To pay bills and die.

Stars come down to my bed
On some no moon nights
They glitter like insomniac jellyfish
And keep me awake too, and thoughtful

On Sundays, as the westbound sun
Dries my afternoon wet hair,
Clinging to my shoulders
I reluctantly give in again and think

What am I letting go, to become who I be

Which layer of me, be the true layer, like I were an onion

Every peel, and a new color. From dried and coffee brown, to orangish red and pinkish yellow, and the wheatish stem of the onion be my untamed soul.

Am I numerous persons, all at once
Or am I a process, and every day catalyses me towards my core being.

I know, it's impossible and untrue.

We are all tame, mostly, mere domestic beings, victims to carefully cultivated routines that keep us from thinking.

To pay bills and die.

But when a westbound sun, quietly dries my hair, I've gotta think.

Think on an endless loop. Think towards no conclusions. As the rest retire to siesta and my lunch awaits, getting cold.

Anathema

Drunken slurs.

A woman once was

The funny caricature in her ex-lover's poem

She sat feet outstretched in winter wind

On a January midnight

Old Monk in her hands

A glass with a square base

Fit into her hands like magic

Ice cubes clinked 

And it was all that moved

She spoke in indistinct 

Drunken slurs

As he drew her that night

Eight years later,

That ex-lover is a father

Of the child of another woman

And everyday, he dotes

On his naive daughter,

Who knows not one bit

Of what life holds

And packs her lunch box,

With the purple butterflies on it

And takes her pictures

The woman with the Old Monk

Eight years later,

Down the line, or so

Contemplates freezing Old Monk 

Into cubes in the tray, to drink that then

Such that it doesn't water down

And that her passing out each night

Take not as long

Simultaneously,

The woman tries to write a poem

About the new daughter, and the butterflies

And the utter obscenity of fates and heartache

Her drunken slurs, not much coherent.

The passage of eight years

Has been as cruel as healing

Everything happens for a reason

And yet, for no reasons at all. 

How they became whoever they did,

They would never know. 

But they did become their own.

Anathema. Anathema. Anathema. 

Self Portrait

He is an egotist. He has a suave exterior. Very gentlemanly. He carries the weight of his reputed degrees. Numerous foreign trips. His consultant like mannerisms. His erudite family as well. The elegant wife, with slender arms. Who wears sleeveless blouses. Looks nice without suffocating herself with the effort to do so. And their recent addition, a bubbly little baby girl. He is the center of all that. He seems to be a nice man. His face is somewhat chiseled. He would have felt tremendously geeky, only a couple years ago. Now he is more seasoned. He isn't outweighed by his net-worth. But he silently takes an aggregate amount of pride in himself. Now that is not bad, is it. But it is. The modest exterior, vis-a-vis a crouching ego within is no child's play. You could never guess, when he's playing you and how. He could keep you guessing, even perplexed, may be. He would shower you with attention, one day. Ignore you the next. I know this category of men, only too well. Old acquaintances. He will pamper you and at the same time, make you feel completely abandoned. He takes a long time before making you realize, this, that you cannot trust him. And also that he's not the one. Never the one. 

Baker's Delight

Do you remember the year of depression? Because I do. A terrible year that. 2015. I don't know, why exactly I realize this just now. Now, that another year has also almost followed 2015 into the bygone and the forgotten. Yet, I cannot cease myself from writing about it. 

The weekdays used to be delusional. You understand the kind of delusion, when you cannot recall how did things get so worse. You cannot recall the steps, the small pouches of misery coming in before the surfeit of it choked your throat. And you ask yourself, rhetorically though. Only one mere word. Why.

That kind of delusion. That could nudge mental heath enthusiasts off their comfy couches. It was concerning. But what was more demanding of empathy was Sundays.

I recall, it started with a rant of not-feeling-well to I-feel-like-cake. I poured an instant cake mix into the pressure cooker as directed on the cover. And, voila. An amorphous antidote for depression. I knifed it out, spooned it out, in crumbs and that was the first of numerous.

