random ramblings – Dialect of Heart

Pandemic Musings

May 19, 2020May 19, 2020 dialectofheartLeave a comment

This post might not make much sense. I just want to share how I feel right now. It might seem too preachy, the kind of post I would have skipped reading too, but today the value of these words has been reinforced in my life.

Treasure every moment. Treasure every person in your life. Count every single blessing; from the ability to go to a normal day at work, to quietly eat a meal without any huge worries looming in the horizon. It’s highly disturbing and scary how easily one stands to lose everything they hold dear in life, somtime all it takes is a mere second. A pandemic is ruthless.

.I face every hurdle; yet plan expectantly towards a future, the next week or the next decade of my life; hope for miracles; work towards the dream career, the love of my life, the books I want to read, the places I want to see, the children I want to have someday, confess the secrets I carry in my heart, do the things I had been holding back, putting them off for a distant day or letting them go too easily, and oh, the dreams, so many dreams! And a mere gust of wind can carry everything to the edge of a cliff, threatening to topple me and my dreams over, and I hang precariously, not knowing what to do.

Such gusts of wind can be quite unpredictable and blow into anyone’s life. What happens then to the career you fret about, the love you have, the dreams you nurtured, the children you wanted to have, the places your feet never tread on? What then? Only one word comes to my mind. Unfair. But who had said it would be fair?

So, I treasure everything I have, even that petty colleague, the extra kilos, a broken heart, the windswept hair, my books with dog-eared pages, that tiny chunk of blue sky I see from my window. I won’t put off anything till tomorrow. I will hold my dear ones near. I will do only what I love. And not waste my time worrying about petty setbacks. Every blessing we have is palpable during COVID times. Especially the ordinary, everyday ones.

Sunday

September 7, 2014 dialectofheart1 Comment

The door to the balcony is open. The wind orchestrates a pleasant and familiar harmony; coursing its way through the tall trees. The sun glistens a warm yellow on my stretched-out legs . A collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant lay on my lap, dog-eared at page 72 . My hair smells like green apple, a new shampoo. Memories are dug out from the archives and relished at leisure; haphazardly, recklessly; that shared look, that sigh, that day, that book, that song, that blue door, those lanterns dazzling the evening sky, those friends, that magic wind in the hair, those waves, that smile. A foamy brown moustache proudly adorns my upper lip, as I delay the pleasure of licking off the last drops of cold coffee. I find myself humming old songs of Kishore Kumar, the same songs that my father used to hum during the weekend drives, nearly two decades ago; and I remember listening to them, sleepily curled up on the backseat of the car. A warm, lazy cocoon envelops me today, this very moment. These rare moments of solitude pursuing absolutely nothing, but indulging in the slow life and the simple pleasures of the senses-a good book, some good food, a familiar scent, a warm touch, an old melody-is all I require to replenish my energy for the approaching week. What would life be without good, old Sundays?

playing dead

June 9, 2013May 19, 2020 dialectofheart1 Comment

retreating, going incommunicado, discovering the slow joy of anonymity, retreating, cutting off the superfluous, losing self in the routine, hearing the whispers and sounds that constitute a silence, modifying memories *obliviate*, retreating, curling up on a cold floor and going to sleep, not dwelling, never saying, retreating, playing dead.

The One About Skinned Knees, Distractions and Absent Lovers

March 1, 2013 dialectofheartLeave a comment

Two decades ago I barged into a class and under the scrutiny of fifty pairs of eyes that had turned towards the door, I tripped and fell. I didn’t pause for a single second on the ground, and dashed towards my desk, trying to overlook the classmates who sniggered. And it was only when the teacher shrieked ‘Your socks are soaked with blood!’ I looked down at my bloodied knees. The wounds gaped wide enough to require sutures but I was too preoccupied with my embarrassment to feel even the slightest stab of pain. As everyone fussed over my injury, caressing my head, and offering me a glass of water, I felt the pain in my legs explode. That’s what I remember from that day. If you don’t dwell on it, the hurt is negligible. I took to suppression as a coping mechanism against injuries and setbacks; I don’t conceal or run away from hurt, but face it with an essential detachment, like events unfolding in the life of a close acquaintance where I have a ringside view of everything but I am spared the pain. I don’t dwell on the ground to look at my bleeding knees.

February was tough. I lost a sister, an important plan fell through, a close friend disintegrated into depression, and I witnessed (and still witnessing) a career-related legal drama. If I allow myself to take it in all, the chaos would choke me. But over the years, my mind had adapted to detach and distract itself from the dreams that crumble, the people I lose or the ennui of everyday existence, filing them away in neat little cabinets. Life is too short to mourn about what happened and what didn’t. I am yet to be loved; I am yet to achieve my goals. There are so many places I haven’t visited yet; there are so many books I haven’t read yet. I go from one day to the next, concentrating on what is and what would be. The past can’t be crammed into my life.

