// eight // nine

there's this man i know who lives in a large flat, across the park with the white temple-flower trees and the water pump house with red bricks. he's got the place on a one-year lease, he says, when i walk him to the park in the evening, and though i say yes, i don't believe him.

it's been a week now, since he hired me to write his letters, but he doesn't begin. he says he'd messed up something, back in the old days, when he could remember the words and the names still, when there were people he knew, the women and more, and he pulls at a broken button near his belly and says, when i was not quite so, quite so alone

in delhi

and there - between the park and the flat with no number, he is drifting in want.

i can tell by the urgency in his eyes, by the way his hands shake, by the mark left around his weakened wrists where his old gold watch does not fit anymore, by his lean long fingers where there was something once. a ring, perhaps.

it was the first evening of june, and he stood at the window, glaring at the corner sky over the rooftops blackening, heavy, a hundred lusting elephants.

// twenty-two // twenty-three

Arvind Joshi is a city poet. His city is Delhi. Whatever he writes: verse, stories, plays, novellas, he writes as a city poet. He works in English and in various dialects of Hindi.

He has been writing in the playroom since he was eight, and outside the playroom since 1990. He has published an anthology of Hindi poems, "Main Astronaut Hun" and an anthology of early English poems "Songs from Delhi".

lettersinmonsoon

Letters in Monsoon is a collection of letters. The letters are of love, longing and remembrances dictated during the monsoon, by an old man who can barely remember his past.

The work is in the form of prose and verse poems, structured and based on Kalidas' Sanskrit classic Meghdootam. This is not a translation.

Letters in Monsoon is divided into two books: ‘Before the Rains’ and ‘When it Rains’.

The parts published here are from ‘Before the Rains’.

/ V /

1.

2.

// thirty-eight // thirty-nine

hey say that when your body, your physical body that is, explodes, it disintegrates into microscopic pieces of flesh and bone with flecks of blood binding them together. The visual effect it creates, I hear, is quite spectacular. It’s like squinting through a sheer veil, like a muslin cloth hung on the wire to dry through which the sunlight looks hazy. It’s like seeing through eyes shrouded by tears. The effect apparently, is like pink mist that envelops the bystander.

Gold D

ust Pink Mist

Paromaand is based in Bombay (not Mumbai). She is currently obsessed with how cities change form and how that is a macrocosm of how people change.

ldG MMis

MMMttt

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DDDDuDD

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DDD

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PPPPPPPPPPPP

// forty-eight // forty-nine

several hundred people. Did I mention she has a voice of an angel? She volunteered for this same film fest for two out of three days (the second day going instead to help with a youth community center's opening), so excited to finally be old enough to join in and volunteer, as her Mamas had for years. She insists on going early and alone to LBT fitness events if we, the Mamas, can't manage being on time (we can't, predictably, if I choose to go). We have breakfast and dinner as a family every day, mostly because between her classes, internship and volunteering, there's not a lot of time to see her. And she reads to her grandmother four times a week.

We are proud Mamas.

Rosabel's beautiful soul is a testimony to what acceptance and truth can do for our own characters and development if we are open to understanding one another, not as we should be, but as we truly are.

This understanding has brought with it a deep serenity

foundation to our home of gypsy hearts that met in desert

counted on the strength of our convictions as we resubmitted the visa application with more paperwork, and written statements about vegetarian beliefs and King Ashoka, current philosophical thoughts of Rosabel, and of her being hostage to a non-custodial parent in a foreign land. We held our breath.

And her visa was approved. Her family, a myriad of lesbian aunties and gay uncles, blood tied aunties and uncles, international friends and even mere acquaintances,

that Rosabel has so very much to say and do, such potential and such love to share. It is time to see her shine.

Rosabel will start a triple major in June. As we wait to return to India, we count the ways in which we will be happy to be home, and Mamasita calls daily to let us know how our community, our ‘framily’ (friends and family, in one convenient package), and our TV shows are doing. We spend the time left more calmly now, picking out gifts for Mamasita, in our last few days in this country that is our birthright, but only one of two homes, for India is where we have come to belong.

Now that Rosabel is truly free from the threat of being taken away from us again, we are filled with the joy of success. Rosabel wants to buy a scooter. I want to buy a new refrigerator. Mamasita wants us to hurry up already, and

Our lives become the property of others, if our happiness is based on others' approval. Our lives are our own, and it is our own responsibility to choose to share it with those that want and enjoy being a part of our family and extended circles. All of us count our choices and our triumphs in solemn yet hopeful grace for the imminent release of our two little girls and their safe return to our little home.

T

/ VIII /

// fifty-six // fifty-seven

He couldmake a suckin thebathroomchange orientations,a sleep-overthe only desireyou wouldever have.

This was the twenty second year running since our acquaintance and yet the decades had not waned Roy, though if you looked hard you could sense a certain diminishing. Back in college, he came up with the smartest repartees, the most apposite words, the best lines. And then, one day, he disappeared. In his absence, he soared to greater heights; his anecdotes became lore, his life an epic. Every now and then some bits of information seeped into our conversations, colonising our evenings and after- party reflections. Some said he was with a girl who spoke very little, a tall Amazon with an ass to remember. Then there were phone calls which friends got from strange numbers, voices threatening consequences, complaining of money not paid, from fathers whose sons were caught frottaging in parks.

