From Jack, to the Queen of Hearts

It is said that love can sometimes be magical. But isn't magic most often just an illusion? Sheer trickery? So believed the Jack of Clubs. He believed neither in luck nor in fate. Being in the inner circle he knew that most people who won in the casino did so by cheating. Most games were rigged, and the few times when somebody actually won, that somebody always made sure that he/she lost everything that had been won in the next couple of games. No, there is no such things as luck, good or bad


When he found himself looking into the eyes of the Queen of Hearts, Jack did not think that it was chance that brought them together. Just a play of probabilities. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It could have been any other card. She wasn't special. Just one among the fifty two. But what did catch his attention was that she had been crying. He knew it because of the black streaks of mascara on her beautifully painted white face. She had been through bad times

Jack could never handle more than a few minutes of silence. It had always felt awkward. After each shuffling he always found someone new next to him. Their proximity didn't last for long, but he always had a nice time with whoever was near him.

"Rough game night, eh?"

She did not respond

Then he remembered a joke the Joker had told him

"A man is like a deck of cards, y'know?", he quipped

She looked at him, a hint of curiosity lingering about her eyes. A question mark manifested itself amidst the intricate patterns that surrounded her

"Well,..." he continued, "you need a heart to love him, a diamond to marry him, a club to smash his friggin' head in, and a spade to bury the bastard"

What happened next changed Jack's life forever. For the first time in his life, he started believing in magic. Her smile was by far the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Purely magical!

Night after night, he waited for the games to get over hoping that tonight he would find her next to him again. He started losing his interest in every other acquaintance. Sometimes it took weeks for them to be together again, some times months, and some-lucky-times just a day. He started wishing that probabilities would favor him sooner. It was not until the Ace of Spades pointed it out that he realized that luck is what happens when all probabilities favor one. On every night that he found her next to him, he considered himself lucky. Thus he started believing in luck too. And all one needed to be lucky was to believe in it totally.

He would always have something new planned for her. His lil magic tricks. Not that there was anything magical about the tricks, but the smile they triggered was always magical. Before long, the smiles led to something that seemed even more magical. Love. Pure, undying love for her. She had become the reason for all that he would learn and practice. He cooked up stories, jokes, learned more tricks, and did all he could, just to see her smile

Year after happy year passed, and like all good things, Jack's lucky streak too came to an end. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. It has been a whole year now and there still hasn't been any sign of her. Did jack move on? Perhaps he did. Or perhaps he didn't. What I do know is that he still spends his days learning new tricks. And would jack give up everything he has to feel the magic again? Hell yeah, he would. Which is probably why Jack decided to open up to someone

I found it extremely hard to believe my senses when Jack started talking to me. At first I thought it was either that I was going insane or that I regularly had one too many a glass of scotch on poker nights. But soon enough I observed that the queen of hearts never showed up in any of the games. That's when I decided to write this and put it up on my blog. Maybe, his queen of hearts is out there somewhere. Maybe one day, she would chance upon this blog and read this. Maybe someday, luck would favor him again. I don't know for sure. But here I am, doing what I can for him

From Jack, to his darling Queen of Hearts

The whisperer in the winds

There! Caught you again. Fighting your urges to covet me, telling yourself that I do not exist, and that I am but a mere figment of your imagination. You really want to believe so. But you cannot. For I am, and will always be...

...the whisperer in the winds, cold and warm, sometimes telling you just what you want to hear ,sometimes voicing out your deepest fear, and sometimes saying things that send goosebumps crawling up your skin

...the keeper of your darkest secret, the slave to your whim and desire, and the master of your sinfullest fantasy. Perhaps your only doorway to ecstasy.

...the bitterness of dark chocolate. The scarlet of fresh blood. Berries, blue and black. The freshness of mint leaves. The sweet red wine on your lips, and the dark enamel on your nails

...the reminder of everything heard and forgotten, of names you just cant seem to place, of dreams you cant remember. I'm everything that's shrouded by the mist and beyond the brook. I'm the yellowed pages of that cover-less moth-eaten book

...the shriek in the rain. The flapping of leathery wings. The silence in the graveyard. The voice in the woods. The distant howling of a wolf. The raven's cry. The echoes in an empty hall. The footsteps on the other side of the wall

...the childhood companion you never knew, the one you secretly grew up with, the one you painfully grew apart from. The one who treasures your every smile and your every drop of tear. The inexorable truth. The only thing that is clear

You sense me lurking in the shadows at the pit of your heart. You find me shackled in a chamber deep down and dark. And then you see me holding the reins of the chariot of your dreams - the one drawn by desires and fears

