Slipping Away

The story slipped away from my grasp
Like my children
Once they had grown.
I tried to catch it and it teased me
Running from one corner of mind to another
But my limbs have wearied
Of the burden of fetching and carrying.
My reflexes have slowed down
From the sheer monotony of routine chores
That are a series of mechanical moves
That needs no brains and just a bit of brawn.
Like an amoeba,
The story keeps changing shape,
Stretching itself now to grow in this direction
And then in that
Deliberately defying the authority
Of its would be author
Punishing her for neglect, indifference, insularity

And then one day,
As we kept on at our endless game of
Hide and seek
My story and me
It became an amoeba
A glossy, gooey, organic mass
Reproducing and decimating itself
With a blend of sadistic and/or masochistic glee
And I keep watching
This strange metamorphosis of
What might have been my own creation
Helplessly

Affection Magnet

Life has its shares of travails. At times we share a few strands with some who are either close to us or with some who touch us in a way that makes us feel like sharing the same. To make them comprehend. But do they? Do they get us in the way we intend to?

Whilst sharing the walk of our lives, we also relive a few shards. And boy do they mar. Kind of makes you wonder, when will they ever be embalmed in the pages of history where one just kinds of glances at them and they don’t have the power to saunter back again in your life.

Today commented to mom that I was tired of walking. She reminisced about my childhood telling me that amongst my siblings, I was the one who was the first to start walking and that too without any support at all. It seems I had taken them by surprise. [It’s a different matter that later on in their lives’ I did bestow quite a few surprises and not necessarily of the nice variants]. And if I was tired of walking then it’s just because I walked a slight bit “Abol Tabol”. I was blown away. Such simplistic reasoning to my enervated stride.

That abol tabol path has shaped the present me. Yes it did bring a few impediments along the way, but living those experiences don’t label me as an affection magnet.

The Divorcee

I
Bit by bit
The smooth rounded shape
Of her happiness
Acquired angles,
She herself
Had become sharper, brighter
Bearing the weapons
Of a ‘liberated woman’
She was probably the only one
Who knew and admitted
After sleepless nights
Spent weeping
That’s the liberation
Was nothing but despair
Nonetheless,
She wore the mask
Of a proud Modern young woman,
The product of Introspection
And a piercing together
Of what she remembered.

II
She spoke with such indifference
Such derision
That it would have been pointless
To contradict her
For she herself seemed
Always ready to step down
From whatever
Stand she has taken
But in fact she never really did,
She clung to her prejudices
Her personal experiences
To a code of living
That had been instilled
More from Harper’s Bazaar
Than from the Gita,
And her weary voice
That dragged a little
And was so convincing
A cover-up
For a frightened pitiless woman.

III
Yes she was afraid
Afraid she wouldn’t have enough money
Though she had plenty,
She was afraid
Afraid of being old
Though she was young,
Afraid that she would give herself away
Though there was nothing
Under that air of elegance
And offhand manner,
There was nothing at all
Behind that façade,
No haunting Memories
Nothing….