Weird Synapses

While driving on NH-37, most people notice the Sarusajai stadium, a popular dhaba, a few educational institutes or the Balaji temple. But when I go for a drive on the same route, my attention is grabbed by two unusual landmarks, a Tyrannosaurus-shaped tree atop a hill and a life-size model of a red car atop an ordinary house. On my weekly commute to the village where I used to work, few of the familiar landmarks I looked out for were as follows: a pumpkin shed, the toothless old lady who sat on her haunches every morning and picked the head lice of her grandchild, a row of birds on the electric wire, a smoky brick kiln, a muddy pool of lilies, and a police station outside which two men always played carom.

Most people I know are amateur cartographers, gauging distances, noting landmarks and flaunting an impeccable sense of direction. I can drive on the same road for a whole year and yet fail to remember what comes after what, the familiar bumps and bends, and the commonly accepted landmarks. My focus veers into the oddities instead; which after an adequate frequency of visual stimulation serve as good enough reminders to find my way around. But it is a hassle to tell anyone directions such as, “turn left after passing the restaurant that had written ‘dhoosa’ instead of ‘dosa’ on the outdoor menu” or “the lane next to the building that is the colour of vomit”, or even “take the right at the intersection near the statue with parabolic breasts”.

In larger cities with an abundance of one-way streets, I have to take lengthy detours to get anywhere, owing to my selective peripheral vision (once I had trouble recalling and telling a friend the colour of the building I stay in) and driving past my destinations. I require time to cram whole buildings, little nooks and corners, and the roads into my memory. But as I notice the weird stuff rather than the proper street names or house numbers, even GPS technology fails to salvage my paltry spatial awareness and navigate me in this immaculately labelled urban world.

My father claims it is a lack of focus, but I feel it is just an alternative focus; like being left-handed in a world swarming with right-handedness, or being colour-blind among people who sees a riot of colours. Now, colour-blindness is another story. On my first day of HS at Cotton College, I gloated about securing a seat on the first bench of the severely cramped chemistry gallery. The reason was to get a ringside view of the magic show (or the fun chemistry experiments) that is demonstrated on the first day of college by a very exuberant professor. While the magic tricks were going on, the professor turned to me and said, “Do you see that heap of powder on the table? Tell me what colour is it“. It was late afternoon ans we were in a minimally-lit room, and there was the additional pressure of nearly five hundred pairs of unfamiliar eyes that had suddenly turned towards me, awaiting my answer; so after a moment of observation  I replied, “It is dark green, Sir.” The professor shouted, “ARE YOU COLOUR BLIND? That’s grey.” And I shrunk in my seat.

Considering I have perfect vision, I wonder if my brain has weird synapses that perceives the world in a different way from the normal folk; and this feeling is reinforced by my habit of looking for signs where they are none. Dear reader, tell me I am not alone.

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Morning Monologue on Things Inappropriate and Disregarded

At four in the morning the Middlemarch book brick tumbled off the bedside shelf, picked up momentum, took a cruel trajectory and landed on my face, book spine to nasal cartilage; probably as a sign of protest against its use as a bookend. I found myself awake at this early hour on a day when i was neither chirpy enough to dive straight out of bed onto the yoga mat nor poetic enough to press my face against the window pane and watch dewdrops trickle down the leaves of my favorite tree.

I wanted to read but the recently hazardous books didn’t seem enticing; so i logged on to stories that were safely encased in distant computer servers. I found myself browsing ‘The Paris Review‘ for love stories, even when that fat cherub, Cupid, had left an unpleasant taste in my mouth yesterday; it reeked of the black bile of indifference. I found one that was straight out of my Before-Sunrisey dreams and packed in serendipity, Edna St. Vincent Millay, long journeys, and a loft with a typewriter. I also learnt that in Yiddish, there’s a beautiful word called bashert that describes the person you are fated to meet, your soul mate. I read a cleverly titled ‘Love Stories‘ by Phoebe Connelly. The lovers separate in the end, but I could identify with the little things one does, unasked, uncalled for and often unnoticed, when gripped by the throes of love. I felt a sad tenderness for her when she started reading books for him, not out of curiosity or interest or compulsion, but out of affection. The aching familiarity was an odd comfort; halfway across the world a woman in love had done the same things that I had done, and felt foolish about later. Here is an excerpt.

“…courting each other with words—our own, but also those of any writer we thought might impress. We certainly weren’t the first to go this route. But like every romance, and every reading list, it felt like our own. The question “What are you reading?” became a convenient excuse to chat when we spotted each other online, to send links, to write long, complicated letters in which the subtext was always desire. For him I read Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, which I had dismissed, without reading, as rankly sexist. (My opinion didn’t improve much after the fact, but he argued that the main character was a true portrait of the male writer.) I sent him John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy after quoting a description of Smiley’s wife out of context. He told me it drove him near mad that the line didn’t come until the second-to-last scene in the book. I started compulsively reading novels set on the West Coast. A sticky  July was spent filling in the gaps of my Lew Archer catalog; I hoarded tatty James M. Cain paperbacks and dreamed of smoggy afternoons and winters without snow. Was I falling in love with F. or with the idea of a city that lent itself so easily to narration?“

These lines wouldn’t mean anything to the casual reader, but i had to thrust my lower jaw forward and blink rapidly to block the stinging tears. Stupid, that’s what i am!

