Relapse

"Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,

Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. "

And yet, Romeo chose to be poisoned by each of its thorns.

Have you ever laughed just to relish most the point where it breaks in to a cackle? Have you ever tuned your earphones just so loud that you can't hear yourself howl? Have you ever spotted a candy stick on a Christmas tree to catch a smell of your childhood for a fleeting moment just to cringe to breathe that moment again? Have you ever taken the name of God in a language unknown and felt like it meant the universe? Have you ever wanted the painter to color your body and soul and yet, take off every hue so brushed? Have you ever wanted love to kiss your feet while your eyes are floored in worship?

Surrender.

You are forever what you have seen and heard, even if you deny having been influenced. Amidst all this confusion, I stand, wondering if I am. And if I am, then what is it that I am searching for? Perhaps nothing. And out of that nothingness sprout the indecisive devises of my futility. Imagining every character as an antagonist, I am striving to finish my story drafted in morbid delusion. I beg for respite at the turn of every page only to become the last words that either get washed away or are smudged by an impatient proof-reader's soiled thumb. There is an alter at the end of the narrow aisle that I walk, where I make deals of my punishments, prejudiced in statutes. 

Has it ever happened that your eyes have succumbed to sleep, losing all your thoughts, and your mind and limbs and dreams have caught fire? And awaken hysteria has never felt better? Feels like I have looked the stars in the eyes and ended up walking in to an ocean. Cold. Water.

Obligations

Living a drop and two,
Drinking a drop and two.
Let it trickle.
And if this life,
Let me live it too.

Woe me with wings,
Still treading on earth.
Memories log.
In dysphoria, sleep
My dreams of mirth.

Pi

I have been scared. Mortified, even. Scared of losing. But what is scarier than losing is the realization that I am scared of losing what I never had. Hopelessly mistaking reveries for memories, I have been strangely swindling with the present.
Last afternoon, I spoke to my plants while watering them. I spoke in gibberish terms of endearment, garbled with fear that someone may hear me. Now I know why people keep pets, everybody is scared. Scared of losing. Losing to Eleanor Rigby.
They are also scared of saying what they mean sometimes, more so than what they don't.
Pinching pockets of love, making myself richer in boiling non-disclosure, I have come a long way. Shy to make eye contact with who I was, eons before I delved in to "serious" relationships of any kind, I feel truly blue.
This post is incomplete, unfinished.

Spin half

I spin the cotton of your being, all night long. 

Am I the old woman on moon? 

For on every full moon night

my heart pants with every footstep

of the silver.

Is my soul a shape-shifter?

Bond

In the silent waters of this lake,
falls a pearl so silent.
Ripples up waves,
and grows to a vortex.


is gumsum jheel ke paani mein,
koi moti aakar girta hai.
ek dayraa banne lagta hai,
aur badhke bhanwar bann jata hai.

Ivy

In yearning, in not wanting, in disbelief and in faith, the quagmire of desires have camouflaged your existence in my being. My dawn-fulls of you, slip between my fingers, biding me with a forbidden smile of omniscience.
I can't remember when I met you first, but I remember you creeping slowly in my watery sunsets, infusing melody to my melancholy. Chamomile. I have only ever wanted to not want you. Weaving and unraveling every thread of moment snarled in your breath, I trudge to keep pace. You tickle, tingle, trickle on the sole of my feet and brace my soul.
Should I hold you or snatch you? Should I implore or should I writhe in longing till I long no more? Should I ask if you too will implode?
Or should I treasure you, like a beat in my bosom, living and leaving my life when I be?

My feelings don't make money

and they really don't. What did you think, they did? Ofcourse not! Which is why I am awake at, well, 05:19 and thinking about what most have either forgotten or conveniently refused to learn.

Your feelings will never make money either.
Sleep.

Shame

This is like one of those dreams where I am falling down from the top of a cliff. I am struggling to open my eyes to end the fear, while still trying to reach the bottom and know how it will be thereafter. My heart thumps loud, my palms are sweating, and yet I know that I am cold. Free falling and yet captive in the dungeons of my fears. Lost and yet not wandering.

