Stone and Bread.

Statues, so many statues. Cemented, chiseled, sculpted, they glisten when the sun shines on their old, Gothic faces. Signs of life, you know? Mark is 23, he's ambitious, he's going to rule the world in a couple of years. Playfield, this land, its all his, his alone, territorial. This particular Sunday afternoon, we meet his long, sinewy body standing erect in appraisal of the City Centre. Every quaint little town has one, hidden somewhere. The City Centre, where heritage and history (however banal) collide and manifest as ruined buildings, or sculptures or just some milestone that says M.G.Road (built 1978).

Today is unlike all other days. Mark has had.. a shift in perspective? No, he's had his belief system collapse into gravel and dust, kind of like the ruins he's inspecting. They're the same, man and environment. The ageing statues have parts of them missing, a broken nose, or a stone gem from a cement necklace. So does he. His mind's a jigsaw today, you see, with all the leading pieces misses.

So tell us, enough with the mindless description, we don't care about that, get to the point, what happened to your boring Hero from Small Town, Third World Country.

Heh. Nothing happened. This morning, he changed his regular breakfast routine of cereal and milk to bread. Just that. Bread. Bread, incidentally tends to mould, green and crumby.

Kind of like life for a 23 year old who wants a lot, tries a lot and doesn't know where to begin. And the statues that withstand the abrasive pressures of time but only breathe when the sun shines.

I'm walking away from him as I type this. He's still standing encompassed in that naked statue's shadow. They're kindred, the shade protects him and she shades him only when she's alive. And he needs to be alive today. Why? Well.

Disenchantment. And Disillusionment. When you're 23, there comes a day when the world is no longer a playfield, your territory and becoming its ruler is suddenly not "practical." And when that happens, you shift from healthy food to self-raising flour and start smoking.

And when that happens, you sneak away for a little bit and stare at beings, etched in stone. Beings that whisper quietly, in your ear, that this earth is big enough and kind enough. Big enough for you to have your own slice of kingdom.

…And that unlike them, you must stay alive even when the sun doesn't shine

Mine.

Green park bench, green over-mowed grass. Warm summer night. My skin was crawling along the lines of his cigarette's curling smoke. He's a real nutjob, one of those English pieces, dirty blonde hair, Oasis fan, sexy drawl. The works. Bohemian, nomadic poet, he would spend his days singing in a gondola if he could, you know? He scavenges around north London, that lazy face with arched eyebrows at every gig. Used to dabble with the guitar, he's written a few songs I guess. They're very good. He gets by. No one knows him. I do.

Me, I'm just a small town girl from a third world country who wants to be a groupie. We're both looking for The Beatles in the dark alleyways of London city. The architecture, the red brickwork oozes that 60's charm I want to internalize. Wide-eyed, starry-eyed. Drugs, sex, rock n roll. Cliched? Yes. Unreal? No.

That fateful night after a particularly grand The Holloways gig, we'd decided to crash in a park. His red wine bottle was rolling on the scant grass, little drops of blood everywhere. That band had bled us, made us robust. Healthy. Life in our hair. "You know you're only here so you get to sleep with one of them tardy guitarists. Its the glamour for you god damned villagers. Ride the band wagon of the talented. Ho hum." My smile wasn't going to lose out y'know. Its true. I WOULD sleep with one of them. Fuck me, but those sons of bitches can play.

"How's your lit course at the university going?" Meh, haven't touched those books in a long time. I didn't feel like conversation.

He got up, brushed his pants, flipped his red hair back. Smoked. Walked. The idle summer breeze was rocking the swing. So restless tonight, the motherfucker. There was scant melody playing from some house in the neighbourhood. Some poor kid trying to play an old Ben Gibbard song.

I got up too. Started swaying to the scratchy tune. The bolt of ember in my hand was about ready to burn me through and so was my head but I didn't care. A poet, a guitar, nicotine and the dream of music. I'm wasting away. The dissolution from being a person to being a character in your own imagination can be real fun, you guys should try it. That summer I WAS the character though. That night in the park was the rest of my life. And it was calm and pretty.

And it was mine.

Caught.

Silver strokes. Brush, paint. Oil and water." Of course, the shadows are always the most mathematical, precise and rational part of a painting. All else is just us, artists, crying because we're not creators but simulators." He'd often been cynical, knowing he liked the bohemian lifestyle more than the actual brushwork. The fabric of his life was colored with women, wine, good food. Animal. Basic. Sex, hunger, thirst. That summer of '63 was a good time to be in the art business. Music interlocked with the nomadic abandon of "obscurity". Being different. Everyone was doing it. Being different.

