Low Light

Sometimes I wonder if I can see in darkness. I don't trust the dark enough. But once the lights are off, I see almost everything. How eyes adapt. Even the streaks of mellow street lights filtering thought tight maroon curtains are enough. The notification light of the cell phone is enough. Multiple cell phones, iPads and such. 

I had a knack for total darkness back in the day. I celebrated my tweety-fifth, sitting alone on the bathroom floor and smoking, in the dark. My roommate knocked on the door when she had to pee, badly. I don't remember her name. All I remember is that she had straight hair, like ironed hair. She would iron her hair every morning before we left for work and I would steal glances at her, in between my several morning pretend chores. 

Morning chores. Evening chores. Now, night chores. I don't need the strength to go on from day to day, week to week, hour to hour because I busy myself with such chores. Water the plants, assemble breakfast, pack a lunch, dry out the clothes, don't forget this, don't forget that and such. One after the other, jam packed schedule. My routine is my one bloody saviour. Never having a moment to sit in the blank, pitch black darkness to merely think is probably my secret. Otherwise I wouldn't get a reason to get out of bed. In a way, this is the best thing ever. In other ways, it's the worst possible damage I could cause to my soul. 

When I am in a routine, I don't let the little sorrows of life catch me. And when life crumbles like a pack of cards, instantaneously catching me unawares, it's probably the numerous alarms I set to wake up, to go back to sleep, to take pills, to pay bills, to get to work because I need money to pay said bills, that eventually get me back on track in my no thinking life. 

Earlier I loved the darkness so much, it brought me ecstasy. Somewhere in the middle I weaned myself off it, you know, how we do that. But now, again, I am using darkness to catch a break from this mindfucking to do list that I have turned my life into. Because I want to probably grow that courage to go on from today to tomorrow, inside me, for real, and not just fake it around.

Hallelujah 

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

Remember & Write

On early mornings in December
I witness,
Sisters in tow from upstairs
Rushing down with school bags & lunch boxes
Their hair split into twin braids
And tied in white ribbons
So neatly, so neatly
I can never be a nihilist again.

Life must have some reason
Some hidden order in this chaos.
It must. Because of those braids
And the bed of flowers

Here, you know.
They haven't got marigold or gerbera, I believe
All they've got is chrysanthemums & roses
In that paucity of variety, there is infinite beauty
Heaps of roses, blood red, orange, pink, magenta
And chrysanthemums yellow and white
Those hawkers, stuck in your peripheral view are omnipresent
And they make life feel akin to
A bed of roses & chrysanthemums

And even if you don't buy yourself a bunch for Valentine's,  that's okay

It's alright. It's not the end of the world
Until it is.

That your poems don't rhyme, horribly
You couldn't care less

What matters is that you remember and write
Like a mild insomniac beyond caffeinated midnights.

Remember & write.

An Introduction to Murakami

I wish I could write listless fiction. Like Murakami does. A story needn't have a beginning or an end. Either. It can be, peacefully be, a random extract from time. Happenings of a day, or an hour, or a lifetime. It needn't even carry any direct meaning. Or a climax. Or a moral. A story in itself is a being. It begs no justification. It can be about a man getting random telephone calls all day, or making spaghetti brunch for himself, or listening to records, or taking a train alone. Or an elephant vanishing into the blue, or an insomniac woman driving around all night, or a man with nothing but a strange sounding name. It can be about me-you. It needs a faceless narrator yes, one who is neither happy, nor sad. Who is neutral enough to merge with Murakami's canvas. And his sole job is to narrate, read out Murakami's fucking brilliant mind like a dispassionate reader. Isn't the man a genius? And genius is clearly an understatement. There are days, when all I can fantasize about is reading him. He addicts me. With his bare words. I don't know how to stop. Or to look the other way. I am obsessed, with him, like I am never with other stuff. 

Probably, I love him so because in his incomplete unpredictable abrupt endings, I have snuggled up to a new found comfort that not everything is entitled to a meaning. And things can be, just because they are. Just for the sake of being, and nothing else. And I am otherwise so fatigued with jumping to conclusions and drawing deductions that I find a certain relief in Murakami. It's okay. It's normal. And even if it's not, that's okay too.

