A Decade

Now my life comes to surmise this building. Yes, the time has come. There is a drink on the rocks. There is a kitchen in the corner and cups and saucers don't clean themselves. How stunning. There is a sink, that fills itself up. There's a bunch of dried curry leaves in the bottom drawer of the fridge, if anybody cares. Life is dry. Life is good. How can anyone describe life with adjectives. Wouldn't that be judgemental? It is what is is. By itself, in its own absolute singular capacity. I do not choose to describe it with adjectives and demean it. You wouldn't believe, this is the only place wherein I speak up. Because it's a one way road. I am not the one that confronts. I am the one that quietly places an opinion on the table and vanishes. It's my audacity that you don't want to see and I don't want to unleash. 

My neighbors, got a row of potted plants today. What looked like a shrub of green chillies and mustard seedlings in those pots, I hope I am wrong. The building needs more flowers. Women on floors other than mine have acquired entire corridors to plant cacti, crotons and money plant. Money plant is actually Devil's ivy. Now I didn't know that. The woman who planted them so generously told me. They also have bougainvillea by the bunches. Red, pink and white. Some women have entire trees on relatively tiny pots, one of tamarind for instance. A tree literally standing on a tiny little pot.Some women have their own hanging gardens of potted plants. Table roses and the kind. But still, the building needs more flowers. 

So I got three potted plants. Not three, four actually. One, the holy basil. Two, moonbeam. Three, hibiscus. And the fourth one is clitoria. Yes, the one that looks like the female-holiest-of-the-holies. They are pretty low maintenance, they don't flower much, but I check on them twice everyday. Sit with them and think. When I have time. I wish I had more time.

I started blogging exactly a decade ago. Not a day has gone by when I didn't wish I had more time. More time. More time. More time. 

Terminus

I am not Holden Caulfield. I am more together than that. Nevertheless, there is always a drought on my face. As if I have lost my way. The blood began surging up my temples. It was almost audible, it was so loud. My skull was increasingly unable to keep the noise within. I felt like a cola. I walked to the nearest parlor. They don’t keep colas anymore. They had skimmed milk and yoghurt and juices of about hundred and twenty nine kinds. But no cola. This was a place for kids may be. Then I looked around saw. Lots of kids. Toddlers, hand holders, some with honeysuckles in their mouths. This was a mistake, meeting this guy at a place that was for kids and their mommies. Gross mistake. But it was too late to change it now. And anyway, one could always go to the next floor of the mall. And drag the conversation to up there. Or to the basement garage where scores of cars are parked in abandon. Some cars have lain so much dust on them, they probably have been lying there for months. The owner has forgotten where they parked their car and gone back from a party from the pub on the roof by hailing an Uber or something. And suddenly they haven’t found their car after waking up and went looking. Tracing back their steps from last night. That would not be a passable theory though. Because the first place they would look out for would be the parking of the mall. But not if they had gone pub hopping. From one to the next to the one after that, losing count, going absolutely crazy, painting the town red and yellow and all the shades of pastel there are. And waking up like a total amnesiac. That would be a good story, yes. Definitely. I checked the time on my phone again. It was 11:37. What was keeping him so long? I texted him asking where he was. He was delayed at the hospital he said. I didn’t call because hearing his voice would give me the shivers. So I just texted. And he was at the hospital where he had come to see his grandmother who had been put on the ventilator two days ago. Somebody had sent him downstairs to the OTC medicine store to get something and he was just about catching the bus to the mall. I was at least forty five minutes away by bus. And boy! Was I secretly relieved or what? I could still pull away. Compress myself into my shelled cocoon, tell him I couldn’t wait any longer because the assistant of the ENT specialist had called. An operation had come up around 3 pm, so my appointment had been proponed to like 2 pm. Yes, that sounded true. No more sweating. No more shivering. I could lie and get away with it. He belonged to one of the water tight containers in my life. Just like everyone else. My life has lots of water tight containers, did I ever tell you? Everyone I know is in a separate one. I like no links between two characters in my world that doesn’t verify it through me. So if I lied to him, and he was a well-kept secret, I might as well get away with it. He would never find out. Except that he would get that feeling. That I didn’t want to be seen, just yet.

An Excerpt from::: A Tryst at Terminus. 

