Blind eyed men

A knife with a blunt edge,
a pen made a blurred sketch.
a leaf that broke away,
a child that went to pray.

I stand here with a cup in hand,
one foot on in mud, one in sand.
I lost my eyes when pecked by a hen,
to live in a world of blind men.

The wind sways under clouds,
the crows call out to their kin,
I stand here with a cup in hand,
as blind as a barbed pin.

The dust settles, and it rains,
men work, and their children play.
I stand here with a cup in hand,
on me creep up the dogs stray.

The sound of the water,
and the beautiful fish that swim,
I stand here with a cup in hand,
as the day ends with the light dim.

The moon comes up to fly,
the black sky celebrated by the stars,
I stand here with a cup in hand,
as small girls dance around with flowers.

The fragrance of something that bakes,
the voice of the wives over the shops,
I stand here with a cup in hand,
as the world buys, sells, and robs.

The night ends to draw a new day,
if the previous was black, this is as grey.
The days end and end as leaves brake,
men are too busy to take a notice fake.

I am strong enough to stand here with a cup in hand,
notice the world with feet on hot sand,
I maybe a blind beggar standing with a cup in hand,
but I can still see and celebrate my land.

I am a blind beggar who can pen,
standing in a world of blind men.

The Cruise

Due to the inert happiness, I was bored and down,
I wore my shoes, and decided to go round the town.

I unbolted and opened the house gate,
feeling the cold metal which my hand ate.

The air was cool, the sky wasn't clear,
The dark clouds pretended to be far, in fact they were near.

I started walking on the road, kicking the lumps of mud,
watched laborers working, mixing water with their blood.

And their children lying naked under the heat,
deprived of food, dying bodies with dirty feet.

Rubbing my shoes on the gravel, I moved ahead,
Met a fruitseller selling apples green n' grapes red.

Fruits he never ate, he offered with grace,
owned trembling hands with a pleading face.

I looked up to see the blue sky,
saw rich men sitting in a vehicle pretty high.

I looked down to see the seller again,
smiled at him, and understood his pain.

Clothing my hands with pockets I went ahead,
to find beggars asking for bread.

Some were one eyed n' others had two to see,
sitting along the walls where men usually pee.

A big structure stood on the other side of the road,
decorated by a great honoured politician hanging on a board.

The public servant who served the ones who could give him back,
and did charity to himself by filling his sack.

A little ahead came restaurants with huge yellow smiles,
preparing food they were to throw at night in piles.

Suddenly I ran, moved my feet to escape,
leaving human bodies behind to stare and gape.

And I reached a tree brilliantly huge and strong,
with yellow leaves, and branches in directions wrong.

I touched the roots, and felt the wind across my face,
putting my hair right across the wrong place.

Opened my arms to call out for rain,
standing in the world so just and sane.

Incidentally the god heard, and rain did start,
I started the run, shirt tugged to the heart.

The big houses went, and the flair passed,
there were servants in them, brilliantly grassed.

The shanties came, flowing with the water,
a thin father running after his daughter.

The canal came, with boat in it,
a sailor directing it with his dying grit.

An old man struggled with the umbrella and the stick,
as the water around him made him pretty sick.

Atlast the home reached my shoes,
as I ended my silent cruise.

I jumped on, on my bed,
laughed, cried, cursed, and said

"Life is so weird, a god with a beard.
He never shows his face, never gives everyone a good place.
He makes one a king, the other one to sing,
but all the others get struggle on which to cling.
A god he with a beard, he never shows face.
If he ever does, I am sure that many will take his case."

Bodhki Ram Buddhu

Any god who may read,
The post office of heaven,
The sky.

Date : 3rd of august on earth.

Subject : Too light for the intellectual god

Dear God,
I dearly hope that this letter finds you as soon as it reaches the heaven. I hope you won’t be out on an inspection session in hell, because I don’t want any sub ordinates of yours to read this very private letter.

