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.