the love that remains

You still find yourself there sometimes.
Tracing the marks on your back, after you first met him. 
Your hair smelling of cigarettes and eyes lined with love too fierce for paper. 

This was right. It always felt that way. 
But, so did most of the things that knocked the air right out of your lungs on December winter mornings,
that aren't just cold enough yet.

Things like these – they always have a knack for starting like that, don’t they?
Setting you on fire - limb by limb - bone by bone – and before you know it,
you’re glad for the flames - oblivious of the skin peeling off - coloring your world in sixteen shades of ashes.

I always wanted to write about you – and empty beer bottles that get me high too soon – and songs of Floyd that told me how we were just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, which I don’t listen to anymore – and that night I spent running my fingers through your hair, whispering the same thing over and over, not wanting to be anywhere else but there – with my bare, very vulnerable legs next to yours.

You sometimes wonder if you’ll ever forget him – let go completely – a boy like that, whom you wrote of, since you were fourteen, yet to put words to that sudden fall in your chest that accompanied a deep sense of hurt.

Japanese call it fukoturo.
Literally translating to bosom. Figuratively, to the physical feeling of a broken heart.

You know too much now.
Perhaps, a little more than you should.

I remember walking next to the train carrying you home. Carrying my home.
Somehow, I knew I’d never see you again. Just like I knew you’d fall in love with me when we talked in late September, from two years ago. You – with the perfect complement to my superhero alter ego.

"I'm writing a story."
"Do they fall in love?"
"How do you know there is a they?"
"There isn't?"

He didn't sleep last night.
It has been 288 days since I last wrote and now that I am,
I wonder if I’ll fall in love with you in the end. Again.
Maybe you can kiss me this time.

Yes?

Or maybe I’ll just fall in love.
That’d be okay, too.

So, let me and
If that’s alright with you, love,
I’d like my heart back.

Tokhon amaaye naiba mone raakhle.
It's alright if you don't remember me then.

"I'll be home before eight."

Two things happened on July 22, this year.

My mom’s what would have been her 50th birthday.

I boarded the train to Pune to start on the job I always wanted.

Exactly a month later, a 22-year old photo journalist was gang-raped in Mumbai. You read about these things happening every other day now and even then, I felt different, very different about this one. Maybe, because I was the same age. It could so easily have been me.

The news piece said, her mother called her when it was happening and one of the 5 men switched off the phone from then on.  My thoughts immediately went to my father who let his only daughter move away from his already empty home so that she could do what she always wanted. I called him twice every day. Still do. I’d talk about the new place I was sharing with my friend at the time, her absolutely crazy neighbours, how I travelled through 6 buses back and forth between my apartment and office, how I got lost one of those six times every day and somehow managed to find my way back in a city I knew nothing about.

Every month after making my routine payments of rent, food and internet, I tell him I might be short on money and he insists I take some from him to get me through, after all ‘Why did your mother and I work all these years?’ he says as I accuse him of being filmy and turn his offer down.  "I still have a quite a few bucks left." I tell him, “I’ll manage.”  And I do.  (Actually I know I will be fine from the beginning only. I’m just messing with him. Its fun and I’m dramatic like that.)

I’d be leaving for Diwali next week and I stopped to shop for things I could take home as I went empty-handed in the suddenly-planned trip last time.  I picked up two t-shirts for my brother. After a while I realized, I really liked one of those two and suspected I’d keep it by the time I got home so I got another one just like that for myself. Talk about greed. I called up my Dad to get his shirt-size and he refused to tell me. "Buy something for yourself, no? I don't need shirts. I already have many." He told me as I rolled my eyes all the way to my brain, standing in the middle of the shop.

"So do I, now are you telling me or am I supposed to get the first thing I lay my hands on?"

"Forty two. You just don’t listen to me."

"I know. That’s what I am supposed to do. It’s in the job description."

This one time, I'm out with people from the office. I know I'd be late and my battery is low. It's seven thirty when I retreat into a corner and give him a call. 

"I might be a tad bit late. Out with office people. Phone would possibly die so I thought I'd let you know in case you call and worry." I tell him, slightly bothered that he might not be very pleased. 

"I'm not in town, why should I even bother?" he says. 

"Oh wow. So cool are we now?"

He laughs and tells me that he knows I can take care of myself. "I trust you." He says, "More than I trust myself." There is a certain weight I feel everytime he says this to me.

This week a 23 year old software engineer was abducted by 2 men and raped in a moving Volvo.

