Living through

Silence seeps into the walls of the room, on the north-western corner of the House. From there it spreads - slowly into the stairway, and drawing and dining and everything that remains under one roof (or many, three? Four or five perhaps, not more). Like an ailment that defies the science of medication, it grows. It grows, and gains strength- from the undeniable truth of the impending doom, from the sorrow that has settled deep down inside the visibly strong minds of a handful of weak humans. It feeds on that smidge of weakness, on those two drops of tears that sometimes miss the forceful efforts of shutting down, and break free.

I can see Grief getting ready- ironing its shirt and pressing its pants, savouring the breakfast slowly and taking its time. It can have all the time in the world, have all the time in the world. From a safe distance, it watches the way silence builds an empire and sits on the throne with an evil, all knowing smile; it has finally won the battle, the long battle.

The oven that was bought eight years ago with the anticipation of an at-home-bake-heaven, runs in the background, boiling a glass of water with a spoon of lemon juice in it; the bake-heaven part of it never happened. Tap water seems to be of most use, there is a constant opening and closing happening there. Someone shut the kitchen door- to the work-area- with a bang. There are five distinct footsteps. Words hang in the air, bereft of meanings, sour and dry. Life seems to be barely alive.

Nothing prepares us for the truth. No amount of ‘in-depth understanding and profound wisdom’ prepares us for the ultimate experience of living through. The only comfort comes with (and has to come from) Pain, because it cares. Pain cares.  But Numbness doesn’t. And the real competition is between these two. When Pain wins, you win. Because then, the light at the end of the tunnel is a promise. But what happens when Numbness does? It teams up with Silence to rule, slowly infiltrating your conscience with a flood of memories, sure enough to drive you mad, silently. You are left alone as a silent spectator on the bank of a river, and each water molecule would deliver a memory. It wouldn’t necessarily deliver the memory so much as it would give you a glimpse of the glory that is past, of days that did not carry the weight of emotions, of moments light as a feather and once taken for granted. And you’re left alone as a silent spectator on the bank of the river, and each water molecule would deliver a memory.

I hope the Grief comes in at the right time, as much as I want it to delay. I hope the maleficent Silence and its prospective companion doesn’t get to rule, even as I know it would. I hope the not-so-evil Grief would successfully help the Pain, and that we all would, someday, somehow, go on to make it to the end of the tunnel, where the light is promised and so is life.   

In search of a poem I so know exists

Are you aware, my love? Are you aware

of these whispers I hear –

from within you?

Are you aware of the existence

of a poem so beautiful, so beautiful

it shall shame –

every one of them ever written,

floating inside you?

Every time,

every time when my head rests against your heart,

when your hands trace the length of my hair,

when our eyes are closed, and souls entwined,

In that moment of magic, of heaven and joy, and

bliss of being, I hear a poem,

more like a song – soft and subtle,

but of essence enchanting!

I press my ear closer to your chest

craving for more of that –

what you preserve.

You twist a little, wrapping me

in your arms, smile a bit –

knowing not what I am up to.

What was left of the concept of space

dissolves into the realm of being.

Here I am, enthralled

by your words unspoken; love, untouched,

in search of a poem I so know exists,

and so it does, beneath

the splices of silence –

and mystery, forever to unfold.

To the Silence within, and Magic beyond...

On the terrace of my home, on this cloudy evening, I sat down for some time to honour the silence in me. With folded legs and an open heart, I closed my eyes to seek some sense. I could hear the wind breezing around the corner, I could hear it in the leaves that mumbled. A few birds chirped and the insects buzzed. A crow cried it’s story out and horns blew every now and then. When was the last time I sat down this way to listen, to the world around and to the voice inside?

I remember how careful I was up until a few years ago, not to use the word “life” in anything I said or wrote, for it intimidated me. I thought, here I am, a tiny tiny human on a tiny land with a pea size experience of light and dark; who am I to talk about this four dimensional world of meat and miseries!? But somewhere in the frenzy of growing up, the fear subsided, paving way for arrogant thoughts and head strong statements.

It was not so much the process of growing up itself, but the way changes took place around my-self which influenced this process and shook the fear factor away. Change being the only constant, we’ve respected and resisted it on varying degrees from within a certain distance in all those years and yet was not prepared for the magnitude with which it hit us hard on the face, and smiled ever so stylishly.

