Reflective Writing

I had always been very hesitant about showing my prose writings/poems to people. Given my involvement with theatre, and the fact that I’m primarily an actor, dramatic writing—I think—came far more easily to me. Asking people to read my plays, therefore, was easier and did not involve me breaking into a sweat, and wanting to crawl into the earth and bury myself there permanently. If I trace this feeling of nervousness, I find its origins in my second year in Kirori Mal College, from where I had been pursuing my bachelors. I had written something—which was terrible—and I gave it to one of my professors to read. He was a professor of English and a man whom I greatly respected. However, he was also known for his short temper and the fact that he never minced his words.

I don’t think I was ready for that.

Anyway, when I went to the staff room the next day to find out what he thought of my written piece, he looked at me and said, ‘Basak…Get a life.’ Of course I was mortified. Now, however, it reminds me of a conversation that I had had with another playwright last year. We were at a party and he said, ‘My greatest fear as a writer is that I produce something and people look at me and go: what is wrong with you? How could you have even written this?’ I understand that this came from the fact that the playwright I was talking to never ‘played it safe’ and always ventured into contentious territory in his works. But this also informed me of the inherent vulnerability of the artist when he/she shows you his work of art. Or maybe I’m wrong. There’s a famous story in which Faulkner, after having written As I Lay Dying, calls his editor and hands over the copy and says: I think it’s the best American Novel yet written! And he was right. It was indeed. So maybe there’s no point in generalising. What is true however is that when the professor said, ’get a life’ I questioned my very existence. Now that I think of it, I over-reacted, and the many subsequent artistic failures (and a few successes) over the next years hardened me towards criticism. However, for the next four years, I continued writing prose poems, on and off, but never showed them to anybody—other than my parents who I knew thought of me as the next Kafka.

So the first time I actually showed my written material to people was in the Crafting Poems class. Indeed when people discussed A Moment of Violence (Title needs to be changed) I could hear them analysing, critiquing, decoding what I had written and—I don’t know whether people noticed this—I shut my ears and closed my eyes in order to block out all voices. When discussion began, I was ready for people to struggle to find words that would do justice to the horrible and horrific thing that they had had the misfortune of reading. But when the discussion didn’t turn out like that, when the criticism was more tempered, and people didn’t ask me to get a new life altogether, I was surprised and I felt the dizzying nervousness subside. 

And I learnt of my adjectival excess. Of how, often, the adjectives that I used would slow down the pace of the piece and how sometimes it would seem like a pointless exercise in sesquipedalian obfuscation. How the adjectives, instead of enhancing the descriptions, would render it opaque. Of course my influence was coming from a writer called Cormac McCarthy. He has a distinct writing style and is known for often using an odd and unusual vocabulary. And my writing style, was also shaped by McCarthy’s—if you read him you will see how greatly it is derived from his and how I wear his influence on my sleeve. Of course whereas he deployed the style to talk about the violent, biblical, psychedelic, hallucinatory, western outback, I used it to talk about the city at night.  

So when I was charged with the crime of overusing adjectives, I went back and read a few of my favourite passages from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and saw that the adjectives had been used, but economically and precisely. Now you may say that I am over dependant on McCarthy. That may be true, even though I have had other influences that have dictated the particular kinds of world that I want to build. But what has interested me always is the sensory experience of writing, something that hypnotises you with the rhythm and the sound of the piece, and there is a particular piece in Blood Meridian—a page long sentence—that seems to be the absolute culmination of this particular kind of writing. Nothing more hypnotic seems possible. And every time I attempt to create this kind of language, it is always that passage that has served as a lodestar.  

What I struggled with, however, was precision, and often my writing seemed to go all over the place. This became a particular challenge when I tried the Ghazal and The Villanelle form. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and was never satisfied with whatever I produced. It all seemed like nonsense. What was tough was to say what I wanted to say, sans adjectival excess and the freedom of not being restricted within a form. It was like trying to walk with no legs. This made me realised that I had sealed myself shut in a very particular kind of writing style—the McCarthy-esque writing style. For these two forms were such that they did not allow for a grand and extravagant kind of writing geared towards world building. I realised that I needed to explore other forms, do other things. So the recent poem that I wrote—Bombay 1947—is devoid of excessive adjectives and is replete with surrealist imagery which came as a conscious break from the kind of writing and the kind of worlds my previous poems tried to build.  ( I haven’t uploaded the ghazals and the villanelle yet, because I am not satisfied with them.)