I took to the heavily underused microwave then. And blatantly decided to mix my own batter for the better. Better batter. And boy, did I bake some mediocre unpalatable stuff. I am told baking is so simple and often asked, how can I be bad at baking. But I just was. Probably it as my mood. My mental heath, as enthusiasts would say. 

I was battling my own wars. Arguing, screaming. And almost simultaneously baking. I whisked flour, eggs, milk, sugar. Sometimes bananas. The baking soda was either too scant or too much, it always failed me. I was in tears. Chocolate powder or vanilla essence, nothing sufficed to fill the holes in my soul. The knife I stabbed into the cake to check if it was done, I weighed against it the option of stabbing it into myself. I couldn't handle anymore questions. I had no answers. 

It was such a ruthless time. And I was so callously lost. 

I Google-d newer recipes to keep my mind engaged. I once baked an apple pie with a bunch of overripe apples. I distinctly remember baking my personal favorite, the caramel custard. Cup cakes were done too, Jars and jars of Nutella, and Hershey's chocolate sauce. Powdered sugar as icing with cherry toppings. 

But nothing helped me as much as I would have wanted to be helped back then. I would cut myself two generous slices on a plate and go to bed, every Sunday afternoon. The rest of the cake would lay on the dining table next to the microwave, untouched. Sometimes, I ate the rest of it, on week nights. It didn't matter. 

And then suddenly, things changed. Both for the better and the worse. It's hard to imagine it bothways, but it's true. And I stopped baking altogether. Probably because I don't own a microwave anymore. Amen to that. 

One by two

Do you remember that chicken soup corner at the end of the street. Where there was a huge banyan tree, and the road forked. You found it the year before I was to graduate. And boy, did we make the most of that. The first time you bought soup for me, I had been down with the flu. Influenza, as you would call it, it was a thorough windy afternoon of winter. And the warden's assistant called. I had a visitor. You were waiting downstairs with a tall plastic cup in hand, your face seemed smaller, your glasses covered most of it. You looked a different boy from afar, very apart from the backbencher-latecomer in class. The soup was only lukewarm. My shawl din't stand the breeze. Your t-shirt had swollen up, the wind got in and bloated it up. Like a balloon.

Three days later, when you had gotten my cold, we had walked down to that soup corner. Together, for the first of many times. It was only a shack, back then. Boys and girls, sat in pairs, stood in pairs, about the cemented base of the banyan tree, cycles parked in tandem. You shook one and the entire pack would collapse, one upon its adjacent. I actually wanted to do that once, shake on cycle and run for my life. Or pretend that nothing happened. Like a poker face, you know. You always asked me to confine that idea to my mind, for the better part of the year. And just drink the soup. Chicken noodle soup. Fiery and hot. One by two. 

Everytime, later in life, I split soup with anyone, I would think about you. Everytime, I see anyone read Chicken soup for the Soul, I would miss you. Hoping you were around, then and there. Sometimes, when I see a banyan tree, centuries old, and pause to see it some more, it is as if you are there. Like literally. And then I see the fork in the road, I realize again. Hands are held, till the road forks. 

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..

Implosion

I wish I had this juvenile ability to pick up two people from one point in time and drop them within another, doing the exact thing. Ceteris paribus. Everything else remaining constant.
That way I would crawl backwards a few days, to the night when you were singing to me. Forgetting lyrics midway and not caring. Inserting words as you fancied. In some impeccable American accent. Unashamed that I was there to hear you. Judge you. Rate you. Because I wasn't gonna do that anyway. Midway shifting songs, you halted on a soft romantic one. And I noticed there was a string of pain in your voice. The one I had been looking for forever. And was worried, wasn't able to find. But finally relieved I did.
And then how, just how we wrecked our brains because we couldn't remember what song it was that you wanted, only the video kept flashing across our midnight minds. That debilitating muted feeling, felt happy though, because I was with you. At a point, when I felt that my memory has been wiped off of that song, I felt like my heart would implode with the joy. The joy of trivial amnesia and another of great love. Later when I googled the lyrics for you, you were cold asleep.
I wish I could crawl back in time, pick the both of us from that moment, and place us here now. But I can't. Nothing can, bring that back.
Atleast I am glad, we don't have the other juvenile ability to forsee the future. For if, that night, I had seen that this was what our future was gonna be like, I wouldn't have let you have me, the way you did that night.

