Autumn Mosiac

Somewhere in those empyrean halls,
An antique cerulean clock strikes ten,
And down here, on these ephemeral
Vales of the sins and virtues of men,
The turquoise skies blissfully elope
With all shades of the summer mirth,
And celebrate from afar, a tulip's grin 
When her spirit gives her a wide berth.

The winds and all their winsome eddies,
Swim the panorama in salient ebullience
And rob the dainty dahlias and peonies
Of their bouquets of tempting essence.
The scarlet rose and her crew of delicious
Summer-tide blossoms tepidly fade away,
While their mesmeric memories linger
Into some wistful caskets of the yesterday.

And just as these oil-paintings of summer
Drift away to a parallel cosmos of elisions,
For three blessed, yet placid seasons and
Feast on the syrah of siestas and illusions;
A spell of invincible mellowness seamlessly
Cascade down in myriads of reddish amber,
A maple slips a leaf, unfurling an autumn
Clad in robes of a tangerine tinted October.

The earth is blessed with a clement sun
Together with smidgens of juvenile cold
And the fields, feed and watered by the
Crisp mustard sunshine, autumn holds,
Rave about their love for the fine fall
To a buoyant bevy of linnets capering by.
A finch waltzing with a passing zephyr
Sings to the starling gleaming up high.

The songs of the gladness of autumn
Those of a jubilant harvest and life,
Of the aromas of pumpkin and peach
And the plums and pears, who are rife,
Chime their way through the passels
Of smiles and laughs of rejoicing men.
But soon dusk breathes a winter blue
And a fallen lark hears a clock strike eleven.

Alas!

Yet another autumn kisses an oblivion!

               

  ~ Barenya Nayak

Memories of a harlequin melancholia

Infinite questions, an inane pursuit and a treacherous bridge of uninvited intricacy delicately weaving them together – Yes, sometimes life betrays! I feel so vulnerable, so petrified, so vacuous and so very inebriated by my overwhelming fears. You could accuse me of pondering over what to ink down, but consequently, I wouldn’t give a wide berth to your accusations, for though acerbic, they portray a poised and unvarnished axiom.
Perhaps, no; It is not a void fribbling away in my soul, it is a medley of harlequin melancholia. Surprisingly, Life has never been modestly scrupulous. When you assume no masquerade, and are appeased with the genuine ‘you’, some officious paramour of Satan veils your persona with an imaginary exaggerated tag of ‘fraudulence’ and makes sure that your juvenile alacrity evanesces in a tempest of despondency. Yet would you succumb and embrace the ever-austere ethos of saccharine buoyancy and pseudo altruism, life wouldn’t bother to smile upon you either. That’s one modicum of advice, the twelve years of banality at my alma-mater have hurled at me!
Although I adulate innuendos, I’ll dodge it for now. Three years from today, down the corridors of yesterdays and yester-years, I seamlessly reminisce what a churlish bitch I used to be. I had this impolitic hauteur and undying imprudence that embellished all my narcissistic instincts, but though relentlessly impugned, the chances of my vain aplomb being immured in an abyss of impasse were assuredly synonymous to triviality. May, be I wasn’t agreeable to an infinite majority, but life sure seemed agreeable to me, so ‘my-way’ and unstained with baseless accusations. But somehow, succumbing to the umpteen accusations hurled at my blessed arrogance, I let an invincible opacity envelope my whole being. Being opaque is so exacting, but when you conceal your genuine temperament and let people assume you’ve blended yourself with their vibes (for a good many presume solely their preferences to be superlative), life bestows an ephemeral clemency. But for the herculean endeavors, all I get as a souvenir is chagrin again (Perhaps, she adores my insaner eccentricities). How deplorably cabalistic could it get!
When you are crowned with the badge of honor, a tiny rectangular piece of metal, with cyclopean deferential influence, something for which you’ve nurtured an adulation and appetence, all the eleven long years, you feel like life couldn’t have offered an jubilation better saccharine, but ironically the sun impales your rainbow arch, eroding it before you could the golden pot of opulent bliss at its end, and you, resigning to the harrowing aversion people nourish against you, abandon the badge and console your inconsolable self, for a moment, life seems like an incessant and expanse of unsurpassable chagrin, a moment that again seems an eternity (And worse still, you have to have this annoying facades of bliss and fake smiles etched on your face, all the while). When you are accused of being romantically inclined to some deservingly popular comrade (As if love is an unpardonable peccancy!) and soon, you yourself are vanquished by the uncanny veracity in the accusation, but almost every other entity pushes it a little too far and eventually the delicate threads of unacknowledged mutual penchants entangle and lose their verve…. When you’re once-upon-a-time close pal is ruined by the incurable affinity towards any fool of the opposite sex, along with being consumed by a ridiculous proclivity to the Dollars and parallel sanctimony – You can’t help but fling the epistles of camaraderie at the hearth and see the ink on paper dance way into oblivion, under the arabesque clemency of the phantasm of fire. When you know your prissy heart gives refuge to predilection for a certain him and a her and another her from the three scores of teachers, and for a few blissfully roguish, but adorable fellow-classmates as well, but you get seized by a tempest of qualms, the fears of being uncompromisingly abhorred by them, you rile your sanity and throttle the remnants of your sangfroid and complacency, within a triangle of abysmal remorse, amaranthine decadence and towering emotional mayhems. When you know your first crush, was such an insane random choice, so very barbaric and bizarre that you can barely break your cocoon of recondite but unblemished sagacious and poised- silence and when you feel so ‘nothing’ for the long lost friend, you had held so close you your heart and so etched to your memories for the past seven years, but now all the penchant seems to have wasted and marred itself in the Armageddon of empathy, just after stumbling across her out of the blue, you just can’t help but let the insatiable frustration, consume your heart and mind, both of which now stand shattered into a million of evanescent dew drops, each a testimony to my cacophonous melancholy.
Twelve years at St. Joseph’s, of which the last saw me dying a twelve thousand deaths, saw someone who flaunted and her amour-propre, reduce into a quasar of mortification, a hatred for being who she was, saw a gullible someone brimming over with aplomb, stammer and forget how to entrust another for the rest of eternity, someone lose the last hopes of regaining her unduly snatched acumen… But that era is over now; it has been gathered to an elision. No more mornings where my mom would caress me and consoling my fears, coax me to go to school, no more assemblies where my petrified self would try its best to be out of any teacher’s sight, lest she should call me a defiant bitch from the inside and grin on the outside, no more breaks where I would confine myself to the class-room of X-C, just to be away from Mephistophelian cynic … No more St. Joseph’s; Just an empyrean bliss at the thought of embracing the new insecurities of tomorrow’s unknown ventures and blooming from a new caramel bud, under a new agreeable sun and yet another bliss at the thought of sewing up school-life.
It could never get harder to push a pencil, for me…. Well, sometimes it’s best to cling on to my invincible opacity and muffle my vagabond musings and barbaric emotions with a solitary thread of pristine reticence.
Oh! I just discovered the thread is overwhelmingly fragile… pity.

