Wednesday, July 19, 2006

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!

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