That's okay too. Because Murakami says so. 

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. 

  

Tesseract

Of late, I have been afraid. And afraid is not good. Fear is all consuming. Crippling, sometimes. It takes away a lot from us. I've been trying to fight it. But failing. I guess. It's been years. Yes, years since I had begun looking. Looking for my feet. Still haven't found 'em. My feet. It's been so long, I can't remember.

All the soups I have sipped, men I've ignored, women I've discarded, clothes I have grown out of, books I have read and taken credit for and forgotten, the attachment I have faked, the time I've lost. Ages. Months, years. And I am still looking for my feet. Oh, it's boring. Almost illegal to be this banal. I haven't heard myself. Because, I am mostly dumb.  I used to speak when provoked. But lately, I don't speak at all, I don't know if I have any voice at all. 

Mostly because I have come to believe that I am nothing. I don't mean it in a demeaning or pitiful way. I just claim knowledge of the minisculity of my existence. With humility and arrogance. Mostly I am sick of the way life turns out, eventually unfolds. And I am afraid of the gigantic amount of energy it takes to change its course. Yeah, I am afraid I don't have that kind of energy.  Not right now. And afraid is not good. Fear is all consuming. Crippling, at times. It's taking away my everything. 

Then again, I like to imagine myself in a tesseract. And in a five dimensional space-time. There is a parallel universe may be, in which life unfolds exactly the way it's supposed to. From in there, I am staring at myself through this tesseract, and passing me some sort of answer. About how to find my fucking feet. You know. Yeah, there's that. 

The Pursuit of Depression

I

I owe my existence partly to Chuck Lorre. I wanted to write this sentence for a long time on this blog. One, because I quite like the way his name sounds, like his surname itself was a story. And two, because I do. From the bottom of my stomach, I am thankful to you, Chuck Lorre. For being there, throughout. Whenever I have needed to unscrew my life, watching an episode or two of his or his kind, has seen me through. Even when there was nothing else to hold on to, he was.

So, recently I read this somewhere that dear Chuck has this tendency to fish out the singular point of contention even from a paradise. As in, he looks out for things that worry him even in the most hunky dory of situations. Far more than being a tendency, it becomes a habit, then an obsession, when you just can't stop worrying. You be constantly perturbed by phantoms you can't see and then, life screws itself irreversibly up. 

I suffer from that, yes. That's the one governing pivot about which I revolve and lose my way numerous times every day. We, Chuck and I pursue Depression. You know unlike Will Smith, who pursues quite the opposite. He is the antithesis of us.

II

On the other hand, there is the nitty gritties of love. Time bound phases in an hour when you need nothing else. When he pins your head down onto is lap, but only mildly. By shutting close the lids of your eyes with his two fingers. So that, you being the little girl you sometimes are, aren't overcome by the whim to open your eyes wide and just see. Him, his face right above yours. Holding you down that way, he drifts closer to you. You can feel the warmth of his breath growing lukewarm. The whiff of air leaving his nostrils, you can now feel on your upper lip and then he plays a bit of it upon your other lip, chin. You can feel him, milimeters away, teasing the air between your faces, but he isn't there yet. He's playing it slow, real slow. Testing your patience. Which apparently is the key to a lot of things. And you can't see a damn thing, his fingertips keep you in perfect pitch black darkness. You go crazy and part your lips to sigh. Then, exactly then. He. Seizes. You. 

The wait before that, feeling his hot exhaled air, was the Pursuit of Happyness. Yes. 

3:00 pm

The crumple of skin behind knuckles, 

A slight itch in the corner of an eye

The corner of the shelf, where

I store our bodily smells, like I hoard them

Protect them against time

Shut out from the volatile rest 

And this untiring motion

Breathless commotion 

As a fragile constant

Tethered to my soul

The woman downstairs

In a purple-blue nighty

A child clinging to her waist

Like a creeper to a tree

Being fed from a bowl of silver

The smile of that silver, in the afternoon sun

The belly of that child

The mashed dal in that bowl

His refusal to swallow

Her persistence to make him

Swallow

Like, we do

That (corner in the) shelf, forgotten

Chasing something we can't even see. 

Can't spare one constant unmoving hour in a day

Going through circles

And arcs, circles that don't even care to finish.

