Strangers

I noticed a framed photograph of a bunch of strangers in my living room. Next to the television. I couldn't remember why it was there. I hardly ever notice my house. Things lay, neglected and dusty. I have often wanted to have a life in which the mind is beautiful, you know. So I don't much focus on making the house beautiful. In the last decades, I've managed neither. Anyway.

I picked up the photograph and stared closely. I could spot myself in the last row. A different version of me, of course. I am, ageless, to be truthful. I was born with an older person's head. So I never feel I have been childish in the past. In the picture, my hair is tied up, I am wearing shorts and a favourite blue top. Next to me is someone I had recently met with back then.

This person, a girl, vivacious and affable had taken a keen interest in me at work. In fact, she suggested, we go out for Chinese lunch, just like that, out of the blue. I obviously couldn't turn her down and we became friends. The way an introvert and extrovert gel, we adhered to each other with a level of comfort I hadn't recently found in another human. 

This girl, she had her boyfriend introduced to me. He worked in one of the adjacent buildings. He came off as a reticent man. But when he spoke, it seemed, folks listened and intently. For some reason, could be my intense vulnerability, or me living alone, having moved into the city recently and not knowing another soul, the girl was reluctant to leave me unattended. I mean, she would hover around. And I, surprisingly, didn't rebuke her and let it be.

The couple, they never made me feel like I was third wheeling, you know. It was always like, we were friends hanging out. They started accompanying me to my Saturday night temple outings, instead of hitting the pubs in town. Who does that?

One day, the girl suggested we go the waterpark. I had never been to an amusement park. I didn't buy the idea of having an entire day set aside for fun activities. I wasn't good enough for such prizes. But she convinced me that I was. 

It was a Sunday and we took the bus to the outskirts. The day whizzed past wonderfully. I crossed the lazy river thrice. And there were tidal lakes and the joy of screaming hydrophobic strangers next to me as they drowned in waist high waves. Towards the end, we realised we didn't have a picture. So this was the last ride we took. 

It was one of those slides, roller coaster kind of thing where the cart with a dozen people crashed into the water. The picture was taken just before we crashed. Our jaws are wide open. Eyes are tremendously excited and we're screaming like there's no tomorrow.

I held the photo in my hands and realised that I had been keeping a photo of nine total strangers in my living room for over four years. The girl too moved away after she switched jobs, but not before breaking up with the reticent boyfriend. So, the only person I knew in the photograph was me. The rest were all strangers. In that brief moment, my agelessness came crashing down.

Fetch me

Come back to me, for tonight

I am right there,

Where you left me

In 2013

Outside the movie theater

Before the matinee show

In soft rain

Drenched in October

I've tried, to move on

Trust me when I say I have

And I've failed, unflinchingly

You're still the one of my dreams

Irreversibly damaged

Broken and exhausted

I'm furious at myself

For letting you leave me

Can't you come back

And fetch me

Unfuck up my life

Loosen the knots

Breathe air into my mouth

Tell me it's okay

To fail & be miserable

To be angry & unhappy

I want to be told this

I want to be gathered

In your arms

And watch that movie, we never did

Circus

The travelling circus party has halted in the city. They did that once in a few years. We lived in the hinterland, the villages. And were really little at that time. I'm talking early '90's. 

Aunties and mother, decided to take us to the city to watch the circus. The men were away at work. Those were the days when old women in the family booked a taxi and went to distant villages and fixed a girl for an uncle in marriage. Such girls then moved into our homes and became our aunties. And also there were vivacious daughters of the family, who were married at nubile ages, to government job holder men, and they were aunties too who visited from the city in summers and winters for respective vacations. 

And both categories of aunties and mother, decided to take the kids to the circus in the city. And there was no stopping. For some reason a taxi was not available. They never were, for immediate bookings. Those were the days when hardly anyone had cars and you had to tell the taxi driver weeks before. So somebody called an auto-rickshaw. Although now, it is difficult to imagine how so many of us fitted into one little auto-rickshaw, but we did. I remember one gigantic auto-rickshaw. The kind, that was probably not manufactured. 

The driver had a potbelly and a mustache. We, packed food in paper packets and water bottles, umbrellas and towels and embarked on the road trip to the city. It was more than fifty kilometres away. And with bad roads, that must have been a lot. A few of the women and children puked on the way. The auto must have been stopped. People must have complained that we would be too late for the circus. But thankfully we made it on time. 

The kids were excited beyond words. Tickets were bought with soiled notes from women who toiled in kitchens and saved money underneath pickle jars. You can't tag a value to such things. 

