Rings of Smoke

okay.it is a plain and simple truth.even though i travel more than two thirds of my time,i am just plain terrified of travelling,especially when i am not driving the vehicle i am travelling in.now this creates quite a few problems,because i dont know how to drive even a car,much less an airplane.
whenever i have to fly,frank truth is i am scared,i like looking out of the windows,and hide my terror behind a stoic face which says flying is no big deal,and i do it everyday,just like everyone else in the plane,but like all of them,i also believe that the plane is just an oversized bus which somehow manages to fly.and i dont really trust those metal tubes.
same with cars.when the driver of my taxi zips on a highway at 90kmph,the only recurring thought in mind is that of the indica i saw on a highway back east which had tried to settle a point with a tractor and comeout the worse for it.and when he careens around a C-turn at 80kmph,never far from my mind is the bolero which i had seen making an attempt to mate with a bridge.the bridge,unfortunately,did not like the idea,and responded with stoic disdain,resulting in the bolero coming off somewhat the worse for wear.
and i am a travelling salesman.how will it look oh my tombstone if it says…”met his maker while his car mated a bridge!”

he had left the office early,today…nearly half an hour saved,and yet,he was dog-tired.sitting in the autorickshaw he realized that he could not even listen to radio on the phone,because he had left his headfones with the other laptop,locked in his office drawer.oh damn!!and a hell lot of traffic and noise.the auto slowed down at the goregaon flyover redlight,on s v road,and he sat,too tired to think anything,with a blank mind,waiting for the snarling,moving,molten multicoloured, flowing mass of metal which shelled the fragile humanity encased in it and got it from one place to the other, to crawl forward. too tired, he was seeing things,but his mind was not registering them…his vision as vacant as that of a man in a faint…or an alcoholic who has had a dozen glaases too many…and then he saw her.

she was old…very old.and very dirty.poor.but then if she was not,she would not be begging here on the redlight,knocking on the power windows of AC cars who would not roll down.her hair was a tangled mass which looked from afar as if a nest of a bird,her dress was a patchwork quilted mix of men’s and women’s clothes,all dirty and torn and sewn and gone to hell and back.she wore on her eyes dark glasses of the kind blind men wear, or people with injured eyes,the ones which have shades on the sides to prevent light coming onto your peripheral vision, only they were tied by a string that went around her head. and on her feet,dirty,black pump shoes of cheap plastic, and around one ankle, a thick ring of whitish metal, which might have been silver, but was probably aluminium or tin. she had been knocking on the closed window of the car right in front of his auto for the past few minutes, and of course, the owner did not lower his power windows…the heat and dust might invade the airconditioning…oh…and the noise.

he turned his eyes away, deliberately looking very hard at the opposite side of the road, in the gesture of someone who does not want to see, as he sincerely hoped either that the light would go green or she would ignore him and go someplace else in her quest of alms.the lights stayed red,and she did not go someplace else.

she held the sidebar of the auto and began pleading unintelligibly.he continued to stare at the other side of the road, as if there was something very fascinating about the exhaust pipe of the truck next to his auto,which was persistantly and deliberately pumping hot and ugly smoke into his auto, and thus into him. she stayed.

he turned and waved at her to go away.she stayed.

he made the mistake of looking into the glasses…more accurately at the face.she was hideous.worse pathetic.her nose was flat, as if it might have been broken by the innumerable beatings her husband or lover or parent or pimp might have given her in a youth long forgotten, and even then she would have been ugly. her lips were flecked with dirty saliva,and cheeks like dry and shrivelled like a paper napkin with too much dirt accumulated on it.he took a glance at the shrivelled hand jutting towards him-the grime covered palm,the fingernails black with the accumulated dirt and grit and smoke of god only knew how many weeks of dust-and reached for his wallet.

he was swearing very silently and very fluently to himself as he handed her the tenner,and stared stared straight ahead,with a stonily expressionless face,his insides trembling with the rage threatening to boil over and overcome him.he did not who it was directed against,himself,or her,or her husband/lover/pimp/father/family/children or the other people who turned away like he himself had done….he spat on the road angrily…it was none of his business.he had paid his tenner,and that was more than was worth…whatever.maybe there would be others with other tenners that evening…and maybe she would get a decent meal or two.but then again…may be there was a son…or a beggar master,who would beat her up and take the money.none of his bloody business.violently,he spat at the road again,and glared at the passing vehicles on the goregaon flyover.

the heat,and the dullness of the afternoon,
the too-slow moving fan and the still wind,
and the dirty socks fallen in the messy room,
sometimes,they get on my nerves,
on idle sunday afternoons,
the room,empty-no,vacant;
seems just as forlorn as the afternoon street,
empty,quiet,and burning with its own rejection,
sometimes,the summer heat gets on my nerves…

stifled inside those open windows which admit no wind,
i sometimes angrily sit down on the bed,
filled with a nameless frustration,
an anger,probably directed at myself,
i take the plastic water bottle and throw it at the wall,
and it hits,exactly at the spot it hit last night,
like an infinite sense of deja vu…

like the poems i write,life seems to have become,
purposeless,straining to say something,
meandering,weaving and painful,
but futile.

OLD JUNGLE SAYING:

every morning, the male of the human species reaches a place called his office, ties a scrap of cloth called a necktie and turns into a docile animal….

well,here i am sitting in a flying tube of metal,which is floating through the air at 30000 feet, or what ever is they height they float at.cruising,i believe is the term.i dont have much respect for airplanes rides, as such…just a bus on drugs is what i think of it…gimme a nice aircooled train journey anyday.and airplane journeys have their moments…like this one,which shake my faith in the normal good taste and rationality of the human race…the current impulse comes from the guy sitting next to me…the first phrase that came to my mind when i saw him was “The Horror!”

