someone called clouds

Her name meant clouds. It still does. Just that i dont know her anymore. She used to say that whenever she cried it rained.

She was a soft skills trainer with a BPO here, a nicish kathak dancer and training to be a Bharatnatyam one too. Id met her when we were working as volunteers for a fashion show for a common NGO we used to spend time at. She was so beautiful.

She had just broken up with someone and I too had, with someone id been with for 5 long years. And we had connected. I still remember that moment during the show when id finally closed the ticket window and was sitting in the last bench. She had come and sat next to me and said - Amit i dont have friends here, can I hang out with you. She was wearing a brown Sari with a big bindi on her forehead. and id said of course, im feeling useless myself.

Ill call her meggie. Meggie and i dated for a very short but very turbulent 5 months, sometime starting the autumn of 2004. She had been hurt very badly in her previous relationship and I too had hurt and had been hurted by someone who, at that time id felt, was perfect for me. And in those windy, rainy and about to be winter months, the way they are here, we had scripted, driven by our own fears and longing, the most intense, passionate, mad, angry, dirty, conniving, loving, sad and unfulfilling relationship ever.

The first time we kissed was with pizza in our mouth. 2 days after we had met. The first time we had sex was in a school for disabled children that we had painted the previous night with stencils for drawing angels. The first time we fought was just after having had sex in a school for disabled children that we had painted the previous night. id called her a slut once and she had spent a whole night crying. It HAD rained all through that night. And at that time I had attributed it to the season. The first time she'd called me a bastard, id cried too. And had to skip office because my eyes were so swollen. And she had attributed to a binge night. Such was our relationship. In those few months that we were together, we had completed our recently broken incomplete selves and we broke whatever semblance of completeness that some parts of our bodies and minds had managed. We had the most magical sex possible. She had once blacked out after we had been at it for the larger part of an afternoon. Id once not showered for a full 3 days because she was not in town and id not wanted her smell to go away.

I still pine for her lips. I imagine her saliva on my body, lingering in a small thread between our lips as she pulled away after a kiss. i sometimes think of the way she used to smell a very nuetral 'woman chumming' smell. She had a dancers body and i used to remark on how graceful she was. I remember that. I sometimes think, in a niteclub, in between shining lights, how she used to sweat when dancing. Sometimes when driving back home, I stop and wonder what used to make her cry whenever she used to see little kids begging at late nite traffic lights. I remember the times id gone to watch her dance performances, she bowing to the audience and I clapping and whistling, like, maybe, a proud husband. She'd always called me her cute devil and had once even made me act out the role of a 'Rakshasa' in a durga puja dance play she had done.

Sometimes now, I think of meggie, and I cry. and i wonder how I let someone so beautiful go away. she never forgave me. and i never forgive myself. but then this isnt the first time i have asked forgiveness of myself and NOT got it.

Everytime it rains here, like it did last nite, and it is right THIS moment, the warm dripping rain of the summer months, i suddenly get warm and scared and welled up in my eyes. I imagine that we are still together and that i am rocking her tears away.

colors magazine

An all time favorite of mine. www.colorsmagazine.com. its a quarterly magazine published from italy by benetton. Its chic, its extremely visual, a canvas of colors. it talks about contemporary times, but through pictures. the underlying theme is color, the sense of sight. Its been noted, controversial and even banned. the current issue is China, but go back a few ones, to an issue titled Lust. Pure magic. About the myriad forms of lust - sex, blood, money, fame. I wish i could cut paste the visuals from there. seduction. here's an extract from the editors' note - There are the saints. And then there are the rest of us, who sometimes crave, yearn, covet, hunger, itch, ache, pine, and hanker for too much of a good thing. This is lust.

image copied from - www.colorsmagazine.com

Friends and sex and sudden evenings

A friend of mine recently came back after spending upwards of 5 months in North America on work. Client onsite as it is called in these parts. Ill call her bigblackeyes. Bigblackeyes and i like know each other for 2 years now. we work for the same company, albeit different groups, and have been out and about so many times that for anyone new, we would almost be an item. There's something we always guarded ourselves against, and that is crossing the more than friends rubicon. She is just too important a support system and sensible people never DO support systems. And so she came back and after the week long company provided plush acco., had no place to shift. Accomodation in this bustling city isnt one of the easiest things to manage, esp if one needs it for like just a month. What with the 10 months deposits and lecherous landlords. The most logical thing happens, i had a spare bedroom, a cook and a maid, we were good 'safe' friends (call it lack of the phrase fuck buddy in our urban dic).

Bigblackeyes shifted in with me.

She had got me the nicest box of gift ferreros that i had ever seen. I helped set her up, unpacking her stuff, smelling her new perfumes, feeling some new clothes she had bought. And we commented on how both of us had changed in the last 2 and a half years. Funny, how you dont realize how people change in 2 years if you see them continuously and then a 5 month break and bingo! you realize the changes all of a sudden. I commented on how well toned her body looked and the neat hairstyle she had started sporting and she, well, commented on nothing. i could have done with a longer legs thing. All she said in a passing kissing the air tone was a wayward you're still as mad.

We drank. A lot. Like all through the evening. Like those times when you think that Hey! today my liver is not pickled and tomorrow the GOD of liver will frown on me and say - i pickle you. She is one of the few women I know, wait, the ONLY one, if i disregard a skank i used to know back in delhi, who drinks whiskey and drinks it straight up. And we got very drunk and silly. The kind of silly when you think that jumping up and down on a cold bare floor is super cool. She hopped on my shoulders trying to touch the ceiling. We even danced on the dining table one by one. And i think there was a mock strip tease i did too with my tie and belt.

All good. But then slowly something changed that evening. Maybe it was because we were getting to see each other after so long, or maybe very simply the fact that we had been sexless (i can vouch for myslef) for like maybe 3-4 months, but we both knew....and well just before we were to hit our beds (in different bedrooms), in the wee hours, we gave each other a good night hug. It was insane the ferocity with which we tore clothes off each other after that. it was unnerving then and very lustful but strange and magical when i think of it now. And i dont think it can ever come back. And itll be good if it doesnt. The guilt is just so much. Random sex with friends, I think, carries as much baggage for men as it does for women, or maybe for just SOME men. bigblackeyes is getting married in May.

andain

there's something about 'beatiful things' that always has a magical effect on me. it is not just the atmospheric deep groovy tone to it, it is not the shiny sparkling club sweaty dancing to it either, its just the way i can think of it as a story - a party and slowly people trickling in, in their myriad perfumes and clothes and faces and smells, some pretty some not so, but all so beautiful and an evening to look forward to. its always my music of choice whenever i host a house party and its always something to which i absolutely love someone to stay over for.

oh well, such is music and such are our lives. atmospheric? full of beautiful things? ambient? and above all for that evening and night.

and also our first posts.