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.

Pick up a pen

Pick up a pen
When your hands are too shaky to hold it still
Because to yourself you have not been true
When damp layers of your soul scrape off and fall on the floor
And you hear the sound of it too

When you've watched the sundown of free thought
Into the obnoxious sea of social obligations
And the burden of time crushes your ambitions
When you realize how powerful the word ambition is
And yet so commonly mistaken
How easy it is to shatter and yet be shattered again
Into smaller pieces

By all means
Pick up a pen
When you are ripe enough to bleed
Or let it lie inside the leather case
For worthier shakier versions of your hands

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. 

Summer

It's a long summer afternoon. She stands with one foot on the metal gate, another in the air, and takes a swing. A childhood flashes by in the semi circle she makes. 

She is six. She swings with one foot on the freshly-repainted metal gate. She loves that smell - the smell of new paint. She has on a light cotton frock with polka dots, and holds an ice lolly in one hand. These are a rare allowance, these ice lollies bought from street vendors. They aren't considered hygienic by her parents, but sometimes, on summer afternoons like these, she uses their presence in her grandparent's home to her favour. The world out here is different from the one she lives in. Life is slower here. People seem to always want to meet and talk to each other. There is a girl in the neighbourhood her age who does not go to school. 'That is not such a bad thing though', she thinks. The thoughts of school and holiday homework make her uneasy. She climbs down the gate and goes upstairs. It's three storeys, but it has never seemed like much to her. Nanaji is in the pooja room. Nani and Mummy are pickling mangoes. Mummy spots her and asks her to come and have some mangoes. Everything seems to be in such action! As if bathing and getting ready and worshipping and cooking and eating and pickling and telling kids what to do are the most important jobs in the world! 

There is a noise and a lightness and a yellow-tinged distant happiness about that memory that make her smile. She goes to the living room and switches on the flat screen LED TV that has silently replaced the black and white TV with double doors somewhere through the years. She flips through the channels and settles on Doordarshan - something completely vague and uninteresting. But it allows perfectly for nostalgia to flood in again.

She is sitting on the sofa with all other kids, sibling, cousins, neighbours. They have learnt how to make Rasna, and they are each holding a glass of it proudly in their hands. 'Chhutti Chhutti' starts on Doordarshan, and there is cheering. There is a cartoon with a girl and a boy and a rat and a bird, all two-dimensional hand-drawn cartoons, with a compulsory moral in them. She loves everything about them - the voices, the background score, the simplistic animations. She needs nothing else in that moment. They play hide and seek after the show is over. They laugh and shout and run around the house, with occasional reminders from elders to not be too noisy and disturb naps. In the evenings, Mummy puts on a crisp cotton saree and wraps herself in that familiar sweet smell of talc as she takes out a set of pyjamas for her and asks her to take a shower too. She washes off the sweat and dust of the day to spend the night lying under the stars with the entire family on the roof. Summer nights are all about stories. 

Just that, she didn't know then, that they become stories too.

Summer

I bought you a can of lemonade.

'Canned lemonade? Ugh!' is what you'd say
'How lazy ass wasted would one be to have lemonade out of a..'
and you'd take a sip and look at me with surprise in your eyes.
'Holy ...Where did you find it?'

I found it in the shop where they are canning everything
and selling them at ridiculous prices

'What do you mean everything?'

You know, like, pink popsicles and cotton candies and my granny's blueberry muffins, and the smell of talcom powder mixed with sweat on summer evenings, and our siestas, and all our loud laughing neighbors, and the treehouse in the backyard, and the dusty street from my home to yours.

'All of that?'

Pretty much.

'And us?'

We are the buyers.

'Why us?'

May be we are the only ones left who'd pay for all that. 

'What's the shop called?'

Summer of '94

Honest Life

Perhaps all I want is an honest life. A life in which I am honest to the work I do, to the people I love, to the things I believe in, and to the dreams I dream. Perhaps, that, would sum it up.

Oh to be young!

Oh to be young and uncertain

to be ready to break

and to rebuild

To be willing to not know

and yet keep on

as if you do

To be ready to die

for a belief

And to live

believing

in life

To be scared

and foolish

To be willing to dissolve

in the headiness of a kiss

as if that is all there is

Oh to be young

and in love!

Loneliness takes hold of all of us at some points. But after a while, you'll know it was for the best. It was your heart wishing and preparing you for something new, something that you needed to do but weren't able to do before. It makes you *do* things. It makes you, in heightened awareness of your self, sensitive to your own needs, true to who you are. Listen to what it is telling you. Life is whispering its plans for you in your ears on lonely windy evenings. Hold on.