For Anna, who also loves 'Medea'

Medea

There was once an angry queen called Medea

Her cheating husband really had no idea.

She said to her husband ‘Darling, I love you!’

While she put his little boys on the barbeque,

But she got away scot-free and now lives in St. Lucia.

Glauce

In the land of Corinth there was once a princess,

Her name was Glauce and she loved a new dress!

But a married man was she wooing,

She should really have been more clued in,

And she certainly should have trusted the wife less!

Creon

There was once an unwise king called Creon,

His daughter to be looked after when he was gone,

So he caught the first cute guy in town,

And lured him in by promising the crown.

But the guy’s wife found out and burnt them all at dawn.

Jason

Do you see that beggar called Jason?

Once he had a wife, a kingdom and a son.

But he threw it all away,

For a turn in the royal hay,

And now he has to make do with none.

The Anatomy of the Primordial

The estuary of time meanders into the timeless abyss

 Shesha, the void-eyed serpent of a thousand faces,

Slithers this way and that, across the waves as I, Vishnu

The order of the universe, the witness of the beginning

And the prophet of the culmination, breathe out the cosmos

Upon these waterless oceans of nothing.

The coronary clock-hands of the nothing

Continue to strike the hours into the abyss

As the blue-boned, circadian mind of the cosmos

Sloughs off its latest rage. Those cotton-clouded faces!

Those ambrosia-mottled limbs of devalok are beginning

To seize and choke my being! No, No, cries Vishnu.

But the gods, the leaves, the shoals and the fires are also Vishnu.

I am the nameless, the limbless; the solitary sailor of the nothing.

The synapses of each moment wreathe my end to my beginning

While I cannot die, I must give birth and blossom into this abyss.

The umbilical lotus springs out, bleeding immortality onto the faces

Of the four-headed Brahma, the son and the keeper of my cosmos.

Brahma, as he is born, excavates the suns and the jupiters out of the cosmos

He tills out the moons, earths, comets till the Milky Way gushes out of Vishnu.

I, Vishnu, the king and the steward, breed continually till I am a thousand faces.

I am the wild boar and the vast shell of the tortoise, and the life-giving nothing.

I, my lotus-son and the serpent are both the ouroborous and the abyss,

We are the map of the apocalypse woven into each dewdrop of the beginning.

Matsya, the piscean lord, gave me his form to wear at the crisis of the beginning.

I remember his immense lamellar bones, his lobed fins; his tail rips the cosmos

Like ice. I lived and blessed his fragile, scaled body, and still it lurks the abyss

Around the sub-Himalayan landform. For a mortal body to house the Vishnu

Is great suffering: from the king of kings he has become a near-extinct nothing

They call him the coelacanth for his hollow spine – the spine he lost for my faces.

As the ocean bed retched up the ambrosia and the venom, the greedy faces

Of a million demigods slobbered upon my shores. I saw then the beginning

Of bloodspill: they would all suffer and nothing would come of this mad nothing.

Vishnu, then unbecome, took off his cyan-scaled skin. He turned the cosmos

Into a stage lit by a million suns. He became the aniconic, courtesan-Vishnu

To lure and thwart, swerve and sway those who must fall and be eaten by the abyss.

In the boundless midnight abyss,

The trinity reigns in the name of Vishnu

And so shall, till the culmination of the cosmos.

Happiness is the skin of a morning

Writing is difficult.

I wish to write every day, every minute, because there is so much along the lining of the cavity, just waiting to pour out in a slide of haphazard words, gesticulations, stares and tears. A conversation with a friend or a guardian spirit is a better vehicle for release One can spew and spew and it all dissolves into the great void of the world. I sometimes wonder if the air is not an incarnation of the blue-throated dancergod- breathing in and holding the toxic waste of the human soul for an eternity.

Writing, on the hand, remains. Writing stays still and writing dances across the manifold surfaces of the limbless internet and the humble ten rupee notebook that your mother may decide to read one day. A website may be hacked, a diary read without consent. In other words, whatever you choose to put down in a legible script risks being captured and taken away, or worse, used against the writer.

This paranoia has always kept me for writing a diary. However, over the last two years I have had a notebook that occasionally swallows up my misgivings, regrets, rages and terrors. But only that. Nothing positive, nothing heart-stopping ever goes into it. I think I would find it easier to own up to my flaws and ugliness than to confess to breaking down in front of a painting a strange city or having a morning that compensates for all the dull, sad mornings I have ever had.

To own up to a happy moment is to admit that happiness exists. I am not brave enough to raise the stakes that high. If I admit that happiness exists that I can no longer submerge my soul in the petty, the tiresome and the easy. I must go out and find this nebulous little poetry of existence.

To write about happiness is to remove all scope of denying that it happened to me, and that is to constrain myself forever from despair and annihilation. That would be difficult.

But I am happy. I am happy right now, listening to music I have never heard before, writing this confession and setting it free into the oceanic randomness.

I must give in to my bad writing. I must write trite things and silly things and self-indulgent bullshit and non-p.c. confusions and everything that is frothing and freezing the innards. So, I shall begin by writing about this morning, because I think I had the most mindful, ecstatic, heartbreaking morning of my life.

It is 1.37 pm and I have written a page, and the happiness is still quietly nestled against me.