Gypsy's grumbles

Diwali is over. You wake up in the morning and feel like going away from the city, from the sounds of bursting crackers, from the hurly burly of people and their blaring laughter. You remind yourself that this is the first time in your life you are alone on a Diwali. You are not going to meet anyone who knows you. It's been a long time you left your city. Diwali had always been so colourful and boisterous for you. You were fond of chocolate bombs and flower pots and kali potka. You liked the way kali potka used to resonate inside the neighbourhood houses. You were the only girl with the group of boys who used to burn those loud firecrackers. Baba is a brave man. He taught you to confront fears and overcome the anxieties. You didn't even light up a sparkling stick this time!  You miss buying a candle today.  

You are tired of stomaches and ceaseless mood shifts. You want to just leave right now. Go to the countryside and close to the nature. You remember sitting alone at the edge of a mountain in the Western Ghats, not a very long time ago. You walked and walked in the woods till you found yourself one with nothingness. You would like to take a that kind of walk. For a couple of hours perhaps. And talk occasionally. As the afternoon makes way for evening, you walk back towards your refuge for the night. You want your face to be lit up by the warmth of the setting sun. You start talking. About life, breathing, God, ambitions and failures, and you. You tell yourself you have not had such a blissful experience for many months now. As the night falls, you start looking at all the corners of the sky, searching for the moon. You love to repeat that exercise all over again whenever your eyeline meets the horizon. You start counting the stars and before the number reaches hundred you fall asleep without knowing. 

You are always caught between your desires. You are a wanderer. Being defeated once again, you ask yourself foolishly why you didn't take birth in one of the nomadic tribes of the desert. 

                              A thousand desires such as these
                              Each worth dying for
                              Many of them I have realized
                              Yet I yearn for more
                                                                                                                          
                                                      - Mirza Ghalib 


P.S. The nomad celebrated Diwali at home waiting for she didn't know what :)

Healing of the past

He is still a dreamer. He cherishes his dreams like before. He still nurtures his entrepreneurship visions of creating a big organisation, much like Infosys or Wipro. Five years is a long time. Last time when I met him in Kolkata in 2007, I asked him not to meet me again.  In these five years, much has changed: he finally opened his business venture, created employment opportunities for more than a dozen people,  travels to places for business and pleasure, and has created an identity for himself and his company. Nevertheless, there are some things that still haven't changed: his long eyelashes still cast a prominent shadow on his face when lit up by light; the edges of breads even today remain as the leftovers on his plate; he still continues to wipe his face with hand and continues to dream high and works sincerely to make his dreams come true. His indomitable confidence and spirit of life remain unchanged, rather have become stronger as life moved on.


In these two days, I went back to the life in which he played a very important role. He wanted to explore a demented person's mind and transform her into an optimistic person. He worked hard for her exams more than she did. After suns, she finally left the city and abandoned him. Dreams never came to an end.
Those were the days of seasons in the sun. The winter came after Lucknow.


Past crawls back into the wound. Healing begins.

Conversations and emptiness

This was something I didn’t know will happen but happened. I knew before going for this trip that something will change, some part of my life and it did. Oh, I don’t know what to say. I am sad, extremely sad. I don’t want to go back to that home. Please no no. I want to go back to Pondi or some place else. I feel extremely sad. Both kinds of feelings are extremely opposites and overwhelming - the power of conversations and exploring people and places, and the feeling of emptiness, once the conversations are done and you are alone. Something made me realise in this journey to Pondicherry and back is that I can't marry now. I won't be happy being married. I have to pretend and I have to make myself understand that I am happy. After few months, I would run away from my marriage, from the people. So the point of pretending being happy doesn't come. What would I do? I would travel, write and read books, as I always used to.

A way to find myself

Being lonely is not equal to being in solitude. We all know it. Sometimes you can be lonely, yet enjoy the solitude that being alone has given to. There are no more only black and white shades. It's insipid to ask such bipolar questions to them, most of the times, as if I have been promoted to grade eleven. I do not like journalism that provides information dispassionately and on the next moment loves to inquire the likes of "Is Virat Kohli  Tendulkar in the making?" Any writing which doesn't narrate but merely asks polarised questions for the sake of objectivity doesn't fulfill its promise of making a true inquiry.

How do I calm myself? How do I get away from this world of madness into my inner self; from the milieu of overloaded information to pleasures of literature and torments of thoughts and experiences? Should I not log on to this world of hysterics at home? I better not!

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः

Lived my life over and again

Lights flicker in the dark jungle

Dark..dark jungle..

Oh, I can see a blinking light..
Help..help..please help..

The flickering light travels far.

Run..run..run..run fast

Wrap me in a warm blanket..


I dip my feet in a warm sand of oasis

I close my eyes..

Tenses freeze..

Like other lives, this too I created and nurturned, and escaped from it.

Ten stories

I

The world outside is germinating into new strands of hair

I grope, grasp and grapple; water is no receding


I was eaten by a grasshopper when the sun dipped its last ounce in the sea.


breathe, breathe, breathe!

the eyes, letters, touches..stop..stop..stop....


The poor tree sucked the milk from my breasts.

This is not to be read

Hyderabad was gracefully peaceful. And immensely unsatisfying. I lined up in a crowd of a million people waiting to earn a little extra to be able to eat at least once, twice or thrice a week in a spotlessly clean restaurant, served by English speaking waiters and people huming the lines 'I become comfortably numb'. This side of the page has notoriously spaced-up malls and imitations and hearts of wooden mirror walking in empty streets.

The Charminar reminds me of Feluda's preferred brand of cigarette which he invariably used to smoke to discover any new twists in the trick. I wish Feluda lived on, just as we haplessly live and play merry-go-round. This was my first experience with the name Charminar. On the contrary, Charminar lives on as aura less grey iron pillars amid no insect's life with the name Hitex. It was incredible how both could co-exist knowingly it is flip-flopping. It has big roads and streets and flyovers with no meddling to take you to your little chalets faster. A matter of convenience undoubtedly. Too many sumptuous and seemingly happy preoccupations. The sky ends somewhere behind the spaced-up large fort-alike houses, and tall ambitions; you and I barely had a chance to view the horizon.

Sitting on the grasses, received the first splash of green drizzles, over cups of Lucknow was amusing while the parrots continued reading your future. Waking up to dreams of togetherness and those I experientially lived last night and this moment lying on his torso, I realise this is what I wish in my heart and can live so possibly. He has grown to a delicacy in my eyes.

I am a lonely soul, not deserted, not secluded. The bitter sounds and desperation of not being them, of not being able to play guitar, of not being you perturbs my consciousness as I walk down the streets in six, and seven sometimes.

The people who take a ride of merry-go-round with you, the wide, empty roads and the lanes with white and pink houses lined up, the little potions of love you are fortunate to drink in every fading moment of your stay, too many numbers of unrestrained freedom and despair, this is not yet the place to become untamed.

P.S. I will come back again and again to fill up my insatiable hunger, for peace.


A disclaimer. These are the odd fragments from my story called Hyderabad. Might not be akin to yours. Someday you and I, and them will sip coffee over manifold hyderabad.