Chhath

It's the festival of Chhath. I will miss it of course, for the nth year in a row. I don't even have a count. The festival is now nothing but a tradition of nostalgia that surprisingly doesn't fade but grows stronger with time.

Chhath. A personal festival. Celebrated only in some parts of the country. And yet, it was as if the world celebrated it when we were younger, when we didn't know there was anything different that existed, that there were other cultures, other rights and wrongs, other shades of skin, of light and dark. As I type this, I realize that more often than not, I write nostalgia. And I wonder if this is who I am, if I am really trapped somewhere in the bygone, and then I realize that the present doesn't make me pick up the pen any more. Happiness doesn't make me pick up the pen. Fear and anxiety do. Loss does. Regret does.

Today, families that still manage to be families and get together on Chhath as an annual tradition would have come together. The late arrivers would have arrived today, and would have been teased as work-shirkers who arrived after all the pedakias and the thekuas are made and all the daliyas are prepared. Tomorrow, the day would be spent catching up, playing antakshari, dancing, and fake palm-readings; the children would disappear into their separate worlds with cousins, and wouldn't be found when looked for. Bedsheet tents would be made, ghost stories would be told, crackers would be burnt, fights would be resolved, tears would be wiped, while the fasting members of the family would stand in the river/ pond/ pool and play homage to the setting sun - all in the backdrop of the most melodious Chhath songs streaming from loudspeakers. 

Tomorrow night would be a night of anticipations. The kids would hardly sleep for fear of oversleeping and missing the time before dawn. Showers will be taken with cold water in the freezing hours of pre-dawn and the music and the crackers would begin anew. The earthen elephant lamps would be lit to light the darkness and the sun will be awaited. Millions would pray to the rising sun that morning and then would begin the raiding of the dagras with all the food that was not to be touched till now. Children would be warned against having too many Gagar nimbus for the fear of falling sick, so there would be elaborate planning for stealing them, probably involving holding an open bedsheet on the lower floor to catch treats being stolen and dropped from an upper floor. Everyone would chew sugarcane, peeling it with their bare teeth, and the antaksharis and leg pullings would resume.

I would like to believe that this still happens in families. That the large three storeyed houses do not echo with the sound of emptiness. That some of the generations have not disappeared entirely, that people are not so disconnected that they aren't even expected to be part of this tradition anymore.

There are these thoughts that come to you and then they leave. Before you understand what to do with them, before you process them or write them down to process later. They just alter you and leave.

Pain is a beautiful thing. Because it's all yours. It has no half commitments, no change of pattern. It comes into your life and hits you hard; no other soul can know it for you. It's personal. All of it. Just yours.

Be the velveteen rabbit. Let it happen and let it wear you out. Let it make you real.

I sit at the window and look at the city lights outside. It's a typical Bangalore evening with a breeze touching me from time to time. It brings coolness and a faint scent that tells me it must have rained in some part of Bangalore. It is one of those days when you sit down to write after a long interval, and you have none of the excuses that you thought were the reasons you haven't been writing. You have a fucking 6th floor window with a vast empty space followed by the whole of E City beyond. I realize that I have perhaps used the F word for the first time in my writing, and I don't know what makes me inherently so averse to using it more often in language. It is a wonderful word after all and I admire it.

People stop writing for many reasons. I think the most prominent of those is that they change. They change and then invoke the old person who wrote in such and such words and the problem is that *that* person does not have an existence any more. And it is ok. It is absolutely alright. It is essential to keep pace with yourself because others obviously can not. Do you sometimes have a feeling so vast and so powerful that you feel it peels off a layer of you? The more that happens, the more you live, the more miserable or crazy you get, the more disappointments and failures you face, the more you crave for what you do not have, the more scared you feel of unknowns - the more you change. Most people would probably fail miserably to describe themselves if asked to. There is nothing more confusing than seeing changing shades of yourself. And yet, vanity allows us to fall in love with this inconsistency, this sham, this mad, mad life.

