Q&A

What will be the best thing at the end of a long,sleepless night? Absolute stillness and clarity of 3am

What will be the reason for getting out of bed? The first rays of sunshine

Where will you lose yourself in? Early 20th century prose. Big fat books.

Where will you find yourself? Stories within stories within stories

What will be your comfort food? A fluffy omelette with butter, garlic, spices and tomatoes.

What will you look forward to? Aimless wanderings in the evening; serendipitous moments

Who will be your companion? A kind man.

What will entertain you? Malayalam movies. Persian movies.

What will you learn? One must create their own happiness

Whom will you fail? My optimistic eighteen year old self’s dreams.

What will you gain? Perspective. Patience. Joy. Calm.

What do you secretly love but pretend to be annoyed with? Work.

What is important for survival?Books. Love. Money. Coffee. Trees.

What do you treasure? Solitude.

Intuition

I never really relied on the (in)famous “intuitive” power women claim to be gifted with. Till recently I used to believe people unquestioningly, and was of the general opinion that all people have an inherent “goodness” in them, and since I don’t want to hurt anyone, why would anyone ever hurt me? Dumb reasoning, I know.

I was taken on many a ride by friends, acquaintances and strangers alike because my reputation of being the “ever-trusting” fool preceded me everywhere I went! I used to unquestioningly believe each and every word the people I loved and cared about said to me. Not a very wise decision as I ended up hurt quite often. Sense got drilled into my head much later. I finally have begun not to take everything at face value and trust my intuition after neglecting it for too long. I did follow my intuition when it came to all things except for when it came to judging people. If I had not done that, I’d have saved myself a couple of heartbreaks.

I am a firm believer of the fact that a lie would be caught sooner or later, in ways we least expect of. Every time I’ve lied about something, my family came to know about it sooner or later, even when I had made sure no one can ever detect it. So they came to know of each time I’d made excuses of bunking class, or had met my ex secretly, or made excuses about not completing a chore assigned to me…just about anything. They will come to know, sometimes as late as a decade! Sometimes I confess and sometimes they come to know because I goof up and forget what I’d lied about!! It’s easy to tell the truth…you don’t have to make an effort to remember something that hadn’t happened, but for a telling a lie you need to be on constant alert for the rest of your life and remember what story you’d made up. It can be very taxing. My mother takes one look at me and immediately knows if I’m making excuses or fibbing about something.

So, I’ve experienced it myself in a small scale, and my belief that lies get caught sooner or later only got stronger. My mother intuitively knew every time I fibbed. And so did I, every time someone cheated me or lied to me. It took time, sometimes years…but I eventually come to know. ALWAYS! I find it difficult to explain, because it’s hard for me to ever doubt the ones I love, but sometimes an intuition gets so strong and it inevitably turns true when I follow it. Every time.

If something doesn’t sit right with you, think and question why it is so. Don’t just ignore that voice. Don’t become suspicious of everything, but don’t take every word and emotion at face value either.

Watch Out For What You Wish

How can I be sure of what I might want a year from now, when I seek a million different things every day? Not long ago I had the good sense to finally accept the fluidity of my thoughts and desires that refuse any stagnancy. I am also aware that getting what one wishes for doesn’t always guarantee happiness.
I grew up cursing the dust, smoke and blaring noise of vehicles; I detested the hectic buzz of cities where everyone was in a hurry and longed for the slow and meditative pace of life in the hills or a quiet village. In my relatively short life, I had already formed opinions about what is ideal and lying in a patch of sunshine and reading, dipping my feet in the silken sheet of a river at sunset, and long conversations by the glow of a kerosene lamp were prerequisites of it. I would like to mention here that the books that I read in the formative years of childhood were of the likes of Heidi (with its mountains, stern but kind-hearted grandfather, ruddy-cheeked children, goat cheese and a bed of hay), Anne of Green Gables (trees, brooks, books and conversations), My Family and Other Animals (Corfu and its glorious flora and fauna, and its quirky inhabitants) and stories of Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond (with his turtles in a shallow pond, leopards and foxes in dark forests, haunted houses standing alone atop hills, old widows who had a treasure of stories to tell, deodar trees and yes again, the mountains). And then there were my father’s stories of growing up in his village where he swam in the Brahmaputra, and was surrounded by people and surroundings so idyllic that made hardships and poverty not just bearable but tackled with an optimism. I craved for such a life, surroundings that provided a premise for stories to occur.
My wish came true in late 2011 when I enrolled in the compulsory rural posting under NRHM and was sent to work in a remote village in Assam. By the end of the first month I went dizzy with excitement by the steady diet of impossibly green fields, fresh air and bluest blue skies, witnessing the simple (and slow) lives of the people who spent their mornings digging up sweet potatoes and afternoons taking long siestas. By the end of the second month I was ready to commit seppuku for the lack of excitement. Time stopped in that place and I slept off at eight every night only to be woken up at odd hours to deliver babies. The simple life got on my nerves to the extent that I could have torn apart the limbs of the next person who called up to say, “I envy your quiet sojourn“. Every time I returned home, it felt like an escape from a prison. I gulped in lungfuls of polluted air, chalked in every hour of my weekend with some activity, ate out, went shopping, surrounded myself with noisy and boisterous people, and went to bed at two in the morning. I missed the noisy, grimy, hectic city life where there was always something going on. I still crave for the quiet hills and idyllic sunsets but now I am wise enough to realize that I want a balance between the quietness and the noise. I want both, I love both. 
I fell in love when I was nineteen. But it was out of reach and in the following eight years I wished to recreate that first love in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. I got attracted to only emotionally unavailable men or to those that didn’t have the potential to evolve into anything substantial. I created illusions of love. Was it a subconscious protective instinct? I don’t know. Love had brought out a side of me that I didn’t like-clingy, jealous, insecure and nurturing worthless hopes. That’s not how it is supposed to be, is it? Yet I convinced myself that I was wishing for romantic love. I was ecstatic when that first love walked into my life again, but everything that followed clashed with my wish. When I think hard and clear about it, I don’t really want the romantic love and all its complications and responsibilities in my life right now. Not until the right person and the reasons comes along. Then why did I wish for it? Because I mistook my need for quiet companionship as a need for love and this lack of clarity led to unnecessary anguish. But now I know better. 
I never had any definite ambition in life; I just wished for a career that brought me job satisfaction, stimulated the mind, gave something back to the people, and made me financially secure and independent. I ended up being a physician. But there were few unseen and sometimes self-induced obstacles on that path. I am happy with the career I have chosen; not many get to be a part of this noble profession and heal lives. I am just grateful that I got the opportunity and sincerely carry on my duties. But it hasn’t brought me the happiness that I had hoped it would. And I know why. I am always eager to learn and improve my skills, but it lacked that rush of passion and go-getter ambition. Instead I am passionate about writing. The irony is that I am skilled in the medical profession that doesn’t invoke in me a mad fervour, and even though all I want to do is to write I lack the talent for it. There is the clash again.
Often I get what I wish for but it doesn’t guarantee the happiness that I had imagined. So be careful about what you wish for, and devote some time to know what you really want. People change and so do their desires and wants. Always foresee that possibility when you make that next grand wish.

How To Lose Your Sanity In One Easy Step

Step 1: Try to please everyone.
Do you remember that scene from F.R.I.E.N.D.S when Rachel’s mother behaves outright rude with Monica for a minor (and unintended) lapse, yet Monica continues to apologize profusely and disproportionately to her? There are people who can remain impervious to others’ opinions of them. I am not one of them and have an innate need to please everybody, avoid conflicts and fall-outs. It would be sheer idiocy to actualize my desire and I succeed in not being a ‘Monica‘ when it involves people whose actions or thoughts I detest strongly. I turn completely indifferent to their existence and memories. But when the people I respect and admire harbour a distorted perception of me owing to misunderstandings or miscommunication, I worry myself sick about setting things right. I would fret about where I had gone wrong, apologize continuously, take repeated initiatives to sort things out, and allow them to stamp all over my dignity by giving undue importance to their (lack of) response. It would torture me to wonder how I am being perceived, and in my restlessness, contribute negatively to that distorted image by offering unnecessary justifications. Recently I went through a similar situation and it disturbed me a lot. Between the two of us, the generous share of wisdom belongs to my younger sister and I often look to her for advice.

Sis: Why do you care so much about what others think of you? 
Me: I don’t know. I can’t help it.
Sis: Then prepare yourself for a lifetime of self-induced tragedy.
Me: How do I get out of this need to seek everyone’s approval?
Sis: Seek approval of only those who matter to you and for whom you matter. Judge yourself if a person falls in that category. If no, don’t think about it again. If yes, try to sort out any misunderstandings or apologize appropriately and genuinely for any lapses. If they don’t acknowledge or appreciate your efforts, don’t go overboard by giving others the power to hurt you.
Me: I was being an idiot, wasn’t I?
Sis: A first-rate one.
Me: Hmm.
Sis: There’s no use wasting your mental peace over unnecessary issues. But also keep in mind how you are quick to shed off excess baggage of certain people and fussy about who you let into your life. Sometimes people might be selective about letting you into their lives too, and it might not be because you had done something ‘wrong’. Accept that.
Me: *big kiss*
It won’t be easy to change overnight, but I have to learn to let go of my need to please all those whom I had let into my life. That is the basic requirement to preserve my sanity.

As if on cue, I stumbled upon this wonderful children’s book by Plath as an “an admonition against the perilous preoccupation with other people’s opinions“.

Personalized Spring

I am aware that the first day of spring is seldom the first spring day; the sky is overcast with dull grey clouds, and if not for a lone cuckoo’s call one can almost call it early winter or the late monsoon. Yet when I woke up this morning I couldn’t help the anticipation of something serendipitous around the corner on this first day of spring. Not long ago I was told that I manufacture reality without any basis, and maybe today’s anticipation was a classic example of it. Maybe most of my hopes, dreams and yearnings would thrive only in the world of wishful thinking and never in the real world. This uncomfortable realization is not the serendipitous thing I wanted to happen today. So much for the joy of spring! 
But I have a weird problem. No matter how many skies fall I can’t sustain an appropriately gloomy mood for long. It was only the anticipation anxiety that troubled me in the past, but a depressed mood rarely lasted beyond a few hours. I always find something to occupy myself and create my own happiness; a task I had mastered since childhood.
So, when the day started going downhill with unexpected skirmishes and stubborn memories crowding my mind, I knew I had to salvage it myself. As night fell, the dull grey clouds finally started pouring out the first shower of spring, and I stuffed my sneakers into a bag and headed for the Pilates class after a month’s hiatus. After an hour of challenging previous limits of elasticity and flexibility, the mind was unable to focus on anything apart from a violent tachycardia, which was followed by laughter and the conversations that varied from mountain treks to (one-at-a-time, because it is so expensive) butt implants! The rush of endorphins returned the spring into my day.
The street outside was wet and gleaming, bouncing off the red and orange glows of the vehicles that plied on it. The night sky was a bewitching indigo and the dark silhouettes of trees swayed in the brisk wind. The rain continued. My favourite dishes were prepared for dinner (minuscule serendipity?). I have turned off the music tonight, I want to go on hearing the rain through the open window. I’m in bed now, snug under the covers, and a new book, The World According To Garp, lies next to my pillow. I can no longer recall the gloominess I felt earlier in the day, or be tormented by worthless thoughts.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened, no serendipities, and the day would end in a few minutes. I dug out my own spring on a day devoid of sunshine and cherry blossoms; instead it had a wild wind, ceaseless rain, occasional thunder, a new book, some camaraderie, good exercise and good (small portions of) food. I may “manufacture realities without basis” and look for happiness in the oddest and simplest of things, but it turns out quite well for me!

In Pursuit of A Selectively Spotless Mind

I am accustomed to the despair that ensues in the aftermath of losing the people I love; a covert awareness and dread of an eventual end always runs parallel to the initial rushes of love. Yet the melancholy of knowing all the while that this too won’t last doesn’t offer any consolation. Each loss leaves its own mark; fresh invisible wounds quietly await time, the good old physician, to work its amnesic magic on them.
The first time it happened, I roamed around apathetic, gloomy and dazed for a couple of years; torturing myself with worthless hopes and analysis. The second time it was just a quick spell of anger followed by the relief of escape. The third time I was over it sooner than I would like to admit, and the ensuing guilt about this self-assumed fickleness led me to repeat to myself that of course I was still in love for an acceptable period of time (which in my mind is a minimum of two years). It bothered me how soon I had forgotten the face, the voice, the laughter and how I had felt for him, that I erected my own (and completely unrelated) idea of him, cherishing this imaginary love just because I was scared of admitting that it was a mere infatuation and never had been love. I continued to fool myself because its negligible longevity ashamed me.
Then there is this fourth or rather the real first or an intermittent second or maybe intermittent third or the only persistent and subdued and very complex yearning over the years, something that had never dared to leave the shadows and move into the blinding light of realization until now, something intermingled with hope and the lack of it, something vulnerable yet resilient to the passage of time, something that defies closure, something that doesn’t seek acknowledgement or reciprocation and is sustained by its own intensity, something that is beyond fear and shame, something that is unknown and elusive yet eerily familiar, something that wants to be declared unabashedly yet lingers in a sacred veil of secrecy, something that is as pleasurable as it is agonizing. I don’t know what it is, but it is like a splinter that had gradually burrowed its way deep into my heart; and owing to its tenacity and sense of belonging, the pain is just a minor deterrent to my existence. I had made a choice and I have to live its consequences.

We all seek to love and be loved. We crave the intimacy of being the only witness to the other’s life and vice versa. We want a common bank of memories, adventures, conversations, joys and sorrows. We want to love someone more or as completely as we love ourselves. There are no guarantees, there is no definite destination and there are no definite routes. It can’t be engineered or chosen, it just comes to you. Some get to journey along the scenic route, the rest gets the messy and tiresome route fraught with obstacles and insecurities. I belong to the latter category and often find myself dragging my weary legs back to the starting line after encountering dead ends. I enjoy walking on my own, and prefer solitude to the cacophony of dissimilar wavelengths of thought; yet have a never-ending reservoir of hope that there is someone meant to walk alongside me in a journey that reverberates with love, laughter, the good unrest, binding similarities, alluring differences, pleasant companionship, mingled experiences and memories, new adventures, long conversations, continuous individual growth, shared intimacy, and looking out for each other.
But the fourth or real first or an intermittent second or maybe intermittent third or the only persistent and subdued and very complex yearning of many years has to find closure before I can start anew. I don’t feel any anger, apathy or agonizing hurt this time. It’s just a somewhat uncomfortable and heightened restlessness that is not much dissimilar to what I had felt all these years. Even this will end someday, but I don’t plan to wait helplessly till time erases him from my mind. I need adequate distractions till then; new stimuli and work.
Here are my list of immediate distractions till I attain the relative calm of a selectively spotless mind, and curb any further impulsiveness and hurt:
1. Indulge in the only agreeable distraction: books. Read more non-fiction, and some contemporary fiction.
2. Join that Zumba class.
3. Write more (if that is possible!).
4. Take up whatever shifts that comes my way.
5. Continue the ban of all information overload from my life, except for maybe occasional tweets.
6. Overcome my laziness and ennui and re-connect with old friends.
7. Go back to the pool.
8. Overcome my dread of the kitchen. Make a ritual of cooking (I use the term loosely) dinner at least once a week.
9. Delete a certain phone number, mails and messages. Already done!
10. Use that language learning software and dictionaries to learn elementary German. Ask my sister to be my tutor.
11. Enough of the slow life. Get out of home more. Explore.
12. Maintain an essential detachment from all the problems that crop up in my life or the ones of those dear to me, to avoid drowning in panic and sorrow.
13. Not curb the thoughts of the one I am trying to forget, because I would end up fuelling reverse psychology. Let it be.
14. Revive the fervour of watching more world cinema.
15. Nights are dangerous and insomnia encourages irrelevant hopes; try to sleep early.

The Price of Resilience

When I was a child, I used to accompany my parents to visit a family whom they had known for more than a decade. The couple had lost their elder daughter, then aged four, in a road traffic accident a couple of months before their second child was born. Both their present children, a boy and a girl, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Even as a child, I could comprehend the graveness of the adversities faced by them. But no one in their family sulked about the apparent unfair and cruel blows life had dealt them. The whole house was a riot of laughter and activity. Sketchbooks, crayons, plastic trucks, glass marbles, frisbees, half-eaten packets of potato chips and a football were always strewn around the living room. Since the children were the biggest fans of Michael Jackson, they often used to rev up the music volume and give impromptu performances. They continued to quietly celebrate the birthday of their departed daughter, just the four of them, huddled around a chocolate cake baked at home, and the kids were oddly solemn in the remembrance of the elder sister they had never known.
There was none of the expected shadow of gloom hovering over their home; in fact often we could hear their laughter from the street as we turned into their home. But I was not convinced that not even a shred of anger, disappointment or sadness lingered in the lives of their parents; and was always on the lookout for hidden signs. But they were no more exasperated about their children than my parents were about my sister and I. I was suddenly disappointed about the hue and cry my parents raised about the glass of milk we refused to drink at bedtime or procrastinating on homework. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and bewilderment at their amazing coping mechanism and asked aunty how she managed to accept whatever life had brought her so uncomplainingly. Didn’t she ever get angry that this wasn’t exactly the life that she might have envisioned when she was young? Wasn’t she scared of what the future held?
They weren’t sticklers for religion, but they believed in the presence of a higher being who would look out for them, as they continued to make the best of whatever life brought them. She told me that the slightly detached overseer of our lives brought such obstacles into the lives of only those who had the strength to tackle them. She grew angry a thousand times every day but over the same causes that every parent frets about; untidiness, temper tantrums, excessive TV hours etc. And yes, she had found everything that she had always wanted in life; a loving husband, two happy children, a wonderful job, good health and lots of laughter. It is all about perspective. The journey was tough, and peppered with losses and obstacles; but the destination more than made up for that. She was content with what she had made of the sufferings life brought her. She was proud of it. As for the future, who can say what it held; it is useless worrying about the things we haven’t come to yet and giving up the pleasures of the present. She preferred to spend her days equipping her children with life skills, good education, ensuring they were healthy and happy rather than worrying about how they would cope in the world later.
These words had stayed with me and I still find them oddly consoling. Even now when I want to scream my lungs out, every time a cascade of new obstacles flow into my life and wonder if there will ever be any respite; I think of her words. I remind myself that I am resilient enough to handle this. Last night I had another health scare as the word cancer sprung up again, barely one and half months after I had lost my elder sister to it. I had lost three family members in quick succession in the past five years to cancer. And frankly, I am tired of it. I am tired of people dropping dead, when they are young and full of dreams, leaving the rest of us to battle the loss. All I crave for is a life where all my near and dear ones are healthy and happy; and I can get to worry only about things like what to wear for an evening out, long hours at work, the bad food at cafeteria, and get adequate time to lament about and pine for a lost love.
Sometimes I feel envious of those people whose lives had run such smooth courses, but then I remind myself that I haven’t been singled out, every one has their own private sorrows; and into each life some rain must fall, some more than the others. It has taught me to treasure the apparently mundane, everydayish things where nothing much happens; and revel in the infrequent but real joys that come my way.

Assumptions

It’s funny how we inhabit two worlds simultaneously; one that is real, tangible and where ‘A is A’, and the other that is essentially an overlap, crowded by our myriad assumptions about the objects of the real world. People, intentions, books, movies, places, relationships, emotions; nothing is spared from the realm of assumptions.
I am no exception and often assume who is worth letting into my life, and who would be merely excess baggage to lug around. Despite being a insatiable reader, I still harbour prejudices about the readability of a book if they belong to certain genres, or the section of the readers they appeal to. I do it without even flipping open a single page. The same goes for travel choices; often I assume that certain places have nothing worthwhile to offer apart from the usual touristy stuff. I make assumptions about relationships (often equating superficial variables like time spent together, number of conversations to the amount of care; even when I talk only once a month to my closest friends), about emotions (I am/was in love with a boy I met a couple of years ago and had known for just a month, and it was initiated on the assumption that he liked me too. stupid), and even about everyday conversations (what did she mean by that? should I read between the lines?). It is human nature to create our own versions of everything we see, feel and hear; blending with, and sometimes even overpowering the truth. Sometimes I feel guilty about jumping to conclusions without bothering to verify facts, but usually I brush it off as it doesn’t affect me in a direct and immediate manner.

But it is troubling to be on the receiving end of such assumptions. I have a close friend from my junior college days who had suddenly started giving me the cold shoulder. I assumed she was busy and didn’t disturb her with frequent calls and texts. But when it persisted, I confronted her only to be told that she had assumed I was the one avoiding her! Now we are the back to our giggles and gossips, but I shudder to think that a mere assumption might have destroyed a decade old friendship. My sister is home for her summer training and I was bursting with joyous anticipation about all the places we would visit and all the conversations we would have. But she came home, slumped down on her bed, barely talked to me, and didn’t leave the house often. I assumed she was tired, while she assumed that I had cancelled her offer to study abroad due to trivial reasons and harboured a silent grudge. And this would have continued had I not asked her directly about what is bothering her.
It is surprising how often we let assumptions colour our lives. The Anne Tyler books that I have been reading makes me want to tear out my hair in utter despair, what with all those people drifting apart due to mere assumptions and unsaid words. Children drift away from parents, lovers and spouses drift away from each other, and friends separate too. It is such a waste, yet it is happening all around us. This is one mistake that no one ever learns from.

I guess we would do ourselves a favour if we talk it out instead of sprouting assumptions. But that’s tiring too, isn’t it? Sigh!

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.

Ignoring Life

The clock in my room observes a twenty seven year old wearing mismatched prints and a pair of precariously placed reading glasses, poring over a book with her mouth half-open, till a few hours before dawn. If these discrete hours of reading every night are gathered and calculated, it would amount to nearly two years of uninterrupted reading. Two years of my relatively short life had been spent in scanning words of unseen men and women to crowd my imagination with new stories, lives, places, ideas, stirrings, perspectives and often discovering a hitherto unrealized or unexplored thought, or a trace of familiarity. It brings a new plot to my life where things head in a specific direction, reach a climax/anti-climax, and i don’t have to wait for ages to see how things will turn out; i can skip decades with the flick of a page.
Real life introduces new plots and unexpected twists too. But they don’t come frequently and take ages to develop into something substantial; also the restlessness of not knowing what is to come is just too much for me. It is our prerogative to decide whether our life will be an open book that stands revealed and unapologetic about its contents; or be as private as an adolescent girl’s journal, with stories that are open to a select audience of choice. I have chosen to be an open book after years of being the latter. But what are its contents? I open my journals and all i read are accounts of the people i have met, the conversations i had, the funny thing that occurred, the disappointments; people walked in and out of these pages with no definite pattern or purpose. My days have no specific continuity as i run helter-skelter through life; there can be a wide discrepancy of the events of one day from the other. Milestones are often insidious and realized in retrospect. And so is love. He might be an irregular visitor on the pages of my journal, but all of a sudden i mention his name with the intimacy of an old lover. I miss the transitions. My life’s plot is confusing even for me to follow; it’s all over the place, going in every direction, and hence stagnant.

It is somewhat tragic to be reading old journals, only to be acutely reminded of the passage of time, the surges and dwindling of hope over the years, the unforeseen curve-balls, and the things that never amounted to anything substantial. Love had come into my life, and i waited with bated breath, wondering where it would lead. A few departed with the usual fuss and drama, and the hurt reached an early crescendo before ebbing away. They were easier to let go. And then sometimes things fell apart without a distinct snap of ties, without drifting apart, without monosyllables replacing conversations, and without a heap of failed expectations; they were just a clean and abrupt end; no explanations, no mess; it was just that over, and just that uneasy.
I am here now, experiencing these feelings, having these thoughts, writing these words; and a hundred years ago there must have been another girl pouring out her heart, believing in the permanence and relevance of her world. Where are those thoughts now? Didn’t they end with her life? I am just another person and my thoughts will end with me too. It is alarming to dwell on the impermanence of our hopes, thoughts, love and secret desires;and  i feel like spilling out the chaos in my mind, the love in my heart, so that it doesn’t wither away with me. But then i wonder if it is even wanted, whether it will be valued, and grudgingly accommodate the word repression in my life. And continue my quiet reading about lives where things happen. 
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life”~ Fernando Pessoa

The One About Skinned Knees, Distractions and Absent Lovers

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.

Love In The Translucent Wrap of Ambiguity

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.“~Pride and Prejudice
She is in love with him; somewhat tentatively, a little defiantly and so utterly. It is funny that she missed how and when it all began. It is funnier, the dumb things she does to be crammed in a tiny nook of his mind and linger, even if just for a moment. And it is positively hilarious that she takes solace in sentences like ‘at least he knows my name’, ‘once upon a time we had stood breathing the same air’, or ‘tomorrow is another day’.
She doesn’t conceal it; although to avoid awkwardness on his part on seeing her naked heart and mind, sometimes she covers it in a translucent wrap of ambiguity. She allows him a convenient escape under the pretense of never having known, stamping all over her vulnerabilities. She knows it is not his fault; he hadn’t asked for it. And it isn’t her fault too. Over the years she had built up her fortifications and defenses well, to ward off anyone from messing up her life, but he had walked right through those walls without ever intending to. He must have gone about living his usual life doing the usual things he does, and by some dumb accident ended up taking her hostage within her own life, completely unaware. And by doing just that, he had rooted her to him.
 
Unintended events remain undeclared, but in the mind and heart. She is not articulate enough to say it in clear, precise words; nor is she brave enough to withstand another blow of indifference. But inactivity is equally frightening, as is the thought that he knows how often she thinks about him. So she dons the translucent wrap of ambiguity, to allow him to walk away; or in a world of wishful thinking, to come to her someday.

Random Smile-Inducers

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.

