Arunoday Singh

I came across these fragments and unfinished pieces.  The notebooks themselves are falling apart with age and neglect.  Thought this would be a good place to preserve and clean them up.

***

Lonelier than the people I see

Feeding pigeons in the sun

Whistling to the squirrels

Begging them to come.

I sit in a crumbling tower of dreams,

Behind a forever-locked gate.

Staring at the empty pages

Smoking the cigarettes I hate.

Trying hard to capture a moment

Feeling unworthy every time.

I look into mirrors to remember my face

Reading words that can never be mine.

Who am I pretending to be today?

A poet, an actor, a wandering flame

Trapped in a stillness of spirit

Looking for something to blame

Searching for my corner of Beautiful

Somewhere to hide the love I keep.

To greet the dawn with a smile

And dive a thousand kisses deep.

***

You remain hidden from me,

Like all the hopes

We dare not breathe.

Sometimes I catch your scent

Lingering.  A wisp of magic

In a mundane day.

I see a smile I recognize

On an unfamiliar face.

I search through Coltrane

To understand the meaning

Hidden just beyond the words

I don’t quite understand.

All these words…

What happened to my voice?

I can’t force a picture to smile

Or a glass of wine to be truthful.

We are all locked within

Parodies of ourselves.

Searching not for a way out,

But to trap another within.

***

Where do your dreams take you

Love?

Into the meadows we were banished from.

Into the songs the Seraphim hum.

Feathers on the summer wind,

Where do your dreams take you

Love?

Do you see my face, there

just beyond the Light?

Where all the things you wish for dwell.

Waves of hope against the darkness swell.

Do you see my face there

Love?

I cannot make the words beautiful.

I cannot make them sing the songs I hear.

You are the beauty and the song

The flame of my hearth.

You are my burning bush,

my desert cave.

My brimming cup of nectar.

You are my final goddess

My last loss of faith.

There are silences within us

We, who reflect only moonlight.

Silences they cannot drown

Or wash with television,

Silences that never whisper

Music that never stops.

I do not remember

My dreams.

I search the faces,

For the bright ones,

With eyes like drops of nectar.

We gather the sheets, and

Whisper “Good night,”

to empty beds.

Linger with the shattered

Things, and whimpered dreams.

Away from the silence.

This begins with guarded smiles

Safe distances, excuses wrapped

In Hookah smoke and Turkish coffee,

And two perfect cups of lemonade

Wearing matching smiles.

Words dancing to her voice.

Fingers weaving around each other

Like dragonflies in the sun

I take her eyes in mine

And forget to look away.

A song sung by this woman of quiet,

Distant places, and desert suns.

And hair that curls and flows

Like the pen of an Arabian poet.

A woman deeper than all of this,

A sound vanishing beyond itself

She sprinkles me across her sky.

Jasmine dreams in a secret garden.
She gives me the words
I told my ears to forget.

A prayer calling its priest,

As I take her in my arms,

And welcome her home.

I decided to finally stop procrastinating and go see Michael Jackson’s “This is It” tonight.

Moment of silence…………………………………………………………………

Words cannot begin to describe the nostalgia, the euphoria, the overwhelming shaking of the booty, and the heartbreak I felt whilst watching.  I have loved that man’s music ever since the first day I heard “Thriller” playing, in July 1991.  In Swedish House Dormitory at Kodaikanal International School.  I was all of seven and a half years old, and I had told my parents the year before that I wanted to go away to boarding school.  I have no idea what had gotten into me to leave my comfortable home and my doting parents and move to the other end of the bloody country, up a mountain, and into a boarding school.

I remember the green stucco walls of the dorm.  I remember the alien sounds coming out of the Tamil maids as they cajoled, pleaded, screamed, and jovially pushed all of us into the cafeteria for dinner.  I remember the white tiles on the floor that smelled like spilled spaghetti sauce and Coca-Cola spills.  I remember the heady aromas wafting out of the kitchen which wasn’t really separated from the cafeteria by anything except one of those saloon doors that they show in the old Western films.  And every  now and then, Mary, the chef’s wife would step through like Clint Eastwood and thump unidentifiable stuff into the bowls in front of us.

