The Sparrows of Joy

Two years back, there used to be a nest of sparrows in the attic of our office. Every morning, as I opened the door to our top floor, there would be a hectic flutter of activity inside-with all of them birds frantically bumping into glass panes of the windows, to find a way out from the intruder who had just disturbed their nightly tranquil. Already flustered by my 20 min delay, I would rush to my table, only to find the papers all cluttered (definitely not the way I left them), a sheaf of hay protruding from my drawer and sparrow poop littering one of the paperweights. It would then take me only about 1/10th of a second to lose my cool and start yelling at anyone and everyone who dared call me at that hour.

So not the way to start the morning with!

Soon, I would be busy with the daily activities- phone calls, reports, project deadlines, field visits, inspections and more phone calls. Unperturbed to my presence now, the family of sparrows would keep darting in and out from the little holes they made in the false ceiling, chirp some more, and then fly away to their neighbours nearby - on the Water Tanks and the Godown, perhaps to gossip or gather their  food for the day.

Every day, I would leave my desk clean. And every day, I would return to find it impossibly messy.

Things had gone too much out of hand. So, one Sunday morning, we changed the ceiling panels, and nailed a wire netting all across the attic. The sparrows were finally kept at bay. The next day, I actually relished the thought of them birds not getting a chance to make a bed out of my desk papers. I was finally happy.

Or so I thought.

Two, perhaps three weeks later, I began to find something amiss.  The sparrows were gone. My desk was clean now. There was no more the noisy chirp of their arguments to disturb my work. Still, I did not stop barking at my phone calls. I did not stop getting impossibly angry at office. I did not stop feeling distraught.

In fact, I realized (albeit a bit late) that I missed that steady hum of activity all around me. Their comical gossip. The frantic search for that one morsel that would save their day. And despite that   tomorrow all of them might actually starve, they would still celebrate the night cluttering up my desk. Perhaps my getting fumed up never was related to them poor sparrows. In their absence, they instilled in me a new belief on life. I changed. I kept a window ajar every night for them to come back. But the sparrows were nowhere to be seen.

Two years hence, a lot of water has passed down the bridge. In between frantic bursts of activity, I do think of the birds even now. Yesterday, like any other, I shut shop at 1900 hours sharp, and left the left corner window open. Today morning, the key took unusually long to turn the old lock. Already worried over a looming inspection, I hurriedly threw my folder on the desk. Over sparrow poop.

My eyes stared in disbelief and the heart danced in bliss. The Sparrows of Joy were back! Finally!



-Palash
March’2013, Lumding.

Stolid Nights

The hour shies away from the midnight gong,
reluctant to step into change,
though inevitable as the familiar tick tock,
of the famished lizard crawling on my wall.

Beneath my humanitarian back,
two cockroaches make merry,
playing jump to death,
on my crisp absurdly clean bedsheets.

In the corner,
The  four mosquitoes throw a toast-
"The summer's here at last!,
and we'll have our full"
And I waver in non chalance,
of blood draining,
only from the limbs this time around.

Dodging mysteries and revelations,
Drowned in cliches,
My atmosphere refuses to breathe today,
muting even the deafening loco horn,
to a whimper of this whimsical night.

Nothing does matter anymore.



-Palash
March'13, Lumding.

You listen to it one day, wondering what the hell in the world is that torn jeans-skinny bugger with the voice of a banshee is shreaking about. You shut it down.

You play it another fine day, cross the vocals, come over to the magical electro-acoustic solo. You shut it down again. Never coming to the end of the 8.03 min epic masterpiece of a song.

Grave injustice.

On and off, off and on, it plays, and somehow the music, the beats,and the swings start finding a niche in your soul. Slowly, You get tied to it, invisibly chained, culminating in a bond that can never ever be broken now.

It is now a part of your life. It becomes a part of who you are. The day starts with it, and ends with it. In odd little places, it springs up suddenly, raising a depressed you to the most dynamic peaks, and throwing a foolishly high you to the most sober depths.

They say its creators were temporarily, proponents of the dark-the voodoo. Perhaps some of that got sprinkled over. Or perhaps, there never was a more Godly song.

Each time, each and every single time, its a different experience altogether. The original, the remasters, the tributes, every single recording ever done.

Led Zeppelin are legends.

Starway to Heaven is their priceless gift to the world.

HOPE & some Ramblings.

Leafing over some unfinished manuscripts, I noticed over a few months last year, a lot of material on "hope" as a theme had accumulated on my notebook . Most of it unfinished though (perhaps due to ongoing undercurrents), but still browsing over them, made me rethink and for a moment, rewire my thought processes.

Everything happens for a reason. Not necessarily the way one wants them too. Everyone is priceless. Lets respect that.

·       

1. (Prose)              "A  slight shift in perspective can help adjust the focal distance of your life's lens to the right degree. Things of the future are now thankfully blurred. And I am suddenly short sighted."

I see the air I need to breathe.
I see the seconds I need to time.
Much thankfully not the hollow years,
I still have to painfully live.

I see me. Thats it.

·         2. (Poem) The Lens.

By the cobble stoned pavement,
there sprang an "odds and ends" store,
I stopped by from work,
and my errands with time.

The keeper got me a lens,
from somewhere behind the shiny cobwebs,
A one I couldnt even peep through straight.

"But how do I make it work?"
"You don't. It's an artefact of life."

The day over,
The errands done,
The lens soon found its place among my own cobwebs.

Not later than yesterday now,
when your memories,
stole that brick in my shaky embankment,
The lens resurfaced in the waters.

