Excuse the Doodling #1

Because I am in love with the places I have not yet been to, with the people I have yet to befriend and with undiscovered, cobbled squares which will have enough shade for me and my sketch book.

The pigeon will be unafraid, the tinkling bells from the unidentifiably small white specks in the distant hills will be sweet, the water in the fountain pool will be cold and sweet and time in my undiscovered, cobbled square will run slow enough to make it imageable.

Hope and Other Mistakes

Her words were inhibited, reluctant creatures that peered out and stared at her at the darkest hours of the nights when she wasn't looking. The signals of the towers veered away from their path and the dish antennas rotated their faces to save themselves from the flashes of silence. Mushrooms grew on the concrete, red with scent of morning dew and petrichor. The tar of the highway melted in the sun till it became the first sheet of solidifying lava on the new born planet.

She wanted to plant a jungle and meander a web of clouds at the foot of her rain trees. Her rivers would rise higher than the sky and her mountains purple and gold would sink with the sun and trick the daylight to persevere just a little while longer. And her words would grow in it. They would feed on the darkness of her soul, on the moonlight, on the starlight and on the silky whisper of the scops owl’s wings. They would blossom shy and forbidden like the orchid, dense and golden, shimmering like the dodder and lulling the bees into afternoon siestas on their cradling boughs.

The fledglings that had been pushed off of their nest at birth in their siblings’ struggle for survival flew home to her forest. The snakes bathed in the bubbling brook and lounged on the sunny rocks, photosynthesizing. The lost poachers sat spellbound at the splendour of the fiery orange family of the tigers. The forests encroached upon the villages on its glossy green margins and the villagers disintegrated their stilted mud huts to contribute wood to the lone beaver’s dam project.

There would be dynamites bursting mountains open for their peeling sheets of mica, not far off. The blast would resonate through your blood and instigate the baby ant in the anthill to ask uncomfortable question to its mother. There would be fireworks in the ridge that signalled where the radicals would meet to chalk their next invasion. But the wind in the stray strands of wild maize would have eyes only for the firefly.

As long as the wind giggled through her mossy forest floors, kicking up a storm of rusting leaves from last autumn... there would be hope. There would be rays of sun falling upon nests lined with feather down and eggs as blue as poison waiting for the breath of spring. There would be forgotten hoards of acorn hidden in hollow trunks by forgetful squirrels that the lost hunter would stumble upon.

He would believe. He would let her forest be.

Let Nobody Know How

Today has been a day of many firsts.

Today, for the first time I have felt completely alone. Not lonely, not isolated.



Alone.



That has put me in better perspective. I now know the exact expanse of my mediocrity. I accept judgment. Better still, I welcome criticism. Pain is my most potent emotion. And right now I pine for its familiar twinge. Just to confirm that I live, all melodrama apart.

I have tried to write but not a single thought worth inflicting on the world has crossed my mind. The universe is blunt and heavy with truth and helplessness. The threshold of creativity is too high and I can only stand and stare beyond, at the brink of output.

Today I have realized that right and wrong have nothing to do with good or bad. They have no opposition. They are but extremities of one another. Thereby, I am drained of love, hate and all other tertiary emotions.

Feeding dogs, caffeination, meditating amidst the green scurry of squirrels and the chalk-board screeching of seven sisters have been experiences more liberal than existence itself.

Life is a hushed grey cycle of heartbreaks and hopes quietly unharnessing themselves when you are not looking. Fragments of incoherent horrors, semblances of nightmares.


Today has been a lifetime without the prospect of waking up with parched relief.

discoverer mine

My grandfather is was now.

He passed away on the last season that was purple. When the moon looked like a million dollar note. I did not feel a thing except for my phone vibrating in my hip pocket as I missed call after call. I was in the middle of my vernacular architecture class. And body level breeze production through modification of fenestrations in Kerala’s villages was of course more important.

