My Rules of life or just everyday Arunlekhaisms - 1

1. Have empathy for everyone. Everyone.
   [ It makes every bitching session very long winded as you end up switching sides because you feel like you understand the motives and that had you been at their place, you wouldnot have done anything too different]
2. Don't be ashamed of the truth. Truth will set you free.
   [No matter what we have become and how much society has conditioned us at being average and have homogeneous aspirations. Truth remains the same. However, Any sentence beginning with “According to me” is not the absolute Truth. It is your opinion. Truth is that CO2 is a pollutant.]
   p.s: If you have a low self-esteem, admit it. To yourself. That will help stop you from hating others who seem to have high self-esteem]
3. Apologize for your mistake.
   [It feels great. And not only for altruistic reasons. Make your apology in clear words and sentences. Say what exactly what you are sorry for. And what you are not sorry for and if you want to dicuss things further, you should. You will feel strong and completely in charge of your own actions.]
   p.s: It's O.K to apologize to yourself if you are the person whom you have let down
4. Don't make the same mistake twice.
   [You will be embarrassed about all the apologies you will be making to others and mortified about the ones you will be making to yourself. Learn from your mistake and resolve to never repeat them again. Analyze your mistake and learn about yourself from it. Make a note of the patterns and try to change them if you can't live with them]
5. Listen to yourself.
   [All of us who can afford it, have a prickly soul. We cry and get upset or depressed or alienated. Take time out of the things you have to do, like, study, work, eat and the like and get to know yourself. Check for your instinctive reactions. Don't be alarmed if your natural reactions are very different from that of the societal norms. That is your truth and we can't be ashamed of it. Never let your conscience stay guilty. Never. Never. Do whatever you have to to make amends and then make peace with the situations and promise yourself, to never let your conscience feel like this again.]
6. Remember in Minute details.
   [In order to learn. You have to remember your life in details. Plus, your life is worthy of being made into a movie or a sitcom at least, wont do you good to forget]

To be continued...

Relatively Dark

I was about 5 when I realised that I was darker than my younger sister. And immediately my 5-year old me deduced that darker probably also meant coarser, uglier.....

I would go around comparing the colour of my skin to that of my mother's and my grandmother's and would still come up with the same answer. I was clearly a brown skinned little girl whereas my sister, my mother, and my grandmother were yellow, cream and almost peach, respectively.

My even fairer mashi would come to visit Kolkata every winter with my rosy-cheeked boy cousins and the four of us would play and have our pictures taken and I stood out as the darkest and I felt almost unclean. I would try to scrub out the 'moila' but I still remained as brown as ever. A day in the sun would turn me coffee-coloured and them red.

Looking back, I saw that I was well-loved, pampered and almost spoilt by my parents and grand-parents. There were never any direct negative comments from them regarding the difference in skin colour. Looking back, I saw that my family tried to never make me feel bad about being dark. My grandmother would sing 'Krishnokoli Aami Taare i boli' to me all the time. 'Kalo ee jogoter aalo,' was a oft-repeated line. There was an anecdote about how the Doctor who delivered me told my mother that she now has a 'Pauroma Shundori' daughter. And then with their faces etched in difficult-to-hide disappointment, my mother or her mother would lament how I then grew darker because of the hot-oil massages they'd given me as an infant. I would then joke, saying good for those encounters with Hot oil, for I was a much healthier kid than my sister, and I rarely caught the sniffles. No, there were never any negative comments.

I was positively taught to consider being dark beautiful. But, sadly, if not for that I would have never known I was dark.

They tried too hard to make me accept myself, whereas, at 5, I had not yet looked at the mirror then and had not had any notion of the beautiful or the not.

With all the love and all positive reinforcements in my childhood, despite them, I grew up feeling ugly and coarse and ungainly (till I was about 11 or 12 when a very dear friend's casual comment about how pretty I am, made me relook in the mirror)

Of course, this is not a linear story. It has circular repurcussions. Since, I was not as good-looking as my sister (it's not only the skin tone – She is prettier), it was again and again said, how I was smart, and how I was such a precocious reader and the like, and my sister grew up believeing she is stupid.

Anyway. One day I grew up, after years of hearing my family debate about whether I was Shyamla or wheatish or just a bit 'moila,' I relooked in the mirror at 11 or 12 and realised what an attractive -looking girl I was and how I was barely even dark. Especially in Hyderabad, my home-city. 

