Selfie

Small steps mattered so much. They were the most hope we could gather in the chaos of our lives. Tiny stretches of distance, stepped, tongue bit between teeth, so afraid we may be wrong, yet not looking back, taking that step anyway. Because, all we wanted lay on the other end of those series of steps. But one day, we merely stopped taking those. Tiny steps. Put our feet to rest. Probably, it was fatigue. The loss of hope. We preferred the chaos of our lives, instead of giving it any direction. Or there was no reason, at all. Years later, we are exactly where we left ourselves that day. Or we have regressed a bit. So, we cry like a baby, like the world's gonna end, watching the climax of one silly movie. Beg ourselves to hold on to what we have. And ask, to be held in return. Tight. And for long. 

Resurrection

You don't keep any memory. Somehow you are never inside your body. Flesh is too loose an envelope to be in, for your mighty soul. Your frivolous mind. Winged, all the time, you are never exactly where you are. Your co-ordinates are imprecise.

That's because there's some concern hidden somewhere. How to get home early. What excuses to make, for this and that. How did that book end? Some movie character that's hanging in your for longer than required. Nagging you, making you lose your mind, over issues that barely exist in the premises of the beautiful present you are in.

The moment you are in, is unfortunate never to have you.

A by product of that being, you don't have any memory of this life you are living. Rain showering, from above, and spraying back up from moist earth, the smoothness of bare skin, the smell of mouths, feel of cold wind on warm cheeks, the whispers of confessions made and forgotten, slant sunlight filtering through  sky-lights, staring at endless horizons, getting lost in mist, letting go of your hands and spinning around your vertebrae, faster and faster, turning blind, dumb and deaf, ultimately; there are absolutely no memories, of anything at all. Because all that time, I reiterate you have been somewhere else.

So you are relieved that once this beautiful present passes away, you wont miss it anyway. Because you are devoid of memory. Sounds so riskless huh.

In the end, though, nothing can assure you, that. After everything is over, you won't be alone for one moment and not remember each damn thing. Every memory suddenly recollecting in corners of your mind. Debilitating you from standing. Making you take the fall. You find yourself resurrected amongst a pile of ashes.

Midpoint

The most undying of love stories, always end in the middle. 

Even after invigorating beginnings and debilitating climaxes, the story per se, doesn't end.

You, reader, are taken to a point, somewhere vaguely in the middle of the story. An approximate midpoint. 

When the love was ripe enough, not sour yet. 

Some rendezvous. Very distinct, disconnected from the consequential chain of events. 

Something fragile, mostly inconsequential.

Like they*, for instance. They met, drawn together due to the heat in their young blood, had numerous conversations on their ideologies, on movements they thought would change the world, how they would all break free et al. They got married, she got pregnant. And he was killed. The rest of the story continued sans him. The humdrum around them went on. Countries, rivers, seas, snow and sand. 

In the end, you, reader are told, what he saw when he was killed. Before his eyes flashed a scene from the forgotten midpoint. Each had fallen for the other, entirely. But there was this stalemate. He had asked her to come for a movie. Matinee show. He would hold her hands, in the dark. For the first time, touch her, in that way. She hadn't made it till the interval. He had waited for her in the sun alone. And when she did come, they must have smiled. He angled down his head, his hand forming a canopy between them to shield her from the sun. 

They stood there pretty much frozen in time, as the story ended. Slowly, simultaneously as he died. 

Sometimes all you remember after having shut the book, despite all its drama, the meandering of the story line, is this singular moment stolen from the middle, and craftily placed in the end. 

* Gauri & Udayan: picked up from The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (words in italics are verbatim)

Today

What date would you keep safe for memory's sake. Because the days of our lives are listless, least said. A list of forgettable activities lined back to back, front to front. No space in between, to squeeze in one breath. So we need one day to celebrate, commemorate, birth, death, love, estrangement.

For love, it gets slightly ambiguous. Which day do you pick? The day of the wedding? The day of the unholy rings? The day you confessed, you loved, indeed, you did? The day he confessed, he loved, he did? Your first official date? Was it dinner? Just coffee, or a drive? Or just flowers? Gerbera and roses? The day you fought for the first time, and you imagined a disagreement was even possible? Or when you shared the warmth of the same sheets? Which? Tell me.

I chose the day when his eyes caught mine. For the very first time. As absolute strangers. The first passing comment. Pleasantries. Stretch of a couple minutes.

