Jour de naissance

In a pensive stance,

I sit beside a window,

with my head tilted sideways,

my eyes affixed,

on the blades of grass,

that dance to the tune,

of mellifluous drizzle.

I have switched off the fan,

I didn’t like the sound of it;

it is obstructing, distracting, subtracting;

the convergence of my cognitions.

I light a cigarette,

I smoke effortlessly.

The smoke,

sometimes slaps back at my face,

and sometimes it is extracted,

deep from my mouth;

in a twisted cyclonic fashion,

goes out of the window,

and dissolves into the moist air.

How, the direction of the wind changes without any notice.

I try to recollect my last birthday. Abhishek wishing me at midnight; lunch with Sumit and Anish; the movie Love Aaj kal after that, at Inox. Yes, Ma had made Ilish Biriyani for me. That’s all. I don’t remember anymore of that day.

The last year of my life had not been very eventful, as I’d supposed it would be. I had spent most of the time coping with my illness.

A few good people were added to my life,

a few good ones subtracted.

Sporadically, at times of depression,

I feel, maybe,

I’d held the grains of sand,

Too tightly.

They slipped through my fingers,

Through my clasp.

Well,

I could have gathered,

the grains of sand,

could have taken a piece of paper,

made a few strokes,

with a brush and glue on it,

and then let them slip away,

all of it, again.

It would have remained.

A piece of art.

Birthday kiddo.

You’re a year older.

Letter

Dear I,

I wonder why I didn’t write me or myself or just simply my name Sayak. Maybe I have an affinity towards the vowel ‘I’. You might think I, that’s also you, are a narcissist; maybe I am, or may be not. Let’s drop it, it’s not important.

Look at me, look at how lame a thing I am doing, perturbed by the hallucinated repercussions of self established, self demolished melancholic felicitous ode of insularity, noisily ranted in the harshest possible voice. Why don’t I sit for a while in solitude and get over with this conversation? Ah, I can’t strain my vocal chords to yell my quirks at you, or even if it is a mute conversation I can’t vex my mind to do the talking; I am too lazy to do that, you know. But I can do the typing; it comes to me almost involuntarily.

We hardly talk nowadays; and to speak the truth I don’t feel bad about it, rather I don’t have the time to feel bad about it. I am always busy doing something or the other and more often than not I am in the company of friends. Not that I am all ablaze and lost in hyperbolic hysteria while I am apparently and technically not alone, I do feel solitary at times, I glance at your silhouette, try to speak up, then reject the notion and lapse into the prevalent marooned numbness of temporarily anaesthetized inertia of the fake frivolous presence, the thing called fun, joy and very loosely life.

Sometimes, I feel like that small bird perched on a high tension wire, oblivious to and free from the facts of science. I don’t even realise what flows beneath me, grazing my feet; just like I let the relentless waves of time flow, disdaining and mocking that dimension altogether.

Nothing concerns me nowadays, not even you; I stay afloat and adrift on the turbulence of the jittery ocean of interminable nonchalance. But you are indispensable to me. I might burn out, but you are like the Amaranthus plant, which never withers, never fades away. You are the soul, the energy; which can neither be created nor destroyed.

I shall cease my speech now. I hope to talk to you soon, although, seriously I am not very hopeful about it.

Yours sincerely,

Sayak

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" The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves. "  - Eric Hoffer