Wistful Trash Can

The door that you never opened

and the door that I never closed

opens up the vault of abyss

that traps the echoes of past

loneliness of present and

longings of future into a colloidal

amalgam of  a ketchup

squeezed into a trash can.

The book that you never read

and the book that I never wrote

creates a fiction of memory

with a narrative of error where

Satan and God trade their

places and saints and sinners tear

away the pages which are

dumped into a trash can.

The song that you never listened

and the song that I never sang

plays a melody of emotion with

the destructive beat of drums

which forays into heartache

that lumbers to and fro

resonating the din of

slamming into a trash can

The road that you never took

and the road that I never left

led into a meandering trail of

misty forest where sun hid

under the canopy and the darkness

opened into the glade of deception

packaged in a wrapper of garbage

thrown into a trash can

The words that you never heard

and the words I never spoke

Recited a poetry of comedy

with vision of paradise whose gates

adorned by the warning sign

beware of dog scribbled on

the tarnished tin plate

corroded into a trash can

The door that you never opened

and the door that I never closed

opens up the vault of abyss

that traps the echoes of past

loneliness of present and

longings of future into a colloidal

amalgam of  a ketchup

squeezed Into a trash can.

From the Porch that Overlooks the Zoo

The lines read “Winding road in the desert was unending. My mouth was totally parched and a tranquil lake in front beckoned. I ran across sand dunes only to find it to turn into a bloody mirage. And alas! I woke up profusely sweating. It was a nightmare. Again! ”.  My first impression was little Miss Barbara Holmes was too much caught up in Twilight movies and her writing style though very persuasive was still bit childish, which was of course natural considering her to be just around fourteen and studying in ninth grade. She pressed me on to give my opinion and I said it was really good piece and complimented her by further adding that she has all the geniuses to be a great writer in future. Her face blushed and eyes sparkled with my comments. She became so ecstatic that she nearly overturned the hot cup of tea and upset few saccharine cubes into the parqueted floor which eventually induced swarm of ants to creep up through the small cracks thus invading the entire wooden cabin. All the racket however didn’t seem to have any effect on the vultures in cage below. They looked stoic and were somber as usual.

 I ran into Barbara at the Café Sundae which adjacents the zoo. The place is newly renovated house that boasts a fine porch which overlooks the bird section. With its low arch and wall engraved with fine stucco punctuated by beautiful murals the entire place is exquisite. Besides, the straw roof and hanging rafter that nested bevy of little swifts, gave the picturesque room a dose of inexplicable irony. At the end of the corner a low recliner stood, lying on which one could glance into the bird cages below that stretches to the far west corner where a dark silhouette of large Ostrich lumbered to and fro. As I spoke, hundreds of birds under the captivity, on a futile attempt to break free, were flying within the cage in Sisyphean manner. Inside one of the cage a starling was peering out venting a melancholy air perhaps with longing of murmuration, meanwhile nearby a golden pheasant was stoking a twig probably looking for some left over grains. Being a Sunday afternoon the place was not that crowded but it still harbored enough yelp and cries of little children to perturb the roosting aves. And in the middle of all there stood a tree with its overbearing nonchalance towards captive birds. It was showing no emotions and exhibited same countenance as it had shown several years before.

As I was watching the scenes unfold, Barbara and two of her friends Jason and Alexa entered the room. Jason, a freckled face boy holding a crib of A4 size paper, screamed at top of his voice pointing at bald eagle-“Look at that grumpy old fellow “. Alexa, a girl with braided hair and pointed nose, who seemed to be his sister, admonished him not to scream in front of strangers all the while squinting towards me. Meanwhile Barbara, a tall blonde girl with blue eyes glanced around indifferently and quickly reclined into a nearby couch followed by her friends. All three children were carrying textbooks and had a school bag with them. A waiter came along and took order for some junk food consisting of Nachos and Cheese Burger and they started to chatter again. With the presence of three kids the solitude I was looking for disappeared and place turned into a bedlam. In particular Jason was using a lot of colorful languages and was swearing at Earnest Hemingway for writing such a story as “Big Two hearted river”. Even Alexa who was disapproving of his behavior nodded and interjected saying-”How the hell a guy fishing relates to disenchantment towards war?” Being a huge Hemingway fan I couldn’t tolerate three snotty kids ripping him like that and proceeded to explain to them “Iceberg theory’  which was completely against my grain. The kids were astonished at first. They might have found it weird that some stranger lecturing them on English literature but after a while they came around and became friendlier.   