The prosody workshop was particularly important for me, for it helped me articulate what I had always sensed—the consistency and inconsistency of rhythms. Always, while reading my own writings, I always ‘felt’ or ‘sensed’ that something was off, but I couldn’t exactly pin down what it was. And so, when I found out that it was a question of syllables, life became easier. And in many ways, life became easier, and tougher after the course. When I get back to my writing after my Masters is over, sit down at the computer, and write every day, five hundred words minimum, I will be writing from a perspective that puts precision on the same level as affect.

And, also, I will show my writings to as many people as I can.

Thanks

Bombay 1947 or Dream Poem

(A response to Neutral Milk Hotel's song 'Communist Daughter.')

Sometimes in my dreams

I see her growing out of seaweed

and mossy rocks

on that port in Bombay

and I grip the bulwark of the ship

and wave to her like the tricolour

on the flagpole of the upper deck

as ambassadors twist like rubber

and burnt flesh turns so soft

that my fingers sink through bodies

like knife through butter.

Sometimes in my dreams

I feed baba’s memory and pieces of my

tongue, to catfishes that bump

against the hull of the ship. And an emaciated boy

looks at me and asks:

am I dreaming

or does the moon look like a half-eaten biscuit?

He waits for an answer and I

open my mouth and show him

the cavern in which my shredded tongue

flaps like an obscene gesture.

Sometimes in my dreams

I pack the memory of my fingers

on her spine and the way our tongues moved

in each other’s mouths and the colour of her hair

into my briefcase when Baba says:

pack only the things you need.

And I dream that I sing her

a sweet serenade

full of guitars and bagpipes and nice voices

as the ship moves away

and Baba looks for Ma among the stars.

Sometimes in my dreams

she and I

sit on that port with our feet in water

and eyes towards the future and it looks

like ice lollies and evening walks and

phantom comics. And her feet grow roots

and her body turns into a branch and her

words sprout leaves and I plant the

seeds of our rendezvous

on the hard ground of the ship

and water those bygone days

with my sleep.

Chimera flights

Stealing through the pre dawn dark

And the fey woods, the phantom mist,

Gentle azure, steely cobalt, like a water

creature roiled and stirred from its repose
gliding sylphlike over some great boggy
wetland, has its underbelly tickled by blades of

grass agleam with twilight dew, its cheeks

cooled by the mossy branches of pine trees

standing single file like a ghostly platoon

of sentry men guarding the secrets

of this strange, chimeric woodland, as a

morning horizon unfolds in the colours

of a woman unplaiting her auburn hair,

and the mist

swerves by the foothills of some great

silt and limestone mountain,

and swoops by a basalt rock shaped

like a knock kneed harridan,

and flits by a boggy grotto that must yet

harbour a slumberous fairy tale troll,

and tip toes by the sculptures of the riverbed,

an elfin creature crafted from granite and the

turnings of this earth and the flight of the stars

and the howl and the laughter of the wind,

and the mist

swirls and curls into itself atop a bayou upon whose

body a phantasmal world tosses its colours:

sandstone whites, marshland greys, dahlia pinks,

and the oranges and vermilions and crimson blankets

of autumn leaves in which this languorous world

wraps itself and goes to sleep, all kaleidoscopic

hues that bleed and unfurl into a strange

prismatic phantasmagoria,

and the mist,

above which half this world adrift, mountain tops

standing footless in a void like floating temples,

trees like the masts of ghost ships sticking out of

a shapeless pool of white, like what grand sails

must the world harbour underneath, and the susurrus
beckoning of a veiled distance by the snap of a
dry twig, by leaves crackling underfoot, by the
rustle of trees that sound much like rainfall,
always stirs me, 
standing in a metro line, 
or staring out the window at a city which,
to my view,
often unfolds on an overcast day,
like the onset of glaucoma.

The Minimally Exceptional Life of Unit 2935

The Colony specifies that I must not,

Use the procreative process for personal pleasure.

That I must engage,

In the process that is exercised

In the assessment of mutual compatibility,

Through the exchange

Of directory assistance

And light banter

And amusing anecdotes

Over wax candles

And aromatic food

Only in order to determine a healthy mate,

And as such help expand and strengthen,

Through procreation,

The human resources area of The Colony.

                                                     *

I was an efficiently operating unit

In the large and expansive machinery of The Colony.

And I was moderately satisfied.

My area of specialisation required

The maximum exertion of the mental faculties

And the physical mechanisms at service.

The internal pumping unit compressed

And expanded

At a healthy rate of 75 beats per minute.

My centre of ideation functioned healthily

And I possessed an average intelligence quotient.

I had a moderately satisfactory skillset:

A team player

And a hard worker.

My cognitive abilities had been adjudged

By the committee as being minimally exceptional.

I am

Minimally exceptional.

But I am a senescent unit now,

And I have no mate.

