Excuses.
All kinds.
Sickness, mental sickness, work, work trips, emotional downturns, people trouble, bursitis, writers' block, I-just-don't-feel-like-it.

The blog writing has been infrequent. All the excuses are genuine of course, as are all excuses. I have been reading a lot though. I have been thinking a lot as well. That has kept me plenty busy. I wake up and I find myself weaving stories that are far too realistic to be made into blog pieces. It's complicated, but not really.

My writing has gotten more personal, while it didn't seem possible that it would. I find myself writing snippets on my phone, on the back of notepads and in promising Word Docs. I then wonder if I can blog about it and I get all diffident.

Then I see some of the brilliant writing that some brilliant people I know have done and I get inspired and disheartened at the same time. Then I write and trash it and write some more. All in private. Isn't that how it works?

The light peeps in through the carving on the top. She looks at it often enough but never really opens it.
The carving is intricate but quiet, it doesn't impose, it doesn't demand attention. Like the silence between the music, where they'd kiss against the night sky, his arms around her waist.
He gave her the box at the beginning of the summer last year. Did he know then that it was his last summer, she wondered. Had he decided at that point, that it was all too much for him?
She returned home, drenched from the rains, and found him hanging from the ceiling fan. His head leaned to one side and his mouth curled. Like he'd purse his lips any moment and say "You're beautiful, baby." And then she'd say, "Even like that? All drenched and mucky?" And he'd nod.
He gave her the box for her bangles, because she had so many and she'd have them lying around everywhere. But that never happened. For months after the unfortunate monsoon, the box just sat on one side of the bed. Her side of the bed. She slept on his side, taking in whatever was left of him. The impression on the pillow, a sliver of his perfume. Her heart would beat faster when that happened, and she would cry until her eyes got swollen and her throat closed.
Then one day, on a solo trip to a hill station, she found something in the middle of a forest. The remnants of something dark and terrible but also intriguing and convoluted. And then she brought it back and her heart thundered inside her until she put it in the box and wrapped it in a shawl and hid the box.
The crying stopped. She picked herself up. She ran a comb through her hair and went for jogs. She had a safety net. She had her box, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She knew, if she wanted to, she could go to him.
Comfort is a strange thing. When you find it, you stop needing it as much. And it comes from strange things. Some write about it, some find pistols in odd places.
In the end, they all sleep better

The forever that people speak of is a curious little thing.
There is a long winding road lined with people and trees and people. Some wear top hats and some hold up their naked feet to check for bruises.
You and I are on this road. We don't have the same forevers. Mine is blue and scratched up from the constant rumination. Like an old cassette, the dear things that people wore out through trying summers.
Yours, you don't tell me about. I ask you if it's black and smooth, like the rocks from sea beds. Like the rock you got me from your trip to Greece and you held it up against the sun to show me how beautiful it was. I said, "it's a dark blue. Nothing is ever completely black." And then we kissed.
I asked you if it was green and neat but you said no and you'd never tell me because it's private and I said ok.
Our forevers are like children left loose at the beach. They run in crooked lines, drunk on the summer and their youth before it slips away. They fall and rise, they hold hands and then fight the second after, walking away in childish huffs. When the sun sets, they fall asleep next to each other, tired but with secret smiles playing on their lips.
You and I. And our forevers. So complicated. So many shades of the unknown. So much challenge, so much excitement.
You and I. I wouldn't expect any lesser.

Then I was jealous.
Not because of anything but because her beauty is overpowering. It's all consuming. I can't breathe anymore. Well I can, but it's almost like I can't.

In the rains, her hair was filled with the stars. In the winters, her hands were beautiful through all the wool. When she turned around and looked into the camera, her eyes darted about like children chasing butterflies.

In the nights by the fire, the charms hanging off her wrist made sounds that destroyed you because you were worried that you'd get hooked on to them.

It's like when they put her together, they knew they had to get it right.

They did. 

Corn and lemon and some other things all in a paper cup. I was six. Maybe seven. We walked through Pune and I wore my white hat. The white hat is now long gone, torn lost dead. It was my grandfather's, the kind that umpires wear. He wasn't an umpire but he could have been.

I didn't want to eat the corn. It was too sour. But when I said that I was silenced with stories of children dying of hunger. So I ate all of it and my nose leaked and my vision got all blurred. I didn't throw the paper cup away, because I assumed there are children in the world without paper cups.

I came home and planted a plant in the cup. My grandfather let me borrow some of the soil from his garden. "Do you want me to help you?" he asked. I said no and watered the small soil filled cup for a few days until the cup turned to mush and the plant looked dismal.

A few leaves shot out a week later. They smelled of lemons but not of corn. It died eventually and I threw the whole mucky package into the dustbin. I was sadder than I thought I'd be. But not as sad as the children in the world, I was told.

A break. From writing.

I found myself in Gujarat and amidst silence and trees. There's always work but this time around I found some time to think and unwind and find food that didn't go down quite well with my system. Like someone wise said, it's all an experience.

It inspired me to write a little bit. But more importantly, it inspired me to recognize how much work I need to put in my writing to get down something that is both pleasing and substantial.

I stumbled back into Bombay weak from the failing fight my stomach put up with the food and slept for ten hours straight only. The weekend is almost over but a hugely optimistic part of me is okay with it - because here's another week long scope to mess up in a completely unpredictable, new manner. 

In the crevices in the wall, live people that have lives worth mentioning because aren't all lives worth a mention?

There's Govind with his drying moustache that he oils every night. And his wife with the belly as brown as a stone. She smells of food, like dal perhaps or maybe oil. It's hard to tell. 

Aaram sells mirrors, because he thinks it's fascinating. He tells stories about his mirrors, like how film stars buy them off him because his mirrors are clear enough to reflect the future.

Sarika is the brightest student you've seen but all she really wants to do is be a part of a film where she can sit in a plane. Strange enough, just a plane ride won't do. It has to be a part of a film.

Lilavati, who calls herself Lala, does things she doesn't talk about for the fear of judgement but she enjoys them all the same. In the nights, when she comes home, she soaks her feet in lukewarm water and massages her neck which is terribly sore. 

In the cracks in the ground live people whose stories are as fascinating as their narrative, peppered with words that you'd fear to ask the meaning of. 

As the curtains are drawn, and the cracks are filled with plaster, these stories become rubble because the voices that tell them are unceremoniously silenced.