Odd Jobs

1

He works as a security guard. Far from home. Like two nights and one day away. That's very far in train terms. He sees his family only twice a year. Going home for Diwali is a constant. And once more, whenever the opportunity fell through. He speaks a different dialect. And lives in a single room asbestos shack. He cooks his meals on a solitary stove. Three neat meals everyday. Rice and dals and rotis. Sometimes chicken too. Aromas fill the air around his one roomed existence. Apparently, he uses garlic in everything. Whenever I see him, he is slicing garlic, chopping garlic, crushing garlic in his stone pestle.

2

She works as a sweeper for the municipality. Wearing one of those fluorescent jackets over her tattered sari, she would sweep the sides of roads. She collected polyethylene bags and plastic bottles and gutka sachets from the streets that somebody forgot to put in the garbage bin and put then in her sack which she would finally load into the garbage truck. She worked with poise. As if there was no hurry. In her own comfort zone. She would smile at other women like her and at the end of it all share their harvest. They plucked whatever was worthy from the trees on the land beside the streets that nobody owned. Be it drumsticks, or wild spinach, or papaya or pumpkin flowers or guava. There was never much. But how much ever there was, the sweeper woman and her friends took their shares in the pouches they made from the ends of their saris.

Erosion

A well-rounded two year old baby. Her plump cheeks. Being held like a cat would be. Flagellant. Like a worm. There is a certain glee on her face. And a lump in my throat. Because life is far from cake. It's so hard sometimes, it's not worth bringing another person in between us. To suffer it all from the beginning and till the end. The end doesn't come easy.  Slowly, but steadily dreams are powdered. And blown off like dust. Food doesn't taste as good. Days turn into a bore. Love was but a rumour. We thought it was real, but only it wasn't. Now we are stuck in a mesh of equations, unknowing if we are a variable or a fixed element. Love was but a rumour. Dreams don't be anymore. Where we had envisaged, to be, and where we truly are. It's not worth the little baby girl. It's not. Really not. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Second Hand Sorrow

It was the peak of summer. The sun beat down almost relentlessly. There was no sign of any rain or breeze. Skies were often clear, unabashed blue. Roads shone in endless mirages.

His grandmother fell ill, just around that time. She was old. But there is no such age beyond which one can say that a person needn't be. Anymore. So she was that way. Old, ill, under the constant care of her children and grandchildren. He was terribly attached to his grandmother. Almost all his childhood memories would have glimpses of his grandmother pickling mangoes or grinding pulses or de-husking rice or simply sitting between all her grandchildren and telling stories to ease long afternoons of summer vacations. And no wonder he missed her and was miserable to see her because everyone thought that she was too old to be now.

He was delicate and sensitive. The phase that we were in then, I was yet to see his sentimental side. He never expressed emotion per se. He cracked jokes, I laughed a lot. And that was about it. A few times things had gotten out of hand where in emotions had come into the picture. Like I had messed up someplace and I needed someone just to talk to and not merely make jokes. Or the time he forgot to wish me on my birthday and was apologetic like a bunny. Like that. Apart from such occasions, never had he ever brought up feelings, sorrow, fears into our conversations. We had been very safe that way. Very insulated from each other.

So when he spoke about his grandmother the way he did, I felt very unprepared. Sometimes providing consolation is not one's forte. What can you do? But I genuinely felt for him and I told him everything was going to be okay. There are hospitals and doctors and everything. But deep down we both felt, this was it. I discarded that deep-down-feeling as my ingrained pessimism and told him that I truly-deeply felt his granny was going to be fine.

And I don't know how, but he got a rush from what I said. Instead of being sad, he planned to go and see her. The temperatures would make the journey impossibly hard. But I didn't have the heart to stop him. He was like a child to me and all I could do was quietly obey and execute whatever he wanted to be done.

I packed him some fruit and a few bottles of juice in his backpack. Literally squeezing his clothes and laptop for space. And saw him off at the bus stop. He didn't text me on reaching or to tell me how things were. I didn't bug him either. Space was an important thing. And suddenly I felt like an egotistic bitch. I am that way, nobody can help me.

The next day, he texted me that his 'aai' had passed away. 'Aai' is what one calls their maternal grandmother. I felt a tug in my heart. I cried and couldn't sleep at all that night. Still didn't know what to text him back.

Inertia of Rest

Lately I've picked up a rather weird habit. Before falling asleep, I listen to some guitar instrumentals, read my own poems and cry. Yes. And my nostrils block. But the nasal drop is in the top flap of my backpack on  the living room sofa. And nobody is gonna get that for me. So I turn sides half the night with a blocked nose and develop a slow yet stringent insomnia.