Sitting right where it all started. When you make promises, you know someone will come and put them to shambles, put them to shame.

dV/dr = 0; Minimized.

So I realize that I cannot probably come up with an appealing blog layout, but that is not at all the point why I am trying to type in more than an email or a microblog message.

What have I been up to of late? Dreaming. Putting behind me every histogram that I must analyze, I have been caught up in dreaming, envisaging memories of dreams, complete with lights, choreographed movements and expressions, every which of is possible.

I have become more of a romantic, post the sporadic bouts of emotional blow-ups I have half planted myself and half let others kindle. I always was a romantic dreamer, (or a dreaming romantic?)

After many a humble unpublished posts, multitudes of arrogant resolutions to write more frequently and make more sense out of them, I am back to putting together the muddles pool of what I may call my dreams.

Sincerely, not trying any much to make sense of all this, like I do when I read my older posts. I do?

Do I really do? What does it change in my life? For the best I know, I tried last night to cook which started as a craving for the chingri-maach my bengali fantasies are made of, doused in thengapal, befriending my palette with a reassurance of garam-masala.

I think, I really do. I am a romantic alright.

humne aasmanon mein laakhon ke saude kiyein

I have to stop listening to songs that make me cry.

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.

For Eli

Five months out of Kgp, five months away from my corner in heaven, five months away from my personal social mess, five months of unknowing.

And yet I am happy today, in a strange way. I am happy in closure, happy with the beginnings, happy with the end terms blowing with the wind chill, happy.

Because I have you, amidst all madness. Because I can cry for you laughing with you. Because it took me a world full of pain to know the pleasure in our miles, in our hours. Because like a hot cup of tea in a winter afternoon, you hold hold my flowing insanity in your steady hands.

In and Out

Kgp. Finally out of it. And how does it feel? Wonderful! Home made food, cooling system, reunion with lost wingies (errr...almost them), shopping, general pampering...whoa whoa whoa! Stop right there, because that is so much all that is there to it. Though I can sleep through the day and pore in to the computer all night with super fast broadband and no proxies killing me, there still isn't DC++ and the "general arbit bhaat" to keep it alive. So, after a lot of procastination, I decided to clean up the most scandalizing stuff from my one terabyte HDD (spent a lot of dough on it, so thats a must mention ;-) ). And half-way through, I was choked. Choked with the overwhelming urge to run back to F-306, SN Hall of Residence.

The dirty, almost sickeningly so, stripped and scribbled with crayons walls, where the reassuarance of known names welcomed me after the rare excruciating vivas or intoxicatingly frequent beautiful night outs, are so not replacable by bright and clean walls of my room at home. Not that I am that averse to cleanliness, I just loved the names on them :-|

So... Hall

The first thing that comes to mind when I say SN, or think SN, is the buzzing common room. Way before it had that huge expensive television, and ages before they got that new TT table, there were sofas, we used invariably in our plays. The black covers with yellow flowers, the glass table, the broken dressing table, drawers, chart papers, paint brushes, dust, seniors screaming at me for not getting it right, followed by me screaming at juniors for not getting it right.

The lights practice, jumping around almost aimlessly barefoot on Netaji, the stinking sponge used by Abhiram da to paint us white and pink, and oh! the pricking moustaches.

Thank you seniors for the haranguing lectures and the tempo building sento sessions and ofcourse the treats that followed. Thank you juniors for the inexhaustible supply of paranthas an d chai.

The butterflies in my stomach, I still remember, never felt before exams, but almost everytime I stepped in Raman Auditorium. The cat-calls, the desk slapping (a deformed tell-tale gold ring still adorns), the utter disappointment at losing, and the consequent sniffing at possible poltu, and the exhilarating shrieks on wins, publically smirking at friends from other halls and later having chai/ scotch with those very mates, every day in the soc-cult calendar exhausted and rejuvenated at the same time.

Thank you SN, for keeping the vigour of competetion going every passing day, for making me more of a soc-cult scholar than a science student, for the tiny bit of tech, for the immense love and camaraderie, a dash of bitchiness and a heartful five years.

