What I am trying to say is, if I had ever known love, it was for you. That is why I keep thinking only of the horrible hurt I cradled in my heart all those months through. I don’t think of the summers of aching from when I was fifteen or the still sunshod afternoons of last December,when I think of having loved.

So here I am writing about you again. I would not want to quote Neruda at you if I saw you now, believe me, I remember always having thought your features comically misaligned upon your face.But there has never been anything I could romanticise with the same ease as I can absence, so here I am.

Because that is just what it is. I have fallen for absence, for impossibility for distance, and even as I do not long for you anymore,that is what i continue to do. In writing to you, I am keeping alive the only thing I ever loved- I am keeping alive a mirage. For surely it was only the dusk playing tricks upon my eyes when I fancied I saw the softness in yours?

But that was a long time ago-a long time back when I would perch upon the balcony and watch the sunshine ruffle through the leaves with all the wonder of a child first seeing light. Everything that was dazzling and glorious then has simmered into banality now. A winter has passed and a summer and a winter …and here we are.

I don’t know if you know about the acute horror with which the world is collapsing around us, around all we once swore we held dear,and I cannot do much but write to you. Write to me. If, once, I had so much love to hold in my heart, surely our lives are not quite as redundant, our aches not quite as futile, as we have come to believe?

Nostalgia,In The Age Of Social Media

I am scrolling through Twitter. I have tweeted about the daily displays of sexism I am sick of facing, and got a few favourites.

I am back on Twitter after a very long time, so I find myself going back to my own profile. In my photo gallery here, I am, when I appear, eighteen. Chubby-even more then than now,more pimples,hair freshly shorn. There are other photos too-books I am reading,snug under blankets as I wait for first my board exam results, and then university acceptances to come along. The first few days of college, and I am documenting every stretch of campus I am newly enraptured with.

Instagram. The story is the same. Hazy shots of books strewn across bedsheets, screenshots galore, shrines in dedication to my seventeen-year old mind’s heroes-Jim Morrison, Edie Sedgwick, Talitha Getty, Janis Joplin.These give way to a month spent vacationing in Delhi, then starting university-here again, a campus documented lovingly,if rigorously.

Someone said the digital media has killed albums-photo albums handed down generations, the intimacy of leafing through your childhood, your family huddled round you.

I am sure it has its charms. But..they died with Facebook,with Instagram,with the new non-commitment  of Snapchat and Instagram stories-they are replaced,you allege,by something that doesn’t deserve to replace them.

But these are our albums now,our stacks of journals,our letters,and these are our feeble,frantic,tiny histories.

What social media lets us do is tell our own stories. A little filtered maybe, a little adjusted sometimes to suit society’s expectations, or win its approval.

We still document,we still archive,we edit a little with time-who hasn’t?What documentation is, in this age,is a very personal, very individual-if not a little narcissistic, affair.

I am scrolling through Twitter,and I am thinking of nights I spent in a similar way,the glaring blue-and-white screen providing a series of distractions from the inevitable worries-results,college acceptances…I am thinking of playing Mohiner Ghoraguli in my room,alone, on a night like this-and dreaming of all university would open up to me,if only it opened up its gates. I am thinking of the youth I dreamed up and never got to live-the spirit of rebellion bubbling down from the 50s Beats-Hungryalists, and the 60s surges of counterculture-the rebellion that bubbles down to a Facebook post or two.I am thinking of the book by Deborah Baker I read, about the Beats in India-the quotes from the Kolkata chapter neatly archived on my Tumblr. I am thinking of the scarlet dupatta I bought from the Gujarat emporium on my 18th birthday and how pretty it made me feel.

This is how we assert life,dangling earrings and a selfie-I was here,I flaunted a defiant crimson smile. We leave traces of our thoughts,trickling off our heads,messy and glorious,we scatter our rage and our laughter onto Tumblr #aesthetics.

