that house does not stand anymore.
the house that smelt of water boiling over wood, that had a dark kitchen with very tall shelves.
i remember tall jars of papery, round sohan papdi stacked in a row and this woman who fed them to me. i remember her sari's end that went all over my face in order to wipe out the sticky threads of the sweet.
her sari smelt of the day's lunch. and a little bit of the breakfast.
her hair was bundled up in a tight bun and i, a girl of six or seven, stared at the amount of hair she had.
hardly shampooed, seldom oiled. washed, dried, tied up. sometimes combed.
the hair was cut to the shoulder by my mother one afternoon when she couldn't take its weight anymore. there was a newspaper spread across the floor that filled up with hair. thick strands of black hair.her hairline reached her shoulders and ended at her temples.
i began to miss the big smear of vermillion on her forehead, she did too. but never mentioned.
she missed my pishi, who died some ten years back and my jethu whose dead body she never saw through the bomb blast rubble.
she didnt cry for them. not in front of us.
there were these days recently when she did cry taking their names. and a few days after that she died talking, asking her attendant to call her sons and daughters. people noted how in her last years, she began to look like her brothers.
a fight that spanned over decades, across countries finally ended with that inexplicable, nauseatingly sweet smell of flowers mixed with that of incense, room freshener and ogoru.
Rest In Peace, Amma.

Megh peon er bag-er bhetor monkharaper deesta…

(The cloud postman’s bag is full of sad papers…)

This was what I was listening to when it finally rained today. Life loves a laugh.

Rains are very good storytellers.

They tell me very old stories of running around in uniform around the school field. I feel a weird tingle of joy rush up to my head that makes me want to keep turning in giddy circles. I feel the wetness of the thin white cloth on my back as the air fills up with screams of giggly, running school girls who were in too much of a hurry to grow up.

At times, they tell me of a boy and a girl sitting at a bus stop. The lanes in my head fill up with roadside puddles as the girl’s sandals get muddy with the muck reckless taxis splash on her feet. For those twenty minutes it doesn’t matter that her feet turn a dirty shade of brown, or that they don’t have money for a cab. The boy rummages through his pocket and takes out a soggy handkerchief and the girl smiles and refuses to wipe her feet with it. He probably decides that when he grows up he’d make sure that this girl never has to take a cab, or wait for buses with dirty wet feet. Water droplets run down their hair but for those twenty minutes, it didn’t matter that they’d catch a cold or that their bus had broken down somewhere in its route-far away from their muddy potholed bus stop.

I hear of a woman who remembered how her husband used to silently wipe a tear in movie halls, how he sniffed at some music. Maybe it rained one of those afternoons when the vinyl screen flickered and he sniffed silently so that she wouldn’t know, and when she stole a look at him sniffing and faintly smiled to herself. Maybe it got very difficult to get a cab back home that evening.

Rains always paint me a watercolour of a very old story-hurriedly scribbled and hidden away in some moth-eaten, dog eared diary. Rains make me wish that they weren’t in so much of a hurry to grow up.

First attempts at mush.

This thing has been getting too much to bear, really.

The way they looked at each other-from the tiniest corners of their eyes, across the road he walked down everyday.

The way she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her right ear trying to suppress a stupid grin each time she caught him looking.

This way how each of their silences was being packed with so many inexplicable little unnamed desires, was getting crazy. It was like you could touch the air between their faces and feel the vibrations of these weird waves hitting every molecule of space.

It was like the air- this thing.

This thing that was getting too hard to bear.

Each time she smiled, each time he ran his fingers through his new haircut.

It just got crazier this way. Crazier and Better.

Neither of them had the right word for it till he hit upon it that night while he sat trying to read a book.

The corners of his lips curled into a smile.

"I swear, man. It's always so electric.", he said to himself.

Here's looking at you, Kid.

When my one year and four months old niece bangs her tiny little head against the glass of my sister's car window, she doesn't cry anymore. Instead, she slaps the glass with her hands and leaves behind a tiny, wet imprint on the glass that reflects the pacing lights of the city traffic. Amidst the cacophony of blaring horns, I listen to her barely formed words giving vent to her nascent pool of anger.

That's a lesson learnt, my dear D.

That it is not one's fault when one gets hurt.

Thank you. Love you.

pic: Pratichi Basu, 2010.

You know how microcosm-macrocosm works, right?

So today when I took out my clothes and folded them and stacked them in my naphthalene scented suitcase, I thought that maybe life will figure itself out too-in neat folds, in crisp pleats, lined with smells of last winter.

When I combed my hair today, holding the ends tightly while letting the comb scuffle through the knots, I thought that maybe life was sorting itself out somewhere.

In jumps and falls.

In tsk-s and sighs.

I sometimes wonder if all this will actually turn out the way we've been told.

Is it not possible that these colours that we've painted are meant to turn gray, and these roads we've walked will all be dust one day?

All our pages will be ashes, all our words- hollow syllables mouthed by some alien tongue.