For this one time, I won’t give you a paragraph of feminism. I won’t tell you how critical it is to teach your boys to respect women and to not look at them as mere objects or prizes to be claimed. I won’t tell you how it makes me cringe with rage within, every time I see victim blaming in the name of culture. I won’t tell you how badly I wanted to slap that piece of shit who cat-called me when I was walking home from office last week.

But, I will tell you this. Somewhere very far away, a 51-year old man calls his daughter who lives 800 kms from him - alone, when another such incident comes to light.

In that moment, there is nothing sadder that listening to him try hard to strike a normal everyday conversation amidst all the very noticeable concern filling the distance between them.

"I’ll be home before eight."

She tells him out of nowhere,then.

soulmates

they say
the right person for you
is probably at some place obvious
at this very moment
waiting just to find you.

somehow
I’d rather have him walking under the purple evening sky
his fingers tracing the inside of the wrist
of this girl by his side
(her skin like porcelain and eyes rich with love)
trying to hold a conversation
that finally ends with a soft sigh
and a careless thought
tugging at the back of his mind
resurfacing every now and then
saying
‘What am I missing?’ 

beginnings.

There is a strange non-definable beauty in not knowing someone enough. You are somehow at this slightly different brand of peace with yourself. Every day starts with a new carefully drawn conversation happening in your head and ends up with the satisfaction of stolen glances and that accidental brush against their skin. There is a rush when you see them. The adrenaline. The awe. The radiance. The magical air that surrounds their epitome of perfectness.

And then you get up one day, walk across the hall and say hello.

Endings hurt the way they do because beginnings ruin the false sense of flawlessness you so happily dwell in. It’s the beginnings you should hate, and yet. 

i wrote this for you

You have been here before
tracing with dainty ineffectual fingers
the black and white montages from the past
for that precise moment when 
the tiny specks of light in their eyes
turned into 
cold new beginnings of disappointment.

Listen to me.

Let nothing and nobody
silence the mellow beating
of your very vulnerable heart.

Alright?
Now breathe.

answers

Someday, it will all make sense.

Maybe I'll still know you then.

Maybe I won't.

Either way, we'll be okay.

Losing You

There was a suffocating sour smell lingering in the corridors with walls, the saddest shade of yellow. I remember a painting outside every room. A vague attempt at bringing life to the place. I can’t, however, recall what was in the one outside hers. Some landscape perhaps. With more green than there should have been. The curtains matched right with the walls, a faded pink pattern marking their borders. There was some red too. Maybe. Sunlight filtered through the windows behind them as I rested my head against the sill, breathing in the air outside, deeply.


“When will you come home?” He asks in his fourteen year old voice that is yet to falter.
She shrugs giving a slight gesture of uncertainty with her right hand. Her eyes flutter as she attempts to keep them open. So much effort. She gives up in the end. The fluids slowly enter her, through the IV needle in her already swollen left arm. The silence gnaws at my skin leaving a trail of tingling goose bumps. I clench my fists by my side. Sweaty palms.


“Try talking to her.” Someone says. I sit in front of her. I hold her hand. Carefully. So frail, I am almost afraid I might hurt her. She has lost weight, I notice. Considerably. Her hair, an unkempt mess. She has no appetite these days. A cup of soup, a day. She has an uneven breathing pattern. A series of calm and deep breaths, one moment. Shallow desperate ones, the next. I don’t remember this person. She looks at me. Her eyes speaking of exhaustion. Finality. I shudder in denial.


The monitor beeps as I silently keep a steady gaze on it. She tilts her head to look at it too. Can’t. I gently rub her hand, still looking at the rise and fall in her pulse.
“Is it low?” She squeaks. Almost inaudibly. Her voice, so different from all the twenty one years I have heard her. I stare at her hand and shake my head. “No. The nurse says, it's fine.” I tell her.
Last conversation.


It’s three thirty in the afternoon. There are six other people in the small room. One of them, talking to my father. I have dozed off sitting on the chair in a corner. I wake up. Notice she has been put on oxygen due to trouble in breathing. I stare at the air from her mouth, forming a mist on the mask. It vanishes as she inhales, only to reappear a few seconds later.
I am supposed to go back home.
“I’m leaving, Ma.” I tell her.
She nods. I wonder if I should hug her. Or kiss her cheek. Too awkward, I decide. Or too scary.
Instead, I just walk away, without looking back.
Or maybe I did.
I don't remember.