We got distant seats, but I don't remember regretting. Every show amazed us. The circus was held inside a gigantic tent of sorts. The seating area with rickety steel chairs was dimly lit. The stage had the brightest lights I'd ever seen. As trick after trick was performed by magicians, we, a family of a dozen women and children, huddled together, chatted, giggled and shushed each other. 

Petite little white girls hung from the roof with invisible ropes and relentlessly entertained us with their gymnastic prowess. Even our good old Indian girls did the same but the make up on their faces, outshone the lights. And we were besides ourselves to see white women, in bikinis, we had never seen someone so fair before. 

Animals were called upon. Ill fed tigers and elephants. Jokers who stood on storey high wooden legs hidden inside their pants and the littlest of kids were all wide eyed. 

When the show got over, we were all famished and thirsty and tired. But our pot-bellied auto driver had bailed on us. We looked everywhere, but he had taken an advance for the to and fro journey and left us in the lurch. The women got worried, it had already gotten dark. And there was no telephone to call and inform or get help.

One of mother's half a dozen brothers lived in the city. He was a big shot civil engineer who built bridges. Bridges that mother would show to us every-time we crossed them. How big a man would be, I wondered, who could build such enormous bridges. I realized he a was not that big, when we all sought refuge at his government quarters for the night. They were surprised to host so many and without notice, but what other choice did anyone have. 

The next day, after a visit to the city's big temples, and lunch at a roadside dhaba, the women and children headed back home in a bus. 

Man

What a little boy you were. With your impish smile. You hardly said anything provocative ever. You were so mild, subtle. Gentle even. I doubted if you were in love with me. Perhaps, not.

An infatuation? Yes, sure. It wasn't that long ago. But we were so much younger, you and I. Unhardened by life yet, unburdened. Cheery, dreamy even, hopeless and nevertheless filled with hope. So a crush, yes that's possible.

But love was beyond the horizon of possibilities. It always is. Now we have realised, love lapses, fades, moves on. But we didn't know this back then and were caught unawares. Naturally assuming that infatuations would, one day, convert to love, automatically.

But that never happened. We drifted, apart. Aged, lost as much as we gained. Then, thousands of nights later, I tried to imagine how you would be. Would there be lines under your eyes now? I closed my eyes to recollect your face. Nothing came to my head and my eyes saw blank. I tried again. Many other faces pushed into my recollection, but yours. I tried to discard them all and think of you again. Only you.

33

I regret everything

Not everyone, nor in the furthest of chances, I

Would appreciate, how it was possible, to ever

Regret everything

But I do

I am real

And I've messed everything up

This poverty of mind

Body, and complete lack of riches

I had never foreseen

My peers bathe in plentitude 

And I've even given up on envy

Now I merely scream into pillows

Hope isn't my alibi

For I relinquished it long ago

I reside among many absurdities

Wanting to crush my life like a crumpled sheet of paper

And throwing it into the infinity of space

I think of ending things

But still continue to be

Because the logistics of death aren't for me yet

Happy 33 to me

2020

A few years ago, we ate out, dinner in icy cold Shillong nights. Chicken kebabs, in restaurants that are now closed. And walked back in multiple jackets, scarfs, mufflers and whatnot. We were, so hopelessly romantic, looking for the one paramour.

A few years ago, we kissed the sun and wandered around Bombay beaches in sweltering summer afternoons. Slurping mango lassi at ten bucks a glass. Salty winds gushing through our tufts of hair, untamed. We could be everything, if we ever wanted. 

A few years ago, we hung out laundry to dry on crisp and breezy Bangalore Saturdays. We shopped for trinkets aimlessly in the evenings and drank in smokey bars and remembered other years.

A few years ago, in spring, in the home town, town of towns as strange flowers flowered and filled the air with addictive smells, we held mugs of creamy coffee in our hands, languorosly chatted and looked for the right words.

We don't know how we lived this long. But suddenly we're in 2020 and the world's ending. We've hardly ever been happy. But now that the literal apocalypse has been squeezed into a few months, here's to harbouring a silent hope, that we get to see 2021. 

Migration

Long ago, I lived in an old house surrounded by periwinkle bushes. A river flowed near by. We reared chickens and harvested eggs. Summer storms brought on a surfeit of mangoes. Then mother decided we needed better education. 

So we loaded every piece of furniture we owned in a minitruck and moved many many kilometres away. I still remember sighting the truck on top of the Mahanadi bridge, all our stuff covered precariously with a tarp behind. That was some summer day in the mid nineties.

By the time we reached our new home, the clouds had burst open. Ours was a two bedroom flat on the ground floor with a barren front porch. The soil looked like nothing would ever grow on it. I missed the periwinkle and the mangoes and the tall hibiscus trees that flowered in hundreds.

