In Memoriam.

The small things remain behind.

The thin glass bangles that went up and down wrinkled arms.

The cotton saris that had softened over time; that had been speckled with stray marks of our childhood.

The books, dog eared with age, sitting next to a pair of runaway spectacles.

The familiarity will be missed; of having her in the house and of her quiet enthusiastic presence. The room will be empty for a while and the bed sheets will smell of her. In the night, I will find myself searching for the soft thump of her footsteps.

Earlier today, the thick metal shutter of the incinerator came down, swallowing her whole into its fierce stomach. I stood outside and watched her life become dust in a glass jar. 

It was a full life; one that not many people witness. 

The ashes will find themselves in some holy water body somewhere. In the meantime, she is far away - much happier and in no pain.

The roads were empty. The sidewalks were cluttered with plastic bottles, paper cups, plates and other remains of last night's festivities. The swaying people had liquor on their breaths. They sang disconnected tunes, like broken music systems in old homes.

The immersion parties in trucks drove back into the warm morning light, chattering in delirium about the brilliant lights and the jarring music.

The elephant god, a city favourite, walked into the sea and swam back out with the tide.

He lay in the sand, now just another piece of garbage. The hype like all other things was washed away into the salty water. 

The room feels is full of water; gurgling blue and hissing in parts.

The two of us lie on opposite sides of the room and give out a tight group of bubbles. The window is sealed but the sun rays come in through the cracks and makes bejewelled patterns on the water. The patterns, sea horses and cacti shaped plants, move around without a care.

Our jokes come out less funny and our stories don’t sound as sincere. When we talk, there are no words; just harsh sounds like the bottom a drainpipe. One of us swims across the room and we float next to each other, but in reality we can be only so close in this room.

The next day, the water drains out. I don’t know how, but it’s gone. Our hair is matted and the dancing patterns are now silent. I open my mouth to say something but swallow the sound. You nod; you’ve understood.

Then there are all those things that you really want to tell someone. You wish that you could narrate them all to that one person, all while sitting on the floor of a dark room, who will understand exactly the way you want them to.

Every day, you find yourself bubbling with things to say. Not necessarily happy things or sad things, just all kinds of thoughts that need telling.

But you can’t – because either you will end up sounding childish or inane. You stay mum for the fear of accidentally hurting someone or ticking someone off. You decide that it’s best not to speak, that way no trust is breached and people don’t flare up.

All those things will eat me one day. If you cut my head open, all these things will gush out. It’ll be like standing under a waterfall – interesting at first, but rapidly trying once it picks up force.

The night is full of stars; bright eyed like a child at a fair. We sleep on the ground on thin bed sheets. I can feel the pebbles jabbing into my back. I can smell the vague fruity smell that sometimes comes travelling by with the breeze. I shut my eyes and I feel as if a bright light is closing in on my face, but when I open my eyes there’s nothing.

In the early morning hours, we wake up to start trekking. The stars are now moving away; they fall behind like the backward-travelling trees alongside the train tracks. The sky is pink. I pack up things into canvas backpacks. I drink water from a flask, trying to concentrate on every small action so that I can remember it later.

We start walking, heavy footed and uncertain at first. I turn behind, checking to see if I have forgotten to soak something up. I see the depression in the soft ground where we slept, roughly our size and shape. I look at it and walk away and soon enough the wind blows away whatever little of us was left there.

No tears, his wife said. No tears until they find him.

He went to work, turned on his computer and disappeared. They thought he went out for a smoke. Then when he didn’t come back until lunch, they thought he went to the bank or for some meeting he forgot to mention. By evening, they ran out of excuses.

They called the wife, speaking in a cautious tone, to see if he had gone home. She said he hadn’t and they could hear panic clouding her voice.

They sent out people to search hospitals, parks and movie halls. His wife suggested they send someone to the bars even though he had never touched alcohol. They came back without him. The police took a picture of him, a rather cheerful one on vacation, and promised to do what they could. A neighbour who dabbled in astrology said that he was in danger. He just assumed that his optimistic brethren would have eliminated this possibility.

