Ode to my Wall Collage

For five hundred and ninety two days
You have hung on the wall beside my bed
38 snapshots of bliss
Shocking colours of elation
Mellow smiles of celebration

Faces looking at me searchingly
Trying to whisper some word of the past
Acting as a window to peep into utopia that was

Still frames out of the cinema of my life
Actors out of the core of my existence
Urging me to relive the true me

A catalyst to my rutted weeks
Potent in its muteness
Complete in its fractioned self

People and places
Painted through the lenses
Occasions so obsolescent
Yet moments so immediate

Holding within themselves
The power to tug a smile
The potency to well a tear
And holding delicately
The icicles of my frozen past

For five hundred and ninety two days
You have hung beside my bed
38 snapshots of my head
Brought warmth in your constancy
And coursed life in my numbness

Dilli Duur Nahin

The smell of momos at Dilli Haat. The clappity clippoty clop of the brainless high heels at M block. The sheer dynamism of Habitat. Pix’s green and yellow room. Just Pix herself. Trips to the fabric piles at Sarojini. Wiping our nose and eyes from eating the sevpuri at LSR. LSR itself. Mushy gooey squidgy cake of Big Chill. The mufflered winter. The intellectual fecundity at BCL. The smell of coffee and “herbs” at Village Café. Random walks to N block. Sticking our tongues out at the designer stores. Lapping up the joyful Janpath. Strolling along CP. The whiff of reshmi kebab at Khan Chacha. Inhaling the intoxicating aroma of old books at Book Bazaar. Being shoved around effortlessly on a Sunday at Lajpat Nagar. Waking up for an early cheap weekend movie at Chanakya. The horde of cows and buffalos at Zamrudpur. The air conditioned window shopping in the 45 degree heat at Ansals. The delectable food and delightful music at Turquoise Cottage. The bangles of Chandani Chowk. Parathe wali gali. Poetry reading. Mental peace. Emotion satisfaction. Bacon and eggs at American Diners. Walking out of a horrendous GD with Pix. Chaat at Kailash Colony. Followed by corn and pastry. Airy breezy rickshaw rides. Ice golas that stain my mouth orange-red. Crossing the road in front of college. Paying homage to Red Bricks. Still loving its memories. Pure unadulterated joy. Hating the overdone Mocha. The drinking on the sly. Sharing and talking it all. Dressing up with the Sadist 5. While dappling in life’s entangling complications that eventually combed itself to a solution – for we all stood by each other and shared all this. But reality check – right now it isn’t the tiny pretty room I had, or the roomies that was my family, or the best friend who is my pillar, or the mere overnight journey to my home – right now is that one yellow light that glows ominously – I am in an alien city with alien people - but the same grey blanket covers me – and I slide under it – and feel like I am enveloped in my old life again. I try to sleep – I try to dream – I take a trip down the trodden lanes of my life – “Its just 5 months”, I tell myself – Dilli duur nahin !

Life is Beautiful

Life is beautiful. Did I say that? It is amazing how suddenly a change of heart can brighten up your day and fill you with that inexplicable urge to hug the world and shout out and say that “I am okay!”…
Today was a brilliant day – one of the best days I have had in Pune. I cribbed and I cribbed and I keep cribbing! Today, I smiled and I smiled and couldn’t stop smiling. Something just happened to me. People usually say this when they fall in love – I. however, just fell out of it. If love is a disease that bogs you down and rots your insides, then I don’t want to be in it… and if falling out of it means happiness, here I come !
Life is beautiful. Atleast mine is. Lord bless my soul !

You Brought Light in my Life and I Will Always Love You - A Tribute

This diwali will be the diwali I will remember the most. This diwali is the first diwali that I didn’t celebrate. But strangely enough, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on something. It was a rather beautiful quiet moment I shared at home with my father, mother, brother and grandmother.
My grandfather died a few weeks ago. We feel his lack and I, more so, for I was terribly close to him and loved him with all my heart. Watching him disintegrate physically through his illness was the most agonising experience for me. Watching a 6 feet tall man who was an epitome of power in his times, slowly lose his mobility was most heart rendering. I can never forget that one line he always taught me from The Gita: “Karm kar, phal ki iccha mat kar”…loosely translating to “do your duty and don’t expect anything in return”. In today’s materialistic selfish world does this even make sense? I don’t know… but I like to think it does… I think it is one line that makes me the person I am today and I am grateful to my granpa for that. I can sleep in peace when I know that I have shown my genuine concern to someone who is unwell, knowing well that he may never bother even if I am in the hospital, I feel at ease with my otherwise constricted heart when I don’t harbour bitterness and malice against someone who has wronged me, but instead forgive and move on. Why expect? Expectations lead to disappointments. I think our grandparents are a storehouse of wisdom that, to many may seem like utter crap at this point of time, but later it will be the only thing that will make sense and the only worldly wisdom that they will carry on.
I miss my grandfather…miss so many things about him…like sharing fruits (he always bought kilos for me and himself and we sat together and gorged on them while he told me a little story from his life), going on walks with him (we always went on walks and carried with us 2 oranges that we sat in the woods and ate)…during my board exams, he woke up in the middle of the night to make me tea so I stayed awake to study, he showered me with such massive amount of love that I felt I could drown in joy, he called me “sona baccha”…he called me “Indira Gandhi”, for he thought I was rather bossy and could be a politician one day (and I also had really short hair that time)…I was his favourite grandchild…I am the first grandchild… I was the constant name on his lips when he cried in pain during his last few days… and I feel miserable now for I think I could have been a lot more with him but I didn’t… but he always knew I loved him and I still love him and he is like this presence keeping a watch on me, asking me and telling me “karm kar, phal ki iccha mat kar”…
It was a quiet diwali, I missed my grandfather…I shared a sentimental moment in my grandmother’s arms while tears involuntarily welled up my eyes, there were no words exchanged…but yet there was this silent understanding…that he was a wonderful man and that we were lucky to have him in our lives…he enriched my life, he made me a better human being, he taught me that if you love someone, say it… I was his greatest fan and still am… for me, he is the best grandfather I could have ever had, and still is… and in the whispering, shimmering diyas and in the hazy smoke of incense, I feel his warmth and his protective embrace… and though we are not technically celebrating diwali, I am festive in myself, in the ethereal glow of the night and in the memories of my darling grandpa.