I've been living alone for the last six months or more. And it's one of the best things that has ever happened to me. There are fewer issues to be dealt with. Lesser questions to be answered to. Lesser conversations to be faked and alibis to be phrased. It's better. Definitely much.

But there's nobody to get you the nasal drop from the living room, in the middle of the night. Everything has its pros and cons. I learnt this phrase at the tender age of sixteen or a bit later. May be twenty-one. When I had begun having opinions about things. And I repeat it to myself very often.

I've never had strong opinions about many things, nor is my voice that loud. I am not that type of person. I am a classically mild person. A classically mild person who keeps a journal. In a layman's language, I am your typical run-of-the-mill loser. I am not trying to get anywhere. Except putting in all my might to avoid paranoia.

As I wrote, I read my own poems and cry. When there are at least three half-written-probably-abandoned stories waiting in my laptop for my collection of short stories. But the words wouldn't just come to me. Right now. 

Someone, probably a well wisher had anonymously commented long ago and had asked me to get myself checked if I had one of those syndromes. Asperger's syndrome. Because I am so completely shut off. You know. I felt offended immediately. But not anymore. Also another old friend/companion-of-sorts had written that life comes a full circle. That there is as much joy, as there is sorrow.

I am realizing that he is right. And waiting for my nose to unblock by itself.   

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. 

Memories from April

It was a summery afternoon. I felt like watermelon dessert in vanilla ice cream. The kind that comes into vogue every time the season changes. Summer dictates a lot in our lives and you know how much I detest her for that. Anyway, I genuinely craved for the dessert. How neatly, 'twas served on a bowl held up on a tripod stand, as if it were the godamn chemistry lab. The watermelon cubes, de-seeded and mounted upon by three scoops of vanilla ice cream. Very geometrically symmetrical. It was perfect for the onset of summer. And that only. Later months of May and June, nothing, absolutely nothing helped. 

There was no remedy for summer, then. The cranky air cooler had a history of mood swings. It worked if it felt like. No lassi, no sugarcane juice would stand by you. The air was hot enough to give you blisters. We sat for hours inside the ATM. That was the only placed that was air conditioned. Until it too gave up one day. 

Summers gave way to very typical blossomings though. The smell of raw mangoes and the relentless nostalgia of first love, sometimes. I don't remember if I fell in love in summer. Now memories don't work that way, do they? I feel a mild loss when I look back. A mild one, yes. 

The mountains would turn grey from all the dried grass and leaves. And catch fire. It was a scary thing, the way those forest fires looked at night, up from the roof. Where I sometimes spent hours trying to forget the stifling heat in the house. As if ghosts had come back to life, or as if the fires would not be quenched and would spread to the plains and burn everything with them.

But you, in addition to getting me that glorious watermelon dessert, got me a dozen other consolations. Nothing bad was going to ever happen. You even took me boating, to take summer off my mind. To the park at one end of the city that had a lake. And that lake had huge trees across its edge where bats lived, probably. And when you paddled too close to the edges, a swarm of bats would swoop right over your head. 

How I clutched on to the sleeves of your shirt then. I panicked and couldn't find your wrist in the dark. And you told me that bats were blind. And that they can't even see me. How reassuring was that. 

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. 

  

A Story

Sometimes, the stories you write, don't let you sleep. At night. 

Your eyes burn all day through. Shamelessly, unbridled, your two eyes look red. 

Like you made love all night, through dawn and didn't, hence get a wink of time, to sleep. 

But that there was no real person. 

All night, you stayed up, making love to your story. 

And not getting enough of it. That's the libido of an idea. 

A plot, that is driving you insane, almost as if it's new love and raw lust.  

Each time you touch it up, undo and redo twists and turns, create pages, paragraphs and moments, it is the equivalent of touching the lover's body. 

Feeling for curves, squeezing soft flesh. 

Every pause in writing and the distant stare are like assuming and finding his arms in the pitch dark. 

Waiting for fiction to come to you is like waiting for his next surprise move on you. 

Like the act of love, writing a story is a two way thing. Being the subject and object in the same sentence. Being made love to and making all the good endless love, to him.   

The men and women you are constantly creating and disintegrating, the narrations of their face come alive so strong and so real that their faces stare back at you from the screen and you can't sleep no more.

It's like Frankenstein. But a good one. This story of mine. 

