Summer Night of Love

Bright stars fill up the dark blue nightly sky,

Shining down upon lonely lovers;

The gentle Summer Breeze speaks softly by,

Caressing the nearby sleeping flowers.

Softly solid demands for endless love

Rupture the deathly silence between them,

Passion bursts like soft heavy clouds above

Then slowly want ebbs away from the two

The reverberation of love dies as

The proclamation of the night returns.

Loudly the crickets converse in the grass,

As the two silently emerge from the ferns.

Now, silence mingles with sounds of the night

As the stars continue to sparkle bright.

Brahman

I doth bring forth the fruit of life

The chirrup of the bulbul

The scorch of my flame doth burn and nurture

I pass through the expanses

And the sapling doth blithely sway for my rapture

From the slant I move the light to the o’erhead

In the tall shadows

I see the agitation of the day

In the slant dusk, I see my creation coming to rest

Every birth I mark with another death

A leisurely stoke of my whim

And my creation turns to dust

I banish the light to the gallows

Only to be freed early in the morrow

Laying with the end on the horizon

I flit through Time

Cradling the fledgling in my arms

And crushing the dry leaf ‘tween my palms

Indolence seduces me

I let my creation be

In the unidentifiable hollows of my desires

Lay the three sisters of faith

I turn in my sleep

Beings fear me

And yet know me not

I bring them death and bring them birth I do

From the depths of their bosoms

Doth fear of my next move reside

Like the cloud, there is no end

Through destruction I bring forth more birth

I turn

Fatigue over takes

Will I start it again?

For now, the question remains unanswered

Hung between the spectral and the temporal

My thoughts wander

I fall into a deep slumber

*

Only to awake again

Brahman rests.

The Bazaar

The narrow path widens

Now packed with people.

We are reaching there.

                                   *

Reapers with their crop,

Milkmen with their tins,

Children sent on errands

All heading towards the Bazaar.

                                   *

The sun lights the warm sky,

The earth begins to heat

Packed bodies raise the temperature

The sweat and oppressive weather can’t deter the buyer.

                                    *

Some sell cloth, others sweetmeat

Shawl sellers from Kashmir,

And red chilly from the desert.

The vendors propagate in shrill voices.

                                     *

A loud din hangs over the air,

The women haggle with the sellers,

The men noisily sip their tea,

The children shriek and run around.

                                    *

The sun begins to descend

As the crowd begins to thin.

The women tug their children behind them,

The men get up and stretch.

                                    *

Silence slowly sweeps the bazaar,

Only a few people are visible,

The dirt road is packed again,

The people are returning home with their hands laden with the days purchase.

                                    *

The women hurry back home to dinner,

The men lounge about at each other’s,

The children go back to their homework

Tomorrow will be another day.

Bright Rapture

Fills me like water a seabed

Surges out of my being like a waterfall

I twirl in the air lest heaven forbid

My rapture and ecstasy to the ground fall

I lock eyes with the shining star

And take in its twinkling brightness

The night sky holds itself far

Away; keeping euphoria in its firm fluidness

Reaching out I try to grab hold of more

Hand hurting I fall on the floor

Of the green earth

A happy failure in a sleepy starry eyed mess.

Shenanigans in Mexico

I really want to update my blog with happenings in my vida mexicana! So, I'm already doing it in spanish and since my proficiency in the language is more like: "why you no go when i tell to go", I obviously, want to keep an english blog too. For purposes related to sanity.


You will notice that what I have written so far is grammatically incorrect. This is what happens when you are speaking another language 24/7. It is more than possible that spanish words will creep into my english blog and that my english blogs will not have any structure. Está bien. Happens.

For starters, I have the best host family imaginable. No, seriously. My host dad told me to cal over all the other kids on the program so we could have a barbecue. He proceeded to inform me that cerveza (beer, for the uncultured) is the national drink of Mexico. It isn't. He also told me that his son should make me his famous mojito cubano, you know, to give our hija a proper welcome. My mexicana mamá is the best cook you can ever meet. She made me LOVE prawns. I don't touch sea food. It is an accomplishment that my own mother has not been able to make. She's cooked me oriental soups, lasagnas, salads, mango salsa, fried prawns in coconut and super delicious breakfasts. I won't be surprised if I gain at least 15 pounds after my viaje. My host brother is a bundle, no a giant bundle, of laughter. I literally do nothing more than hold my sides because he makes me laugh so much. He told me that since I am his hermana, I get to go to all clubs and bars for free. Obviously, he knows all the right people. When regular people pay $100 (Yes, american dollars) for a bottle of good alcohol, he gets it for free. Duh.

The entire group of Dartmouth students conmigo are amazing! Our prof is great, he swears like nobody's business and shouts hijo de puta in the class. Amazing. Chingaron is one of his most used words, obviamente.

Oh well, too much good food and a sudden bout of happiness that had purposefully evaded me for sometime has made me sleepy.

So, for now, adios. I will come back later, hopefully, with more updates :)

All I Ever Say

After your girl breathes no more

After your child lies limp on the kitchen floor

After your neighbor’s gone

After your dog’s uneaten meal is strewn across the lawn

I will say sorry.

