Monday, December 6, 2010

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.

1 comment: