Wait wait wait! Hold on! Spare me tonight, darkness. Not yet. I'm just learning to hope again. Tiny baby steps. Tiny little breaths of trusting anticipation and appreciation for the beautiful uncertainty of life. Tiny little whiffs of the uncharted unknowns. Let me, for now, soak in all of this. I am young. I am alive. And life is so intoxicatingly beautiful!

After a long long time, I feel like writing. And not about sorrow or nostalgia but about how miraculously beautiful the world is, how cool the breeze is tonight and how I love the way it touches me, how there's a faint scent of the earth, and an elegant stillness to this hour, right here. I love this city, and all the different ways in which it charms me. This city is love. And home. And hope.

Evenings have a distinct quality of taking you down the forgotten lanes of memory. I look at the people walking the perimeter of the park, and I wonder if they too are reminded of long lost childhood evenings in places they will never set foot in again. As you grow older, mirages start to break. You start to slowly take your idols out of their moulds and see them as what they are - flawed, disappointing, afraid human beings. And, perhaps, as we are never given something that we can not handle, with this process comes the ability to accept people for exactly who they are.

'Godhooli bela' - that's what they call this time of the day - this slow, slowly fading light that belongs to the children and the birds. It is called godhooli bela because at this time, the cattle, mostly cows (hence 'go' from 'gau') would return in large numbers from the fields, and their walks would raise a lot of dust (hence dhool) which would cloud the vision. This is what Papa had told me, and I am glad that some day, I might be able to take someone back to the vision of a far-off village with this definition, just as he had taken me.

Evenings in Darbhanga were probably the quietest ones of my life and hence most prominent. Dadi would make a big deal about 'saanjh batti' and light a diya and sing a song of longing. In the song, Yashoda would pine for Krishna's safe return as the day started to darken. I could feel the anxiety in Dadi's voice as someone would light a kerosene lantern and hang it in the verandah. Sometimes, I would go to roof to have a look at the mosque from where a far off voice would stir my soul, and I would wonder if perhaps, in another life, I had a connection with the song of the azaan. I never found the mosque though, so I would watch birds flying in perfect patterns above our coconut tree - returning to their own little nests - perhaps some Yashodas going home to their hungry and waiting baby Krishnas.

This godhooli bela, I remember that innocence, and I remember remembering - sitting in my very windy balcony in Patna, watching the forest inside IGIMS, humming a slow tune, and affirming to myself that there will be a better life. As I write this, I get the picture of a page being turned of this diary - isn't that how life is too? Turning, page after page, filling, line after line, until the ink runs out.

I feel okay. I feel...'centered'. There is no better way to say it. I feel okay with being me - being lost, sad, devastated, and everything else that I am. It's a strangely comforting acceptance to finally not care about what everyone thinks, to finally listen to myself and allow myself the space and time to flounder and fail. It's scary and yet liberating like nothing else. There is a process that is happening and I can feel it, that of re-aligning to my inner compass that I was way way off from. Things are not perfect, not right, not the way they are supposed to be, but they are okay. And sometimes, that's all you need.

Being a woman

My one advice to women everywhere is to be a person. Just be a person. Before being a woman. It's great to embrace your womanhood, but before you do that, just stop and be a human being. Question the way you look at yourself. Question the things you take for granted, the things you expect, the things you accept. You are not your mistakes any more than anyone else is. You are also not who you date, how you dress and definitely not the shape of your body or the texture of your skin. It's a great thing to take care of yourself, but that shouldn't be the purpose of your existence. That shouldn't be why you get up in the morning. You don't owe beauty to anyone but yourself. Just go out and live life and make mistakes and learn and be hurt and grow and please, please, create something! Invest in who you are. There is too much pressure to look a certain way to allow you the freedom to spend time on other things. Do not let that happen. Crow's feet are good. They tell a story of a life well-laughed at. Smudged mascaras are good because they say that you lived intensely. Do not pull up the glass on a sunny day. Lose the complexion. Gain the kiss of the sun and the wind on your face. Get dirty. Clean up later. There is so much of life to live and it's so insane to waste the chance to live it!

So, that is why I write. To give everything a sense of meaning. To be understood, in whatever broken way, by whoever has taken the time to read the words that flow out of my mind. To feel that what I think and know and believe matters. That it is not insane to want a world that is better and kinder. That it is not utterly impractical to want to have a life around my own ideals and to not want to slit the throats of all the dreams I have grown up with for the idea of a 'working' thing. I write because I want my words to 'work' too. I write because I need you, whoever you are, to know that I care. That I get angry and disappointed in the world sometimes, and that sometimes, I have doubted everything that I am, and that I have almost killed the real me for the idea of someone I am not, in the pursuit of a life that was never mine.That I still, after everything, somehow, hopelessly and inexplicably, believe.

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.