I learned that they were actually students at Lincoln school and were children of some diplomatic attaché at US embassy. Apparently, they were doing an assignment on creative writing which included an essay on Hemingway and in addition a short story of their own. They were at the café trying to get some fresh air that can stimulate their mind allowing the creative juices to flow. Upon my imploring they showed me the manuscript of text they have so far written. Alexa had written a story about a city girl trapped in the enchanted Dolce shoe that she bought in Wal-Mart. The narrative was fantastic but suffered from many plot holes. On the other hand Jason had written about a mercenary sent by CIA to fight Bolivarian Intelligence at Barquisimeto, who later is jailed in Carcasses. His knowledge of geography of the country particularly Andes Mountains, was impressive and without my further inquisition he told me that he had been to Venezuela several times accompanying his father and has even shaken hands with Hugo Chavez. Perhaps, future Fredrick Forsyth I pondered. Barbara, meanwhile was a shy girl. She was reluctant to show me her writing but upon everyone’s insistence finally she gave me her story. With her high cheek bone and large eyes she reminded me of someone I used to knew. Her cursive handwriting was beautiful and the best thing of her writing was proper use of punctuation mark. And the frame narrative she used is not something you get to read in contemporary literature.

Creative writing can be a daunting experience for anyone. To let your imagination run wild and at same to have a rein of control is akin to stepping on two boats, syncretizing which requires a skill that only few possess. It is said that through the means of creative writing one can gaze into others mind. For instance in Virginia tech massacre, Seung-Hui Cho, the psycho who perpetrated the heinous crime is said to have written several menacing essays that delineated his troubled mind and in the hind sight of the tragedy many of his teachers and peers were disappointed for not seeing the warning signs. Coincidentally Barbara’s story, entitled “Nightmare again’ also detailed all the blood and gore, despite that it didn’t occur to me at all, that she too had cultivated misanthropic tendencies. But in that surrounding the thought that all the lowlights in the society are at large while freedom loving birds were caged was a night mare indeed.  

As the food was brought in, all three of them jumped into the plate gobbling it up with total disregard to the manner, thus abruptly bringing an end to our deliberation in English literature. Kids being just kids I guessed. I too lost interest and again started to look towards the zoo. I saw a little boy being accompanied by his parents watching intently at jackdaws. Nearby a young couple were lost in their own world oblivious to the surrounding. Entire circle of life could be witnessed in that single frame. Kid comes to zoo with his parents, later with his girlfriend and afterwards with his own kid. And the birds are simply ancillary that becomes part and parcel of it. All the while the tree watches everything without passing any judgments. Just like it did in distant past, when a swing was attached to it and someone beautiful was swaying in the wind with the entire majestic. Believe me it was not a nightmare.

Ephemeral joy

You and I sat across the pond

Throwing pebbles into water

Unbeknownst of its fate

Making fleeting ripples

That took shape

Shape of heart,

Shape of joy and shape of hope

The ripples cut through silently

Making circles, interspersing each other

Dissolving into each other.

 With aim to reach the shore but

Retreating without sound

But now water has dried and the pebbles ran out

You and I still seat across the pond  

 without ripple without shape

with only debris of broken dreams left behind.

Daisy in the rut and nature at all smiles

Wind swayed gently and a bee waddled among the bushes, fleetingly perched on the sweetness of rose and finally nestled on the smiling daisy. Another one came along and made a sinusoidal crescendo of humming sound and settled on neighboring inflorescence. It is daisy’s day I thought. For some reason it appeared that entire swarm of bees on the hive were ignoring calls of all the other flowers in garden and crowding towards her.  Feeling slighted, proud rose seemed to have become crestfallen and was looking sideways. Meanwhile jasmine as usual looked indifferent and lily upholding her wont appeared jealous. With ranging emotions in garden the colors ignited into vivacious semblance akin to those portrayed in English summer of Jane Austen’s novel.

