Searching for the Man in the Moon

Once upon a time there was a little white pigeon. When he was born, God directed one of his angels, Iblees, that he was to clip the pigeon's wings every time they grew long enough to allow him to fly. So Mr. Little White Pigeon grew up, watching all the other pigeons who lived around his nest, fly into the sky, dipping through the sun as it sank lower into the sea, and returning with their daily booty. He was a happy, optimistic pigeon and it never really occured to him that he too, could have had the ability to fly. He just was. And he was happy.
One day, Iblees was watching this little pigeon and God asked him to prostrate before it. Iblees refused to do any such thing in great indignation. He was, after all, the archangel, and this was but a pigeon who didn't even have it in him to rebel against God for the injustice he caused him every day. Thunder struck the world, and Iblees revolted. He also fled. So in some sense of the word, it wasn't really a revolt, but Iblees, who had been watching the passivity of the pigeon for some time, had begun to feel that he too, was nothing too different from that pigeon. And as his insecurity mounted, so did his outward indignation. He didn't really rebel against God, he rebelled against himself.
At any rate, there was now no one left to cut off Mr.Little White Pigeon's wings, and suddenely it started flapping around with two soft, floating boats of white, cotton feathers hovering on either side. At first, this confused the pigeon. He didn't really know what to do with them and they hindered his daily activities of hopping nimbly from one tree branch to the other. He began to pray that God would take these back and allow him to live his life as it was. He had been happy. Now, he found it hard to hop around, and since this hopping around formed the hub of all his activities, he began to lose color. The other pigeons, ofocurse, never noticed his wings. For them, he was Mr.Little White Pigeon who Didnot Fly. And his newfound wings went completely unnoticed.
One day, Iblees happened to come across this huddled mass of misery, and with a stubborn indignation to prove something to God, but essentially to himself, he gave the pigeon a hard push. Poor Mr. Little White Pigeon toppled off his familar branch and, as if in slow motion, began to fall down towards the hard surface of the ground. The pigeon panicked. He thrashed about, trying to find some way to save himself, and in his fear, his wings rose.
Mr. Little White Pigeon almost died in amazement when he realized that he was flying.

God watched from above and smiled silently to himself. He watched Iblees rubbing his hands in self-satisfied triumph, and wondered at his oblivion. He thought that he had finally managed to enable the pigeon to rebel against God. To overcome odds that God placed before him. God smiled. Rebellion. Like Iblees, he thinks, the pigeon did not rebel against God, he rebelled against himself. And in that rebellion, he found what his wings were capable of. And they will all think that they fight against me, that they rise above the constants I place them in. Except that they forget, that nothing is a constant. Everything changes. And change brings them closer to a final understanding. And those who appear to believe in me, will fight amongst themselves over these constants, forgetting that change IS balance. And I, too, am balance. And those who do not believe in me, will fight their own self, for in each I have placed the firefly that burns with the fire of change, and each step brings them closer to the final understanding. Fly, my pigeon, fly. For your flight, is but your fight against yourself. You will have to die in your freedom, to overcome the final obstacle to freedom, that is, freedom itself. And then, you will find me.
And I will embrace you, my firefly of change.
Iblees, you too, are my pigeon. And your fire too, shall one day, understand.

Baloch Mess

Flecks of broken torches,
Blink. And blink.
The pale yellow creases in a setting sky,
fall in flimsy, vaporizing folds,
Upon the fireflies as they freeze on the Dark Mountain.

The dark outline of a figure,
chalked on the dark outline of another sky,
Atop a climbing row of stone steps.
Sitting.

Watching the sky freeze.

Life in the dark blinks.
The night wraps its bosom at sunset,
Its cloak strewn with fireflies,
Tiny centres of hot, bubbling life. Blinking, Throbbing.

Cars in the distance,
Moving like bright pebbles and blinking glow worms,
Homing devices on God's little map.

And solitude.
Patting and piling the clay of "solitude",
Looking for a mould to "Life",
Drinking God's wine in search for sobriety,
Gambling with Silence to find the voice.

The Story of Us

We depart. The two of us.
We stood there. Knowing that we knew. And knowing that we would never look.
Something in us changes, as we move.
There are two divides we need to cross. The first one, for me, is you, and for you, me.
But the other divide is much the harder. Its us.
I need to free me from me and you need to free yourself from you.

Words. Empty. Millions of them. Flying into the wind. It carries them when they emerge from the being of a person, and guides them softly, gently through each day. When the being can no longer allow them to escape, the wind sheds these shadows softly into our laps. We pick them up and rub them against our cheeks like our childhood flannel comforters. Feeling. Remembering.

