The Egg-seller & other stories

When I was a child, and this I write from honest memory, my world was much smaller. Not that now, I live in a larger world. My world remains the same size, or perhaps, it has even shrunk to convenience me. But I know that there is something huger beyond my sight. Something vast and intractable. As a child, I had no idea.

I walked a few hundred meters to my aunt's place where my school bus picked me up. Spent the whole entire day at school, picking which battles to fight, and which to let go. Was dropped off exactly where I had been picked up. I stayed at the aunt's till my mother got back from work. In the evening, I sure ate some noodles and watched some cartoons. Did my homework and went to bed. I remember the orange grey light that filled the rooms. The papaya trees that grew just outside the window, beside the ones laden with drumstick, always tempted me to stretch my hand out and pluck one. We lived on the first floor. There was a thorny tree full of sweet berries just outside my parents' bedroom. I could stand on the bed and clutch a fistful of berries.

But the egg-seller broke the routine. I am not saying, there were no other sellers. There was the little girl, my age then, selling balloons and flutes and loudly playing them in the streets. There were mobile snack sellers in the afternoons, candyfloss, fruit cakes, ice-creams. There was a quiet grocery store man to whom I was sent with money to buy noodles.

On my trips to the grocery store, I noticed the egg seller next door. He sat in a cabin with an asbestos roof, with a face that gave away nothing. He looked neither happy, nor sad, neither content, nor dissatisfied, neither angry nor impatient. He looked like nothing. Just a middle aged man who sat at the edge of his cabin selling eggs in paper pouches to whoever came by. People said he was a wholesaler and had bought much land and property just by selling eggs. Perhaps, they were just stories, we would never know now, would we.

But what attracted me was the pungent smell of boiled eggs, emanating from his shop every evening. He had a helper of his own, who chopped onions and chillies back stage. The egg-seller neatly pealed the boiled eggs and split them into two with a thread strung out. Then he would place the egg on a small piece cut out of newspaper, sprinkle the onions and chillies and most importantly black salt. I think the black salt was the ingredient that made the customers come back.

Whenever I had extra money, I would go there and chomp a couple of eggs. Whenever guests came to our place and asked me to show them around, I took them to the egg seller. I would take my new acquaintances and introduce them to the egg-seller. His cabin became the cynosure of my tiny little word. The center of everything. 

History

Erosion of memory is an indispensable part of healing. One forgets, one gets past, one heals. When she was younger, she didn't believe she would one day be able to comfortably forget. In the angst of young and unrequited love, she strongly believed that one actually never forgot anything, only with time learned compulsively to get by. But as she grew older, it got real. It was actually possible to forget. And it wasn't necessarily an active activity. Memories faded quite automatically, passively, quietly. And before she consciously took note, many chapters of  her life had been lost. Suddenly she felt possessive about her past, however lackluster that had been. She felt unfairly dealt with, after all.

It felt so recent anyway. Once she started scraping off the surface, she counted with her fingers the number of years that had past, since. Not many. At least, not that many. But her slight wrinkles told her a different story, that she's older now. With a totally different set of  priorities. But then again, when did this happen? When did she get so old? She felt as if she would undo the Venetian blinds in her cubicle and see him on the other side. Through the glass, he felt immediate. He suddenly erupted from the past and felt so so so damn close in time and in space. Like he had jumped out of that continuum into this.

But the truth was far from this midday hallucination. He was nowhere around. You know how actual physical raw time space work. Once someone has passed, someone had passed. They ain't coming back for good. That said, how can memories be unfair. How can they self destruct? And so easily. Feeble recollections of events haunted her, grazed on her mind and taunted her. And she couldn't remember any further, any deeper. They had been so particularly staunch about keeping no memorabilia, there was nothing to cling to. How sometimes she jumped into the traps she herself had built.

Probably this doesn't make much sense. But she couldn't understand how she could totally completely absolutely forget a man who had loved her and who she had almost loved? Subconsciously she thought of the others like him in her life, and had nightmares about them. But never anything on him. How strange. How quietly he exited, never to reappear again. So much history gradually decayed in her mind and she didn't even realize except for now.

If she undid the blinds, just now, would he still be there though. She pondered.

Faraway

Years ago, on a quiet bylane
Next to a tree where cherry blossomed
There was a house
But more than house, there was
A garden,
Like an untended jungle

Adjacent trees of wildflowers
Stood in between unscathed wilderness
A solo white chair
Sat amongst them all
Rusty and rickety, that chair
Barely white actually

From between its legs,
Rose a creeper
With lotus leaves
And purple, clitoria like flowers,
Only denser
And purple-er

The nectar of that flower,
Or if you crushed its petals,
Squeezed it into your mouth
Made a rare potion
It chose your priciest memory
And erased it

Tonight, get me that nectar
Wontcha, wontcha, apple pie
I need to forget,
More than I need to live
So run, run already
Back in time and fetch from Faraway

Ergo

All of my memory converges into one evening in the past. It was 2006. Or 2007 probably. Because 2008 would rather be too late for the events I'm going to narrate. It was a silly little evening. Nobody significant was even involved, as in physically present. But people don't have to be present in body and mind to cause effect and effectively mar an evening, a day, a life. Mostly, it's their absences that work that charm. So yes, it was an evening long long ago and I was mostly by myself. And it was then that I lost my innocence. Ergo, all my memory, if retrospectively stretched back in time, converge, then and there. 

It was January. And it was drizzling. Winter rain. I must've been eighteen. Unscathed. In love. Brimming with naivete, unbeknownst of the ways of the world, that such scales existed on which humans are weighed and chosen, and the rest rejected, I callously thought till then that love begets love. It never did. Never does. And it shouldn't either. But I was young and full of colors. Purple, magenta and violets. 

It was a grey evening we'd stepped out into. With a few friends and somebody's cousin. I was meeting somebody's cousin for the first time. He was tall, bespectacled, comfortable in a lose T shirt. Forgettable as a person, because I don't even recall him name. But he has been reluctantly stuck in this memory forever. Because he simply happened to be there. It was a huge college campus. Somebody's cousin was showing us around. Mostly from the streets, their stadiums, activity centers, auditoriums, gyms. I saw numerous, numerous boys that evening. 

I knew you were there, out there somewhere. But we're never lucky enough for coincidences. I never saw you. You never sought me out. It was a lost cause. But you were right there. Within square meters probably. It was getting duskier, cooler, darker. Slowly yellow light from the street lamps filled the streets. I looked up to see bulky deodars on both sides of the streets. Upright like our guardians. We were just a bunch of kids back then.

Within minutes the air got chilly. The power went off. It was completely dark except for the shrieks of voices. And laughter. It began to pour. We took shelter under the nearest tree. I scooted to under the nearest tree. I almost hugged it tight. I could feel its trunk on my cheeks. And shut my eyes, I wanted you so much. It was so debilitating to be so close to you and still not have you. It was precisely under that tree, that day, standing in the rain that I got my heart broken the first time. 

For a few years I imagined you were there with me under that tree. But I knew you weren't. I have concocted so many alternative memories of the same exact incident, I can't tell the real from the unreal. Probably none of this even happened. But now I am too seasoned to give away the truth so easy.

In parallel universes and in other tesseracts of time, you were probably there with me under that deodar. In a tight embrace, in galloping rain, our cheeks touching its trunk. Because that would answer just so many questions right now. 

Penumbra

There was a time when we were all,
Gleelessly stuck in Penumbra
Between the ages, thirteen to nineteen
Or twenty-one

That teen angst, wasn't like nothing else

One particular afternoon,
I wasted sitting in the sunbeam
That trespassed through my window
In the dark, and writing a letter
On pen & paper, yes, real blue ink
And sprinkling it with rose petals
An unposted letter with that angst
About being alone and unwanted

Don't recall much else though
Literally speaking, for instance
My first sip of alcohol (cocktail - sex on the beach)
Or my first kiss
The first smoke,
But I know I had many firsts

Growing like a multi faceted organism
In so many directions
And with so less control
Nothing could begin to heal that angst
Not a box full of books,
Or nights spent drinking coffee
Or making craft

So many years of constant rebellion,
Do you recall yours?
Stuck in Penumbra, glee-less-ly
So long, so long.

Who You Be

I don't keep a good track of time. Because what is to it. Every realization that such and such quantity of time has passed, you only feel nostalgia. And along with nostalgia, a tinge of sorrow. Helplessness because we have been so callous in life. Though we have been extremely savagely prudent, we have managed to be callous, nevertheless. So I don't appreciate keeping a track of time. I keep no album. No journal. Nothing. And it feels liberating, living like this, deliberately, without a care for time. Living life day wise. Hour wise. Week wise, at most. But not in any longer tranches of time. 

However, I remember, faintly though, deeply loving myself. Loving yourself is a good thing, no doubt. But I was a narcissist. I don't judge you if you are, by the way. But I don't like being one. It's a huge waste of time. But then what is not. If you are not the artist or the muse, your life is a ludicrous waste of time. But I was arrogant. For no apparent reason. I wasn't even pretty. That I wasn't pretty played over my fucking head a lot. I overcompensated the lack of being loved. It's basically sort of playing defense. But in a twisted sort of a way. 

After a long time, I cannot tell you how much time exactly, because I don't keep track of time, but after like a dozen rejections or so, I learnt my lesson, that beauty probably cannot be attained. And no matter what you do, you be who you be. And nothing you do, believe, can ever alter that truth of truths. So I shed the arrogance and compensated the lack of love with deep compassion for the self. Yeah. And it's been working. I guess. 

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly. Khaled Hosseini

Keepsake

Do you remember the dim lit alleys. And cafes with bowls of water and petals floating amongst floating candle flames. Have the slightest memory, do you. Of the long nauseous drives, uphill and downhill and then uphill again. Do you remember, how our friends hooked up and went for long walks leaving us behind, alone, alone-together and writhing in unbearable adolescent solitude. Seated on wooden benches under tall, very tall pine trees, picking up pine cones from the ground and counting them. And those long sun less mornings of fog mixed with steamy breakfast. Memory is a tricky thing. You forget the obvious. But store these tiny irrelevant details. Like the big flat-screen TV. Or the aimless strolls uptown and getting lost. And then not finding a cab on the way back and getting caught amidst a hail storm. Do you still think of late night, almost running into dawn, parties. Do you remember the first time you held a drink in your hands while another girl mixed up vodka with rum with whiskey and danced and puked. Do you remember watching, and being watched. And how the feeling of undiluted lust was. When you lusted for a man, so blindly without considering parameters of beauty or money, just lust. Pure lust, on plastic chairs, holding drinks in plastic cups, until dawn, under pines. And then witnessing a gorgeous orange sun crack the sky and washing off that illegitimate lust with all the pragmatism you could gather. And walking back to your room and taking a really hot shower. You could never claim what was not rightfully yours. Nevertheless, you smoked in disquiet corners in insomniac parties and imagined poems. You wondered what it would feel like to doze off on each other's shoulders and wake up in the touch of undiminished love. Even if things didn't work out much, you thought of dinners in cafes of floating candles on rooftops. Same rooftops that were too tempting not jump off from. Yeah.

On a slightly different note, do you remember home. Unbearable summer days and sucking off seeds from melons. And forest fires. And rickshaw rides of total absolute liberation. Do you remember long chats and unacknowledged affections. Do you remember splitting the cheque on a date to make it look platonic, how fearful were we. Do you remember wearing capris and skirts and hiding your bosom full of love in loose immortal t shirts. Do you remember the earphones and endless playlists on loop. And windows media player. Do you remember boat rides and swooping bats. Propositions and heartbreaks. That could never be healed. And walking back in the rain, plucking wildflowers. Strange train journeys and waking up bare feet because your slippers were stolen. Staining your fingernails in flower juice. Do you remember grainy pictures and unsophisticated phone cameras. First touches, shoulder brushes and kisses in the dark. How naive were you, how unloved were you darling. Do you remember. Chomping off platefuls of noodles and gravies in garlic sauce, and espresso, all that. Yes. Do you remember being ugly, particularly. 

Picture courtesy: Ukiyo-e 

The Couple by the Lake

It was an intense moment. Like a moment inside a moment.

We sat on a bench by the lake. City lights reflected on the black water. Nearly mesmerizingly. But there was nothing romantic about it. We were both deeply bothered, I guess.

We had a rule. One smoke per night, strictly. One each that is. Sharing a smoke would be too intimate. His black polythene bag was between us on the bench. It had his drink for the night. I would have a swig from it before we walked back to our rooms. Sometimes, two or three. 

There was a girl he loved deeply. She had recently been married off to another man and had been shipped abroad. She still loved him back. That so rebellious love of the early twenties. He had heard her voice after weeks, he was almost too benumbed to speak. He had told me about her earlier though. About how they had met and fallen in love at the place they worked. And how vehemently her parents had opposed the match, and so on. Their love had been obsessive-compulsive. 

Not the milder poetic version, but serious life endangering love that. I wasn't aware of such love myself back then. I only came to know of it later when I fell into it myself. Some mind-fucking, nerve-wrecking shit that. 

But back then, I was in a different kind of a love. With another man, who was as far away as far away could be. Victimized by my repetitive tendency to fall for unavailable men. That was young-vulnerable love. The love of cards and roses. And preferably, low sugar chocolates as well. 

One thing we had in common was that we had both been equally sequestered by the ones we had loved. And that pain was enough to make us sit side by side with the lake and with its shimmering lights on back water. Every night, for as long as it took for us, individually and together, to gather our heartbroken selves and walk back to our rooms. A strange camaraderie that. 

Somethings needn't be explained. This, needn't even be touched. Years have gone by, now all that remains is a faded memory of two jaded beings by the lake. Almost wiped clean, it is sometimes recovered to remember, so many loves since then, so many heartaches since then. But I can still recall the taste of the ice-cream he treated me with afterward, to snap me out of whatever depression that was. Dark chocolaty chocolate with cream, yes. And no, not sugar free. 

Matinee

She was completely soaked in the plan. She went through it again and again. The show was at quarter to three. She had to leave at half past one. The cinema hall was more than ten kilometers away. And he was to meet her at their designated pick up place. She couldn't be late. They wouldn't miss the ice-cream before the show started. He had booked three seats for the two of them in the corner of the last row. So that he could wrap his hand around her shoulder and no one would be bothered. She had made a suitable alibi at home, she was away for back-to-back tuitions and soon after she would go to the beauty parlor. She prayed hard that nobody should find out. What else could she do but pray. What could anyone do but pray. She was a few minutes late and he had been waiting. She tied a scarf so as to hide her face and climbed on to his bike, and sat clutching his chest from behind. Like they do. In a minute, they were on the main road. The wind was unstoppable that afternoon. It shouldn't rain, how would she explain at home if she got drenched. Her head had transformed into this constant alibi manufacturing machine. It didn't. They licked their ice cream cones standing in the alley behind the hall. Her face was uncovered now, and people stared on, uninhibited. In her eyes he saw how nervous she was. In the darkness, when the film played, they held hands and even plucked kisses off each other. But her heart lay in her phone, which might ring anytime. What if they found out. Nobody called, though. In the interval, he bought more soft drinks and wafers. The cold breeze from the air conditioner, gave her the chills and she snuggled as close to him as she could. He whispered things into her ears, making her promise for a few more matinee shows like that. She whispered back, asking what if people back home found out. He whispered back saying that he had his way of taking care of things, if they did. She felt both empowered and bothered, by what he had said. Later, when the show ended, the skies opened up. The wind had stopped and the rain began to look scary. They couldn't ride back in that weather. They waited and waited for what seem like an hour and she couldn't make anymore alibis on the phone. She was at her wits end and her forehead heated up.They were both soaked under their skins. She was in tears, well almost. And he consoled her with all he had. That they were going to be just fine. 

The Fever Bird

A poet of repute writes about love. He mentions how he wakes up disturbed to the cries of the papiha in his garden, in the dead of the night. The lunatic bird sings in the midnight heat, without relief. Like a bone of pain is stuck in its throat. And our poet doesn't know sleep. He feels that the papiha is conspiring only against him, because there is no one else in the house awake. He looks out of his room, and can't trace the hidden bird. Its throttling cries split his heart apart. Those cries of pee-kahan, pee-kahan. Where is my love, where is my love. The poet christens this emotion as love. And tries to make me believe so.

Yet again, I have been lied to. Call me a man for having said this. But love is an extended mating-ritual. It's like fore-foreplay. At least this once, men are right. It's a terrible facade that love puts on, it cheats you for half a life. It's all about chemicals gone crazy in your brain. Some hormones out stepping their fucking limits. The same ones that ensure you get hair under your arms. That's about it. It's animal instinct. All that we suppose sets man apart from animals has been doctored to fill in books, to make people fantasize. And make this hunt for an okayish mate, a pink one after all. That's about it.

I saw a blind man and a blind woman. I don't know if I could impose our jargons on them. But they would have been objectionable had they not been blind. It was a public place, there were scores of people, like me, like you, who would but ogle at people who make out in public. But I couldn't find a term for them. I couldn't force any thought on what I saw. No one else was watching, so I could just stare on. Like an almost involved by stander. The woman was taking the man's hand and running it across her face, above her eyes, with almost all white and the squinted black, the dark circles around her eyes, her nose, the slightly hollow cheeks, and then his hands paused for a short breathtaking moment on her mouth, fingered gradually from the upper lip to the lower, like a beat of music. Then down to her chin and below her neck. There was a smile on the man's face. It was a like a mad man's. He must have been happy. So must have been the woman. Now I wonder, was that about it?