Just a couple of months back a article was published in British science journal that said researchers at Queen Mary  and Royal Holloway university discovered that the tiny bee brain can actually traverse the Travelling Sales Man problem. This NP-hard problem which is often considered as the benchmark for studying optimization and has captured imagination of generation of computer scientist all over the world all of sudden became a child’s play for these tiny hymenopterans.  All the anguish of Mathematician like Hamilton and Kirkman when they discovered the problem  and entire chagrin of any  junior at computer science course for having to read theory of computation and delve into  seemingly much ado for nothing realm  of computational complexity, abruptly appeared puerile in front of mother nature’s play.

Nature is indeed a mathematician, painter, scientist and artist. Otherwise how would she know that the symmetry of dancing flowers should follow Fibonacci ratio, or radioactive element should decay with years corresponding to natural logarithm.  Who knows some day, some where we might read that researchers discovered that school of fish actually triumphed in solving the convoluted partial differential equation of Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness whose partial solutions manifests as a grim reaper to any engineering students studying fluid dynamics. Perhaps this will lead to discovery of better aviation engines that will reduce the turbulence and make your flight as smooth as silk as advertised by Thai air in days to come. And you no longer will have to be judgmental towards the veneer in airhostess face that is trying to hide the inherent fear of flying while portraying a phony smile.  And probably the Clay Mathematics Institute will bestow Mother Nature with prestigious Millennium prize with cool cash of 1 million dollar, which she will certainly spurn just like Mr. Grigori Perelman did after solving Poincar`e Conjecture.

All of sudden, the atmosphere changed and flowers appeared to gossip again. The topic of conversation might be that bees were going back to their hives leaving miss daisy lonesome again. Though chrysanthemum seemed to console her, queen rose appeared to be leading the rhetoric while jasmine was again indifferent. Though all the girls in the yard were cursing the impropriety of bees, no one can hide their true colors mingled with tinge of schadenfreude. Actually what usurped the joy of princess daisy was the portending rain.  And before they could shelter the rain poured abysmally, which instigated helter-skelter among all the creatures that were hitherto enjoying the sun. Mother Nature was at it again, wielding her magic wand to bring forth another episode of chaos which ironically is called butterfly effect in mathematics. Only this time its precursors were those unseemly bees.  And before the order was settled a wayward squirrel jumped over with a trajectory characterized by Lyapunov exponent that even fastest computer won’t be able to compute, and adding injury to insult landed on forlorn miss daisy. Unable to shield against that brute force she eventually succumbed to the rut.  As if teaching the lesson of ephemeral joy and ubiquity of transience cloud went a drift, sun came out and nature smiled again.

Sound of eyes

When the eyes meet

There is no sound

But only trembling of heart

Along with beating of pulse

That resonates

Resonates subliminally

In frequency where passion

Whirl in eddies

akin to  driftwoods spinning aimlessly

When the eyes meet

There is no sound

But music plays

Music with colors

Palpable and sharp with brightness

Contrasting with monotonous

drab of grey clouds

that tears down

 into rain dancing joyfully

When the eyes meet

There is no sound

But flame is still lit

Which in wind dances

The Dance of tango

To and fro in the dark

With burning anvil

Forging the bond of hope

That grows slowly but steadily.

But when the hope has passed

Flame has died

Music has stopped

And hearth turned cold

The meeting of eye still

brings warmth

giving one more reason to smile.

Abandoment

Around a month ago, during the afternoon hours while tending flowers in my garden, when the sun was still at all his might, I noticed something unusual. Two crows were flying around with little twig on their beaks circling the canopy of the tall Rudrakshya Tree. They were building the nest. My first reaction was that of indifference but realizing that the sight of nest will probably look ugly from my living room I shooed them. Catching the cue Rocky too barked around frightening the birds away. For a while the tree was safe from the encroachers.  

