The Curse of the Crying Boy.

What do you do when love stifles you? What do you do when you discover the greater hidden secret behind love? The darkest form of hatred. One day, when you realise that you have started to hate the person when you had too much love to give, what do you do? Does that mean you still love the withered leaf? Or have you now chosen to let it shrivel on its own?

What is the point of all the tears you have wasted for being helpless?
You were helpless to such an extent that you could no longer see the pain. So all you did was end it. You decided to whip the dying baby till it bled. You watched it bleed till it made up for all your helpless tears.

You could do nothing when you merely sat there weeping and making those barbed wires. Carefully, choosing the sharpest of the thorns. You didn’t know why you chose the sharpest. You didn’t know if it was to end the pain faster or because you were one of the finest chain makers of the state.
All this while when you were weaving your chain of death, you kept glancing at the victim. He sat there, wounded, and smiling. He knew no one could love him the way you did. Hoping that you would open his chain of barbed wire. Set him free from this torture. But all you did was make the chain longer while weeping at the helpless victim. You knew he will not last long. You knew it was too late, he won’t make it.

I sat there preparing for tonight. Yes! Tonight had finally come. They were going to stone him to death tonight.  I am going to stand on the tallest of the towers and watch it unfold in front of my eyes. I have to watch it. I was one of the kings men.
I looked at the wounded child for one last time.. he smiled at me.. and all he said was.. “the stars are beautiful tonight! Its a perfect night for me to be free.”

The Wild One.

“If it rains Namrata, lets fry vadaams. And then we can lie on the ground and read.”

When do you know it is love? What do you do when your dreams come true? It came true for me. After twenty years of living in a cardboard we just realised we were living in a dream that we had created in those lonely nights when we knew nobody would ever know us, nobody cared to know what we were capable of.

Today our ‘home’ is sacred, a home where four wandering souls love each other and strive on each other’s smiles. As I sit here penning down my little fragments of contentment over mugs of espresso and smokes, she is crouching next to me beneath the loving shade of the old willow tree in the backyard. She looks up at me, her silver nose ring glistening in the sun, she says, “the wind is beautiful, its going to pour.”

I sat there admiring that spirit of the wild in her oversized grey t-shirt as she read out Frobisher’s last letter from Cloud Atlas. Her oversized classes intimidating her tiny face, her talkative beautiful eyes, and the tiny bikini ear studs. She always craved for the unusual.  Always pretending to be strong and never realising that we could see through the pain.

I love her, love how she always notices the things people don’t. That’s how she loved; she will gift you these wonderful fragments of beauty you never knew existed around you. Winking at the bright sun through the green leaves, staring up at the sky when it rains then laughing aloud every time you could not help but shut your eyes. And when you were having a bad day, she would make sure to tuck you in and read you pieces from ‘Little Princess’.

We are all living a perfect life from a beautiful poem. Scared to lose it in a whiff of time, we seem to underline our favourite lines like a five year old.

Like Frobisher said...”.. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.”

The Lost Yarn of Gold

I woke up one morning, to realise that I was lying on a boat in the midst of a vast sea. A sea filled with people. A sea filled with happy faces on tiny colourful boats made of papier-mache. They were all holding on to colourful strings of wools and every now and then they would tug at the woollen threads as if to make sure the bonds were still strong. I was watching all this fun for a very long time, when suddenly a big pot-bellied duck propped himself on the rim of my boat. I was rather very annoyed at that healthy feathered being. With a very stern face I pointed at him and yelled, “Sir, just what do you think you are doing? This is trespassing!” The haughty duck pulled out a thick cigar from underneath his waistcoat and lighted the roll of black tobacco. He pretended to not hear me and went on puffing his smoke. By this time a little embarrassed by the negligence of my existence I sat down and looked away. Half way through his cigar, he offered me a drag. I realised that the so called bird brain not only smoked Arabian cigars, but had a beautiful baritone.  He asked me, “so young lady, where are your strands of attachment?”