Man is a symphony in white, with middling overtures of gold…white trousers,white shirt,white cap,white socks,white hanky,and even white leather shoes…and he has enough gold on him that its a wonder the plane can take the weight…gold chains…gold rolex watch,gold bracelets on both the other wrist,gold rimmer cartier sunglasses…i didnt know bloody cartier made sunglasses too!and he is such a pain in the you-know-where…but at least i have the window seats,and the view makes up for even the torture of having him sit next to me…

the clouds look even more beautiful from up here than from down below.different shapes shining in the sun’s light…brilliant white with indefatigable shadows of black cropping up, being wiped out and cropping up again…it looks like someone was there up there,hanging them with a thread and switching on and off the lights inside them. and ooh the shapes they take…hulking hippos,crouching elephants,floating alligators and flying pigs!!most of all, the clouds seen from above resemble hippos or alligators swimming in a dark pond with only their noses and hump visible out of the water…lethal with a menacing crouch,but very beautiful nevertheless…and there are millions of them,as far as i can see, stretched to the horizon which is a beautiful light blue gently seguing in the inky blue sky up above..

and then there is this lot which looks like rocks projecting in a calm,millpond flat,inky sea…and then there is one that looks like a bespectacled crocodile…the wonders never cease…such beauty!!!

have been watching the shane warne beer affair on the news since morning and am seriously in need of a barf bag after the quantity and quality of coverage that the news media is giving to a guy who just created a new tamasha in what is already a tamasha…

i have a new theory as to the way our news channels select their copy editors…i suspect they give all applicants an IQ test,and select the lowest scorers…still the news is so much entertaining!!whatay fun to listen to the stories…even more than reading comments on rediff!!

btw…i quite liked the cheek of the man,drinking beer on the field.and no,however much i like it…20/20 is still not cricket.it is just a form of entertainment derived from cricket,just like pulp fiction is writing but not literature or marzani marzani is not poetry even though it is verse.

recently discovered the poetry of sheema kalbasi. trying to find out as many poems as i can now. she writes beautiful poetry. check one out here:

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sheema_kalbasi/poems/23565

extract:

Time is eternity, my dignity
resides in yours and your
words are wonders that I count
as precious coins kept quietly
in the pockets of my tears

subah ke dhundhalke me,
ap mujhe tab tak jaga hua dekh ke
thithak jaate hain,
par kuch kehte nahi,
usi khamoshi se aage badh jaate hain.

hum kabhi bahut kareeb nahi rahe,
na jaane kitne saalon se,
jab bhi main ghar aata tha,
aap aise hi, mujhe duur se dekhte rahe,
rukte,aur fir khamoshi se badh jaate.

shayad kuch baate jubaan pe aake ruk jaati thi aapki,
neele,baingani savere me,khamosh,
ap mujhe sota dekhte,pyar se,
magar chup,bina koi baat kiye,
shayad aap mujhse kuch sun na bhi chahte the.

Pita, kitni baatein karna chahta hoon main aap se,
wo saal jo hum saath nahi rahe,
us bachpan ki kitni baatein chhupi huyi hain,
aapko batane ko,aap hi jaisi meri bhi khamoshi me,
magar ab main bada ho gaya…pita,aapko sunane ko
main wo bachpan kahan se laauun?

I have found a great new pastime…one even more entertaining than reading profound comments on issues of national import which people write on earth shaking news stories-stories of epochal significance,like sonam kapoor casting her vote.the way rediff publicise this,i am convinced that we should start a campaign to make the vote of sonam kapoor count more than all other votes polled on that booth.

anyways,speaking of my newfound pastime-what you do is this–
1. you finish office,sit down in your car/auto(not yours,obviously,unless you prefer owning an autorickshaw and going to work in that)/subway(definitely not yours,because unless you are an ambani,you won’t own a metro,and even then you wont be able to take it to office).
2. connect to your local radio stations on your phone/car radio/instrument of choice.
3. find two adjacent stations playing music, preferably one playing old classics and one new songs. (for those who are scared of ambiguity, by adjacent,i dont mean two stations located in the same locality,but next to each other in your channel switcher)
4. flip between the two in succession.
5. enjoy the results (mostly).

for example,here are the results i got yesterday while going back from office:

~~dekha tujhe dekha maine
hua main to crazy
tauba meri tauba
meri kudi hai tu sexy~~

~~Tu pyaar ka saagar hai
Teri ek boond ke pyaase hum~~

~~heyy boyy…
if u wanna get to know me come here
heyy boyy…
lemme tell you what u really wanna get
heyy boyy…
get up and lemme show you howz done
heyy boyy…
by the time i wanna have some fun~~

~~Kaanon mein zara keh de
Ke aaye kaun disha se hum~~

slightly risque,dont you think?  :)

meanwhile, The Ulysses Chronicles still wait for you. Chapter 2 will be up soon.Do visit.  :)

So, I am back in Mumbai. Been Busy travelling for nearly a month, and will probably be leaving in another week,for maybe another fortnight.Work is keeping me occupied.But I have loads to write about.Something of a different nature.Travel.Some Humor.Some irony (there is always a lot of it around,so whats the harm in sharing a bit of it with you,after all). Not much poetry though. And though I still don’t have a home (don’t plan to get one for some time too, ’cause I will be doing a lot of travelling these few months), I will get the most important thing in life in a couple of days- an internet connection. Regular service will resume.Most of it will be written on another blog. The Ulysses Chronicles is what I have decided to call it, go and read. If you like it,write a comment and spread the word about it. If you don’t, tell me about it,and I will try to make it better.

I have been to Bihar.You know things are changing when autorickshaws begin to write NANO on their backs and people begin to show political leanings by breaking off the letters HO from their HERO HONDA bikes…for better or worse,only time will tell.