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  

  

AN APOLOGY FOR POETRY

To 

Any Curious Souls Out There

AN APOLOGY FOR POETRY

I have just figured out that mostly...

I cannot rhyme an A with B and C

My X’s don’t gel well with a Y or Z

I have no sense of the sonnet and its metre

My poetry doesn’t flow from brooks or streams

Even if I tried to make a sensible rhyme work

It would never come close to a Shelley or Wordsworth

The truth is that I’ve read most of “the Greats”

Yet, unlike them, I don’t have a way with words

See how I nearly skipped on the rhyming there?

I’m telling you, writing poetry is my nightmare

             My father loves “Ozymandias”, my mother “Kubla Khan”

Yet, I can’t think of a single word to rhyme with Khan

I’d love to go to England some day

And visit the romantic meadows crossing my way

I’d greet the tender roses, lilacs and lovely daffodils

Which once helped great poets pay their bills

In the midst of a gloomy concrete jungle I do thrive

I have never closely witnessed a flower’s petals five

Never even seen a proper park in these flat, gray towns 

No large trees, no mountains, no waterfalls, 

No birds chirping, no peacocks dancing...

Basically nothing—none of Nature’s beautiful sounds...

Well, what do you know, I got carried away again

I have no inspiration for poems, except for miserable rain

Let us go ahead and call it my lame excuse

I cannot speak in rhymes, so this poem must be a foolish ruse

My love for complete words is far too great to explain

Abbreviations like “LOL” or “OMG”, to me are all in vain

Sometimes, I don’t even fit in with people of my own age

That’s why to me, social media is just an outlet for my rage

By now, it must be quite clear to you

I can’t always speak the language of the youth

But neither does my style match “the Greats”

I can’t rhyme about flowers or inexplicable fates

Now if you must ask me, go ahead and ask...

Who am I, and what is this poem about?

Well, I write this simply to clear your biggest doubt

Just so you know, I love literature to the core

But don’t drink in every rhyme that comes knocking to your door 

I may read and I may even write

Yet, that doesn’t make me a poet if my poetry isn’t “quite right”...

The rest is now for you to judge

But I made a point that I’m not a poet

And I will not budge...

  

From

Yours Truly (who is a disappointment in the poetry department) 

      

FIRE AND ICE

To

A Voice I have heard often on the streets

Very rarely do I come across people whose souls glow like the amber flames of a cackling fire—burning brighter and brighter, louder and louder with every broken twig you throw in. They are alive, in every way that a human being can be called ‘alive’. And then I have come across people who are like ice, frozen solid in the mire of their passions. They have such drive and determination. No lies with them, only the bare truth. They are not mean either. They would melt if you only brought them close to the fire. It just takes a bit of effort.

And then I met you.

Thinking about you is difficult without the ghost of a smile appearing on my lips.

You, with that ridiculous laugh and a head full dreams—it was endearing to watch. There was such innocence in your ways. How many twisted ways can she possibly find to poke fun at life, I used to think. It was like watching a child chase after two dogs called ‘misery’ and ‘life’, giving them a run for their money. Positively hilarious. And I used to enjoy laughing with you, laughing at you. Who didn’t?

You are one of those lucky people who can die knowing that everyone will miss them and their jokes at the funeral. Guaranteed.

It was then that I decided—you were all about life and living, so you must be fire.

But I was wrong.

One day you mused about theater. The very next day, everything changed. At that first performance under the sun, you meandered into a different territory.

It was not just about the fire anymore, only the jokes and chortles that everyone had been willing to see up until that point. I realized that this was serious. These were the fruits of a passion and determination that only people with souls like frigid ice have. You said that you wanted something, and you actually stretched far enough to reach it.

I don’t know much about theater. I don’t know much about acting. But I do know how to ‘feel’. And you reached deep into the recesses of my heart to pluck out rare emotions. You have done this to countless others. That is how I know who you are. I know that’s what everyone calls an ‘actor’. 

There is a plus, now that I know how deep your bond with writing and the native language is. You write in one language, I write in another. But we both speak the language of emotions. You even know how to enact on paper, to make your words obey the emotions. They dance to the tunes of musical Urdu and terse Hindi.

Now, after one year, you look like a complete picture to me.

I don’t think you’re just ice, or just fire. Not anymore.

You are a bit of both actually, a rare combination.

You made me realize that everything is here and now. A moment of the present is nothing but the past melting into the future—an in-between. It is not a destination. And when this moment slips from my hands, I could be left with nothing.

That is why each and every moment counts.