It is just part of how we live, do not dare tell us we are anything short of majestic.

quiet winter afternoons at home alone make me so terribly nostalgic for childhood. suddenly all i want is to feel that perfect peace again as i lie in bed with a fat “story book” and eat an obscene amount of chocolate without worrying about my weight and know that every little problem like third grade arithmetic is really a triviality. i want to reach out for gifts tucked under my pillow on christmas morning and feel that wonderful happiness.i miss not minding much, not minding having only one pair of shoes that i would wear everywhere,sneaking upon my mother’s one tube of lipstick and secretly smearing the dark red over my lips with a strange subversive thrill and not feeling the great heavy weight of wanting anything other than perhaps the next book in the wishing chair series.everything was so bright and sunny and simple and i miss it

On Loving Men Who Cannot Love You Back

The first boy you love is a boy you never say the word out aloud to,is a boy you keep your mouth clamped shut around-because the reality of him,of this, dazzles you.You know his eyes are warm and his lips are soft,and sometimes you sense a line or two of unwritten poetry hovering around his mouth when he speaks.When he speaks to you-just you,with no one else in sight,you feel like the first flush on rosy sunshine tainting the eastern sky every morning,but then his voice starts taking on tones of cruel,of bitter,the likes of which you haven’t really seen before so it terrifies and fascinates you all the more and he starts slipping into a dream or two.

You know he wants to love a girl as sad as him-you have seen the cracks and the jagged edges of his soul and you want to fill those in with wisps of light,but you are not sure he will appreciate seeing all that shine on you,so one day you strip yourself bare before him and show him the length and breadth of your brokenness.Then his hands are on you-you always thought he had nice hands,not nice like freshly washed bedsheets or a blooming rose,but nice like nights of being caught outside in a thunderstorm and taking refuge under a roadside shack,then coming home to a hot cup of tea and the knowledge that the storm will have quelled the summer heat by tomorrow,if only by a tiny bit.But to return to the boy,his hands are nice and when they are on you you almost fancy he is gathering the broken bits in his hands and putting you back together,but he doesn’t care about you at all.All he is really doing is rearranging your bits and pieces to make a mirror,and everytime you delight in his beautiful eyes looking your way,it is just his own reflection he insists on repeatedly checking.Honey,this boy you have come to love is a grade A narcissist but maybe,you think,in his own way he does love you back-so he is burying his face into the softness on you and building a home there with the shakiest of foundations,visiting once in a while,leaving behind a rumple on the sheets and a dent on the sofa seat but always licking his fingers clean of your sweetness before he steps outdoors.

This is the first love you know,it feels queasy and a little like morning sickness then and later,in retrospect,you equate it to a few shots of cheap liquor in quick succession.You smile at the naivety of your first intoxication.

After you do not answer his ring on the doorbell for three days straight,you gather together the fragments of who you had been and start afresh.Six months later,you found six new ways to work yourself up the same.There is never a dearth of trivialities to wear your heart out on.Your mind unfurls a collage of men-and they end up all looking the same.Men you almost loved or would have loved or could have loved,and they only wanted you in bits and pieces-wanted to step into your drawing room for a second,rearrange the furniture,pluck out a few souvenirs.They all looked a little sad while they were at it,so you loved them out of pity or was it empathy and when they did not,you loved them for they posed a novelty.

And it is very exhausting-as love always is,and unaccomplished ones even more so.You make a pattern out of it,so many unloves that you can thread the men together and dangle them from your wall as a symbol of triumph and of failure.Men who smell like cheap cigarettes,as chock full of promises as an un-inaugurated  diary but it is always the same tired scribbles filling the pages,it is always a few words coined from scratch and pieced together.It is always a few sentences scratched out and written over and over,till all your mistakes start looking just the same.And there begins the sum of your foolishness.

You are poised to rust your heart out again,and it feels like you are hanging off a cliff and there is a voice in your head that sounds like all the women you have ever loved,who have loved you back-step back,step back,you are more than this. But you wake up from a dream where you are lying face down on the pavement and then rolling out onto the road and a car buzzes over your head,and there is the rush of blood to your head that you cannot shake off even when you wake.Next time around there is a ship lost at sea and you want to be the light guiding it back,you fancy yourself the anchor tying it back to land but you are drowning and you are losing a layer of skin every day to the saltwater burning out your eyes and you jolt awake.

You loved him with one-half of your soul wrapped around a fiction and the other chained around your ankle,you trip over it with every step.You spin new stories in your head every day still,just like you did as a kid but there are more monsters and less angels in your stories everyday and the monsters are now looking like all your little loves,burning out too quick,then settling in your arms and falling asleep.

