Tree #2: A cherry tree in Bangalore, India

I should have posted this a few days ago, but have been down with the 'flu.

My friend Sukanya's DAUGHTER is really responsible for the planting of this tree. Apparently Anahita is an avid bird-lover and amateur bird-watcher, and wanted this particular tree to attract the sunbirds. Wise and wonderful child, we need more of your kind on this planet!

And who is Sukanya, you might ask? Especially you of the good old days .. and oh, there have been many different types of good old days in Nazu's life. Sukanya is a friend of the good not-so-old days, we bumped into each other some years ago at a workshop for NGOs (not that I or Askios are NGOs .. we are more of an NGO-groupie and we tag along wherever the NGOs go, and try to be useful). Anyway, Sukanya and I bumped into each other and became friends, and now we continue to bump into each other every so often at one workshop or another.

Shameful, really, because we live in the same city. But now that our friendship has been so beautifully and symbolically rooted, I must pack my water-bottle and make the long trek to wherever it is she lives (I only know that it is very very far away from my part of town) so that I can meet fellow bird-lover Anahita and take a nice picture of us all under our tree!

When a witness smiles

Years and years ago, okay, decades, my father decided to frame a print of the Mona Lisa, and put her up on our living room wall. She terrified me. Especially when I had to switch off the light in one corner and then stumble my way past her to my bedroom.Thirty years later, and Lisa (we're not on a first-name basis) is back with me, the frame a bit battered, but otherwise unchanged, unwrinkled, and just as terrifying. Although as an adult, I found I can bravely out-stare her in the daytime. It's at night when her expression seems to somehow go EVIL and her eyes follow me oh so creepily.I tried covering her up at night, as I do my birds. But that entailed having to go up really close to the picture, tablecloth grasped nervously in hand. Then I tried painting a red nose on her, which actually did improve the situation. But then I got to thinking and remembering how this fear of her eyes goes way back, and it brought back feelings and with it, a kind of resentment. And now she is off the wall, and soon, I hope, out the door. And this is why.

Her eyes followed me
through the rape of my childhood.
All she did was watch.

"Caress

I was going to say something cynical about getting back to the mushy stuff .. but I'll let it pass on this. I wrote this for Bops, of course, and I think I entered it in a poetry competition at Christ College's Spring Fest that year. Did not win, evidently .. and soon after I lost Bops too .. was whisked away from Bangalore in an attempt by my desperate parents to save me from that terrible Coorgi boy who had ruined my life (and by a strange coincidence, his equally desperate parents were at the very same time hugely relieved to see the departure of that terrible Muslim girl who had ruined their son's life). After writing this, I don't think I wrote any poems for a long time.

Caress.

Do falling stars grant wishes?
Do twilight dreams come true?
My nightmares turn to golden dust
with a soft caress from you.

You give my dawns their hope,
Carried on fresh breeze.
You give my afternoons theirlanguid warmth.
You bring my nights their peace.

One look, one word, one gentle touch
And all my dreams come true
I want to live forever
If forever means with you.

(for Bops Feb/Mar? 1987. Spring Fest).

I can't be cynical about this one. It's too sweet and it brings up too much sadness, and although I can no longer connect to those feelings, it touches me that I once was the person who said this and meant it, and that gives me a sense of loss .. not so much for him, but for that Me that I no longer am.

The prodigal clown.

Yes, Gladys is back. (Or will be, soon). Clearly I am not just clown, poet, warrior .. I am also drama queen.

So after all the melodrama and fond farewells to Gladys I have discovered that my vocal chords are going to heal after all, and that with some exercise and self-restraint, I will once again be able to fill the air with that delectably shrill Cockney accent!

For the moment, though, my voice is far from alright, and every phone conversation leaves me feeling as though I have peanuts stuck in my throat. So I still have to be careful, and have to do that silent thing at least two days every week, but at least I know that Gladys will soon be back from having tea with the Queen (which is what I tell anyone who asks where she's disappeared to).

"Now that it's night ...

Now that it's night
You can let your fears out
The darkness will cover your scars
You can pull off your mask
And breathe free at last.

You can straighten your shoulders
Stick out your chest
Tuck in your stomach
And walk like the rest
(As you'd like to, by day.)

You can smoke all your pot
You can drink all your booze
To try keep your mind off your Freudian blues
You can lie down and wait for your dreams to come true
But watch out, cause they sneak in a nightmare or two.

You can't look in the mirror
You hate what you see
so you go for a walk
And pretend that you're free.

And you look at the moon, the stars and the clouds
But you're not man enough yet to cry out aloud
Though you know that the morning
is just a different kind of night -
And if you don't remove the shutters
You won't see any light.

(Jan 21st 1987, Madras, at Mardi Gras).

Once Upon Turning Soft White Bread

Once upon turning soft white bread into crisp brown toast, I was reminded of diamonds. Little chunks of carbon that we'd think are irrelevant. I suspect that, like carbon, we think the crushes, burns and dark lonely eons of childhood are irrelevant, but they're not. They're what we have to go through to become the people we are today. Only a very few have ever come out of that process without black spots or other flaws. Maybe none of us. But we can still be diamonds.

Snape fanfic: Just Plain Luna

Delightful fanfic by The Treacle Tart, written in 2006, supposedly post-DH .. The full title is Implausible, Irrational And Just Plain Luna .. Snape is in Azkaban, but rescued by a now adult Luna Lovegood and taken to a world that only Luna could have conjured.

"Everything looked like it was made of marshmallow, gooey marshmallow. Worst of all, everything was unnaturally pink. In the midst of it all stood Severus Snape in all his black-cloaked glory, standing out like a mortician in a three-ring circus."

And this ..

"She slid her small hand into his and gently guided him back outside. Against his better judgment he allowed her to do so, partly because he truly felt he had no choice, and he hadn't the strength to fight her or this place any longer, but also partly because he liked the way her hand fit in his. It had been decades since someone held his hand."

Oh .. my heart wrings a bit every time I read that. Really, JKR, couldn't you have been just a bit nicer to him?? Well, never mind .. fortunately we have all these fan-ficcers giving Snape the lives and loves he deserves. Er .. sometimes a bit MORE than he deserves .. but you shan't be seeing any of THOSE links here as some of my friends who read this blog are innocent schoolgirls.

Well, schoolgirls, at any rate.

So you won't find any pornography here. Perhaps just a kiss or two. And Treacle Tart obliges in this fanfic and makes me wish I was Luna (instead of just plain lunatic).