Crash and Circle

For those wondering what happened to the poetry challenge- its still on.

Obviously not every week, because the inevitable work rears its ugly head, and doesn't even give me the time or peace of mind to write this post or even think of words that don't involve blahblahblisation and poopoopoointificate, which don't really lend themselves to verse.

I seem to be trapped with chalk circles drawn around me, well, if they're not chalk then they are assignment submission dates. I break out of one by uttering the magic charm- which is extremely long and convoluted and filled with nonsense words and I only crash headlong into another (circle). Circles everywhere, around my eyes, a halo around my computer, a zero on everything else, and I have got caught up in my own rather weak rhetoric.

I apologise.

So the poetry thing. The week after the limerick was haiku week, which had interesting if not successful results. I've never really got into the haiku craze, and there have been very few haikus I've liked. Poetry can have a pretentious flavour to it, and haikus seemed to be the epitome of that. The fact that so many people were into it did put me off a bit, and their randomness didn't help.

I really thought it was just an excuse to throw random images at each other, watch them crash, and then revel in the spray of enigma and general "look how DEEP we are! Rhyming went out in the twentieth century!"...ness.

Writing them I did gain a little more respect for those who wrote them. It's trickier than I thought. Apparently you have to aim these images at each other, or they won't crash properly, only glance by and basically miss the point entirely. Or they'll just be three lines, with the requisite syllable or word count which sound vaguely interesting but are not Haikus!

The haiku writing was a bit of a failure, though my poetry partner, being more comfortable with the form, or perhaps more comfortable with the idea of the form did slightly better.

Evenings, the street lamps

halo passersby and wet roads

make raindrops glitter

I still think haikus are a form best left to the Japanese language, as the peculiarities suit each other perfectly. That is, it seems to me haikus were constructed in that language and English just doesn't have the tools. It's not just haikus that are written already and converted to English where the essence gets lost in translation, but just the act of writing them in an alien language. Of course, there's no fault with taking something beautiful and trying to recreate it differently, but I suggest giving it a different name, because they are not and can never be the same.

I ended up writing way more about haikus than I thought I would. I thought I'd take a quick break from studying the codification of law in the 19th century and copy paste a sonnet here. I should have known better.

Right, next week was Sonnet week, obviously my suggestion. This was a mistake perhaps, as the rigid form terrified my poetry partner stiff to the extent that she still hasn't written it, though the constant sream of work might have had something to do with that.

Quick 411 on sonnets- they're generally fourteen lines- each line with ten syllables- written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable is followed five times (still didn't get it it? Don't worry its clear enough when you read it) Have I forgotten anything? Ah yes, the rhyme scheme- abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet (gg) generally turns the theme around or looks at it differently.

Right enough said. I tried my hand at it. It was very difficult, and writing in this sort of rigid structure often takes away from the purity of the thought, in the sense that at least for me a lot of tweaking is required to batten it down to the iambic pentameter shape and what not.

One of the most famous sonnets is of course Shakespeare's.

Sonnet No. 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I took issue with certain aspects of this sonnet and decided to well, reply in kind.

What alters when it alteration finds?

I never even sought to question that.

With foggy eyes I read that which reminds

Me sadly that I’m at a caveat.

I see no tempests but a minor squall

And yet I’m altered. Drops of rain throw hard

And stubborn truths at me. ‘No more! That’s all!’

I cry, and hurl the same words at the Bard.

Man has loved: here the Bard’s words mean no lie

Except that time does make of love a fool

Real emotion can fade or melt or die

Just as the sweetest words grow forced or cruel

Man has loved, Shakespeare has writ, but he’s wrong

If true, Love must change else it can’t last long.

Full circle on the sonnet front too, I suppose.

I'm proud of it, even if it sounds a little stiff, like an upper lip, a term that feels uncomfortable even existing in modernity. Or like my metaphors who really, so very badly want to be let go.

Anyway, it was true. True not in right or correct, but true in the feeling in which it was written, and that's what really matters I suppose.

Okay. Must dash.

Poetry Challenge- Week One

So life was rolling along as usual. When people asked that dreaded question- 'What up?' I had variations of 'Oh, trundling along', 'Fairly skippily', "Oh-ah', 'Oh, You know, same old same old'.

Well, to put it nicely, Balls to that!

A friend and I have decided to do a poetry challenge. Every form of poetry one can think of, and one form gets picked as the theme for the week. We're going to do this for as long as we can.

Since we were both short of time the day we decided upon the first theme- we just hurriedly told each other 'Limerick! Any topic! Go! You have till Saturday night!'

