my romantic tryst with cancer

I'm not sure where "home" really is any more.  I miss Toronto, and my life there, but on this trip back, like all the other trips I've taken over the past decade, I've slipped right back into where I left off when I left Mumbai all those years ago.  My friends are still my friends, my family as familial- everyone is just a little bit older, and some of them have procreated another generation to survive ours. I wonder sometimes whether I have a few more moves left in me...

This week's been different, promising... through calls, messages and memories, I've been reminded of how many people- family and friends I love all over the world. We've reminisced, giggled, talked, typed... These are relationship that have weathered time, and I hope they always will. We are but the lives we touch over the short span of history that we walk this world. I've always been amazed by the bonds and friendships my parents have built all over the world over their lives. I realise that my own are no less genuine and meaningful. "It's getting better, growing stronger". My friend Jane says there's a song for everything. I couldn't agree more as I hummed the lyrics I just added above, but I'll up that. There's a poem for everything too, often duly bastardised by yours truly... The words that come to mind, again, after I first read them in 1995 in Delft, as I steep in this lovely, present warmth... "and in passing leave beh

It's one of those days when I've stumbled willingly into the sea that is my life. I swear I didn't see that memory as I tripped on it. I swim in the encompassing warmth, needing neither air nor light. I'm glad I learned how to sink wilfully at an early age. I am struck by the infinitely long, glowing tendril that waves in the ocean of my existence. Salty, murky waters, and yet its sinews shine resolutely. Each filament of its ethereal body is more precious than a full hand of flesh chanced on a butcher's block. That strand was born of an innocence devoid of armour or pretence. I call that love. We talked, we felt, we believed in possibility. The fragile shoot was conceived in a moment of honesty and chance, where everything seemed possible and nothing was enough. That it has survived silence and separation is proof that it had more meaning than I knew it to be capable of. I call that love. I wonder how deep it runs... This chasm of secret ocean is mine.

This song's on my mind tonight. The line circled the steady curve to return where it had been once, it crossed that point and travelled to where it had been since... I remember hearing/ seeing Damien Rice performing this song live at the Hummingbird Centre. So much has happened since, and yet nothing has changed. I smile, with the knowledge that we're destined to travel our journeys, even if they take us right where we are and aught to be. "And so it is Just like you said it should be We'll both forget the breeze Most of the time..."

So this is what it's like when love leaves, and one is disappointed that the body and mind continue to exist, exacting payment from each other, engaging in stale rituals of desire, and it would seem the best use of one's time is not to stand for hours outside her darkened house, drenched and chilled, blinking into the slanting rain. So this is what it's like to have to practice amiability and learn to say the orchard looks grand this evening as the sun slips behind scumbled clouds and the pears, mellowed to a golden-green, glow like flames among the boughs. It is now one claims there is comfort in the constancy of nature, in the wind's way of snatching dogwood blossoms from their branches, scattering them in the dirt, in the slug's sure, slow arrival to nowhere. It is now one makes a show of praise for the lilac that strains so hard to win attention to its sweet inscrutability, when one admires instead the lowly goug

I can feel it, in every sinew, in every nerve. My heart feels a heaviness and a lightness in the very same breath The unbearable lightness of being. This is it. I'm in love again, I think, and this uncertainty is so delirious... I want the answers now. I want the ending. But not at the cost of living the story. I want it all revealed so that the waves that are life, that wrack my being, subside, and therefore it must be real. I didn't think life gave one a chance to feel these feelings again, and again, and yet again... it is forgiving, if you let it be. It sounds pathetic to think that life rations out moments like these, but it doesn't, we do. Sometimes fate cracks that coconut of a thickening shell and lets us feel the raw temperature and pulse of life. And then the dreams that followed. Vivid, real... I've theorized, with conviction, that in order to really be a part of me, someone, or something, has to enter my dreams. I woke up several times, comic

The weather is a willing muse, and the warm drizzle that touched my face on my slow walk home, felt like a treasured hand I'd always known, and always missed, stroking my face, gently, sometimes in little gusts, teasing, yet present. What is love? Is it the touch of skin on your skin as you close your eyes and sink your being into the scent and salt and hair and texture, or is it what you feel after that hand no longer rests on your face? Does love need another? Do I love you because I miss you? Or is it [love] a question, and do we delude ourselves imagining it to be an answer... The rain's been my companion at times like these, on such warm, dark and lovely nights. Ephemeral, yet tactile, fleeting yet committed. If it all ended tonight, I wouldn't mind. I heard the trees rustle, playing with the rain. They breathe, and I did. Long, deep breaths. Life is about holding your head up high- not to be brave, but to be alive. It is about feeling what you feel. I wondere

He stands on the railway platform where we've stopped en route to Toronto, his dirty blonde hair blowing on his thinning head. A child not yet two propped in the crook of one arm, and another, a year older perhaps, holding onto his free hand. His bare legs move restlessly in his sandals, telling strangers more than he might care to share. As the clock ticks, his face fills with worry. The children, who came in excitement to meet someone, have now directed that enthusiasm to the train. He scans the horizon several times over. It's only been minutes, but the sky seems to have darkened. The train begins to move on. They just stand there. Mother had decided she wasn't coming back home after all.

Tonight was seminal in many ways. Ordinary by most measures- we had a drink, took a walk, went to a club, danced a bit, left, walked home, said goodnight, retreated to our respective lives- but I feel more visible then ever. We were at Rangeela , an annual South-Asian fundraiser, elegantly nested (and somewhat marginalised) at the early cusp of Toronto's Pride celebrations. These were my people, or rather people like me. I didn't feel different, even though I never think I do, or so I tell myself. I recognised the music, the language, the vibe. There is always a place you call "home" when you use the word, and I realised tonight how much more my identity finds its feet when it feels comfortable in its own skin. I realised in being visible, how invisible I can be otherwise. My community, also has a colour, and acknowledging it is a start. Songs were played that reminded me of first blushes in my early days at University. I danced in a way that everyone else kind

I'm floating tonight... I just got back from an evening that I'll always remember. There are two authors I cherish, who weave words into the most unimaginably beautiful fabrics, who garden the universe with planets rich with stories, who make life become art, and their art becomes love... Jeanette Winterson is one of these two. Her books have been companions in the best and worst of times. She's a philosopher, and poet, and in my opinion a sculptor of thought too. She spoke of how important poetry is to make us human. She spoke of her life, and her past, and how precious the present is. "Love is art" she said, and you have to love the inside as much as the outside. There are only three endings in her opinion, "revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness", and if we all could accept and make peace with that eventuality, we could live the present with so much more feeling, beauty and meaning. My words do not do justice to hers... I got to speak with her afterwa

I'm in London, Ontario. I've just come back to my room after a long walk with colleagues of mine from this course I'm at. I feel alive when I'm here, even though this City is somewhat dead. The conversations, the discussions, the utopian luxury to even have them, unpeel the patina that seals me from myself, a flake at a time. I write this tonight in an effort to remember this feeling when I return, and relive it in how I live each day. It's not an aspiration, but a reality that I cannot deny for much longer. Change is inevitable, and I've got to think of how and when it happens now, and why... I stopped to smell the peonies in front of the campus on my way in. They were intoxicating in the darkness of the evening.