Bharati Challa

“Count all these
sufferings from here to the end of the endless sky which is no
sky and see how many you can add together to make a figure
to impress the Boss of Dead Souls in the Meat Manufactory in
city City CITY everyone of them in pain and born to die,
milling in the streets at 2 A M underneath those imponderable
skies”—their enormous endlessness, the sweep of the Mexican
plateau away from the Moon—living but to die, the sad song
of it I hear sometimes on my roof in the Tejado district,
rooftop cell, with candles, waiting for my Nirvana or my
Tristessa—neither come, at noon I hear “La Paloma” being
played on mental radios in the fallways between the tenement
windows—the crazy kid next door sings, the dream is taking
place right now, the music is so sad, the French horns ache, the
high whiney violins and the deberratarra-rabaratarara of the
Indian Spanish announcer. Living but to die, here we wait on
this shelf, and up in heaven is all that gold open caramel, ope
my door—Diamond Sutra is the sky.”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa