THE EYE AND THE BEHOLDER

I remember lying in a queen bed and staring into the double-mirrors on the opposite wall. No matter where I looked, I was in my frame of vision: the me in the mirror was already looking there. Endless repetitions replaced true sight and before I knew it I was watching myself watch myself. I wasn't even looking into the mirror, anymore; I was thinking of myself looking at myself. Somewhere around 3:00, I turned out the light. Somewhere around 5:00, I lost consciousness. Somewhere around 7:00, she woke up and left for work without saying goodbye.

Let's try a metaphor

Let's try a metaphor. I wanted to drink some coffee, and you showed me a beautiful cup, so I began to brew some. Now I find your cup is as yet unbaked; the coffee will melt it and absorb its clay. You didn't trick me; I just assumed it was ready. The kiln is heating slowly, the coffee is cooling rapidly, I don't know what to do.

I PRAYED FOR FIRE

You told me that you love me but that you're afraid you're not ready to let someone love you and that, though the future may hold a place for us, the present is going to be static electricity and we'll have to go slow to see if it can be conducted without lightning striking. But you told me all this in Russian and I don't speak Russian, so that when we pressed ourselves into one another, you prayed for warmth while I prayed for fire.

Caught

We are sitting outside a park under a blue tarp eating potatoes and paranthas and discussing digital news functionalities. Across the smooth wide street is the multi-storey urban approximation of a Buddhist Monastery; delicate white travellers go in and come out. A gently dog slinks about around the food smells, routing through trash; he is startled by the plastic bottle flung at him by a young waiter. A portly man leans against a motorcycle (or vice versa) and pulls dramatically from a little cigarette, striking an irresistible pose; I whip out my little black box and catch him in it. We drink tea and talk about catching and getting caught, and with one eye I am looking at the branches above as they catch the light. A pair of improbably white loafers catch my eye and I guffaw. It doesn't seem like we are in the most polluted city on the planet somehow. And as we are paying the bill, a young man with two friends and a perfectly heart-shaped birthmark on his neck walks to a table and sits down.

TENSION

It seemed simple: from one end she pulls and from the other I pull until the line is taut enough for one of us to walk across. But the flaw was even simpler: the line goes slack when one of us lets go.

Extreme measures

I think I'm going to have to learn a new language just so I can write you a love note.

YOU'VE GOT THE WRONG GUY; or, JUST A DRUNKEN SCRAWL

Wasted days

When you walk in the door and open your face I can tell immediately that I am headed for a rash of wasted days. And before you even begin speaking I am preparing myself for life on fast forward, speeding through the hours until sunset, sleeping till sunrise, speeding, sleeping, speeding to get some time behind me, however, whatever, I will just have to put some days between this one and myself, as a buffer or a muffle or something else soft and hazy enough to dull what will be just under the surface now for so many weeks to come. And before you even get to your point I have slumped somewhere deep into a hollow of terror, held upright only by a taut cord of certainty. Soon, you will be out the door and it will begin: I will begin to do all those unpleasant things I know must be done and fill my days with them unthinkingly, desperate to just keep going and going and going till suddenly this moment is too far away to matter so much and I can start slowing down enough to notice time again.

HEAD

Slamt down twelve-ouncer froths, foams, bubbles—
grows to beyond capacity from the rhythm of gravity and the randomness of escaping it.

Like a bad clock

Like a bad clock I am broken and I cannot explain why. There is no reason, I am just out of step. I cannot identify a catalyst. I never can. I wrinkle like a raisin then crumble like a cookie then turn to dust like old paint. I have slowly become a mess and there is no moment or event or sharp edge to which I can point and say look! There! That's what broke me.

I'LL TRY NOT TO GET YOU WET

for Amory

Gravity

You are a man of the universe, and I, a woman of the world. Our home is a classroom. You talk me through the big ideas as though I were one of your students and I squint at you. I learn things while the tea's brewing, while the glass is fogging above the kitchen sink. I learn things when the floorboard creaks and when the window rattles. You stitch the cosmos into the lining of our walls and I burrow into your brain; I will do this for many years. I will break things and mend things and learn and you will ask me questions about what is happening in the city tonight, in the world this week. Our house is a cafeteria and a town hall, a haven, a headquarters. You listen to the people who pour in and pour out. You make sandwiches and ask softly what else you can do. You find breaks in Space-Time and I fill them with the news. You frown at the papers and ask me what I think and you learn some things from me too. You cheer on the kids on compost duty and clean up the mud tracks and marvel at a crate of dusty tomatoes as though they were a galaxy up close. Last night I curled under your arm because the universe was too vast and nothing in my day felt relevant. You held my feet and told me that when we stood in the street for hours last week you'd suddenly noticed gravity again.