I think I will leave it at that. This is probably all too much for you, but it is my perspective of the truth. Days, months and years later, we can laugh at all of it together.

I could have compared you to a cliched flower, I guess. Or poetry, maybe. But that would not be fair.

In fact, you know what, it would not even be close.

Yours Truly

   

DEFINING WOMANHOOD...

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?... that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from?... From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

                                                                                                                              - Sojourner Truth

Imagine dark women coming up from the murky backwaters of slavery, trudging along a winding, muddy path, heading towards a bleak and faded sunset. And beyond that sunset lies more disappointments. This is exactly why I used to think that African American feminism was a thing apart from commonplace feminism. That these women had the specter of slavery following them around. They were more powerful because of it. That when they began, theirs was an intimidating, louder, hoarser cry for rights. Far too loud and much too hoarse to bear.

But I had not yet come across that life-changing speech.

In eleventh grade, I was gently nudged forth into a speech-making competition. It was called, quite ostentatiously, “Golden Words”. It was a charade—some of the poorest imitations you would ever see, of some of the world’s greatest leaders. But someone had to be a dear and dress up for it. So I did.

The stage was set.

I saw Nehru, Napolean and Martin Luther strut past me.

Till date, I don’t think it was as much ‘me’ choosing to become Sojourner Truth and enacting her popular “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, as it was Truth herself, walking up to me. A strange black dress and a string of fake pearls. That was all it took to look like the nineteenth century women rights activist.

It was harder to ‘be’ her, however. It was a different ball game altogether.

Even if I had to modulate my voice to sound like an angry Oprah Winfrey, to stand on tiptoe and make myself appear larger and bolder, and even though I was declared the winner that evening—even after all this, it was hardly a victory to call mine. I had spent hours in a front of a mirror drinking in the historical speech, till it was lodged in the tiniest crevice of my soul.

Until I had walked up on that stage, I had no idea what it took to be a woman. I thought I was going to be seventeen forever, and a long dead slave woman’s words were hardly of relevance.

I was very, very wrong.

Sojourner Truth’s words caught me by my hair. They drove home the fact that women are not black, white, brown or yellow. There is no slave woman or free woman. A woman is simply a human being—bag of bones, flesh and sinew. And if a woman is just a woman inside, no two ways about it, then how can there be multiple types of feminism? All we ask for, and for that matter what anyone asks for, is the right to ‘be’ ourselves.

Truth did not just get me my first “first position” in the last year of school, amongst a sea of countless competitions I had competed in so far. She made me walk a mile in her shoes. She made me relive history, not just learn it. When my voice reverberated through that room, it was unrecognizable. It was her spirit speaking through me. I could have hardly called myself the same person because neither had I ever hurled out words so loud, nor had I believed in their power so genuinely, ever before in my life.

I think I made her proud.

It is for this reason that I believe in my ability to dream, look and talk like a nineteenth century slave women rights activist. She and I have much in common. This ancient thread binds womankind across the centuries, across seven continents and beyond the tenets of history.

I am Sojourner Truth, and she is I.

Forever.

Yours truly

DOES NOBODY UNDERSTAND...

To

Anyone interested in making an entry into the world

“Does nobody understand?” 

These were the last words of author James Joyce. They were simple, they were deep and they were profound. You could twist them this way and that. But they were most certainly not pointing to a question. I refuse to believe that it was a mere question, that you could trivialise these words in that manner, no matter how you chose to interpret them. 

I see a different kind of affirmation here—a realisation.

It is hiding in plain sight, underneath the translucent words.

This is a strange world, you see, where we hand over the keys of our lives to someone else. So much so that everybody can peer in through the windows and decide on whom we should love, and how much. Everybody but ourselves, that is.

They choose for you “who” you must love. Can you love a woman the same as a man? Can you even love yourself the way you really want to? Who is to explain? Everyone but you will have an answer to that. 

By nature, human beings are strange creatures. We make our own laws and forget to believe in them. That is why there are neat little tags to identify emotions—an unusual homosexual homo sapien, a normal heterosexual male, a lesbian female, a confused bi-sexual etc. There are laws to legalize same-sex marriages because while others’ are made in heaven, these are not. A piece of paper decides whether your love is valid. And in a world where a piece of paper comes above love, you would do well not to become overambitious in your pursuit of this strange emotion.

It is all a charade, a desperate attempt to categorise what cannot be understood in entirety.

Don’t bother to love at all, if you think that your love is not of the right variety. Don’t bother to fall in love until you’ve understood the rules of the game. Be very sure that you are a man, or a woman as the case may be, first and foremost. If you’re not sure you cannot proceed. Once this hurdle is cleared, proceed to love the right person, namely, someone from the opposite sex.

