AFTERNOONS

(image: deviantart)

To

S and S

Afternoons are great for hard-edged conversations. Even better than absurd, miserly-short night time because by then, most people like to surround themselves with their own unexplainably mildewed, dark thoughts and either build a cocoon out of these, or strangulate themselves with these. That’s when they begin to fade away like objects in a sepia-toned photograph. Nobody can see clearly. And it works like so because that’s the rule. You’re always the strongest every morning, the weakest every night.

Happy bunny in the morning, weeping wolf at night.

The afternoons are somewhere in-between. That’s when life is not being anything but its real faceless, self. Things are as they are, not as they ‘seem’ in the revolving axis spinning uncontrollably in the back of your skull. Nothing is popping out in technicolour, all wild and exaggerated, or soggy like wet paper, mild and subdued. It’s just what it is, with an acute sandpapery roughness to it. Very business-like, actually. And my finest, most precious conversations with both of you began on afternoons like that—one on a decidedly rainy afternoon, the other on a confused pendulum, swinging between unbearably sunny and very pleasant. One began with a notebook and a writing challenge hurled at me out of the blue, the other with a sense of comforting randomness. On one occasion, I managed to write the most wonderful short story I’ve ever seen myself writing. And on the other, things escalated quickly from finding faults in others to an absolutely unforeseen discussion about the politics of losing one’s virginity. But I like the fact that we spun out our own stories on each occasion. That made it all worthwhile, as if we had accomplished something.

Accomplished a lot, actually.

You’re both so different but that only reminds me of the two faces of a coin. One is short, the other tall. One has beach hair, the other has something of a bipolar element clasping onto her roots. One couldn’t bother with a bad joke and would straight away call you out for it, while the other could sway in your ocean of lameness without making you feel a penny more awkward than necessary. So I flip one side and it is the tail, flip it the other way and it becomes the head. In my head, though, this is very much like trying to separate an egg from its yolk, unsuccessfully.

To one of you, I could spill out the greatest compliment in the world and it would still boomerang back in my face, sounding like a pithy insult. Maybe it’s the way I articulate my thoughts. They are still sepia-toned, confused and unclear at daytime, so you better forgive me. And in the other one of you two, I can sometimes see a reflection of my own indecisiveness. It’s comforting. There is a quintal of heavy advice, frothy feel-good messages (that we may or may not believe in ourselves) and awkward conversations floating between the three of us. You have got to remember this when the current phase of our lives is over and lost in a whisper too:

We make a weird triangle.

But I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because I know that ever since the day that I’ve learnt to articulate myself, I’ve been just a ‘nobody’ floating about in the universe, looking for meaningful conversations. That changed with you two. Simply talking, or expressing ourselves in whichever, however many ways, was the most liberating aspect of our souls clanging together on strange afternoons in the college. Clanging souls make noise. But there is so much honesty in that familiar yarn of comfort. So much to say and to feel and to keep on coming back to, on a stupid, lonesome day.

I don’t know about you, but I would love for us to spend another afternoon together, no matter how many years may have passed, by then, in this cold vacuum called life.

Yours truly

WHAT GOES AROUND

To

S



We have known each other for more than a decade. And we have known nothing. We have lived like the best of friends and the worst of enemies. Sometimes like two peas in a pod. Sometimes like venomous vipers in the bushes. But as far as this futile venting goes, although ten years sounds like a very long time, it’s like we have not lived at all. For all practical reasons, we are too young to border on the vast, absurd dome of experience.

Yet.

But soon we will be.

And what happens then? There is something so wrong with where a sense of nothingness leads our rusting memories. For example, when we do get to that dome of experience with a few strands of grey hair (hopefully) left on our scalps, what will we even think about each other’s names scribbled on a sad, yellowed scrap of notebook paper from fifth grade. Or, will we even ‘think’ about each other?

Maybe.

Maybe, not.

Though I hope it is the former and not the latter, there is always that nagging, yet disturbingly familiar feeling which whispers quietly to me, and says: oceans, sands, time zones and every random thing in between that goes around in the world, as it pirouettes on its axis like a fat ballerina, will only serve to separate us more. Pencils with attached erasers, fancy lunch boxes, all that Disney magic, water bottle wars, music from the 2000’s crashing into an EDM whirlpool etc. is already in the past. The stuff of the ‘future’ has arrived, and neither of us can decipher it. But it is here. And just like Disney fizzled out from our new adult lives, you and I grow fuzzy in each other’s memories. Something changed about the way you do your hair. Something changed about the shape of my glasses. And somewhere in the middle of such trivialities, we didn’t quite catch up with each other as perfectly as we imagined, as we once very well could. But we might have told ourselves otherwise and cozied up in self-reassurance.

