Things we wear

- Jeans
- T-shirts with graphic designs
- Glass bangles
- Shapeless skirts
- Tweed jackets
- Moonboots
- Belts of dead animals
- Piercings in the side of your nose
Your tongue
Your eyebrow
- Tattoos on your ankle
The back of your shoulder
The nape of your neck
- Paint on your nails
- Fingers that hold your nails
- Hands, legs, arms
- Lips, ears, eyes
- Skin
- Muscles under the skin
- Bones and blood
- Sweat, sometimes
- Expressions that elicit sweat
- Things bubble-wrapped in insecurity
- Smiles, laughs, frowns
- Nakedness

That which never dies

I'm reading a lot of Urdu poetry these days courtesy acquaintances and new-found friends and I can not begin to express my absolute love for the drama, the wonder, the reality captured in those words. I'm not even going to try. I'm just going to post one that I'm in love with. Thank you Iqbal:

Teri ishq ki intahaa chahataa hoon/ I want the depths of your love
Meri saadhagi dekh kya chahataa hoon/ See my simplicity, see what I want

Sitam ho ki ho vadaa-e-behijabi/I don't care if you maltreat me or promise to unveil your beauty
Koi baat sabr-aazamaa chahataa hoon/ I want something unbearable to test my fortitude

Ye jannat mubarak ho zaahidon ko/Let the God-fearing be dwelling in heaven
Ki main aapka saamana chahataa hoon/ I just want to be face to face with you

Koi dam ka mehmaan hoon ai ahal-e-mahfil/I'm only here for a few moments, like a gust
Chirag-e-sahaar hoon bhuja chahataa hoon/Like morning star I will fade and vanish in a few moments

Bhari bazm mein raaz ki baat keh di/ I disclosed the secret in public
Bada be-adaab hoon, sazaa chahataa hoon/I should be punished for being so rude.

For this I feel grateful.

I'm also tempted to post another poem here. It's by Neruda and my friend sent it to me the other day after one of our long conversations about life and living and going crazy. It's so beautiful.

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and I lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips :
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off: it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Waking from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood-
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

I read it and read it and re-read it. And started falling in love with the forest. To be lost in it is perhaps all that I desire now from life. For this I shall not apologize. I'll ask for the grace to encounter my twigs and maybe I'll encounter little drops of sun too. Or better yet, maybe I'll be to the twigs the light that it needs.

After all, fireworks are wonderful, but they can't compare to the sun.

Mysteries

There are secrets within me. Because I am aware, I try and unravel them. I try and unravel me, I try and unravel the world, I try and unravel people. The elusiveness of secrets fascinates me. I want to know more. I want to know everything.

But my mind alone can not will everything into reality. My mind can not engage with these secrets. No, it is not enough, it never was, it never will be. My mind is the most useless tool in this regard.

For these secrets need all of me. In effect, they need the parts most sacred to me. The sacred ones are the most sensitive ones, yet they're not strong enough.

And the only way of strengthening is an absolute complete shattering. The most sensitive must be thrown into all the turmoil there is out in this universe. Only then perhaps will the secrets become remotely familiar.

I imagine

What did I imagine as a little kid? Of course, I had to have imagined for isn't that what little kids are best at? But I think at that young, tender age, I imagined of the most impossible fantasies, the most unreal stories, like little butterflies growing out of my pillow. My imagination had no bounds.

But even with that boundless imagination, not once did I ever fathom the possibility of a reality I now live. I could not imagine these things, maybe because my mind was obsessed only with the most unreal of sagas. And this right now is real. Me, typing on my Apple laptop, in my bed on the floor is real.

Wait.

Is it?

No, this isn't a trick question nor am I pretending to be smart. All I am is deeply curious about the possibility of this moment right now being merely a figment of my imagination. No, not the fact that I'm sitting because, yes, I am sitting. I am typing. That, I agree, is very real. But this context, everything around me right now which is not me seems merely an extension of something that I once imagined. For in a way, am I not in this little messy college room because I had once imagined, dreamed so much that I willed it into reality?

Maybe I had imagined many other things that do not exist in any real shape or form now but I don't remember those things anymore. The process that transformed my imagination into my reality was so gradual and insidious that I can't trace its progression. So insidious that I wonder if it even matters what I had initially imagined or when or how or why. That slow process which transformed my imagination into a full-fledged animal has made those initial details irrelevant. All that matters now is this big animal that sits in front of me, around me, in me. Even athraaf, as we'd say in Urdu. This big animal called Reality.

Yet this big animal right now that is making me consciously type furiously can't stop some part of my brain from imagining and dreaming completely unbeknownst to this conscious, furiously-typing me. The imagination is happening, regardless of Reality. And the slow process with which it transforms into Reality is also happening.
But of course I don't know of it.

