the inane glint of icicles,

winks, that never were….

the paddock’s equipped,

the deer, all reined/feigned,

mumble sweet nothings to silence………

all the world’s,

picture-postcard-blasphemous…..

i’ll stay at home,

no gifts for me this christmas…

The descent commences,

of angels and pertinent fates..

The comfort of fables and a belief invested,

on fine-prints and tacit, implied clauses….

Greener than ivy,

are the brewing tempests of envy,

like,

blisters on the velvet of faux bliss..

i promise not to despair,

when there will be no gifts for me, this christmas….

The elves, all,

poised with their harps…

the requiem’s all but composed,

an interring to this death..

death of an imagination, kindled, tended,

on a tableau of unfounded hopes….

Even the turkey on my platter,

is morbidly listless…..

Solitude is my companion tonight,

no gifts for me this christmas….

The cosmos rejoices,

rather starkly,

staring me squarely in face…

laugh.sing.try.repeat.repeat some more.die.credits roll…

You dance with the world tonight,

and dispel all this random fuss….

i promise not to lose my religion,

when i don’t get gifts, this christmas….

The constant press of sweaty specimens of your own kind, often from less than privileged backgrounds, hosting despair and grime accumulated from a full day at work and wasting away to oblivion with each iteration of this exercise, normally enacted twice or more every 24 hours hardly reeks with romance.The social and economic fault lines that fracture our demography and often, our perspective, dissolve into one unified mass of flesh, blood et al when subjected by circumstance to accommodate oneself and more importantly, ones snobbery and ego in the stingy confines of a bombay local train. I disembarked at bandra station, from a suburban local, with scenes of my forthcoming adventure(as i imagined it then) playing out, way prematurely, before my eyes.Pushing past bodies of all shapes,sizes and genders, i emerged from the station to this bustling and in-patches-hip western suburb of bombay. Bandra is a microcosm of bombay in a sense that, some of the most posh locales of this metropolis unravel over the expanse of this suburb, in complete harmony with the squalor of slums and bazaars that seem to have sprung up, impromptu, in what is, a scene of total chaos and arbitrariness.
Like much else in Bombay, the sheer throb of energy and life will blitz you as you come out the station, to bandra(west). There are stalls dishing out non-vegetarian delicacies, mostly grilled fare, adhering to age old recipes. Patrons throng the stalls, spilling onto the streets, because, like everywhere else in bombay, there’s just not enough space for every one of this great city’s minions.Jostling through a spate of communal dinners, i reached the auto stand where majority of drivers were wearing skull caps and fashioned longish, unkempt beards.To one, unbaptised in the ways of this city, they would’ve appeared intimidating, malevolent even, but of course, mostly such pre-conceptions are grossly unfounded.Aboard an auto, i made my way to the Mount Mary church, negotiating bombay’s chronic traffic snarls.Off carter road, perched atop an 80 meter hillock, mount mary church has always been a centre of pilgrimage for the city’s Catholics, most of whom trace their roots to the southern indian state of kerala, not to mention, being a constant installation on the intinerary of most tourists, visiting bombay. After paying the auto-wallah and sending him along, i found myself standing on the cobbled street that snakes across the very pinnacle of the hillock, right in front of the church.There were stalls by the side of this narrow street selling candles and incense sticks.Hawkers, calling out in their unique tenors, trying to persuade devotees to anoint the virgin with their merchandise.Its not everyday that i visit a church.I find people my age, calling themselves atheists, simply because its the new cool. Wary of the just-another-prick-in-the-wall connotation of being a public atheist, i choose to call myself agnostic.Quite often, the thankless place this world is, when i have no-one in particular to bestow my gratitude upon, i think of god.Or when i am in grave trouble, of nature, that doesn’t allow it to be divulged to parents and seek solace in their authority and experience.Otherwise, its an existence giving fuck all and receiving the same in return.In any case, in a country where communal boundaries are intermittently and alternately,well-defined and porous, as the situation dictates, hindu by birth, that i am, praying in the church was never of particular allure or imminence.
