Scraps

The jaundiced glow of the cheap Argos lamp pervades everything in my memory. Her limbs, her laughter, her love have all been infected by that block-colored flat light.

Sometimes, if I try hard, I can smell the aftermath of her perfume. But I don’t. It tastes of char and ash for a long time afterwards. It is better, always better, to focus on the incidentals.

So I focus on the floor. The anonymous grey carpets of student housing. Hoovered once a week; fat with the accumulated sex and spilled wine and vomit of years, months and days. The carpet is now an abstraction – a symbol of the once real carpet. But soon, soon her feet invade. She had big feet – size 6 at least. I can see her red toenails under the deniers.  I can see the shape of her ankle, now the calves now her knobbly knees.

A raven caws in the garden. The sky turns a dull blue as the clouds foment and gush.

Selfish. Shellfish. Selfish. Shellfish.

Lullabies are for the infant and the geriatric. We must make do with Valentine’s Day gift coupons instead.

She had a boyfriend when I met her. Big-muscles, big-bones, big-jaw our baby boy was a public school golden-haired motherfucker had a slur for an accent and fucking wore fucking tweed and laughed gregarious and lived in Zone II and did not know how the innards of charity shops worked. My job was to bite down and stay. He had his epigrams and smooth cheeks and Ovidian humor. Sure, sure, I said. But I will see you on the other side of sanity, dear something-Huntington. 

Meanwhile, I went to the circus of the flailing limbs. I did Sambuca shots every Friday night and my drunken, ridiculous-grinned, fluorescence-ringed pictures showed up on the club albums. Hey, hey, hey I was doing my bit. You can’t accuse me, mate, of being an effeminate squishy little worm. Yeah, I may be five four but I can down as many as you. You think I can’t pull? I will show you, Mr Fuck-Face Huntington, I will show you.

It was a charnel house. The skulls, clavicles, ribs and joints heaped up on each other till they resembled the pile of limbs they were not. Each skull had once been a full-throated, weak-kneed, heavy-topped sensation, pushing in and pulling out of twilights, midnoons and late evenings.

The clock swished its tail and went on mating with the house lizard. Tick Tick Tick Tick.

Break, heart, break they said, like a big heaving pearl, sweating and birthing, living and dying on the eve of the birth and the dawn of the death.

I said no. No, I am not foolish, merely behind – behind the times, the states, the hours. I will get there oh you will see, I said I screamed.

But then the thin cold line sweat sliding down my spine reminded me that I am nothing, nothing, nothing. Not lyrical, not critical, not poeticall.

If I could eat fish and live amid the lensed up wit like so many around me, I would. I WOULD. But the itch to be bigger gets worse. I scratch and scratch and turn red but not clever. Well read, but never clever. The ossuary of my many lives will tell the story of crossroads and crises. Nothing more.

The fugue of the sea

The absent sea regards the moon, falling
On the lemniskates drawn into the sand
On the piercing cry of a sea-gull in flight
On the gentle undulations and ululations
Of the tear-bright eyes of the Andaman cobra.
The coconut tree feathers against the cobalt
As its skull-children Thud Thud
On the sea-bleached night of ether and quiet
Exploding upon the soil, against the world,
Against the gelid roar of the tide.
The sea, by now, has fled to another time,
Drawing out the venom of each body
Each carousing family, each bawling baby
Each widow, each son, each little blot
Kneeling on its shores.

Of grandfathers and granddaughters

The creamy pinkgold of the afternoon curdles on the glass. I am sitting in the glass-walled, soft-sofa'd third floor cafe, pretending to be a grad, pretending to be useful as I grapple with my stupidity. The river snakes around in a steel half-quatrefoil beneath. I have the endless sky, the river and the languorous willows. What right do I have to be here? What right do I have to doubt?

The postcard perfection of the scene outside my glass box reminds of me other less placid beauties. I have seen other sunsets - severe, undying ones of the Calcuttan midsummer that endured with an irritating, loud yellow and refused to go until it was too late. The dogs would sit panting outside the house, a strange veteran patience in their lolling tongues and liquid eyes. The sunset was a relief. The world suddenly became traversable and it made sense to put the kettle to boil for a cup of tea before going out.