What really got me was the way this ginormous tide was sweeping over the platforms of human expression and authoritatively claiming every bit of it. The stingiest of stingy expressed himself so flamboyantly, leaving the audience mute spectators of an overnight circus. Oh, how I resisted the temptation to join the show! Or should I even put it that way for it never interested me enough to tempt me.

But the world moved so swiftly, like never before, and I being the teenage girl I was whose peer pressure on the topic was directly proportional to the pace of the world, gave up to an unduly heated argument on a fine Sunday evening, and joined the ‘web’. And that, I believe, was the end of the most creative era of my existence.

What mostly followed my little ‘social’ adventure were mindless clatter, misplaced curiosity and disrespect towards the beauty of silence. There is a thought formed inside my little head long time ago (there isn’t many recent thoughts to boast off in there, it seems!), that the romance of silence with the music of nature is home to all our creative endeavours, no matter what the medium of expression is. Magic happens when you listen to your silence. 

In these times when noise is easily mistaken for voice and voice is often unheard, I failed to serve my creative genie and to attend its call. But I’ve learned, and hence understand that unlike any human of our times, universe is patient and permissive. It accepts apology without conditions and lets you grow again; for the mother of hope knows it well, what is life without a second chance?!

  

My Lobster!

Into the complexity of your thoughts,

let me disappear, inhaling the fragrance

of your soul.

Inside that beautiful mind of yours,

let me build a world, where you and I

herd a flock of sheep, and

sleep under the stars.

Show me that space in your heart where

you’ve kept alive, the truest of love for me,

untouched by the perils of time.

Show me that space in your heart where

only I have entered, and stayed so long.

Help me undress your linen of enigma

and fondle the chest where

ages of pain, you’ve lovingly hidden.

Help me undress your linen of enigma

and indulge with what’s righteously mine.

In your eyes I see a sense of wonderment,

a childlike freshness of soul.

How many years have passed?

How long have we come together?

And you remain, you still remain,

the key to my all dubiety.

My Lobster!

Writer's Block

A couple of months away from Facebook and Whatsapp, and I feel like I have finally begun to live a life like before technology had begun to eat our brains. I wake up in the morning and watch my phone sleeping peacefully on my side table. I do not feel that violent urge to shake it awake and load it with updates and news and whatever. Even I feel peaceful for there is no idiot in here to disturb me with their utterly stupid and mostly harmful thoughts. There hasn’t been anything that is nearly as serene as staying away from those two social media platforms and I think I should have done it like months before, much before what is happening in the north and the east and the west began to bother me, much much before I even tasted the pomposity of such spaces. Well why should I be blabbering this here? Because I have nothing else to blabber about.

Why has life become, all of a sudden, a less-happening, more useless, monotonous drama? I would have much appreciated a sit-com or a thriller, with some twists and turns. Or may be for the sake of my own anticipatory happiness let me pretend that some sexy story is on the way, and while its being written and re-written and perfected, I am asked to sit here and just absorb the last bits of boring normalcy. Now that seems like something I can do!

Again, it is the boring blabbering that’s going on. But yeah, I promise I will be doing better than this the next time. My creativity has taken a break which, unfortunately, has lasted a lot longer than I would have preferred. It has just got used to the state of rest that I doubt whether it has motion sickness, and now I must give it a small, very respectful and rather strong kick in the right place to let it know that time’s up and I am ready here to work with it. Now you must understand that my creativity has this very intolerable habit of acting cool and being the dude thing. It has just passed its infancy and is still in its teenage, so listening to someone right away would be a mortifying thing for my creativity. So I am trying all my tips and tricks here because if I don’t do it properly I might scare it away, which I do not want to do under any circumstances. So while I am sitting here with my laptop on, on a table full of books read, unread, and to-be read, sipping a cup of coffee and waiting for my darling creativity to come greet me, I thought I’ll put up something to help engage you.

Room no. 209

The window of room no. 209 had a view, a serene view. Standing there behind the iron bars I could see vast expanse of lush green trees, heads straight, resembling those animated pictures of green hills of a fairy tale land, illustrated carefully in one of those lower primary English school text books. Away from the tiring city lights and ear-tearing traffic sounds, the hospital room felt more like a holiday retreat with a soul soothing aura of tranquility. I wish I could have stayed back for a few more days.

It wasn’t the first time I was hospitalized. Owing to pneumonia, I was admitted in the same hospital once before. Only then I had a smaller room with an even small bathroom, in the western side of the hospital, for I could see the sun slowly sliding down, making way for the dark night. That was a rather melancholy scene, one that is meant to pop up every time someone mentions something about a hospital. It was for five days, then; it has been seven days, now. And for some strange reason, room no.209 felt homely.

