The Cigarette that burned

The burning white stick sticks to the folds of the fingers of your left hand
While the other one has my arm around it as we stand
On the edge of the bridge, 
That bridges the distance between the separate lands.
I glance sideways, my eyes on the white stick 
Burning in between your lips.
My heart cries, "Smoking Kills"!
You are nonchalant. 
The relief that your lungs feel when the smoke exhales;
The heart trapped between the drugged lungs do not notice
As my fingers loosen the hold on your arm,
Loosen the bond that was once so firm.
Alas! I slowly walk away
And to my dismay
You don't look to your right.
You don't get the drift of the emptiness on your right arm
Because the blazing stick on your left sits so firm.
 

Now I am on the other land

While you are stuck in the middle

Unaware of the choice you made. 

A Murder.

Tip toe she walked through the darkness that engulfed the earth.
Tip toe she walked beneath the starless sky.
Tip toe she walked through the maze of rooms and corridors.
There was silence save that one dog's endless cries.
There was paranoia dripping with every bit of moisture in the air.
There was not any witness to register the crime about to be committed.
She stepped on the floor with checkered tiles.
She pulled out the sharpest butcher's knife.
She walked towards the only unlocked room in the almost vacant house.
None to assess the finger prints on the weapon.
None to stare at the red drops falling on the white floorboard.
None to heal the deep gash made on her wrist.

7 Deadly Sins of Reading

I am getting a little unconventional while writing my take on the 7 deadly Sins of Reading by not adhering to the exact rules here. These are the deadly sins that I have committed and many readers like me must have the guilt residing within them of having done these at some points of their reading lives. 

Greed
I am not the general greedy type since I borrow books and read (or get them as prizes, gifts sometimes as inheritance *giggles*). The typical miser you might say. But greed does force a reader to do the silliest things in life. Being the typical HP fan that I am, the maximum amount of bucks that I have spent on a book is 975. The Deathly Hallows was given to me after a lot of nagging, shouting and crying. 

Wrath
I hated J.K.Rowling for committing cold blooded murders. How could she? How can you just kill people with life and blood (may be not exactly that but close), ones with whom our emotions were connected. Fred, what had he done to deserve that untimely death? An easy going humorous boy who could have lighted more lives but J.K.Rowling just had to go and end it. And then just make a young Lupin parentless. And also turn our Harry godfatherless (after he had lost his parents).  The wrath was cooled off a little after she gave a happy ending to the story.

Gluttony
Gone with the Wind. I can never get tired of reading this one book again and again and again. Margaret Mitchell, I thank thee for bestowing us with this masterpiece. I love the book because of its layered characters. It taught me that every person is different shades of grey- a mixture of black and white. Every time I read and then re-read it I get to analyse the characters in a different way. She made me live the life of each and every character in the book.

Sloth
I am not the type of person who has a lazy bum when it comes to her reading life but like I said before, every reader has been affected by the 7 sins at one point of time or the other.  I could never really bring myself up to finish Istanbul: Memories of a City. No offense to Orhan Pamuk, and I am sure he is a wonderful author but I could never get past the first few chapters.
Another book that I have been putting off reading is The Princess Bride. This is one great book by William Goldman but there are too many distractions in life at the present.

Pride
I take pride in having read, analyzed and loved many many beautiful books. One that I remember properly right now is Chanakya's Chant. I have endorsed this book so many times to every friend of mine that they have started dreading my company. What more can I say? I love the thought of being surrounded by books and talking about books and writing about books and thinking about books and here it goes.. This is my most promising and emphasized sin. Pride.

Lust
Fine. I admit it. Yes, I am guilty of developing crushes on the characters in the books. So what?! I bet you do the same too. Okay, I drool over Rhett Butler way too much and I have sweet, wet dreams about him. Can I resist? No, of course not. He is difficult to understand, has been shunned by society (making him more irresistible), has a glint of humor always on his lips and that oh-so-sexy mustache of his. Another of my sin- I get attracted to handsome men (ones who don't exist). 

Envy
I get jealous when I see others buying good books and I want to read them. But this trait is not that dominating in me. Although I do want Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri as a gift soon.

If reading was a crime, I would soon be arrested! 

A poem

I want to write to you, beyond the moon and the stars

beyond the love that won all wars

Write to the place where you stay

among the galaxy of milky way

I want to write to you

when your mood is blue

Write to bring a smile

Write when you are away

I want to write while

My mind is occupied with thoughts

that turn me blank with its emptiness

I want to write to you 

Till the grass tip keeps bathing in dew

Till the rainbow has not lost its hue

I will keep writing to you.

A Product of Insanity

It seems like a million centuries have passed since we fell in love.
It seems like a million decades the last time I embraced my freedom.
It seems like a million years since we revived our long lost love.
It seems like a million months since you stopped adorning me with your eyes.
It seems like a million weeks since the affection started turning to adjustment.
It seems like a million days the last time you held my hands and confessed your love for me.
It seems like a million hours have passed since our confused, half-broken, half-maimed love completely shattered.
It seems like a million minutes the last time you sealed our promises with a kiss.
It seems like a million seconds the last time my heart skipped a million beats for you.

Yet another girl..

