The hiding man.

The hiding man is now behind my curtains. He is  crouching behind the rippling fabric. If he catches me watching in, he slithers away into a corner. He isn't shy per se, but he would rather I don't spy on him.

My black room has been his home for a while, but he will always remain a visitor. He doesn't walk around the room the way I do, he doesn't touch or own any of the things. Sometimes, he walks over and hides behind my books. I see him reading the titles, cocked head and grumpy face.

We never speak. I accepted his presence with more curiosity than suspicion. I nodded at him only once, the first time he ever came by. And when I went for a vacation, I saw him there too, hiding behind an unfamiliar house plant.

I did realize then, the first time since he came, that the hiding man isn't hiding from me. He is hiding with me.

Run; fast and far.

They escaped in the dark of the night. They fled, leaving behind a dysfunctional marriage and unpaid bills.

She took a cab and eventually found herself walking through scores of people. Everyone looked at her, everyone smiled. They said, “You have such lovely hair.” Or “Oh I love your dimples” One of the men in a grey blazer took her by the crook of her arm and led her to a table facing the sea. He asked her if she liked wine and when she said yes, he stood up and poured her a glass; looking her in the eye the entire time. The rest of the night was a blur; she vaguely remembered bubbling with stories. He sat opposite, his chin propped on his palm, drinking in every word that left her mouth. He told her she was beautiful and she believed him.

He walked away into a quiet space under a tree and sat next to a couple of guys who were smoking. They offered him a cigarette and he accepted it, making rings of gratitude in the air. When he put it out, he felt strange. He felt drowsy and surreal. The guys around him were talking about a TV show and he found himself chipping in with his light-hearted opinions. They spoke for a long time, hours perhaps, without stopping to exchange names even. He remembered being rather thankful for the non-intrusive conversation. He enjoyed the span of time where he chose to speak and wasn’t forced into it.

The next day, they turned over on their sides and looked at each other through gummy morning eyes. He told her she was beautiful, but mentally shut his eyes tight as though in pain. She smiled and patted his cheek, but deep inside she knew he didn’t mean it.

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.

The road seems endless.

The people by the side, some in clown caps and some in capes, wave at you and you wave back nervously. Some of them offer you tang, grape flavoured and crystal clear, but you say nothankyou and begin to jog because you have to be somewhere and you don’t remember where but this is the only road.

It’s a one way road.

When you look back you see a large writhing object, like a thousand people in a rain cloud, coming at you. It’s not menacing but it isn’t pleasant either. The people are saying things to you. Disconnected things you already know. Like how you’re lactose intolerant but can keep yoghurt down. And how you hate getting haircuts.

Your slow jog is now a sprint because the people bombard you with inane details of your life which are distracting your thought process and your mind is fogging up. The people up ahead on the side-lines, are taking pictures of each other . They are singing upbeat songs and whistling Belafonte tunes. As you pass them by, they drop their things and starting calling out to you. They ask you if you can make it and if you’d rather stop and join them for some minced meat sandwiches.

The road comes to an end and opens up into an open space where there is nothing. The space is full of nothing. Nothing.

The people vanish from the sides and the object chasing you dissolves into the air. You look behind and the road is folding itself up like a carpet after the party is over. You stand on the edge. You don’t know why you are here but well, you’ve arrived.

Everyone's man.

Today, he is a good listener. He sat through lunch listening to a colleague whimper about a cheating wife. He nodded at the right places and thumped the colleague’s back when he was done. He dropped in a few appropriate phrases that he couldn’t believe came out sounding sincere. There was the age old “This too shall pass” and then there was “you’ll pull through” Neither of which he could provide a guarantee for but since today he was a good listener, he said it anyway.

Some days, he is a funny man. He makes incessant jokes about everything and people tell him what a hoot he is. He is full of good natured jibes and harmless sarcasm. He pulls out one-liners that he’s heard elsewhere but they never fail to impress. In tense situations, he makes people laugh and they look over at him gratefully. He drives back at night, wondering if people could see the dead pan expression in his eyes.

Last week, he was the conscientious one. He checked for punctuation and made sure that the pages were aligned when he punched holes through them while filing. He replied to each of his mails and then said, “It just bothers me to leave unread mails in my inbox” while people looked on with a milder variant of awe. He washed out his coffee mug and he made sure all calls were returned. He had his coffee without sugar and took the stairs instead of the elevator.

