Love is like the reflection you see on the surface of water. It looks exactly like a thing you already know. Something that looks and seems recollectible. But you cannot really touch it. You cannot really remember it in your heart. You cannot really feel it at will, can you? You feel something in your heart and your body. It is lust. You know it. When does that become love? And what are the signs? And how do you not confuse it with friendship or lust?

I have always been a believer in the notion that once you say the word Love out loud. You feel it in your 'Heart.' That it is that easy. But I am not sure anymore. What is love really. The stubbornness of the word is so confusing. It refuses to budge. It's as if it can have no other meaning. Is crush love? Is infatuation love? Or is love referring to something long-term? But then when at the onset one says “I have fallen in love,” how do they know it's long-term?

I still think of these things. Yes I am that juvenile. I feel so much. So passionate I am and so confused. So inward-looking. That I am constantly looking for a marker which will show me what love is. Purple for Love! Yay! Yellow for Crush and so on and so forth. 

28 and still at it.

Over and Out. No. Not Yet. But I am finding it difficult to enjoy the life I have created around me for me. Every bit of it is my doing. And that, now that I think of it, is exhilirating in itself. Especially, this – I accept it's my own doing. However, I am drowning in a vat of unrequited love. I know, I know. Yikes. Sounds artificial and pretentious and brought on by self. Yes Yes. Sounds almost like an excuse to mope. Must Be. But It's back. Omnipresence of Melancholy. I can't see beyond a grey haze of regret, of what-could-have-been and unrequited lust, but of course. Pity Party - But of course. Even as I write this much, I am engulfed by sadness. Sadness, which brings real-life tears to my eyes. The tears in themselves are not not uncommon. But Usually I shed them for fictional life/love/death I see on screen. But of late, all my tears are for me. My 28^th Birthday is around the corner of time. I feel the magic of that age will bring some sort of revelation upon me and when I wake up on Monday I will be a different person again and I will be able to cross a gap of some sort and 'Get Over' to the otherside. Where there is no drama, neither within nor without. Where I just am. At peace. Feeling unmitigated joy. Unadulterated. Where lonliness is welcomed and seen as more 'me' time. Where I start again to depend on myself for love (and sex :) and stop trying to fill voids. Let me enjoy the voids. I also want my energy back. I have been sleeping a lot in the past few weeks. And all of this points to a bad thing. But that I am aware of it is half the battle won. Right? So I wake up tomorrow and start to do one thing differently everyday.

1. wake up an hour earlier everyday.
2. Thus go to sleep an hour earlier everyday.
3. Walk 3 kms during the day or night everyday.
4. Smoke 1 cigarette less everyday as compared to the previous week.
5. Don't give the friday club night a miss for any reason.
6. Write in blog everyday.
7. Get a dog? A cat?
8. Watch 4 movies every week.
9. Read 2 books every week.

She lay. We’d lain that way for... for not more than 5 minutes. We were probably... no definitely, not thinking of each other. My mind was on a moment that had unfolded within that same physical space with another. I was again lying to the right - My left hand on her head quite similar to how it had tried to entwine in his hair. My right hand firmly around her or in between her breasts on her sternum, whereas it had then been loosely wrapped around his waist. My face was tucked under her arm, just as I had wanted to tuck it under his, but instead I had placed it rather tentatively in the crook of his neck, trying to taste the skin there, while he had resolutely turned his head the other way as if his mind had been made up, while I had struggled and drowned and resurfaced within the crook of his body.

Have you ever felt like you were in the middle of your dinner, what you thought would be a 4-course affair; and just as you were half-way through your soup, the other one, the only other one at that table, spits out the cherry pit, licks the ice-cream spoon clean, scrapes the chair back noisily and leaves the table.

It hadn't been that long. except of course in her head. but she firmly believes that just cos something's in her head doesn't mean it's not true. so an eternity it's been. the Y at the end of the word, really puts the lengthiness of the word and time in perspective for her. like infinity. eeeeeee. someone shrieks in her head. the window in her room overlooks this rock. it's very like the window and the room in her head. The real rock is big, overwhelming and fenced in by ancient grey-green trees and batches of this, filigreed, hardly there leaves. Unlike the real rock in her head. which looms large and stands like a monster, ever changing shapes and size; it stands on an always stretching barren land, sometimes translucent almost, thats when she's at her peaceful best and at other times made of dark grey pebbles of desire and unfulfilled wants. 