His wife woke up two days and reminded herself she wasn’t allowed to cry. She touched the empty side of the bed and took deep breaths. She had barely slept at all and felt worse than she did the day before. Her throat closed in on her and her head hurt.

That afternoon they found him on the border of the city. He had been mugged and then beaten after. He was alive but shaken. They called the wife but she didn’t answer. They went home and found her lifeless on the bed. Her body was still warm and her eyes were still dry.

It was like a joke where no-one has the strength to laugh. Real stories do that; they rarely follow the rules of humour and writing.

They sit against the spit streaked wall; scrawny and bug eyed. When people pass, they raise their hands, asking for money. They shake their steel containers, up and down, making a racket with loose change.

The shoe-shine boy sits cross legged next to them. He plays a little tune with his instruments. The dull thud of the wooden brush hitting the rusted can of polish plays out a popular film song. The men stop by and raise one leg on to his pedestal. His cloth runs across their pseudo expensive shoes, back and forth. In the end, they watch their grim faces in their gleaming shoes and hand him five rupees. He touches the money to his forehead and drops it a nook in the pedestal.

The barber tops the pecking order. He sits on a chair waiting for an unshaven man. He taps his feet against the warm ground. He observes his fingers, trimming the nails idly with the scissor in his hands. The old man who comes for a shave also gets an enthusiastic neck massage. The barber pummels and pats the man’s neck with a clapping noise. The old man falls asleep somewhere along the way.

At night, they wrap up their things and thoughts in boxes and containers. The sounds of their trade seep through their things, running along the cracks of the sidewalk; they lie still only to pick up their song-and-dance the next day.

We drove over a wide bridge. The wind filled up the car with a fierce sound. Everyone laughed, because there wasn’t too much else to do. There weren’t too many other cars.

At the end of the bridge, hovering above the water was a ball of silver. It writhed and struggled like a creature in agony. When we drove closer to it, it rose higher and towards us. It wasn’t really silver. Everything glitters from a distance, and all that. It was powdery grey smoke coming out of a plastic tub from the water below. It was dense and foul smelling.

We tried to lean over and see what was being burnt. It was a toy – like a doll or a stuffed bear. There were probably more ingredients in this smoke show because it seemed unlikely that a soft toy would put that up, just by itself.

All the made-for-TV horror shows would suggest that this was a concrete case of black magic. We wondered, as we drove away coughing, if there was a child somewhere far away bleeding from its ears or shrinking into a lump of flesh. Or if the only thing coming out of this was an asthma attack.

The breaks, both from reality and the writing, come with consequences. Two little blog-posts for the next two days, then.

There’s Chinese food bubbling inside me. It’s like I ate embers from a dying fire. The heat rises and falls periodically. Earlier today, when I woke up – I wish I didn’t have to. Everything seemed bleaker. Everything felt like it was covered with a dark, thick blanket. I don’t really recollect what I told myself to encourage myself to get out of bed, but I did.

Now, even though I am sitting at my work desk, looking atleast mildly intelligent, my brain is still swimming through dregs of grease from last night. Two long weeks are ahead of us and unfortunately there isn’t too much to look forward to.

Yes, it’s Monday morning. I don’t think I should be expected to be cheerful atop everything else.

Silently, we are moving to our zen spaces. We are moving backwards, in slow motion, wrapping up our things. We are taking nothing with us. Not our worries and insecurities. Not even memories because we don’t know what they might spark off.

When we reach there, we sit cross legged and quiet. We breathe in thin, cold air. We try and think about nothing. It’s possibly the most difficult thing we've ever had to do. In the quiet room, bursting at its seams with thoughts that people are trying to avoid but are pondering on in the process, we shut our eyes and hold our breaths. We tried concentrating on something neutral like water, but it didn’t work.

By the end of it, there is no peace but a headache from all the effort of emptying out thoughts. We crawled back, filled with shame, to our worries and fears and memories. We sat amidst them and indulged, because it was the easier option.

There’s a puddle of ice and lemons. We jump through it, rubber slippers and such, making a rather pleasant smelling mess. Nobody seems to mind it, which is rare for a room full of serious looking, no-nonsense people. By the time we are done, lemon seeds are stuck between my toes and the exposed part of my foot feels numb.