I extrude the unpleasant by replacing it with small moments of pleasure. A day after my elder sister died, I felt guilty about the happiness that bubbled up in my chest on seeing the new and vivid bougainvillea blossoms near my home. On the days when love disheartens me, I write about love. I read wherever and whenever possible. The calming monotony of laps in the pool or feet pacing on a long walk is something else that I look forward to. My ambition had blunted in the recent years, and I am trying to revive it; but all the while reminding myself that it is just a job. I am not one of those revoltingly joyous and perky individuals brimming with optimism, but I refuse to drown in despair too. Life is just normal; sometimes I create my own happiness, and sometimes it creeps in unexpected.

I take solace in the unusual; even the absent lover has a peculiar charm. It can sometimes morph into a constant and subtle longing for him to witness the world with me, to witness me, to let me witness him. These are the moments when I walk about interposing minutiae of my idea of him into the world around me, blending the two seamlessly. Today I drove to IITG and spent few delightful hours walking the large green grounds and catching up with old friends. All throughout I carried him around to hear that song on the car radio, to see that lone black bird on a tree with red blossoms, to be enthralled by that sunset over the vast river, to hear the conversations I had, or to laugh over my hair fanning out weirdly in the wind. Sometimes an intangible absence makes me feel more alive to the world than the tangible objects that crowd it.

Random Smile-Inducers

February 19, 2013 dialectofheartLeave a comment

Lack of internet connectivity on my phone and laptop made me me grumpy the whole day. There aren’t any important mails to send or any pending assignments to complete. I had deactivated all my social network accounts as they were tiring, unproductive and intrusive; and i no longer missed them. But somehow I felt very isolated and couldn’t figure out why. That caused the grumpiness. I tried to focus on the random things that we pass by unnoticed but have the potential to induce a smile. The subtle and often hidden humour needs to be extracted from the surface of seemingly monotonous and sometimes unfortunate occurrences. Today I cite three such random incidents here.

I am scared of birds, especially the rock pigeons and their obscenely loud flutter of wings, the guttural cooing, the creepy rotation of their necks and their surprising knack of flirting with danger when they sit on electric wires. But these damn birds had haunted me all my life. When I was three I was attacked by a pair of swans taller than me, and i had fainted. This was followed by few fat ducks and a smart-alecky parrot which my grandmother had determined to keep as pets throughout my childhood. During my first job, I was posted in a godforsaken village and allotted dilapidated living quarters that seemed to be standing upright on sheer willpower. On the first night I was rudely awakened by sounds of something short and heavy jumping on the hollow ceiling. Ghost of some brutally murdered previous child occupant was the first thought that came to my mind. The next morning the hospital pharmacist laughed off my fears. I had just about heaved a sigh of relief when he casually mentioned, “It’s just a family of large, white owls.” He had the audacity to call them cute too. I would have preferred an army of ghosts. These (parliament of) owls were huge and despite my pleading cries, my mother refused to drive them off. They are a favorite of Maa Saraswati! Wtf! Then there are the pigeons that follow me around everywhere I go, and perch in groups on my window ledge. I have given up sitting on the front verandah because of the rock pigeons that fly in to soak in the sunshine! Ironically I had been born into a family who named the kids after some weird peacock fetish! My sister delights in scaring me that I would get unknowingly get married to a ‘ichchadhari’ (shape-shifter) pigeon (as in the infamous ichchadhari nagin) and will wake up one night hugging a giant grey pigeon, my husband! Anyways, not long ago the building I stay in was undergoing renovation and one day I was startled by the sight of my parents chatting with a man who was crouching outside our window, about forty feet above the ground. Once the initial shock wore off, I realized that he was crouching on the makeshift bamboo ladder and was getting ready to paint the window ledge, and my parents were helping him remove the flower pots from there. Suddenly, he asked, “What do I do about this?” My parents quickly exchanged alarmed looks with each other before turning towards me. I knew they were hiding something that involved their annoying love for anything avian. I shouted, “Is there a pigeon’s nest on our window ledge?” They shook their heads in unison, but the crouched painter craned his neck through the open window to look at me, flashed his betel-stained teeth and said, “Yes majoni, there’s a big nest over here, and two baby pigeons too. Come here. Come and see.” My parents had a sudden murderous glint in their eyes as if they wanted to shove the painter from his precarious post for revealing the secret. But the painter’s placid and almost cow-like countenance, oblivious of how his words had scared me; and my parents’ sheepish grins were just too funny and I burst out laughing.

