I am putting out the lights.

The darkness smells of candle wax. In the borrowed light coming in through the window, I am writing my memories of you. Such that no one will ever see them later. Not even me.

I live under my blanket, I cringe under the weight of all those layers. The cold night air weighs down on me like leftover guilt.

I fall asleep at some point. I wake up to the street lamps dozing off against the pink sky.

They carry you far, in a wooden box, all tied up and pretty. You’re like a present. It’s as cold as Christmas.

They lower you into a cavity within the ground. It is slippery and we all wear scarves. Mine is blue. They took yours away. It was orange. I shut my eyes tight.

There’s a harsh wind and the dry crackling of leaves sounds like a cruel laugh. I am irrationally angry.

Your parents look like wizened versions of themselves; like figurines made from porcelain with cracks running through them. It’s a sea of colours in the middle of nowhere.

Your wooden box is now rapidly buried under lumps of semi-frozen soil. I watch, unblinking, until I can see it no more.

It’s real. It’s happened. It’s over. I can’t find my voice. So I turn around and walk away, leaving a pair of uncertain footprints in the snow.

The trees are glowing with the afternoon light. The rustling tales get amplified as we come and stand under them.

We try and hold hands because there isn’t much else to do. You keep playing with your hair. It spills on to your shoulders in a riot. I am tempted to reach out and touch it. I don’t.

You have something to tell me. Under the cackling tree, you say you want your things back. Your clothes, that smell of flowers. Your books, some of which are dog eared from quoting and re-quoting passages in the night. Your slippers, pale and blue and smooth from use. I don’t have the courage to ask Why, but I notice that you have pulled away your hands and stuffed them into the pockets of your sweatshirt.

I nod. A brief, pointed nod. You look at me and the corners of your eyes, where my laughter lived for a bit, start to fill up. “It’s really hard. You know that right?” You ask me. You want me to say that I understand. I look at my feet.

We walk back, an awkward bubble walks between us. When it’s time to take different routes, I say See You Soon and you say Take Care, but neither of us mean it.

I ran around chasing sunlight for a while yesterday. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, but I think it had something to do with wanting to keep the day for a while.

My feet were the colour of soot; my hands red with the surge of blood and fervour.

I saw birds circling above me, in perfect shapes, making shadows of moving rings on the ground.

The shadows got longer and distorted and I knew I had to stop running at some point.

The evening came by, despite my best efforts to contain all the sunlight in my arms. The day did end.

In the grey evening light, I realized that disappointment usually soaks through the layers and finds you, even though you deny any deeper meaning.

It's not cold enough to wear a sweater but it's definitely cold enough to be hugged tightly.

We don't dance, but if we did now would be the perfect time.

The cane chairs are comfortable. The lights are yellow - my favourite kind. The liquids keep flowing and the food appears and disappears from the table in a flash. I am in an ideal place, a part of the conversation but not in a way great enough to be required to constantly contribute. 

People ask me about you, you know that already. They ask me about where you are and then they smile, drawing on some memory of you with them. A dinner, a meeting, something you said. There is a lot of warmth in this conversation. 

The stories that follow are stories that warrant posts in themselves. 

Far away and all that. Things I am not allowed to say. You know it all. 

I fell asleep in a sea of comfortable blankets, glowing from the night that had gone by. When I woke up, I woke up happy. 

The small things always get me.

You won’t be standing in your balcony anymore. I won’t wave at you from across the road while I wait to cross and you catch my eye. In the wee hours of the morning, I won’t hear your rubber slippers clapping against the concrete downstairs. In the night, there will be no sounds from your house next door – no opening and shutting of cupboards, or thuds on the floor from a book falling.

The newspaper carried your picture today. You were smiling and that’s how everyone remembers you. They said you will be buried today at 4. It sounds alien. It makes me lean out of my window and look towards yours to make sure that this isn’t a mistake. It isn’t. The curtains are drawn.

Everyone around you hoped that there’d be an end to your suffering. They prayed for your pain to cease. And it did. There’s only relief here on.

I am told that there are stories everywhere. I am looking for them, and sometimes I almost see one and then it darts away.

Bits and pieces of potential stories are stashed away somewhere at the back of my mind, like incomplete jigsaw puzzles. The funny thing is the more you try and fill the gaps, the more you realize that the piece that you’re trying to fit isn’t the right one.

I am trying desperately to paint my tales in different shades. I am attempting to not have them covered in the emotions that lurk in all my posts because in that case, sooner or later your stories start to mirror each other. Then it’s like being in one large story – where the same people and same situations appear under different names and places.