We eat cake directly from the box. It’s funnily liberating and full of guilt. We are adults, we say over and over again, but we behave like children left loose. In the end, someone pours a bottle of dark liquid into the cake box and it’s a heavenly mix of all the good things.

I fall asleep on my front, hands tucked under the stomach, with my mouth a little open. In the morning, it feels unreal. My head doesn’t hurt and the floor is clean. That is slightly odd, yes

The festival lights are a throbbing  mess. Against the black night and the sleeping buildings, they bare their teeth; like a small-time, children's book demon. Through the drawn curtains of my room, they are making patterns on the walls. Lines that come and go and slowly make my head hurt.

The festival day is behind us. The people in their sunny clothes have left. The elephant God has fallen asleep. The food has been put away in air tight containers. The holiday has come to an end, as it always does.

At the end of everything, what remains is the sound of laughter that rings through the room - like a lost echo on the hillside.
By the time it fades, some wandering traveler comes by and screams again, doing almost everyone a disguised favour.

It’s like sitting in a drum. You can hear yourself whisper. Everything you say under your breath, something derogatory about someone or even something you’re really hoping for, everything comes back at you, louder and more aggressive.

My temples feel warm. The fluids inside my head are making guttural sounds. I have sneezed four times in the past hour. The people around me turn their heads in my direction every time I sneeze. I say, “Excuse me.” and then they look away. It’s an obligation.

The whole floor is cold. Not a regular air-conditioning-gone-crazy cold. It’s like being in a different country. I stick my hands under the laptop, hoping that the weird computer heat will help me regain some feeling in my fingers.

The drum feeling returns. The people here seem to hear my every move. If I tear open a toffee wrapper, heads swivel. If I unlock my phone, they turn to look. My phone doesn’t even make any sounds. It’s like sitting in the midst of very well trained dogs.

In the evening, I pack my things as quietly as one can. The person opposite my desk, who I can’t even see from my current position, says, “You’re leaving?” It’s begins to border on eerie.
I leave the building quickly. I sneeze a few more times and turn around and say “Excuse me.” I am pretty sure the people have heard me, even if they’re far away.

There are fairy lights in the trees, long haired women with tinkling feet and all the food that reminds you of your grandmother’s home.

They walk around laughing and talking, their arms laced together – festival sisters and night time confidantes. One of them bends down to light the lamps. Her face glows and her hand looks a deep red when it cups the dancing flame of the lamp. The other stands by her side, bending over. They move away soon enough, their white and gold saris rippling in the evening quiet.

Their husbands sit on lawn chairs, playing cards on a picnic table. They aren’t the best of friends, but they get by. They place kings and aces with an enthusiasm that increases with the same pace that the whisky level in the bottle drops. One of them makes the effort to talk a little –their jobs, the stock market, cricket, and the usual. It’s met with an equally brief, yet extremely polite, reply. They watch their respective wives from a distance. They marvel at their companionship, their attachment to each other in all kinds of situations.

The night becomes colder and the men become more amiable. The women serve the men on large gleaming plates. They pour, all while chattering animatedly, thick coconut curry on mounds of rich looking rice. They hand out glasses of buttermilk, creamy and peppered. They insist that the men eat more, handing out silver bowls of sweetened milk. After their husbands have eaten and moved a little away for a stroll and some more small talk, the women serve themselves but forget to eat. They regale each other with stories from their childhood. They remember together, their parents’ home, their mothers food preparation that lasted days, the smell of new clothes on the morning of festivals. They hold each other’s arms trying to steady themselves through all the laughter over old memories of odd family members and the like.

At the end of the night, they hug each other tightly. While one gets in to the car, the other stands at the gate waving, as the car drives down the dark road. They both think the same things at some point in that night.

They’re glad for what they have. While they will rub backs and wipe the tears for one another should they need to, they also need someone they can be genuinely happy with. The kind of happiness that isn’t laced with jealousy; the kind that fills you up with strength every time you think you don’t have it in you.

I have seen that face in the rain.

Little rivulets running down the sides, warm and cold all at once. The melting black eyes, like cut up pieces of dark fruit, blinking away the raindrops.