A Happy Man

A happy man is hard to find. Specially to my eyes, that I constantly squeeze out only the morose. But this one, is a happy man. He oozes with calm and content. It's almost like a spectacle. Like a natural wonder, to me. A man, so in his skin. I wish he could scatter the dust of his joy on the jinxed like us.

It comes with a lot of seasoning, this happiness.He wasn't born with this. Nobody is. He must have consciously, laboriously developed into his present person. He wears it like his attire, the Ganesa like laughter, the suitable little paunch, his gestures, everything about him is so slow and beautiful. I wonder what thoughtcrime have I ever committed to feel the way I do. Forever trapped in my imagined list of things to do, I am so restless. Whereas, the happy man's eyes are like a calm ocean. Glistening and deep. Like he's trying to tell me, life is not about today or tomorrow. It's going to stretch decades and I could be myself. That this day to day struggle is going to kill me and that I shouldn't. Allow it to do so. That in the really long run, tiny compromises are the harbinger of so much joy.

Happy man, relishes his lunch of four side dishes. He takes two full helpings of the rice that his wife cooks and packs. His daughter's name is stickered onto the rear windshield of his car. He doesn't care about the font, it's his daughter's name. He talks good of his wife and how she chops up the vegetables the night before and keeps them in the fridge. About how she takes care of the tiniest of things, to make him happy. He talks good of even his house maid. He talks good of everyone. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have an opinion, he does. Just that he does not make a business out of being an asshole.

Some people when they exhibit their happiness, they helplessly make it appear so fake. And I have an allergy for such people. But not this man. His happiness, is probably infectious. Need I say more.  

Leap Day

Today is February 29. It's an extra day. Today is the day when Phil Dunphy takes out the kids to indulge in things they wouldn't usually do. It's an extra day, it ought to be taken as a privilege.

The last time we got an extra day was in 2012. I cannot remember the state we were in when that happened. I must have been reeling under some kinda pressure. Something must have been irking, troubling me. I wasn't the problem solving machine then, that now I have become. I was a slower lamer version of the woman I am now. But pain and pressure is omnipresent in the life. Imagined, if not real. But still there. I must have wasted February 29, 2012 exactly the way I am whiling away February 29, 2016 today. It's sad, how predictably and ruthlessly uneventful life could be. Introspection is vile. Last night, I showed the symptoms again. Of mild insomnia, bubbling depression and a nascent headache.

And I am sure, come 2020, if alive, I am going to be the same. I am going to let February 29 pass without anything meaningful, worthwhile. It's who I have become. Can't help it.

God bless Philip Dunphy. And his three kids. And pray, God bless me. And make me better. Happy leap day all.

My blog is gonna turn 10 in a couple months. Yeah, 10 fucking years. That's twice half a decade man.

Culinary Flashbacks

He has a long history with food. He ain't the fat kind though. Far from obese, he's lean and lanky. It's unfair. But that's how it is. The way he speaks of food, makes your mouth water.

When he was in college, campus life treated him to many delights. In his days, there used to be a guy who used to vend omelettes through a pigeon hole in the compound wall. After past midnight case discussions and team meetings, they walked down in gangs and surrendered themselves to the guilty pleasure of cheesy warm omelettes sprinkled with black pepper. He would fork out the tiny bits of green chilies. And relish the rest. Order a couple of refills if need be. He barely ate the dinner in the hostel mess. And hence, the calories never showed up.

He worked in Calcutta for a bit. A few years I guess. The city that would set your palate straight. It's so difficult to think of anything else when you are in Calcutta. Anything but food. But he wasn't in for the street food. The chaats and the pani puris. There were, are these shanties, in corners of streets. Their roofs made of hay and tilted walls nearly falling apart. These shanties dish out lunch meals as early as eleven. In the A M. And the beeline in front of them, men scattered around, holding plates made of sal leaves never seemed to dwindle. He used to be a fan of these.

Since he used to be, I used to be. He told me, they served steaming hot rice and dolloped with lentils cooked in vegetables, potatoes, pumpkin, papaya. There would be a lump of sweet and sour dessert of dates and tomatoes. On the edge, you could get a slice of lemon with salt and a green chilly. And a dish or two more. But he was more nuts about the fish in mustard than about anything else. Pieces of deep fried fish simmered in a paste of mustard and garlic. The aromas would disintegrate before me every time he brought up the fish. Garnished in fresh coriander. He would go on about the patrons of the shanty if I didn't stop him. But then again, that was very very long ago. Now, I wonder what he eats. Where he lives. And what his newly wed wife cooks for him.