I sit here and wonder at the lives being lived in the illuminated tall towers I see in the distance. Do they shelter hearts ebbing and breaking in love, dreams bundled and kept away and forgotten in the much cursed software jobs to be cried over on booze nights, hopes of a better city life being circled in smoke in one of the balconies, people making love as if they will never see each other again, people cooking something with love, people looking at pictures of less-travelled destinations and rousing the lost adventurers in them? Or do they just have some people going through lives day after day without much thought, without any crushing or uplifting emotions of any kind? *That* is my biggest fear of disappointment. Does it bother you sometimes, that the world may not be the way you see it? And then do you laugh at the idea the next moment, at the very irony of it, as if there were such a thing as an absolute definition of what the world is. It is anything you like it to be! Any fucking thing. Just think it, and that is the world for you.

I will hide behind my screen and cry. And no matter how much I try, all that I type will be normal. Those moments when I long for the keyboard to write about my brokenness are somehow always stolen from me, and are patched up with obstinate hope, so that all I am left with are lost moments leading to more lost moments. Some day, we will break in and away. Some day, the patched up cracks will start to give in, and we will have to see what we do not want to.

There is nothing more bitter than past happiness. Nothing crueler than larger-than-life dreamy moments of perfection that get stuck in time. Feeling the passage of time is a strange thing. You aren't supposed to notice it go day by day, are you? And yet, at some point in life, you do. As if you are running late. For life.

There isn't much left to say or do. Never before has hope seemed so cruel and so indispensable at the same time. 

The Now.

For once I want to draw and I don't want it to be about symmetry or shape. I want it to be blurred and foggy and mildly reminiscent of intangible, unidentifiable memories. I want to paint, not with a brush, but with my fingers and a knife, and I want to not care about the outcome. Once, again, I wish to be a word stuck at the back of the head that becomes a whole story, and then a whole new life, a whole new existence, a whole new me. 

Inhale. Exhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale. Inhale. Exhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale. Inhale deeeeeeply. Hold your breath. 

*And never ever let go.* 

"Life starts with a deep inhalation which triggers the baby's first cry, and ends with a long exhalation at the time of death. So life is just the space between a deep inhalation and a long exhalation. And when we do Pranayam, we try to bring in this life, this prana." Such an astoundingly beautiful analogy! 

I have brought some discipline to my life. Long walks, Yoga classes(finally), visiting and teaching in a school on the weekends, and right diet. Yet, something is amiss. Something elementary. 

I am unable to write, or frame sentences. I will have to wait. It will come back. It always does.

14/06/2012

I miss home today. I have never had a 'home' home owing to the transferable nature of Dad's postings. I never had a place where I 'grew up'. So I guess I grew up with just that familiar protective nest of family, no aangans, no summer gardens, no permanent neighbourhood chachas and gubbare wallahs, no ageless neem trees. I have always felt the absence of these things, and the helplessness of a life being shut and reopened every three years, change of schools, change of friends, till the point that I began to suspect that it didn't affect me any more. But I have never missed an anchor in life. They have always been there; the two firm pillars of my existence who hand-made a picture perfect family with love, sweat and immense patience. I didn't know strife in a family. I never heard a raised adult voice directed at another. I want to go back to that. That innocence and that complete devotion to the idea of a family. We were family, and we didn't know any other way to be.
I miss them. I want to be with them and show them the beauty that I see, because they raised me to appreciate it. Because they smiled at my first ever ridiculous poem and said it was brilliant. Because they encouraged me to re-draw a sketch that I had unfairly traced, and made me believe that the honest one was the more beautiful one. 
I miss nana nani and dadi. I miss those houses where time never advances. Just that the number of people in them reduces significantly over the years. I miss that tradition of calling out people's names from the third floor to the ground floor, and that running around on those endless stairs. I miss Dadi's prayers and her intoxicating voice and devotion. I am not doing justice here, because these are not things you write about. They are not relevant. In fact, when is perfection ever relevant? This was not supposed to be about nostalgia though. This was supposed to be about now. About wanting to go back and be with them. All of us fragments at one place, on one large bed under one razaai on a winter night playing antaakshari. 
I am very tired. Dadi's bhajan is playing, not in my head, but somewhere deep, really deep inside my chest.

Random thought

We waste too many precious things fretting about the future. If we are happy now, why would we not be so in the future? Wasn't now future too? But we survived, right? And quite brilliantly at that. Lets not blow the unknown out of proportion. Let's allow life to happen.