I have walked behind that face, staring a little too obviously at the neck.
I have marveled, more than once, at the glistening tense muscles holding their own; the sliver of brown between the nape and the shirt collar peeking at me.

I have seen that face in the rain.
In the quiet privacy of my mind, I keep looking back at it. Like a child and a firecracker that holds all the mystery; awe and fear holding hands. 

The hand us a bucket of paint. It can be any colour. I choose blue, because that's my favourite colour. 

They hand us a white piece of canvas. We are to paint the first things that comes to our heads. I make a fence. It's pretty fence, really; with even spokes and neat outlines. When they ask me why I painted a fence, I have nothing special to say. "It was the first thing I thought of." I tell them. The others laugh at me, they've all painted seemingly profound things - a green heart with jagged lines and a black horse.

I look at my blue fence and try to come up with an explanation. I can't.

The canvas is still lying somewhere in my desk.

An art project at age 8, where we were being subtly psychoanalyzed.

Dark, humid nights follow the disappointing days, in a mirthless game of Tag. The people are apathetic. They offer no emotions in exchange for yours and no attention either. They walk in and out of the paper thin walls of your day and leave you feeling strange; like there’s a tug in the pit of your stomach.

In these nights, when the clouds all come and make small talk above your home, you wish you were a child again. You wish you were five, maybe six, playing in rubber slippers in the stairwell.

You wish that your days were wrapped in endless games of cricket and tall glasses of juice and your nights were blissfully calm, in preparation of another riotous day.

In the mornings, after you’ve woken up from a warped nightmares and the fizzling hope of a childlike existence, you find yourself wondering when you can sleep again. Then you remember the unpleasant taste that the nights bring along and you are lost; because there’s nothing to hope for even.

There is a new coffee machine in the pantry.

The buttons are a fierce blue and they blink, like what I imagine is that back of a robot. The sides no longer have a picture of a pretty girl with long flowing hair. Now, there’s Pac-Man consuming cups of coffee instead of whatever else he otherwise consumes. One can’t tell if he’s happy or sad by the caffeine intake, because well it’s hard to tell with a face that geometric.

They took the old coffee machine out in a big blue polythene and from a distance it looked like a person. A dead body, possibly mangled, being taken away to be appropriately disposed. The place where the machine was kept was caked with old coffee remnants and half crushed beans. There was a distinct smell of sour milk.

In the afternoon, we went with our ceramic mugs to partake of some new coffee. The machine sputtered and sighed and a rich brown stream of coffee slid into my mug. I drank it with unnatural amounts of relish. There is something very comforting about coffee that doesn’t taste like metal scrap.

The woman died in the lap of a spreading apple tree. She just shut her eyes for a second, and then remained like that. The people walking by assumed she was sleeping and nobody bothered. They just kept walking, stepping on the crackling leaves on the ground.

After a while, a little boy went and poked her arm. She was sitting in his favourite spot and he wouldn’t quite have it. He grew increasingly impatient at her lack of response and finally resorted to tapping her head in a army-like rhythm. He called out to his mother who scolded him for troubling the old lady and asked him to leave her alone. He ignored the mother and started shouting, “Getupgetupgetupgetup” right next to the lady’s ear.

The mother of the frenzied child began to panic. She called out to a few others and they came and surrounded the old lady, gently slapping and watering her face. One of them pulled out her cell-phone and called an ambulance. The little boy looked stricken on gathering what had happened.

The old lady died in a way she had always hoped to; amidst trees and concerned people. It was only a small matter that they didn’t know h

The shiny faces have been dulled by time and experience. The blinking lights from the fancy buildings at a distance now hurt the eye. The rain now fills me more with exasperation than with wonder. The singing birds and the dancing children can just aggravate the passers by. The ringing phone from perhaps a concerned parent or friend is followed by annoyed sighs. The time ahead looks unending and stressful.

Long days have glasses of their own too. Only instead of rose-tinted lenses, they have scratched out, poor quality lenses that make the world look frustrating and difficult.

We are surrounded by tottering piles of papers. I have lost track of the number of sheets I have looked at and number of staple pins I have torn apart to be able to read the document easily. The back of my neck is burning up; a feverish reaction to both the stress and the heat. We have been in this storehouse since morning, but we haven’t found the document we came for.