Stepping the threshold of the main sanctum of the church, the peace of the place, the unblemished calm suffusing the insides of the church struck me like a poetic irony given the bustle of bombay, outside. There were rows of benches leading to the shrine where people sat, bovine and placid expressions on their faces, enjoying a temporary vaulted existence, insulated that they were from the goings-on of multitudinous lives unfolding outside, inadvertently linked to their own.Like a Bedouin relishing the oasis before heading out to face the rigours of his existence in the unforgiving desert. There was a knot of people at the front, kneeling, standing, lying prostate, praying before the virgin. A few were busy with their purses and wallets, extracting currency notes and coins and dropping them in the Donation-Box . It was then that this girl caught my eye. She was placing a candle on the altar, shaped liked a foot, knee down.Probably for an arthritic mother, i thought.It is fabled that if people suffering from bodily ailments, pray before the virgin, offering candles in shape of the affected body parts, the virgin alleviates the true believers of their afflictions.The girl was darkish in complexion, a certain shade of brown that people from peninsular india often display.Her hair was tied back in a severe pony-tail and she had a grave, almost sullen look to her face.She was wearing a white kurta that perfectly accentuated and flattered her measly curves over tight-fitting glacial blue denim trousers.Altogether, she wasn’t exactly unattractive, quite the opposite in fact. She mustn’t have been more than 25 or so i guessed.What struck me the most was the almost-contrived formality and severity about her.I thought she was too young to sport the demeanor, she had.I was intrigued, I admit.Anyhow, in order to seem the part, i clasped my palms together and closed my eyes in a silent prayer.Then, I reached for my wallet just as she was turned around to make her way out. In my almost-comical captivation, I dropped a 100 rupee note instead of a 10 rupee one in the donations-box. Cursing out aloud on realising my folly, i prompted condescending looks from retirees around me…’today’s generation’…Thoroughly embarrassed, i lumbered down the hall and out the doorway.By now, i had lost the girl and given the sheer profusion of humanity around me, i decided it futile to seek her out. In any case, her hold on my mind had worn off. I mean a random good looking girl can detain the imagination of a guy my age, only so long.
Stepping out in the sanguine, evening light from a sun in descent, amidst lank shadows, i decided to stick to my plans and check out the Band stand. a cobblestone street ran down the western face of the hillock leading straight to the sea facing promenade.By the side of the road, embracing the contours of the shore, runs a cemented track for the joggers. Beyond this track, lie the sea facing rocks spread right across the shoreline till the bandra fort and the Lands-End after which, the land pulls back in to form a peninsula of sorts and then after a luxurious curve, again heads out in the general westward direction and therein lies worli. And connecting the bandra reclamation with the worli sea-face, circumventing the tortuous road that obeys the curve of the shore and lies stricken with a pathological traffic issue, straddling the sea in awesome majesty is the bandra-worli sea-link.
Love birds make a beeline for the sea facing rocks, especially those, deficient in monetary resources to sponsor expensive dating options.And then facing the sea, in setting sun is a romantic rendition of any and every circumstance.In a city where change and transience are the only constants, the sea, is probably the only entity that day in day out manages to keep itself pristine from external influences and feigns a convincing, unchanging veneer.Its hard not to be sedated and calmed by such a presence.I strolled amidst deepening shadows, keeping the sea, company, till i reached Taj Lands-end, beyond which, clinging to an infant hillock, rose the last remaining, crumbling ramparts of the bandra fort.The hotel, i could sight from outside its gates had a most impressive facade.A gargantuan awning over an equally imposing doorway.Cars were being inspected by the gate by security men using detectors to trace hidden explosives.It was here, i saw her again.She was talking to one of the guards about something, in hindi, i guessed, trying to explain to him her predicament, or so it seemed.He let her in.I could see her figure ascend the staircase at the entrance of the edifice of the hotel and disappear inside revolving doors, that no doubt led to the reception.I dwelt upon her for a while before succumbing to my immediate environs.A climb up the hillock unearthed a spectacular view of the city.I could see the sea-link, winding about in its course, just a stone throw away.There were couples snuggling up to each other, oblivious to the apprehensive gazes of familial groups. Against the backdrop of a setting sun, they cut harmonious silhouettes as two bodies united into one in perfect cohesion, yin-yang, at the crucible of faith, hope and everything else, that induces an exhilaration in those embalmed in love. i could only look on in longing, quietly envious……hoping to intercept and to immerse myself in the dense syrupy vibes that were eddying all around me in tumultuous expressions of love, the next time i would visit the place.
I was staying at my aunt’s place, in bombay. Observing my keenness and excitement towards bombay and trusting my instincts now that i was 19, she had let me venture out and examine the city at my own leisurely pace.I did not want to put her receptiveness towards my spirit of adventure to test and hence after this trip, i refrained from mentioning or remarking about places in bombay that fascinated me, lest she misconstrue it as a masked, roundabout request to let me out of bounds again.The morning, three days post this trip, i was sitting on the sofa, languid, sipping tea and gazing across the newspaper spread out over the coffee table, when a certain headline caught my eye.
Body fished from sea at Bandra
Taj lands-end implicated
