Untitled
(From the assemblage: ‘Milk of the Black Cow’)
Finger-drawn on phone app.
Radha Gomaty
A Beautiful Lie
“Can you help me find the zipper to this dress I’m wearing, please?
If I could find it I would just unzip, take it off, leave it behind crumpled on the floor and simply vanish without a trace from this Earth…
You see…there is nothing here to hold me anymore.
I need at least one beautiful lie that I can live by…
That I can touch with my hands, taste with my tongue, smell with my nose, gaze at with my eyes to see me through this.
I’m also a beautiful lie.
Useful for the same purpose.
If anyone has a need for it for reasons that match, leave a note under the front door.
The mat that said “Welcome.” disappeared a while ago
And No.
I’m not being a drama queen.”
(Last Journal Entry)
……………………………
So, she let herself into the office with her own set of keys and put up a notice on his board pinned up with fluorescent tacks.
It said:
“Urgent Vacancy!
A reasonably healthy female of variable physical and mental age urgently requires one beautiful lie to live by that can be touched, tasted, held, smelt and seen.
The advertiser is similarly a beautiful lie useful for the same purpose.
Looking for incumbents with more or less matching needs.
The job will require some physical traveling and plenty of nonphysical journeying alone and together.
Backpacker mentality with camping skills and capability to set up and take down pop-up homes, highly desirable.
Additionally, keeping& sharing a journal is part of the task list.
Attitude to turn water to wine and feed five hundred with one loaf of bread and a single fish combined with a very high pain threshold are highly appreciated traits.
No worries. Ample scope for developing and fine-tuning these traits will be made available on the job once selected.
For further queries and clarifications contact theblankpage@gmail.com
OR
serveyoursentence@gmail.com”
Carefully locking the door, she felt the cold hard shape of the keys once more in the palm of her hand before leaving it quietly on top of the electric meter outside the door.
There was no one at the beach when she reached.
Her gaze flew to the point of the channel at the end of the stone pier where she once saw a young boy who had come to have a good time at the beach with his friends disappear into the grey swirling waters.
It had seemed so effortless. Even innocuous to say the least. She had stood watching then, stock still.
Transfixed at the sight of this young boy suddenly go down below the surface come up again once only to disappear again.
Then all she saw was his outstretched hand, palm open once, fingers splayed. And then he disappeared … without a trace as people looked on in disbelief.
The minutes ticked past. Nothing happened at all.
The water just bobbed, its cold greyness aswirl where his hand once was raised like a flag, a last outpost …
For a moment something disturbed her attention, and she turned around in the direction of the tug of some invisible line.
A fairly well-dressed man with a fleshy face and thick lips was hanging around slinking behind the remnants of a wall. He stared fixedly at her with expressionless eyes and without pausing once unhurriedly, he unzipped his fly.
Then he began to masturbate; Slowly at first and then with a steadily increasing pace without once taking his eyes off her.
She looked back at him fixedly jaw clenched without batting an eyelid feeling a rush of blood briefly go to her head as she did. The brilliant noonday sun briefly was covered with dancing silver spots that slowly subsided.
She refused to withdraw her gaze and began to slowly walk backward on the stone pathway that led a 100-odd-feet to the turbulent water at the point of the channel where it met the sea.
She walked backwards in slow deliberate steps down the rock pier without once taking her eyes off as he continued his increasingly frenetic movements
The sea rocking like a cradle threw splinters of blinding light into the brittle salt air glinting like mirror shards.
Now the man was just a form about a foot or so tall in her field of vision. A foot high dwarf making some sort of indistinct rabidly unreadably absurd rhythmic movement
The spot on the grey water where the water wrinkled, where the hand splayed outwards and sank, swirled just behind her.
But now she had eyes in the back of her head. The sun was so bright that all was nearly white.
At that moment she turned …
The grey was cool.
So shockingly deliciously cool. The salt stung her lashes and she smiled. Or did she?
The blob at the distant had stopped bobbing up and down.
That was the last thing she saw as she rolled her eyes upwards at the sky, at the noonday sun that spun like a mirrored plate, an oscillating disc…
The waters dimpled once where a hand was once raised.
The grey lid closed shut the wake her body left.
****
“Breath” (From the assemblage “Alexa! Win this War!”)
10″x13″ (Archival ink on Archival Paper)
Finger drawn on Mobile App
Radha Gomaty
2020-21
Us-2
” … _Staring at the bottom of your glass_
_Hoping one day you’ll make a dream last_
_But dreams come slow, and__ _they go so fast__
……..