The Horse Shoe Pandemonium

Where is the U-turn. U has nothing to do with you. A U-turn is a silent belief that life comes in the shape of a horse-shoe. Like the magnet, you know. The magnet. And we are gonna have to travel in the opposite direction of now. Wherever it is that we are headed. And come back to each of those milestones. Undo it all. Erase every single memory, by reliving it.

But the problem is, I can't see our U-turn coming. Rather, I can't see us getting any closer to it. I am so sure that it's somewhere around the corner. And we will be there in a while or two. But still can't figure out when. It's like driving across a busy highway at night and waiting for the spot where the road divider splits for a stretch for you to take a U-turn if you have to. But there's  head lights of cars blinding your eyes. Flashing on your face from the opposite direction and you can't say where exactly that divider will split and when you will be asked to pull the brakes and rush back, undoing everything.

For us, though we have come some distance, now, I believe there is a U-turn just about to encounter us. We are driving past, staring out the windshield, our hair flowing in waves in the strong wind. And I couldn't care any less. But still, there's this fear that I hold on to, sometimes for comfort, sometimes for reassurance of my fatelesness. That there's a U-turn about to come across sometime now. Just about now. But it's not here yet.


Where do we go. Either we keep going in circles and end up where we began. Or we are stuck at only one point, suffering the illusion of motion. We begin and finish in our minds. Rather, we never finish.

Color of Longing

The color of longing, is far from purple. It's the color that forms when skin folds on and above skin. It must be a bloody tint of pink. Longing must be the mild chocolate of his lower lip. The tiny shadows that form between its creases. Longing must be the color of palms, and the lines of fortune and misfortune that criss cross across.
Longing must be the color of the edges of fire. Yellowish orange, with the same burnt of ache. Longing is also the white sheath of the moon, of a pearl.
Longing is the outline of waiting. Longing is also the hopeless aftermath of crazy writing. Black on white. Staunch. Relentless. Like this. Like this. Babeh, like this.

Year

How long could be a year?

As long as the pain in the breath lasts. 

As long as memory doesn't fade away. 

As long as the scathe of the ridiculous mistake of love,

lasts. 

A year feels like one complete cycle of life. 

One run of each season.

Summer, winter.

Monsoon, mother of them all. 

A year loops across all the days that we remember 

To celebrate.

Festivals.

One birthday.

New year. 

Days of love.

Fake anniversaries of confessions of affection.

Approximate memories of first kisses. 

A year also marks those numerous insignificant days.

Hundreds of them.

Sundays you sat on the balcony, 

and watched time pass under your nose.

Weeks of meaningless slogging. 

Nights of realizing how real this deadlock was. 

Accidental discoveries of favorite songs.

Pictures taken and forgotten about.

Mugs and mugs of coffee.

Stolen glasses of wine. 

And other cheap intoxication.

Whining of being unread,

Being unheard of.

Moving toward death,

undiscovered. 

Unknown. 

Such other nuances of life.

One whole year. 

Do you care?

How long a year could be. 

It could pass in a jiffy.

But this one, just doesn't go. 

Bitcch 

Pictures often limit imagination. So, don't let this one tie you down for one. 

Now Playing: Chhodo More Baiyyan-~Zubeidaa

Saudade

They say that putting our rules down in written keeps us from faltering. So, here goes.

Anecdotes. Stories, that we tell people we want to start conversations with. Honestly, in this shabby world of ours there are very very few people worth having a conversation with. And for them, we keep a set of anecdotes to be narrated. Such that we are perceived as interesting. Sometimes, we say those just for the sake of saying them out loud. Even when they make no sense.