But soon I began to belong to the new place. I was so young and malleable. I joined a new school. I was about eight or nine. It wasn't the posh little montessori my little brother went to where they were taught vegetable painting with lady-fingers. 

I went to a bridge school. A school that would help me bridge the transfer from my older school in the village to the new english medium school in the city. The main motive behind the migration afterall was better education. 

The school I went to was nearby. I remember it being really tiny. Classrooms were as cramped as bedrooms and benches were pushed against one another. The walls has holes. I made a few friends. Somehow I never missed my old school from the village. Perhaps there was nothing to miss about it. Except a cartoon I had painted, framed and gifted to the principal before leaving. The principal was elated and he hung it on his wall. I longed to go back to solely procure that painting.

But the new tiny bridge school grew on me. It finished sometime in the afternoon and I always came home and ate lunch. One day it rained quite heavily and a friend of mine was stranded in school as nobody came to pick her up. I swooped in and suggested she come to my house.

Oddly, that day mother was at work and father was home. My little brother recited the rhymes he had been taught that day. My friend and I were both treated like guests in my own house. Father served us platters of fryums. Garnished and all. Glasses of fanta. And a plate full of boiled eggs, sliced into halves and sprinkled with pepper and salt. 

There were like half a dozen eggs on that plate. I had absolutely never felt that pampered. Eggs were special food for some reason. You always had one at a time. My friend was flabbergasted and decided to stop by often.

She never came again. I changed schools and joined where my brother went. On the first English test, I had scored 9 on 25. After years of crippling inferiority complex, I could barely adhere to that school. Somehow I always felt as if I was being pushed over some kind of edge. Never felt at home or safe anywhere for a long time that followed.

Failing

When I was about thirteen, a girl from the class above mine, flunked and came to sit in the bench behind me. She shared the bench with another girl who had flunked along with her. The teacher had made them sit together so that they could share their shame as well. But they didn't get along well at all. Almost immediately I started becoming friends with her. There was this innane frankness about her. And happiness. She was always giggling, chatting, laughing. Even as a kid that young, I remember being sad, afraid, angry. So our opposites attracted, perhaps.

She used to get idlis and curried peas in her lunch box. Everyday we began sharing lunch. We went to the water filter together to fill our bottles. We sat with each other in PT class. We talked, almost constantly. I had made a new friend. 

I used to be good at studies, I was almost about topping the class then. So it was an odd match. Even when my friend was repeating my class, she kept scoring badly in tests. Not that it hampered her joy. There was this certain effervescence about her that was inerasable. 

Since she was the weakest in math, her dad found her a tuition teacher who came to her house two days a week. I joined for the class too, along with a few other kids from the neighborhood. I now think I went solely because one of the senior boys was a neighbour of hers, and he I had a pretty bad crush on. But that's another story.

Our math teacher was excellent. He totally was a game changer for me because he made me like math. He caught me sleeping with my eyes open a few times and made fun of me adorably. But with my friend, he was more strict because he had promised her father he wouldn't let her fail again.

Her father was a businessman. Their apartment was big and flashy. My friend wore fancy clothes and was dropped off at school in a gigantic car. Often after the tuition I would stay back at her house and watch TV or just chat. And be treated with delicacies.

I told her everything that was on my mind. But she hardly ever shared anything. I imagined she had nothing going on in her head. So I let it be that way. Soon we passed out of school and parted ways. We wouldn't see each other for a long time. Because we had nothing in common anymore.

I started the gruelling journey of preparing for college entrance examinations. She casually meandered through 10+2 in a different school. I heard from somebody that she burnt her hands when a pan of hot maggi titled and fell off the stove. I didn't call her then, because I was just being me. Somehow that would be the last memory of her I would keep.

We weren't even friends on facebook. Wonder how that happened.

Then one day, when I was about eighteen or so, I heard she fell in love and eloped. With an older guy. That sounded so chain-breakingly liberating at that point in time, to me. I didn't even have a boyfriend. I was just fat and studious. 

More years went by, life really dumbed me down. That happens. A person I worked with invited me to his kid's first birthday. I happily obliged. At that party, I was lounging with a plate full of buffet Chinese food, when I saw a beautiful ten year old girl running around in a princess frock. Her mother loudly warned her to be more careful. It was my effervescent friend from school.

I was besides myself with joy to see her. She looked exactly the same except chubbier. Her daughter was only a younger version of her. She held a little baby boy in her arms. Her husband was a relative of my colleague's. We talked even though we didn't have much to talk about. Even though there was nothing to say, there was so much. I welled up inside. And yet, she was just smiling, giggling, like not a day had passed and she would pop open her lunch box and idlis would emerge. 

