Ishan

Ishan,

I have seen you create demons and angles out of the atomic blanket of atmosphere,

Seen you talk for hours in perfectly structured sentences without making sense to the surrounding,

Seen you running for your life ducking in alleyways, dodging vibes, light, WiFi signals and rainbows.  

Seen you create castles and no-man's lands of your ideas and thoughts, packed neatly in an immobile montage of insanity.

And I am proud of you.

Ishan you,

a fissure in the cosmic, brought down to the galactic, then rendered earthly, your craving for that extra activity in brain cells is not unjustified.

A thinking man's Prophet Mohammad, a sensitive man's Jesus Christ, just before their deification, parting packets of wisdom, which no one understands.

A four billion year old bacterium, collapsing into itself with every new life, shouting obscenities in the face of its own understanding, is finally evolved enough to frame questions to her own existence.

And what have they done to you?

I know the voices you hear are real.

I know you are the next messenger on an earthly recce,

I know you know, it is all going to end.

I know you fear not death, but oblivion,

I know you are here to solve the cosmic puzzle,

I know you are here to save us,

But, we have already locked you up.

Ishan,

We have seen the fabric of time and space, all bundled up like a crumpled bed sheet, overlapping, merging, extending and going round and round at the same time.

We know what is real and what is not, we know we cant talk in absolutes, never a fixed amount of dead cells left our body,  as humans we are bound by perception, not even causality.

We have seen ourselves sitting smoking in a cafe, through a Google Earth sort-of-view, the horizon of rooftops giving way to city connected by roads to hinterlands.

We have seen ourselves from the Moon, from the Sun, through Mercury and through Venus. We have seen every one from a distance of a thousand light years, living their irrelevant lives.

We have felt the hum of the universe reach us, the slow rumble of the divine dynamo,  before anyone told us of Om or CMBR.  

We have seen the tail end of things and thought, "What went by?" just to forget about it before it went by again.

Ishan,

I know what you are thinking is right.

I know you are working backwards from a plausible answer.

I know you are pissed off

I know you are not at peace.

I know, they know that you are losing it.

Ishan, a name, an identity, an authorization code,

I am with you in Vimhans,

where your serum swollen

                       veins have turned                           you into a vegetable.

I am with you in IHBAS,

where your head hums with the
latest doze of ECT.

I am with you in AIIMS,

where your bed hurts and you 

munch meds more than food.

I am with you in Apollo,

 where they are working 

                  night-shifts to make you forget                     everything,every feeling.

                                                                   

I am with you in RML,  

as you lie curled up in your bed,

 distort,distant and paralyzed.   

I am with you in Max,  

where the needle hurts not because 

it pricks but because it is followed
by a darkness that can never be measured

    on a clock or a calendar. 

I am with you in those pale dusty dawns,
when you are all alone between

gathered chorus of oxide-in, dioxide-out,
and feel hollow and
truncated.

I am with you in those compulsory garden strolls,

               where the trees don't  speak to you, as                      they did a week before, while your vigilant mother 
provides a background score to soothe your numb mind. 

I am with you in every room, cabin, canteen, hallway,

where you'd probably need me, as 
they try to calm you down, slow

you down, put you down, and don't let

them convince you otherwise.

Ishan,

In the absence of activity there is an activity nonetheless,

Between vocal chords changing their dance move to produce another sound, there is no silence.

The space between the alphabets of a word is not empty. 

The period between breathe in and exhale is not breathless.

Between synapses and the jumping neurological signals there isn't a nullified gap.

Ishan in that place of chaos and nothing, you and me are the same, diffused and  amalgamated, inseparable like two atoms of hydrogen, two grains of pollen, chromosomes in a cell nucleus.

And Ishan, there, I will always wait with you, for you.   

Reflections

Silence

As the dusk dawned on the city and the punishing sun receded behind the wall of rooftops, leaving just enough light to make things visible to the naked eye, a sudden coolness descended on the city and Johar, like always, went and stood on his balcony. Every evening of this summer, Johar has spent more or less standing on the same spot, watching the blue sky turn darker, into deeper shades till becoming a complete black, and also, Mira, granddaughter of his newly moved, across the gali, old couple. 
Mira, a dark, shy little creature of 16, has in turn, done the same since the night after her family moved into the new house. Every evening as the flushed white sky turned from a royal blue to pitch black in color, she, standing on the balcony has been watching the million little stars twinkling innocently in the sky and the boy across the gali.
Every evening from that first evening, when Johar had seen her, from his balcony standing alone on hers, across the road, they had been coming to the same spot regularly, waving, smiling, gesturing at each other. But never did a word leave their mouth, never did a sound got across the gali.
Johar would wave his hand, beaming, and Mira would lift a limp hand, a pink blush evident on her young face, and within that gesture, Johar would guess that something was wrong and jumping his eyebrows twice slowly, lift his head too and she would slowly turn her dark eyes along with her round face to the other side. Again it would be enough for Johar to know that she was feeling lonely in the new city and he would quickly bring a broad smile on his face and gesture to come to her, at which, arching her eyebrows Mira would shake her head in negative and Johar would look deep into her eyes, and nod once knowingly, closing his eyes for a good second. And by then the sky would turn completely dark and hearing her name being shouted from inside, Mira would rush in, waving, again, the same limp hand at Johar, who would look at her with dreamy eyes.
Every evening the same thing passed, the two across the door neighbors would come to their balconies and do their silent romance, which had every component of a good romance, except sound. But then, one evening, as the bright summer was turning into a golden autumn and the trees had started shedding their dry brown leaves, Johar found Mira`s balcony vacant. Mira wasn`t anywhere to be seen. Not the next day, not even the other or the one after that, and when the day after that too, Johar was greeted by empty sleeping walls, he could not control himself anymore. Running down the steps, he unsteadily crossed the road and with calm, controlled, measured steps climbed the steps of Mira`s house, on the second floor of the building. He knocked at the door thrice, hesitatingly and it was opened by an old woman with, velvety wrinkled skin, and lead straight into a hall, where on an old red sofa, sat an old bearded man, next to her sat Mira, with a terrified look in her eyes. Johar slowly walked up to the old man and using his whole body but not making a sound gestured, which the old man rightly understood as the boy`s desire to talk to the girl. 'Haan beta' he said, noticing the palpable discomfort on his face. Mira in turn, not making a sound, nor hearing any, understood, from the look on Johar`s face and his fidgety hand movements, that he felt uneasy and how much the same he was making her feel.
Like every rejection, that precedes a heart break, this rejection and its subsequent heart break too had all the components of a perfect sad situation, expect sound. As the various colors of the setting sun danced in the sky, Mira gestured Johar to leave.