A lifetime stuffed into a few months’ time and all that dreaming seeping into you,now,only they did not learn love even in their sleep,even if you had tried singing them into  a dream.And so you start nodding off too,till you melt into a dream and into a story where the angels look once again the way you did when you were ten.So maybe this is your happily ever after,then.Your fairytale starts when you burn effigies of Prince Charming and smile at the mirror,build your own fictions and build them well,and climb up the staircase to your cloud-castle,little dear.

In another wold,I line up the boys I have loved and

tell them, “It was good to know you”. And they say, “It was good to be known,

by you,it was nice being written about.It was nice and warm there,tucked away

in secret among the pages of your journal.”

(In this other world. My journal is a thick black smear. I have blotted out the indistinguishable blur of unhappy there.)

And he calls me beautiful again, but now not by way of consolation,so this time I

smile,I still wear it smeared around my mouth a year or two later when you

come by.So this time we have more time. We have time left over now that the

redundancy of our “stop being sad” is no longer here.

There,I learn to thread together soft silences by something other than tremor.

Not fear,not hurt,not regret. There you hold me and i brush away the hurt from

your eyes the way I always dreamed I would. I reach out with bare arms and

end

with them full of hope. A little of you.

Then I go home and dream away the good part of a summer.I wake to the

warm dreaming still caught on my eyelids but feel no need to blink them off.

This time I say,hi it is nice to meet you and I smile without wondering why. I do

not run but I teach my feet new  patterns all over again. This time my mind does not somersault away to space.

I go back to spreading branches of a sad tree that isn’t sad here and isn’t sad anymore

and I sing myself to sleep when the moon sets.

In this world I love without screaming why without gasping how this time the

men I loved know I did and do not look at me with anything but gratitude,and I

say thank you too.

Someone asked me about my blog a while back,and I told them I don’t update anymore.I liked blogging while I was at it,I really did but then I stopped because that’s the kind of person I am,never sticking to things and too lazy for the things that make me happy.

But things are getting bad again,and I need to write-perhaps writing here is the best because it isn’t Facebook where I am perpetually on my guard,and it isn’t a diary-still public enough to keep me from pouring out thoughts which I will still be cringing at, years down the line. What the public nature of all my venting forums cannot save me from,however,is living with those thoughts and those truths I will never quite be proud of.

Here’s the deal: I don’t know who I am anymore,I have been consciously trying to be something I am not but that probably stops soon-yet I can never go back to the person I used to be,I am  not sure I want to.

Facebook memories showed me a post from 5 years back where I said I was depressed “all the time” but I am nineteen,pretty much where I wanted to be-I was supposed to be happy by now.

Amidst a cocktail of loathing and distaste,the most overpowering is this distaste for my own self-absorption,yet one feeds of the other.

I read a post somewhere-Facebook,was it,or Tumblr-where they said selfish people are sad,and selfless people happy but what if it is our sadness that makes us selfish?Sadness can be crippling yet it is time perhaps we stop attaching value judgements to our emotions,prioritising one over the other.

Maybe happiness isn’t an accomplishment,maybe the best it is is fleeting,maybe it is overprioritised,maybe it is a fairytale-the last of the castles we keep on searching for,the demons in our mind the last ones we never quite slay. It’s just that things have been this way for a while now,and I am a little tired.

 

One of these days,you will wake up and the strangest thing will happen to you.You won’t be sad anymore. I don’t mean to say you will be happy,or okay.You won’t be coherent,or well rested,or productive.Not necessarily.

But not sad either.

For a moment,the shock will flood you.Just to make sure,you will touch the old wounds.Gingerly at first,then not.You will play those songs and read those poems that helped you cry,and you won’t feel a thing.

Just like that,all those months will dissolve into nothingness,crumble away like sand.You will not be all raw scars anymore,and you know how it will feel?

Fucking terrifying.You will go over the blank slate heart and if lucky,a vague sense of panic will engulf you.But otherwise it will be like getting over with an exam and,while unsure of your performance and at once not caring much,you look around for something to do and there is nothing.