I am yet another girl. A girl with no ambition but plenty of dreams. Dreams that might have drowned the need of ambitions in my life. Crowded Dreams that did not allow Ambition to crop its head up like the New York city’s skyscrapers will never allow a tiny warm cottage to survive. Dreams that might have killed my urge to have an ambition. Or may be Ambition was too lazy to prove its existence and thereby the more active Dreams replaced the dormant Ambition and gave my life a new reason to survive.
I was a girl whose dreams gave her a reason to live and yet again these dreams bring the doom of futility to her life. I am yet another girl with plenty of dreams but not a single ambition to live for.
My dreams are petty giving me a chance to dream regarding every little thing that marks a scratch in the papyrus of my life. I remember there was a time we used to live in these tiny quarters with very little space and comfort yet adequate happiness to dwell on. Every little thing brought with it a little bit of sunshine that overall turned my day into a bright and happy one. A particular kulfi-seller passed our quarter block every afternoon. My mother was almost always sleeping then and I was generally painting or writing on my notebook sitting by the window. I would have this insatiable urge to buy at least a small kulfi from the man but whenever I tried to convey the feeling to my mother she would shove me aside and mumble “Ice-creams ruin your teeth” and fall asleep again. I saw how hard he worked, sweating profusely in the mid-summer afternoon trying his best to sell the kulfis as quickly as possible to prevent them from melting. It had suddenly dawned on me like the truth had dawned on Lord Buddha under the Bodh Gaya tree that my life’s entire purpose would go in vain if I do not become a kulfi-seller when I grow up. I had thrown tantrums, cried endlessly for days and stopped talking to everyone when my parents did not agree to my decision of not pursuing studies anymore and going to apprentice with the kulfi-man.
Many of such dreams were short-lived. I forgot them as soon as I had something else to pursue, something else to divert myself to. My parents had bought me a small play doctor-set when we went to the monthly fair. It had a beautiful stethoscope, a pair of scissors, scalpels, an oxygen mask to put on the doll I preferred making my patient, a small doctor bag, et cetera. I played everyday with these toys and once I grew tired playing with my doll I would make patients out of human beings. Sometimes mother whenever she could take time out of household work and her afternoon siestas, father when he returned from office and was not busy watching news, everyone took turns in being my playmates. Unfortunately I had stopped considering it to be a game a long time back. Now I had this serious dream of becoming a real doctor. I say serious dream because I had learnt at school that what you want to become when you grow up was considered to be a serious dream, an ambition. It wasn’t until later when I could distinguish between dreams and ambitions. Anyway, my parents were proud to hear that their daughter wanted to be something substantial.
As I have mentioned before, this being another of my short-lived dreams did not last more than a few months. Once I was given a wooden ruler (those were the latest trends in stationery then) I used it less to draw lines and more to hit the dolls that were my students as I acted out to be a teacher. I wrote on the walls alphabets and new words that I had learnt recently at school and used my ruler to point at them. Another of my silly dreams.
When a new desktop computer was brought home by dad I immediately formed the idea in my head of becoming a computer engineer. As a girl of 10 years my still to-be developed brain could not imagine that when a person used computers they could turn out to do any job other than of a computer engineer. This dream had lasted for quite sometime, about two long years. However once I started realizing what one might have to do or, much unpleasantly, study as an aspiring computer engineer I swear it was no longer high on my list of priorities.
Dancing rehearsals for our school or college cultural programs would drop a hint to my heart that “may be if you would try a little harder you could actually end up in a great dance show”. I would practice profusely for the upcoming programs and imagine myself on the reality shows but all I could manage in that one month long rehearsal was picking up the steps and performing gracefully. Once the curtain fell on the stage, I would cover my dancing dream away.
Reading travelogues and watching the videos of tours to different places made me wish to go traveling the world for the rest of my life kind of “Around the world in 40years”. It did not sound all that bad in my imaginative and inexperienced brain. Sketching gave me the idea of creating cartoons, caricatures and large canvases for exhibitions.
Whenever I read good books (which I did all the time) I wanted to write. I had this yet-another dream of writing something phenomenal, something so different and nice that people would stop to talk about my book after reading but all my stories remained unfinished as I could never think of putting up any unique climax to them. However since I continue reading quite furiously even now I guess this is one dream that I can not really give up on. Yes dream and not an ambition because I did not take it seriously and will never take it either. Dreams never cease to be a part of one’s life but ambitions are necessary to have a proper stance in life, it prepares a ground for you upon which you can stand proudly and claim that you dream, dream to do many things in life. However I realized it quite late but not too late to stop dreaming at all. I am yet another girl dreaming, dreaming to finally have an ambition, to do something productive in the future.

By a Victim of Female Infanticide

Lying on the barren ground,

Naked of all emotions.

Struggling hard to open my eyes.

Distant unknown voices strike my ears like darts.

I can feel rough hands groping my body,

Pushing, tugging at my wrap.

Observing the cold, blood-less wrists.

Do they want me to wake up?

No, I can’t open my eyes,

I had to shut the world out.

And now when I try to unglue the eyelids and flick them open.. I can’t.

They had abandoned me; left me on this barren ground,

When they realized I came from the land of Venus.

They didn’t want me.

Buried me on the same ground.

Do I sense a feeling of regret, a desire to undo the done?

Is it possible to bring back the light of life?

But then I have more companions around me,

Ones who have had to face the same fate I did once.

Now I know there is no feeling of regret.

The age old tradition will continue without any variation

And I will have more lifeless bodies surrounding me on this barren ground.

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