Clouded in

Ruddy faces, gossip, ale or mead, stormy night: content, complacency, a chuckle of delight and suspense, spice of fear, mud clinging without, thunder beating around brick mansions, trellising ivy. Content or complacency? One is begotten from hard work or easy conscience, the other begets idleness and uneasy conscience. Which one do the listeners to the fireplace tales carry in their breasts? How do they sleep and on what their dreams grist and glisten?

Tomorrow, the clouds will roll away, buds will burst forth from the earth, and no one to toil them, nor to gather their embrace. For here, now, in the black night, that night so well and so profusely punctuated by electric strikes, in that fathomless pit, which farmer and baker both dread, the peeping faces from hanging pots, from rough wooden beams, from every thud of an empty tankard waiting to be filled, all those hideous and angelic faces peer at you and grow within you, as rain and fog smuggle to your soul though you may well believe yourself well sheltered.

There is no song, nor battlecry, nor revelry even. There is but the tale, told in a crackling voice, with gasps of those who listen as rejoinders, and an occasional "Eh?", a "Say you so?", a perfunctory call for a drink more, a distrustfully friendly nudge to your nervous neighbour. The old man in the centre keeps spinning, prolonging for not mere better effect, but his own better enjoyment. His is not the 15 seconds of fame, but of every such night when they demand him, and those others when they recall those words even if far away from his yarn. Yes, for that is how intelligence gleams, first in shadowed tapestries, gleaming in chinks, not as splendid suns of the glorious blue sky. But then, it is up to each man, what path he chooses: content or complacency?

The old man will keep going.

(inspired by Dickens)

auto destruction

When beds are emptied,
sarongs are dried out,
beaches are swept and scorching sun is bottled,
after that, in the dark,
the genie comes out, the zombie, the monster,

the genius,

shaped by the monolithic fun,
the unbearable lightness of a sunny Sunday.

आशा-भ्रम

मेरे मन को मैने फूल समझा,
हर डग लिया महक की ख्वाइश में,
पर मालूम क्या था, छुपते हैं बलों में
ज़िंदगी के सात सबेरे, ख़्वाबों की सिमटन में,

वे आते हैं बिन-बुलाए, दूर-अदूर से
रिश्ता जोड़ते हुए एक पल में ऐसा,
कि बरसों की धूल मैं करता हूँ बरामद,
जैसे हुई हो चकनाचूर रात भर ऐ ओस,

एक कटु व्यंग्य, एक मत में खोई नज़र,
मैं-मैं का मात्र वह एक लघु अस्त्र
निकले जो क्षय-ग्रस्त स्वभाव से, निरुद्देश्य,
पर मुझे याद दिलाए, खिलने का मौसम था ही नहीं|

the researchers, the scavengers

A couple of years back or less, I witnessed a very disturbing scene: some field researchers, who had talked over the past three days a lot of poverty of people, decried castes and had vociferously let everyone known that they had very well subscribed to Western vacuity of intellect, sat down, at the end of their workshop, for a very expensive dinner, drinking Indian wine that costed at least 700 Indian rupees per glass or beer, and eating pastas at 300 rupees plus.** Some months back, I assisted a French director in finalizing her documentary's subtitles: she was making it on Indian pollution and healthcare system. When she realized that the guy interviewed was not critical of the government in some of the portions she had shot in India, she just decided to remove them: that wouldn't suit her documentary, after all. I know that no photo, no film is objective: but I thought that it was because of our subconscious dictating, guiding, not our conscious self. In the past couple of months, I have, not very willingly, come into contact with the esoteric, self-congratulating circles of researchers: they go on some itinerary of six months in remote Indian villages, interpret everything through their lens and triumphantly pronounce those results, "building on" past work: for to be considered as an academic, they have to reference, and qualify each of their statements - no, not with feeling, not with emotion, not with intuition - but with previous similarly jaundiced eyes and their visions. They sit so smugly around a table: when they discuss Kabir, they always remind me of the doctor's receptionist. The doctor's receptionist always gives herself so much airs: as if she were wielding the stethoscope, not the guy within. (Some may sniff sexism here: the receptionist is a woman, the doctor is a guy. They can join the other smug ones round that table.) And the doctor himself, Kabir, so humble himself, all absorbed in his craft.

