Lovemaking

How I love the act of lovemaking. Watching the sea caress the sands into an evenness and leaving in its belly some shells wrapped in the covers of foam that had once breathed in its divine lymph. If I classify it as a smooth union, there are the times when I see them in a violent act. Whatever it is, the sea always leaves gifts for the sands and takes with it anything the sand has to give. I look into the Arabian Sea in the darkness of a moonless night and see nothing. The sound of the waves hitting the shore and the muffled song of the wind is all that my senses can detect. In the distance the horizon ceases to exist and for once the sea and the skies are one. I wonder if the stars feel close to the sea during one such spectacle. I have been told by a painter that there are three basic colors: red, yellow and blue and all the others are just derivatives of it. From the east to the west, from the morning to the night, from the skies to the sole of my shoes, I see colors that are neither red, nor green or yellow. In their lovemaking of different intensities, these colors have lost their identities.

I make love to my beloved on the sands of a stranded beach, wearing colors that are none of red, green or yellow, at a time in the night when our horizon of infinity concurs with the horizon in the distance. I am belittled by the thought that we are still not a part of the homogeneity of the existence around us. What convergence do we lack that forestalls our entry through the gates? I lie on the sands on my back and look at a star. My beloved sprinkles some sands on my chest and I kiss her lipstick laden strawberry lips. I am still not the sand, and I cannot see any stars in her hair. We make love, and yet it is not lovemaking. We are still two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears, a pair of nose, eight distinct limbs trying to cocoon into a single heartbeat.

That stride towards a “WE” needs the dissolution of two “I”s. The irony is not our reluctance to let go of that “I” but the verity that we are yet to discover it fully. But doesn’t the sea get to know itself better because of the shore? Doesn’t the sky whisper to its stars to look at it’s reflection in the mirror of the sea?

While we enjoy these sights and sounds of the togetherness of the universe around us, we are caught up as a solitary spec of white in a tissue paper blotted with an ink. The water touches our feet; she smiles at the receding wave and draws a pattern with her toe in the sand. The waves come again to take the pattern in its foamy ride. She draws an arc on my chest with her finger, much like the pattern in the sand. The cold sensation of her wet finger slowly sinks into my skin and with it the feeling of her presence.

The Spider in my Bathroom

As I sat in the bathroom giving company to the bucket beside me, I looked at a spider trying to spin a web in the corner where the walls touched the ceiling. A sad smile gave way to an involuntary shrug as I visualized how short-lived its haven would be. With a swab of the broom it’ll be taken to the dust. I stared at the tiles of the bathroom wall through the raining shower; they were in turquoise with a tad of blue. I smelled the wet skin of my arm, and kept my nose as a refugee in my arm’s territory. “You smell so nice” she had said once. I wonder what that nice meant. The bucket was amazingly noisy, singing its tune with the shower drops that fell onto it. Don’t give me no company, I shoved it aside. It still sang for me, although in a muffled tone. She had hugged me tight, but I could feel a thin plate of air between us. And there she was waving her hand just once from the departing lounge. I have been under the shower for a long time now. But I had not the strength to get out of it. For once, it’s been constant; for once it’s predictable; for once it’s in my control. I did not wait to see her one last time. I’ve had enough in my clay pot, and I knew of the impending drought. She could smile through it, even I did the same. But, does she know that somewhere I get torn in this uncertainty that reins our lives? Perhaps she is torn as well. The spider swung to its right and it was followed by a thin thread. Hopeless, I thought. HOPELESS, I yelled. The spider went on, weaving into the future. And I sunk my teeth deep into my arms.

Late in the night, I went to the bathroom to see my friend of misery. He was now resting in his fully knit web. Perhaps I should sleep awhile, I thought and went into my bedroom where beams of the streetlight passing through the window flooded my bed.

I slept well that night.

In the morning, I did not see the spider or any remnants of its adobe. The maid’s mop did it all.

But she’ll have to come back to do it again!


To bring oneself to love uncertainty, one has to learn to accept even the most shocking of the probabilities, if it ever comes true. So, in a way it is all about acceptance.

Of Life and its Elements

The irony with life is that we don’t tend to realize the essence of an element in it until the element is taken away from us. At times, there remains no way to bring back the element and we are left with a void that is filled by lonely nights and pensive thoughts. No wonder why the night sky is a favorite for all of us even though most of us hardly know how to locate the Pole star or the Andromeda. What do we search in it?

An imaginary string connecting the stars in search of a relation that we as human could not build…

A feeling that someone, somewhere is also looking at the same star with the same thoughts as we hold; somewhere when everything seems to diverge, this single star acts as the point of convergence of our thoughts…

A feeling of security that irrespective of what goes on, the night would still visit us after a half spin of the earth, waiting for us to look up at its never ending brace…



The endless sky is the sink for almost all of us, with similar thoughts of reminiscence and memories in its map. Amazingly, with so many inhabitants claiming their emotional space in the sky, we still end up having our own private piece of the sky, without any need of demarcation from the sky of our fellow neighbor for fear of trespassing.

A time comes in our life when the pain of loss instead of draining us down becomes as continuous as the flow of blood in our veins. We do not tend to realize of it until we stumble upon an element that fairly fits into that space. So that while we are filling that abyss, we hit upon a wall of emotions. We discover the incessant pain of this arthritis of last winter. And while we had thought that we have moved on, we learn that we have still ingrained ourselves to our past. This brings us to the realization that that abyss will never be filled, we can only bridge it.

This irreplaceable property of the elements we love makes us attached to the world and are also the reason for our every emotion. So, the night sky will always be flooded by pilgrims seeking their own unique space. And amazingly, the sky will always have that comfortable corner where we would find the transitory haven before we stand out to face the day.