What On Earth Do You Want?

Who is this shimmering, transient quantity called you? Why is it important that you should be? Why do you need to be? And why is this need dulling with every day that passes in a mediocre, less than okay haze? When purpose is missing, and talent questionable, how long can you run? And why are you running? After so many, many days of giving in, why does it rankle so sharply still? The conviction of being something, something worth being, that shone like a torch inside for so many years; where along the way did it quench itself without ceremony? Why do words offer poor consolation, when they have been more than adequate shoulders for a lifetime thus far? And do you even want to know? Or is the asking deliverance enough?

What do you want? Not need, because need is something you have no say over. What do you want with the fierceness of flame and the grit of dripping water seducing rock into sand? What do you want with a passion that rages across your mind and your soul, without relent, without rest? What do you want to be, to assuage a fear building for years, that may be this is all there is and ever will be. What will shield you against the cutting licks of desperation and the beginning of despair? Where has your body of strength disappeared behind a shadow of impersonal mass? Do you want, and want badly enough? Will you, ever again?

Life In Limbo

My brain is so rusty with disuse that I can hear it creaking whenever I try to think about anything more challenging than "Is it time to the bathroom?". Is it the work? Is it the house? Is it the life? How does one fill a void one can't find? Should I have lived during the bubonic plague so that I'd have more substantial things to worry about?

All right, I need a break. This blog is on hiatus till further notice (or RSS update). Because melted icecream is just, well, mush. And no one likes mush.

Much love.

Convent Educated

These past few weeks, I've been thinking about my schooldays a lot. This particular wave of nostalgia was triggered by a classmate who recently got married and did the requisite commemoration of the event on various social networking sites. We had been rather close at a point of time, and in remembrance of that particular chapter of our lives, she had sent me an invitation two months ago. Of course, I didn't go, but what struck me a little was how I didn't even consider going.

This friend of mine, S, was my partner on the quiz team in school. Well, we were the quiz team in school. Between the seventh and the tenth standards, we spent a lot of time together trying to win glory for our school with our astonishing knowledge of random trivia. We had our moments. We were the first all girls team to qualify for the final round of a particularly prestigious city competition (which we eventually lost). We had four exciting and exhausting years, competition after competition, and a friendship burgeoning in between. My mother was taken by S's other worldly commitment to her studies. Her parents also seemed fond of me. We lost touch after school, and over the years, I only heard of her, not from her.

So when I saw her wedding pictures, I was looking at her, really looking at her, after a gap of nine years. And it freaked me out a little. I know it's unrealistic to expect everyone else to stay the same while your own life moves on, but I just keep picturing everyone else still in their school uniforms. How can they be getting married? Are some of them seriously posting pictures of their children?

Driving down the lane of your own intensely important life, you tend to keep others' lives constant just to give you perspective. When it finally filters down to you that the rest of the world is moving too, it can be oddly unsettling. I miss the existence of the two too serious girls in their navy blue blazers and skirts, discussing the latest weird factoid in the corridors of a beautiful, still colonial school. I miss the fact that school is one part of my life that I have absolutely no contact with, keeping it fossilized in my memory. Most of all, after all these years, I still miss school as sharply as I did after I left. But that actually makes me happy.

Congratulations, S. You were beautiful.

Divine Inanity

I used to write poetry some time ago. Used to because these days I don't write anything apart from mediocre copy and superlative grocery lists. But today I read some of the stuff I'd written and kept secret all this while. Then I decided to post some of the poems in order to feel that I've earned the right to an evil smirk. Here's one now:

They build you temples,
Mosques, churches,
Even complicated sounding places
Like synagogues, imagine that.
They look to you
With hope, everyday
Believing that every little sorrow
In you, will be assuaged.
Kindness, mercy, love, wisdom
Are contained in you, they think.
Incense, flowers, wafers, wine
Small things to get you
To notice, to care.
But you keep laughing,
Hurting and watching,
Lashing out at the very fools
Who then grasp you closer still,
Wondering why the gashes
Keep working deeper in.

