Clay

I remember seeing two people yesterday. One who kept laughing; the other who kept dying.

I've a fond memory of a girl who did both equally beautifully. I wish she was my forgetting.

The two men I'm talking about are mad. I told them so. I told them I'm the clown. I'm mad. But they were too afraid to be recognised thus.

But madness is like love, it comes when it does. I couldn't resist it. Niether could they. So they are two madmen. One who keeps laughing 'coz death has forgotten to take him in; the other who keeps dying "coz he can't laugh.

And then when it started to rain in the afternoon, they started melting.

"Jesus! They're made of clay."

So what makes them different from each other? Laughing or dying? Happy or sad? Sane or insane?..... Jesus or me? Its all the same.

Dear girl trapped in my memory, are you clay?

A Terrible Beauty

Once upon a time, I used to have time. Like a white sheet of paper. And I had to fill it up. I believed it was my obligation towards life. My duty. Time, like money, is not to be preserved, but spent.

But then, one day, time left me. Deserted me. Or if she had been my lover, I would have said -- ditched me. So that I was stranded in one single moment. What I really lost that day was a past and many uncertain futures. And the present was unending. Tiresome.

I had attained death.

Slowly, after I had overcome the initial excitement of my great achievement, I realised that the line that divides life and death is actually very, very thin. Delicate. So that we must overstep it again and again. We keep living our death. And we keep dying into our lives. Your feeling that this piece of writting is somehow connected to your life is the evidence to this.

I know now that all of us are immortals. And life and death is as beauty is, in the eye of the beholder. Relative. We don't live forever. Neither do we die. Don't be misguided. I'm NOT writing about a reincarnation. But about this life of yours.

You'd never be able to live. Nor to die. But will be trapped in a single moment, just as you are right now.

Imagination is your escape. Embrace it.

God

Oftentimes, words leap up from scriptures, from books ..... even from the transparent air to gobble me up. They take each other's hands and form rings...... No! Not rings. Crystals. Disturbing crystals of jumbled words. That's exactly when I start writing nonsense - like I'm doing right now.

A few years ago, when I fell in love for the first time it had taken a strange shape in my heart. And I remember I was trying to sketch that shape on a rough paper.

Have you ever met a person who would suddenly make you realize that you were a part of a common past -- of different times, different lives, different eternities? Could you describe that person to me by words, by paintings, by photographs? By any or by all? No. Because belief is always inversely proportional to expression. We have very few expressions. This society has made expressions only for the common, the drab, and the surealistically veiled drab.

This is the terrifying wordlessness that I live everyday. Thoughts start filing up my head, they overbrim and start covering my face. And I find words everywhere which I'm unable to catch, to decipher, to define.

And then, I think maybe all words have meanings. Maybe, I've forgotten.

Maybe, I'm forgetting myself.

Maybe, I fade within your memory everyday, so that you may start remembering me yet again.

Maybe, all you're reading right now is just your imagination.

Maybe, I don't exist anymore than God does. Imaginations.

Imagine. Frenzy is a realm of infinite possibilities.

Forgetting

In my childhood I was told to write opposites. So, when I saw knowledge, I wrote ignorance. And when I saw remembering, I wrote forgetting. But then things changed so that when I saw knowledge, I wrote forgetting. And when I saw ignorance, I wrote forgetting. And when I saw forgetting, I still wrote forgetting. And I never saw remembering ever again.

In those days I used to live with my granddad. He had amnesia. My parents told he had been so from a time when he had been less older. Although children in this town ( including me and my friends) believed he was 200 years old and had never been any less older. We believed he had been living in this town from a time when there was no town, instead in its place stood a kingdom where wars were fought daily to keep the king busy. We all loved him dearly because forgetting everything he had become a child like us. But then, as they say, things changed. As far as I remember it all happened one afternoon, when while having my lunch I couldn't remember what I had had in my breakfast. I shuddered at the realisation and thought --

"My God, amnesia is contagious"

From that day I was afraid of my grandpa and used to stay away from him.... perhaps I took my imaginations too seriously. It was from that day that I started forgetting my grandfather. Then, one day when I succeeded in forgetting him completely I learnt that he was dead.

I still don't know, till today, what exactly keeps us alive - our heartbeat or our memories?

I write forgetting. And I keep writting.