I remember that first dinner, sitting at a table alone, watching everyone so comfortable with each other and themselves.  I tried to understand all the jokes, decipher the stories being told and the references they used.  I knew nothing, and noone.  I had grown up on a pretty secluded farm, with my only contact with kids my age at the local public school where we all had worn uniforms and not really talked to each other.

That’s when I heard the music.  Michael Jackson playing on the most beat up tape recorder I had ever seen.  But this kid called Dhanus Nair, who would later become my room-mate and my friend, put it on and did an impromptu jig in the middle of the cafeteria.  Our dorm parent, Mrs. Lazarus, a tall statuesque, Amazon of a woman (who later become as close to me as my own mother, through my time in that dorm, and later, as I moved on, grew up and grew out) come storming through the doors like one of the ghouls breaking down the door in the video.  But I, sitting alone in the corner, was the only one who noticed her smile when she turned away again to walk out after chastising Dhanus.

That smile was the first moment I felt the weight and the fear lift off my chest.  And I’ve always associated that feeling with Michael Jackson’s music.  It’s one of those strange psychological associations that happens.  Doesn’t have to be logical, doesn’t even have to matter to anyone else.

Till this day, all I have to do, to feel like a kid with an entire universe of adventure ahead of him, is to play Michael Jackson.

You were an angel Michael.  An angel we raised up then tore down and threw away.  How we wailed when you died…how we beat our chests.  But what we cried for wasn’t that you were gone, we cried that we had ever known a moment of doubt about you.  That the world made us stop loving you as much, even for a little while.

Forgive us. 

And thank you.

For the music, for that feeling, for the love.

You were it.

Have fun teaching the angels how to Moonwalk.

I feel the weather changing.  There was a promise of relief in the wind, just the barest brush of better times ahead.  Bombay never really gets cold, but the wind tonight seemed to promise some respite in the future.  I hope so.  I am not a man suited to this humidity and dust.  It’s been only a week since we all came down from Rishikesh, and every morning I wake, I can feel the siren call of the mountains throbbing against my eyes just after they open.  In that half moment betwixt slumber and when I toss aside the sheets, I can almost taste the thickness of the mountain air in my mouth.

It’s strange how I’m always wishing to be somewhere other than I am.  I wonder if it’s my own personal purgatory, or do others have a similar ache in their hearts now and then.  When they look around a room, or stop at a red light and stare outside their cars, do they long to be anywhere but in their present circumstances.  I’ve been working at not being so disconnected with my present, and am proud to say that there have been mostly successes on that front.  But my rambunctious mind and it’s endless, bounding energy to skip and twirl and disappear into fantasy, like a pup chasing into a thicket after a rabbit, it always takes me by surprise and snap!  I’m away in another world.

I found myself doing that very strongly this last Thursday night.  I was invited to attend the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image’s Eleventh Film Festival.  Truth be told, I went more because the opening film was going to be Soderberg’s “The Informant”, a film I’d been jonesing to see ever since I saw the trailer earlier this year.  But before the screening, there was a long drawn-out introduction and opening ceremony, with many speeches and many moments of applause.  It was very well done, heartfelt, a bit sloppily staged, but sincere.  And yet for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to actually pay attention to my surroundings.

Thankfully the movie started and gripped me from the first moment.  Matt Damon who, after watching him in the “Talented Mr. Ripley”, I have come to greatly admire, was unbelievable in “The Informant”.  The man altered everything about himself, body-language, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, tics, speech pattern, even his body shape.  It was a humbling experience watching an actor inhabit his role so completely.  Realized I have a long, long way to go before I can even claim to be an actor worth the mentioning.  If you get a chance, watch this film.  Aside from “Frost/Nixon” it’s probably the best film I’ve seen this year.