I have this story I tell people. Not all people. Some people. Who I like. In the midst of a bustling chat, I would fill in an awkward pause with this. How as a little girl, my kid brother and I were locked asleep in a hotel room in a strange country, and my parents thought we were drugged or something, or we had fainted or something. And had the hotel staff screaming our names and poking at us through a stick from under the door until I woke up and opened the door to see my parents standing among dozens of strangers. How I thought it was a dream and went back to sleep like nothing had happened. The next morning, everyone knew our names.

I don't know what's with this incident. I realized I must have said it to quite a few people who don't matter anymore. Just for the sake of filling in that awkward pause, and unintentionally letting them peel off one layer off me. I told this to you too. I am sure you wouldn't remember. And the odds are slim that you are even reading this. But I told this to you. Too. And in return, you had responded. With one of your stories. Which you must have told to a few girls before me. About how out of dumb curiosity you had mistakenly seen one of  your dad's endoscopys as a child. And ended up puking. And puking. And.. you continued till I couldn't stop laughing anymore. I am sure you're going to be telling this story to a lot of girls after me. But I won't tell mine to anyone ever again.

It's a crazy whim. But I lay to rest this story here, now. Amen! I won't falter. Because I have it in written here that I won't. Repeat this story. I won't.

Getting Past

Let me be. Stuck in this limbo, that I am. Unmoving. Let me just oscillate about my center of gravity. Just don't let that center be you. Leave me. Divorce me. Tear me away. Discard. Throw away. Abandon. Forget me.  Me. Believe that I never was. Believe, in your heart, that I am not, not even now. I don't exist. Our pasts don't exist. And my present is in its entirety a separate entity from yours. We are not connected. We aren't. What-so-ever. We aren't the same. Not anymore. Not ever. You are, merely, someone I happened to know. Some man I met in a bar one night, drunk and hallucinating. The breeze that unsettled my hair, and put it in such disarray, that it won't just settle again. But I have recovered. I ran my fingers through my strands of hair, and combed them fine, just now. Just about now.

So don't come back. Don't even think about it. Don't you dare!

tonite i wonder if it was all my fault. if i should have held on tighter. waited for you longer. compromised a little more. understood and sacrificed like everyone else. fought harder with destiny, to keep you for mine. and not let you go this easy. ya, now it feels easy, in retrospect. then the world was upside down. i was crazier than ever. but i should have been saner. how much could that have cost?

now it has cost me love. 

The End

The way they show it in movies. There's a sad ending. Colors disappear and the screen goes black and white. The ending often has some or the other huge message behind it. And your eyes are about to well up. Deep inside, you must be touched by this poignance. Because there is some beauty in it. Or may be you see glimpses of your life in the movie, etc.

Sometimes, after that moist climax, they bring up the beginning. The beginning that they din't show earlier. Just a couple of glimpses. During the movie those moments of the beginning must have been referred to many a time. Making you imagine how must have they gone for real. Arousing related general curiosity. So you wonder, a couple of times. About those happy moments. When our story began. And strangers held on to the eyes of other strangers. For a little longer than the usual stretch of time for which memories are involuntarily erased.

You then travel to the other end to see the beginning for real.

And then you can connect the dots. The beginning after the end. All the blanks are filled. Everything falls into place. And you are relieved, at least there was this happy beginning.

Now assume that movie is life indeed. And you feel like you are fast approaching the climax. The sad ending. Because you really don't know why, your sense of loss keeps getting deeper and deeper. And colors disappear. You begin to think, you must be somewhere very very close to The End. A closure must be in the offing.

And you are trapped in amnesia. You can't remember how long you have been walking. Incessantly. Panting for breath, half in tears. But most of all, you can't remember the happy beginning. The one they show in the movie. In the end, after the end. No matter how hard you try, you just cannot remember. What the beginning felt like. And you're not sure if it was a happy one. So that must not have been the beginning after all. So you keep going back in memory. And yet there is nothing in your hands. Probably, there was no happy beginning after all. And all your life has been this way. Dis-satisfactory and flooded with ennui.

Drawing parallels, between the movie and life, you never stop wishing. For a miracle that could bring back in a flash, the memory of the first few happy moments before the drama began. For any Closure, other than this, would be unfair

The Soldier's Wife

You fight your own battles
I am the woman who waits home alone
Fighting a bigger battle

My emotions alter between
Sorrow and Anger

Sorrow
As I wait by this window
Giving myself false hope

Anger
Because you leave no trace
You take me as a given

I worry
For you, on the crests of mountains
In the cold and snow

Amidst gunshots
Smoke and death
When you forget me, for your purpose

I ain't as selfless, I
Want you all mine
Want you all mine

You don't wonder as I do
And weigh possibilities out of nothing
Alone in the dark

Aghast, all I do is wait

When you are all I have
And I still don't have you

Love may be unconditional
Wait isn't.
Isn't.

And everytime you return
To me
Wounded, and lost

I won't be here.

Pic Courtesy: $uch!

Our feet
On wet sand, digging puddles
Chasing crabs into their holes

I stepping into your footprints
Guilelessly, in abandon.
Foam of waves, receding from our toes

We stand still
Our fingers melted into one
My toe ring of silver, glistens like a star in the sea

Sky split into a brilliant dusk
Not even birds, it's just us
You & I

I write our names on the sand
You wait for them to be washed away
And then you laugh

That intoxicating, open mouthed laughter
Waits for me to join in mid-way
I feign anger and walk away

And you console me
The sea won't stand our names
Because we're not forever.

Nothing is forever.
That we're here only for now
After a day has ended, & another hasn't begun

And I am deep in a dream.

Love and other Disasters.

Once I was made to attend a workshop. It was loosely focused about excelling in the workplace. But drifted to personal problems sooner than expected. And the guy was telling us about artificial happyness. I don't know what but I felt something inside me snap. I almost heard it. I nearly screamed at the poor fellow. But it wasn't fair, he deserved the scream. Even stitching together an idea of something like artificial happyness was preposterous. It's oxymoronic.

He argued that it was possible to love someone with all your devotion. But that someone leaving you shouldn't be exactly apocalyptic. It sounded like a contradiction because if you love someone that way, he leaving you should mean the end of the world for you. Shouldn't it.

It's hypocritical of me to feel so because the process of trying to be happy is as continuous as breathing. But when someone else tells you things you yourself have been trying to swallow for so long, it feels like a slap. One feels offended, wondering how did he get there first, before me. I conceived the freaking idea way before he did!

But I did scream, and in front of a lot of people. And the spasms on my face were so immediate, so honest. It totally sucked, opening up in public that way.

Sometime later, I read things here and there, and started practicing indifference like a religion. Drew strict lines around the contours of my body, limiting me, constricting my radius, trying to contain myself. And I wondered if living for oneself was applicable enough a thought.

Someone told his friend, I would die for you. But I wouldn't live for you. It's the same as loving with all your devotion, but learning to live beyond being dumped. Do you understand.

Isn't that a manifestation of unconditional love.

I wonder if that could be workoutable. Bah!

The only time when I am reminded I can still feel, anticipate, crave is when I walk across the road and expect to meet you coming from the other end. Lanky and grinning.

Else I am sternly indifferent, numb, uncaring, emotionally paralyzed.

I do not hate or love this state I am in. Though it's both better and worse than what I have been in. Because I have leaped over the zeniths of ecstasy when in love with you. I have also decayed in the filth of being lovelorn when you broke my heart. And I believe this state of being nowhere, being in between the two is much better than being tortured by such extremes. But sometimes it seems worse, because what is living worth if it is not for reaching these extremes and crossing them blindly for the beyond.