So we aren’t connected, no matter what Facebook or Whatsapp or an emoji tells us in order to deceive us into complacency about the present. We just are not. It will never work out. Because we are not our older selves anyway, and time cannot be frozen and reheated like last night’s dinner. I prefer what we were though, absurd as it sounds, since what has been has been, and cannot be revived. I preferred it when our conversations slid into each other’s seamlessly, when memorable quotes slipped off the top of our heads, when spontaneous laughter just poured into a gamut of more silliness without prior warning at the end of a tiresome day… Back when… Back when…



But because we are the sort to be swayed by letters and specimens of bold, handsome cursive handwriting, every word hurled meaningfully ‘online’, comes across meaningless.

And just like that, I know now we’ve changed...


Yours truly

TUMBLEWEED

Memories don’t fit like a hand in a sequined glove. There are no shut drawers or watertight compartments or cartons to capture Memory A, as opposed to the bleak and distant Memory B. We’ll never even know why A weighs more than B. In fact, both of them could be as different as chalk and cheese, and still be engaged in a rapturous pillow fight on the mental landscape at exactly the same time as a fortune teller sits describing your non-existent future, while you stare at the blank, harsh daylight of the present, right outside your window. Sometimes you ‘choose’ A over B—you ‘allow’ a certain flimsy memory regarding a sad, broken street urchin smiling across the coconut-water counter for no reason, to weigh heavier than the traumatic memory of an exam. Something will come up and you’ll forget the urchin again. He’ll be gone in an instant, replaced by something more painful. Perhaps the memory of a horrible meal at an overly-expensive café, overlooking (not some beautiful Riviera) but the broken roads of Satya clogged with stinking sewage water in the monsoon. So it happens. And it’s okay; we’ll move on. We’ll forget the memories A and B, but not quite in the same way. Their shapes and sizes will remain impressed indelibly on our prefrontal cortex or whatever. Is this why some things are painful to talk about—all because of our dashed gamut of ‘memories’?

The only constant is that there are no rules.

But it makes sense. Makes sense all the time.

I think that human beings forget nothing, simply because we have the power to pick and choose. We ‘choose’ to text someone, or to not do it. To call someone or to not pick up the phone. To read motivational stuff online or to stay away from social media. We choose to give importance to some people and then, pretending to ‘forget’ them, we ‘move on’. But the dashed, obstinate memories remain where they ought to be. And when that memory A or B takes over, we can scarcely look at ourselves in the mirror and lie. We could forget that memory, but not the shape and size and feel of it; that we were the ‘creators’ of such a memory in the first place.

And that’s why nothing is the same when you or I ‘choose’ to ignore the trivial flashing of our phone’s screen. Nothing is quite alright.

(Image credits: abscfreepics)

   

THE MOON WAS JUST A PLAYTHING

“Oh, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We’ve already got the stars.”

                                       -Bette Davis

When I was younger, the moon followed my father’s bike unquestioningly on winter nights; watching over my helmet-wearing rider in a strange, brooding silence. It was just another pillion passenger in the queue. Nocturnal road-trip ally with a natural white headlight—that was moonshine. Followed us and traipsed, meandered and circled through the boisterous traffic, racing past the city’s bright lights to the suburbs’ chilly quietness, sticking by our side right until the end. Sometimes it was over our heads and sometimes I could see it on the sides. Sometimes, it wasn’t even white. A patch of red, a bloodstain, lodged itself on a crater somewhere in its expansive milkiness.

Not crime-scene red. Mostly, water-colour red.

(This year, in case somebody noticed, it was all red and glowing like a disc of deep-rose coloured strawberry milkshake. Frozen solid in the night sky.)

I decided that the moon was as much in love with blood, gore and action movies as my father. That’s what I thought, because who knows if it secretly admired Jackie Chan’s split lip on TV from behind the translucent living room curtains. Perhaps, it even smiled and winked at my father. Would they ‘hi-five’ someday?

Oh, well.

   

The bike swiftly veered away from one tarmac lane to another (and god bless the potholes that rattled our bones).  I thought, then, that we would lose the white, round smiley face following us. Lose it forever. No ally, no white headlights. Just annoying yellow beams from other ordinary vehicles.

But we never did lose it.

At the next turn, “That’s I spy, you count to ten,” said the moon and vanished from the scene. Somebody was clearly getting bored hanging (upside down?) from the sky all night. So, I agreed. And so it rushed. Its size kept on decreasing, getting away from us and getting smaller and smaller, till it was about as round as a coin. I swore that it could fit into my palm any minute now. Nobody listened. Hiding behind the giant trees lining up the road, peeking out from the houses’ rooftops and stopping when the traffic light said red—it grew infinitely larger as we slowed.

