Romance?

A soulful number playing itself out on the radio, and I start to think about my reactions to the same over time. It would have made me feel dreamy, inducing a dull kind of ache deep down, an extreme urgency to be in your zone...somehow. I would have placed a phone call across distances of the mind and the road, just to cut through the clutter of life and to reach out to you, just you and me on the wire. even your ‘I am busy’, curt but not impersonal, would have sufficed. No, not really, but..and I would be left wondering to myself, do you sometimes feel this way, if at all? Are you at times, irrational, dil phaink, in the moment and not anywhere else and then sometimes, somewhere else except where you are…well, maybe not. And that would bother me somehow..

But now, I hear that soulful number play out on the radio just when I have some time, a few snatched moments to myself and my heart, it takes a small leap of joy, an imaginary hi-five of the mind…and then I go back to my list of to-dos…the music in the background is tugging at me, trying to tell me something, to stop me in my tracks, calling out to me, ‘care for a dance with me?’,  it beckons. I stop short, try and recollect the next line of the song to hum along, make a mental note of wanting to tell you that I heard that amazing number today…and I move on. Back to my tracks, a minor deviation of the mind, a little tripping of the heart and its back to business as usual with no subtext of he loves me, he loves me not. But romantic all the same. It makes me think of you, admist all the clutter of life, the waiting for you at the end of the day grows deeper, denser and I reach out to you…

Wishing you were here with me…

Sleeping in

The three of us, tucked in bed, way beyond the wake-up hours, not even fashionably late but arrogantly so. The duvet flowing over us, hiding us from the world and binding us together in our rebellion against the ways of the world. We, the three of us, in a world of our own. We with a dinosaur (I had said alien, but dinosaur prevailed) sleeping in the ante-room on the two-and-a-half seater..so we talked in whispers to each other (it also helped because I had the mother-of-all sore throat) lest we wake up the beast. He was only here to get some sleep in the daytime and he couldn’t think of a better place. We, the three (four?) of us, armed with crayons for when-we-wake-up plans, just in case we did decide to abandon our ship under the duvet and step out onto the dry land. We, the three of us, tugging at each other and each other’s heartstrings, craving for ever more closeness and love that can flow out & in only if my pores were exactly juxtaposed with yours, dermatologically speaking. And then you shouting out, please mere itnaa paas mat chipko naa with an expression and stance (all the while hugging me tight) that completely belied your sentiment. With the whisper glass shattered , the dinosaur was declared unreal and the volume levels shot up and a state of new euphoria set in with the realization of the altered, soaring noise levels. We were shouting. I should have read that as a sign of unrest, of sea sickness, of wanting to get back to the world and its disciplines, no matter how sweet the reverie of doing nothing. Then he started to do something IMPORTANT with a very IMPORTANT look of purpose on his face which looked like a lot of stacking and unstacking of books. To be precise, this very IMPORTANT task comprised of a book on Steve Jobs titled Passion, its book cover, two sets of crayons (aforementioned) and a phone book, very IMPORTANT mix of stuff indeed…while you, the third one, tried with all your zest and ability to mess with this all IMPORTANT task and claim more than one set of crayons (which was the only thing rightfully yours to keep), which then led into a physical battle wherein I tried to tickle you two from all the loose ends of clothings..and we rolled into a heap, sometimes attached, sometimes disparate…but bruised and laughing at the end of it. Me still doing all of the above mentioned in whispers. All was well, until that fateful knock on the door, she walks in armed with a banana in her hand..fruit snack time, and she descended on us like a warring ninja…and from behind her, from the little vent of the open door, the real world came tumbling in and everything merged. The dinosaur leaped out of the window, onto the train tracks at some point, the IMPORTANT work was mixed up like the chinaman in an un-sortable state, the colours spilled out onto the white duvet, taking away the blankness of it and marking it for life. It was over and the day began.

PS: we were aged 4, 2 and 34…not in any particular order. 

Ba..ba..lu..ba..la……books!!!

There are some things you never forget, ever. Cycling, you can get back to this whenever and wherever, swimming, dancing to a rhythm, dusting (this one only applies to cleanliness OCD freaks)….because these so called acquired skills take refuge in your instinct cabinet, refusing to ever move. They stay put and how! 

