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. 

Ladies Tailor

Many rains come and go, the anguish of existence drags on. Unlike the unforeseen shower of today though. It's such a relief when you forget for a while, everything. The infinite pleasures of amnesia.

Years ago, when I was younger, there was this woman at the bent of the street. She ran a Ladies Tailor. By the name such places go. It was hell of a similar rain. The one that was never to be. The smell of dry earth rose and I waited on one of those benches they put out for girls. To sit and wait on, go through repulsive design booklets. For neck designs, for sleeve sutures on dresses you wanted manicured to fit you. Because you were only seventeen and there was an entire life ahead of you. Your skin dimpled and glowed in the summery sun. Those days, I sat on one of those benches waiting for my turn, for the queue ahead of me to dwindle and finish. It thundered and splashed outside and there was no electricity, and yet I waited for her to measure me up.

Some bitches even elbowed you to get in front of you in the line, such species that. Their menagerie continues to exist. And for their long lives, it felt like decades before the Ladies Tailor even looked at you. She was such a poker face. God knows, she had that Robert de Niro face of pitiful disgust. She would ask you to step out of your shoes and then treat you like a lifeless doll as she turned you around and strung her tape all over you. Like some wild animal she would grunt if you didn't keep your hand straight or bent your neck even a little bit. 

Inside, it felt like she ran her own slave army of tailors. Young girls and middle aged unemployed men sewing and sewing till blindness, both physical and metaphysical. Like bonded labor under her iron hand. She wore her sari like a man would, the pleats would run right in the middle across her chest. Exposing whatever was to the sides. Yet you never dared to point that out to a friend. Her deliveries were always way beyond the promised date on the receipt. And the work only about average. Nevertheless I never stopped going to her, those days. 

The delay never messed up with my life as I pondered it would. Nothing ever does, until of course it does. 

Paro

They lived in one of those dungeon like apartments. Hidden in a corner was the mattress which she unfolded in the night and slept upon. Along with her other flatmates, several women living alone together, sharing home cooked dinners of foreign vegetables. Low on fat. Paro was used to staying home all day, all afternoon as the others left for work. She had been laid off, it was 2009. Some said she had been fired, there had been a drunken affair at work. But people say such things, the whispers of the wind shan't be trusted. She was on a semi solid diet those days, to shed some belly fat. Some slurpy wheatish soup she drank two times a day and that was that. In the evenings, she left for the market an hour away, wearing the slippers and capris she had gotten from the weekend flea market and came back with bag full of beans and climbers and creepers of all kind. To be chopped and boiled and eaten with pickle as she sat beside with her bowl of soup. Her boyfriend lived in another town, they had met online. He was younger, still studying. Paro would say, since she wasn't making rent for the last few months, she would move in with her boyfriend as soon as he graduated, with a job and everything. Paro was the eldest of three daughters. Not necessarily pretty, this one. Her face was large with features defined good enough. Sleepy eyes and a nice pair of black lips. Her hair, fell till her waist. Curled in their own insane uneven manner. She would often knot them to have them in place as her heart fluttered each time she imagined the future looking at the night sky through the iron grille ringing their dungeon like balcony, and smoking. 

Apostrophe

Human beings, sometimes have this thing. They know for certain that is. Instead of swimming in the black pool of chaos. When introduced for the first time, to each other, they knew they were going straight to bed. There was no doubt about that, no negotiation. It was something that was being forced upon either, neither had any upper or lower hand. They were sitting on the exact same plane, knowing the one truth that there was. A compulsive force drawing them to each other. An understanding had notoriously crept up, where there was none. This was years ago.

It's rare, this kind of love. Without its baggage. The usual baggage you know. The whim for a marriage or the craving for a baby. All of this was absent. I praise it so, because, it was love in the most well-contained sense. Love exactly within the definition of love. No extrapolations. Or deductions and suppositions.

It's made to believe, that it was amicable. The separation. Not as messy, neither was torn apart, so it seems from the surface. No howling or smashing of phones. They both, were old enough to break free. Young enough to start afresh again. To a bystander though, it caught him by surprise. The bystander gazed on, unable to understand the chemistry, the union and the decomposition. An involved bystander, that is.

Today, they live in the city by the sea. He probably is seein' another woman. They are still friends. They must go out for coffee for the lack of better company, on some days. They must relive and feel the friction between their hearts. But there would be absolutely no will to turn back. Are they afraid, that it might be messy this time around? Or have they really fallen apart this well.

