Lounge

When I travel alone, and I normally don't, I think of you. 

It has something to do with my mind experiencing a void between errands. Not in cabs, of course. Cabs make me nauseous. But when I take the train alone I think of you. 

It's startling, how, after so many moons, you still effortlessly waft back into my thoughts. You perhaps are waiting on the fringes. Forever. I haven't been able to sequester you. Train of thought is surprisingly continuous as well. 

The same happens when I fly alone. Airports that run endless and I end up walking kilometres within. Escalator after escalator. Wide corridors, advertising too bright for my eyes, strangers everywhere. It seems, upon throwing one glance at me, that I am walking with great purpose and urgency. But that's furthest from the truth.

I am all undone from within. My fabric of existence has become threadbare and your memories have penetrated and dishevelled any pretense of order, there was. After walking and walking, I glimpse at screens to course correct, if at all. But I am completely robotic and lost and operating at your disposal.

And then finally when I reach the lounge, the airport lounge that is shelter to lonesome travellers like me, I imagine, I would have you waiting there. My long lost lover. 

Misc: Visiting Cards

The compulsive introvert that I have come to be, for the umpteen reasons that have coaxed me to be so, I cannot make conversation anymore. Not atleast, the kind of conversation I deem to be a conversation. Thus, I have no friends. 

But I work a job. In which I am expected to have certain charisma. A chutzpah would certainly augur my situation here, but beggars can't be choosers. Anyhow, I am to deal with people all the time. I think that's a very basic ask from any job. But for me, it is enormous and taxing. I do not form bonds, my dealings are superficial mostly and I would like to say - transactional. No deeper aspect at all. I do not form any deeper connection with anyone because I am wholly incapable of it. I cannot speak one word extra than what is needed. And when I am not succinct, I go the extreme extent of mental torture that I inflict on myself. Since I am this way, nobody perceives me as friend material. Thus, I have no friends. 

But of those I meet for work, I keep their cards. Visiting cards. Name, where they work, email, contact number, other coordinates and blah. And I have a book of mine within whose polythene flaps I slide in these cards, not in any particular order and for no other purpose, but to look at months and years later. As my only record of human interaction. 

My Beige Sweater

My beige sweater

Is as old as me, or older

It used to originally be - off-white, egg-shell-white

As decades passed, it's full-blown beige now

It's got tiny, embroidered peach roses

And a couple buttons missing

It's not a fashion item

My beige sweater 

Is a shelter

In shivering sunless winter mornings

A refuge, from cold hopeless nights

It's something I clutch on to 

I don't remember how I got it though 

Though I distinctly remember never buying it

It perhaps just showed up

In my dress rack 

A hand-me-down, from an older cousin

Or aunt

And every winter, without fail

It's stood by me, fit me smugly 

Warmed my blood

Calmed my skin

Weathered me, in my perennial morass 

Through my joyless existence, marred with fears and doubts

Wearing this, 

I have rushed through countless December mornings

Packing lunches, folding clothes, doing dishes, watering my plants, chomping my omelets, watching TV, reading the paper, waiting, thinking, not-thinking, giving up, letting go, crying, weeping, wailing, bursting out, napping, running errands, hoping, praying, hoping some more. 

So many many mornings

So many damn years

Of achieving nothing in particular 

Nothing of note

Feeling that life's slipping though my fingers like sand

But my beige sweater has remained 

With me

And I cherish it so. 

Winter Sun, The

Casuarinas sweep through the dry December air. There is a sea, waiting half a mile away. Winter Sun is so shy, glinting down between sleepy moments. Mid mornings are the longest now-a-days. Now that I am in purgatory. Sluggishly suspended in between. I rest, in a hut, with skeletal furniture. A tiny stove to boil water or make some rice. A bed, and a table to sit by. Windows open to endless sand and casuarinas, which I assume end at waves, but I've never been. Because I never step out. There's a someone, perhaps a woman, who comes to drop some food, sometimes a few clothes, before I am up. She stops showing for days, I suspect I am gonna starve. But I never feel hunger, in the pit of my stomach, just as I do not strongly feel anything anymore. My skin's thick. Like I am in a coma. And it's been November for years, at a stretch. There's a verandah. And like an alien stands a gargantuan eucalyptus, right next to it. It's the most dream like - this eucalyptus. It touches the sky, it's unabashedly vertical for a tree with no boughs. And its bark is white, layers outside keep falling off, day by day, revealing whiter insides, I am curious how. My afternoons are spend completely in observing this tree - who is now almost a companion. And then night comes quickly. The air gets cold and the trees make noises of shallow nightmares. But I do not know fear. Because I do not know for sure, if I exist at all. Or all this is merely a stretched hallucination. Pondering, I tire into sleep. When my eyes open, I see fog for distances. But I know, the winter Sun is half bobbing at the horizon. And it's the same day, happening all over again. 

