Forever

Sometimes you make the wrong choices, and you hope that they are the right ones. And sometimes the right ones that you make are wrong beyond recall. It is always just a matter of time before everything falls into place, or falls apart (whatever is most likely in your world). There's a reason people are forgotten. They are meant to be. Broken hearts are just an excuse to express random sorrow. The kind that's accumulated over trivial affairs and the lack of them. You can keep holding back. You can keep assuming that there is going to be a reason for you to break free. You can keep kidding yourself and nurse a broken heart and perhaps learn to sing.

Kiss Good Bye

Is it what you feel or what you know? Deep down inside at the bottom of your heart where you're busy churning love in various new forms is probably where it all begins. The mediocrity of people combined with yours makes one big average. It's more average than the individual spirit. And then the standards are formed. To which one must conform. The big average becomes the guideline for things good and small. There are moments when you can feel yourself floundering and lost. And the scariest part is that you relinquish that too. Because it's alright to flounder in everyone's combined average angst. You sacrifice your anger for a time and once it finally comes and pats you on your back you drown it and yourself in misunderstood rage and selfish grief.

There is hardly a point to life. Except to simply feel the fact that you exist. Every single day. Just that. And everything else is simply a bonus - good friends, a decent place to live, loves of lives and the occasional craving for blueberry cheesecake.

Life

The purpose of living was surely not to spend most of our time in pursuit of small spurts of happiness that resemble contentment but are too fleeting to be anything but pretence. Dissatisfaction has a foul stench. And jealousy is at the root of every disgusting discourse. Knowing what you don't want eats you up on the inside worse than knowing you what you do. It seems too futile to put into words. So I stop trying. The constant consternantion and erratic behaviour which must be explained to someone day in and day out so that there is a proof of conscience is simply proof of the fact that there isn't. Sometimes I stop myself before it becomes tangible. I wish it would break. So that I won't have to touch it. Always tentative, always watchful, always waiting, always afraid. It's as if I read 'Life for Dummies' and am still too dumb to understand it. I doubt the answer will lie in 'Life for Dumber Dummies'.

Bright and Shiny

There are some ties that are made in an instant. There are some that are broken and repaired so many times that they're unbreakable even if you want them to be broken. There are silly moments when you want to sit curled up on someone's bed with a newspaper and do the crossword with them. There are rituals that were meaningless before and have become something of a keepsake.
One shouldn't have to escape within oneself. Mornings before college is when I do that. I indulge myself. I walk barefoot all over the house with my cup of tea and then stand alone at the window nursing it till it's lukewarm. The window that used to be a balcony. It used to be the place where I searched for playmates down below. Now I just look across to the other building and beyond that towards the horizon. At nights too I stand there. Hiding behind the curtains. Listening to conversations meant for me and without me. I thought I was bright and shiny. I'm not too bothered that I am not. The ties that I make are not bright and shiny either. I'm very bothered about that.

Us, Girls

Quick to judge and quicker to love. That's what we are, us carefree girls. Careworn too sometimes. Seemingly innocent, with shadows of doubts beneath our eyes, we get lost in our own various defences.
My trail of charm is different than hers and hers and hers. Maybe someone picked up the wrong scent and traced it back to the wrong girl. We hold our heads high in our fathomless mistakes made for and by others and secretly flounder.
I know I am always slightly confused and secretly alert. As I watch the others I know that they are too. All of us are on the lookout for the signs from each other about our own trails and travails.
Sometimes the most innocuous of words become infested with a plethora of meanings and then we ponder and think and construe.

And So It Begins

I stare at my lap. Look out of the window. Stare at my lap again. Look out of the window again. I have never been this nervous. Or perhaps I have and don't remember.
He seems fine. Drives. Smokes. Drives.
I wonder if he's smoking because he's nervous too.
"Is it the music?" he asks.
"No." I am mortified. I curse every single Western musician silently under my breath and then myself for never having been able to understand or appreciate it!
I'm actually very proud of myself for keeping so quiet! I guess he notices as well.
"What's with the silence?"
I smile. I feel like a retard but I smile.
He gives me this huge grin and I realise I'm fine.
It begins to rain and I gather up the courage to fiddle with the radio. I give him a sideways look to see if he minds. It doesn't look like he does. I feel myself suddenly relaxing. I smile again.
A long drive and a bit of rain and a little bit of music.

Oohs and Aahs

Orange and gold bangles,
mist in the air,
big strong hands
and kisses everywhere.

I spent the better part of the morning wrapping a present in blue and gold handmade paper and then tying it with pink and gold string. Beautiful. I keep looking at it and feeling happy. It's a good week. There are countless messages on my phone and lots of plans to make with lots of people. Not to mention the weather is fricking awesome! Just the kind for long drives.. which we managed to do last night! I'm slightly concerned about my phone addiction though. Sigh.. I'm in the mood to write letters..

Today

Last night was painful. My rage wouldn't let me sleep. So I tossed and turned and went over a thousand things in my head. Whatever justification I gave, the hurt inside me lingered and distorted my behaviour. I was tired. I was exhausted with what I thought I could resist and what continued to persist. So I let it wash over me.
I let myself feel guilty for a good five minutes and the pain too. I remained totally miserable for a good 25 minutes and then I let go.
I'm different. Was different and always will be. It is not that some things are pointless. It is that to the things you are not the point.

