Kaput Again

Living days in perfunctory anxiety
Missing the bus, most of the times
Building worlds within worlds
Pointing all furniture toward the TV

Waiting for that day of the week
When you can say, that
My day has been bad enough
To deserve a smoke

Cooking, chopping vegetables
Peeling vegetables
The same condiments, in every meal
Yellow mildly disgusting food

Walking, looking at your toes
Stealing eye contact
Being mum, containing poetry
Caging prose

Coating hours with abandoned love
Soaking minutes in sunlight
Chasing cabs, chasing autos
Wading through knee deep flood waters

Fiddling for change
Running out of money
Thinking you're poor
What have you done, nothing

Except watch TV and shirk
Watch TV and shirk
And live in this perfunctory anxiety
Waiting to go kaput

Prequel here

Bibliography

One autumn, I picked up Jhumpa's 'The Lowland'. A cyclone hit us then. Metaphorically and literally. Then months, probably years later I remember picking up a distant suggestion. 'The Book Thief' by Markus Zusak. That book has made me a WW II fanatic for the rest of my life. Probably after this, Murakami happened. I chanced upon 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'. You must know there is a charm in not completely comprehending what is being read. Murakami enthralled me with that. I had 'Norwegian Wood' then. Soon after, totally by chance, discovered 'The Diary of Anne Frank'. After that, I must have tried 'Kafka on the Shore'. But Murakami's cats and faceless men, kept me awake longer than I could handle. So gave it up. Then Jon Krakauer's 'Into the Wild'. Christopher McCandless stayed for a long time in my mind. He might never leave, to be frank. Also let me confess, I tried reading 'Jane Eyre' and 'Persuasion' somewhere in the middle. But failed. I also tried 'The Great Gatsby'; but Leo's face kept coming to my mind. To Fitzgerald's displeasure, read Hemingway's 'Old Man and the Sea' though. Sometime, somewhere. In between. Couldn't go back to 

'Moby Dick' after a few days. Out of the blue, started '1984'. George Orwell's dystopia soothed my jarred nerves for sometime. And then, J D Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye'. The last story I finished would be Murakami's again. 'Tony Takitani'. Meanwhile, tried reading Plath's 'The Bell Jar' more than a couple of times but it depressed me so much that the book and I mutually abandoned each other. And out of fear and mouth tottering respect for Woolf, yes, lets call it that, shall we, never finished 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Mrs. Dalloway.' And probably I would never know, what the woman writes about. Rand's 'The Fountainhead' changed me forever. I still am saving 'Atlas Shrugged' for the next decade of my life; which starts in slightly more than a year. Yes. It's lying in my bottom drawer. And Roy's 'God of Small Things' needs to be reread. Something that had so generously enthralled me, is now beginning to fade in my eclectic memory. 

  

Epilogue

Whatever happens to those writers who narrate an entire life story in a sentence or two. It's quick and done with. Like, they met in college, married soon after. She bore him his first child, a brilliant little fair girl. A decade into, differences emerged and they separated. Moving on, he met his second wife at forty two. They have a son, who is neither as brilliant or fair like his half sister. But he is, nevertheless. Or, let's say: He was the unwanted third child, conceived by mistake, half heartedly. His father wanted him, mother didn't. So, he grew up with half the love, half the heart, tagged along with his older sister and brother, until, they would no longer have it. So he branched out, broke bad and became an alcoholic. Or, let's say: Ever since, she was seventeen, she wanted a child, a cute plaything of her own. But she could find no man that was a keeper. She studied and worked. Meandered through life, far from effortlessly. Swinging between depression and self doctored therapy until she met a keeper. But then it was too late to have a child, her fluids had stopped flowing. A hostile uterus, or something. Like that. So easy. So easy. So swift. Thanks to those writers, you can live the lives of their characters with such ease. 