Next day they arrived again and again like selfish neighborhood watcher I chased them away. The routine continued for next few days. Finally being intelligent creature with high avian IQ they perhaps learned my office schedule and started building the nest unbeknownst to me during my absence. Slowly I started to notice the nest taking the shape. Its size grew with every passing day and before I could make any further futile attempt to stop its progress both crow moved into their new home. I too made truce with them; as long as they don’t spoil the yard with droppings their dwelling was fine with me.

One morning few days after this silent pact I was rudely awaken by the sound of Kow Kow that reverberated around. Upon looking at the nest I saw flock of crows fighting with each other. It seemed that some outsider males were trying to steal the nest. Its well known fact that whoever owns the nest gets the girl. The age old struggle for mating and perpetuating your gene applies everywhere. The fight was brutal and involved lots of pecking. After a while the outsiders were chased away and the nest was restored to its rightful builder. After this incident few more days passed by without any incident and I too lost interest.  However while reading ridiculous news about Nepal bandha, from the terrace I noticed pearl shaped eggs on the Nest. The female was incubating her eggs while her partner was perched on the branch of nearby Avocado tree keeping watchful eye on trespassers.  

After a terribly hot day that ensued, Kathmandu witnessed a small windstorm around the evening. I was having siesta when sound of slamming windows made me disinterestedly scout the surrounding. The ferocious wind was indeed menacing and threatening to uproot any thing that comes its way. For no apparent reason my eyes turned towards the nest.  And what I saw was indeed poignant. The branch that nestled the nest was swaying dangerously and both the parents were holding to it with all their strength. Their grit and relentless effort against the sheer forces of nature to save the egg truly showcased their unconditional love for the unborn child. Finally even wind god yielded to their resolve and the weather calmed down leaving the nest and its habitant intact.

After few days that followed the storm, a joyous event in the nest grabbed my attention. The egg had hatched. Mother was busy tending new born while the proud father was foraging for worms in dry grass. The fledgling was pitch black and was raising its head tenderly. With new arrival even the environment seemed cheerful.   

This Monday however while watching extended final coverage of French Open between Nadal and Dojokovic all of sudden the sound of clamor filled the air. The unexpected noise filled fear in my mind. I rushed to the window and yes my surmise was right, the child had died. And both the parent were lamenting at top of their voice. And they were joined by their fellow crows. Finally they lifted the baby’s carcass and dropped it under the Cycas tree. And without even turning back they left, all of them.

Today as I watch over the abandoned nest, the entire thing seems wrong. The emptiness is stark. And though I never approved the crows building the nest in first place, I have to admit I really miss them. And only one thing that comes to mind is those haunting lines from Wordsworth’s poem: “She lived unknown and very few could know when Lucy ceased to be; but she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to me”.

At the Barbers

The chill was unbearable but the place was warm inside. With one old fashioned electric heater below the chair, emanating enough heat providing comfortable refuge from the frigid weather. The heater was made of a red mud, and a dingy looking solenoid coil probably made of tungsten or some other high heat resistant filament seemed to have been ineptly inserted into it. Besides, it’s all cracked up edges suggested that it had been tossed around for a quite a while and the fact was further accentuated by its hexagonal shape.  A trash bin stood next to it and manifested as if it too was trying to wade off the brutal cold. The lid was lying aslant with the mould of hair creeping out of it. The squalid bin certainly provided fine dwelling for the bacteria that as I speak were probably in their merriment and multiplying like rabbits.  Scattered leafs from the newspapers which dated few days back were strewn all over the floor and some on the table as if it had been subjected to great twister. But despite all that, familiar aroma of alum had palpable and familiar effect on olfactory senses.

