating. Now more than twenty years later, he still was the same. Cursing a lot and hating himself. Perhaps that gave him a better reason, to live.

(To be Continued ....)

Flaky Feelings...

2007-06-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

One dew drenched evening, still we sat
our eyes floating under the ocean of stars.
The breeze drifted into a delirium
and that one night had you open your heart.

But the morning came and took you back
to where you smile between your fears.
My open arms you withdrew from
and knowingly I had shed no tear.

Since that day you're afraid to sleep
Your bloodshot eyes tell no lie
A bowl of sun and a drop of pain
is all you'll dream when you close your eyes.

~Proma

Atlanta Film Festival - the Goods and the Gossip

2007-04-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

First things first : I didn't get the opportunity to cover the fest as much as I would have loved to. But what I saw I liked a lot, so I'm ok.
By the way, here's to those of you who missed it and hate themselves for it - you can watch all of it on your COMCAST on demand ( can't believe I'm actually advertising ugghh.. ). Funnily enough, at one of the screenings at Midtown Art Cinema, the comcast guys were giving away popcorn (Comcastic popcorn huh ? Will pop inside my mouth or something ?). I got mine. Whatever buddy.

A strong dose of thought-provoking and mind-twisting shorts was exactly what I have been craving for a while. A little nourishment for the visceral fluids inside is all I need to tranquilize the traumatising affects of everyday-banality.
Here, I'm not talking about everyday-living. Living is different. We live when we do the little things and find joy in every thing. We live when we learn to live. Living concerns the harmonizing part - finding harmony between the exterior and the interior without sacrificing either. In my opinion, one creates the harmony by understanding the two a little bit, accepting a little bit, and discarding or plain ignoring a little bit.
But the mind is different. It is the highest prized possession held by a human being. And it probably knows it. Like it or not, it is the beauty and it is the beast. It is not easy to please. And for the most part, it hates to be pleased (but we will resume that discussion later). Mine was quite pleased actually, especially after watching a few good...

"Everything will be OK" -
Don Hertzfeldt is a 30 year old genius. He draws cartoons. Simple stick figures that my 4 yr old would claim he could draw. And then, Don makes them into films. Short 17 min films at that. You would probably not go watch them unless I told you that THIS 17 min film took me through an over-turning ,mind-blasting , grey-matter churning ride which most full-length features are unable to do.
EWBO is a film about Bill. He works and lives like a normal being. But inside his head, he is rapidly changing. He begins to see things as things should not be. Like monster faces on his friends' heads and contorted images of his own room. Bill's mental illness is brilliantly portrayed through a few stick cartoons, interwoven frames with multiple "windows" in each frame, each inter-related but independently speaking something about that shot. Incredibly creative film.
It is to the creator's credit that a few weird stick figures conveyed more about the grim world of psychosis than most full-length films running for hours.

"Fighting Cholitas" -
Cholitas are certain women in Bolivia. The film is about the Cholitas that fight in a ring. They wear huge frilly skirts and fancy shawls to the ring and fight just as fiercely as any WWF contender. These weekly contests have become popular among the locals from one of Bolivia's poorest dwellings. Men, women and children all gather to watch their fighting heroes(or rather, heroines) every week. It seems the women enjoyed the shows the most(perhaps they shook of some of their pent-up anger and frustation this way)
This movie takes a look into the lives of these mysterious Cholitas, women that say they "Fight, but while retaining their identity". Isn't that what life is all about ? To fight without sacrificing our identities. While googling "Cholitas" , I found that they had helped the menfolk during the wars. So I would guess they are natually brave. The subject matter of the film was so good that I did not have the opportunity to see if there were any shortcomings.
By the way, I chanced upon one of the films blogs maintained by the woman who shot the movie. I sent a message to her and she responded back quickly. Sweet. All my support to these brave ladies.

"Family Reunion" -
An icelander settled in NYC(Isold Uggadottir) has directed this movie on a 20-ish lesbian from iceland living in USA. Its a sweet story on how she tries to come out of the closet and open up to her family during one of her visits home(Reykjavik,Iceland). A neat twist in the end. Pretty, Colorful, technically sound. Pretty neat. Again I found blogs (on blogspot too) of the director and other crew. Overheard - Isold says in one of her interviews that she won't do this again. I hope she changes her mind soon, girl you are awesome.