But receptionists do not have much of a value except for a patient to skip a queue. However, academics, unfortunately, do. These receptionists guide people's stereotypes about places and peoples: always pretending to be objective. But I would much love to listen to a song, from heart and so subjective, than to a typewriter, so objective, isn't it? They are bored, they feed on tea and cakes, they flatter you and expect to be flattered, and rarely they get a bone to pick with some other smug companion, and then both tear into each other, while the rest of the world celebrates their "rivalry". I sometimes wonder, during one of their theses or lectures or whatever: can a child speak, interrupt, sing, shout, play? If she cannot, then is it worthwhile, meaningful?

Note: Not all researchers are like that. But many are.

** I was to learn later, through living in the West, that there should have been nothing shocking: that they were thoroughly Westernized (through Indian educational system). The traditional Western culture, a product of Christian Church mentality, has led to people wearing garbs: to put it in more understandable terms, if you have seen Ben Hur, Pontius Pilate admonishes Ben Hur (Heston) that I speak to you as a friend, but once I cross those stairs, I command you as a governor. The same man: two different garbs. This is practically implemented in France: for example, people cannot wear religious symbols to government work, so a professor can wear a turban at home but not to university. Slip off your religion dress; wear the state dress now. More importantly, people's beliefs are taken to be something as "slip-off-able". And hence the story of almost every Western philosopher: they spin esoteric, incomprehensible philosophies at the debating desk, and then they return to their life of philandering and bitching. Hence the Rushdies of this world: write bad, popular prose, then return to lust after women as horrible as that prose.

the closed world of intertextuality

paper was flying, words as well,
when I last stood by the sea.
I was alone, the breeze did not last
and a smile played on incipient moon's
face. Wicked drop
of abandon, of freedom.

You sit on the rock, the waves lash,
waiting for a being to cross the sea,
walking on water in age of cynicism,
and you stay, , but you stay,
as revelation is lost
amidst throes of reason.

While descends a pall of wisdom
deep into soul, blotted into
as guilt and as sin,
while stone transforms to Creator,
and new eggs are laid to turn to wood,
Kristeva fills minds of men, of women.

You wait in a checked shirt, blue jeans,
Looking at that dibbly-dobbly vessel,
as if you should sleep while He comes;
But you prefer so, for waiting is better
than conversing with flies feasting on the dead,
for You remain the last one to see the Rhino.

a European life

Elephants stomp around me. The earth shakes, cigarettes burn and smells of blood and meat pervade the air. Life's circle is complete in this very life itself: after sex, there is nothing but the next day. After the next day, there is nothing but death. After death, there is nothing. In this life are stalls. Stalls of marvellous things, but so many that I don't know which stall to look into. I am a slave of choices. When I will get tired of one choice, then I will betake myself to another stall, another set of wares. Everyone is a merchant. Everyone is on display or is the displayer. Nothing is outside of the shopwindows. Everything is reduced to a rational minimum. Everything, you and me, mine and yours, and the unknown, everything is encompassed by it. Nothing is unknown, though it may not be known. For every unknown, there will be a known reason. For every reason, there will be a wealth of information. That most essential ware, that priceless commodity. Everyone sells it, everyone buys it. Your heart has become a papier mâché of all this talk. Silence is nowhere, except in resistance. Sometimes, a cigarette butt will scorch some portion of this collage covering your spirit, and then suddenly you will feel a corner of sky peeping in at your soul. For a moment. Before the next raucous, drunk laughs of liberty and equality will drown out that, maybe for ever. You never know. I spend meaningless days on end, thirsty for Your one drop of love.

तू प्यार का सागर है

तेरी एक बूँद के प्यासे हम

no Other – paramatma – at home, but not

I got my answer of long time this morning: of what I used to feel missing when I lived in France. I was dropping two stranger boys to a bus stop who had put their hand up and asked me for a lift: could I have imagined that scenario in day-to-day city life of France? Often, I give and I see giving people lifts (rides, to go back to standard English) in India: it's normal to ask, it's normal to give. It exists more of a birthright than any swarajya: the other person  is going that way, so why won't he? so why shouldn't I? so what's the issue at all?

When I stop at traffic jams, I often talk to the people waiting next to me - in spite of the language barrier. Today I asked the guy waiting at a train crossing like me that where did that bus go (its number was strange, and I hadn't ever seen that number). He offered an answer - it looked to me an invented one, since in India we seldom like to say that we don't know, but maybe his answer was correct; that's not to the point - and then both of us discussed buses - green, red, different numbering schemes, etc. The train came only in another five minutes, so I had plenty time to learn more. As the train barrier rose, we finally broke our conversations (yeah, without any "bye," just like I had directly asked him the question without any "ahem" even, forget a "hello"): and we went our ways.