Lift please?

You were an accident…
May I say that?
And reduce your existence…
To a mere trifling?
But as though every rain drop
And every variegated leaf…
And as every misted window
And every patch of sun…
Forms the daily of our lives,
You, my beloved…
Formed the daily of my life.

You were an accident…
May I say that?
And reduce my existence…
To a mere traveller?
But as though every distance covered
And at every drive-in stopped…
And as every motel crossed
And every turn missed…
Forms the highway of our lives,
I, my beloved…
Formed the hitchhiker of your life.

Hop-scotch

Her smile now lies
In the shoebox of her dreams…
Cluttered with memories
Tattered with age.
And in the dark musty corner
In the cupboard of her life…
Sleeps the dent of her cheek
Away from the salmon sky.

Her life now lies
Within that iota of a second
When the spring of her joy exhausted…
And no one could wind it again.
But shove into the refrigerator
The clock of her ordinary youth.

So let no life touch her
Let no confetti of laughter
Colour her air of indifference
For another heart turned hop-scotch
A game? Hop… Jump… Trample
And another Havisham born.

Red

These are a few rather beautiful poetic lines written for me…
My most perfectly detached turned lovable room mate, friend, sister, support in Delhi to who I owe a lot of me that is and a lot of me that I was and am glad am not anymore…
Thank you Deb, for drawing this little painting out of me through words and through the colour I love most…


With my burning desire, let me be red,
The symbol of fecundity…
In its each drop is life…
Ardent… potent… passionate…
Blazing hearts afire…
On the alta smeared feet…
In the niche of all’s existence…
As crimson… vermillion… brick…
Let me be the impetus for change.

The Wooden Room of my Head

An assignment on a dream sequence in class made me think;
Yes, we dream all the time… at the yellowed sight of dawn and at the pink placidity of dusk… in the cushioned comfort of our beds and in the uncomfortable chaos of the daily bus… but how often do we think about a dream… or rather, think what our dream is…
It is a class on visual design. As a film student I am told to think visually. As a literature student I have always thought visually. But my dream lies in literature and in visuals lies my dream.

So there is this room. Small. Compact. Warm with wood. Lined with shelves. One window. And strangely enough I see no door. My perspective isn’t a 360 degree one. My vision encapsulates three sides. The books in the shelves are hardbound and large…heavy and old… gold embossed… making my heart fill with an inexplicable feeling that it wants to burst and spray out celebratory confetti! But they are not arranged in perfection as I usually like to keep my shelves…in categories and according to sizes… yet they are not carelessly stacked. There is a certain complacent sense of regal laziness in them. They are like old people…looking at me with a vault of wisdom and philosophy. They are alive with knowledge and potent with the power of thought. The peculiar smell of old books that is like incense to me emanates from them…yellowed pages… fading letters…with the old english fonts… ornamental fonts, elaborate fonts… stacked together into exquisite sentences. At the left side corner, is a small table… really small… enough only to fit a huge book, an ink pot, and a lamp. The lamp is glowing, yellow light…incandescent and luminescent. There is no other light in the room. It is daylight but it is dark inside…somewhat reflecting me and my multiple layers of hidden self. The single window is large, it is framed with dark mahogany wood…it has a rich royal maroon curtain that is heavy…it is plain but has a character to it…it is grave, almost profound acting like a barrier against the rest of the busied world.

And I sit at the table… head bent slightly, fingers stained with ink, slightly shivering with the anticipation of hurriedly putting down the next thought on paper before it passes me by… scratching and scribbling…yet in a neat beautiful honest writing… the y’s are a little extended and the t’s are abrupt and stand tall.
Through the window and the curtain… a little space is left open, for the sun to stream in… there is a wide ray that seems to be travelling in from some infinite space…and you can see the little dust particles hopping in that light… but if you look closely, really closely… like strain your eyes to a super humanly capacity…and see that they are not really dust particles after all… they are words… tiny microscopic words… floating and streaming through that ray of light… and entering my wooden room… permeating through its every corner… till I can smell the words and feel it in my breath. And I begin to write again… I don’t know what I am writing, but I am writing…and furiously so… the ink pen is making faint itchy noises…noises that are like manna to my senses and music to my ears… and I am happy…in my closed room, I am content. There is a serene expression in my otherwise obscure and inscrutable brown eyes. I am filled with silent joy.

So I thought of a dream. I dreamt of joy. This, to me, is the only complete joy.

Monsoon Returns

White walls sullied…
Across it, in invisible paint…
Marks …. muck… malice…

But for how long does stay a distemper of humour…
Or a wallpaper of illusive plaster?
Erroneous was I…
Swathed was he…

Monsoon came…
Months… moisture…. mould…

White walls mutilated…
Fissures… fractures… Finished.

