Random images

This is going to be a really random piece full of quotations...

It's funny how certain images have a tendency to get permanently etched in your mind. I was teaching Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column this morning when it struck me that one of the things that define this book for me happens to be one horrifying image-that of a woman dying of tetanus.

This woman gives birth to a still-born child and gets infected with tetanus.
Everyone thinks she is possessed by the devil. They try to drive away the
devil by opening the Quran...
I could hardly see. Jumman stood by the door. Some women grouped round the bed lifted the mother of Nandi toward me, supporting her head and shoulders. I could see the skull of a small animal near the head of the bed. And then I looked at her face, her mouth.It was twisting fiendishly. My paralysed lips scarcely moved. I held the open Quran near her face, and my fingers fumbled as I drew them rapidly through the thin pages.

...The woman's face and body twisted. The women around her moaned.
I ran into the sunshine towards my room.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, an image that haunts me to this day is that of a baby being eaten up by ants.

And then he saw the child. It was a dry bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden.

Then there are the rats in Orwell's 1984...

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now.One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.

All random images tied together by the sense of horror, tied together by the hair standing on the back of my neck...

Song: A question

Must this be
Your journey alone,
No longer mine to share?
Must I sink
As your passions rise
And the music fills the air?


Your throat swells
And your body sways
With songs I do not know;
With every beat
And every note
I feel my emptiness grow.


You shake me off
And rise alone,
So proud, so disdainful;
Must I look on
At your alien face
So crue, so forgetful?


Will you ever
Look down below
For what you've left behind?
Will you ever look
In the mirror one day
For the one you will never find?

Niggling thoughts

Today, I was on my way to CP by the Metro. At the Kashmiri Gate Station, this guy got in, stood right next to me and flashed this muscular arm with a long tattoo on it. I couldn’t help but scrutinize. It had a nondescript picture which was half covered by his sleeve. Below it was written

GIRLS ARE NOT FROD.
THEY HAVE ONLY
FAMILY
P
R
E
S
S
U
R
E

Does it make any sense to you? What is ‘frod’? Fraud? Or as ‘So Long and Thanks for all the Fish’ says, some mint fresh but very bad slang word? But above all, I just can’t figure out why anyone would want to have those words permanently imprinted on their body. Perhaps this statement means a lot. Or else, why would he go through the painful process of getting more than thirty letters tattooed on his arm? Pity, I just don’t get the point.

Haiku

Tossing out my hand,
I jump and touch a tempting branch.
Feeling young today?

thesis

it hovers like wispy mist
teasing the dark green hills
slipping out through fingers
that crave tangibility

i struggle to catch it
in reams of paper
articulate it
argue it
analyze
theorize
hammering at the keyboard
to type it down
to an irrefutable thesis
in double space

it just slips away
and flutters around
tickling the corners of my mind

To begin with...

I've finally decided to start a blog. If it hadn't been for Saumya, I would probably have never thought about it. I really don't know where to start, but I think I can begin by posting two of my poems. One of them (written long ago) is about the place where I was born, and the other about the place where I learned to survive. (You must have guessed that from now on, I'm going to torture you from time to time with my attempts at poetry).

Shillong

The distant skies grow dim,
And the blue hills melt
Into the dark blue skies,
The huts along the slopes glow
Like numerous lanterns in the dark.

The narrow, winding roads,
Lately washed with rain,
Glitter in the light of the lamps
Hanging by the eaves of the houses.

Clinking sounds in the kitchen,
Children reading aloud;
Someone strums the strings of his guitar,
The hills softly hum
A song of tired fulfillment.
Time pauses, and lingers a while,
To hear the soul of the hills.


On the Streets of Delhi

The streets of Delhi
That drizzling summer evening
Resembled the streets back home.
Paving stones lined with water,
Gravel sparkling under street lamps,
And the familiar squishy squashy mud
Squelching under my feet.

That evening, you walked with me
And the air felt warm against my skin;
You talked about your busy day
And I about my weariness,
We talked about our monthly pay,
Our jobs and the dreariness,
While the city hummed a muffled tune.

We turned a corner and you said goodbye;
I walked on,
A faint smile playing upon my lips.