Pheromones

If indeed, it was all about pheromones, what the fuck have we done?! We have gotten ourselves into something irreversible, called love, lust and the like? If it's just the smell of the lover, that we can't overcome, isn't it an overstatement to call ourselves a smart race? It's just one thing. The smell of the lover, that intoxicates us and keeps us tied. The way his chest smells, or the odour of his mouth, the smell coming off the ruggedness of his feet or that from his soft fingertips. It's just a smell. A pheromone. A smell very very categorically belonging to the lover, that we cannot just overcome, then it's more black magic than it is love. And love is too much the price to pay. But what can we do? Our nostrils cannot overcome him and his smell. An odour that belongs to him in the whole entire world and therefore, has no replacement. No complement. But what, on earth, can we do? Pheromones, like run the world. They have been, for a long long time now.

Yet in intervals, we go totally absofuckinlutely immune. Not only to pheromones. But to all other senses. We feel no hunger, no heat, no cold, no thirst, no libido. No passion, no whim to be anywhere or with anyone. But continue to stretch one's own solitary line of existence? And just that. May be, this interval is called peace, if not joy.

This

We are here now, because we couldn't be anywhere else. Life has taken the exact number of turns and twists that it has, taken. Shorter and longer paths. Through whirlwinds and thunderstorms. Night walks and dawn breaks. Deafening silences and paralytic dumbness, later, we are here. Because we couldn't be anywhere else. But now, here. This.

We have stared at graveyards, through nights. And written poems on heartache. Breathed in smoke. Breathed out fumes. Made strangers our own. Discarded the ones that loved us, and those we loved, also. Walked by hills, gotten scared. Felt infinite. Crumbled under the sad misery of our very very tiny and hapless existences. Tasted momentary exhilaration. Felt bound, completely incarcerated, sometimes. For others, for our own selves. We've blamed others for our endless suffering and passed the blame. With ease. And sat back, and turned away. 

We have walked towards and walked away from. We have tried to write. To read. See through others' eyes. We've won, sometimes just the illusion of victory, vis-a-vis sometimes having actually won. But mostly we have failed. We have mulled over ending our lives. Yes, we have. Shamelessly. And thought that there be no shame in that, either. 

But more than anything else, more than everything else, we've run for time, and against it. To get things done. Some many of them. Groceries, salon appointments, laundry, work-stuff, shopping dates, temples, cleaning and wiping and dusting, errands, payments, receipts, crap, crap, crap. More than anything else, we haven't learnt to pause. We haven't waited to absorb, whatever is happening to us. We haven't rested to appreciate, the simple, the tiny and the beautiful. 

We've fucked up big time. By running around and not pausing. To be here. Exactly here, now. This. Yes. You heard me. 

Moonlighters

Dirt can have categories too. There's several kinds of it. First, there's broken bottles, glass. Then there's cardboard, smashed cartons. Then there are polythene bags. Hordes of it. Like our worlds have collapsed into it. Also there are piles of scrap metals. Rubber. And other things, I don't know the names of. Everyday, they sit down in the morning heat and categorize the garbage they pick up. Women and children. Women sit around in spaced out semi circles and talk in their high pitched voices. Covered from neck to toe. Except their beautiful pale yellow faces. Like features carved out of stone. In an artist's mind. Hair tied in a bun. Women who are barely even women yet. Holding babies, clinging to their chest, bend down to inspect the scrap collected for the day. They laugh, their shrill voices aloud. 

Their children, each must have at least four or more, play stray games every day. All damn day, no school. No books, chalks and pencil sharpeners. They roll around cycle tires with a stick. Sit in old abandoned cars and pretend they drive. And there are lots of them. So many of them. Young girls, too hold babies. Boys chase trucks that drive past. Their laughter sounds like utopia. Like the last knot of constraint on human life has been undone. These boys experience, fathomless freedom. The younger ones are naked. The older ones don torn pants and crumpled dirty shirts. Barefeet. Some of them pick out shoes from the garbage it seems. The girls sit on trolleys and watch. In the yellow moon of dusk, they begin to look more like their mothers. It's a scary bent in time, when that happens. The drunk men, who would have just gotten up in the afternoon, after a change of clothes may be, head out to be drunk again, tonite. But before that, they sit down, where the garbage had been categorised in the morning, for a quick game of cards.