She's  noticed the rock outside her living room window and promised herself that she would take the time out to look at it and admire it. It had been raining that day and the rock in her head had almost melted. it's been 2 weeks of space and time but she hasn't really looked out to admire anything except the hot Hyderabadi summer.

The opaque rock now looms large. Every night has been filled with people. Good people. People with shared history. Brand-new people with potential. and the rock now really looms large.

She has of course oscillated her whole life between her effusive and loner self. both feel so right. so her. both are her 'reality' -  her honesty when she is in them. After moving on, she retrospects and rationalizes. But how much ever she is aware, of her rocks and other rubble within her, she is still not able to demolish them. there sometimes rises this innocent desire to accept that. that it is inevitable. that there are different sides to her. That her highs and lows can reach great elevations and depths than is safe for her heart or mind. she knows of the 2 poles. but she is still unable to control. Swinging back and forth. She thinks sometimes being less aware might have helped. but to to be only aware of the Nizami rock outside her living room and not the more ancient one in her head, seems pitiful. she hates self-unawareness in others, she's horrified at it in herself. The answer to it sometimes seems to jot everything down and make poetry out of it. dark, ugly, frothy, pretty poetry and cluttered prose. She tries, she tries. She churns out poem like structures out of the fissures of her soul. Nobody realises that they are her wounds her welts, sometimes self-inflicted. Or do they?

Sometimes, instead of creating this self-study in words, she wishes she could have a biographer instead. Someone else. Involved in her life. Who would ask valid questions, edit out her narrative and punctuate it with understanding or even an acknowledgement of her uniqueness, only because they love her. And so she seeks this. A biographer. Someone who would rid her off this painful process of lying on her living room carpet with a pink pen in her hand, writing about her rock, which now looms very large and is menacing in its closeness to all her senses. It's shutting her down. It's coming closer.. it's.......

Love story I’­­d thought it would be. Solid, sensual, earth-shattering and tangible. But it was all smiles and pretty hair and smatterings of borrowed scenarios from the best of Mills and Boon, but because it tried to be better than that, it ruined any chance of the real romantic. I tried you know. To feel something. Anything - But it left me cold. Cold. Yeah very pretty it was. Very. But that’s it. That’s that. She smiled too much. Too easily. Her smiles should have been in spite of herself and the situation she was in. Instead it was readily given. Toothy, wholesome - Completely inappropriate. His veins stood out, nostrils shivered, voice shook, eyes watered, but, but….. Nah! Where was the love. I saw nothing that made empathise with them. I didn’t necessarily root for them. When they died for apparently they couldn’t live without each other, I laughed at the absurdity of it all. It could have been my cynicism. My belief that, ‘come on! Get over it!’ and ‘Life goes on.’ But it wasn’t that. Cos I don’t feel that all the time. Somethings are worth waiting for, worth pining for, worth may be even dying for. But with those two, I didn’t feel it. Believe me! I was primed to cry for love or its loss. Instead I yawned, ate pop corn, then Thai food, and then played out some scenes of my own. But that a story for some other day.

Census

I got counted yesterday. As an Educated/Single/Bengali/working woman.

p.sssst - Nobody asked my caste!

Sometimes at #10

I’m probably just repeating myself. I do that. Life is a long series of the same and co-incidences. I am probably repeating myself. Have I said ever before that the summer in my city is everything superlative? Quite literally, it is awesome, it is brilliant, and it is severe and probably quite beautiful, if you have a mind open enough to accept it, to even embrace it. The mornings shine like the mirror. Every reflective surface will blind you with its one wink in your direction. Within a closed room, a strange sultriness will embalm you. And then there’s the hot hot breeze, which will cool the sweat off your brow and then proceed to suck the last drop of anything hydrating from your body. It is demonic. We stand powerless in its grip. We stand hypnotized by its stern gaze. In the afternoons, the sun glares you down, no matter what protection you took, or how brave you are. Your face will burn, your nostril too and your eyes will water and the tears will dry on your face even before they had the time to disengage from your eyelashes. The remnant salt on your red brown face will taste less salty, more hot and bitter. No matter how much you try, how many times you wash yourself, you will always smell of the summer. How does the summer smell? Like dust. Dust in a dry jar. Your pores will spew ancient dust. You’ll be so dry; you’ll begin to wonder if the summer is outside you or within you. There will be this unanswered, even unqueried question on everybody’s tongue. Nobody but an outsider will ask it. We denizens know giving voice to it only increases your impatience. You’ve sat in a sauna like room, with no power, at 1 in the night, with no breeze in sight or touch. When the sweat pricks your eyes and there’s a puddle beneath you and you are still able to thank the fates that at least there’s no sun, we are insiders. We the real insiders never ask each other, “where, when are the rains?” we instead maintain stoic, severe silence and pretend nonchalance. In the privacy of our balconies, we sometimes look up at the sky and check the cloud formation and look far into the horizon, to search for that first loaded pregnant nimbus cloud. But we never rejoice before time. Sometimes, a quick summer shower catches us unawares. We look outside the window expecting to see the mirror, and instead we see fleeing delirious dogs and gray leaves slowly turning green, clean and the roads a dark black, we quickly leave everything else we were doing and go for a walk. Our summer footwear unsuitable for puddles and slippery roads, we roll up our pants and start walking. It’s indescribable, this relief, it’s difficult to put into words the joys of discovering unknown lanes and turns. New clean gleaming houses almost welcome us in; we scared of their human owners hurry on ahead. We meet several dead-end s. But the weather, the evening will last just a few minutes, so we brave up and tackle them too, and discover forgotten dead lakes and find trees, which give us privacy and some moments which are not new and not original and indeed are as old as time itself, but which this rain washed evening feels quite new and completely and unabashedly our own.