Prescience

We are born with a thousand realizations. In that first moment when we open our eyes and stare at the world the first blink is always that of understanding. Perhaps that's why most of us start bawling at the top of our lungs. We are horrified at the million possibilities and the countless expectations. I'm pretty sure all of us want to go back inside our mother's wombs and simply not be part of that sudden drop in temperature (15 degrees) environment.

When I was small I was told I was meant to do great things because I was born legs first and they were crooked. The fact that my dear mother somehow managed to straighten (and lengthen) them convinced a few people that I was different. I believed it too for a long time. I saw it in certain things that happened while growing up. I became from one of the stupidest children in any room to a person who could hold conversations and get good grades. At some point along the way I stopped being the ugly duckling of groups. I never realized any of this until I started looking back.
Every single day a thought flits into my already very crowded head. I think it's all the realizations I was born with that are gathering up every moment that I am older. I wasn't born coiled up like a spring on the inside. And today I feel that all of my realizations knew that too.

Not mediocre

I have exams... And I'm not worried. Because something else is taking precedence. Something that consumes me from the inside out. Sometimes it meekly walks away. Sometimes it snarls and keeps up the torment. Somehow it is always there. These days it's a little insecure...seeing as I am winning.
They told me to write it down. They are stupid people. All of them who claim to understand. To feel and to know. It is always one against the world. Only the world doesn't want you to know that anytime soon.
These days I have dreams of those that I never saw before. Atleast not clearly enough.
I am thankful. For today I have made up my mind to live. To push and hustle!
I'd lost the faith. I thought someone took it with them. I had lost it. Not the faith though...

To you and you and you

"Ooooohhhhh.... I'd love to be skinny!"
"Give me your metabolic rate!"

I never knew thin was the cause of such envy... A certain someone told me they'd die to be so thin... I tell them often that I'll probably die because of it... :-)

I'm envious too.. of raging appetites and risky lifestyles..

IF I COULD I WOULD:
vodkas with cokes (more than half a glass) and
dhaba food and
sweet concotions and
chocolate milk! and
maggi, maggi maggi! and
chicken sandwiches from subway and
chhole kulche from roadside vendors and
momos from obscure carts and
glasses full of coke with loads of ice! and
ice creams after every meal and
chicken!! rolls, gravies anything!

This is for all of you.. who can eat and eat and keep it all in.. savour it! fuck the weight issues! they're dumb and stupid!

Here, There and Everywhere

It was high school. I was ugly. I saw it every day in the mirror before leaving for school. I remember walking down the longest corridor, with sweaty hands clutching a binder tightly to the chest as I tried my best to slink past the group of senior boys without getting noticed. Of course, it was not to be. I was the weird Indian girl, the one who read all the time curled up in secluded corners and ate her lunches alone because she was told Indian food smelled. One of them winked as I walked past and my stomach lurched. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears right there and then. I hated them. I guess they didn't like me very much either. It would have been the uncool thing to do.

I began to dread opening my locker. On Valentine's Day everyone had a red carnation sent to them by someone or the other (school initiave) inside their locker. I opened mine to find a bunch of smelly socks and a note which said : you won't notice the smell anyway.
I think I still carry that rage somewhere.

A year later. I had another note. It said: "You're beautiful". I mistrusted it instantly. I imagined a bunch of people were standing around waiting for me to smile before they started jeering. I threw it in the trash. The next day there was a red rose inside. I went to the school counselor to ask her for a lock for my locker becaues someone seemed to know my code. I cried at night. I couldn't understand why someone would mock me so.

What happened afterwards is a blur. I was in love... with the way he felt. I was everything I wanted to be because he could see me that way.
Seven months later.. there was another note: "I don't think you're pretty enough to be mine".
This time I smiled. It was the longest prank anyone had played. You had to give some credit.

I came back to India. Outside my car window a small child held up a rose and grinned. "Aap bahut sundar ho didi". I smiled. I loved my country instantly.

Red Shoal

Stifled within yourself. An island in the middle of a red lagoon of pulsating nothingness.
You're mesmerized by the thought that the mind carries the body and not the other way around. In your case which carries which has never occurred to you.

There comes a certain moment when you manage to humiliate yourself and feel such degradation so deep somewhere that you begin to hate with this fiery intensity anything that makes you think.

Whenever you will pick yourself up and dust off the failure that others have piled upon you, there will always be others waiting to pull you back down again. Those that claim to love you are the most capable. You will let them think for you, all the while remaining an island and at the same time will try to float into a pathetic merged existence with them.

There is no respect. For you, or for your scathing resentment of all that there is around and beyond. All this while you never realise, that more than anything else, you have this need to destruct.

When you peek over the edge of the island. The red is shallow and your reflection is upside down...

