Grumpy fragments.

It's raining. Everything outside seems darker than it possibly is.

I am on my bed with the laptop on my stomach, watching stuff and willing the internet speed to go up. It's a lazy afternoon - something I look forward to all week and when it actually comes around I don't know what to do with myself after a point.

There were several attempts at writing, but everything sounded either insincere or unbearably trite. I looked through old things, mails and writing pieces that could perhaps inspire me into writing something that wouldn't make me gag. Instead, I stumbled upon all the college memories that made me more wistful than I'd expect to be.

It's the monsoons. They make me gloomy.

Blueberry yogurt is delicious but that's just a blatant effort to change the subject.

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.

The sky is a dark dark purple, like the skin of a grape when you hold it against the light. I see no stars. My head feels clogged; crammed, crowded, impatient thoughts. 

The floor is full of party hats that have been cast away. The paper cups flock together in the corner. The music is scratchy and distant but everyone taps their feet along anyway. There's a guitar and there's occasional off-key singing. There are sticky fingers and ketchup stains. There are noisy whistles that unfurl at every chance available. 

Around me people are speaking in swaying, tear laced voices. They are reminiscing about some part of their lives that has gone away, leaving behind bitterness in a bottle. There's always something that sets it off - a song, a word, a mention of a place where feelings remain strewn, battered amidst the grass. They lie back facing the sky, watching the aeroplanes take off, wondering if they can bring back all that they miss in the capacity of this moment. They wonder whether they will miss this tomorrow, when their senses are no longer foggy and their self esteem has stopped faltering. 

The words start petering off and the stories become more vague. Eventually, there is a audible silence as people start to nod off, their mouths slightly open and their heads at painful angles. 

We stand, only a few of us, holding onto the railing of the roof and listening to music that finds our thoughts and battles them.

We watch the houses in the distance slowly light up, yellow rectangles mushrooming in the dark. 

There's a raw feeling of being awake at a time like this, when your thoughts seem insignificant and your worries worthless. 

Quivering sheets of rain on the other side of the glass wall. Eighteen floors below, white-and-purple trains run along, the rain wetting the disgruntled people that hang on for dear life. There are pebble sized hail stones that hit the glass wall hard enough to get our attention but not enough to crack the glass.

The cars, that look tiny from where we are standing, appear to move at manic speeds, getting to places before the angry rain has its way. Ant-like people scramble for a place to stand.

It gets darker and our reflections in the glass become more defined. A row of faces that stare back in an eerie manner. Hovering heads and disconnected bodies swimming in a sea of discontentment.

That sinking feeling which comes with knowing that the place where you want to be is just out of reach.

Organized worries.

Get a yellow legal pad and a freshly sharpened pencil.

Then, you write down on what exactly is bothering you. If there is more than one thing, make a numbered list in no particular order. However, if there are more than ten things, I’d suggest you make the list in a manner where no. 1 is the biggest worry (like. Renal failure or bankruptcy) and no. 12 is less urgent (like chipping nail polish or empty juice box) 


Then you divide the list (still maintain the descending order of seriousness) on the basis of things that are in your control and things that are contingent on external factors. An example would be, while you can control what tie you wear to go with your blazer, you have no command over the country’s inflation rate. 


After the list has been duly split, into these sections, put away the section which you cannot change. I don’t think you should trash it though. There’s a strange pleasure in ticking off things from a list, so you can preserve that and check the item as and when the world conspires to correct it. 


The section which you have control over gets further divided into whether it stems from you or from other people. I suggest you write ‘me’ or in red ink against each item. In my experience, most of these things will usually come back to you, unless you’re an absolute darling but your husband beats you with an iron rod on a whim. 


Now your lists are ready. Look over them for typos or logical fallacies. You now have two options. You either deal with the things that are upsetting you OR you sit with your feet on a windowsill and wallow in how the world has wronged you while smoking a teaky pipe.


It’s really up to you. Both bring their own qualities to the table.

Stationery woes.

Find a pretty notebook of handmade paper.

It could be a bright blue, the colour of peacocks. It could be green and gold and majestic with tassels. Some tie across the front with a little ribbon, some button up neatly at the side, the hard cover falling perfectly into place. Smell the pages. They smell delicious; the smell of paper and glue and writing. The hand made paper is coarse and warm. It reminds you of scrolls and missives and other old world things that you wish still existed.

Fill your pen with ink; a deep royal blue or a dark shade of green. Watch the drops fall out of the pipette into the body of your pen. Wash the ink stains of your hands, the basin water turning blue.
Open your box of erasers, stiff and tan coloured, soft and pastel. Ink erasers never work too well, pens are for the more careful section of the people, those who know what to say and will not go back on what they’ve said.

Rub the lead off your hands, after you finish sharpening your 2B pencil. Touch the sharp pencil point gingerly. Throw away the pencil shavings, tapping the sharpener against the side of the bin to get the last of the waste out.

Lay everything on a glass top table; the pretty notebook, the pencil and erasers and the smooth ink pen.

It is now that you realize that, like how you worry that your writing will never be as sincere as you mean it be, there is nothing beautiful enough to be written in pretty notebook.

You lock it away in your desk and look at it from time to time. You wait for the day when your earnest thoughts are worthy of being carved on this delectable paper.

The amateur's painting

Hold the paintbrush at an angle, so that the watery blue looks thicker, more pronounced if you will.
Cobalt blue; is that really the colour of water? The 12 bottle poster colour kit definitely thinks so, because the other blue is the colour of ink. Then again blue waters are a magical, mythical thing. Just like how little girls colour the people in their pictures with a chalky pink. No one is pink really. Nothing is pink.

The sky looks a little patchy but so does the sky outside so I guess it isn’t a complete miss. The clouds have a shade of grey that is far too realistic for a painting. I wait for them to rain all over the picture. Little children always ruin pictures. Either their limbs look too awkward or their raincoat sticks out at an odd angle or their faces look far too happy. The landscape stands a better chance of looking picturesque without the scrawny human figures.

Making V shaped birds is alright till about the fourth grade. Beyond that, there is nothing clever about making crows fly around your sky in this manner. There is a branch swaying on the left; the leaves aren’t all the same shade of green. Some are a dark spinach coloured mass, the others are a more amiable green – the colour of parrots.

There are a few rocks at the foot of the tree, round and even, all a smooth brown that looks like a clever amount of white was mixed in it. The trick is to mix in a little ochre. The greater trick is to mix in any number of colours because if you do see a blue-green rock in reality, I am sure you won’t question Nature about its colour.

The piece of art is left to dry, under a fan, held down with a talcum powder bottle and a old chocolate tin. These items, when picked up after some time, leave a wet ring on the page where they once stood. You shrug and say it merges with the picture anyway.

Pre-monsoon thoughts.

The weather mellowed down a little today; my sepia toned world took on shades of grey. I ambled along inside of my head, examining a stray thought on a whim, as the cars zipped past in blurs of expensive reds and blacks.

In the suburban by lanes, last year, I ate raw mango wrapped in newspaper. Behind me, a storm was brewing, and the evening light changed from golden to a menacing black by the time by the time the last mango piece was eaten. I remember reaching home and writing by the window. It didn’t rain however, just stayed like that until night came.

I remember walking on the cobbled streets at Fountain, looking through all the delicious looking books that smell of another time covered with translucent plastic in preparation for the rains, your big blue umbrella doubling as a walking stick while you haggled with ease. I remember walking away, books tucked under your arm; the world around us walking along an edge, where the monsoons would soon storm in, like thieves in an old woman’s house.

There is a salty smell I associate with this time; when the sky loses its cruel summer edge and the cloudy edges soften, allowing only thin glimmers of the sun; the few early June days when the monsoon hasn’t quite arrived but another summer has passed us by.

I sit back and take this smell in, and it fills me up with a dull sense of wonder. I am not a big fan of the rains, but the build up always delights me greatly.

You can write it down a thousand times and it won’t change. You can say it in your mind, or out aloud, and it will still cut through your skin like tiny needles.

You can man up or wuss out. You are welcome to pretend to be at peace. You might make it and you might not. I’ll put my money on might not.

My mind is a jumble of thoughts. I don’t even have the energy to sort through them. If I start now, I am not sure where it’ll take me. It’s like untangling a pair of earphones. By the time, I finish straightening them out, I have reached work and I can’t listen to music anyway.

