Works of RK

She would bat her eyelids constantly  As if they were sending morse codes Of the things she spoke about. The things that one misses of another Are everyday stuff, nothing momentous... Like how she enjoyed my food Or how she would allow me to make the bed I wish I could decipher In time The dots and the dashes of despair  Before silences fell over the valley And the fog of time Caved in. 

If you were to cry for long enough Your tears will sear through your skin And create puddles in your soul. And eventually,   You will misjudge the roundness of your edges To compassion and to growth.  Those are just scars Masquerading as Trophies. Stop crying.

Her birthday reminder popped up on my screen yesterday. It was close to two years since we had stopped talking to each other. There was a finality to it.   There were parts of her that I could never fathom. And in the easiest of times, I can muddle minds.  I knew it then, as I know now, that it will be many seasons before she would allow me to grow in her garden again. If ever.  I closed my eyes in a prayer. May I be protected from droughts and floods and lightning and fire and other evils of everyday living.... for I want to someday regain that lost patch of loving land in her garden.  Let there be sunshine and water and shade and care and flowers and love in her life. Until we catch up again, may the keepers of time run slow. ps: Written in early Feb of 23

I want you to look at me Like a passenger on a slow train Looking out of an iron window At an old man sitting on an unkempt Ancient wooden recliner  In the balcony  Of a tiled traditional kerala house And it is raining A really light drizzle  Misting Your memory  Of the time we shared

I was trying to make sense of the thousands of lines of code before me. They wanted me to figure out why it was sluggish.   Over the years, so many programmers had worked on this. There were so many patches and upgrades that the brilliance of the master coder had stopped shining through. There was only this much overwriting that it could accept before it turned into a zombie. I looked at the Client Account Manager. All she wanted was for the application to work. Make it work...she said. I looked at the lines, it were like stories of many characters crisscrossing through time. It was too complex and opaque. As if the meanings of these lines were now lost in time .  Allow it to die....I said. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Let it be, it cannot be worked upon anymore. It is asking for redemption. Tell the client it's over, I said. She started crying. I could see similar tears bleeding through the lines on my screen.  No difference!

I look back and I cannot see beyond a couple of days of the time that has passed by. A good memory here, a bad one there. A moment of shame, some moments of sorrow and many moments of love. If I were to count all the moments that I remember, It will still not fill the 48 years I have lived. Where did all that time go? Is it hiding in secret places in me. Are there memories in me that have stolen time from me and are now themselves lost to me? Time, so much time, and I cannot figure out where it all went! I now think I know more closely what Einstein meant when he said that time is a human experience. It is an illusion of our befuddled minds to make sense of the chaos of everyday life. When I stare at the crumpled paper on which the innings of my life is written, I see how the dots on the last line converge with the white spaces on the first line. All that is past and all that is yet to come is all enmeshed into one tapestry of intricate stories, mostly out of sequence, but ...

On a video call with Mom, I told her that I am making Sambhar, something that never really turns out the way I wish it would. I am accustomed to having Mom's version of the Sambhar since childhood. It's taste is imprinted in places where I have no access to. The tongue knows when something is off. Sambhar is a complex dish. It is not like a plum cake or a bread, or even Avial, where, eventually, the grated coconut and coconut oil evens out all the other tastes and brings them to a consensus. Sambhar is complex. The ladies fingers have to be slightly sauteed, else they disintegrate into the ocean that is Sambhar, and you can see that they existed once in the little seeds twinkling here and there. The Drum Sticks have to be just right, else they stand out. Drum sticks have to bend to the will of the greater cause that is Sambhar, but not break. Then there is the coriander powder and the Fenugreek Powder, and the asafoetida chunks that should melt entirely, else they raise hell in...