The Wonder Years

My heart goes out to my young cousins and their generation of children who were born and brought up in big, noisy cities. They are frighteningly precocious, growing up at a pace and picking up stuff that is hard to monitor. Their talents and skills are superior to us; they can multitask and are far more articulate and self-assured than we ever were. But their childhood had been deprived of certain joys and cramped with unhealthy stress for no fault of theirs. Space is precious; apartments are cropping up everywhere and playgrounds are disappearing. Pollution and deforestation paints their world a dull grey. There is neither the space nor the time to devote to pets even if they wanted to. Families are nuclear.  Parents have to work long hours, and children are raised by a host of servants. Or after school they come home to empty apartments, heat up meals on the microwave, and gobble them while surfing the countless channels on TV. They spend their afternoons playing video games or surfing the internet, constantly distracted by a beeping mobile phone, ordering take-outs, and looking haggard after a long day of school, dance recitals, swimming, guitar classes, football, study tutorials etc. There is always some upcoming competition or exam looming in the horizon. Their playground is the empty concrete car parking in their building.
There are barely any trees, ponds, large green grounds or pure, unadulterated fun in their lives. Their minds are too cramped with exam questions to have a healthy curiosity for anything else, and are too tired to develop a reading habit. Holidays are hurried and spent in hotels and touristy sites. They cook pastas and fancy omelettes by watching You Tube videos and turn up their noses at the simple, home-made fare. Derogatory slang words pepper their vocabulary. The lack of respect for teachers and the aversion for school is alarming. They are always unsatisfied, and demand new gadgets and expensive objects ever so often. Neither the parents nor the children could do much about adapting these lifestyle changes. Urbanization demands that you keep pace with it, it can’t be helped. Things are changing, and rapidly. Even my hometown barely has any traces of the old world charm that it held. I don’t hate the busy life in a city; I like its chaos and dizzying pulse. But it leads to a somewhat deprived, stressful and precocious childhood. I am lucky to have been one of the last few generations to have experienced the joy of a childhood in a relatively unsullied and small town of Assam.

My childhood was wondrously laid-back and my parents were blissfully unaware of the need to enroll their children in extra classes that taught any new skills or sports. I had free rein over my leisure hours. I learnt swimming, or rather how not to drown, in the huge pond in our backyard. There were all sorts of fishes and creepy crawlies lurking beneath the murky surface, including a huge tortoise and once my foot had accidentally grazed its rough, scaly back. My father had brought home that tortoise when I was three and it had slid out of his palm onto the dinner table, slowly crawled across the whole expanse, and would have fallen off the other end if I hadn’t held it back. Not much brains to speak of. My cousins and I never contracted any illness even after months of splashing around in the pond that had never been chlorinated. I also learnt how to fish sans any expensive equipment. All it took was a long and thin bamboo pole, a thick string and a fishing hook. I got flour balls from the kitchen, dragged a small moorha to the edge of the pond, and sat down to fling the bait into the water. My youngest uncle accompanied us and solemnly whispered fishing tricks to all the wide-eyed children surrounding him, basking in the attention that we showered him with.

Winters were for badminton, and summers were for cricket. Children and adults teamed up together to play these sports; it was one of the major advantages of growing up in a large, joint family. What we lacked in talent, we made up for in enthusiasm and energy, and played for long hours. My cousins and I interspersed these real sports with self-invented games and the ones we learnt at school. They were weird and highly entertaining, like ‘ghariyal pani’, ‘gold spot’ and the meat and potatoes of children games, ‘hide-and-seek’, whose difficulty level was greatly enhanced by the sheer vastness of our home and the adjoining grounds.  Our flexible limbs and reed thin bodies enabled us to hide in the tiniest of nooks and not be found for a good hour. There were treasure hunts and the whole neighbourhood, including an abandoned house, was our territory; people didn’t mind if a group of kids barged into their homes to hide a treasure hunt clue. The ambience was such that children could walk unannounced into nearly any house in our neighbourhood to demand a piece of cake, orange-cream biscuits, or even a yummy plate of ‘lushi-aloo bhaji’. Now I know nothing but the surnames of our next-door neighbours in the apartment complex I had been living in for a decade.
There was also no dearth of imagination, we wrote and enacted entire plays. The dressing up for the parts was half the fun, and improvisation was the keyword. Large cardboard boxes had the potential of turning into anything from a class room to a castle. An empty barrel was the perfect underground tunnel during the fierce battle scenes. Come Sunday mornings and all the children took their positions in front of the TV to watch Rangoli on Doordarshan; and tried to copy the dance steps in the songs that were aired. There was a lot of jostling around, faces got accidentally slapped, feet were stepped on, borrowed dupattas that we tied on our heads to substitute for long hair swished around. That was all the dance training we got, and often we would end up on the floor, doubling up with laughter. Indoor games ruled too; carom, ludo, chess, and even table tennis in a long, narrow corridor of our home. It didn’t bother us that we didn’t have a proper table, the tiny orange ball bounced back well enough off the floor. We flouted all rules, and made up new ones, but it was such fun.
Some of us constructed a swing too, that hung from the branch of an old tree in the backyard. It was so much fun to let our hair sweep the ground and the very next moment get pushed towards the skies. I played ‘doctor-doctor’ a lot, lugging around a tin box filled with tiny bottles with dubious concoctions from the kitchen and plastic stethoscope, and caught any unsuspecting victim as my patient. I didn’t even spare first-time guests to our home, plying them with orders and questions like “Stick out your tongue”, “Do you have worms?” much to the embarrassment of my family. But the people were generally very pleasant and playful, because they always complied with the orders of the six year old doctor and allowed me to check their temperature with a plastic thermometer and displayed appropriate concern on their faces when informed that they had a fever of 1000 degrees Celsius, and once I had even diagnosed an uncle with a fat belly as pregnant.
Among all the cousins and neighbourhood kids, I was the only one who was mesmerized by the world of books. I practically devoured them. The school librarian had to issue me multiple library cards, because they got filled up so soon. I splurged during book fairs; clothes and toys had never interested me much. One summer I brought home a book about dollhouses, and spent weeks making one that was four feet tall out of empty shoeboxes, match boxes, scraps of clothes, and fitted it with a tiny kitchenette and bathroom set. That was a glorious summer. We helped in gardening too, planting marigolds, roses and dahlias; and helped my grandmother in digging for sweet potatoes and carrots. I measured my height against the tall pine tree in our garden. It overshot and dwarfed me within a couple of years. We climbed and hung upside down from the  trees; picked the tiny, white Sewali flowers during spring and made fragrant garlands; ran through fields of ripe golden crops on the visits to our native village; slept on warm and somewhat itchy haystacks and played in tree-houses. Evenings were meant for long walks and buying a toffee at a small stall at the end of the road. The road seemed so long that sometimes all the cousins hitched a ride in the mini van of a neighbor. When I visited home after a few years, the same road seemed so short; the road hadn’t shrunk, but then what had changed? It baffled me.
My parents struggled to curb my restlessness and get me to sit at the study desk for more than an hour. I hated these forced study hours that cut into my play time, but the effort paid off by putting me among the top three students in class, and subsequently mollified my parents. Then I had to face a nightmarish demon: Hindi. With no disrespect to it, I prayed every night that by some miracle Assamese or English was declared the national language of India. It wasn’t long before my total percentage suffered due to my Hindi marks. I tried to divert my parents’ attention to my excellent grades in the rest of the subjects, but to no avail. And to my horror a tutor was arranged. I vehemently rebelled but soon my new tutor became one of my best friends. Unknown to my ignorant parents, we barely studied for ten minutes of the assigned hour. The rest of the time was spent playing Scrabble, telling each other stories, reading Archie comics, and going through photo albums where I painstakingly explained to him the story behind every photograph. We even listened to new songs that on my cute yellow Sony Walkman, with the earphones on obviously. He didn’t treat me as a kid, and I loved that. He had an amazing sense of humour and we often convulsed with laughter, trying to drown it behind palms. Surprisingly my Hindi grades improved out of proportion to the amount of effort we put in; maybe the laughter and fun made me more receptive to the little I studied. I still struggle with Hindi, my vocabulary and grammar is laconic and I speak it worse than the driver James in that old movie ‘Chupke Chupke’; yet thereafter I managed to get through school without unfortunate Hindi grades.
After the ordeal of homework was over, the television beckoned. In the evenings we were allowed to watch it for an hour to catch old American sitcoms like I dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Silver Spoons, Who’s The Boss? etc. On Sundays we were allowed an extra hour of cartoons or the Famous Five series, and once a month we indulged in a movie, never in the theatre though, but on the now defunct VCR. We didn’t demand any extra hours of television; there were abundant sources of entertainment: funfairs, book fairs, parks, libraries, theatrical plays, Bhaonas, the circus (seriously, where had they disappeared?), picnics, and umpteen birthday parties given the number of kids in our neighbourhood. Then there were all the festivals. Pandal-hopping during Durga Puja, the rowdy Holi, the even rowdier Diwali night when we lighted the bagfuls of firecrackers my father and uncles bought home at a time when noise pollution and child labour were alien concepts to us, Magh Bihu and Meji mornings, Bohag Bihu and the husori groups that performed at our home; and much to the alarm and despair of my grandmother, who was convinced that her grandkids had been converted at their convent school, we even celebrated Christmas with a puny plastic tree and gifts for everyone.
I loved my school. It had large grounds, quaint church, tiny ponds, a basketball court, and even an orphanage where we had fun playing with the babies and toddlers during the lunch hour break. The teachers were more of friends to us. My best friend and I didn’t even hesitate to putter around the Principal’s (Fr. Philip) office; our restless hands fiddling through the contents of the drawers and cupboards, opening fat encyclopedias in his bookshelf, and asking him innumerable questions. He smilingly indulged our curiosity and never complained. When we were in the fifth standard, we had a teacher (Angelus Sir) who didn’t hesitate to grab and throw any object within reach, including the chalkboard duster, at disobedient kids. We were petrified by his mere sight. Once during the lunch break, my friend and I strayed into the empty fourth floor of our school, exploring the cobwebbed rooms that echoed our voices, and came upon a closed door at the end of the corridor. We pushed it open to the see Angelus Sir sitting cross-legged on a small bed, slurping down noodles and watching an Amitabh Bachchan (I guess the angry young man act was adapted from it) movie. We froze in horror, but he just flashed a bright smile and invited us in. Turned out he lived there, and soon we were served steaming bowls of noodles too. Few minutes of conversation dispelled all fear from our hearts. He told us interesting trivia about any country we pointed to on the large world map pinned on his wall. He played a tune on his guitar. We spread the word about the newfound knowledge of his gentleness, and soon his room was filled with dozens of kids, eager to hear his stories and listen to his lovely songs. I don’t know if students share such a rapport with teachers anymore. They nurtured in us a healthy curiosity to know things beyond the constricted and rigid curriculum of school.
Vacations were spent in whichever town my father was posted in. My parents took us to the hills, picnicked at the riverside and explored every nook and corner of these towns. My sister and I made new friends and played long hours in the sun. She learnt to cook at a very young age, but wild horses couldn’t drag me into the kitchen. It was a period of my life when I could just eat and eat and not a single ounce of fat accumulated due to my excellent metabolism and the tireless running around during the day. Pizzas and burgers weren’t available, and lemonade was preferred over colas. Eating out was reserved for special occasions, but we never got bored of the simple but tasty home-made food. My father occasionally took us to a restaurant that served authentic South-Indian fare; because my mother never managed to cook a dosa that didn’t resemble an amoeba. Later, the kilos quickly piled up with the advent of fast food and a sedentary life.
One summer I had enrolled in the art school. Even there I displayed more enthusiasm than talent, but the art teacher never curbed my imagination and let me paint people with disproportionately long limbs, living in the hollows of gigantic trees and flying in chariots drawn by colossal eagles. My drawing pad was a riot of colours and I even learnt to sculpt clay figurines. Most of all, I loved sketching unusual trees; they seemed to me the most beautiful things on earth.
My grandmother crowded our household with all sorts of birds and animals. There were separate coops for ducks and chicken; the pond was filled with a variety of fishes and that tortoise; there was a lazy, cud-chewing cow and its calf, the birthing spectacle of which gave me nightmares for a long time; a fierce but extremely loyal dog that stayed with us for sixteen years; few docile goats; a cat that came and went according to its will; a parrot; and a pet squirrel too. There weren’t any leashes and the gates were always open; there were no visits to the vet and no fancy pet food; but these birds and animals flourished in this freedom and provided delightful hours of companionship.
There are many reasons I had so much fun growing up. It was a small and unpretentious town, without many distractions. The parents were happy to let children enjoy different experiences and didn’t impose any undue pressure or restrictions. There was also the joy of a common childhood shared with my sister and a dozen cousins, learning the value of sharing in a joint family. There was always someone we can go to in times of need, always someone to listen to us. Neighbours were akin to extended families. Most importantly, the general instinct was of an unquestioned trust and goodwill that is rapidly vanishing. The grounds were green and large, the imagination was sharp; and trees, flowers, dogs, and fishes grew alongside with us, were nurtured by us. School was a second home and teachers were extra-ordinarily encouraging and friendly.
But these wonder years were limited, and on my thirteenth year I was pushed into a world of traffic jams, a school with a dusty ground and no trees, teachers that were ridiculed by students, few classmates whose life consisted of ugly sneers, curse words and unhealthy obsession with all things adult, a tiny apartment in an apartment complex that housed two hundred other families and had a playground where kids jostled for elbow space, honking cars at all hours of the day, ready-to-eat meals replacing dal-chawal, chlorinated swimming pools where strangers kicked each other during laps, goldfishes as pets, dull hours in front of the television, a competition so fierce that tuitions classes and exam guides ate up all leisure hours, dusty roads, smog filled sky that blocked stars, and neighbours that were too busy or too nosy.
Nowadays the children lead a life that is in stark contrast to the one we led; and the only things that had survived from my childhood are my books, and a brat of a little sister to share the memories of those wonder years.

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.

Smorgasbord: Overflow, Quiet Worlds, Kisses

“Everyone else seems to have the brakes on… I never feel the brakes. I overflow.”
 ~Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller

This sentence sums up my life. I incline towards the excessive. Overflow of thoughts, of words, of a vague indifference, of solitude, of fernweh, of yearnings, of independence, of anger, of songs, of poems, of a sense of wonder, of impulsiveness, of caring, of travels, of determination, of dreams, of books, of quietness, of volubility, of happiness, of melancholy, of laughter, of hopes, and of love. The brakes are defunct, vestigial. It isn’t obvious; everyone sees the invisible walls of restraints that i put up, inhabiting a narrow world of measured words and actions. That’s a perception i don’t try to correct; a very few people can be accommodated in my inner world, the one without any brakes; they know this world, and it’s enough.
————————————————————————————–
If it was possible, i would curl up for a nap in a poem. I would gobble a poem whole. I would plant millions of poems around me, and pluck them at will. I would stuff  poem in a pillow and let it caress me every night. I might even allow a poem to put coffee stains on my books. That’s how a good poem makes me feel.
I want to share two of my favorite poems by Jeffrey McDaniel tonight. ‘The Quiet World‘ is in sync with the wordless love I am forced to live, having brakes on for the first time in my life. I am a mute lover. Unsaid words die in my mouth every night as I wait. ‘The Archipelago of Kisses‘ is a encyclopedia of this endearing gesture of love. May the pants of the people who claim that they don’t like kisses drop in public! From an overflow to relative scarcity, from meaningless to being steeped with meaning, from fleeting ones to the ones that claim you, from sloppy to sensuous, from dizzying to a comforting habit; kisses grow with us. I still wait for the ‘I will love you through a brick wall‘ kiss and ‘I will swim through the Earth for you‘ kiss; have you found that mouth yet?

The Quiet World
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

 ~Jeffrey McDaniel
 The Archipelago Of Kisses


We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love?
If you rub two glances, you get a smile.

Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

~Jeffrey McDaniel

(Pics Courtesy: 1. Overflow painting by Natalie Houston; Pics from Google Images)

Candles, Mass Murders and Small Towns.

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When I was a child I sat at the study desk every evening for a few hours, opening slim volumes of brown notebooks with a serenely smiling Don Bosco on the front cover, to draw maps, solve quadratic equations, summarize a poem or memorize the years of famous battles. I grew up in a modest locality of a small town in Assam, where the residents were thankful for a few hours of electricity every night. And till the time my father brought home a noisy power generator, a candle and a match box were as essential on my study table as a pen. Every time there was a power cut, it was the perfect excuse to plead to my mother that my eyes hurt reading the tiny print in the faint light of the candle. She knew me well, and after confirming with an ophthalmologist that I had excellent vision, she started bringing home newer sets of large candles with thicker wicks.

When I realized that there was no escape from the study desk, I decided to improvise new forms of amusement or escape routes. Once I dipped all the candle wicks in water, but got a much deserved scolding from my mother when she found out. Then there was the dissection of any unfortunate mosquito that got drawn by the flame and landed on the desk. I took out my pent up frustration of being confined to study on the poor mosquito; I trapped it, dissected its tiny wings with a compass from the geometry box, and then burnt their miniscule torsos in the very flame they had flocked to, rounding off the whole exercise with unblinking eyes and a sinister laugh to scare my little sister who watched it with horror from the adjacent table. I was cruel little pyromaniac burning up dozens of minute winged creatures every evening. My cousin had taught me the neat little trick that if one was fast enough, they can move a finger across the flame and not feel a thing. I did that too, till the fun wore off, and a painful blister erupted on my finger.
And when the electricity decided to favour us by returning after long hours of darkness, there was this race between my sister and me to blow out the candle, accompanied by a wish; a silly hangover from birthdays. Sometimes the loser initiated a quarrel, which my mother resolved by lighting up the candle and giving the chance to blow it out again with a wish. When I was in the seventh standard, I was infatuated by my history teacher and had made it my sole ambition to excel in his subject, and much to the amazement of my family,  even a power cut couldn’t budge me from the study desk. Once I had studied the various invasions of India with such fervour and attention that my sister gleefully watched smoke rise out of my hair for quite some time before informing that my curly hair had caught fire from the candle flame. It took a clever hairdresser to minimize the damages, but it was never the same.
Many years later, the candle returned to my life, albeit in a setting when lovers have the crazy idea to grope for their food in the dark, all in the name of romance. I suppressed a smile when I recalled our old hostility, and the mass murder of so many mosquitoes. But I couldn’t reveal it to the one who sat in front of me, without him questioning the unusual sources of amusement in my childhood. So I kept shut, lest he also found out about the evenings of dipping a flour-laced winnow board in the pond and taking it out after a few minutes, filled with tiny prawns. Or about constructing a swing in the backyard, playing table tennis without a table in a long and narrow corridor where the ball bounced off the floor, the long nights of badminton, striking a shot on the carom board I could barely reach as it was set on a tall barrel, catching dragon flies and glow worms and putting them in glass jars, digging for sweet potatoes in the garden, looking for a lost treasure at an abandoned house, climbing trees and hanging upside down from a branch; what can I say about the delights of growing up in sleepy, small towns of India. I merely smile at the memories.

Layers

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Layers. The word has always intrigued me. We are never in a rigid mould; there is a fluidity to our personalities, ever changing, as we pile on new layers, and peel off others.

Some are carefully wrapped and covered; few of them need digging to be discovered; and the rest are glaringly visible. My family, and especially my sister, knows me better than anyone else; but there are still unseen layers, subtle, hidden. Friends know what I want them to know. To a few I have revealed more than the rest, but then on a good day, I am ten different persons from dawn to dusk. A goof or a lover; a dreamer or a doer; a compassionate caregiver or a selfish bitch; someone with a secret or an open book; book lover or manic jogger; resilient or vulnerable; a fiery temper or monk like calm; insightful or idiot; voluble or loner; it is hard to say which facet would emerge when.
I still discover new layers ever so often. Impatience and impulsiveness is ingrained in my very core; yet I recently discovered that I too could be patient, I too could let things be, and let go of things without a fuss. That felt good, finding this new layer. It’s a puzzle, hard work, digging them up, and knowing them for what they are, deciding what to keep and what to discard, what to reveal and what to conceal, and to whom.
But it is a dear wish that someday someone somewhere would have as much fun peeling off the layers, knowing me, and loving me, as I would have in knowing and loving him for who he is. The above sentence didn’t have any sexual innuendo though.

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!

Me

My existence fleets among three worlds; discrete and non-overlapping. The primary world is the one where I have my duties, responsibilities, my family, attempts to conform to expectations and correct my shaky career; it’s the practical world, where things don’t come easy, where A is A, where love has no place, and monotony is accepted as a rule.

Then there is my secret world, the one that I escape to often, where books lustily beckon me to lose myself in them, where music lulls me into serenity, where obscure movies from Iran or Poland or France creates in me a new sense of wonder, where happiness can be sitting under a tree and reading a good book, where a blank page and a pen offers so many possibilities, where I am inaccessible to everyone, where I am me, without any obligations, without any worries, just indulging in unadulterated joy.


There is another world, that is all in my mind, that is as dark as it is blindingly bright. It tells me of things that could have been, of unplanned and unpleasant things, of things that give me nightmares. Then there are the good things, laced with hope, of an imagined love, wallowing in its warm glow till reality crushes it sometime in the future; of someday travelling to distant places, seeing for real what I had so far only read in books; of being accepted the way I am.

Sometimes I’m simultaneously present in all the three worlds. That’s a chaos. So, I have been trying to inhabit only the primary world, slipping into the secret world when it gets suffocating, and trying to let go of the other world of dreams forever. That is the only way to preserve my sanity, even if it will kill the only thing that I treasure, hope.

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.

Insomnia

www.christopherwalkerart.ca

In Calvino’s Difficult Loves, a man tells a woman, “At this hour of the morning, people who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already.” I used to be ‘already’; but, often nowadays, I am ‘still’ awake at four in the morning.

I sleep fitfully, drifting in and out of it, resistant to any pattern. I am in bed by eleven every night; making the familiar nest of my fluffy pillow, warm quilt, a thick tome, a bottle of water, cherry lip balm; and lying in the yellow cone of light from the reading lamp, I write in my journal before curling into the comfortable fetal position. Last night I read few chapters from Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Often I am distracted by messages from insomniac friends or from those in separate time zones. Sometime before one am, I drift off to sleep; half-smothered by the thick tome lying on my face. I would wake up a few minutes later, surprised at the lethargic pace of time. I reply to messages, read few more pages of the book, alternating with short cycles of sleep.
At four, I would be lying motionless in bed, hearing the particular sounds that interrupt the stillness of the early morning; strange bird calls, cars on a distant road, the rhythmic stride of the watchmen’s feet, tap-tap-tap, mumbled conversations of the couple upstairs as they potter around their kitchen making tea. I sink my head deeper into the pillow and position my limbs in different angles, but sleep would evade me. I try to lull my brain into forced inactivity by shutting my eyes tight and taking deep breaths. Sometimes I count cute, cartoon sheep with cloud like torsos. If my efforts succeed, I often lapse into a dreamless sleep. I finally wake up by six-thirty; feeling rested despite the erratic sleep that doesn’t total up to more than three hours.
I get out of bed, shivering in the pleasant and familiar chill, and head for the nook near the bedroom window where I get the promised uninterrupted 3G signal. I place my phone there to stream delightful songs from old Hindi movies, while I read the news. Today it was Shashi Kapoor crooning “Kehdoon tumhe ya chup rahu”, Rajesh Khanna contemplating “Kahin Door Jab Din Dhal Jaye”, Dev Anand mimicking torticollis to “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil” and Neetu Singh dancing to “Ek main aur ek tu”. I played them in a loop till my mother threatened to throw the phone away. The old songs and the morning cup of coffee are more than enough to wipe away any remnants of my insomnia.
But when would I be able to sleep for the recommended eight hours again? I don’t know. The curse of a restless mind!

The One about Nothing

It’s appropriate irony that a few days after I declare that a distant reader makes me a prolific blogger, I can’t think of anything to write. I don’t want to write about love. Its tiresome. I don’t want to write about what could be, I’m too preoccupied by what is. But I write about it again.

I get awed by certain attributes and achievements-intelligence, wit, good writing skills, honesty or kindness-and the ones who possess them in abundance. I put them on pedestals. There isn’t any room for envy; I just can’t stop gushing about these exceptional people for a long time thereafter, which greatly amuses my family and friends. They shake their heads and say, “Let’s see if you feel the same few months from now“.  I find their irreverence to these talented souls nothing short of blasphemy. I idolize these people, building the pedestals higher and higher after every interaction and a rare look into their dazzling personalities.

I get tunnel vision and only see what I want to see. But with time, inconsequential details that I used to overlook earlier becomes glaringly evident, and often knocks down the pedestal an inch or two. Anything could lead to it. Sometimes they can’t spell (loose instead of lose), or their vocabulary is generously peppered with verbal trash like dudes, gals or ‘sure thing ya‘! I want to run to them and put my hand over their mouth to stop them from sprouting such words so often. Most often they lack sensitivity and have inflated egos, which I had liked at the beginning as ‘sexy arrogance‘. Few of them are sexists. Sometimes the witty one-liners fail to produce even a flicker of a smile. Only three persons continue to stand on the pedestals I had erected, but I won’t name them. I don’t want to jinx it. So many have toppled over.

I take care never to fall in love with someone I have put on a pedestal, as it can be tragic never to harbour a hope of it being reciprocated; the possibility seems so absurd and improbable to me that I avoid it. I fall in love with the accessible. The mediocre. The ordinary with an edge of extra-ordinary. The rude boy. The bookworm. The poet. The one with a frown. The one with strong hands. The one that makes me laugh. The one that listens. The one I love to listen to. Sometimes even the accessible becomes inaccessible. And the wait never seems to end.

Find someone new who appreciates your love“, I was told recently. If only we could vacate our heart and accommodate it with a new person so easily. I go back to my favorite passage from Aimee Bender’s short story that describes with such clarity how I feel this moment.

…it’s brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character, the cautious revealing of my insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech. The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence, we will have to learn it from each other some other way.
 (Aimee Bender)
 And sometimes there is an exception, and it scares the hell out of me.

Subdued Chaos

The week has been a subdued emotional chaos, halting at unlikely spots, sometimes a little too long, sometimes defying reason.

I read about the hotel manager who had lost his wife and children in the 26/11 incident; he had re-married and has a two year old child now. I tried to imagine what he must have felt holding his newborn, the morbid deja vu of life coming a full circle, the trying attempts to build a new life around the debris of an irreplaceable loss, battling flashbacks of holding other tiny hands or the pain of losing the woman he had committed to love for life. I mourned the fragility of life. Why do we ignore it? Why don’t we love with abandon? Why don’t we do what we really want to do? Why do we hold back? What do we really treasure? I am still trying to figure out the answers.