He stops talking. He’s moving now.

She pretends to laugh at something her friend says.

He walks towards the exit, near where she stands, slowly, giving himself time to think. Giving her time to react.

She feels him watching her. He’s trying hard not to look and she feels it. She knows she should turn around and look back. Let one window fall. But she doesn’t. She wants to. But she doesn’t.

He wants her to look. Look at me. Feel me. Know that this is the last time I will be passing you. Know. Why does it not tantalize her, that knowledge, the way it does him?

She tries to fight back the slow storm that is making her want to run to him. She closes her eyes briefly and wonders why she wants him to approach her first. Why? She wonders. There is only silence.

He wants to go to her. To tap her shoulder and to watch her turn. To see those colours cascading into each other in the dance of a waterfall. He wonders why he can’t. Why, he wonders, does he wait for her to look at him? Why? He wonders.

A man and a woman. They both look for signs.

Somewhere, a foghorn is heard in the distance. The ships are leaving. There are no goodbyes.

A man and a woman. Two ends of a shore. No meeting places.

How do you depart? Do you look back and wave goodbye? Do you close your eyes against the surge of pain and refuse to acknowledge that which you are leaving behind? Do you smile and think of tommorow? And who stops? Who clenches the moment tightly in his fist and crumples it? Who returns?
Lives dissolve. Tomorrow. She doesn’t really know what it means yet. Tomorrow. But she knows it’s there. For him too. It holds them both in a cradle of knotted fingers, and a strange optimism arising out of its uncertainity, its blurry outlines.

Nostalgia frays the edges of the sun as it dips into the sea. Soft and wavy. The water shivers.

We know. Oh, we know. We are the two who have moved time. No one backtracks into history. We pulled the sword out of the stone. None of us will face ourselves in each other. There is a part of us, that we don’t want back.
But there is still the forhorn. It blows in the distance. Finds its way through layers of sunsets and the salty ocean air to come to us. How many paths are there in this world? And how many of them lead to the same place?

Flight and Paintings

One single drop of rain begins to tremble. In the heart of the tallest mountain in a world, one single drop shivers.
This is where my story starts.
All things grow hot. And the point of beginning, for that heat, is the centre.What is the "centre"?
In a man, the centre is his "real" self. Soul? No. Souls lie in the realm of neither black nor white. Grey."Centre" is the truth. The "Centre" or the "self" never lies. Man's conscience arises because of this "centre". All emotions, arise as a direct consequence of what is felt in that "centre". When we construct delusion to live life by, we KNOW they are delusions. We hide. We pretend. We put up the facade for so long that it takes on the disguise of the "real self" for us. But it's not. And sometimes, people are shocked or stunned out of these delusions, because the "real self" , the one that had been subdued, takes charge again, sometimes with the help of a stimulant from the outside. And man begins to feel.
Perhaps, that is what "niyat" is. The "self". And that is, perhaps, why God, if there is one, judges a man on his "niyat", because that is where the truth lies. The "self", or the "niyat" that never lies.It is truth, or rather, the search for truth, that makes us talk to God. If, ofocourse, God exists.

I look for that "self" when I cannot feel. When I begin searching, I start to stumble onto narrow, hidden corridors, secret stairways, and dimly lighted passages in my being, that I hadn't walked on, much less noticed ever before. I fear that if I pass them, I will forget where they were. If i forget where they were, I would never be able to find out where they lead. That is why, perhaps, I start to paint. I map these blueprints of my existance, perhaps of my "self", onto a dry, scratchy canvas. The Gods of my "self" that take on the form of reds and blues and yellow. The colors, they pulsate. And as they throb, I feel.

Somebody asked me once, why I never give away my paintings. Is there any one in this world, who will be able to read these maps? They will judge my paintings for their aestheticism, and their craft, and their "themes", but they will never really understand them. In the end, we walk alone. No one man, can understand another. Each person, is in themselves, a universe whithin a universe. No bridges link two different galaxies. They each move in their own spheres, communicating, but never really connecting.

A wild bird. Singing Freedom. Freedom of thought and emotion. The only freedom in this world, that is a prerequisite for classification of man amidst the "human" species. Freedom that runs with blood and the fiery wings of the Phoenix. So really, more than nine-tenths of the "humans" on this earth, aren't really humans. Natural constants limit the freedom of thought and emotion that a man can possess. But this limit arises from the need to allow other men an equal amount of freedom. Man-made constants though, do the exact opposite. They take freedom away, so that the freedom of certain others can pile up into a shining, golden mass. Symbols of injustice.
Humans dehumanize humans.