Your thoughts will border on bewildered relief,and that’s when you will sit to write about it.If lucky,you will find words again but they won’t taste the same in your mouth as they did.Nor look as pretty as they did,because that was an once upon a time and you look forward to calm,clinical survival.And that will be all.

 

 

on libraries

I’ve been writing about memories of late,with the kind of ridiculous nostalgia that accompanies feeling ridiculously old- the way one can only at nineteen,and with a strange dimension of distance,too,that seems to detach you from whatever past you are looking back on.

So today a post about G.D. Birla’s libraries popped up on my newsfeed and I was on the bumpy trip down memory lane once again. The G.D. Birla library comes back to me with a certain distinct,pleasant smell that always seemed to cling to its walls.I remember musty-spined books,dust laden volumes lining the walls,collapsing on the floor from bouts of laughter while browsing with a friend once,and a lot of happy,happy times.The library,with its limited collection of books and its odd,quaint charm seems to be,in retrospect,the site of my happiest memories from my last two years of school,my two years in that school.

And I go back to every library I have ever set foot in-the week-long anticipation for and the air-conditioned luxuriance of South Point’s junior school library,the instinctive picking up of a copy of Anne of Green Gables from the senior school library and the beginning of a lifelong romance-big words at my age,but it’s been eight years-the plush two-storied grandeur of Garden High’s library and the extensive sections we,as middle-schoolers weren’t allowed to browse-leading to some natural Harry Potter inspired parallels.

So this is to every library I have ever been in,to every librarian I’ve got on the last nerve of,every book I’ve devoured and forgotten,or not read at all,to all the dreamful wishful whispering amidst the rustle of yellowing pages.Here’s to you.

I go to subversive history-steeped,rebellion-happy and movement-famous Jadavpur University.It’s a nice enough place,ponds with water lilies-one with a romantically dilapidated bridge in the middle-and canopies of green all over, misspelled inspirational slogans beckoning from signboards at every corner. There are a lot of posters-graffiti too-ambitions of dismantling the government or changing it,of smashing patriarchy and freeing Kashmir jostle joyously with each other. There is a lot of smoke-wafting out of professors’ rooms and through the corridors,there are sprawling ledges to sit on,overlooking views that get more picturesque the higher you go,there is music heard every now and then from dusty staircases and cosy nooks in the corridors,there are professors with Rosie the Riveter posters on their walls,and there is a wide variety of people,normal,nerdy,wacky,sanskari(traditional),sanskari with an edgy twist and everything in between.

Like I said,nice enough place.There are things to get mad about,too but I’ll leave that for another conversation.

I vaguely remember responding to the environment of the university with incredulity the first time I stepped in-this is an educational institution what -but I was very young,and was in JU accompanying my mother who would get her PhD from there,and i went to a neat,single-building primary school.So Darshan Bhavan,nestled as it might be among surrounding greens,was greeted with disdain-it was so traumatically dingy,this university,I would never want to study there.I have one nice memory of my childhood tryst with the place,though-sitting under a tree to read Wishing Chair while Maa visited her research guide.

Almost a decade later,I would want nothing more than to get in there,free me from the claustrophobic rigour of my second choice college,god,please?

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about my evolving relation with JU.This was supposed to be about a certain aspect of the university,its canteens.

I have tried to follow a meal plan over the last few months,and nothing has perhaps made it more difficult that this almost magnetic pull of visiting the canteens-not just for the food,but to infuse some purpose into the hours of doing nothing between classes.And more.

My first acquaintance was with Milon Da’s- the Arts favourite,with tree-shaded places to sit and a shack-like building you could previously go in to,but now have to gather at the counter of. It was Milon Da’s that sheltered us from the rain that soiled our first bouts of exploration of the campus,it was Milon Da’s where I discovered a love of cold coffee-its invigorating and soothing powers,as required,even when badly made. It was at Milon Da’s where I discovered the potential fear of the life-threatening,having bitten halfway into an oil-soaked dhop er chop ,only to realise it had prawn in it-a food my asthma has always kept me from.It is to Milon Da’s that I still steal away whenever a bad day has left me in need of a sugar fix-Coke or crunchy Oreos or chocolate cake or Nutties or,of course,generously sugared and milked cold coffee.

