Reverb 10.3: Life In A Moment

Another Reverb 10 prompt that made me think and think and come up with an answer I feel is less than satisfactory. But then again, I think the purpose of this exercise is to engage in such questions and be surprised by what comes forth.

December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards)

I first thought these should be the happiest moments and that gave me enough of grief (!) since there have been a wonderous number of them, especially in the second half of the year. But I realized I need to stop feeling guilty about that. Okay, so that’s the touchy-feely Chicken-Soupy bit of it out of the way.

As I started to type out this post, it also occurred to me to wonder whether happy moments are the only ones in which I feel alive. Undoubtedly the first six months of the year were shrouded largely in gloom. I felt like everything was slipping away, not just out of control but out of reach – health, family, friendship, career, creativity. Every single thing that mattered to me was vanishing into a black hole. I felt like I was being stripped away, layer by painful layer and what would be left of me in the end?

This was among the first things I talked to the boy about. He found it difficult to imagine having a crisis of identity of the sort I was describing but he was wise enough to conclude that it indicated our differences not my problems.

I don’t quite know if I felt alive in those moments. Actually it felt more like what I had thought of as my life was just flaking off, chipping off, peeling off in ugly, painful ways, the ugliest, most painful sensation being the fact that they came off so easily. I think this poem from my past captures the feeling perfectly. That time was about one person leading a crowd of others. This time, it was true of every single emotion, way of being, person and relationship. A winding down, a closing out, an approaching full stop.

And then there was life. Just as it is hard for me to understand completely what happened in my head in the first six months, it’s equally difficult to sort out what’s been happening since then.

Mornings are usually my favorite time of the day. I’ve stayed awake through nights often and the subtle start of each day is always one that lifts my spirits. It’s still an odd feeling, sometimes having to go to sleep right after that. But the glory of the moment hasn’t been lost.

Then there are specific moments when I’m swimming, a more recent occurance. I usually swim a number of laps, going one way freestyle or breast stroke. At the other side, I’m usually out of breath so I flip onto my back and float back, my legs gently pedalling and my arms loosely drifting along the sides of my body. The sky is usually a pale greyish-brown, the colour of ash as it falls off burning paper. I often see crows flying in V-formation overhead. I can’t hear the usual sounds overground, of voices, car horns and daily life. But I can hear splashing, bubbles floating by as other swimmers splash past, muffled sounds which is what water does to voices. And it feels like the water washes away the confusions and strains overlaying my thought process. Then the top of the club building comes into sight, which is when I know I’m nearing the edge of the pool and need to be careful not to bump my head. And as I touch the side and drift up to vertical place, I am ready to turn around and swim another breath-challenging lap. Or walk out of the pool into whatever waits for me next.

That’s alive indeed.

Crashing Point

I couldn’t sleep. I knew I had to. I stared in the direction of the wall in trepedition. I knew the clock’s hands were inching towards the crashing point. Perhaps they had already passed. I was too scared to switch on the light and check. If they had passed the point, then well, I would have crashed.

The crashing point is a concept rather than a position of the clock’s hands. When you are a kid, it’s about 43 minutes after your bedtime. At least it was for the kid me.
As you get older, you push the hands of the clock with your eyelids, daring them to crash on you. They never did on the rebellious me.
And I was duly packed off to bed to lie in wait for an extra 15 minutes for pushing bedtime by about that much. The crashing point knows when you’ve started waiting for it. At least mine did.

By the time you are an adult, you’ve gone a few rounds with the bedtime and you’ve lost a few of those bouts. Each time that happens, it is a surprise considering how infrequent it is, compared to how often you seem to win. And it’s a crashing defeat, please pardon the pun. At least it was for me.

The thing about the crashing point is that you really know where it is, after you’ve crashed a few times. That sounds almost Zen doesn’t it? There has to be a reason meditation always felt like a walk into the long, dark hallway with crashing point waiting at the end of it. And in my best times, we danced together, each one showing off our prowess at being able to return to our original places if we so desired.

Then I lost my crashing point.

A few years ago, I started to experience the frantic panic of not being able to get to crashing point at all. It wasn’t exactly insomnia. I woke up in the morning after all and that’s only possible if you have fallen asleep in the first place. And yet, the waking up felt like something else. Like sleep was an intercontinental cruise, a long, engaging journey whose start and end were clearly demarcated and noticeable. This, what I was experiencing, felt more like a tentative wade into dirty seawater and being yanked back, wet and sticky. That feeling wouldn’t go away for the rest of the day. The blurry, topheavy feeling of carrying an entire aeroplane on your head, being afraid to shake your head too much for fear you’d topple right over.