I have been classified as a senior citizen,

A unit that has dried out into obsolescence:

The battery fluid depleting,

The internal pumping unit registering several aberrances,

Namely myocardial infarctions and inconsistent

And slow beats per minute.

And the process of senescence has given me:

Anatomical incorrectness

Biological unproductiveness

Functional inefficiency.

An additional worriment: the coming into possession

Of severe appearance deficits.

The unpleasant olfactory emanations from the body

And the orifices;

The deficiency of hair;

The gastric irregularities;

The urinary irregularities;

The incoherent rendering of communication;

The unaccustomed stretchability of skin.

Now, thus, I put forth this:

I was more than a unit .

I was more than a unit.

There was an internal pumping unit

Underneath my outer covering

That compressed and expanded too.

Battery fluid traversed through

My channelizing tubes too.

I ideated like all units.

My centre of ideation was capable of registering

A spectrum of temperament modifications

Ranging from

Satisfaction

To threat perception

To mate recognition hypnotism.

Yet now, when I expire,

The health maintenance organisation

Will call it

A terminal episode.

The insurance company

Will refer to it

As negative patient care outcome.

All terminology will be engagement in disinformation.

A requirement of The Colony to de-channelize

The correct information.

It will not be a terminal episode.

It will not be negative patient care outcome.

This is the official system of information directory

That is euphemistic and obscure in nature.

The cause of my expiration will be only,

And only,

Operational exhaustion.

A moment of violence

In the yellows of the streetlamps, dark shades are woven

Shadows patterns of branches on unmanned footpaths

Silhouetted arteries of the dusty concrete

There where window lights hang listless in the night sky

Like discombobulated fireflies, and the flaps of an owl’s wings

Sound like the night’s heartbeat.

There the boys are kings at night. And they speak in a scream.

(Jhaantu and Gillu and Baamba and Ponty.)

Perched on rooftops, vulture like, they spy cities at rest,

And their spider like fingers coil around knuckledusters,

Agleam in nuclear colours, and the coruscating hues

Of seedy billboards.

Inebriated, their words are frayed at the edges: rusted,

Moth eaten. The offspring of dead end jobs, their voices

Trickle down your spine like ice water. In slurry

Grunts, they decree capitalism an omnipotent malice.

Burps and vomits and talk of  women.

It stirs them from their slumber. It makes the blood,

Course through their veins.

In the streets paper dogs totter: their vermicular ribs

And reptilian barks, their rabid eyes, their spit,

Stretching from the mouth like the slender tentacle

Of some fairy book beast, hidden yet in the recesses of 

Sawdust throats. Soft billows of dust and a lumbering gait,

Every breath like a tubercular cough.

The boys launch stones from the roof: yawing and caroming off walls,

Ricochet bullets, tiny meteors, cling, clang. And they find

The soft flesh of the dogs, napkin skin torn, patchy red shades now.

Pinprick silence pricked by howls spat out like the overtures

Of a berserk charivari. In a shock of wind a white polythene bag

Performs a crazed jitterbug.

Armed with iron rods, the boys now drift in their yellow SUV:

A phantasmal apparition. A sudden swerve, a screech, a halt.

Doughnuts on unsteady roads. Black residue of tires etched across an

Empty parking lot like a frozen rictus carved out on cardboard

Pavements. Torsos dangling out car windows like unstrung marionettes.

On the tip of their tongue a taste of whisky,

And mindless violence.

In a cul de sac, they see the dogs: panting in a corner

Quietly, all dead to the world, foam coagulated around the mouth,

The eyes filming. They coil their fingers around the rods tight

Like the legs of a spider wrapped around a beating heart. They kick

The paper underbelly of the dogs, and laugh. They raise their rods,

Unsteady, swerving, swivelling, and they mouth curses that sound

Like the ululations of a crazed lot. Chants of forsaken supplicants, godless.

And they stop.

For in the phlegmy eyes

Of the dogs,

The boys see

Themselves:

Overturned and disfigured.

And their hands quiver.

A small, white envelope

I have a small, white envelope.

On my bed it lies, unmoving.

The edges frayed.

Yellow and blue and grey.

And pale, like moth eaten skin.

My small, white envelope is,

Bedecked in ancient addresses,

Necklaced in landline numbers,

Blanketed in sketches of faces,

Now unfamiliar.

You can feel,

The coarseness of sawdust,

The frailty of ash,

The softness of mildew,

The dampness of spilt coffee,

On its infirm paper body.

You see,

This small, white envelope,

Is no longer white,

And it is crumpled like my skin,

And it smells of time,

And the oil stains of an unfortunate lunch.

                                                                        *

I had a small, white envelope.

Now I lift its carcass.

A decrepit cenotaph.

Dedicated to me.

To time.

To the letter I never wrote to you.