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?

Writing comes from trying evenings and wistful times spend hiding under a sheet. It comes from bitter arguments and stony silences.
The dark patches in the blanket that you weave and the frayed edges that unravel leave you feeling like a bus ran over you, but you atleast you have something to write about.
I don’t do too well with happy writing. I can’t write about victory or triumph or candy pink love. I can’t get myself to put together a story that ends perfectly where people meet, their careers are on track, they’ve been in long, beautiful relationships that culminate into marriage and babies and houses with lawns.
My writing a while ago came from the fact that you are somewhere, in a labyrinth if you shall, looking for answers and similar things all while maintaining a distance with a beanpole. The space where you have pitched a tent, where you’re hiding is so far that from here it’s a speck. We tried calling out to you from atop a tree but our hoarse voices were just reminders of how far you are and how stranded we felt.
We tried waving flags at you but they were red and torn and probably not befitting your tastes anyway.
Writing comes from the lack of hope. It is often the belief that scribbling about things will do something towards dispelling the helpless feeling at the bottom of your churning stomach.

Disconnected statements and half baked emotions all line the edges of my bed.

They are living, breathing things that speak with each other. Or so I like to believe. Everything I think and feel comes and stands around me. It's easier to put it together that way, when you think of these things as entities and not just whims of your tired mind.

It's like having a curious slumber party. People sitting at the edge of your bed, telling stories, asking questions. It's like being with a delightful mix of people who may not know each other but know you and, possibly, like you as well.

I shut my eyes at some point, listening to snippets of conversations and voices.

Later, I try writing. It doesn't necessarily come out in a flawless manner, but I have more fun than I   do otherwise.

Emotions get painted on inanimate objects. Books that urge and chairs that weep under the weight of everyone else’s troubles.

How exciting it is to dole out traits to things, to have the last word in how something must behave or react. How thrilling to be able to create a world on your own, to know the nooks and secret trapdoors in a way that no one else can.

Some days writing is all that. Some days it is hard and tiring, like trying to look for something you’ve lost, but in vain.

Some days you write long spaces of crammed words only to trash it in the end with a burning rage of dissatisfaction.

The day, when you write a page, maybe two of something you like, that you’re proud of, that amazes you even if you don’t show it, makes everything up until that point worth it. It doesn’t matter if it takes you two days or twenty, if you create something that makes you happy it’s all that really matters.

The backlog is weighing down on me.

The writing isn't tough, it just takes more to say things because you fear they'll come out sounding flimsy and fake. A lot of the things that swirl around in my head have started to remain there. The talking has become lesser and quieter. The thinking has becoming more complicated. In the addled state of affairs whilst sitting with friends so close that they are an extension of your being the thoughts come out in slow, calculated steps. I won't say if it's pleasant or not; mainly because I don't know.

The words feel more raw and inhibited when the spout out now. The longer you protect them, the happier you'll be. 

Write. Delete. Write write. Delete.

Change location. Try the inside of a car as opposed to the windy balcony.

Try looking Inspiration in the eye. Will you write about the boy with the prayer beads? Will you write a moving paragraph about the beggar with leprosy?

Delete delete.

I'll stand in the rain and shut my eyes. Then I'll talk about the surreal feeling. Or maybe the strange feeling. Or maybe some pseudo angst.

The fallen leaves and the sea breeze are both more poetic in my head. On paper, they fall flat and lifeless, like a bad hair day.

Scrap everything and wait for a brilliant idea to hit you.

If it hasn't come to you even an hour later, lather rinse repeat as needed.

It's hard to create something you're completely proud of. It's hard to make something, shape it and love it, without doubting yourself every five minutes.

Everyday, I write sentences, at times long winded and some times stubby. Then, I look back and wonder if they have any substance or are just pieces of fluff. It becomes hard to tell after a point, the lines blur and my judgement fails me.

I write, reluctantly on some days even, hoping to reach a place where I can nod with some amount of satisfaction at my work, atleast more often than not.

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. 

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.

Ordinary.

In a world of verse, where lonely people are cycling past me, I am alone.

I am alone with my prose. I am alone with my repetitive thoughts and trite words. I have nothing new to say. I have nothing that you haven’t already heard before a hundred times. In my black room, I have circular narratives that bring me where I started. There isn’t depression or glee, there isn’t anything extreme. I am alone with my mediocre, lack-lustre plots.

In the nights, I fall asleep earlier than everyone else. I think of all the things around me. I think of all the people. I think of their stories. I think of their paint speckled hands and their whip like wit. I think of who they are, thin and long haired or small and poetic. I think of all this. Then I don’t think anymore.

