Tell Me No More of Enchanted Days

Cafe Mondegar Many memories are stuffed in the air, some of tea, some of beer. I feel the place, a landmark in a way, defining a city and its people. There are white faces around, mingling with the brown..waiters scurrying around...and the smell of steak rises over the walls, outside onto the blue street where rain colours the faces. It's a moment captured many times. Collegians pouring in, checking out the junk jewellery they bought. I light a Camel and remember my college days. A friend once said, "You'll always bump into someone you know here." He was right. This is where the city comes..if not always, then like me...maybe after 5 years. The last time I was here, I was corrected for calling 'Rose' wine as if it were the name of a flower. In irritation, I played 'No More I Love You's' on the jukebox. Before that, it was a celebration of someone's marriage. Maybe my own. I don't remember. There were friends cheering, singing, dancing...now

Portrait of Suzanne Bloch - Pablo Picasso My love is the blackest love, engulfing, intense and complete, not a pale shiny blue or a slow watery green. It's not like the winsome reds, not worldly wise or lipstick dyed Not a pink sky shade, eternal, spiritual or kind. It isn't a bright yellow sunshine smiles and colored lies, not a deep violet, lost and mystical, not a shallow brown, boring, staid and down, not lavender or crimson, sounding different, but the same as another. Not white, and non commital a cowardly bystander in a cowardly crowd. My love is the blackest love, as black as your eyes, as black as your veil. My love is the blackest love, the black of the night that captures the dying day.

These nights, since I seem to have developed a bad case of clinical insomnia, I try to kill time by surfing all over the place. And when I was doing that, I recently came across an Indian blogger ( The Compulsive Confessor ) who got her book published by Penguin. It's supposed to be explicit for Indian standards and rediff has published some excerpts from the book. What sickened me was the kind of comments people gave after reading the excerpts. It is terribly disgusting to see Indians thinking that a woman who writes about sex has to be either morally depraved or corrupted by Western influences. Some even went to the extent of calling her a prostitute. Imagine, a well educated, beautiful woman in her 20s who writes a column for a paper and gets her book published is the target of all this crap. This got me thinking about sex on blogs. The world over, women are writing sex blogs, attaining instant fame and getting their books published. They are also bringing their own bit of femin

Image: Dawn by Alphonse Mucha Eyes sleepy, and brown, alive and dreams, sun inside, creeping, washing into the window, and the fog outside, you rise, auburn hair over your curves, hidden under white sheets. Pale skin warmed, as you look at the trees, then at me, and smile, remembering last night when I soaked in the force of your floods, your rivers I swam, now just memories of dew as they linger with you, stretching across the bed, while I dance my fingers on guitar strings, wanting the morning to be night, and night to be morning as you rise and fall like a flower blooming with the dawn, then showering petals at dusk, over my dark, frozen ground. I keep listening to a song these days (From the Morning) that always paints the same picture in my mind. It's almost like a vision I've seen before. Maybe Nick Drake's voice has something to do with it. I don't know if/how to upload a song, so I'm putting the youtube link for my inspiration here: http://in.youtube.com/wa