26th July 11
A vector is an organism that carries and transmits an infectious agent from reservoir to host.
A vector is a geometric entity endowed with both length(/magnitude) and direction.
The light here is filtered always, through the dust particles clinging to unformed water droplets in the air, through the haze of sputtering rickshaws and waves of rebounding heat. Or inside, through the yellow of aged glass, the puffs of spiced smoke wafting from the kitchen, the flutter of tiny wings.
It hasn’t rained in weeks, the dust is settling in the cracks of toes, the surfaces of puddles are shrunken and brown and flat. Stagnant and lined with eggs. The heat leaving sheen on my skin, I sit in the dimly-lit dining room and read. I sit on my bed and read. I sit on the staircase and read.
The power goes out as often as it comes in.
When it leaves, light filters through grills on windows, through stained linen, through heavy silk drapes, through frayed screens, and the air stops stirring under slowing fans. The mosquitoes descend.
A vector is a geometric entity endowed with length and direction, contrasted, in physics, with a scalar quantity, which has no direction.
Every day at the office, I wait in a cubicle for eight hours. I stare at my computer screen, hoping for glimmers of inspiration. Keep tabs on the windowsill for hints of a quick-passing rainfall. Track the squares of light that slant through gridded windows and travel eastward across the tiled floor. I watch for signs of arthritis, and the minute hand alternately crawls and careens around the circumference of my watch.
Back at the house, when it is darker, I arrange myself horizontally under a makeshift tent of sheets, raveling my eyelashes together and curling my knees up towards my elbows, pressing wrist into wrist, chin into chest plate, aligning my ankles with each other at the base of the bed.
I hope for the fan to spin through the night, for my reddened skin to stay tucked away in case it doesn’t. Try and ease into sleep like the slow turning of a page. It only sometimes works; the stillness of limbs seems stifling and dangerous, infectious, but impossible to shake away. Any still surface is a target.
A vector is an organism that carries and transmits
A mosquito is a vector, because it carries and transmits an infectious agent (malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Chikungunya, paranoia, desperate impatience) from reservoir (all the stagnant water – quarter-full buckets from yesterday’s waterfall bath, puddles left dormant beneath mango trees from the weeks-ago rain) to host (me, with the nectary mango blood and bare skin, with the landmarks from mosquitoes past and the quickly-developing twitch). A mosquito is a vector, because it is an entity endowed with both length (half an inch, usually, or eight hours, the average length of a sleepless, swatting night) (/magnitude) (the effects of sleeplessness and of slow-creeping insanity on the semi-foreign mind have not been quantified per say, but Garcia Marquez’s insomnia plague took the memories of many lives) and direction (again, towards me, host, with as direct a path as possible; or, in terms of purpose, towards nutrients, the fostering of eggs, the perpetuation of a species, and of an enmity, and a fear).
from reservoir to host
When we speak of ‘monsoons’, we speak of the rainy season. Technically, though, the monsoon is much more than that – the changing temperatures of land and sea, the shifts in atmospheric pressure, and the seasonal winds that whoosh over the subcontinent in predictable paths charted by red and green arrows. The rain is just a byproduct.
It’s also crucial. Without it the crops are left burnt, the stomachs shrunken, the landscape faded to a crackly yellow. The water lies still, and a new flock of mosquitoes rises from the surface. Our saliva runs dry, our skin runs dark, we sigh, we bake, we itch, we wait. We stay.
an infectious agent.
A mosquito is contrasted with a scalar quantity, which has no direction (no destination, or perhaps no ostensible purpose, no straight path, Predetermined or otherwise; in physics, no force, no application of strength, no upwards muscular pull against the insistent tug of gravity; no outwards push from the body’s molecules against the pressure of an entire atmosphere, no outwards push against the pressure of an entire walled-in world, against the pressure of an entire family tree, the pressure of an entire body, an entire mind–– in physics, and not in physics, magnitude zero).
in physics, a force
The last monsoon I remember delivered two feet of murky brown water to swirl around my knees on the side of the highway as the car stubbornly pushed back against the drivers’ palms. I can only picture the rains in the nighttime, which is rarely as dark in the city as it should be, with the streetlights blushing orange all over the smoggy sky. But that night, I only remember seeing a gaping navy above my head, spilling its lukewarm contents in relentless blankets, smothering streetlights and nostrils alike…
–there’s an odd sort of comfort in the touch, in the paradiddles pounding downwards into the skull, into the skin, into every creaking upturned space. comfort in the blurred vision, the colored streaks that are other bodies. in the impossibility of breath, and the persistence of it. the release of the bones and slow curling of the fingers. this is what clean is, what new is, this is what it must be like to swim skyward–
…Where is it now? I wait, I itch.
an entity endowed with direction
When my grandfather died, his ashes were split among ten sons and daughters. They took him to three different oceans and let him melt into the salt water, be pulled and pushed with the incoming tides and eddying currents. They told me that, with time, he would flow around the world.
Hindus cremate bodies to free their souls from the earth, and let them rejoin God or reenter life. A body buried is a leash; a body burned is a pair of wings.