The storehouse is a square shaped building with a tin roof. There are hundred of shelves, going all the way up to the ceiling. A scrawny boy with the agility of a monkey goes up and down a ladder if you point to some document you’d want to see but is beyond your reach.

The enthusiasm we showed when we started petered off within the first hour of entering this dungeon like place. After a couple of hours, I began to lose judgement. Everything seemed like the right document. The letters formed one large mass, like ants attacking a sticky toffee, and the papers started crumbling under my sweaty palms.

Now, I felt like I was caged in and I could never leave. It had been five hours and the document was still on the loose. There was one last box of papers left on the top shelf and I asked the boy to get it for me. He went up the ladder, breathing heavily, and tried to come down holding the cardboard box. He fell off the ladder at the same moment that I started to warn him that he would.

After we picked him up from between the boxes and their contents, we realized that the little accident had brought on a graver one. The piles had all collapsed and there was no way of now differentiating the papers we had gone through from the ones we hadn’t.

I walked out of the storehouse, into the blinding sunlight, and kept walking until the urge to shoot someone had passed. Behind me, somewhere in the storehouse, the monkey child continued to swing from shelf to shelf without a care in the world.

Haven.

You go away into a parallel world; one where you're alone. I am lying counting cracks on the ceiling and checking my phone. You are away, although you are right next to me, living and breathing in a different space.

The space is dark, just like you like it. It's lined with books. No sunlight comes in. The books glow with the faraway light of your computer. The world outside is shut away, you can't hear anything over the music from your headphones and the impatient thoughts in your head. The space is sacred. It isn't disturbed by people and their petty opinions. It remains untouched by the the troubles of the commoners. 

I fall asleep waiting for you to come back. When I wake up, you're there, wearing a small smile. It's hard to tell whether you're away or you've returned. 

Some days it comes to me more easily than other days.

I find my fingers putting up a performance, flying across the keys with nothing holding them back. Words and sentences are woven within minutes. In no time, I see a page full of thoughts; one that might not be perfect but isn't completely worthless anyway. 

On other days, it's much harder. 

It involves ridding myself of a lot of trashy ideas to finally claw my way towards the better ones. I find myself panicking very often; writing doesn't necessarily comfort you at all times. Many times, I give up and stare at the blinking cursor.

There's always something to write about. Sometimes, it's something obvious like the rains or broken hearts. Other times, it's something you have to look for with a discerning eye. But it's always there. 

Every corner I turned – the sky was a different colour.

The cab I was in drove past a school and I looked up at an orange-pink sky. The children trickled out of the school. The tiny ones, whose school bags where bigger than them, wavered a little under all that intellectual weight. They looked ecstatic on seeing their mothers who’d come to pick them. They dropped their things and began to run about in circles.

As we drove on the sea link, the sky soon became blue, with only a slight hint of the dark side. We crossed all the young couples sitting on their stationery bikes. The sea wind drove their hair into a frenzy. They had to chase after their scarves, which hopped away with the fierce breeze.

As we turned onto the all-too-familiar street, where trees swayed lazily and the home winked at us from a distance, the sky turned a dark graphite grey. People quickened their pace and cars rushed past so as to reach home before the it started to rain.

I walked into the building under the slate coloured expanse above me, with all its stars tucked away. There was a sense of doom to the whole thing, but only in the nicest possible way.

Sea-side love.

Beyond the angry vehicles and the impatient people, there is a little world behind a blue umbrella.
The rain and the sea are riled up. The rain attacks the city with the new found vehemence. The blue umbrella holds its own. It stands strong, quivering only now and then, unable to contain the emotions.

Their world is a lot more secure in the monsoons. Behind the blue fabric, they are overwhelmed with everything they feel. The rainwater runs down their faces, like tears of gratitude. They trace patterns on each other's palms, speaking a secret tactile language.

They inch closer, trying to find a way to express themselves best. Their thoughts remain unspoken as they see a cop in a yellow raincoat at a distance.

They start walking away, worried that they'd have to bare their feelings in front of an irate policeman. The blue umbrella in all its majesty protects then from the rain, but fails to shield them from the judgemental eyes of the city.

