Submission

it is so cold. icy cold. my eyes could shatter like glass, if they choose to move. a frozen, stony moment...devoid of wetness, of a promise of growth, of fertility. 

Only my heart beats. Time treading with burdened arms, determined, resolved...

can anyone stop him? can anyone choose to be angry with him? can anyone slap him and make him wait?

some lover would've wished earnestly, some mother pleadingly, some father helplessly...

to each knock, only the echo exists. the doors remain closed. 

Time treads on, without looking back.

His superiority no one questions anymore. Oh how we yield to his indifference, his insolent arrogant power!

How helpless...how vain...to wait for him to look back, once...to expect him to stay till i can be comfortable with his pace.

such death, every moment of life. 

of companionship

I ran in the wilderness, ecstatic and free...

a huge banyan tree spread itself there

its long roots streaming from the heavy branches

its leaves shining and shivering in the wintry wind

i sat and looked at its grandeur

oh heavens, how grand a sight

of truth and beauty and being it sang

proudly yet modestly.

my heart jumped and skipped a beat

took in everything till it brimmed 

and when the sun set and my legs grew tired of running

i smiled wearily and with relief

that i had my little jasmine bush for me

flowering with love and delight.

all mine...

I sat around a crackling fire today, in cold darkness. Very few stars were out because the moon is bright and almost round. Full moon seems to be around the corner. One cannot expect a starry night on a full moon night after all. There was chatter and laughter around me. But it did not feel nice. I was drowning in the darkness, coming across thoughts that startled me, made me want to tear myself apart and remove these silly thoughts that dwelt in my being, silently growing, unwanted but still growing, like the poison of a slithery snake. 

Inevitably in life, there are these moments...of a desire to live in a memory that was so beautiful, of a desire to live in a dream fed everyday, of not wanting to be present, of hiding somewhere in the corner of some distant past or future. why? isn't it always refreshing to be present, to be alive, to be laughing about nothings with other people, to warm your feet over a golden fire on a chilly chilly night, to breathe...slowly but peacefully...

But this today, makes me want to shut all the doors of being. stare in silence. and be a fallen leaf. 

i can be a fallen leaf today and an alive blossom tomorrow. there is security in that. and a pride, of being human. and in lying motionless, there is saturation. sometimes, it is rightly said, you just have to saturate. and wait. 

Truth

She stood there, candid and transparent. She looked at what she saw, fearless of what it is. I haven’t seen fear in her eyes. What amuses me is the plainness of her pure questioning eyes. There was no anger, never, there was no complacence, no pride, no joy and oh most importantly, there was absolutely no condescendence. She merely expressed herself. It did not shock me. It made me breathe a sigh of relief…She exists.

The Earth is really spinning. I'd forgotten this bare fact for a while. The world stood still for me, watching my indulgence in pure feeling. I spun dreams of thin air. I danced in the abundance of love. I laughed till i was out of breath...

 And then it hit me (and it hits hard when it does) that the world is spinning, that everyone has to start on their own journeys, that these journeys, very very rarely, are taken together. 

So here it is. The moment of cleaning up the mess of my dreams and packing my bags for the next journey. For anyone as insecure as i am, it is an assuring feeling to know that there will be crossroads. And journeys cannot be complete without them. 

i heard people speak today. sometimes, when i open a book or a play, and read a conversation right in the middle of the book, i hear their conversations coming from a certain source in point of time, having a 'before'. it is quite understandable if i open a random page of the book. but funny when you actually experience a chunk of a random life in person. it happened today. i heard people talk about their lives. as if,  i accidentally chanced upon them, and so they continued their conversations with me in front instead. i heard a friend talk about a film he made recently. he came and spoke about it, and left. and then i heard someone speak about history. and law. and cinema. and acting.

i am attracted towards the written word these days. reading a word is like an idea being whispered in your ear, gently. there is nothing condescending about it. (this is not always true really). but how some things should just not be spoken of. how speaking kills it. i could not avoid listening to some conversations today and that made it difficult for me to breathe. i wanted them to stop speaking. everyone is speaking so much about that which so should not be spoken. it rather be seen or sung or played on the sitar or captured in camera.

thinking about 'being' inevitably involves death. and every death makes me realize how helplessly alive we are. as if the death of the other is the assertion of your answer-less life.

but life there is. and beautiful too, sometimes. and in a series as disconnected as my blog appears to me today. oh well. :)

There is so much that falls under the word ‘being’. it felt proper for me to start writing afresh, under that heading, about things overflowing in my head. Overflowing in my heart perhaps. My last blog was silly I thought, so I abandoned it - it will remain a little forgotten space on the internet, without any cobwebs though, which kills the romanticism of abandoning a space you once lived in and made your own.

I was speaking to shanno over lunch today. She works endlessly, from morning till night. She goes to two other houses in the neighborhood, where she sweeps the floor and washes clothes and hangs them on the rope to dry. After that she comes here, in harmony (which happens to be the name of my home), and with purposeful vigor washes the utensils, clanking her bangles and brushing of the tiny rolling sweat on her forehead. She is very beautiful. A Muslim beauty, mom says of her. Black big eyes and all of that. She braids her hair in a long plait. And is as old as me, which is 22. But her 22 years of life must have been expansively different from mine. She is married to the man she has now grown to love, has a little kid about whose future she is now worried - which school to put him in etc.

See how I categorize her! How I place her ‘being’ in my framework of life and marvel at how she lives. I can marvel about that only because I don’t expect her to be in any way.

Sitting at samovar yesterday, waiting for reema to come, I realized how everyone is looking at me only as an instance of life. In that one hour, I saw lovers smiling contently over a cool neembu sherbat, friends chilling and speaking non-stop, others eating quietly, and I also noticed a few noticing me, sitting alone waiting for (they must have here thought, waiting for a boyfriend, I heard the guy tell his girlfriend, “see how much he is making her wait”) I smiled.

We are all merely instances of life for each other, left shivering independently in the wilderness. Little bubbles of life, wandering in search of something. There are millions clinging on to the nearest leaf, saturating there and drying away vaporously.
 Today I feel, ‘being’ like this, is in essence complete, tainted with a horrendous feeling of incompletion though. And the struggle is to feel complete, and perhaps not to be, because that is already there.

Anyway, that is not what I set out to write. I wanted to write about shanno, because I do feel immense love for her. And I wanted to understand how she manages all this, what she thinks, what she feels, what she plans and what she dreams. In loving someone, isn’t there always a want to understand? And not merely observe as a specimen of beauty or as a subject of respect?

J it is all pointless to seek answers after a point of time. Thank god the questions are still ours to ask.