Write an absurdist piece, beginning with "If you ask me on a Monday" and ending with "I'd say yeah!"
When I wrote this prompt, I was thinking of the units of the week that had melted into one another. I was trying to reinstate the slow passing of ordered time. In response to this piece, Dipali Taneja wrote this frothy wonder of a philosophical sleight of hand.
If you ask me on a Monday if the moon was made of cheese
I’d turn around and look askance, and fall on bended knees
Asking you if you were sane, or just being a pain?
As you can often be…
If you ask me on a Tuesday if my love was true,
I’d turn to you, and say, What ho! I’m living here with you.
It could be love, it could be lust, could be financial need
Or even simple greed. (Great cook, you know you be)
Try and guess, till then you know I’ll bless you when you sneeze.
If you ask me on a Wednesday to help you comb your hair
I’d run a mile without a smile, it leaves me in despair
Those tangled knots, those matted locks
That length that you must wear, Rapunzel,
Just go to hell, its more than I can bear.
If you ask me on a Thursday to tidy up the flat
You know you’ve asked for trouble, mate.
When things go flying, splat. Take that, and that,
And that, and then some more of that.
You’re the one that messes up, you filthy, messy rat.
If you ask me on a Friday to take you on a walk
I realize that it is time we had a serious talk
Living in the same house isn’t too bad,
We get along, we do, (most of the time)
But you always want to walk the talk
Which is something I can’t do.
If you ask me on a Saturday to bake a loaf of bread
I’d dive beneath the covers and immediately play dead.
But on a Sunday, oh, beautiful glorious Sunday,
How I truly love everything about you, my little turtle dove.
Your messiness, your tidiness, your silly laugh, your hair
Everything mesmerizes me, for everything I care.
I know I am a nut job, but I am a Sunday flower
My special day I blossom, a gentle pleasant shower
Of goodwill to one and all, even to you, my pet
For the rest of the week, you may have many a regret
At having plighted your troth to this strange behemoth
Of a person who is so strange, so weird,
And yet, there must be something in me,
Which to you has me endeared.
I’ll cook, I’ll clean, I’ll walk, I’ll talk
Whatever you want I’ll do.
I’ll whisper sweet nothings in your ear,
we can even go to the Zoo.
If you desire, I’ll light a fire
Behind the garden shed
We’ll have a barbecue, just me and you
Next to the old rose bed.
What pleases you will please me too,
I will be your willing slave
For the rest of my life, until I rest in my grave.
Stupid old romantic, with these silly Sunday antics
I can see these thoughts float within your mind
I try my best, on Sunday, to be kind.
If you ask me, just today, if I love you, I’d say Yeah.
My partner Vijay sent out this prompt during the week when the community pitched in with prompts. Poetry has always been fundamental to an inhabitation of the world; so he sent out this:
Write a piece inspired by Basho’s winter haiku poem:
you make the fire
and I’ll show you something wonderful:
a big ball of snow!
In response, Gouri Dange sent in this joy of a dancing piece, injecting all of my next day with a floating yet earth-bound magic.
-- xx --
In these times, and the times that are bound to follow, I wonder if we can bring something of this monastic camaraderie to our interactions with each other and to our ‘consumption patterns’. This Basho fragment also holds so much potential in its ‘come, let’s…’ suggestion. The word “let’s” is itself one of my favourite ways to start a sentence or hear someone start a sentence. It is so onward-looking and enthusing and regenerative – the Marathi and Hindi equivalent would be ‘challa’ or ‘challo’ – followed by apan or hum-log (us). Utter it and a string of possibilities immediately sit up. The sheer willingness to invite and to participate, both, is what we could hope to have in our lives, albeit much-changed from earlier plans and patterns, perhaps.
So in keeping with Basho’s spirit, what are some elemental things we can ask and offer of each other? I wrote them as much-loved people and interactions came up in my mind.
Here are some. (Nowhere as finely-balanced and world-in-a-grain-of-sand-like as Basho’s, so pliss excuse and edjhust while reading. Here goes, with advance apologies for being nothing more than a poetaster.)
And insert a chall! before each one, as you read:
you bring the beers
and I’ll go soak the brown harbara:
let’s do a Google adda!
you bring the pumpkin
and I’ll make magic with the peels:
a smokey orange chutney
you bring a big car
and I’ll canvass the neighbourhood:
a Kamdhenu food bank
you open out old plans
I’ll see how we can rejig them:
let’s have the best staycation!
you bring your swimsuits
I’ll pull down the sheet soak tub:
pool for overgrown babies!
you change out of scrubs
I promise to be in post-exercise clothes:
dinner in SFO breakfast in PNQ!
you bring your solemnness
I promise to keep a straight face:
and then we’ll laugh at people!
you go out with friends
I’ll chat with your sulky teenager:
a reprieve for all!
you dig up the soil
I’ll scope some seeds:
a lush vegetable garden!
You repair my binocs
I’ll make buttery egg sandwiches:
birding trip down the road!
you roll up your shutters
we’ll swarm up your stairs:
dosa and filter coffee!
you come back to work
I’ll listen to your dreams:
a doctor-banega son!
you re-start from scratch
I’ll bring more customers:
a buzzing bazaar again!
you get the Wai-Wai
I’ll get out my stashed shiitakes
a bowl of far-away Sikkim!
you play a new raga
I’ll listen with old ears:
an age-proof arrangement!
you got no curfew
while we wait in suspension:
bring it on, Gulmohar!
You fetch your leash
I promise you a long ramble:
we vanish into the hills!
you give the prompt
we’ll scurry to our laptops:
500 sparkling words!
My last two prompts were companion pieces, asking for pieces inspired by two of my favorite poems from Tony Hoagland, “There is no Word” and “The Word”
In response to the first, and because I am never quite sure what to do with the felling that is the consequence of too many words, and not enough meaning, I wrote the following piece:
UNMOVED
I am always home these days. Even I can scarcely believe it. But even here, I am forever scurrying, between coffee, writing, tea, phone calls, new skills, and newer maladies still.
But I have more time. On my list of discoveries this morning: cobwebs (two on the windows behind my bed; they are beautiful), trees (a newly discovered beauty of a being with languid beans, hanging off twenty to a branch, being nibbled on by one intrepid upside-down squirrel), bats (screeching at twilight and gathering at the mango tree by the fire-escape), glass earrings (swirly-gigged in blue, orange, and green), and a lone mini-hot water bag in blue with white polka dots. This house I thought I knew so well, is now along with me a breathing entity, much more resolute in its existence than me.
Outside, the children below are yelling as they bounce basketballs. A man with a mask over his mouth on which I see a chintzy print, delivers two cans of water at 10 this morning. He huffs as he tells me how nothing will happen to him, for he delivers water. Just in a geographic span of five kilometres, I know that men and women are out and about in the world, cleaning, sweeping, guarding, nursing, swabbing, cooking, feeding, and coming back home, late at night, exhausted.
I am writing, and I do not have enough words. Even more than ever, I find there is no word for living.
In the timespan of a month I see one new silver strand of hair. Old, older, oldest. But there has never ever been a good enough word for ageing, I think. I feel like that interlocutor in a conversation where someone has revealed something very shocking and I respond, “Just no words!”
I see my own frame at arm’s length, and examine its movements like a time-lapse video. This body is also a house I think. But this body is also the house-r, I also think. I have even more time to think.
For so long, I have lived only through the ongoing, relentless obligation of movement as a specific set of possibilities: outside equals speed, inside equals stasis; body equals use, mind equals transcendence; home equals quiet, world equals chaos. But now, I am still, in a room, and all around me there is everything. There is no word for the ping-pong of a life between ghostly presence and incomplete absence, for hallucinating into self at key moments to display attention, presence, familiarity, certainty, lucidity, life.
The world reveals itself one shocking event after another, one injustice after another, one unbearable weight after another, and you realize there must be a word that speaks to the cultivation of willful ignorance. And the banishment and abandonment of those with memory. There must be a word for all the writers, the dictionaries, the etymologists, the philosophers, the poets, the bards, the mendicants, the sages, and the madwomen, that we have sent away because they had the words.
In response to “The Word”, Paromita Vohra responded with this beauty of a piece, so located in the moment, so resolutely insistent on living all of it.
A DRINKING PROBLEM
She feels she may be developing a drinking problem. No, not the kind you are thinking of.
She only permits herself to drink on weekends during the Lockdown. She’s trying to keep a routine, she’s trying not to fall into the well of people who wake up at noon and eat chips for lunch (they have eaten up all the Maggi in the market).
She’s so good at To Do lists. She has experimented with various formats, most of them successful. Lists and bullets, boxes and tabs, all of it works, works too much it works so much she works too much. They wrestle, she and the To-Do. To Do wins a lot.
But not in Lockdown. Now it is boxes and ticks, boxes and ticks, and tick tick tick goes the brain, an uptick of attentiveness to what’s going where who’s saying what.
The drinking problem? Right, ok. She is worried she will get drunk and write, as she calls it, antt-shantt all over Facebook. She is worried she will be-gin to hit enter instead of backspace on comments. She is worried she will wake up and see 503 likes and 99 comments saying “we do not expect this of you” “you disgust me” “what a hater” “what happened? Can I help?” because she posted last night “Get over yourselves already.”
What a to-do there is online. So many thoughts, more thoughts than ever and yet even fewer. Prim scoldings, unoriginal rants, greeting card epiphanies. Band karo yeh bakwas! She might say. Sab kuchh jala doongi! she might declare.
If someone writes, I am leaving social media because it has become too toxic and my tender heart needs to outrage in private, she might write, oh please (eye-roll emoji). And next day when the person hasn’t left, she might write, kya hua, tusi gaye nahin?
She might notice eye contact on an Instagram live and yell, get a room! Oh sorry, forgot, you can’t, lockdown. But I saw that. Ok? I saw it.
She might publish all her unsent tweets.
She might write things like – “stop being so spiteful!” to people who are mean about other people’s cooking or stitching or opinions.
She might reply to emails about collaborations with “Really? What will I get out of this?”
She might say “don’t be stupid” to someone who is being stupid, instead of “I see where you are coming from” and thinking “from Stupidland” only in her mind. Or “what nonsense, this makes no sense!”.
Scroll scroll scroll and it’s cannons to left and right with every sip and it’s a drinking problem.
But all of a sudden, there is a baby. A child, new, small, light, as flowers are light, in the arms of a new parent, whose face is full of light, as the full moon is light, defying all quarantines, unlocking all lockdowns.
By mistake she says out loud to the Facebook post, ‘ohhhhhh’ her body and heart opening like a hibiscus at 10 am.
God yaar she thinks, stop being such a khadoos so-and-so. How does all this matter? Tereko kya hai? Do your work. Eat a mango. Have another drink.
She does. She’s smiling too.