Pomelo

'Been always a fan of summer-fruit

If there's any antidote for the sweltering,

It's fruit

Be it - raw ripe mangoes, not yet fully done

Falling before their time

To a sudden swollen pre-summer thunderstorm

Scattered across the backyard

Were cut into long slices and relished with crushed red chillies in salt

Or small ripe ones

Suckled upon, like a mother's bossom, then peeled 

Tasting nectar-like

Big enough to fit smugly in my child's first

Oh the raw sin, gnawing into piles of mangoes, for infinite afternoons

Be it jackfruit 

What is this - god's gift to mankind

Huge gargantuan fruit

Protected underneath thorny skin

Like all good things soft and fleshy 

And plenty to take us days to finish 

Those who had sought help from the family and couldn't repay

Always thanked us with jackfruit

Also a jackfruit is true at heart, unlike the mango 

Treacherous mango - which could turn out sour.

But a jackfruit is always sweet

Always predictable, can be taken for granted to play out exactly as expected, like me.

Be it watermelon.

Frozen watermelon after sultry summer lunches

Have you had those?

Impossible to describe the feeling

When a chunk of watermelon hits your palate

Utterly confusing, like is it water - is it melon?

And I could chomp chomp chomp, without a care in the world

And then there was

Pomelo

Shameless fruit of December though 

A magician's fruit - almost

Scary large oranges 

Not orange in the flesh, but pink nearly or scarlet 

The peel was so thick, you'd have to knife through 

And the wedges - too large for my child's first

They weren't sweet or sour 

And sometimes too watery to tell the difference 

But they grew at the end of our garden

The furthest point from home

On the absolute edge of our kingdom

After the marigold patches, and chilly rows

Pumpkin field, coconut orchard, 

Two ponds brimming with sweet fish 

And then - ah at the end of the world

The Pomelo tree

I was told stories about how the seed was procured and planted

All made-up am sure

But to my child's mind, it was a magician's tree

Because how else could oranges be that big?

ilk

those of my ilk

do not make it to the top

we are sediments 

settling on the ocean floor

layer by layer

fossilized and forgotten

there is nothing special 

or noteworthy about me or my kind

painfully average and below

our talent erased by struggles

identities dwindled by exhaustion

crushed by choices we ourselves made

we say we're understated

that's not true now, is it

we lost and bowed out long ago

just after the race began

and decided to meander through 

to test, how much longer we'd make it

thus, we are here, now

sugarcoating our under achievements 

with amorphous adjectives

trying to say we tried

ah, it wasn't enough

and we never did

I and my ilk

my ilk and i 

Maggi

Nostalgia hovers around my memories like a gentle giant. Causing effect only when I am otherwise unbothered. That way nostalgia has been kind. Not causing undue duress. It's also, at times, the only thing, that keeps me in touch with my old original person - aware of what is of any real value, and what is worth any sort of chase. 

In fleeting glimpses, nostalgia takes me to my past and I see again, everything in sepia hue. Honest about the hue. In an huge expanse of a campus, there was one near dilapidated girl's hostel. In the middle of the hostel, ther was a lawn. Where women and girls walked after their meals and pulled allnighters before semester exams. To one corner of that lawn, was a tiny cafe. Run by two tribal girls. They spoke chaste Hindi and made the driest maggi. 

It's strange, how the human mind works and saves faces. I have met hundreds of people and really I mix up faces to an embarrassing extent. But i remember the face of one of those girls. She had a dark thin face and small eyes. And spoke like she's carrying a grudge. But she made the driest of instant noodles. It was my first time away from home and I didn't know instant noodles could be cooked that way. I would eat parts of the paper plate that would be scraped off with the noodles. It costed some 10 bucks and was highly looked forward to because the food at the mess tasted so alien.

And then there were months I ate only dal. I was a chubby one. Have always been. But those intervening years between high school and graduation, the pressure to be thin was so intense that I mashed garlic and green chillies in my dal and drank it down. 

I did lose weight, yes. And made holes in my mind so deep, that only a few have been filled back up in decades that followed. 

Today, I move with gratitude. For all that, that transpired in those years have made me the person I am. While I may not be superior, I still am someone. Weak but real. Exhausted, but with gumption. Restless, but believing in time. Tattered, but still soft.