He came to me before the alphabets. He is closer to me than my father. Dearer to me than my mother. The only person whose hopes I was always afraid of dashing. The only opinion that stood vivid in the misty perplexity of public sanction.
Every time I hum a note of rabindrasangeet. Every time I control the urge to correct somebody’s grammar. Every tree I mentally whisper the scientific name of. Every time I see an underfed dog. Every time I scribble a frog, a fox or an owl in my notebook. Every time. Everywhere.

After all the evening that we spent churning through pages of Wren and Martin, I cannot bring myself to decide on a tense. I wonder if he is proud of me or disappointed. But then again he is nothing. Loving is so short, and forgetting so long, I tell myself.

From the lush greens of the Bengal-Arunachal borders, through the fires and famines of the partition, he came a long way to the sophisticated urbanity that we dwell now in. Dragging nothing but a trunk of books and a burden of homelessness that would haunt him forever.

You pushed us ahead, made us modern to the degree of social unacceptability, where we sob to be more average, make more friends. Every time I think of you, I end up thinking of what you have done for us. And never who you have been.

Also, I have survived the biggest loss I could have suffered. I tick off one item from my short list of trepidations. I don’t have to be alarmed by emergency calls ever again. Quantum of escape. And I pat myself on the back for the defense mechanism that I have developed.

You look at me indulgently and forgive me for not having cried once since I was told that you are dead.

Creaking City Breaking Bonds #3

He cheated on his wife. The same wife that cooked apple pies and taught children at the blind school, telling them how beautifully they had painted the walls of the playground.

He hated himself for the cheating, for the fact that she lied, for he saw Rorschach inkblot’s wherever he looked.

But he couldn't commit suicide because he couldn't write a suicide note. It was the most frustrating writers’ block he had ever faced. If justifying your death wasn't humiliating enough, justifying it with random words strung together in unsophisticated pettiness was.
He thought of Africa. A thousand children must be crying from hunger pangs right now. This very moment, a lioness of the Golden Pride is singling out the weakest among the herd of grazing zebras. This instant, a shipwrecked sailor lost at sea is sending out a message in a bottle asking unconvinced for help.

The tragedy had ended.
He went back to living.

Creaking City Breaking Bonds #2

So then there was in this world, him and her and the scurrying mice in the fields.

And the cat who was so disinterested in mice. This urbane cat roamed the rooftops instead. Taking in the fresh air, enjoying the view of the city spread out till the horizon, reveling in the smog clad sky and the darkness of the starless night. And the more-ness of food it implied.

Flat roofs, gabled roofs, domed roof, steeple roofs and then aah.…finally, a chimney. Chimney after chimney padded the cat with the broken tail. Some smelled of smelted iron, of burning sulfur, of incinerated secrets and finally, the orange broth that the old guard cooked each night.

The cat slithered down the chimney and fell on the old man’s lap. How he avoided falling into the curry was a secret he would never tale he would never tell.

That left him with eight and a half lives; he counted the one time he had gone to say hello to the Pekingese next doors. She had looked so much like his once upon a time lady cat.

Creaking City Breaking Bonds #1

He was thirty eight and he had never met a girl before. And when he met her, he realized how natural that was. She was rosy as a bushel of apples and smelt of a garden in full blossom. Her hair was an unharnessed mess of sunset brown and it seemed to catch the warmth and redness of the setting sun in its tangled waves at dusk. Her teens had passed and the jeans had frayed and she seemed caught up somewhere in time between 22 and 25.Poised for the leap, faltering in the eyes.

It was that time of the year when the harvest had been reaped, when the sand seemed still too damp to sit in, when a dive into the ocean sent a nervous chill down your spine.

It was that time of the year when the harvest had been reaped and all that lay in the bare fields was the scurry of the rats after the last of the grains, the hay stacks. Neat, neglected.

It made you wish you could set fire to them. It made you think that the world would turn in its slumber and give u a lazy smile in gratitude if you did.

So he decided, set fire he would.

