The drip, drip of the long-haul…

Weekends are awful…a prelude to future… though I would lead myself and people around me to believe that there is dignity in loneliness, I do realise that there is nothing noble in being so chronically untouched that a mere whiff of a man standing next to you sends shivers of longing sraight down to your groin…to catch a flash of a young, lean man in the rear view mirror of an autorickshaw and wonder what his mouth tastes like… It’s not just lust, mind you, but a longing for human intimacy… to be held, to be wanted…
When I was younger I had such a vision of a content life… of warm libraries and bare, stark bedrooms… I also, in moments of weaknesses, would dream of finding someone… but one learns one’s limitations... Slowly and kindly it dawns upon you, that at the end you are all alone…

It’s you face am looking for...

If there is one lesson I have learnt in my 27 years of existence, it’s the notion that repressed passion does no one any good. It turns ghosts out of vibrant men…

The sweet and the lowdown

If I were ever to write a novel, this is how it would begin...

It was a Kohima of fond memories that I was born in. Before insurgency, before the gurgling brook that ran through it caught fire. We were four. Ma, Baba (was that what I called him), Mithu and me. We lived, fought and fell out in a rambling 3-bedroom cottage, with two cavernous, perpetually wet toilets. Our house was quaintly perched on a hillock, and there was no concrete road leading to it. Only a neat pile of stone steps that connected it to other hillocks and civilisation …

C R A S H
When I’m alone I keep the television (which is two rooms away) on at night …disembodied voices and signature tunes of shows waft in, lulling me into a very urban sense of security… it’s as if the grotesque soap opera of life is unfolding outside while I bury myself in the blueness of my room… it’s nice this way …
I don’t feel completely alienated from my reality, though it becomes difficult sometimes, to distinguish what has actually occurred from what should have happened…
At times, I spend hours trying to think about people hurtling across the hinterlands in trains at that very moment… it’s a kooky promise I made to myself in a sleep-bereft train journey between Vizag and Howrah almost a decade ago… I had promised that in the security of my home, when I am safely tucked in my bed, I will try and think about those who are
uncomfortably twisting and turning in blue-sheathed bunkers… how fragile yet potent is their existence in these steel boxes… their lives and realities, their loved ones back home and their temporary bonds with fellow passengers, equally palpable and dreamlike…