But your own life! It is so excruciatingly slow, painful. Excruciatingly slow and painful. And fucked up. There's no way you could just cut short some of the agony. Some of this misery. Some of it. You've to roll on it, lick it, swallow it. There's no way out. Only if the writer of my fate would learn something from these on the fast track. And get done with it. 

Ladies Tailor

Many rains come and go, the anguish of existence drags on. Unlike the unforeseen shower of today though. It's such a relief when you forget for a while, everything. The infinite pleasures of amnesia.

Years ago, when I was younger, there was this woman at the bent of the street. She ran a Ladies Tailor. By the name such places go. It was hell of a similar rain. The one that was never to be. The smell of dry earth rose and I waited on one of those benches they put out for girls. To sit and wait on, go through repulsive design booklets. For neck designs, for sleeve sutures on dresses you wanted manicured to fit you. Because you were only seventeen and there was an entire life ahead of you. Your skin dimpled and glowed in the summery sun. Those days, I sat on one of those benches waiting for my turn, for the queue ahead of me to dwindle and finish. It thundered and splashed outside and there was no electricity, and yet I waited for her to measure me up.

Some bitches even elbowed you to get in front of you in the line, such species that. Their menagerie continues to exist. And for their long lives, it felt like decades before the Ladies Tailor even looked at you. She was such a poker face. God knows, she had that Robert de Niro face of pitiful disgust. She would ask you to step out of your shoes and then treat you like a lifeless doll as she turned you around and strung her tape all over you. Like some wild animal she would grunt if you didn't keep your hand straight or bent your neck even a little bit. 

Inside, it felt like she ran her own slave army of tailors. Young girls and middle aged unemployed men sewing and sewing till blindness, both physical and metaphysical. Like bonded labor under her iron hand. She wore her sari like a man would, the pleats would run right in the middle across her chest. Exposing whatever was to the sides. Yet you never dared to point that out to a friend. Her deliveries were always way beyond the promised date on the receipt. And the work only about average. Nevertheless I never stopped going to her, those days. 

The delay never messed up with my life as I pondered it would. Nothing ever does, until of course it does. 

Residual Love

This time, as I haven't written the usual sadlove Valentine post, allow me to put in whatever remains, the residue of love. Plain and quiet, the following is some rant about a couple of couples I know. 

There's this two people. They met through an arranged marriage set up. You know how that works. I've got nothing for the uninitiated. They must have however immediately fallen in love with each other. Because down the line when one of the parent parties tried to pull out even after they had been duly betrothed, they stayed put. And said they would marry each other and each other only. Such balls. Where do you get those. 

Then there's this other couple. Technically never a couple, because they were never together. So they are more like a couple of people, a man and a woman, outside your orthodox understanding of the term. They came across when she was on the fading end of an on and off fling with another man who shall perennially shadow her life forever with his betrayal. And he was a lot more like just a shoulder to lean upon rather than a whole man. No, she didn't use him. Nobody uses anybody. We are at the even ends of the deals we crack for ourselves, we are all equally awake. But they didn't last, her crying session was over before he could knock her down with his love. She found someone else. And that was that. But till today, he bugs her in the oddest of ways. Like sending reminders of what they lost out on. After random intervals of time. Sometimes all these acts of nostalgia don't even involve him, it's like she has imagined a decent half of them.

Also, there's this third couple. Last couple for the day, I swear. They are supposedly in love, the real one. The passion is mostly past. They are with each other only when they are with each other. Like physically, right beside, behind locked doors. Otherwise they are not. They are singular beings of what each is worth. In their own, non-overlapping worlds. Of different people and different passions. Pretty much like strangers outside of the sphere of their knowing. And, they are learning to be at peace with this existence, as I write. As I think, as you read. Together, yet apart. 

But then again, what kind of love is that. Huh. 

