Sex and the City

Watched Sex and the City. I had this instinct that it’s going to be a sissy movie; with lots of crying and emotional stuff relating to women that can never get into the logic-fuel driven mind of a man (I have never watched the HBO series of Sex and the City). And lo, what did I bump into: humor and emotions laced in an intricate way that cannot be catalogued into different pigeon holes of MAN and WOMAN.

In it I discovered the quintessence of humor in life, and how it is the single most revitalizing factor that helps us to wade through any situation. In life, we do not relate this element with every emotion of ours…
In happiness—yes.
In a pensive mood—somewhat.
In sorrow—are you crazy!

A person who tries to make light of the situation is seen with a raised brow; it seems people relate sorrow and emotions so much with a sad contemplating face that the existence of a smile or maybe a moment of respite is beyond their concept. I still remember the time when I had drawn the ire after cracking a joke while visiting a friend who was diagnosed with cancer. While my friend laughed aloud, I could see the discomfort around. Why, come on, you people are feeding him the cancer, I felt like shouting out aloud.

My friend survived the disease, and people have forgotten my act. Otherwise I guess, the joke would have become a case study and I’d have had to live the rest of my life for being insensitive.

What is it that I want?

“But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”

Bono sang for me all night, bringing me to one question that I’ve been struggling to get an answer for.

What is it that I want?

I do not find any reason in the space of time that I butcher away from the morning when I step out to go to office to the evening when I heave myself back home. Every morning I see the raising Sun, and every evening I forget of its existence in my life. As I’m climbing the corporate ladder, I tend to ask this question less and less. I seem to be more content to let life “unfold itself”. But every now and then, the question comes to me like some viral fever. During this viral attack, I move from the content being to a restless drifter who questions everything that is and that can be. This drifter sees nothing as an impossibility and wants to find an answer to the age-old question that has been lying dormant. I call this the “awakening”. Unfortunately, I’m still able to resist the call of this awakening and move on. Somehow I am reluctant to find the answers, maybe because it asks me to leave my secure world and step in to the uncertainty. With each passing day, I’m getting glued to this secure world of mine, and in the process moving away, gradually, from that single answer.

I do not know why this fever is not strong enough; sometimes I pray that it lasts a bit longer so that there is no U turn for me to my mundane world. I would then have only one way – the way towards my answer.

My Beloved

My beloved knitted me words of the choosiest colors,
With a ply of wool that let the air marinate into us in a warmth
That neither boiled like the pleasant morning sun growing into the day
Nor cooled down like some coffee left in the window sill over pensive thoughts.

My beloved left me a blank note beside our smiling photograph
With the weight of the photo-frame’s shadow holding the message
From the call of flight of the sleep-disturbing wind of a Sunday morning.
I read the words which her three-page letters would otherwise never talk about.

My beloved left her painting palette and a begging-to-get-wet canvas
And stepped into the picture she wanted to portray.
The colors have dried up,
But even in the deep smell of cobalt blue I find her attentive hand’s fresh prints.

My beloved, why do I see you through your creations,
And never through the compass that you had gifted me once?
You keep an intrigue element in this game of yours
That you have no intention to teach me and yet ask me to play.
I just keep on playing for you to win me
And for me to understand your unstated rules of the game.

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.

Distorted Thoughts: Episode II

Long after the fire died out, the ashes held the story of the warmth of the night. I did not know whether to let it linger on in me for awhile or to let the early morning dewdrops descend on my brows; to let the warmth of the ashes die in my tryst with the in vigor.

**** **** **** **** ****

I refused the wind’s assistance, I refused its impediment. The wind smiled at my repudiation to the dreams of the spring and the memories of the winter. Little did I know that it was I who was hugging the wind and stepping in its current.

**** **** **** **** ****

I would not make that call to her. She would not wait. And the nights would pass. But we would still remember the day we made the last call.

**** **** **** **** ****

She tells me that she cannot give me tomorrow. Well, isn’t it enough to pencil my tomorrow?