Things to Do to Your Cat When He Sleeps

Begin by counting his whiskers. Bonus points if your cat has whiskers in prime numbers.

You can always take advantage of his slumber to sever the 14th whisker otherwise.

Fold back his ears and see how long they stay folded before flapping back to original shape.

Stroke cat and marvel at all the bruises, wounds, scratches you find, and all the possibilities of what your ninja cat might be up to when you r not looking. Thank God you don’t know.

Make squeaky sounds and see if they transfer into your cat’s dream as mice.

If cat starts lashing his tail in his sleep, it is working.

After a while hold the cat’s tail firmly in position and stop the lashing. This in turn will stop his dreaming.

Check out the padded feet of cat and tickle the pink softness. Watch him squirm.

Nudge cat gently and try in vain to push him off your pillow, because its 4 in the morning and you need some sleep.

Give up.

Try using cat’s belly as a pillow.

Hear him purr with pleasure while trying to gouge your eyes out with his claws at the same time.

Give up again.

Fall asleep with your head on the hard mattress, sighing with satisfaction and love for cat.

**if you manage to keep giving cat a tummy rub with one hand while performing above maneuvers, he might just give u a head bump on the morning. Do not get your hopes up. He also might not.

Urban Design and the Need for Absinthe

She had neon red nails,
He could dream in her eyes.
That dreams u can’t own, is
A fact rarely known,
When he harnessed them one day,
Came the lies, the goodbyes.


She kept the neon red nails.
But bit her lips before she talked.
Smoky was her past tense,
The green fairy promised more sense,
Downwards she was rising,
And imagine how surprising,
To see the clouds compromising,
One day to hide her absence.


A neon red non-existence.

high there!

from the top of the lake to the bottom of the tree
i can see
the big bad wolf came for you
sniffed for you
but chose me
instead


in bed
i wept
and held my kitty fat paws close
the sun rose
and my woes were washed away
with the fresh smell of the clay
in the damp color of the grass it lay


awaiting the calf to nibble it from its stem
and though the feeble clouds passed
they left the air moist
with tears from all around
surrounded by sorrow
i found

i could stop trying
enact surviving
the go getter
will feel better
without highs
and white lies.


because though sorrow is over rated it might
tomorrow be berated
and glum faces are not pretty
petty, you will say
but them you wouldn't have dated!

Because

I lie here in the sand and see
Gold and red becoming one, and then the darkest blue…
The sound the sea makes trapped inside a conch shell.

Feeling only the obscurity of the coarse sand,
Missing the certainty of the ocean, edging closer,
Had you been here..
We would have made love now.

Not savouring the salt in the air…
Not noticing when the gull broke a wing …
Or when the crabs breathed under the waves…
But you are not here.

And in this starless night,
I feel you more than I ever have before.
I love you like I never have loved.

As the foamy sea creeps up to my toes…
Up my body and as it wets my hair…
The need for survival ebbs away…

I die tonight.
Revelling in the beauty of loss.

This is not a poem, I just like to hit enter.

I wanted to be a pirate, a fashion designer with a street named after her somewhere in Milan, a freedom fighter. In the least, a cheetah conservationist in the dusty plains of Namibia.

So I study architecture in Jadavpur University (yes, that university whose students monopolize the S9, play 29 in the four facing seats and scream b*r* at least once in every sentence, especially in public places). And the most exciting thing that I’ve done this entire last year is complete a set of eight toilet details in one day during training ( all inspired by Corbusier, Richard Rogers, Tadao Ando and the World War II).

I like to wear black, behave gay and talk about Monumentality, LEED, the character of Kolkata and the dense knitting of its physical fabric in my free time. My free time of course being the time left to me each day after 20 hours of irrelevant work and 4 hours of sleep.

