Love of my life - a plea for patience.

I remember our mornings as clear as the sparkle on the window pane after the neighbour had cleaned it to absolute perfection.
Pardon my similes, because you have pardoned my thoughts so far.

I am praying for our yesterdays. I am praying for a moment where things fall into place like they always do.

Tell me, did you memorise the lights, my toes, our mingled thoughts?

Do you feel like I am tightening the noose around your slender throat?

Know that my insides are permanently ravaged, and I beg to come to you with all those broken pieces - because nothing else
gives me that semblance of being a part of a whole.

If wishes could scatter like leaves in autumn in a place far away, I would give you a million happy ones. If my thoughts could be a part of the
drill - I would beg them to traverse the conveyor belt in a straight line.

I see that you look sad. I see that you are slowly giving up, but trying to still fasten the belt, because, hell,
you love me. But they say, love is a verb, and you think I hardly try. You tell me "It's all in your head." and I know that
you are speaking the truth. But what do I do with my head, I ask you. It's a barren, empty battlefield, pitted with
dead bullet shells. Some days are worse than the others, and it's physically painful to drag my body out of bed, and somehow numb
the numb head and go about trying hard to follow a routine.

How long will you keep planting flowers?


How long?

Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

There's nothing more to do really. 
Lucy left, with her particular quips, her giggles and her baton. It seems to me that the parting has mellowed the memories of her, with her. 
I'll miss Lucy. 
She told me how important it was to be independent & self-sufficient. 
She had been my mother when I needed a mother more than ever. Mine was distant, in more ways than one at that juncture. 
Lucy had a really bright laugh. And, she could take problems on head-on, and always find a solution. 
She always wanted to do things. She wanted to create, she wanted to store, she wanted everything to look gorgeous. She was young, childish yet really mature.
She told me that there is nothing to be/feel helpless about.  She made me believe that happiness is not illusory, not really. She made me chocolate milk at 2 AM, and helped me pick up my broken pieces. 
She loved me in her own special way, and I know that. 
Lucy was brave, she was braver than most of us put together.

It was a deep affection that ran between you and me, despite the undercurrent of foolish irritability. 
You told me I could write even when I was absolutely certain I couldn't. 
I'm sorry if I have been stupidly stubborn and snapped at you. You knew. 

Big hug. 

Stay//

Full-blown adult

I still look at the sky with naive wonder.

As the week wraps its grimy fingers around me, I don't have much else to do.
I think I am running out of things to say, running out of that weird, adolescent rage, running out of laughter.
It frightens me.
I don't want to calm down that much.
I react less, and it feels like there's a fevicol-strength bubble wrap around my head, protecting me from myself.

Yesterday for once, for a couple of hours, I felt like I would explode.
The bubble wrap came off, and my thinking disintegrated.

Seemed like I stepped out of a noiseless place.
It hit me like a tornado.
I thought my ears would bleed.

But nothing happened.

I held on to my sanity, slept and prepared for one more meaningless day. 

Today, I feel like the inside of a lift. 

does the distance matter/ mind over matter

while on a cab to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to catch a train to Calcutta, I saw three eagles floating happily and a little recklessly with the wind. I was light-headed from a persistent fever, and somehow this sight made me feel a little in tune. I loved how they stopped using their wings and instead let go, steadily.

I often wish I could do the same.

Everytime you are miles away, you decide to go further. 

ignore the ignorance

Pray tell an old soul if this is what music is, or should be? Tell me where the beauty lies: in the woods of mechanical noise interspersed with bits of our routined everydays? Is it not supposed to be a distraction or an escape? Is it supposed to be like existence itself? Is that where the beauty lies? In the future of sound? Should we re-christen it sound then? So tell me, this peculiar music needs a backbone of projection mapping to support itself? Shouldn't we maybe, then, call it an installation, instead?

The real rocks.