Well, coming to books, that’s what a good story also does to me, somehow takes up permanent residence in my basic vitals. I can always recollect the time, place and smells of where and how I had the story reach into me. I can always vividly recreate the setting and the light, like I have the entire set along with the emotions encapsulated and frozen in a time bubble, for forever. My very first show in the theatre, the Jungle Book and the coconut falling on Baloo’s head as he dances and prances about to and with the ‘bare necessities’ is an immortal memory of my sepia childhood. The kathakali dance in the temple of Kerala as watched from Rahel’s eyes, from the comfort seat on my bed. I remember the reddened eyes that narrated the story of the dancer within the story of Rahel, which seemed like a story of my dance, and me. I owned them all. My bed in my room at Sabarigiri was much more than a dreamy place, it also doubled up as my own little far-removed world, all of it within a mosquito net. It was also a time machine that would take me places both outside and inside of me…every day whenever I held a book in my palms and was drowned in it, oblivious to the motion of the motor carrying me across time zones and landscapes. The Sirius incident happened, not in the darkened corridors of the ministry of magic, but in the turbulently moistened eyes of Harry Potter, the vulnerable soul sitting in her room upstairs with her younger brother listening to Mirza Ghalib on his headphones to get past the grief of the potent loss. Even the densely dark night of that day, I remember. It seemed like the stars too were in mourning. And then Calvin and Hobbes dived on each other in the middle of my living room and undid all the furniture settings and all else, as I laughed with my insides churning and whirling at their genius of seeing the world and its people exactly as is and realizing how humourous it all is, all the brazen realities of life. The laughter and its echoes reverberated in my house and soul, plunging all coordinates in a humorous nausea, slipping everything from its coordinates and thereby altering all familiarities. The boat trip of Kabir and Lata along the banks of the Ganga on an early, bland kind of a morning...and my passionate appeal to Lata as I stalked the couple in the shadows of the banks, 'marry him Lata..he loves you. please, marry him'. My loud, pounding heart even drowned some of the written words and dramatised it into an alternate of the fictional reality. She didnt marry him and my heart was broken.

The books, they take a lot out of you, sometimes a trifle more than they give you…but the connections made, they stay afloat...they linger on.

Finger tips

A parched throat is a sign of no words to fill the commentary of life. A full day gone by and I feel drained and emptied out from the inside. Like a lentil storage box, that once emptied, must go in the wash before it can be refilled. Let me detox myself, give me a thorough rinse all over, scrub myself clean and then lay in some sun and dry myself out, leaving back no sign or smell of past contents. Let me start afresh, all new with unknown stuffings and untried colours. I look at my reflection and present to myself a new me with a new label. Can it be so easy?

Every time when I feel the passage of time, like the slipping away of the sand from my palms, from between my finger tips, I panic at the futility and emptiness of it. Each moment passed, must be chewed dry of the memories and in return, must be flown away, burgeoning with emotions…on the verge of bursting, all wet and full. I want to love and live in each passing frame of time….so, I rush in, with my empty container to fill it all up to the brim…but what do I fill it back with in return? Hollow togetherness, meaningless echoes banging against dark walls, silent conversations with oneself or a thoroughly lived-in loneliness? Which of these would passing time opt for? Somehow, my gut says the deal will fall through. So I pause and turn back with my dangling empty container balanced on my finger tips and stick back the old peeled off label onto myself, slip back in my old clothes and become back the familiar me.

Dried-up

Just sometimes, emotions and their expressions dry up inside of you, without even reaching your eyes…or maybe, they do reach your eyes and burn in them black holes with their fire. They leave behind a cake-y layer of ash, their footprint. No sign of life is found, just a trail of grey dust leading all the way up to the burnt holes in your eyes, their graves. The ghosts stay back in your eyes as shadows of possibilities and wander the landscape as fleeting smoke screens, aimless and haunting. They follow the everyday banalities with staunchness reminiscent of the saints; you can smell them, those dead emotions, subdued and potent. They tirelessly wait out real time with their newfound patience and drag you backwards with their deathly hold. Your will to live free and to  breathe new, propels you forward, your numbed limbs trying to haul themselves out of the deathly marshes, tempting you to shun it all and move on, light and free. Fly. Is it possible? Will you pull free? Or will your heavyset heart sink deep and drown? 

