"Right at the moment when the scheme makes sense, the grand plan interrupts like a wash of bright sunlight erasing the night. There is a freedom in submission, in the insistent wandering and discovering that actually, we know absolutely nothing at all.''

-Changing World, The Dewarists

When Raymond becomes King

When Raymond becomes King,

He moves with such style

He knows he's the man.

You can spot him from a mile.

He puts on his impeccable silk necktie,

Complete with Cravat pin.

Then smiles into the mirror like he's guilty of no sin.

They made fun of the paint peeling off the walls and the bricks that were getting loose. The chairs were too hard for them to sit into and the bed not warm enough. They stared at the blackened walls as if they made ugly faces at them. My father’s old rickshaw was to them a funny sight. Their frosty gaze pierced through the cloth that covered our windows instead of glass.

They had a quick lunch sitting in my dingy kitchen as mother made them hot rotis. They left after a curt handshake, smirking to each other. I saw them till they bent the corner and vanished.

I had tears in my eyes as I turned to go back inside. My gaze fell on the rickshaw standing alone on patches of green. It wasn’t the rickshaw I could see then.

My father had come home after the day. He smiled as he saw us. We rushed into his tired arms and he kissed his exhaustion away. His mouth smelled of hunger yet his eyes gleamed as he took us for a ride around the house before retiring for the day. We huddled around the kitchen fire as we had our dinner. Mother sat in the rickety chair beside our cold beds as she transported us into our world of fantasy, lulling us into the arms of sleep. It wasn’t the blankets but her presence that kept us warm through the night.

Mother was calling me inside. It was time for father’s medicine. I glanced one last time at the dilapidated walls of the house that my friends had seen today. If only they could have come home instead.

My friend wrote this. Her name is Namra Sultan. She is as beautiful as she writes.

Mumbling #6

I remember waking up slightly breathless from a dream a few months back. I would have fancied it happening in the over-dramatic Bollywood style, complete with a scream and an appealing heaving chest, then frailly scampering for a glass of water. It was anything but that. The next few moments were spent in figuring out what the hell the dream was about which came to me in bits and pieces.

I was back in school, standing in this stadium sized chemistry lab and my Chemistry teacher, her head three times larger than the rest of her body, was bending over and furiously asking me questions in a language I didn’t understand. Meanwhile, rest of the kids kept sniggering at me. Flicking back her Snape-like hair, she smirked and said something rude and I threw the shit in the test tube in her face and ran. I ran for my life.

So this morning I had a revelation of sorts. I think I have realised what I have feared the most. It is the fear of not knowing and then being put to test. Like how S says she sometimes feels when she’s in her Political Science class and everyone else except her has read the fucking paper. It’s that feeling when we don’t know the answer to a question and we avoid making any eye contact with the teacher hoping that she would just look through us and ask that twit sitting in the front row. Almost all of us have felt the same one time or another, mostly in school. I’d like to think I have grown out of it but on some days it haunts me still. The feeling of being constantly accountable.

Mumbling #5

What brings comfort, freedom and happiness all together?

A pair of freshly washed, tumble-dried, snug underpants! :)

MUTILATE

Scratch it.

Cut it.

Bleed.

Sew it up.

Repeat.

For now, she is your fetish.

She is your very own rag doll.

“I see with sympathy

The swollen veins on his brow,

How exhausting it is to be evil’’

-The Mask of Evil, as translated in Brecht on Brecht

Mumbling #4

Back in the day, when we were in kindergarten, things were simple and only a few emotions were known to us, I believed that I would grow up to marry that boy. We used to travel in the same van and he drank water from my bottle on the way back home more than a few times. It is funny, how I have remembered so little of this, never realising that he was the first boy I thought I loved. Memories are strange. You have to keep scratching on a few to find them. And when you finally do, they surprise you with their starkness. Now, I can recall his name too.

Mumbling #3

I never believed in Santa Claus, even when I was a kid. Santa was supposed to leave us gifts under the pillow every year. Not on that one rare Christmas Eve when my father was in a relatively good mood.

BLIND

I'm a light bug. The faintest light I see, and I run towards it, losing control of all my senses. Not a moment must be wasted, not a glance back to see what I'm leaving behind. I don't even see what I'm heading for. I'm intoxicated.
I'm a light bug.

I don't remember the last time I felt truly happy. I don't remember the last time I felt gratitude. I've always been brushing past them, sometimes stepping on their foot. I stare at their shoes and smirk. I have nothing to say.

That little baby girl trodding in her pink frock is a walking flower. She looks up at me and grins a toothless grin, as if, in me, she can see all the goodness in the world.