Psycho

(i)

I must have never known, until then, what Mickey Mouse looked like. So I drew out the stuffed toy that used to appear on Amulspray tins. And filled in the outlines with crayons. On battered chart paper and glued it on top of a piece of wood I chanced upon. I still can't remember where I must have procured the glue from, from among the thousand destinations in a child's mind. Signed my name in one corner, in bad handwriting. And gave it to my school principal before leaving, the school, the place, that life. In these numerous decades, only once did I go back to that school, to the principal's room, which was occupied by another man now, who nevertheless recognized me instantly and showed me that picture I had drawn. No matter what you do, where you go, relics of the past, fair and ugly, show up. No memory is discrete enough to let you walk away

(ii)

A couple years ago, I was texting and walking. I tripped and fell. Like fell on my face, flat on the road. Got up immediately to finish typing that text and sending it away. But the next day, my swollen ankle kept me from going to work. I limped to the doctor's alone and got an x-ray done. The inflammation of flesh went away, but the pain stayed. For which, for some reason, I never decided to see another doctor. Because after weeks of tying crape bandages around it, the ache would freely reappear at its own will and hardly go away, irrespective of how much Volini I massaged it with. I at times believed that the pain was psychosomatic. That term I found out existed much later. But I did believe that I was imagining I was undergoing that pain, because there was no reason I should. Some agonies stay forever. Psychosomatic, psychosoma-, psychoso-, psycho..

Haiku

This is not a Haiku. I just named it that to drag you here. If you already know what a Haiku is i.e., or just Google it. Take a break from your respective missions, everybody.

Because I am on none. It's disheartening to see my time whiled away as I see everyone around me haranguing about how else I should take things. Coating layer on layer of paint on their faces. Coaxing themselves to thinner waists. Comparing bust sizes. Buying things en-route to their materialistic paralysis. I see nothing except a race. 

In the beginning, before a lot of beginnings, I had believed that the ultimate idea behind running this race was to be able to get out of it someday, to become capable enough to call it sham. But that isn't true, is it?

Once you run, you have gotta run. Once you fall, you fall.

There is always a list of things to be done with. Wrinkles to be tightened, belly fat to be lost, money to be saved, money to be spent, places to fly to, pictures to be flaunted, things to be bought and stacked, and stacked, until they suffocate you with regret of ever having been that incorrigibly desperate.

They sell magazines, don't they, which apparently tell you that there is a shortcut to get flat abs and have great sex. And you buy them, only to discover that it's after all not a shortcut at all. Then there is the harangue. Somebody just pops up from behind the white clouds on the blue skies and tells you, that see, s/he had told you there was no shortcut. And that you have to burn your ass. And you should turn your sleep cycle topsy turvy to actually get there. So back in the race you go.

There seems to be no way around here. To take things at my own pace. All I sometimes want to do is, watch a solo crow fly revolving about an unknown axis in the blackish white monsoon skies, full of rain and never landing. Being in that state of perennial fight. Apart from that, I merely want to be. And write things that are abandoned unread.

Baby Steps to Sanity

There are these following stages to sanity. Sometimes not in that exact chronological order. But whatever:

1. Singularity: And all the other fancy-pants terms used for being by oneself. With a sparkling clean head. Making through the day, calling for cabs alone, standing by the ATM machine, waiting for cash alone. Etc. Not being stuck in some wait. Content, by measurable parameters of human reason.

2. Infatuation: Being one of the most dangerous sorts of fixation. One-sided. Unspoken of. Driving oneself to the ends of insanity. And making her fall off the edge, with the elan of an enchanted lover. Living, vicariously, lopsided towards imagination. Hunted by cravings of the anti-pragmatic kind. Counting the inconsolable, unsettled gasps of a perennial adolescent.

3. Non-committal Non-serious: The conscious choice of being in this kind of an arrangement finds its root in the dearth of conversions of series of infatuations into regular affairs. Parties engaged are mostly busy convincing themselves that this is indeed the non-committal non serious thingy. And there are no stakes. Either party exclusively look out for their reasons.