After his retirement my father works from home now, and I spend half an hour every day typing and mailing his daily work report because he is stubborn about not using the vile computer. Sometimes I find it tedious, and ask him what he would do when I’m not there. He asks cheekily was I planning to go somewhere in the near future, and I blush at the implied notion of matrimony. We grumble every evening, but when I see him jot down his reports on the black notebook that he carries everywhere, and know that in few minutes he would stand awkwardly beside my bed, clearing his throat and trying to gain my attention, I can’t help but smile. I like being useful to him in these little ways, and it brings a quiet satisfaction.


I don’t have a home there, but my heart lies in the hills. I want my voice to echo through pine trees, walk all day on narrow winding lanes, have clouds within reach, wiggle my toes over a log fire, drink umpteen cups of chai, let a wild wind beat against my face and redden the tip of my nose, wake up to the rain on a cold morning, snuggle under a cozy blanket, read late into the night, stargaze, watch the sun rise through a cleft in the distant mountains like the drawings of my childhood, lose myself, and find myself again, rejuvenated. I’ll be there in a fortnight and want to cram all these into a weekend. The anticipation is palpable!

I dared to dream an impossible dream and let it peep out into the sunshine of hope from the dark recesses of my heart. But then reason overshadowed it, sending it back to its dark depths and locking it for better measure. Now it beats wildly at odd hours, but I won’t let out my dream again, I already feel foolish that I had done so earlier. I don’t want it battered and bruised by a heart it can never touch. Why bother? I ignore it now.

These subdued grief, happiness, excitement, satisfaction, yearning is interpersed with nervousness about an upcoming exam. A quiet week at home doesn’t guarantee steady emotions!

Quiet: The Power of Introverts

I have been reading about the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Here gregariousness is revered and is often a survival requisite in careers and building relationships. A talker triumphs over a listener. Everyone is always ‘preparing a face to meet the faces it meets‘. This pressure to sell oneself, the preference of personality over character, can be overwhelming for the introverts who want a little quiet and solitude in their lives, and yet don’t want to lose out opportunities to the hyperthymic extroverts.
One remains unaware of this anxiety in early childhood. I used to spend hours holed up in a nook reading my favorite comics, watched Sunday cartoons, sketched trees and rivers, while the rest of the children in the neighbourhood broke windows with cricket balls. My participation  in their games was quite enthusiastic, but when night fell I also needed to chase fireflies in our garden, oblivious to amused stares. Adolescence brings awareness of preferences for spending time alone or not being able to break in to conversations with ease. Introverts have a small group of  friends and engages in one-on-one conversations rather than be part of a rowdy, large bunch of friends at school/college. They prefer to blend into the crowd, cringing at any unwanted spotlight. It isn’t ‘social anxiety‘ or ‘inferiority complex‘ or ‘depression‘ as many helpful souls had termed it in an attempt to diagnose quietness. Introverts can be chatty, but only with people they are comfortable with. They don’t start blabbering in front of complete strangers in order to emphasize friendliness. None but my closest friends understand why I let calls go unanswered sometimes or spend nights in with a book and revel in some much needed solitude. It’s not a rude avoidance of any social contact, introverts just need their own space to recharge and dive in to do the things they love.
Introverts are a misunderstood lot and often pitied for their lack of voice. ‘She’s very shy‘, my father would offer as an explanation for my apparent disinterest in striking up a conversation at social events. He apologized for my quietness! I’m not shy. When it comes to standing up for what I believe in, when speaking my heart out or when voicing my opinion I have always been very forthright, even at the times when it is a boldness bordering on foolhardy courage. Introverts don’t elbow their voices into every conversation around them or boastfully state their opinion about matters they know little about. They are often assertive, they are just not into its loud exhibition.
Introverts have a million thoughts in their minds, but will tell them to you on a quiet evening over a cup of coffee, sitting cross-legged on the bed; they won’t announce these to mere accquaintances at a party. I am very fortunate that two of my closest friends are introverts too and I enjoy not having the compulsion to impress them, or constantly make sure that they don’t get bored; often we spend time quietly pursuing our own interests in companionable silence.
I don’t put down the ability to converse well and be comfortable in any social setting. That’s an enviable skill, and I regard its immense importance in this talkative world. I thank my stars that I chose a profession that has nothing to do with the corporate world where mostly extroverts flourish. I am there to treat patients, do my job quietly and efficiently, and that’s it. I am happy with this amiable one-on-one interactions. Even among physicians, I have seen smooth talkers, the gregarious ones being considered more skilled than the quiet, unassuming ones because of efficient marketing. But few of the best physicians who I have had the honour to meet were very humble and quiet. Once I met Dr. P. Dhingra, ENT surgeon, and his affable and serene aura invoked great reverence. This tiny old man wrote a book every MBBS undergraduate student in India reads!
If someone asks me what is it like to be an introvert, I would probably murmur a single word answer and escape. But you can see the paragraphs I have been going on and on about introverts, simply because it’s in writing. Introverts love to write. If it were not for us, the postal system would have gone extinct. We communicate better through the written word, simply due to the myriad observations finally finding an outlet, without interruptions and the need for approval. One just has to write.
I have had my periods of frustration and anxieties about the conscious effort it takes me to keep up with  social interactions. There had been times when I smiled and nodded my head so enthusiastically to show my rapt attention, I nearly dislodged a vertebrae. I had observed and applied the nuances of small talk, but there’s a lurking fear that others can detect its pretentiousness, that it is not my own preference, but a genuine attempt to blend in just for once. I did enjoy the fringe benefits when I slipped into my extroverted phases, mostly the laughter and the fun. But as I said earlier, I need some quiet time in between such phasesor I’ll collapse. Few of the introverts I know had adopted the same ploy of slipping into extroverted phases, and had enjoyed it enough to remain so, pumping their liberated fists in air! Adulthood had freed me from the need to fit in and more comfortable in accepting the way I am, which is in a minority of solitude-seekers, quietly and happily doing their own thing. I admire the verve of extroverts, but I don’t regret its lack in me.

Introverts all over the world are reminded at every step to be more voluble, get some chutzpah and radiate an almost blinding energy. But it’s a comfort to stay true to one’s self rather than act through life to be another specimen of ‘ideal‘ as deemed by society. So, walk slowly at times. Think. Observe. Lose yourself in what interests you, instead of multi-tasking. Stop. Breathe. Listen. Awaken your inner introvert for a day, and recharge. Be quiet.

I am thankful to Susan Cain for writing ‘Quiet‘. It’s a thump of approval, a comforting re-assurance, a pat on the back for the introverts, long awaited and much appreciated.

Stuck Inside

Stuck Inside
60 days till exam.
61 days till freedom.
124 days till the verdict.

Surges of pleasure in this dark abyss:
1. The Complete Haiku of Basho.
2. Studying in bed.
3. Dairy Milk Silk.
4. Willie Nelson.
5. Sunrises. Early morning rain.
6. A Rubberband journal and a purple pen.
7.Catnaps. Coffee.Catnaps. Coffee. Catnaps.
8. Blue shards of sky through the leafy canopy outside my window.
9. Cuddles. Laughter. Family.
10. Legitimate excuse for a loner to avoid small talk. Exams.
11. Quiet by Susan Cain.
12. Birthday anticipation.

Duet: On People who Gifted Me Books. On Love.

 On People Who Gifted Me Books

Only four persons gifted me books I love and thus brought upon them the misfortune of being gushed over for life by yours truly.

Ruskin Bond’s autograph

There is Mannan, my classmate from medical college, who is straight out of an Austen novel- brooding, intense and frighteningly intelligent. He was in Mussorietraining to be an IAS officer and I had asked him to try to get me Ruskin Bond’s autograph. A few months later he sent me a book autographed by an author whose stories populated my childhood. Thank you, Mannan. I really appreciate the gesture. He gifted me Dust on the Mountains by Ruskin Bond.

Reading it now

There is Shakeel, a friend from high school who writes like a dream. He is living a life I covet and admire; writing and getting paid for it. Someday I hope to read a book written by him. Our mutual friend, Snata, is an amazing writer too and I’m simply happy to know this talented duo. I received a book from him today; and it was so unexpected and it made me so happy. Shakeel, prepare to be gushed over for life that would embarrass you enough to hide behind doors and duck under tables whenever you see me. He gifted me The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi.

Mystical

The third is Amrita, who is nothing short of my soul sister. We have conjoined hearts and minds. She is a quiet person weaving her own world; and it’s a beautiful world peopled with soulful thoughts. I’m glad she invited me into her world where we can talk about books, movies, love, life, men and hills. She has gifted me a lot of books including Paulo Coelho’s The Fifth Mountain.

Heart-felt essays and poems

Then there is Priyanka, who is courage personified. She brims with intelligence, wit, confidence and a passion for writing and for making the world a better place. She has taken risks in life that I highly admire; she is vibrant and full of infectious energy. She recently got into MIT as the prestigious 2012/2013 Elizabeth Neuffer fellow and it makes me proud beyond measure. I cherish you, Priyanka. She gifted me Kora by Tenzin Tsundue.

—————————————————————————————————————— 

On Love

I write about love, but I’m not a lover. I read about love, but I don’t live it. I see love, but I am a mere observer. Even when I was in love, when I was a lover, when I thought I was loved, it was emptiness and detachment wrapped in a thin crust of passion, that was a ghost of some earlier self, and a dollop of forced interest. This detachment and ambiguity of feelings scared me and I tried to be involved; I became neurotic about it and felt re-assured when I experienced symptoms of romantic jealousy or missed someone, which gave a false sense of being in love, or capable of being in love. I am often swept off my feet, but never by a person; it’s always a singular attribute: a warm smile, owning a common set of books, very often it’s the eyes, or kindness, sharp wit, ambition, intelligence, a fancy pair of shoes, arrogance, clean nails, someone who dines with family, writes poems, well-travelled, chivalry works every time too, or sometimes it’s just a mix of serendipity and hormones.

I can’t define love anymore. I was naive once, not so long ago, in a time when everything seemed possible and there were no missing puzzle pieces. I knew it once, this love, without having to say it in words and I poured it copiously in letters and gestures. But one day it slapped me out of my reverie. Singular attributes continued to lodge in my heart instead of a whole person. Now that time has lifted the veil off the pretenses I had forced myself to believe, I wonder why I ever considered it to be love. The conversations bored me, the laughter was hollow and I longed to be alone and with a book instead. But instead I talked for hours, laughed out loud, was a finicky and clingy lover, as if the love was real! I planned strategies, I made lists of pros and cons, I observed the duel of my mind and heart, and I was scared of acknowledging that it was doomed from the start or that I was passing off a fleeting attraction as love or worse, that I was incapable of love anymore. At twenty three! I was scared of letting go lest I don’t meet anyone before I turned thirty, or forty, or fifty.Knights on white horses were a cliché even when I was just ten. The concept of ‘casual dating‘ and testing the waters is lost on me too. So I settled for the first decent person who confessed his love for me. Sad, I know.
My friends call me the ‘most romantic person ever’ and I squirm in discomfiture. I worship romance. I love to love. I crave intimacy. But on actual confrontation with it, I panic and withdraw into a shell. It baffles me. Why do I get attracted to men who I know for sure will break my heart? Why am I incapable of living the romance that exudes from every single fiber of my heart? Have you watched the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is making love to Diane Keaton and she just lies there in bed, inert and passive, and her soul has an ‘out-of-body’ experience and walks around the room, lights up a smoke and reads a book? That’s exactly how I feel when I convince myself that I’m in love!
I have thought about it and have come up with few half-baked theories:
a)  I have set certain standards for the man I want to fall in love with and so far I haven’t met anyone who had lived up to them. Practicality convinces me that the standards are high, and I should settle even when just a quarter of my expectations are met. I did so; but deep down I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for and it would only damage me; so I clammed up, emotionally and even physically. One called me prude; the other thought I was sexless. But I tell myself it’s just about not meeting the right person.
b)  I can’t believe that anyone can love me. I have my own set of insecurities which leads me to wonder why would a person decide to devote his time and love on me when they could do so for the millions of other girls who are prettier, can speak well, can make them laugh, can walk on high heels, have lustrous hair, independent and knows how to dance. Why would anyone love me? And this question leads on to another disturbing query, ‘Do I love myself?’ Over the years I have started liking ‘me’, even though I am not bursting with love for myself. If loving self is tough, it becomes tougher to believe that one is worthy of love. Cynicism sets in. Sometimes it takes deep roots. It’s tough to see ourselves through a lover’s eyes, which in my mind is always scanning for flaws! ‘You had been bad relationships. Once you know love, all your cynicism will go out of the window’, my friends tell me. I give them a wry smile and my eyes mock their optimism, but my heart thumps with hope.
c) I worry about the word ‘forever‘. Intolerance is rampant. Who has time for love? Or the patience to make things work. People jump from bed to bed, memories fade, and all that remains of what started as a promise of growing old together is a tattered  Hallmark card. You start cautiously; you exchange likes and dislikes, you move on to dreams and hopes, then comes the stories of childhood and secrets you don’t tell your friends. You remember anniversaries of first date and first stirrings of love, and get wooed by flowers and dizzy kisses. Then one day when you least expect it (or expected and dreaded since always), everything vanishes. And you are left wondering why you invested so much time and effort on the relationship. It disturbs you that your declarations of affection and confessions of your innermost thoughts are in the mind of a man forever lost in the crowd. You despair that you are back to square one; you have to lay a foundation again, and build block by block another relationship. Just the thought of the effort tires you. So you remain passive.
d) I am scared of infidelity. I have seen it at close quarters in people around me. I question the existence of monogamy. And it disturbs me that I have reached a stage when I feel fidelity is a blessing. I try to be nonchalant about the end of a relationship and feel liberated from a worse fate in the future. But lurking in the subconscious is a cautiousness that’s overwhelming and sometimes damaging, nipping opportunities in the bud.
e) I am selfish. I want it all. The wooing, the proclamations of love, the romance, the right amount of possessiveness, the loyalty, the opposites that attract, the similarities that bind, the conversations that are endless and effortless (Before Sunrise hangover), the adequate space, public displays of affection (not bordering on perversion), the flavor of newness, the comfort of familiarity, the intimacy of knowing looks unknown to the rest of the world, the respect, the honesty, the book-lover, the laughter, distinctively ‘I’ yet ‘We’, a team of two in this world or against this world, growing together in life (not in chronological sense), and a disarming smile is always appreciated. And yes, soulful eyes. Since re-incarnation is not an established fact and I’ve just one life to live, why compromise? So, I wait.
A cynicism has seeped into my attitude towards love that I largely attribute to certain bitter experiences. But in the past week I watched three movies, three unusual love stories that have dusted off some of the cynic crust layering my heart.