To My Heart, I Bid Farewell…

As I begin to write this, I do not have any particular topic in mind, or any defined thought, or even an idea about what I am going to type next… for at this particular moment, I don’t have any specific issue driving me, or some annoying thought invading my head… so I think I will continue my ramblings till it finds direction by itself…

I’m sitting in my blue room…the music is blaring…and I think what’s making me type right now is the music that is going on right now… I feel like I am a teenager again… LFO is playing…I find myself doing a little jig in front of my full length mirror of vanity… then some John Denver plays while it rains outside and the greenery is shimmering in its complete lushness…
How innocent is childhood…school days…little things like an argument with a classmate is the huge mammothian problem of the day… some inter-school activity that results in a crush on a boy from the other school is the only thing required to make you a giddy gladdened goat… when I return home, I feel like I return to my innocent days of glory… when I didn’t have to censure myself when I talked or think about its repercussions…

Life is such a maze… and right now fate has taken me by its fisted grasp and made me perch right in the middle of the labyrinth from where I am still trying to figure out where to go to… but the past few days have been a rediscovery into myself… an accelerated exercise into an introspection that I have been trying to indulge myself in since the past few months…
Yesterday, I entered home and burst into tears… I haven’t behaved this way since I was in class 3 and returned from the boarding school… I don’t know what took such a fierce hold of my emotions that the tears ran free as a cathartic stream… maybe it stems out of the fact that in the past one year, I have revealed too much of myself…too much of vulnerability, too many words, too much of the side I wouldn’t ever go back to… and that only resulted in tonnes of misinterpretation, so from the past few months I have put on a waterproof mask that refuses to show any signs of tears. Such a huge lesson learnt in time has made me very wary of the real world… I realized maybe I have had the best of too many things and too many people all my life… the most amazing family, the best friends, the best of roomies and the strongest of unconditional support systems till I hopped into a new chapter of my life last year and then all the best things snatched, all the worst ones were all at once put on a platter and served to me under the fasad of a fancy garnishing.

This new meal …that looked oh so pretty, was layered with all things bright and beautiful… till I got to the rotten core of it around January this year and then it took my another few months to realize that it is actually the source of a terrible sickness, and that this indigestion is making my life pure hell… another few weeks and it was time to throw up…to expel all of that out of my body…

And now I am here again… I feel so old, I feel so mature, I feel so ridiculous at times, for being a blind trusting naïve person – when I was growing up, I was taught the goodness of humanity and the importance of a genuine apology… even though I have been callous with words and feelings, my conscience has always poked me enough to try and fix things… so even now, I just don’t get it how some people can just brush off things, or reverse the blame, or worse still…forget it all? It makes me think…so was I taught the wrong things in the little pretty convent school that I studied in and the little pretty warm home that I was brought up in…or there is something wrong with that world outside…with the people from the big cities and the fancy public schools? … Maybe I am generalizing too much… but right now I am in my rambling mode and I give myself the freedom to type exactly what’s coming to my mind than write the pre-planned structured prose and poetry that I usually churn out…

Home is where the heart is…home is where my heart is… where I feel a void when I see my brother’s empty room because he is off to a boarding school…where I wake up and get my morning “chai”…where I have heated arguments with my mother about commodifying marriages…where I wait for my father in the evening so I can greedily grab the car… where I snuggle between them both and feel like I am 10 again… but most importantly where I can express my true self and not worry about being labeled a nut or a slut…

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine in one of those green CNG autos that seem like giant ladybugs chugging along the wide beautiful roads of Delhi, and we realized that we are the kind of people who are not very “socially conscious”…and I think its so true… we are the kind of people who say what they want, when they want… who look at a spy camera and wave at it and make funny faces right in the middle of Connaught Place, who go to a coffee shop for a few minutes just because they allow you to smoke, who bargain till their throats hurt for something so crass and garish that they wouldn’t even want to own in their wildest nightmares … this is what I call life … to get kicks out of doing strange things…better still if its in public… for in the anonymity of the world and in the companionship of another crazy person like me…I find myself again… I find someone who discusses with me the problems of being stereotyped and the sheer joy of being a feminist…a liberal leftist…a nihilist…a ‘anything’… with whom I go beyond the trivialities of definitions…

Home is where the heart is…with these people is where home is… to them belongs my heart and my true self… the first mistake I had done was to carry my heart to the infernal pothole Pune that I had gone to…the second mistake I had done was to let my heart go to my head… and now after such realizations and such let downs and yet such major lessons…I have decided this time, to leave my heart here and take my superficial self there… to think with my head and feel with my head… and let my heart do both when I am back home!

Settling in…Setting out…

A dread had taken refuge in my heart the moment I had heard that I have to spend the next 3 months in the city of Mumbai…now I do not know what or why that was… though some reasons were starkly clear – I didn’t want to run into the people of my distasteful past, I am also known to be the sort who hates changes, I thought it would be too crowded, too humid or maybe I just wanted to plop myself in the comfortable cushion of Delhi where I didn’t want to make new friends but be with my beautiful bracket and relive the old me… whatever the reasons may have been, the moment I set out to Mumbai, I felt a displacement…like that house cat that has been thrown out of her familiar home and then turns wild and hostile… I turned wild and hostile – but only mentally… many things were jumbled up in my head, many memories knotted, many issues hanging mid air waiting for me to hold them and sort them out – so as a person who used to have a terribly simple life, suddenly these new cropped bugs got into my system and my defense mechanism revolted and in effect I shut the most important door of my heart, the sensitive one.

And then I had an encounter with the city that never sleeps – or rather the city that hardly even let me sleep… the initial days were utter confusion – grappling to get into the groove of my internship, getting used to living in a pg with a nutty landlady, handling dead lines, making some new acquaintances as well as digging out some old ones – until one day I realized that time was zooming past me and I wasn’t even cribbing as much anymore…
Then came a short patch of ill fate again when my path crossed with my ill past again… it was inevitable – I say that now – for everything happens for a reason and that was the final kick in my head and a jolt into the reality of the world of selfishness… another important lesson learnt…and another speedbreaker old me, picked her broken pieces and resumed her journey…

