two minutes (more)

we lost the rain.
we’ll always have the rain, you know, like an overquoted line (when you misquoted lyrics, i ended up liking your version more), like continuity (you stand out like the one strand of hair out of place in a neverending plait). sometimes you feel as if, at the end of all things, it’ll always rain, glorious.

rain at night, two minute drizzle but you go running out anyway. when you try to catch it, the rain, in your palm, sometimes raindrops don’t leave a shadow. i tried tasting, all i could taste was my own skin, tasteless, almost invisible, wetness doesn’t leave a trace. hugging a door against what’s now just wind, no water, i’ve never collected rain in anything. you and tears and something you said to someone once about how much you like their taste.
it’s over, it’s left a wet sleeve and a slight headache behind. like an icecream headache, or the ache of missing someone

pictures that asadullah takes and other stories

Because when he takes a fabulous picture with my camera, I can’t help but be a little jealous, you know. That’s donkette, she drives my car.

they say that on the subway in new york , every seven seconds you see a face you can imagine spending the rest of your life with.
i squeeze out more ketchup for the fries. there’s a pink floyd poster on the wall behind fez that reminds me of someone. we take turns guessing what the next song is. Hobnob (and he adds an extra k in there for no reason when he spells it out in an sms) seems to have gone a little crazy, nirvana and dylan and the fugees and john mayer all mixed up, no one seems to like your body is a wonderland except me. (maybe he’s missing k)

Gtalk adds a wonderfully considerate “x is busy, you may be interrupting” message when you message someone who is busy. If you hire enough technology, they’ll do the politeness maneuvers for you.

One day, we’ll drive around town all night, zooming through blinking yellow traffic lights. Like that night, standing on the top of the flyover, at the exact point where you can’t walk one more step without starting to go down the slope, standing and wondering how many people might’ve thought about jumping off right here. Maybe it was because there were three boys walking on all sides of me, maybe because things were different, but no cars started following even after midnight. we walked for three hours straight.

one day, i’ll tell you the sleepy nashta stories, and maybe try to get you to stay up all night and we could drive out to the nearest dhaba. halwa puri and cold soda, 7 in the morning and no one’s out on the dirty-from-last-night roads yet.

(’cause i am)

the un

“You Say”

Here in the light
It burns you up inside
Here in the shell of a sun
We echo on

Too much listening
Not enough living

[Chorus]
And you say
What did I say
What did you say
We just
Go away
Go away
Go away

It helps you out
Knowing I’m left out
Locked in a box with a light
That won’t shine

Turn it on and wait for
Someone to come

[Chorus]

I’m here now
Waiting
Holding on to reasons
Wasted
I faced it
Watching you deny me

Here in the light
It burns you out sometimes
Here in the shell of a sun
We echo on

Left alone forever
All alone together

[Chorus]

-vertical horizon

Lyrics always surprise me a little, I find out I’ve been putting ands and ors in places where they were never sung. It’s a song you can’t rediscover enough.

And I’ve always been right here…
but sometimes right here is still far, unwalked inches stretch to miles.

Ice cream man has a theory about the order of the universe being vicariously balanced on the tip of an icecream cone, and it’s stillalmostmaybe winter, so it can’t melt. Sometimes you avoid all the cat’s eyes without even intending to, and it always seems to happen when you’re on your way home in damp windshields and the one mildly happy tape stuck on repeat.
Words that you love to speak, just to hear how they sound, annihilation, mercilessly. Sg walks away in a smile, murmuring what a lovely word, recidivism…Should’ve made a list long ago, where’ve all the bulletpoints gone.

I’m the anti-everything today, the side of the oreo cookie without the cream on it. (Is the anti-hero still a hero, but). But you need the contrast, I’ve been told; the sameness maddens into oblivion, into indifference, into tedium.

I always thought the word chime was ugly.

where does the lion sleep

Win Some, Lose Some
Robbie Williams

We didn’t think it’d last beyond summer
I met her father she met my mother
We didn’t have anywhere else to go
She said to me when we grow older
Will we still need young love on our shoulders
Does it just fade away, will we ever know?