All this time, I had never thought there would be any need to weave strands of attachment or love. From where I had come from, we were told that souls were gifted with glistening threads of gold, some were true and some fake. The fake gold threads turned into ashes when they were exposed to the harsh red sun of the dusk. “If you are done pondering, can you please start rowing? I have to reach the island of hopes before the blue birds start singing.”
I don’t know why I listened to him, but I rowed to the island. I rowed for a six nights and six days, and came upon a patch of land which had a blazing purple volcano. When I asked about the volcano, he simply tactfully changed the topic. (The ‘hopelings’ never talk about the volcano I came to know much later in life.)
When he waded down to the silvery stream, he looked back and thanked me. He said he had given me a precious gift, and time has decided to keep the gift a secret from me. Without wasting any more time, I started steering my boat away from the island of hopes. I steered my boat as fast as I could. At noon, I was sailing in the midst of the vast and lonely ocean. Blue as ever, serene and peaceful. I lay down on my back and watched the sun when a flash of yellow light form the edge of my boat almost blinded me. I crinkled my eyes, and from the eye slits all I could see were hundreds of gold threads attached to the edge of my boat. Were they real gold? Will they turn to ash at dusk? I ‘hoped’ not..

Droplets of Darkness

To be or not to be..
Again I aimlessly feel the sudden shudder under my fingers as I go through the old photographs of my touch screen cell phone. I was perhaps waiting for the changed tune to awaken my senses as I matched my heart beats with the dying droplets of the leaking tap. The very familiar sound of the moving fan above us reminded me of its existence as the electricity in the neighbourhood came back. I looked out of my window as a string of golden street lights seemed to crown the roads of this sleeping city. The blurry golden glow could be easily mistaken for the Vanaras Ghat. The old grandfather clock seemed to laugh at me. His wise stare and his constant reminder of these fleeting moments stifled me. It seemed as if he was laughing at my decay, laughing at stillness of the tide. What if he had feelings? Does he have feelings?

The rustling sound of the bed sheet reminded me of the existence of another person in my room. A human being with a heart. A heart colder than the winter frost.

Like a five year old I tried closing my heart from the world, simply by closing my eyes. Pretention is solitude. I felt the darkness engulfing the known strings. I gasped in desperation to hang on to the tune of my city. To the song of my love.

Voices and vices of known faces led to forgotten and forgiven feelings. And I waited.. Waited with my grandfather clock.. Waited for the fog to turn down into dew.

Humorous Miseries

On a rainy Wednesday, somebody somewhere (assuming a superpower exists) took a little pity on me and gifted me a wonderful afternoon. After a tedious week of constant toiling, I got the rest of the day off. I managed to drag along a friend for the mere desperation of a good conversation. Everything seemed perfectly normal, in tune with the rhythms of life. The pouring rain, the steaming hot idlis and the perfectly brewed frothy filter coffee. We sat there for hours debating on ‘society’. What is society? Why do we call it society? Who is society and why the hell should this word dictate our lives? And the list went on.. 

As we sat there fighting for the existence of the societal outcasts, there sat another group of ladies next to our table. I don’t mean to pry on anybody but the decibels yanked my attention to their table. So I sat there concentrating very hard on my coffee cup and pretending to listen to my friend who by this time is on a ferocious rant on the Martin Luther King Jr. 

Meanwhile, in the next table the ladies were having a gala time by themselves over a cups of coffee and onion ‘pakodas’. The harmless home-makers were sharing a moment of privacy as they started unfurling their lives on their very plates. These colourful lives seemed nothing more than colourful façades as they went on to make fun of a certain rich neighbour’s son who found it a little difficult to get promoted from standard eighth to ninth. The peals of laughter seemed to have a certain sharpness, which made me shudder and wonder. Where did it all start?

Where does man learn to discover humour in discrimination? Did it start from Hitler’s racist cartoon of the Jews? Or was it simply deformity in minority?