Sometimes, on evenings such as this, I think of the undefined that is you. You, who make me melt in the honey-flavoured sunshines so that I turn into something as abstract and immeasurable as you are. Like poetry. Or love. Or summer. Or the nothingness that fills my heart on days when there is nothing but an existence, a unique existence, content in existing. 
I know you only as much as I know me. Yet, you belittle me. Like that younger version of me that used too much of the words 'love' and 'change' and 'beauty'. Tell her she is missed. That she still manages, in all her confusion and uncertainty and ill-decisions and failures, to inspire an awe. That she stirs the stillness in me and reminds me that there is nothing like past or future. And so, I brought you to this moment. To see how I am still trying, still wondering, still creating word-weaves to keep us warm when winter comes. Will you look for me then? Outside of the comfort of your winter afternoon sun and the softness of the cream-heart on your coffee? Will you seek me out if I hide behind the heap of the pebbles I am busy collecting throughout spring? Will you spread some of your sunshine on my bread while we talk of sweet mundanity?
And I will tell you how, sometimes, in meaningless poetry and untuned instruments, I have heard the rattle of our souls brushing past the meaning-and form-obsessed mess of this world. In imperfection, I have found our song. An imperfect song of formless submission. Intimate. Free.

14.04.'12

There are phases in your life when you can perceive changes in yourself, when you can look at yourself objectively like an onlooker and see the flaws you never knew you had. I disappointed myself with my silence, with my lack of courage. At least I know I need to work on it.


These are crucial times, times when there will be moments of truth, and a plunge will be taken into the unknown. 


I have changed in my beliefs. I have gone from struggling to fit in, to a rebellion, to a very new and strange understanding and acceptance of how things are. I feel a strong and urgent need for simplification, everywhere. I need a world where people are not commoditized, where feelings are not hidden, where there is freedom but it is not misused, and I need to create it around me if it isn't already there. I now believe, more than anything, in transience; in the fact that people and things change. And therefore, I believe permanence is worth striving for.

Us

For my brother :)


I don't know if you remember, you talked of silly things. You told me once that the universe records every sound that is ever made, and that some day, it will play it all, at once. I took note and decided to watch what I speak, so when the playback happens, I am not ashamed. That theory seemed so believable, I would keep wondering how all these different sounds from different places in different languages would be distinguishable when they are played together, and I would end up explaining to myself that the universe would not make an effort so futile and that it would make sure to make us hear only what made sense to us.


I believed you, because for a long part of my childhood, I did not know where I ended and you started. You said silly things that always made so much sense. Why, for example, would I doubt that pencil shavings kept in milk and frozen would turn into rubber? It was all so clever, freezing would solidify the milk, and the milk would obviously explain the white colour of the erasers we used. So, when Shilpi's mom found out about that experiment I did with her and laughed, I still explained to her that we probably added too much milk, or didn't allow the freezing to happen long enough. 


You talked of the universe one moment, and pencil shavings the next. But you always tried to explain. To ask questions and have answers. Sometimes, I wonder, what you did in those evenings when I sewed garlands with those wild yellow and pink flowers in the garden, because you were never around. Perhaps that is when you observed the earthworms, and took my curiosity to the highest peaks later when you spoke about the cycle of the universe, about how, there is a bit of the earthworm in us, and a bit of us in the earthworm. 


I remember watching the ants with you in the verandah; we would try to distrupt their line, and observe how they struggled to find their way. Sometimes, we would blow an ant off its path, and that would sadden me, because I thought it impossible that the ant would find its way back to its family, considering its size, and considering that the displacement would probably be like another end of the city for it.


We cared about ants then. And about pencil shavings and the one-ness of the universe. Together, we had deciphered everything they tried to teach us in textbooks all our lives. 

Perception-wise

"Have you ever wondered how strange this is? This basic assumption that you see the world in the same way as I do?"


"Like perspective-wise? Yeah..I don't think any two people can ever have the same set of beliefs or preferences."



"Yeah. But I meant it in the more literal sense. Not about preferences, but about perceptions. Like, what if you and I perceive color differently? What if everyone perceives colors differently? I mean when you were young, your teacher showed you a color and made you and everyone else identify it as yellow, and so you and all the other kids learnt that the color they saw was yellow; may be all of them saw it differently. And all your life when you look at a dress and called up your friend and said, "Oh! That was a very pretty yellow", she pictures a completely, or may be slightly, different pretty yellow."

