The Baggage and The Morrow

It is the time of the day when you want to come home to a person who takes the baggage off your shoulders. The baggage of tiredness, exhaustion, drowsiness, dejection and sometines...hopelessness.

No matter how you manage to keep yourselves occupied throughout the day- sometimes may be to avoid the thought of being lonely to strike and other times just to tire yourself to the extent that at the end of the day you crash on your bed, already half-asleep, to sleep the night away...dreamlessly.

But for some, even being on their toes doesnt help.
They have had a long day. True. They are in dire need of a good human sleep. Again True. But when they recline to their space, another world-one of their own-opens up to them. Their own clock starts ticking.

They find all the inertia accumulated throughout the day has evaporated. They feel charged up...to dream with eyes open, to plan love (ironically), to wish and to hope.

This space, their "Eat, Pray, Love" zone takes them away from the hassles of real life and strained relationships, into a world that they want to build.

And the real life sleep that follows is sweet, full of optimism.

The body is put to rest while the heart and mind, together, say- TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY...

Life and Fevicol...

Hi all...
Just another day when i had decided to get a bit organised, I started out with cleaning the dust off my desk. I made separate room for literally everything, including a tube of fevicol whose cap had run loose.
So... it took me a good couple of hours to set things right but I felt immense pride and sense of worth after I was done.

At bedtime, when i had this urge to see the beautiful town that I had resurrected in the afternoon, I pulled out the drawers one-by-one. I didn't know this would take the next 60 minutes of my already sleep-deprived soul.

For a couple of seconds, i could not realize what was wrong with the third drawer and its contents.

Then it struck me that the fevicol tube had tilted and the cap had goner for a stroll, alone. And the city was, obviously, painted white.

I was more vexed than sorry. My favorite candies had drowned in the white, I had an urge to throw the entire drawer out the window at once.
But i decided against it and carried the drawer to the4 bathroom.

As i lifted every single thing out of the box, i realized the situation was stickier than i had assumed.

And it was then that this post was conceived. As I was running water over the washables, like the 3 inkpots and color boxes, and had dumped the rest, like some papers and *ouch* the candies, I realized there were patterns and cuts on them that I had never noticed, not before now when they were filled with fevicol and I was made to take it out of them.

I realized how similar life is. There always is a tacit part in relations that we keep closest to our hearts. We might never realize it. But, when the relations are drowned in the fevicol of problems, do we see all those areas that we thought never existed before.

Only... here I could wash them clean and put them back in their place.

While relations are more like the unwashables that I had dumped...thoughtlessly.

Yet another Outburst

I wish I sleep tonight and never wake up again, never see the Sun again, take the memories of this dark sans-moon night in my eyes and close them forever...
I wish I never see anyone of the people-with whom I've shared my life of 20 yrs.-again. I am just so sick. So tired. So exhausted. So spent.
Rational thinking has given way and now I only wish I had never lived that day, when the truth was revealed, when my beliefs shattered. When i felt like an orphan.

Yes. I could never rise above that fact. And i could not even live with it. So, i chose the mid-way. I chose to hate those very people who, once upon a time & for the most part of my life, were my life.

It was difficult, ask me. But i was determined not to get hurt by anyone after that one incident. I kept my stride. I always won. I would hurt people, so they wouldn't, couldn't, hurt me back. But, i was only a loser. War has no victors. My soul would die, daily...a part of it.

I would sneer at my people- at their agony, at my victory- victory over something certainly unknown. But when i woke up, when- for a second- I saw the world around me without the glasses of hatred on, I saw my own people- agonized, pained, suffering.

I realized what i had done was not to them, but to my own mortal self. As it is, life is never an exam where u could cut out the whole answer attempted wrongly and make a fresh beginning. It is about life. If i do it wrong, it is wrong forever.

I wish i dont wake up tomorrow, or any morrow for that matter...

ek ghaav tha, jo bhar gaya...ek nishaan hai, jo reh gaya.

He and I were completely engrossed in each other, only, he was 50 kms. away and I was on the middle of a road, trying to cross it to reach the station that would take me to him.
As i put a step forward, my heart and mind still with him, my knee jerked and the first step I took brought me down, right on my knees.
It was a wound. But, with my heart and mind still with him, I knew nothing could possibly go wrong. That that was nothing.
Though afterwards, he did tell me how awful the wound was and that i must tend to it.
But i, being myself, ignored it out of the fear of ignoring him.
Now i realize. I did not have my eyes on the path that i had chosen & so, I got hurt-right at the place where it hurt the most.

Now, though the wound has healed, the scar remains. And THIS is everything I have of him...of us.

