In the long innings of this life, we are like the stage where the drama unravels. The Plays change, the players too come and go. The audience is like the river of time that runs through us. There are bright lights and wonderful stories and some stories that run to empty seats.
Whatever be your story this coming year, pray don't be enamoured by it, nor be bogged down. These are just stories. Stories change. But life as it is, is lived forever between the shows and the silences that follow when the curtains come down.
You are the stage. While you may have a little say in the stories that play out in your life, I hope you learn to enjoy the successful ones, and forgive, or forget, or do both, to the ones that never really took off. This is not a new year wish. It is what I wish for you, every year of your life and for the lifetimes that are yet to come.
Happy All Years.
It was not planned. It was a government office. A private sector bank representative was called in for some support. The person was supposed to come by 10. It was already 12. I was busy on my laptop. Three others in the room were busy in their own works. And then the door opened and she walked in. Just like that.
24 years of thinking about her, and she just walks in. It were as if there was a tear in the fabric of my universe, and she just appeared out of nowhere. We talked like two perfect strangers. If she recognized me, she gave me no indication of that. I wanted to hug her across the table. But that was not why we met.
Later, as we said goodbye and she crossed the busy road, my heart leaped at the familiarity of it all. All these years, and she still jump walked!
I have worked on many scenarios in my mind. None of the scenarios actually ended up with I having you in my life.
The glaciers will have to melt someday, and so you will say. The ocean floors have to heave now and then, sending unforgiving waves crashing on to unsuspecting lives. Gravity, you would say, is the glue that joins parallel universes. And universes keep falling into each other all the time. Time is fluid. It is not a linear variable. Time is a different thing to a fruitfly and to a child on her winter holiday.
I have explored all your definitions. Not one defines closely, how it will be, when you are no longer with me.
I have looked far into the winter mist. At the heart of its cold grey despair, I have found shimmering undercurrents of hope.
This winter derives it's darkness from my longing for you . With the first flush of my unbeing, you will be born again.
Allow me this death for I need you to be reborn.
How many memories can my mind retain?
I have seen clouds up close. They are really filled with nothing in them. Their undulating form of fluff is made of my memories of you. Their white comes from my happy thoughts of you. The greys are my desolation, the black, a drape of your absence, falling like velvet and drenching my soul.
Such magnificent shapes you make, scattered through my once clear blue sky.
Cheruvally Appachi (The aunt from Cheruvally) is about 86. She looks just as beautiful as I remember her from the time my grandma was alive a decade ago. Yesterday, we met at the wedding of one of her grandchildren.
As I hugged her, I could feel her tears drench my bald head and creep through my shirts collar. Her tears would not stop. Nor mine.
Great Aunt of mine, I want you to know, do not grieve for the time that is no longer there, for we shall meet again. This one was as your favorite grandnephew, the next will be as your son.
Once a wise grey owl perched on a large sullen tree in a garden in ruins. The butterflies hushed their wings, the snakes crawled for a while like snails and the wind that was already tired from all its windiness, screeched to a stop.
The owl would now look to the right and then look to the left. It would turn it's furry head all around without a rustle. It's bright golden eyes pierced the low light dusk falling like a shround on to an unloved body.
When the night finally drenched this forgotten garden in its mossy grey, the wise owl screeched a chilling shriek, flapped it's giant wings, and through a tear in the fabric of the universe, escaped into another dimension.
Autumn brings in memories of muted grey and flying ash. Memories of fallen leaves gradually letting go of their greens.
Autumn paints itself on a desolate canvas.
It is that season wherein your eyes draw back your tears into itself. It is that season when your hope falters and your faith waivers like the last of the twigs holding on to some imaginary leaf.
Such is wretched misery of this waiting, it transforms your soul into a refugee. You grab on to made up memories from some imaginary springtime and trudge through your life believing that your world is this bleak canvas, and you that grey tramp ploughing your soul through limbo.
No. It is not a nightmare, for it is not night yet, just the dreary day draped in grey.
There are no dreams, for to dream, you need to get to sleep, and you rarely get to sleep on days that stretches for years and is blatantly grey.
But when the first set of silly shoots find their way through sunken craggy gnarly wood, we drench in its first shameless showers and hurry to erase memories of Autumn from our minds. Green replaces grey. Hope that springs eternal, brings back faith, brings back love. The only hint of Autumn is in the hurried glances that we keep giving our loved ones. It is in the sudden desperate hugs and fierce embraces. The fear of draught scalds your soul, singes your being. Just once is one time too many.
Do not ask me why I miss you. That answer would come to me, eventully. Some day sometime in the future I will find myself not thinking about you. And in not thinking about you, I will end up thinking about you just like that.
All stories are my stories, but I am not my stories. I am yours. When we are older and our world is quieter than it is now; I will be in those intriguing tales that your heart spins to give you company.
Do not ask me why I miss you. That answer would come to me when it comes to me. Why hurry?