Hypnotic

The first is Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’. This movie seduced me! It curled my toes, sent a shiver up my spine and unspeakable parts of my anatomy, and haunted my dreams for the next few nights. The simple act of passing each other on the stairs on the way to buy noodles can be orgasmic for the viewer. It told of a love that crept up unknowingly, discreetly; a love that would be illicit yet the purest form of love. Intense gazes, dark passageways, metaphorical rain when the tension brought you to the edge of explosion, a haunting melody that intensified every gesture-a bend of the neck, a touch of the earlobe, a wave of the hand. ‘It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.’ The agony stayed with me, I lived that tale of doomed love for two hours and a long time thereafter. It reinstated something I thought I had lost.

Subtle longing

The second is Before Sunset. Its prequel is one of my favorite movies of all time. But this movie edged ahead with a subtler love and longing that I could identify with better. It’s set in Paris over the course of an hour; two people who met just once and had spent an amazing and meaningful night in Vienna, meet again after nine years. They are still in love, but are cautious and bound by new commitments. They walk around and talk about everything under the sun. The effortless conversation portrayed in the movie is what I crave. No mushy talk, no promises, no flattering. But the love is palpable as it surfaces with every passing moment. The fragility of it all and the fierceness with which they protect it and hide it is touching. The way he looks at her, the way she looks at him, secretive yet fully aware, melted my heart.

Melt! 🙂

The third is Barfi! I don’t need to elaborate on this; by now everyone and their uncle must have watched it. It felt like a warm, fuzzy cocoon. Misty hills, the humor (Saurabh Shukla takes a nervous bow when he is caught peeing in the field by the hidden farmers), the dizzying visuals, the refreshing silence that spoke volumes, the Chaplin-esque acts, the lifted sequences (like the train scene from Fried Green Tomatoes) that blended so well and thus forgiven in an instant, the charming Barfi and the adorable Jhilmil ignited in me a love for the whole world! So this weekend I feel everything is possible and good things will happen. I put Libya and Egypt and diesel hike away for a while and basked in the mellow Barfi daze. But it’s the tender innocence of a love so giving and so enduring that rejuvenated my sense of romance.

I’ve a filmiheart!
 

Of Serialized Dreams

I often dream in soap opera format with episodes ending at crucial junctions to be continued another night. There is no strict continuity and these dreams reside in the dark recesses of brain sulci only to resurface after weeks or months.My overactive imagination, which I consider an asset, overflows into my dreams. They make for interesting insights and even belly laughs. The characters and the narrative never fail to fascinate me in their diversity and even absurdity. It feels as if a little man, who in my imagination resembles Rumpelstiltskin, opens a secret door into my mind to weave a story every night. The dreams are vivid in all senses; I can smell the ocean air, taste a freshly baked cake, touch a sticky clot of blood, hear rapid fingers on a typewriter and speak languages that I no longer understand on waking up.
I remember most of my dreams as they get chronicled the next morning. Some are funny and has the recurring character of Woody Allen as a belly dancer who crops up without warning in random dreams. Some are sinister where I get murdered by a Sphinx or Prem Chopra. Often I fall off a cliff but hold on to a tree branch or rock and then my hand slips; I see my head crushed and oozing blood and brain that is washed away at high tide. I see Naginiswallow a certain professor of community medicine. I live many lifetimes in what maybe a fifty minute dream. Some are filled with intricate details, and few are tedious where the whole time is spent in doing things like trying to make a perfectly round chapatti and just when I am done a monkey appears and gobbles it up. I have found myself in a large dark room with a dying candle in a corner and suddenly a blinding glare envelops me and a crowd of pregnant women bring in a sand-timer and turns it over. Often I am ‘happily married’ to Sheldon Cooper and we live in a loft filled with books and have weekday-specific dinners.
I live near the ocean and watch the dolphins dance every evening. Or I am a middle-aged woman struggling to wash away a lipstick stain off the my husband’s shirt, but I’d always worn my lips bare. I am running from someone and turn into a dead end; a ladder appears suddenly and I climb up furiously only to appear in an old examination hall and I realize I am naked and all eyes are on me when the invigilator announces that I am late and the next exam will be held fifty years later. Sometimes I am a fetus in the womb of a woman who doesn’t know I am there and vodka courses through my veins. In some dreams I am deliriously happy when I am stuck in a Ghibli-esque world of green hedges, blue ocean, bluer skies, book filled apartments and hilly roads or I am running around trapping dragonflies in empty matchboxes or I’m at my childhood home eating lushi-aloo bhaji while watching ‘I Dream of Jeannie’. Sometimes I am a famous and prolific writer with innumerable Booker prizes and even a Nobel and whose typewriter is auctioned for a million dollars; the auction house is filled with all my favorite novelists.
I live the pages of the book that I fall asleep reading, and so nowadays I am Pip in mortal fear of a convict or a traveler waiting in the bar of an old train station or a Hobbit. My earliest memory of a dream that later recurred throughout my childhood was that of an old woman with a hump on her back and a mole on her cheek who hobbles up to me to inform that my family had died and I will never be able to buy new crayon pencils. I cried so hard that I wet my clothes with my tears, but in the morning I woke up to the embarrassment of a wet bed.
Last night I had an unusual dream. I am back in my hometown and one evening there’s a power failure. The entire neighbourhood is out on their verandahs and admiring the full moon. Suddenly another moon sprouts up and then another, and another, and soon the whole sky is filled with pearly moons and some of them seem frighteningly close. Maybe my high school physics teacher directed the dream or maybe the scene of Jim Carey seducing Jennifer Aniston with a large (hence, romantic) moon lurked in my subconscious, and so the appearance of thousands of moons was followed by huge waves submerging the whole neighbourhood that lay hundreds of miles away from the sea! We take refuge in our homes and soon there are fishes and snakes swimming outside the window. An unfamiliar thin man tells us that it is the work of the mad scientist for whom he used to work. The thin man knows how to destroy the moons and bring everything back to normalcy but he needed an accomplice. Luckily we have Salman Khan (the real one and not a doppelganger) amidst us, and he helps the thin man to save the Earth from an impending apocalypse!
I don’t know why I dream what I dream. I tried to read Freud’s book but a string of yawns never let me proceed beyond ten pages. Dream analysis bores me; I am even scared of what it might reveal. So the dreams continue, and they continue to entertain.

Smorgasbord: Dating Readers, Ephron’s Neck, Calvino and Me, Being Jane Morris, Birthday Blues, Wedding Whiff

via urban sketchers

I spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand how my words and actions get interpreted, because more often than not people read between the lines for non-existent revelations. I lack the social graces and the ability for small talk; I get nervous when the onus of conversing with strangers or more than one person befalls me. I can’t talk about the weather, the people in front of me might not be readers and that eliminates books as conversation starters, I stare with my eyebrows raised to show interest, my mouth freezes in a half-smile and to heighten the creepiness I check the time every fifteen seconds. My tongue utters sentences that seem alien to my mind, I curse the unbearable length of a minute, I feign nonchalance and tip my head back but tip it further than I intended to and my chin hangs in an awkward thrust towards the ceiling, and heaven forbid if I have food in front of me, my lap is littered with crumbs. The  funny sentences, the smart one-liners, the queries about the pet and the travels, the sympathies about dental work and humidity-assaulted hair, and interesting trivia about Einstein or Madonna come to my mind usually a day after the end of such disastrous conversations. Despite the utmost caution with which I tread in making my point across, I often send innumerable wrong signals. My list of faux pas when it comes to interactions with people other than those in the inner circle of friends and family is longer than Sheldon Cooper‘s failures in detecting sarcasm.

Today I re-read this article about dating ‘a girl who reads‘ that I had read a year earlier. I present an excerpt from the article; it’s a lovely message that only lovers of book lovers will understand thoroughly.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

via Cyril Rolando

Sundays find me awake at a frighteningly early hour and staring bleary eyed at textbooks ranging from medicine to orthopaedics, and later reading the fat weekend newspaper while I eat my breakfast at the pace slower than of a snail finishing a marathon. Then I struggle for a frustrating ten minutes to hide my scalp, the graveyard of my beloved and recently deceased clumps of hair. I drive out of home a few minutes to nine am and on the way I rewind and keep listening to the songs that the iPod throws my way. I appear for a mock test every Sunday morning which I hope will equip me well in preparation for the important exam in January. I get bored of attempting questions after just twenty five minutes and start tapping my foot till the students around me glare disapprovingly. I dash home for the half a day in the week when I have declared a self-imposed ban on my MCQ books; from Sunday noon to midnight this bird is free from its cage. I sweat in anticipation and my hands grow cold as if I’m off for a secret rendezvous with a panting lover hidden in the dark bushes outside my window. I got that from Madame Bovary. I open the novels that had titillated me in stolen pockets of time throughout the week and watch a movie later at night. Twelve hours of pure, unadulterated pleasure and none of it involves a lover or dark chocolate or Disneyland.

I read two books last week Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart‘ and Nora Ephron’s ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck‘, and they were as diverse as they can get. One is set in a Nigerian village towards the end of the nineteenth century and the other is set in  1960s-1990s New York City. One is fiction based on stories the author heard, the other is an essay of womanhood. One is written by a legend of African literature and the other wrote few emotionally-manipulative Hollywood movies that I love so much. One is about drinking palm wine in the first hunted human head and the despise towards a lazy, flute-playing father, the other is about the joy of Julia Child’s cookbook and hiding wrinkled necks in mandarin collars. I loved both the books; but since my week had started on a sad note, Achebe’s grim novel was slightly upstaged by Ephron’s breezy essays about living in the most vibrant city in the world, the woes of ‘maintenance‘ by manicures and blow drys in case one runs into an ex-lover, the stages of parenting etc made me smile more and she won my heart with the sentence ‘Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

 
This weekend I bought three books from Flipkart: Italo Calvino’s ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller‘, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Complete Stories‘ and Julio Cortazar’s ‘Blow Up: And Other Stories‘. I also got Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl‘ and David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas‘ on by e-book reader. I am reading Calvino this week because his imaginative novel makes me, the reader, the protagonist!


I make sure to indulge in something sinfully good every week; sometimes it’s poetry by Whitman or Cummings, sometimes it’s a dark chocolate ice-cream, last week it was browsing online for  Pre-Raphealite art by my favorites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse. I devoured these paintings for hours till I fantasized being Jane Morris with the long honey-coloured curtain of hair and that proud nose and those sensual lips. I was mesmerized by the warm greens and mellow golds in their paintings.

 One of my favorite paintings is by an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Sir Frederick Leighton; I had an acute case of Stendhal Syndrome when I first saw his ‘Flaming June‘.


Birthdays make me delirious with joy, they are highly over-rated in my world. I become excited on New Year’s Day for my birthday in November! I expect the world to stop spinning for a moment on my birthday to acknowledge its significance in my life. I blame it on my parents. Growing up, birthdays were the most coveted and lavishly celebrated events in an otherwise commonplace childhood in a small town. There were more than five hundred guests, I repeat, five bloody hundred guests on each of my birthdays till I decided I was too grown up to wear a party hat and cut a cake while standing under a tuft of balloons. I missed the mountain of gifts though. I continued celebrating birthdays that ranged from a rowdy get-together of friends with mock stripteases and dangerous truths to quiet dinners with family and a temple visit in the morning. Birthdays rule my life and birthday cynics turn me off. I make sure I don’t let the birthdays of my loved ones be just an ordinary day; I am worse than Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreations determined to celebrate Ron Swanson’s birthday. That’s why the news that this years AIIMS post graduate entrance exam is scheduled for the day after my birthday has caused such an emotional upheaval in my life! I don’t want to study on my birthday, but that’s what I’d probably wind up doing instead of all the good stuff I’d imagined, one of which included a leisurely lunch with my girlfriends who would coincidentally all be in town this November.