I am told that everyone has a story to tell. I agree. It’s just that there has to be a narrative worthy of the plot. That’s the tough part.

The street lights looked brighter and more exciting, for a reason that I couldn't point out, from the 22nd floor. They looked like fireflies.

When you kept your eyes halfway open (or halfway shut if that's what you you prefer) they looked like jagged lines below. Thrilling but also slightly dangerous.

The air was crisp and our cheeks felt raw. There was a vague floral smell, like lilies and drugstore room freshener. We took pictures with the skyline behind us. The pictures were pretend candid- where you pretend to be deep in conversation or you have a faraway thoughtful look on purpose.

By this point, the concert across the street had taken to a display of fireworks. In the noisy evening, a bunch of electric pinks and greens shot into the sky and disappeared, like sparks of brilliance on dull afternoons.

What am I supposed to do with all these thoughts?

They are all over. Some of them are unpleasant to say the least. The others tend towards being questionable and well, just plain unrequired.

I am sure for a change that they have nothing to do with Monday morning blues in anticipation. They also have nothing to do with hunger or exhaustion or lack of sleep.

One could be hopeful that they'll pass by morning, after I have disconnected from them for a few hours. The thing is I am scared that they won't.

They aren't the transient variety and the fact that I can't really do too much about it aggravates both me and them.

The terrace has a clothes line that can’t be seen in the dark. All of us walked through it and winced a little.

Somewhere far in the distance, we see smoke from a refinery or a factory or some such. We stand at the edge and watch it, our hands stuffed in our pockets, hoods covering our ears. It is cold; a lot colder than we are prepared for, but not so much that we can’t stand outside. The night is pretty much starless and what we see in the sky is what we wish to see, patterns from our mind.

He tells us a story from his childhood –pointing out places and locations in adjoining houses to make it real. It works to some extent because when he takes me by my wrist to show me where exactly he saw the disappearing figure in white, I suddenly don’t want to see it.

We listen to music from a phone; favourite songs and songs that mean something within. This always happens. The buzzed feeling always lends itself to feeling more vulnerable than you’d like to feel. We hum along, then sing with no inhibitions until our throats feel ripped.

We stumble down to fall asleep, the dark sky watching our backs, glad and disappointed at the same time.

Cold Saturday mornings aren't all that commonplace in Bombay.

I had to fish out my sweatshirt from my unpacked Calcutta luggage and wear it while drinking tea. The sweatshirt had a vague travel smell; of perfume and dust and moisturizer that we used in copious amounts while we were in Calcutta.

When I left the house, I felt my lips turn dry and my nose sniffle. This is the closest we will come to knowing what winter is. I kept myself wrapped in a scarf until I got to work. For the first time, the it was warmer inside the building than outside.

The one week hiatus

It was a break, from both the writing and the city.

A whirlwind Calcutta visit; the city that potters around in a lackadaisical manner.

Walking around aimlessly on a Tuesday morning, stopping at every curious looking shop, being unnaturally gleeful that everyone else you know back in Bombay is at work.

A marriage with the usual emotions that it stirs up - happiness, a wistful tug somewhere deep within and an overwhelming wave of "someone my age is now married"

A campfire on a terrace, that was only partially successful, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Driving around the city, trying to make sense of bengali billboards and drinking milky chai from clay pots.

Extreme generosity, hospitality and camaraderie.

It was a green lamp-post in the middle of the street. 

The birds sat under it in a zen manner. A dog sniffed at its base, wagging its tale perhaps to the dying smell of food. The beggars showed off their earnings to each other, a cheap cigarette cradled in their chapped lips.

All their silhouettes danced as the night grew darker and the lights came on. It looked like a puppet show, except the puppets were dark outlines of real people with feelings and lives. 

There was nothing noteworthy about the lamp-post or the people it sheltered, even if for a short period of time. But still it caught my attention and held it for a while, until I passed it by and it became just another thing on the street. 

This is the quietest that the floor at work gets.
There is a conspicuous hum of the air conditioning and faraway sounds of rustling papers and someone folding a plastic bag. There’s the occasional cough and sputter and muffled sound of someone on the phone.
It’s eerie yes, but also very calming. You have the printer to yourself. Granted that it may not necessarily work, but I’d rather deal with an angry printer than ten people jostling to use it. The sound of typing echoes a little and well I have always thought that it is a delightful sound, like stories being created or a tapestry being put together with wooden spindles. Very often, I shut my eyes and type, letting the sound fill me up to the brim.
There is no one else on the floor now. The people in the distance have left. When I crane my neck, I see rows and rows of empty desks, where their computers are still warm from being used all day.
The pantry feels squeaky clean, the smell of coffee replaced by the smell of medicinal flowers from the room freshener.
When I leave, the raw sound of my feet against the floor is magnified. It feels like a lot of people are clapping around me, cheering me on at the end of a long day.

