Drumster's Den

That evening I sat and I wrote and I wrote and a million different ideas would pour into my head. Thoughts about why someone never thought of these ideas. They would be discoveries and inventions never attempted. They were ideas of radical thoughts that would alter the way the humanity lives and thinks about its progeny. They were about love and how the loss of it makes you impassioned. These thoughts kept on gushing at me like the waves of the crimson tide. They washed me with their warmth and healed me with their speed. And then suddenly as the tide subsided I was jolted back to reality and the waves felt like those of the most roguish sea and the thoughts were pulled back with as immense a force as the world cannot reckon with. You become stone headed, mindless, closed and restrained with chains, oh so strong.

Then I thought about the intoxicant and how it leads us all back into the real world as against the popular notion. I would behave differently with people even after I am on a high; people with whom I have different relationships and different realities. And I realized that the “intoxicant” wasn’t working to intoxicate you, but it was life – the one big strange miracle of the gods – that was the intoxicant; always pulling you away from the reality.

We felt life rushing by as we walked faster and faster through it. The walk with her today felt like the best walk I ever had with her – silent and calm; it wasn’t this good even in those few months when we were lovers. That’s the irony of life; the best things happen to you when they are already gone.

Walking along the afternoon roads when you are high on marijuana, you do not narrow your eyes to impede the light filtering through and reaching your soul, but it comes to you as a savior; as a messiah of joy and it gladdens your soul. But when walking in the real world you narrow your eyes to restrain the light because you don’t want the joys and the happiness; you want to be miserable and feel the depression ripping your life apart.

And that’s how you keep going on; through fever, illness, bad health; tired, battered and bruised but still trying to stand tall looking your best. And half the life passes away in this endeavor. But what’s left of you then? Nothing but pieces of your past lying along the way; and losing sight of them as you amble along. Scattered hopes and unfinished battles in this stroll through the graveyard until you finally knock at the doors to be let in. And when you walk through that door you realize that it’s right where you began as a child with an empty page.

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A lone biker tears off as if in the greatest hurry in the world. The trucks pass by the joint in great lines leaving all the heat and longing behind. Where are they all heading? Truly they must have some destination; some purpose; some aim in life? I stood there without any purpose or hope. The cigarette made the wait and the journey bearable. The winds blew as a harbinger to the impending monsoon which had blessed the towns around. It always makes me sad when I see people hurrying with their luggage for their vacation or their travels. It makes me sad because I’m trapped in a life I don’t like. The life I never chose but came to me as a disease that wouldn’t cure. It makes me long for the day when I’ll be in their shoes packing off my luggage to a place far away. I walked back to my bus with a last sigh as the driver blew the horn indicating that the journey had to be resumed.

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The only thing that doesn’t change between places or between people is the distance that separates them.

On a sweltering May noon I stood there waiting for my bus to Pune. There passes by a man in his late sixties, old and haggard. He was carrying a satchel which was tattered at its ends as if waiting to be finally put to rest. I was enjoying the weekend’s first cigarette trying to beat the heat under the shadow of a dilapidated general store. The man stops by, looks at me, his eyes peering through his thick glasses as if trying to recognize the face of a long lost son. Then suddenly wrinkles appeared on his face with the onset of a frown. He said in an ancient reproachful voice, “Its better you give up. You are too young and there are a lot of things you have to do.” All I could muster was, “Thank you for your kind advice sir.” And he just shook his head and walked on as if he got the same old answer. As if he had found many sons on his foot journey and none of them gave him an answer he desired.

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I don’t like wishes. They have a nature to put a definite shape to desires you don’t want complete control over, but you would like them to take a shape on their own. On the other hand, hope, is something I believe in. It subsumes a lot many desires in their very own form. Uncertain like life, with its own course, but you grappling with the steering at all times, unsure of what’s going to happen, but knowing the general direction.

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The evening slowly dissipated into the night with the wind making gentle admonitions to the lowly shrubs. The wind still brings with it faint memories of her. I could still hear her voice in faint whispers through the dying nights, almost sacred of losing what we had between us. Her eyes grim with the reality and boring straight into mine, almost hurting. She held onto me like I was her last hope. This was the city where I’d thought that life would stop being that whore and become my own. All it brought back then was pain.