I don’t know now, whether that was necessarily a bad thing. The distance, the absorbedness, the sheer effort it took to just focus that numbed out most of what else was happening to me…I suppose that’s what people otherwise take to drugs and booze for.

The few times I did sleep heavily and well, I woke up feeling like my eyelids were stretched back a little too wide and they might tear in the corners. The day began bright and chirpy with a nursery rhyme ‘early to bed, early to rise’. And then I’d go into the day. A high heel grind into my bare toes. A toenail sluice right off and hang mid-way. A missed station. The sun burning hot, so hot, I had to yank my arm out of the sunlight or turn my face away. And then people. Faces. Expressions. Annoyance. Resentment. Pettiness. Fakeness. Joy, not for me. Jealousy. Bitterness. Bile. And as afternoon arrived, exhaustion.

And eventually, without thinking about it at all, I fell off the sleep bandwagon. Back into oblivion. Crashpointless. Up all night reading. Or so I said. Reading for awhile. Staring at the ceiling. A meditation on the dusty corners. Zen with a dust bunny. Lights out after awhile. Staring at the lights outside my window. An auto creaking its way down the road. Two in the a.m. and this city is still awake. I hated those kind of realizations so I took to shutting the window and curtaining it off even in the height of summer. The tchuk-tchuk of the fan was my background score for each nighttime drama.

Sometimes I’d replay a situation of the day. And then all over again with a different ending. Or a different twist in the story midway. And over again. And again. And again. And before I knew it, the other people were being replaced by childhood bullies, by ex-boyfriends, by screaming teachers or parents, by other people. Who says you need to sleep to dream? Waking nightmares are the real thing.

Who needs drugs, I wrote? Your body is the factory of chemicals, your brain the lab, the projector room and the control panel. I dosed on such potent fare each night. Occasionally I dozed as well, waking up to find my cheeks wet. It was delicious, the pain. And the hangover, devastatingly nauseating.

What I think is this. Living, it hurts. It heals as well but that takes time. And when your life is about bigger, faster, better, right now, there’s no time to even count your wounds or even stem the bleeding. And little by little you’re wearing away till all that’s left of you is a wraith. I’ve always had a talent for self-preservation, unconsciously, that kicks in when my masochism transcends adventure and goes into the realm of being serious. Insomnia was a drug. It had me out cold, just enough to be able to sustain the daily farce but inside a glass case of unfeeling. I would never have been able to bear it otherwise.

It has been awhile since I left behind the life I led, the person I was then. I find myself laughing much more. Sarcasm doesn’t come as often as it used to. And talking, really saying what I think or feel…I do and I wonder why I thought it so difficult. The world behaves differently too. People are nice. Or stupid. Sometimes I cry. A lot actually. And even in the middle of conversations or with other people. That’s news. That’s new. I never used to be able to cry, I think.

I spend days on end just stringing together moments the way kids put beads together. And then one day I can suddenly do everything and anything. A social outing. All the housework ever. Writing. In buckets and waterfalls of words. A blogpost. New chapters on the book. Short stories. And then a word document just because I’ve already posted and how would it look if I shot off 10 posts in a day after nothing for 10 days?

I sleep a lot these days. 12 hours sometimes. And then, 7 hours later, I’m drifting into deep sleep for another 10 hours again. I say, my body is making up for all that sleep deprivation of the years. But I don’t really need that kind of rest and relaxation, not after nine months, not after virtually zero exercise. It isn’t the heat, it isn’t depression and wanting to hide away. I think what it is, is making peace with the crashing point. Whoever called sleep, the little death or a sibling of death was seeing things the way I am. A little death every night allows you a new life every day. It is about succumbing, about giving in, about acceptance. Let go and tomorrow there will be a new person in a new world and how she takes the day is her problem. Today is over and not your worry any more.

I don’t know where the crashing point is. I’ve been staying up all night some nights and through the next day. Or sleeping for a couple of hours interspersed with bouts of talking and writing. Or slept through the hottest part of the day and awake at both of the cool ends. It’s around somewhere, I know it is. I won’t worry. It’ll happen to me. Perhaps it already is happening. The body can and does take care of itself. Its rhythms can even take tampering, just not micromanaging. The crashing point needs to have its own anonymity.

Rejection

Rejection is hardest to take when it comes from someone you’ve handed it to, in the past.