One major reason why I didn’t want to come to Mumbai was also the fact that had I ever got into trouble, I wouldn’t have a friend in the middle of the night, to fall back on… my best friends were in another city and the best friend I had here was nobody to me now… life has its strangest ways of testing your strengths and weaknesses…
At a time I was alone, I faced many obstructions…. Pressure of an unwanted marriage, paralysis of my grandfather, being mugged in the streets of Mumbai, falling sick…while that ignorant past of mine who thought that all my problems of life still revolve around him – for a moment I wanted to laugh – in anger or in amusement, I didn’t know… running into him at the streets of a market, on the day I needed a friend the most, reiterated his conceitedness and my final judgment of him in my mind. After that day, bit by bit, the messed up, knotted strands began to unravel and started combing itself out… in life sometimes, you need just one moment, to redo your priorities and to salvage your pride and joy back… the hurt was there, and I admit it without any shame…lots of hurt and lots pf pain… for why wouldn’t it hurt to have seen one lose a friend that was so close to the heart, to another. Yet, nothing was worth more hurting… ‘enough’ is the word that I finally knew the meaning of…

So in my trips to the hospital, while going to work, having sleepless nights, yet finding reasons to laugh and make people around me smile, I began to get a little bit of myself again… not all there yet not all here… I wasn’t unpleasantly closed, yet not cent per cent open…a comfortable balance I had learnt to strike in my daily life. Another huge advantage that staying in Mumbai gave me was it returned to me my sense of independence… I could go alone for movies again, and having coffee alone at Barista wasn’t weird anymore… loneliness is a beautiful thing – it is such a retrospective reflective phase… when you start question your existence and your reason for existence… the necessity for joy and the dispensability of misery start to make sense…

Like for example, on of these days, I got a ride from a colleague to this place that’s one far end of Mumbai but where my precious friend plus mother figure plus counselor plus sister, Adi lives… and as the bike zipped by the highway, I saw the cars just zoom by, sometimes we overtook them, sometimes they left us lagging behind…and then at one point, we were at high speed, the entire scene seemed to slip by me in full speed and I saw a plane take off and swim across the sky at some unimaginable speed to some far off destination – and it made me think…this is life, this is what every day is like… time is passing us by…and there is no way we can turn back and grab back even a second of it…the time I am on the bike is unique, it will never return…even now as I sit here writing this piece wont come back to me, every breath we take is transient, every word we say is like time – once gone, never to come back… so even when the laziest of days loom over us and life seems to just sit still in one immovable position… think…we are still unknowingly rushing through life… we are ageing, youth is cheating on us… so instead of sitting and lamenting over the sorrows that life brings us, we should learn to live a moment – carpe diem – grab the moment… live…celebrate… some of the most profound philosophies of life come through such simple words… and we, silly human beings who take too much self importance in wallowing in our rights and wrongs, fail to acknowledge and follow that simplest of paths….

Three months, many tears, some smiles, a thousand realizations, one cathartic confession and innumerable retrospective hours later, my priorities are in order, some issues are sorted – I finally know what I want to do , where I want to be, with whom I want to be and with whom I don’t need to be… I feel more complete and largely at peace with myself… I want to live my moments but also in the process, make sure I don’t end up covering anyone else’s moments in muck. Life is indeed short… and we are all on our own bikes, how we choose to maneouver it is entirely upto us… we will never stop and the road will never be empty… and it took me some time to learn that no one is indispensable to me but myself.

Mumbai made me see closely the beauty of life... that during the rains and the floods, a stranger doesn’t hesitate to stretch his hands and help you through the current, that the guards take it as their personal duty to prevent you from venturing out during the riots, that out of the many auto wallahs who have steered my safely home at 3 at night, only one was a mugger, that even when by mistake I have jumped into the men’s compartment in the train, I haven’t felt threatened or unsafe, that on a Sunday, however dirty or crowded the beaches are, the families still have unadulterated fun as if it were Switzerland itself, and that there is a certain warmth to this city that has finally seeped into me and replaced all the prejudices I started out with... and I used to wonder before, how come, inspite of all the traffic, the water logging, the rush, the crowd, people still don’t want to leave this place... now after 3 months here, it has begun to make a little sense... and though Delhi is still closer to home, and closer to my heart... the dread that had taken refuge has found an exit at last…Mumbai beckons me back...and I will return... as for now, I feel a strange twinge of sadness... for I had hardly begun to settle in and its time to set out again... !

