“…those whose names count in our literary market…their literary creations are like the camel in the animal world—neck and shoulders, belly and back, front and behind, uncouth and clumsy; and like the camel they shamble across the bleak desert of…literature with their loose, disjointed gait.”

Amit likens fashion to a mask and style to the charm of the face

“Amit , what you said was so true, you needn’t have said it all.”

“To be prepared for all possibilities is the way of civilization. Barbarism is always caught unawares.”

“Were I to smear the mirror of my mind with set convictions of my own, it would no longer reflect the shadow of each fleeting moment.”

“A confused mass of scattered impressions without a sense of unity to  link them up was responsible for a constant sense of restlessness and frustration in Amit.”

When we are prevented from loving someone who we might have, then such a person becomes for us an object, not of indifference, but the very opposite of love, blind hatred.”

1.

“What was death like for you?”

“It was small and round, and looked like an eggplant.”

2.

“I LOVE creaking!”

3. 

“I wish I could keep her smile, like a little crescent moon on the palm of my hand. But you can’t do that with bodies.”

4. 

“I wanted to be close to you when we were alive. But our bodies got in the way.”

Pallav Ranjan

August 12, 1995

As we walked upon frost bent grass,
did you inhale fungus spores?
And white blossoms that drooped heavy,
did you notice,
they smelled of death.

Berries, in so many tight bunches, so red.
The light. The sunlight. The morning light.
Do you remember how I ran
to capture those colors?
And on hills you noticed green hope.

There was that Ganesh shrine nearby,
snout towards the Himalayas,
eyes so beady gazing where his father danced –
except thorn had built a curtain, a living veil,
between him and his parent.

A memory of headache
sunlight bright
vodka by woodstove,
vomit stinking in tent, yours.

These ghosts walk about me
on the meadow where the sages were
two thousand years ago.
They, too, like us, watched fires burn
and the morning dawn,
they, too, saw our colors.
Flames fly now
not as an offering to the gods
but in an effort to make Rara noodles dance.
Armymen with rifles are gone
they were afraid we would set fires to bushes.
and fires, fires, fires,
spreading like you in my mind
would take the meadow grass like never before.

You straddled me in the sun yesterday
in that shelterless meadow.
The clearing,
just me and you on our knees,
that place is there still.

The tent forever like blue fire
eats into the browns,
greens, and the autumn.
We should be there today, every day,
forever, like pilgrims,
back at the same clearing,
in each other’s arms.
Back to early memories,
dark alleys, dim restaurants, arguments.
Like pilgrims.