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‘Cause If You Like It, Then…[ii]

18 Aug

Read the story so far here.

 

Peering into the darkness, her eyes fell on a figure crouched at her feet. He was on bended knee, holding out a dark velvet box with the unmistakable glimmer of polymorphed carbon.  Will you marry me, came the words from a galaxy far, far away, and echoed in the ether of that seaside town. Her eyes re-focused. Her ears nudged each other into soldier-like attention. Even her stomach stopped churning for the merest of moments.

Will you marry me, he repeated, as her brain tried to pinch her tongue into responding. Say something, it hissed. Anything!

So she did. Barf, she went, I’m going to throw up, and stumbled forward, bracing her body for projectile hurling. Miraculously, something else emerged. She heard a voice say yes. With an exclamation or two thrown in for good measure. And their eyes met as he rose at last.

The ring was simple and locally-bought. We’ll call it Thiffany’s, she giggled, as he slipped it on her finger, smiling and holding her gaze. But nothing in their lives was quick and painless, so why should an engagement be an exception? Remember the bright blue door she had stopped outside? At the precise moment that the ring went on, it opened, and a figure emerged.

 

(To be continued…)

‘Cause If You Like It, Then… [i]

16 Aug

Once upon a time, on a balmy February evening in Pondicherry, a couple years ago, a Boy and his girl walked over to a candle-lit courtyard for a meal. They had taken a quick trip from Bombay, zoomed around on a rented bike all weekend and wanted to make their last evening special. It was a sweet and intimate time that had begun with a disagreement and involved lots of making up. It was just them and the Southern sun, whitewashed walls and bougainvillea, incense and long walks, and the curious sense of home that the girl always found amidst it all.

Struggling to see under the not-so-bright stars and ineffective candlelight, they tucked into a meal of Creole mutton curry, coastal fish and some forgettable dessert. There were few other diners that night and they held hands and talked quietly. Dinner over, they strolled back through silent lanes, the crash of the waves a reminder that the blue bay was only one street east.

The girl, greedy thing, had consumed one helping too many and she staggered toward their hotel room, mumbling about how stuffed she was.  Let’s sit by the sea for a while, the Boy suggested, taking her arm to guide her. An explanation about fresh air being helpful followed. I’m feeling sick, she whined, her gills spewing curry, I want to go back. And with that, she quickened her pace, leaving him a few steps behind.

Then I guess I’ll just have to do it here, she heard him say, and tried to fashion a suitable question over her shoulder. But curry can rapidly seep into one’s brain, dulling all senses, and dessert delivers the master stroke. She stopped outside a bright blue door. All was calm, but not bright. It wasn’t Christmas and she certainly wasn’t Mary. Her brain registered a lack of sound. She felt his presence behind her and turned around to face him. He was gone.

(To be continued…)

Virtuoso

18 Jul

Some days I scoop up love in those neon-hued plastic shovels from a kiddie sand pit, scrape-whoosh, scrape-whoosh, filling the spirit, topping it up with a rare fill of generosity and compassion, so that I may lie back, eyes closed, contented, and bask in the simmer of affection until darkness swarms and she siphons me out again.

O Mother mine, dementors chant like schoolboys at your feet.

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Abstraction

29 Jun

Are places just places or do the ghosts of events past lurk around their corners, dribbling narratives and memory like senile elders? Can they ever be sterile, antiseptic, scrubbed free of the flotsam that is a solitary man’s story? Will there always be a stance to a square of earth, a side of emotion, a tug, a claim? What is it about places that make them more than places?

Perhaps just the fact that everyone has one. And loves one. Even if the ‘twain do not meet.

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Chocolate for Brekkie, Starlight for Din

18 Apr

Language can be a beautiful thing. You can stack up phrases and bite into them like a sandwich of plump shrimp. You can twirl sentences like I curl hair around my fingers, gazing absently at its tensile brownness against my skin. You can dip into it like the soothing jasmine green tea I have recently discovered. It bubbles and warbles in a kettle and the words spill over as you lie on your back, high on the sound they make. Language is the quiet of California rain. The cacophony of Bhendi Bazaar. The little shiver that tingles down your back when he looks at you that way.

Language is a new chaise lounge from Ikea. I’ve been curled up on it and refuse to vacate. Language makes me reach for grey skies and wrap them snugly around the shoulders. Eat a doughy chocolate cookie for breakfast and warm tortillas for lunch. Language makes me unrecognizable to him. I prefer you, he says simply. And OJ bristles. Shifts uncomfortably on her cushion for a while, then goes back to watching steam fog up the window. The landscape shuts itself out and she turns inward again.

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Furl, Un-

8 Jun

It’s steaming and the sky looks ready to explode. A cool wind has whipped itself up from nowhere.The anticipation is almost sexual. Anytime now. My favorite moment in the whole year is almost upon us. Lord, how hungrily I wait.

~A text to the Boy as I rode to work today.

