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Another day in paradise,
without you,
Is just another day,
for me.

But for you, maybe,
It’s room to breathe,
A place to think
A time to be.

What’s odd is that, in every minute,
in every possible way,
You’re always, completely you.
With or without me.

And I wonder then,
If, to matter to you,
Jailer or Alchemist
Is all I can ever be.

Indeed,
You can never lose.
For, of all things I could,
Those are things I could never be.

The Girl At The Bus-Stop

I particularly remember the details of a particular journey. It stands out in the multitude of other daily routes and frequent destinations that would checker the rest of my working life.

I used to take an AC bus to work each morning where I was spared of the usual Mumbai crowd. My favorite seat was the last one from the back, on the right side. Its window was not interrupted by a frame, the seat itself didn’t lend itself to additional bumpiness on account of being situated over a tyre and it was far enough from the initial seats which would get taken by the occasional non-regulars.

These were my early days of employment and all I had was a battered Walkman to keep me company. In fact on most days, I didn’t even carry a cassette, choosing to listen to the radio instead. Yes, I didn’t even have a phone with a radio on it.

Once I sat down and bought my ticket, I’d settle my handbag to a corner, arrange my Walkman on my lap, adjust the blinds just the way I wanted and close my eyes. The music and the motion lulled me into a gentle semi-slumber, of the sort that I, like most other Mumbai commuters would perfect over the next few years as a substitute to the regular sleep we missed. Exactly three stops (and 7 minutes) away from my destination, my eyes would fly open and I’d awaken fully refreshed. Just in time to switch off and pack away my Walkman, gulp down my entire waterbottle, tidy up my appearance and make my way to the door. The routine never varied.

On one particular day, I couldn’t sleep. Traffic jams and the ensuing horns blaring, even if they were much filtered by the capsule I was in, kept me awake and irritable. And then we passed one of the bus-stops on the way and my head jerked around, almost 360 degrees. At the bus-stop across the road, I caught a passing glimpse of a tall, slim girl with long hair in a ponytail, clad in a bright red top of some sort and jeans. I absorbed all of this without fully realizing why I had turned. It took me a few minutes to piece together with memory before coherence happened.

The ex- had spent much of our time together, playing mind-games and one of his early techniques was ‘My ex-girlfriend was hotter than you, thinner than you, smarter than you, better than you’. It was the most torturous routine I have ever been subjected to and its memory lingered on far beyond the death of that relationship. For every minute in that relationship and a long, painful time after that, I felt ugly, undesirable, unimportant, unintelligent and unlovable. Inadequate. I had never met her and she made me feel terrible about myself.

I struggled to make my peace with my past for a long time after. But I found I couldn’t stop obsessing over what I had heard about this girl. I even tried to get in touch with her, tried calling her just to be able to hear her voice. I wanted to hear a lisp in her speech, one mispronunciation or perhaps spot just one single mole on her face. Anything at all to let me know that she was not perfect. It haunted me for a long time.

All of these memories came flooding back. One time, when we drove past this bus-stop on his bike, he had whipped around and with a practiced solemnity declared that he thought he had seen the love of his life standing there. He refused to turn back or say anything more and after all this while, I suspect it was no more than a ploy to keep me troubled and under his control. Yet, I succumbed to every one of his ploys and tossed about in the black sea of self-loathing and worry.

The girl I had spotted fitted his description to some extent. What was she doing in Mumbai? Was she still living with her aunt as he had claimed? I sank back in my seat, the flood of unwelcome memories overwhelming me. And suddenly I just felt very tired. Very, very tired of hurting so much.

I closed my eyes in despair.

And that’s when I was suddenly conscious of the sound in my ears. The radio had been playing all along, only I had been too caught up in the moment to notice. And the words I heard as clearly as if someone was telling me gently, very gently,

Jin zakhmon ko waqt bhar chala hain, tum kyon unhe chede jaa rahe ho?

