Sometimes I think that the whole reason I met him was to discover that his wife was studying Counseling Psychology, if indeed that is the name of something a person might actually learn, with the great-grand-niece of Frida Kahlo. In the narrative of desire, perhaps what matters is not intimacy but it's counterpart: a new thought. In this sense, the lover is a necessary force, but rarely it's limit. I said: "Maybe this is the reason we met." Thinking of the yellow table, the third eye, the monkey in her arms. Dominant. I begged for an introduction, forgetting for a moment who I was. To him. For her. A cunt. Do cunts get to meet Frida Kahlo? In the flesh? Greeley, Colorado is where the slaughterhouses are. I'd like to visit that university town.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 27, 2008
This is not caution. I am a university professor. It is not a particularly cautious act/behavior to write vaguely disgusting and diachronic definitions of angels, wolves and migration on a public dictionary site that anyone could read. I like writing my autobiography in the form of Urban Dictionary definitions. This is not, as I said, caution.
Writing intensely personal definitions of futurity, modernity, you name it, on a public dictionary site that you will have no access to once you press send. To do this without caution.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist July 22, 2012
An entity who carries stories the way other entities carry bits of twig or children with big eyes or a carapace.. I cannot say the human being has a set of appendages or that he or she has language. It's not about that. It's not about movement. It's not about sounds that are held in the body. When I boil up a human being (which is horrible to think about, I'm sorry), I get: narrative. As the distinguishing trait.
I mean, she broke up with me, but she broke up with me in the morning. She was a real human being about it, you know? She spent the night.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 17, 2008
Any day that has an airport, from which you text-message a person you once loved, and they write back, after 40 minutes: "Wow. Safe travels." And, feeling stupid, you stare out at the Manhattan skyline, observing how the Empire State Building is both absorbed into the silver gelatin sky and periodically released by it, when the gold light floods the sky just after dawn. Clouds. Newark. The feeling that you are about to get on a plane and travel in the opposite direction to what the heart wants. That kind of bittersweet melancholy and imperfect nutrition -- you've just ordered a fruit salad that seems to be fermenting in it's plastic tub -- constitutes the soft day with no misgivings, but a profound inability to think things through.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 17, 2008
Obviously: the deluxe cheeseburger franchise. Apparently: Brooklyn. But actually: the initials of an obscure experimental prose writer of Punjabi/British origin. Author of: "Monsters I have Known": an essay on inter-racial romances that ends with the soulful but unkempt and aforementioned BK drowning her sorrows in short, skim milk lattes, even though it is a well-documented fact that too much coffee makes her impervious to omens and others signs that things are or are not going well. Which is no way to live. It's precarious, and does not necessarily lead to a marital outcome. But there you have it.
With a big sigh, BK flipped through the glossy pages of Cottage Living, even though it was was clear that the so-called cottages were really five bedroom annexes to an already established empire of primrose-yellow wallpapered mansions in places like Vermont and Southern California.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 23, 2008
It did not make me happy, exactly, to give birth. In fact, I felt numb and lay, without urgency, in a bath of flowers and herbs, afterwards. Numbness is transgressive. Numbness, though it isn't happiness: helps. It helps to burn the hours into days.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist August 14, 2010
The remarkable event of one's heart breaking at the exact instant that someone offers you a vial of their blood.
Rochester, NY: February 1994. Though chunks of ice were falling from the sky, he bicycled to Tops supermarket to get me, then a menstruating woman in her mid-twenties, the Sunday New York Times and a bloody steak. Now that's true love. Except, of course, it wasn't. Sometimes I think that love isn't something located in a particular person, like a husband, but, rather, something that's passed from person to person, like an albino rabbit at the petting zoo in Oklahoma City. But where is Oklahoma? This is the problem with not knowing how to position yourself appropriately in a restricted space. Though I'm now an American, I was born in a country where even the children drank tea for breakfast, like pirates in need of root canal surgery. Where were you born? Do you love someone? Describe your favorite lover of all time. My lovers have had the following occupations: bike mechanic, waiter, wedding video maker, performer in a miracle play, rabbi, merchant banker, poet (though I don't think they earned any money), professor, and...I think that's it. No. Art critic. Electrical engineer. Peace corps volunteer. The son of the Chief of Police of Rajasthan. (I believe he received a stipend.)
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 18, 2008