bandra,8.10.2010, a body was fished from the sea last evening here, at bandra fort.It was found floating amidst the rocks in highly mutilated condition that seems suggestive of a fall from the cliffs overlooking the sea .It was found at around 17.30 in the evening by a koli fisherman who was looking for a cove amongst the rocks to shelter his boat for the night, since a high tide had been predicted.The body was then sent for autopsy at the Bhabha hospital, carter road.Initial post-mortem reports suggest a death by drowning with a broken right arm, probably owing to the fall. Alcohol concentration in her blood was through the roof and it is believed that she must have lost her footing and fallen to her death in the rocks and the churning sea below sometime between 12 and 2 o clock, on 6th night.Police investigations, our sources tell us, have revealed a shocking twist to what shoud’ve have been a regular documentation of an accident.It turns out, the lady in question, Pearl Gonsalves was a call-girl. Records at Taj Lands end testify her presence in the hotel between 18.45 and 21.30, on the 6th. There was a room booked in the name of one Ram Bhalla, who is understood to be a ‘client’ of hers.Police are in the process of questioning the concierge and the employees of the hotel to investigate if the hotel authorities were aware that their premises were being used for such illicit activities.Meanwhile the husband of the victim, Varghese Gonsalves came forward to claim the body and was grilled by police in relation to his wife’s alleged profession.He is paralytic, hips down, owing to an accident last year on Linking road.He lost his job, soon after and this is what is said to have caused her to enter the flesh trade.
It all seemed sensational to me.Right out of a prime-time melodrama.I mean, of course, i did not know the name of the girl in white, whose mere presence had laid siege on my thoughts for most part of that fateful evening, but somehow it all seemed fitting.As if this news was the last piece of some complex jigsaw.It was inside me, this worm of belief, that somehow, even though unsubstantiated, dethroned every thought, however critical, from my mind and made me feel like an unsuspecting, clueless character of some abominable script, schemed by an unfathomable monument of power.I did not know how it changed things for me because i quite obviously had nothing to do with whatever had unfolded there except for the fact that i just happened to be one person in a city if 19 million who was fated to spectate the sad events, real time, from the sidelines.I somehow felt connected.i somehow felt lost.And i couldn’t even tell my mom.
The next day, there was an obituary in the newspaper.There was her photo with the regular accompaniments.It was Pearl, all right.My first glance at the photo, almost made me snap my fingers. Some inscrutable cog had just snuggled into place. The knee jerk was like, ‘i told you so’ to no-one in particular, more to myself.The mass was to be carried out at St. Andrews church and she was to be buried in a cemetery behind the church, within the precincts of the same.I said a silent prayer in my mind for her soul to attain peace and solitude.After all that she had been through, i guess it was the least she deserved.As a side-thought, that candle she lit at the Virgin’s altar, that was for her husband.
My stay at bombay came to an end 3 days after the obituary featured in the newspaper.I was back in my old life, grappling, coming to terms with the humdrum of my regular existence.It does take a departure of no small measure,from the lofty insinuations, to get the mind back to the insignificant scheme of everyday life after having tasted the heady, not altogether unpleasant cocktail of co-incidence and sensationalism.I told a few friends about this, relishing the sight of their eye-brows, wrinkled together in rapt attention, and a comic-disbelief gracing their faces.These sessions though almost always ended on a sorry note with me always promising and consoling my psyche, that i could have done nothing at all to prevent the horrific events.That when the wheels have been set into motion by a true authority, you can do nothing but comply and play your part with diligence and resignation.It was one of these days that i happened to look up Mount Mary church on Wikipedia.This is what i chanced upon.
“Although the current church edifice is just 100 years old, the history behind the current statue of Our Lady goes back to the 16th century when Jesuit priests from Portugal brought the statue to the current location and constructed a chapel. In 1700 Arab pirates interested in the gilt-lined object held in the hand disfigured the statue by cutting off the right hand.
In 1760, the church was rebuilt and the statue was substituted with a statue of Our Lady of Navigators in St. Andrew’s church nearby. This statue has an interesting legend. It goes that a Koli fisherman dreamt that he would find a statue in the sea. The statue was found floating in the sea between 1700 and 1760. A Jesuit Annual Letter dated to 1669 and published in the book St. Andrew’s Church, Bandra (1616–1966) supports this claim. The Koli Fishermen call the statue as Mot Mauli, literally meaning The Pearl Mother”
I could scarcely believe my eyes.All i could say is, i was converted.I was, now a believer.As for Pearl, well….all i can say is virgin mary answered her prayers.
For me, it instilled a fear and awe of the divine in me.It certainly did.