After the screening was a dinner, but everybody seemed to only want to head home.  So I peeled away too, took in a nice quiet meal at a nearby restaurant.  Something very relaxing about eating alone in a dimly lit joint, with smiling waiters and perfectly decanted port sparkling crimson in a glass.  There’s definitely something in the air these days.  I don’t quite know what it is, only it fills me with the oddest surge of hope.  As if something’s coming, or has already arrived.  I keep walking into rooms hoping to find IT there, or turning corners hoping to glimpse it.

Now to be away.  Brand new book sitting on my bedside, and a steaming cup of kahwa.  My apartment smells like champa, and the wind’s tapping softly on the windows, asking to be let in.  I think I’ll oblige.  Excuse me…

She told me that her favorite song was “Again” by Lenny Kravitz. Her voice was a soft whisper in my ear, and her body a softer one beside mine, separated only by the arm of one chair and every fear that glistened in her eyes.  We were both high on more than weed, and we were both exhausted, and we weren’t alone, but we might as well have been.  The laughter of the other’s around us, their jokes and their back-slapping camaraderie merely added to our isolation.  They were no different than the moon flitting in and out of the swaying branches of the trees above, and the moths and the candles locked in their deadly tango.  The night it seemed, and all its children were there for us, and for us alone.
Or at least, it was so in my mind.
Now it’s the following day and I’m listening to the song, again and again.  “All of my life, where have you been? I wonder if I’ll, ever see you again.  And if that day comes, I know we could win.  I wonder if I’ll, ever see you again.”  And I wonder about a girl who could love those lines so much.  Where every pleasure was deferred, every wish was killed by negativity before it could ever take flesh.  The search for the perfect love, the finding of it, only to cast it back into the wind hoping life and destiny and chance bring it back into your arms again.  It’s a great song, but a sad one.  How you can meet someone completely amazing and yet you can let them pass you by without saying…anything.  Then you wonder why you never meet anyone truly amazing.  How could I have let last night pass me by without fulfilling it’s promise?  How could I have been so stupid?
I wanted her that night, from mind to body, follicle to toenail, but I did nothing.  And she wanted me, inexplicably to her and to me, and hesitantly for sure because she didn’t trust that part of herself that was drawn to me, and she trusted the world not at all.  So she pushed herself away from me, from the table full of kindly laughing faces, and away from that night of seductive shadows.  She pushed herself away with a snapped “Good night” and fled down the hallway.  The moths flitted after her, drawn by the dying heat between her and me.  She pushed herself away, and locked herself away in her room, alone and wondering.  And I sat outside, with my laughing happy friends and felt myself seized by the oddest mixture of rage and sadness and lust and loneliness.
I remember us, and our canted postures, our breaths doing what our mouths wished to, our hands finding reasons to brush up against each other.  It was our last chance for a dance; our last night together before the world intruded and work took us away.  And we did nothing.  I sit alone now, drinking teas of regret, while she walks through her streets, surrounded by friends.  I wonder if her thoughts are straying, stumbling their way towards me.  I know they are not, why would they?  She is a woman that ever will ask “Why”, never “Why ever not?”
But what galls me is my restraint, my petulant insistence that the next move be hers.  The things I could have said, the things I should have done, all carefully and brightly wrapped in my mind, of no use now.  Just extra clutter in that room we all have in our heads, the room full of things we never said.  Mine’s more a mansion than a room now.
It amazes me how much we think we’ve matured, become scarred veterans of this bloody war of the sexes.  Then lightning strikes and we’re left just as blind and scared as we were the first time it struck.  How pathetic this must sound?  How weak and despondent?  I’m writing now to turn my face away from the mirror.  I don’t need seven years of bad luck.  I’m writing because my disgust must not be allowed to ruin the fragile castle of patience and faith I have erected.  I’m writing because out in the real world, I feel like a coward of words.