History's forgotten him, no one remembers his studio apartment in New York, or the magnificent potrait of Grapes in the Sky he once finished in 15 minutes. I remember watching him as he played with paint, late at night after wrapping up my part-time job at the University lab. He would splash around in the color, like a child enjoying his first warm bath. His fingers caressed the pigment like it was the ivory neck of a Petrarchan beloved. Have you ever seen Joy? Touched it, it's tangible solid contours and wrapped your hands around it? I have.

It was during that summer of '63 when I watched him paint.

I remember with vivid clarity that day in the park he told me I was immortal. That he was immortal. Because he could will it, he could create a universe of his own on canvas and live in it, forever. That the kind of people who do good things when no one's watching are the only Believers there are. The day he told me that to rule the world all I needed was a charming smile, a palette and knowing the way around my mind. Just that, a blue print of my mind.

That's the day he got up, shook my hand and left me, feeding the pigeons. The next day, as I rushed to his apartment, my stomach churned with premonition. Foreboding. The landlady told me he'd moved out, never to come back. That she didn't know where he had gone.

All she gave me was a charming smile and an old palette he'd left me. He'd often told me to not look for the things I've lost, every time I'd lose a tube of color or an idea that tipped off the tip of my brain before I could catch it. " They were just getting in your way anyway, those thoughts you keep losing."

Never was I to look for him, though I fancied I saw his shadow sometimes on an abandoned street in a quiet suburb or near a tree he used to love. Shadows after all, were the only real creations he ever indulged in. It fit.

Sitting in that same park as I type this out. The pigeons are still here, nothing has changed. It's '96 and they don't talk of art anymore, not the way they used to.

Me? I'm holding up a grape to the sky, recalling his smile and trying not to lose this thought, to catch it before it gets in my way.

The Keepsake.

A dusty summer afternoon. His head was inclined sideways, his scant stubble catching the tired sunlight. Gold and red. Like the mahogany table his tissue rested on, the ink on it still wet. A deep azure. We were never to speak, him and I. Regulars at that forgotten, quaint cafe. He always scribbled on those pieces of tissue, smiling to himself at some private joke, balling them up, aiming at the wastepaper basket on his way out. "We daydream too much, such cheap corruption. All our banal brain is capable of doing is modifying reality." He missed often. I was curious.

That day I stayed till past midnight, working on my 16th century theatre assignment. He kept a brown paperbag on the table, for 6 hours. Every few minutes, he would peek in, grin absently, nod a little and get back to whatever deep lyric he was working on. Whatever deep lyric he would throw away, again. Over the last few months, I'd developed the unconscious habit of flashing interested, intrigued glances at him from the corner of my eye, every few hours. We were comrades. We were both escaping the reality our brain could only modify.

After downing his 50 somethingth cup of espresso, his hand inched closer to that curious bag. He seemed to hesitate, fought a mental battle, lost, and gave into the temptation again. He looked in. That familiar hue of subdued glee seemed to paint his face, before he guiltily wiped the expression off his face. I wanted to give up all pretense of indifference, to go upto his table, pull out a chair and demand to share his fascination. I didn't. Our tacit code of brotherhood was too precious to be violated by even awkward hellos, and such an overt acknowledgment would absolutely shatter it.

The evening passed on. Growing frustration on my part, the same absent joy on his. I was struggling to dissect Restoration Comedy, the multitude of cups on his table grew in number with each passing hour. At some point, he nonchalantly reached over for the paperbag. My pen stopped mid-sentence, his established routine for that night was far from getting old. This time, he flattened the paper, and worked his pen into great swishes all over it. Anxious crossing. More scribbling. This, he followed by pulling out a weathered LP and balling up the paperbag. With one swift, disinterested motion of his wrist, what once held a world of attraction, now lay in a languishing, inconspicuous mess by the dustbin. He left the cafe, humming to himself.

I still have that paperbag, the years have deepened the creases on it, the ink on it is beginning to fade. It smells like parchment and coffee beans and decaying wood, like an Englishman's old piano. A relic.

The shy ink reads: "We're strangers and lovers, poets and brothers.
We're actors in someone's play, we're characters in a book someone is reading out to a drowsy child.
We will but be a hazy memory when this night dissolves into dawn.

Isn't that a relief?"

Grey.