The Quest of Questioning

You have a gruelling day at work. The matters of the heart are screwed enough to give you a giant ulcer so you prefer not to even think about it. The rains are slashing against the roof, constantly reminding you of its attack once you step out in the open. Things at the family end is also not so hunky dory. Your best friends and supportive bests are miles away. Not such a happy scenario, is it?... then at the end of each day, how important it is to come back to a flat where you regain some peace of mind?
For my first almost month and a half, I chose to live alone in the city of Mumbai. Then some memories came back to haunt me and going back to a psychotic landlady amidst all that wasn’t exactly my idea of “going home”… so I began to work like a maniac, the office became my second home, the streets of Mumbai I walked with ease and the cinema halls became my solace in the solitariness that I entangled myself in. But the good that came out of it was that I began to enjoy my work…a line that I wasn’t so sure about began to beckon to me with open arms and inch by inch, I walked in to get embraced in all willingness by the world of television, cameras, digibetas, and edits. This is what I want to do – I realised, as days went by and I watched a world around me, that has no time to spare, yet time enough to make the best of professional as well as personal relationships. It is a statement I use a lot, “There is no alternate tomorrow”… so if I had to be here, I am here and I am happy. It doesn’t matter then, if my personal self wasn’t at its happiest best, as long as office was a place I enjoyed going to. Yet sometimes, late nights are inevitable and some tiredness of the mind and body, unavoidable. So then coming back to a nutty, money-gnawing, squirrel of a landlady wasn’t the most welcoming of thoughts…
So I escaped – that hell hole and a part of where I had knitted more memories that had turned bitter – and shifted to a place where I was sharing a house with 4 more girls… now in my life, though my best friends are girls, my general opinion of the general girls are generally not of the very positive kind – for after the few girls I made friends with and who entered my tiny bracket of the indispensables – I haven’t bonded with too many women, or rather come across any that I have wanted to bond with – or for that matter, even where men are concerned, there is a level to which I can be friends with them and after that, I pretty much emotionally back out – so in a nutshell, making new friends is an effort that I don’t feel like taking, and a risk that I don’t want to take, for after being so let down by one such best friend, I have taken a sanyaas of sorts from this world of friendship and closeness.
So shifting into this new place brought out the sceptic in me – but then once I moved in I realised, that this is a world, totally disconnected from any front of my life. These are the people, that I will share a space with for a few weeks and then disappear… so here is a place, there is no pressure to be someone else – no pressure to guard myself or censure what I speak – no associations, no connections, - what an amazing expansive breathing space – where I didn’t choke or suffocate… where I came back everyday and made tea for the whole lot and then sat down and talked about absurd things in life…
For example just yesterday, I was having this random conversation with one of them about religion, it all started with my statement about how I think that religion is the last thing that people should fight about, yet it is the first issue on which riots break out and how completely ridiculous this is – and then we went about talking of Godhra and other Hindu Muslim issues and then I mentioned that I find peace in the church and that it is one of my favourite place to go think and reflect on myself – it is like that coup where I can untangle and comb all my mixed up and complex thoughts and give some direction to them and hence form my beliefs and opinions. She is a catholic, so she started telling me about how her faith and her prayers bring her peace of mind and helps her in times of distress and despair… and then she asked me what religion I follow – and I am an agnostic – so I told her so – that I don’t ridicule, condemn, or comment on people who are religious – but I don’t believe in idol worship or chanting to the elements – I however acknowledge that there is a universal force that shapes our destiny and that’s my belief. I think that religion is too personal an issue to bother about any further than your individual self. And then she made an offhand statement that made me think further … she said that I am still searching, that I haven’t yet found a path that gives me peace and that one day I will find it. It sounds like such big words coming from a 20 something year old girl, yet I found myself questioning myself….
So is that why I am not at peace with myself? Is that why I look to get some answers from the other person because I couldn’t answer it myself? Am I really looking for a path that gives me salvation? …
And while playing around with such jumbled up thoughts, another thought pops into my head… “religion…religious…religiously”… Is religion really a pillar of strength or is it just a routine and a hope to have a better after-death experience?... why do we then replace it for the word “regularly”? like we say…”I religiously do this and I religiously follow some soap opera”…so is that all there is to religion?...is its just a routine that you are so conditioned to follow that you now follow it without a second thought - like eating, walking, even crapping – is it just a routinely thing?...
So that one discussion with a person who I just know as my tea-companion and whose surname also I don’t know – with a person I may never meet after these few weeks – makes me think, makes me feel like myself again … wondering, questioning, critiquing and thoroughly and healthily confusing myself!
I think in life, the salt and pepper doesn’t come through answers…the essence of everyday comes through questions…these little thoughts, these strange doubts, these issues of personal concern… the more the questions, the more the speculations…more doubts and more thoughts still… so why are we always looking for answers, when just diving and floating in questions is an experience in itself… why the human quest for answers to these universal questions… but then again, the very fact its been centuries, and we are still looking for these answers says just one thing – that we may spend all our lives looking for these answers – yet ironically and unknowingly simply exist within questions and queries…and that’s what makes life so indefinably beautiful.

The Death of an Ugly Duckling

As the wet droplets of rainwater fiercely splattered against my face today, I took a step back, while the monsoon infested suburban areas of Mumbai whizzed by me…. then I realised that it was going to be a rare experience… midnight…local train…the rain water wrestling against the wind to enter the lonely ladies compartment and wash against my face… and I stepped forward again, letting the rain caress my cheeks and ruin my brand new khaki bag… like this evening, it was a rare experience… that may never happen again… that I may have avoided but yet wanted to bring upon myself… so the step forward was a choice…
All choices are half chances. Chances on life, on love, on friendship and other such abstract yet definitive bonds that as humans we are entangled with. This evening was an end to a beautiful chapter turned ugly…and end to a part of me that was… the vulnerable, trusting, open me ended. The guarded, sceptical, clamped me was born. This evening was a chance on myself... a chance to hold, a chance to let go… and I took the latter…
I think at the end of the day, we all have the instinct to differentiate between what is bad for oneself and what is not. It is as simple as a diabetes patient knowing that sugar content is bad for him or her…or for an obese one knowing that another bite from that mayonnaise filled burger may mean a step closer to a heart attack…or for the smoker to know that another cigarette means another few minutes of the priceless life snatched away… and yet the paradox lies in the fact that the thing that is bad for you is the one you crave for the most… so can we just pass it off as human behaviour… and then reiterate the helplessness and utter stupidity of the human self?...
Someone once told me that I am a woman of paradoxes… it immediately brought me to my defensive best but then again, today when I think of it, it seems to make perfect sense… I know what’s bad for me and yet like a diabetes patient craves for that sweet, I feel a lack of him and sometimes reach out to that wretched phone to tell him to make things okay and then better sense prevails and my hand involuntarily jerks away from that phone as if it were a dragon waiting to gobble my pride with pleasure. And then I think of the choice that I made, the half chance I took on life… lost yet won… suddenly the rain water hitting my face tasted salty… and unknowingly, a strange contracting feeling of absurd joy seemed to take hold of me while I let the rain wash away my tears… because though this evening was an end to a beautiful chapter turned ugly, it was also an end to a beautiful me that had turned ugly.

Ivorised

A hazy curtain does raise
Iron shutters be my eyelids
Like globular lead, my pupils –
Pupils that reflect nothing
Why so blank, so bland?

Downcast are my eyes
From left to right it darts
No tug at the mouth
Puckered, like my thoughts

Clad in red
Crossed grasshoppered legs
Fingers haven’t been spread so long
Scratching, spotting, scrambling
Across the sheets.

The walls are white
Four walls – no door
No window – no hole
Large, expansive –
Loud yet deathly silent.

And in the whites
Like a drop of blood
I sit frozen
And pen down my mind

Such mindless thought
Such mindful rot
In the ivory coloured room
With looms of space
The breathing expanse
I sit and jot.