But God is kind, and he soothed my bruised heart with a news that made my heart do joyful somersaults. My oldest and ‘best-est’ (yes, I use this word) friend is planning to tie the knot next year and I feel so happy for her and the ‘best-est’ (again!) guy in the world that she has chosen to spend her life with (I told her just now that I am officially in love with him too after hearing about his romantic gestures and old-world, Victorian era gentlemanly concern for her which is so hard to come by nowadays. He is Mr.Darcy or ‘non blind’ Mr.Rochester!).

I will watch a movie now, In The Mood For Love.

Weekend

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

-Walt Whitman

The magic hour when all the ideas are yours and the pillow is soft and the windows are open and the moon throws oblong shadows on your bed and the cicadas sing and the breeze softly brushes your feet.

I have been reading poems. Poems about love and desire, life and death, spring and autumn, hope and despair, books and travels, men and women, days and nights, time and eternity. Poems by Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou,John Keats and Sylvia Plath. Poems that exhilarate me, kindle flaming hopes, drown me in despair, bind me in a realm of fantasy, curl my toes, awaken myriad questions, isolate me, melt me into the unknown, swirl my soul and harbinger a good night’s rest.


I have also been reading a book that caused furrows in my mother’s forehead when I had unpacked it in front of her. It is Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘The Bad Girl‘. This is the book I chose to linger the charm of ‘Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter‘. A flip of forty pages and I’m thrown into Miraflores teenagers and Parisian bureaucrats,  bad girl who toys with the heart of a good boy, Peruvian guerrilla warfare and military coup. I vainly try to curb the erotomania for authors that seduce me with their words; this desire to devote my entire being to their genius and gaining a scandalously long list of potential lovers in the form of Hemingway, Pamuk, Nabokov, Chekhov, Saki, Jules Verne and now Mario Vargas Llosa.

I felt around in the dark for the switch that operates the need to stay connected and be within reach of a writing wall, 140 words or a beeping mailbox icon; then turned it off for the weekend. I read poems and the novel, I crossed off items in my ‘to study’ list, I took catnaps, I listened to Nat King Cole and even ‘The Kooks’, I watched a Woody Allen movie, and I got scared by a pigeon on my bathroom window. I heard the song ‘Tokari‘ by Papon and couldn’t stop the tapping foot and the heart bursting with a blazing love for Assam. I read the obituary of Armstrong and at night watched the moon that he walked on, and the space where a woman of Indian origin is still floating in, with gravity defying hair framing her face.

I basked in much needed solitude; it is so addictive, I think I will continue it till it gets on my nerves.

When God Overdid My Fervent Teenage Wish For Feminine Curves And Turned Me Into A Ball Of Fat!

Children are impressionable and quick to soak up nasty comments that deter their self-image, sometimes for life, which can be a problem because none in the world can be crueler than school children.  My childhood and even my college years had been generously peppered with unkind and uncalled for comments about my weight, my unruly hair, my mannish jaw line and even my dark skin. I had been the pampered daughter of a large household and never made to realize that I lacked the physical attributes of beauty that ‘society’ had set down. The only comment about physical appearance I had ever faced till then was being affectionately nick-named ‘Baah Khori’ (bamboo stick) by my youngest Khura(paternal uncle) due to the effortless size zero figure I had and was blissfully unaware of such prejudices till I moved to Guwahati the year I entered my teens. 
I remember being in awe of a friend who wrote like a dream; but sighed and withdrew the pedestal from underneath her feet when I learnt that and she had nicknamed me ‘defective piece’based solely on the beauty I lacked (maybe she was just being a ‘regular’ teen and I was wrong to presume that her intelligence freed her from prejudices that afflicted the hoi polloi). When I saw the ‘early developers’, I resigned to the sad fate of forever remaining a mere thirty eight kilos despite unabashed gluttony and never having to buy a bra (or buying one and stuffing it with socks) in my future. Soon I turned a veteran of accepting such shallowness in my stride, and toss it off without a second thought. I wasn’t exactly a saint either; I too had joined in the raucous laughter when the object of ridicule had been someone else. It’s an uncomfortable truth that people judge others on their physical appearance, always or at some point in their lives.
But (-um, Robin Scherbatzky!) there has been one issue that I had struggled with for a decade, and that is my body weight. When I turned thirteen my super-fit cousin and a highly sought name in the Indian modeling circuit, Aryan Baruah, advised me to join a gym and jump in the newly emerging trend of fitness in Guwahati. I enrolled for an aerobics class in a gym in Dispur. I was eager about gaining some much needed curves, because people had started to look annoyed by the rude boy (yours truly) who sat on the seats reserved for women on the bus! The high point was when a group of ‘cool’ college girls told the gawky fourteen year old me that they would kill for legs like mine! That was it, even my father’s frowns couldn’t stop me from wearing mini-skirts for a blissful two years; although I overdid it the day I wore an outrageous ‘leopard print’ skirt to attend (cringe in shame now, eeeesh) Math tutorial class! But the increasing demands of college life with medical entrance examination preparation squashed out gym and the only flicker of consistent physical activity from my life. The local grocer’s fortunes doubled when I started buying out entire shelves of potato chips, colas, butter to go with my Aloo Paranthas breakfast and Maggi noodles. God too decided to grant my fervent teenage wish for feminine curves and he felt so apologetic about being late that he transformed me into a big ball of fat! I didn’t have a waist and no one could strangle me because they would have to find a neck first. It took me a year to realize that I had multiple chins and the stores no longer carried the sizes of the clothes I liked.
Did I wake up to the horrors of my sedentary lifestyle and do something about it? Of course not! I just sat there with an imbecilic belief that I would lose it all in a few months if I tried. I went on dumping junk food and mountains of rice into me (my father once told my ex, ‘Look how fat she has become. She doesn’t listen to me and eats thiiiiiiiiisssss much rice’ and compounded it with appropriate hand gestures that killed me then and there), and the only exercise I did was flicking the buttons of the TV remote. I panicked when the scales tipped over seventy kilos and tried to lose it with internet-researched-and-self-implemented diets and early morning jogging and swimming, which I skipped on the days it rained, the days it was too hot and humid, a certain four days in the month and the days when I slept in late! I didn’t lose a single gram of weight and my father got hoodwinked by salesmen selling all sorts of home-fitness equipments. The treadmill, the stationary cycle, the pair of dumb bells and a dozen other exercise machines gathered cobwebs in less than a month, and amused visitors to our home who looked at the treadmill once, then looked at me and then awkward silence!
My sister, who had always been very active in sports during her school days, suffered a similar fate and was plagued by the curses of obesity like fibroadenomas and cholelithiasis. I too had the sword of family history of diabetes hanging dangerously low over me. I felt defeated and accepted that I would always be fat, donated my wardrobe of short skirts and jeans, and started wearing shapeless salwaar kameez and baggy jeans. I wore only black outfits for two whole years! My self-image took a serious beating, but I kept repeating to myself that physical attributes shouldn’t bother me, I was above all that. But bother it did, not just ‘looking fat’ but also the health risks associated with it.
My sister lost twenty eight kilos last year, using the gym facilities in her college and following a healthy diet, and has maintained it ever since. Now I was the only fat person in the extended family and the cornerstone of all weight-related discussions! I huffed and puffed while climbing stairs in the hospital, I turned crimson while giving dietary advice to patients, I was convinced no one would ever be attracted to me (not that I wanted to be with a man who judged women on physical appearance, but I didn’t want the poor guy to settle for ‘The Hulk’!), I was used to matronly well meaning women patting my hand and asking ‘Fourth month, Majoni?’ on noticing the unsightly lower belly bump,  and the dismay I felt when random people gushed over my cute daughter (read nine year old cousin)!
What I lacked was motivation!To get up and do something about the extra twenty kilos of weight I had lugged around with me, and ‘maintain’ that motivation and hard work all throughout (that applies to everything in life, doesn’t it?).  So, I joined a gym four months ago. The gym is quite a popular one especially with doctors who form nearly 95% of its clientele; and if you stand in the middle of the gym floor and throw a stone in any direction, ten doctors will go crashing down like dominoes. My usual conversation starter is, “Which hospital do you work in?”, and I have a pain in the neck bowing down politely to my former professors.  We are enticed with special workouts (just 4000/- a month!! Oh wow, really? Let me shake my money tree!), personal trainers that guarantee results in three months (and I am sure they do), Swedish massages and a soy-happy dietician; I couldn’t afford their exorbitant prices, but had the floor trainers, the exercise equipment and the motivation of joining that elite club of toned and lithe bodies that sauntered around the gym, oozing confidence and flaunting washboard abs.
On the first day my lungs were at the point of a violent outburst after just ten minutes on the treadmill, and the rowing machine was the only consolation after the unmerciful and continuous assault on every fat-laden cell of my body. I tried to strictly modify my diet limiting my rice intake too (which is a herculean task that involved combating thebhotua’ gene empowered people of Assam); but gave up after a month, although I continue to avoid caffeine, sweets, fried foods, pizzas and pickles. The restaurants in Guwahati, especially the ones with pizzas on their menu, woke up to my conspicuous absence from their loyal clientele and started spamming my phone with all sorts of discounts.
I started losing weight and gaining muscle mass at a pace that would shame even the proverbial tortoise! But I was losing weight after a decade, and in three months I happily threw out my size 32 jeans, and felt smug when a salesgirl bought out ‘L’ size clothes (that’s an improvement from the days when I was told politely that they didn’t stock ‘my size’ just by the sight of me!).I am yet to lose another dozen kilos to reach my ideal BMI and I hope to get there in six more months, provided I don’t hit a plateau.
I took up Pilates for a couple of months and although it didn’t cause the muffin top and the arm jiggles to disappear, it strengthened my core muscles, increased flexibility and loosened up my stiff joints. The biggest reward was when my battle with insulin resistance tilted in my favor! I’m happy with the routine that the floor trainers have chalked out for me and the assistance they provide in the workouts. I have lost a little more than six kilos of fat and gained two kilos of muscle mass in the past four months but I feel like giving a bear hug to my friends and family when they ask ‘Have you lost some weight?’ Music to my ears!
Yesterday I had my fourth end-of-the-month fitness assessment done by a new gym trainer who looked hardly out of his teens. The conversation while filling up the details in my assessment form went as follows:
Trainer: Your age?
Me:26.
Trainer jots down ‘56’!
I want to say ‘Are you mental?’ but calmly repeat that my age is 26 not 56.
He smirks, “ARE YOU SURE?!!!!”
The first phrase that came to my mind was ‘Kaan Toliya Sor (a popular form of expressing anger in Assam) and it’s a miracle that he didn’t bleed to death on the carpet, considering my infamous temper outbursts (which unfortunately many had witnessed till date) and that too when I had just started feeling good about my weight loss! I spent the rest of my day seriously considering Botox, but woke up today to the happiness of fitting into an old pair of jeans.
Women, who can understand them!

