He is my kind of rain. My confetti falling from heaven.

Listless mornings melding into  the afternoon torpor, and you will find me sitting in front of my laptop in my tiny room here with its tortoise printed curtains of a ticklish blue. The blackberry plugged into the speakers, music wafting through the them- some lyrics sustained,a few sublime notes, pure like untouched nectar, sometimes a feet bewitching number. I do not usually keep my tube light on, preferring to pamper my laziness with the slumberous glow of halogen lamps. Somewhere in the backdrop hums, the distant crescendo of buses, cars, two wheeler, voices. Calcutta  being a concrete jungle does not offer much of a piquant view, but, when I stare out of my window, growing the whimsical wings of a daydreamer,  I notice the purple-orange blush of the night sky. It seems like stammering lights from the buildings below had stumbled upon together and suffused the polluted and corrosive black to a somewhat clumsy gentleness.
Somewhere in that room, in the Niagara of chords and the lullaby of the amber light, I lose myself into the world of dreams. 


My thoughts, they surround me like an impassioned maelstrom. Random, raw, abstract. Nimble footed like the virginal antelope, they tease me, taunt me,beckon tantalizingly. I cannot focus on one, I cannot lift up one tendril of thought from the pool of many.Today,however was different. 


My brother came back home after walking my dog, in a turbulent mood. He is a big fellow, of 17, tall and sinew. He tried to talk,but he flustered, so agitated he was. 17 does not call for much poise and maturity in a boy, and being a protective sister, I tend to be biased about my brother. So, when I say he pummeled his fist into the wall, hurling the golf sticks and kicking the ones that had clattered to the floor, his face a volcanic red, his eyes starting to water, I would say it was justified and that it pained me. Not only me, but my parents. We were all rattled. 


He is a simple soul, my brother. He likes to plug in his earphones, or strum a few chords on the guitar, or merrily make fun of me and my utterly vague nature. Food is what makes him happy, and once again I am not exaggerating when I say he has an expandable stomach and he actually looks crestfallen( so cute! ), when Mom ladles out plain yellow daal for dinner. His life is all about tearing into a crispy chicken leg, persistently ignore my Dad's efforts to wake him up in the morning and he considers it achievement when he can kick me awake just before going off to school. You see, apparently it pains him to see, that while he slogs at school and memorizes his abominable Economics, I am cocooned in the softest arms of sleep, beautiful sleep.
So when a sweetheart like my brother ( once again, a very biased sister), comes back home and kicks at the furniture, cringing with pain, trying to stop tears for he is a boy, and sputters and stutters, overwhelmed by anger, punches into the iron walls, bangs the doors till they sound like a minor blast, obviously we were all scared, pained and surprised.


The story was simple. Buddy being the 3rd child of the family, though noticeably different, for he is a golden Labrador, needs to go for his daily nature calls at 5pm. The society in which we live in, is full of stuck up pricks(pardom my language) and they made this raucous affair of a dog peeing and excreting in the compound. Even though, there were mangy mongrels doing the exact same. Of course, we are not insensitive, so Buddy is trained to do his needful only on grass. But to avoid further confrontation with these annoying pricks(pardon, pardon), Daddy gets the car to drive Buddy to the nearby park at 5 everyday, so that my youngest brother can gallivant around while he does his dump.
Dad was busy today and Buddy treats me like a rag doll, dragging me along the floor. So, I am never sent with Buddy on his nature walks. Brother being "the man", was chosen to take the huffing- puffing, tongue- wagging and tail dancing cartoon of mine. 
Now apparently Buddy peed near a car. Not on the car, but near it. 4 guys, pot bellied and stinking (Brother's description) and somewhere in their 30's ganged up on him, ruffed him by the color, spatting  uncouth words on his face , the words being " How dare your dog pee near our car?".  While one guy acted as a leader, the other three surrounded my brother, ruffian hands ready to take action. My brother justified saying, with all the muck and mud on your car tire's, why are you even bothered about my dog peeing on the road. Not even on your car! But they just told him that dare you come here next time and even if you do, make sure your dog does not come near the cars.


Bastards. Bloody jerks. I hope they rot int hell. How can you do this to a kid taking his dog for a walk? How can you corner him for your own time pass? How can you provoke him, and prick him, abuse him in that one lonely deserted stretch of a road? The wanted to goad him into fighting, and then they would have beaten him down to a bloody pulp. BASTARDS.Why would you even chose to fight for a cause that is so utterly pointless? Just because he is not from your land? Just because you want to? He is just a kid! When you can watch a cricket match together and root for the country, religion caste, goddammit, Why the sudden need to have this obnoxious pride of your community? And cultivate the pride, go on, but honestly.. this way? 