Pedophobia

And it may hurt me, I suppose. It may hurt my individuality I suppose, to realise that I am not unique. And that the life I have just lived, which in reality I have not yet finished living is not just my life, but that myriads of children like me, have had the exact same childhood. Parents arriving in their lives from the same stock of 'culture' and 'value.' Diluted by the 'beliefs' and 'education' of similar grandparents. Peppered by similar 'cunning,' 'benevolent,' or simply 'indifferent' aunts and uncles and smeared with same cousins. Cousins who are exactly what I am, or exactly what I could have been had I been born in their family instead of mine. And my childhood plays out like a film I suppose. Colourful, rich, filled with pathos and irony, all seen through my vulnerable, powerless, 9-year old eyes. My childhood plays on and and on in a loop. I change. For I have grown up and moved away from the film of my childhood. But there is still a multitude of similar children stuck in the film that is my childhood, that is also their childhood. Childhood, wherein, no thought sticks out (or it does, but you have to quash it in order to fit in, and you will want to fit in, for you are still a child) and you live in fear. No No, there is Joy! Joy, happiness, surprise, but there is an underlying patina of fear – Of helplessness – Of rightlessness – of not knowing how to fight back (in a world filled with stupid stupid adults). And as soon as you perceive some strengths, some height, some rights within yourself, you rebel. And the adult world will label you, 'Rebel without a cause.' But of course, there is a cause. An umbrella of causes. For everytime someone was unfair to you. And someone was. Most of the time, it was your benign, loving mother or your silent, reserved but adoring father who wronged you. They wronged you by simply being themselves. They wronged you by the virtue of not being perfect. By being parents without really being God. By just being Good, which simply wasn't good enough, when it came to raising a child. Any child. Every child. Me. Everytime, an adult in power said something stupid, something casually, something lightly, without realising that it is going to stay with me my whole life, for I heard it as a child and my clean slate of a mind, simply absorbed it like a sponge.

And then one day I grew up. I learnt to tell the truth even at the cost of not being liked by my peers, I learnt to tell the truth even at the cost of sounding exactly the same as my peers. I resisted the urge to fit in. I resisted the urge to stand out. And I grew up. And for all my failures in life. I try to chase every thought and analyse everything that enters my ears and my mind and what comes out of my mouth, for I never want to do what my adults did to me. To create false ideals and then not living up to them.

And there you go

I am beautiful again.

Mind really cluttered: Upcoming posts on religion and love.

Every night,

The Idol in my head

and I

fight.

9 yellow moons

die

and resurrect themselves

and smile

Bud like Bruises

Open up

shop on my chin.

Blood vessels burst,

paint

a van Gogh

in the canvas

of the whites of my eye.

I crack a rib

I crack two

Alright

I crack quite a few.

It hides

making tents

of my bed clothes.

I wander from

pillow to post

pillar and bed

itching

for the next round of hurt.

I bed hopped last week

lost my earrings and sleep,

and all your pillows and sheets,

reeked of treachery and me.

The demon caught me knee-deep

in other women's desperate dreams

In vain I tried to feel dirty

even as the cross singed me.

As winged hordes danced and leaped

and counted last night's bruises on me

I shook with laughter as I pretended to weep

(as I sat on my favourite god's knee)

and still god's favourite child I continued to be.

incorrigible

My swollen wrists

fingermarked by you

bruised thighs

black and blued by you

images of last night

hijacked by you.

Yet

I woke up alone

starved naked befuddled

once again by you.

Mesong

Not always for me the unspoken. 
Not always for me the subtle. 

I am a brown girl from the earth. 
I grew in the middle of everything. 
I grew in the corner of everywhere. 
I grew being big. Strong. Wilful. Lazy-limbed. 
Not for me the mildly hinted. 
Not for me the whispered.
I thrive on the oft-repeated. 
In the shouted. In the brutal honesty. In the Bald truth. 
I can gleefully chomp on the borrowed. 
I can woefully cry for the unknown. 
I can roll with the punches. I can take that hit. Again and Again, and Again. 
I can carry off the black and blue with the brown. 
I dont tuck my hair behind my ears. 
I dont decry my burden. My Brownness.
I dance. Drunk with the power of the transparent. 
I sway. Heady with the scent of me. Known. Common. Citrusy. 
Men fear. They laugh from afar. Or think me someone else. And hint at something and run away. When I roar at them with my eyes. 
I snap my curls and it rains camaraderie and I gather them in a knot and friends grow foe. My tense calves flex at my bursting energy.
I scatter secrets with my eyelashes and gather love stories with my ears. 
My heart is in the right place and mind sinks in the weedy waters of my neighbourhood pond. 
My intentions are always kind and my actions lost in the serpentine lanes of the monday markets of lust. 
I was born into a maze of thoughts. Into a melting pot of identities. Into the back alley of modesty. Into the slum of morality. But I grew a giantess. And chandeliers glittered in my hair. 
And I can barely see where my feet land. But I stomp on. And on. On rubble of pulled down vanities. 
On the down filled dream of the ancestors. On the mud filled gullies of a silly hometown. And sometimes I fall in puddles fiilled with rainbow. 
And sometimes I fall in trenches of the polite. 
And I grow strong and die. I grow weak but survive. 
Hope eludes me. Hope is in my pocket. Hope is my best friend. Hope deceives me. 
And I wipe my eyelashes on my torn heartsleeves. 
And I fly again. Blind. Scared. Stupid. Hopeful.

Deathwish

For each time you looked away
For every time you said no
For every time you came in uninvited
but left before  i was ready
little pieces of my eager heart chipped away

Many a times my fingers itched to touch

that nonchalant hand so close to mine.

My rejoicing finger would graze your back

as i adjusted to your nearness in a cramped space

And that would have to be enough for the night.

For every time you canceled on me

For each time you postponed
For every time you wrapped your hand around me
but you kept your head turned away
Tender Tendrils to that place froze grey


And I hurriedly answer every time you call
And my ears still prick up with your name
And I still remember, and I still remember
And I still hope you do too
But for each day you seem not to care....


Heart chipped......Tender Tendrils........Grey...