Turns out Limericks are difficult. Its all very well to compose one randomly and get a laugh because it's fine if its lame, but it seems that they turn out that way even after concentrated thought.

For those who have any doubts on the subject, a limerick- popularised by Lear (though he didn't call' em that)- is a witty or nonsensical poem, classically 5 lined, with the aabba rhyme scheme, and is often funny in an obscene way.

My father was fond of this one...

There was a man called Skinner

Who took his girlfriend out to dinner

By a quarter to nine

They were ready to dine,

By a quarter to ten it was in her.

(The dinner, not Skinner!

Skinner was in her before dinner!)

Though my favourite (read Only) limerick as a child was:

There was a man from Bengal

Who went to a fancy dress ball

He thought he would risk it

And go as a biscuit

But the dog ate him up in the hall.

Right, now that you've got the picture...

(Nobody bite my ass about the number of syllables. I tried pretty hard, but in some lines, you've just gotta extemporise!)

This was my first sorry effort.

There once was a lady from Gouda

Who would cover herself with powder

She thought it was the fashion

But the girl just looked ashen

And not one man even tried to crowd her.

Yes. I know. (And just to clear this up- Gouda can be pronounced either Gow-da or Goo-da. So ha!) But yes, even apart from that, this is a terrible limerick.

My next one was better!

There was a young man from Crete

Who boasted of many a sexual feat

But few ladies were charmed,

In fact, most were alarmed,

And not one was keen on a repeat.

I tried to do a third verse where he and Gouda's Damsel meet, he thinks her a choice Morsel, and they wind up like the proverbial Pretzel- but as you can tell the rhyme was more than iffy.

That's when my friend messaged to proclaim her own difficulties with the limerick business. I told her to pick a place- any place. Not immediately getting what I was driving at, she picked Karkarduma - A place I've only seen on the map of the Blue line of the Delhi metro, and giggled at occasionally.

So what follows is a collaborative effort.

There once was a man from Karkarduma

Who only ever bought shoes from Puma

He thought he'd go yuppie

And buy from Hush Puppy

But then he caught the 3.10 to Yuma.

Yes. I know. It makes no sense. But I like it, if only for the pop culture references, if brands and movies can be characterised as such.

Today, still griping, she wrote:

I have a friend called Meghana,

Very talented, she's a stunner,

And as I took my time

To make this sad thing rhyme,

She tsked and said, "You're still not done, ah?"

I appreciated the 2nd line, but I did tsk a little bit.

What follows is another, even more collaborative effort; I told her to pick a place, any place, and she was by now, wise to this game.

There was a banker who went to Goa

Who, for a thrill, bought a bright pink boa

It might have had style

If that silly reptile

Hadn't picked a fight with the lawn mower.

That's right. I think the image of a banker wearing a magenta snake around his neck and mowing his lawn is funny. And it gets worse. I was fixed on doing a rhyme on someone from Rajkot, and this is what we came up with. The end is mine more than Harshita's- she's still trying to cook up a better one, which I will put up if she manages- so if these limericks are putting you in a murderous frame of mind, feel free to assassinate Me, and Me only.

There was a young accountant from Rajkot

Who had the gift of learning things by rote

But the 23times table

Rendered him incapable,

So he retired to the mountains and bred goats.

Please don't hate me.

Okay, okay, so the limerick thing was a bit of a damp squib, but quite fun. Maybe not the most felicitous start to the whole poetry challenge- but a start nonetheless, something I'm grateful for, as these things sound great discussed on the phone but rarely get done. So here's to better verse in better days.

It Had to Be You, Then, There.

Its been fairies and bright lights for me from the start.

Trees and topsy-turvy lands, rings and wardrobes.

Poems and midnight feasts, witching hours and wings

Rain and fantasy and sorcery have always had my heart.

Even later, angst was bathed in moonshine

Words my refuge, like any red-blooded teenager

I had a diary, and magic and heartbreak.

Runes and love, and courage; they were all mine.

Dusty windows and dirty candles lit

my world, splintered and guttering as they willed.

The tritest metaphors- loud voices through blasts of music,

Reality seeping into really very forced fantasy- made to fit.

And later still... Still alone, one could still dream

Of trysts and deep dark forests and stars and spider- silk

And love and time twisting, twining around each other.

Words and music lyrical and soft, throttling a scream.

How fitting then, my fantasies all entangled,

that it was you. A stranger so tall and menacing

like in all the good books, your grin painted on,

and me in red boots, as my tunic bells jangled.