I haven’t been at my calmest, the past few days.The glum weather makes me gray and irritable and one of these times, i’ve known myself to cross the proverbial limits that, even without my consent, were imposed on me.I would have been glad to burgeon back to my true self and spirits but for the fact that this scheming world then played on my magnanimity and threatened my conscience with a collateral.A collateral so immense that killing my ebullience seemed the only way to circumvent the approach of an eternity of absolution and repentance. When guided by my essentials and bearings, even when sulking or putting up a menacing veneer, i stick to my domains of the unspoken and tacit yet obvious and pseudo-natural frontiers. even When dwelling in these darker realms, the maintenance of my upright and cowed posture is paramount. With all the physical ambitions or frustrations that these times bring, the violent coalescence of my aspirations and realities erupts forth, that to the beholders appears like the seething of an abomination thats only worth the repugnance of the spectacle and devoid of which, is just a pretentious mortal organism that has a harmless core inside this ostensibly dangerous frenzy of emotions and hopes. 

I have been ill.Attribute it to the doping habit that i was forced into.You may see a traffic of syringes lining my derma.I am now hooked to a daily dose of a million different kinds of nectars sourced right from the devils garden.But given the pulsating nature of my physique that doggedly follows the crests and troughs of my mood swings, this obsession becomes a tedium.I lose weight and i put on weight with alarming regularity magnified hundredfold by the magnitude of the occurrence and the cost it exacts from me, both physically and mentally..for others, its a simple matter of getting the thyroid investigated for afflictions but then my travails have hardly ever followed a uniform scheme.My life blood spills out the orifices in the syringe when i am in one of my bouts of unaccounted growth.The gush though is more profound in one of my charged moods when i am led astray by external influences to commit to stuff, i never would in my right senses.

In the torrential rains of 2005, i had the fortune to visit a devout hindu neighbourhood in kurla. The ever hospitable family let me have the whole of ground floor to myself while they themselves settled in the meagre spatial endowments of the first floor of their run-down tenement.I was an yearly visitor and hence was accustomed to this profession of love and solidarity. I always had had great time with the children as they loved me. Frolicking around me with an innocent abandon and bleeding their affection into me in our moments of contact such as these .Their parents of course were condescending mostly, telling them off for bothering me. But i could sense the overtones of unease lacing their demeanour; maybe because i was such a prolific junkie. Therefore, i forever was wary of encroaching their property and overstaying their hospitality.

