Author: kilroykishore

Tomatoes used to taste better
When I was a child:
Squishy, succulent, seedy
Like nature blossomed in my mouth;
With the rind squeaking between my teeth
As the juice engulfed my tongue
And the seeds swam as if to
Celebrate something.

I stopped celebrating with them
When the eyes of the beloved —
Deep as the sea —
Flooded my brain’s love centres,
Engulfing my love
For tomatoes and trains
And for the wind and words,
Until one day he left
In the dead of the night.

Now I don’t taste a thing
With my arid brain
Cluttered with anxieties,
Even as I squish tomatoes into my mouth
To moisten my withered soul
Deep as the abyss.

Kishore Kumar

You hear your dog’s excitement from your scent even before you slide the key in
Just like blind ants find their way to sugar, like sharks to blood, bees to boughs
But smell is a gift we gave up somewhere on the savannah
In exchange for tender fingertips and sharper eyes

In a parallel universe
Where we kept our olfaction but lost our prejudices
Maybe nature would reach our bloodstream before trans-fats
Maybe we would be a better species: more earthy, more in touch
Happiness would be a face as much as a chemical signature —
Maybe we could sniff our way to salvation

Childhood would smell like laughter and sharpening pencils
And youth like cycle grease and second hand smoke
Life would smell like ink and portraits and sins and regrets
And love like a new word invented for a new feeling

The beloved would smell like bedtime stories and tradewinds trapped in your coffee
Like a silent garden and the ferocity of a late monsoon
He would smell like poetry was oozing from his pores, like the motors of the universe running on his lips and fingertips

Kishore Kumar
(from my notebook)

This one is from my notebook, written over a year ago while wandering the streets of Bombay Fort at night.

I hear these stones whisper
In a million dissonant voices
Under the burden of vaulted ceilings
And the memory of human experience —

Of Romeos and their goodbyes
Of fathers and the blood of their daughters
Of smiles between strangers
And tales of mushroom clouds

That strange melody
From the other side of the fence:
Can I make it mine
Even if my mother never sang it to me?

And can nightmares of murder
And fables of jealous gods
Be erased from the memory of a race
That has run out of shame?

The susurrus of the stones
And the light reflecting off the patina
Seemed to be mocking my obsession
With drawing lines in the earth

Because the story is never finished
And history always spills over
To tell the tale of a creature
That can kill but loves sometimes

When we look into the inner workings of biology, we see that the central code that runs life, the genome of an organism, is the sole carrier of interpretable information. Its DNA (or RNA in some cases). This then begs the question: where from does the organism get its instructions on how and when this information needs to be used? It is partially written into the code itself, but if you isolated one copy of a genome onto a Petri dish, it would do nothing outside of a living system. So besides a self-reading code, is there another — more vital — force, which dictates which chapter of which volume of the Larousse needs to be read on a Tuesday morning? Is there room for a vital substance still, or a watchmaker, if you will?

The most astounding part of biology for me, is the answer to this question. And the answer is an anticlimax. There is no watchmaker. There is no vital substance meta. What supplies these instructions on a day to day, or a second to second basis, is the web of interactions between molecules within the cell, between cells, between the organism and its environment, and between organisms (the last interaction not solely driven by molecules). This web of interactions is held by the scaffolding of time.

Carbon and such begat organic molecules; those molecules interacted with one another over time (lots of it), and begat patterns of interactions that repeated ad nauseum, ad vivum. Repeating, reproducing patterns begat living systems (aka LUCA, the last universal common ancestor). Organisms reproduced, passing along recurring patterns of molecular interaction which later got codified into genomes, but all along, sustained by the same unbroken sequence of chemical reactions. This unbroken sequence of reactions, beginning with the first carbon chains and phosphate bonds in the primordial soup, is tethered through time, through surrogates carried in eggs and sperm and glucose molecules and phosphodiester bonds, to the web of reactions that holds me together. The cells of my body know that insulin turns the knob of a tyrosine kinase because that’s what it has done for as long as insulin (or its relatives) existed, and further second messengers will go on to flip the pages of the Larousse to a very specific page to activate a very specific code to bring a very specific protein to the cell membrane.

What sustains life, what dictates the reading of the code, is also what ties me to LUCA: a continuous, unbroken chain of chemical reactions.

I walk these streets again
Tracing back my steps
In search of a lost innocence —
Dreading that I shall find
Its decaying carcass
On an abandoned road;
But I secretly hope
That I never find it:
That I shall not face
Those deep beseeching eyes
Those festering sores
Those faithful questions
Of a child on its deathbed

Kishore Kumar