Z

Inspite of the more than a couple of times for which you have broken my heart, and for the one gigantic time, I broke yours in the end. I don't know what I would do if you suddenly walked in through that door. On the edge opposite, I sit talking to a stranger. Would I turn to face you? I would dammit. But would I freeze? Like a mummified doll. In awe of the man I had learnt to love. One can never predict, can she. Would you still have that humor, and make me ripple, the way you did, then, when we had a horizon. A time, a corner, one wish. Unlike the futility of the present. What would I do if you walked in. With your gaunt cheek bone, the ash grey sweatshirt. What would I do? Will my legs obey and stand up. Or should my eyes ignore and look away. My heart with all her fossilized pain, what would keep her put in the thoracic cavity. Would I drop her on the floor, accidentally and scream. Will I rush to the toilet and cry. Would I say hi. Or faint, yeah that would be good. I have always imagined fainting. Should you walk in through that door. 

Scattered Soul

I left my soul at the mouth of the river. In my old room, standing aloft on the third floor beside pines. I left a chunk of it on the balcony of his new home. Also a bit of it in the wilderness I never could go to. A piece of it, on the scattered skies above the earth I slept on, gazing up. I left my soul inside the God of Small Things. In the diary made of pure bamboo pulp and on it as a spot of blotched ink. I left my soul in the wind at Lovers' Point. I abandoned a slice of it, back in the darkness which I smoked. Bit by bit in the curls of fume that escaped my mouth. In the sweat and breath of strangers. In the eyes of the men who stared. At breasts, at legs. I lost a bit of her in the minds of men who read my poems. And a few compassionate women, it would be unfair not to say. On the edges of my broken nails, and upon the roofs I wanted to leap down from. Last, on the chair I drank coffee on alone, and thought of writing this poem. Each of these places, keep a piece of my soul, frozen, un-agile. In comatose. In original specimen, undiluted, unashamed, described by other similar adjectives. But most of all, I left my soul, the last time I saw her, on his bed. On his bed. Yeah.

#NowPlaying - Shakira, after a long long time. 

Dragonberry

Nobody knew, where she was. At work, they assumed she was home. At home they thought she was at work. Some friend thought she was with the other. The other thought, that she was with another. Some didn't even think anything. Their heads empty, thoughtless in her regard. While she spent a thankless afternoon in deep sleep on a mat on the floor. Under the influence of dragonberry. Sleeping off the insomnia of a lifetime. All bridges snapped. Phones thrown away. All constraint abandoned, with her elbow like a pillow, beneath the chin. The dragonberry was a hallucinogen. Bringing about an acceptance of loss to when it doesn't feel like a loss no more. Alcohol traded for sorrow. Tears dripped from the corner of her one eye and dried up. The coagulated salt in that and the pinch in her heart. Both stayed though, but gradually got inconsequential. The stitched straw of the mat printed an impression on her cheeks. When she woke up suddenly, fear clutched her heart. Had she overestimated her freedom. Nothing could steal her away from the truth afterall. 

He, crouching in the opposite corner of the room, looked at the print on her cheeks and laughed. Aloud. It wasn't funny. And she didn't even fathom why. She was with him. And nobody knew that. Just about nobody. Nobody knowing where you are is as good as death. Or as bad as. They were as good as a couple of dead lovers in a thankless afternoon. It was then, precisely then, that she realized that everything was imaginary. The salt in her tears, the phones she had thrown away, the constraint that held her, the people she put off by knitting one complicated mesh of lies. All of it was afterall, imaginary. Only s/he was the real one. And probably, the dragonberry. 

Litmus

1

They stood like the stagnant rain of late August. Against the moist afternoon breeze rushing through their hair, giving them an occasional totter. Away from town, its buses and the smoke. They would quite religiously meet in the valley. Well not exactly, if you could call it that. It was a huge ditch washed clean by the monsoon. Sometimes flooded, it looked like a lake. Filled with brown water, of the color of tea. Only the beverage in the cup they shared standing on top of the ridge looked less watery. The color of that was for the thick boiled buffalo milk. Not a day went without he making a comment on the goodness of that milk, and she not laughing to it. At it. Forgetting the day, at ease, an hour at a time. As the orange sun set and the porous skies gave in, again. To another lash of night long rain. 