The dreams are dotted with fairy lights, like glittering birds flying into the sun. The nights are shorter and the darkness is as thick as a sheet. The dreams are of stories; stories that I create with wide sweeping strokes. They are of cold, snowed in houses and warm brown sweaters. The dreams are dense with a wayward hope that surfaces only when the mind slows down a little.

The glass-panes are fuzzy with the rainwater and smog. I have to wipe out a little smear to look outside. In the brightly coloured dreams, I look out from this little smear window and see the whole place buzzing with a hundred people. Some are wearing mufflers and some carry beach umbrellas.

The men have rolled up tents tucked under their arm. The children have balloons tied to their backpacks. As the electric blue rain drips out of the sky, they hitch up their shelter and start singing. I am not sure what they sing, but their mouths open and shut in harmony.

The little sojourns between two chaotic days are covered in yellow wool. As I open it up, and stand amidst the vivacious fabric, the night peels away. What lies beneath is a long, twisted episode of something that I may not always remember, but will almost always appreciate.

The sacred writing ritual

At the beginning, you sit down and just be. You stay, floating around in parallel realities, and dabble with the voices in your head. Then you write disconnected words, pointless sentences in empty documents and look at them. Then you shut your eyes, as though in immense pain, and think about life and what stories it has offered you.

Then you take a long hard look at everything you've failed to accomplish, given that you haven't been able to come up with one decent plot. After all this is done, you take a break because you believe that time and distance give perspective.

After a long period of time, which involved watching stray episodes of some TV show and checking social networks, you return to writing and start writing about something deep like, you know, regret or self actualization.

You end up, three hours later, with a story about farm animals and a hot air balloon.

There was nothing romantic about the rain today. Nothing poetic even.

Muddy water flooded up the streets. I walked through this, holding my breath, convinced that I will slip and fall to my death in some open pothole. A pregnant woman was reduced to tears by the high-handed cab drivers and the buses that were bursting apart. People kept walking past, throwing rubbish into the water. Runaway slippers and plastic wrappers were floating past me.

It was like we were at the epicentre of a large drain and were trying to get out before the toxic waste killed us.
After a point, the gutters and the street became one. It wasn't even just an analogy by the end of the evening.

The rains failed me today. Instead of a surreal story to tell, they left me with some clammy bitterness that I had to wash away with soap once I got home. 

We are all in one large, widespread trance. We are overpowered by the sound of applause, the smell of leather, the thrill of being swept off like that. The theatre, with its bottle green seats and plaster-of-paris wall figurines is suddenly no more just stone and brick. It's alive. It's breathing. It's clapping with the rest of us.

The actors, oh good lord the brilliance, look like they are living their lines. It's like they rolled on their characters before walking on stage. They seem oblivious to the few hundred wide eyed people watching them. They aren't worried about pleasing anyone. They are a part of something amazing, as it unfolds with all its delicious details and quivering emotions. 

There is then a surge of euphoria as the last sentence is delivered with the unnerving precision. The trance is broken and the people notice how red their hands have gone from clapping passionately without realizing it.

Then in the metaphoric whirlpool, we found ourselves in a tumble. Our arms were not really ours anymore and my woollen cap was on your shoulder. We kicked and pushed and bit. But we held on.

You then walked away, parting the little catastrophe across the centre. At the bottom of the world, after all the water was drained, I sat cross legged, drawing little pictures with a stick. The mud was brown but also red. You returned a while later, and I assumed things were better. You held out your hands for me to see. Claws, you said, not smiling. You have claws, you told me. I ran my fingers on those marks on your forearm; scars from angry wounds. They are beautiful and beastly at the same time. You pushed my hand away. Your fingertips were cold.

They were my fault, I figured; the wounds, the anger. While you stood nearby, I hung my head low because I was too scared to talk. When I looked up, you were gone. There were imprints of your slippers walked away from me in the mud; a perfect pattern. In the midst of this I realized that the whirlpool was gone.

The rains came, and the pictures in the mud were washed away. I picked myself up and tried to follow your path. The footprints were gone, but my memory prodded me with sharp jabs in my back. When I found you, there were no words.

I tried to hold your hand, and this time you let me.