Safety-pin

I don't know how much a sense of shame men possess, in the mundane coming and going of things. Women for one, average day-to-day women are built to be ashamed. A hint of unintentional cleavage would crumple her. So I didn't know about you. 

Although sometimes when you would walk up to me and say hi, and chat while fiddling with your wedding ring, I would notice, in the folds of your shirt, a bit of your chest visible between buttons. Suddenly being conscious of it, I would look away. You wouldn't even know why I did what I did, finish our terse chat and walk away.

So, the other day, when you walked up to me, like a little boy, that you sometimes are and asked. In a nimble voice. If I had a safety-pin. Something had ripped your buttons open. You were holding your shirt together with your fingers. 

A trifle taken aback, I didn't know whether to stare at your face or your buttons. I involuntartily fished out my hand bag and started rummaging through all the pouches.

Simultaneously regretting that why being a woman I wouldn't keep basic stuff like a safety pin or a clip or a rubber band handy. Some women I have come across are so sorted, they carry everything from a snack of salted almonds to headache pills to scarves and god knows what not. And here I am, struggling to find a mere safety-pin.

You patiently waited through my dramatic search. I looked at you hopeless. I didn't have a safety-pin in my bag. You half smiled, perhaps and began walking away, still clutching your shirt together.

I asked someone else. She had one and fished it out immediately. I borrowed it from her for you. Although I didn't say it to her in as many words. And walked to you and handed it over. You grinned. This time, totally.

And right in front of me pinned your shirt right back. I didn't know where to look anymore. So I ingulged myself and inhaled that vision. 

Puri

Insanity runs in my family. Like it runs in everyone's. A fifth of cousins in every generation would be crazy in some way or the other. Or a fourth. And the rest would have sanity forced upon them. Because who then would take care of the insane cousins. 

It's true albeit not that obvious. People's brains just pop open. Some cousin develops a strong case of OCD in his teens. Some aunt has been a little off since her childhood. Some uncle can't get out of bed after retirement. Another third cousin has anger issues and can't hold a job, can't manage people, in effect can't make it from day to day. And of course, drug and alcohol issues are more rampant than they seem. 

But of course, we hide. We hide that insanity races in our veins along with the blood that we inherited. Because we're ashamed. Because we're supposed to be fine. Why wouldn't we be? How can we be anything less than what's expected of us. I think this lack of acceptance pushes many of those sitting on the edge, into the deep gorge. 

But this story is from back in the day. Many many years ago when I wasn't aware of any of this. I was little. Seven or eight years of age. My brother may have been four or five. An uncle in the extended family had gone crazy. It was made to sound like it had happened overnight. It hadn't. Things had been brewing for a really long time and then one day, everyone around just accepted that some kind of line had been crossed from being sane to being otherwise. 

We were summoned. A trip was planned. The crazy uncle lived in Puri. With his wife and three daughters. He used to be a teacher. They lived in a rickety house with a huge courtyard with trees. We, my family, had been summoned by a rich older cousin of our father who kind of oversaw everyone's well being. The rich older cousin gave us a chauffeur driven car and put us up in a hotel room. We only had to go and check on the recently insane uncle and find out how things were.

Somehow that trip has stayed very fresh in my memories. Or it may be now that everything seems to be coming back to me. We drove to Puri in peak summer. And made friends with the driver. We reached in the afternoon and headed to the uncle's house. 

A sense of hopelessness prevailed. The air was dry. Stories were traded quietly. He had become very difficult to contain, his wife mentioned. Everything was manageable until a few months ago when suddenly one day he stopped going to work and started screaming expletives at the neighbors. He had shattered all tea cups and hence we had been served tea in steel glasses. And he went away erratically and came back home with torn clothes.  The daughters were older than us. They seemed to be hiding although as is expected we were supposed to become friends almost immediately. We didn't. I don't even remember what their names were. 

But I clearly remember that even though I was very excited in our sea facing hotel room at the fag end of the beach, I was sad too. It was all trickling down into my head because I had heard the whispers. That night I came down with a fever without warning. It rarely happens that way, my mother said as she shut the tall windows and kept the sea breeze out.

Free

Our mouths smelled of

Red wine and shami kebabs

It was a night of Friday

And late

Lights were disco

We saw

Only what we

Wanted to see

Music was quite deafening

Mixing with sea waves

And the midnight wind

Made me feel rootlessly free

You

Came from behind

And tapped me on my right shoulder

With three fingers or two

That was the first time

We touched

Both were quite inebriated

So that's understandable

I turned 

Saw you and smiled

You grinned too

And asked me to join the dance 

Amnesia

The mind is a tricky animal. I read somewhere that the heart understands. The heart is on your side. But the mind, the mind is dicey. It will go berserk in a second. It will mess you up bad, you will never know peace. 

Off late, I have been more unhinged than usual. After my son was born, things have been hard. My mind has been asking me to rebel, break free. It has systematically not allowed my heart to love. That apart, I have come to believe that amnesia is a part of post partum. Like, I wouldn't be able to recall which friend I spoke to last week, which sheets are in the laundry bag, what I had for lunch yesterday, whether I have been planning to call my mother or I have already called her in the past half an hour. So I seem to forget things more than usual. Sometimes I wonder if it's nature's coping mechanism to make me forget how hard being a mother is.

Since my short term memory is being wiped off as we speak, my repository of events to go back is taking me further behind. So I have had an average life, nothing out of the ordinary. Mostly, I have to try hard to remember if some event happened in 2016 or 2017. Everything before that is quite hazy. Hence I try not to remember anything in the first place. So it could be that my subconscious is digging further behind, or it could be the isolation and confinement at home for months, but suddenly memories of decades ago have started sprouting in my head.

I now remember, clear as day, incidents, painful episodes of sexual abuse that I was subjected to as a child. Perhaps, I had blocked them out completely because that's what the hippocampus does. As an act of self defense. But now, as I see my son erupt one milk teeth after another, I cannot help but roar in pain that when I was abused, I was so little that I too had my milk teeth. And yet, I can feel the day, the light, the time, the smells, the texture of the floor, the aridity in the air, the sighting of blood. It's like I am there. Immediately transported back to an hour in my life I didn't know I had lived through until a few months ago. 

And then my mind does its thing and connects the precendents and the consequences of the episode and everything comes back. Nothing is blocked anymore. I writhe in agony and wonder who would do that to a child as I nestle mine in my arms. But there's no escape. There's no forgetting. There's no getting past. There's no understanding. And I become a million scattered pieces of myself in the air. 

Potpourri

Back in the day

I never knew what potpourri was

Then in my fourth standard book of GK

I found out

All my life, I have wondered

How underrated smells are

Olfactory is a powerful sense

But we let it wither so easily

So now

At the age of whatever I am

I am making potpourri

Unless I think otherwise tomorrow

In a glass bottle

That came with the dessert we ordered

On an evening long ago

Mango mousse, or something

Am gonna put orange peels

As many as I can

And sprinkle it with dried bougainvillea

Pink & white & orange

Then am gonna add beads

From a bracelet I got made

Long ago in a fete I wandered into alone

With letters of my name

Am gonna also put

Old earrings with their tarnished stones

And some more dried petals of rose

Sprayed with my expired perfumes 

Am gonna tear up old Polaroids & put them in

Just to add to the nostalgia

And a bit of the umbilical cord 

Sprouting from my newborn's navel

Also add drops of my mother's shampoo

So that it smells like her too

And scrunched old love letters as well

Because old lovers deserve some caging too

Isthumus

Yesterday in the middle of the afternoon, our windows shook. Doors too. May be the walls, a little bit. Assuming it was an earthquake was the safe bet. As we were planning to run downstairs, there was a loud bang. Like a collision between celestial objects. Or may be a supersonic jet. Or a very loud thunder; but the skies were bright. We were stupified, not knowing whether to stay in or run out. Suddenly the clouds covered the sun and added to the gloom and chaos. In a few minutes, many people started making calls and the telephone network gave up. This clueless lull stayed for about an hour. Then towards evening the power went out. 

I rescued some candles that had been buried deep in the kitchen cabinets and we sat on the floor, close to each other. Our car wasn't in the best of shape. What if, we had to escape and the thing just gave up. The only thing that kept it running, more than petrol, was faith. Nobody was hungry but we all ate leftovers for dinner. Around midnight, there was a knock on the door. 

A neighbour who I had never met introduced himself and asked if we were doing fine. I said we needed water, there was no water to drink. He said nobody had water to drink and that by morning a water tanker would come by and cater to the neighborhood. After shutting the door I wondered if he really was a neighbour. 

Towards dawn, only a while after I had managed to doze off, there was another loud bang. This was twice as loud as the one during the afternoon. I clutched the bags I had packed with some supplies, woke everyone up, made them empty their bladders for the road and headed for the car. I couldn't remember if someone had locked the house but seeing the exodus on the road, we didn't head back. 

We drove constantly for a couple of hours and nothing felt different or new except for the traffic. People in stopped cars, lowered windows and exchanged rumors. There were folks on foot too, on cycles and bikes, who were faster than those of us who were stuck in cars.

When the sun rose to the top of the sky, things got moving, like really fast. Like they had diverted the traffic or found an alternative road or something. The road ahead emptied out. No one knew where we were headed. There was no destination. The idea was to get as far as possible before the third time the loud bang happened. But would we? 