I also overhead a really big guy with shabby clothes talking to another guy at the Festival venue:
"My friend X produced that movie".
"Really ! I thought he was broke".
"Who needs money ! This is Atlanta baby, you help me , I help you".

Yeah ! Thats Atlanta city for you. Its not like NYC where there are tons of aspirers and tons of production houses on the hunt. Over here, a few good... help the other few..

Live it !
~Proma

Untitled - a poem

2007-04-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

Clinging to strange lands set
my native fears free
burying the known I’ve let
the unknowns ravage me

The only truth I’ve hit
Were souls others had tried
Someone’s pains slit
Inter-twined with mine

There’s nothing to despair
My contemplation drafts –
There’s nothing to repair
It’s broken from the start

I’m tired of the swinging
And death-ness and the stings
There’s no meaning in -no-thing-
Until your loveliness sings

- Proma

Is Life Surreal , just like joy ?

2007-04-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

Its one o clock in the morning and I'm still awake. Conventional wisdom would suggest I go to sleep. Not enough sleep would probably mean a less productive tommorrow. Not for me. Being a mother, I'm inherently programmed to wake up at 6:45am every morning. And I've done all the great deeds of my life being tired, broke or sleep-deprived(sounds scary!).

I've been thinking about family, home, roots and culture. Perhaps because its so close to my upcoming visit to India (after a gap of three years). The mind imagines the reunion with the family, the glowing faces, the tears of joy.
There is nothing like home. For so long have I missed the strolls along those streets strewn with idle shops, tiny but uncluttered, ugly but charming. The roadside thelaas selling the spiciest bhelpuris and the yummiest egg-rolls. The magic madness of the tuesday haats. Thin street-vendors nagging every passing tourist. Brightest saris. Hot pink sindoor. Neon bangles. Loud uncles and warning auntis. Back bending pranaams to every visiting relative. Endlessly running soaps beginning with "K"s. How can anyone not miss all that ? After all, a part of me still remains there. Isn't it ?

I'm pondering over this question, whether a part of me really yearns for the roots, or do I just miss the familiar images. Or are those two really the same ? Do I really yearn so much for what I've left behind, or am I just craving a surreal image of a real but slightly forgotten past ?

AFF

2007-04-08T19:08:00.001-07:00

The memoirs of a march afternoon

2007-03-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday we drove up to the Amicalola Falls of North Georgia. It wasn't really planned but, as it sometimes is - things just happen, plans just don't.
After a cozy night's sleep (it was cold!) when I finally acknowledged the morning, albeit reluctantly, it wasn't so exciting. The mercury had dipped significantly since last week and the clouds threatened to ruin the last day before the hectic work week began. Darn ! just when you thought this was going to be the day you could do anything under the sun, it turns out, the Sun God has a mood swing.

In a couple of hours, bleak turned into bright, and the temperature rose to bearable(a very relative term). Aha ! mmm... the adrenaline rush was getting me now. A packed ice-box and a filled gas tank later, my Pontiac Grand AM was ruling the roads(ok, at least in my mind).
Now, lets talk about the landscape. Honestly, the roadside trees are not their sexiest in March. In fact, unless you love the bald look, they probably look their worst now. However, I must admit that still, there was great beauty in the endless lines of these silent standing trees, awaiting their spring colors.

All the same colors - rusty red, raving brown, broken green.

If the drive had been pleasant, the destination seemed no less inviting. The Sun and the chill, the children playing around the small streams, the Amicalola Waterfall of course, and the winding roads, all together completed the picture of a very relaxed Sunday afternoon. mmm...almost, almost sleepy.

Sounds of waterfall, so prominant, have you ever listened so intent ?

Its a sleepy afternoon now. An afternoon drooping into a stretchy evening.
The sky will turn into a million colors soon. The road that I'm driving on will soak those last sprinkles of colors before the night submerged them into the commonplace dark.

The drive back was lazy and less exciting to begin with. Same roads, same bald trees. Getting somewhat bored now.
Hell, What do I see in that large farm to the right of the road ? I see not horses, not cows, not even mules. I see Llamas ! Scores of them. Its a large farm. (This was the first time I had ever seen a Llama)
They are beautiful creatures. Some were grazing the greens. Some were resting under the huge trees. An entire family was it, lazing in the grass ?