Munchkins

The previous makes me out to be a Smob (SmartSnob). I confess (re-confess) that it’s True. I love the smarts. I crave the high IQs clashing and mashing and creating snobbish, narcissistic, mostly exclusionary ideas. But I love you my Non-Smob friends. I love you for your sweetness, and honesty, your loyalty and your utter nicenesses.

I don’t know where I would be without you guys!

And if you knew me, (and you Do!) you would know,

That that’s true too!

Like Ms Woolf, I fish and the elusive idea surfaces like bubbles. It also stays with me for days like that stain which refuses to leave. But when I open this lid I stop and hesitate and don’t take those steps which will make me what I was born to be, an Author.
Perhaps it just laziness,
Or
Perhaps my fear of failure has caught up with me at last.

And I feel like falling in love again now but only with the impossible ones and so that it doesn’t really matter. And I want to purge and keep myself tied to some unknown but ever-punishing altar of penance. And all that was green, if ever there was has dried and its winter within me. And even love is forced. I had not known that 26 is this withered.

Nothing touches me now. If I died tomorrow I wouldn’t fear or care. For we all know that death is all-encompassing and no memory exists thereafter. But it’s not only this, but also my life. I can’t get excited about anything now. I do get numb and more defeated. And I cry easy. Easier than earlier. And I am more on the verge all the time, on the verge of rage, extreme emotion, sainthood. And I exist only in this un-feeling superior detached self which can see all and teach all but feel nothing. Its cynicism of course, but it’s even beyond that. I have never lived life, life has lived me and where before there was some direction, some guidance, some will, some philosophies, now there is a null. And incompetence makes me cringe and cringe and cringe. And I see as if from very far and I expect nothing and get nothing and if I died tomorrow I wouldn’t fear or care. Nothing touches me now.

i have been spending a lot of money lately. however, given the current state of economy...thats a scary thing and i am going to revert back to being a little kanjoos. A lot of pujo clothes have been bought and 3 perfumes. 2 Dior and 1 CK. And I feel so rich and pampered. I always knew I will be able to love myself the most. However, I rarely smell myself....right now sitting in Confucious, I can smell me...and soon i wont be able to...and there is none around who will say "you smelling nice!"

Orange blossoms cling onto my morning skin. My very intelligent dog  lies, panting after a walk with her father, my father. My mother is trying to time the tea, so as to coincide with my coming out of the bath. My sister enjoying the sleep i awoke from. My extremely disgusting cabmate gives a missed call. Orange blossomed haze helps me refocus. Till i reach work and the day begins to unravel.

Happy 26, A'int it?

This is the beginning, isn’t it?

I can no longer live in La-La Land, can I?

Turned a woman at last.

Some would say I turned that a long time ago but refused to step out and smell the candle wax.

TV is fun again for me!

TV is fun again for me!

First, there is Kahaani Mahabharata ki.

I have read the Mahabharata only once and people were always sleeping with lots of other people and then dying or cursing others and causing there penises to fall off (I am only half joking). I have also seen the Doordarshan one. In fact my early memories were of watching MB on Sunday mornings sitting on my Grandmother’s bed (which was also my bed)

I have looked forward to Ekta Kapoors’s version of it since I saw Chetan Hansrajs’ Bhim on a poster everybody on my way to work and everyday I try to memorize how his body looks naked.