4. Non-committal Serious: This usually kicks off at a book shop, or a meeting at a common friend's. One doesn't understand why one likes the other, given that the track record of past flames doesn't match with. But there is a certain level of comfort. Understanding of mutual flaws. Something that comes with seasoned loveless-ness. Parties are semi-involved. But neither has the bloody guts to commit.

5. Committed-Serious: Finally, when the most necessary issues of arrangement are worked out by the art of persuasion and the fear of dying alone, parties enter into what is commonly called as a relationship in romantic parlance. Movies, dinners, stay-ins, taking the sex for granted. Etc

6. Marriage: One day you are made to believe that you were created to only pro-create. That is the beginning of marriage and the end of what is called life in common parlance.

7. EM: Stands for Extra-marital. After the boredom of feeding on the same face for years kicks in, one finds an artist on the street, with long hair, or an unkempt beard, living on alcohol, the perpetual hedonist, or any one specimen stretching from 1-5 above, she secretly elopes with whatever she previously cursed as unconventional.

And then someday, if the stars are pleased, gets to Sanity.

Unrelated prequel: here

Irrevocable

Past few days, I have been struggling to live in the moment. I mean, this is not a note to self about how to make the most of what is now and other related nonsense, but. I have been trying to live, without trying to keep record or maintain any witness. Letting things come and go, trespass my mind as and how, they fancy. I have been trying this along with a freshly composed mythical list of things to do when you begin to believe that you need to rest. But has it been working.
I mean, aren't we designed to fret. When we are sad now, we can't wait for desperately things to get better. And when we are ecstatic, we keep worrying about when things will get as bad as they were in the past. When and not if. Do you see the degree of conviction in what I just wrote, out of writhing spontaneity. Like, I am assured things are irrevocably screwed up.
Anyway, I chose the unaffordable substitute of happy: ecstatic. Didn't you notice? I am ecstatic. And counting my days.

Sedentary

Our tremendously sedentary lives
Filled with hundreds of pauses a day
Feels like, sometimes that the
Whole thing is a pause
Between the past life & the future one
This one is quiet and
Full of waiting.

Our nervous pretenses
Cracking finger knuckles
Neck aches
Day in and out
Stolen yawns, in our corners
Migraines, to top it up

Makes me want to ask
How is it that
That we do nothing,
Absolutely nothing worthwhile
And yet, we have no time
I mean no fucking time
To indulge in what we really deeply want inside.

Such stark irony.

Feels wasted,
To be anywhere other than where I would be
If I were to give myself one chance.
Also, not knowing what stops me from doing so
Is yet another

..

Dear Eve-teaser

Dear Eve-teaser,

I understand breasts are beautiful things. I also agree that they call out to you. Or so you imagine. But what sexual gratification do you derive from brushing your hand across some random woman's, in the evening traffic rush or in a railway station bustle? Is that public property? How can you? And dare you?

Besides the fact that the random woman has already had the worst day, and is trying to get past all that, get home and get ready for a harder day tomorrow, you decide that it wasn't enough. And do what you do.

The next time around, she will find you and skin you. Blind you with pepper-spray. Scream into your eardrums, the most unspeakable of adjectives about your mother and your sister. Mark her words.

You moronic fucktard. Mark her words.

Cheers
Random Woman

The Fear of Writing.

Besides my loathing for pulp fiction, there is one other reason why I haven't dared ever to write a story. And though there is no way I could filter one particular reason from a body of unwillingness and outright lethargy and exhaustion, here's how I would like to try.

Every man and woman has a center of their being. It sounds rather idealistic, but there is one idea, one solo thing, that makes you who are, binds bone to bone in your body and makes you walk around on your two legs, be the phenomenon that you should be. And that idea, is beyond everything, almost everything, indomitable, uncrushable. It only has to rise, like a snake from your navel to your head.

Every damn story that has been written, that I have found and read, has reflected with honesty, its writer's intricate bonding with her this idea. The process of writing a story is like an endothermic reaction in which the writer comes to be, this person that she should ideally be, doing justice to the words she is scribbling across pages, leaving her footprint in every single stanza, every comma pushed between words, every semi colon inserted to space out one thought from another.