The city ended and we hit the highway. We drove really fast without even bothering about filling up the tank. We took turns and drove. When it was my time to drive, we switched seats and I lowered the window to see water everywhere except the road ahead. The road looked a shiny grey vis-a-vis the brown grey of the water all around. And there was nowhere to go except ahead.

I asked aloud if anyone knew where we were. There was no answer.

They had bombed the dams. The nearest dam was a few hundred kilometres away. The one after that was a thousand kilometres away. The one after that, it didn't matter. There was water everywhere. The city must have been under water by now. Who knew? 

The road we were driving on, felt like an isthumus that had suddenly showed up. Connecting two landmasses, the one we had abandoned and the one that lay ahead. Something definitely look lay ahead. It had too. 

A few minutes into driving, it dawned on me that the road we were on, wasn't a road it all. It was a flyover. And sooner or later, it would plunge into the water. 

At the Beach

Been living in isolation for over months now. But it doesn't feel odd. It's peaceful in a way because there's no urgency to go out and meet people. There's no obligation to buy stuff. There's no valid reason to be anywhere but home. This isolation has given a validation to my chosen way of life. 

Do you remember Celine, from Before Sunset. When she talks to Jesse about living in a communist country. This is vaguely what she would've meant. Her mind opened up and creative juices started flowing. Nothing of that sort has happened with me, of course. My mind is still in some self induced coma, there's a stasis I have chosen to hang in. But I am assuredly unafraid as I don't have to be around people anymore. People aren't so bad, tbh. But I am not just built for it. My bad.

When I imagine the future of life this way, is there anything I would particularly miss? Probably not. May be, I would want to get away a little bit, once in a while. I fret and panic a lot, I live with a lot of anxiety. So a break, in a few months is something I really would appreciate. Not that it changes anything, but. 

Long time ago, I remember being at the beach. It was Puri. Near the crematorium. But it's business as usual, even with such proximity to death. The eateries by the sea were doing good business. There are some stalls that sell sea food of all kind dipped in thick batter and deep fried till they turned orange. I somehow never gathered enough courage to eat at such a place. Then there are some hawkers selling samosas and sweets. A fast food stall that's shaped like a circle and is famous for its rolls. I would've gone there, but kept walking instead. 

We sort of reached the end of the market. Beyond that the beach looked virgin, the sea wilder. We stopped because there was no where left to go. There was a shack that sold tea in those white little paper cups. No matter how little tea the seller poured in, there was always a fear of it tipping over. In the strong breeze, our hands shook as we took small sips. It was milky and sweet enough; thick with some cream added after straining. We saw eggs and asked the seller, a boy of mid teens, if he could make anything. He was just manning the shop, he said, and his father was running some errands. 

So we waited. The sun began setting and fell deep into the sea. A yellow bulb came alight upon the stall. Not many were around, we were pretty far from the hoopla of the beach. It got cooler, our sweat dried against our skins and we got a chill. Sitting on the sand, I made a trip or four to play with the waves. The foam looked dreamy on my toes. Everytime I would be screamed at and asked to retreat. In between one of my trips to the waves, the boy's father showed up.

He made us bread omlettes and served them on paper plates, garnished with ground hot black pepper. The man was quite a pro and cooked fast on an iron frying pan. The stove fire was the only light we could see for a distance as even the bulb went out. 

I could feel the salt in the air seep into my skin and the chill penetrate my nostrils as the waves touched my toes again, and again and again. 

Fast Food

We had accidentally spent the entire day at the doctor's. I had imagined it would be an hour long affair once I got the appointment, or two. But, the tests involved, waiting for results, chatting up with fellow patients, sitting in large waiting rooms, took up our entire day. We had left soon after breakfast, hoping to cook lunch after getting back from the doctor's. But we left in such a hurry, the vegetables lay half chopped on the board, peels all astray. The day was slightly tiring, we ate lunch at the doctor's canteen. It was our first eat out in a long time. 

On the way back home, it was almost evening, right beside the canal that leads us home, I saw the neon lights come alight on the sign board of a tiny fast food shop. As we crossed it, I saw the pictures of momos, brightly colored. Usually a fast food shop had its kitchen out front and the dining at the back. We stopped and I walked out and asked the cook who had just started the kitchen fires, if they had momos. They didn't. I could get an egg roll though, if I waited. I was not as hungry as I was bored. I somehow wanted to delay getting back home and went into the dining area and waited alone on a table after placing my order for an egg roll to be taken away.

