Monsoon

The rain outside my window is lashing past in horizontal lines, with sporadic puffs of mist. 

Winds are banging doors and knocking articles off-balance. I can hear things crashing in other homes too.

I have never witnessed monsoon fury of this magnitude in my life.

Can this tiny, presumptuous, self-sufficient, seemingly unperturbed island really take so much rain? There are only 655 square kilometres. 


I think it too might be starting to wonder if its perfect roads and banks and offices and drainage system can really handle the wrath of this monsoon.

Baggage

I saw a kid going to school yesterday. He was about three and a half feet tall, by my best estimate. And his school bag could not have weighed less than 5 kgs. It was sagging with weight and splitting at the seams with bulkiness, and its straps pressed into his small, fragile child shoulder blades- a giant bird with claws digging into his shoulders, landing all its weight on him and trying to take him down. I suddenly realized that the sling bag I was carrying was nearly 3 kgs heavy, and pressing rather viciously into my shoulder blade too.

Ma once gave me a pearl from her treasure of wisdom. She said, have you noticed how, while travelling from one place to another on a bus or train, some people hold on to their bags in their hands or on their backs? They might as well put them down while they are on the move, and pick them up when they reach their destination, but they resolutely clutch their baggages and add weight to their bodies, and themselves.

The metaphor extended, according to her, to the concept of leaving set your troubles down when you sleep - that just before you melt into your dreams, put all your worries, troubles and hassles on a shelf, and don't let your precious sleep be disturbed with unfair blame and thoughts that it doesn't deserve to be disturbed with.

There's a reason babies sleep the way they do: they don't ponder about things they can't control.

Big Yellow Cheese Moon

It looks surreal. A big round yellow pin-up in the sky, with small imperfections on it, like blemishes on a face. 


Blemishes on perfection, just a reminder that it might always be so. I saw it last night. 


We find change and perspective in things larger than ourselves.

We don't live very long, so things have to move in bursts sometimes.

Lava Lamp

It felt like a movie.

Her lava lamp was orange. It cast an orange glow over the entire room. Globs of wax in it moved up and down, slowly, floating, hitting one wall and moving unperturbed towards the another, only to be gently self-pushed in a tangential direction again. Their lazy fluency was fascinating. Big gooey bubbles of all sizes, bumping and moving along, like lots of people slowly hitting each other and continuing to move without a complaint. Maybe she should have bought a blue one. A blue glow would have been lovely.

She continued to watch it shine and drift lazily. She wished she could go inside it and trap herself into one of the little bubbles, and watch the world from atop the bookshelf, from inside the lava lamp - and if her bubble slowly stretched and eventually performed mitosis, then she would stretch with it, stretch gracefully, arching, until she slowly got divided in the middle, and became two small replicas of herself, one in each bubble. There could be many of her floating around inside the lava lamp, just like that, watching the apartment from a corner, people coming and going.

She shook her head from side to side to clear it, and sipped her strong black tea. She could feel it slipping down her throat, like a small stream of water on the floor would slip along the surface - she could feel it flowing gently, soundlessly, into her stomach, and soothing her. It had a distinct flavour. It sent a shiver up her spine. The breeze in her hometown did that to her. It was a shiver she waited for, invited, looked forward to, anticipated - like waiting for a person with more power, with the power to pleasure her insanely for just a moment, and then take it all away and tease her from a distance.

I'm drifting again, just like the wax globs, she thought, taking another sip. She shifted her gaze from the perfect lava lamp to the scene outside her window. A mosque began it's daily call, and she watched a few birds flying into the sun. It was quiet, except for a single baby's wailing, almost haunting in its loudness and helplessness. There is no time like evening - the last hour of light before dark, the last breath of a long and tired day, the last flutter of the sun's eyelashes before they close for the night. She watched as it got darker, and the lights in the buildings came on everywhere, one by one. The city still looked beautiful. From the top floor of a building, any city looks beautiful.