"Umm...okay. Let's clear this. What color is that car?"

"It's a dirty yellow. But you miss the point."

"May be I want to miss it." *smiles*

Language

I feel so crippled at times, with language. There is so much that language can not express. Like that moment under water, when a beam of sunlight fell on us and the marine life, when I had held the stranger trainer's hand, and rested my life on him; it was a dive of faith, a dip of calm and beauty that cleansed me of something, and I do not know what. I was aware of my existence, and of all that I do not know, all that I haven't seen and will never see. And now, when I think of that moment and try to capture it in words, I realize my inefficiency again, as a human being, as part of an inaccurate, subjective civilization which can not express even a minute fraction of all that it experiences. How vain of us to forget this truth and go on living like the center of the universe. How inadequate of us to even classify and generalize every unique tangible and intangible experience. I like the feeling of smallness, of being a tiny insignificant speck in the thread of the universe, as small or as big as the golden striped fish that slid through my toes and altered something inside me forever.

Confessions

Sometimes, I turn around on my heels
in a public place
Just to feel small again
and rejoice when I find no one paying attention.


Sometimes, I cook with just a little oil and very little salt
to let all the vegetables have their natural flavour
comparing them, in my mind, to people
young, impressionable and wishing them the freedom
to be.


Sometimes, I read multiple books
one after the other
alternating identities, between Hermione and Jane
David and Celie, Gandhi and Gulzar
My version of a literary peek-a-boo


Sometimes, I cover my face
with all my hair
and open my eyes only a little
to watch ordinary sunlight
transform into marvelous shiny fractals
- hexagonal boxes with mystical secrets
cut by the magician's sword
but still intact
like stubborn, residual, unyielding hope


Sometimes, I still
talk to myself and write self-addressed letters
in order to discover
things I forgot to tell myself.

Classroom

I want to go back to being in a classroom. Classroom education should never end if you ask me. I know life teaches a lot outside the classroom, too. But I wish we could go to classes all our lives. Classes with an inspiring teacher, where questions are asked and answers are sought, where theories are stated and examples are demonstrated, where life is simplified on the blackboard and friendships are made effortlessly, the way they are supposed to happen. I love classrooms for the way everyone there is equal and everything being taught is just another lesson. I love that, the homogeneous whole of heterogeneous individuals, the sharing, the discussions, the submergence of egos to the only thirst for learning. Voluntary classrooms, shiny, beautiful subjects of choice that go side by side with regular jobs and life, that is my dream for a better world.

.....

There are some things that are best left unsaid. They are to be felt, involuntarily, in the silences between two hearbeats, in the spaces between words. That is how I have experienced it, the unspoken pain of my unfulfilled dreams. They are too proud to wail. They will remain quiet. They will remain unquenched, spent embers with a tiny silent flame inside them, that will continue to burn at late hours of the night when the heart is the truest to itself. These shards of broken dreams, they are sharp around the edges, but colourful none the less. Sometimes I play with them over my veins as I wait for dawn. In the sunlight, I hold them against the sky and they diffract and multiply, giving birth to a million small dreams again. I believe them and I live them, fooling myself all the while. But at night, under the stars, there is no pretense. Its just me and the broken pieces again. And a very old kind hearted moon that spreads her milky grace over us. She tells us not to wail. It is not of grace to wail. We obey her in our silences and await the dawn again.

What do you want to be?