I don’t know how I feel about God, but I like the idea of flight. When I am cremated, I won’t just puddle, quiet and still, on foreign sands – I will ask to be thrown into a reliable wind, one that will hold me steady and carry me above the surface to wherever it wants. They will throw me into the only wind they know, and it will wing me across a subcontinent, deposit me where sea meets bay meets ocean.
I will dapple the light, and then rain down in warm sheets of water, the monsoon moving inland, the monsoon moving; the monsoon returning again.
with magnitude.
25th July 11
They built the Outer Ring Road to direct traffic away from the whirlpool of downtown and shunt impatient vehicles into a crooked, breakneck orbit. It fits the city like a fifteen-year-old belt. Nudging inwards as a reminder of past circumferences. Spilled over on all sides by the insistent bulge of new business.
And it isn’t the only one – along with the Inner Ring, and the impending Core and Peripheral Rings, the city will soon seem like a target from a sky-perspective. No more missing monsoons. (Paris is the same way – a spoked wheel, thanks to Napoleon III and Baron Haussman; I have rarely seen the city between rains. Fluke? )
It’s an odd anatomy for a city of speed. Circles, one would think, are not the ideal way for a semi-caffeinated driver to get to his destination. Ideal or not, though, the road injects the veins closest to the city’s skin with the breath and movement of a commuting populace at nine in the white morning.
The outermost part of the outer ring whirls clockwise, as traffic careens along the left side of the road. This left-side-affinity was inherited from the British. The careening… who knows? They careen in an attempt to funnel wind through cracked windows and the exposed bones of rickshaws, to dry the marks on the fabric beneath arms, to outstrip the puffs of stormcloud gray rolling from their tailpipes, perhaps. It’s a doomed effort – careening is difficult with five lanes of vehicles, people piled generations high on laps, braiding across only two long-faded lines. But the scooters weave relentlessly, lean smoothly, criminally away from vertical; babies laugh, swathed in dupattas and clutched to the bosoms of unperturbed mothers perched behind unhelmeted fathers; rickshaws putputputput, hack and restart, squawk indignantly, cut across medians; sedans, flowers pendulum-ing beneath the rearview mirror, shift gears like water flowing downstream; traffic careens, careens, careens, tracing tiny straight lines across the Ring Road like they can somehow recapture the shortest distance between Point A and Point B–
25th July 11
Impressions: stray ink blots, or staticky reception, like the momentary holes on projected film reels that crackle in peripheral vision and vanish the next millisecond, thin scratches (the time I experimentally dragged a bobby pin across the smooth surface of a group portrait), reflections with no sign of the surface other than sharp angles, symmetrical splotches like an accidental Rorschach test, foggy gray and black, a glare, a cloud mountain (?), a crooked flag (?), and is that the sun behind there, like spilled milk?
25th July 11
-the shape left on the uncoastered table: somewhere between crescent moon and full, sloppy edges bleeding brown onto the wood
-the brownish growth across napkin fibers, quick and amoebic, like a shadow or an omen
-the fog on the glass – its own chilled breath
-the sizzling noises, even fresh from the fridge; a jumble of popping, a confused pop
-the curve of the bottle: the only of its kind, such that a sofa with the same combination of diameters and tangents would induce an odd thirst
-the tickle in the back of the throat; the impossibility of catching each flavor’s play, the vanilla or ginger, something root-y?
-the feel of the altered air against open nostrils, the tingling tongue; the feel of every surface, the silky swishing, the surprise and fizzle, the feel
-the strange pull of the translucent dribble along the bottom creases of the cup. the impossibility. the dryness after.
-the dryness after.
25th July 11
We make marks on paper not because it is blank, but because it is white. Because some things are much easier to penetrate than others, and light is one of them. Marks are made by layering, obstructing the bounce-off of rays hitting the surface, slathering on something that will absorb, yawn and consume instead – odd that adding something new to a page can be like chiseling something else away. I sometimes imagine that the pen-marks in my margins, the doodled swirls on the ends of floating letters are engraved there, cracked deep into the marble of my notebook, and that into every black chasm trickles all the other things I should have scrawled there instead, like falling pebbles along a fault-line.
Photographs are similar, but not quite the same – darkness seems to pool along the planes of negatives as though there were already dips and wells to hold it, pressed in by the gush of light as the shutter opened, the areas of hardest impact caving simultaneously to a sharp inky inhale; the blackness relegated to the surface instead of the depths, the blackness imprinted instead of somehow unearthed. If the shutter were to stay open or the back of the camera clicked ajar, the negative would swim black, almost pretending to capture that hollow dark space behind the closed shutter doors. A different blankness. This one is harder to chip away at, harder to force into pools or one choice form. The inside of the camera, the close-up of the pupil, the night sky – all melt evenly, darkly, over the surface, the same mysterious expanse.