When the bride doesn’t make it to her wedding

When a chaffinch stops singing

When your wait is fruitless

When the your backyard is treeless

I say I am sorry.

Because she could not finish reading the book

Because he was cycling just round the nook

Because the roads were dug up

Because you couldn’t get water, not even a cup

I will say sorry

As the wail dies out

As the blood splatters around

As the noise pierces through the thickest of walls

As the silence engulfs all

I say I am sorry.

I am not one of you

I am still going to hold the powerful tool

I am here to protect

I am here to acerbate the strife’s effect

I am sorry.

You didn’t ask for me and yet I am here

You didn’t deserve to live in fear

You didn’t want to hear those cries

You didn’t have to stand our lies

Our fight was not against you

Yet, we took away the joy of a  lazy Sunday morning

Yet, we took away our promises

Yet, your milk never boiled

Yet, your sister never slept

Yet, you never woke up.

I am sorry.

Wanderings of a Nomadic Mind

There is too much going on in my mind. Sometimes there is so much to think about, I start thinking about the fact that I am thinking. It’s happening right now. I don’t know if this qualifies me as a weirdo, but my mind can wander from the cow sitting on the road to naked children playing with broken tires. As I pen these thoughts down, my mind races to the Landmark bookstore where I see books by young Indian writers, hoping to make it big like Chetan Bhagat. The other time I went to Landmark, I wished that it was a giant library instead where I could read old books and be surrounded by a frothy silence that tastes of learning and solitude. Oh wait, I have to think about the housing situation back in school. Really, I almost missed that deadline. My mind needs some loose shackles; something to keep it from wandering too far away. I wonder what heavy chains smell like. Too many thoughts make my head dizzy sometimes. That means a lot of dizziness. Sometimes I wonder if thinking about dizziness can make you feel dizzy. I guess it would be the same logic as saying thinking about headaches gives you one. Maybe a hypochondriac could explain better. Or maybe he’d think talking would make a malaria mosquito jump into his mouth and spell his doom. Today’s Hindi newspaper informed that the situation in Kashmir would cause India to meet her doom very soon. The next page was about the ‘party circuit hitting it up in town’. Is it ethically correct to ‘party it up’ when our nation faces imminent doom? I wonder if the ‘fashionistas’ ever give it a thought. If you give it serious thought, the money spent on one Christian Dior bag could probably feed at least fifteen families for three months. If only every Indian fashionista thought about this before splurging. Its easy to think that those tucked deep within plush velvet and mahogany chambers are duty bound to feed those lesser than themselves. I think if the middle class as well as the rich did their bit, we could stop all the angry growlings of India’s hungry stomachs. Rummaging in last year’s section of my memory, I dig up the image I saw in my dermatologist’s clinic. It was advising a tummy tuck. Patting my stomach, recently stuffed with noodles and AppyFizz, I don’t think I need it. Tummy tucks are probably expensive. Being completely unaware of the way the whole cutting and pasting job is done, I would like to think that they sedate the patient, or ‘tummy conscious’, before poking a knife through their digestive organs. I saw a movie that was based on the illegal organ trade that was ravaging Indian hospitals some time back. Maybe it still is. The newspapers are too busy with Kashmir and the Fashionistas. Salman Khan recently said it wasn’t cool if people only stood up for the Taj hotel bombing and didn’t bother enough about the other blasts. I think he’s right in some way. Unfortunately, his shirt tearing and pelvic thrusting have earned him little credibility with the general population. Only young Indian men want to be like him. It’s cool to ride mean bikes, wear body hugging shirts and jeans, rip shirts off in public and be like him. I don’t think I dislike him. No, not all. It’s the men who want to emulate him that annoy me. Thinking about Indian men, those adorning our already dirty streets, makes me pretty furious. For one they desire to humiliate girls by singing songs, then they want to follow girls again to trouble them, then they want to whistle at them to achieve the same purpose. So, I guess, the desire is one. However the methods of achieving that are varied and cheap in different levels. I wonder if wearing inexpensive clothes, qualifies as cheap. The meaning of the word varies. The tone with which it is used can tell what is being indicated.  Maybe.  We are an equivocal people. Politicians freely abuse the use of ambguity in the parliament or show their expertise in using it in front of cameras when asked trivial questions about education and hunger. I am getting back to problems of the Indian society. Are my thoughts coming full circle? A circle has no beginning or end so maybe my thoughts fall in the same category. the only problem with this prolific thinking is the distraction. Sitting here in the hot and dirty third world, I think about the cool limes of New England. While in New England, ambivalent thoughts about my duty to India occupy my mental recesses. The food is especially tempting when I’m 12 hours behind. The chicken biryani and kebabs make my mouth water. Just like my dog here, who’s sitting and staring at the cupboard that houses his favorite chewy bone. I wonder what the bone tastes like. He chews on it so voraciously, you would think his life depended on it. I can hear the sound of plates clattering on the dinning table.

Ahh, good old Indian food. I guess its the one thing that can stop my mind from running wild. I think I should go down before all the kebabs disappear.