How different here, that the sunset sends down shivers. The bleary light only lasts for a few uneven minutes afterwards when the day seems immense and unfathomable, and I never know, not on a single afternoon, how I will brave the inevitable long, dull dark.

I can ask for little sympathy for my melancholy. Is it not a privilege to be sitting here, in this topsy-turvy land of sudden, guerrilla darknesses? The winter solstice beckons in all its mausoleal, annual sameness. For the briefest of the moments my mind breaks into an awkward crab-scuttle back to the teenage joys of badly-written paperbacks on Holy Grail conspiracies. Even the grim solstice had seemed exciting. A testament to the power of the fomented mind and the power of association. Coleridge, in all his deluded excitable voices - 'Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part.'.

He was paraphrasing Aristotle, he said. I have read very little Aristotle so I will take him at his word.

The winter solstice has acquired many shards and shoals of ideas around itself over the years. As I sit here in the semi-dark of another useless day, I have to agree with the obsessive, sob-racked patheticness (MS Word refuses to believe that such a word could exist. OED crooks a snide grin.) of his idea.

The ghosts of solstices past and the premonitions of the solstices future sit at the edge of my vision. They are not all mordant nor hopeless. Some are even wholesomely, quietly happy. Take that, you bastards, who wring all possibilities of happiness out of nostalgia.

But some memories do rage and storm. 

An old man walks past me. He walks in cautious baby-steps, he walks in a dimeter of walking stick thuds and the slow drag of his feet. Thud, drag. Thud, drag. Probably a retired fellow of one of the colleges. Who knows. He reminds me of another old man.

Bhaidimma. That is how the faces turn up - conjoined and inseparable. My mother had taught tried to teach her fat little girl to say dadabhai, but it was a mouthful, so her tall, stoop-shouldered, distinguished father became my Bhai. Bhai of the full, bardic laughter, Bhai of the crisp blue Bombay Dyeing shirts, Bhai of the telebhaja and muri and afternoon tea. Bhai who will soon be another year older.

He is now half the height he used to be. The crippling terrors of a pension-less retirement and a disintegrating family have left him nearly paralyzed and vacant. I look into his eyes and I only find the same joke, compulsively told and retold. The laughter lines have set in grim finality.

I loved him fervently and unwaveringly for many, many years until I grew up and began to see his mistakes - his mistakes that cost us all something or the other. But all this was far away when we used fight over the last beguni. Then Uncle Chips took over - it was over the last crisp. When we lived with them, I would hop around him when he shaved and he would put a big daub of foam on my nose. It was our little game, it was our little secret.

Whenever Dimma saw us she would join in. She believed in edible products of affection and those alone. Gently scolding her husband she would appear with a plate of fulkopi'r bora or alu posto or some other little piece of her culinary genius. Constantly bustling, muttering, scolding, cooking, Dimma was the perfect antithesis to her husband's stillness. Together they were the absent yet present stabilizing pillar to the stormy little unit of my bickering parents and their glum kid.

And now they have sunk so far in despair and oblivion that I can only talk to them in jokes and jocular one-sentence conversations. I saw them last summer when I was at home for three months. In those three long, luxurious months of leisure I only saw them twice. I do not know when the bell will toll but when it does it will certainly be for me.

People talk about apathy as if it is a long sleep. For me it comes in bursts when feelings are too big to bear. When I saw their hunched, glassy-eyed forms, I knew I had to forget about them, about myself and the memories if I had to survive the sight and go back to England in one mental piece.

But now, the winter solstice lurks in the air, bringing memories of Bhai's birthdays when he was younger and full of life and a gentle giant at six feet to my four feet self. Ma had taught me to finish all cards with 'Love, Koel' although I never felt like a Koel. But love poured generously from the tip of my new gel pen on to the handmade paper. Love would follow up in a big cake and hug.

Now I am here, and there will no cake, no card and no hug on his birthday. I will probably call him up, but he cannot hear very well, and it will be a shouty, cross birthday wish, cackling from a strange, cold corner of Europe to a less cold but equally strange corner in Calcutta.

Happy birthday, Bhai. You are the nicest , kindest, gentlest man in my whole family. I do not care anymore that you stopped ma from pursuing her career. I do not care that you refused to let her leave a terrible marriage. I do not even care that you disapprove of all that I am and am not.

Happy birthday. I love you a lot.