All Carved Up

I love you

is real hard to say. And so is

You hurt me.

But the hardest by far, is

I forgive you.

because it actually says both of the above.

If love be the knife you willingly hold to yourself to feed the life-blood to your beloved, then their betrayal is the rubbing of salt into the wounds. How then, can forgiveness be the healing, when all it is, is brandishing the knife all over again into the already-raw wound?

If love hurts, forgiveness hurts infinitely more.

Caged

If there is a God,
then why did he give me wings and a cage?

NovelRace

The literary world is never boring. And social media is never quiet. Put them together and what have we? My new passion is the NovelRace that Aditya and Samit have organized. Several people, serious writers and others are scribbling away furiously (okay tapping away on their keyboards), to see who can complete a novel of 60, 000 words first by September this year. Participants tweet their wordcounts and some like me, also share their little woes and joys about the experience.

Well…since this is my own, sweet, undemanding blog, let me share what’s on my mind. I’m scared witless. Frightened, terrified, petrified, spooked, horrorstruck, struck dumb (not a good thing for an aspiring story-teller, I’m sure you’ll agree). What if it comes to rubbish? What if I discover that after all these years, I’m not that great at it anyway? Oh horror, there’s nothing worse than losing a dream. Okay, I’ll worry about that later.

Pull back and onto the point. What’s really interesting is what I’ve been learning about writing in the meagre few days that I’ve been in the race. For posterity, some of my big lessons:

1. You can’t write about a character that you don’t like. Get to know your characters well if you are going to tell their stories.

2. A short story can be created from a plot idea and the characters will just sort of fall into place (I know, I’ve done it). But a novel is different, you really need to work on characterisation and build a case for each character in your reader’s mind, for them to empathize with the story. So Character above Plot is my big takeaway.

3. Writing a chapter is very different from writing a short story. I’ve spent so much time ‘condensing’ my writing…into blogposts, into tweets, into 55-worders, into short stories, into read-all-in-one-page articles, into concise reports that I have to learn the art of writing with a lot of words and not boring my reader. I am finding it really, really hard to go beyond 1000-1500 wordcount. And that’s sometimes not enough for a chapter, or well the chapter just seem like fluff.

4. Just because you can string words together well, doesn’t mean you can tell stories well. BIG, HUGE lesson. But ah, I’ll come to dealing with this on a later date. For the time being, this experience is valuable for how much I’m learning about writing.

And hey! I got quoted in a Mid-Day article about Twitter and NovelRace for this, today.

There are others who use it to post recipes or haiku poems. In fact, Novelrace followers are even giving each other tips on what would be an ideal length of a chapter and style of writing.

For instance:

ideasmithy: wonders what is the right length for a chapter. 1-1.5K is as far as I’ve gone with short stories & now one chapter. Thoughts?
allvishal: @ideasmithy Break them up as you like. Wrote a story with 2K chaps once, this one is leaning to 5K. Some may have none or 100.

Signing off now. I have a novel to go write. In the meantime (in a shameless self-plug), go read about my writing adventures on Twitter.

~O~O~O~O~O~

UPDATE: If you’re a participant, follow the participant discussions on the NovelRace Facebook page. Also, a live update of participants’ wordcount is available at the NovelRace website.

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Other NovelRace updates:

1. NovelRace
2. Adventures Galore!
3. If You Fall, Get Up & Run Again!
4. The Lone Runner
5. My Characters Are For Real!
6. The View From The Shoulders Of Giants
7. So Much In A Name!
8. Taking A Stand
9. Everything But The Novel
10. The Long, Dark Teatime Of The Writing Soul

Things It Never Occurred To Me To Wish For

I’ve already established that my life hasn’t gone according the gameplan. But there’s plenty that I never even accounted for in the plan, that did happen. So much that it never even occurred to me to think of or wish for, that actually happened to me along the way.

~o~o~o~o~o~

I met a girl in junior college. She was smart and beautiful. I thought she liked me too but I didn’t know why and I was never sure of it anyway. Then we had a fight and didn’t talk to each other for a long time. I got to know her again, the year I was preparing for the b-school entrances. Then as luck would have it, we fought again and parted ways. And quirky as ever (Lady luck, such a cat, such a dotty old bat) we ended up within a single point of each other in the thousands of people who’d taken the admission test. We went to the same college, we saw a lot more of each other, before I knew it we were bonding. At the end of those tumultous two years, she was the only one standing next to me, propping up my mortal remains. My best friend, my soul-sister, my prize for having endured all those other painful relationships. I am so blessed to have her in my life.