God, I have been surrounded by intellectual people all over. The simple problem I have is that I am finding it very hard to survive among such people. The way they talk, their mannerisms, the way they eat, the way they use their genitals, the way wipe their butts after using the washroom, and the way they show me down, and make me feel like an outcast. I am really miserable god. When my friends in the classroom raise their hands, and answer to the teachers, I feel stupid. Leave the answers, I am unable to understand the questions for starters. These intellectual people talk in hushed tones, and look at me in bewilderment when I shout or stand up on benches or break plastic scales on someone’s head for just a bit of fun. They make my life boring, and the fact that my parents want me to be one of them kills me every night when I go to piss in my garden. My parents want me to comb my hair, wear the tie with a perfect knot, talk in a sophisticated manner, and act sensible, and I don’t even know the meaning of sensible. Those big books with more than a hundred pages fail to hold my interest, until and unless they don’t have monkeys and donkeys illustrated on their pages. I have been flunking all my exams except the drawing one because the drawing teacher declined to give me grades after she saw what I drew. The only solace is when I go to play in the playground. But then, even there the games they play have so many rules. There is this game of a stick and a round ball they play in which there is a boundary of limitation, and so many men standing surrounding the man with the stick, and surprisingly the man with the stick never hits them. I fail to understand their rules god, I prefer kicking stones, and digging holes in the playground, and occasionally I get kicked for it by the other people in the ground. And then in class, most of the people wear these round rimmed things with glasses fitted in them on their eyes. It makes them look ugly, and when I ask them the reason of wearing it, they tell me that it makes them read better, and obviously make them more intellectual. You should listen to their jokes god. You have to think about the joke four times, and then you get it, and then you laugh on it. There was this joke I overheard once in the afternoon, and I started laughing at midnight when I atlast got it, and I was sleeping between my parents, and got a spanking from them for being uncivilized, and unsophisticated. What an unfortunate, and sad a joke, it was for me.
I won’t blame you for not making me intellectual. But I beg you to place me somewhere on earth, where the people aren’t so intellectual. When I see the dumb people of my class, I find peace and solace in them. They are the ones who never answer, have the most sleep, the largest of the yawns, the loudest of the burps, and the farts, and the most fun. Their jokes evoke laughter from within. And they have such innocent smiles. Please put such people along with me in some lonely deserted land, and I promise that we will do good enough deeds to qualify for heaven, and make you proud.

cigars,
Your seven year old kid,
Bodhki Ram Buddhu

Good Night

go go go go go
run run run
to the shadows under the blanket,
to a life warm,
and a sleep calm.

a sweet an air that will run over you,
and the eyebrows that will move when you dream,
a pretty face smiling with a beam.

the soft eyes won't move anymore,
you will turn red as you sleep,
as black will turn more dark and very deep.

hours will pass over you,
and you will run through it,
because you have to wake up and sit.

go go go go go
run run run
today's work is done,
tomorrow is waiting with a grunt,
and another happiness you will have to hunt.

Morning Mile

A ray wakes me up out of a dream,
To be treated with milk with cream.

A yawn I possess as I drink,
Shying from the bright I blink.

Slowly I tilt towards the window,
to find a sparrow and a crow.

A smile on my face spreads,
As I sway pulling threads.

I jump across to stand,
To stretch I raise my hand.

Cleaning my teeth I think about last,
Throwing yesterday into my past.

The cold floor feeling my warm feet,
As I brush my teeth clean and neat.

Then the soap so soft washes me nice,
I fill the bucket less than twice.

Out of the tile room I run to dress,
White shirt, blue pants are a bless.

The blue tie with a permanent knot,
The badge I lost and yesterday bought.

The shoes dusty I wear without polishing,
As my mother shouts I softly sing.

And I see to my left to find my strong bag,
With seventeen books I was to drag.

The mirror comes to me for my hair,
Thinking today I won’t emulate the mare.