Yet tomorrow Reality is going to strike again. The big animal that some part of me is creating right now is going to hit me like it's something new and unfamiliar. And it is. It is an entirely new being but its disguise of independence can not hide its humble origins, can not untie itself from the imagination, the part of me that created it. So I feel like I have a right to know, because a part of me already does. I have a right to know what tomorrow shall hold for me but my boundless imagination, cultivated ever since my days of childhood, shall not tell me. It says, "Have patience, Aditi. Have patience. Wait and watch."

There is no other time when my being feels as incongruously assembled or disjointed.

For this is how it must be

Everything seems to be a flight, a phone call or a few mouse clicks away.

Does that reduce insecurity or merely the distance?

My friends on the side of the world see me on Skype, in BBMs, in the Mango store near their home. But I am 1000s of miles away.

Shall we simplify, forget complexity, collectivize our experiences to feel some proximity?

I walk in the snow, pass people and smile. Sometimes we pretend not to have seen each other. Sometimes we are too busy.

Shall I sink into a sea of faces for the sake of assimilation?

Decoding magic...or maybe not.

This time of year, oh this time of the year.

Holiday food, fatness, snow, or simply cooler weather, family, friends, get-togethers, the start of a new year.

I love the first the few hours of January 1st. The world is alive with activity but also sleepy, like a period of time that doesn't quite have any real meaning. Like a lull. Like frozen time. Like it wouldn't make a difference if everything started or ended.

Of course, there's hope just thinking about the possibilities within the new year, like writing a new numerical digit in the date, like feeling old, like being astonished. But in those few hours, there is a spacey nothingness. Every year when I go to sleep at around 2 am (or later) on 1st of January, I wake up to a whole new day, feeling new in many different ways, even though it's all completely psychological. And when I wake up I attempt to do all those things that I'd like to do in the rest of the year. It's my aspiration day and I have as much fun planning it as much as actually living it out. The most beautiful thing about the aspiration day though is simply living it out and then at the end of the day looking at it and seeing whether any of it really matched the trajectory of the year I lived out.

So as this year sort-of-ish ends I'm thinking of January 1st 2010. A three-course dinner to bring in that night, a little bit of tipsiness for reasons unbeknownst to me (I was alcohol-free, I promise), a leisurely day by the beach in Santa Cruz. It was beautiful. And now, I'm looking through the journal I started that day. I wrote a post about fear, about being scared of the possibility of never being scared but I also feared tremendously the possibility of never being able to rise above the fear. And in that submission to fear, I had a weird realization about the vulnerability of humans and human bodies. I wrote of feeling suddenly aware of my muscles and tendons that stretched and turned and played around. Looking back now, I realize that maybe that was the day I made the decision (albeit an unconscious one) to submit to my humanness. In some ways, that has been the entire year for me - a submission to my inner writer, my inner wanderer, my inner risk-taker, my inner meditator, my inner human who stops isolating herself from the world around.

Maybe this is me reading meanings into everything in life because, honestly, that's something I'm great at. But a part of me genuinely believes that this is merely the result of my true being merging gracefully, honestly with the divine of the universe.

How then can I not believe in the possibility of subconscious requests to the universe fulfilling themselves?

Can the poets please stand up?

Conflict, peace studies, militancy, violence, sociology, hegemony, colonization, revolution.

Bas. Bahut ho gaya. Enough with the political jargon, I say. 

Or rather, can the political jargon please coexist with literature? 

I've been reading news articles and scholarly journals, books and opinion pieces and all of them shed so much light on the world, its issues and mankind in general. But today, upon someone's suggestion, I encountered work by Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri American poet and was dazzled by the intensity of reality and emotion that the paucity of words can lend to understanding. Poetry has the ability to touch heart strings that we don't even think exist. So can we please begin meshing creativity with what we deem to be intellectual or expository or academic instead of confining issues into boxes? Can we make space for a revolution in education/knowledge-gaining through creativity? 

Here's a poem. It's long but please read it, absorb it, let it seep into you. And then tell me: can a person walk away from this? 

Farewell

          - Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point I lost track of you.
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 when you left even the stones were buried:
 the defenceless would have no weapons.

 When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
 who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
 O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
 who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

 My memory is again in the way of your history.
 Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
 In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
 winter- its crushed fennel.
 We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

 In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
 reflections.

 Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
 centuries later in this country
 I have stitched to your shadow?

 In this country we step out with doors in our arms
 Children run out with windows in their arms.
 You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
 if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

 At a certain point I lost track of you.
 You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
 In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
 Your history gets in the way of my memory.
 I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
 I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
 Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

 I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
 Exquisite ghost, it is night.

 The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
 It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
 I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
 if it had pity on me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
 have happened in the world?

 I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
 My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
 There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
 I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

 There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine,
 what would not have been possible in the world?

-- Agha Shahid Ali