Sunday, November 7, 2010

River river stupid river
falsely confident intrepid water
I took a walk along ur side (whee!)
with Me and Myself for company
And stumbled and fell
...D time didn't go well
I'll tell u what's safer
you could disappear as vapour
Or i would raise my arm
and use d "obliviate" charm
To clear my mind
of u - my accidental find
River river silly river
murky concoction of incorrect grammar
U bungled my day
(yawn) please go away!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

If you let me live
You will let me thrive
On your bounties
Like you let the meanest smile

You burnt and saved
As the empty years passed
Through the tunnel
You allow the meanest to pass

I refused to be humbled
Unless I fell
Yet you answered me well
When like the meanest I cried

Why do I think so hard?
When I see you shred
The best pictures
You let us meanest paint?

Mine is not done
And yet you let me hope
To leave things behind
Like you let the meanest do

My mean heart aches
As it takes in
Your little whims
My mean lowness weeps and prays

Maybe you break canvases
Yet I hope you only erase
Misguide me to good
Like the very meanest ones there

Stable soil stands
Like a mirage on real sands
Let the sand win
So we mean beings stay put

You have let me live
And you will let me thrive
With your bounties
On a complete canvas as I stoop

Thursday, June 10, 2010

tisha's diary - learning to speak

i live underground
no seriously! i live in the basement.
They also offered me the mezzanine.
but that's not a proper floor too, is that?
i still have my own room though, in the basement.
i try to keep everything here.
from embarrassing little necessities to my most expensive clothes.
but i do not have a computer in the basement.
if i did, i would have lived underground for the rest of my life
like a worm or a mole.

why have i been writing separate lines like in poems while I'm really talking in the vilest commonplace prose? it is quite silly really. someone once said i could write poetry. but i cannot. does emphatic negativity add to poetry? well, not in mine, because i cannot write poems. my little lies only make them worse.
i shall speak like i normally speak from now on. and tell the truth too. and if there is something i don't wanna tell, i shall simply omit it. i hate to type. but people do not read paper. i am not even sure i want to make people read this, but this is just for me. i shall come back to this page on screen again. but if i really write, the words will slowly disappear on yellowing sheets... and i shall forget where i kept them.
i live in a normal house and a normal room. our flat does not have a basement. it is, in fact, on the first floor... with a little below us and a lot above.
typing is funny. i never remember to use caps, or get rid of the occasional sms-ese considered unfit for anything other than orkut conversation and, well, short messages.
my voter ID says i am Tisha Ray and my birth certificate claims i am 19.
i have a handsome big brother and parents- both of them. they told me that when dada was little and i was on my way, they would ask him if he wanted me, and he would say "baby bon nebo"!!!
sex determination is illegal here, but my little big bro cracked it somehow.
i arrived in 1987 on a very rainy day. and they named me Tisha. I do not know what it means, but i like it because it sounds good somehow, and because it goes well with my surname.
dada could cover the entirety of anything i ventured to write, because he is all over my present life and past memories.
i wonder why i am writing something like an autobiography at 19... maybe it is because now i am pretty much by myself, in my room that i tried to pass off as our basement. maybe it is because i have prolonged hours of leisure, or maybe, because dada is an expensive phone call away in a different continent. writing to him is not like talking to him.
so i am storing my words. these words i never paid heed to earlier. but now i have to hold on to them before they can slip away. i am , for the first time, reading my own spoken words.
i am learning to speak to myself.

A
ugust 2006

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Nasreen

In between the black silk covers,
I could see her eyes.
Her sleeves refusing to reveal
More than her petal-white fingers...
And what fair fingers they were !
A gold ring shone on her slender fourth finger,
Surrounding it like a chastity belt,
Maybe for some lover
Or maybe for herself alone.

Her feet were covered
In pretty closed-shoes.
Did her soft toes
Have the same shapely nails?
I could dream her hair -
Silk like her covers;
And her perfect being appeared in my mind...
I imagined Nasreen
As innocence reincarnated.

But then you spoke !
Your asking for the ticket
Breaking the vision like a common ailment !
I had not created a voice for you yet.
My dream lost to reality.
Not sweet, nor rusted,
Your earthly notes hit the air.
You were still fair
But suddenly you disappeared in the crowd !

Friday, April 9, 2010

may i drink water?

Everyone is writing about school, so I thought about sharing a few things from school as well. I loved junior school, where the teachers really taught us the beautiful ways of the world. I equally loved high school, which taught us to unlearn and re-learn those ways in a brand new complicated way, while the teachers taught us various subjects.
But this post shall strictly be about certain fun things in school - all true incidents I witnessed.

Drinking water is a major issue in schools as is its opposite - going to the loo. Let me talk about the first one.