That’s all I need
In whites and reds
I can live myself
I can immortalize –
My brain cells – preserve into words.

Then let me live
In lonely space
Let me breathe & let me write
Between passion & detachment – let me exist
So without regret, I may perish
Become cold & numb, even before I die.

T'ease' till Dawn

I am like the autumn leaf
Variegated is my existence
Like inconstant fractions
Denominators and numerators inverse
Inverse as often as day and night

Mouth widens
Tears spill
A laughing sob escapes my body
Convulsing – Sometimes in joyous fit,
Sometimes in passionate anger

Despair, disgust, dream, die
Change colours,
Wound sentiments
Turn dust to gold
Turn heart to stone

And then like an autumn leaf.
Detach and drop
Float midair
Swoop in the wind
Touch the ground.
The season has changed.

Demons of Denial

There is this fancy sounding word that I recently came across… and have been using it ever since. Is it an attempt towards positivism, an ironical usage or simply another one of those babies of the Greek metaphorical and mythological world that I seem to adopt periodically?
Eudaemonia… the greek goddess of Joy…eudaemonic, the state of being in joy and the derivation that I have been using of late…

But I wonder… do we just use these words to cheat ourselves? To make the apparent surface of our lives better?... like one of those self-help books, that ridiculously ask you to wake up every morning and like a buffoon look into the mirror and reiterate your own positivism to yourself…I have always found those books full of glossy frog crap, if I may put it that way. And then again, every day, I log onto my account, and watch the fancy word “eudaemonic” appear on the screen – as if sometimes indifferently watching me, sometimes mocking me in its noiseless expression.
How often do we tell ourselves that we are happy? How often do we desperately want to believe that we are content? So have we climbed onto that branch, from where, we only have one perspective of ourselves, and we end up assuming that, the view from up there is the only view that there is?

And this vague question now makes my stream of thought, take a leap into another random track …how powerful is the art of self conviction? Can you look into the mirror every morning and repeat a lie, so much so that the lie turns into the truth for you? I have heard of people living in self denial, not acknowledging their shortcomings, their faults, their lacks and blacks. Of late, I have also seen some of those… who, for fear of coming to terms with their wrongs, refuse to acknowledge and admit it in the first place… so as to live in a joyous illusion of virtuosity.

It is a human phenomenon I think… to believe in what makes life easier… but an easy path isn’t essentially the correct one… and then again, you can turn around and say – who defines correct and incorrect, moral and immoral – they are all constructs – more societal than personal – so what maybe terribly heartless for me, may be absolutely acceptable to another. But I think that humanity is the touchstone to human behaviour, to compassion and concern – the abstract feeling of hurt defines right and wrong – not society, not a personal weighing scale, not a moral conditioning – but simply the art of being humane… to consider feelings… and even if inconsideration has already been perpetuated, then the self realisation and consequent apology must follow. I believe that denial is cowardice, those are the brave ones who admit to their fall only to rise again

It would be judgemental on my part to make such statements on others…to demarcate the line between being courageous and an escapist, to define the two in the first place – for definitions is what limits us, as human beings - to stop thinking beyond our convinced selves and look beyond the little world of denial that we constantly build and live in… it would be narrowing my view to that branch that I may have climbed once, but then again, a few steps beyond and I am another iota closer to the zenith, and instead of looking down with one perspective, may learn to look around and beyond. And then, eudaemonia may be a sight, a vision, a feeling that may permeate in me – than just be that elusive, deriding word, demonically sitting on my screen.

I like an unlike verse...

Just when i begin to steer clear of every little particle and word that even distantly smells of the word called 'love', i open some old dusty poetry books and within the yellowed pages, come across something like this and cant help but want to share it with the world... even in the false emotion of love then, there is some inexplicable beauty, that, if in not life, can atleast be an expression in words...

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon,
at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

- Pablo Neruda

Hug me Tight

It is just another morning thought…one of those soul searching sort of questions that pop in your head once in a while…however these questions seem to have been popping in my head too often for comfort – it may be a good thing though, for then I give a few minutes of silent consideration to some issues that I subconsciously grapple with in my life and don’t even know about… some questions that make me the complex person that I am…some questions that makes me the cynic that I am, the critic that I can be…
I woke up this morning and thought about the same time last week and the time before that…then my mind traveled like a port-key to the time much before that too…weeks, months… time seem to collapse like a castle of cards in front of my very eyes and images, flashes, words, conversations, touch, smell, feel…everything of the past just seemed to touch by me again – like that humid wind that just whiffed past my face- it was like a movie and I was the protagonist and I wasn’t smiling…I was one of the two main characters and I wasn’t happy…and then some droplets, some sobs, some breathless sniffles seemed to zoom in front of my eyes…big huge brown eyes – soulful sad hurt eyes… and then in another flash of a second, it zoomed out and the face was mine…and I wasn’t happy. How important is happiness in one’s life? We live – we don’t die – I may be an existentialist and yet I don’t live in the worthless abandon of one – yes, it is an interesting theory that I keep telling people for I find it extremely fascinating and remotely believable – that how can we say that we are living if each day we travel closer to death…so aren’t we dying…what is life then, if we started dying since the day we were born – and then again, I see sad movies where unrealistically the dying protagonist talks about dying with a smile, about living each day – for tomorrow is a distant hope and today is the only gift we have – so live, smile, let joy wrap its arms around you and let a hug envelop you – and then I look at the movie that had just flashed in front of my eyes… and I only saw a depressive sight of me – and then another question began to nudge me every minute – do we live to love, that love which is a skewed up theory with no particular definition – comes in all shapes, sizes, ages and stages – that we share with a friend, a family, an ideology, a passion…a person?? And then if love is a phase that makes me the protagonist of this story then I’d rather not love – for if we live, we must live to smile, we must live to experience each day and squeeze that last dreg of happiness – to be hugged and to hug with all our might. This morning I couldn’t remember the last time I was truly happy – and when you reach that stage and its cause is some sort of inexplicable love, then you know its time…the day you cant recall your last unadulterated moment of joy, it is then time to let go of that futile unrequited love – it is then time to let some happiness seep in and some bitterness ooze out – it is then time to go back to loving, but only loving your life…it is then time for that tight hug – and I need a hug again.