One day you will be found out
For what you really are.
No benevolent mother, or magnanimous father.
Just a vicious child, with more toys
Than he knows what to do with.
I wonder if I should tell them
Maybe get stoned to an early demise.
But lift the mists in the process
Of them wondering why.
I only hold my tongue because
Wilful child or not,
In you lies the hope
That they hold on to,
The possibility of a morning
A little less blue.
It's not you that I bow to,
You're a child of cruel whim, destructive fantasy.
I bow to the ones
Who know no better than
To put all their faith, their trust,
Their hope, everything in you.
Their faith moves
My mountain everyday
So you keep playing, and I let you be,
Needless delusion, futile, necessary.

It Wasn't Supposed To Be

He wasn't supposed to die. She was sure of this, surer indeed than of anything else in the world, including her own existence. She couldn't imagine anyone more solid, more real than him. Why was it then that everyone around her refused to meet her eyes when she asked about him? When the warmth had still not left his body, why did his eyes refuse to light up? And just what was she supposed to do if he did actually prove her wrong?

As it turned out, he did prove her wrong. He died barely six days after being rushed to the hospital. He died in the same manner in which he had lived - quietly, with dignity. He even chose the wee hours of the morning so that there would be no one around to create a fuss. The next time she saw him, she no longer had the warmth of his body to console her anymore. Her children wept at the sheer incomprehensibility of it all. Her own mind was reeling with questions. How was it possible for the world to keep moving? Or did the world simply not care for the passing of quiet, dignified men? How was she supposed to fill the little voids he left in every single pattern of the life they had crafted together for the last twenty five years? How was she supposed to surmount her insomnia to make sure that the kids got to school on time? Who was supposed to ensure the precise shape and texture of the rotis? How was she going to make any sense of the innumerable minutiae of life that he had stored in the different corners of his mind? Would people ever know that he'd written her poetry?

Her mind came to the only conclusion she could fathom - it was unnatural, it had not been fated. Now every other player in that theatre of illness and uncertainty was suspect in her eyes. Her relatives, there was a reason they had refused to meet her eyes. They were killing him, they had killed him. Friends and well wishers drew away, the ones who remained suggested that to decipher unnatural events she had to consult those with supernatural faculties. Therein began the never-ending line of holy men, yes men and of course men. They were sure he'd been killed. If only they had been consulted, they would've saved him. Even now, danger lurked around her and her children. Amethysts and pearls, emeralds and opals were the only protection. They all visited, sympathized, prescribed and disappeared. She never seemed to find peace. After every holy man left, she would meet a detractor who denounced him as fake, and lead her to another. The wall of gemstones and suspicion had turned into a fortress which left the world outside. She was happy in her prison because it was just the way she liked it - orderly and neat, with thoughts that stayed in their boxes. And yet, all the gemstones in the world couldn't drive away the sight of his face and the little proofs of his existence that still made her weep. Was there any stone in the world powerful enough to drive away the love from her heart?

Within two years of a holy man predicting that she would live to a ripe old age, she lay dying. Her fortress was in ruins and she was letting go of life everyday, bit by little bit. The friends and well wishers crowded around her once again. They wondered if this helpless waif could be the vital, colourful person they had known. They implored her to try living, but how did one live with a heart that was so irrevocably broken? She lingered for a few moments, taking in the faces of those who had meant something to her in an existence which was getting more difficult to remember with every passing second. A few more moments, and then it was done. The ignominies of life were rendered powerless, and with her last breath she found him again, waiting as patiently as he'd always had. For once, love had won over the need to let go.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

They made me move out of my perfect apartment. Some high-flying company decided that their executives needed the house with one red wall more than I did. The landlord's compliance was purchased with a princely sum of money. The roomie and I looked around for a week or so. It made me realize certain things all over again:

1. Moral policing is a landlord's definition of value addition.
2. This whole metropolis thing is a sham to disguise mindsets which are narrower than Slimfast powered waistlines and more medieval than all the assorted K soaps.
3. If you're unmarried, your virtue (?!) is to be guarded zealously by conducting random checks on your household, for your safety of course.
4. If you're single/non-Hindu/slightly independent of mind, you should live on the street.
5. If you don't believe that owning a house makes people demigods, you should live in the gutter that flows by the street.
6. In your house hunt, you will say 'uncle' more times than you have ever said in the rest of your life.
7. Wine shop owners are not appropriate landlords. After a while, the fumes go to their heads.