Birth

8 Apr

Lalit. It is difficult for me to speak. Words halt and shuffle under sentiment and I labor to breathe. All was as usual today when I hopped into a cab and was on my way to the sonography. Dr. D awaited me, it was just a routine scan, there wasn’t much thought to it. The fools they call staff around the place made me pee first and then guzzle four more glasses for the procedure. That brought my total to 14 since noon. I even looked over my shoulder a couple times, half expecting the BMC to rap my knuckles for excessive water consumption. Finally, I was in.

Good, good, murmured Dr. D as the cold gel spread over my belly, the smooth end of the pod bearing down on an alarmed bladder. Just mildly polycystic, she said, as she continued to examine my ovaries. They’re well-behaved, as you know. Haven’t ever been cause for trouble. So I lay back and let her earn her fat pay cheque.

Kidneys, check. Urinary tract, check. Uterus, the pod dug deeper. I casually turned my head toward the screen. Emptiness, naturally, stared back at me. A cavernous space, quiet and unused, minding its own business for three routine decades.

WHY AREN’T YOU HERE? I WANT YOU TO BE HERE. WHERE ARE YOU? WHY AREN’T YOU HERE, WHY, WHY? Half roar, half hysteria, the words flung themselves at the screen. I turned for Dr. D’s reaction. She was dictating away. The nurse in the corner hadn’t noticed anything amiss. The being formerly known as me pleaded with the blackness, willing my eyes to see a shape, railing in unreasonable hunger, consumed by a bodily need no logic could perforate. But baby, you’ll say (and I’ll pardon the terrible pun), you’ve never had a child! You aren’t planning one now either, so why the agony?

I don’t know, Lalit. I wish I could say it took me by surprise. But no emotion save blind urgency was permitted to address me while the virgin longing coursed through my body and held it utterly captive. In that moment, nothing else mattered. The room melted away. Dr. D travelled into another dimension.  The nurse ceased to exist. I did not obey my own body. All that excess water pricked the back of my eyes and flooded mountains in my throat. Atlantis drowned all over again and oceans rose to demand a tenant. For the first time in my three routine decades, it was just me and a baby I wanted to exist. I fear motherhood, Lalit. The erasure of carefully constructed thought, plan and reason.

Back at baseline, I reacquaint myself with consequent emotions and catch my snatched breath. Maybe what happened this afternoon was an aberration. Oh well, now we know I have somewhat healthy ovaries.

Leprechaun

16 Feb

a.k.a. Amen to Angst

I am jealous. Of happy people. Not the ones who have it all, or are beautiful, or accomplished. But the ones who find it so easy to live in a permanent state of thrill, who pluck strains of joy out of the ether and plant them in their backyards. The ones who insist on being euphoric. Who slip into contentment like silk over skin.The ones who don’t have their radar trained on discomfort, pick up on melancholy or carry a goatskin bag of pathos straining to burst. The ones missing a depressive gene. Who take curry on ceilings and the loss of ways of living in their skip-hopping stride.

And have the temerity to smile through it all. And make me look at them warily and mouth “How?” while their limited processing capacities, mediocre life and sorry choices mock my wellsprings of angst. I can hear the taunts & chuckling all the way home and their sunshine gleams behind me, an even deeper shade of green.

But my sliver of glee dwells in knowing that you’re the one person in the world who will absolutely understand. And I toss happiness one last pitiful glance and speed-dial your number.

~~~

Updated to add: The Science of Lasting Happiness, an article in the Scientific American magazine.

Of Sleeping Pills & Sanity

6 Jul

Lately, I am constantly aware of a feeling of spiraling doom. The city is converging on us, the times are fragmenting randomly, even coldly; it’s mayhem within and mayhem without and I’m up at nights, seeking that elusive ingredient that makes me believe it, the one abrasive incident, the cautionary tale, the warning of an impending apocalypse under a veneer of smooth normalcy, as people celebrate new bridges and governments and triumphs over parallel democracies.

I can’t shake it off, this sense of alarm, it bubbles in the pit of my core, and I am uneasy, jumpy and watching like a cornered hawk as the sensation rises to my throat and threatens to bring up howls of dark, viscous green at a pitch I cannot recognize as my own.

And in the midst of the mire, Yatra.com messages to tell me its rates are slashed and I should fly away. One-way tickets, my friends, couldn’t be better timed.

On Writing

25 Jun

It starts with the mildest of anticipation, a sense of prelude, the uncharted liberation of an empty Word document.

I pause, even though the sketch has been formed, for the lines to get darker, firmer, definitive. Shards cohere into rapidly swirling aerial whirlpools, spilling out into letters, words, and then lines sliding off the page. I can take no credit—I will not—only convey what needs must be told, for holding words within, like ingesting too many groundnuts, routinely fosters belly aches.

And finally, when it leaves you, there is a sense of relief. A package sealed, a job done, the closing of another sub-chapter in that coffee table tome we only occasionally browse. Applause is extraneous, the act itself organic, a past I am all too comfortable leaving behind.

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