**** **** **** **** ****

I always wrote in love, I always wrote when I fell out of it. My friend, I always wrote.

**** **** **** **** ****

I drew an arc in the night sky and my beloved’s stars stringed its ends. And while we lay completing each other’s circle, the dawn announced its advent.

**** **** **** **** ****

Why does it pain the most when the wound is the least visible?

**** **** **** **** ****

Take me away, to the life that I could never live. Bring me back to myself.

**** **** **** **** ****

I gazed at the lines of my palms and wondered how they held my narrative. This thought remained until I met a man coming from the war who had his arms amputated.

Stringed by a Decade

Living in collusion with the logics of life,
I've still had moments of a vagabond and his penchant for mirages.
That streak of my drifter existence soon became the me once
I found you floating like a seagull lost in its own seas.
You asked me questions, the answers of which were written on your face.
I looked at you and read the lines;
A decade old, they were still virgin, like a bottle of wine forgotten in the cellar.
I wiped them in my narration and uncovered a teardrop.
Is it also waiting to be shed, I asked.
Smiling through your eye's moist haze
You guided me to the happiness of my own tears.

Anthology of Promises

Reduced to an anthology
In the dusty shelves
Of my inherited life, are
Some houses without doors, some
Chaotic prayers and some
Broken Promises made
On the sea shore.

If the voice
Did not reach you, does it
Mean I never promised anything?
With the split of memory, and the
Fire on the grass-gone-dry, I
Forgot the time, but my words,
Carried forward in the wind
Had your name.

Buried in the snow now, the
Spring buds will remind me
Of the autumn and the
Life in the Sun. Wont you
Then sing another daffodil song
For me, to
Make a new promise
In the still wind of the remnants
Of the cold days?

And the promise will
Sleep with a banyan leaf bookmark
While the dust will dull my
Memory. The hope of the leaf
To ride to another page
Will inspire it to
Wait for
Another winter, another
Spring.


Some promises:

Unsung to time, living
The life of the pressed grapes, growing
Beautiful all
Along, but dying
In your death… in its
Last breath, it remembers
The day it was picked from
The vine, when the river flowed
Backwards to the land where
Youth sang and Old age
Danced.

All That We Seek

The quest to live a million lives
In the infinite breaths of
Our finite existence;
The shades of intensity in our
Laughter, peaking at the onset
Of tears of a pulsating color.

At reach are the treasures of
Finality, yet the hands don’t seek
Them. The river of reason
Flows from the sea, into
Its womb. A peak’s unhappy
Story lies in being the gatekeeper
Of the looming decay

All in a day’s story- with
The eyes into tomorrow, the
Heart singing the bygone song, and
A pulsating teardrop not
Knowing the purpose of
Its birth.

Painful Parting Part II – The Parting Song

With the sky as the roof,
We looked at the distant stars, and realized
Of the closeness. The clouds came and
Took away our stars, but
The feeling remained.

In that warmth, we have melted, in
That gust of passing wind between us, we have
Found the untouched touch that
We neither owned nor orphaned.
Somehow, it smelled a bit of me and
A bit of you.

The clouds are no longer hanging
Their curtains on us, but in that newfound
Closeness to the stars, we have fallen miles apart.
And in that muffled breeze, we started
Singing our songs, not knowing
If it'll bridge the distance or just die in
The impending silence.

Distorted Thoughts: Episode I

Only when she gleamed in the stolen light did I realize of the Moon in the sky. And all this time I lived an illusion where my Moon walked beside me.

*** *** *** *** ***

She showed me the stars, and while I lay lost in their skies she stole my Moon

*** *** *** *** ***

The silence following an applause... does it cry for an acceptance too?

*** *** *** *** ***

Times when you roll in a laughter and start believing that your stomach can take no more, times in your distress when the tears would well in your eyes, and still obey the Physics of surface tension---both held by a bond called pain. In it we live: in our Summer, in our Winter. About it we think: in our Spring, in our Autumn.

*** *** *** *** ***

To the endless night we give ourselves, extending our hands into a tomorrow unseen, unknown; hoping that half a rotation of the earth would give what an another half has taken away from us.