And I have no such idea, haven't discovered mine yet. Or may be I never would. Because I am constantly looking. I begin a paragraph by writing about a couple that lives in the middle of the forest, an unknown bird that sits by their window every night, a girl that's waiting for her roommate, how the wind blows today, how the clouds are strewn across the sky and likewise. And then, after a few hundred words, I am drained. Exhausted. I run out. Of thoughts. Of all conceivable fiction. Of all routes, that could lead me to become the person I should ideally be. The person my story wants me to be.

I am cowed down by embarrassment, humiliation of not being worthy of my own reading. And I tear apart the papers, roll them into a ball and dump them in trash.

I have seen the noble ideas that make people write, drive them to finish pages after pages. But in my case, there is no such.There is no spiritual snake rising from my navel to my head. I am blank, except for the empty center of my being. Which is soaked, soaked with lovelessness. And a terrifying solitude, which began as a disappointment, soon became a sorrow and has now turned into a writhing anger.

If I ever write a story, only this lovelessness will be scattered across my pages. And therefore, I shall not. 

The Mating Game

This post is supposed to bring back the magic. And announce, aloud, the return of fiction. The return of romance. To this blog. After a year of an almost continuous typed out sequence of psychobabble. And remind us after all, of those days when this thing was read.


Ideally, this post should have been named after the inglorious series 'Men in My Life' . But then that's too cheesy, so lets skip that, should we. Because ideally a lot of things should have happened, which never did, do, will. Hence.

In a crowded room, full of strangers, when the only man I knew failed to give me the attention I thought was due, he had absolutely no idea what game of mutual humiliation he had just begun. Because I had walked down to say hi, totally endowed with the knowledge that he was an ass, after all. And he snapped it back right in my face. How crazy was I to overestimate his skills at being human. Affable and chivalrous, be at bay.

But anyway, we get used to shrugging and walking away. In due course of time, in life, we all do. I assumed that episode never happened. And settled down with a drink. Inside my mind.

Later that evening, things changed. It was getting pretty late. And I stood by the road, trying to hail a cab. But all the cabbies, as usual, hated the place where I stayed. They raised their noses and drove off. And there he was. Shirt tucked out. Tie-less. Loitering. And assuming I wasn't there.

And I know how un-feminist it sounds, but just his being there made me feel safe.Our world is so small, it's too hard not to know people. Most of who I know, fall somewhere between being a friend and an acquaintance. With distinct loyalties towards being the latter. Because sometimes, I don't let them in, and sometimes they run away. But as long as the guy is in between the points, there is a probability, and a few may-be's. The hope of a possibility.

Clinging to that possibility, when he walked up to me, that night, I has an 'apology accepted' written on my face. Somehow, I knew we had been put up in the same hotel. It was honestly, very comforting to know that  now, being the man, he would hail us a cab. So, I stopped screaming for one. And we got talking.

Unbelievable as it sounds. We never ran out of words. It was obviously getting late. But nothing seemed to matter. I assumed that happened, because we had lived similar lives till then. Only at different places. With different set of people. Etc.

But what irritated me was that he wasn't looking for a cab at all. I mean, of course conversations could be taken to other places. Two minutes later, I found out that he wasn't headed to the damn hotel after all. Shock gripped me hard, I wanted to hit him with a hammer. Why did he waste so much of my time if he wasn't going to get me a cab. Ugh.

Some sanity must have dawned on him, and he dropped me at my hotel, before heading to wherever he was headed. And it was a goodnight after all.

Today, he is not someone I barely know. I mean I guess I know him well. Rather well. He assumes I am a friend. I assume he is an acquaintance. And I also assume, he isn't reading this right now.

Continuance

Decades ago, there was a bride. A sari crudely wrapped around her frail figure, whatever skin showed, was filled in with gold. There was a groom, and that old grunting ambassador adorned in threads of jasmine. A dozen drunken men, dancing in mad moves; a perfumed night. Dimming yellow bulbs, shamianas hung out, colors of which aren’t readable in the black and white pictures now stuck on forgotten albums.

