Reading Horror

Let’s try to find a way out of this mess. When the severity of your trauma could only be rehashed by the temerity of your long-playing LP, her eyes opened ala Andelou and out poured a variety of ants, from the humdrum to the mythic. But that was the day before the sickness that is raging in your head came to light. On that day you woke up feeling cold, eyes dead to the world, with a mouth cold, harsh, dry and sticky. Where was the water? But the day carried on. There were walks in the relentless sun; and walks in the relentless moon. There were howls and horns, destroyed minds and fragile kindness wafting like the pulsing heat-wave in your mind.
Oh well, that was then, and yet here we are today and this needs to be done. Let us start by going to the exhibition. There will be paintings there you know, and you are to chew each one of them carefully….till you get the colours tied up to you…till all you become is colour and bits of gilded wood. There be monsters in the closet-haunted dreams of crashing pirate bones and grinding sea ice. But the colour is there. It will always be there…and the sun the horror the beauty of the gilded throne.

Quiet Nights

Mountain curves down river’s bend
Riverman just laughs and says
All was forgotten with my name
Articles on fallen stars
Harps, cellos and guitars
Riverman just smiles and fades away
Into the night

Songs on fires have been sung
Ferris wheels and broken drums
All smoke and mirrors in the sun
Suddenly the clouds appear
Rain filled voices everywhere
A little play of lost days and a gun
Ends today

This world was made in seven days
While you were busy being misled
With moonlit eyes and curling screams in the night
To avoid the serpent’s tongue
We’ll make amends, ‘ere long
Take this gift darling, I loved you well
Through it all
-Bibek Bhattacharya

Midweek musings

And so Liverpool won against Chelsea (again!) in a Champions’ League semifinal, and I couldn’t even watch it. The pretty cool thing is that such an overpoweringly ‘red’ club won on Labour Day. Though that’s where the similarity ends really. The rampantly capitalist Reds are as far a cry from Marx as Groucho is from Richard, but there’s a sweet irony in there somewhere. Pity I couldn’t watch it though.On a weather vein, its lovely today. The first inkling was a surprisingly cool, windy morning with a weak sun…as the day has grown older, dark clouds have veiled the sun resulting in a much-needed respite from the inferno of the last one week or so. It was a fabulous bus ride to office, which was after the office rush. Everything peaceful, a cool day, and me reading a wonderful companion to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Life could be worse. As I always do when the bus passes Nizamuddin, I look up to catch a glimpse of Humayun’s Tomb. Most days it blazes in the sun…today it was a cold thrill against a dark sky. The old Mughal buried in there would have liked it. And so it goes.