We wait at the ends of those arcs, 

To automatically shred into smithereens. 

Middle Berth

On the journey onward, they weren't with each other. He looked older, wore a stud in his left ear lobe. She tied her ironed hair into a messy knot, her face glowed in the sun. He hung out of the door of the railway bogie when they were moving past the valleys and each time he did that, she took a picture of him with the big camera that slung from her shoulder. They must have kissed when the tunnels came. No one could tell.

On the way back, they had only one ticket. His ticket. She travelled like an extension of his, like a limb- a hand or a leg. Always conjoint to him. He coaxed her extra luggage in, let her sit on his seat and stood by her and chatted on about whatever. Later slid beside her onto the middle berth. Together, they looked like one common mass of black. Except for his man-scarf of purple striped in white. They lay anti parallelly, and hugged each others' feet like pillows and slept. 

When the night got deeper, she took a U turn though. Now they lay against each other, she tousled his hair and talked into his ear, the one with the stud in it. Night long, most night long. Sometime after that, he must have left. Somewhere close to dawn. Gotten down at some odd station, less known. 

She covered her face with that scarf and slept the rest of the journey alone, like a log. 

Breaking the Mould

Learning to disappoint is vital. I barely do it. I fit into the mould with absolute precision, the mould that is crafted by expectations of everyone around me. I don't think I have genuinely disappointed anyone in the world with the honest exception of my boss.

I do exactly what is wanted of me, supposed anybody with my age and roots would do. I wrote all the exams I was supposed to, went to colleges that were understood to be good, slogged in a regular job because money and recognition are considered necessities, cultivated behaviors that were mostly socially acceptable and harbored guilt whenever I deviated. 

But I should unlearn the above, because I indeed should peel away the sense of shame. I haven't done it yet because I am worried of causing a lot of disappointment, of falling beneath. Now, better than never, I am wanting to break that mould. I want to be unafraid of letting down my, friends, family, admirers, even my indifferent gazers on the street. 

I got an extremely crazy haircut done today. I look like a patient of dementia, or an insane cow girl now. I can't tie it up, or let it down. It looks like a mad crow has munched away my mane. The hair, doesn't go with who I have been, nor does it go with who I so desperately want to be.

Before it grows back to its past original shape and size, I just hope that this, makes me learn to stand the ridicule. Makes me brave enough to cause disappointment and move on for the greater reason. I hope that and more love to come by me, inspite of who I be.

Anyway, if you love me, you would love me anyway. Won't ya? 

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon

We don't do reviews. Because we firmly believe we can never judge another man's work of art. We could never be equipped well enough for that. Things are subjective, we know. One cannot generate a score and draw that dirty line between good and bad. And say. This is that and that ain't this. 

I may be cheap to impress, more often than not, I love what I see than not-love. Though I might pretend the strength of sarcasm because love makes my knees weak, but I keep the margins wide, to err is beautiful. I am forgetting the point I was trying to make. 

Works of art change the way I see. Breathe in and out. And if you know me, you should know that I talk like a maniac for a book that I have adored, more than adored, a movie that don't let me sleep. And this is an understatement. The effect is sometimes toxic, repeatedly addictive, I can't unhook me from what I love, from who I love. The latter is, another story. Anyway

I am in awe of mad geniuses. They rock my world, more, much more than perfectionists. 

Getting back to the point, hold on. I found a movie, another movie, that I am gonna keep coming back to for a long time. It's nothing short of a treasure. Pulp fiction. Every time I watch it, I want to smooch John Travolta right out of the screen. 

Work of art, joy forever. 

PS: Not to be understood otherwise, title is a song from the movie. Google, at your own risk. Disclaimer. yeah, life's full of them. 

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.

Design

If we obeyed design, the body would have three centers. Collinear. Running across, its central axis. Making us fall apart into symmetrical halves.

The first center would be where our eyebrows meet. Like lovers tilting toward each other, gradually inclining and then secretly meeting behind the camouflage of scarce shoots of hair. But meeting nevertheless. And giving birth to the sanest of thoughts and ideas. Intellect. This must be the brightest spot in the body.