_But you only need the light when it’s burning low_
_Only miss the sun when it starts to snow_
_Only know you love her_ _when you let her go_
…* “
_
He is singing.
And She is thinking…
The dulling iridescence of the dust on dead butterfly wings
Fragile Life
fraught with goodbyes
A Springtide of Salt Tears
Futile
but which we nevertheless shed
at the hour of parting
when the chasm opens between us
without warning and suddenly.
We find that we are standing
on either side of its swift widening
unable to run across
into each other’s arms.
Unable to move even a toe…
Our limbs are heavy
like pillars of stone.
From the long, awful growing gaping hole
Rise the dust, the smoke
and the stentorian sounds of the Earth ‘s inner plates
Slowly shifting
their enormous weight
like an old woman laboriously
trying to rise, lifting
the rebellious masses of her recalcitrant flesh
too busy redeeming themselves
from the clutch of bones as they turn
to heed to the Final Call
of Gravity…
Too elemental for the normal human range of hearing, true
but her dog already knows
and he weeps
unable to wake her as she dreams
of a summer storm brewing
within the white walls of her ancient house
as she sleeps….
……………………………………………………………
” _I’m coming Home …I’ve done my Time! _ ” **
She sings. To herself ….
……………………………………………………..
I lose my terror…
I look into the chasm and see how
it is actually the Mouth of Earth opening
to take in the swift blue spurt of Sky
set afire with sunset passion.
You look at me
from the blueing upper lip
and I at you from upon the lusher lower one
We leap together into the Open Mouth.
Past the volatile torque of their mating snake tongues
past the hyoid hovering spread-eagled without a sound
past the tautness of tracheal rings and
the pink-sponged alveoli clouds
trilling a tune as we hurtle brushing past
the exquisite xylophone of ribs
into the labyrinthine ruby clusters of gut
waved on by villi fingers down
to the darker places that birth
the mystery of the gametes in secret chambers
whose pitch-blackness we breach and enter like hackers breaking code
searching for those wormholes from where
we can access worlds that were otherwise locked to us
in this one….
…And there I am!
The Well-Loved Woman …Her face
like a glowing orange
kissing away the fears of a little child
going to school for the first time and who, calmed, then turns
to kiss her daddy goodbye
… And so do I.
Glancing up from those lips
past the rugged thickets of beard
And knobbled ridge of nose I see
that those almond crinkly sunshine eyes beaming warmly
down into mine
Oh! …are yours!
…And we leap once more.
The Descent is now
like a Dancer’s pirouette…
I alight weightlessly
on a forest floor of red sea anemones
an iridescent red pearl …And I see
you heading towards me
like a knife-sharp white
pinpoint of light
from a racing laser-pointer…
I open wide … Let you inside.
The Mouth closes around Us.
Footnotes: *Lyrics of "Let Her Go"(Passenger) ** From Perry Como's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree"
*****
“Home”(From the assemblage ‘Milk of the Black Cow’
Finger drawn on phone app
Radha Gomaty
2022-’23
“Why I Do What I Do …* “
(*All wars are one war …)
(The Daily Patriot Journo is on the lookout for a quickie 2-minute- read-kind of feel-good national pride wartime story.
A minimum requirement…
He needs to get back to the safety of his hotel room with Wi-Fi & warm running water asap. On-Ground reporting is really not his favourite thing…
He randomly chooses a volunteer ancillary nurse on the field, walks over to her, introduces himself, flicks on his videocam and pops his question:
“Why do you do what you do?”
“Why do I do what I do??”
Turning around, slightly astonished, she echoes his question … And then she answers herself with an air of breezy nonchalance.
“Oh, I do what I do basically to escape a broken, wounded heart.
Because I can neither resolve nor escape it…”
He frowns a little, slightly bemused.
This is not the reply he is expecting.
“I do all that I do because I’m suffering anyway … So I thought… rather than suffer by myself uselessly inside my boudoir, I might as well attempt to give an arguably worthy … (she gestures with air-quotes) “… context to this relentless sensation of being cut altogether and all at once by a million shrapnel by actually being where I metaphorically am all the time anyway–in the fuming inferno of a battlefield … Might just as well be this one, you see…?”
There is a slightly contrived kind of nonchalance to her shrug as she turns away, as if to briefly hide her face.
Discomfited, he clears his throat, opens his mouth but closes it immediately again.
There is no way he can leave now because she has turned around to face him, fully and squarely. Even perhaps a tad defiantly…
“I do what I do …which is working round the clock with the wounded and the dying because I too am mortally wounded and dying anyway but by an altogether different and invisible weapon….”
It is hard to retrieve his eyes from hers that are now blazing like deep green-brown wildfires.
She slowly advances closer to him, her voice tautening in tone while lowering in volume…
“I do what I do because rather than repeat to you, who are deaf and blind, with accusing tear- filled voice and eyes:
“You broke my heart, O you broke my heart”,
I’d rather take this body that you no longer need and throw it to where it can be put to some use …”
Her words, meant for someone else, fly at him. Like shrapnel fly at anyone standing in its vicinity.
She looks away pausing for breath, recovering herself, resumes, this time in a calmer and even almost a conversational tone:
“You know, someone of spiritual persuasion told me once … by way of consolation … that this Body is nothing but a Prison in which is trapped the Spotless White Bird of the Soul? So …”
Those eyes begin to burn again, this time with an icy mockery as her voice rises once more in cadence and meter…
“… I do what I do in order to wear the walls of this prison thin … SO thin…so … egg- shell-thin… that the Spotless White Bird of the Soul has a chance to break out on the strength of the memory of her own hatching, the strength of her own resolute little beak and to fly away free so much the quicker…!”
Her voice is low once more …. Almost hoarse as she continues moving closer and closer to him….
“…It doesn’t matter anymore that I never thought much of this metaphor.
Because this Body you see now? See? This one??
These thick fatigues camouflaging now what’s mere cannon fodder was once the trembling fluid medium of such sublime shared passion, that my White Bird of the Soul often escaped my throat with her songs of splendid ardour….”
For a moment his breath stops … stuck at the pit of his throat looking into her faraway eyes, yet now, so near to his … His gaze runs up along her small strong form — like that of a tiny wiry little migratory bird fired by a reckless courage that can come only from No-Hope…whose wings are about to catch the flames of the raging inferno of an approaching forest fire….
Suddenly she looks a little gaunt … a little wan … a little quiet … She looks back at him groping carefully for the right words ….
“I do what I do perhaps because … I’m just stubborn and … I do not fully know why I do what I do. Bu t… I do know that … I’m that knot that I am unable to untie …
And also because … clearly … since it is not disinterested but deeply … passionately … inextricably interested, there is … a …certain compulsiveness to this drive to self-effacement that makes of it all … a lie….”
Suddenly the lull breaks with the staccato choruses of crossfire and their intensifying explosions like a blown-up version of festive series-lights at big weddings ….
He can see her now … rapidly blinking back her tears. She struggles now with something like a wail rising … at the back of her throat gradually merging … into the tsunami of sound with the … rising decibels of myriad sirens and the roars of rocket fire aimed … at dragonfly-like enemy choppers …
“As I say this, my voice trembles and I … can feel the sadness rise … in my body, this… this ancient atlas of endless grief … I can feel it like a twang … on an invisible string that stretches… from the sensitive, pea- sized bunching of nerve-endings in my groin … through my womb … the solar plexus, threading the navel like a bead right … to the centre of my chest where … it knots itself and … constricting the throat, forks … to either eye where … they are subtly tied to … two tear-filled pranksters’ buckets that spill over … without warning every time … with the gentlest tug, each time corroding … my cheeks….”
Just then, struck, a fighter jet bursts into flames breaking into two … She is standing now… her small straight silhouette outlined by the fierce orange fireball lights that now dance like crazed snakes — reflections in her pupils ….
“These burning tracks of salt and slime … mixed up with kohl from my eyes on … my stained moon face in … the dead of the night dully gleam as I … lay my aching body to rest on the hard and narrow … makeshift bunk bed….”
The commotion of squadrons revving for combat. She is now walking into the zone of fire with a somnambulist’s slow, entranced steps…. Despite the cacophony of artillery crossfire, commands, shouts and sirens, strangely he can still hear her talk, her voice soft but taut and controlled like a welder’s torch as he tries to follow her….
“… I do what I do because … in the face of my most intense desire, formidably … impossible to realise, I am … brought face to face with … the darkest terrors I … barely sensed lurked … in the dark cave … inside.
…I do what I do because … exacerbation … is sometimes a strangely effective… way … of dealing with pain. It is … for the exasperatingly stubborn … stupid ones … like me or for… the truly, selflessly brave …”
She turns around one last time.