25th July 11
There was a song Fed used to sing, it went something like “because in Venice/ everyday life’s a work of art/ that must be seen firsthand…” It was pretty, the way the room filled with the quick pulse of a tenor voice, the way he slid up to the note on art, drew out the ahhhh and drawled the consonants into the closing. The ripples of the piano line, of the held vowels, bounced around in my ears for three full days; I only remembered the parts that sounded like gondolas cutting through tame water. The song was about a dying lover’s last wish. I do not know that my last wish would be to visit Venice, which, for a labyrinth of a city, feels much the same three days in as ten hours. But the rose of the streetlamps was a nice change, extending the faint flush of a watery sunset well past twilight. The first night, we went for a romantic ride through the much-sung-about waterways – my parents and I. I had arranged myself faux-gracefully at the nose of the gondola, wearing a dress only because I imagined it was required of me; they sat feet in front of Bruno, who was striped and scarved, stereotypical as he directed their pointing fingers into the shadows. I recalled that scene from that movie with the couple on the canal, those fables of new loves, all the mythical eyes caught across the banks. I suddenly felt very close to sea-level, almost like I had missed out on some secret height or perspective, perched there in the blue dress with my mother and father on the Venetian canals. I didn’t think not to use my camera, even as the light fell to a trickle.
25th July 11
Good Advice.
15th June 11
It’s not just that by day all vision occurs in hues of blue – it’s that all figures must be silhouetted, as well, backlit by some far away something that lies beyond the rippling roof, or maybe just along it. Perhaps they resemble eclipsed suns, darkened but for a streaming white outline; or perhaps they seem haloed and angelic as they wriggle and shine along. Or does all that refracted and reflected light, zigzagging across the surface and down through the depths, bathe bodies in some almost grayscale glow, as if the sand were a dulled mirror? Instinct favors the bodies as shadows darting, navy, overhead and dappling the ground below like leaves would on a wind-trembling tree. From the floor, the sky seems much less static, much more like something that is constantly moving and exploding. From the floor, it looks like it exists just on the surface, like if you floated upwards gently enough you could let some sky undulate against your back and feel it push you wherever at whatever speed, fold yourself up in that odd dancing light.
15th June 11
(this is some of the random draft-ish stuff that didn’t make the chapbook)
The blank stare, I promise, is not a sign of some inner vitality, some wishful rendition of clever conversation ping-ponged across the flat mind or return to the landscape of last night’s dream (the one all in shades of soft purple); no, no, nothing like that. It is a signal that I am not ‘here,’ though – ‘here’ being the present moment, with the constant low bubble of conversation, the over-emphatic jiggling of chins and all the rest. The closest I get to ‘here’ is the occasional jostling of consciousness in the direction of the surface, perhaps at a name, or the slow trudging of a phrase (like “I cannot believe they’re still talking about this”) through the haze. But, assuming the blank stare, the farthest I stray is a near-complete emptiness, as though ears and eyes have been swiped clear of all firing neurons, as though the only remaining sensation is the vague tingling that seems to start from nowhere and flow into buzzing and back out at will.
(Breaths, when they happen, seem longer away from ‘here’, but then again, so does time.)
It perplexes me when people speak of the lively mental jaunts conducted from behind screens of disengaged, deadpan features. Mine seem reluctant to cut their ties to the twirling mind, and so when the banter I wish we had had sculpts itself into quick and witty and we both turn into fleet-footed comedians, my eyelids flicker; my lips twitch; I inhale in a pattern to support the imagined sentences, not the real-life hush. Such is the benefit of the blank stare – if my mental goings-on are to be unequivocally betrayed, I’d rather they be wiped clean for strangers.
15th June 11
(this served, at one point, as the endnotes for a longer essay on inheriting a cavernous apartment full of random stuff)
1. Use permanent marker or highlighter.
2. Refer to it by its full, proper name.
3. Give it more names, and refer to it by those instead.
4. Capitalize its first letter, even when you’re speaking.
5. Fit it into a pattern, probably one designed by the fates.
6. Make it the exception.
7. Indulge and/or scratch it.
8. Eat it with both hands.
9. Use it to forget about other important things.
10. Use it to remember about other important things.
11. Panic when you lose it.
12. Give it some space.
13. Give it some of your space.
14. Give it someplace to haunt.
15. Exorcise it.
16. Exercise it.
17. Let it rest in your bed, or on the inside of your eyelids.
18. Always keep it at eye level.
19. Collect it.
20. Try to put it off.
21. Stress it.
22. Let it stress you (out).
23. Hold its baggage, or let it hold yours.
24. Tell it your secrets.
25. Let it make you angry, and maybe forgiving.
26. Throw it out a closed window.
27. Expend a roll of tape on it.
28. Keep it in the pocket without the hole.
29. Sleep on it.
30. Place it near the beginning.
31. Place it just beyond your reach.
32. Place it anywhere unexpected.
33. Put it in code, or be unnecessarily cryptic when referring to it.
34. Bequeath it.
35. Inherit it.
36. Read too much into it.
37. Consume it last, and savor even the crumbs.
38. Fail to rip your mind from it (or, always leave it unfinished, but rarely leave it).
39. Extrapolate from it.
40. Brand it, or make it a brand.
41. Customize it.
42. Give it (a) definition.
43. Preserve its essence and/or flavor.
44. Imply it, or avoid referring to it.
45. Place it in the middle, disguised, on purpose.
46. Use it to measure time.