There was no dearth of visitors; doctor came and nurses also did, relatives came and so did friends. There was laughter, there was noise, there was whisper and then there was clatter. But nothing lasted so long as the two hours of silence and solitude that followed my mother’s departure, to home, did. Then, an inexplicable grief would tighten its claws around my arms, squeezing me, and would maliciously remind me of all loses and traumas I have had, leaving me breathless, weeping, trying to fight back the emotions that are a product of my own memory’s mischief. Every day when my mother begins packing her hand bag, putting back the flask and plates into it, the grief would come back, more or less like a certain kind of fear; the exact same kind that I felt when I was forcefully taken away from my mother to the lower kindergarten class, the fear I felt when I saw tears swelling up my grandfather’s eyes as we got ready to re-allocate ourselves to a place near to where my mum worked. And yes, that fear has many more dimensions, hence most unwelcome. Yet every day I surrendered, partly because I began finding refuge in those few moments of recollection and pain, because the pain I felt was so extreme that it was so real. Everything else was abstract and the pain only mattered. That way I re-lived, for a fraction of a second, those precious moments of my life.

Discharge sheet was signed and sealed; payments, settled. I smelled of antibiotics, the room smelled of mosquito repellents. Packing was almost done but Amma urged me to double check it all. When it was time to say good bye to the room where I spent seven nights and eight days, I had this bizarre feeling of having left something behind, something very important. And it took me a full good minute to finally convince myself that what I had left behind and couldn’t find out was a small part of my own self that had become so much in terms with the gentle ambiance of the room. I did not trouble myself with the task of taking that part home. The journey has only begun. Million more places to go and billion more faces to see and many more parts to be happily left behind.

On a 'Time-ly' note.

Time has this annoying habit of flying away with great pace when we most need it to just stop and pause for a few moments. When I was very young or little, I thought time never moved. It was hard to push a day away, especially if my mom was having a night shift at work or if my sisters were not home. A day, back then, used to last so long that I had to beg to God to make it come to an end and let me grow up soon. I thought it was cool to be older; to be considered more important, to express your opinions without being laughed at, to go by bus all alone to the town and so much more. But alas! It took me ten long years to be finally ten years old! And ever since then, I have no complaints. My only problem has been that I just can’t keep up with the tempo of time and the subsequent advancements.

This happens to me all the time. I would get enrolled in a school, now college for that matter, start mingling with my fellow students, find out who all comes under my ‘tolerable lot’ category, try to talk more with them than with the rests, and yet maintain a respectful distance, find out the best few who I can totally call my “friends” and then, all of a sudden, will wake up wide-eyed to the appalling reality that I have got just a few, countable more days to spend with them! That is how cruel time has been to me for the past few years.

In a matter of a few days my final year will kick start. Though I have been in that college for two years now, I still feel like a stranger. Well, the place is pretty familiar; there are a few good familiar faces too. But I feel like a stranger got lost in a familiar land. The campus, with all its flora and fauna was always more than welcoming. It has a soothing ambience anyone would fall in love with. The lake view ground is literally a heaven for someone like me, who likes to stay away from the buzz. The aquariums and ponds and the odd fishes it house are all evidently a part of my life today. But still I don’t belong to that place. I have absorbed what it could give, but failed to give back a piece of me to the place, I guess. Or maybe my college never really wanted to have a part of me. The corridors I pass through every morning to get to my class have always known my footsteps, but have been so indifferent. Even when I sit in my classroom next to some of the best humans I’d ever meet, I am almost invisible. There are times when I get confused as to things happening around me. I feel like I am dreaming, that it is all some sort of hallucination; college, class, friends, teachers, everything seems like a product of my artistic illusion. But then when the exams are closer, I know it is not. The feeling that everything happening around me is a misinterpreted perception of my sensory experience is itself the concrete evidence of how I have blocked my college life from entering that special zone of my heart; I am yet to accept it as it is.

Hence, today I feel more in need of some extra time than ever. Without actually knowing it, I have somehow begun to like “the college life”. And the painful realization that I have only a year more left to explore and experience it in the best way makes me sad and anxious. I hate myself for not being able to embrace the changes as quickly as the situation demands. I am afraid this year too will fly away, like all others have, and I will be left behind without so many feathers in my cap, totally unprepared for the unknown out there.