I try to be my own person.

But my person is everyone I meet and everything I see. It is a chaotic medley of all the things I hear, the foods I taste, the words that roll off my tongue with practised ease.

My person is calm on some days and frantic on others. It carefully weighs things sometimes, and other times it is an impulsive, headstrong bunch of emotions.

My thoughts are clouded by the thoughts of others. My opinions try and stand their ground but they sit back and take in whatever opinions are flung its way.

I am not independent of everything around me.

I try and be my own person most of the time, but if you look closely you’ll see several shades soaking through. Like painting the sea with multiple shades just to make it appear the way you’d like it to.

She has big eyes, like saucers. It sounds cartoon-like but it’s true. Her feet are stitched together with red felt and the shoes she wears are lumpy.

Her hands are stiff, rigor mortis setting in, and her face is pale spare the two awkward red circles on her cheeks. Her nose is a little red thing. They call her Cherry Nose for a reason.

Her hair is stringy, golden wool that has dirtied with age. In some circles they call it dish water blonde.

Some days she lies still, a corpse preserved in ice. Some days she comes alive and trots around the house, living hypothetical situations created by others.

It’s hard to tell which one is the real her, they both seem believable, even if it might be absurd.

There are few things I can say right now.

Except that the weather has caught me off guard; it's pretty pleasant for a Bombay afternoon.
And that my bed is a sea of disconnected things, like phones and bedsheets and demure books hiding behind pillows.

The Sunday is what it usually is - lazy but restless, comfortable but painfully lethargic.
Nothing I can do will change that.

There are few things to say.
The afternoon is slipping from under me and I know that in a second it'll be dark outside. 

We'll have breakfast in bed.

On a wooden tray with a ribbed bottom, there will be a blue plate and a big ceramic mug. The eggs will be scrambled and delicious, dry enough to stand their ground but with the sunshine leaking from their edges.

The coffee will be strong and hot, with the stream fogging up your spectacles. Hands will be wrapped around the big mug because it's just the right thing to do. The aftertaste will linger, like that of a stolen kiss in the rain.

The toast, in an open cane basket lined with napkins, will smell of the Sunday mornings of my childhood. The buttery residue on fingertips will stay a lot longer than health magazines deem fit.

After breakfast is done, we'll solve crosswords from the newspaper. Then, we'll go back to sleep.

There’s always that new year resolution that make people make –to be a better person.

You run more. You eat less pizza. You study harder. You don’t slack off at work. You don’t bite your nails. You water the plants. You don’t shout at your folks. You get the drift…

A better person doesn’t really mean one thing. It means that you want to change something but you’re scared to admit to yourself what exactly that is because it makes you feel vulnerable. You then make a broad sweep and do many small things, trying to convince yourself that all of that is contributing towards a change.

And then again, maybe you didn’t fix exactly the one thing you should have but atleast you’re thinner and fitter and your nails don’t look like a bleeding mess.

Fixing things isn’t easy. Attempting to do it is commendable, but it takes more effort than others can imagine. I want to change something about myself too, and it’s harder when it has failed you before.

The insecurities wrap themselves around me in the pseudo winters. It makes me feel colder and full of guilt for feeling bad. It’s strange, yes.

More often than not, the insides of my head are writhing in anxiety over situations that I both create and build up in detail, thanks to an over-active imagination. My plots involve grief and deceit and all kinds of drama. It would be amusing if I didn’t end up worrying about them translating into reality.

Insecurities are like the friends you have because you can’t really get rid of them. You’d rather they didn’t hang out with you, but they do. You don’t have the strength to cut them out of your lives and they know that and fester and grow, feeding off your weakness.

I hope you make time to read and more time to revel in the magic of the experience.

I hope you can get away for a day or two to a place far away in the rains. 

I hope your life is more than train rides and work stress and weight worries. I hope it is larger than all that and full of things that make memories.

I hope you get more than you deserve but less than what might make you complacent. 

I hope you write, because to create something by yourself is the best kind of satisfaction.

I hope you spend time with someone who wants to spend time with you. 

I hope you eat food that makes you grateful about being alive.

I hope your socks remain colourful.

I hope 2013 surprises you. But only in the best possible way.