~o~o~o~o~o~

My earliest memory of writing is age 4,  penning (okay, pencilling at that age) a song about a bus, using an upright soap box for inspiration. I contributed to the college magazine, two years in a row, that brought me the sweet appreciation of a teacher whose classes I’d never attended, only because she was also the magazine editor. She gifted me ‘The Little Prince’, one of my most treasured possessions. My teenage years were marked with angsty, angry and secret writing that was abruptly snuffed and revived (my version of self-mutilation). And then there was the blog. And another. Comments. Links. Emails. Friendship. Blogger-meets. Group-blogs. Editorship. Media mentions. An audience. A space to call my own. A world of my own.

~o~o~o~o~o~

The relationship was the turning point in my life and I can clearly see my life as pre- and post- that experience. All along I had been fed the idea of independence, of liberatedness and of not needing a man to be happy. But it was only after going through that nightmare did I truly experience that understanding, in my very bones. For months afterward, I was jolted awake by a new emotion – immense, overwhelming gratitude. I couldn’t believe just how lucky I was, what a narrow escape I had had that I had not ended up married – or worse, pregnant – with him. I really felt like I had been granted a reprieve in life. And that feeling slowly evaporated, giving way to hardness, an unshakeable faith that I would rather be alone than go through that again. I remember reading Gone With The Wind, a gift from my favorite cousin, in which she had inscribed,

This is not a book about love or the war. It’s about never giving up.

It was my personal Tara moment, when I promised myself that I’d never cry over a man again.

I don’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It is a fact that I’ve never had a real, lasting relationship since then. I’ve also never been broken or defeated since then. I’ve lost the desire, the aching need to belong to someone and with it, I’ve also relinquished trust in men and caring about their opinions. Yes, I’ve been alone for over six years now (relationship status independent). I’d be lying if I said I was never lonely. Far from it, I’m lonely more often than I like but each time I am, I just have to think back to this time and I know I don’t regret my desicions.

~o~o~o~o~o~

My state of mind has spread to every other aspect of my life too. I used to be the girl who always wrote postcards on vacation, called up people and asked, “Why don’t you ever call me?”. In these past few years, I can’t remember the last conversation I’ve had to initiate, the last time I’ve chased after anyone for affection or friendship. I am not necessarily proud of it and I really admire the people in my life who are there solely on the basis of their effort and very little of mine, often forgetting that I used to be them a short few years back. But I’ve just gone too far into walking alone and the ability to reach out which comes from a need to bond with other people closely has just been burned right out of my being.

My career and everything else I do has changed too. I never thought of myself as an ambitious person; not me, the back-bencher, the almost-dropout. But in the past few years I’ve found myself with so much of time and energy and a desire to burn it away as fast as possible so I have no time to get into messes. It seems to be showing results. I’m doing well in everything that I’ve taken up since then, my work, my hobbies and my activities. I still can’t get used to it though. After having been branded a loser with no future, I seem to have grown a Midas touch. It’s scary.

~o~o~o~o~o~

I can’t change the fact that I am a passionate, fiery person. So all I’ve done is unconsciously divert all my energy from personal relationships into my activities. It can’t be all bad and it keeps me engaged and brings me a lot of attention and respect, something I never would have thought would be mine in such magnitude.

In sum, I had a vague idea that I’d be ‘happy’ in ten years time. I don’t have a straight answer to whether I am or not. But I also never thought to wish for independence, admiration and success and they seem to have fallen into my lap, quite inadvertently. Ah well…life, that crazy old bat, be careful if she invites you around to tea. There’s no telling what she’ll put into it.

Not According To Plan

I wasn’t a cool kid. I wasn’t a hip teenager. I was perpetually confused, secretly angsty and with no Lakshya. I had no life. But I had a plan. A decade later I look back and wonder, How ever did things turn out so differently?!

Here’s how.

I dropped out of college for a year so ended up graduating a year late. Still, I thought I’d make up for it with extra effort in that last year. I almost made it. I missed getting into the b-school of my choice by 2 points.

I also managed to get my heart broken and shattered to smirtheens (some of the shards have still not been recovered) by the person unlikeliest to hurt me – my best friend. The worst bit was that I had resisted him for years, knowing all along that it would ‘only end in tears’. It did and knowing that beforehand didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

I still had a plan and at that time I couldn’t think fast enough to change. So I decided to give it one more shot and just revise my schedules by a year or two. Everyone advised me to not spend that year sitting at home and studying. So I got a job. My first job changed my life in unimaginable ways.