We sped through the fields of cables and electricity. Two souls standing on the bridge, watching the day live its dying moments. I stood at the edge of the speeding train watching the world go by as another week ended its cruelty. Life is like the tracks on which this damn thing on wheels runs. 12:52 says the indicator; we are 14 goddamn minutes late. Boisterous laughter and drunken songs from within the coach. Same old place where we boarded the train for 4 years. It means not a fucking thing now. Whoever said nostalgia lasts a lifetime must be fucking wrong. All that lasts is anger and prejudice and all the things that people want you to forget. The laughter soon gets lost in the dust along the floor, crushed under several oblivious feet. Silent corridors and dead memories.

Calm black skies. Wedding lights glittering below as if begging the heavens, to bless them, the ones who have been accursed all their lives. And there are no answers. Only the empty skies, looking down on them, condescending, mocking.

Isn’t it every man to himself in life? This question baffles me everytime when people start advising. Its like a movie that you see, but by some weird twist of fate, the world doesn’t want you to see it. Isn’t life about going through all these things? Or is it just a bunch of things that people tell you to see?

I’m confused, devoid of all professional and personal ambitions. And I know, that people like me, whatever we do, are always going to be the ones that will remain restless in life. Even though we crave for success, we are not ready to compel ourselves to a life of misery and subject ourselves to the advice of others who think they have seen all in life. Yet they say that the choice is completely yours. I disagree.

Who said life isn’t beautiful? Its as beautiful as a dying dream with the well conjured scenes and hopes left behind in its wake. Life is as tranquil as the flight of a feather detached from the body of that bird, once full of life. Life is somewhere between the spaces of that drunken night and the morning after. Life is between the spaces of that broken dream and a new start. Life is between the spaces of that girl’s heart who never loved you. Life is between the spaces of that jump out of the window and the landing thereafter. The beautiful silence. Life is a mirage of abandoned dreams and unfinished battles. Whoever said life was beautiful, must be out of his damn mind.

Winter for me is a season of lost innocence. Of days when words didn’t hold with them the weight of the world. Then, before I knew it, time stood still, sweet smoke blowing through my nostrils, the world receding lazily into oblivion and strange visions threatening to take over my mind. I was born again and the world seemed new. My darling girl was still at my side, her eyes – delirious, making love to the smoke and watching me with tenderness. Time had stopped reeling somewhere in between and we were just two souls sitting in a deserted field with dreams of utopia.

To this day I travel lonesome on a road I never took, but still running. Inebriation gripping my soul but thoughts of another lifetime, so distant even my mind plays tricks on that log of life. Trapped inside.

Empty rooms. Plush hotels. Loneliness. Carpets stained with memories and rushes of the thousands of lives that have lived here. The air heavy with the smoke of countless cigarettes that were lit here, only to count the passing minutes. The silent nights not as dark as the darkness that fills your soul. Every minute takes you further away from home, yet, threatening to bring the journey to an abrupt end. Stifling luxuries and trifles not needed. Books that take you far away into a world you desire, the one you can never have.

Tired walks down the deserted evening roads. Cigarette smoke makes love to the fog and the chilly winds make your face go numb. The road to take at the crossroads seems like the easiest choice you had ever made. Alien country, nothing to call your own, yet, this minute, it embraces you like the warmth of a mother’s arms while estranging you the next.

This evening the world seems as distant as the fading horizon on a lazy shimmering sea. I don’t think i know the people anymore. I don’t think i know my friends any more. There are no more songs to capture my imagination, no more vessels can take me to that horizon. Is this where it all ends? Or has it only begun? Questions such as these plague my weary mind and the train chugs on to the destination i can barely call home. The thought of those walls suffocates me and life seems like a prostitute waiting for a customer, ready to finish the job and move on to the next.

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More incoherent thoughts. I wonder if the beauty of a poetry lies in its incoherence. Words form a trapdoor in an inebriated mind and spill out in a beauty of disorder. The dark folds of this endless night engulf it in shrouds of mystery. These words will never be spoken again. Interpretation is just a facade for your own thoughts.