Marmalade

A rumble at my feet… and a quiver in me… like frames per second…the sights pass me by… so many familiar views… huts covered with dung…bamboo shoots… rice fields submerged in water… sand mounds… dry ever stretching yellow fields… looming peepul trees…some destitute naked children…bricked houses dappled along the way… and I sit and watch in silent wonder and a gloomy face…
I have just left my utopia…stepped yet again on the paths of hell… only this time, with a slight hope to make inferno less charring…
Again a wistful me…makes her way into the paths that have been charted out for me by my most unkind mother fate – for I would give an eye and a leg…I would kill…I would have done anything to spend the next 3 months in the world I existed before…
A single day here was beautiful… maybe fed me with enough memories to last a week…and then what…like always would I have to depend on dipping myself in my revitalizing storage of memories that I have carefully preserved in my head?...
I like to call it my precious marmalade – these memories that I thrive on… every single hour in my utopian land…every single word that my friend Estella has uttered …every smile that my familiar people have showered on me…that crispy brewed smell of Village Café… that old yellowed pole by the road… the coconut-man that has been at that corner forever… its all a part of my marmalade… jellyed into a box… with the sweet smoothness and the tangy bits that makes it so unique… conserved… preserved… jammed in my head… flexible enough to make space for new moments… adjusting enough to squeeze in more bits…and yet, in its congealed state sits in my head, not allowing for my defective present to act like a fungus to its eternal undiluted perfection.
I am allowing myself to soon turn into a Miss Havisham of sorts…and yet, in all consciousness, I take that alternative…for I’d rather be preserved in marmalade than rot in the fungus of my today.

Camera or Vase

A very disturbing thought has invaded my mind recently and has built a nest there – and every few hours I hear the silent squeaking and the mute screeching in my head...
I was a searing feminist – I was an independent soul ...and the women who chose to objectify themselves were the sort...the type....the category I used to call “victims of society”. But now, my surety in myself sitting at the other side of the fence is slowly shaking, I can feel that fence crumble, can see the shiver under my feet and can feel an earthquake jar my self identity from its very core. A very simple universal and a loud question knocks against my brain and asks me three words...
Vase or camera?...

It is an interesting way we look at both these objects...
A vase ...ornamental, mute body of beauty, holding within itself, flowers of every season, yet sitting in the same corner – stagnant, unchanging, rather boring...growing older... mouldy...and yet becoming an integral part of the household...

And the disposable camera... in new versions, models, makes and colours... an accompaniment of the vacation...a break...a change... makes moments, captures transient joy and then without a second thought, once the usage is over, once the moments have been developed and handed to the owner, discarded as easily as it was picked...

As women, have we become confined to these parameters? To these definitions? To usages and moments? To boring stagnating existences and mute objectifications?
Have we become the vase...have we turned into the disposable camera?

For all my sensibilities and my opinions, for all my individuality and my intellect – I seem to be no different... I seem to have fallen prey to both these definitions...and in a period of less than 6 months...
For one man chose to have snapshots of moments with me... he lives for the moment while he kills every other scope of any more moments for the other – he is the one that knows it all – which is the better model of the camera at what time, what he can have, what he cant have, what he can afford to have, what he cant reach to. But I suppose that is how the market works....that is how the market of consumption goods worked for him – for in his momentary fast changing technological world – there is no word called durability that exists.
And the other – who wishes to exhibit me to the family unit – to make me a pretty vase on display and keep me stagnant at one place and space, to hold seasons and to live a uni-seasonal life...to make me a domestic object.

In both cases, we are objectified...so are we limited to the dual narrow bracket of wife or slut? Virgin or waste? Mute or loud?... in this journey from myself to these two, somewhere I have lost myself...and nowhere have I been happy... I do not wish to be a camera, I wish even less to be a vase – so as a woman where does that leave me and does it even leave me with any options... I had a sea of options holding out its multiplicity to me once upon a time...and now it is time to reaffirm my identity and have a dive into that sea before, in this dual dirt, I lose myself.

Q: Camera or vase?...
A: Neither.

Angst

In my existential state of incompletion...
Like a mechanical corpse...
I breathe yet not live..
Unless you call existing, life.

In my affections unguarded...
I give in, give up...
Leave no scope for redemption...
Until you call existing, death.

Sarcoma-cised

If there must be the heart…
More than just a fist-sized organ…

If there must be sensitivity…
More than just the contracting siphon…

Then why must such butchery…
Of the soul come so easy…
Why then must a man…
Slay a belief with such apathy…

And if then such a massacre…
Of trust must transpire…

If for such carnal gaffes…
The body needs perspire…

Then let me be a cadaver…
A carcass must I be…
For humanity once touched me…
And then did he…

And in the eternal wait…
Affections turn ephemeral…

A convenient turn of the hour…
A verity so belatedly he did cull…

For never shall I now permit…
A healing to my tainted bed…
For love is a cancerous perjury…
To enervate, assail and then shred.

Estell'awe'

Like a slender fern…
She floats in a bemused languor…
Thoughts stroll through the inroads of her mind…

Words strewn around like petals in spring…
And tawny leaves dotting the earth in autumn…
Mould into astute sentences…

Articulating into speech…
Her cherubic mouth does part…
Trickles the words now ordered…
That erstwhile speckled the terrain of her mind…

Engaging and enlightening…
New theories. Novel philosophies….
Sense and sensibility… wit and vivacity…

And in a semi-stunned state…
The stuttering spectators…
Stare at the seraphic form…

Who smiles in silent satisfaction…
And pities the stunted minds…
Of the technical tots and the numerical noughts…
Deprived of the seasons of words…
That to these mulish mortals cannot be taught


And like a slender fern…
She floats in an amused languor…
Laughter sprints through the inroads of her mind…
Estella has dawned into the night.