The second  would be where the clavicles meet the sternum. The exact center of the chest. From which emotions arise. Into which I collapse when the world doesn't stop chasing me. This point is the mother of all longing.

The third  would be the navel. Which is the center of being. Which sometimes makes us see in black and white. And sometimes in such myriad shades, that we go insane. It reverses all the science that is. And makes us sway to the whims of a quest that could never be quenched.

But we do not obey design. Any design. There are no symmetrical halves, we are falling apart into. We are mashed up, very twisted. Every vibe that arises, we don't know where it comes from. From the center of intellect, longing or being?

Every atypical mood swing, each pang to binge on food, every sudden depression and random elation, the mellow shades of romance and the utter stabs of heartbreak. Like literal stabs in the chest. And the warmth of tears on cheeks. We don't know what's leading us where. What's leading me where, and why.

Maya

I am told this world is a dream. Brahma's illusion. It's funny to even imagine, why the fuck am I being screwed so bad in someone else's illusion.

I used to dwell on the truth that everything I see is the sum of everything I imagine I see. I was shut off. There was a distinction between what was me, and what wasn't me. My four walls defined me. Protected me from diluting in my obsession, my cure-less narcissism. 

And I sometimes, in wildest dreams, I tried even to distillate whatever truth there was, however minuscule that may be, from enormous proportions of what everything just seemed to be.  

But now, with time, I have begun to live outside myself. That's the cost we pay. I'll tell you how. 

I am a lose summation what everyone imagines that I am. That I should be. Losing out on breath, I am aimlessly trying to become that one person that I ought to be. To get a better life. 

That notional ideal, is not the one thing I wished to be. Be-come. In fact, I didn't wish to become anyone. Anyone other than what I absofuckinglutely was. Not one trait more or less. No metaphor. No nothing. 

But look, now I live via others. Evaluate every moment of existence by how much I tended to become some tired-of-life-end-of-the-world-frustrated-tireless-moron. And I can't help myself. 

'What is truth? What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe, that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya, may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right?'

-Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

Seen Unseen

It's spring already. And I have a bevy of reasons, for why you wouldn't even think of loving me. Because I have this subtle quality to merge into the backgroud. The hem of my clothes must look like the edge of a weird piece of furniture. And my hair must look like wool. Or a tree. Perfectly overlookable. I must be almost invisible. Or completely invisible. And you wouldn't know until I scream that I am. That I am absolutely taking advantage of my invisibility to relish your every move. Every single movement that your muscles make. Absorbing each pause between your laughs. Understanding whom you be. And feast on the slight delights of the man you are.

I am almost proud,of how you wouldn't screech to a halt even if I rain dance right past your eyes. Or run hither and thither. Or use worn out archaic English for that matter. Because you are married to everything I am not. For you, I could at best be a non-existent no-body. Or in the very least, be like the lone girl at the next table in a restaurant you're at with someone else. You're only probably faintly aware of my presence and couldn't practically care any less.
..
Spring is almost over. And the first phase of Summer is breaking itself upon us by intermittent afternoon thundershowers. And I count that as first rain. In which today I got drenched. Bulbous drops tripped on my head and broke apart on my shoulders. And I felt like flinging away my hands and let virgin rain seep in. Wild waves made inroads into my mind. And dreams that would never be dropped in hints that they could be only if you had raised your eyes once. And looked at me,crouching, right next to you. Staring at you already, and waiting to be seen. Merely seen.

Chronic mental congestion

A shaky fingertip on the button of the remote. Impatient, ready to flick any moment. And skip this one to see what's on the next channel. Then wait for a few seconds, and repeat. Merging such seconds into minutes, minutes collapsing into hours. Spent with nothing done. Nothing gained or lost. Time consumed as if it hadn't even been there. Just the mind, more unsettled.

Looking. For something unknown. Probably. Aimlessly, loitering in shady corridors of an abandoned apartment. Weekdays gone by, weekends apart. Two days of pain. And Television is no consolation. Neither is the paper. Sheet after sheet of gibberish. Unread. Stacked under the bed. Crosswords, lost at. Peace, flung into pieces. Just so you know, time doesn't pass on its own anymore.

