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Monday, September 25, 2006

How a dinner helped

Our acquaintance began with a staged coincidence.
Perceiving her pretty eyes, I changed course
to collide with an old friend. He was kind enough to
have an inconsequential talk with me,
and my efforts at wit, produced a smile
and an inquiry from her. He introduced me
as an old friend, and hurried away without
mentioning her name.

A week later, I was stirring my coffee,
when her smile flashed before me.
Without my friend about her, she made words
that were music and comedy at the same time.
The shimmer on her nosering, the mole
at the root of her neck and her hand movements
made an impression.

When she left, I realized, I had missed
a job interview. The job was meant to help
me pay my bills. Yet I was happily in love
with the idea of dinner at her place.
Romance makes misfortune look so attractive, and
the spirit so dainty.

The rice was undercooked, and my jaws hurt
after making valiant attempts at chewing them.
The vegatable curry was Americanized
by presence of undercooked corn, and lack of spices.
A human system can never digest any cellulose,
though here I ate like a donkey on drugs, who munches
dry stalks of crop, thinking its green grass. She raved
about how little time she spent in preparing what she
though was an original recipie.

Our conversation moved through trails like lost desert storms.
Her stories began to behave like grains of sand in my eyes.
I soon realized that the mirage of her eyes now stirred
no emotion in me. Within ten days, my first impression
had turned into my intellectual embarrassment, and of course,
like a true old friend, I helped that guy, in winning over
the woman with the original corn concoction.

People ask me why I spend so much time in these pursuits.
I tell them that there is merit in learning from ones own follies
and understanding how the unexpected rules the events
related to women in general. The girl remarked later,
that it was splendid for her husband to have such an honest
and dedicated friend. I smiled and pretended that I was delighted
to be of service.

2 comments:

Vivek Sharma said...

Perhaps you read too much into the poem. I think I have evolved as a writer to a state where my poetry and fiction is not based on my personal experiences only. A fair deal of imagination, heresay and commonplace goes into making of a story.

Vivek Sharma said...

From desicritics.org

#1
temporal
URL
September 25, 2006
02:47 PM

vivek:

ten days?

Within ten days, my first impression
had turned into my intellectual embarrassment, and of course,
like a true old friend, I helped that guy, in winning over
the woman with the original corn concoction.

hmmmm

;)


#2
Vivek Sharma
URL
September 26, 2006
11:09 AM

Are ten days not enough to clear the mist? Most people fall off the dreamscape productions as soon as they open their mouth:)

I guess "How a dinner helped" was a bad title (I thought for a long time to find a better one, and wasn't able to) A dinner recycled is quite as bad.

I wish someone would suggest a more apt one:)

#3
Howard Dratch
URL
September 26, 2006
03:11 PM

10 days, 10 minutes. There are people who wait 10 months and 10 years. That is why there are so many divorces. One has to get over the "donkey on drugs" period and deal with the undercooked rice one way or another.
I just wrote about spices on Blogcritics and here on Desicritics. Your excellent story proves the point about spices entering so much into cultures, love and literature.