This and that about how "Moving On" happened

By mid July, 2009 ( a month after I had quit my job) I was finally convinced that I had a body of work that was worth being published and that it was high time I took the plunge and brought out my book. Also, for a various number of reasons that I will try and talk about later (related to the "penury of demand" for poetry, the confused landscape of publishing, my past interactions with some so called publishers and my belief in the so called tradition of "self-publishing) I had already decided to learn everything required and do all that needed to be done to bring "the book" out.

Now, if this makes you visualize someone sitting locked up in a room at a desk / computer spending most of the day and night waiting for the muse to come, you are both right and wrong.

Right -- because, I did spend a lot of time sitting locked out of what used to be pretty much of an ordered life prior to my momentous decision.

Wrong -- because....oh well, here you go...

Around May / June, basically with the vague idea of getting fitter I had again got back to cycling (I used to commute on a bicycle through most of my school / early college days) and I continued with cycling July onwards, because it helped in my poetic thought processes and also gave me the much needed release from all kinds of questions from within and without....

So for most of early July and August, while the monsoons played truant, I used to burn calories with a furious frenzy, on a road that still burnt with the vestiges of summer.

Had you been a bird in the afternoon sky, you would have seen me cycling away, in search of the epiphanic and inner peace -- willing new poems to come and waiting for those already in ferment in me to sort themselves out.

My road used to the same one, day in and day out, the stretch that leads to Shameerpet and then onwards to Karimnagar and Asifabad, S.H.1, also called Rajiv Gandhi Rahadari.

Then, for something like three weeks in September when the monsoons were well and truly here (over the Deccan) and the waters that rained down from the heavens varied in between being a misty ooze, a persistent drizzle, a hammering of liquid hail and deluges of cloudbursts that blinded and drowned -- I had continued with the habit that I had clothed my days in, all through July, August and September.

So, in stages, I got used to cycling, I got used to the thirst (and pain?) of waiting for the rains and then glorified in getting wet in it (as opposed to getting wet in my sweat). For most of these days, I would stop and cloudspot / horizon-gaze at Shameerpet Lake and I guess unwittingly, the lake (and the coming of the rains) became a metaphor probably larger than the season and life.

It started raining and I started cycling beyond Shameerpet (but still stopping there to cloud-spot / horizon-gaze) and I must say the cycling soon became more pleasure and less pain. Seeing Shameerpet lake covered by an umbrella of dark clouds (on a daily basis)and getting wet in the year's first rains were pretty much euphoric. But the best thing was cycling through a cloudburst that was primeval in its fury and intensity -- as primeval as the rain / hail / snow that I had stopped for and shouted at while motorcycling up a totally deserted Baralaccha La in 2005.

By and by, I lost the urge (or burnt out the fury) for cycling non-stop like an automaton and got bored of the routine of the same road again and again (in fact, I had written some really dark and confessional stuff in the days before it rained, but even with that mindset, I spat out "the outpourings of blame" onto the road itself).

Then I discovered a stream of gravelly red streaked with ochre and yellow running through a lake of wild green grasses -- that starts where one of the asphalt roads from my colony peters out and peters out somewhere near the stretch of N.H.7 that leads to Medchal. This stream of dirt led to more discoveries and more space for thought as it wanders through solitude and open spaces that are wild with grass flowers, butterflies, chameleons, and abandoned, water-filled quarries.

By now, my cycling getaways were more focused on reworking on my poems and most of the time I would have a copy of the manuscript of "Moving On" (in a plastic folder) with me. Or a notepad (again in a plastic folder) to jot down visitations poetic. In fact, for three consecutive days in October I went to the same quarry in the evening to try and do justice to the magic of the monsoons, when the skyline was all clouds and one couldn't really distinguish where the reflection in the waters trapped in the quarry was rain-wet rock and where it was pencil black, rain-swollen cloud.

And since it rained almost all the while I was on the cycle, "Segues of Shade and Shadow" was mostly pencilled on a wet notepad, with me hunched under an outcropping of rock while the poem came "... while rain walks / on stone-pooled rain ..."

Granite Gaggles also happened in a similar setting somewhere in that monsoon fed wilderness, where the poem arrived with "... light leaks out / and writes odes ... "

Yes, some of the poems came in / from this monsoon-fed, "monsooned" wilderness. As October ended and November started, the grasses were almost shoulder high at places and I even motorcycled through them, sometimes with the little man sitting on the tank, both of us equally thrilled at the Bullet thumping its way through the grasses and the sightings of the various birds (coucals, peacocks, parakeets, cormorants, bee-eaters, etc.) and I guess it was on one of those trips when he concluded that I have some kind of supernatural (at least comparable to the Cartoon Network characters known to him) powers since I was taking the motorcycle into a "thick forest".

Coming back to the book, though the rains and the cycling added more poems to the MS, by first week of November almost everything was sorted out and ready for printing. Then started this and that delay on this and that account. The "T" agitation just burst out of the blue around this time and that didn't make things any easier, either.

But then, December 18th finally arrived and "Moving On" was finally launched.

P.S. - Maybe its entirely in keeping with the way things happened, that the title of the book also came to me while I was on the move. In R's car and on the way back from a marriage at Nakrekal, on the same day the poem "Crossing Over" came.

P.P.S. - I did not exactly keep a log / note down the "exact" way things happened. This is basically meant to be a structured ramble about how the book happened.