First and foremost when I fixated on MBA, I decided that with my innate interest in human behaviour (I used to cut physics classes to sit in on the psychology courses or reading popular theories on human interactions)…human resources would be the place for me. In the seven months that I worked for a marketing agency, I realised that my interest and my skills lay quite elsewhere and thus came the first change in my gameplan. I switched my preference from H.R. to Marketing. It’s a change I’ve always been grateful for. I think I’d have been miserable as an HR professional.

Secondly I was working (still driven insanely by a desire to prove myself and leave the failed year far behind) and preparing for the entrance exams together. In that very fine balance, I somehow tipped over into work and at the end of the year I was even further from that prized college admission than I was a year back.

So I squared my shoulders and decided a change was in order. I reasoned that it did not make sense to spend more than 2 years preparing for a course that lasted 2 years (no matter how prized the degree/diploma may be). It was the first ever big desicion of my life and I remember it clicking into place practically overnight. I brooked no arguments from family and friends (all eager to see me follow in the footsteps of my high-achiever cousins) and (quite surprising to me) no one asked me to consider changing my mind. I had never thought of myself as a desicive person and it was odd, how right that felt.

So I started my post-graduate program at 22 instead of 20. I was still keen to stick to the plan.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

I never anticipated the dot-com crash, the twin towers falling and the economy dipping so bad that there were no jobs available when I finally finished b-school at 24. I also did not think (not in my wildest dreams) that I, of all people, would fall into an abusive, destructive relationship. These two things are inextrobly linked in my mind as the causes of the most tumultous phase in the last decade of my life. At 24, I was drained out of every drop of my hopeful, cheerful, inspired energy.

On one hand, it was a stomach-twisting experience to scrounge for jobs (when I’d got my first one with practically zero effort) after an MBA (and I thought it would actually enhance my prospects) and when I did get offers, it was for half of what I had earned as a fresh graduate. On the other hand there was the acrid, heart-burning sense of humiliation during the relationship and the residual low self-esteem and hopelessness after it ended. I felt like every single positive emotion of love, joy, happiness and hope had been wrung out of me and stomped to death. All that was left was an empty shell of a human being with nothing at all to look forward to.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

I finally got a job six months after the b-school graduation. It was an triumph and an angry triumph. Not a happy celebration but an ‘up-yours’ answer to the placement cell I had walked out of (on a matter of principle, such pride I had in my beliefs in those days), the classmates who’d borrowed my notes for two years and then refused to acknowledge me at the farewell meet because I didn’t have a job and everyone else who’d written me off as a failure.

I also found a man, not the love of my life, not a steady relationship but the love that healed me. The difference is the same as that between a nourishing, hot meal and a life-saving drug. He salvaged what was left of me, the real me, the one that could feel..and for that I will forever be grateful to him. But I did not fall in love with him or find that elusive soulmate connection in our relationship.

That experience blurred my definitions of love and relationships. Timing stopped being a part of it after that.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

At the end of that year, I realised that it was a miserable job, one I hated and that drained me of whatever little joy I was managing to dredge up everyday. In the second no-two-ways-about-it desicion of my life, I quit my job and career, indefinitely. It was the biggest and best desicion of my life. My parents asked me when I was planning to go back to work and I replied,

Maybe never.

I’m sure that didn’t make them very happy but I was all out of the make-other-people happy ingredient. I’m proud to say that I continued to pay my own bills and didn’t even need to cut down on expenses in those paycheck-less months. I’m also happy at the memory of the next alumni meet I went to, where the same bunch of people who’d followed me through college, ignored me at farewell, sucked up to me again as soon as I got a good job, finally had no clue how to react. One of them said,

You’re on a break? Wow, lucky yaar. I wish I could do that.

I replied,

Why don’t you? Have you taken any loans? Are you married or supporting someone else? Haven’t you saved anything from the past two years?

Once again, that ‘up-yours’ feeling but laced with a little less bitterness. I don’t know if I was growing up but I think I was definitely starting to be a little less intense about other people’s reactions. Not forgiving of them, (oh not yet) but at least accepting that some people would be jerks and cowards and miserable louses.

I think I did put the 5 months to good use. I wrote a lot. I took long walks on the beach by myself. I fell in love once and let him go, with complete peace and not a leaf of anger or injury. I learnt to read the tarot and even wrote a blog about my spiritual experiments. I blogged and discovered that I had a captive audience.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

Then I woke up one Thursday morning and said to my mother,

Today I’m going to get a job.