Caramel Chimeras

When a delirious mind ambles
Through a plethora of reveries,
In a rummage for the atrium
Where evanesce quandaries;
A mirage of winsome chimeras
Is poured onto the brown veil,
Like a ballerina incited by the
Syrah in some wager's deal.
Fancies are ignited, so the whims,
As if summoned to the empyrean,
To welcome the savior from the
'World of lights' of a Mandaean.

A clairvoyant - Unfounded and sham,
Builds an odiously buoyant imagery;
While the facades of opulent vagaries
Hurl their phony charms as a gaudery.
A pariah smothers his melancholy
And riles the remnants of his sanity
To paint his new quasar in an alluring
Pearlescent bohemian rhapsody.
While another mediocre Utopian
In an unseasoned verve and alacrity
Losing his aplomb, drowns the vilest
Yet fanciful farragoes of animosity.

Risible the charms of the chimeras,
Those blithely swill all nonchalance
And with specious guile adorn its
Cenotaph with an arcane ambiance.
In some pacific clandestine orifice,
They shroud their own peccadilloes.
Yet bewail! Curse these charlatans-
The insidious slayers and vespilloes.
Knitting the candid musings into a
Canvas, they paint a divine fantasia.
And veil the onerous reality and rue,
To deluge with silky auras of ambrosia.

Blasphemies against these chimeras!
They draw a caramel bridge between
The pragmatic Utopian and his utopia,
And thaw when a Helios of reality's seen.
The caresses of hopes are verily poised
Not chimeras, if you sense that the line
Between the 'realistics' and 'idealistics'
Ought not be effaced but left pristine.
This ephemeral travesty of a 'dream'
Courts a duchess of baloney and elopes,
Leaving behind a tempest of melancholy.
So blasphemy against chimeras, not hopes!