Iron and wine, in forest glade,

Blue and white lights, so bright that night.

Full moon, new roles in a graphic novel universe

As we played out the masquerade.

How fitting then, that your mask was true

Almost fantastic how we slipped away.

How fitting, that it was terrible- that moment,

Dark, guilty, fumbling, smiling and through.

How fitting really, that you had to leave!

Even more that we never really spoke

Fantasy tends to invert the prosaic; washes

New colours out through the sieve.

Stranger from a distant land, that's you!

My life though real, plays in a surreal strain.

I didn't even know your name,

and true to my fantasy, I don't actually want to.

Pianissimo

Terrible things were happening in minor notes outside today. Fortissimo voices tinny and yet scary through my door.

And I, reading, had an awful, and undeserved swoooosh back to the past.

That old, beaten down to nothing image...

Here it is...

I, tinier, reading.

Then, crouching, and wondering if things could turn bad; if I was brave enough to intervene, or whether it was enough to cry bitterly in my room, and morning-time, emerge blithely from the cracked little world I had occupied that night.

The terror was over five minutes after waking.

The night is for fantasy, and the day for dreams- the bored sort.

The night is also for horrors, and the day only stretches to annoyance.

I resent the fact that I am compelled to pour forth this nonsense now.

Now!

This stuff, worthy of the least creative 12 year old you could ever come across, and I'm heartily ashamed of the fear.

I start hyperventilating, and my mind spins, in a sense, even more so than when I was a child, for now I wonder how much agency I have.

Crouching and wondering whether things are likely to turn bad.

And I can't put my earphones back on, I can't stuff a cowardly head into the pillow, or slam a balcony door, and think the cold world outside will be a poetic and windy refuge from my home.

I have to listen.

I have to be brave enough to intervene, and the crying must be limited to a minute's worth over the sink, mostly consisting of rigorous nose-blowing and hoping the eyes aren't too scarlet-rimmed.

In a way, loneliness acts as my anchor.

It's something I know.

It might be a dead weight... but its pretty stable and it rarely yells.

But it tells me( quietly) that I have to learn to deal.

Its not like I'm going anywhere.

...

Wow, how maudlin is this? I keep repressing the urge to make fun of the more sweeping statements, and I guess the more formal phrasing cloaks the more corny sentences. I'm going to take it as a good sign that I can't even take misery seriously.

You say goodbye

You say hello, but do you really mean it?

I wait and wait for knowledge of my self-worth to come fluttering back.

It does sometimes.

But sometimes it gets thrown too far away, and I have to buy a new one.

And I'm broke.

So, are you there?

(Not self-worth, silly. It's just the knowledge of it that floats away.)

Merrily, merrily.

I wish this life was a dream, sometimes.

Then again, sometimes I don't.

Come back. Please.

I can't chase you both! I'm too cool to look like a fool.

And yet I do.

Do the fool act, I mean. And most of the time, sadly.

It isn't an act.

Argh. ARGHHHHHHHH!

I'm too cool to need you. I'm too sad to need anybody anymore.

It'd just be nice.

Please come back so I don't need to need anybody.

Even my family has begun to look at me from the corners of their eyes.

Loneliness is unsocial. It makes other people uncomfortable.

Come to think of it, me too.

If that had happened, this wouldn't have. I think this every time it didn't.

Happen, that is.

You say stop. I don't believe you.

So. Go, go, go.

*goes away humming.

Real Live Fantasy

I want to write a fantasy book, but I know this is going to take a maha- long time, since a. I'm a distracted little creature, b. I do have to scratch out a living c. I really want it to be one of those books where I know what I'm talking about.
The uninitiated, or simply stupid, might wonder what one has to know before writing a fantasy book, but the fact is there are too many published and unpublished fantasy authors who take a fancy to write something fanciful, or use fantasy to be funny, or expound certain social or cultural or political viewpoints and be done with it.

We live, fortunately or unfortunately, in a time where a plethora of good literature already exists, and to make one's own mark, one has to either follow fantasy tropes or the big guys- Tolkien, Jordan, Pratchett, McCaffrey... adding enough of 'something different' to mark one's own world out. If the difference isn't enough you end up with plain old plagiarism like Era-Gahn. Sometimes, one creates one's own world by acknowledging and mocking the earlier greats. Cheers, Samit Basu. Of course, this is a tricky path to tread; I believe even Basu ultimately tripped and fell on his arse, however gracefully. It's hard to keep a grip, and then the author is caught up in a welter of spoofy plot lines that have to be resolved satisfactorily and to do this without it becoming completely farcical and thereby unsatisfactory is tough.