Gradually, we stopped.

And bam! It sneaked upon us from out of nowhere. 

The enormous moon was absolutely quiet, standing absolutely still, no longer reeling under the pressure to pick up its speed in order to match ours. There was that cheeky smile, of course. Who knows, perhaps it even winked. Always smiles, that one.

Nice kid.

But this was years ago, when moonshine was more important than counting lucky stars. When stars and luck and prospects and the future were all chafing in a tightly clasped bag, flung deep and far among the moon’s craters and all that mattered was childhood.

It’s not about I spy between two kids anymore.

The moon still smiles though, but in a sad sort of way, when no one is looking. Sad, because the moon is not really an ‘it’. The moon is a goddess. It’s a ‘she’, as I realised in ninth grade. The Greeks called her Selene and the Romans called her Luna. And she controlled everything, right from the huge oceanic tides to the tides of madness to a woman’s menstrual cycle. It’s not ‘her’ smile but the vestige of a smile, heavy and burdened with the weight of ceaseless myths and legends created in her honour. (What honour?)

I, the trivial human being and she, a strange goddess/mythical persona, can hardly be called friends. Devastation and tragedy. It’s like calling childhood a myth. Nobody notices the moon from their office windows while it sits there, just waiting, as if someone will come out to play. Nobody does. Everyone visits the hills to see the ‘stars’ line up above their foreheads. And for all things expedient, the moon is a de-mystified planetary body now, already conquered by man. Nothing more to see. Nothing more to say.

But that’s how it is. It’s a ‘She’.

She and I will deal with it.

The next time that this moon turns red, I’ll barely look up in wonder. That’s tragic.

JOINING IN FROM THE MIDDLE

To

People with textbooks in hand




In a makeshift classroom under a tin roof, there are thirty bedraggled students. In another classroom with an air conditioner, there are sixty, seated immaculately on polished wooden benches. Each classroom is aware of the other. The one harbouring clean faces has a remote understanding of what the word ‘Marx’ is supposed to mean. The other one, with dirty faces which resemble sewer rats, has no idea and also does not care. Dirty faces are either forced to come to school and dream of becoming the next Superman or the President, or they are withdrawn from school at an early age.


There is no concept of revolution in the shanties or the parched fields or in clogged gutters. There is just an old, internalised, inescapable concept—’survival’.


The nation keeps swinging between both classrooms, unable and unwilling to strike a balance.


Therefore, universities can keep harping on an on about Marx and ‘class consciousness’. But it will forever be the language of the elites. It will not apply to my maid whose husband was an abusive drunkard, to the security guard who cycled over eight kilometres to work, or to a poor woman I knew who once saved up thousands of rupees to buy a cricket kit for an unworthy son (who ultimately, as it turned out, neither went to school nor to the cricket academy).


Maybe that ‘consciousness’ which arises from desperation and helplessness, is not innate in most human beings. For every trade union where somebody has got the other’s back, there are scores of ‘individual’ widows or maids who do not want to or know how to rebel. Maybe they do not want to be roused from their slumber. Of what use are these rebellions which will only make their lives infinitely worse, before they even turn towards the better. Revolutions are a way to acquiring power. Sheer power, as it turns out, cannot be the answer to anyone’s problems. If the society keeps working on the premise of a revolution coming upon its head someday, there will never be a solution.


And so it is that we, absolutely terrified of being toppled over and banging our own heads into the wall, refuse to give the poor their fair share of human rights. We don’t want the kingdom of sewer rats to establish their reign. But then there are the poor and the Marxists, seething with inexplicable rage. Neither should they have aimed for complete and absolute power.


Now if there was a middle way, my maid would certainly take it. She’d be glad that no one was robbing her of equality. Some of us would be glad that the kingdom of angry maids no longer exists.


From
Yours truly

A MAN IN A LADIES' WORLD

To

This Girl

I knew this girl once. Then again, I know a lot of girls. Knew lots of them even back then. By now, some of them have probably turned into legit women. Plump, maternal mothers and condescending mothers-in-law. Maybe, it’s just my destiny to keep bumping into girls all the time whether I like it or not. 

But the point is that I knew ‘this’ girl once. 

And she turned out to be some woman, I tell you.

“I feel like a man sometimes,” she told me once.

“Of course you do. You’ve never waxed in your entire life. You have bushy brows. You’re only half a girl,” I replied.

“No, no. I don’t mean that I feel literally like a man. It’s just that I feel that I would make the ‘husband’ in a lesbian couple.”

“That’s insane. For starters, you’re straight.”