I figure I am going to spend most of my life making houses for the nouveau rich; possibly in this pathetic suburban place called Rajarhat (Jyoti Basu Nagar might have been more suitable indeed). My life will be unhappy, so I intend to be vengeful and take a lot of money from people with a lot more money (who want to flaunt their money to people who understand mostly money and not much of Bauhaus or Brutalism. Lets face it, Corinthian capitals and gothic arches do go so much better with the idols of Lakshmi and Ganesh.)


So the area of the earth is 510 million square kilometres. The area I cover is 0.0000000625 sq km. So yeah, I know whining is stupid and who the **** cares and all the rest of it.
But then I write a little. Sketch a little. Design a little. Speak French, very, little. Read books, a lot. Feel bad about it all much much more than that.

I have not the DSLR that I would wish to have. And if I did I would still not have the patience to throw cats and chairs and water and Dali 28 times around to create this beauty/thing/whooh-what-is-happening.




Even if I did, I would never be recognised.I am sure.
Because I can’t open a page and name it Parshati Dutta Photography India, pose in it with a telephoto lens which I clearly do not know how to use, judging by the pictures. Nor can I send people links in chat and ask them to like the very sub-standard pictures I’ve put there. (Please, please take a hint)

Mediocrity is hard to accept.
And genius is suffocating. Masterpieces discouraging.

Also, 05.48 in a January morning is a bad time to still be up at from a caffeine high.
Plus, this world is not worth living in with Karna and Satyajit Ray both dead.
(No offense Souvik Bhattacharya, I do love you a lot.)

So I am cynical, pessimistic, infinitely frustrated.And fashionably so.
Much like you. So no thanks, to your observations.

That feeling

when you search for Chuk and Gek and find it in a blog named after Murakami's book.
and about how her mum got them books to make them finish off chapters of maths.

wonder if she did k.c.nag as well..?if she hated it quite as much.
and if they read the blue cup too...and wondered what a whirligig was..and the red army?

class 8 e taasher desh.so Patha Bhavan
4 number gate e fuchka.so JU.

in love with Ray and Karna.so me.
and no..i don't want to know...let me see what it must feel like being Ruskin Bond and never actually getting off the train at Deoli.

sometimes the world is a good place.full of happy people.especially today.


that is a whirligig.



and that is the red army.

kabhi kabhi odditi...

Odd things happen.


When I have decided to call someone, and their phones start to ring. I invariably want a biscuit from a tin that I need to open with both my hands. And I can put the phone down on the table while it is ringing.

I have never considered how I would explain not talking if somebody picked up while I was choosing my biscuit. I cannot remember somebody ever picking up a phone in this phase of time. I am sure somebody must have. But that is a suggestion between a face and a voice, and completely unidentifiable.
None of this is odd though.

What is odd is how when I put the phone next to my ear again, it is invariably the span between two consecutive rings. And I can swear that this span stretches out to infinity until you are sure that there is somebody at the other end. And you say “hello?”


Only then will you hear the next ring. The ring has a smirk to it then.


I could make a list of odd things. I would want to connect these and make them part of a short story. But that would be unfair for the story. Not having anything to tell for itself. Like being born of failed contraception.
Maybe that is what makes “this generation” so shallow.


And odd things like how the neighbours ringing tone that you somehow always hear when you are taking a shower is never considerable as a tone. And when you hear it again somewhere you would not be able to say, ‘‘hey, that’s my neighbours’ ringing tone!”
Even though you have rehearsed recognising this tone in your head a million times, in a million different situations.



Or how when you are having buttered-sugared-toasts.
There is s rubbing schmuggy noise just inside of your temples. Less like a noise and more like the texture you would feel if you could magnify two particles of sand and rub them together.
I have wanted to ask this question to whoever other person is around, having buttered-sugared-toast with me. I have not had the scope to do it in twenty odd years.


Maybe that is just as well. Talking with your mouth full is considered bad manners after all.

i don't have to name a blog. idont.

You tell me you will visit me,
I tell me we will die.
I tell you nothing without a smile anymore,
But I know u know it better,

I will miss my city.
My rundown bus route n coming home to a jumping puppy.