Saints And Sinners

Creativity and sensibility can never share a mutual penchant for each other; At least not for me, so do pardon my baloney. You see, while sauntering amidst the shadows of varying tones of grey and slumbering black, when an affluence of serenity drenched in nonchalant blues, pours the sangria of whims, to rouse a bohemian's dreams, the thin line between sense and non-sense drowns in a blur. So are the impressions of a ludicrous reality on the ostentatious cadenza of life, where aspirations and compulsions, wrongs and rights, loves and aversions as well as amiable fantasies and abhorred obligations, all mingle into an atrocious pandemonium that echoes the intensified hassles between the audacious mind and the emollient heart.
Somewhere in our sedentary pursuits of materialistic luxuries, a zephyr of emotions skim across our soul, in vain attempts of embellishing the remnants of humanity in modern 'men'. But a better share of people deny the blissful innocence in its demeanor and sabotage it. The fragments of my fifteen year long acquaintance with life, that have shattered themselves and now take refuge in my heart, proclaim that life can be Beautiful (with capital 'B') if you see it as it should be seen, love it as it wants it to be loved and define it as it wishes to be defined – as a farrago of blinding emotions caresses by the music of candor and genuineness. My reader, are you one of those unfortunately ignorant beings who seeks the beauty of life in a few prodigious chateaus, exuberant wheels and crispy notes and pronounce your ignorance to the world with a risible profusion of pride? Permit me to act on my own accord and I'll label these delirious entities as translucent evidences of the bafflingly despicable sagacity of mankind. Your mistaken if you've assumed the sagacity to be regarding the '$' loves for I've been decrying the choice of loving your mind more than the heart, all along! The fault can't be entirely yours, for I'm not a success at delineating!
You can't toss a drachma and be a Greek, but you can abandon the peccadillo of adulating the narcissistic instincts of your mind. If I just said 'peccadillo', let me rephrase it as 'blunder', for the mind is the only abyss of ghastly egoism. Every mind is a misanthrope's chalet and every heart, an altruist's paradise – unsurprising you're in oblivion of either the former or the latter. Very dolorous? Perhaps... but the consequences of the oblivion are way beyond the presumed dolorousness. When you smother the melting yellows and roguish smiles of life, allow your genuine alacrity to die in an elision and seek solace in fortunes by slighting your heart and cherishing the odious fancies of the mind, you are merely dragging your whole being to the Armageddon.
The saints can be sinners and the sinners, the saints. Would you choose the lesser of the two evils that dwell in you, that is to say, the random saint over the incurable sinner or chide my extravagant sanity, and decoratively address your asininity as 'indifference'?

A prestigious affair

In the chaotic silence of the classroom, two solitary individuals strode up to the teacher's desk, in vile murk, discreetly concealed beneath a deceptive sheet of confidence. Neither looked at each other, the entire class stared at both while the teacher choose to let her sight fall on either, with that 'either' varying from time to time.
Those two pent-up souls were the final candidates contesting for the post of the class President – Martina Homes and Peter White. In the eyes of the teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, it was Martina who seemed to stand as a valid candidate, with all her goodness and talents to speak for themselves, for she was indeed one of those polite, yet confident and popular kids of Austin's college, while on the other hand Peter was a thorough ruffian, unpopular and disliked, in short, as the others of the school had labeled him, he was the school bully.
The two contestants delivered their vote appeal speeches and walked back to their respective seats amidst loud applauds, after exchanging a few hard looks. However what seemed strikingly cold was the devilish quietness that surrounded Mart, who although was Martina's twin, had failed to match her standards in any field. Martina had definitely set the bars too high. The silent mischief maker that he'd always been, made it considerably easy for anyone to realize that some devilish thought was taking its final forms, in his impish mind.
As the clock struck 2 o' clock, the class dispersed for the day, but while all the fourth graders trotted back home, Mart followed Peter. In the corner of the Lewis Lane, which was where he could cease the first convenient chance to have a word with Peter, Mart approached the bully and said,
"Hey Peter! Listen up, what if I help you win this election?"
"Tell me how would you do that?"
"That'll be a piece of cake on my part. There are always several advantages of being a convincing speaker!", chuckled Mart.
"Goodie-Good. I'm prepared to give you whatever you ask in return, of course, anything that would be within my limits."
"I'll help you win the elections and you will give me your video game."
"That's neat"
"Wait... may be a hundred bucks per month"
"A little too much, I say. For how many months?"
"As long as you remain the President. It's a prestigious affair after all!"
"Deal"
"Yeah..."
With this the two parted.
A week later, the classroom bore an air of austere silence. Indeed, it was a serious ambiance, with streaks of significant tension among the kids. One after the other, the children poured their carefully folded chits into the secret ballot. There in an isolated corner, stood the frowning boy, Mart. And Mrs. Sullivan announced the long-awaited results.
The elected president of the class was... Master Peter White.
Two months and three weeks later, Peter White resigned. It was not because of the growing burden of responsibilities but of the hundred bucks per month, which unfortunately for him, yet fortunately for the class, Peter couldn't afford!