I don't have to go to Hindu philosophy to feel the paramatma ("supreme soul" shared by all): I can already experience it in India. Is it Hindu thought? A common background of difficult conditions and poverty? But then India was the golden bird: merchants of India have been there since time immemorial the richest and the shrewdest, so it can surely be not the poverty? What is it in this land that does not have a bonjour - not because we are rude, but because one doesn't say bonjour to oneself (with increasing narcissization, I guess though we are already there): because there is no feeling about otherness about any other. All Lacans and Foucaults fall flat on their faces in this land: there neither is nor is not the Other, an Other, Other. There simply is life. There simply is the temporary abode of soul: the inn where we stay. Some people ask for proofs of God and soul: I wonder if those same people ask for proofs of life when they go to watch theatre. Thankfully, this infantile state of mind is already not much to be seen in the land of lands: because we live our thoughts and thought systems. We act like children of the earth.

often

Rain has filled those sunken footprints,
Now, water shall seep inside like
Pain does, to every pocket of air.

one inch, two inch

You go on,
go on. the sky, the wind bleached,
nude sand and few palms. as the smiles
unwind, you
go on till eternity. like in mother's lap.
the moon will twinkle like silent sentry,
the night will spread like ink on dark hands.
the blood shall sputter with names in incantations,
the cars shall overtake yours, life you could've grasped.
If you had wanted to.
The fireflies you will mistake for muse, each one.
The dew-soaked bamboo for forest of fire.
Thus in darkness you find deception, in darkness enlightening.
squalls of flying squirrels shall be music,
the roar of the hidden cascade your guide.
you search but a corner to lay on, a mound to call your own,
you want but an hour where they claim you, where you are owned.
you own, to be owned; you pretend owned, to own;
you walk, to move; you move, to stay.
and thus you go, on.

Till the morning comes and vast swathes of oceans burst forth,
and you are in the middle, and the gulls are far.
There is but sun and the silent ocean, there is but drowning and the peace,
of a battle lost, a soul won.

Unheard shrieks

Prayers mumble out in quick succession,
Breaths whispering death among black cowls, blackened skies,
Before blood and piss rise in holy chant, and the wizened babies kiss each other's butts.

untitled

blue air resides often where i stand, watching from under the hazy spires of Bonn. clocks run, watches are timed, and in a matter of minutes people are lined outside the gents' toilet. outside we make sense of nonsense and chip away at the nose of Donatello. amidst flying colours and spread words, in the patch of humanity melts and touches arms. like gum and gold, the sequinned wear sparkles from where you look at but has no consistency.
amidst the languages, i will stamp my hand in the red soil, i will brand it on the wall of a house, my home?, and i will look scorningly at the sun. life is here. come down, you, get off your high horse. in every smile and tear, in the rolled up pants.
home is where my foot crosses, river and ford, jungle and terrace. Tea and berries.

How we understand the billion destinies, to shut out the billion-and-oneth

Or: the seemingly endless process of creating a repository, yet at the very start of which we set parameters for what shall be entered into it?

I could start with simple, reductionist analogies: the world is obsessed with digital and MP3. Yet the first one only means greater control (as of yet), not the richness of an analog content; the second one only means less hogging of memory resources, again not the richness of a WAV file. A computer programmer often creates a look-up table when instead of a binary logic applying to things, there is a particular case for a particular instance: the programming is only done for when and how to access the lookup table, and whether it's a dynamic or static table; whether it may grow or not; and when it grows, what will be the maximum limit before you start removing something, having an overrun? The last question is a crucial question: because every human being is a new story with the richness of his and her world; my experience is not yours, and if you have simulated mine, then you still haven't simulated as yet my daughter's. Or the one that I have not yet experienced.

What is thirst?

I have often grappled with the question and so have many. How to define it? By the words, that you feel parched? By coming up with magic Orwellian words that will tell everyone what does it mean: I wonder what will the thousand words for "love" will be if it comes to that stage of lingual foliation? By the exact knowledge of what chemicals get produced where and which impulses do those chemicals "fire"? Or, dismiss the question saying that it is merely a play-acting, a dream, that no real thirst exists, that it is either a figment of my imagination or Brahma's dream, that I know thirst by imagining it to be real and thus I know thirst - the advaita oneness? Do I? I do not want to define the sensations: I want to know what's that feeling, which if I am thirsty only then I may know (and if in my imagination, then how in my imagination that particular feeling: can I imagine how does a dog feel thirsty?). Objectifying thirst yes does give me great knowledge: knowledge that may help me preventing thirst in someone, that may help me inducing thirst in someone else, that may help me varying its degrees, that may help me play with it just as I can use my computer without understanding the bus cables in it. Will knowing all the signals be actually the knowledge, and thus make it redundant whether I experience thirst or not in life?