*Dedicated to my closest friend…my greatest support...and the most beautiful bright-head that I have ever met*

C'wrinkle'd

In me bred happiness…
Joy and glee entwined their fingers…
Revolved in my insides…

Causing goosebumps…
Eliciting a smile…
A toothy smile was mine…
As a brightly-lit rhizome…

Making insignificant creases…
At the edge of my brown eyes…
Furrows of grin…
Crinkles of bliss…

An inexplicable contentment…
That awakened me at dawn…
And sang me asleep in the dark…

For the prophecy hadn’t been said yet…
Toxic words that he said…
A silent hope mouthed…
Struck a deal with my fate…

To happen to me as has happened to others…

And I…
So unaware of his animosity…
So unbelieving of his flaws…
In a delusion of a dotard…
Falling in the quashing palms…
Of fate and of his…

Sitting so oblivious…
Reclining between the palms…
Blinded to an actuality…
That I only functioned…
As a body not a soul…

And then gnawingly and gradually…
The fingers began to close in…
Fisted me in its murk…
Squashed my every essence…
Snipped my every smile…

And then the last move…
To mangle every hope…
And wring out every faith…
Poured over me…
A stream of filth…
A nauseating statement…


And the creases ironed out…
No elation expressed…
The crinkles shifted homes…
From the rim of my eyelids…
To the plane of my forehead…

And if I were to show age soon…
I would rather be furrowed when I smiled…
Than be ironed out into a dispirited flatness…

For I am not a mask…
I am also human…
I do not come with an expiry date…
I am not the “best before 2005” product…

I would also indulge in uninhibited laughter…
That he stole from me…
And now in his yarns of humour…
Distributes it to the world…

And never would he return to me…
What he snatched so callously…
And he will live in joy…
And trash from his memory…
What a misery he unknowingly brought…
And flattened my crinkles…
To gift me with wrinkles.

Sylvia Plath...a mouthpiece for my current state of mind

the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight

Feenix

Death is irrevocable
Irreversible…like time
Once a vision blackens
And a shutter is downed
Then the only blaze that remains
Is at the morgue
Ashes born –
Only to merge again
In the elemental whole.

For we are mere humans
Not characters of mythic proportions
Of clay we are made
Only to fuse with earth again
Never to emerge again
But in stories of the supernatural.

Such is the story of feelings
It will not take rebirth
It is a human phenomenon
Not a creation of the imagination
Or of fanciful hopefulness
Like a phoenix.

For a phoenix dies to rise again
But feelings stagnate into oblivion
I remind you dear sir…
Maybe you spelt it wrong…
It is feelings…not feenix
It isn’t just a blunder of the suffix.

Pre-lewd

The empty walls
Dark…stark….
And a shade of fire…
Half light… dimmed light…
Ambered through the space…
Filled in it… a warmth…
Smouldering to fervour…

Shadows splattered on walls…
Like an abstraction…
Stretched out of proportion…
Concealing the truth…

Of two bodies entwined…
Whispers and gasps…
A silent conversation…
Of skin and spirit…

But no definition…no outline…
A haze… a fuzz…
A miasma of desire…

And a soft query…
“What is this…”
For an indestructible faith…
Draped sensibility…
In cloaks of fib…

“A prelude…”
A convenient word…
With a distant hope…
Like the carrot on the stick…

So a semi-conscious trip…
To a callous fall…
In the pit of lust…
Sliding and gliding…
And a thud…
And the sudden interlude…
When actuality strikes…

That “prelude” is such a misleading word…
An overture? A prologue? A preface? ….
A lie?... a deception?...

A way to elude…
Or just to delude.
For I despise…
A prelude.

I Object

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Metamorphosise Me Not

Its a cocoon that I've created
A covering. A shield.
Within it contain strands...
Strands of memories
Threaded together are the nights...
Of helpless laughter
Of inhibited tears...
The days i existed
In complete joy

A busied body... like a big eyed bee...
Perching and wandering...
Buzzing through evenings
Rendering my soul a fullness
The familiar roads
The unconditional care
The silent comfort
The intellectual babble

Its all still there...
But in private moments - of recollection...
Lik worn out sheets of scribbled images
I turn pages - I flip my past
In my perfect past i stay cocooned -
Refuse to be a butterfly.

Souffle

My life is life a souffle...
Fluid yet bound...
Melts in the heat...Harmonious otherwise
In all flavours like my masks
For all times like my moods

Seasoned with my mates...
Topped with my present.
I am an indestructible whole
Made of gelatinous chunks
Held together by unison
Bound together by moments
Like a souffle am i...

In exact proportions i am made
You break a part of me
The souffle remains the same
And then when it shall perish
In perfect smoothness i shall die...
A delightful sweetened end...
A souffle am i.

Suspended I Lie

Shimmering and Glimmering...
Sliding and gliding...
Like a firefly...
With blazing eyes...
And molten enthusiasm...
I smouldered in pure joy...

Shone...Burnt...Peaked...Burst...
Like a phoenix I did die...
But always rose again...
Swung around and landed...
On my feet...ready to fly...

Moments that did form...
Untouched by any flaw & petty lie
Evaporated...Collected...
Made clouds in my mind...
And now i won't let the rain
Clear my frozen perfect sky.

Snip...!

Stop. Rewind. Play.
Like a film is our life.
Memories captured in still frames.
Replayed in motion.
Flashes. Rushes. Hitches.
Life a Film is our life.
Unerasable. Unchangeable. Non-reusable.
Yet you can... Change. Cut. Switch.
Trash bitterness. Tape joyousness.
Just simply edit.