And then there are days when he tries to be everything all at once. He laughs and makes impeccable presentations. He makes a visit to a sick subordinate and then makes sure to take some flowers along. He walks home to burn a few extra calories. He stays up at night to finish off a task he took on because it would be challenging.

Even in his own space, he is unsure of who he should be. He wonders what he should do with the ten free minutes. He falls asleep over his laptop, his back bending at a painful angle. He wakes up with a cramp in his neck but he powers on anyway because today he has to be an interesting person and he needs to prepare for that.

She wears scarves with little bells at the edges. A small silver bird, wide winged and intricate, hangs around her neck. Men offer her their coats very often, when the cold becomes more than just pleasant. She takes them with a nod of acknowledgement but her expression has no gratitude. She doesn’t thank people for things she didn’t request for.

In crowded rooms, she is still on her own although there’s a tan muscular arm around her waist. Her eyes don’t move when he whispers into her ear about how beautiful she is. She has a small smile when he asks her if she wants to have dinner again sometime. She always tells him she’ll let him know. Later, when she's alone in her room, she makes a list in her head-she looks at the pros and cons. Usually it's the same. He's nice but he smothers her with attention.

There is something about how she carries herself. There is something striking about her indifference. She's a little condescending, in a very deliberate fashion. It draws men to her like children in toy stores. The toy you want the most, is the one you can't have.

At night she falls asleep, after she brushes her teeth and the bathroom mirror is speckled with water and and errant blobs of toothpaste. Her phone rings more often than not, but she rarely answers. There will however come a day, she tells herself, when she will answer the phone. She, like everyone else, knows that you need someone to be by yourself with. She also knows that, that person will not be the kind who'll call her in the nights.

And the circle will be proverbially vicious.

Fragments.

Some days you try and fit into your skin, try and make peace with who you are.

I float in myself very often, being half the person I like to be. I feel the self I could be hanging on me, like oversize clothing. I concoct ways to fill in the spaces, to put in effort to live up to what I am capable of.

People pass me by, some looking through me, some offering advice on what I could do to live it up.
Then there are the people who don't mind the person I am.
 Weirdly, it is for those people I try the hardest.

Half solved crosswords in the newspaper, held down with the happy yellow box of cereal. 6 down is Baku, the U leading to ubiquitous. The cereal has a free toy inside it – a plastic dog that has a squeaky bark when pressed.

All stray reminders of much deeper feelings.

Your striped blue tie reminds me of your first interview; humble beginnings but extreme gratitude of having made it. The tie hangs in your cupboard, lost among the other neatly stacked clothes. I remember days, very early on in our game, when I would hold it to my face when you weren’t around.

The meaning we attach to inanimate objects; a piece of cloth and a barrage of emotions.

My running shoes always sat next to yours; looking rather diffident next to your feisty ones. You always made fun of my socks, when we went jogging. I never kept up with you and strangely I didn’t mind. There are people you meet, against whom you know you’ll lose a game. But you participate anyway, because atleast that way you have a chance to play with them.

We run as fast as our feet will carry us and as far as possible to get away from something that is never going to go away. It will stay, steadfastly, inside your head until it decides it has bothered you enough.

When we first met, we had deep conversations about intellectual things. We argued and agreed and took equal pride in both. Then, we found ourselves in a place where our conversations were mundane and our pride was over having picked the right movie show.

If these are comforts that come with time, how comfortable would you like to be?

The people we know almost always become the people we used to know. Not because they go away, but because they change a little. They are sitting right next to you but are thinking thoughts that are of a place faraway.

When we sit on a park bench, sometimes we hold hands not because there is overwhelming affection but a vague fear that if we don’t, we’ll slip away from each other.

The lamp casts a deep red light on his side of the room. His face looks as if it is on fire under the surface. He writes with an ink pen, the sound of the nib scratching across the paper echoes through the empty room.

There is no place for writers like him. He doesn’t write action packed whirl wind romances. He isn’t particularly good at creating mysterious stairwells or thrillers in graveyards. He writes about nothing specific. It’s a big verbose confusion of words and stern punctuation. His stories are about the emptiness of things and the lack of real feeling in the world. Nobody gets him.

For the past week, there have been three letters in the mail all rejecting his work. All the letters mention their deep regret over his rejection. He understands but they don’t need to lie. If they had any regret, they wouldn’t reject his work.

He writes furiously filling pages with his cramped inky handwriting. He looks outside the window into the dark and wonders if there is anyone out there who thinks like him and understands his thoughts. He wonders if he were to meet such a person, whether he’d like them. He isn’t a big fan of himself but he prefers his own company more than anyone else’s.

Somewhere on the fifth page, his nib cracks through the centre. It is only then that he realizes that he has been pressing it into the page a little too hard. The ink runs down the page akin to the dripping blood that the readers would love but is not something he can get himself to write about.

He isn't sure of what he can do next. He throws the pen far away and sits in a corner. The deep red light now just falls on empty spaces.

Balloons. He sells balloons.
His wife screams at him every morning. “Try and find another job, will you?” she screams. “The smell of your stupid balloons is making me sick.” He stays mum. Then she screams some more for good measure.
He makes his way through the dizzying crowd outside Dadar station. The women carrying baskets of flowers on their head chatter in rapid Marathi. They throw him disdainful looks, for no particular reason. He finds a spot where it isn’t too sunny and settles there. Nobody buys his balloons. A couple of children pass him by, squealing, running towards the ice cream man. The ice cream man has a sour disposition, but that doesn’t deter the kids. He scowls while scooping out bright pink icecream. They just grab the cones from his hand and skip away. He yells at them for giving less money. They stick their tongues out at him and run.
Then an old woman comes to buy a balloon. She wants a 5 foot balloon that says happy birthday on it. He shakes his head. He has only the regular variety. She walks away. He sighs and remembers the time when he would come with his father to watch him sell balloons. He remembers the number of children who would surround the cheerful man begging for the balloons. Blue ones and smiling ones. Happy balloons in the bright summer sky. Now, no one wants balloons; atleast not the ones he sells. Even his kid doesn't care for his balloons. He wants toys and ice cream and shoes that light up.
He looks down at his wallet as the evening comes by. Nothing. His balloons look deflated, mirroring his general spirit. He makes his way to the station, bracing himself for his wife's taunts and his kid's disappointment.
Then someone taps him on the shoulder. It's the icecream man. He pushes forth a small battered ice box. "Will you give me your balloons for some left over icecream?" He asks. He now looks more tired than sour.
"My wife threatened to throw me out if I bring in more strawberry smell into the house. She said it makes her head ache." He explains.
"But the balloons? Does your wife like them?"
"No, but my dog does. He chases them around the room and it makes him happy."
Then they walk away into the crowd, balloons bobbing and small mercies in ice boxes.
The next day, they look a little less harrowed.
The city moves past them as usual.

I am my own Confusion.

This isn't your life you're leading. It's a dizzying blur of a million things. Your father's ideas, your mother's hope. The fleeting hug your brother gave you before he left. The way your best friend painted your toe nails a scarlet red when you probably would have preferred a tamer colour. This isn't your life.

There are books on Chemistry piled on your bookshelf. Yet, in the dark of the night, you scribble poetry on old notepads. You like your peace, you like your loneliness. Yet, every weekend, you find yourself making your way through noisy teenagers, making small talk about life in the hazy backroom of a bar. You work for a corporate, you wear your stiff white shirts and carry leather handbags. You make cookie-cutter presentations to impress the people on the other side of the table. Yet, ever so often you close your eyes and imagine yourself wandering through the muddy roads of a small town, thinking thoughts in your head that you're obliged to tell no one.

You live in a crowded city, you fit in like you should. You don't have time to stop and gaze at the world. You have some place to be. You read on your phone because it's just convenient. Your handbag has unpaid bills and make-up.

You fall asleep with escape swimming in your eyes. Your mind is full of half baked plans to pack your life up in a backpack and leave. You dream of oakwood book shelves and freshly made buttermilk cookies.

Then one day, you find yourself enjoying your work. You go to the bathroom and shriek. You write more everyday. You jog more everyday.

You stand outside your office holding your papers, smoke snaking out of your thin lips.
 
It isn't your life. It isn't.

But you don't hate it as much.

Also, your poetry is getting a lot better.