Overt schmaltz perhaps, a story of hope, or love or hate or consumerism or communism or all of the aforementioned woven intricately into the autobiographical recapitulation of the life of old-lady-with-three-cats Mrs. Pinto and her objectophillic obsession with a particularly pretty digital clock. Imagination fails me. The clear dichotomy between yesterday and tomorrow. Between The Before and The After. Today, right now is the thin white line that separates the two.The exact second when the dark tresses of night break into dawn. That grey area inspires.

The Lady of Shalott will tell you that for a writer, reality must be divorced from life. That to be able to imagine, he must shut himself off in an ivory tower and avoid the transgression from the mind to the mundane, that the political and the aesthetic must be kept separate. We all construct ivory towers. Mine's bricked with The Shins, steaming black tea, torrential rain and William Blake as of now and that's precisely where the paradox emerges. My dilapidated ivory tower finds reality's cement. It transports, isolates and engages, as it lies corrupt. My psyche, it languishes in the greyness. "Four grey walls and four grey towers."

Another conundrum I struggle to unfold is the poetry of everyday life. The luscious mix of conversation, nicotine and walks around North Campus. That's art right there, not divorced, not independent but snugly knitted into the fabric of platitudes that constitute my 19th year.

The assessment leaves me restive. The mind remains shackled within the confines of Life and its bromides. Unsettling, disturbing, consuming. To produce a work of literature from the viscous, brown mass of inexperience, immaturity and a chained imagination.

Or if your glass is half full? To produce art from dried paint.

Torrential rain, a steaming cup of black tea, Hello Saferide and eyes made of sleep. Every six months or so, motion forces planted in my fingers guide me to type the living shit out of my keyboard and the blog normally bears the brunt of what results. The last half annum has been.. compelling. You know how every birthday you wake up and wish you felt older and you don't. There are those times and then there are times when every inch of metaphysical growth is tangible, when you can feel your maturity flourish, when you pass a finish line or complete your thesis on 16 century poets. Or listen to the rain interrupt the Swedish twee pop that's going to kill your ipod in two songs.
The clear division between yesterday and tomorrow. Between The Before and The After. Today,right now it's the thin white line that seperates the two. I'd like to pretend I have something consequential, revolutionary to write about. Heh. Overt shmalz perhaps, a story of hope, or love or hate or consummerisim or communism or all of the aforementioned woven intricately into the autobiographical recapitulation of the life of old-lady-with-three-cats Mrs Pinto and her objectophillic obsession for a particularly pretty digital clock. Imagination fails me.
So I'm just going to tell you about this fun thing that happened to me day before. Person A (who would probably castrate me( oo parantheses within parantheses oo! anyhow, in brutal, tribal ways) if I told you who he is)

Haze.

Every shining fortnight I leave my new, nebulous life in north campus behind and return to the seemingly inanimate life of rural confines. Seemingly. There's something that holds me here, snug and warm. My own little dream world that I escape into every two weeks when college becomes too real. A dream world that took four years to construct, to adorn, make it homely. Less gray, less ivory, less cold. Less tower, less wall. More home, less house. Music. My personal little cubby hole. Most people would regard this.. reverence.. for music as juvenile. In more hipster terms? Wannabe. Needing to be cool, a part of it. A vehicle that carries my leo trait of ostentation? Most people would be wrong. Its something else. Something different, perhaps, something stronger, shakingly stronger than the normal, healthy respect most people harbour for melody and harmony. Reverence. Gratitude. There's something very tangibly identifiable about indie. About Gibbard and Mercer. It takes possession. And it's hardly normal. This blind-eyed.. losing. Transportation. Losing. Dissolution of reality. My personal fire-exit. Like the earth is not a cold, dead place after all (and if you point this one out, I'll consider marriage =) ). Like the first breath after coma (hah, yes, repetition). As I type this out, I have a sinking feeling I'm not doing the adulation justice. To put it simply, after a whole year of losing touch with this one best friend, these voices, these pieces of melody, it feels good to be back. Like therapy after withdrawal. Or like the rush of adrenalin after you first inject in the drug after a long period of restraint. A frenzy begins. A chaotic, all-consuming pandemonium that expresses sheer bewilderment. "Wow, how did I stay away for so long?" Music. The word doesn't do justice to everything it encompasses for a small town girl. When reality doesn't offer you the fluctuations in emotion and feeling that you crave, when you're 18 and in Faridabad. You turn to other people's higher experiences. To live a little, vicariously. And that's what music is, really. My feet planted in underground New York and my ear an inch away from Kevin Drew's guitar. Acoustic and easy. Heady and relieving. Most of all? This.. intoxication.. gives me reason to believe my made up world could be real one day. Because its made by real people. They're just a few continents away. But it's their world. And it could be mine.