And it really was as simple as that. I drafted my resume and mailed it out. In less than 24 hours, I had a call lined up. I trekked across the city for a written test, stayed back for an interview and was offered a job before I even got home. By Tuesday next, I had accepted and was poised to start my new job in 10 days.

In those ten days, I finally actualised something I had dreamt of since I was 18. I got a tattoo (which went on to become my personal symbol and logo). On the same day, I watched the love of my life get engaged to someone else. That week, I severed the longest, most poignant (and poisonous) relationship of my life and walked away, vowing not to shed another tear for him.

I was 26.

~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~

So much has happened in the 3-odd years from that time. The only thing that’s been constant (apart from change, as the Gita would remind us) has been the company I work for. I’ve been promoted twice, had 3 bosses, changed office locations twice and made an internal transfer. I still don’t know if I’m ‘someone important in the workforce’ as I’d hoped but I can reasonably entertain such illusions.

I still love kids and continue to hold out for the dream that I’ll be a mother some day. Maybe I’ll adopt, maybe I’ll get a donor. Or maybe my plan will just shift by oh, about a decade.

Three-Quarterly Review

While everyone in the accounts departments sits heavy on numbers and does a stock-taking quarter-by-quarter of the year that was, it occurs to me to do the same with my life. Except this is a three-quarterly review. Of my 29th year.

I’ll be 30 this July and it’s an odd thing but instead of feeling 29, I’ve been feeling ‘one away from 30′. It’s like the way numbers are counted in Hindi where 19, 29 and so on are one less than the nearest 10-multiple. Okay forget that, yes, it is the big Three-O looming up ahead. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a big deal (yes, even if I know theoretically it shouldn’t be, life begins at 30 yada yada…). I’m human after all and there’s so much swirling in my head, I’m not waiting till July to write about it. And thus begins the 30 diaries – a special set of features on the experience of hitting 30.

So what has been happening these last three quarters of my one-away-from-30 year? Plenty.

Love life: A non-boyfriend and a non-relationship. The customary one-in-a-few years check in on someone that went off well. Ask no questions and hear no lies. A few crushes-that-go-nowhere. A pang.

Travel: I visited two new countries. My first visit to Europe (well I’ve been to London but that was on work and I had no sight-seeing or fun) and my first time on a cruise as well. I didn’t write enough of about it. Frown.

Career: I changed jobs. Well, technically I’m still with the same company but in a completely different role, practically a 180 degree turn. Do I like it? I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t hate it. Yet.

Media: I got featured in the press a few times. Only once accurately. These journos, what to tell ya…

Death: I’ve attended two funerals, both within a fortnight of each other. One, my best friend’s father who succumbed after a long and difficult struggle. The other, a wonderful and dear colleague whom I still miss.

Interests: My favorite bookstore was shut for 4 months on account of a fire. I received books and only books as birthday gifts. A book-voucher as a gift from a reader. And another as a V-day gift.

I’ve written and written and written. (Yet another) group-blog. I didn’t contribute to the Kala Ghoda Gazette this year despite attending the festival.

Every now and then I remember that I used to paint. And promise myself that I’ll take it up again. Still waiting.

Last night I dreamt that I went on stage to sing. That was after facing numerous hurdles like the compere scheduling me without telling me, a new compere not letting me on stage, the orchestra packing up (wherein I begged and begged the restaurant musicians to back me up and they did), another guy sabotaging my audience by paying them off, a semi-drunk wandering up on stage and ruining my song by singing off-key. Oddly I ended the song with my back to the audience but they gave me a loud encore. Wherin I woke up. So another reminder. I used to sing too. And I used to sing well, not just in the bathroom. Ah, the lives that we let go of with the choices we make!

Health: Twice in seven months, I had major health scares – arthritis and spondilitis. Both of them turned out to be indicative of calcium deficiency caused by a Vitamin D deficit. I didn’t know whether to laugh or frown when the final prognosis was,

Worry less and get out in the sun more often!

Ironic that very morning I remarked that,

I’ve turned into one of those horrible people who feels guilty about taking a day off from work, even if it is sick leave.

Ironic turns to miraculous when I remember that a decade ago I dropped a year from college, without remorse or second thought. When did I turn into super-efficient whizkid? This isn’t me, this so isn’t who I am.

Haiku: Chronic Thinking

 

I decided to say yes
You wanted time to think; I think
to learn how to say no