I have had a very traditional, middle class and conscientious upbringing. My mother decided never to work to raise us, and she did a great job at it. When I was growing up, we had limited resources, but plenty of love and laughter. My parents never fought. Not in front of us, at least. We could take them for granted, and I am thankful for that. I grew up being loved and pampered by the whole of the extended family. Two big vans and jeeps full of relatives would arrive at our house around our birthdays, and the party would last a week. Most of the times, they would come for my birthday on December 30 and leave after my brother's on January 26. Everyone would stay in the two bedroom houses we lived in and my mother would be completely unreachable and out of sight, always in the kitchen, with her salwar-kameez and a pink cardigan over it, dough on her hands, but never without a smile on her face. My father is the epitome of principles. He would live with days of troubles and threats from local goons but refuse to sanction a bad loan, he would not save a penny but never refuse to meet the needs of his immediate as well as paternal family, which was tragedy-stricken, disease-ridden, big, and had only him to depend on. My father was the perfect son, my mother the perfect daughter-in-law. My brother was the blue-eyed first born on both sides of the family, I, the lucky second. I would carefully observe everything my brother would do and try to be like him all the time. He was a quiet and observant child, inquisitive, intelligent, and respectful. I tried to be him. But I was not born to fit in. I was defiant, talkative and I would always want to judge wrong and right on my own. 'Rules' never made much sense to me. But we were looked at as the perfect kids to have. We loved each other ardently, protected each other fiercely, and never fought.

But this is not about my childhood. This is about my dreams. But to know someone's dreams, to understand them truly, you need to know who the person is. I have very early memories of myself. I remember being all of three or four, conversing with 'God' when my mother took her afternoon naps. I would close my eyes and talk silently, and pray to grow up to be someone who would make my parents proud. I remember believing that I did not need to speak it out for him to listen, for he is supposed to be everywhere, even within me. I don't know how I had that idea at that age. Perhaps it was the number of stories I had heard while having my meals. I would always ask questions about God, about who was right in the story and why. I remember having given my mother a hard time after I heard about Sita's 'Agni Pariksha'.

My parents believed in not sending kids to school till they were at least five. So we were taught our initial lessons by Mom and Dad. I would insist on learning everything my brother learnt, and in that enthusiasm, even before I could actually read the words properly, I knew all his lessons by heart. Once, when a friend of Dad's was visiting, I sat on the chair opposite to him, and started to read a chapter on 'Gai'(Cow) putting my fingers on the lines and speaking out the words that I had heard my brother read so many times. Dad's friend was amazed, because I was too small to even know alphabets properly. He started to express his amazement when my Dad smiled and asked him to make me read a random sentence. At this, I laughed and ran inside. When he came to know that I couldn't read and was just reciting it from memory, he was more impressed; by the pronunciation and the confidence. I guess it had already begun then, the love for words, and for the way they were pronounced.

Another time, at a family wedding, a relative asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. "Hindi teacher", I had replied. The whole big family had laughed a hearty laugh. Some had said, "She is already so preachy, she could do a good job at it." I was confused. I didn't know what exactly was so amusing about wanting to be a language teacher. Then, I was told that everybody would like me to be a doctor. I thought about the job of a doctor, and thought it was a noble profession. So my answer to "What do you want to be" changed, to everybody's satisfaction.

Growing up was difficult, as it is expected to be for any independent spirit in a highly traditional family. But growing up, my dreams changed from those of just being successful to make my family happy, to those of travel, and a dream home, and leisure. In those days if you asked me what I wanted to be, I would probably just say 'a successful software engineer' which would imply being able to fulfill all other dreams.

When I was twenty, I was on a bus one night with my best friend, when I told her, "I don't like the idea of being twenty. I am not sure I am everything I wanted to be when I was twenty".
"Why do you say that?" she asked.
"All the wrong choices and mistakes I've made."
"But they make you who you are. They're going to make you a better person of twenty-one or twenty-two, or seventy-eight. And, you still have your dreams." she had told me.
Just the words I needed to hear at the time. So her.

I am twenty-three now. Am I who I wanted to be when I was twenty-three? Yes Sir, I am. It took me many mistakes and downfalls to be here. But I am here, and I am happy. Not because I have attained a perfect job, or because I have fallen in love. But because I have lived every day of my life for the past few years. I have laughed, I have traveled, I have made friends, I have risked being hurt, I have been hurt, and then I have received love and friendship. I have lived like a child, bruised my knees, and I have grown immensely in the process. I have lived in the mountains, listened to fireflies in the wild, tasted the sea water and witnessed the life under it, I have listened to the whispers of history in ancient ruins, I have been to war museums and ancient churches, and I have coloured myself with different cultures and cities. This was exactly my dream. This is still my dream. To always have wheels on my feet. To never stop exploring. To never miss the opportunity to play with an animal or a child, to never miss an opportunity to make a difference, and to always, always learn. Thankfully, the world is large enough to fuel this dream for a lifetime and still leave a lot to be done.