“I don’t know...”

So that’s how this girl cemented herself in my memory, straight up lodged herself in a cold crevice of my brain one morning. She barely had a clue about what she was doing in a girl’s body, even though she had no desire to be otherwise. No short shorts for her, no makeup, no jewelry, and definitely no long, flowing tresses.

Some women can look beautiful sans makeup or effort. “Natural” we call it. She was not a natural, though.

Her hair was positively a crow’s nest.

“I don’t know what I am doing” was the motto of her life.

If you were a girl and you insisted upon a couple dance with her, she would hold you by your tiny waist, like the male partner does. Then, as if unsure of what she was doing in the first place, her arms would shift onto your shoulders and rest there uncomfortably. Finally, when she was just too frazzled by the dance, she would drop her arms altogether and scamper.

If you were a girl, she would open the door for you and hold it while you passed through. She would pull out your chair for you in a restaurant. She would even pay your bill. She would treat you right.

But only if you were a girl.

She gave no hoots if a man did the same for her.

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about a chivalrous ‘man’ that way. I have met a few, never thought about them,” she told me.

Everybody thought she was just a girl. She was not gay either. And she was not asexual or impolite. But the biggest problem was that she had no clue how to “act” like a lady. If she were born a male, I think she would have for some reason, made the most respectful man I’d have ever known. 

But she was not a man.

Sad, though true. 

It was a wasted opportunity.

I know for a fact that she is very feminine, in her own wacky way. She grew up to be a woman after all. She has long hair now. She dresses up in t-shirts, maybe she still doesn’t like to play “dress up”. But deep, deep down, she has always been this strange woman.

A very strange, chivalrous, “un-womanly” woman.

That’s all I know about her...

Yours truly

SCRIBBLING A 'THANK YOU' NOTE

To

Teachers of the past, present and future



This is not the first time that I have chosen the written word over my voice, nor will this be the last time I do so. But in saying that, I also realize that there is no one better to ‘write to’. You might just appreciate words more than anybody else. You might, because you spend so much of your time scratching them onto the unyielding blackboard’s surface with half an inch of miserable chalk.

You must figure out how to etch those ‘words’ onto blackboards and unyielding minds. So I thought that the very words which you gifted me once, putting them on the blackboard when I was three, might just succeed where my voice cannot. They might strike a chord with you, even if they did not with others. They might take a stroll through the alleys which lead straight to your heart.

They just might.

Almost as if it were a rule handed down to me by my ancestors, I don’t wish people on birthdays dot at midnight, or make ‘handmade gifts’ for anyone at any point of the year, or even say nice things to them on the right occasion. Maybe, I’m not a nice person at all. For instance, I would never make a silly card using a random, shiny chart paper, draw a forlorn five-petal flower on it (since I can’t draw animals or human beings) and give it to you. I admire those who can get away with it. They get away with it successfully.

Unfortunately, I can’t.

How could a scrap of paper, with my poor drawing on it, ever convey the deluge of emotions fighting to come to the surface? How could it be a substitute for the sense of gratitude that I feel towards you, that simmers away in a cauldron locked within. This is what I have always thought.

And I’m not claiming to be very good with words either.

But when I think of ‘ABC’ and the alphabet, it takes me back to something which I can never have again. It takes me back to moments in history when you read out precious stories to me, and if I closed my eyes, I almost ‘believed’ them. It takes me back to the first time I scrawled something on paper so that it deserved a star in red ink. Back to an era when I would receive crayons if I behaved (and since I always did, I always would have an armory of rainbow-colored crayons ready).

Back to the brink of tangible memories.

Back to waves upon waves of History and Geography and Literature and Mathematics and Sociology and Political Science and Economics...

I felt grateful then, and I feel the same surge of gratefulness today. I thought that being a top scorer all my life would be enough to give back to you. Now, of course, I can see that it will never be.

You have given me that which I have no easy way to thank you for. Although you have taught me the alphabet (and taught me well), I’m not even sure that my written words are enough. There is always a ‘you’ walking beside me, in different disguises and names every time. In all these years, it should have become easier.

I realize that it’s just a matter of saying two untangled words—’thank you’—but to me they seem inadequate. They require something to back them up the way cardboard helps to back up loose paper. I’m yet to figure out how to make them sound hefty and meaningful enough.

Therefore, I will end with a ‘thank you’ just the same. But I will let the burden of deciphering fall on you this time. It will be up to you to see, or to not see as the case might be, everything that my ‘thank you’ is meant to convey. And if you can see right through it, even if you can feel my gratitude in half of its total strength, I will have succeeded.

And you will have emerged victorious, because you taught me how to use words well...

Yours truly