Tiny surprises, hiding like eager children. Spring up when you least suspect, when you least expect...

And that my friends, was the end of yet another remarkable afternoon.

Wannabe Perfectionists

2007-03-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

ALL Perfectionists are Wannabes . By definition.

I ain't gettin there at all.

All it takes is a Tall Cafe Mocha

2007-03-11T20:50:00.001-07:00

Today was a refreshing day. The past weeks had me caught within a "Coriolis Effect". This effect is the apparent deflection of objects from a straight path if the objects are viewed from a rotating frame of reference.

Sometimes even a steady headed person can deviate and forget that we live within a mesh of various forces. Its not fun being carried away to a strange foreign land by strong staggering wind and not realising that all I had to do was to hold on to the familiar hand of obscurity, until the wind settled.
Instead , once caught in a wildfire, its easier to lose way and get caught towards the worst epicenter, than run out to the perimeter. The Whirlwind, that's what it is.

Today was the day, I got out of that whirlwind. And silly me, all it took was a walk to the local Barnes and Noble, get a tall Cafe Mocha, head to the poetry section and settle all by myself at a little corner in the store.

As my latest muse, Rumi took me in, and overcame all my six senses with his magic words. The deepest emotions, the complex-est cluster in the head, the untended part of my conscience, all literally melt together in an amalgam. The body, mind and soul, stone-stare in complete wonder. Such is the force of Rumi's poetry.
After wandering through the pages, I felt like a new day had just begun.

Mocha was over, and I got another one. I was in no mood to leave. This felt like home.
The Film media section was staring at my face. My feet instinctively took me there. Between the big fat books on hollywood films, were a couple of books on filmmaking. I picked one up and started turning the pages. It was just a regular book on the basics of filmmaking - Production basics, Screenwriting, storyboarding, Editing, SoundEditing, Music Scoring, ADR(Automatic Dialogue Replacement), Foley, and Titles. The reason I mentioned them all is because I just learned today what they all mean. Gosh I never knew the difference between the executive and the associate producer until today. The next time I watch the opening and closing titles of a film, all my attention will be towards who did what and a quick interpretation.

I am so happy ! Thank you B&N.

Imprisoned within the invisible cage

2007-03-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

I meet all kind of people all the time. Love 'em. They intrigue me. Knowing, observing and analysing them comes to me naturally.
Some open up easily. Some push me away. Some wait and watch and test before giving away in increments.
Sometimes I come across someone that doesn't know the existence of the 'invisible cage'. What is this invisible cage ? We live with it, and operate within the framework it lays for us. Hinduism describes that cage as "AHAM", but you and I know it more as "ego". I think of Ego as a useful engine, but it needs a driver for steering. A powerful engine without an equally powerful driver drives aimlessly , and could even be self-destructive. They miss their goals, repeatedly. According to Hindu Philosophy the Goal of Self Realisation may be achieved by surrendering ego and merging with Self. The road to happiness begins with the giving up of the notion of ego.

Now, the reason I'm writing this is because, from meeting people, I realise what the ancient scripts said, is so true. The most stressed out, unhappy and lonely people are the ones with enormous egos . They block out not only people, but ideas, and experiences. Their path to self realisation is long and whiny. On the other hand ,the ones that drive themselves and not let their egos drive them - keep on achieving what they really what and are happier.

Rumi - I'm speechless

2007-03-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

Art as Flirtation and Surrender

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.

- R U M I

About Fire, Water and the Earth - and us Indians

2007-03-06T21:12:00.000-08:00

Whats wrong with us ? Why are we not rejoicing that Deepa Mehta's "Water" was at least nominated in the Oscar's foreign films category. The day the oscars were announced most Indian newspapers had the following headlines :
"Deepa Mehta's Water misses the mark" , "Mehta's water not good enough" , and the even more bizarre, "Water misses Oscars, John misses Bips" !!!! .
I sense the deep rooted complex that we have against our own fellow countrymen a little different from the rest of us.

Before you begin to think that I am a fierce feminist who wants to defend Mehta, let me tell you thats not true. I had personally found Mehta's films good but never great. And I'm no feminist.