There was a bride, not too young, not too old. The groom may or may not have had a moustache. Nobody had seen nobody. Love hadn’t been discovered in those ages. Decades ago. Hymns were read out, women with saris drawn to their noses, sat beside the summer night fire, and dozed. Funnily enough, there is no proof to that demi-heavenly drama. Almost everyone must have been half asleep. But there is the continuance.

Continuance. Scores of fights behind bedroom doors, disagreements, many scars. Children born and fed because they had to be born and fed. Who grew by inches in months, and fell apart. Strings of the womb couldn’t hold anyone together. Each had a mind of his own, too many minds inside one rather.

They fought over who should have the TV remote, they sat on terraces, hidden, stealing a smoke every now and then. Each tenaciously clutched her own secrets, under one roof. Nothing shared, not even glances. Slept turning sides, secretly hating each other. And still posed for photographs together, some of them framed and kept in the living room. Space became a problem, the big problem.

And so the menagerie was complete. Too much for continuance!

Just Friends -3

I took those glances for a tantrum. Her explicit efforts to avoid me, at times behave like nothing had changed. Thought it would pass. And we would come around, to where we were before, before one accidental night happened. I tried not to be alone with her, was afraid she would ask me something I wouldn't have the answer to. I never had the answers to anything those days. Wasn't a seeker of sorts, I lived like a life had been thrown upon me from the clouds, and I could do nothing else with it but live it through. She too pretended to be like me, and may be that's why we hung out together. But she wasn't, she was only trying too hard. She had to get a thick skin of indifference to defend the dangerously sensitive person she was. I knew that, but didn't make a fuss over it because I just wanted to keep her with me. I was teaching her stoicism, but an accidental night came our way.

I hadn't returned the shoes she had forgotten at my place the morning after. She had walked out in haste with a pair of my slippers instead, and it was only after I found them missing, I traced her shoes flung under my bed. Did she want them back? Because those slippers were the only pair I had. I couldn't ask, she couldn't tell. A week ago, we were friends, who could talk about any damn thing. And we literally sunk our minds into each other, we were like this one siamese soul, trading notions till we reached a mental orgasm. That some things would alter so irreversibly, I hadn't quite calculated.

She would often repeat her ideas to me, many times over. I mistook those to be the principles of her life. I had no idea that she told them to me again and again, because she herself wanted to believe in them. Funny, isn't it. And from those mindless babblings of hers, I had made a strict mental note. That she felt no relationship could go from physical to emotional, only vice versa. Had I doubted her, I could have asked her if she wanted her shoes back! And some other things too. I didn't. Couldn't.

Just Friends-2
Just Friends-1

So much for a book!

Someone once asked me to write a book. I tried hard to listen to his sarcastic laughter. I couldn't. Loss of hearing I guess.

On second thoughts, I have tried to stitch together some nights, and write a story. A story. It doesn't begin, it doesn't end. It doesn't even go on. It's short, shorter than expected. It's just a flap of time. Stolen, by a self obsessed writer, who sees herself in every character.

She can't otherwise. It's difficult for my story to have more than one character, I cannot be that generous. A severe limitation of my imagination, it's pretty constricted, can't stretch a bit. I find it challenging. To create a person, out of nothing, inside my mind, whose every cell I am supposed to know, to knit together his attributes, to bring into existence his subconscious, and then hide it, to ensure he justifies his presence in the plot's every move, it's hard. It's hard to create a character you don't know.

So I create me, the only one I know. Again and again. And sometimes I crib in the guilt of selfishness.

There have been books, of course in which all the characters are reflections of real people in the author's life. With names changed, so that they can't file that hefty lawsuit. Writing that way must be easier. But I wonder if it's worth it. May be it is. How does it even matter!