The necklace road was just as well lit as any other day. Its park benches occupied by lovers of all hues. The lake was full of sail boats and the Buddha as usual, held on to his smile. I remember that the rain surprised all of us. It came in waves, slightly slanting, beating down relentlessly. I would have run into the car, had you not stopped me that day.
That evening, I walked in the rain with you. Hand in hand, you holding on tight so that I don't take a shelter to save my buckaroo leather, and I taking delight in watching you dancing in the rain. That was the first time I got wet in the rain...and did not mind it all that much.
I open my door and almost see you sitting there, angry that you could not get the air-conditioning on. Is that small speck of red on my yellow tea cup a stain from your lipstick? I ride my car and I can see you sitting next to me, glaring at those jealous guys staring at you. There are six strands from your hair that I saved from the last time you were home. A green elastic band sits lonely in my bathroom shelf.
A bindi stares at me from my dressing room mirror.
So much of my memory is stained forever. I am no longer what I remember. All I remember is you.
I can hear your voice on the other side of the phone. Its like some lonesome wave spent from a long voyage crashing unto my shores. I love it when you crash into my world. I love the overwhelming sense of being drenched by you. I love the mysterious stories you tell me of magical lands. I love how you try to make it up for all the time we lost by speaking too fast, running out of breath.
I love the way you explore yourself around my loneliness from you. I love the faint sense of unease in your tone, as you try to find out if I am the same edges you rounded off from all these years of random onslaught.
I love the saltiness of my soul that you leave behind.
Don't judge me by my silences. They don't divulge the whole story. There is a story that runs in my mind. I carry it's lines in my thoughts and live its scenes in my life. I am the Macbeth and the Othello. I am also the Romeo in my story.
You are omnipresent. It is as if the script revolves around you. You are in each scene, ever chapter every line.
And as the curtain comes down on me, you dissolve into my mind, like a dark cloud of my own making. Taking weird forms of my own perception.
Don't judge me by my silences. There was never a moment in my life, when I stopped talking to you.
Long flights dredges up lost memories from an otherwise sunshiny life. They come from all the corners, steadily, like coyotes, biting away small bits, from my otherwise well preserved sanity.
From my childhood, comes echoes of laughter, and playing in the sand, and jumping off trees and beautiful looking Didi's and school teachers and sir Raj, smoking charms, endlessly. The laughter bounces off my brusque facade of professional chicanery, and chips away some paint on the go. Right from under the starched white shirt front, I bleed blue, as I remember myself and my sis, playing, alone, under the guava tree. We were young once, and our life was full of each other, forever.
From my youth, my grand uncle calls out, in a voice unheard for a decade. I see myself grinding arecanut for him to chew, in return of cardamom treated raw tobacco. I see us painting the front lawn red, together, three generations apart, chewing home grown betel. Some bit of that red betel haunts me again, sparkling red splatters in my otherwise clinical, lab life.
And then there is that wide expanse of tranquil greens, amidst which my grandma sleeps in peace.
It's a long flight. I wish for this journey to end. I look forward to being home again. It's a journey well begun. Some day, I got to be home again.
The train that I was on stopped at a small station on route to its destination. There was a sudden silence that fell like a velvet robe across the train. The station was absolutely empty. No guards visible, no vendors, no beggars, no dogs, no dripping of water from leaking ancient pipes... Absolutely nothing. It was almost as if the visualizer had morphed a train full of tired people into a 3d postcard.
Right then there was a shudder on the other lane. A train thundered across the rails at a speed that for me was incredible. Such was the speed that it did not allow me to count its bogies. Such was the speed that I almost forgot to breathe for about 30 seconds. Now I knew why my train was halted at this junction. We had to give way to the faster train. Our journey was about to end in an hour, this one's had only begun.
I see my little nephew raise a storm at our ancestral house even as his grandpa looks fondly at him, loving the coiled energy in the child. The young are in a perpetual hurry. The old get glued into postcards.
I just finished this book. It left me disturbed. All the hours spent lovingly turning the pages came to a naught. There was no poetic justice. The villain was not caught, the hero did not get the heroine. It opened up so many loops that never closed. It was like a dream interrupted, a limb torn off. Stories have no right to end this way.
But some stories are like that. They are quite like our lives. Half lived. Like a dream interrupted and then lost to everyday living.
I miss many people in my life. I miss the dead but I miss some of the living a lot more. I can see them going about their daily lives, and their everyday lives look just as good without me.
I miss a lot of people in my life. Those whom I miss, rarely miss me.
The next station is New Delhi. Gates will open on the left. The constant crooning of announcements lull me into a trance.
As I consume time and distance, I don't want this ride to end. Everything is so clean. Everything so much in control. Each of us sit silently sullenly looking into some point on the roof that is really not there. Nobody catches my eye. They don't want me to remember them. Nobody wants to remember me either.
It's a ride. And it is all paid for upfront.