Then there is the canteen near the Engineering department,overlooking a cricket(?) field.There are two canteens that meet that description,actually,one is cheaply priced,and where I have fond memories of sharing greasy chicken chowmein with a friend by evening,and one is where i laughed so hard at something long-forgotten that I managed to fall down from-no,with-in my defence,broken, plastic chair.

There is an AC canteen-one that greatly disappoints to reveal that the AC in its name does not stand for air conditioned-and another among particularly picturesque settings,near gate 2.

And then,of course,and then, always,is Moni Da,stowed away off the main campus,with its bamboo shade and its two dogs,its Chinese and other experimental food,where crispy baby corn is delicious when fried and accompanied by hot tangy sauce.

I haven’t been long enough here to relate the culinary specialties of the canteens,nor do I  have fascinating insight to deliver about them.

But I write this to articulate,make sense,even,of a certain something.Of the way I,even when I have no wish to eat,will suggest a detour to any of these places-because in the dusky calm at Moni Da,or the hazy din of Staff,food is more than just food,taste is more than just grease or fry or 500 calories.Canteens make university university,make it that much more hospitable,that much more home.Because food.And because more.

Because they are parts  of campus where you need little to justify your existence,because they provide that much impetus to dawdle,to breathe in a little more of this life because it will be all over so soon,too soon and the more you can absorb now,by way of taste and sight and sound and smell,the better.Because here and now I’m forever voracious-for life,though it seems I am always still searching. But sometimes,in the way dusk dawns over Milon Da’s you will feel like you have found it.You will feel like you are there.

 

 

The rain today makes me nostalgic.

First I think of campus.Of the way it rained relentlessly the first few days of college, and vague memories-snippets of evenings spent in campus when the weather was a lot like it is now,the sky similarly overcast,a breeze similarly soothing blowing.There would be cups of coffee to be bought from Milon da’s-and the sky would be a benevolently darkening grey.And I would be enraptured,drunk on the heady dreamful of caffeine,on newly found freedom,on the first flush of love,for my love affair with the campus,then in its first chapters,would be shod in the sort of untainted,rosy glory that accompanies the first stages of acquaintance,of discovery.
And so today the rain makes me feel a strange kind of nostalgic-a nostalgia for a present,if that is possible,that seems part past,part half forgotten dream in the way it was seen and felt and soaked in by this me and yet a different me,a long while and a short time ago.And the rain today makes me wonder just how much of our lives is really lived in the reliving,through memories-the workaday of yesterday gains so much significance in retrospect,and even the apparent trivialities of emotion reveal themselves in a certain majesty in memory,in a way they didn’t when experienced as the present.

And then memory takes me back to times I don’t normally relive much.Because they sicken,perhaps,more than hurt.The school where I did so well,the teachers positively doted on me.Where I was the fat ugly kid who was only good at studies-only-“if you weren’t fat people would like you” etc.

But god,the fields there,the tiny flowered garden,and clouds gathering over the walls lining the bus bay.But,god,the best friend I found there and the quiet roads I would take to school-now bustling,now all the desolate beauty gone.

Then the school I went to after that-how did I survive two years there?Yet. The drowsy afternoons,poetry scribbled at the back of history notebooks,empty classrooms and long,deep conversations,eating chocolate in Sociology-a friend had got an assortment for her birthday and was generous enough to offer, unresentfully share-  and doodling Warsan Shire’s poetry all over my diary in Political Science.

Life wasn’t easy then.I was younger,dreamier,softer,less jaded. But also so tired,school-the daily ritual of getting up,putting on an uniform and taking down notes all day long would drain me out-but there were those moments,little snatches of happiness that still make me smile.

Maybe this is the way it’s meant to be.Life will sometimes be a bad dream,sometimes a dull hum.But you will get scraps of these approximations of happiness,or contentment thrown your way  every other day-sometimes adulterated,like the worry of calories clouding over your enjoyment of your favourite flavour of ice-cream-a Cornetto double chocolate in my case,and sometimes not-the pure bliss of feeling the weight of a newly bought Harry Potter book in the bag you are clutching at twelve,or sinking your feet in the sand and letting the ocean breeze rush past your ears.And those fractions of seconds will fill you with a certain something so deep that the memory will be enough to get you through anything-when nothing seems to be okay anymore.