Smiling and laughing I run away from it,
But father combs my hair after making me sit.

The bread in my mouth and the one in my box,
So much stuff in the mouth turns me red like a fox.

A good child in me turns into a student,
To the school I have to be sent.

Like a leaf without a tree,
My childhood I see

A south Indian

As i write this, my hand is shivering. Maybe I am just too confused to keep it still. One month in the law university, and sentiments are back after the initial excitement and anxiety of a new place.

I reached here to find a big south indian as my room mate, and a silent south indian at that. I guess he didn't want to trust the north indian sitting in the room. The days started, and I used his laptop to chat with my friends at night. I asked him to talk, and he did with an ease which looked like he always used to talk. The legal studies on, classes on. I, the sleeper in the room was woken by him everyday at seven, after a lot of effort of course(which included messages, calls, and surely names). A four o' clock waker, I found a lot of innocent manliness in him. I did ask him a lot of questions about himself, he gave me a lot of answers about himself, the thing ended there. He used to listen to our vulgar language and used to ask the meaning. Thus our Bala is the man -

(a) who rarely speaks, but when he does beats all in humour and vulgar.
(b) the man, who when asked by seniors to call himself 'babba' (due to his big size), spoke his full name clearly, and trust me no senior was ready to force him to say babba.
(c) the guy who has been most effective in waking me up in the morning till now in my hostel life.
(d) the guy who can blush more than any girl.
(e) the guy who even with a fracture can still walk up and down the staircase ten times a day.
(f) the guy who had the guts to wear what he wanted to without submission.
(g) the student who got us all the internet safeguards, the downloads and proxies available, and saved our computer.
(h) the student with whom the whole pressure of studies amounted to nothing, and the discussions were too sharp to be slow.
(i) the roommate whose acer aspire 1 saved my relationship and destroyed one relationship (aayush's)
(j) the person who is intellectual as high as he is fat. Maybe more.
(k) the mate who cared about me, and vinaya.
(l) the boy who used to stand silently while I used to blabber about my perspective.
(m) the human being I am sure will be something very big in his life. And very means more than very.

I remember thinking this when I just sat in my new room on the first day of hostel life here - After five years, when I will leave this university, I will miss all my friends like hell. Like hell and like hell. But just after 25 days, when this guy is leaving the university, for he cleared the best law university in India, I am having the same feeling. I am shivering.

A friend of 25 days, and I know I always fall in love with south Indians.

To this south indian, from chunni (aayush) and sleepy (me), tata bye bye.

P.S. - We will miss watching you snore at 3 in the night.

Anger, pain, and insanity.

I can understand I am insane when I start listening to music at full volume, punching my wall to feel the knuckles. I perfectly understand I am insane, and for a considerable amount of time too. I am insane right now too, and if I keep typing for a long long I am sure to break the keyboard. And yes, I am dangerous during this time.

Let me understand my insanity, in my childhood I used to be angry, very angry. When angry, I used to bite my tongue between the two jaws, it gave me pleasure. I wanted to crush my anger source, to split that person into two, taking a knife and blowing his eyes, inserting hot rods in his ears, burning his lips, and then with finesse cutting him into two parts vertically. I used to visualise it all keeping the person in mind. And no, it never gave me any pleasure, it gave me incentive to at least punch him to some bleeding.

The primary reason for my childhood anger was the non-introduction of reason of anything. Like someone asked me to do anything and then he didn’t give me a reason, I felt the same for him as I felt for the person in the paragraph above. Reasons are basically important for me, and as I have seen in this world, either there is reason or there is bloodshed. Thus the same went with me, as a kid I couldn’t blood up anyone but yes I used to fantasize of killing my anger sources, pathetically at that.

Pain grew as a cure to anger. I don’t understand mental torture or pain or any of the shit novels, and people say, I don’t believe in it because I haven’t ever seen it. I believe in physical pain, because I have seen people crying out of pain and punches. And their cries are desires of sympathy, and voice, it gives me intense satisfaction, no doubts.