The first one of the Trilogy , "Fire" was about two women, married to brothers of the same household, both women being neglected by their husbands. Shabana and Nandita did their roles convincingly, yet I found the film not depicting reality. In what households do two such women turn to each other for physical fulfilment ? They were not born lesbians and so what happened in the end was somewhat unbelievable. A lot of women I know in India are subjected so some mistreatment from in-laws or husbands. And personally I have close friends in situations similar to Sita and Radha's. They turn to other routes, if at all. I've never seen them turning to women. I do know real lesbians in India, but they are not born out of such situations.

The second of the Trilogy was "1947, the Earth". Now this film I had watched back in 1999, even before I had watched Fire. And I thought in the film Mehta did a pretty good job. The film successfully recreated the horror, shock, angst, resentment, mistrust and plight accompanying Partitions. The train scene was pretty gruesome, just like it really was and even years later I shudder at the thought of it. This film was certainly not the very first film on Partition , there had been scores like this one. Yet it invited controversy again. It was anti-Muslim, anti-Hindu, anti-India , anti-Sikh, all at the same time. WHAT IS WRONG WITH US ? Can't we ever accept a tiny story about human beings ?

It is easy to see why Mehta always finds her films in trouble, especially with the fundamentalists. She chooses to make films on controversial topics. Now which film in India made on partition did not get the brickbats from some section of the society, or let me say the political society ? Even the simple love story called "Bombay" wasn't spared , just because it was between a Muslim and a Hindu. I was in Kanpur(yr. 1995) when I went to watch "Bombay" at a movie theatre with friends. Two days later a part of that theatre had been partly demolished.

Anyway, back to Mehta. Now coming to the third of the trilogy, "Water" has been through the most out of the three. From the sets being burnt to Mehta being forced to film in Sri Lanka, the film couldn't have had worse circumstances. Kudos to Mehta for displaying an amazing level of dedication and determination.
The film was well received outside India. I had watched it on DVD early last year. And then I heard it had been showing around most film festivals (Independent cinema, Indo-American fests etc) and had earned accolades galore.

I loved the film . It was so much more mature and understated than the first two of the Trilogy. There is a silent spiritual tone to the film which makes it unforgettable. Perhaps it comes out of the character of Chuhiya, the little girl. She holds the lamp of innocence and purity through the complex and ugly drama of oppression and domination. I almost wondered that the film came from Mehta. Her loudly kohled eyes and long dark locks have never impressed me with any kind of subtlety or softness!! Yet, even after fighting for 5 years to complete her film, Deepa Mehta did not give in to her own emotions. She finally gave us the purest unadulterated story. Kudos.

Why , why then my people would not rejoice at the nomination of the film like they did when Lagaan was nominated? Why did the newspapers sound like they were trying run down Mehta ?
Is it that Indians haven't yet come of age when it comes to honest introspection and open hearted exploration ? Are we still fooling the world with our so called virtues of non violence and tolerance ?

Bank of America is an UGLY monster

2007-02-28T20:11:00.000-08:00

As my Indian friends would agree, building Credit in this country when we already are in our mid or late twenties can be a bit daunting.
Last year(Jan 2006) when I finally got my SSN I was on cloud nine. I immediately began making plans on how I'll build my credit , how long it would take me to build a solid credit history and even started researching mortgage loan interest rates:-). Oh the malady of sweet ignorance , little did I know that the road to my dream castle was ruled by evil loaning predators that wait on prey like me.

Ok, now colorful prose aside, in March 2006, I made an online application for a secured credit card from Bank of America.

After a couple of days they sent me a card. As soon as I got the card I called to activate it. The activation process was interupted by a real human voice on the other side. He very politely told me that I needed to fax my personal info to him for the activation to happen. I thought "Screw you, I'd rather take CapitalOne's card which doesn't even have an annual fee". I asked the man to cancel my application because I didn't want to take the trouble of faxing documents , that too on a weekend.
The man said "Ok, your application is cancelled".

After 10 days I get a letter from BOA which confirmed my account had been cancelled.

Within another week , to my greatest surpise I got my first "BOA credit card statement" with a charge of $29 (annual fee). I thought it was a mistake on their part (See here I made the first mistake, I should have called immediately).

The next month when I got the second statement which showed a charge of $29 + $35 + $1.50 = $65.50 in all !!!