In the whole place, with its wide eyed wonder and fickle drama, I am standing here by myself, watching the magic fold and unfold. And fold and unfold.

There was death in the house on the hill and we had covered the tears and intense grief. We did everything we could to build it up to that point, with the torrid love affair between the man and the maid. That was naturally melodramatic enough for our tastes. We pulled all sorts of cards of the man excluding his obdurate son from his will but promising the maid both the house and the rifle on the wall.

It had it all. It had the maid being overcome by greed and then using the rifle to finish the man, on a night with too much liquor. We then had her freezing where she was, realizing how money had made her a monster and then breaking down on the man’s dead body, with the bullet making little bloody marks on her face.

Then we looked at it and then we threw it in a bin where the rest of our stale ideas were making merry.

We turned off the TV and went to wash out brains with soap and diluted rum.

While everyone sleeps, you stay up. You sit with your back against the wall and with your head in your hands. The room is dark, barring the light from the computer screen.

A hundred thoughts try and sell you the idea of sleeping. The bed covers are all balled up at your feet and suddenly you feel the need to draw them close, as the temperature drops. You close your eyes and think. You think as hard as possible to come up with something interesting, something pleasantly absurd, and something brilliant to write about. You read a few things and you’re momentarily inspired, but that fizzles off with the clawing sleepy feeling that now has made some room inside of your head. The idea of working the next day, in a sleep deprived state, isn’t too pleasant either.

You contemplate writing something mediocre. Nobody cares, you think. You convince yourself that you will write something path-breaking soon enough to wipe out the memory of the second-rate piece you’re about to write.

This thought cheers you up for a minute, because this means you can write something and just turn it in, and then crawl into bed.

You write a few lines, feeling strangely liberated because you aren’t erasing them every two minutes. You don’t bother if they’re well written. You don’t bother about anything.

Then, suddenly it hits you and you are taken up with guilt. You write for yourself. Perhaps the people out there will scoff now at your bad writing and then eat their words with your masterpiece, but you’ll always know that you gave up on working your best at something because you were sleepy. You will not be able to shield yourself from yourself.

Then, you write and erase and repeat the procedure till you write something you’re pleased with. It isn’t a masterpiece perhaps, but you know you aren’t let down.

The next morning you don’t even realize that you have slept only for two hours.

Writing about not being able to write.

The table is full of blank sheets of paper. They are just sitting there, looking all nonchalant, whereas in reality they would very much like me to ink them with all that I have to say. I am stuck in this situation more often than I’d like. Sometimes, it’s Word Docs. The cursor keeps blinking back at me, while I shuffle around with font and colour, only buying time until I pull myself together to write something.

A friend of mine used to look at objects to get her to start writing. She’d look at hats and ladles and shoes with broken heels in order to write tales about them. Someone else I knew would listen to music relentlessly until he stumbled upon a word, an emotion, a note that compelled him to spew out a masterpiece.

I try all of these. It really isn’t something that you can learn off someone. It’s not something you can hammer into shape. I try writing disconnected words hoping to weave a story. Some days, I have stories, some days I have a heap of pretentious gibberish that mean nothing to no one.
Then, when I don’t know what to say, I manipulate the conversation to a point where I am bursting with something to put forth.

The cursor then starts flailing, a seizure of sorts, trying to hold all these runaway thoughts on a leash.

Recurring mental images.

I sit back watching multiple pretentious plots crash and burn.

The people in these plots are people around me. I try and think of them in interesting roles. The crazy plant lady becomes a geisha; her lips a bloody red and her leathery neck now smooth and powdered. The man with the limp becomes a detective and wears dark glasses and a hat. He has a gruff voice and thin fingers.

Every time the crazy plant lady walks by, I add a little part in her jigsaw puzzle. Her name is Migaya and she bats her fake eyelashes every three seconds. The silver hair ornament that holds back her tresses is actually a kitchen knife. Then one day, the hunter becomes the hunted.

The detective just buried his wife, because God knows that sometimes the bravest warriors are the ones that shoot at their own feet. He washes up and sits at the table, slathering butter on rubbery toast. He watches the rain come down, knowing that somewhere some grave will be leaking a chalky white liquid that smells like green tea.

The crazy plant lady and the man with the limp sometimes take a cab back home together. I wonder if they know.

Blah.

There was no rain.

The protagonist woke up in the morning and didn’t meet anyone special. He was slated to go for a movie shoot where a beautiful woman would fall in love with him, but he went to the park instead and sat on a bench. He didn’t read or make conversations. He sat and watched the empty park and left when it was too dark to watch anything.