Aslam bhai’s barber shop is a place to be. If you ever happen to have an opportunity to walk from Milan chowk to Sangam chowk you will notice a ragged metallic plate with a symbol of scissor beckoning you to have a haircut. Meanwhile in the door you’ll invariably find two old men squatting or sitting in the stool and intently regarding every passerby with their hawk sharp pair of eyes always focusing towards each head with uncanny capacity to recognize the potential customer at stone’s throw without any shred of insinuation. Aslam bhai and one of his cousins had built this establishment nearly two decades ago, the time when Baneshwor area was still lush green in vegetation and according to the popular legend a playing ground for foxes, which during the most opportune time would fled with rooster from nearby dwellings. It is really philosophical to ponder what mind set the two middle aged men had when they embarked on their endeavors twenty years back or what hopes and aspiration did they harbored when they set out to this alien place where both their language and religion were foreign.  

One can imagine that when Aslam bhai set out from his home, an un-trodden and unnamed village in some rural part of Bihar, to seek fortune and wealth he might have encountered many questionable glances from his peers and families. Some might have showered him with the encouragement while other may have festered him with ridicules. His father might have objected it disapprovingly while his mother must have cried during the farewell. I wonder what unforeseen power persuaded him to come to this part of Kathmandu and try out his luck. And to start a barber shop with a shoe string budget in part of town with thin population must have dumbfounded many. But there is no telling about human spirit. It is capable of reaching the moon as well as scouring the depth of sea despite any odds. As Hemingway put it poignantly “A man can be defeated but not destroyed”.  Now gray and old, it’s hard to discern in his face pervaded with wrinkled lines whether the dreams he once fostered came true or not.  But one thing is for sure the vitality and spirit still pervades in his dexterous hands.

Being a usual Saturday afternoon the place was bit crowded and Aslam bhai and his son Tarbez were having hard time persuading all the customers to remain seated. Everyone seemed to be in hurry. Funny thing is once the customer seats on the barber’s chair and starts getting pampered no matter how much time elapses he won’t complain at all. Perhaps seated chair turns into non-inertial frame of reference and time dilation as explained in General Theory of Relativity kicks in. But whatever was the reason waiting is always the pain and patience is indeed a virtue. Watching two barbers one at his sear and other in his early spring and  both projecting agility despite their demanding schedule made me lamp blast the “Sleeping Barber “ Algorithm in standard operating system text book. Who says barber sleeps in busy hour?

It is said that barber knows secret of everyone in the community and Aslam bhai was no exception. He too knew every nitty-gritty detail of everyone in the room. He especially took pride in cutting hair of his old customers and liked to tell stories of many distinguished customer he had throughout his career spanning from minister to police chief. He seldom allowed his old customers to get hair cut from his son, only during times when he is already handful and the customer was in hurry.  It reminded me of that old Seinfeld Episode of Barber where to jerry’s upmost exasperation his old barber insisted on cutting his hair that transpires some of the funniest moments that network TV has ever presented.   

All of sudden a car stopped in front of the door and a tall, stout fellow entered the shop. Aslam Bhai’s face lit up and menially he cleaned the bench and implored the customer to take a seat assuring him that he won’t take long with his present client.  He really seemed to be in hurry and the fact was further accentuated by fast paced scissor chops totally indifferent to state of the customer’s hair. In offhand fashion he dismissed the current customer and began weaving magic in his new clients head. Perhaps some VIP I guessed.

With Mr. Cynosure ensconced in the barber’s chair all we mere mortals had to wait. But no one seemed to be bothered. I enquired another customer regarding the proceedings and he explained to me that the seated customer was no other than Mr. Nikhil Upreti , a leading actor in Nepali movie. Not being a fan of Kollywood movies I forgave myself for not recognizing him. But it indeed was flattering to know that the place where you cut the hair is actually frequented by leading men form Nepali tinsel town. To much of our relief Mr. Upreti didn’t take long and left as early as possible. My turn was next but we all (five of us) rushed to the chair and Alsam bhai was nearly squashed like a pancake.  After having his faculty restored he yelled at all of us reminding that conscientious people do not jump in front of buffet line.  But being in queue characterized by Poison distribution with prolonged waiting time, none of us were in mood to yield. Finally we settled and I received the coveted chair as I was their first. I called for it. I was feeling high when my eyes all of sudden fell on poster above of holy Mecca that had words “God is conscience that whisper in your ear” inscribed in it. I felt guilty.