Man-Woman-&-MBA

It's a much denied fact, but we all look for support. And when all else fails, we look for an ideology we could stick to. So as to say, if at the end of the day, everything else is taken away from you, you could still say, you stood by what you believed in. Or pretended to believe in.

I am going fishing. For one such comforting ideology to stick to. You see I do not have many other sources of solace or engagement. So I would rather hunt down my beliefs, and try to knit them into what they call a belief system. And call it a day. And go off to sleep again, as my mom says.

It's a funny post, me writing about all this. You see I never had the time or more importantly the stretchable attention span to look for an ideology, I was running the rat race like all of you. I don't intend to call you a rat anyway, if you quit, I do bow before thee. Why I was engaged breathlessly doing what everyone else was doing was because the risks of being unique and hence ostracize-able weren't involved at all. So there was a comfort, a safety rather. It's my typical middle class, I-don't-want-to-be-left-homeless fear. It has nothing to do with anything. I have been brought up on fear. Not that I aspire for the filthy rich worthless millionaires, or sympathize any less for the decaying chunk of the population in slums.

Just that I have been so busy with me, that there has hardly been anytime to be actually concerned per se. But now, I have been lounging lazy for two months, and I need something desperately to comfort myself. So I am here to knit my belief system. So that I can call something my own.

I was never slightly inclined towards the left, but as a kid I have seen appalling poverty around. I mean really! So I began thinking that something should be done about all the poor people. I read a few books, I wouldn't name them and bore you to death, but the filth in their lives was so accurately described, I was drawn closer and closer to wanting to find a solution.

Then I saw the helplessness of it. Conversations with people, with myself, the absolute inability of the system to change, the lackadaisical attitude towards it all, frustrated me. And since I had so many other frustrations in my life, I quit on this one and became indifferent.

Later, I read some more books and gave my heart to individualism. And thanks to my stint with a master's degree, I supported the staunch capitalist, and became a vague rightist. You get these bi-directional sways of my heart, don't you?

There were too many questions, a quagmire of them actually. A mess inside my mind, justifications I sake, guilt I felt. The lingering silence became very disturbing, but that disturbance is anyway a respite from my perennial issue of heartache.

However, now I have stopped looking for the absolut. My solution, if I may call it one, is that I have begun seeing things on scale, that extends indefinitely in opposite directions. And everything can be explained in a relative context to something else. But that something else is never the absolute, can be explained again with respect to something else. And so we move on the scale, in either direction, and sometimes multi-dimensionally.

And if the luster of the title attracted you, but the post bored you to death, but still you read on till the end, then you may in fact ask for an apology!

A Room of One's Own

Her room is the best melange of any creator's inspirations. Because in her room you see her at her worst, in her element. I have lived my life shifts, changing my room every year. And I ensure I never grow any affection for any room. However I can't help a couple of memories in the cracks of my brain, left behind, by mistake.

There was once a room I lived in. Some four years ago. It was the one in which I fell badly sick for the first time and met a ghost. Probably a ghost, can't be sure. The room was stashed away in a corner of the top floor of a rickety old building. Overlooking the basketball court, overlooking a jungle. A jungle I wanted to walk in someday, but couldn't even once in those long years. And, it was in that room that I came into being, I believe. We all have some stages in our lives when we come into being. Post that I have been pretty much the same.

That room, you wouldn't like the vision that I would now give you. Summer must have been approaching quite like the devil. And it must have been a Saturday, a stolen Saturday of no work. Washed wet clothes hung from a plastic string running from corner to corner, incessantly dripping, filling the depressions in the uneven floor. Salwar kameezes and duppattas, of tens of hues, all washed, dipped in detergent and shown under a running tap, merely to ensure the smell of sweat went away, no qualms for the dirt. Wrung for the sake of it, and hung to dry across the room, squeezing into each others' space, sometimes overlapping, sometimes sliding off the string itself. In such a room, I whiled away the last chapters of adolescence, with my generous share of heartbreak. Waiting for the clothes to dry, so that they could be folded and stacked in a shelf in the wall.