Every morning around ten, my father receives a missed call from the local fisherman whose name he had saved on his phone as ‘Raju Fish’. He halts his jog and saunters into the second floor balcony to stare down skeptically at ‘Raju Fish’ and his piscatory catch of the day, which would be splashing around in blissful ignorance in a dull grey vessel tied to the carrier seat of an old cycle. This would be followed by a scene (and ordeal for me) that had varied little over the years. My father would harangue for the next twenty minutes and end it with a grumpy proclamation that one day divine justice would intervene and really, really bad things would happen to those who cheats and sells stale fishes to elderly men, almost the age of their own father (a deliberate pause here for the desired effect), and charges triple the actual price. ‘Raju Fish’ would deny vehemently and swear on his parents and grandparents, justifying his untainted business ethics. My father smirks, but ends up buying the fish. My father’s accusations are true, but I feel sad for the poor ‘Raju Fish’ who has to go through twenty minutes of obligatory questioning to sell one stale Rohu! I can’t shake off the feeling that someday somewhere ‘Raju Fish’ would commit suicide and leave an accusatory note blaming my father’s questions.

Then there is the incident of the flashy red car which is always stands in front of our house because of the scarcity of proper parking spaces. The owner is paranoid about it being stolen, and since his home is a short distance away from where the beloved car is parked, he had equipped it with a loud and irritating alarm. All that precaution was sensible and good, till the day the toddlers in our locality found out that the car wails if they punched it hard! The harried and unfortunately fat owner had to run at odd hours of the day to deactivate the alarm when some kid deliberately kicks the car, or he had to face the ire of the neighbours over creating noise pollution. He still refuses to permanently deactivate the car alarm and bow down to a bunch of pesky toddlers, who are innocence personified once they had made the car shriek. The man has aged a decade in a week and looks perpetually sleep-deprived. When I see him or his haggard-looking wife standing guard near their flashy red car, i am sure they had not foreseen this calamity.

Things I Don’t Tell You

December 8, 2012 dialectofheartLeave a comment

In the recent months I’ve experienced such an abrupt prolificacy in writing that often the content gets butchered in favour of frequency.

I think of you as my only reader and hope that the essence of what I want to convey doesn’t get diluted or misinterpreted in the transit. I write for you because I would never speak to you. I don’t know if you are even aware that I write, but hope that serendipitously you would stumble upon my blog someday. The only drawback is the constrained range of topics that thoughts of this particular reader brings to my mind.

I write an hour before dawn, sitting cross-legged on my bed, impatiently drumming my fingers on the laptop, wondering what would I like to tell you today. Sometimes I have little to say, sometimes I have to remind myself about this lone reader’s attention span. I am unable to contain the things I’d like to tell you; it’s a chaos that I look forward to each day.

Today I woke up at four-thirty am in a familiar yet relatively new city. The sun wasn’t up yet and it was freezing outside. So, I switched on the bedside lamp and started reading the book my sister gifted me yesterday, “The Groaning Shelf” by Pradeep Sebestian. This is a book about books, about unabashed bibliomania! I think of you and wonder if you would frown in amazement that I’m just a small fry among bibliophiles.

As the grey early morning light suffused the sky, I slipped on an over-sized black pullover and walked out to the terrace. It wasn’t an impressive skyline but the familiar stillness of dawn that greeted me. A sliver of the moon still hung unsure in the sky. An aircraft flew by uncomfortably close. A scary pigeon stared at me the entire time I was on the terrace. Do you know that I’m scared of birds? Hitchcock and a pair of huge swans are responsible for it.

As I sit on the edge of the bathtub waiting for it to fill up, my thoughts drift to you again. I eat eggs for breakfast and wonder how do you like your eggs. Fried? Scrambled? Omelette? I laugh hysterically over my sister’s antics and wonder if you would find them funny too.

I’ve traded my dream of travelling to the distant hills to visit the accessible Chandigarh due to lack of travel partners. I’m somewhat disappointed. By nine in the morning we were already on NH-1. There were so many things that caught my attention. I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk and she was nearly as tall as the lamp post, 6’5” at least. I gaped like an idiot, till I realized it was making her uncomfortable. I saw acres and acres of naked fields that would be luxuriant next spring. And there were the fauna; the horses, the bullocks and even an occasional camel! I saw turbans in every possible colour; aquamarine, peach, lilac, brick-red, you just name it. Old women with pendulous breasts carried large bales of hay on their head. Liquor flowed freely on this route. And so many expensive cars that I don’t even know the names of!