Is this evolution?
Cannibalism, perhaps, would be a better choice.



Singing on a throbbing pulse,
The wind searches.
For a way to escape from its freedom.

Our Circle

In a circle
everything keeps moving.
No ends to drop luggage down and rest.
Just endless running.
Who, in this world,
can't find their way
Outside of things that are round.
You.
And me.
And our perfect circles.
Perfection is a flaw.

Tommorow

One woman in the rain.
Who tells herself that she doesnt need a man.
She looks out itno the sun. Adamant. Defiant.
She has been told that the sun will blind her. That is why she looks.


The fog is lifting. The day feels fresh. Like hot doughnuts. Or sparkling sunlight in a wineglass. The smoke catches its last driftwood home. Its moving out into the sea.

She raises her head.

Is it really gone? She wonders.

Memory traps. But it also squeezes tiny shards of painful honey, out of its crevices. Like handmade paper, she bends under the wind. Like a reed. Hollow. Making music, but hollow without the wind. Dry. Silent.

She rethinks. She isn't a reed. But does she need him? No. She wants him.
Ah. There's the catch. The tiny, secret trapdoor in her perfectly wooden staircase to tommorow.
She wants him.

Where is he, right now?She wonders.

Distance matters. Tangible distance. Motorways, and roads, and highways and landing strips. And the sea, of course. They all congregate under "distance". Was she responsible?..Was "distance" responsible?

Kaledioscope of confusion. Reds and blues and yellows and greens. Broken bits of a mirror. Each bit calls out to a different ribbon of voices in the spectrum. Red. And blue. And yellow. Green. Where is SHE? She wonders.

How do you tell if you've really lost something? When the road that she walks on today, bends suddenely, she can no longer be sure which path she was walking on yesterday. The present tangles the past. She is no longer sure.

Her hands reach out. Fingertips grazing the underside of a dark blue pigeon. One of its wings has an ivory-colored feather. One white feather. In a host of blue. Should she pull it out? She wonders.

No. She likes to see it fly with that one white feather. Slashes of blue on a hot, swollen sky. And one strip of white. When the pigeon moves the white weaves through the blue like a ribbon. Pulsating. Connecting.

She paints a picture in the sky. And flies with her pigeon.

My Monsoons

They came today. The Monsoons.
Unfailing.
Every year, they come. They disappoint no one.
I woke up to the sound of water. Clashing.
To the sound of a dancer in red, whirling. The art of abandon. Like streaks of colour pressing in and out of a tapestry of baby raindrops.

My last monsoon. Before life changes.

The wind, like a strand of hair moving of its own accord, twirls around the rain. God’s fingers. Wafts of water, spray a blood-red beetle. A spot of red. A shiny little sequin off the dancer’s dress. The beetle.

Something in me dances.

Rain. That brings back my grandfather. That places my childhood on my lap. That makes me young again. Im old in the heart. They are anti-ageing, these monsoons.

Standing. Pressed to the cold, hard handle of the door. Watching. As the God of Eternity, takes the shape of the monsoons. To talk to me. And I stand. And we talk. We live. Eternity, who wants to exist. I, who don’t. In each other we find the scales that balance “forever” with the “now. I live in this moment, this monsoon. The monsoon lives through me. Together, we create immortality.

Wild. The rain. Wild and nostalgic. A gypsy with hair blackened by the shadows of the sun, sits alone in the desert. An eagle takes off from its perch, and on the wings of longing, flies across the sun. The dancer, red and wet, with rain clinging to her hands, her feet, her arms, her breasts, whirls around in wild, mad, uncontrolled circles. A seven year old street boy runs. Wild rain. Free. And freeing those who are not.


I hug myself. I laugh. The monsoons, they ARE me. Passion is a drug. Not because it’s addictive. But because it’s good. Very good.

My monsoons. My red.

Leaving

In the thick heat, midsummer,
Little chinks of nostalgia, like cut glass,
wrinkle the edges of swollen air.

One bench. Beneath a tree.
Lies forlorn. Expecting.
Sparrows scatter and regroup.
Regroup and scatter.
Tremors of a branch, as it sweats,
Unhinges a leaf.

Memory falls onto the bench.

When all the words pass into a void,
Where does that void go?
Black holes move.

Time bubbles. Spews forth a torrent
of disjointed glass mirrors,
Reflecting a disjointed existance.
But real.
Heart wrenching.
Real.

The monsoons are coming.
With a layer of warm, drizzling nostalgia,
Of last year.
Of time.
Of change.

Remebrance.

