Works of RK

It was a long distance call. I could hear the lines grumbling garbage. It sounded as if it were raining down on the window panes at her end.  There were long stretches of silences between sentences. She would ask me a question and then wait for eternity for an answer that would not come. I used to use this silence to imagine where she would be standing. I would picture her in the master bedroom overlooking the valley. I would imagine the dress she would be wearing, the color of her top, the color of her leggings. She had thunder thighs and I fell for them long before I fell for her. Are you there? I am asking you something... Why don't you respond? Her bungalow had those brass roof linings which channeled rain water from the roof to run through British gargoyles into a small pond. Some of channels used to leak from the corners. I remember the sound falling rain used to make on the tiled roof and windows. The noise used to be so loud that we had to shout to be heard. We rarely shou...

Photo for representation only I have wedding album from one of my many marriages that did not work. Buried in there are smiling faces of friends and relatives who had attended the ceremony. Like many chapters in my life, this too passed almost a decade and a half ago. Today, I am scared of opening that album. Most men and women who could laugh an unrestrained uncouth villagers laugh are dead. They dropped out of my life over the years, without much noise, most without good byes. Every time I see that old photo album, I remember the laughter that I miss in my life. Most of my loved ones now stand forlorn, as coconut trees, untended, uncared for, in some corner of large tracts of land which now remains barren. We are now dwellers of large cities. My village postman could not compete with the Dominoes delivery boy. He too is now gone, but not before a final whoosh of laughter from his toothless creaky betel stained mouth. --------------- PS: As an ancient Hindu ritual, we plant coconut tr...

It was difficult for him to act normal. For years, he had not had to wait for the right moment to say something. He was known to be blunt. He also felt too old for all this. The music was not the kind he was fond of. It was more of hip hop and he was a lover of good old rock. There were too many people, mostly the young crowd with the blush still on their faces. There was too much light. He could see his ridged and craggy hands, there were grey hairs on his fingers that he had not noticed earlier. For the tenth time he felt his breast pockets; the wallet was there. She said she would be in by 7, he was in by 5.30. There was this one waitress who had heavy legs. Oddly, she reminded him of Jyothi, his first wife. Tall, lithe but heavy in all the right places. He found himself looking at her more often. There seemed to be some connection. The waitress kept glancing at him every now and then and caught him looking at her. Her eyes were the eyes of a yakshini, deep dark and full. And just t...

Yes, I can walk back in time and join our lives together into one. I can make two rivers merge into the same sea. I can make both of us lose our identity and become strangers to ourselves. And then we will fall in love again. I can help you and me crawl out of our skin, each using the other, and grow new names and new identities. I can paint this sky crimson and plant 8 birds of love who will continuously flutter their wings for you...flying nowhere. I can. I can erase your memories of strife and loneliness. Of fights with your papa and nights of sobs in your attic. I can help your dog live longer so that you don't have to see him die. I can babble as you drive me into the night and light you a smoke every time you feel like it. I never fall asleep. I am God. I can do miracles.

In me I harbor a cold winter chill. Each day I wake up with prayer on my frosty lips that this long winter of discontent should give way to warm summer breeze. I go out into the cold and trudge through winter gloom. I collect firewood from trees that have given up their greens years ago. My breath turns to icicles and merge with the white below. Every now and then, I come across birds frozen cold. I hold them close to my ears, almost believing that I will hear their little heart beat. These are the times when I am most afraid of snow. The frost has a way of getting into places inside you when you are not looking. And then, in a lonely silent cold winter night, I hear my feeble heart beat. I believe.

From the time we were together to this day when you live in me through my words, I have often asked myself how well I knew you. I have heard this spoken about myself, as to how hard it is to understand me, as if I were a mystery, a Dan Brown novel. I have known you just as well as I have known myself through you. In the fleeting moments of togetherness, I have heard my heart sync with yours and sing the same songs, dance to the same beats. I have felt two souls resonating, as if we were strung to two separate guitars but  strummed by the same cosmic guitarist. I have inhaled your shampooed hair and fell in love with the way you smell. You have breathed me in as I held you close, and from the way I could hear your heart beat, like that of a little humming bird, I knew how much you loved it with me around. I have heard your Hindi poems late into night and I so believe that your lines are far closer to perfection than my meandering thoughts. I have crossed busy Hyderabad streets with ...

I am sure you have read The Godfather. It is one of those very rare books I have read more than once. I have often wondered, when younger, about the relationship Luca had with the Don. It is only now, closer to forty that I understand some bit of it. As we grow older, our personalities crystalline and go on to take shapes that we might not always love. I love myself, I am also at ease with the way this world sees me. But deep in my heart, there is a silent longing that everyone I ever come across come and tell me that I am a wonderful person. I have always wanted to impact every life I touched, positively. However, when I look back, I see that this is far from reality. Back there in my past are numerous graves of people I have hurt grievously. The worst thing about these graves are that so many of them are unmarked. These are those of strangers to whom I have been less than kind, impolite or mean at various times in my life. There are some who walk around wounded still. These are the o...