But they never were. The life of my clothes ended on that very string. They were worn right from there and thrown back after use, probably awaiting another wash. Who knew! That string must have become the delicate balance of my life. Because one day the loose nails hammered into the walls that held it, gave in after some mild encouragement from a visitor, some random intruder. And down came the string, along with my world, thrown astray on the floor. I stood there, for a moment, celebrating the sheer shock of it.

Living, as it is.

The ghostly apartments. An enormous high rise with broken windows, scathed walls. Spat on walls, red pan stains. A tree nearby, leaning up to the first floor, that never bore fruit in the last five years. Silence in its corridors has lasted so long, it has settled in like dust on windowpanes. It is like a man now itself, the silence. It ensures its presence when you walk through, and your footsteps echo. Louder. Overflowing dustbins. Stray dogs and bitches, looking into for an early breakfast of leftovers. The furry ones, the white ones, the ones that look like soft toys, still inside, never left out, fed on milk, tied in chains. A hurrying kaamwali. Sari in place, starched and pinned. The sleeping watchman. Barely present inside his dreary mosquito net. Old man with a paunch, returning with milk packets, from a morning jog or a laughter therapy with comrades, going to shake wake up the dozing wife, and coax her to make tea. Newspapers thrown into grilles, stuck into the gaps under shut doors. Faint sunlight. Mild breeze. Poodles from the rain of last night. Morning yawns. Of reluctant children, to be sent off to school, with heavy bags and slung shoulders, they would walk down these stairs in an hour or so, to wait for the school bus  teeming with other children with slung shoulders, near a gate that has the name of the building cut out on it. Spelt wrong.Their mothers shall climb up again, after seeing off the bits of their heart. The thin ones would scoot up may be. The fatter ones, their sagging thighs, and panting hearts, under shabby nighties, would be counting on it as an exercise may be. There is no elevator. No elevator guy who stares at you as you walk in and out. Just the watchman, still asleep.

Towards the rear end, is a quiet flat, with a young girl in it. Who goes nowhere these days. Her room has a window, that faces between east and north-east. A tree of coconut whose branches almost enter her window, like a begging suitor on sunny mornings, or as a jilted lover on stormy nights. Like last night. Her life has been paused, apparently. She lives in her past present and future, all at the same time. Living, as it is.

The Better Picture

You can hold her narrow waist in your hands, almost. Her hair is bunched together and rests on one shoulder. The phone is on the other ear. She stands still, holding the curtains in her elbow, standing at the edge of the window, looking away.

It's a summer afternoon. Typically hot, but there's mild wind too. Oozing in from between the railings of the window, blowing through strands of her hair, disturbing it a trifle. She's unperturbed, still. Talking to someone, either very softly in whispers or listening to his silence.

There's a ceramic vase in the room, with purple paper flowers in it, kept on the other edge of the window. The flowers exude a smile, a faint smile like a human would sometimes do, when mildly satisfied or just shy. There are streaks of random colors painted on the vase, you can't make out from this distance.

Her skirt ends below her knees, her top has short sleeves. Outside, the sky is gradually turning into many hues of orange. You can see the city skyline, birds flying home. You can hear honks of cars pass by, pause to give out gusts of black soot.

There's a wind-chime hanging from the pelmet of the window. Everytime she digs her face into the curtains blushing or laughing, the wind-chime rings, mellow random rings, sonorous, pleasant. Only to remind you that things in the world can still move, time hasn't frozen as yet.

Can you draw me a picture of this? Can you include the sounds I mentioned, the honks, the rings, in your colors on a canvas. Will you paint me the sky outside that is the melange of an extended infinity. Can you also show the strands of her hair falling off her shoulder. Won't you include her blush, even if we can't see her face? The subtle quiet smile that has settled on her face, that's paint-able too, isn't it? And don't leave the flowers alone..the purple paper flowers that smile so human..