She touched my face and called me her lover
I never thought that I’d need another

Your cool suburban sun
You’re foolin’ every one
You win some you lose some

I didn’t know what we had found
Just caught the bus and rode it to town
She wouldn’t notice anything else but me

Your cool suburban sun
You’re foolin’ every one
You win some you lose some

Dancing at discos, and moaning at phone bills
Torremolinos and sun burnt in high heels
Swap it and sell it and drop it and smell it
All those years ago

She touched my face and called me her lover
I never thought that I’d need another

Your cool suburban sun
You’re foolin’ every one
You win some you lose some

Now it’s gone, now it’s gone,You win some, you lose some
Now it’s gone, now it’s gone,You win some, you lose some
Now it’s gone, now it’s gone,You win some, you lose some
Now it’s gone, now it’s gone,You win some, you lose some

Win some

Robbie Williams floats my boat.
Massages on make-belief streets, under toobright-white streetlights. Leaning against crossed-legs, hands working their way through invisible nerves and foreheads unseen. No secrets, and no stories told and re-told, i’m repititive i’ve been told, like the chorus of songs, like chewing nails. Sometimes in a roomful of tapping-shuffling legs and voices, you burst into whispered song, and i listen. There’s a mainmarket in Lahore that looks just like Bahadurabad, somehow, and anti-air-pollution posters dot the walls of a cafe tucked under a car showroom. I remember stairs the most, and I’ve stopped wearing high heels ages long ago.
But there’s some kind of resilience in Robbie Williams that you can feel in every sarcastic line. Sarcastic and bitter aren’t always sisters.

saif

saif
Originally uploaded by psnob.

on a different note. an icecream parlour from long ago, with assortedrock on repeat. sweet home alabama sounds just right in the middle of nowhere, tiled floors and glass doors which swing soundlessly as you walk in and order the last thing on the menu. sitting side by side, not opposite, like passengers on a bus, twenty rupee cones and no sharing because it’s saif and he doesn’t like other people in his food.

OGs in a lahore cafe seem to make sense again. Not that i’ll ever be one, but i can sometimes close my eyes in the middle of the half-familiar conversation and feel half-at-home.

two cellphones in a picture, yours and mine, what do we need them for now? two cellphones on a paper bag, two cellphones thrown in abandon, windscreens and dashboards and nothing to tell the world outside. sometimes when we had girls nights in, we’d pool all our cellphones together in a tray, go to sleep and know exactly where to reach a hand out for at a familiar ringtone. i’ve stopped customizing mine, i don’t know why.

secret. i never feel heartbeaty-scared in car races, sometimes itfeels like the best way to go.

another sunrise

another sunrise
Originally uploaded by shadycat.

found on flickr interestingness; i nodandsmile at e who cant see me as he proclaims how addictive it is.

fitting that i just watched the sequel, before sunset, the one where i always muddlefused the word after in the title somewhere.

sifting through spam comments is like being on duty at a 24hour suicide helpline: you KNOW most of the calls that you’re gonna get are going to be bogus, but the one odd call at 3 am with the ready-to-press-down-knife-stories makes making the effort truly worth it.

a stranger did call me at almost-3-am today, startling much. and for apparently no reason, or not much anyway. a stranger who once tried to read all my secrets without a palm, on a drive to a university neither of us really belonged in.

meeting an old friend, someone who actually interviewed you for your first job, for ten minutes in a town muchmorehis than yours. half hugs, walks and interruptions in calls parade. you look thinner, your beard’s grown longer, i wonder how your brother is. but sometimes when i talk to my mother it’s like i’m attending a class i’m waiting to be dismissed from.

the smell of oranges inexplicably followed me all the way back to the car. i get home 1:41 am, and think wildly about driving away and never coming back. i’ve never completely understood the word neurotic.

walkdanceswimswirl

disclaimer for the last entry, the compose window was stolen. much pawfully.

found this in a draft. thought it might mean more, somehow, but it was just the fragmentedness of a script never written. when will i untwist my mind from the comparisons endless and nonmeaning.

