Ambush

Haiku perched on pen
Ink-coloured and fancy-flecked
Paper nets ensnare

The Secret Life of the Big Yellow House

Of course, walls can hear. They see and smell too. Nothing ever stays hidden from them. Humans. They think they know each other really well. They live together for decades and decades, but each one is enveloped in a private universe that is unknown to the other. They can read signs, decipher symbols, and solve the greatest mysteries. But…they don’t sense much. Only because they’re masters at blocking out what they don’t want to see, what they’re afraid of hearing. They just refuse. Walls unfortunately, don’t have that liberty.

The annoying thing about secrets is that you can never get rid of them. The garbage man comes every morning to clear the dust bins, but not the secrets. The secrets are tucked away in places that are in plain sight, but nobody sees them. Some of them mix with the bricks and the cement, some fly up to the rafters and nest cosily, some splatter themselves on the window-panes and refuse to come off like a particularly stubborn stain, and some just hover around like an unpleasant smell. Forever, obviously. But they show up, you know, in ordinary ways. In the peeling paint, the shattered windows, the leaking roof, the floor-cracks, the rusting grille…
When it becomes too much to bear. That’s when the house starts ageing.

The cat didn’t kill the pigeon, the child did. A spider just fell into that cup of tea, you just fished it out and served it to your mistress. That’s tap water, and you tell the guests, “We boil every drop of water in the house”. No, you’re right; something about the bedroom has changed. You actually hate your father, don’t you. You’re not actually working on a presentation on your computer. You’re going to be in big trouble if someone comes to know about that fetish of yours. No, you shouldn’t kill yourself, he didn’t cheat on you! Your son lied to you. You lied to her…

Lies, whispers and ghosts. They bind. They fix. Not mortar.

Treehouses

As a kid, I was a book-eating monster. I read in between and during classes, I read while I ate, I read under the blanket when the night put everyone else to sleep, lighting up the stories with my baby torch. I read so much that my mom used to hide my books.
As a result, I lived in parallel worlds, that collided pretty often. In one, I was the average kid with the occassional freckle and her hair in a Rasna fountain who was known for always doing her homework on time and never giving her parents any trouble at all. In the other, I spent my afternoons in a treehouse, feeding baby sparrows and ruling over Very Secret societies, and finding mysterious (but bat-less) passageways that led out of school. Let's just say that they were as different as gajar ka halwa and orange blancmange.
But the differences were never evident to me then. It took me a long time to realize that I'm never going to live in a house with an attic with ancient leather-bound books or little treasures just waiting to be discovered.
My fascination for treehouses died after two separate incidents both of which strangely, involved snakes. I was sitting under a tree talking to someone when I happened to glance at a branch only inches above my head. Coiled cosily around the branch was a muddy snake, quite dead. A few weeks later, at a sixish hour, a large snake dropped right in front of me from a tree at Nicco Park. My head still reeling after an exhilarating ride, the only response I could think of was flight, of course.
I remember being part of a few club elections. Sadly none of those clubs lived longer than three meetings. It was highly impractical for kids who lived in different parts of a huge city like Calcutta to meet every Saturday without irritable eyebrows being raised.
Gajar ka halwa was just never going to taste like orange blancmange. They were't made of the same ingredients.
And now that I'm over twenty-one, my dreams are no longer mixed up. I've given up trying to make my worlds meet because they don't exist anymore. The first one is lost somewhere in my various childhood homes while the second got awallowed up by a huge fish called Age.

In the courtyard,
the trees are absorbed refugees
embroidering maps of return on the sky.
-- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Cure for lonely nights

Dip the night in lots of music. Remember to add lots of electric guitar and drums. Switch to piano instrumentals after some time. And by the time you feel sleepy, you'll hopefully have a melody in your head instead of nasty thoughts.

Thank

You. For Mochalicious and Kaapi Crema, and the heavenly smells that drew me to you like a magnet. For the couch that became an integral part of the coffee-drinking process. I wish you’d get it back.