When will we start living for the greater good? When?


By the way, "She is my kind of rain" is a song, I liked. 

In a different sense, my brother is "My kind of rain". Sweet drops of happiness he rains on me, when Life scorches my guts out. 
I could not see him, the way he was today. It hurt. 

The Inelegant Bride. (Part II)

They pitied her, they pitied her. And yet on the streets, they would shy away from calling her. Her obscenely fleshy frame which she covered in soul-less colors, the knife clutched firmly in her hand, the hair which she had never cut, a mass of black broomsticks, and those hollow eyes of a volcano black, put people off her. On social gatherings, when the ladies would sit together, at the dirty pinches of the frayed multicolored tent, the topic would inadvertently and surely touch the life of "Poor Swati". There would be audible sighs and sympathetic clucks. Someone would try to mutter, but instead in needle-like voice say a small verse, with the theatric closing of eyes, and clasping of fingers. The new brides would shake their majestic heads of hair in pity, the meek one would look pointedly down. Pregnancies, babies, philandering husbands, failed businesses, family feuds, cat fights and a visit by the local film star later, the murder of the Mathur's and the fate of their only, spoiled child, still was titillating sensation, the sobered embers of which were fueled to a tickling life, every now and then. 


15 years was a long time. But it stood frozen for Swati, the winsome 25 year old, who walked into the dead bodies of her beloved parents. A balmy afternoon, with the heat fluttering in a listless haze, while fondling happily the complying bodies of her dead parents. Her Mom's wheat colored face coated with sluggish blood, her Dad's eye unseeing and lolling in their sockets. They laid side by side, like two dummies, in clothes tinctured with drying blood, cold bodies in the copper heat. 
The people came to take her away wanting to wipe her tears. There were none. Soft voices, softer touches, the softest words. A kind lady  gently opened the fancy necklaces that looped on her neck, someone else greedily took off the gold bands on her fingers. There were five of them. Somewhere, someone, in a plaintive voice warbled about God's grace. The smell of the rose incense wafted around the house, gently  like the footsteps of a fleecy lamb.They fed, she did not protest. They nudged the spoon of daal into her tiny mouth, they dabbed her chin with the towel when water would dribble down it. They talked, she did not hear. She stood, frozen in time.


And then she made love to madness. The neighborhood would be woken up by her acidulous cries of unbearable pain. The night would be punctuated with her spams of wails, the venomous sobs and withering laments. The dawn would have her convulsing with heart pain, the day would hear her tempest of prayers, frenzy and feverish. The God's were ripped from the walls and hurled into garden with its long, octopus like grass tentacles. She laughed, her delirious laugh, seeing the wooden frames and their slaughtered inhabitants rotting in the rains, fading in the sun,even the stray spring flower not wanting to touch them.Her hair grew long and in copious amounts- her body clung to the comfort of fat, her eyes became more vacant. She muttered, she stalked. Her rants were soft like a pianissimo, and sometimes vicious like the wolves. She paced, she paced.  She was shackled to life but not to its obligations. She cared not to care for herself, for the society. And she went on, making love to her insanity, besotted to her madness. 




How could she get be married ? Who would marry her?

The pandit drawled again. 

"Bring the bride"
The pandit-he was an oily man.His verses were oiled and so was his hair and just like his face. He righteously chanted the hymns and the verses, while feeding the hungry pyre of orange, its milk of ghee. Every now and then, he would tinkle the bell, and toss the lilies floating in the bowl next to him unceremoniously in the humid air. There was a place, empty next to him. And he beckoned on to her.


She stood up. Everyone eyed her like a jackal, hungry for their morsel of gossip to whet their craving appetites. They watched her, place one unsteady foot shod in golden plastics after another. Her frame wobbled, she grunted. Like as if a spotlight was on her, everyone just stared as she took her steps on the dirty velvet of the carpet, slowly making way to the bamboo mat next to the pandit. She sat down on it, inelegant bride that she was, farting, as she let herself spread on the carpeted macadam. Her eyes black, yet shampooed to a hard glint by her frenzied excitement, her lips pursed, her body heaving, sweating, trembling. Swati- The mad bride. 


Everyone held their breath. For now they had to call the groom. There was a rustling of tacky silks, and the graze of nylon trousers, as people turned their head around, peeking squinting waiting for the HER groom to arrive.