Ask me again, "What do you want to be when you grow up?". My answer: I do not want to grow up, thank you. But I want to be. I want to be so much that being is looked at as an art. I want to quit my job. Sometime soon. And I want to start something with a difference to make a difference. It will take care of old people, because I love them, more than I love children and animals. I love them because they, who once knew the spring of life, are learning to deal with its fall, and they are trying hard, alone. I love them because they are ours to love, they are stories, they are old buildings and history, they are a bundle of memories. I want to teach. Because education in the true sense is the solution to all our problems. But we never educate people. We make exam-experts and desk-jockeys and perfect corporate slaves. I want to 'educate'. I want to write a book. A marvelous, glorious book that creates history. But before that, I wish to read and travel, a lot. So that I can do justice to my first baby. It needs to be right. I do not like apartments, I wish for a beautiful bungalow, with enough garden space for my kids to grow up in. I would have a lot of pictures and quotes on the walls. I would have a large white room with just a canvas and a glass wall that overlooks a beautiful garden, or a sea. I would have unique furniture in the whole of house. It will be a practical and useful house, with space to walk in, lie in, run in, play hide and seek in, and a lot of light and air. And of course, I would always, always have the wanderlust. I would go to unknown places and experience their cultures, deeply and genuinely. I would taste different types of cuisines, learn languages, traditions, hear stories, listen to the whispers of nature, and continue to grow and share the joy, till the last breath I take in, wherever in the world that is.

I have a dream

I dream of writing songs. I dream of being in the company of musicians and write songs and watch them become music, watch them float in the air, in the sea, and in the pores of the soil and sand. I want my words to add, however infinitesimally small, a meaning, to sunshine and salt, to winter breeze and the taste of sea water. I dream not of a name, no, thats not what I want. I just want my words there, out there in the world, on their own, without my shadows, but with hidden bits and pieces of me, and all that I am, in a secret way. I dream of a day when the sun will shine through a window and someone like me, someone I've never met, in some place I've never been to, would recite a few of those words, with sighs and pauses, with the sun in his face, and gratefulness in his heart.

Encore

Then, there'll be times when you'll be there. When you'd have done everything you wanted to do when you were ten years old, or twenty, or a few years younger. Then, there will be a moment of calm, an eerie silence, a void in the world of your dreams. Success can be scary. It will be scary. You'll be solitary, you'll be scrutinized and misinterpreted, you'll be loved by many, but not for who you really are. No matter whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, a dancer, a painter, to the world you're just an entertainer. They wouldn't know where to stop asking you for an encore. There will be times when the noise of encore will transcend from the ears of the entertainer to the ears of the human being who craves for silence. There will be a blurring of the boundary between the entertainer and the person, the beauty that is created and the beauty that really is. You will not be expected to stop. You will not be forgiven failures. That is why you need to know not just your passions but yourself. That is why you need to realize that you are more than your passions, you are also your failures and disappointments. That is why you need to learn to forgive yourself.   That is why you need to learn to fail.

Random Thought

Its like people running with their backs on the present towards the unknown. Everyone seems to be in a frantic attempt to win over the uncertainties of life. Its surprising how many people forget to 'live' in the process, how many people never know love, the magic and the beauty of it, how many people just don't let out a sigh at a beautiful sunrise, how many live their whole lives with a compromise, because their souls were too chained to fly in search for what was best for them.

Banaras

People here name their kids 'Banarasi' and 'Varanasi'. That is how pervasive the spirit of this city is. It seeps into your identity before you know it, like the water of the Ganges filling all those earthen lamps of hopes, prayers and dreams that float on its surface every evening. The city bustles with its very own Banarasi energy that years of bewildered foreign gaze could not refine and change. They wear saffron and chew paan. They wear green and chew paan. They laugh a paan-ful of laughter as they roam the streets of Daalmandi and Chowk like the characters in Premchand's Sevasadan. But that was decades back. Since then, the bicycles and horse carts have been replaced by cars and buses. But the streets are just as narrow, the buildings just as colonial and ancient. But that is Banaras, ever bubbling with noise and energy, never changing.