There should have been a checklist for this.

Men can kill for the right kind of love. You can be killed if it’s the wrong kind.

But look at the irony of it all, won’t you. 

Who is they? Who made the rules, and now stops us from being ourselves? Who made the rules and who punishes the trespassers?

“Who is they?” is a very valid question. 

Because it is us. 

We are the traps and we are its victims too. We hurt ourselves until our laws of love become meaningless. The human race, as glorious as it stands, is very effective in pulling its own strings. 

Now if we were to go back to James Joyce and his last words, you would “understand”.

You would know that it is pointless to put his words in that order to ask a silly question, a mere trifle. It is more of a realisation that sometimes, indeed, “nobody” understands because they don’t want to. The onus is upon you to choose your battles carefully. In order to survive, you must learn the rules of the game of loving early on. Either that, or you prepare to die.

Unfortunately for you, the game begins at birth. 

Yours truly

THE BEFORE AND THE AFTER

To

The Girl in a picture

There was a picture of a girl standing on the beach with her back towards the onlookers, just staring at the vast sea. Only a trail of her footprints in the white sand behind her, as if at the very next moment someone would call her into the sea and she would vanish. Maybe she was waiting for the tide. Or maybe she was planning to drown herself. 

There was her, this girl unnamed, and there was the white sand. Only stark footprints and an ethereal silence permeating the rest of the picture.

Frozen time.

So simple, yet so powerful. 

It was a picture I drew with crayons years later, and taped it to my cupboard. It was supposed to be inspirational.

But everything about it and my life right now is similar, almost tantamount to nothing. It’s a powerful ‘nothingness’. It can make you do things if you let it. But it can also engulf you if you so wished it. Being a teen, being a ‘new’ adult, is not worth more than that picture. It’s the first half of this life on earth, when you don’t know where you’re going. Are you going to make it big? Do you have the courage to plunge into a sea of possibilities? Did you do all that you were supposed to, to carve out a “successful” individual?

There are questions but no answers. 

Only Time has the power to answer.

Time and time again I’ve looked at that picture. My grandmother loved it. It was she who requested me to draw it for her. She loved it because she was secure. She was not on the precipice at that age. She was not forced to stare into an abyss of ‘before and after’. She was not being reprimanded for not ‘using’ time anymore than she was for using it however she wanted. 

Of course, I agree to competition. I agree to passion, courage, the drive and everything considered essential to make one’s self successful in this day and age. I agree to ‘living’ a life. But I don’t agree to being judged for it. What if I am not that individual, the one who derives a pleasure from winning every single time? Who decides whether 21st century’s young adults ought to win every battle or not? What if I never win? 

I believe that Time will condemn all individuals when it does. 

But we tend to do its job beforehand.

Now I would like to wait for my sentence, to let Time decide. I want to wait for the tide. 

The only part which bothers me is having to stare into the abyss, to stand at the precipice, to ‘not know’ the before and after. What sweet torture it is to be a ‘young adult’ without knowing anything about adulthood, to be encircled by swarming possibilities like a pair of vultures overhead, and to be wondering about yourself all the time. 

A terrible bouquet of innumerable hopes and innumerable fears. Lots of fear.

So in the end, I always find myself being drawn to that picture.

In the end I’m just a girl unnamed, standing on the beach with her back towards the world, staring into a huge sea of nothingness. 

All I have behind me are footprints in the sand.

All I have in front of me are the shadows and possibilities of Time.

Yours truly

LEGEND OF THE HAND-PULLED RICKSHAW

To

The “Miniature Rickshaw” Man

There was an old man with his precious rickshaw, a miniature pre-Partition rickshaw, grown soft and smooth around its worn-out edges. The brass rickshaw now looked like worn-out brass, that old sunset-y, copper-y hue also found on huge brass platters and utensils of worshipping Hindu gods, and on the ubiquitous “mandir ki ghanti”. An old miniature of the ancient hand-pulled rickshaw, as old as the wrinkles on that man’s broad forehead, reminiscent of hand-pulled rickshaws from the streets of colonial Kolkata. The rickshaw had made it all the way from Bangladesh. It was the rickshaw of someone’s childhood.

The old man’s wife often derided his fondness for that bogey of childhood memories. “My mother could create a far more versatile rickshaw from matchsticks, as she often did for me and my siblings—there were so many of us, you know,” she used to say. 

Sheer wickedness, deriding someone’s childhood.

The old man kept mum. 