The kitchen was a smokey hot place. But the dining area was cooler, it had about half a dozen tables adjacent to the walls and a couple in the middle. I sat in a corner. The walls were tiled white, some paintings were hung. They had tried to give the place some kind of touch. I kept looking at my phone and then at the clock hung at the wall, matching the time. The cook, still visible from where I was seated was just beginning to assemble stuff. 

Meanwhile a woman walked in with her two kids. A boy and a little girl. She parked her scooter next to the canal and held hands of both her children as they crossed the road to the fast food shop. They looked quite happy, the little girl with curly hair was almost bubbly. I think food of choice makes kids happy. The older kid was slightly aloof though, he appeared geeky with spectacles. The mother looked tired, she was a bit more on the stoical side, but constantly monitored her children. The father was amiss, I thought. But it was a weekday, he could have been at work. Their soups came really soon and they playfully slurped from their spoons. Then came bowls of chowmein. The guy at the counter signalled that my rolls were packed. I left immediately thinking of my half chopped vegetables on the kitchen counter.

On the short drive home my head went back to my days as a kid. School buses made me nauseous. The smoke, the heat, the sweat, everything added up against me. Plus there was a big rush for seats and not everyone ended up with one. On somedays I would be picked up from school by my parents. It was an extremely joyous occasion to find a familiar face outside school gates. We had just moved into the city and everything felt foreign and too aggressive for my mellow mind. I barely had any friends and the classroom made me homesick. I found the teachers to be somewhat rude. So I ended up wanting to stay home or go to the park. We always went to the park on Sunday afternoons. When we were there, I wanted to build a house in the lawn and live amongst the flowers. But the park was far from my school. As we rode back from school to home, we would stop at a fast food shop. It was a shack next to the road and the farmer's market. It barely had a roof, the tables and chairs were set on the sidewalk and people shopping at the farmer's market would often stop by. 

My family would occupy a table. Sauce bottles, mostly tomato and gree chilli sat on the table beside a plastic jug of water and a few glasses. We were not supposed to drink that water no matter how hot a chilli we bit into. It could be a health hazard. Instead whatever remained in our school water bottles would have to do. I wasn't fond of any kind of meat as a kid and would often have to be cajoled really well before I touched it. Instead I loved eggs. I would order soup and egg chowmein and egg rolls. Oh it was such a feast!

I wondered if the egg roll I had parceled that day could match the taste of the rolls I had relished as a kid. In fact, could ever anything.

Just-existing

Like in peak summer

The soul has evaporated

Walls have shrunk

My mind has imploded

Anxiety isn't cake

Every day, every hour

Unknown fears obsess 

There must be 

One cheap shrink for me

Will take a cab every Saturday

Or biweekly

Just talk you know

Cry, hug, roar, may be

Sit on a chair

Stare, be heard

And for one fleeting moment

Be unraveled

House plants still flower

Husband still cooks

My son, cries, smiles, 

And doesn't eat enough

Drink enough

I sweep, wash clothes

And work too

Phones ring off the hook

Mails are typed and sent

At super fast speed

Sans typos

There's no time

None at all

But even in those free nano seconds

I get daily to barely sit

Somehow I manage

To devastate myself

With worry

With regret

With anger seething

And unbearable disappointment

You know what I am talking about?

Every day, I weigh

Not-existing over just-existing

I shouldn't have to

It probably ain't that bad

But I just cannot

Seem to manage my mind

Hurt

Now, living in this capsule

Weeping with nostalgia

I remember

Staunch summer days

When you & I 

Roamed the thrift market

Sipping salty buttermilk

Under my maroon umbrella

And later

Made out in a tin-roofed car

Sweat gliding down our foreheads

We loved each other

What happened?

What happened now

That we have rented this

Claustrophobic capsule for ourselves

Decaying in hurt 

Seething in permanent anger

We are our worst selves imaginable

This is far from the clouds

You had shown me

That hot summer day

Saying 'It would rain later today'

And when we were mid-kiss

It did

Dolly

I was ten. That many years old. My friend Dolly was seventeen. She was to get married in three weeks. Everything had been fixed. The groom's family lived in the neighbouring village. Dolly's father sighed in relief after many months. 

As her family started looking for a tenthouse and cook for the wedding feast and accumulating their scant jewelry, neighbors began inviting Dolly with her friends into their homes. It was a bridal shower of sorts that lasted days. The group of girls would be served an elaborate lunch, sometimes dinner too. Dolly would get a set of clothes, some cosmetics, sometimes just money in lieu of the clothes or cosmetics. The women of the house would paint her nails, colour her feet, tie flowers in her hair, make her wrap the new sari around, no matter how uneasy she was. The group of friends would have a gala time too, with plenty of food, some song and some dance.