Night and Day

There were hours of sunshine and minutes of pain.
Seconds of ecstasy existed in both. My knowledge of the dozen rotations upon an axis was limited.
Once night fell, the recollection of golden moments eluded me and one by one the instances of hurt came and fenced my bed. The length of the ordeal could not be measured and the expanse which it covered was shadowed in moon light.

There, perched upon a gleaming bough sang a lark. Further below at a window sill, a sparrow morosely pecked at bread crumbs. The lark had perhaps forgotten the five dozen seconds of ecstasy, the sparrow had perhaps never been in the sun.

Worth Preserving

I want that moment to exist behind a closed door somewhere and know that I can walk in anytime I need to and anytime I want. With food in the centre and boys on the phone and little babies who turn over and demand to be burped. Where we tell tales over and over again just to have that one last laugh or simply to forget the story. Where certain others lament the lack of maal or the fact that we can't afford it coz people owe us money...In that room we are the three most beautiful people I have come across. I'm thinking it as I take my monkey arms and start measuring them against the milky softness of the baby's. I'm thinking it when I look at beautiful big eyes that somehow look childish all the time and I'm thinking it when I sit, legs stretched out under the table and declare I'm hot simply to hear no one rebuff it.

The boy does a brilliant imitation and I laugh until I there are tears because that image of me is so atrocious that I actually know what he's talking about. Sigh. In that room is where it all falls away and I come to sickening realisations for which the food is in no way responsible. Then the baby becomes the mother with hand motions that remind one of a lotus blossom and it's all warm and fuzzy and sleepy. It's nice. Worth preserving.

Take Heart

Far beyond the never ending expanse of grey

there is a bit of amethyst

I have been told,

"After the fog and obscurity,

a beautiful yellow

you shall behold".

Odi et Amo

I loved and I hate. She flies with her own wings.

I want to colour the dots. Big, gaping holes, in their anonimity they'd be happy. Therefore I take a felt tip pen and make diamonds and flowers with holes as the centre and at the edges and all around. Myopia is a pre-requisite to appreciate my wet ink art. From far away I see a hazy figure- Monet could have painted him... the grey and the black and other black blue dots making sense from a distance in a drizzle of white.

I figured out a pattern yesterday, or the day before or a year ago (I forget when). It went something like Henry VIII's wives : Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

Sometimes, when it's dark, I practice waiting. When it's light it becomes like Penelope's burial shroud for Laertes, a little bit of which is unravelled every day but without suitors to prompt. I have given it the dawn of a certain day and the dusk of others and the sky is black all the time for all those who didn't know.

For once..

For once I would like to experience basic peace. Not the complicated, obscure shit people keep talking about but the normal kind. The one in my head. I want to see what that is like. I imagine it would be sheer bliss to stop living keeping others in mind..

So

I remember sand. It was all over the car and on my feet and dress. Mommy sitting in the front seat had it all over her saree and my papa had it in his hair which she laughingly dusted off. Bhai had filled his shoes with it to take some home.

It was my first day at school. I was given 6 chocolates. One for every hour till the driver came to pick me up. They had forgotten I don't like chocolate. I gave each one away.

I woke up to smells of toast and egg and coffee and Nivea. Mommy in the kitchen, bustling, humming, cooking. Papa sitting with his newspaper. I went and sat on his lap and read the headlines out loud.

It's the first day of the rest of my life. It hasn't begun well.

Wishing Lemons

With her glasses perched at the tip of her nose she breathed patches of steam on the tram window. She felt very conscious of the fact that this was the night she was running away. She had passed a frozen river on the way. Had contemplated jumping in, but realised just in time that she couldn't swim. Just in times weren't supposed to save her. It always was for others.

She thought about the man with the wishing lemons. Rows and rows of lemon trees in that beautiful orchard. A beautiful sunset in the background and a summer dress blowing around her knees. She had wondered if her legs looked as nice as people said they did and was glad it was warm enough.

All those lemons - all those wishes. Of course there was the possibility that the mass conversion of all those fruits into jams, marmalade, lemonade, pudding, cake, pies etc. would leave a person feeling quite wretched. A wish would cancel out another just as the taste of one lemon dish would cancel out the taste of another. The lemons left on the trees (those that were meant for others) rotted and fell onto the ground and were a pulpy mass squelching under her feet. They were trees of endless possibilities. It was wishes growing in abundance. A lemon in itself was no good. She thought that man was stupid. He was stupid enough to want to look after an orchard like that all by himself. It was stupid how all his wishes failed to take account of others before them. It was stupid how he didn't try making money off of that never ending source of happiness. When she had told him that he had laughed and kissed her for her stupidity. He told her he'd make her a wish dish. Whatever she liked. He couldn't let her do it for herself. There was always the possibility of her stupidity leading to her wishing the orchard away from him. Even in terms of wish dishing, or dish wishing no one knew what they wanted. If they ever did realise it in their dreams (they equated these with wishes sometimes), it was elusive after they woke up.

So, I'm going home. I think I am. She felt very old. Extremely young and very old at the same time. I think it was the coat. The long black coat, boots, the cold outside with the steam patches on the windows and those eyes with the glasses perched on the nose. She adjusted them and everything fell into focus. My wish dishes would be made of rotten lemons.