He never allowed any child from his family or outside to even look at it, kept it locked away in some darkness. This was his revenge.

The problem was that his granddaughter grew up. 

Then there were two people in the house during the excruciatingly humid Kolkata summers, vying to get their hands on the old rickshaw. One pressed for time (he continued to work even in dismal old age) and the other with too much time on her hands. There was a deadly duel, a war of words, and a final, unspoken compromise. He lost, victory became hers. She thus became the first ever, and the only child, to have laid hands on the old man’s rickshaw. His bogey of childhood became hers.

She played with it. She imagined the hand-pulled rickshaw with one spoke too sharp (so that you had to be extra cautious while pulling it, and the defect was as ancient as the rickshaw) traversing through the streets of Kolkata like a lone horse. It passed through the filthy, Municipal garbage filled streets of Dum Dum Cantt. and through the posh, “surrounded by high-rise buildings” roads of Rajarhat. It trotted along at night, to the beats of the Dhaak on Durga Pooja, and during the day, weaving its way through Park Circus’ tram-lined roads. It traversed roads imagined and unimagined, making its way through Kolkatas of the mind.

Years later when the old man was long dead and had left behind the bogey of his childhood, the granddaughter automatically assumed that it had been bequeathed on her. As if the bequeathing ceremony had been an unspoken ceremony, just like the unspoken compromise which had made the man “gift” the rickshaw to her.

The granddaughter lives, the old man does not. 

She has still no idea about half the streets of Kolkata, about a true-blue Bengali Durga Puja, or the unknown passages of her future. But she remembers the rickshaw and like him, it reminds her of her childhood. It was an age of innocence which did not last. His had not lasted either.

There was never a simple definition for what the rickshaw signified for either of them. There always was, and still remains, just one explanation—”his bogey of childhood became hers”.

  

Yours truly

WREAKING HAVOC WITH WORDS

To

A ten-years old child

You drew an astounding portrait at your age. Sketching a replica of Mother Teresa in art class was not easy, what with the hawk-eyed teacher lurking in the shadows behind us. She kept a watch over us, smudging a line here, erasing one there. I couldn’t find the courage to improve upon my sketch. But you managed to impress her. You were good.

A few months later at the P.T.A. Meeting: your father at the desk, you by his side, and in front of you sat the teacher admiring your masterpiece. Every parent with glistening eyes admired it then, and how they wished their child too could draw like you. Every parent, that is, except your father. 

“It’s okay-okay. What more can you expect from a child of ten, only a few broken pencil lines...” he said and dissolved into laughter. The laughter still echoes in my ears.

I knew it then and I remember now that those were not just ‘a few broken pencil lines’ to you. They were the result of toiling away for hours with perspiration on your brows in a never ending class, where everybody, including the teacher, had given up the hope of seeing a decent Mother Teresa portrait made by a ten-year old. I can see the bruised, reddened fingers refusing to give way under pressure, the tiny hands smeared with grey pencil marks, and a determination etched clearly in the bulging blue veins of your temple.

This was what those ‘pencil lines’ were worth. It may not have been perfect in itself, but it was remarkable for the effort you made. And that’s why I remember your face in the end, when the illusions of a little girl got shattered like a glass house in the barrage of her own father’s words, pouring on her like hailstones on fire. It was an unexpected assault on the fragile senses. 

I wonder what happened to that girl afterwards.

Did she ever draw again?

I too hit someone very hard once, unthinkingly, and left a bruise where there had been none before. But the person did not hit me back immediately. This person, so tangible, was constructed of real flesh, blood, bones and sinews. Yet I had not even touched the flesh. But the bruise was very visible. After all, I had only hurled at him a smattering of red hot, abusive ‘words’. How bad could it be? Little did I know how large a festering wound created by mean words can be. No amount of love or time can fill that gaping hole. I realised it much later, when he threw the same scalding words of harshness back at me.

Physical brawls do hurt. Yet how can they ever rival the intensity of an insult, of a mental scar? It takes but a few words of meaningless hatred to completely destroy a soul from within. As human beings, it is but second nature to us to hang onto each others’ words—promises never meant to be kept, lies dipped and coated in truth and abuses disguised as compliments. We don’t seem to be able to escape our own selves, our own nature, anytime soon. Then why do we only make matters worse by saying what we never meant?

Every time I hurt a person with unintentional words, I remember the face of that broken little child within each one of us. And I hope to never make the same mistake twice—to not scald someone’s memory with acrid words, or worse still, use words like the weapons I never meant to unleash...