In 2005, i was marooned in the house of this family in the same locality. The rains had arrived without any preamble and so had i. In spite of that, i was treated graciously and the customary ground floor reserved impromptu, upon my arrival.The single mother of the family and her 2 children lived off the meagre pension off her deceased husband, augmented by the odd jobs she took up from the people of the locality like sewing the shirt torn in the liquor-induced-stupor-induced-brawl of the husband of some lamenting lady in the neighbourhood or volunteering to weave the sweater for the progeny of some expecting young mother or soliciting sex at the busy harbour and central line junction that is kurla station.She had her offsprings to attend to and hence adequate precaution and protection was prerequisite for any such carnal encounter. But discretion is not always the most lucrative of pimps and she had had her share of lapses.I was settled,stoned like a dead weight when her travails that night brewed in the rarefied atmosphere of her unprotected promiscuity. Hear-says, and i hear a lot, tell me that she had entered the 6th month of her pregnancy. What i thought to be a thyroid problem, much like my own, in advent, had been the bump of a foetus. Now in a city of 18 million people, there is no dearth of quirky fetishes; after all, the groin is one region that seems to have a life and existence of its own as the diktat of the brain, seldom trickles down to the nether region. Now battling an acute dearth of clients owing to her advanced pregnancy, she though she had struck a gold mine when a a group of three migrant taxi drivers offered to buy her services.An orgy with an expecting mother, gross;But adherence to the pre-sex measures, she levied, by the drivers, was all it took to coax her to put up with the pain and nourish their darkest desires.Fast forward to my encampment at her neighbourhood;The labour pain, they say, cannot be quenched even by the near mortal doses of morphine but a precocious miscarriage is a firm rival to that. She had been a bit under the weather right through the day and as late evening neared, the clouds that had been mute witnesses all along, crossed some unknown tipping point and without a notice, wept out amidst a crescendo of monsoonal thunder.Two hours of this rain and i was persuaded to broach my barriers and take shelter in her vicinity and elsewhere.The pain was a dull persistent sensation at the start that refused to die down even as she tried to calm it with prescription sedatives.Holed up in the now-damp and stuffy room, the consistence of the pain subsided, albeit to return in morbid shriek-causing throbs and spasms.The neighbours were blissfully unaware owing to the racket whipped up by the atmosphere.Her children were too excruciatingly young to seek out any help on their own, sabotaged by their nascent, empty instincts.And i was the biggest deterrent of all.As i reflected earlier, i wasn’t exactly a welcome presence and the courtesy bestowed on me probably stemmed from this fear.The night came.the night passed.so did the matriarch of the family.

The rains were now a distant memory and i was placid. not trying to redeem myself for my nonchalance and indifference i displayed a few months back.Not disturbed.Not unsettled.not agitated.a spirit of calm dripping from the sunny skies.just that.I was on a regular rout.withdrawn. Gazing at the Tomb of Haji Ali and the causeway leading to it from the shore, i was fondly relishing the vividness of the scene.A throng of beggars lined the wire mesh barrier.All shapes.All ages.All genders.and more. I couldn’t help but to dwell on a desolate figure squatting at one of the sparser spots of the causeway.He mustn’t have been more than 6 or 7.He wasn’t gesticulating to the flowing masses for alms like beggars around him did but nonetheless, he didn’t exactly have a noble bearing about him. A family neared him.A normal family where the patriarch is satisfied with a young son to bequeath his genes and fortune and to keep the wife busy from poking her nose into his overtures and a daughter to dote on.They jostled, they fought, but they cut the picture of an average family.The Male head dropped a few coins on the turf in front of the young guy, probably moved by the sight of his own son.The child beggar gathered the alms in his tiny palms and ran towards the shore in his small, cute strides.There was an ice candy hawker by the side of the sea-facing promenade. He was dousing the glistening ground ice, perched on a stick, with loud coloured concoctions. The kid paid up for the stuff and retreated back to where he belonged.

As you might have guessed, he was the very same kid who had lost his mother in the 2005 floods due to a miscarriage.But had he known the origins of the now soiled coins that earned him the ice-candy, he would have thrown the uneaten candy away and puked the rest. Unbeknownst to him, the mustached male who had so generously dispensed the currency had nearly a year back seduced a whore near kurla station and convinced her to establish sexual relations without availing condoms.As a consequence, her womb contracted his child which as we know, culminated horrifically, that monsoon evening.But oblivious to this, the kid licked away at the candy with gusto.In the humdrum of life in Bombay for an orphaned child, yet to shed his milk-teeth, this was his microcosm of heaven.A temporary vaulted existence.divinity unto itself.

And hence i decided to keep my mouth boarded and not reveal a thing to the kid.