I grew up to be a lenient person, the anger got buried under layers, and no one really gave me enough reasons to bring it up again. As I entered my 16th year, the pressures came, the reasons came, and the frustration came. It so happened that I started seeing reason in everything I did, but when I was asked to do things opposite of my own reasons it made me angry and when I couldn’t do anything to satisfy my anger it turned into insanity. So much more of punching walls, tearing notebooks, and shouting out to beat my own lungs. And yes, being rude to people intentionally to hurt them and as people tell me, I quite as well succeeded in it.

So, let me draw a graph for my anger, and insanity. In my case, it has a lot to do with pleasure I gain from self inflicted pain, and a lot of encouragement from the fantasies I give birth to. In anger, I see reason, and that reason tells me that I am irrational. On the other hand, people in anger can’t see reason. I see reason, and then I act irrational in the worst possible way. Though I don’t really have a history of violence, to find reason I will always turn insane, and maybe when I have power enough I will inflict the pain on others too.

To end on a sadistic note,

“Let me hurt you before you die yourself.”

A Fairy Tale

A day started with a bag on my shoulder,

I hurried to school picking the pens from the holder.

I sat on the cycle and kicked the paddle,

with zest like sitting on a horse with a saddle.

The journey began with the ups and downs of slope,

violent velocity and a no falling hope.

The insignificant constructions zoomed by,

I knew them, so unbothered I fly.

And then started my anticipated fairy tale,

on the pavement I saw a woman very pale.

I couldn't judge her age from twenty metres,

she was standing outside a house of cheaters.

I saw and stared her till out of sight,

the sad eyes and the face so bright.

The red lipstick and the brows so black,

she sure wasn't from the mansion nor from the shack.

The distinctive saree and the naked feet,

the way she kept her hands were a watch to treat.

I surely got infatuated with the wonder,

I rode that journey with a new found thunder.

At the school, I did maths and science,

for the first time out of tens, I got nines.

There was certainly something special about that day,

I want to see that woman, to the god I pray.

My jolly nine-year old heart kicked on for hours,

I saw dreams of her, I did make towers.

Back at home, I smiled all the time,

Mom thought I was tired & slept me with a rhyme.

The next day journey, I saw her again,

she was still barefoot, and the eyes still showed pain.

I again saw and stared her out of sight,

she stole all my day and she stole all my night.

So the journey every morning changed for good,

I saw her everyday while riding, but never stood.

She was there everyday, she didn't notice me at first,

she seemed lost in her mind like quenching her thirst.

After a lot of days, she finally noticed me,

a frown on her face, like she was angry at me to see.

I didn't change routine, I still stared as I paced,

still the frown on her face didn't get replaced.

Then one auspicious journey, she gave me a weak smile,

whole day I felt bouts of joy while after while.

I was so happy, I wanted to save that smile in a glove,

my nine year old heart sure fell in pure love.

She became my fairy, she was my dame,

every day her smile was a joy and still the same.

The twenty metres between us never got less,

she was always the same beautiful, always the same dress.

Months and months passed like a dream,

she was my ecstasy, a heaven she did seem.

With the journey, I changed into a happy boy,

even at twenty metres, her smile pleased like a toy.

One day my father decided to drop me at school,

during the journey he caught me staring at her like a fool.

He saw her, and said, "Oh, that's an eunuch."

he pronounced the word like she was an ugly duck.

That day in school, I stole a dictionary from the library,

I read the meaning, it was so short and scary.

When I learnt all about it, I was shocked to death,

I cried and cried all day and got short of breath.

Thus I understood that it wasn't natural to love her anymore,

I stopped the journey with a heart broken and sour.

Bliss was so nice, bliss was so sure,

that part of my soul broke with no cure.

But even if I couldn't love her, I still smile at her thought,

the happiness, the love, the joy she brought.

