I took advantage of a 2-for-1 print promo over at Orms Printroom to create my first personal chapbook.
In it, arbitrarily selected images from my archives pair with couplets written for the 2014 Ramadan-Photo-A-Day challenge.
The Orms promotion added a free 200mmX200mm photobook onto every 300mmX300mm order. I haven’t quite decided what I should do with the smaller book (keep/gift/something else). I’m open to any suggestions.
Las Vegas
Neon lies, fabricated whimsy, suspended disbelief.
On the Way to The Grand Canyon
Landscapes on loop, Hoover Dam.
The Grand Canyon
What picture can show what shifts the soul? Old silence as deep as the ravines.
On the way to and at the 2014 Autostyle Motorshow.
October 2012 in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
I wonder how many writers of some Indian extraction feel this pressure.
That as a brownie (wherever you may sit on the spectrum of pigmentation), one is expected to proffer prose rich and unctuous like the jalebi that must line the bottoms of our quotidian.
That as an Indian from anywhere, my life experience is always lyrical, bittersweet in uncertainties of belonging, caught as we are in a swinging net between here and there.
Perpetual immigrants, even three generations down, all of living is taut with the embroidery of vagabond merchants and labourers.
With saffron and turmeric auras, my characters are cast to wear clothes that hold fast the smell of fried onions and cardamom.
Everything is weeping and laughing.
If they have Muslim names, then the thread-counts of cloth must be declared; how much do they cover and what will happen if they are to reveal?
A call to prayer is the soundtrack to a sunset and the dilemmas of the modern believer; thinking eastern, acting western.
Rituals are extensive, arcane and shrouded.
Colours are never colours, they are a riotous mob of rainbows caught under a juggernaut.
Days 21 and 22: Fear and Hope
This world is not safe for children.
Children could grow to save this world.
Days 23 and 24: Gentle and Harsh
My faith; the cool spots under pillows.
So far from yours; damning and bludgeoning.
Days 25 and 26: New and Old
You are still my fresh horizon love,
an accomplice to set these years alight.
Days 27 and 28: Remembrance and Forgetfulness
The Almighty knows best of human caprice.
When we are ready, He is there.
Days 29 and 30: Temporary and Eternal
These sticky things like pain and doubt,
They too lose tack and flick away.
Days 11 and 12: Perfection and Imperfection
This before, this was an unwritten universe
And now my hand, fails the page.
Days 13 and 14: Moon and Sun
For two coins, writers scrape the skies,
to spend on love and other tides.
Days 15 and 16: Dependence and Independence
Your heart is on training wheels until
you choose the person it beats for.
Days 17 and 18: Give and Receive
In sincere communion; two hands embrace unknown
whose is the one that has given.
Days 19 and 20: Individual and Collective
There’s nothing original about sin or suffering.
Lead-heavy our souls, we bear together.