Yours truly

GOING AWAY

To

A dead man lying on the road

I’ve seen beggars sitting by the pavements, impatiently tapping their bowls and muttering incoherently, as I make my way home. Helpless mothers, straddling an infant and begging for food have passed me by at traffic signals. And I’ve observed the homeless too, they sleep under the thinnest, most threadbare of blankets on the chilliest winter nights. No one bats an eyelid. 

They’re the discarded, the useless, a pileup of humanity that the society does not need but cannot find a way to do away with, either. Yet life continues. Somehow, it refuses to cease. It keeps pumping through their veins remorselessly.

I had come across the poor so many times, but never a dead man. Never a man so irreversibly barren of life, sprawled across the tarmac, while onlookers wondered—should we bury him, burn him, or leave him here... 

For two days in a row he lay at the entrance of a busy marketplace. Minimal dirty clothes and hair matted with dust. Was he drunk, or dead? No wife, no children? Did he even have a job to call his own? I don’t know what to call him, how to describe that man. He looked like every one of us will do when we are quite dead and forgotten too. His eyes were shut as if he had let go, as if letting go was the most logical thing to do. And that tiny smirk playing out on his face—he knew exactly what was going on in our minds.

I wonder how he died and why. But more than that, I wonder if he was at least the master of his own life, when alive. I hope he held the keys to that door. I hope he was not a slave to misery and debts. I hope someone somewhere out there misses him, now that he is gone. I hope they are not like these onlookers, wondering and wondering but doing nothing.

My biggest hope is that no one may clamor upon his possessions, no matter how little he possessed. Like a beast he died, but let the memory of a ‘man’, a human being at least be kept alive. As I looked at him I could not see any chances of his last rites being performed. And God knows what he wished to be done to his body once he had departed. 

The truth is, at some point of time, the corpse will have to be identified. If they do, they may still not come to know what the man had wished for. It is possible that his wishes, unspoken, died on his lips as the last breath also gave way. 

Looking at the man was like standing close to the precipice. Death is so close, none of us knows exactly when and how we will depart, but we are staring at death every moment. Rich or poor, I don’t know a single person who wants to die unknown and uncared for. Who wants to go without leaving their mark? But that man, who probably had nothing, left anyway. 

He left just the same. And he left with many words unsaid, clasped to his chest, lost forever and decaying with his corpse. One fine morning, he vanished from that tarmac too. 

But now that you are gone and for all that it is worth, all I can say is ‘rest in peace’.

Yours truly 

TO BE OR NOT TO BE...

If the all the men-hating misandrists of the world gathered around a bubbling cauldron under the guise of ‘feminism’ and took an oath, it would probably go like this: 

We solemnly swear by the following...

A woman is much, much superior to men. A woman is so much more than a rag doll, not to be tossed around and played with as men may fancy. A woman is more than just ordinary, even if she is a housewife and does not eke out a living. A woman is more than the worth of her anatomy. 

A woman is this, a woman is that... 

But here’s where they missed—a woman is definitely not both. 

She is not everything. In fact, she cannot be. 

She is only fifty percent and it’s time she acknowledged the other half, just as it should acknowledge her.

There are men who detest daughters and in an equal ratio, teenage girls who detest old men (because they might be lecherous?). I don’t ask men to vacate a seat for me in buses or trains because I have legit, strong knees. If I can get tired, so can the legions of men hanging from the bars in a DTC bus. Why would men, or better yet the State, persevere to make a woman feel helpless by ‘reserving’ our seats. But that’s just me.

The flip side of the coin is that when a woman who does not have strong knees comes begging for a seat, no one should not refuse her that seat. And it applies to a man and a woman alike, it’s only courteous to vacate. It’s only humanity. 

Norms are bogus. If I am a woman both strong and fragile, equally capable of loving a man or a woman, then there exist no rules for men either. We are rendered equally helpless by feminism. My fight is not to become a ‘man’, to take over men in what they can do, but to be myself. 

In being a gentlewoman, I want to be seen and heard as the ‘other’ half. A significant ‘other’. I want to be a woman first, and leave it at that. I don’t strive to grow a beard, wear trousers, have a thick voice or undertake any masculine task. I am gentle and polite and I wouldn’t change anything womanly in a lady. But I wouldn’t call gentleness and fragility in a man ‘womanly’ either. That would be an insult taken too far. 

The point is that every being is the same. And also that every being is so different. The same hair, eyes, nose and lips, but myriad rivers of emotions and traits underneath them, coming together to form an ocean. We need each other. And if there is no race between men and women, no comparison, then why would I want to engage in this tug of war in the first place?