For I am, and will always be...
Everything that could have been

Cinnamon, Coffee, and Passion Fruit

Wispy white fumes rise up from the black porcelain cup, hoping that the sea breeze would be kind to enough for once to let them climb. But it withers away the fumes spreading the aroma of coffee and cinnamon, mixed with the salty smell of the sea, and the memories of a skin that smells faintly of passion fruit. Its that time of the day when clouds turn crimson, birds go back to their trees, and memories wake up from where they had been put to sleep. I stir the coffee for a bit with the cinnamon stick before taking it out, wondering if its the amber sky, the cinnamon stick, the sound of the waves, or the strumming of that distant guitar that just woke up the memories. The strumming grows louder waking up more memories. I sip on the coffee which continues to let out cinnamon fumes. I see the guitarist walk past - a gypsy of sorts with long dreadlocks and sun-scorched skin, and a guitar that seems to have stood the test of time and still managed to sound beautiful. Son of a bitch! May be there are things in this world that get better with time. The used cinnamon stick lay wearily on the black saucer, still damp, still smelling good perhaps. The memories loosen their grip on me as the strumming fades into the waves, leaving me and the cinnamon stick alone...and gloomy. And I say this to the cinnamon stick: "Trust me, I know what it feels like, but your job here is done"

The Pinky Promise - Draft 1

He believed in the words. They were her words and she had them engraved beautifully in nice running letters around the silver ring. "Eternally yours". And now, with her gone, the ring was all he could hold on to and he did so by selling everything else he had. Zeus, Aphrodite, the matador and the bull, the cherubs, the two headed dragon, the giant sea-turtle. He sold them all. Marble statues he had sculpted for her out of sheer passion and love. They were never intended to be sold.

Yes, he was a sculptor. For a living, he made tombstones, and occasionally, a bas-relief or two, or an angel of death for a graveyard. He hadn't made any after the day he carved her headstone. The bas-relief on it had their hands hooked in a pinky promise and the Celtic writing below it read "I will win you back, Carissa. I promise I will win you back a thousand times over if you leave me". Hector and Carissa were both in their early twenties and had just realized their feelings for each other when they had that conversation. They were a very handsome couple. She had asked him what he would do if she ever left him. He had looked deep into her beautiful blue eyes and replied with the promise, and she had made him hook pinkies with her and repeat it. "I promise I will win you back a thousand times over if you leave me". Hector meant every word of it when he said it. Five years later, when he wrote it in stone, he still meant every word. But for this he would have to travel to the dark continent. He would have to seek out the voodoo priests and convince them to teach him the blackest of their tricks. Necromancy. Bringing back the dead. And for this, he needed money. A lot of it

It cost him seven years, twenty one of his favorite sculptures, and a good part of his soul to finally master the dark art. Today was the day he was going to finally put it to practice.

He had made all the arrangements just the way Shaman Bimkubwa had taught him. He had drawn a perfect pentagram with the white ash from incinerated elephant tusks. On each of the five corners he had erected a six foot tall burning torch. Inside each of the five triangles, he carefully drew the symbol for one of the five elements. On the five intersections, he placed the severed heads of five billy goats. And right on the heart of the pentagram, lay the most life-like of all his pieces of work. Lying on her back was Carissa, life-sized, bare naked, and moulded out of earth soaked in goat's blood. She looked stunningly beautiful even though she had reddish black skin, empty sockets without eyes and toothless black gums that showed through her parted lips

Head shaven and skin painted, Hector danced around her like a mad man, chanting the magic words he had learnt. With iron pliers, he pulled out his fingernails one by one and placed them on her fingers, crying out in pain, but never for once stopping the chant. Then he did the same with his toe nails, followed by his teeth. He placed them all carefully on her, planting them exactly where they fitted. He found it harder now to utter the words through his toothless blood-filled mouth. But he wasn't done. He took out a sharpened piece of ebony and started skinning himself, writhing in agony while doing so. Somehow, through all this, he managed to gurgle out the chant unobstructed. He covered every inch on her with his bleeding skin. There was one last thing to be done. He placed one arm on her face to make sure he had the position right, and with the other, he gouged out his eyes. He could stand the pain no more. A cold shadow shrouded him numbing all his senses at the same time

When he regained his consciousness, he couldn't remember whether he had placed the eyes in her sockets or not. The wind felt like fire on his exposed flesh. Every inch on his body burned. All around him was the same shadow. But it wasn't cold anymore, nor did it numb the pain. He lay there waiting in the darkness

It seemed like an eternity before he finally heard her voice

"Hector?"