As for his brother, he decided to shrug off the boredom by spending some time with me. He never went back to the world as you know it.if his brother had chiseled out shreds of heaven from his existence, this guy had ascended to the heavens.literally.

I thought it best for him.

As for me….well…ambiguous and redundant might seem my existence and identity.

But then being the sea lapping the greatest metropolis of the subcontinent, identity has always been an ill-defined term for me.

I am the sea.The sworn sentinel of this decaying theatre of dreams that is bombay.And.this is my story

suggested-go though it again to grasp all the nuances.. ;)

You are ungrateful.you are the first beam of a monday morning that disrupts a hermetic equilibrium.you are the toothpaste tube with a butt forever pleading to be pinched, read-not the midriff.you are the caffeine percolator that falsely lulls you to a blissful state of being instead of aiding your awakening.you are the salmonella ridden grime on your throne.you are the sodden, limp, pungent almost-solid thats been an acquaintance since the genesis.you are a bar of fat that has ceased lathering, lest the bubbles reflect you back.you are the full-wheat that has developed unworthy liaisons with mould like a disgruntled lover,not attended to.you are sock with a gaping hole, probably to ventilate your smelly feet.you are the 9 o clock tube, perpetually threatening to leave you in its wake.you are the almost-retired, fully-retarded loser who was ejected from some uterus just so that you, even in your kindergarten days don’t mistake B for M or birth for mirth.you are the tantalizing whore, that gives your nemesis, a fluttering heart and a creaky bed.you are the forgotten collateral of corporate loggerheads and dictatorial whims of your superiors.You are the wasted suburban commuter, with no will for even an erection, let alone, resurrection.You are the trans-fat laced dinner, outsourced from a deli that forms the only matter of concern, for your dead, numb heart.You are the obnoxious judge of some lame reality show that draws an income from ghoulish cackles and moral bloodshed seemingly induced by clueless tenors.You are the slumber that that refuses to be persuaded into your being, even by the most profound of the lullabies you reminisce.you are being vaulted by this existence, your life, rendered impotent, your fountainhead of hopes, sterilised…….as you hurtle through a meaningless cosmos to the end of living…not death..as death is peace…the end of living..

Short Story-Suggest a Title

charlotte Young sure was getting no younger.She is your average 60 odd mom, hailing fromthe ‘good ol’ days’ of the boomers, born just as the beat generation was laying siege on thenations mind, as the erstwhile bohemians hitherto transformed into unsung intellectuals, the cerebral sufferers, something like the early renaissance period except, the persecution in this case was make believe,a figment, targeted against the system and the elitists driving it.Experimenting with drugs and sex was considered ‘liberal and liberating’(in my own words)and she like others had had an uncle who had driven off one fine day, abruptly at that, to pursue some self-conjured el-Dorado just as countless others, cutting right accross the spectrum of the country’s demography did fuelled by visions of che-guevara-like-bravado and an insatiable appetite for LSD.again,As you might expect, she had had a brother who had fought in vietnam against the anti-gringo, pro-communist-soviet-rallied forces and had in words of the then president Lyndon Johnson, ‘served the nation well’ or in other words died a sordid death bleeding away to obscurity in some godforsaken rainforest,the name of which, half of america couldn’t even pronounce.

So the sense of loss,as one might guess wasn’t really an unknown entity to her, especially the loss of a loved one at high seas.A lone elder in a community-centric southern US is generally benevolently addressed and helped if not pampered and adulated so when her neighbour knocked the door that fateful April day, charlotte guessed, it was for a routine ride to this acupucture centre, little more than a few blocks away where lately she had been undergoing treatment for arthritis.The downcast face and the hesitant demeanour of a 35 year old melinda jones hardly caused her to have second thoughts..’benny must be buggering her for that beach ball we saw yesterday’, thought she. But that wasn’t it…..the words of a well meaning neighbour as she mouthed the news might have sounded distant but a crack at her hip didn’t as she fell, rather comically, if i might be forgiven, as if struck by a sudden gust of a gale.cry,she did.sedated,she was.old and alone, she felt.

