How remiss.
We think we age like fine wine, but not all grapes make it to the wine championship (think table grapes!)
Tarnished by cynical partners, rebuked by parents for errant ways, underwhelmed by our own choices, the debris is immanent and everywhere.
Will this mega-drought of lack-of stop?
part 4
Context- this is the fourth part of a nine series‘ collection of poems I aspire to write, by personalizing Dante’s nine circles of hell
The sanctity of mind is a spotless realm,
where infants reign supreme.
They are material, but for a different curio,
a constant hankering for affection.
As time plods with a geometry of precision,
all love is lost to avarice and property.
A marriage portends something amiss,
A prenup is signed on a white-collar desk.
And if this were 1789,
this indulgence wonder woman, were no crime.
You’d love me for my free-spirit and intelligence.
Ancient moths, emancipated from yellow-pages,
would confide their secrets to me.
And I would break the sacred code of forests, to tell you a secret more,
and give you what your soul desires.
All would be transparent,
like the glass-winged moth, the only witness to our scandalous union.
The strain of uppity consumerism and money-hauling jest,
would earn you a ticket to the gallows with the rest.
And all profound plebeians, with cultural capital to fashion,
would make a jest of you, and your passion.
But alas, we are a few centuries too late.
Pure love, here, is a clever bait.
Like a mental illness back in our days,
easily passed for a spell of wicked adolescence.
We are drunk, you and me,
with an unctuous desire for money.
A fancy car we cannot buy,
a credit card we cannot not swipe.
The witch-forest by the bank has now turned to dust,
where double negatives define our lust.
A hammam of money green, orange, and blue
Is the only destiny left, for me and you.
part 3-
(Context- this is the third series of a nine series‘ collection of poems I aspire to write, about basic stuff 🙂 )
I devour everything in this plodding comedy we call life
I am a glutton, pregnant with no vision
Some call me agnostic; I don’t mean to sound glib, but it’s what they say.
They say, they say, I am a prick.
These prisoners of sentiment; they blanket their sluggish desires in a taco
They make love in missionary, on a bed, at a farm house, at 8 AM.
Some want to be Range Rover moms, tip-toeing pathetically around husbands who couldn’t care less
A mackintosh and a martini in hand,
they think they have cracked the code-
Be peachy, and pretend to understand.
Some say, be positive
How can I pretend? Love ends only one way. In fiction
But for me wonder woman, it ended rather realistically, in self-imposed dereliction.
All this while, your amorphous advances I could not crack,
And back and forth, back and forth, like a slender noodle on your juicy lips, chapped
I got roped in
You ate me, and you sinned.
But I was a bumblebee trying to bumble my queen
Guess that doesn’t make you a fiend
But all this honey has bled me dry,
and you look pregnant with all my sacrifice.
But then, why am I the glutton? You must wonder, wonder woman
I’ll tell you why, it’s easy, like our love
For I, ended on this side of the island with infinite forests,
With hideous lizards, and Tyrannosaurus
And you, got to swim in the azure sea,
Which is why you moved on so quickly.
An abysmal overtone has airbrushed the sky today. We just might be oblivious to the most eponymous phenomenon to happen to mankind. I don’t know what it is. Its eerie … Continue reading An homage to Delhi
part 3- My lover’s skin is scarred territory No love bites dwell on her corroded body Her eyes burn bright like potassium And set the marquee on fire Lust … Continue reading LUST
What puts pahadi weddings in the outstanding category is not the rituals, but the beauty of the terrain. Here, blood-relations do not determine RSVPs. So, pretty unsurprisingly, I did not … Continue reading A sojourn to Rishikesh- pahadi wedding
Part 2-
You know, there is a word for every emotion you feel. Except, it is all a fallacy. I can study emotions, but can I understand them? You are a part of my narrative now, wonder woman. There shall be consequences.
Screw emotions. Concepts. Godforsaken concepts! Our understanding of- love, hate, affection, disgust- all so relative. So rookie. So maladroit.
I run to the dictionary to understand concepts. Word, I think, is a superficial synonym for concept because without concept there is no word. Anyway, what I am trying to say is, does the person, who put these concepts in the dictionary really know what they all mean? Bah! Its impossible. I open the dictionary. Page 1354 presents itself. The letter is S. My eye registers the first three concepts I see- Samurai, Sandpiper, Sanctimonious. Now tell me, because I’ll tell you that I have never seen a Samurai or a Sandpiper. -So my knowledge of these two concepts is books I’ve read in passing, Samurai Jack and Nat Geo. My knowledge is relative because I have never experienced these concepts in real life, myself. Has the person who added the concept Samurai to the dictionary ever met one? Unlikely. So, isn’t it sanctimonious on their part that they explain concepts they know only relatively? What right have they to be so sanctimonious?