                Almost exactly one year after we made “Sikandar” in Kashmir, I find myself once again under the ageless gaze of the Himalayas.  This time it’s Hrishikesh that’s playing host to this wandering soul.  The undying Mountains and the undying fires of faith being assailed daily by the polluted river of humanity, that crash against it without pause, without pity, and completely without thought.  It hurts me to see the garbage heaps we’ve turned our holiest and most beautiful places into.  But that’s what we do, I guess.  I might as well try to change the Sun into a gentler watcher, than tell my species to stop befouling their surroundings.  Probably have more luck with the Sun.

                Been shooting for a new project for about a month now, and have been quite underwhelmed by work.  Not been working as often as I would like.  And nothing saps my energy quite like inactivity.  Pathetic excuse for the lack of any blogs I could have posted, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

                I’m just grateful to be working again, even if it’s a relatively small part.  I’ve had a great time working on this one.  The crew and the directorial team are all oddballs and fun spirits.  And a truly blessedly wacko bunch of co-actors which always is preferable to the stuffy, stiff-shirts that one can across.  This bunch is all young and funny, and uninhibited and chilled.  It’s a great atmosphere for work and contemplation of nothing much at all, just sitting in the evening light on wicker and plastic chair circles with laughter and coffee fumes floating up and startling the birds sitting overhead in the temple trees.

                I went white-water rafting today for the first time and had myself a big, bloody blast.  Half way down the trip the guide told me that I could jump out of the raft and body-surf the next bunch of rapids.  My companion hit the water wrong and swallowed a rather unpleasant mouthful of the Ganges and then panicked in the water.  But I reached him in time and propped him upright, after which he laughed and got the hang of it.  So barring that first terrifying minute until the smile reappeared on his face, the rest of the body-surfing section was the about the most fun I’ve had in a long, long while.  I highly recommend it to all of you.

                This is what I love so much about my job.  To go routinely travel and stay in all these places, the nomadic life, the life of new faces, strange tasting waters, odd-smelling rooms, and the bonds I make with all the people.  Some which will last only until the filming lasts, and some a ways longer, but all dear and all interesting.  Life is grand.

                The only thing I miss from the city is the cinemas.  I’m craving a dark auditorium and a bucket of popcorn.  I was hoping to be able to catch the new Tarantino flick in the cinema adjacent to our hotel in Delhi on the last free day before we travelled to the mountains, but there was a party and there was tequila and pretty girls dancing, and much Mary, Mary, Mary…  So yeah, that plan didn’t get executed quite as smoothly as I had anticipated.

                I feel strangely blessed to be where I am right now.  It’s not a deep or moving feeling, simply a quiet satisfaction with my present.  I’m coming closer and closer to living in the moment only.  I still manage to stray from it, but I’m gaining my stillness.  The more I wander, the more I work, the more calm I seem to become.  Bless you Lords and Ladies for blessing this unworthy fellow.

Green tea left brewing far too long.

Long walks on a dirty street, hunting for a patch of green.

A young dog with the eyes of an old wolf.

The literary equivalent of a harmonica before Bob Dylan picked it up.

Sleeping on your side of the bed in an unfamiliar room.

The first cup of coffee after a great night.

The first page of a great novel, written by a writer you’ve never heard of before.

The first night in a lonely city, watching the lights twinkling below from a window you can’t open.

Full moon thoughts in the Delhi sun.

Watching the prettiest girl say the ugliest things in the sweetest voice.

A lost soul in disguise.

Where the lost and the forgotten meet and toast to the setting sun.

The last thought you have before you fall asleep.

That dream you need to but will never recall.

A New York State of Mind thinking Indian thoughts.

That new Jay-Z album playing on blast in a black and yellow cab, and even the cabbie bobbing his head.  Like this.