Scene: a computer theory class of the 6th grade, in which I happened to be a student. A sleepy yet stern teacher at the desk, who had finished teaching us what the spacebar is.
Teacher: now, everybody will sit quietly and NO ONE will drink water.
(little girl did not quite hear the orders and started drinking from her white-and-green water bottle)
Teacher: you there.. come here.
(little girl gulps the water down and walks up to the desk wondering what will happen)
Teacher: why were you drinking water?
Girl: I was very thirsty, Auntie.
Teacher: I'm also very thirsty. Am I Drinking water?
(girl wonders why. Is staying thirsty the norm ? Or do you have rabies?)
Teacher: go stand in the corner
(girl goes to the corner for the remaining 10 minutes of the class)

I was the little girl of course and I had this real bad reputation among my friends that I was a hard-hearted self-helping little brat who would never break down even if she was oh-for-shame made to stand in the corner. :D

Another such water incident happened in the 8th grade on a very rainy day. Only a handful students turned up and two sections were seated together. The history teacher of our section let us drink water anytime we wanted, thankfully. BUT all hell broke loose if we forgot to ask for permission. She was taking the class when a poor ignorant boy from the other section made the mistake of drinking water without asking the sweet lady.

History teacher: Why are you drinking water without my permission? STAND UP!
(Poor boy fails to come up with anything. He stands helplessly, water bottle in hand.
A second later, the woman realizes that the boy is not from the section she teaches.)
History teacher: Oh you are from section B!!! Why didn't you tell me???
(Silly boy has no answer to this either)
History teacher: Well, sit down!! And if you need to drink water again, ask me first.

The two incidents taught me important lessons in life. Incident number one of course stood for the rules you have to follow even if they are unexplained and cause you inconvenience. The second one is about how you have to adjust with new rules when you move to a new place :P

They are right when they say school makes you ready for the world. Even the most base elements in school contribute to that.

music lost and found

It's never a good idea to write when you are wired to your headphones.....
You feel that they are singing your song.. something you wrote - almost always
And if its something u didn't write, you answer back...

but if its just a synthesizer, and you copy out the tunes in words.. do you feel like a thief?

I see huge sea waves
Of a dark blue sea
And a blue-black sky

I can smell salt
And feel the sand crawl under my feet
A gust of wind runs away with my cloak

I turn my face away
To find myself surrounded...
The cloak floats away in the distance.

Monday, March 8, 2010

certain surprises; i finally woke up

1. I had, sometime in the remote past, singed up for this poster-making competition on a whim. Someone just told me its tomorrow (whaaaatt? oh okay. whatever!). I am guessing its about certain gender-issues, keeping Women's Day in mind. As far as I am concerned, today was Oscar day. I watched a bit of it in the morning and slept through the rest. Now, I can only hope some brilliantly original idea will hit me tomorrow when I start messing up the chart paper (er, making the poster).

2. "Hey! surprise me! tell me something about myself that you have kept to yourself for so long. and send this to 10 people to know secrets about yourself!" I just typed out a text I received thrice today, from three of my wonderful friends. They think I know stuff about them that I nourish in the deepest corners of my heart and will, on this auspicious day, reveal those to them (oh how sweet)! But nothing about 10 years of bad luck if I do not do as asked. So there were three heartbreaking deletions, followed by a feeling of slight regret - maybe they know something about me. I'll never get to know the secrets (ahh what the hell!).

3. I am done and over with sitcoms for the time being. The rightfully hyped and rightly rated Friends was really good. But it came as an overdose. Thus I am going nowhere near the likes of Zee Cafe these days. And those who have not sampled Diff'rent Strokes, do try it out. I can still watch it during my no-sitcoms phase (hopefully).

4. I had this sudden umpteenth realization that to get myself up and working, I need a to-do list. Then I realized that things were so cluttered, I will need a to-do list about the to-do list. So, bacisally, I need to note down the way I'll note down the things I'll have to do. I did a bit of that today, and did it surprisingly well! Why I need such extensive planning can be better explained by the fact that my initial single to-do list would have started with "send the important mail by Monday" and ended with "scratch your bum when it itches, as long as no one is around" ( YES YES I love to plan. Planning is good, at all levels).

5. The last one is about maa. She got pickpocketed (pickhandbagged, to be precise) for the first time in her life this morning in a very busy railway station. She had three major problems -
i> this NEVER happened to her before. how could it happen now?
ii> Howrah does not have a proper security system.
iii> she remembers to have been surrounded by women! a woman pickpocket!!! chee chee

I had my answers to all three, but they did not calm her much, unfortunately.
i> enjoy your first time! its an experience
ii> I had my purse stolen in a stupid and NOT crowded Jadavpur mini(bus). Howrah is a more dignified spot for such experiences. At least people don't blame your carelessness entirely.
iii> now now maa! Do not be such a sexist. kudos to the pocketmaar-ni (like chakrani, and jomadarni) Forgive her. Its Women's Day after all. It would have been a shame to be cheated by a man on this day, isn't it?

Sunday, January 24, 2010

connected.. alone.. transient.. everlasting...
mixed...
but this is the life baby...
you have one
live it :)