But the exact date was again lost in memory, I hadn't noted it down. So I played a small trick of assumption. Hit -n- trial. I remembered the month, and the day of the week too, approximately. He had made me feel like Friday, always, anyway. So I forcibly assigned the day, I was going to commemorate, say a quiet prayer in my head. Whisper a wish, count the months. 

And that's how I chose the exact day. I picked today. 

Honeymoon -2

One amongst those multiple of packaged honeymoon offers, ones with cash back offers on booked hotel rooms, particularly. Arranged in the worst kind of rush, stress levels bursting your pulmonary, the one hurried event of a lifetime, all scheduled to happen in the right time, in between the right witnesses, enough pictures to taken of the wedding, in plastic predestined poses. To ensure with certainty that you have left behind all your friends and enemies in arranging meticulously the most ostentatious expression of the time and wealth you didn't have, you end up at an obscure airport. Standing in front of arrivals, congested red bangles in hands, shades et al, posing with all your luggage for a stranger to take picture, to commemorate the beginning of your honeymoon. The stranger is your husband. Yes, the man to who you had once quite mentioned that x went to Bali, z went to Maldives, which one do you think is better?

Then the series of lone photographs begins. You click him, he clicks you. Sometimes, you even switch shades, his deep golden tint, for your dark green. Vice versa. You enter rooms, err suites, of fairy white, scattered with pink. Emblems of the love stationed in every possible shelf to remind you, that make love is all you are ever supposed to do. And then you take some pictures of that room as well. From various angles. Fitting in windows and sea facing balconies in your tiny 13 megapixels frame. Ultimately you coat yourself with sunblock and head out. Some more suffocations to be endured, you take pictures of the delectables ( with their fair share of aphrodisiacs, I believe) and then head back to the suite, sun tanned anyway, to indulge in the sundry. Because you are expected to.

Sometimes, company is so much more asphyxiating than solitude. So much much more.

Disclaimer: No offense meant. Please ensure, none is taken.

Loving Brothers

Tormented by a whim to confess, she looked the truth in the eye finally. That she had loved brothers. Two men, in adjacent phases (shamelessly) of her ordinary life. But brothers. Not exactly brothers though, first cousins, their mothers were sisters. Who had brought up their families parallel-y, fiercely matriarchal.

The older brother, with the credentials of an above average geek, was tall. Wore glasses. Pinstripe shirts. Had some sense of humor. But did not take many chances in love. The younger one, was shorter. Believed he was flamboyant. Strictly held on to the idea that he was a babe magnet. He wasn't. But he liked that idea and that oozed out from his presence. Heavily. Obnoxious. 

The streaks of similarity between the two, however couldn't be denied. Faces, mildly alike, each's laughter scarily reminding her of the other, stemming from common genes. 

At first, when she was seeing the older one, the one love of her life, her Eve's apple, of the numerous conjunctions in their conversation, one was about this kid brother he had. The older brother would often bring to her notice how his kid  brother was good with women, good at women.

After the snapping of ties in this affair, the philandering younger one, rode by one day. Two days. And then again, until he didn't give up on her. Innocent child, he did ask her a few times, how she knew his older cousin. Casual acquaintance. Oh. Okay.

During the life and time of this new courtship, she would be banged by awkward moments, when he repeated their childhood tales, which the older one already had reiterated a dozen times over, narrations of weddings of sisters, and who wore what, habits of mothers and aunts, aunts and mothers now, and one common maternal grandmother. The tainted tree of life. 

Sometimes she could only stare at the roof, shut her eyes and restlessly shift between the two. Loving brothers. 

Psycho

(i)

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

(ii)

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

Haiku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loophole

They lived quietly next door. A family slightly younger than ours. Mamun was their daughter. And she had a baby brother. They would stroll into and out of our place, we would put out tiny chairs for them to sit. One yellow, one copper sulfate. Mamun would often soil our balcony, dig up our potted plants of chrysanthemum, until we took that inevitable decision to hang them from the railing, way out of her reach. She did love our Sunday morning poached eggs, densely peppered. Often, her chiming silver anklets would declare her sudden presence, and make us watch-out. Mamun wore a strange piece of metal, like a pendant around her neck, like it was an animal tooth, or a shell filled with ash. To keep her away from evil.

Quite treacherously, without warning, she died. Was killed. Her family was out on vacation, and we were told, that for one moment they lost sight of her and she was a hit and run. For months, I kept staring at our yellow chair. Her father with his shaven head, would wake up screaming, wailing. But I continued assuming that she was still on vacation and would return. That assumption, I preferred it over the silent acceptance of such loss.

