May 29, 2008 at 10:05 pm (Short Stories, Snippet)
Tags: pulls, sea, story, suicide, tides
A little less time, or a little more and I could have stayed. Who can dig thier toes into the sand at the fringe of land, with bubbles and foam around your ankles and stay unmoved?
It was the moon.
It shone, and washed away the bright painful colours of the day, lending a soft glow and patient hope to temptation. It made morality, education and society’s rules which were dinned into your mind since childhood seem as slender as the webs of a spider – to be swept away.
It made you forget that the spider’s silk is stronger than steel. There on that beach with crabs that broke out of thier coccoons and turtules going extinct, things were possible. Impossible vistas would open, and it would take just one more step, just one more.
To follow that wave that returned into the heart of the ocean, cold foam, warm water. The shelf is short along the coast of the Deccan. Adam’s/Ram’s bridge lies about the depth of the Bay of Bengal. It is hungry, and people no longer notice when it finds another sacrifice – one willing to simply step forward and give in to the tide.
I am the moon’s daughter. What else could I do? I was swept away.
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February 16, 2008 at 11:21 pm (RL, Snippet)
Tags: nostalgia, science tag
Curved plastic shielding six – or when the sky is clear, twenty – odd people chattering away about three doors down, pandit ravi shankar, or the wavelength of x-ray for diffraction of the micro-crystal, or particle physics with equal ease. All of them clustered around the black cement table that couldn’t hold twenty cups without seeming crowded, out for a break during lab time, for a birthday, for a tea, for a breather and a freshener before diving right back into whatever they came from.
Sharing tea, swapping stories about work (or life, which might almost be the same thing for this lot), and friendly and malicious gossip about friends, acquaintances, absolute strangers, and mrs. sharma’s daughters. Absolute strangers, of course, who didn’t stay strangers for long in a closed campus with limited privacy, since five years – at the least – in one place made sure you got to know people whom you may otherwise never – or only – have talked about.
Most tables occupied by a person sitting alone and contemplating who-knows what, or two people engaged in quiet, if sometimes vigorous conversation. And more rarely, when three or four gather, managing to pull off a controlled, if not dignified appearance despite loud disputes that can be heard clear across the place.
The chipped cups, the black tea “lemon beda”, and soothing yellow lighting where atlas could shrug. And someone else would pick up the burden, just for the curiosity of it.
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October 13, 2007 at 4:50 pm (Poetry, Snippet)
are an endless quest to find beauty
and once you have it, to keep it,
not realizing
that sometimes
heart breaking poignant beauty is in impermanence
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September 2, 2007 at 2:29 pm (Snippet)
They seemed to circle each other in the lamplight under the trees, close enough that a swaying arm may have circled the waist and the watchers at the coffee booth would wonder. Just as they would wonder if the trainers were too short on the tall young man with a crewcut, or if it just the sneakers showing. Their shuffling gait – almost a dance – down the road led them towards the crowd of three sitting on the grass on the edge of the road, munching and discussing lasers. They’d pause here and there, she’d clasp her small hands behind her back and look up, up and up at him. And they’d talk. Later, only images would remain: perhaps the swing of her hair from her pony tail, or the vivid sharpness of his features in the shadows, maybe the moment of laughter in circular spotlight created by one streetlight. They’d step along in the night air, before the violins started singing for either of them and never forget. This magical night with the rain hanging heavy in the air and clouds covering the dark moon, they would not run out of road. And they wouldn’t have to part ways.
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March 26, 2007 at 3:47 pm (Snippet)
Tiredofrunningaround,ofendlessrounds,tobewhereyouwant,whenyouwant,fatigue.
fatigued,withthe rightkneeachinglikeanarthriticwomanofgreatage’s,eyesaboutto giveoutsoon, backalltwisted,hunched,hurting, painohpain.
a tooth that has misaligned, a catalogue of things to do left behind,atasktocomplete,and twomorespingup,
please,
where does it stop?
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