Poet in reference: Vikram Seth

me & You - a sequel..?

In the last few days, I have been creating memories.

These memories, I want to shed. Right now. Right away.

Because I travel light.

Because I make life sufficiently complicated, anyway.

Remants of the past, make it worse.

Someone I worship, once thus spake.

'Eva memories can only cause ache

Bad ones remind you of the worst you have been through

Good ones are also bad as that good is bygone.

And Eva bygone is as good as dead'

Keeping memories is like

trying to nurse a dying moment

It's like telling yourself that

a corpse will spring back to life.

Coming back to why this is being written.

I keep looking for traces of your face, wherever, whenever.

My strange fixation.

I am obsessed about your face

I know

You will leave

This moment will die.

Our moment, in the rush of months and years

I won't nurse the corpse.

I travel light, no memories for me.

But when I look for traces of your face fading away

Getting lost in a crowd

What lingers on is those faint contours..

Your eyes like mine, sometimes tired, sometimes Red

Mostly understanding, loving

Because it has to, anyway

I dread the way all this is going to end..

Ashes to ashes

Dust to dust

Me to you

me & You..?

Now, I'm writin yu a song. Our last..

YASP IV

chasing a faceless man again, succumbing to his whims, waiting endless nights, broodin over hundred possibilities, cryin over the impossibilities, indulgin in wishful thinkin that in retrospect feels criminal, i am wastin away, promisin maself the curse of another heart break, yet another era of numbness, sorrow that can't be fathomed, sorrow that can be cynically laughed at years later, days of yearnin for his company, wakin up with his thoughts ingrained..

one thing i am gonna gift myself for sure this new year is a feel of perfect deja vu.. ;)

once Upon stilettos..!

did you graduate?

mm? ||surprise takes over my face||

or in the final year?

Uh..nope. i did.. '09

okay! cool

yeah. very

it's been two years.. you lose track of thins ||matteroffactly||

yep i know ||stupid grin-you keep jumblin up the girls yu met-for future ref: pls remember

there is only one order ..chronological||

so where is it that you work? ||obviousness again-yu'r sure about everythin uh||

oh no place unfortunately has had the privilege to have me workin fothem.. || forced smile||

||he breaks into sly laughter|| an why so?

caz equally unfortunately i'vn had the privilege to work fothem..

||silence-mild questionin eyez||

still studyin.. masters

oh!

yeah.. ||purely an powerfully smilin now-sayin that 'yeah' thrice inside my mind or more||

NB: Your life is the collection of people you'v met. An' so is mine. An' it neen't be any other

way but this. I'l live with the meanagerie they'v creat-ed inside me.

Men in my Life -II

Unaware of the storm inside me when you saw me for the first time waiting for you over there I wanted to know what your honest reactions were. That I could never know. I had quite told myself that whatever would follow later that evening I would see it through as the real me, and not some fake woman trying to please the stranger in you. But I defied myself in the very first moment. I smiled at you. The way I had decided I would have been rather staring at you curiosly, asking weird questions about the person you are. But I smiled.

Before it all began, one thing irked me somewhat. I wondered how people remembered their ownselves after their better halves entered their lives. Years of solitude had mended me into someone whose emotions were pred-decided, opinions fixed. I had irreversibly fallen in love with myself. This self-love was the buffer around me, my shock-absorber of sorts.No matter what, I was to stand by me, like an insane hypocrite. It was understood that the man in my life would be just secondary.

Later I met you. I had been looking for a reason to love, more than I was looking for love. But then I met you. Thin strands of attraction dragged my eyes to you, and made them stay there. Thin from my side, thinner from yours.

and this made me insecure. Insecure that I wouldn't love myself as much anymore. What if I end up losing you. I would have lost myself already. and there was not a trace of selfish guilt in all that I thought. It appeared obvious. It does with time. Time spent alone, inside the four walls of my mind.

In the days that followed when we got involved, i forgot to think that this way to love wasn't politically correct. the way to love was to start from acquaintance, and then via frienship trickle into love. drop by drop.

But we were meeting intending to fall in love. we might have been trying as well. now in the light of reason, that appears ridiculous to me. had it been some other female in my place, i would be clutching my stomach and laughing. but way back then, i was like living in a dream. all else but you, looked like a facade. i wasn't sure of you, but i wanted to believe you for real. believe that we could happen.

Believe that love wasn't a myth afterall. and that i could fall for it.

PS: But love isn't a myth. I actually saw a guy in this..!