*** *** *** *** ***

What is a drizzle that does not excite you to dance? What are tears that do not dry away your pain? What is a laugh that ends in a bondage? What is a wait that does not end at infinity?

My Diary Entries: Freedom

In breathing out the air what do we give to the world? A realization in the free warm air of what entrapment is.

I looked at her in the low illuminated realm of my bed. The remnants of the lights were coming from the stereo playing at the corner of the room. The low volume mixed in well with the light and somewhere they made a good amalgam to give evenness to what was. She did not shimmer in the stolen light. Instead, she surrendered her skin to the homogeny around her.

Somewhere in a sea of homogenous dunes, in the midst of the direction-seeking desert I stood facing the night. All that was above me, all that was below me, and all that was in front of me was a pitch of cold. Was I a part of it or an interloper trying to make my own light?

She waited for me to pick my pieces from the homogeny to build my story. Instead of imposing her own self as one definite character in my story, she let me to wander to my heart’s direction. There she was, in front of me, ready to be taken as a straw… ready to be taken as the jade…

I picked her in my fistful of sand from the pitch cold… I held her in the last song of the cassette. She smiled and let her distinctive fragrance overwhelm me.

I wondered what she had given me, and what she had held back.

My Diary Entries: 12th November 2007: Riding the Wings of a Promise

I am smoking a bit too much these days, and although I can quit any day, I don’t know what it is that I am drawing from the smoke puffed into my self only to be released after a brief touch with the lungs. Maybe, it also wants a piece of my heart. But isn’t it me, myself baiting my heart to the damage?

I want to quit. I know I can, but every evening sees me breaking one promise in the making of another. It also draws me to the futility of a promise: not a stain of uncertainty on making it, but losing color like the denims soaked in water for a night. I often wonder how it would be like if we were required to validate a promise. Just like the creditworthiness of a person, we’d be judged on our ability to fulfill a promise—on a scale of promise-worthiness. We do sign on documents everyday, it is infact a type of promise, but I’m not talking of those. I am talking of the ones which require no signatures: Promises made on terraces on cloudy nights, promises made in the flow of cursive ink, promises written in the bark of a pine, promises written on the sands of a beach, promises held in ones eyes and read by another’s, promises…. it’s a sea of words and we never tend to realize how it is going to impact the other person. It can take us soaring to the heights of rapture but then leave us to doom in the darkest of our moments.

Such is the power of a promise, and we are allowed to carry it and use it too without any license.

Talking of the promise-worthiness scale, what would it actually indicate?
Character of a person?
The ability of a person to predict his future?
Time’s cruelty or munificence towards one?

We dwell on a moment so much and get carried away in our emotional spurge to such an extent that the future seems an easy constant for us to define. And we make that promise. A promise-worthiness grade would actually indicate how grounded are we while saying something.

For I have suffered, and everyone reading this piece and everyone not reading this piece alike has in some way or the other suffered when a promise made was not fulfilled, a promise that had our hearts hinged on its wings, so much that when it died, we lost a part of our innocence.

Now that a promise-worthiness scale is a not on the radar of Humankind’s invention machinery, I smile at every promise made to me. When it comes to the everyday stories of my cigarette promises I tend to nurse myself well every morning for I had played with my own self the previous evening and am not carrying the corpse of someone else’s crash of hope.

But this also brings me to the point where I wait to be asked for a solitary promise rather than giving one myself—to quit smoking. I patiently wait for the day when the cigarette would be pulled out of my mouth, its butt crushed under the soles of the shoes and a word taken from me to quit it all.

This promise, I would keep, the truth of which would never known during my lifetime.

My Diary Entries: 1st November 2007 (2 AM): Forgiveness

We had walked together, and although we never held each other’s hand, we felt each other’s warmth in the space of our breaths. And today we find ourselves separated not by miles but by the worlds we live in. That space between our breaths has become too very insignificant. I once wondered what has got into it. All I found was a deep pain of loss. And so I started living in the breaths of my life. But am I not living the other equal part too… between my breaths?