(The wounds that time had undertaken to heal, why pick at, all over again?)

When I finally opened my eyes, I realized that it could not have been the same girl. Or perhaps it was. Either way, it did not matter.

In the past two decades, I’ve had a troubled relationship with faith and God. There have been turbulent storms that have broken my belief. And then there have been islands of reprieve such as this one. I have no other name for them.

The hurting didn’t stop immediately. But at least I stopped continuing to hurt myself. I think I just needed someone – something – to let me know that it was okay to stop punishing myself. I made my peace with it at one level back then. But closure happens in stages, little by little every minute, some visible, some not so much.

Some time ago I thought of her again and made contact. She didn’t reply. And it occurred to me that if I had been in her place and received such a letter from a stranger, I would have responded out of empathy or at very least, pity. I know I would have because I already have, in another case. She didn’t and I think that makes me a better person than her. It may be very weak, it may just be rationalization but for what it’s worth it makes me feel better.

In a life starved of belief, when you’re being tossed about in confusion, you grab onto whatever you find and hold on for dear life. Sometimes even a stray line from a song will do.

Goodbyes & Other Wounds

Not a good time. Not a good mood. December always gets me down. Even though the fabulousness of my life must make me seem like a crank for complaining. It’s too many people, too many expectations, too much to consider and keep track of.

They say a man (person) is known by the company he keeps. Personally I always thought that was a tad unfair. After all, I enjoy the company of a wide variety of people, across age and interest groups. What does that say about me? That I’m fickle? Or that I like variety? But I realised when I was screaming my heart out this week, what that really came to. There’s warmth in this friendship, genuine warmth, at least I thought so. And yet, more than once I’ve had a chance to be pained by the people she hangs out with. Are some people natural filth-magnets? I surely don’t want to be part of such a circle. And so I resign. Even though I have no problem with her as such, I certainly have a problem with the riff-raff she chooses to hang out with and forces me to rub shoulders with, at every conceivable social occasion.

Goodbye dear friend, I’m sorry for running away this way but your ugly world scares me.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

Another adage – a man is alive so long as he is remembered.

The Best Friend is moving overseas, the visa approval finally having come through. Somehow I feel like a part of me is drifting away forever. The last connection I have to my distant past, the person I used to be before this cynicism and visibility. The person I was before the fractured dreams, before those dreams were even conceived…all of them go with her. If there’s no one who remembers what you really sound like, do you have a voice anymore?

Goodbye dear friend, carry my cherished self with you. I know you’ll take care of it well. This is not a world for that gentleness anymore.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

I snapped at another friend for calling me a name I didn’t like and I told him not to pick on me in my rare moment of emotion. He replied,

This isn’t a rare moment of emotion for you. Its a rare moment of this particular emotion of helplessness. And, I’m not enjoying you feeling so.

You know why that was striking? Because he pinned down the exact thing that’s bringing me so much agony. I hate this, hate, hate this feeling. Helplessness is not a place I’ve ever been comfortable in.

What am I doing? The writing is not going well, not at all, I’m afraid. I don’t want to know that I’m good, all I care about is that I’m not good enough. It may just be a matter of time but I’m afraid I don’t have that time. Or perhaps I do but I don’t think I can live on these shifting sands for much longer. I need terra firma beneath my feet and if that means I bury my dreams and sell out, I probably will.

Goodbye dreamer-girl, there’s no place for you in this gritty world. Your wings are no substitute for the strong legs I need to stay put. I’m going back.

Secrets

If I had to write a PostSecret card, it would be a photograph of this old house and caligraphed over it in red ink,

I loved you only because I didn’t think I deserved any better.

Sometimes, telling a secret can be cathartic. I hope.

The Whole Tooth & Nothing But The Tooth

I had a wisdom tooth extraction earlier this week. Don’t haha (or heehaw) at me, you merciless thugs! Everyone I’ve been talking about this, before the appointment, has insisted on regaling me with their own horror stories.