I stopped for lunch at a road-side dhaba where the utensils resembled a hotbed of staphylococcal colonies but the food was mouth-watering. They got the concept of ‘fat-free‘ wrong, and freely poured dollops of desi ghee on the paranthas. I thought of you again as I stood outside the car at this unfamiliar spot on the highway.

I am in Chandigarh now. I type these words as I lay curled up on a large white sofa. Today I wear pink, a welcome addition to my wardrobe of monochromes. In a few minutes I will accompany my sister on a shopping spree. She wants to buy kurtis with embroideries and works that she had painstakingly explained to me but I didn’t understand anything. I think I’ll settle for window-shopping.

I will think of you there too. And you won’t even know.

Whisper of the Heart OR In which I yearn for a home in the hills

July 9, 2012 dialectofheart2 Comments

“On a perfect day in a perfect world, I would wake up to the sun peeking in to tiger-stripe my nest of white sheets and a pillow as soft and plump as a baby’s cheeks. And I would run up the stairs barefoot, to the terrace and be surrounded by a sea of trees interspersed with pretty houses, a riot of colors blooming on their front porches and an occasional rocking chair.

I would sip a steaming cup of coffee with only the birds on a red roof for company. And then be tempted by a long winding road disappearing around the corner in a pink bougainvillea bush.

The early hour will contrive to keep the people of the pretty houses under downy quilts in their warm beds while I would tie my shoelaces and quietly slip out of the house. I’ll meet a few children though, with cheeks as red as apples; and going downhill I’ll cross a girl, waiting and drumming impatient fingers on her satchel, and a minute later walk past a boy hurrying uphill, smiling to himself. I’ll run my fingers along ivy-lined stone walls and stand under a tree with the prettiest pink blossoms.

After an hour of meandering I will realize that I’m lost in this Ghibli-esque world of green hedges and winding roads and a narrow stairway will be the rescue; old steps would bypass the curves of the hill, and lead me through a tiny garden onto a familiar road.

A hearty breakfast later, I would walk into the city square that bristles with the young; school children in green and blue uniforms, tight huddles of college dudes sharing a smoke, and the petite girls swishing long black hair and wearing bright shoes-and spend few moments relieving my own schooldays. Sturdy legs will go uphill and downhill, as charming shops and boutiques beckoned. I’ll touch muslin and silk and slip my feet into a dozen shoes and read in bookstores; but will end up buying an orange notebook, a keychain of a doll with stringy hair and a pair of socks. I will not visit the waterfalls and the peak that the crowds throng. Instead I will eat a warm croissant in a tiny café and watch the rain trickle down a sloping green roof.

At noon I would go out of town along picturesque roads lined with pine trees; driving past a house with blue picket fence and people whose eyes crinkled delightfully with laughter. And I will literally live on the edge, looking down steep hillsides and looking up at cottony clouds. A sharp curve and a sacred forest will loom in the horizon.

And the pristine wilderness suffused with an eerie green light will be everything I’d ever imagined it to be. Trees will rise high like lithe black limbs, saplings will bloom with orange flowers, creepers will slither along mossy tree trunks, and I’ll sidestep delicate herbs and mushrooms as I walk on a floor of dried leaves that would crunch under my shoes.

I will jump over fallen tree trunks and a tangle of white roots; duck under thorny bushes and tackle precarious slopes. The sun will shine through a leafy canopy, and it will be a mellow sun. A tree will be shaped like a bulbous nose and ancient stone relics will bring in the mystery.

I might see something majestic tomorrow, but the absolute stillness of the forest will stay with me forever.

I would step out into a goliath green ground with lilliputian yellow flowers, like tiny suns. I would let the dew on the grass wet my feet as I look down the beautiful valley of farm fields and a gurgling brook.

At dusk I would return to town and finally join a crowd to watch the sunset, sitting on a hillock at an old golf course.

Dinner will be savored at a restaurant resplendent with colonial architecture, mahogany pillars and velvet cushions. And wicker chairs on the patio too.

On the way back, I will walk under a lamp post that will remind me of Narnia. In bed I will read Kipling as the a flirtatious breeze made the curtains dance. “

I would spend a day in Shillong.

(Mundane details: Stay at The White Orchid guesthouse in Upper Lachumiere and a morning walk in its picturesque surroundings; walking around in Laitumkhrah, eating street food, shopping; a trip to Mawphlang sacred grove, sunset at Polo Grounds, and dinner at Hotel Pinewood.)