MUSINGS FROM A RECENTLY TOUSLED BED

This is a note that happens when the author crawls out of bed and decides that any excuse is a good excuse to crawl back in. The author (this one a male) decides he must write a note. It takes some time for an idea to form. While he waits, he watches the trees: outside, each of the thousand droplets clinging to the fir's spindly leaves catches the light that pours in from the whole sky, diffused by an unbroken cloud coverage; the droplets fall when a small bird lands on the branch and causes the bough to bow. The author smiles at the phrase "bough to bow." He decides to write a note about whether or not inspiration is more easily derived from sadness. Maybe the writing stays the same, but the sexually frustrated author was more eager to have his writing read. Maybe that's why this note took so long to write.

A mystery

That letter is a mystery. It sits in a little pocket in my desk and, from time to time, I reread it to see if it will make sense to me. The last time I read it, I began laughing uncontrollably. It is not a particularly funny letter, and I am not sure whether I laughed out of joy or incredulity. It is a marvel, impossible, absurd, a dream. A work of art and a feat of artifice. So vivid, beguiling, neat. I can't decide if it's evidence or exoneration. Is it true? Is it false? A red herring? A clue? Who wrote it? Was it you? Who were you? Who might you be? For whom did you write it and why did you send it to me? You write with such clarity and purpose. But I've never been sure what you mean. 

WILD ANIMAL

for Caitlin

I was brought quickly and gently to consciousness when you changed in the morning. It was like being in the room with a wild animal. I gripped my eyes tightly shut and held my body stiller than it had probably been in sleep. You're the gray wolf: an apex predator; and I'm a boy with googly eyes penned onto my hand. I was in the presence of greatness. But as much pride as I felt for my proximity, so did I fear the primal wrath that your clenched canines and glared focus might deliver. So I steadied my breathing and I waited for the distant clink of a cereal bowl before wandering out from the blanketed cave and into the world.

These days

These days, empty of momentum, I am filling myself with stories. The details, digested, stitch together like tissue, and I feel muscular enough to carry things again.

BE PROUD

Short things

I am making a study of short stories, short sentences, short men and shorts. They share a quality. Beside shortness, that is. It is that quality of which I am making a study. But the shortness helps, I think.

WILTING A ROSE

There's a whole craft that goes into wilting a rose. There's an entire league of rules and procedures that guide the browning, the drooping, the hardening. Without this order, a rose might go on flowering well past its expiration date. The petals could remain red far beyond the point that they'd all bent to the thumbs of passersby and been sucked dry by bee and hopeful nose alike. Maybe we'd all own giant vases full of ancient roses. Instead, they die, and the floor of my apartment becomes crunchy when the breeze pulls forgotten petals from their stiff stems and lands them in my foot's path.

Corollary

When I am hungry, I become afraid. Today, I woke up frightened, and so starved myself.

THOSE JAGGED K9s

Inflatable heart

THIS IS A NOTE FROM A BAR

Driving

Driving home one night this week, late, the usual route, I saw a man standing perfectly still on the divider of the Chirag Dilli flyover, silhouetted in the dust and high beams, looming over the left lane like a dead tree in a desert.

Tonight, the same place, around the same time, frowning against the frazzle of another social evening and those big truck headlights, I saw him again, perhaps not the same man but the same figure, a dark shape walking along the divider.

This morning, a naked man walked evenly across the width of the India Gate circle—all six lanes—with the air of a man going into the shower. Everything from his forehead to his penis to his feet was the same brown; his heels dark, his buttocks dusty.

Tonight, two different sets of street dogs in two different neighbourhoods followed me to my car. Others, strays, watched me approach, pupils wide in my headlights, and gave chase as I passed. They are barking now, here, as they were then, there.

Men are everywhere: lone loiterers ambling across intersections at an angle or waving their cellphones in the middle of some sidestreet. One is huddled in a watchman’s cabin outside a house in a nice neighbourhood, muttering; another waits outside Siri Fort auditorium with a bag on the ground at his side.

Earlier, at a traffic light, a man in a Mercedes shook his fist at me.

Later, in a house, I jerked away from a sudden flush of breath on my cheek.