She will be my fairy, she will be my fairy tale,

that person so sad, that person so pale.

1460 days

This is not nostalgia. This is just a realisation that how fast life moves, and how we mistake it being too slow. I clearly remember how four years during the end of eighth standard, I counted out the days I had more to get out of home. 1460 days was the perfect figure and for a dozen or so days I used to cross out the days mentally. But the overwhelming number of days never seemed like ending, so I gave up counting them out. And today when I sit here on this chair, I realise that I only have a few days left and then I will be out of my own house forever. How time came and went by, each day passed away leaving weak memories occasionally. I was fourteen years old back then and how I longed to grow up. But there was one thing I had back then, and that was that I used to dream. I was an innocent dreamer, the one who used to play, study, and appreciate his own actions highly. I used to be amused, and awed by things back then, but now things only satisfy me. The sense of realism and rationality which has been crusted on me has killed that tender dreamer. Entering the ninth standard, my mind bought itself restrictions called love and future. The future of packages, of doing great, and the burden of being successful did direction me to a scripted path. And of love, I discovered a whole new world of girls. As a student of boys’ school, my contact and experience with girls had been lesser than zero. They were creatures from whom I shied from, little beautiful beings that were just meant to be admired, and dreamt about secretly under the blankets, things about whom you think about, smile and blow away like an unachievable dream. But introduction to a complicated thing like sex and flesh blood girls did make me think about them a lot. The usual concept of love did affect me and as a teenager I half forced and half lusted myself to fall into it. And for the first time in my life I had aims or roughly restrictions, love and future.

I vaguely remember my first day in my school in kindergarten, the parents saw off their kids in the quadrangle, and so did my father. Out of habit, I asked my father to come down lower near to my face so that I could kiss him. As a very private person, my father declined and softly said “This isn’t exactly the right place, son.” as the quadrangle was full of parents and students. Then he put his big hands on my face, gave me a big smile and left. I clearly remember the denial of his cheek that day. I didn’t know of embarrassment at that age.

And then there was this day, when we entered Ist standard from kindergarten. I and my best friend were sitting on the stairs, and then I held up my newly acquired blue school tie and announced, “Piyush, we are seniors now!” How big I felt and how senior I felt that day. I guess that was the biggest I ever felt in my life. And now, when I am in the highest standard of my school life, I don’t feel like a senior at all, it is just as something which is going on and has no significance. Like someone has forced me into a boat named ‘Puneet’s life’ and the oars of the boat are being controlled by someone else.

I am the only son of my working parents and from a young age I had this habit of being alone in my house for long periods of time. I have loved the hollowness and silence of the house from the beginning, it gave me my own space of imagination and the faint light coming out of the curtains have always fascinated and ignited my mind in weird ways.

The earliest and first girl in my life was the daughter of my mother’s fellow colleague in the school. I was 5 or 6 years old and I used to go to my mother’s school on some days, and she also used to come. She was my same age, I remember how we used to jump on the desks, and run through the empty classrooms. I don’t know if she was pretty or not, but she did look beautiful to me back then. I haven’t met her for twelve years, but I so want to meet and feel her now. It isn’t a feeling of love or longing, it is just that I want to see how she has grown up. I adore my memories with her, and just want to match myself with her now.

All my life I have been a good student when forced, and till sixth standard, my mother forced me enough to be great at studies. I still remember her reading out every line of the hindi chapter and then also explaining it to me. I have always been awful at hindi. She had been a good teacher to me. She just left me on my own in seventh standard and I somehow like the decision now. It made me wander into different spheres of life by myself.

I turned 18 a few days back. The 1460 days went by and that too faster than a flash. I don’t miss myself being a child, but I miss my open sky at which I used to gaze, and my open grounds on which I used to run. I hate paths and I hate directions, and somehow I feel that I lost something in my transition to being an adult. I miss something, something very dear, and something which defined me. I guess I need to cry. I need to cry.