The days when my thoughts are colourless.

And what is there to say?

That you shouldn’t start sentences with ands and buts.

That some days you feel unnaturally warm despite central air conditioning.

That if you don’t clip your toenails in time, they cut through your skin like blunt knives.

That some days you realize that you made a mistake and now you have to grow up and face the repercussions.

That if you wear denim on monsoon days, sometimes it smells of seaweed.

That some things aren’t up to you and the sooner one realizes that, the better.

That you cannot take people for granted.

That curly hair throws more tantrums than a child at a toy shop.

And what is left to say?

Some times Tuesdays feel like Mondays and that isn’t ever a good thing.

Mismatched Misgivings

The bottoms of my feet are always cut with the sharp edges of eggshells and my palms are always clammy.

I am not a nervous person but I do find myself talking faster and creating hypothetical situations in my head where I am running along the side of a road with a car following me and the driver has a manic glint in his eyes. The car almost always runs me down.

I create extreme mental images of metaphoric buildings crashing down while I am in them and I am killed by careless pieces of stone hurtling down at me. I don’t always die. Sometimes, I survive in a metaphoric tornado and I am the lone survivor. I then feel a smug mix of grief and pride.

It’s not always eggshells. It could be landmines or something similar too, if you get my drift. It needn’t always be clammy palms. You could replace that with a racing pulse or a cracked voice.

My misgivings have a mind of their own. They brew in my head until I am overpowered by them. Then when I concoct a plan to combat them, they disappear.

There is this rule called the 15 minute rule. If something bothers you, you wait for 15 minutes. If it still bothers you, you offer it some mind space. Else, you congratulate yourself on not having wasted time worrying over a seemingly small issue. I am working on it, I still have 5 minutes to go.

Indulgences.

The thoughts come and hover around the corners of mind, while I go through my day refusing to acknowledge them. They come in the form of books I read or something funny I hear.

Most times, I succeed in ignoring these thoughts.

Some times however, I let these thoughts take over my mind for a while. I sit and watch them play their parts, like children in a school play. One of them is the witty one, one the insecure variety. One of them almost always makes me tear up just a little, despite myself. Then the curtain falls and I roll over and go to sleep, in the midst of confused applause.

On an unsuspecting afternoon, these thoughts creep up from behind me while I am lying on my bed. They will me to acknowledge them, speak to them, write them down perhaps. Then once I do that, they beg me to dial numbers I have been pretending to not notice, and send texts that have sitting around in my phone, waiting to be sent but oblivious to what repercussions they may bring on.

There is a small victory in standing up to these thoughts and walking away slowly from your phone. This is the only kind of victory that brings satisfaction but no happiness. 

Disconnected

My cell phone didn’t ring or beep today.
Atleast it didn’t ring or beep for the reasons I’d have liked it to.
It’s not the last day of the week for me; tomorrow is a working Saturday. I don’t think you have an idea how much of a mood dampener that is.
In the elevator on Fridays like these, people look horribly morose. The one extra day is like a ton of bricks weighing them down. There is no cheerful banter or small talk. Only uneasy silence.
Some days aren’t good or bad. They aren’t even mediocre. They’re just a bunch of nothing. They haven’t gone well but they haven’t failed you. There is not much you can do about it. I don’t like to find hidden meaning in these days. Everything doesn’t have to be a life lesson.
I cannot wait to leave, get home and crawl into bed. On such days, I am happiest when I am asleep.

Garbled.

You have to be very careful what you hope for. 

You have to be even more careful to not hope for certain things. 

You sit down, and make a list of all the things that you have been secretly hoping for and haven't been admitting to yourself. Then you take that list and burn it. 

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If something sounds like it's absolutely horrible and you laugh it off because it's never going to happen to you, don't. The strange turns that your life can take have more potential than you give them credit for.

Realism leans towards pessimism because no one likes being caught off guard. It's easier to pretend that you are going to fail miserably and then you can rejoice silently when you scrape through.

Realism is when you use a lot of maybes, because come on now, in reality none of us have a clue.

And those of us who have a clue, run with the clues and then sulk in our soups because we feel short-changed.