The unshackling: Light and Freedom

They hear it...
Some of them.
The earthquake.
Erupting into the curl of their ears..
Someone sheds a mask.

The smoke lifting a drugged eye,
As it unfurls like scrolls of papered music,
From the Indian Drum.
A Black man,
with the night in him,
Transcends into the light.

Fingers grope. Searching.
Glass bowls with fireflies in them..
The scattering of wings,
Wings on rainy light.
Light echoes. Not sound.

Walking in braided fog,
The mighty tremble beneath those
of Lilliput.
It hangs on them,
the cross of the Albatross,
Except they ARE the Albatross.
Dead or undead...

But what does one make of the silence,
When silence makes one undead?

They run now. Towards the loud.
The fear of understanding.
Clamour squeezes itself
into a baby's blanket
blue, and sweetly swollen,
strangling.
Their death is the creation
of slavery.

The black man rises.
Chiselling wings from smoke and music.
Glass bowls break into bits of light,
Fireflies. And a purpose.
The unshackling of flight.
As the circle of supple ivory, the moon,
Stands like Isis and Ishtar,
Arms fostering a holier light,
drifting into a trance, it shifts and
the sun, hidden at first,
rises out of the water.
Awakening.

Glistening.Wet.Centennial. Divine.

And the fireflies melt into the source
that echoes their light,
In an embrace
of fullfillment.
Wild joy.
Freedom.
Bits of stars erupting.
Music and the creation.

Their tears make
winds wet.
It rains.

Healing

Chopping the self..
Into neat little words
Into commas, and fullstops, and excla-mashun marks..
Breaking the mould,
Resculpting the eyes, the ears, and the hands,
Healing the poetry.

The Space between Two Waves

Echoes step softly on the hem of my skirt..
Careful. Not to disturb
the healing.
Like a cicling mass of violet stars,
Spangled and trapped beneath the melting surface
of molten memory,
you come.

The sun dips, salty swallows over
hedges of orange waves
gather to scatter over naked, red bruises
in the sky.
I come and go.

Puffing on sacred Aphrodite
and her pipes,
from which songs entwine in smoke
and come out embracing,
making love.
I come and go.

A tear in the hem,
and the echoes withdraw.
Stars and smoke and water on memory,
Still. And Silent.
Sharp boundaries blur,
life awakens life,
Leaving music submerged in the accidental
space, between two waves.

Colliding Oceans..and running time.
And her space between the waves.
You Come.

Faith, Windowsills, and Life on a Lake of Silver Prayers

Shadows of rusty thoughts sit cross-legged on the window sill and smoke joints filled with sweet sunshine and a clear, bitter underglaze of early morning chill. Baby explosions of powdered blue fireworks erupt softly from one end. Bridging the gap. The sheet of glass keeps her outside. She makes little effort to enter. She isn't ready yet.


Thoughts..and their shadows, leaning, bending, boiling water, tucking in Baby, and....laughing. Household mechanics. Blind reflexes to conditioned stimuli.
Thoughts...running. They run on the narrow edge of an old stone building. Small green faces peeping out of chaliced gaps in packed stone. They run. They don't open their eyes. They just run.


She takes a deep breath. Puffs of blue smoke turn midstream, and flow towards her heat. Smoke in her blood. Blue in red. One eyelid flickers. Like a candle flame, it shakes a little, sweats a little. She reaches out. One hand touches the rushing water that surges through the pane of glass. She reaches out. Cold.


Running thoughts. Scampering, hopping, scurrying thoughts. The walls of the old stone building are a happy-go-lucky stacking of this over that. And the thoughts, they run. The walls are a swollen moon, grey and round and defiantly eroded. Thoughts...running in a circle. Eyes clenched, lips pursed, heads down. Running.


She hears something. The glass does not divide. It has betrayed. It must pay. But later. Right now...right now, she needs the silence. She presses one ear like white, wadded cotton wool, against sharp, cold, perfectly splinterable glass. The cold smiles faintly in triumph. She has an opening.



Thoughts are tiring. Running, but tiring.One of them gets its foot caught in a thin, stone splinter clawing out from a crevice in the stone. It falls.


For some, the widow's walk facing a sun they never get to see because it blinds them, is over.



She finishes her joint. Some last blue feathers of spun sugar and manafactured bliss(that comes in white paper triangles), sway drunkenly between her heat and the glass. Silence watches. She opens her eyes and removes her hand. She folds the silence, the cold and the glass in a neat little square and swallows it in one gulp and beneath the deluge of a shortlived permission to reminisce. Her blood catches it and holds it close. Deep, and buried,...but close.