They all just keep telling you to jump right in, and everything will be illuminated: your life like out of the pages of a glossy brochure.  

But you still sigh at the mirror, stare despairingly at your paycheck, squeeze the fat between your fingers & chomp down on McDonald's. You do everything you swore you wouldn't. You get pushed over, you get your heart broken, you pay your bills on time, you ditch a night of debauchery and stay in watching television. 

And, sometimes when you can't take it anymore, you call your parents and cry. You do that despite knowing they'll worry, you do that because you know they are there for you no matter what, you do that because you actually want to see them so badly the lump in your throat refuses to go away. And you decide to let it all go for a while. And you feel warm inside as your mum tells you - " But we are always there for you", and you know there's no greater truth than that. 

While we are at it, let's practise.

One wise man once told me : don't write, talk. Being quite inept at conversations, with a history of stage fright and blunders while reading poetry or even opening my mouth in front of large gatherings of people, this was indeed a challenge. It continues to be so. When I write here, I don't pretend to talk to anyone. I don 't have a target audience, I don't have a brief. I just vomit. I do so because for me, this is coping mechanism. Or a journal of sorts, you can say. This is an album or a scrapbook, where I store certain memories, thoughts, people & lines. Sometimes, I craft. I craft after the vomit is over. Mostly, I don't. Does that make me a bad writer?

You might say I am not confident enough, you might say brevity fails me every time, you might say I can't tell a story, you might say I can't sell a product because I can't talk. 
 
Death of a salesman, or death of yet another writer, I wonder.

.........

Monday Mind Munch

I was thinking about a fleeting moment, the kind you witness when you are speeding past roads, shops & an endless throng of humanity. Just the tiniest snippet of dirty toenails, the flutter of a dupatta, maybe a giggle, or a discarded Mirinda label - the orange popping against the grey of the asphalt. It all happens so fast, and you catch a glimpse of these utterly everyday things and maybe give it some coherence in your head. 

That reminds me of Calcutta buses. Huffing and puffing, I would aim for the window seat. If I got lucky that morning, the road & its people would be mine. I would shut out the angry tussle, the sleazy stares, the endless chant of "ticket ticket ticket", the very high-pitched mashimas and meshomoshais and weave the lazy patterns only a daydreamer can. After 40 minutes, I would be at the Minto Park crossing, or on Park Street, and would run to college, with my backpack swinging to and fro.

I wonder sometimes why Calcutta is such a recurrent pattern in my life. Why do I keep revisiting every detail of my beloved city so relentlessly. I know how nostalgic I am, and how home is home, after all. But can I not move on? Can I not find that feeling of wholeness anywhere else?
Then I realise that I am trying. Trying very hard to keep the image of the city alive & throbbing in my heart. I might be anywhere else, in close contact with another city, but I never really got over home. Maybe I never will get over the lazy beautiful sleepy city. It's a poetic & platonic relationship. It's the kind of love which won't be affected by everyday nuisance and the dirty palm of routine. It's the kind of love that uplifts, inspires & comforts. 

It's a Amit - Labanya kind of love. 
 

A well-established pause & some eye-contact. There's a big voice in my head, which feeds me more often than I want, and I feel it's all rehearsed. It's a part that's being played, just a chapter cherished, for reasons unfathomable - much like everything else. For those who wander, how would you hold on - with an iron fist & starry eyes? I would have no right. 
I just try to convince that big mean voice inside my head that things happen for a reason, hold on to the best thing that has happened to you - I tell her, hey! you won't fall face-first, bum-second, into a disaster.
It's maybe, just maybe time enough, in this quarter of my life, to sit and stand and ponder and laugh belly loud, the laughter which came back to me after what seemed like an entire era. Uproot & levitate two inches from the ground. 
Who would understand? - you keep asking yourself, persuading, pleading over and over again, now running, now waiting for the monsoons, now falling into potholes of predictable plunders. 
Honestly would you embrace the idea of me now? 

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