I was angry and more than that scared and called up BOA immediately. After MUCH trying(their customer service sucks) I finally got on the phone the right person who deals with issues like mine. The guy checked the system and said that yes indeed my record was STILL there. I told him I have a confirmation letter from BOA that my accound had been cancelled back in March. The guy apologised and 'canceled' my account (notice how many times it got canceled).

I received no more statements thereon.

AFTER almost a year had passed, in Jan 2007 I was surprised to know that my credit score fell by more than 60 points !!
I checked my credit report and saw that the BOA account that showed 'closed' but also showed a DELINQUENCY! I was MAD, PISSED, ANGRY and FUMING. It took me a couple of hours just to calm myself. I called BOA late in the night. Some ugly BOAn b**** told me "Maam, I'm sorry I can't help you but I can connect you to the right person" , and then she hung up on me.

Can you believe if I tell you that as of today the Bank of America is the largest bank in the US and the third largest worldwide ? Is this the kind of service they are offering and GETTING AWAY WITH IT ????

I decided not to call BOA again . My self-worth had been severely crushed by now. I recalled that the last two times I had called BOA , they had actually been very rude to me. I then made up my mind to never call them again . THEY will have to CALL me instead and apologise.

1)I first Disputed the BOA accounts on my Credit Report to all the three Bureaus.

2)Then I researched the web on how and where to enter a complaint against BOA.

3)I gathered all the evidence I had - BOA's letters of confirmation that my account was cancelled in March, the statements they had sent me after the cancellation.

4)Finally I wrote a letter with the entire story(just like I've told you here)

5)I sent Copies of my letter, all evidence and personal/contact info to these organisations:

The Bank of American Credit Services,
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency(OCC),
Federal Trade Commission(FTC) ,
Transunion,
Equifax and
Experian.

Perhaps, as a friend pointed out, I had overreacted. Perhaps all I needed was to write to BOA and threaten them . But I did not want to do that. I WANTED the OCC to be after them.

Within 2 weeks I got a letter back from OCC that said they had started investigating.

Last week, while at work , a very sweet voice called me on the cellphone. That sugary sweet voice(I hate it- all that artificial niceness) was that of a lady from the credit services department at BOA. She apologised and apologised and told me
that they had removed the delinquency from my file. And then she apologised some more(she must hate her job, no?)

However, I asked her if their simple apology which they are offering only after the OCC went after them , was enough to compensate for the many many hours I had spent feeling helpless and confused and frustated ?

People like me , who tend to get nervous very quickly - What would have happened if by chance I did not have all the evidence against BOA. What if I had thrown away all the correspondence from last year ? Where would I be then ?

I forgot to add that BOA had another messed up account with me but lets leave that for later.

Dismiss Jade Goody - N E X T

2007-01-19T07:26:00.001-08:00

Last night I watched all the episodes from "Celebrity Big Brother"(rather parts of it) on YouTube that features Shilpa Shetty and other 8 housemates. My God! I couldn't believe that Shilpa actually took so much animosity and bad behavior from the housemates, especially Jade "Goody". On the one hand I have developed a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Shilpa for displaying an amazing level of tolerance . On the other hand I yet again reaffirmed my belief that Reality - TV is Super Trash TV.

In almost all what I saw Shilpa was subjected to bad-mouthing for no reason by Jade. Many times Shilpa turned to tears in utter shock. Was she thinking "How can anyone be so bad with a person like me ?".

Welcome Shilpa to the Real Reality World. What were you thinking before you joined ? Did you not know that some of the people you would be staying with are well-known jerks. Noone even subtly sane takes them seriously.

If you did not know already, Jade Goody in no good . She is a fat shit-head. She redefines "P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C" . Her IQ hovers dangerously around the retard levels and she had lost it long back . Evidently, she does not even know that Cambridge in not in London(yes, that's a new standard in ignorance, is it not!).
To confirm that she is also a venom-spewing b**** whose pathetic mouth-works guarantee that her tiny brain will never get a chance to develop, she was also judged the "4th Worst Briton" in British polls.

So Shilpa, tell me, why would you take even one word of her seriously ? Why would you try to put up with her ? Why would you shed tears when she'd say something nasty ?

I think that's 'cause you are too good a person. You would rather take a lot than stoop to the same levels. In the end, you have won support and our hearts. People , Press , Politicians - everyone loves you.
Everyone's talking because Racism is a bad word. Civilised societies don't do it. And especially not the British(or so they would like to think).