Oh, you need to rush home wonder woman? So suddenly? And call me sick behind my back? I am not sick! You just don’t have the acumen. Could never keep up with me. I was the Alpha in disguise, and you, the sick person in whose shadow I spent my seasons. So, I levitated everywhere with you. And you despised the very concept of Time so maliciously. I could tell by the way you would squander it, smoking Marlboros with those ugly fingers. God, what happened to those fingers? I wish you would wear a gauntlet for the sake of aesthetics. But its summer.
I can’t believe how malevolent I have become. But we saw it coming. All your insipid yapping made me evaporate, and I became the summer woman.
Do you remember that lustful autumn night? From limbo to The Second Circle of Hell? From summer to fall?
Part 1-
I quit. But do you ever really quit? The sorcery of life is, bad things come out of good ventures, and good out of bad. I quit smoking when my lungs slackened two years ago. I began smoking with you. It helped me fit better, I suppose. You and your cool friends were intimidating. Delhi kids always grow up way too fast. Love, sex, cigarettes- they are well read. It’s the country kids who really experience the novelty of experiences. I can instantly recall the first time I smoked a cigarette, the first time I got sloshed, and the first time I met you.
It was on the city bus. On that ride to college, I forfeited the reins of my life in your grotesque hands. You were always conscious of the way your fingers and toes looked. The first day itself was a roller-coaster. We smoked weed at your friend’s, and everybody, almost readily, put you on a pedestal. You had that vibe. The Alpha. And I, Beta. You had a million tricks up your sleeve- waterfall, French-inhale, wow. Wonder woman…
What is extraordinary about this story is how ordinary it is.
At least the first half. The protagonist David Lurie, a 52 year old professor and Byron enthusiast, lusts after an attractive girl in his class. Everything goes how you imagine it would. The most obvious things happen. He gets caught. Scandal follows. He is disgraced.
So, Lurie rationalizes all of it. Like we all do when something blanches our skin. But throughout the narrative, Lurie sees it all coming himself. He paints all events so ordinarily, and justifies it like an able raconteur. Its marvelous! You automatically side with him as he bullshits the inquest by glorifying temptation and calling his ambush ‘enriching’. Like Byron in Don Juan, Coetzee glorifies the Devil in David Lurie’s character.
But just when you think, thanks to umpteen Romantics’ references, that this is a novel of temptation, the most unforeseen themes (apartheid, rape, class-shift, subjugation) invade the story. But there is no chasm. It flows so naturally. You can’t portend anything at first, but then you realize they were skedaddling in and out all this while. Only, they manifest themselves in a different light through different characters in the second half of the novel, when David visits his daughter Lucy in Salem. To give an example, in the first half, it is David (white) raping/ having non-consensual sex (you should see what he has to say about it himself, its riveting) with Melanie Isaacs (non-white). In the second half, his daughter Lucy gets raped by three non-white men. The same theme gnarled in different tendrils.
Lastly, Coetzee masterfully plays with the word Disgrace itself. By the end, you don’t really know how to interpret the word. Such a simple, uncomplicated word, complicated by the most ordinary and real things. Things that happen all around us in the shadows, things we choose to turn a blind eye to, to keep our imagination pure.
This January I opted for Literature and Gender in my Master’s. The Awakening is the first book I picked up. And I am glad.
Scintillating and concise. Capricious and envisioned. Feminist and elitist. The book falls into the classic feminist fix by ignoring other feminisms. But that isn’t reason enough for opprobrium.
The Awakening is a quest for realization. Quite fastidiously, Chopin captures the active and passive rebellion that a woman, Edna, trying to be a woman encounters from outside and within. Mostly it is the essentialism of motherhood gnawing at her, pushing and pulling her out of the freedom she thinks she is naturally entitled to. Edna slips into a celebratory stupor, and jarring despondence almost instantly. The quest, however, abruptly ends (or is fulfilled) with Edna artistically drowning herself. The Awakening remarkably stupefies the average sensibility leaving us with a lot to think about.
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