Unable to stand their misery, her family shifted to another place, I believe, somewhere away.

And then the plump woman, with the parrot moved in. All the time, she lived in that apartment, we only heard about her son. Never saw him, he was in another city, studying or working, or something. I imagined he must be a replica of his frail bespectacled father. The plump woman, wore sleeveless blouses, blaming the stifling single bed-roomed existence. And an unforgiving summer.

In the afternoons, she would switch on the TV and chop lady fingers and pumpkin, skin potatoes and slice bitter-gourds on the dining table. Many of those, I spent with her. My siestas were as ever empty of sleep. She introduced me to tea, I owe her that. But it was her parrot that bewitched me. That absolute flirt of a bird, I would try to feed it things, bribing it to shed one of those vibrant, parrot green feathers. I would wait near the cage for hours, I needed one to press between the leaves of my diary. The woman of the house would pacify me saying that she would give away that parrot's chick to me. So I waited for it to lay an egg. Equally impatiently, or more. But, I hadn't known then. That caged birds don't breed. 

chalance nonchalance

Erase all preconceived severely convoluted concern. Like no preconditions existed. As if the space before and after this moment was dead. This minute, this hour, tonite. This shy moonless evening. Kick the long term purpose of life. There is none, anyway. Except for the sum of these tiny ones. Dwell in this new found freedom. Forget. And let exactly your whim drive you. Only that. To whoever it wants you to. Shiver not.

Nice feel, in't it? Ah, very nice oh. 

Saturday

Muse:

The muse. She wore a pink sari, wound around her lean self in a way I couldn't figure. Out how. So I just bathed her with all my attention. Not the baby pink, not the rosy pink. Real pink, how pink should be. With white squares printed over. Her hair was knotted, neatly. Like the knot held her head in position. And those black bead earrings, not tiny, big enough. To be seen from far. Where I was. She, of course stared straight in front, at the road ahead. No after hang of the past. I couldn't figure out that either. Just how?

Movie:

The movie. Sprinkled with instances, some exact replicas of the past, some insinuations of the impending future. Such an amalgamation of rather contradictory contortions of love. One that shows how desperately we seek companionship, irrespective of who we have become or where we are; and another shows no matter what, all affections fade. However, hard you try, or not try, mostly, you end up alone, literally alone within four walls, or virtually alone living among a bunch of strangers you remember you  happened to know. Love stories, like these, are often that beautiful picture painted upon and against the peaceful humdrum of life. 

Summer Love:

They say, summer love. We have passed, one summer by. Half of, or rather, almost one full, eighty percent of, monsoon. Rains have lashed against the new love that in May we had realized, we had may be. Now we are stare at autumn, for the trees to come out naked. Winter then. And finally, even spring, in possibility. You know, how love takes your breath away? Moments that bless you with such a glue that you cease to exist in person, and become one deeply rooted pair of Siamese twins.

Movie in context: The Lunchbox

Twenty-six

Pocket fulls of sand. Wet magical sand. One stringed bracelet. With our names inscribed. And my prescribed notions for a lifetime. Nothing has turned out as it should have. Most things have just flown from one random destination to another like a lazy holidayer. Somehow leaving me wet and unwanted. Just like the sand in my pockets. Yet, you being you, keep me. Love me. Possess me. Not with the jovial possession of new love. But with the charred traits of a seasoned lover. Like quiet sunlight on fair skin, you fill me with warmth. One moment of which is worth caging and saving for looking back and unwinding upon for years later. When feelings of seclusion corner ME, and make me want to run off the next adjacent roof, sometimes not too knowingly I think of you. Your chin. My lip. Our things. Paraphernalia for love. I use them to invent words. To selfishly develop feelings, I not tell you about. Because somethings should be given time to unfold. Somethings should rather be bottled forever. Till we end.

I think of our tiny toes and the hard earned grace to make a living out of life. I wonder what we have. And see it vis-a-vis what we require. For contingencies. For answers. For supplying enough proofs. Like juxtapose. I wonder if our stringed bracelet of love would stand us on our tiny toes. It should. Because love should be the sole deciding factor. Of our endless haywire lives. If not it, then what.

I am not saying just because I am saying. But as I have learnt. I am not that child that sees and doesn't seep into. But I have witnessed a certain emptiness in the plethora of lives around me. In their guarded drops of sweat upon heavily maintained faces. Heavily to the extent of it being an obsession of creating a pretense. A shallow facade. And that bores me to the extent of scaring me.