She had cried, I could see and for once I felt like crying too. The ambience of the party would masquerade my tears, I knew. But then I discovered I had no tears left in me. There was no desire for the pain to come out and embrace the world. Content it was within me and I was struggling to say goodbye to this only constant thing in my life. Have I become too stonehearted to forgive myself? I wondered but not for long. We were in a party and had to attend to other things as well.

Late at night the following evening, I decided to clear my inbox of SMSes. Resting my head on a pillow, I started reading and deleting the trivial ones. It was then that I encountered her SMSes: the everyday good morning quotes she used to send, a few ones where she told me how much she was missing me, the ones which had prompted me to think of our relationship, the ones seasoned in the spices of lies, the promises that were never kept or maybe forgotten, the few complaints, and an endless sea of explanations. Arsenic poisoning, they call it in medical parlance, but I’d still name it as a slow death where the pain starts off as a pleasure and then slowly gets into you. Those SMSes transformed me from a smiling individual enjoying the Sun to the one of today, waiting for the Sun to set to be able to see the swirls of his cigarette smoke more clearly –all in the blink of an eye.

I found my pillow getting wet and before I could realize I was sobbing hard. I held back, lest someone might hear me, but then gave way to the on flow.

And while I’m crying my silent tear today, I know she has someone to wipe hers. In that cauldron of empathy she’d reside and she’d slowly take it as the flow of care and understanding.

I’d wait for her to bring me the day when we had smiled on a sunny day and prayed that it’d not end; I’d wait for her to give me that one single moment of her unadulterated life which she would not share with anyone; I’d wait for her to bring me the gifts of love bought in the company of no one except my thoughts; I’d wait for her to understand the song sung by the masses for her to realize the truth in it; I’d wait for her to lay down her fortress and still command the respect of the attackers; I’d wait for her to look into the West with a hold on the East; And I’d wait……

Till I learn how to fill the spaces between my breaths.

Where Pain Sinks In

(In the company of my friend, Powai Lake)

The small ripples on the silent lake
Breathed out in the dark,
I lay in my rock-stance by its side,
Untouched by the lights of the distance
And the reins of beckoning.

What it hath given me, I surmise not.
It hid my reflection in its dark waters,
And when I cried, its breath wiped
The tears for me to look at the
Lines of my palm?

I threw a nugget and waited
For it to hit the bottom.
When no sound came, I asked,
“Can you take the world in you?”
My words sunk in and with it my
Infinity.

How many more infinities would I breach
Till I stop throwing that pebble?
I looked at my palm,
But the dust of the pebble held
Blurred the story of what will be.

I looked at the distant lights and
Held one neon between my fingertips.
Its reflection, I could see
Played with the ripples and
Did not sink in.


Often I envisage

What good is a mirror that cannot absorb?
What good is a mirror that emulates you?

The Parting Song

(thoughts in two minutes of emotional madness)

If the wind would not have blown,
I would not have known, that
Such a fragrance exists.

With the wind gone, i'll burn the
Hearth and let the fire make merry.
In my smoked palms you would
No longer be-- a provocation
For you to come back and
Dab me again, this time
With another fragrance.

The Gift

If I had to gift you something, what
Would that be?
Isn’t it an inconclusive affair, for
The gift would have to live a timeless life
In the ken of your ageing eye, drawing
From the fountain of youth not the key
Of the hereafter
But the secret of the dew-drops’ ability
To comfort our vision every morning.

It should speak to you the
Words of the last rays of the sun in
Your moments of silence,
And bring to you the tidings from the
World of hope. To be able to lead you
Through the nameless road,
Down to the factory where
Dreams are made.

It should hide within itself a chest of
Unheard songs, a note of which
Would be discovered by you
Everyday, to be
Hummed in your moments of
Oblivion.