He came home and made baked beans with toast. He almost cut his finger while cutting the crust of the toast off but didn’t. He was meant to bleed to dead as a haemophilic, but turns out he doesn’t have haemophilia. He watched TV with the volume off with the curtains drawn so no inquisitive neighbour (who’s actually a serial killer with an apron) could spot him and slit his throat later at night.

Before he fell asleep, there was no tap on his window or knock on his door. He slept peacefully and woke up the next morning at a time that was neither early nor late. He did his dishes and went to the park again, missing a book signing this time.

There was no storm or background score either.

That night when he came home, there was a solitary letter in the mailbox that had the potential of being ominous. But even that turned out to be a flier for a local clothes sale.

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.

Preachy.

Write about death if you’re good at it. Write about emotions you can describe well.

If your best works are about decapitated heads and dying children, by all means write about it.

Describe the pain of a war widow or the deep hollow inside of the mother whose five year old died of cancer. Spell out the biting indifference you’ve witnessed; people who get over death even before the coffin is lowered or those who don’t base their happiness on anything materialistic. Write about it so I can feel your confusion which is lined with envy. Involve me in your tales, so that I may be able to tell that while you detest the indifference but you also desire it secretly.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ll be as good at writing about happy things, especially when they don’t come to you as strongly. You’ll falter when the sunshine hits you in your chest, you’ll cringe as the calculated happiness leaks out of you. Don’t try and narrate your cheerful anecdotes to me.

I will not relate to it and I will not feel for you. I will be able to tell that your words are just words.

Write about it only if you really feel for it. Don’t write about because people chide you for writing too much about death. The chances are your story of your favourite football club winning a game will come out sounding way more honest than your story about India’s independence.

Don’t worry about all your stories sounding the same. The best stories, like we all know, are the ones you want to go back to and read again, even if they’re familiar.

Write about what matters to you.

Write about what moves you if you go back and read it.

Write.
Write.
Write.

And another monsoon post.

Rain - humid smoky Bombay rain.

We watch it bring down the blue plastic sheets on autos; furtive couples breathe while the unkind city looks the other way for a while.

Water streams across the streets. Tea coloured water with pieces of rubbish floating in it.
A bearded man sells peanuts in newspaper cones. He holds it out to passers-by, calling out the price. Nobody stops.

A child stands at the side of the road and pretends to be an aeroplane. Children do that, arms stretched wide and guttural sounds is all that it takes. His mother begs him to come under the umbrella.

The black umbrellas bob against the beige buildings. The garish ones scream for attention. Neither keep you from getting drenched.

Lazy Sunday afternoon rain. We watch the scene from behind dark windows with our hands wrapped around ceramic coffee mugs.

The thoughts all blur into each other - the reckless children on rainy afternoons, the people, the smells. There is a sense of deja-vu.
The days now all roll into one big burly monsoon. 

And we seek our stories.

There is a playground where the swings creak a little and the metal see-saw heats up too much for children to use it. The benches miss a leg here, a back there. Children run around shrieking, pulling, hurting. By sundown however, the park is almost empty.

On dark monsoon evenings, I see a man there. He carries a navy-blue bottle. The opacity of the bottle hides the contents. Alcohol is an obvious guess. Other guesses, which aren’t as dramatic, include protein shake, coffee or even plain water. I have nothing against plain water but you see, I can’t weave an interesting plan around a water bottle. Then again, even alcohol might lead to a poor plot. Long story short, it doesn’t matter.

He wears a dark coat and sits on a bench, with his head hanging low. He talks to no one. Also, there is no one to talk to. He carries a fruit in his pocket. He eat it whole, uncut. I would have liked him to do it in a savage fashion, but he eats in meekly, like a squirrel. I pass him by, walking slowly, to observe his face. It’s clean shaven with taut cheekbones. His eyes don’t look like they could have ever been bloodshot.

I walk towards a swing disappointed. The man sits there, oblivious to my presence, staring at the empty playground. The whole lacklustre event leaves me a tad bitter. He must be a regular playground-goer, with a mundane job and a nagging wife. The bottle probably has sour buttermilk.
The man gets up and walks towards the gate. From the gate, he turns around and looks at me, unblinking, a surprising amount of hatred seeping out of his gaze. Truth is, maybe he is angry at me for observing him without subtlety.

I, however, hold my breath, hoping that there is some deep dark pool of lunacy swimming in him. He could of course a normal person, but normalcy got no one anywhere. Atleast no where interesting.

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.