Daniel Dennett says, yes. Mary is the omniscient being. Or, RoboMary is the omniscient "someone." She knows what happens to other robots when they see red and thus she knows what will happen to her, by which I assume that she already has perfect knowledge of herself is what Dennett is implying. Or, rather, she doesn't need to know: her brain's simulation acts like a controlled input A and seeing red is another input B (again controlled, because she knows the results on other robots); however, the output is as yet unknown - she will only "know" it once the simulations of her brain and seeing red are run. The following questions arise:

1. The omniscient being is someone who already knows everything. RoboMary can only know about her reaction on seeing red after doing the equivalent of seeing red - running a red-seeing simulation. She cannot anticipate it; she has no way of knowing beforehand what will it be on encountering red. Doesn't contact with red give knowledge hitherto hidden to RoboMary?

2. Imagine Mary whose brain is implanted with RoboMary. Without ever encountering red, if she somehow can imagine red, she will then have the emotions of experiencing red. The crucial question is how will she imagine red? RoboMary will simply process the wavelength info of red color and thus without even knowing what red looks like, Mary may have a gamut of emotions that she would have experienced on actually seeing red with Mary's brain.

Right? Or, is there a catch? RoboMary does run simulations based on Mary's brain but the other input is all the reactions of all other people/robots. Is the output actually reflectant of Mary's brain? If 100 people did this and that with such and such elements in their brains with the red color, Mary with her particular brain should experience all this. The question is: how many people will be the deciding factor? 1000? One crore? One billion?

What Dennett does is to discount the possibility of a wider template than whatever is the number of robots RoboMary is feeding upon: or can humans with new combinations of chemicals and post-modifications of those chemicals given conditions, surroundings, etc., be not born? A billion human beings may be recorded, but who is to say that the billion-and-oneth will not have any element new (and then who is to determine if that information might not have been crucial to determining Mary's state on seeing red?); in a blind race to objectify experience, and human experience, why are we forgetting that we never created the world (even if a Creator didn't) and that we do not know what life is, what thirst is? The billion-and-oneth might yet be different: but, ah, yes, given the growing controls on me, it will be much more difficult to produce anything but my clone or my neighbour's clone.

Move on, Berni!

days of colds

Today was slow. Sometimes I become slow. Everything gets blocked with mucus and the air beats me as it does every other object. Amidst the discussions, the laughter, the zeal to do something, amidst it all there are moments when I feel the earth has become a map. I wonder if I were to say this to anyone, would I be looked at as if I'm crazy? But it does feel so. The finger moves to trace the Arctic Circumpolar and in a moment all the people struggling with identities, love, recognition, the meaning of life, a great sorrow, a sharp event, a prolonged circumstance, the people elated after winning applause, having scored well, something to look forward to, the people busy in spinning stories, teaching new mysteries, researching new methods of saving lives, trying to solve an obscure village's very real problems, and those people who roam about in guises but do nothing, who want to do so much but cannot be true, who will even destroy life rather than create even a mere clay statue: in prairies and meadows, in mountains where snow falls for the whole winter, sitting and watching from windows of havelis where the road marches by every day but their lives don't move on, in aeroplanes where live moves on so fast that it has become again stationary, and in thoughts that fly faster, that connect and spring from books and music, that immortalise because they cross the time. But then this is the world that my heart beats for, the world of good and bad, true and false, of reason and unreason, of rationality and irrationality, of kiss and slap, of procreation and murder. And the world becomes a map, a sheet of paper on which I dream, my elbows dream.

What's tangible? Whom to believe? Where to rest? What to achieve? Then I remember the hound that roamed the moors. Then I recall how sharply etched in my mind are the silent smoke curls going up in the air of the unseen silhouette of the thief prowling on the roof. I remember how people not just fight for honour and ethics, but rather there is more to life: I remember there is love. I remember there is the instinct of love and goodness, like when the man tries to save a little dog just when the firing practice is to take place and he loses his sight as a result. He does save the dog. I also remember that modern science will try to explain away his action as if it's something not otherwise acceptable at all; I of course know humanity doesn't save dogs and lose eye sights and hence it's a thing worth investigation. I remember the lakes that shimmer in glinting winter sunlight and give joy to a child's heart. I remember belief and the childlike joy in it and how the grasshopper sits on blank white walls every night and the child looks on with wonder and fear and fascination, as if the grasshopper is the god. He's still to learn the god by name, because that is the role of the world to teach him that and to then make him obey a thousand things (or to disobey); but he's already known God for once, the green lanky insect with an antenna like a fisherman's rod to someone who has not seen fishing.