You. For the steamed rice and the chop suey.

You. For the many hours I spent browsing through your wares, not buying anything most of the time as I waited for people.

You. For the obscene Taboo games, the laughter, the cushions, the bean bags, the weird walls and the weirder orange lights.

You. For drawing those wonderfully clear maps in my notebook, so I could get to different parts of the city without losing my way and my wits. And for a huge trunk of things I don’t want to open right now.

You. For perhaps being the only person who’d listen to me till I completed my sentences. For being the only person I could share my deepest concerns and insecurities with, without the fear of being judged. For our silent conversations, and our conversational silences.

You. For freeing me before it got too late. For all the nonsense, and the anguish.

You. For being so refreshingly different from anyone else I know.

You. For your spirit. For your affability. For the comfort you gave me, for drawing me out of my shell to some extent.

You all. For the teasing, the turning-back-and-glaring during classes, for the eye-rolling, for the madness. For our friendship, for midbenchers. Need I say more?

You. For being so insanely difficult to thank.

Rewind

Sometime in the last week of school, Nakashi and I made a huge list of No Mores. It was a rather pleasant day, I remember- not too cold, with a hint of rain. Perfect for reminiscing, in fact. Pleasant days are rare in Delhi.
We were sitting on one of the balconies and looking down at Cluster B, thinking about all those things we wouldn’t be doing anymore. It wasn’t a terribly sentimental moment. I think it was because we were too stunned by the inevitabilities that had sneaked up on us.

Moving to Delhi was remarkably easy, come to think of it. Surprising, because the capital was so very different from the city I’d grown up in. In little ways. For starters, there were no Maruti 800s on the road. People hardly used public transport, unless they were college students. The roads were wider, cleaner. The trees, greener. Malls, glitzier. People- fewer, and better dressed. (The food- not as great). Delhi looked planned. Cal, however, is glued together, which is perhaps the most charming thing about it. Lives were transparent; everyone seemed bothered about everyone else.

Note: I don’t think it’s possible for one person to capture the essence of a city in a blog post or a series of pictures or even a book. The most you can do is describe what you perceive.

I grew to love the little pieces of my life in Delhi-
Going to Dilli Haat with my parents only for the momos.
Bhel Puri at the Malviya Nagar Market.
Night shows with my parents and Saturday mornings with Megh and Sonali at PVR Saket.
Megh’s house and everything about it, starting with Suman’s finger chips (not French Fries, mind you).
My apartment. It wasn’t as exciting as Nakashi’s or Megh’s but it was nice all the same. I miss my little room “upstairs” even though it was the hottest room in summer and the coldest in winter.
The singing!
Conversations with Nakashi without either of us worrying about the phone bill.
Even visits to the stinky INA Market for fish and chicken.

(I could go on. But I’m digressing royally from what I meant to write.)

I’m yet to learn to love Blore, with its strange mix of conservatism and cosmopolitanism. And it’s no secret that I absolutely despise my college. But now that there’s less than a week left for the much-awaited happy ending, I somehow feel I’m just not ready to say goodbye to my friends yet. And the random classmates I spend my lunch break with when they are away attending CSA meetings and library-ing for Cultural Studies assignments. And the people I have conversations with in between classes.

The human memory is funny. We only remember dreadful things. And/or the exceptionally good things. We forget the in-betweens, except for a few stray fragments.
They slip through the cracks, unnoticed unless they’re documented or fished back through facebook tags and mushy blog posts.

The Joy of Writing

rows of ink puppets
dancing on a paper stage
Creator beats time

Disney

“And they lived happily ever after, right?”

All stories end like that.

Lila thought of how Ariel had thrown herself into the sea, her body turning into foam after the Prince had broken her heart.

Cheating isn't always bad.

There would be time later for unrequited love, divorces and tragic endings.

“Yes,” the mother affirmed.

Yup. Still rusty.
And so annoyed I want to stamp the life out of something.

Uh.
Erm.
Er.
Dammit. I've become rusty.