2

Each morning, her huge dog, that monstrous canine, demanded comforting by the pedestrians crossing the street by barking out loud from the first floor balcony and craning its neck out like it would take a leap now. It never did, but the children stopped taking that street. The ones who would earlier sneak into her garden to steal shrubs of pink table rose and pineapple from the bushes. Or a raw jackfruit or two. The canine put an end to that for good. But after that, there was no one. The barking would stop once her hoarse scream scared the animal off to a mid morning snooze. And then she would emanate from the rickety house in her off white maxi dress for summers. With a cup of tea in her hands, chewing one of her own sun dried coconut cookies. To tend to her rose bushes and to cut off the weed. Weed, you know.

-x-

Last Name

Now I'm sitting in a corner, hidden
And sulking
Again, I am laughing at the memory of that moment
Suddenly, it is years ago

Here is a sunrise by a pond
Then the bare branches of autumn
Colors of April
Waves of the sea, and my toes

Do you realise,
How swiftly,
Our existence merges and emerges from Illusion
And vice versa

A bunch of memories
Will soon become a collectable
The dearth of words for a poem
A distant feeling to recall.

Amongst the scores and scores of days
We live through and worry endlessly about
Only few will make it to the album of life,
When we die and move on

Something which was so heartbreaking then
Doesn't mean a dime anymore.
Come to think of it,
What was his last name again?

Wasn't Frost right,
When he said that.
'It goes on'
Wasn't he now

So, live in love
Die with your eyes closed
And heart open.
Also, write a dozen insane poetry.

Condiment

Don't blame me, honey
If I don't keep no memory
Because there's dark concentric circles
'Round my eyes, of worry
The one time I am glee
Is when you with me;

Swivelling about our plum backs
To your music & mine
Tip-toeing on zig zag marble floors
Tugging to strums of guitar

Talking of places, far off
And their peoples
Colors, black blue red & grey

Talking still, entwined on the kitchen slab
Windows shut,
Breathing in unlocked airs of 
Summer winter and rain

Exchanging stories of our mothers
Names of our fading past lovers
Chopping tomatoes & potatoes
Spices & flavors

You're the condiment, baby
The one that adds flavor over me.

So, don't blame me 
If I complain amnesia
'Coz I am so busy living, suddenly. 
I ain't keeping no memory. 

The Other Day.

The other day, I ran into her parents. Them, who I had barely met when we were us, seemed to have aged twice as fast than they would have, had time been more merciful. After a moment's raw hesitation and an unsuccessful attempt to flee the spot, I stood with the poise of a man and approached them. Her mother blinked at me, with faint recognition. With a bravado I was unaware I had, I introduced myself as a friend of their daughter's. A friend they had never known of. She welcomed me with a confused but affectionate smile. I hadn't expected much anyway. She had shrunk from the photographs of the steadfast woman I had seen in the pictures I had been shown, a couple years ago. I greeted the father similarly, the lines on his face had become more precise. Those dictions of his which she would tell me over and over again, repeatedly, and never tire of, hardly ever left my mind those days. Like her father was permanent company, always watching over her. In a moment's notice I was carried away, wondering what kind of an alternate reality would it have been to actually have been a part of their lives. It's funny in a way, whatever the wish that did not fulfill. Whatever the love that vanished, passed away peacefully like death from senility. I always told her that she looked like her mother. She could never catch the parallels though. And would argue that even though they might look alike, as a person she was quite the antithesis of her mother. Like she was selfish and aloud, inconsiderate and obstinate. Quite the contrary to her mother, quite the contrary to any decent human being, quite the contrary to the beautiful person I sometimes saw in her.

I ran into her parents, the other day. But not a word was spoken of her.

.. 

See

It's a ridiculous wish I had. To see Khushwant Singh in person. He's the one who taught me how to live without shame. Now he is dead and gone. That's one item struck off like that. Sooner more than later, I am sure I will forget who I am. It's like losing sight of oneself. And it's a horrible thing to say. To become someone with no identity, wishes and aspirations. My autobiography could be named the autobiography of a corpse. Because my life is pretty much a list of things to be done, things to constantly worry about, work wise, life wise. I feel I have made too many unwise decisions and now there is no getting away from those. Like a vicious circle, the aftermath leads to the cause itself. And can't look out, look within. I am entangled such, I can't see. My biases are such, I don't think I even understand my environment very well. It's like being really stupid, immune to the obviousness of the world. I am so serious when I say I can't see, I can't see a damn thing. 

I need a filter, something that tells me what I should see, what I should ignore. Because there is so much fucked up stuff happening around, they all merge into a haze, I can't differenciate one from another. There is nothing definitive, it's all infinite and irrational. I feel small, incapable. And stupid. Like a failure.