It was still early but a pale light had sheathed everything outside my window. It felt like a Norah Jones moment, and I brushed my teeth to the rhythms of ‘Sunrise‘. Try singing ‘and i said ooooooooooo‘ with toothpaste foam in your mouth. Fun, but not a pretty picture. Edna Millay was still on my mind, and I downed my morning coffee searching for an appropriate poem that spoke of my attempt to distract my mind from an inappropriate person for whom I had inappropriate feelings at an inappropriate time. Turns out she had written just the poem for it. Another proof that all over the world, beyond barriers of distance and time, people are linked by the familiarity of emotions. Here it is.

Intention To Escape From Him

I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in
America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might
deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, strong to overflow its banks in spring,
carrying away bridges
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear
narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—

Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

I try to distract myself; i read with that crazy glint in my eye; my writing typing threatens an impending carpal tunnel syndrome; i work on and off as i await an important outcome; i scratch dogs and strange babies behind ears and pretend they are cute; in the late afternoon i risk bursting my lungs on the cross-trainer; i nap snuggled under a soft, blue blanket; often i have giggling fits with friends; on weeknights i watch the drama unfold in a fictional hospital with a predilection for the unusual and even the promiscuous; sometimes i sketch bare trees on a winter landscape; on my Nigella days i bake umpteen coffee cakes; i dig up old songs too; i discuss books with friendly bookstore owners; obsessively cleaning sprees calm me down; i go on drives without destination; i surround myself with family and laughter; but no matter what I do, a name remains glued to my mind. Bashert? Unlikely. 

“Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.”

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Something

While walking uphill on a wintry morning the cold air stabs the eyes and tracks through the throat to settle heavily on the chest; the icy gulps don’t just perpetuate but invigorate my existence; the walk is labored, but who wants to stop? That’s how love feels. Strained, punishing, deoxygenated, and so intoxicating.

It’s an orchestrated and self-permitted ruin. A lunacy that unravels in the stillness of the night, when the mind is devoid of distractions and hurtles towards the thoughts of the one it finds so adorable. Staying away is even more punishing, like trying to hold my breath underwater; I have to surface, give in, and survive.

Odd things satiate: a word, a glimpse, even a shared silence. The regular world continues to rotate and revolve, there’s no apparent change and no one knows; the same work, the same lunch, the same books, the same bed, the same socks, the same people and the same roads. The change is inside; such thoughts! They bring on despair or an unavoidable blush, they torment. They seem so alien yet so familiar.

My life is highly protected. The pieces had taken years of gathering and careful structuring; the mess is not yet tidied, the cracks are still visible; but it is the only home. This intruder can’t take that away or cause further disorder; that is out of bounds. But something makes me want to push the walls with bare hands and make room for him in this familiar and organized mess of my life.

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Known, Realized

Once he had bought a fancy pair of shoes and asked her if she liked them; she thought of them as a tad ugly, but had nodded her approval. He had a defiant walk. His eyes were always laughing, almost mocking. People thought of him as arrogant, but he wasn’t; he was just tactless. He had lovely hands; not long and artistic fingers, but it was rough and reeked of hard work. In the old photographs that she had hunted up, he wore spectacles. He was rude, but not to her. He thought he worked smart and delegated duties well, but often ended up offending his peers. He didn’t care though. He was not tall, he was not dark, and he was not at all handsome. He was always in a hurry. He spoke rapidly and it was difficult to comprehend his words. He had a home in the hills. He loved trees. He loved picnics too. He kept his car spic and span. He valued the few friends that he had. He had a shy smile that curved up slowly on his face. He blushed easily, and too often. He raised his brows in greeting every time he met her. He encouraged hard work, never demanded it. He was extraordinarily helpful. He didn’t believe in small talk. He was always well-dressed. He frowned a lot, especially when he was studying. He was quite attached to his family. He was frugal. He spent a lot of time on the phone. He had a wit that took time getting used to. He laughed heartily. She had assumed that he loved books. He was moody. He was restless. He reminded her of her.

That was all she had known before she fell in love with him.

He is insensitive. On most days he would be a happy memory, and an unbearable burden on the rest. He isn’t easy to forget.

This she has realized after she had fallen in love with him.

She hadn’t seen him or heard from him in nearly two years, yet she can’t stop thinking about him. Weird, the ways one falls in love!

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Vulnerability

Vulnerability is tricky. It can make us feel human. But its exposure creates uneasiness. Sometimes it brings about an intense fear, of exploitation, or of misinterpretation. Then there are the ones who use it to manipulate, to cling. That’s the dark side; it’s a thin line, and it’s blurry.

How do you mask vulnerability? Especially when it’s exposed, and now, you are so scared. Can you ever feel safe to peel off the layers and layers of masks you wear, unearth the memories you have suppressed, speak about the past that had shaped you, tell about the things you are scared to lose? Will it be understood, valued, safeguarded? How can you ever be sure? Sometimes you feel safe, intuitively, or maybe even a bit recklessly, and then the very next moment you feel scared, and stupid for saying things that are too precious in your life. 

Who do you tell it to; your family, the one you love, your best friend, a colleague, or just a random stranger? What guides you; blood ties, proximity, comfort, inebriation, intuition, or just an impulse? Whoever you choose, whatever guides you, however you let it out, and however it makes you feel later; your vulnerabilities will always keep you on your toes, ready to run, at the slightest threat.

Exposing your vulnerabilities can also be used to create invisible boundaries, to ward off things you can’t trust yourself to deal with, fearing what you might get into. So, you say things that will keep you away, keep you safe.

Yes, it’s tricky.

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