My cheeks swelled up like a chipmunk’s and then someone came and pinched my cheeks affectionately! - @shaaqT (Facebook friends, there’s even a photo illustrating this moment at twestival; check out her demonstration and my horrified expression!)

I couldn’t feel one side of my face for a month! – nameless person at twestival

My tooth was embedded in a bone so the dentist has to drill it out! - @melodylaila (which comment lost me my appetite and I had to look away from the delicious tray I had amassed at Candies)

Mine cracked and left behind half inside the gum that had to be root-canaled out! – Don’t even remember who (the ghastly ghost!)

Can you tell that I have really gleefully horrible friends?! But as Baz Luhrman (playing in the background) says, advice is a form of nostalgia. I will dispense with my own now.

The extraction itself was relatively simple in my case. That’s not compared to the horrendous accounts of my friends, that is harking back to my childhood of frequent earaches (my ENT specialist really should have given us a ‘Preferred Patient’ embossed card) and other pains in the vicinity of the crunchers. I’ve had cavities, numerous extraction and the cherry on the cake – braces!

Sometime remind me to tell you about the horrors of being an orthodontist’s patient. Orthodontists are like dentists, only worse, a hundred, twenty-thousand times worse!! Mine had a sense of humour as well, which is really the worst thing for a person to have, especially when he has both his hands inside your mouth and is leering over your scared face because you can’t laugh at his jokes. What’s more, you’re afraid he’ll be offended if you don’t laugh and he might give you an inadvertent nip with his evil-looking pliers…on the wrong tooth!

And then there is the orthodontist’s office, strewn as it is with foul-looking casts of other people’s teeth structures, sculpted in green plaster of paris. It boggles the mind, how he manages to identify which one is yours and fish it out from amidst that dental array. Never mind the horrors of mouth-roof-plates (to ensure that the teeth did not go back to being Bugs Bunny-like on removal of braces) and the *shudder shudder* torture of rubber bands (hooked on to lower-back teeth braces, brought forward to string onto top-front teeth). Imagine the agony of one of those rubber bands snapping right inside your damn mouth!!

Suffice to say I have gruesome stories of my own regarding tooth-doctors and their ilk. Which is why I say I survived this extraction reasonably well. Except I started burning up with a fever almost the instant I stopped taking painkillers and antibiotics. Hmph, I never thought I’d have to sing “You give me fever” to a piece of calcium my own body created!!!

Anyway, I’m going to be brave soldier with stiff upper lip and all (not that I have much of a choice, all local-anaesthetic things considered…). It tickles me to think of having a wisdom tooth extraction coincide with my hitting 30 and all the resolutions that have followed. I was a mature adult at 16, an ambitious go-getter by 21, I never did the silly-young-thing thing. I feel like my body is also accepting and giving me the full g0-ahead. Now that I’ve lost my wisdom, I can get down to the business of being all silly and giddy-headed with gusto!!

Oh and by the way I have another appointment next week to extract the other tooth. I’m still vaguely confused over whether we have two or four wisdom teeth. I read an article online that said that excessive calcium could create even more wisdom teeth, the highest record being someone with 12 wisdom teeth!!! Gaaaaah, all the more reason to be silly, giddy-headed and errm…..avoid milk like the plague!

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?

Survival Skill

I thought I’d die if I didn’t have you
And I very nearly threw away my life when you asked me to
Just about but not quite
Because in the last minute, some shred of something pulled me back
What was it?
Self-preservation? Self-respect? Dignity? Sensibility?

You called it selfishness
I’m so glad that I’m a selfish person
It saved my life
That I loved me more than I loved you.

Haiku: Time, The Healer

The water of indifference
wears away even
the ragged cliffs of pain

~O~O~O~O~

Walls crumble
I watch the dust fly
Even my anger cannot defy time

~O~O~O~O~

Pain was power
to create new life, after
The bigger magic is that even that ends

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.