Also there is this constant awareness of a mammoth of suppressed sorrow within myself. The fear is that it still lives by the possibility of an eruption, a sudden one, anywhere, anytime. Things go out of my hands then. Now probably is one such time.

Switching between numbness and breakdowns, sometimes I experience this anticipation, this craving. This intermediate phase is independent of the past and the present. It's unaware of what has happened between us. It doesn't know a thing. And it waits, like crazy, to meet you walking down from the other end of the road. Lanky and grinning.

This sometimes happens in a horrible 10 o'clock traffic jam too. I roll down the glass and wish you were just there. There in the next cab. Or when I am picking up groceries from the supermarket, to meet you in the next aisle, doing the same. The will is so strong, so strong that sometimes I almost see you there. There, right in front of me.

Expecting coincidences, I move in and out of consciousness so fast, that I forget I am crossing a busy highway, I could just get hit by a car and die. But my numbness doesn't let me feel any difference between being alive and being dead. It doesn't.

It's very scary you know, that moment of not being able to realize the difference between life and death. And that's when I fall back and into an abyss. Exactly. 

Bitch

You know not all stories of your life. You're lied to more often than you know. What happens to you is governed mostly by strangers. Some of these strangers are absolute strangers. Their whims that precipitate consequences in your life can still be justified because, at least they were impersonal.

But there is another kind of stranger. The one you knew all the way. The one you thought you knew all the way. Only you didn't.

The stranger who stood a skin's breadth from your heart and cheated on you.

The stranger who didn't deserve to be a part of your life. Only he was. He wrote your destiny, cutting across the lines on your palm. Rewriting your life, turning it tipsy. Breaking your heart irreversibly.

And be ashamed, you let him. Given another chance, you will let him do it again. Bitch.

Trading Dreams

They sat beside each other, in a room dumped with books. Books here and there and everywhere. Piles of them. Some torn, some yellowed. Their covers falling off, she was tired of stacking them one above the other. A slight imbalance would make the whole stack come down like a humpty dumpty and she would gasp and begin all over again. There was a kind of warmth in the room. A warmth that had nothing to do with the late summer afternoon outside.

It was because of the  presence in the room, because of his arm touching hers. No hair stood up, no one got goosebumps. That proximity, that lack of distance, brought about a peace that was rare. All noise as if had gone off to snooze. It was a summer afternoon with books and scarce conversations.

He was typing away, something. She felt no quest to see what that was about. He would tell her most of his stories, the rest she knew. He assumed. They had known each other a few months. But it felt like much less than that, there was always that freshness, that expectation of unlocking a few more secrets about the other.

Sometimes it felt longer. Mostly she had to strain her memory to recollect how she had already lived a third of her life, alone. That would be the most unusual thing however. Company makes you forget what you are for real, under your skin. Only austere loneliness makes known the inner person.

Togetherness, on the other hand conspires sharing. Even of those fleeting dreams we secretly nurture. Away from destiny's prying eyes.

'I want to be in a city that is all of water.'

'Shouldn't you learn to swim?' he laughed.

She continued as if he hadn't said a thing.

'No streets, and you move from one house to another and even shop using a boat.'

'Isn't your wish to perennially float in thought converting into this one?'  

'You know I have a complicated right brain, very very mysterious.'

A prolonged silence followed. She leaned on his shoulder, breathed in sighs at times. Toyed with his nails, put her fingers between his. They clasped.

'I only want to write.'

There was a pause, like he would continue to explain his dream. But that pause stretched into a lull. Her expectation of a continuance died after a while. 

They didn't turn and look into each other. They be that way, she leaning on his shoulder. Nothingness prevailed. A moment froze.

Years later, years that seemed like longer than they were, she was glancing through his pictures of Venice. His broad glad smile, and water. Everywhere. No land, no ground realities to struggle against. Afloat forever.

And she was hung in the middle of writing her maiden story. Looking for words, sketching a character.

Love makes us like each other. Conspires sharing like said. And sometimes it makes us part to live each others' dreams.