A friend recently halted at a guest house by a lagoon on a rainy night because their car broke down on the way. In the morning when she woke up, the lagoon and the sea it merged into and the sky, everything looked like one grey screen of nothing. She stood on her feet and stared, unable to figure where the sea ended, where the sky began, they were all so homogenous. No sight of the horizon, of the distances we could go, of the persons we could become. Nada, nothing. Then, minutes later an orange sun punctured that grey screen. It rose slowly up the sky, shooting out rays, drawing out a horizon in front of her eyes. Separating the sea and the sky. Differentiating the closer from the distant. Showing her what exactly to see.

I want to see. Just like that. 

The Girl

The girl glided into the compound of the building. She had gotten down from the bus a moment ago. City buses, town buses that ran between home and school. That carried her to and fro. Except for today, when she got down in between. In a place that was neither school nor home. Nobody was startled, nobody cared. Or gave a damn. She stood right beside the building and craned her neck to see the top, she couldn't. Approaching the flight of stairs she stood by the board which read which offices were on which floor. On the second or the third, there was a bank. Which sold out forms for an exam she was to apply to and write to find a place to be in, after she finished school. Upstairs there would be a security guard standing near the grille entry to the bank who wouldn't even spare a glance as the girl would walk in and join the que of dozens. And spend the next hour staring at the red spit on the walls and its corners. The disgruntled breath that held the air together in that place.

Downstairs, there was a middle aged man with an eye on her. Staring at her every move, trying to draw out her intentions. What was a girl like her doing alone in a building like this. And at this time? In the afternoon, when nobody is home. She, he had been made to believe was going to one of the top floors and engage in something illicit. Anything at all, outside of rules she was expected to abide by. Anything that should bring shame. 

Torn between the man and the Girl, we would hardly know where was it that she headed for real. Knowing is as good as not knowing anyway. Who can tell. May be we are only fooling ourselves. Who can tell. 

The Virtue of Indifference

I lost my innocence very early in life. Not owing to any incident in particular, but I just grew up faster I believe. Things that people realized ten years hence, I was done and dusted with in my adolescence. I don't blame anybody specifically, I was just the way I was. Sometimes this extra dollop of maturity acted to my advantage, i.e. I could get over stuff faster. 

I have hardly ever truly believed in the goodness of the people. World is a comedy of errors and I have gradually taught myself to laugh and then appreciate those errors. I sometimes even gorge on the beauty evident in some of these blatant flaws. Like nothing, absolutely nothing is up to our expectations, so you have got to dissolve your daily dissatisfaction with nicotine, caffeine, whatever it is. Or just woman up and stick with it. Like given a chance, life would fuck itself up. It's like Murphy is the father of the world. Bad things constantly happen, it's like the law of inertia. People, men and woman, are tightly wound nut jobs. They are narcissistic fools, arrogant buffoons, with mommy issues and daddy issues et cetera. The only way to get past their shit and focus on yours is just to give them a hearing. Only a hearing, mind you. Never listen to people, if you prefer sanity. Hardly anyone would actually be right beside you when you need anything, so never let them in. 

Mostly as you could already guess, I did not believe that goodness could actually exist in our species. And so I was never actually good, per se. I would just make do. Just be nice. And indifferent. Sometimes, even this would take a toll on me as it is. But it is a load less than being truly deeply madly good. 

That I have been the above for so many years now, reverting back to innocence is such a tough choice. It's so damn hard to actually mean it when I say, I am a good woman.

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. 

May

The stink of henna on her hands kept her awake. She was in one of those, umbrella cutout kurtis, that bloat up in air, from right below your chest. The kohl that day, was thicker somehow. More blatant than usual. It was, the kohl, made of the same black ash her heart was composed of. You know, how that is. It was a day in May. In the month of. See, how that untidy little month is named after a tricky adjective of uncertainty. Like the lover she may or may not meet. Like the clouds that may or may not give in. That afternoon. Of a late day in May. With waiting rain, and blistering summer. Her dusky had gotten closer to a color of charred chocolate. She constantly felt the prick around her newly pierced nose ring. Almost like the constant persistence of a heartache. During all this, the storm hit. Not the cherry blossom precursor to the Monsoon, but the kalbaisakh. Violent winds swept rooftops, rain filled into roads like a river. The lightening cast a chill down the spine. But nothing could stop her. She has this thing. Of being possessed, and chasing without any thought, mirages that tempted her. She wanted to be with the lover when the first rain struck. And though she was already delayed, like the rain, still she had to make it. To him. So she closed her eyes. And leaped. You know, how that is. To make the love, that may or may not be. May or May not. 