The years caught up with most of us. Rajiv went ahead and died on us while driving back from Darjeeling with his wife and daughter, Sandeep wrote some books on South-East Asia, Raja grew a beard and broke into the New York art scene as a minor curator, and Bagi got his father’s post in the State bank after his old man died of a heart attack.

I came to Delhi.

It’s not that we never met Roy. He would emerge every once in a while, looking dapper in khaki trousers, a white linen shirt, bathed and cologned, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth like Bogart. His stories took us back to the books we had read and thought we would live out.

“In Vienna I saw The Third Man sites; they have actually marked them out! Though Greene only sees Vienna as crumbling and destroyed... You can see the patina of loss held together with such precision, with such terrible beauty. Toby, my Viennese friend; his mother is the adopted daughter of Ezra Pound. For me, meeting her was like having tea with history. Toby does nothing, when does royalty do anything but waste? Ha! Ha! He is a hundred and thirty pounds and reads to live. Vienna is where I shall marry a bar girl and be a father to her brood, but really, it is London, always London for me!”

“So boys,” he would say, “who is paying for my booze tonight?” One of us would invariably pay his cab fare. The last bus back home would have gone by the time we could tear ourselves away from him, still asking him to tell us more about us, what we did, what we said, how we looked, when we were young. He remembered our past for us; the details adding up to exactly what we would have wished our past to be.

With me, he liked to have conversations in the morning over coffee. On his way to the hills he would stop by, sometimes even stay a day or two every few years. Those were not like conversations men have. Those talks were oblique, quieter, almost real... At night he liked to be left alone. When I would get up to go to the bathroom way past midnight, I would steal a peek into the guest room and see him play the piano in the air or write notes on scraps of paper he kept in the front pocket of his old black sling bag. Sometimes, I would find him looking at himself in the mirror, ruffling his thinning hair to a flick, walking up and down the room, turning back and front, sucking in his widening girth, holding his ass up to a perk.

The morning would show no trace of the previous night’s ardour, the hours spent in preparation for a life to begin. “You have a good life, old chap, all so wonderfully arranged. The sun hits your study with such predictable punctuality; one has no need for a clock. How did you do it, how do you do it,” he would ask, half with scorn, but half with anxious seeking.

“Till I was ten, Mum was very particular. There was no forgiveness for weakness, no excuses for laxity. The old bidi, poor thing, now she forgets everything, except very old things. She liked you best among the lot. When you are in town next, do look her up. But only if you wish to, no pressure, pal, none at all.”

There were books he had been planning to write. Stories fermenting through years of disenchantment, a life aspiring only to be literature. They made your puny success pale in the glamour of failure. For every mood he had a tale, for every small little thing an imagination.

“I was wondering which story to start with. There’s one called “Tea for Two”- it’s about a boy who goes to the hills alone but imagines the whole trip as one where his girlfriend is with him. So, when he goes to a restaurant, he orders tea for two, with an empty chair in front of him. It’s only in the end that the reader will know that the trip was a solo one. And then there is the one about ‘bandh’, a total shut down of a city. There are five characters in the story- it will be a metaphysical thriller; part dystopic, part rip-roaringly funny. All work is suspended, even a suicide is postponed because the shops are all shut and the man cannot buy any rope or poison.”

That one made me laugh and revisit a moment that I had till then, only remembered with horror. Roy had the ability to do that. He could make a suck in the bathroom change orientations, a sleep-over the only desire you would ever know. But when we

were alone, he and I; we never talked about the past. The promise of future propelled all our discussions over endless coffee and cigarettes. With Roy, I temporarily forgot that I was in those years when keeping up needed regular morning walks and lust ran thin in my veins. He was always on the verge of beginning- planning the set and the setting, orchestrating the perfect moment, the overwhelming culmination.

The boredom set in quietly and with it a gradual slipping. The old frayed shirts would be neatly packed in his bag. He counted them every day, arranged them in sets, matching their fade with his three trousers. In the evenings, he would be ready, all tucked in, walking to the same corner shops to catch them young with the same stories. In hotel rooms he asked the bell boys to share his dinner, the last dregs of the fourth half bottle.

"They lose it so easily- all that beauty, the leanness, the shadow of the lashes lost in the maze of hardening, darkening stubble. If F had remained, I wouldn't have known what do with his manliness. Plus he had such poor taste in music that boy; to hear Bach's first cello suite and not be moved!

How utterly wasteful those evenings were!" he told me in a mood of detached regret. "But that’s the beauty my friend, the inevitable doom and the charm of discrepancy."

He began to forget that these were repetitions. The same stories- improvised with synonyms, old words pretending to pose new dangers to ensnare the first-time listeners. I bore his wearniness. It has been many years.

This time he asked about F. He was on his way to the foothills after two years. Only two days on this trip. He had only two days for me after two years. I had tried to fill the gap with distractions. It has been a lifetime of distractions.

"Did F call you after last March, what day was it, the 8th? Did he ask about me?" he asked tentatively, inhaling the cigarette smoke deep into his lungs.

"Only once. He said he was leaving for Pittsburg. It was a short call," I said quietly.

// sixty // sixty-one

*Inspired by a quote from City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

// sixty // sixty-one

// eighty-four // eighty-five