But my question is - what made you wait till the slurs progressed into the racist domain ? Everyone who has watched the show knows that Jade was pushing her limits. And you let her do it? Thinking she is finally going to see reason ? Well, remember she is a retard. And things that apply to normal people don't always apply to them.

I would have LOVED to see you speaking out and demolish Jade with your wit. I would have loved to see someone expose Jade's utter ignorance and stupidity(not that she does a bad job of doing that herself!). I would have loved to see someone force her to eat her own words. And then Jade will have diarrhea (I can't stop smiling ;o)) . Now that could have made me watch some Reality TV .

And that would have been a great victory for us Indians. That would have been a great victory to the thousands of Indians working in call centers that have to listen to racial shit from customers. That would have been a great victory to the new generation that has evolved from the colonist-suppressed generation. We don't take things lying anymore. Why portray the idea that we do ?

We are tolerant , but not to the extent that others begin to think we are wimpy. We won't always wait for the press and the politicians and the world to declare us "good". When we are right, we should make it a point to prove it. Or at least, make the other person look so utterly like an idiot , that the next time they think twice before opening their mouth.

Jade and Danielle apologised to Shilpa only after they started losing a few deals and it began to pinch them financially. Those idiots would still be talking crap if they would have gotten away with it. I only wish that the next time an Indian goes to a show like this - they know when to cut other's tongues much before entire nations are left wagging theirs.

Live it !
-Proma

End of 2006

2007-01-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

As the year ending ceremonies begin with flowing champagne and throbbing music, and end with the birth of countless new hopes, every little heart feels the in-escapable sadness arising out of that fleeting last moment, the emotion lasting perhaps for a split-second. But then in the next blink of an eye, the glitter of shining new promises take over. Tomorrow will be a beautiful new day, and even if it is not, perhaps I will be stronger to still hold onto you, wonderful life.

Like every other celebration involving a public holiday, people party, and that too within huge groups. Countless new resolutions are made. Some old ones are renewed, yet again. As if resolutions made this night are consecrated by the collective goodness of the nocturnal participants. People hold hands, kiss and cry with complete strangers, share (coincidentally) similar sounding stories, as they look back at the year just passed.
All this, I am sure is familiar madness to you.

At the strike of 12:00, I decide to call my grandmother, of all people I know. You may wonder why. Well, I wonder too. It is true that I haven’t spoken to her in over a year, and haven’t seen her in three years. Yet, I don’t miss her, and since to the best of my knowledge she is in good health and spirit, I don’t ever feel guilty of not calling her regularly.
But this night, by complete random chance, my fingers dial her number.
In Calcutta, India it is 1st January, 2007. Time is around 10:30 a.m.
The phone rings six times, and I envision my granny walking through the humid corridor connecting her prayer room to the family room. Then I hear a very low “Hello”.

Granny, it’s me Shamee (my pet name).

Who?
(She doesn’t hear clearly. I feel her face press closer as her hands clasp the sticky handset. She is only seventy six but her voice is shaky. Perhaps at a temperature of 70 F and with humidity at 95%, even the December air plays nasty)

It’s Shamee. Shameeee (louder)

Oh! Shamee. How are you?

I’m good gran , how is dadu doing now ?
(My grandad has been sick for a while)

We’re all doing fine. How wonderful to hear your voice my dear…after…oh ....What’s that noise?

Oh it’s just fireworks! People celebrating and all.. Granny, What did you do for New Year?
(I ask despite knowing she doesn’t care about the New Years Eve. Gran starts laughing gleefully on the phone.)

Nah, I don’t know about these things. But today is special. Because you called.
(There was a pause after this.)

At that moment we realized that really a long time had passed since we had met. Glimpses of time spent together flashed through our minds. Everything that we had shared with each other bundled itself and propped before our hearts. I felt overpowered by the heaviness of this sudden realization of long lasting bonding. I felt guilt. I felt relieved. I felt ceremonious. Had I just found the otherwise insignificant link that tautly held the threads of my life? Had I just reconnected with the timeline of my short span? Or maybe I just found out how far I have moved on since the last milestone? And that I haven’t moved so far out that everything I cared about in the past has become irrelevant now.

Finally I could say this.

Gran take care. Don’t work too much and don’t scold dadu all the time. I’ll call you soon.
(I know I never do)