In my travels to the new lands, never
Have I seen such a thing. Its presence was but
In pieces of insignificance.
Fragments of it lay
In the breath of a fall from a cliff, while I
Discovered some more in the clamor
Of the silent lake. I even found its element
Hanging onto the swirl of the
Fast dissipating smoke of my
Marijuana sober thoughts.

When the Pimpernel would embrace
The dull weather with its flowers,
I’d tell you of my searches in the boondocks,
For you to lay your hands on the pieces
I could not hold in my palm.
Until then, I’d home these
In my eyes,
With the hope to wrap it in
The colors of reflection
For you.

Confessing To My Diary

While human exploration has reached to a point where we are considering settlement on the Moon and space tourism as an industry, we are yet to throw light and peep into our own self. Hardly do we realize what we want out of life. To be rich, to be happy, to be famous, to be content—these are all oversimplifications. Many a times we realize of one desire of ours only when we reach a point in our life when we cannot accomplish it, we mull over it thinking of the time when we were so close to fulfilling it and cursing ourselves for not taking that step. And many a times this realization comes when we are doing something petty—washing the dishes, looking at photographs, writing a poem, mowing the lawn, using the toaster…

For my friend’s birthday, I had decided to make a small movie containing some photographs of hers. The problem was to choose a few photographs from the sea of my digital camera’s output. I began looking at each of them, one after the other, sometimes going back to the previous ones. It was not the smiles and the poses that caught me. I saw a pattern in the photographs, a chronology of growth and a bookmark to the day and incidents when the photograph was taken. It was infact a time machine, dropping me into the past without a ticket.

I dwelled on it for time I knew not, surmising the thread to today with all its tethers. We have all changed, so much that I felt like painting the old pictures in the Polaroid black and white colors. Isn’t it amazing, the ability of a picture developed in the dark room to visibly grow old like the mortals in the picture? Some proportional relationship no Newton could ever prove.

It was in this web of knots that I finally surrendered my fort on that day. In the photo story I found my own story. Of the love I refused to surrender to, of the songs I refused to sing, of the dreams my sub-consciousness did not permit to dream… And while I have loved her all this time, I’ve realized it only today.

I felt a strange relief; of the kind you feel when you find an answer to the questions bothering you for long. With it also came flooding the answers to all my innate actions. I looked at the photographs from my new set of eyes, wrought in the colors of love. She was indeed beautiful, an undiscovered mire challenging you to explore its depths of quicksand. So slowly I had sunk into it that I did not even offer any resistance and the transition seemed as normal as the flow of water from the river into the sea.

When I had finished the photographs, it was well past the time of the night when you feel very sleepy. Maybe around 3 AM it was. But I did not bother to check. And then I constructed the photo-story—with the words I wanted to speak and the moments where I wanted to live. The architect in me wanted this construction to go on forever, encompassing everything I had admired in life, into the nothingness of being. Every brick that I picked up from my photograph-store fit in perfectly in concord with my dream. Eventually, I ran out of the bricks, but even than the house that I had built was complete in all sense.

Later, I mulled over where I stood. I was amazed at the way I was looking at things now, with the softness of the dewdrops comforting my view.

As I write this piece, I am standing in a fork on the road where I do not know whether to confess my love, or to just let it linger on in me.

I’ve read somewhere:
Many dreams may remain without a trailing line of pursuit. They plunge into the darkness while we never lose the ones with the trailers.

The Wait

Someone has said, if you are on the road, you should walk; if you are at a crossroad, you should decide. This age defying road must have started as the dead brown grasses of the fields, stomped heavily by the ones keen to go some place but not finding a road, a shorter way. Those early stompers had played the other way: deciding on the road.

And they have left us the road, which is hardly a semblance of the one they had walked.

Once, at a crossroad, I could not decide where to head. I waited there looking at the people—coming and going, busy with things that hardly mattered, ignoring the words floating in the air. They walked on, pausing at times maybe to decide, to where they found attention. And just when I had figured out the crowd’s pattern of movement, I was yet again brought to another situation—whether to move in the glittering road of attention or the road I desire, narrow and small. I decided to wait.

I am still waiting, and I do not know why or for whom?