Now he is looking into her eyes and she, unrelentingly into his ….
Her voice is urgent now as she puts out a strong commanding hand, her open palm pressed hard for a moment whole against the heart wildly beating in his chest…stopping him from coming any closer…
The sounds are very close now….
“I do what I do because … I am able to turn this garment … of my being that I normally wear… inside out so that no one can see its lacerations, outside-in once more … when I stand … here, in this … war-torn space where … the random explosions of grenades and gunfire rend … the air filling me … with a strangely satisfying exhilaration….
I do not need to make the effort to write anymore … For I see … the nameless grief in my soul written … against the dark sky in the … blazing trajectories of crossfire.
I slip … into sleep, head under … wing … a dove blackened … with soot … on the eave … of a burnt down house …
Something bombards into something not so far-off … He suddenly notices that she is not looking at him anymore but through him … intently … at something approaching but still … a little far with an anticipation that … is slowly growing … into something else within her, something … inscrutable.
“… Do not ask me why I do what I do anymore… For Love, turned out of its home of Hope, is a deadly sniper… that with unerring aim … finishes what it started….
In that last flash of blinding light he sees her rise … up from the ground … in a cloud, her pale … face flush … jerked back her hair … loosened out … from beneath …her flying cap … in the ecstasy of the impact, a … wild and reckless abandon….
Then … obliterating everything between them…
a wall of flame roars … and rises.
***
Postscript
The long and short of it is that it hurts.
When it does (which is almost always),
as the occasional little anaesthetic wears off, you find that for all your thrashing about, you really haven’t moved anywhere…That you have never left your primal location:
A place that starts with P & ends with N …
A signboard that reads “[P(ai/ssio)n]”: to which the milestones are all always marked ‘0’.
So, what do you do then?
You step back…
Palms open…
Hands raised…
Eyes (though blurring and clear in turns past its spasms of tears) wide open…
All forms of analgesics/anaesthetics/ sanitisers /…or even good old walling materials like cement, mortar, granite, marble for that matter…are not options anymore…
Now that you got it, hold that stance**…
When you have held it long enough and you have:
…. Become flexible enough to now be rollable (say, like plain cardboard at 100 gsm)
.. Exploded into a certain critical mass of multihued ***shards
…Have had each of your ruptures change your reflexive self into resilient multifaceted multiple mirror strips.
… Know that you have mutated into a Kaleidoscope that now compulsively generates endless designs with the slightest of shifts…
The only way to stop it is to stop moving.
But there is another word for that-
The null point where all movements cease…
The one that we tend to make fables about to mediate our pre-wired fear of endings…
As we leave it for now… unnamed…unsaid …Almost like a side-effect… You may notice that it’s more likely now (rarely though when you still breathe…but still…) that one of the better adjectives with which a few (oh! very few!) people start describing you now… is ‘Poet’?
Footnotes: *I'm grateful for the Age of Endless Information for numerous DYI videos on How to make kaleidoscopes. **This is a version of Planking that no one tells you about on YouTube. ***But poets can do pretty well, possibly even better, with colourless shards that the normal run of ‘normal’ kaleidoscopes eschew… Supremacist kaleidoscopes are built with the plain glass shards of bullet proof glass in the rare event of their shattering… …That's when Pain is at its most devastating. …That's when whiteouts happen ...And screams are silenced to such intensity of frequency on the Munchian scale, that even the bats go (batshit) crazy... [Refer to ‘The Scream’, Painting by Edvard Munch,1893, to know what a 'Munchian scale' means]
Radha Gomaty had her initial training at Kerala Kala Peetom with Artist T Kaladharan. After attending the Foundation Programme for school leavers at NID, Ahmedabad, she opted to do her BA. in Fine Arts (Painting) at MSU, Baroda, followed by a PG in History of Art from Viswabharathi University, Santhiniketan. From scriptwriting for documentaries, curating art shows (including a section in KMB's recent edition) involving in various outreach activities, aesthetic & ecological, Radha’s engagement with multiple concerns is principally poetic. She is in fact a poet with her first collection Through Moonless Nights published by Kendra Sahitya Akademi under the Navodaya scheme in 2008 and her second Immortal Story (2013) published by Aether Books with colour plates of her sculptures based on her poems. Today she is a noted upcoming actor in Malayalam Cinema. Address: Radha Gomaty Edathodam, ALRA 75 South Eroor PO Ernakulam 682306 Kerala Ph 8281185859
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