Finest wine drunk off the wrist of the finest dime, with her eyes on yours.

Muddy Waters’ “Hoochi Coochie Man” playing everytime you walk into a room.

An irresistible force on vacation in the Mediterranean, sipping MaiTais, head resting on glistening thighs.

A Spanish Guitar played in the middle of  a Bombay traffic jam.

Technicolour dreams in a sepia print.

Sinatra singing with a broken microphone.

The illest shit smoked on a wet sticky night.

An insomniac dreamer…

Forever Young….

Forever I..

Forever.

The wind reminds me that change is coming.  The moon whispers goodbye and the clamor of the street hates me tonight, but I refuse to cry.  I spoke many words today, each one was a lie.  When I tried to tell the truth, she began to cry.  I couldn’t stand her pain, knowing it was my only gift to her.  And all I could think about was the way she smiled at the other man today.  The way she laughed, and touched her hair, and made excuses to reach out and touch him.  She knew I was watching.  She was testing me.  But she didn’t expect this, now, here, with the windows open and the cacophony of the devout dancing in the streets below us and blowing their ridiculous pipes and horns and shouting “Morya” with more rage and anger than devotion.  I wonder if they realize that their god cannot hear them tonight.  Tonight is when he’s turned away.  That was unworthy of me.  This day was unworthy of me.  Rather I am unworthy of this day, and all the ones that came before this.

“You don’t love me?” she whispers, standing under the windchime and the flicker of the lights from across the street spying on us from between the swaying fronds of the palm trees.

“I never did.”

“Yes you did.  You said so.”

“A man will say anything to get what he wants.”

“And did you get what you wanted?”

“No.  I got disappointment, and this night.  That’s what I got.”

“Why are you saying these things to me?”  She shouts this, not because she’s angry at me.  But because she knows I’m angry at her, and I have reason.  She wants another.  I hate for that.  But I hate her more for wanting me to be angry at her for it.  I refuse.  He can have her.

I turn away to make some tea.  She follows me into the kitchen.  I say nothing, she says less.  Just stands there under the disgusting white light in my kitchen wall, the one that makes me look like a ghoul in the reflections, but somehow she still looks like an angel.  That, I hate her for, deeply.

She stands there, looking like something cast down from heaven, with my heart at her feet which she’s trying to put together again and she starts to cry.  They say there’s nothing that can withstand the force of a woman’s tears.  I want to disagree, and I try, but I can’t.  Neither can I give in.  I rip open the tea bags and stir the leaves into a gentle vortex.  She sobs, I stir, she sniffs, I stir, she stifles, and I keep stirring.  She stops.

When I turn around she is no longer the weeping angel.  When I turn around she is smiling.  And that is what finally lances through my pain, and my hurt, and my insecurities, right into my bleeding heart.  It’s how she trapped me that first time.  But her first smile was an invitation.  This one is for malice.  This is the smile that says she’s leaving me.

I’m left standing in my kitchen, under the white light besieged by moths, and two cups of tea in my hands.  She doesn’t bother to shut the door behind her.

This will be my last post here as an aspiring actor.  The next time I write shall be after “Sikandar” has released and all the reactions are in and the weekend over and done with and my life altered forever.  I wonder how I’ll deal with the anticlimactic Saturday morning.  Because it’s always an anticlimax, isn’t it?  The axis mundi of the world hasn’t suddenly shifted to make me the center of the world, Aphrodite’s handmaidens aren’t hidden in the billowing curtains of my bedchamber, the song “Crawl” by Kings of Leon doesn’t play out loud everytime I walk into a room in fantastic slow motion.

But for all the banality of that Saturday morning, for all that the coffee will taste the same, and the number of times I hit the snooze button on my alarm will be the same, and that old familiar series of twinges that run down my body reminding me of all the bones I’ve sprained/strained/broken, I will have been projected onto a widescreen in cinematic technicolor for the first time in front of a paying audience.  I will have achieved the thing I have desired most in my life, and I’m a little moist in the corners of my eyes just thinking about that.