***************************************************************

Late january feelers from sao paolo were pointing towards a downturn in the demand for bagasse.ricardo di espinoza ,A sugarcane farmer in mato grosso do sul,a state located at the southern frontiers of brazil, bordering the famed gran chaco forests wasn’t the one to jump the gun, a rather peculiar characteristic, more of a quirk, for someone brought up on the upper reaches of the pampas on a staple of beef and a local version of cachaca, fabled for making the men of the region, so ‘well endowed’ and hot of blood.He owned a 45 hectare plantation where he grew sugarcane, feeding most of the produce to the livestock, he lorded over and transporting the bagasse or the left over fibrous waste to the factories in uptown sao paolo state. By alchemy, it seemed to him, the waste was miraculously transformed to ethanol in these giant smoke spewing monsters that fuelled most of the country’s cars and lately, his own new pick up.The miniscule, remnant percentage of the crop was destined, again, for uptown sao paolo, this time though, for the breweries.

It was national knowledge that off the coast of Rio, a mammoth oilfield had been discovered.Petrobras, the national oil behemoth had been fast to issue ‘precursory licenses’ to international oil powerhouses of the ilk of BP,shell and exxon.How big was this oil field?? The more,shall i say, dubious sections of the media fraternity reflected that this find had the potential to make gasoline so cheap for the country that the monumental and leading efforts that the government of brazil, had been dedicating to the cause of clean ethanol fuel was according to them, soon to become a part of history books. i mean c’mon, gallon for gallon, gasoline, they said, was soon to be available at half the price of ethanol.point taken.

The ripples that gradually filtered through to this remote province had the effect of making farmers like ricardo uncertain about their future in face of this prospect.After substantiating the imminence of the event and analysing his own position, he decided to channelise a greater margin of his produce to the breweries.He wasn’t in a bad way, this ricardo, but his astuteness compelled him to take this action.

He started out with a gradual increase towards the cause of edible ethanol to leave space for unforeseen economic and political knee-jerks that could derail the whole oil thing bringing him back into the fuel business,in full strength, he hoped.

***************************************************************

Charlotte was being tended to in a New Orleans hospital by the very same, ever-friendly melinda though this time accompanied by her kid and her husband. Charlotte had a feeling that she knew the young kid sitting by her bedside, trying to look obedient as his mother was telling him off for ‘disturbing granny charl’.His gaze oscillating between the plaster cast encasing her leg and a bottle of rum that the charming couple had so thoughtfully brought along.

What charlotte knew was that her only son had died aboard some oil drilling platform in The Gulf due to some kind of an abominable explosion. 

What she didn’t know, was that the explosion had resulted in a leakage from an undersea pipeline that was vomiting 60000 barrels of oil into the watery grave of her now deceased son.one of the eminent oil disasters of the century, it be noted.

What she didn’t know was that this maritime disaster had caused PetroBras to defer the auction for sites off the Brazil Coast till the spill in the gulf of mexico was addressed to and a definitive analysis and the precautionary measures, any such report would entail were formulated amidst pressures from the international community anf the green peace groups, who had suddenly become vocal about the safety, or the lack of it, of Ultra-Deep sea rigs.

What she didn’t know was that it would take years for that to happen.The Black gold wasn’t to fuel the black Limo of the Black Pearl just yet.

What she didn’t know was that the bottle of rum by her bedside had been brewed not far from sao paolo, fermented and then blended to perfection courtesy our prodigially endowed ricardo’s sugarcanes.

But then, even our ricardo didn’t know this…….

The Sea, in all its immensity and ostensible proximity, feigns a sense of frankness………….looking over the transient blistery ripples erupting in their multitudes over an all conquering expanse, the vista appears simplistic enough to convey the impression of an invariable candor….like a moron, dull and unremarkable, who leaves nothing to the depth of the mental pen-sieve and is shallow enough to be seen through the simple weave of his intentions and aspirations.

Nestling astride the rocks lining the sea facing promenade at the Bandstand, the surf of the sea, frothed at his feet. The lights dancing amidst the natural phosphorescence, were actually reflections of the sodium lamps on a yonder Carter Road. The fishy smell wasn’t quite as profound owing to a late evening high tide but the reek of salt was omnipresent. Over a perspiring bottle of vodka, he was trying to access the bosom of headiness as the sea or at least its constancy acted like a natural and powerful analgesic, working in tandem with the ethanol, now surging though his veins.He hadn’t been sitting there long, arriving only as the shadows, already lank by the progress of the evening were lapsing, faint, with the background as the twilight signaled its departure and as such, there was a sizeable crowd milling about but no attention was jobless enough to be focussed on him or his sorry presence. As the evening traffic intensified, the air was dense with a thick syrup of indistinguishable noises, wafting about.But to him, it barely induced a ripple in his pool of thoughts, perhaps because it already was agitated enough to camouflage a single isolated disturbance.