The Road

It was one long road. With trees on both sides, of mixed variety, unknown species. Big old trees facing each other on parallel borders of the road, full of leaves meeting right over its midline. Like forming a content canopy of thought.

He and I, we walked down that road. Only seven years ago on a faintly similar afternoon of February. Talking of things that seem the most inane now. Like what we would do with our lives, in our futures. Non collapsible ever expandable futures. What higher schools would we want to get into. What jobs would we walk into, what kind of money that would give us, what kind of lives.

And the suddenly it rained. Like in buckets. I am not joking, it did. Nor am I saying this just to make it sound romantic or anything, it did. And we had to run towards a tree. Beneath that we stood for what seemed like eras. Breathing out cold vapor with whatever little we spoke. Whispered. The noise from the rain dropping down the leaves was so gigantically deafening. And children on cycles were chasing each other down faster than the rain. Autorickshaws impatiently zoomed in and out of our canvas. The world seemed to move pretty much in fast forward as we stood there, temporarily frozen in our own thought, glued together to the trunk of our tree.

Today, I went back there again. Not in time travel, but in reality. Walking alone down the same road. And picked up my drenched self. A raw girl. With her mind full of things that were yet to happen. Living in the future. Which actually is, now. And it's barely what she thought it would be like. Barely. Sigh. What a wreck!

A Single Man

One single man and his scattered life. An empty fridge, not a stacked one like in real homes. His bottle of sugar, infested with ants. The top of his TV, filled with old unused keys, with no locks to them anywhere, random receipts to stuff he had bought months ago and everything layered with dust. There's cobwebs in the corners. And a bed that hasn't been done for weeks. There's power cords everywhere on the floor. Almost like the quagmire of life. Plugged into extension cords and then into points in the wall you can't trace. Newspapers. Oh newspapers. They would make new walls in this house if piled, newspapers and books gotten and forgotten in furore. Decade old sheets of the Economic Times flung about. He has been living this way for long. One static unchanging undemanding stretch of time that seems to stretch forever. No one has been here, or in his heart. Except that almost over tube of facial scrub abandoned in the bathroom, left behind by a certain someone. An old girlfriend, a fuckbuddy, the ex wife or a one night stander. Whoever that was, her toothbrush stood in a corner, right beside his, watching over the rest of the house like a hawk. 

Being Unremarkable

Looking back, I cannot remember when exactly I lost my ambition. And why. I can zero in on the why, but not on the when. I used to be one striving kid, before this happened. I used to have dreams. Hallucinations. Of living in big cities, in sea facing houses, doing some key job. Money was never exactly in the picture, but then everything does come down to money, in the end. Though, like someone said, most of who we know, only eat, work and continue to survive. Our naked eyes cannot visualize any more. Mine, can't. A few years ago, I used to believe my life hadn't even begun. Suddenly, now I feel like it's over. I am twenty six. And I have accomplished nothing major, except for getting by. By and by. Sometimes, I imagine what life would have been on the other side. Had my winning streak continued. Had I become the decisive ambitious person I was being nurtured to become. I would have been happier, definitely. 

But I am happy now. Aren't I? I have the smaller things. Most of which I am trying really hard to value. I am trying. Sure, am. Making checklists, constantly evaluating and reevaluating. Training myself to be self contained. Consciously building a routine and then actively falling prey to it. Such that my wilder shades can be contained. Trying to move towards what I find joy in doing, or atleast hoping that I would. Staying away from the things and people that nauseate me. Most things in my life are far, really fa' from working out. But I have convinced myself, everything is a gradual process.

This is mostly how I have become a decently moderate and laid back woman from a breathless go getter. I have my regrets alright. But I relish being in the shadows. I find peace in being unremarkable. 

I Hope You Love Me

Because love is as fickle an emotion as it is mighty. I can only hope, you love me. Love me back that is, as I have let my guard down. Also, because I have had enough of love, of the unrequited kind. That's good for only a fucking love poem. And not to keep alive. So, I can only hope that you love me. The real lasting bearable kind. Because love is like smoke in hot air, now it's here and now not anymore. Despite who I am, and despite who you be, the love in between has to simmer like a third person. Like a child. And it should be, no matter what you and I evolve to be. It may not be everlasting alrite, but it should last the decent span to sew together my broken heart and keep it that way or whatever. This may read like sleep talk, or gibberish. But aren't the stakes high enough. And this assurance I shall beg, no matter what. No matter who. I can only hope you love me. The real lasting bearable kind.