The mosque finished its prayer and the silence that followed it resonated into the dusk. The baby stopped wailing and finished off its complaints with a prolonged gurgle. She continued to sip her tea, blinking slowly, seeing everything clearly from behind her glasses. She played a strain of Billy Joel on her laptop, and continued to watch the city wake up for the night. The trains must be so crowded. The clubs must be getting ready for the teenagers - college goers in their first year, waiting for a release without knowing why, doing things they didn't understand and being carefree with the excuse that these years only come once. They aren't wrong, but they will regret some things later. 

Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong that week. All the promises she could have made to herself and broken, she had made to herself, and broken. A few bright spots, like plankton in a dark shallow sea, had come along over that dark week, but they were short lived. Like fire flies. Like shooting stars. Like a bulb with a fuse. She felt like she had sunk to to bottom of something jelly-like, and was yet to begin her journey up. She knew it wouldn't be so hard. She knew she would get there, and be all she had to be - it was dark, yet there was solace in that sunset, that lava lamp, that black tea, those city lights. 


How cliché. 


How true. 


That entire surreal moment encapsulated in the evening, the fading light, the liquid, the silence.

She returned to her desk, checked her mail, rustled a few papers, and began working again.

The lava lamp continued to glow.

One Side Only

Some things look strange

When they’re one side only.

Take my gold fish with a fin on one side –

The other side, lonely.

A face that has a smile

On one side only.

Or half an ocean wave or half a leaf –

Or half a hen, or half joy-half grief.

Sometimes, when my mind is in conflict,

I wish it had one side only.

~inspired by Kirry~

Of Lovers

Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heart breaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

~Shantaram

What Life is Not ...

A neat wooden desk with all stationary organized in right angles.

A blue sky with a white cloud and a smiling yellow sun.

A 50-50 in relationships.

Your favourite people living forever.

Your innocence untouched.

A scroll that can spell out your life or your future.

A reasonable, rational journey where the people you meet are reasonable, rational people.

Missed calls on your cell phone from the people you want them to be from.

Home cooked food, 24/7.

Certainty of God or some power.

Mutual affection.

Internet connection.

All even numbers.

Nor is it continual thunder storms and rain,

Or monsters under your bed.

It's not mediocrity.

Bad grades and bad recommendations,

Or leaking roofs and insect infestations.

It's not heartburn and helplessness,

It's not gray-blue relationships.

It's not hatred and parting and wilting flowers

It's not all poverty and calamity.

Dumped or turned down or forgotten.

It's not let downs and evasive treasures.

Loneliness.

All odd numbers.

There's more to it.

I don't know what it really is,

But I know what it isn't,

And that's better than not knowing at all.

Tagore

“… O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart’s blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again”.

~Extract from Rabindranath Tagore's "The Postmaster"

Of Pillars and Roofs

It's not just about fighting the huge battles. It's about getting through the little stuff, day by day by day. It’s about the little things that stop mattering (who does the dishes, who does laundry, who takes out the trash) and the little ones that start mattering more and more (post-it notes, love SMS’s, catnaps and snooze alarms together).

We don’t stand strong alone or by ourselves, we seek strength – it’s not a single pillar, it’s a whole roof held up by pillars, and that’s how we stand steady. There are several others holding us up, even when we don’t know it. When one pillar weakens, the rest toughen up.

Being lonely and being alone might be two different things, and we learn to deal with both – perhaps that strengthens us as individual pillars. But you gotta know where to look to find another one standing. We crumble when we cast our hopeful little glances in the wrong direction. We’re more careful thereon, but then we’re never quite done building foundations, are we?

It’s all very romantic to say "I stand alone and I am strong" – you will, because survival is instinct. That’s courage, and we all have times in our lives when we use it because we have the will to live and be happy.

Real strength is a network. There is a power in togetherness that no distance or space can defeat.

For the sake of a single poem

~ by Rilke

"...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else – ); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, - and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”