Painting

My parents bought a painting off a struggling artist. He would like to take up art as a full time career but circumstances forbid. He has a family to support-wife, child, ailing parents and so he is forced to give art tuition to uninterested brats. For a regular income. His creativity, he rues is getting cramped and perhaps slowly destroyed…
The painting now hangs on our living room wall. It is an eyesore. The canvas, painted a lurid red shows a despairing woman. Her arm looks like a leg of ham and a couple of sickly yellow flowers are sprouting on her head. It symbolizes the life giving power of a woman, he had explained. A moon has also been painted on the red canvas, for aesthetic reasons I believe, there being no other.
In spite of all this, one could have been stirred by some indefinable quality in his work. One is not. He could easily have been gifted, wouldn’t have done anyone any harm. But that he most definitely isn’t.
Whoever is scripting our lives can’t be counted on for kindness.

The Khadims showroom on Gariahat Road is finally being pulled down. It was sheer madness to have built it in the first place.
Initially I watched with indifferent curiosity a makeshift construction, on the lines of a puja pandal being built on an important commercial road. Then, to my surprise they slapped an imposing looking wooden façade onto it, complete with a glass door. Through it I saw a wall-to-wall carpet being laid out to cover the crude, uneven floor. In some days they opened it up to the public. The ordinary window shopper once within its carpeted, air-conditioned interior would never suspect its sturdiness. But this bothered me, more than I can tell, and every time I stood at my verandah and noticed the ungainly looking bamboo and asbestos behind the painted front, a vague resentment welled up.
Trade flourished through the summer .A liveried guard was installed at the door. Then it got hotter and hotter until grey clouds started massing in the sky. With the first kal-baishakhi the foundation-less building tottered. I pictured the roof flying off leaving the air conditioner and the guard standing foolishly behind and laughed.
They didnt,off course, when the same thought occurred ,so now its being dismantled. And I, irrationally enough, will miss it. For though an oddity it was rather interesting and one highly representative of our times.

Slaters

Almost Heaven

On close scrutiny,
The backdrop was hand painted
And the haloes were tarnished
The detachment was too complacent
And perhaps a little forced..

But they didn’t know
And we are willing to forget.

Unnamed

I tossed and turned
And timorously said
'maybe..'
to the deaf night.

Saffron robe, string of beads, a vacant gaze-he ticked off in his head. The look had been perfected. He was almost genuine now, no one could tell the difference. Or so he feverishly hoped. A meditative pose was hastily adopted as a rather portly man cautiously entered the room. He ran a swift glance over the incense sticks, tarot cards and the other faith-inducing commodities.
“Er...I am Mr. Sudhir Bose. My friend, you know him, Jayanta Bab-”.
“Namashkar”.
“Yes, yes Namashkar.”
“Is this to do with your family?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
The astrologer merely smiled omnisciently.
The man then came and sat in front of him like an obedient schoolboy and fished out a couple of horoscopes from his pocket. Pointing a stubby finger at them he said,
“My son’s and the girl he wants to marry, hers.What do you think?”
He carefully scrutinized it and after a decent interval said the usual thing.Rosy future.It was a time tested principle-happy men pay more.
For a few moments the mans face crumpled in disappointment but then a cunning gleam lit up his eyes.
“Maybe so. maybe so. But you mustn’t write that.”
“Why not? It’s the truth…”
“No no”, he explained patiently, “’You must say that he will be very unhappy with her. I’ll pay you extra for that.”
“But why?”The Guruji asked, omniscient look abandoned, at a complete loss.”
“We don’t want him to marry her that’s why! Why do you need to know so much? I’ve said I’ll pay you ext-”
“You don’t have to. I won’t do this.”
“You won’t?!” he asked, puzzled in turn.
“No and you may leave this place.”
“But wait let me expl-”
“Now.”
It was an unmistakable command and so the man left. Rather flustered and muttering something about exasperating men of principles.

Career Plan

Last evening my parents were having a heated discussion about their tax returns.Accounts,declare,black,white,ULIP,Mediclaim.Gobbledygook.
I hope that when I'm grown up I wont earn enough to have to pay tax.I hope that when I'm grown up I can live like Plath.Alone in a bed sitting room in some random country with complete bastard for a husband.Who writes phenomenal poetry.
Or divorced with two runny nosed children.Hard up.Snatching few hours of aloneness,early in the morning and writing snippets.Furiously leafing through a well thumbed thesaurus to perfect the rhyme till its time to make tiffin.
And walk to work (sub-sub-editor of local womens daily) and back and have aching calves at the end of the day.Have many friends who are interesting because they're so boring and write mean comments on human nature based on them.
Meticulously study Audens style as though it mattered.Conscientiously read Alice In Wonderland each night.
And then one day,just put my head in a gas oven and end it once and for all.Then a great critic will 'discover' me and say that I was brilliant but(sighing tragically) before my time..
I also think that none of this is going to happen.I dont have the figure for tragedy.
In all likelihood I will be an obnoxious Fabindia clad feminist who writes lame reviews in Anondobazar Patrika which nobody reads and quotes from them and thinks she is ever so smart.

adult-like

A hundred years from now
They'll be worrying and waiting
A hundred years from now
They'll be duly contemplating
A hundred years from now
They'll still feel that they're
Skating on thin ice.