Stems roots and leaves, and now an urgent reprieve from a bent mind. To underscore for some time to come, the absolute need for a sober calm. When it was Christmas the nativity of our lord, his benediction was this unseemly discord; in me. Under a moonlit sky a color of magic and echoing music and certain dialectics of proud logic. And later abandoned by the night floating in sleep on two strips of wood. Soaked gently by an invisible rain. These days ricochet and come back again. Just one night spent away from her like many others that are tied each to each devoid of intimacy and coyness. She danced under the open sky three hours long and I too danced differently to different songs that at that time seemed to lend themselves more to longing than to an exhilarated thrall. The morning after I wished her Christmas and she already knew that it was that time again but this time it was wrong to have been somewhere else in some other ball. Thus it is that a fairy tale one night long has two versions jingle bells and santa claus.

Sunday morning violence in jodhpur bazar. for our afternoon repast. A chicken, a kilo and two hundred grams neatly dressed, still warm when handed to me in a polythene carry bag. 66.50 but the obliging salesman was happy with 65. I’ll keep going back to him. While taking the balance I saw that he had washed his hands, he must be washing them every time a bird is sold. There is a certain kind of guilt in spilt blood, no matter where it belongs. I was wondering, its cold now, his hands must be getting pretty numb by the time he’s done. Inside the dingy abattoir in one corner the entrails and feathers of the flightless are gathered to be disbursed amongst the lower animals at the close of business. Is nutrition a grim business, is cuisine a brutal art.
These are obviously gratuitous and useless observations. Happens every time im sent to fetch meat. My mental make up I conclude is very thin and weak. Nausea forbids violence. For me at least.

The redeeming lunacy of our destinies. To be slapped by a chimp that is frustrated at not being able to escape a zoo, whose love life is all a shambles and a placid existence itself as an exhibit threatened by a prospect of half a century’s cohabitation with the object of his greatest rage. Oh why o why chimp why did you love in this zoo. Be that as it may, babu the faith worker who had shaken his cage door assiduously for the last five years finally had his patient industry rewarded yesterday morning when his cage door snapped open. A chimp don’t need anyone to tell him what he oughta do when this happens. But with a chimp couple that has seen happier days out and about in a zoo crawling with people, no one was ready for the melee that ensued. The chimps leading the panicked people ran pell mell. Nervous confusion led to frustration and one (its not clear which) chimpanzee slapped a visitor. . .

oh consumed copious quantities of the fairy tale drug in the afternoon today and then exhausted by tragedy and farce collapsed into the stupor of the calmest black that is unruffled by the incompleteness of the stories that lie jumbled in my mind like the narrow lanes of the old quarters of a timeless city and through which at odd hours lovers and thieves move with a nervous stealth. I woke woken up by ma and in that moment opened my eyes in a dream inside a dream and saw for a fleeting second that time of fairy tales when its neither dark nor light, a suspended hour of magic hung like a lamp from a tree in a far corner of an oriental garden under which the first born has hidden the most valuable belongings of his childhood at just such an indefinite hour when a hole is dug that is filled up by little hands that will soon never turn a page in a fairytale anymore and for whom this secret consigned to the deep is at the same time an adventure and a departure, a time when something ends and something begins, and where this treasure lies like the oldest and the smallest coin in a jingle of coins in the pocket of the old itinerant salesman meandering around the yellow or whitewashed houses whose women sleep in the afternoons with their ears to the street so that the moment they hear the rusty drawl of our merchant they can rush out to exchange for old clothes useless items of grace and beauty. It is a quarter whose streets are traveled by donkeys and traders and their cocky apprentices whose robust claims about the wonders of their wares and distressed litanies at the offer of prices far below a bargain open and close days like a east facing window of a tropical climate whose well worked hinges never creak but suddenly on a day will come off and hang for one whole day like round spectacles from the eyes of an old old man who has slipped into sleep with a book in his hand in the arm chair in that bright fork of light that shines bright into the room in the afternoon facing which only the old can sleep because they always sleep as if inside a dream in a dream.

im stupid and more suddenly
than how sudden it dawned on me that im stupid
i felt this cold creep on me
by the marge of the field and
i was sure of it
by the time i walked back to the bath
to cold water and disinfectant cream
that ive strafed myself a cold chill grief
grievously misunderstood
the portent in my gut feeling
and poured a bucket on this foreboding
now with fever and assorted pills
covered from head to toe
my bum to bed and nose to the ceiling
i rue this certain ill my stupidity

This season began when the dogs curled up in the sand in the late afternoon, when the sun on the field seemed like lovers of a long long time in an embrace at the end of a long day at years end trying to forget a year long agony just before the lights came on and we sat around the tv. Me my skin turns to chalk and my wet palm I run over it to wipe the marks that my nails have left. Mosquitoes gather with the gathering black over my head and moan a solemn hymn of thanksgiving; for blood and for human beings. The nights are cavernous deep and when I shout after you just before you turned the corner my voice echoed how much this night is lonely. Seeking warmth thirstily I wrap my fingers around the two rupee cup of tea like I can forever enclose this warmth and touch pink carnations to bloom on my pale ashen cheeks. The tiny blades in the air nip the skin off the lips and I suck onto them pondering the taste of blood through a very thin film. and I am entombed in layers of wool packed like a box for the Christmas eve but no theres no toffee inside. A dry heat kept from the dry cold.

The latest concern is over my form. Im thinning down after years of corpulent well-being to a reed, bent and whittled, like something amongst which moses was found. And like at that time, so now, the reed isn’t important at all. Im no moses. To investigate this widespread alarm Ive had to revisit my childhood. Yes, I was disgorged from the womb plump and succulent, an offering to the demon, and was then nourished by a cornucopia of farm and dairy products, we being humble village folk from south-east India (if I give any more away il become a victim of racism). So, to come back to the meat of the matter, my childhood, my teens and my adolescence was round with no sharp edges. I entered adulthood healthy and with the avowed purpose of taking every tide in my affairs at the right time. All the tides were high, low only occasionally the morning after. They left their residue around my waistline. It was only in the past year that the storms of sahara have blown over my body. I got jaundice. It was to this dreaded disease of the government water dept. that I gave 10 kilos of flesh as ether, and it gave me cigarettes and lots of dope. Because with jaundice began 5 months of arduous prohibition. Then came a whirlpool of activity, frenetic and mad. There was a play(15-20 cigarettes daily), m a part 2 finals(10-15 cigarettes),comeback parties(10-20 cigarettes),blank afternoons(ditto),lonely nights in front of the tv(5-10 cigarettes). So there lies the genesis of my impending ruin. An embryo I could have left unincubated, (hint-an embryo that is good to avoid is egg. helps as a first step towards weight loss). But I have made a firm decision that the moratorium on alcohol is over, thank you very much, a decision to be honest , that id made sometime back. Ive been warned ad nauseum that the drugs are no longer working on my mind, but now only on my body. I have to parachute down. So ive gone straight ahead and chosen life. A career. a faaking big television…you know the rest.