I mean, not all of us can be Terry Pratchett, now.

Rowling did well enough while the kids juggled being brave with boarding school, and there were the usual imaginative magicky-innovativy small things in the books that made the Harry Potter books such a joy to read when they did come out. Then Harry became a bad tempered prat wallowing in his angst (well portrayed by them Potter Puppet Pals) and the books started remembering that movies had to be made outta them, and the imaginative knick knacks came to a screeching halt, and suddenly there we are, back to every generic fantasy book, a small improbable band of heroes fighting against all odds against the Dark Lord and other power hungry morons and seeing England enveloped by pseudo Nazism.
Well, that tangent was a little longer than I anticipated. Sorry.

I suppose the real trick in a successful fantasy, for me at least, is to mix fantasy with what's true to you, rather than fall into the trap of imaginary people doing fantastical things in some faraway place. Triumph of good over evil is a little old, but so is trying to sound clever in every sentence.
(Yes, yes. I know. Shut up.)

So yeah, enough you, I was saying. Obviously there are no fixed rules to this. I mean, it's fantasy, you're supposed to allow your imagination to romp around. But the weakness of fantasy all too often for me is that it can feel like a soap opera or sometimes even a bad sitcom. Either the characters are typecast with their roles clearly set out for them, or the twist in the tale emerges just for the sake of it.

This is, incidentally, advice to warn myself as well as any other aspiring authors who happen upon the blog. Including me, that probably brings the count up to One, but its out there for whatever it's worth.

I do think it's important that we don't forget who we are when we write. Like, let's face it, I'm Indian, I've lived in Delhi my whole life: and while I was in school my main character was someone called Krystle Lazuli, a fair, raven haired emerald eyed beauty, living in a castle that looked like any image out of dreams of Camelot and King Arthur, with a contrived plotline heavily influenced by Tolkien, David Eddings etc and whatever girly books my teenage hands had touched. Heartily unconvincing and excruciatingly bad.
Thankfully, my worthy dream of being a published author at 15 did not come to fruition and growing up and through college and through reading some really kickass fantasy (Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, to start) I think I've got some slightly more nuanced ideas to build a story out of, those I don't think I'm ready for it just yet.

This blog remains open for me to come up with stuff, struggle with ideas, and to write down fragments, pieces which I hope will add up nicely someday. Till then... the reader's condemned to half baked ideas, emotional outpourings and general long-windedness. Readers, if some are still out there, good luck, and don't desert me now!

The Early Works

I'm the kind of person who gets embarrassed easily. I'm very conscious of What People Think, and unless I'm the one singing loudly, or decently inebriated, I'm normally the one going "Yeah, I'm not with them" or excusing the crime to offended strangers.
I find it rather difficult to put myself completely Out There. I don't have the confidence, the effrontery (or enough quantities of either) that makes people magnetic, or good showmen. What's more, in the constant race to prove myself, I have this silly urge not to appear stupid, or inversely, to appear inordinately clever. Sometimes I stay silent in social affairs and discussions because I feel that if I open my mouth, a whole battery of stupidity will come pouring out.
This tangent is giving the wrong impression. I don't think I'm stupid, quite the contrary. I just don't think I'm clever enough! ('for whom' you ask? For myself. And on a general scale on 1 to 20, I'd rank myself 14.)

Having said this, you will perhaps appreciate the bravery in publishing this one.

Every once in a while some verse written during a time of teenage poetic fervour resurfaces, and produces in me a kind of glee, half guilty; bits of me squirming in the reminder of how seriously I took myself those days, how sincere and devoted I was to the idea of Meghana: Writer, Poet extraordinaire; half rejoicing at the awkward, contrived rhyme, the heavy and clumsy metaphor, the sad formulas for enigma.
Its disastrous and rather wonderful!

This shining example is from when I was 14. This is Deep Stuff. You have been warned.

So here goes,
(minus a verse or two)

THE SHOP FOR LIARS

One step to illusion
Go left and straight on to fantasy
Go right for hallucination
And its only a buck for fallacy

Its so easy to have a shattered conscience
The Shop for Liars gives you a three-month guarantee
It comes cheaper here than anywhere else
Lost, ma'am? Non-working product? Can I see your warranty?