Forgotten

Closing my eyes, I force a beautiful scene to play and replay before them;
The scene that had u and me, that had love and passion
But my eyes open, to a horrible today, when u are gone;
When I realize I am without u alive, alone and
FORGOTTEN…

With you, summers were sunny, now they sweat
With you, rains meant passion, now they are only wet
With you, winters were a hot cup of coffee, now they are cold.
With you, I was one in a million, now…just another in a million..
FORGOTTEN…

You have chosen your path; I shall trudge alone, on my own.
But your memories, them shall I cherish dawn after every dawn…

When i was my daddy's lil girl...

Walking down the memory lane, I see a young girl, anticipation brimming her two big eyes as the clock showed 5:30 in the evening, the time when she would hear her papa's footsteps trudging urgently up the stairs.
Putting all her homework aside, proud of completing it in scheduled time yet again, she searched for a new place to hide in their small home.
She played the whole sequence of actions in her mind again & again and laughed and clapped happily to herself.
She loved her papa. This love was different. She thought if there was one person who could be perfect, it was him.If he said something, it was more of a psalm than a statement. She adored him since when she did not even know what “to adore” meant.

Then…she grew up.

Now, when he, as usual, returned from work at 5:30, a couple of things had changed. Firstly, a new fancy and huge apartment took p[lace of their relatively poor home and secondly, she knew what “to adore” meant and certainly had changed preferences.
Life was its mechanical self where human emotions do not lubricate the wagon to move forward but only increase friction to develop heat among relationships.
This small girl, now big, was me.

And then came one day when my mother’s friend, with her 8 month old girlie, visited us.
It poured heavily and God was in no mood to relent his decision for the less privileged.
The baby grew restless as the minutes converted into hours and she still had no sight of her father.

Then, fighting the winds and the water, he arrived. That was the moment when I bade them goodbye that made me ponder- When did I grow up?? Why did I grow up??

We waited outside our apartment for him to arrive. At the first sight of his, she threw an electric smile. And when they, her mother holding her, sat pillion to her father, she grew so ecstatic that she jumped on her lil space that she stood on and beat his helmet while chuckling a perfect baby laugh.

All he had to do was take her in his arms and she clung on to him as if making up for the time when she missed him and he wasn’t there…

I saw all this & could think of only one thing while their vehicle paced out of my vision- What if she grows up and realizes that she WAS once her daddy’s lil girl…??

The thought left a vacuum in me...

Khulaasaa...the first-hand experience

Hey all!

As usual, my absence has been prolonged. Anyways, without much a-do, I switch to the main point…

It had rained throughout the previous night and it seemed that the Gods had no plan to alter their plan. So, with my lungs full of fresh, moist Monday morning air, I somehow succeeded to cajole my father to drop me to the bus-stop. Oh, by the way, I work as a summer intern with MoserBaer (naam to suna hi hoga…!). So, waiting for the chartered bus to arrive, I opened my latest novel, the color purple, and started from the first page. I mustn’t have read more than 6 pages when the bus arrived. Feeling an adrenalin rush on seeing the bus after 4 strange days felt even stranger and abruptly, I promised myself to have a successful and a work-loaded day. But sometimes, your resolves stand sterile in front of other men’s vice. I had heard a fleeting talk about “Desh Band” today… but never had the thought struck that it would affect me and I would find myself cursing the whole system vehemently.

We boarded the bus as usual, got ourselves a seat (reserved for ‘ladies’) and I resumed my reading. We had hardly gone 3 kms that I saw unusual activity going on right in the middle of the busiest crossing of that national highway. It was the political party activists. At first, I could only see a lady, clad simply in a worn-out saree, carrying the party’s orange and green lotus flag in one hand and a 2 ltr plastic bottle of a soft drink filled with some wine-colored liquid in the other. Till then, the gravity of the situation hadn’t hit me. And since the weather was favorable and the air was soothingly cool, I dint bother myself too. Suddenly, I saw a man rushing towards our bus as it was put to a sudden halt. He was swearing at the driver and was gesturing putting a match to the bus if we dint vacate it. I was still composed coz till everything remained verbal, I was OK, I thought. But the scene got worse when they deflated the tyres of the bus and set some more tyres on fire, right in the middle, on the very crossing where the lady has first stood. There was a gang of atleast 20-25 people who were shouting out loudly and making sure no public transport shall pass through that crossing.

We were advised to take a U-turn and head back home, ofcourse on-foot. When I say “we”, I mean the girls in the bus. The very next minute, we saw ourselves marching over the flyover in a queue, like ants. At that moment, the water coagulated on the sides where we walked and made the route back home even more dreadful. My delicate slippers dint know what lay ahead, later in the day and I know, they were the worst sufferers. We vented throughout. We cursed the system. Atleast I did. This wasn’t really the idea of an educated common man to present his demands. But then, not everyone can refuse to get paid for the daily bread without having to earn it though a day’s hard-work, but a slice of violence.

It is surprisingly sad how the damned people carry out such obscene jobs at the name of “public welfare”, at the very expense of that very common public, the aam aadmi.