I honestly wondered whether this week would ever come.  I think of all the times I walked out of an audition with the callous insults of the auditioners still heaving against my breast, I think of all the ten thousand lonely nights I’ve spent in tiny little apartments whispering to the gods, begging for a sign, an intervention, a bigger ration of faith, I think of all the times I had to hide the pain in my voice during the weekly calls my parents made to check up on their only son, stumbling around in a city more than a thousand miles away, and for the first time in my life - I feel a deep and satisfying sense of accomplishment.

I cannot say whether people will like my work or not.  I cannot know whether “Sikandar” will capture your minds and your hearts like Piyush hopes it will.

All I do know, is that I’m here to stay now.  I’m here to work.  I’m here to give this profession every single shred of me in the hopes of becoming a worthy actor.  The first step shall be before your eyes the day-after tomorrow.  Thank you, to all of you who have been reading and responding to my blog.  Know that I shall not be disappearing after “Sikandar”.  This may have started as ‘their’ idea, but this is MY blog now.  I plan to keep posting my incoherent, inconsistent, incomparable thoughts here until BIG has no choice but to cut me off.

The premiere of the film is tomorrow.  I’ve got a killer suit, an admantine will, and a smile the likes of which these here actresses haven’t seen in a long while.  Like a rapper said - “Blind eyes can look at me and see the Truth.”  Hello, world, I’m Arunoday, I hear you’ve been waiting for me…

This is the last Sunday before my first film release.  Cynicism and hope, the outrageous expectations and the crippling fear war within me.  Even as I brushed my teeth, or relieved myself at four in the morning before that, when I’m usually not thinking of anything at all except getting back under the sheets with my face buried in the pillow, I was thinking about what my life will be like after the twenty-first of August.

Not that I’m expecting that all of a sudden I shall be the cynosure of all eyes, with the men grilling and the women thrilling, and my phone trin-trinning with directors.  That’s absurd, although if I’m honest, some part of me is hoping for exactly that.  But that’s just the overinflated ego I’ve never been able to shush for long.  But I’m grateful to that part of me, the unreasonably proud and confident part of me that got me up some mornings when there was no work and no chance of any, that gave me the courage to walk into audition rooms where there were twenty other men better than me.

And next Sunday after will be much the same as this one.  The morning coffee will taste the same, the smell of my oats as they bubble and thicken will be the same, as will the crow that always come to the window when he smells them.  The morning paper will have the same mixture of amusing and appaling news.  There’ll be a piece then that will give me as much horror as the one I read today about the new Afghan law that permits husbands to starve their wives if they refuse to perform their conjugal duties.  I’ll curse the world with the same words, and then I’ll thank the Goddess for my life.  That Sunday will be the same as this one, and yet nothing shall be the same.  Bloody hell, I wish the week would just get over already so that the verdict is out and I know for sure.  But the waiting is quite an exquisitely complex torment.

I’m interested in monitoring how my body and mind react to the impending release, and how they twist and surge with anticipation and fear.  Being an actor for me is partly learning to recognize all that occurs within me and then being able to artificially induce that reaction when required.  And nothing in my life has filled me with such hope and anxiousness as the thought of that Friday.

Theatre is an immediate experience.  The tension and the release, the fear and the release, they are all over in a night.  And the applause is physically received, you can see the smiles, you can feel the laughter and the wind escaping all those clapping hands push against you ever so imperceptibly.  “Sikandar” was done for almost a year before this August and we’ve been waiting for this Friday with great and sometimes manic patience.  We’ve stopped and started, hoped and despaired, for a long time now.

We are terrified, we are excited, we are elated, we are huddled together like abandoned puppies, we are strutting around, not like kings, but like we couldn’t care less who is the king, but more than all of that - we hope you see our film, and we hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.