Ruchira's Ramblings

#napowrimo Day 3. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today’s prompt is based in a poem by Larry Levis called “The Two Trees.” It is a poem that seems to meander, full of little digressions, odd bits of information, but fundamentally, it is a poem that takes time. It takes its time getting where it’s going, and the action of the poem itself takes place over months. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write something that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable amount of time." This prompt stumped me for a bit, especially since I prefer writing shorter poems but what doing NaPoWriMo and then about eight months of weekly prompts with Airplane Poetry Movement has made me believe is that I can write on any prompts if I try, which is what the challenge is all about, after all. Apologies if this meanders too much and makes sense too little. Point is, I wrote a poem. In other news, two of my favourite poets, Shantanu Anand and Nandini Verma, the founders of A...

Car smells make me sick. I don’t know if it’s the upholstery or the closed space or the stale air- something about cars with windows pulled shut remind me of the discomfort of movement, the uncertainty of the road, the sense of displacement from home. That’s a little bit ironic, because I love cars and cabs (who doesn’t?) and sometimes on a car trip I’ve wished for the road to continue so the solitude of vacant thought would linger, and the comfort of moving scenery provide distraction from the spaceless, static finality of destination. My favourite kind of road is the one that runs through lines of dense, leafy trees to infinity on a cloudy spring day with a light wind carrying just the hint of a drizzle. There seems to be less and less of those nowadays. I think car smells are the strongest on Monday mornings. Or maybe the body is just extra sensitive after the weekend. I read somewhere that general depression levels in a population increases on Monday mornings. Makes...

I watched the starlings perch on a swaying stalk of long grass as the wind gushed about and thought, perhaps little birds need their share of adventure too. And when flying is one’s natural state of being, perhaps even the sky seems to be nothing more than an overworked old map. For don’t we all come from infinite source, seeking infinite experiences in finite things? And so the clock ticks, and the earth rolls, and another year comes to an end. Things I’ve done for the first time in 2018: Presented papers at two academic conferences. And it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought that would be, although, let’s be honest, it’s a little disconcerting to be talking to a room full of people while pretending you know exactly what you’re talking about. I think I did okay. Participated in a poetry-reading. I didn’t read it as well as I had hoped to (see point above regarding a room full of people staring at you), but considering I hadn’t thought of myself as a poet for some yea...

First of all, apologies for the long absence. Also, I know I promised a surprise, and I was supposed to host a writer-friend who was going to talk about his new novel, but I went on vacation, and then he went on vacation and somehow it didn’t sort of work out. To make up for it, here are not one but two whole disjointed rambles. Do let me know what you think in the comments and share if you like them. 1 Last night I dreamt I was in school, going to class to learn calculus and having a generally miserable time of it. I keep having some variation of this dream at long intervals, usually at times when I am stressed or worried or sad- dreams where I go to class and the teacher has covered so many chapters of the math book that I have never studied and have no clue how to answer in the exam and then it takes me a while on waking up to remember that I didn’t in fact need to sit for that exam again. And so it was last night, except in the dream I made a very definite decision of quit...

Childhood vanished like the bad man in a kid's film, leaving behind dissolving snapshots of the long bus-trip to the grandparents' home through a long empty road they called the Bypass. Then home changed, roads changed, people grew up, grew old, died. I remember once going back to visit with my dad- that first tiny apartment where my earliest memories are. A big yellow front door and limewashed walls with blue pathes of damp making maps of countries yet undiscovered, a calling bell tune surely dreamt up by a tone-deaf person somewhere and the ceiling fans from a company called 'Ranjan' that I pronounced 'Ran-Jan'. I thought all of that was mine. That all of it was forever. And then one day a truck arrived and we folded our world in straw-lined packing boxes and home became a goodbye in a flurry of moments that slipped out of incomprehending hands. When I went back a few years later everything looked different, though they were there as they had always been- t...