THIS IS HOW I'D DRAW YOUR NAME

Where I am

I am in the kitchen making coffee. I am in the mirror feeling pleased. I am in a taxi leaking words. I am in a sari inviting attention. I am on the floor getting down. I am in conversation dispensing sass. I am at the bar requesting gin, water, gin. I am at a table twisting naan into mutton. I am on a couch leaning in. I am in a room on a lark. I am out the door with a shrug. I am in a garden answering questions. I am in a singalong at dawn. I am in a cab with my patience wearing thin. I am in the door with a sigh of relief. I am in a quilt on a high bachelor bed. I am reading cross-legged on an overnight train. I am in a blindfold with my heart in my mouth. I am in a pit with a bullet in my back. I am squatting under a sheet of corrugated tin. I am in a country with a passport. I am in the wild with a wound. I am in a fog with a flag. I am in a balloon with a pin. I am moving so that nothing is certain. I am on the road with the wind. I am using my tongue so I don't turn numb. I am opening up for whiskey and thrill. I am merry in a polka dotted spin. I am walking down an alley with a crick in my neck. I am sifting through lettuce with an arch in my back. I am asleep with my nose in the crook of an elbow. I am waking with a hand on my hip. I am speeding through the street with a grin on my face. I am jumping on a bus with an inflated heart. I am in a place I've never been. I am muddy in the field and damp in the grass and brown like the ground in my skin.

ALONE

Sunset on a cold day.
Gloves on hands in pockets.
The only way to keep warm is to keep walking.

What has happened

As I pass through the ambit of a street light back into the dark of night, I am suddenly clouded. What has happened? Have I damaged something? Have I implied something? Have I ruined have I shocked have I lied? What has happened is I have transgressed. And things have shifted. And so, it seems, have I. 

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

An escape

Panicked, whether by certainty or a lack of it, he took refuge in the ambiguity of another language and made a promise that could be translated to taste.

A LOVE SONG OF SORTS

The nasty stabs of breaking pens against this pad of paper remind me of lesser moods. It'll be some pages yet before the marks have all been thrown away. Or kept. Yesterday, I had a good conversation with an amazing young woman. Some of it was silly talk about sea-creature Halloween costumes: "I've heard the mermaids singing." Some was loving, about the elegance in the flicks of her wrist. But the most important bits were of us and what to do with us. Though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, I felt I had little productive to say. Luckily, an energy between she and me spurred my feeling to word. I may be a bit crazy, but I'm no Prince Hamlet. I'm just trying to be a nice guy: deferential, glad to be of use. (At the risk of being obtuse.) I like to think that I'm aware, cautious, and meticulous, and I admit to being ridiculous, and even, at times, the Fool. But I know we can make it through. We just need to work out the pages with the stab marks and get back to a fresh start.

My accordion gait

Today is that rare day when it would be useful to have someone around who might notice the flick of my wrist as I throw the pallu over my shoulder, my accordion gait as I walk through the door.

I KNOW I DRANK TOO MUCH

I know I drank too much because I allowed myself to hope that you'd be home when I got home. Instead, there was mail in the mailbox; the entire apartment had been cleaned; and a note on a dish of freshly made pear cake made me tear up. And you forgot to lock the backdoor when you did laundry. You always forget that.

The story

This is the story: You robbed me blind, warning me against possession. I had less; you pitied me. I asked if we might share and you said you could spare nothing. I pined for old comforts; you sneered at my nostalgia. I starved; you related your struggles with eating. Now you are silent; I am absent. Now you are silent, and I?

ALL THE THINGS I HAVE

All of the things that I have are coming out through my eyes and my nose and some low place in my throat. Everything from my chin to my pelvis is a knot. I'm being wrung dry like a towel.

An explanation

It's the brown, mostly. And the buttons and the braids. And the banana in my glove compartment for four days and that tulsi tea bag and the change of season fever and the shape of my trousers and the hole in my shirt and the wool between my ears and this leftover gooseflesh and this brick in my hand and the green around my middle finger and my idiotic memory and foolish bravado, my ambition, my listlessness, my recalcitrance and eagerness. It's really only those things.

THE NEED TO DESTROY SMALL THINGS

Both

TAXING THE STREETS

Rave

In a narrow alley, outside a shuttered temple, hangs a tiny disco ball. A lizard wags its tail under the spatter of coloured light on the wall. I emerge from a glass pyramid with a whiskey drawl.

SCRIPT

I borrowed stole my script from an old friend and from a man writing on the sidewalk with chalk. The words are mine, but they remind me of the people whose shapes I use.

Blindsided

For hours you stood, waiting for a bus, squinting into the sun. Suddenly there are four, and you have forgotten where you intended to go.

Did you water the tomato plant? Did you wipe clean the spilt milk? Did you close tightly the lid of the coffee tin?

Which bus are you on?

MIDNIGHT STILLNESS

A car makes that sticky sound, the sustained splash of driving through a recently wetted road. I sit beside a lamp taking note of the million micropositions in which one might find oneself were one to engage another in a way that confused the other and caused the other to feel affronted upon. I do this; the car does this; and you walk into the next room and turn out the light.