ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE STOREROOM

In this house also there is a special room, more special than where I sleep with my different lovers, study or listen music, or the kitchen, or where I sit and eat, and where I meet guests.

That dark, small, dingy room of importance is in the back of the house which is called A Storeroom, although it use to remain empty most of the time in my childhood days. Things of use, used to be stored elsewhere. Those days, except for once, far between, at the time of a marriage feast, or the sixteenth day feast after a death in the family, our storeroom looked empty. Rice, salted mangoes or jackfruit or mango jam and the like use to be stored in different places as per the convenience.

But it was in that storeroom that as if ordained by the great uncle’s departed soul I had discovered my love to a man one of those first times. And that summer afternoon when everyone in the house was having a brief nap, along with my senses came alive, I had also chanced up on a small bundle of old love letters written for an anonymous lover by my great uncle. Since then I carried it safely as I moved houses and their storerooms and since then I wanted to find out about who was that anonymous lover.

There is too much dust, all over and on all things in my present store room as well. Don’t dust them I had instructed myself. Draw on the dust when it accumulates thick, whenever there is free time and see you better, things of past and future will become clearer.

When you draw and see yourself, please do not call yourself or anyone sentimental, and if I talk about the picture below the dust do not call ourselves trivial, memory they are only, and simply, that is all for me, you and all.

When we can not find reasons please do not call us emotional if we talk philosophically, what is beyond being dust, ash, I always had asked it to my lovers and myself?

Please do not call us sad if we show love and innocence, we know that you know more than I know myself and I love you too.

Please do not call us any names, what if I like to empty myself today, or say I really want to empty my storeroom, nothing I want to keep for tomorrow except the dust, for the future, or when we may be together again.

In the layers of dust memories and everything of our past sleep forever.

Keep the dust of plastic love in the containers,
The organic love in the grains we cook,
The real love if we get a lead,
The unreal love if it is to the gods,
The carnal love, if it is to the animals,
The pretentious love if it is to the enemies,
The demonic e-mail love, the cyber love, and the web love. Etc.

However, today I had to deal with the remnants of the night’s stand-by love… after all love he had uttered in my ears so many times, and I was satisfied to see his pubic hair on the wash basin the next day morning, that love was also love, just for that night.

I wash it off in the Ganges, and the rest in the pipe water. But today we did our man’s love whole night, isn’t it love too?

And you guys are stupid; some one else told me. You store endlessly anything, when you can actually throw them off after use, why do we have to store things, wise words indeed.

I store because I do not know what will come to the use in the future, a bad time may be ahead and then the memory of these loves would also help us to survive.

So I maintain my storeroom. How does it matter if my great uncle’s anonymous lover was a man or a woman, a tree or an animal? I am happy that he loved and lived.

Shivaji.
13th – 17th March and 8th April ’02.