Sunday, July 28, 2013

Its jump ship time..

Due to things like aesthetics, ease of updation and a general sense of inertia that has been ailing the author of this blog, Mocha-ed Mumblings has decided to shift to Wordpress. For the few fans of this space, please find the blog at

http://ofternoonsncoffeespoons.wordpress.com

Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Unexotic



My sleepy summer noons
Of restless texture,
At times regurgitate
In acidic ascent.
All sweet smell and stinky taste,
And unmindful like.
Perfect booger rounds
Were hard to make.
Just like fake perfect smiles
When strange grandmas
Ushered me into their old-wool hugs.
Unbeautiful moments
Abound in childhood
But romantic conspiracies
Apply wax tinted lenses
To make it like Hollywood’s eternal,
Collective memory of nostalgia.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Affection

                                                                     
                                             
Its the morning rush as I get ready for another flight to Bombay. There's a wordless lull as my mother seeks things to busy herself with - after having promptly finished all the work on the previous evening. Her daughter must seem like an alien creature who wears her tam-bram hair open, turns left and then right, adjusting her strap. This morning she decides that she wants to plait her hair - something she grew up always wanting to do, but never got round to. Single plaits were a mark of 'womanhood', while double plaits were girly and innocent. 

My mother suddenly offers to do it and I gladly let her. For a ritual is being performed - perhaps a couple of decades too late, but even so. In the act of plaiting and having one's hair plaited both women are transported - the mother to memories of her grandmother plaiting her hair. " 'Tight and thick', she used to say..and then I would steal to the other room to try and loosen it up." 
" Make it tight", say I. " I like how definite it feels."

Soon the plaiting is done and mother admires the result. " Wish you were here everyday, then I could plait your hair..." Uncomfortable now, both of them nod a smile and look away. 

--–--------------------------

"Doesn't your mother kiss you and tuck you into bed?", she asked her once. The girl shook her head a little too vigorously, trying to shake away a choke. 

------------------------------

Ritualised expressions make her uncomfortable. Loud pecks on cheeks always make her look away. Shouldn't it it always be present in the unsaid?

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Thoughts after having been called cruel

There is a very lonely nerve to confusion. It throbs silently, unsatisfied, defiantly. Defiant in its belief in itself - that this confusion must be valid. It must have, in its heart, something true that is worthy of pursuing. It is a very un-self conscious stubbornness... Something that itches at the edge of one's reasoning. For confusion must imply a certain validity to the discordance - between instinct and another's loud words.

This confusion makes me silent now. Earlier, while in younger blood, it would fuel me... Incite an uncontrollable passion to mouth words... To double into word the wordless cloud in my head. 

Young blood can be self destructive. It will always lose to sudden expectations of tenderness from the other side. For those things creep upon you when you least expect them. 

Somehow it feels like anger shouldn't accompany femininity. Like its a form of cruel that cannot be swallowed. One must engage in a performance of vulnerable defiance it seems. An interesting thought, but i don't have the first clue to getting around it.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

In my mind's eye


In my mind's eye I stand gangly tall, with a slight width to my hips. 

In my mind's eye, I take to water like a dived-in otter, I crinkle my hairy nose and shake my bottom ever so slightly. 

In my mind's eye, there is a blue jay at the corner of my vision. 

In my mind's eye, I am standing beside Douglas Adams when he is posing as Arthur Dent while lying stone drunk on a smelly heap of hay. 

I can eat an entire steak, and not just with my eyes. I can hike mountains with a old branch for a walking stick. 

In my mind's eye, I could be the student's mind in Florence. I can see what I look like to an old Victorian lamp. 

In my mind's eye, I sit on the edge of the vibration of music on the walls of my heart. I feel my uterine walls stocking up. 

In my mind's eye, my love for my unborn child scares me sleepless, so much that I dare not do that. 

In my mind's eye I'm gullible. 

Everyone is either collectively smarter, or dumber than I am. 

In my mind's eye, I can feel the hot frying on potato skin. 

In my mind's eye I am soft inside, and softer outside.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Somethings

There is something

To be said

For that unnamed fear

An uncomfortable tugging

At an unimaginable part

On the underside of

What they call the heart

And something more

To be said

For when it is teased

Out of its place

To assume

A monstrous proportion

It blackens

Casts a shadow

And leaves you with

A perpetual drone

Stirring somewhere inside

It becomes

Your incompleteness.

And no intelligent verse

Or sugar saturated word

Can help you coat it

In vain, to try and seal it

Like that root

Growing around a stone

Until a handcrafted ped

Dislodges it

Dislodged now

It reveals

A rough healing

But the sun

Warms with its shining

Friday, February 3, 2012

Bombay.

So heavy eyelid collapsing on bed.
So sluggish and out of breath.
So surfing the world next to tiny open window.
So unwritten on stationery.
So wasteful culinary experiments.
So seeking pockets of the rest of the world.
So comfortably cheap hangouts.
So suspicious of ricksha fare.
So advertising wilderness.
So boringly different all the time.
So no time for hair and lips.
So broken down notions.
So frustratingly atypical.
So un-hot college girls.
So unusually myopic bomayite.
So migrant utopia.
So local train announcements.
So sunglassed lack of grunge.
So so many windows.