Untitled

An in-between sort of post. Not being able to claim or set free the emotion. Almost like the weather outside the window, sultry heat in damp lighting, neither here nor there, somewhat in between and in the process, neither. I like the damp lighting of London, the sort that can always legally promise rain and get away with the perennial-ity of it. To some, it is a morose setting, no sun shining and drying off the wetness of the spirits, no dry breeze making them emotions soar high, carefree. But to me, the almost always incumbent rains bring a dance in my step, the splash of the wayward puddle breathes life into my dried up savannah and the dark clouds moving at a fast pace across the skies, bringing in the stiff chill and the brusque nightfall elongates my dream time. For me, there is always a silver lining, and it shines brighter in the darkest of rain clouds.

Maine decide kiyaa hai stage is here of our four year old, scary and exhilarating at the same time. Actually, the other way round. More exhilarating than scary. The onion peels of their layered personality are opening up now, slowly but surely. Will this make us cry? Naaah. The revelations, small ones, bundled up in simple logics and straight from the gut honesty are wonderful packages that lay strewn around all over my day. I keep picking them up from the unlikeliest of nooks and corners, settle down, open the strings and voila, from therein fly out Disneyland dreams, Goa sand castles, unopened letter boxes, drum rolls, glittering fingers, colin spray bottles, diaper bags, newspaper and other important paper pieces, sometimes in the washing machine, books, unopened and stacked, mixed up puzzle pieces, jumbled up crayon sets, homeopathy medicine cabinet turned upside down, Nivea moisturizer bottles.  Noises of feet running towards the train whistles, away from the whistle of the pressure cooker, a lion is in our house roars, secretive laughs holding back sinister, potent plans, smiles that widen till the secret unearthed and accounted for, loud wails, louder than the pain and softer than the hurt, laughters, the ones that make the fairies come to life. Animals everywhere, police cars everywhere, clay marks everywhere, lifebuoy soaps everywhere, lizols everywhere…they must have been here a moment ago. Shriek-y, incessant doorbells, over-enthusiastic goodbyes, dimmed out goodnights, blanket wrapped good mornings, surprise hi-s, the dampened greetings, running feet, slamming doors, last minute instructions, unheard and expected. All of these and more, more mundane than these, more absurd than these, with a spray of magic dust on them, making them all unreal and extra-ordinary.

The sound dying down, the magical clutter picked up and stored in memory shelves, the neat and clean house emerging from the chaos, the sound of my own breathing, the feel of my tired limbs, the throbbing ache of the head coming to the surface, the to-do list swimming in the horizon..I take a deep breath. I exist.

Afternoon Siesta

The creaks of the bed, the little wails it lets out when you get to wake up and walk away are the wails of my sleepless-ened soul. It pines to remain attached to the bedraggled dreams and hazily fudged sequences that play out themselves as realistic dream themes. Even though you can tweak it all, nothing compares to the real thing. I wouldn’t trade the chaos, the confusion and the disorder for even the most well blended painting in the world. After all, what makes a painting a masterpiece is its reality reflectivity index. The higher it is on that scale, the more real, the better. It is because getting balance and equilibrium is easy, but mimicking chaos and unrest with a degree of reality, that’s the tough part. The balanced equation is many a mathematician’s forte, but the riding on the theory of chaos requires grist and sheer soul.

The hard wailing winds outside my tightly clamped shut windows on a hard summer afternoon, trying hard to get in and shatter the glass dome of the afternoon siesta, enter the fabricated stories and strew away the delicately placed-into-a-pattern prop beads and mess with the heads and rustle the hair of the neatly drawn out dream cut-outs…you get the idea. It wants to monkey around with my painstakingly put together theme party and have fun. Fun, did I say? Isn’t that what I started out to do with my own ‘painstakingly’ put together party?  Maybe, there are other ways of having fun? Maybe the canvas sometimes looks for the paint to be splashed about haphazardly, to get messy out of turn, to let the paint drip and drool before it dries, no specifics, no shape or defining colour, no nothing. Just me and my fingers writing in the un-understood language of my soul…come on, lets open the doors and windows and let the monkeys in. let the mayhem begin. 