Let me decode it for you. We fell in love with a beautiful, fully furnished place owned by aforementioned wine shop guy. After packing for two days, hiring transport and moving in, the guy hectored us for an hour for having 'itna zyaada saaman'. Then he proceeded to humiliate a friend who had come to help us because he happened to be male. The same night, we moved to another place where the landlord was easier to live with simply because he doesn't live in Mumbai. So if something seems too good to be true, it is, really.

One more of my teeth has decided to go to the Great Big Mouth. Of course, the process of its demise is exceedingly painful and equally expensive. To top it all, I'm supposed to be churning out creative ideas to garner new clients while my head feels an electrocuted, overly tuned guitar wire.

She came to visit me for barely three days, out of which one day went to the dogs because I was travelling on work. Woe is me for ever imagining that work related travel could be interesting and fun. The work is interesting, yes, but the travel is an exercise in wishing you were elsewhere. Of course, there are also moments when you discover new facets to your personality. Like the moment when I shut up two loudmouths who weren't letting the other participants talk, simply by being politely rude. Now that was fun.

At one research trip, I managed to lose my glasses for almost three hours. Three hours of blundering my way through a blurred world, trying to convince myself that I could conduct a serious group discussion wearing sunglasses. And some people should really stop with the 'Tough Love' pep talks. Unless you've walked a mile in my shoes, or seen the world with my very poor eyesight, skip the lecture.

And then, Michael Jackson died. I mean, is it funny to someone up there?

And yes, I really meant every word of the post title.

Here We Go Again

Over the last couple of months, I've been very detached from the blog. I've preferred reading to writing, and not just out of laziness. I even mulled announcing that the blog and I are on a break, but I couldn't do something so self important and keep a straight face. It's not that I've finally run out of things I wanna say or write. It's not even that I'm too busy (it's never that. If you wanna do something you'll make the time). It's just that the 'what to say' has been overwhelmed by the 'how to say it'. I'm trying to get over that, so here it is.

We met a year and a half ago, driven by mutual curiosity elicited by somewhat deft wordplay which filled up the minutes we spent at work, glued to our screens. We read each other and wrote to each other with a level of intimacy that only very close friends share. We were both addicted to the catharsis of blogdom in a world that spun either too fast or too slow for our liking. He wrote like I wanted to write, and what I wrote gave him pleasure. We had windows into each others' minds long before we met. Of course, the real world is different, and it contains the very real possibility of turning virtual friendships into quietly shushed embarrassments of the past.

But we did meet, and it was so easy that we never noticed the shift. It was simple to be friends, simpler even to be more than friends. A relationship was forged during midnight rambles about philosophy and vada pav, the weight of family expectations and the hilarity of existential angst. We met everyday, without fail, and we never forgot to share a few laughs. I moved to a new place so he could visit without encountering the unpleasantness of a landlady. We fell into a pattern where I always got my way and he always gave in, where I bullied and he let me, where I tried to get him to read Harry Potter and realized the strength of passive resistance. Our friends started referring to the two of us as a collective noun, and we never felt any danger of losing ourselves.

Love is deceptively easy to get used to, especially when it's the kind of love you've unconsciously been holding your breath for. So I've gotten used to the smell of the skin just above his temple, the quick smile that always manages to overlook my instinct for world dominance and the voice that is meant only for me because if anyone else hears it, it'll be the joke of the century. He's gotten used to my hectoring and shrillness, my impulsive demands and my thorough conviction that I am always better and always right. Now we've gotten to a point where we're pretty much unlivable without the other. Of course, this means that he now has to move away.

It's not the most difficult thing in the world. It's not that we can't make it work, or that we 're entertaining any doubts about what we want to do with our lives. It's just that I'm tired. Tired of change announcing itself on me. I could probably get him to stay, but of course I won't. I would never grudge him the opportunity he's been waiting for all his life. But emotions are never absolute, and being happy for him would be so much easier if I could pack myself in his suitcase. I know I shouldn't be this way, but I just am. I'll stop.

Just as soon as you explain to me how to have Friday night dinner with a phone and how to get Google Chat to give me a hug on Sunday evenings.