"Bring the groom", he intoned,in his not so melodious voice. A frisson of excitement in the crowd. The excitement was palpable, like a trembling wave threatening to break open and drench the people any moment. The mother put a hurried palm over her crying toddler, the men chewed their paan tensely. The teenage rebel quietly slung her arm through her mother's. The short ones unabashedly stood on their toes. The old matrons controlled their lashong tongues, the sole waiter serving the guests, paused with his tray of oil lathered goodies. Everyone waited with bathed breath. 
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Years later, Swati's marriage still remained, tucked into manifolds of every conversation. Everyone recounted the disbelief that coursed through them as the inelegant bride, pulled out the picture of a random man, cut out from the newspaper and placed it on the seat next to her. How she walked around the pyre holding the picture in his hand, head held erect. One time, two times, Seven times. Someone said, that was the picture of her mother's favorite singer. Nobody could see properly. The ink of the newspaper had started fading with age, the picture was spotted with unbecoming circles of purple. She placed her fat, fleshy thumb stained with the red and drew a long tikka on the paper. She took that paper and rubbed it on her forehead, and ran it along her hair. She stabbed the paper with a single flower, and herself slung a magnificent garland of orange blossoms. She placed the picture on the ground and then bowed down in front of. Kissed the ground. A play so elegant, a play so dark, its actress so wild, the audience so stunned. They recalled, how when the rituals were over, Swati never looked at any one of them, and walked, the picture clutched to her bosom, to her house, shut the door, to never look back. The mural of the gory murder was complete with the one last piece of the insane daughter. No one knew, no one knew. Why Swati got married, to whom Swati got married.




No one knew, about the times, she spent looking at that one picture of her mother that was stuck on the wall. Her mother in the wedding dress. No one knew, Swati's hours of staring at the picture, wanting to bring her mother back. That smiling face, those chubby arms washed with that sweet smelling cream. Her mother. No one knew, how she would sit on the ground, her hair falling around her, the rat slyly running past her, and look and stare at that picture pasted on the crumbly blue wall. They called her mad, she was not. She lived in another world, where she was not yet born, and her mother was still alive and blushing like a bride. She just wanted her mother back. She just wanted to walk every evening straight into her mother's embrace. Her frozen brain fathomed that a marriage could bring her back. Maybe those rituals had some magic? Maybe the windchime in her parent's bathroom would tinkle once again, as her mom would flippantly strike it, after her bath. Maybe her Mom would be found cooking a delightful mixture of spicy curry for her in the kitchen. Maybe, Maybe. But it did not, it did not.


No one saw Swati after that day. 

The Inelegant Bride. (Part I)

It came in a crude, coarse envelope, sealed..not with glue, but with the hurried lick of a tongue. The saliva had dried to leave pale streams of a salty black along the border. It was a red card. Red and tiny. With a funny loop of silver threads pinned on the corner. Somewhere from the middle, laughed letters written in epileptic strokes, using a cheap sparkle ink. Laughed and ridiculed in their shiny disco clothes of purple ink.

"I invite you to my marriage. Swati."

Everyone who lived on the street recieved it. From the Brahmins to the Baniyas. From the fair faced, to the dark skinned. From the man with his three huge dogs, to the widow opposite his house with her penchant for melancholy music. Tucked in their door knobs, thrashed in their mail boxes, slid under their doors. She never invited them, face to face. Did not drag along her mother like other brides, demurely draped in a dull salwar, politely refusing the sweets placed, gladly sipping the glass of cold drink, blushingly acknowleging the tease about the groom, staunchly ignoring the talks about the past. No. In the dying hums of the balmy night, she would sling across her disfigured frame, her postman satchel of handmade wedding cards, and walk house after house, lane after lane, stopping briefly before each humble abode, to fish out the pen from behind her wild bun and with laborious strokes write the house number on top of the envelope. 

Everyone went to her wedding.

They rescheduled doctor's appointment, the trip to the tailor. They canceled on dinner invitations, some politely refused offers to watch the latest movie.The mother's made sure that their children had finished their homework before 7 and were bathed and dressed by 8. The husbands gave up on their after office banter at the street chai- walla's while devoring gulab jamuns, pulpy with hot sticky syrup. The grandmother's talked in loud, uncouth tones, the teenagers licked up a lascivious portrait of rumors. Women met up on the streets huddled and whispering and stoking a warm, exciting fire of gossip, that fed their bored spirits. 

She sat there on her bridal throne.