The morning light

All it takes, sometimes, is the light to shine at the right place and in the right angles for the angular beauty of a piece to be etched in our minds forever.

Mumbai Noir, that’s where the roulette has stopped spinning for me. It had been spinning for quite a while now. It seemed unstoppable. The dice would keep jumping from one slot to another, sometimes in plurals. You wait, with bated breath, for the your winning slot to emerge, the final destination that will define you and your state of being (my favourite-est phrase). The nausea of the momentum is unbearable. It wrenches you from the inside and leaves you feeling gutless, bottomless, falling into a gaping black hole until you latch onto a pole or a tree or hope and find life again. The earth stops to spin, slowly coming to a halt and up to a point when all else is held frozen. Only you with your new state, new coordinates exist. You feel yourself, all over, the new you. And you immerse in yourself with the new revelation of you that each turn of the page of someone else’s story reveals about you. That is a book, a good read and the power of it.

Why isn’t the romantic piece, the one stuck in my throat like a choking lump not coming through? Is it the spread of time and space that is just not working out, the kind needed for a languorous, lazy, dreamy piece about you, about us? Like a velvet blanket, a white duvet shining in the light of the television playing our favourite movie, my favourite music, your favourite game and we, the two of us, entrapped and lit in its glow, together.

A phone conversation, if listened to, can work wonders to bring us together. You need to listen to the words unspoken, the pauses and the breaths in between. Your hair need to rise with the excitement and the anxiety not fully convey-able with language transmitted on a wire. You should be able to touch the palm of the other and feel the beads of sweat, the lines of time gone by and experiences endured. You should hear the softening of the eyes into a smile when you narrate a regular byte from your life, the one that has a hazy golden glow around it. You should savour the effort being put behind the picking of stories to settle into with you and the effort in not deciding on the ones that might make you cringe, even though, just a bit. This, all the good things. And then, the distance covered will depend on not missing the skip of a heartbeat when an involuntary, spontaneous expression slips through and travels on the wire. You will hear the silence, the longer one, while tip-toe-dly looking for knick-knacks to fill the gaping emptiness of a relationship, a conversation. The stifled sob that escapes when the surface of a fresh wound is dug deep. The loneliness of the eyes that want to reach to you speak a language of their own, you need to understand that too. All this, a lot of work. Like everything else that matters, it needs to be loved, nurtured and watched over…and sometimes, just listened to by muting all else.

Clothes

Oh! I should have known, you will say. But should you? And do you?

Out in the world, we will be known by what we wear and how we wear it. How we wear our smiles, our losses, our grieves, our wins and our character.  The colours of the clothes we wear will be reflective of what we are today. Their patterns and prints will be the mazes we are lost in today, the ones we want to be lost in. not be found. The fabric we pick today will tell you about our porosity, do we mingle or should we be left alone?

We would wear clothes so that you cannot catch sight of the naked, real us. You will not (and should not) see the hurt that swims in our brimming with happiness eyes, yes, the froth beneath is the foam of our tears. Every happiness, smile, a laugh, a clap, deep down causes a sweet, slandering pain. You will never make out the stammer in the voice that narrates the day’s stories to you; you will miss the sharp intake of the breath, the unavoidable lump in the throat and even the delete-able pause. All of them, masking the loneliness, the anxiety and the bloated love that we sometimes feel, all together and then one by one. The feel levels all set to heightened settings. The clothes will mask the hesitation in the steps towards you, and then sometimes the overt eagerness to come to you. They will not make you wonder how you can be wanted and un-wanted so much at the very same time. The fanning of the smoke from the smoldering eyes will belie you about the source of the fire. You will not even notice the cold white coal deposits sitting on our fingertips, left behind while being brushed away from the eyes. Some of them still ablaze and burning black holes in our souls. We hide their burns in the blazing hearth fires. And the soaked blood that does not leak out in the streets and add to the stench of rebellion, it lies dried up in cakes in our clothes. A scratch beneath its surface would reveal its ripe hurt. Don’t mess with it. Leave it alone, it will stain your fingers and mark you for life. Let our clothes soak it all in and dry it all, inside out till it becomes flaky and falls apart leaving back no stains, no evidence of the massacre.

Clothes, they veil us, hide us …but they save you. they save you from us.