Behind the curtains of Suicide,
You'll find pen, ink, and paper
The courage and the cyanide
Dim residue of cowardliness might come later

Shift of responsibility is slightly dear
but its worth it, we give you your money's due
get it now, you'll only get it here,
Wait sir, let me give the change back to you

White lies come for a song
With our brand you can't go wrong
Stuttering and over-emphasis
are minor side effects
Tell all your friends!
You'll find the means to your ends!
Come before the prices go higher!
There's a Sale at the Shop for Liars!

Vacuum

My cousin lately had a pretty terrible accident. I heard the news while I was on holiday. At that specific moment, I was with family members who were not really acquainted with her. For them it was a shocking event that had occurred to people far removed from them.
My first thought was to inform my brother because I knew he was closer to her. And there you have it. I don't know my cousin. And I have never really minded not knowing her. In our childhood, though us five cousins have spent a lot of time together, the elders banded together as friends, and perhaps, growing up, I idly resented my exclusion from the friendship- not just mere family feeling- that had developed between them. After their moving out of Delhi, there was little or no communication between us.

Her parents- my uncle and aunt- moving back in the last year, I did get to meet her. And we talked but we didn't talk. We hung out, but nothing more existed than a laid-back cousinly feeling between us.

One doesn't think what somebody means to you, especially when you have no intense feeling about them. How does one rank anybody in the 'affections' ladder? People you love, People you like, People you can bear, people you can't bear, along with the overlapping emotions. People who are nice, but boring. People who you get along with but inside you know they're complete bastards. People you amiably tolerate, or are on easy terms with, never thinking of what it may mean when...

So I don't know my cousin. I know her, but don't know her. I've shed no tears, even if they have gathered in my eyes. I feel guilty for not knowing her, but I would feel guiltier if I forced tears to drop. Crying seems almost hypocritical. I can't stand the thought of my cousin, from what I have seen of her, lying unconscious in a bed, hooked up to a million machines, helpless, and in a vacuum. A vacuum has placed upon all of us, so far away, physically and figuratively.

This post doesn't really have much of a point. It's not about, 'I wish I had known her more', and 'I will try to know her better when she recovers', though the second is something I want to do. I am not friends with my cousin, and because she's lying unconscious in a bed, does not unfortunately mean friendship secured. It's just wrestling with the thought that the person you were close to but did not know may not, or may take a very very long time to become that person again.

Smells Okay.

The star flew right into her nose. She batted it away like she would a small fly, and losing its bearings, the star got dizzy and lost itself in her nose hair.
And there remained.

She was walking to the bus stop when a cloud of dust and a directionally challenged cyclist assailed her. Having battled these by the simple expedient of slitting her eyes, wrinkling her nose, and doing that little hop skip and startled jump every pedestrian in Delhi is almost used to, she fell into another world without much fuss and only a small number of bruises.

Clawing her way through fog, the thought kept hitting her that if this was the afterlife, it sucked. The thought generally following this one was that unremarkable though her life had been, this sort of characterless vagueness was really unwarranted cheek. Once in a while her foot would hit something and she'd stumble, but she didn't fall, only flailing her arms in an unladylike way.
Once she fell.
Sometimes she felt that she saw a body, a silhouette shaping the fog or smoke or whatever it was around him, and one time when she was absolutely sure, she ran and threw herself at the figure, for once not giving a damn about dignity. This at least was a good thing, for that was the time she fell.

Needless to tell you, none of this really happened.

That's what she said, a bus ride later, to people she didn't know. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to alienate the idiots, or cling to them for the entirely material purpose of not being subjected to ill-meaning fools asking if this seat was taken, inquiring.

Don't you have any friends?

The fans had stopped working, and there were about two hundred people in close proximity to each other. She closed her eyes for a moment and the transition this time to another world was entirely smooth. No bruises at all.
She couldn't move. Not of her own volition, that is. She was being carried forward by a hand here, a foot there, a shoulder on the left, a potbelly on the right. This was nothing like the videos where she had imagined herself floating above the crowd, breathing the fresh air of success and glory and great rock music. Nothing like that at all. The air was so wet and heavy, she was swimming in an exhausting doggy paddle. Somebody else was working her though. Lots of somebodies. Swimming along together.

And then she opened her eyes.

Splash of brown and orange into yellow. Hisssss.
She opened the door and walked into the kitchen.

A sharp plunge into crazy colours, swirling eyes, mad and quick breaths and then they all fizzled into some mottled shade of grey. And the grey was so desperate, so final, that it seemed to be enveloping her, shrouding her, forming a shapeless veil, smothering her...

So she sneezed.
Onions were being sliced in the kitchen so nobody even asked her why she wept.