From a Rich man's Diary -

When you know you are drowning in opulence so very titanic that an eternity would not be a success at swilling it all, you could well afford to bestow your pensive mind with the leisure of maundering through a plethora of mellow reminiscences under a caramel sun. My reader, I believe I just did the same. Reminiscences though evanescent are charming affairs – they blissfully sing a song of a life time and all the whims, smiles and tears it gives refuge to. But you see, mine are adorned with a special charm, the charm that douses the air with giddy amusement as it sings a fairy tale voyage of a rag picker to his fortunes.
It wasn't my first tryst with the ivory moon against the grotesque darkness of the sky and the grey silence of the pavements, upon which she smiled. It couldn't simply be for any rag picker of Victorian London and as you can now assume, I was no exception. These neat patches of concrete beside the insignificant Lance road were always my silken beds. But that certain night, they seemed silkier still, by grace of the encounter with fortune, I had earlier in the day. A change is the spice of life, and the mundanity of the life I was leading, sure kept killing the sang-froid in me. I was in search of a slightly better job and higher wages – a very natural instinct for a meager lad. Lady luck had smiled upon my unfortunate self while I had been rummaging the rubbish heaps that stood at the further corner of the road for an old worn out wallet. Wallets in the rubbish heaps may seem useless but they often make you richer by a couple of pennies. However, it wasn't the wallet but a maimed cardboard sheet that caught the attention of my sight. It read – "Full time servants need. Please contact Mr. Dominick Calvert for further information. 876-E3, Boris Lane, South Kensington,"in an ostentatious red. Well, that was all I needed... a modest wage and a respectable vocation to offer it.
Within a few unconscious hours, the orbed maiden of the night died and for its ashes, like a phoenix arose another caramel sphere. I didn't whine over the loss of a beautiful night; instead, without depriving myself of time, raced down to the end of the street, crossed a few lanes and roads and finally stood before my dream destination, ogling at the Calvert mansion, like a blissfully ignorant toddler would ogle at a candy parlor. It had the mediocre beauty any palace would behold. As I entered the mansion hall, the incoherent whisperings of the two guards made me wonder. Mind you, though a rag picker, I always kept myself presentable and my aplomb high, so probably they were musing over it.
"Oh Robert! Back aren't you? Freshen yourself, you look a mess my boy!", sprang a pleasant voice from nowhere.
Mr. Calvert himself, wasn't it? I pondered over the intentions behind him addressing me so very affectionately. Unsurprisingly no one did explain it to me and keeping my mouth shut for good I enjoyed the bouquets of luxurious cares and unexpected affections that were bestowed on me for the rest of the day, the day that followed and the next and so on. My new quasar had left my mind swim in a farrago of perplexity, joys and more perplexities, until one fine eve when a servant of the Calvert mansion approached me and mumbled, "Listen Mister, your luck's swell I tell you. You sure hit the looks of the man's nephew. Old Man's a pleasant thing, he's no one except the nephew, I said just now, but the boy was a menace. A real spoilt brat I tell you. Hush! Listen here, the oldie's left all his fortune to him. Unfortunate lad, he died last week, but old man doesn't seem to get it down his throat. He thinks he's alive, thinks you're his Robert! Anyways, great going fellow. Thumbs up. You’ve got a neat fortune awaiting you!"
Weeks passed and so did the years. And as inevitable, Old Calvert embraced an eternal sleep, leaving me in an arrant euphoria that basked in an endless magnificence. Occasionally, a zephyr of guilt sweeps across my whole being, cursing me for keeping the pleasant old man in oblivion. But the candor in the fact that he got deceived instead of me exactly deceiving him, gives me an arcane solace. At times, chimeras in few vales, assume a reality and makes some lives beautiful. Life is not always a sordid ocean of strangling tangibility and redundant encumbrances; sometimes, its also an enchanting fairy-tale where a rag picker picks up a fortune from a rubbish heap, a pauper becomes a prince and misfortunes become the pleasantest of fortunes.
Old Mr. Calvert – did he ever know? I couldn't know whether he was aware of the truth or not, all I could know was that he was a victim of Alzheimer's disease. Anyways, I presume the latter discovery answers it all.

This was a page from the beloved diary of a certain rich man, in Victorian London who encountered his fortunes in a magnificently surprising manner.