1. painted people – blue and green
2. food- ?
3. karachi website etc – hand
4. changing clothes – driving karachi lahore
//

5. karachi sea – could see the sea everywhere in lahore, in traffic, in people
6. in dialogue, spaces of silence
7. the way they lapse into punjabi at lahore unis
8.

when s slipped out the restaurant door, i started fiddling with my phone, like always. scribbled a note to myself for no reason; you creep into my words when i’m not looking, like hair curling round fingers in twists during conversation, like a cackle sneaking into a laugh, like a smiling new twenty rupee note handed to you in change.

robbie williams sings of entertaining and strength, and we wind through the streets of defence, brightly lit and nothing dramatic. there was a signal somewhere with all three lights shining brightly, red yellow green, confused and happy. sometimes you sink into the carseats and become one with the patchedfabric, if it weren’t for your voice singing along.

finally saw before sunrise and this movie and neither disappointed, though the former fizzled out in cliches. have you ever danced with a stranger in a foreign land..and the latter tossed every talk ever talked into a game.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0112471/
There’s a scene in before sunrise. Ethan Hawke (Jess) and Julie Delpy (Celine) are walking along a river. They meet a poet in a boat, who wants to strike a deal with them. He tells them that instead of just asking them for money, he’ll ask them to give him a word, which he will then use in a poem. If the poem adds something to their life, they could reward him. Celine bursts out, milkshake, something from a conversationjust. He writes

Street Poet: Daydream, delusion, limousine, eyelash / Oh baby with your pretty face / Drop a tear in my wineglass / Look at those big eyes / See what you mean to me / Sweet-cakes and milkshakes / I’m delusion angel / I’m fantasy parade / I want you to know what I think / Don’t want you to guess anymore / You have no idea where I came from / We have no idea where we’re going / Latched in life / Like branches in a river/ Flowing downstream / Caught in the current / I’ll carry you / You’ll carry me / That’s how it could be / Don’t you know me? / Don’t you know me by now?

When I heard it I thought the limousine was in an eyelash somehow. cumbersome and beautiful.

see the sea
everywhere

the warm seat

i am not supposed to be here.
i am six years old.
she is laughing like she’s crazy.
she denies everything. categorically, unequivocally.
even the letting go.
now she’s laughing again.
you know she’s never gonna let go
(she’s a dumass)
why is that girl moving her head while she’s talking?
she looks like she needs some sleep
she laughs like she’s stupid :S
look at her man
my own little world does not include her
and basant is far away, miss kite on a train

she be sitting right here
but she’s in my head right now
its february already
trust me, if you were me, you’d know
its too bright in here
oooOOoo…
you are a naughty girl.
but naughty is appreciated.
okay you don’t look like a fundo in a hoodie

wait, i’m not supposed to be here.
i need coffee
(or do i?)
yes, because i’m six
yes i need that too
okay yeh bohot awaami scene ho geya hai.

:p

113880588801868892

Sometimes my mother mumbles in her sleep. “Is it raining outside, I think I fell asleep”. Letting go of piercings is a strange process, rather like letting go of an old friend. Nose stud, the black one that people said was nice just because it wasn’t white. The one that looked green or purple in different lights. Came off more easily than I thought it would, and I haven’t checked since then to see if it’s closed up or not.

She aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl

Must be countless women who’ve quoted those lines. And felt comforted? Adulthood deferred, it feels like the rush of arms that surround you and let you be seven sometimes. Do men ever want to go back to being boys?

When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry
and it was your world
Dylan.

Sometimes it feels strange and unneccessary quoting greatness. Food metaphors and links found between dylan and pj, not everyday. Every red puddle looks like blood, even though I’m more into ketchup.

I would rather starve than eat your bread.
Pearl Jam.

The beginning of this movie stole my dreams. I wrote this an insanely long time ago, when sohail was in karachi and everything made sense -

Once, when driving around aimlessly with him, we passed through a familiar area. I turned to him and asked,
“Do we have some time? Could we make a quick detour?”
He said yes on both counts, and we ended up doing something I’d been longing to do for a long time: visiting the house I spent the first eleven years of my life in. I’d walked down that broken gali, past that empty plot where they used to celebrate my birthday each year till I was eight, past that tall crumbling house where no one used to live. New floors had been taped onto houses, ten years, and some had been painted about five times over. Brown walls where white aluminium windows used to be.

And we drove past one house after another after another on the narrow street I used to live on, none of them mine. And drove out onto the main road, without finding it.

“You live in the past, don’t you?” sohail said, foot on the accelerator.

bottles in kitchen

bottles in kitchen
Originally uploaded by psnob.

My mother stacks these one after the other, recycled soldiers. I never help around the house, but I can microwave to perfection. Contrary to what may seem to be, my mother is a bigger fan of pepsi. She has a firm belief in its curative powers, and often longs for it like a drug.