Wednesday, March 18, 2009

being creative

main doon bhi to kya doon tujhe ay shokh nazaron
Le de ke mere paas kuchh ansoon hain kuch aahein..
I am not very sentimental type, or so i like to believe..at least no one has accused me of being one..people have often told me about the firm icy handshake they get instead of the eulogised warm and firm one..yes i have been selfish, narcissistic since when i can recollect..I have my reasons, I have so many stories to tell, so many reasons to put forth, and i know- no one is interested in that, just as i am not in the least interested in learning the crib stories of others and myself by extension..i live in a glass (Palace?) with magnificent cold, hard walls, ornate lighting, trophies and souvenirs hanging on the walls, staring all the time with their brilliantly dead eyes, listening to every movement however slight, relishing the dreams where the history turned the other way round.. each of my trophies is magnificent, a never-to-be seen-again dream killed and frozen and preserved, my trophies are tributaries that feed the great river and the sand and trees and the oasis. I have other tributaries as well, but let's get back to the couplet before i get carried away..I decided to write this, this very night because there is a grave danger that i never will otherwise.
Living in a glass palace is difficult, once in a while you long for the soft mud Walls where you could scratch your and you lover's name, where you might try and wash it away with your tears once she's gone. ( yes that gives you a clue about my gender).
Once in a while you get scared of your trophies as you see these looking increasingly like each other and yourself. ( interestingly, in glass palace you don't have mirrors, or have mirrors that lie except when you want them to, so that you do not have to pursue the snow-white of your kid stories and kill her. the snow-white to be put in another glass coffin so that a prince might see her again and...mirrors in the glass palace do not like their stories to end, there is no khattam-sud a mirror can accept.) The palace,as indeed the river exist in the realm of half truth..
In my book of learning i add another bullet- Do not believe or disbelieve anything you see in glass place, ( or from it by extension). it's this disbelief that keeps you alive in the realm..
Someone knocks on the door, wants to come in, i welcome the guest, knowing he (or she) never came in, ask them to sit, have a breath, have little coffee. we start talking and tell each other stories, we admire and judge each other ,and then i murder them and put them on my walls before i usher them out with my warm smile and handshake..
the blood washed out from our severed heads keeps the river beautifully red even though i suspect sometimes if the river even exists..just as the guests never did. no certainly the river is just a fanciful idea, merely a trick to keep my glass palace clean off all the blood spilt..
I recollected this couplet just as something unusual happened- a guest came looking for me.. she remembered my face, could still believe it was the one on my body and not among those hanging on wall.. I remembered severing her head after we were done with our stories.after we had played our little games... but doesn't that mean she couldn't have come back? or this one the Scheherazade who didn't finish hers?
The guest wants a cup of coffee and the end of story i started last time. i suddenly discover i have no more stories to tell...the walls begin to blur and turn opaque as i ask her to finish hers..

3 comments:

  1. Hey you are way beyond being just the fav kid on the block......i loved this one....shakes and shatters me....hats off!

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  2. Re-read this on an impulse......having a lot of after thoughts, don't know if that is fair though....this calls in for a discussion.

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  3. Fantastic piece of writing....loved the idea of writing and questioning the idea.....masterpeice.....loved to read between the lines...Gaurav (writing from monica's profile)

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