Smorgasbord of Rituals

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
–Elizabeth Bowen
Often inadvertent actions slip into unknowing uniformity and turn rituals, but these everyday rituals define us, comfort us and bring a certain order to our lives. I’m not the paragon of self-discipline, and I lack a structured life. Yet certain rituals have osmosed into my life, and remained.
Coffee and Crosswords
I nearly barfed in my mouth when I first tasted jasmine tea served in the lilliputian cups by a stand-in-Chinese waiter; but the taste (or the lack of it) grew on me and this aromatic concoction is on my table every morning now. It’s a part of my morning ritual which includes the following:
  1. Fumbling under my pillow for my phone to check for any messages, hoping for some earth-shattering good news only to find BSNL/Pizza Hut/Tata Photon spamming my inbox.
  2. Two minutes of stupor as I struggle with the decision of acquiring a little more sleep, and as testified by my family this is the most dangerous time of the day to approach me. Civility is clouded by sleep and primitive instincts of violence are sharp.
  3. An unnaturally long walk (or so it seems) to the sink to brush and floss and being startled every time by my the sight of my hair that could nest an Emu.
  4. Drinking jasmine tea (and this time in a cup made for adequately sized humans) in a desperate attempt to replace the caffeine in my veins.
  5. Sitting cross-legged on the divan in the verandah, leafing through the morning newspaper to check the headlines and the crossword, and inhaling lungfuls of recommended daily intake of fresh air.
  6. Dragging my reluctant feet to the study desk where tattered MCQ books lay awaiting me.
 This routine has subtle variations once in a while to include coffee; and on the days I’m charged up about fitness (usually brought about by reading a new issue of Prevention Magazine) it includes an early morning swim/a walk/half an hour on the stationary cycle which on other days serve as a clothes hanger.
Assault of My Eyes
I don’t eat carrots, or spinach. And I read ALL the time. My hawk-eyed parents make sure I study enough hours in preparation for that elusive AIPGE seat. Then I read the books on my ‘to read’ list just about every where; on the pot, while I ‘inhale’ my lunch without taking my eyes off the book, on my way to the gym (on my way back from the gym I usually lay motionless and breathless on the back seat of my car), while waiting in a queue, while waiting for perpetually running late friends (I’m sure they say the same thing about me), at dinner as my parents threaten to snatch the damn book away and in bed before I drift off to sleep (in a ‘dontiya do’ position, which only Assamese readers will understand!).  Once a month I switch off my phone, shut my door, put on a pair of comfortable pajamas, assemble a variety of snacks, get in bed and spend the day in a marathon reading session. But my eyes have miraculously survived this assault so far and been at a respectable -0.25D all these years (I made the ever-obliging and surprisingly mild-mannered ophthalmology post graduate trainees check my vision quite often during my internship).
Notebook Porn or Life’s Witness
I have a notebook fetish. I hoard them, especially the tiny ones with faded yellow pages. I keep a journal even though I am erratic in maintaining it and absolutely love the diaries from ‘Rubber Band’, with their unassuming black cover and smooth white pages with rounded corners. There are doodles, poems, even limericks and declarations of love and of despise interspersed among the mundane details of my day. Every night I furtively glance around for spies lurking behind curtains and sneak out my diary from its hiding place to jot down a brutally honest account of all that I feel, which would lead me to trouble in the courteous world.
Get Me Tokyo!
Recently the armchair traveller in me has been harboring a fascination for Japan and try to watch at least one of the following shows on NHK World every week: “At home with Venetia in Kyoto”, “Takeshi’s Art Beat”, “Somewhere Street”, “Cool Japan” or “Tokyo Eye”. I watch a movie every weekend, mostly world cinema, courtesy of the heaven-sent torrents. I will watch “The Red Violin” tomorrow.
The Secret Life of Monica Geller
Every fortnight I go through an obsessive compulsive cleaning spree that is almost meditative. I neatly fold clothes in my wardrobe and arrange them according to colour, I air the books in my library and the shoes in my closet and clean out disk space and back up the files on my laptop. This particular ritual is equivalent to a spa visit and rejuvenates me.
Of Talking to God And Not Telling My Therapist About It
I’m neither an atheist nor overtly religious. I rarely visit temples, and send my reluctant mother as my proxy to any religious ceremony. I have grown up watching my parents take their wet slippers off after bath, stand in front of the tiny ‘mandir’ at our home, light up a few incense sticks, bow their heads and pray with a devotion so pure that awed me even as a child as did the ritual’s unfailing regularity. I try to replicate such ‘proper’ prayers only before examinations and they are shamelessly need-based. But I have an informal talk with an unspecific and omnipresent ‘God’ daily while lying in the dark and awaiting sleep. I relate the events of the day and point out (for future consideration) how things could have been better, express gratitude for all the good things in my life-acquired ones than those given unasked-and repeated reminders to make sure that the coming day goes without any mishaps for my near and dear ones. I carry a tiny Ganesha idol in my bag everywhere I go. That’s all the religion I have.
The Rest
  • Being the sole custodian of birthdays in the extended family and undertaking the task of wishing them every year.
  • Saving up for winter, the season of books fairs.
  • Playing cards with my parents on rainy evenings and listening to Pa’s uproarious anecdotes.
  • Late night phone calls with my best friend (she does the calling up, I can’t afford hour long international calls) to share the comical indifference of our parents to the idea of marrying off their daughters who will always be 20 year old in their minds.
  • Making perfectly round and spicy omelettes on the rare occasions when I lose my way and end up in the kitchen.
  • Writing in stolen pockets of time.
  • Putting up a Christmas tree (remnant of a missionary school education and overdose of Christmas movies) every year.
  • Packing my suitcase two days before a trip and staring at the clock in a vain attempt to make it move faster by sheer will.
What are the rituals that govern your life?

The Harmonious Uniformity Of Falling For The Underdog And The Wrong One Too

The storm had abated. Sleep and sanity restored. The question that went on in a loop: “Was it even love?”
I wonder why I put myself through these sporadic instances of total loss of reasoning; from which I come out with a battered and bruised ego, drained of precious energy and time, priorities gone awry, mind plagued with self-doubt, sabotaging my goals in life, repenting in leisure the consequences of my impulsive actions, a memory tarnished with unpleasantness, questioning my decisions and choices, and most importantly making a fool of myself.
Why do I do it?
Because fools rush in. I fall in love too easily; initial triggers may be a smile, kindness, intellect, assertiveness, a love for books, sarcasm and sometimes even questionable wit! The person is just incidental; I am more often in love with the idea of being in love.
But I don’t realize it until it’s too late; till I sit back, put my feet up, take off my rose-tinted shades and analyze why I do what I do.
The Current Tally Of Romantic Follies: (excluding the momentary infatuations that last no longer than a week)
1. 1997-Being a Conformist and Crushing on the Teacher:
A humongous crush on my history teacher which lead to nothing more than remembering the Mughals and Chandragupta for posterity. I studied history with a fervor that would have taken me to great academic heights had I applied it ever again!
Why did I rush in? 
He was the only person who noticed the timid girl everyone overlooked in a class full of boisterous students, and boosted her self-confidence with kind words of encouragement.
2. 1999-The Movie Star…err…Person:
I wasn’t aware of the movies that would follow, and the non-entity he would become. But when “Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi” came out, I was overcome with admiration for the intense, brooding and caterpillar-browed Sanjay Suri (What was I thinking!!!). I tried to immortalize his influence in my hormone-ridden teenage years by writing odes of love and pasting his photograph in my diary, which my sister later displayed in front of my guffawing friends.
Why did I rush in? 
All the schoolgirls fantasized about the blue-eyed poster boys of romance Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic was a craze then) and on the home-front Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan (it was before the debut of Hrithik Roshan). I had to find and love the underdog. I had to be contrary.
3. 2005-Blush of First Love:
I was all of nineteen years, shy and awkward. And there he was on my computer screen, talking to me about books and movies, hearing about my day and making me double up with laughter with his quick wit. We met only thrice and wrote long letters and emails. The long distance tired him after a year. I failed to understand why trivial details like distance mattered when two people were in love. My flabby cerebrum gathered much later that I was the only one who was in love. I spent the next six months digging up the songs one is supposed to listen in times of extreme anguish and hearing them in a loop. I couldn’t take to the bottle, and it was physically impossible for me to grow a beard. But other than that I resembled Devdas in entirety.
Why did I rush in?  
 It was the love of an unsullied heart. Simple.
4.2008-The Rogue with Superficial Charm:
You meet a person, you share hometowns and your old school, he charms you with his undivided attention, you are wary of his intentions, but he becomes your friend, he says he loves you, you laugh it off, he repeats until you believe, you feel obliged to reciprocate his love, you get to know his family, you talk to his friends, you compare notes about growing up, he meets your friends and your family, and he puts a ring on your finger. Nowhere in the story would you feel the need to hire a private eye to do a background check on the person whose ring you wear. Then inconsistencies in conversations crop up and to your horror you find yourself at the center of the web of lies and deceit he had spun around you. Job, education, fidelity…everything was a farce. You go through denial, anguish, anger, disappointment, shame and feelings of worthlessness for lack of good judgement. It ends abruptly; leaving you with a violently disordered life and a distrustful heart.
Why did I rush in? 
After the fiasco of my first love, I was flooded with wise words of well-meaning people who cared about me. My hippocampus was receptive to only one, “You’d be better off marrying the one who loves you than the one whom you love.” Bad advice. Wrong man. Flawed judgement.
5. 2011-The Butterflies in My Adrenals and Tibia:
I had started a new phase of my life, coming out of the shell I had retreated to three years ago.  But I steeled my resolve never to be carried away by the idiosyncrasies of my heart. Murphy smirked and applied his laws on me during the last month of my internship. There was this ordinary face in the crowd, a tongue that vocalized so fast that I had to beg his pardon thrice before I could note down anything he said, and a sarcasm and smirk that highly annoyed me. I detested his ordering the interns around, stressing on military camp punctuality. But gradually I liked working with him. I was his ‘Woman’ Friday, in strictly Robinson Crusoe context. But I was still unaware of the dirty trick Cupid would play on me.
I struggled to curb my feelings of extreme elation every time he walked into the ward, or said something appreciative, or crinkled his eyes in laughter, or told me random happenings of his day, or elongated the vowels in my name adorably, or just sat there with a frown of intense concentration. I couldn’t explain why my heart somersaulted if by some happy accident he came for his evening duty early or our duties coincided. Butterflies not only inhabited my stomach, but my jejunum, spleen, adrenals and pisiform bone too. I kept asking myself what I saw in this guy. Why would I like someone I barely know and whose relationship status remained elusive to me? But the ways of the heart had flummoxed mankind since eternity and I was born human too despite the reasoning power of a gorilla; I just had the harmonious uniformity of falling for the underdog and the wrong one too. My internship ended. But I couldn’t still the frenzy of emotions that threatened to overpower me. I knew I was going to be impulsive and would cringe in shame later. Apparently there are no limits to idiocy. I confessed to him what his thoughts were doing to me. It was a leap of faith even when the other shore donned the cloak of invisibility. I wasn’t expecting a confession of an undying love for me (there was still some residue of good sense in me) and I was prepared for the rejection (I’m not pretty, smart or sassy), or that he had a girlfriend or worse, a wife. But he never replied. One year has gone by now. What stung me was his abject inconsideration for the words that took me all the courage I had to write. My feelings weren’t even worth a reply; I was totally non-existent in his world. That hurt, bad.
Why did I rush in? 
There was this somewhat rude boy, with a perpetual frown and impish gaze, and he made me happy by just being there. I know it wasn’t love (too strong a word), or lust (there was no scope for anything remotely sexual when you see a person disheveled after umpteen night duties at the hospital), or infatuation (too feeble a word), or obsession (I don’t make any attempts to see him or contact him). It was a girly butterflies-in-the-stomach, smile-lighting-up-the-room, laughter-ringing-in-my-ears, I-want-to-know-all-about-you and I-feel-good-when-you-are-around feeling. And I’m still waiting for it to fade. It has faded finally!
I hadn’t been fortunate when it comes to matters of the heart, and my belief of finding the love of my life seems cruel every passing year. But I am not writing off the existence of love. It’s there; I see it in the lives of those around me. It has only eluded me. 
But considering my consistency of falling in love (or whatever it is) and doing something stupid every three years, I am dreading 2014.

Sunday Inertia, Gluttony, Whodunits and Fernweh

Ma asks what I want for breakfast. ‘Something scrumptious’, flashes in my mind in bold,neon Spongebob yellow Comic Sans font. My ‘usual’ breakfast (since a month) has been brown bread, a runny herb omelette and frothy coffee. My weird body clock with its slipshod sleep rhythm and food cravings somehow deduces that it is Sunday, and demands some calorie-laden, scrumptious goodness. But I am averse to dishes that required elaborate planning or waiting time enough for my impatient stomach to digest itself. I want something oily, filling, and quick. And soon I sit down to eat pasta with oodles of sauce while watching the early morning joggers stretch their lithe bodies after a fat-burning run. Show-offs. 7am.
Summer. Sunshine. Sundays. Siestas. This quartet holds true for me. I am quick to blame the weather if I’m caught taking a nap. But I’ve loved these naps even before I first came upon the word ‘siesta’ in Gerald Durrell’s book ‘My Family and Other Animals’; and considering my intense devotion towards this word, I often entertain the thought of being a Corfu inhabitant in a past life. As I sit down to Sunday lunch, I look at the clock and smile contently as in half an hour I will be in bed with a book and try to fight sleep, all the while rooting for the enemy. Rejuvenated after an hour, with replenished vigour, I feel a surging love for everything the world has to offer. But it translates to nothing more than a stretch of my arms and sitting cross-legged on my bed. That burnt some calories, I hope. 2pm.
Books. Five lay on my bedside table. And this weekend I’m reading two of them, John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears& Other Stories’ and ‘Great Expectations’ (I had ignored Dickens and most of classic literature in my formative years). After I lost my childhood to comics and adolescence to cheap paperbacks about summer romances (J-17s), blood-thirsty butlers with eye patches (whodunit novels), husbands who don’t YET love their wives or ruthless tycoons tamed by nubile young things (Mills and Boons), I resolved to undo some of the damage and read only ‘good’ books even if it killed me. But to my pleasant surprise I love these ‘good’ (read respectable) books. The whodunit thrillers and heaving bosom romances with lamentable prose were a thing of the past, and I prided myself on this transition. On a whim I decide to check the ebook library on my phone today and the book cover of a distressed lady in a brown coat holding hands with a sinister man in handcuffs catches my eye. It is “The Lodger” by Mrs. Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. Set in 1913 London and inspired by the killings of Jack the Ripper, it tells the story of an old couple (The Buntings) who take in a lodger, but Mrs.Bunting has strong suspicions that their new lodger is the man behind the frequent murders that had been occurring in the cover of the London fog. The novelty of a thriller written in 1913, the psychological complexity and a healthy curiosity that it induces is very engaging, even though I fear a relapse into my previous fascination for racy page turners. But then, who cares? 6pm.
Online. Twitter. Tumblr. Facebook. Google Reader. Just the thought of them exhausts me and after a laconic browse, I single out the content that interests me. I came upon a quirky cartography site, a book review site that also posts beautiful art when they feel like it, and the German word ‘Fernweh’ (which means longing for faraway places, the poetic certainty that things are better elsewhere. I love it. I have it.). 8pm.

I don’t write in my journal today. This is it. My Sunday. In all its inertness, aloofness, and passivity of limbs. I’ll go back to “The Lodger” now. 11pm.

And yes, I found this on Tumblr today. I can’t help smiling.