Never

I have never been insincere in loving what or whom I have ever loved. And I have never been able to hate casually, or broken causality in doing so.

To me.

I am lost. Help me out.

I am lost. Help me out.

I am lost.

Do not tell me where I am.

To the lees

While the crisp breeze inhales the life of this cup of tea by my half open window sill, caffeine imbibes the last few breaths of summer in my half awake soul.

I can go without tea for days, only to realize on the n-th day how insanely out of tandem I had been feeling. This is so utterly foolish, but I seem to be slipping in to remembering how many friends I forced into becoming tea drinkers to keep alive the air of the kingdom that never slept. The one-time friends who gifted me bags of tea to ensure my comfort in the insipid loneliness of the chattering crickets and never-ending playlists. Only that I could never finish that box of tea bags. Free air called me, in loose leaves and undesired spoonfuls of sugar. On another completely digressive note, my one-time friends also gifted me an alarm clock. But I never wanted to stop dreaming.

Last summer I broke too many things including my left wrist, one and a half hearts, and a tea mug of four years. And since then I drink from a mug on which is a sleepy damsel and "love" scribbled all over, gifted to me by vegetarian, teetotaler brahmin friend, who unlike me, can very much sing. For four years now, we have exchanged bergamont, chamomile, orange, jasmine and philosophy. But only the last we met, we could not and did not rue over tea and cups.

The only person who has ever b(r)ought me tea and vodka with equivalent zeal and zest has, in stupor of alcohol, caffeine and sometimes both, taught me the best and the worst of truths of relationships, patience and more relationships. I miss being demanding, "Oye, chai peeni hai? Toh bana naa mere liye bhi :)".

And one who has never ever refused me tea, whether or not I had the money to pay for it, whether or not he had the time and reason to relish the cup of the brew. The best one, raising his first ever toasts of whiskey, vodka, gin and rum with me, glass after glass, with a steady hand and full heart.

The jolly good geek who spent one whole spring learning the subtle art of extorting black tea from the unwilling likes of Champa, Deepak, Shahrukh. My friend who believes that he can take all my pains away with a cup of bitter black tea. Spending afternoons coding with a cup of tea, while I must sit beside with a puzzle in hand. Spending night longs coding with pegs of whisky, while I must sit beside with a puzzle in hand. Deep, deep brown.

And the craziest kid ever who doesn't drink any tea but makes a cup better than I do or can, but all for her Maam and Dad.

To you all, I drink life to the lees.

Paranoia

tele'r shishi bhangle pore, khoka'r opor raag koro

tomra jokhon buro khoka, bharat bhenge bhaag koro

(you chide a child for breaking a bottle of oil

and thence you break India into pieces, you senile children of the Mother)

And "Into that inferno of shackles, my Master, let my country sleep"

Candy Floss

I either have real fever or I have almost lost all handle on life.

Today was the most beautiful weather that Evanston presented me with in my eight month stay here. Yellow sunshine not only on my shoulder, teasing warm breeze and smiling people all around. Just the perfect way to begin a weekend, stay out, follow Brownian motion, sit by the open window and finish homework!

But the me chose to sit in my bed, put low lights on and watch a Shahid starrer.

Dance pe Chance. Well, since most of you decided to not watch it, you have already tagged me one of the biggest losers of this age. And for those few who dared to watch it anyway have otherwise tagged me the very same. And yet, my heart is racing at the speed of a lingering smile.

I turned twenty five a couple of months ago. And I have no more eloquent way to put it, but my heart hasn't really pumped as much blood at this rate in a long long time. Questions of existence and nonexistence, faith and disbelief, the capacity of power have been lately crippling my moods. And here I suddenly find this bubblegum lover who is not a hero, and not an irascible rebel at the losing end either. There is very little romance in the film but the way it oozes cuteness without annoying the hell out of an all-damning-all-knowing-walking-talking-search-engine. ( I might be wrong here, it still will annoy an all-damning-all-you know-the-whole-string.)

Candy floss has struck me at its zenith.

And please for once let me sound thirteen right now, because in my days you were not supposed to publicly drool at a movie star if you wanted to make it as a good girl. I love Shahid, oh my God he is so cute!

So he is going around being bosom buddies with this super cuteness of a female and not inspiring nausea in your being with the cloying sweetness of "woh mera sabse achcha dost hai" ("he is my best friend"). And like at least that one person you know whose love story must be happily exciting, he walks around talking to her on the phone and without any preface or suggestive background music he says, "aur haan ek aur baat, I love you" ("And yeah, one more thing, I love you").

I almost forgot to breathe that one moment, as if he said it to me. (Juve alert! Its okay you judgmental mature grown ups.) Then I let out all the mean air air with a choking snort. I chortled.

Just one Friday night at 20 degrees Celsius, I think bubblegum boy confessed his love to me.

Spring and its vagaries.

Ek purana khat khula anjaane mein

This will sound overstated. There are two people, I believe, whom you can quote in any situation that you find yourself in. Rabindranath and Gulzar.

Probably you will blow me away like a dying Eskimo, tag me as blasphemous, but it is uncanny how I can quote either or both whenever I find myself in a need or urge to quote. Silent or blaring out loud.

So, a few hours ago I managed to finally write a micromini blog and publish it. And as it is always a pleasure to fight sleep if you do not have an impending exam to study for, I sat up and started reading all my old posts, and comments on them. And though whatever is in the present is wonderful in its own incompleteness, the tiniest of moments that we have lost in feeling discontented will never come back to soothe us with its partiality.

Perhaps life is beautiful in those broken dreams, desires unreached, love unrequited.

When I lived the DDLJ, KKHH days in a red brick building, I wondered at nights, if at all were my crushes to materialize (unlike anybody else's), how would it to be? The end. I would have no chocolate boy to fall asleep to, no bouts of extra-rowdy scuffles to fight away nervous bursts during lonesome meetings, no sugary fantasies of 'what-if's', no shivers to live-relive-rerelive if my hair was pulled or cheeks were pinched.

It is disappointing to grow to your quarter life and realize that the crisis involves feeling too old to develop bubblegum-boy-girl infatuations and too sincere to flirt.

Khushboo jaise log milein afsane mein.

Thump.

Thoughts trickle down in a stream of muddled afterglow. Eights months and words elude me. Five half written posts and three and one quarter of over-loved romances.

Too little things she said, too little he heard.