Mihir without Adil - part 1

I sit between a sequence of street lamps and an eternity,
digging a way through.
The mountain ranges,
widened and thickened by my wet vision.
My wet, deceptive, formulated vision,
a lifelong obsession, a frantic fixation,
spots a younger you.

Memories curled up about the ordinary.
Questions of tomorrow looming over the dark sky.

The yellow light. The flashy, the swanky, the rude yellow light.
cuts across my vision,
like an ill-mannered brat,
interrupting a conversation.
And then, on the streets that follow to a paroxysm of memories,
we survive a lethal firecracker,
we win our first Cricket match, and
we lose ourselves in the melody of Kishore,
it smells of alcohol.

Sobriety asking questions of existence.
Entangled forever in a private discussion.

Tonight, I had a long smoke,
so long that I smoked myself. I perseverate.
A cigarette. A deadly, long, poisonous, addictive cigarette.
Held by a stranger, in disguise of yours,
mixed its smoke with that of mine,
forming an unidentifiable conglomeration,
Like I am today, without you,
an incomplete phrase,
frequently used but rarely defined.

The Bombay Rock Scene and the Old Times

Two of my unfulfilled wishes in the Indian Rock scene are to see Warren Mendonsa play live with Zero and to attend a Rangbhavan I Rock. Both are nearly impossible to come true now with Warren having left the band about four years before Zero themselves called it off at I Rock-XXIII and Rangbhavan being snatched away from the Bombay rock community by the High Court.

Nonetheless, I have been pretty much in the scene for a while. I have attended I Rock at Chitrakut grounds and have seen its qualitative decrease each year with a disappointed mind. Although without Warren, I have seen Zero perform many times. I have seen myself humming songs like Psp 12" and Not My kind of girl while on my way to college, I remember myself being of the opinion that Spitleaf is a better song than Christmas in July and voicing it in public, I have seen myself becoming a fan of Zero's music and getting madly excited about the gigpad updates of their fothcoming gigs. But those were the days when Bombay ruled the rock scene in India.

We would have these frequent jam session all over the city. Raz in Juhu played a fantastic and affordable venue for all sorts of gigs with tickets ranging from zero to hundred bucks. Raz was, or maybe is, of the size of a small studio apartment, always full of smoke. Raz may have had the highest air pollution per square feet in Bombay. These gigs would start late and would generally go on till midnight. Even smaller bands in town were active and some of the big names of the country like Parikrama would be regular visitors at various shows, most importantly, I Rock and Livewire.

It's not too old a story. Locals or outsiders but bands like Zero, Parikrama, Bhayanak Maut, Brut Force, Pin Drop Violence, Vayu, HFC, Pentagram, Demonic Resurrection, Them Clones would really light up the scenes. Independence Rock, Livewire at IIT, Riot Act at SFIT, even the Malhar AM Night at Xavier's constantly brought us really talented bands and showed us then-teenagers an entirely different world of euphoria where sneaking through the security at the gate with cigarettes promised a smile, going drunk for the concerts was a law, and black was the only dress code that was followed.

Today, nothing disappoints me more than a perennially empty gig calender on gigpad. There are no good bands in Bombay. Gigs are rare and those that happen are not really gigs. They are shows at expensive places like Hard Rock Cafe and Bluefrog where college students like me can't really afford to go too often. It's not long for me to graduate now. Maybe, I'll get a job and will have the money to spend on places like those. I may even enjoy going there. But those shows will never have the charm of the old times when one could tell when the next gig is by the length of my hair, when getting free passes for these concerts was a matter of pride, and getting sloshed in a group of friends, spitting out the teenage angst and sporting the Kurt Cobain within me was all I waited for.

I shall come back soon.

Excerpts from the past - 'The Body and the Mind'

“Fuck!” he screamed tacitly. His eyes were numb and face frozen. They spoke defeat. They screamed loss. Inside of his lanky self lay a mind that had been, for years, secretly drinking tears originating at another part of his own body. It never let any other part get affected by the poisonous emotions that flowed through its indefinite shape. Over time, it had gulped down plenty of bottles of venom. It had seen pictures that seemed unintelligible but horrific. It had heard voices that howled through the dark. That tiny little mind had experienced the gloomiest of the days, and yet had bravely walked on the roads that emanated fear on every step that it took on moonless, starless and in turn, lightless nights.

In spite of all this, his mind was a plucky character. It had seen him through the most miserable of the time phases. Till now, hope was its biggest strength; its most lethal weapon of defence. But today, it had given up. Its optimism had begun to wane with repeated failures, and today, finally, it perished. It vanished as if it had fathomed its own superficial nature; as if, his mind had suddenly presented itself before reality after a long sabbatical. It had no reason to deny the fact that his optimism did not have even the slightest of a realistic touch to it.

“Hope is a pseudo concept introduced to enervate the pain of failures,” his mind uttered as the words resonated inside his body, “me and happiness are like a person and the horizon. However much he walks towards it, he is always going to find himself as away from the horizon as he ever was.” it continued, with his eyes reducing in shape and eyebrows coming closer to each other. His hands and legs remained as the thought transpired through his body. Finally, his mind had affected the other parts of his body. It had failed to quarantine them from the pain.

“Another loss!” it said. Perhaps, it was lachrymose today. It was sorry to the body that carried it, that gave it a feeling that it was alive. Helpless, as the mind looked then, it was always loyal to the body but never useful to it.

- Mihir Chitre

-3^rd March, 2008.

The Clock and the Aeroplane

An aeroplane fades in the sky against me, disappearing in the clouds, taking someone away to an unknown land. I sit like a ghost, haunting the night and haunted by self, thinking of a clock that never stops ticking. I alone see it, and imagine.

I dissolve my tears in the vapours of coffee that separate a reality from another. I sense the change in the sky at two different 2 AMs. The dot of the plane makes it more evident. It goes high and higher – where the air gets thinner and no voices are echoed – into the eternal uniformity of a placid nothingness.

The clock still ticks and its hands travel circles in their enduring but impotent attempts to measure the immensity of time. I, alone, fancy the airport and the aeroplane, half the night, and the whole of me. I look up to hear the coda of a softer sound superimposed on the louder one for the last time in my life. The two rows of eyelashes on each of my eyes are farthest as possible from one another.

The aeroplane is now transparent, and I am opaque.

The Boy of Bombay

A phone rings in Delhi. An emotion dials from Bombay. Delhi has a history of a couple of thousand years; Bombay is humble at 150. Yet, Bombay stands out like a man in a group of queers, and has all the variety that makes it the face of the modern Indian civilization.

Delhi is home to a girl, but her womanhood has the scent of Bombay. The boy walks on the byways of Bombay with a certain authority, listens to music endemic to the city, and hunts for a rhythm composed in Delhi.

Today, Bombay has everything that the boy boasts about but not the music of Delhi.