Albeit the youngest, I was a member of Dolly's group of friends. We visited almost a dozen homes in the weeks preceding her wedding. Finally it was my family's turn to have her over for lunch. Incidentally my folks forgot and now it was too close to the wedding date and the bride to be was to stay indoors, not be about much. I was enraged, how could this be.

I pestered my folks to right the wrongs. And Dolly was invited. It was rather low key because not many could know about this. Although I was exasperated, there was so much preparation to be done, I was emotional too as I was to lose my friend forever. I went to the market with mother and picked out nail paint and hair clips and bindis and vermilion and lastly a crisp cotton sari and petticoat to go with.

At home, father cooked prawns in coconut milk and pilaf. The prawns were delightfully plump and they had someone climb the cononut tree in the backyard and throw down a few as I waited to catch them. An aunt scraped them down and squeezed the milk out. For desert there was gulabjamun. Dolly seemed to like it around our house though she hadn't been there much. I was elated to be giving her the send off she deserved. I gave her a bouquet of flowers I had plucked from our garden and tied together. She thanked me with tears and hugged me tight when she found out the crumpled notes I had saved from my pocket money and tied to the stem of the bouquet.

Years went by. I passed into teenage. Dolly kept visiting her maternal house from time to time. First pregnant, then with a baby, then with a toddler and pregnant again, then with three children. Time seemed to get clumsier. Her father passed away, then a few years later, her mother too, she kept visiting and staying. I rarely visited her though. I knew her when I was so little. I had grown up, things were different now.

But whenever I would cross her house I would wonder if she was visiting. If she would see me, she would come rushing out and I wouldn't know where to hide. Her face changed, it became rounder, her belly swelled from carrying so many children, her veins showed from under her skin, hair thinned, the glint in her eyes dwindled. I studied, got gaunter, had heartbreaks, never thought about marriage, fantasized about escaping from home. And then one day, I did. I never returned for good. I never met Dolly again. She lived and grew older in my mind only. Or probably froze at that very moment I had given her my home grown bouquet tied in the crumpled notes of my pocket money. 

Rourkela

The tar on the street roads always appeared fresh. Like it had been rolled out last evening. It smelt new too, or perhaps I imagined too much. The reason could be that they were the roads inside the college campus. The campus stood protected like a fortress, if you think of it that way. High compound walls stood on most boundaries, secluding it well from rest of the town and creating a different world of sorts. On the boundaries that hadn't been walled, stood small hills. Pure absolute wilderness which were inhabited by tribes. So, coming back to the street roads, they always appeared fresh because there wasn't much traffic. Inside the campus. The professors cycled to work, some even walked. The students too followed suit. The college was located centrally inside the campus, the hostels where the students were put up were scattered all across. In between the college and the hostels, were located dozens of staff quarters where the professors lived. There were auditoriums, stadiums, activity centers, laboratories, libraries. And everything was connected by the streets. Always pitch black, always fresh, not a crevice in place. Not one puddle. They were almost as manicured as roads could be. And shrouded by trees on both sides, without a gap. Some flowering, some just plain yet verdant. 

The monsoons created a bit of a hullabaloo though. Or rather the late summers. It got really hot, and it did because I remember once the mess in the hostel had closed for summer vacations and I had run out of pocket money to go out and eat, I made instant noodles after heating a glass of water in the sun. Anyway, on afternoons of days that had been that hot, the sky would give in and a storm would fill in the usual vacuum of our adolescent hearts. It would break a couple of boughs of trees. The next morning before we chased time on our cycles and ran to meet the cut off for attendance in class, we would find the streets covered with leaves. Probably the sweeping staff were understaffed or what. Or there was no sweeping staff. But the leaves would be every where on the streets. Yellowed and browned and drenched in overnight rain, the leaves of many many kinds of trees would just lay on the black tarry streets and soak again in the moist smell of the earth. 

Seeing this untamed beauty of flora, unabashed, I would decide to bunk classes that day and stay on in my hostel room. At lunch time, I would give the sickly mess lunch a go and order kaju fried rice and garlic chicken from the shanty restaurant that fed me loyally for my entire time there. I would unwrap the food from the aluminum foil and eat, sitting at the window staring at the streets, the leaves, the hills and what not. I would assume, I had my entire life ahead of me. I was just twenty. That's a lot in years, but still very young, very naive. The decade of life that started then, aged me by two decades, if not less. 

In the evenings I would stroll a bit, the earth would have dried up in the oppressive heat of the day. There would be couples taking walks, holding hands, chatting. There would be the cake seller who sold small cakes, muffins and brownies, and sweet breads, all home baked in a glass box fashioned like a shopping cart. He would ring this onerous bell, announcing his presence, softly though, but infrequently and without rhythm. It would be alarming at first, but I would miss the cake seller if he took an evening off.