One has to make it glide by. Slowly and slowly. But without break. One has to try to ensure that time hasn't gotten stuck. Somewhere it was. Hours ago. And that it has moved on, relentlessly. You've grown older. Just the way you deserved. And you do it whatever way you want. No body cares. Stare mind-fucked at the TV. Stash away unread newspaper, assuming you read them. Paint your nails. Un-paint them. And then paint them again. Turn sides on the couch. Look out of the window. Write. Delete. Try to forget. And then try to remember. Or cry. No body cares what you do. As long as you try to keep your mind busy when time takes its own sweet time and moves on in the background.

These subtle distractions are indeed the drug. Because save them, there is nothing. There is nothing that can numb you. And make bearable the merging of seconds into minutes, and that of minutes collapsing into hours. When nothing meaningful is gained or lost. When time hasn't passed for a cause.

Blocks of the day, filled in with utter useless acts as such. Voids, sewed up. So that they don't stare open mouthed and breathe in anymore air. Wounds, unexposed. You abandon the remote, and hold the nib of a pen in one hand and dictionary in another. Braving to begin solving the next crossword of the day.

A Time Traveller's Whim

Hundreds of years ago, a land where reality was nothing short of magic, was struck by the insomnia plague. Contagious that it was, soon an entire village was gobbled up. In the beginning, the people couldn't have been more thankful to God because they had twice the time they used to have. But gradually, the peril unveiled itself, insomnia was obviously accompanied by amnesia. People began to forget. Everything about everything. Soon they had post-its on their cows saying that this was a cow. And later, lest they forgot, what to do with the cow, a note was added that it was to be milked every morning, milk which was to be boiled, added to coffee and sugar and drunk.

In a matter of months, entire houses had chits pasted on every inch of the wall. But one thing was inevitable, the past began to erase itself. Quietly, people began to lose track of who they were, who they had been. Like their life had been reduced to a single point; now. There used to be a palmist cum card reader who used to foretell the future before the plague had struck. Now she was asked by many, to read the past. And this old woman, studied lines on palms from their very origin, to reconstruct what had been, before hungry eyes who had lost all sense of their being.

This story appealed to me, got me thinking. The past is all I have. Despite being strewn with my anger and disappointments, strangely enough I owe it my entire life. And besides, before I deny it, I have wanted to go back in moments, sometimes to etched dates on the calender, sometimes to random stretches of time. To one of those grueling days at college, when I would open my eyes after a night's journey to the familiarity of home. To one of those long pre-dawn walks, intended to go nowhere, not even to see sunrise, but just to keep walking till the calves gave up. To not staring at the crackers bursting in the night sky, but at their reflection in his glasses, and being asked, what kind of a guy I thought he was. Some changed answers could have changed a lifetime of other things, filled solitude with compassion or even love.

But that's not why I want to go back, I wouldn't ever want to change what has happened. Like I said, I owe myself to the past, as it is. But the sheer wish to go back in time, the helplessness of not being able to do so, makes me realize that I am still, no matter how frailly, connected to myself. That fleeting whim of time travel, also makes me believe that what has been has almost been a trifle worth it.

Portrait of a Woman

There is a love that unsettles you. One that makes an unbelievable, wildly passionate, insane maniac out of you. Also, there is another, which makes you know peace, makes you grow roots. But who could choose..

She would write in wild bursts of energy. Words that, least to say never flowed rationally, from what was written before. Every new scribble felt like a non-sequitur. There could have been a flow though, not an obvious one but. A connection too vague, in your plane. Too obvious in hers. No body read her mind, she wouldn't stay as long to let them.

In unwashed jeans and with the collar of her jacket raised up, she would roam around. In this obscure, neglected hilly town. Wherein she arrived because she wanted to be treated like the town itself, thrown away, forgotten. Dwell in absolute solitude. Once a month, she would while into the grocery store, hurl in jars of coffee and packs of cigarettes into her bag. Like she was greedy, and she wouldn't survive till her next visit there.

She would walk back, glide rather, on the uphill roads breathing in the sooty exhaust of standstill cars in unending traffic jams. Panting, underneath her layers of wool and the jacket with the collar raised up. With an umbrella in one hand, that she would throw away the moment it rained, and get drenched. Would stop at the most unpredictable of places, never take pictures, or notes. Visit the wildest of dreams, clandestine brothels, deserted monasteries, abattoirs. Stare, with still eyes, a mocking cold glare in them, and move on.