Her voice was smooth as silk, just the way he remembered it. He reached out a hand with the intense desire to feel her soft touch

"I'm not sure I want to do that" Said her voice

"Why not, lovfff?" Blind Hector found it impossible to speak properly without teeth "It iff I, your Hector"

"I know", said Carissa "I see the ring"

Then there was a pause. One that felt like for ever

"What happened to you?", she continued "you....you're ugly. you look like an abomination, and you speak funny!"

"That iff unimportant" said Hector " You haff been afleep for a very long time. Thingf haff changed a little. But I am fftill your Hector. I lovff you. And I haff won you back. Dont you lovff me?"

She did not reply

Hector found that the darkness made time stretch a lot longer. He had always been the patient one. He could definitely have waited longer for her reply. But his blindness and pain made him unusually impatient

"Dont you fftill loff me, Cariffa?"

She giggled at the way he pronounced her name. Then there was the same awkward indefinite pause again. And then, with much effort, came the reply

"Honey,... I know you love me. I dont know what the hell has happened to you, but you look horrible and scary. You look nothing like my Hector, the one I fell in love with. He had beautiful olive skin, long curly locks and sexy hazel eyes"

"But..." Hector stopped. Not because he didn't know what to say or because he too didnt particularly fancy the way he sounded. He just knew all of a sudden that the things he wanted to say would not make any sense to her

"I'm sorry, sweetie", continued her voice "I cannot do this. I don't feel the warmth for you anymore... Forgive me"

In the pitch-black, he heard her footsteps fade away slowly and he tried to picture her walking away in his olive skin and with his hazel eyes. Then something took over him. Something that strongly felt like the commitment to an unfulfilled promise. He couldn't feel the pain anymore. He smiled a toothless blood-dribbling smile and said, mostly to himself

"Well, that waf jufft onffe. I pinky promiffed I'd win you back nine hundred and ninety nine more timef"

When the sun goes down for the last time

No thanks to the book I'm working on right now, I find myself waking up everyday feeling like a love sick puppy. Here is a quickie poem scribbled next to a quickie ball-pen sketch. Just felt like sharing this page from my scribble-pad

Rapunzel's plight

Another collab with Rosh. Poem by Kish(me, of course) and illustration by Rosh. Most often its the poetry that inspires an artist to paint a piece. This time, it happened the other way round :)

Jacque and Jill (Preview)

Jacqueline and Jill could have been sisters. They could have been lovers. Or maybe, they were total strangers. What they were to each other while they had been alive held no significance anymore. Once on the other side, love transcends beyond companionship and passion to its purest form, uncontaminated by memories from the past life, which is life as we know it. The only thing that their epitaphs told them was that they both died on the same day and were buried next to each other. Perhaps they died of some illness. Perhaps they died in an accident; which might have involved something like tumbling down a hill. Perhaps they were pushed down the hill for being lesbians a long time before people started considering it fashionable being lesbian. This too, they had no clue about for facts like these did not matter once you are dead. at least, not to the ones who died. But they couldn't possibly have died of any natural cause, since they were both in their mid-teens and looked very healthy and beautiful. Yes, they still retained a wispy yet human form

At nights, they played around in the graveyard behind the old church atop the hill where they were burried. And from dawn till dusk, they slept peacefully in their graves. Under the moon, they looked like nothing but random shapes swirling around in the night-fog, hardly noticeable. But every once in a while a late night traveller, and there were many during those days, would hear them giggle. Very soon, word spread that the graveyard atop the eastern hill was haunted by evil spirits. It is sad how 'haunted' and 'cursed' are closest that people get to hear about magic these days.

People who lived on the hillside started moving away and in less than a decade, not one occupied house remained in the proximity of the church. The church itself had worn down so much due to lack of maintenance that it looked more like a wayside ill-omen perched on top of the desolated hill. Folks who traveled East often had to take the road that went through the foot of the hill and they did so only when the sun was high up in the skies above them. Now and then a traveler would dare to look up at the granite structure, and the graveyard beyond, and say to himself that there is not a chance under the sun, moon, or the stars, that even a minuscule amount of sanctity remained in that God-forsaken mansion of gloom that once used to be a church

It was against all warnings and advices that Brother Emmanuel decided to move in to his uncle's abandoned cottage on the west side of the hill. As a child, Brother Emmanuel was always fascinated by the books about exorcism that he found in his grandfather's forgotten chest on the attic. He had studied each book just the way he had studied the bible during his days in the old Victorian seminary. He knew each page like the back of his hand, but so far he had never gotten a chance to practice what he believed he had mastered, except for an instance with an Ouija board when he almost established communication with the late John Egerton, the 4th Earl of Ellesmere. But that wasn't much of what one would call a noteworthy incident. Hardly of any significance at all compared to what Brother Emmanuel hoped to do in the abandoned church

(contd.)