The fallen thought has found a new wall. From here, it can even watch one side of the sun as it sets. It wonders why it never looked. Who, it thinks, is really blind?....



She opens her arms. Embraces the noise. Drinks into life. Dances.

One Hundred Years of Solitude(A hundred-and-forever, actually))

I wonder if I got through to her. The air had been clogged. It was starting to seem as if someone had poured a layer of oil over everything and all movement had become sluggish.
There. That's where words came in. They stayed away in a corner first, running here and hiding there, cowering in a corner, avoiding. They didn't want to come out. The air was thick.
Silence is like a disease. It breathes and bubbles below the surface, swelling softly into a pale pink fungus, threading thin lace coverlets over chairs and tables and lamps and rugs and books and the dog. Thin, but deceptively sly. It hides. And grows.


Suddenely though, the rock had had enough. It was sick of the starry white heat that floated in snaky folds in its stomach. It wanted out. The thick, red, creamy, blistering magma that burned below the surface had to come out. It clenched its eyes and squeezed hard. It squeezed all day. Started as feathery shafts of pale morning light clinked her morning glass of juice and kept squeezing until night had come. Night came. With stars in her backpack. And the moon on a walking stick. The stone squeezed.


A man comes.
His dark brown robe is faded. Patches of rough, fibrous earth cling to his sandals. Dust in his hair. Dry erosion on his lips. Everything on him is finely dusted with a barely-visible layer of indifferent, familiar exhaustion.
Only his eyes are bright. Gold flecks in light brown circles. Pieces of gold in soft soil. Fire and Earth.
"They" say eyes are windows to the soul. If "they" are right, then his soul is free. Like fire. Like the wind. Because his eyes are free.
He looks at the stone and wonders. He bends down to pick it up and holds it up in the light. (The stone, ofcourse, is still squeezing itself). The sun is being tyrannical today, he thinks. Thin watery veins of sweat slink down his forehead. A man and a stone(squeezing itself) in the heart of a desert. Gold and the earth. Hot stone and simmering magma. History is on the move.
"Time", who was sitting atop the wind as it flew from white ice to white heat, pulls at the reins of its ride, and pauses to look at the man and the stone. It sees the coming of age of two elements through each other. A stone who begins to squeeze. A traveller who begins to think. It smiles to himself. Time, that is. A faint strip of a smile that stands at the edge of a melancholic memory. It remebers Adam and the apple. It remembers adolescent water droplets and the evaporating light. It remembers rocks and the wheel. It remebers stone and the fire. Element to element. It smiles and gazes fondly at the stone and the traveller. It wonders which direction history will take this time.


The stone has almost reached a climax. It writhes in an orgiastic frenzy as the deep white heat inside its stomach scatters and recollects. Showers of white sparks and then the rich heat of a fused red. In one last final moment, of sheer will, the stone tastes life. Elements unite. Its sweat is the sweat of the man who holds it. It squeezes, the wind dances, time watches, stars hop onto each other in the traveller's backpack, the moon cranes its neck on his walking stick, the universe shifts and the stone rips itself right through the middle. And a hot, red river stretches itself, as it rises from the depths of what it breaks as it comes out.


The traveller screams as the heat makes contact with his fingers. With his dust. He lets go. In one moment of light, of shock, of heat, he lets go. He finally lets go. He lets his backpack fall. The stars that he had been carrying for his own sliver of eternity. The stars that had fallen from the sky where he had danced with them. His insight comes. And he lets go.He finally lets go. The stone hits the desert. Heat and achievment. Death and Life. A dance of elements. Coexistance. And each one of them, dances to the same music. And each one of them, leaves. In the end, there is solitude. It prevails.He understands now. Change is a constant that is built on another constant. Solitude.


One Hundred Years Later:
Time comes back. As it does, always. It sees two pieces of soft stone on a hazy desert bed. The sun shows no mercy. And the heat creates chimeras in the desert. But truth lies in those chimeras. Both the stone and the traveller saw where these chimeras come from that one day in the desert. Not from the sun or the heat. But from them. And they saw the sliver of truth that hides itself under layers of chimeras in the desert like words under thin, lacy coverlets of silence. And they both left pieces of themselves in the desert that day. To celebrate this discovery of truth. The truth that came to them in their togetherness. They moved on and left something behind. When the pendulum of history brings them back here, independant of each other, and moving in new directions, they will look at that one moment in the desert and smile.The stars and the stone will be gone then. But Time had stopped for them.So now, they own a piece of eternity. Of "forever" as "they" say. Because change is built on solitude. And there is no running away from that.