She had abandoned, nobody knew how many accomplished years behind. Middle-aged she was. With no past. No future, only a fleeting present. With a quest, a faint one though, to empty herself into words. And to live by those.

Alone, you soak pillows, yearning for love. In the company of a man, who doesn't get you, you're lonely. On a lunch table with family, you feel even lonelier. More the listless souls, the more left out you are. In a crowd, you feel the loneliest. The only company that survives, is the one which is drawn to you by the measureless understanding of solitude..

Chhaya.

Chhaya. You're not beautiful. You have one of those thousand faces, that one could easily miss. Very predictable. Very rejectable. You ain't fair. And your dusky doesn't sell either. It's a bad dusky. Almost tending to dark. Tanned. Like grilled in the sun. Your lips are too thin. Very unkissable. They're not even rosy, they're a darker shade of brown. Brown lips. Your nose isn't like that of a princess. Not as pointed. And look, you don't have a nose ring either, that could have added some quotient. You don't. The eyes, they don't have lashes long enough. Not dreamy enough, no. Big eyes, don't make up for all your other lacunae. Big eyes are not worth a dime. Your hair doesn't stand up for your face either. It's not straight, like ironed. It's not curly, like curly is supposed to be. It's a mad wavy. Nobody would fuck that. Take my word. The chin, even the very end of your face is a ridiculous bony protrusion. It makes you look older. Way older. Yours is a lost battle. Your cheeks are sunken. And despite your sunken cheeks, you have a double chin. Have you asked yourself why. Because, you're ugly. 

There is no thing called inner beauty. It is one of the most pseudointellectual illusions ever created, to satisfy man, to euphemize your ugliness. Don't listen to them, Chhaya. Listen to me. I am the truth. 

And beauty is an opiate older than life itself. It's a myth because nobody knows what it is, truly is. Beauty is a bias, not even the creator could overcome, Chhaya. So I have created thee. To always remind me that your exact antithesis is what appeases.

Drawing Parallels

A book feels like a man. Force yourself enough and you may catch a glimpse of the parallels. One or two, here and there. Your lines may not be parallel enough if you haven't read too many books or haven't met too many men. No offense. Read on if you feel this will make some sense. Or if you want me to give you another reason to quit reading me.

I judge a book by the cover, by the title. A man by his face. I do, I am a hypocrite. I choose a book by its smell. The one that emanates from between unread pages, if you take your nostrils close enough. The smell aspect is the most uselessly non-functional utility of a book. I choose a man on similar useless non-functional parameters. I say I look for connection. But whenever I chance upon a connection guy, I pass him on as a friend. A connection guy is never perfect. The connection I am talking about is the core functional utility of the man, everything else is a useless non-functional utility, if you know what I mean. I choose a man based on what he is, rather than who is. The ones I have had ruthless infatuations on, I have been attracted to for the most evil of reasons.

I love all the books that I have read. I haven't read many, but it's hard to hate one that I have read. It could be because of the sheer amount of time and labor that has gone into finishing it from cover to cover. Each one has too much of my love in it to be hated. I haven't met many men either. But it's hard to hate all those that I have passed by. Even underneath my shallow sheath of hatred, there is a secret love. I never truly get over a man. Just like I can go back to a book I have read and flip through it, read through my favorite lines, pause at the pages folded in their corners. Kiss the creased covers, fill its fragrance into my soul, once again. It's never too late for me to go back to an old flame. Because I can never hate him, no matter how badly he has abandoned me. Because I always see the fault in me, rather than him. And he has had too much my love to be hated.

Books are heartbreaking. Some of them scream the truth so loud in my ears, the truth that I am not, that it breaks my heart to know it. Books tell me of love that I have not, books give me thrill that in my life I have none, books make me understand how despicable life is which I am too inert to feel, books show me that we're all beautiful indeed which I no more believe in. When I am touched by a book, I close my eyes and lay it on my chest. When I inhale and exhale, it seems I am breathing from the book. The book has suddenly reached a place inside me where no one had been before. I didn't know such a place even existed. At that precise moment books are heartbreaking. Men too are heartbreaking.