The slum nearby is that of prostitutes. It's said that some of these garbage picker women also moonlight as prostitutes. And give them a run for their money. And why not!

Cold

That night was an unusually cold one. Now that is strange because it doesn't get cold down here. We are very close to the sea. You wouldn't hear the waves. But there's the sea in 10 miles. Embraced by mangrove on the coast, and tiny fishermen huts, the sea makes its presence felt every now and then. In the warm afternoon breeze that brushes you awake from lazy siesta. Or in the mild sunshine dissolved in morning air. We know that it never gets too cold, down here.

But that night was strange. May be it was because of the air conditioner buzzing in top of her head. There was absolutely no need for the air conditioner. Or even the ceiling fan. For that matter. On the other hand a thin quilt could suffice. It could have been so that her immunity to cold had suddenly plummeted. You know magical things happen. People also write about it. So probably that it wasn't cold and she imagined that she was shivering. Psychosomatic sensation of sorts. But her jaws actually chattered. She clenched her fists into her belly and rolled like an embryo. Such things can't be imagined.

In half sleep, she turned towards him. He needed the air conditioner. Their skins reacted differently to the same temperature. I mean, how could that be? He felt hot when she felt cold. And they had a lifetime ahead of them, at that moment. A bit of it past too.

May be the cold was an excuse to hug him tighter that strange strange night, she murmured, and went ahead.

Beauty Business

She used to work at a beauty parlour in the city. It was no serious business, everyone said. Just for passing the time and so. She wasn't trained or anything. But she was, she said. She had worked at one of those well known parlours in the big city. For two years almost, when she was put up in one of those grim working women's hostels. That dingy existence sans sunlight. But every morning, she tidied up, put on her purple uniform, tied her hair back and plunged into bringing beauty into our lives. Scores of eyebrows she threaded, faces she scrubbed and de-tanned, legs and hands waxed, and on and forth and on and forth. When she sat down a little perplexed and drained, she spoke on nevertheless, about how a little bit of lemon juice  rubbed on elbows, made the skin softer or when cotton balls soaked in nail polish remover held upon nails for long actually cleaned them well and merely wiping didn't do the job that good. She was full of such tips. But herself, she was a taught beauty, neither soft, nor mushy, nor pink, neither white. It was as if, she never tried all those tips on herself. Those things were for others and she was far apart.

When time ran out, she was asked to come home, leave that job and be married. So she did as asked to. She withdrew her limbs, fingers held in a fist and toes crumbled, into a ball of human flesh for months. And survived that way in hibernation. People talked behind her back, that it was only too late for her to have a child. And her indulgence in that job had made her more futile. She now lived in one of those small industrial towns, her husband worked at the power plant. They stayed in staff quarters, on the first floor, slightly more lit than her old room in the hostel. And they had a huge portico, even bigger than the whole house. Boughs of nimbus and mango made it shady in the afternoon, sunsets were a thing to behold from up there.

It was in that portico that she told stories to her unborn child, and there that later her little daughter took her first steps. There that she picked out stones from dal and peeled vegetables. There that she knit sweaters for her loved ones and sent them away. But waiting for her husband to return from work, when she sat down a breath to look at the sun set, sometimes the mixed whiff of Parisian cosmetics, still, bothered her nose.

Finding Happyness

That one night I met him, is quite etched in memory. I can literally, if I close my eyes now, see him confidently smile at me. That was years ago. We were strangers then. I was awkward around strangers. Still am. But he, he has this warmth that could make you feel cuddled in moments. We spoke for a couple of minutes, I can't distinctly recall about what. Only faintly. I could feel his eyes roving over my face.

Suddenly I turned back for something, for a moment. When I got back, he wasn't there. He had left without saying goodbye. That was the first time, I noticed my man. Like, his person, was created in my mind. You know how people exist twice, once for real, and once inside your mind. His momentary absence clicked and stayed. That was probably a Friday.

And hundreds of such Fridays later, on a similar Friday night, I married him.

Here's to wishing, and silently praying, that despite everything that has been, and everything more that is going to be, we find happyness. And it, finds us.

Misery

I am incapable of relishing happiness. No sadness lasts me either. All I feel is fear, fear itself. Fear manifests as misery. Sometimes the lack of it means, a little bit of joy. But fear is always the underlying. And everything else is its derivative.

All I want right now, is a li'l bit of sky over mah head!. All I want, all I want, all I want.