Dept

Seriously? Friends. And the most wonderful ones at them. The place where I refused to study for four years got me friends in the unlikeliest of people. What labs? Nescafe, not just the one right in front of the dept, all round the insti. And in case, it was a particularly soporific meter gauging experiment, it was nimbu chai all the way down to the old building.

And when the climax hit the rock bottom, it was those four years of friends who stood by, and literally so.

And we parted in parts, a day of a bright red key chain, gin-vodka shots with a thence teetotaller, pretty coffee mugs, vanilla twist, a glass idol of a playful God, and memories of playing in the sand and sea.

And yes, the ice-creams too.

Thanks Sriku, Balu, Subho, Breeta, Dhol, Varun, Ajit, Mangu and everybody else.

Kgp

I found love here, I found jealousy here, I found everything one constitutes for a life here. I lost my heart too many times, to too many things and I found madness in everything I did. The best of 2.2s, endless chai at Champa's , eating at Bala's expense at Shantanu's, Vodka in jungle, sneaky village trips, bitching on IG terrace, pretending to be heartless at freshers' in the mess, feigning arrogance at the hot-shots, trying best at being a girlie-girl on getting roses or chocolates, learning the use of make-up and also how to climb trees, hall days and the perfection at being a snob, walking tirelessly in the fog and stopping only to do a twist, singing emosanal attyachar in front of security gaurds in drunken stupor, playing monkey-kick, Poker and every possible flash game before exams, extorting treats from seniors and juniors alike (totally unbrazen in either deeds), cramming bengali dialogues whose meanings I still haven't understood, having square meals at harry's/tikka's and still not wanting to go back, being overtly mean to people I never got along with (sorry for the huge number of them), being a perfect bitch to one and willing to cross mountains for another, Kgp.

I always thought I cried a lot. Summing up Kgp, I know I laughed as much, I loved even more.

Thanks Froggie, Amrita, Mona, Doggie, Servo, Mallu, Ban, Beeps for putting up with me. And the dues for the last couple of months, for holding me up and keeping me high and dancing, thanks Jadda, Rathee and Abhas.

Kgp

Logged Out.

Catharsis

Of yore and fore I write hence...

I am constantly amazed by the ostentatious diligence with which stubborn change proves its permanence. Gliding through things I never thought I could manage to pass, I am left wondering how much more could I, would I change. I wonder if I may enumerate all that I scrambled, stumbled up on, volatile it may be.
I have confused all desires with needs, the desire of a confidant tangled with the need of an anchor.
Recently, I was "celebrating" a weekend, the "weekend" way. High and not dry I watched Dev D, the epic of eternal love of the quintessential bacchanalian at heart, tempered with optimism. Dev, the lover, the protagonist, the antagonist, the loser does not die bleeding at his lover's door in this novel rendition of the story of love and punishment that I grew up to idolize. The idea is not to punish unrequited love, but to question why love went unrequited in the first place. We have all loved and lost at some point in life, not necessarily a love of romantic kind.
My mother, who happened to watch Dev D the very night I did in a humongous drunken revelry, called me the next day to restate to me the newly fangled idea of "optimism". Climax! My heart does not really go out for Dev, it cries for Paro, the other lover, the other protagonist, the other antagonist, the other loser. The egotists cry in their own names, sing in their pain and throw complicated nonsense in the name of family, society, onlookers. Paro gets to nowhere, to a marriage which cannot be consummated, step-children almost her own age and ofcourse she has to tear her heart with the thoughts of decadence of Dev.
My thoughts have no Chandramukhi, for I know not her, neither do I know if she walks in beauty and talks in sugar. But I want not Dev D, if Paro must cry, so will have to Chandramukhi and not bag Dev, the lover, the loser.

Played ambiguosly by "हसरतों की दिल्लगी " (Farce of Desires) my heart says to
You, I wish I could say 'rot in hell', but then I wrote your name in sand and let the waves wash it away;
To the other You: The piper plays.