Does it not make sense then to start on that run now?

To come out in the t-shirt and shorts you've slept in and take the next bus to that sleepy, foggy little town?

To start spinning in circles till we get too dizzy to even stand straight up?

Talk

- I thought you didn't take sugar in your tea.

-Well, you never wore funny golfer caps either.

-Are we here to fight?

-I am here for the sugar bowl.

-Wow, isn't that sweet of you!

-I'd smile at that, but Diabetes at this age could be fatal for you.

Silence.

Occasionally punctuated by soft sips of tea and the whirring of the cappuccino machine.

Somewhere across the window, street lights make love to the rain water.

Somewhere on that table, a sugar bowl lies untouched.

Traffic lights turn red on the threads of a golf cap.

And the radio plays songs of love.

Pic: Bombay, 2011

all i could hear were your thin fingers strumming at your guitar when i knew of your death. the same song you sang for us three years back.
no, i could not tell blue skies from pain then and still cant.
when the world danced infront of my eyes to a mad drunken frenzy, all i could see was that long corridor of red and you sitting at the end of it. and that face that passed a smile at times, the voice that spoke a few times in class.
i knew of your pain that afternoon we sat cutting marigold petals from their stalks, even when you sat in the front lawns staring at the sun for hours and even when they told me that you decided to end it all with that last step.
i knew and did nothing. we werent friends, and i dont know if i could help if i tried. it's just this silence over these questions that disturbs. questions thought too late, not asked at all.
rest in peace.
i hope you find that happiness you forever wished for, looked for.

Rains either make me feel very happy or extremely sad, never anything in between. And it has been raining in Delhi for two days now- the kind that always accompany the winter on its way back home. There's something comforting that I find in winters. Something very personal, probably because I am a winter born. Something soothing, something very freeing. These days have not given me much chance to do anything with them-they have been coming and going without leaving behind too many footprints. It's like walking on a drawn line- you have no choice but to walk, you dont know where you are headed but you know you're moving, getting somewhere. I dont remember the last time I was this unsure. It's like being thirteen again- underconfident, confused and zero willpower. I guess there are always those issues that never go away irrespective whether one is thirteen or one hundred and thirteen.

On good days, I enjoy my active bursts....like the day I did up the room, or went gift shopping for a very close friend, or roamed around the streets of Bombay doing nothing. On some bad days, I feel I cant do a thing and on others i feel that I can do a lot but do nothing about it.

I am hoping this is only a phase or if it isnt, that it behaves like one.

And that summers never come.



P.S: the pictures are of one of the walls of my room. The part which lies empty in the middle will soon have an original DDLJ poster I picked up from Chor Bazaar :)

Sometimes when I lie awake on my hostel bed, I look out of my little window and think whether you think of me the way I think of you.

I wonder if you ever picture me walking down the street below your window, or see me bending over a book in our seven storeyed library.

I wonder if you ever think of the way I look when I run my fingers through my hair.

Sometimes I think if your songs speak of me the way my dances speak of you.

I wonder if you imagine the roads I walk up and down everyday, the way I see you stuck in traffic jams in a city faraway from where I stay.

Sometimes I wonder if you are lying awake on your bed, looking out of your little window and thinking of me.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...

Another year, eh?
Our lives have become like airports in winters- complete with their departures and arrivals but one has no clue about timings. Airports have been the only constants in my life for these four years. The only spaces which remain the same amidst a constantly changing landscape of cities, homes and people. The only smiles that remain constant are the ones on the faces of air hostesses. Yes they are mostly fake but atleast they're comforting.
This year has been a year of departures mostly- old smiles departed leaving behind some very bitter tears, old bonds departed leaving behind only an empty shell and old spaces evaporated and only left behind an irritating stink. The stink of decay and loss. The year taught me that Trust is an obsolete and irrelevant concept today. It is expected that you keep your thoughts to yourself and sweat under their accumulated force and it is stupid to speak your heart out to your "best friend" (again, a tautological belief) because if you can afford to part with it, the whole world deserves a piece of it. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

Of the arrivals.
I arrived into a lovely university this year and into the company of some lovely strangers who have turned out to be great people to talk to. This year has been a year of meeting very old friends, sorting out old feuds and, of being made to believe that strangers are the nicest people you can ever meet.
They come out of nowhere and let you stay in their room, volunteer to design presentation covers, agree to burst crackers with you even when Diwali is a week away, travel unreserved to Jaisalmer, help you clean rooms and spend afternoons buying mattresses and rugs and to make you realise that it's ok to be messed up.
Arrivals, no matter how few, always bring in joy...enough joy to get over the innumerable departures that are both unavoidable and necessary.

And for everything else, there are those constants, those runways without whom no departure or arrival makes sense.

Here's to my constants and my arrivals, Thank you.
And to the departures, thanks for the space and for making me stronger.

Happy New Year to all of you. Make the best out of the good that happens and try not taking the bad too seriously.
Shit Happens. And it's important to flush it down.