Dressed in a red sari. Red, the color of fresh blood. It was not new, it was not old. It was cheap and the sequins winked in a leery way as the lights fell on them. The fake diamonds and the fake emeralds and the hilariously fake rubies that studded the entire length of the six yards giggled like teenagers giggling in their shrill voices. The plastic gold that clung to her stout neck and her long fleshy earlobes shone like flashlights on a cart. Sweat and powder mixed together to form rivulets of grey all along her neck and dripping down it in a sickening way. Her blouse stuck to her swollen breasts hardly containing them, while clumps of flesh fell loose from the sides. Her bra peeked brazenly from the bottom of the blouse,the colors of last holi still staining the cotton white. She had tried to hide her stomach with her sari, but the bloated mound with its ugly navel was still discernible. Her arms were flabby, and every time she would raise her hand to fob the flies that had come to feast on her salty sweat, the flesh would dance and wiggle in a vulgar way while the harlequin bangles on either wrist shrieked. 

Her makeup- she referred and read laboriously, the makeup tips in the Sunday newspaper. The eyes were almost colored black, and the heat had made the kohl runny and now, pools of black lay underneath her eyes. She had painted an eyelids, the scintillating shade of a peacock blue. The lips were daubed with a violent pink, the cracks on the flesh oozing a little bit of dried blood. The dark facial hair on her upper lips which she had tried to conceal with some extra powder still showed-thin manly strands. Her cheeks which looked like she had stuffed her mouth with an obscene amount of food, were carefully painted in circles of rouge. Her hair was parted in the middle, straggly strands that she had plastered and then puffed into a bun like the latest bridal magazine said. But the makeup was cheap, it cracked all over the face, the sweat turning everything violet. She looked like the Made-In-China toy that the hawkers sold on the street.

She sat on her bridal throne, amidst the unwilling  red roses and wilting white lilies. Feverish and aware. From the entrance to her platform, she had ordered a red carpet to be laid, which was now littered with crushed napkins, sauf, and torn petals.  Her seat was cushioned and she sat erect, while her puffed up bun kept touching the vines of lily falling from the artificial bower. Aside her, were the few gaudy presents and in her golden handbag were the envelopes of money which her guests had given. Her bulbous eyes, the whites the color of wine, were alert and greedy, as she continuously looked at the entrance and at the size of the presents that her guests had bought. 

"Call the bride, it is time for her marriage", the pandit droned.

The guests who had been fed, and the kids who had licked their ice cream cones suddenly set alert. "Finally, we get to see the groom! ", For who would have thought Swati could get married?! She was the mad single lady of 39, whose parents murder had addled her brains at 25. She spent her time reciting macabre poetry in a loud, carrying voice, enacting every though written. She was seldom seen on the streets, except the few times when she had  to go to the market, and even then, she would carry a small knife in her hand while the wind blew her wild mane of hair in a frenzy. She fed the dark nights with her blood curling wails and feverish laments. Her howls were piercing, cold and slimy. Her garden with its growth of luscious vines and tall grass like the nails of a witch, was strewn with pictures of different God's wit their faces ripped open viciously. The Shiva had a bleeding eye, The Ganesh was torn along his forehead, Jesus lay mutilated. All on the street knew that that every Sunday at 4pm, she would stand on the same place, with the same numb look, and stare at that carpet of grass that had once since the stabbed bodies of her Mom and Dad, years back, the green caressed with the warm blood, the face turning blue, the eyes vacant in their sockets, the skin cold. She talked to none, she did not know how to smile. Once lissome, she had turned into a grossly fat woman around whom madness swirled like a malaise. 

So how, how could Swati get a groom and get married?! 

The house.

The house was broken. In spirit, in structure. No one lived there.It stood, tall and decomposed and dead, on the side of the flashy new urban residence painted in the brightest of pastels.


The terrace was of a dying black, with a stain of parasitic moss that had spread like a pool of water. The vines hung like poisonous snakes. Untamed bushes grew from the broken corners, the leaves looked treacherous. The plaster had peeled off- crusty flakes creaked open from the walls-like a man whose face dripped with pustules of ugly, squeamish pus. A brick blushed red and healthy somewhere, it seemed like a valiant attempt to be a part of the present time. The window had no curtains, except the straggly strands of decayed ivy. Dying and an infected yellowish green. The grills were probably painted white, but over the years, the dust licked the white to a salty grey. The house had the halo of the haunted, as if a peek into windows would reveal the palette's of the yesteryear's. Maybe an old man, with his crop of hoary hair, and a face flushed with flesh, tucked into the corner. A shiny box of steel with the assortment of paan and other breath mint by the side of his mat. Or maybe a young bride, smothered with gold and wrapped in a fiery red, the bangles chiming the sweetest tinkle as she fluffs the bed for her old husband. Maybe girls with long pleated cotton frocks and neatly braided hair. Maybe a boy with socks pulled up to his knees, his hair oiled with jasmine and parted strictly to the sides. An earthen pot, a steel tumbler. Maybe, Maybe.


I can only wonder. I will never know the story of the house on the street.