I like to think she will lie down for days with her head down between her paws when I am gone...But i sincerely hope she forgets me entirely...

when i am gone' is something i will never get tired of imagining



They will shift to a new place
N i won’t be there to convince mum what a good idea it is to put this up on the wall facing the front door.





Dada.stop analyzing now..

Need to download the pdf of norman lewis. Need to keep the phone off the hook when memories call on a drowsy afternoon.

Maktub
We meet soon.

pessimism

Long time ago…dj tiesto saved a baby pigeon…or so dada said….
I was the culprit with awful taste to have been playing tiesto…not the crow…no, the raven that comes every spring to our campus to feast on the newborn chicks….
He had scared this baby out of her nest….and the tiny creature had fluttered into our balcony….and the awful music playing in the next room had ensured that no crow came near again… yayy…
We named her polka. she turned out to be a magnificent he later. and lived a happy life chasing coy females…




Sanjana…the neighbors’ kid…pesky one!
She got us a 2nd pigeon…fallen from nest…empty stomach and without knowledge of what swallowing is…
she lived for 10 hopeful days..
7 once we let her out…under the guidance of polka…good old pedophile …
For 7 days she flapped her wings and opened her beaks to every bird nearby….pigeons and crows alike ..asking to be fed…and survived..
We thought she was meant to live….
She had come to our balcony on the 10th night…I like to think she recognized our place…im sure she did not…
Pecked at by an owl….one eye blinded…she died the day after.



This morning a baby crow ..out of the nest and attacked by red ants….
I wanted to let it die...i hate crows…they ate chicki and picki when they were playing in the garden…the feathers were all over for us to see….salim ali says all bird will be extinct if crows aren’t killed…
Its feathers are down yet…the yellow baby slits very there on its beak…and eyes still closed…
It is a losing battle…and I want it to live so desperately…

Baby crow.
I will name u Corvus and you can bring home dead mice. and nobody will scold.

i don't wish

I wanted to go to College Street today. I wanted to feel the nervousness of being around CMC. Wanted to have the chance to run into old school mates. Look at the green painted doors and the torn books inside with pride.


I wanted to take the metro from somewhere to New Market. I wanted to roam about through its cool cobbled insides. Wanted to buy myself a jhola in red silk. And a sniff of Nahoum’s walnut brownie.

Wanted to walk all the way to Park Street. Wanted to walk through Sudder and find the quaint boho shop in the garage. The one where C2 got her blue canvas bag. The one she painted golden paws in.

And go home when the sky went ultramarine. But I didn’t.

Won’t be full of I anymore. i Promise.

What is sad is that you didn’t get that whenever i said i, i implied your being with me.
I’m sorry I took you for granted.
Won’t happen again.

is the chill seeping in to you
i can feel it too
worse.
cos its me that it comes through

finite injustice

eight months.and all the happiness has lead to...?

frustration.anticipation.desperation.(read separately).


not wishing my ex-best fried on her birthday.because i didn't feel like it.was cold.


the pigeons demand a bird bath now.is freezing.

not hot enough. black frayed cardigan whose sleeves you shouldn't pull up.it loses elasticity that way.

a green framed view of the narrow busy road. through glass that reflects unkempt hair.will always be warm.

and i did not. no. no. no. no.
i did not.

Part II

There were cars all around. And not half as many people.
Those were mostly, only beings that occupied the vehicles.


There was an mushroomishly old couple in one maruti 800. They made me happy.
There was a middle aged couple in a sedan. Irritated and listless and silent. They made me angry.
A man in formals in an s.u.v, an office returnee with empty eyes. Sad and very.very.cold.

And then as it zoomed past, in the back seat of a taxi was a big bespectacled dad putting his arms around his tiny bespectacled son.


And I could explode with pride.
And the night was the soft, squishy inside of a goose down quilt again.