Thoughts after having been called cruel

There is a very lonely nerve to confusion. It throbs silently, unsatisfied, defiantly. Defiant in its belief in itself - that this confusion must be valid. It must have, in its heart, something true that is worthy of pursuing. It is a very un-self conscious stubbornness... Something that itches at the edge of one's reasoning. For confusion must imply a certain validity to the discordance - between instinct and another's loud words.

This confusion makes me silent now. Earlier, while in younger blood, it would fuel me... Incite an uncontrollable passion to mouth words... To double into word the wordless cloud in my head. 

Young blood can be self destructive. It will always lose to sudden expectations of tenderness from the other side. For those things creep upon you when you least expect them. 

Somehow it feels like anger shouldn't accompany femininity. Like its a form of cruel that cannot be swallowed. One must engage in a performance of vulnerable defiance it seems. An interesting thought, but i don't have the first clue to getting around it.

In my mind's eye

In my mind's eye I stand gangly tall, with a slight width to my hips. 

In my mind's eye, I take to water like a dived-in otter, I crinkle my hairy nose and shake my bottom ever so slightly. 

In my mind's eye, there is a blue jay at the corner of my vision. 

In my mind's eye, I am standing beside Douglas Adams when he is posing as Arthur Dent while lying stone drunk on a smelly heap of hay. 

I can eat an entire steak, and not just with my eyes. I can hike mountains with a old branch for a walking stick. 

In my mind's eye, I could be the student's mind in Florence. I can see what I look like to an old Victorian lamp. 

In my mind's eye, I sit on the edge of the vibration of music on the walls of my heart. I feel my uterine walls stocking up. 

In my mind's eye, my love for my unborn child scares me sleepless, so much that I dare not do that. 

In my mind's eye I'm gullible. 

Everyone is either collectively smarter, or dumber than I am. 

In my mind's eye, I can feel the hot frying on potato skin. 

In my mind's eye I am soft inside, and softer outside.

Somethings

There is something

To be said

For that unnamed fear

An uncomfortable tugging

At an unimaginable part

On the underside of

What they call the heart

And something more

To be said

For when it is teased

Out of its place

To assume

A monstrous proportion

It blackens

Casts a shadow

And leaves you with

A perpetual drone

Stirring somewhere inside

It becomes

Your incompleteness.

And no intelligent verse

Or sugar saturated word

Can help you coat it

In vain, to try and seal it

Like that root

Growing around a stone

Until a handcrafted ped

Dislodges it

Dislodged now

It reveals

A rough healing

But the sun

Warms with its shining

Bombay.

So heavy eyelid collapsing on bed.
So sluggish and out of breath.
So surfing the world next to tiny open window.
So unwritten on stationery.
So wasteful culinary experiments.
So seeking pockets of the rest of the world.
So comfortably cheap hangouts.
So suspicious of ricksha fare.
So advertising wilderness.
So boringly different all the time.
So no time for hair and lips.
So broken down notions.
So frustratingly atypical.
So un-hot college girls.
So unusually myopic bomayite.
So migrant utopia.
So local train announcements.
So sunglassed lack of grunge.
So so many windows.

Happy diwali and all that

I am not the festival celebrating kind… as in I love being part of it.. but I like to pretend I do it as a chore. Somehow conforming to the ritualistic nature of it always got me down. I didn’t like that it had to be done cos for generations we have been doing it and it’s a happy time, so we must do it. I would much prefer it if someone said it’s a chance to make merry and indulge ourselves. That’s all it was to me anyway. My middle class home had a mother who worked in a bank. And every year she would have applied for the diwali scheme which meant that at the time of diwali.. we all got a humungous diwali cracker package worth 3000 rupees. Every year 3000 rupees. And it had all these goodies and I used to make her exchange the sweets box for an extra box of crackers at the local shop. So we didn’t have to eat badly prepared non-traditional sweets and got to eat the yummy hot ones mom made at home, while we had more crackers to burst.

Even arguments against the noise and air pollution they caused didn’t touch a chord within me beyond a point. For in a tam bram household, very rarely did one indulge in something that was inherently wasteful. You didn’t laugh loudly, you didn’t make special dishes every week and you definitely didn’t buy new kinds of products just cos you liked the ad you saw on tv. Everything was weighed down by The Wait. We were made to wait for our first doll, first bicycle, first telephone, first television. It was ensured that every consecutive generation somehow miraculously gleaned the collective gravity of The Wait of all the previous generations. There has probably not been a single diwali when my dad and mom haven’t sat us down and told us how when they were kids they couldn’t sleep all night cos for the first time in the entire year they would get new clothes and guess what that would be – a new uniform set for school. Those were trying times and I’m sure it was rather tough growing up then.. but we didn’t care. It wasn’t our job to continue revering another’s hardship.

We wanted to burst crackers. Make some deafening noise and revel in the boundarylessness of that. No one could reprimand us for it was the nature of the ritual to make noise. We would wake up at 4 am and sit on teak wood palaghas while patti sat us down and rubbed hot oil into every pore of the body. Gleaming and slipping off red oxide floors all of us would be lined up one by one and given one pittale sombu full of hot water by patti.. and then we could use our ‘modern’ soaps and rub ourselves down. The early morning smell of manjal and nall-eNNai was heady. It told us.. it was time to celebrate. It would stay with us the whole day. Recasting our skins in new textures, the ritual changed the air around us. Suddenly malli-poo clad hair was but natural. We left our convent school sensibilities and dove right in to the traditional.

It isn’t so much the festival as the air it created – clean, sparkling, crackling and new. To be felt from the surface of our skins and radiating outwards. Like vaseline lined camera lenses in real life – or maybe my myopic eyes magically created the soft glow around everyone. It was a perfumed time, kissed by sunlight and the easy boundlessness of our innocence. Skipping along, we never knew we might need the images for nostalgia.

Un-tweetable Shortie

Stray silences and distant 'ayi-je's suddenly shake her reverie. Squatting inside the blue and yelllow bathroom, she realises even her happiness is dysfunctional.

Sigh now. It's the end of an era.

Bandra. Neel. Bandra. Work. Bandra. And then some.

The end of wanton mornings, and hopelessly over-longed for evenings.. of weird new house parties, and truck driver's hangouts. Of mothering myself, mothering another, being un-mothered and then mothering some more.

Its going to be a new freedom now. Freedom from negative labour, negative card balances and an overload of carbs. Now for some of that thing they call family life, whatever that is. It's been too long, I've forgotten what it is. Not that I regret not having it much.. but there's a new pining. A pining for a tiny hot meal after 400 hours of ugly airports and over-done hostesses. Of no time to sleep and too much time to read without the power to concentrate. Of too much hard disk space wasted without time to watch. Of a perenially poor larder and walls that insist on growing. I'm over saturated now.. like my bedroom wall.. retaining too much water.

Now it's the time for padding up the wallet, and unpadding the seat of my pants.. of shared nights and also, shared mornings. Of having many things to get away from at the start of the day and returning to chirpiness at the end of it. Look forward, without teteering on thin ice. Unlock the dreams stocked up, let go rather than grasp desperately.

6 years of wantonness.. and now I'm done. Working on life is bloody hard work.. I'm happy to share the load. Now for some of that 'reaping the fruits'.

Oh! To be able to tuck in at night and wait for sleep to come.