I am slow today. I can't even remember what's spit in French. Outside there is a world that is debating vehemently about unemployment figures and for hours they are debating and for hours they are. They look at me; either they want another wise opinion or they want me to make myself scarce. I want neither; I don't want them. But, there is my map spread out on the table, and there are these people also in it. Some make music, draw paintings, write books, and play a new part; but mostly all they do is just make noises, noises. Noises tire me; I love silences. Or dialogues. Sometimes when I fold the paper, it crackles: everyone has a world, so rich a world. Why do they have to make noises, I realise? I don't know, probably will never. It doesn't always matter, not when I am not slow. I have loved, and I may live. Sometimes remembering the shiver that that hound sent down my spine; isn't that the thrill of life and the love I have loved with?

Let them make merry

I went through gnarled walnut trees
eaten by care and worry, with useless fight
to survive; when I sang to them, they wept.

A Christmas gift

the wooden sparrow
will fall and break
into pieces.
and then you will cry,
but the hands that made one
will make another.
the tree of life,

can it die? can it rot?

what matters: do you want to buy another?
the new carving, the new wood,
another smell; a story of nights spent dreaming of you
and yet you be the unknown; but you are the mind
my soul, the woodartist's goddess
and the human he has sought to know always;

and sometimes, all the toys will come
with labels and stickers, with price tags
and yet where is that wooden device which was made for tales
which wants warm hands, and does not want to be bought;
yes, it will be difficult to find it,
and yes, you will want to touch it, you will want to touch the wood

from the tree of life.

untitled

soon the birds fly away
and settle on branches, everywhere on the island
their raucous cries, their steady perches
and how they are slotted; to be a bird,
the definition is have wings and build nest.
and keep flapping those wings.

The Story & The Idea

You asked me, isn't a novel an idea carried through its whole span using fictional characters? Yes; I ask you in return, isn't the expression of a man in itself always the venting forth of their ideas that they have carried all throughout life, that somehow they want to understand through the written word? Doesn't, when one expresses, isn't it without object at first? Don't I sing to myself? And when I write, it is as if something that I was not able to concentrate upon, something I was missing, by those words that will queue up in my brain and get written on the paper; as if something external to me resides in me, and is actually not external, and yet with whom I often remain unacquainted. But should the expression seek an object - in which case I call it propaganda; when a singer's sole objective is to give a concert, I equate it to a propaganda, but when she can give a concert and yet each time lose herself in the beauty she is creating, yes she's singing - or should the expression burst forth because it had to, because there is no reason except survival, except shrieking in the deep woods? Shouldn't the expression be free, carefree? So, everything is an idea carried forth, each expression: but when tempered by the discipline so that that expression is intelligible, that the shriek becomes a voice, the freedom becomes liberty, the idea becomes more than that: a work of art.

I don't agree with a lot of what Rand says, so maybe I could be biased; so I will take an author I love: Dostoyevsky. His novels were always not quite "well-structured," as he had a lot to say, his primary objective was his ideas, carried through diverse characters; in fact, just as with many other authors (including Rand's), most of his characters are kind of repetitions, though in Dostyoevsky's case sometimes the gradations are steep: Stavrogin is a horrific form of (pre-Sonya) Raskolnikov, with Ivan Karamazov somewhere in the middle in that evolutionary period. If ideas were the only criteria, then "The Devils" would be the best Dostoyevskyan novel for me: and not just ideas, but characters like those of Stavrogin and Shatov are strongly etched on my mind for ever. The former is a brilliantly conceived precursor of all that was to come to the world in the twentieth centuty: the fragmented, anarchist man. Stavrogin can rape a girl and yet not feel any guilt about it; the reason is not a mere "he's cruel," maybe he's not that - it's that things have become meaningless to him; ideas, beliefs, the world, the people. Everything's "egal" to him: c'est egal. Things are meaningless, he's tired, and he tries to live with the games he could indulge in. He's intelligent, sharp, brilliant - and he's tired. Ivan is still one step behind: things are becoming meaningless to him, because is there an answer to his question why an eight-year-old girl is shut by her mother in the middle of a winter night in a latrine for bedwetting? The "middle", the "winter", even the "latrine", and even the "shut" are in fact just peripheral, sensational details: the question is the reaction to the bedwetting. And, yet, as he cannot understand Alyosha and his love - and yet Alyosha is also searching for meanings, he also has none, he also is tired, but probably the only difference is that he's not lost hope to find them, or that they even exist - as he cannot understand that, he's still a step behind.

But, "The Devils" is a mass of brilliant ideas, that Dostoyevsky has desperately tried to fashion into a novel, but has miserably failed. For me, it remains one of my favorite novels, but that does not mean I can recommend it as a novel to anyone else. Can everything be a collage? The characters, the plot - they also mean as much, and more; suspension of belief is fine, but the alternative world in which now we're existing - because a complete suspension is never possible; I think, I exist - should also be believable. I wonder if you've seen any of the artwork by Salvador Dali, or his films: they're brilliant, I am in awe of the genius of the man, and yet they horrify me as much as Stavrogin did. Of course, you can put it all down to my old mad belief in meanings, that they exist, and my continual striving for them; but, if even the music is mathematical, and every single leaf in nature, even after all the mutations, has a pattern to it behind, how can I deny those meanings? I wouldn't even go so far: I ask you, if the other can touch you, how can meanings not exist? Meanings are maybe gained and lost, but as regarding existence, they do exist for me.

wet days

Flames: how they dance! What are you thinking, feeling, tasting? I wonder if I should have ever tried to learn knitting: to learn seems very heavy, but I might love it if I could learn it without investing time in it. For an hour when it's raining outside, I would like to knit absent-mindedly, thinking of things and thinking of songs and thinking of the night moon and thinking of what all am I and thinking of how there are yet thousands of steps to be taken and thinking of how I would love to take each step even if difficult or even if easy but all for me for that is life, and thinking of times that slide into each other when nothing happens but those other times when things seem to happen, and yet I wonder isn't something happening always?

They say let go. They say hold on. Crazy. I don't know why people are so full of advises. Let me live, let me love. I am not anyone else, I am myself. I love because I love, and I live because I love. Why do they want meaning to my life, to my every word, to my acts, to anything? No success matters, no failure matters; there is the myself that is precious. Yes I love; and that is sacred. Not preserved, mummified sacred. But my day-to-day life, my every morning, my wonder, my breathless excitement. My every achievement and every failure - each something, not because of how they see me, of how they talk of me - but simply because each an expression, a discovery, a knowledge. Of me, of you, of life.

today

The day started rainy, muddy, wrapped up in laziness, asking for hot tea. By the time it was noon, the sun was pouring in and the buses were dry and empty; the heat had become scorching. And when the turn came for late afternoon, once again the clouds had canopied the sky from rim to rim, and after a blast of ten minutes of heavy rain, once again all was rainy, muddy, and asking for a long walk where I can soil my trousers, make them frayed with all hues of dirt, count the number of needle like rain drops still left in the breeze entering my hair, touching my face, wanting to know me.

Long exposures

The clouds are everywhere; it is like a rippled, pockmarked sky. Bright teeth, dark eyes. In sheets the rain comes and goes, the umbrellas fly about, the red and golden ring breathes some fog on the glass. I dream of a beautiful shy girl with lipstick, in a demure drawing room, waiting for her lover to come (he's supposed to be in a car), and the wet afternoon dulling itself into a gilded evening. With what? Maybe a comfortable dinner on his knees, a tight sleep in his arms. I laugh to myself, and drive further on: there is only paddy and paddy around me, and there is this thin long road, going up into the sea. It feels that all are waiting for me, everybody is silent so I can come up, and then they burst up into applause, into drums and cymbals. I think of her rainwashed hair and dream of a tea shop: a German tourist lands up there, and a bit awed, a bit afraid, a bit adventurous, she asks for cigarettes. The shopkeeper stares, there is only one another dog there, who sleeps there and prowls there; the woman brings up the warmth in her, makes her arms close together, and an impression registers in her brain. She would remember the tea shop on this rainy evening all her life. There is something about it she didn't know about life: the simplicity of it all, the beauty in it. The cigarette glows like embers. And now the wipers go a little awry, and I have to reach out my hands, and swear to myself. All will be flooded soon, and I must be on my way, on my way. I reach her: like wind, she touches you and yet is not yours; like the sea, she comes again and again, but yet keeps a soul to herself, her own silences and sounds. I can only kiss her, and she can only kiss me; we may only love.