Hours never had passed this easily.

And the last someone saw of him, a frail body slumped over the rugged contours of the sea facing rocks was what that person might have seen.

The procession slithered out the alley like an old, wizened albino of a boa, with a hint of involuntary stagger diluting the remarkable and given the context, surprising fluidity.The buzz about this mobile congregation was palpable in more than one way..the quite obvious profusion of flies, was just one element responsible.Taking an eagle-eyed view of the proceedings, the head of the Boa seemed to be afflicted by some abominable pestilence that appeared to have rendered the frontal anatomy, red and yellow.As if the very brain of the behemoth had spilled out amidst the frenzy of eddying blood.

The narrow street funneled us onto the main road.

The bustle and the confusion seemed like white noise on the radars of our mind.Like a minor disturbance interfering with an unattenuated signal…like a faint glimmer invading the realms of the dark.

And suddenly there was none.

This throbbing, irrepressible organism, traffic, froze in its tracks.The noise subsided, and palms were retrieved from the handlebars and the steerings to be brought together, to be folded, as an emotional knee jerk. This remains the most vivid memory, i have , about this strech in time, being described.

The bamboo was eating into my shoulders, even as people, many of them unknown, jostled to share my agony, both physical and mental….but for once, i was reluctant to relinquish the pain, throbbing at my shoulder as i insinuated it as a pyre where i could immolate my, at times, untoward behaviour…..or i guess, going by how shallow i am, just a distraction from the grief assaulting me…or it probably just was my stubborn unwillingness to let the truth sink in, by grasping on tightly to ‘what was’…..or maybe just an unfounded machismo, that had bubbled to the surface at the most inopportune of moments….

Later……as the proceedings reached their meaningful culmination, aberrations began haunting my eyes…the world, that i was viewing appeared to ripple about forming wavy patterns, as if the scene being witnessed was being jerked about in abominable motions and the collapsibility of what we perceive began to creep in…

Or probably….it was the smoke playing tricks with my eyes…you know how it appears when the hot air from an open flame rises.

The funeral pyre of my Bua gave a sad crackle in agreement to the swirling vortex of my thoughts.

Sepia is the colour of nostalgia and the rustic, with the ability to transform even the most mundane and regular to something cool and retro by, what i consider, a plain induction of this mental frame that anything with a tea tinted gloss is right from the shelves of the distant past and hence, rationalizing and analysing this thought in the sub conscious, we infer that the photo was important enough to preserve against the transience of time and hence a bias gets hard wired in our mind that makes us review the pic from a non-neutral frame of view and hence the general consensus that sepias lend a better feel to the photo.

Thats why, happy and pleasant memories lack the natural vividness since our mind’s eye affords a view from a sepia-ed pane.

While on the other hand, we tend to remember the unpleasantness dissolved in the murkiness of our past explicitly with every detail in place, some, even made up…

So to condense the first assertion in this post and to attune it to some of the above arguments, i guess sepia is the colour of happiness, of longing and of the conspicuous absence of pain in the our nostalgia, when so often we get caught on the wrong foot, inundated by a brown surge, overpowered by the scent, it carries of the times gone by and a reminder of the proliferation of the cobwebs that play ‘the’ role in transformation of this image in our mind from an a’ la darjeeling to an a’ la assam and then on to even more profound shades that finally cloud and obliterate the details and in the end, the sepia, this colour of happy recollections proves its own undoing and reduces the image to a scene, youngly bereft of an erstwhile innate happiness……and since the absence of happiness translates to sadness, the sepia coalesces with the ‘true colour’. so with time, it all becomes excruciatingly uniform and repetitive…..and i…..well……….i revert back to the definition at the top of this post, as it retains its meaning even in the face of this onslaught of my random ramblings… :)