I started taking a few steps back trying to figure out what could be the reason? Or who could be the teacher? Because, isn't it impossible for a newborn to find humour in miseries? And the earliest memories I could trace back to, was the summer vacations in kindergarten. 

I remember going to the zoo and circus with my aunt. I whole heartedly hated both. I could never stand the stench of the caged animal and neither could I see huge elephants chained to tree trunks and merely controlled by a frail man almost one tenth the size of the magnificent beast. Children’s my age clapped, while I would look out for the nearest cotton candy stall. My intentions of going to the zoo, was only to get pictures clicked with cotton candy in my hand. 

During that very summer in kindergarten; our entire class was taken to “Russian Circus”. We were all so excited. Colourful posters painted the whole city bright. Posters would follow us from hoardings to moving buses. Every time we would spot the posters we would cheer and inform the whole world that the next weekend we are being taken to this very circus. Most of us didn't know what circus was, but we knew that there is going to be an elephant on a giant ball, and may be a tiger that could jump through a ring of fire. Our colouring books also informed us that there are going to be several clowns who are going to make us laugh. Our excitement heightened, as the much awaited day finally arrived. I remember watching a huge black bear, which had chains almost his same weight sit on a chair for us. Me and my friends sat there motionless while our teachers clapped. Why were they clapping? It is a feat? Was it meant to amuse us? 

Then a group of three short men with painted faces walked in the arena. They were as tall as us, but they had voices of the grown-ups. We watched in utter amusement as the three tiny men hit each other with hammers, bottles and knocked each other down. The grown-ups clapped again, and we followed suit. Were they laughing at the deformity? Or is it even legal to call something a deformity as it is in minority? Who are we to say what is normal? Just because the majority is 'proportionate' we term it as normal? On what grounds?  

Brothers Tulsi and Basant, with pet puppy, of the Great Famous Circus. Photographed in Calcutta (By Mark Ellen Mark.)

Or were my teachers laughing at their painted faces? The exaggerated smiles, the exaggerated frowns, pulling off a beautiful charade of painted faces. Almost like them. 

That day we learnt how to laugh at miseries. We learnt that slavery and physical violence can conquer anything. We learnt man is capable of making a wild animal behave like human, just by a crack of his whip. We learnt advertising, and how to hide truths behind colourful lies. We learnt to embrace lies. We learnt to see the world through the eyes of the grown-ups, through the eyes of the society.

Prances and Puffs

Yes, after contemplating for five years I finally decided to start writing. It was honestly not a concious decision, I still think I am a little too high on extra strong espresso and cigarettes and by tomorrow morning I would have conveniently forgotten all about this page. Well, I am hoping its just one of those nicotine rushes and nobody would come to know about these tiny letter that have been hiding with my old jeans in the rickety steel cupboard all this while.

The only reason I was avoiding to write a blog was probably because of this very concept of "writing about yourself". Never thought, it is going to be this difficult to pen down five sentences on "Me." How can somebody possibly know oneself completely to talk about oneself? To break the ice with my readers I can try to start a conversation....

"Hi.. Beautiful weather isn't it?"


(awkward silence)

or,

"Hi.." *wink*

Was I being a little too creepy? Sorry! I will go back to my old jeans and simply talk about why this pair of ripped fabric knows a little about me.
I am a painter by heart, but somehow my fingers refuse to listen to anything they are told to do. Probably the dull paint stains and lead patches will justify my secret passion for painting. Also photography has been very close to me, so has being alone. Taking long walks with my camera and reading poems in stranded coffee shops has been a few routes of escapism I tend to prance upon, and the ripped edges of my jeans would prove the fact that I prance and rarely walk. My pockets would always be stuffed with old chocolate wrappers and hair-clips, mostly because I dislike littering and also because I can never remember to clear my pockets. Lastly, like any other twenty year old, I am born with a hole in my purse, and mind you the hole has not been made by the cigarette manufacturing companies.