Coming back to it, after 2 weeks we are proceeding beautifully. It is the same story but beautifully divided into 30 minutes episode. It’s grand and well characterized and filled with beautiful people who worked on their bodies for a year or so and I wish people who don’t like Ekta cos she is Ekta watch this and learn Mahabharata, like my sis is.

My foot

I met some people this weekend. Some people I knew about 5 years ago. And they said I have changed. For the good they think. 1- My phone voice is sexy as hell. 2-I have longer hair. 3- I am all lady-like and gracious, (I think he meant graceful)

I hate this post. I think I have changed too, I am now 1- conceding to the fact(concept, I still wanna believe)that women should dress like women. 2- growing my hair so that it matched the rest of my body, ie, BIG. 3- spending money and time on my appearance. 4-Less happy and attractive than I was then.

P.S: I hate this post as its one of my those posts, wherin I talk about my feelings and show the world how i was a better person then.

P.P.S: I am writing prose for premankur, I hope he is reading my blog now. :(

all i have realised

I have realised that I mostly start posts with “I have realised.” ANYwayyy, moving ooonnn...as I was saying...GAH (“Come to the point”) Lots of existential outpourings have spewed forth my mouth, my ears and nose and this blog in the last 30 days or so. Annnnnd....I realise (rerealise so to say) this post too has no point. Sigh! Like my life (“pity party no 37”). Anyway...sigh!... PMS and 26^th Birthday (“Coming Soon”) don't make good drinking buddies...on the other hand..they do do! 

Food for Thought

Last year or so I have been leaving for home at exactly 5:30 or 5:45 unless I had to go to the gym. And these days I just stay back, like I used to, my first year at Google. This is all cos I just cant be home anymore. My lonely desperation has reached its new heights and this time I am quite happy with it. I have to move out of home and I don't want to be able to slip back into the comfort. I want some prickly heat in my life..I need to take some risks, meet new people, set some tough OKRs.

I need to get off this seat and get back home and spend some time at home with people who I feel are starting to think that I am some kinda emotional burden to them. And all this is making me eat more and buy new clothes, and soon they will be mutually exclusive as I wont be able to fit into them. But then I have discovered Revolutions...so I guess I am safe for another 50 KGS................I just scared myself shit...I need to also stay healthy and these are not like resolutions but what I have realised I need to do like 7 years ago...OK 4. And I can hear this boy and girl next door murmur to each other...and am getting a little turned on.

Anyhooo...I have miles and miles to go before I will be able to look myself in the eye, but Soul is a lil rested as I am writing here at;east at last :D

Love you MyBlog...

MMMuuuuAAAAh!

2 years later me and CIEFL, now Tea Flu

and this is my goodbye to this place.
i will never again return to this pink CIEFL
this place to which i probably never really belonged to.
and it saddens me that i now never will.
the 25 minute train ride.
the innumerable minutes spent waiting for the train at sitaphalmandi.
friends kind and loving enough to walk with me till station everyday.

the tank
the tank on which all sat at the edge, never in the middle.
and the tank which probably created a few communities and
to be fair, intimidated many others.
the mess, with its plastic chairs and food i missed on the weekends,
only because i could afford to.

friends made on the first day,
ships maintained throughout.
in spite of the mind numbing GB s.
in spite of 'ideological' differences.
in spite of .....

and here is to the women of CIEFL.
the most unnerving, tongue twisting kinds,
who make me stammer,
and fall in love.
to the women of CIEFL
the stronger race.
goodbye all the girls i liked
and could never say anything to
goodbye to you all to whom i could say something to,
goodbye again


and soon it will be that last day,
that last ticket, saying sitaphalmandi to begumpet.
the last familiar nod from the man at the ticket counter.
the last cig smoked on tank
the last eye contact
the last look
the last visit to sagar
the last paper soap used...LOL
the last groan
the last "oh god i hate her"

the last of the carefree days
the last of the free world
the last of this weird unique isolated place hidden amongst trees
and inhabited by the strangest people,
who strangely are not strange to each other

the strangeness that is CIEFL
this oasis in the middle of this thing called real world,
which one cant find, after leaving through its gates.
leaves a hole in the soul,
now which we will try to
fill by looking elsewhere
for this place called CIEFL

and fail

till we return once again


return to pink CIEFL.


2 years later....I still know I cant return ever again.
The last footesteps taken by my mojri clad (floater-clad, osho chappals-clad) feet were when I left through the end-gates.

For I now wear leather.