And now I see,
how it does make me soar,
upwards and backwards all around.

Faded and Focussed,
I am not me anymore.

-20/06/2012

·         3. Hope. (Prose)

Sometimes, there will be a persistant knocking of that past on the door. Pretending you are away will only add to the apprehension simmering inside. Do let her in, have a cup of talk and two words of coffee. Loose your thinking capacities and turn into a bumbling idiot who knows nothing about the past or the future. Turn into the you of today. And then show her the door.

Now there's a knock on the door,
of the past on my tail,
I so forgot to cover my tracks,
heck, I'll just go and then sail again.

(C) Ramblings.

·         4. Hope.(Lyrics, Poem)

"And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning"

(C) Waters, Gilmour,Wright, Mason, 1970.

No,
Don't drown this drink of today,
In the hopelesness of tomorrow,
I made it for you, soul,
calculated the percentages and all,
And hope I got it just right.

This drink,
perhaps is not the one,
you were looking for,
The prized alchemic potion,
to a destination of nowhere.

This drink,
This time,
This place,
Has its own beautiful coordinates.

I just hope you see it.

(C) High me. 2012.

·         5. Hope. (Poem)

This back,
my back,
starts acting up today.

Just when,
that rain,
this rain,
starts, and
keeps falling.

Just when,
those dreams,
my dreams,
dared trespass into,
the falling rain of today.

Ah!. Thank thee,
shooting stars in the spine,
for I have no time for dreams,
nor for rains.

-25.06.2012

·         6. Hope 2. (Poem)

In hope you will find your nemesis,

For it will be easy to drown in despair,

in the djinns of hopeless behaviour;

But it will be a rebel chromosome,

that will do you in,

take your wings,

and make you fly,

from the comfort of the velvety marsh,

And fall you may,

Burn and singe you may,

But,

It wil be a shooting star in the sky, say!

-17/07/2012

Reading Room 2 : Midnight's Children

Yes. The clock has stricken. The countdown has ended. And finally I am not me anymore. I am two. The one before and the one after.

“Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as , all in good time , they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it’s the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.”

Many ‘times’ stolen out from hundreds of over packed schedules over the past one year had been used in trying to read and comprehend the whole idea called the “Midnight’s Children”. It is only then I realised that the above last lines come closer than anything to describing for real the many multitudes of the book.

I started it as a fantasy novel (at least that was the impression of the first few chapters), of a story being narrated back in the timeline, of a story that begins one morning by the side of a lake in Kashmir. There was no getting away from the time and date, the date of Saleem’s birth: The stroke of Midnight, 15^th of August 1947. Even then, Rushdie’s magic forces you to concentrate on things and events that that so seamlessly swing back and forth in reference, in importance to everything going on.

Towards the middle, slowly the realistic, historical side to the story begins to unfold. I recall here the movie “Butterfly Effect”, where everything, even the flutter of a wing, is said to have profound consequences. Every little move, or thought in Saleem’s soul is tied to the story of India. India is Saleem and Saleem is India. How the author manages, in spite of weaving fiction, reality, history-all into India’s path breaking events in the Timeline, adding to that his own take and views on every situation is beyond comprehension. It’s like walking on a tightrope with a fire beneath. Pure mastery!

It was only when I was into my last few chapters did I realise (from some other 3^rd source though) that MC is not only the book with all that hype; it is also a loose albeit fantastical biography of some events in Rushdie’s life. A total full circle.

I had to admit. Midnight’s children is THE book to read. A surreal magic realism. A total tangent to everything that is India and everything that it is not. All through the eyes of a young man’s life.

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past,

the more concrete and plausible it seems-but as you approach the present,

It inevitably seems more and more incredible..”

-Palash

November’2012, Lumding.

The Scream

The element of surprise. Thats the catch phrase to any good scream. Not for others, for yourself. One must surprise one's own instincts by the scream. The sound should start from somewhere behind the head, just below the cerebellum, which almost always is the garbage bin of your life. Like a fast moving avalanche, the scream should build up in pitch and volume, reaching a maxima in below 1.5 second. That moment, that instant, everything else must be a blur in the background. There should be nothing but the scream, the scream and the scream.

You can always later experiment with the type of pitch and length of the scream. My personal favourite is a sharp shrill tone a scale above the octave lasting for 5 secs. Somehow, It feels like tearing pages and pages of paper. Writing endlessly, and the scream, and then the tearing. Nothing feels more purifying than the scream at that time.


For that one moment, that instant, I actually revel in absolute chaos.

-Palash
October'12, Lumding

The Puppet Master

Stuck?
Sewn?
or Safe?
in between the pleats of an Italian Saree,
Absurd white with plum blue streaks,

He lurks and plots,
Hides and plots,
Even parties and plots.

When the god mother goes off to mass,
praying for the prosperity of her immortal dynasty,
Queens and King makers in a sorry democracy,
He finds his solace in the pleats once again,
this time a smiling damsel,
wearing the angel moon of her tyrant grandmother.

No one dares question the crooked V of Victory,
The drugged dove of peace,
The resounding slap of the Hand,
And How the Nehrus' became Gandhis'
And with it, came how,
the country's favourite rubber stamp of recognition.
"Gandhi!"


He is now away,
hidden from stern, hopeless public eyes,
Frightened no, a trifle anxious maybe,
But, So what if the shadow of the pleats,
left a half moon on the conning scalp?
In a country of a million of millionaires,
and a billion of ragpickers,
He buys (and sells at 600%) the strings to pull,
The Wise Puppet-Master.



-Palash
October'2012, Lumding.