Leaving home

This day, five years ago, I left home. I had ceased living with my family 4 years before that. But this, this was almost a renunciation. Left motherland, Ma, Pa, the smell of drenched earth in Monsoon, and everything that was familiar for a... I don't know what it is yet. I don't understand what I was running away from. I could have gotten great education, as good a job back there too. So what was I looking for?

This was written by M and given to me before I left. I have received many a love-letters. Some of them now only serve the purpose of reminding me my hostel's room number with their envelopes. I don't read them anyway. I can not empathize with the feelings of erstwhile me. This I read quite often. May be because M understood me better than most men I met. May be because I felt most hurt when she forsook us and this was the last bit that reminds me of her as I knew her.

No crayons and colors to wish you Happy Birthday

But words may play their vicarious part

So here I go drawing for you

With a little girl in pajamas, let us start.

Papa's pet, and Mamma's ladyship

A little doll sans dolls in her hand

Hiding in nooks and crevices of the ancient house

Breaking through into her own wonderland.

You look for her from dawn to dusk

And she's nowhere to be found.

For she's curled up with a perpetual book

Blind to the outside sound.

Now she's off on another venture

The Discovery of America, the big run

With hugs and kisses, her friends arm her

Bon Voyage they all shout in unison!!!

Wondering as an afterthought

When on the jet plane

Which book will be her companion

What wonderland will keep her sane.

I didn't open it till my birthday that year as I was instructed. And it turned out to be more beautiful a gift than I imagined. Much has been lost since then. Contact, innocence, hope, bits of our hearts and souls, a whole lot of tears. But, I have made my peace with it. I WILL see you someday. Hear this?

Lull

I wait for you,
My Love,
An emotionless terra nullius,
To leave a proud Him
And come back to me
To blow the smoke in my mouth again,
To beat the wrong drum beat,
To stroke my hair,
And sing with me.

M

My dream analyzer,
My word beader,
You shined like a thousand lambent moons and
Glowed my pupils into oblivion.
How do I even begin to console you,
My calm one,
When all I do is get angrier!

Thank you DCE

For:

• preparing me for the worst as life is only easier than it ever was there
• convincing me that smoking/drinking/smoking up are not defining characteristics of people
• demonstrating that political correctness can go fuck itself in the ass
• being utterly sexist and treating women as second rate citizens 
• making me deal with government officers, horny men and condescending professors. Nothing else could have inculcated more patience in me.
• introducing me to the most amazing and the most unbearable people, all in one place
• being so very pretty during the monsoons
• fantastic canteen bhaiyyas and their custom prepared coffees
• denying us the most innocent of pleasures like climbing on to the terraces of the hostels
• being a big name in the education market. It helped for a little while.

Disclaimer: Most of the list is based on my own experience that may or may not be reflected in that of other students, although a lot of women would concur with it. The list may expand as and when I remember more, or bother to do so. 

The day of a million butterflies

She becomes the same quiet, lost kid of 7 years. Joy merges with hollowness merges with sadness. The others are still new here. She wanders away from the sunny terrace into the cafe listening to amateurish thumping on the drums and desperate blowing of the flute. Omnipresence of musical instruments, great food and the most interesting people in cafes is most commonplace here. She had smoked with a British tantrik, played backgammon with a Swede and beaten him to win cheese-cakes, and learnt to knit from a French dreadlocked hippie girl over a plate of Rosti. On this day though, she is just looking at a book shelf where travelers picked a book from, and kept the one they just finished reading for others. 

Ah, Marcovaldo! Calvino's Marcovaldo! So elusive, so difficult to find a copy of in Delhi. She could never afford expensive fancy shmancy book-store books. Daryaganj patli gali Sunday book market was for her. Unaccounted running away to the hills without informing parents didn't help with the finances either. So, she feels the knot of desire in her heart. It is a used copy. She loves used copies with the yellowed pages turned on edges by previous readers. If one's lucky, they sometimes even leave tiny notes between pages. Alas, she does not have a book to keep back on the shelf. She's still reading the one she has in her jhola. Now the knot of guilt in the stomach. Book-readers' ethics are the only ones one must care for. But what is it about desire that makes one do things that one understands to be, if not wrong, then entirely not right either. She picks it up, carries it to the terrace and starts reading, sipping her ginger-lemon-honey with absolute nonchalance. The others want to leave now to trek to another cafe higher up on the mountain. The one you need to cross a waterfall to reach. She refuses to part with the book. She is, after all, the same 7 year old who would open up peanut packets to read if she could not find a book in immediate vicinity. It is also her father's favorite story to tell about her. Someone tells her it is alright to keep it for now. And she believes what she wants to and keeps her Marcovaldo in the jhola. 

{The hills: "It's been four and a half years since she was here last. She is indebted but hasn't returned.  She has gone further away to a different country, a different continent. Maybe next time she comes running to the hills, she'd put a book back in the shelf. Maybe her Kafka she carries everywhere. Kafka, she carried even that day."}

Pilgrimage

Credit for the last two words: James Douglas Morrison

Hesse ceiling of the shack

Gypsy King

Altered Egos

Bored to the bone! What was he thinking getting us here? I would have said ambition but he probably did not  remember the reason himself, and who was I to assume. He needed directions even to his own apartment sometimes. But 10 or 15 girls from an engineering college hostel for a FOOTBALL team. Seriously? "Sikri yaar, thudde maar rahi hai"- he said to me. She looked at me, made a face. WAY TOO MANY RULES!! In midst of the chaos (or strategy, who knows?) we were left behind. Or we may have drifted towards the boundary on our own. Next best thing we come up with? Run around the frikkin field. I HATE running. She loves it though. Poor Whappy/coach- "Yaar, khel lo na". Naahhh.. Sighted: cute guy running in the opposite direction. That's new. Good looking guys in our college were so fresh-off-the-cow-ribeye-rare. We enabled each other. But, we were subjected to whistling and hooting around the boys' hostel too. I don't think I would have ever indulged in Adam-teasing with anyone else. Second guy of the evening annoyed with us.

Time lapse start. Exams. Running away on birthdays. Inebriation. Silliness. Warden scoldings. Job-interviews. Break-ups. Last sutta in her balcony together. Jobs. Make-ups. Masters. Convergence from the two ends of a continent. Time lapse stop.

It is a small quiet studio apartment in the middle of a very noisy city. She hasn't spoken a word since yesterday making it even quieter. Then, we have never needed those ostentatious buggers between us anyway. But, she's all grown up now, or at least pretends to be. She tries to shake me into adulthood too. FU@#. No. No. No. "You have to get serious and leave the crazy bone aside"- she says. Scolding for me and another one-seventh over the email to quit our vice. Intervention planning with the other how-ever-many-sevenths. Who gets that concerned? She does. She knows more about me than anyone else. She probably knows me better than anyone else too. Do I get her as well? Bertolucci's Isabelle would have concurred: "Siamese twins joined at the head".