That's exactly why I want you to look within. Unzip me, unskin ME. Look at my naked raw self. And then love me like nothing else matters. It's the mind that will never leave me. So love me in there. Shamelessly. Unbridled.

Make Belief

You make, I believe. Some other time, I make, for you to believe. Calm your jittery nerves & vice versa. I love, and feel loved myself, consequently. Love begets love. Bricks accumulate mortar, by themselves, for their affinity to cement, to make passion to stay. And build walls, roofs and floors, homes, to stay in, windows to look out from, hide away in. Plans get scribbled, ambitions toned up or down accordingly. Tiny steps taken, in unison, like a baby learning to walk, stumbles and falls. And then talking takes over, endless endless conversations. A word for word. Breath for breath. Sigh for sigh. Blink for blink. Sometimes, you make, I believe. Sometimes, I make, you believe. 

Placebo

Where do we go? With our ills and our pills. Multiple sicknesses of the mind. Cramped muscles twisted nerves and pangs of the emotional kind. Hidden magnanimous egos. To be clashed with hidden maganimous egos. Plugged desires. Reading between the lines, between the words and in between phrases. Understanding commas, colons and semi colons. Fuck. Abandoning the hope, the threadbare hope that an end to these means is even possible, we sit quietly and face toward the wall, waiting for someone to ask us to turn around, one hundred and eighty degrees and talk. Sometimes that is required too, silence doesn't do justice to our immensely complex circular demand cycles. Where in, one need just proliferates mostly the previous need, forming in effect, one dangerous cycle of need. And we don't know if we are getting anywhere, or are merely sitting on a child's rocking chair, suffering the illusion of motion. Our ends, flying out in outer space shall never meet. Love fucks up love. Too much love ie. Too little ie. All we await is a temporary placebo. Until the next pang gets us.

Time Capsule

I would wonder what happened to you. Whatever happened to you. You, in immense probability, would move on. Be ladled upon with layers and layers of time. Meet newer people, more or less like the ones you wanted. More more than less. Fall in love, out of love. Miss me in the intervals in between, if you kept a vivid memory. Have babies, marry, or in the reverse order, preferably. Buy flowers, to let them wilt, flip through more books, age, grow more white hair. Stare from balconies, walk among flower shrubs on both sides of the street. Smile, be ecstatic, regret. More importantly, be the way you wished; to be. Holding on to appropriate substances of value. After a certain time, just sit alone and reminisce, just like I would. And wonder what happened to me, whatever happened to me.

Shortly after, you would unearth from underneath the layers and layers of time; a time capsule. Not the literal time capsule. Just a capsule with me in it. Asleep like a fetus, curled, from the ages ago, exactly the way I was. And as you uncap that capsule, you would unlock so much, so much. My caged smells of sweat and skin. The goosebumps intact. The voices of things said, multiple confessions of dire passion. CDs with our songs, pictures taken and forgotten. Plans made and almost ruthlessly abandoned. Truths kept from the world, just between us two, sacred secrets. And the absolute and exact memory of having been, in love. For what it's worth.

Whatever happened to you. Whatever happened to I. Oh! 

Unison

The nose. You never get to see your own nose. Even though it is right there, because both the eyes which are constantly used to seeing it, negate each other out. And you never get to see your own nose.

Same applies to the Lover. You lose sight of him. Outside of yourself. Because he is constantly there, in your mind, fiddling with your six senses constantly. And whenever, even if he is outside of you, your eyes, two pairs, four of them, looking into each other, cancel each other out. Like the Lover ceases to exist. Despite being right there, saying, listening, seeing, moving. He effectively becomes a part of you. Begins to live in your consciousness as a thought, an idea, and not as sturdily as the matter, that can be touched, smelled and felt. Though he very can be, pinched, kissed, loved, you forget. Lovers become extensions of each other, or even become one person.

Level of comfort, as it is called, shoots up to an extra-terrestrial high. Suddenly one pair of extra hands seems unnecessary. So does the extra pair of legs. Lovers carry each other, over shoulders, on arms. The other mind of the two feels like an extravagance. They could as well make do with one, you know. Their memoirs merge into a symbiotic haze and they look into the time to come, with one pair of collective eyes, irises. 

