Nothing (In four parts)

I

Poetry

Is not some

thing I am good at.

I try (maybe not hard enough),

But

somehow

It ends up looking like this.

Damnit.

II

I remember this Ogden Nash book lying around at home. My brother had picked it up, and though I never saw him read it, he knew all the clever ones. Clever chap, my brother.

I remember wondering why stuff in ‘A Pageant of Poems’ couldn’t be like this. I hated that poetry textbook. ‘The Bazaars of Hyderabad’ was rubbish. ‘Jack’ was pointless. The only thing I liked about ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was its title (and that, it turns out, was pilfered).

I remember being asked to ‘commit them to memory’ (as opposed to ‘by heart-ing them’). I did. But I didn’t like it. I’m not comfortable with confrontation.

I also remember, strangely enough, tripping a classmate on the basketball court as she skipped around muttering “Butterfly, Butterfly” in a nauseatingly saccharine voice. I think I did it on purpose. She needed three stitches on her chin. She later studied Sociology in Delhi, shaved off all the hair on her head, grew it back, and is now a (very beautiful) nurse in France. Some countries have all the luck.

III

TMH and I used to write some pretty funny stuff (we thought) in Prof. Horace Jacob’s Quantum Mechanics class. We’d write a stanza at a time, as the Lego-esque poem slowly took shape. We were both, inevitably, very proud of the end result.

Aforementioned HoJo, meanwhile, talked about falling into a Black Hole in the middle of a crowded market, and backed that up with a complex formula that seemed bogus (but was probably correct). There was creativity in the air.

IV

A friend of mine now is now part of a band that plays Indian folk-fusion. They are the only tri-lingual band I know (unless Usha Uthup has a band), singing in English, Hindi and Kannada. I bet you’ve never heard a Kannada song before. I hadn’t, and I’ve been going to Bangalore every summer since I was two.

It’s a good band. They do stuff they enjoy, and it shows. Not pretentious, not profound. Just pleasant.