Letter # 1

I thought the call would last for an hour. But it didn't. You sounded jittery; maybe the rains make everything sound jittery. The clouds had huddled up for another fresh spell. The air was too dank to reek of the earth without. Perhaps duped by memory the earth seemed to barge in, defying dankness, defying welcome.

I was too resigned to talk, the distance was too much to mask. I still long for you. I can still feel the constant rush of that longing replacing all things proximate in your helpless absentia.

But aren't the absent soon forgotten? I try not to believe in that, God knows I try. But I've no control on your beliefs, your pleasured preferences, the love you spill, the intimacies you provoke. All I know is that I'm no longer free, that my mind is fettered to the absent and for the lack of a better word, committed to thoughts outside of myself.

I was wondering about the difference in our time zones. I knew I was ahead; it was left to my imagination to distribute you according to the Sun's point of view. In that brief moment you ceased to be everything that you had ever meant to me. I saw you only as a curiosity in a museum that I dare not touch. Exaggeration is perhaps an abnormality with me but antique feelings are seldom privy to the spontaneity of mundane metaphors.

You made me return to this improper element of prose. I was defenceless against poetry. It loosened my sentences while strengthening my thoughts. I don't know how long can I continue telling a private story in the banal idiom of prose whose very essence had always been poetic.

I can only hope Life interrupts again, the way it always does, for better or for worse.

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Of Mothers and Cats

That must be a demon daughter who
Dreams of her mother being dead.
Only saints take truncheons to dreams.
But the dream doesn’t end there.
The haunting memory of that dream catches
Up with her waking life and kills her slowly,
Heartbeat by heartbeat.
Shouting and screaming at the frayed
Perversity of her dreams doesn’t help
The demon daughter. In an agony of emotion
She turns to religion; she prays.
As regions of life explode in her dreams again,
She sees her mother as a giant cat
Holding the demon daughter by the scruff of the neck
And walking on water—gently, regally.
She dreams of the cat’s nine lives
But she also dreams of the Styx in spate…



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