Entropy

There is a gate which opens on the other side, other than the side I have so chosen. That gate pukes life into the street. Life, mercilessly scatters itself therein. There are these numerous betel shops, that sell mouth freshener and sundries. And their threatened existence. Beggars, one legged and begging. Tinkling ring of coins in their bowls. The rummaging hunger in their under-bellies. Dust. Lethargy of abandoned lives. Eve-teasers, their roving eyes. Looking at you like they had you like a lover, once. Chai-wallas. Teeming stories of dozens of strangers passing by. Inspecting each other thoroughly. Boys and girls. Stuck perennially in late teens, emerging from the afternoon cinema. Tilted buildings into the street, that house brothels. Women with jasmine braided into their hair, navels naked and their betel stained pimps. From around the shops beneath with threatened existence. 

There is so much much entropy, baby. That dies ignored. Ensnaring entropy. 

Our fates, you know, are en-tropic. Spare my poetic licence. Driven by fateful & fate-less accidents. 

Yet how silly of me to doubt that someones who I was afraid were me, almost, that their life might reflect into mine, just because you know, we were similar. Only I realize that it doesn't work that way. Let them have their Entropy. I will walk away with mine. 

PS:

Notice the change in Font. 

en·tro·py: A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

Lateral Inversion

There's this picture. Not in a wooden frame. Not in a wedding album. Just a picture, a photograph. Saved in a few kilobytes of memory. In a dateless folder, underneath. 

Among a matrix of light and grey, they stand, posing. Adjacent, touching. Her left arm against his chest. Quietly resting on it, like that was where it was meant to be. His right hand stretched along her shoulders, palm clutching her sleeve. He's holding her. Her hands are folded. There's a ring on the middle finger on her right hand, red threads wound about her left wrist. This was clicked from the camera he held in his left. Lucid, at peace. They are both half smiles, semi conscious. Very aware, yet not there. 

But wait, it's not them the picture is of. It's their image, their fleeting floating image on a fleeting floating mirror. So probably, we got it all wrong. Rights and lefts are reversed. Laterally inverted. He held the camera on his right, his fingers are so close to the mirror, you could see his knuckles. It's his left hand which is holding her by the shoulder. And the ring is on the middle finger on the left hand and the red threads on the right. It seems so. They are looking at each others' image in the mirror. How juxtaposed that is.

Their lines of vision must converge and crisscross where their real space met the mirror. Or I could just show you the photo, instead of blatantly trying so much at the description, so much. Si? 

Onward

The bunch of papers in his hands just gave in. He was getting used to the incessant traveling. Though it didn't seem a bit like what he had imagined. Mostly he would discard the fatigue of it by saying it was boredom and not the biting solitude. It wasn't may be. Some people can just flourish on themselves. Each trip he would find something fun to do or just unwind his overworked muscles and sleep. There was never the need to go out or wait or seek. 

The bunch of papers in his hands almost gave in. He walked about with an ease. A confidence known only to his kind. It was 2 in the morning, the cab booked to the airport had come on time. There was no one to see him off. He had insisted they didn't come. His mother was the stronger one and her eyes never moistened when she saw him leave. But he always saw this meekness on the father's face, a kind of forced silence that just wouldn't let him leave in peace. So he insisted on being left alone. For convenience' sake.

Taking the last few steps onward, to the land of unforgiving winter. He made the customary calls. Assuring he would text them his whereabouts each time he changed location and made a note himself that he would.

His face grew pale for a second with a pang of homesickness. He had run out of noticing the weird people at the airport, people in waiting. There was this childish urge to suddenly return home just to spend the night on his familiar bed, without being answerable to anyone.

So he called her. And asked if she was asleep and if he woke her up. Without waiting long enough for her to answer that, he told her that he was looking at a bunch of hot chicks. We don't know if they were fictitious or real. She asked him to talk to them and not her instead.

Minutes later, they were laughing at one of his cranky jokes. Laughing together, in an unexpected convergence. Sitting hundreds of miles away, waiting to be separated by light years. 

For the lackluster repulsion of distance to erode their affection. For a beautiful Chinese woman to be on the seat next to him. On the plane. 

Abruptly pausing her midway he said, ' That's my announcement. Gotta go!' And then he rose closer to the skies never to return again.

Signs

Acts of love leave no signs

Such of acts of beauty
Ensure that their marks are wiped off
No imprints, or unnecessary witnesses

For they are possessed by a vanity of their own
Of not becoming mundane;

So, the voices are absorbed by walls
Foot prints, overwritten
Sweat, overpowered by perfume
Warmth of air exhaled from nostrils, intermingled
Dust swept off
Secrets, protected, or often forgotten

They, these miniature acts of love, leave no signs
Only vaguely live on in mutual memories, their vanity untouched.