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.

You Are Here

I feel sorry. For you. For me. For everyone out there who is exactly like us. Because in the world we live in, we are the weaker people. We are the emotionally unstable. We think too much. We analyze more than we should. We are difficult to handle. We feel so much at one time that it’s impossible to contain it. We believe too often. We trust too soon. Sometimes the only constant thing in our lives is the way we fall in love with everyone and everything around us as quickly as we fall out of love for it.

We fall. We get hurt over things that don’t matter. We break to bits. We look for people to fix us. We put ourselves out there. We are all over the place. We are people with vulnerable hearts fighting the urge to call this one friend we think will understand at three in morning. To vent. To cry. To get over things.

We know all there is about not letting people define our happiness for us. All about not tying our goals to people. And yet, we think our stories will be exceptions. This person will change everything. Turn our lives around. This one time, will be different.

We get angry. We want the person we are angry at to come and make up with us. And you know the funny part? This person, who has made you angry, who has hurt you, will always come reason with you on how it was not exactly their fault. That’s what they'll do. They'll explain. And reason. When all you want is just to forget everything and talk the way you used to. That you don’t even think it was their fault. That in the end, they were missed more than anything else. That all you wanted to know is that you were important enough to be made up with. Isn't that what we crave for? This crazy idea of acceptance?

And this, this will eventually kill us.

The Moment

"I wish we could better understand death. And life."

"There is nothing to understand. Trust me. I've seen it.

You sit and play things over in your head thinking how you will possibly react if something like this happens. Truth be told, you never know what will come over you when it does happen. Like, for real."

"You’re wise."

"I know I am. I talk fluent Paulo Coelho, kid."

"Paulo Coelho doesn’t make you wise. It’s not, like, the definition of wise or something."

"That was a metaphor. Can’t you just let the woman have her moment?"

"Ok. Sorry. Here. Have your moment."

Unrequited Love

Ten forty nine.
My eyes sweep across the newspaper in one hand as I pick out imaginary fluff from the curtains using the other. Toothbrush dangles from one end of my mouth. The gentle hiss of water boiling fills the house. I braid random strand of my hair absent-mindedly. Drink coffee. Strong and black with a little skim milk. Hum along to Julia Stone. Write, if it comes to me.And somewhere, during this trance like state reeking of blissful solitude I end up watching random snippets from this movie. Passively out of action.

I have watched it before.
Few years ago. Without developing any liking to it. The typical boy meets girl. Set in the eccentric capital city of England. Average actors I have seen in different movies throughout the decade. I didn't find it boring, back then. Or bad. Just bland. At that moment. Or clinched. Maybe I was too distracted. Maybe.

I like it this time.

There is always a movie like this, isn't it? Funny.

One thirty two.
I call you.
My phone cradled in the hollow between my neck and shoulder as I pour myself this wine with no name, I won in a bet some two weeks ago. Three fourth in a steel glass.
I hear the phone ring. 
Three times before you pick up.

One fifty five.

I take a long swig before I close the door behind me. 
My head just the right amount of dizzy. 
The tip of my tongue laced with a hint of cedar, caramel and blackcurrant undertones.

Two thirty two.
It rained last night. Out of season. Again. That explains the loose white cotton shirt sticking to my back every time I lean on something long enough. I undo the second button as you talk to me about the pottery classes you took one summer when you were fourteen. You stop and pass me a sly smile.
“What?” I laugh, pulling my hair down and carefully tying them up again.
You shake your head and look around. Your eyes stop momentarily at the adjacent roof. Quite similar to ours. Part of the series of abandoned houses we discovered four years. ago. Ugly patches of grey and black cover every wall. Slippery.

Two forty eight.

I prop myself up next to you. My feet dangling on the edge of the roof. You look at your hands. Recite a verse aloud, to no one in particular. Its Latin you tell me a while later catching your breath and holding my gaze longer than usual. Your eyes half open to the sun behind me. Your fingers, slender, long and warm, touching the side of my hand as you slightly hold on to the border of the wall we are sitting on.

I still remember the look in your eyes from that day.
This look.
Of wistful knowing.
You never looked at me the same way again. 

Ghosts

..Because sometimes its not about hoping for the best.

Its about hoping at all.

Signs

I.

You will look at them. People you have known for years. That friend you grew up with. Lived through all those stories you tell people you just met. Had sleepovers. Borrowed books from. Stole shirts.  Survived heartbreaks. Shared countless inside jokes and innuendos. You will look at them one day and  would never want see them again. You’d wonder why you are friends with them in the first place. You will suddenly discover this tangible lost connection you haven’t noticed before.  Walk away. For you. For them. Start new. Reflect. Come back later perhaps. Or not.

II.

Its been fourteen years. You now listen to Floyd and paint your nails black. Grab a sandwich with extra mayonnaise and a dash of mint on your way to work. Small talk with the people in the adjacent cabins at your office. Except one. You saw her for the first time last week. Humming along a familiar tune. It reminds you of the streets of Kolkata. It’s probably from that Bengali movie you saw when you were nine. You can almost trace the smell of  Chingri Malai Curry  that wafted through the house every Friday afternoon in the summers. The few vivid memories of home. Of Amma.

You should probably talk to her, you think. Everyday.

III.

There has been a delay. You look at the watch and count on your fingers. Sixteen hours till your appraisal meeting. You will probably be late. Sigh. It wasn’t a good idea after all. Happens every time you visit home. A five day leave always ends up with Ma pleading for two days more. How much difference does it make, she says, we don’t see you for months, anyway. She’s right about that. You count on your fingers. Again. Four months till you come back. Stop. Look around. They have been here a long a time. The father and the son occupying the bench next to yours. Sipping cheap bland coffee from Styrofoam cups. Engaged in a  discussion you cant really hear. The father with his right hand rubbing his knee every once in a while. Watch. A warm hug that follows. The son mumbling words of concern. The father, his eyes, proud and shining patting his back. 

Think. Of the vague goodbye you have mumbled to yours all this time. The hollow promise of staying longer next time.  Count on your fingers. Yet again. The years that have gone by since you ended your conversations with an embrace.

 Of acceptance if nothing else.

IV.

Close those books. You have been reading the same sentence since an hour. Hold your head in your hands. It doesn’t seem to go away, does it? Make your eighth cup of coffee. Go online. Read about how nine cups of coffee a day can act as toxic to your body. Smile. You are one cup short.  Browse through stray word documents in your computer. There are far too many.   Remember. You were hurt when you wrote this. Happy when that. This, was just random. That, was an after effect of over analyzing.  Think of writing a book. A secret blog would be good too. Pictures and words. Your pictures and your words. Say it out loud. Savour the warm feeling in your chest. Laugh on the prospect of that. So naïve.  

Its been long. Sigh. Go back to those books.

Or.

V.

This is it.

This is the sign you have been looking for.

Good luck.

Time-Machine

If you are reading this I want you to be aware of the lives you are touching this moment. And the lives you are being touched by right now. Just by existing. Breathe in. Breathe out. You are leaving finger prints all over the place. Delicate translucent webs of your highly concentrated essence. Replaced every minute by someone else. Each a different substance. A different memory. 

You.
Falling out of love. Over-dozing on caffeine. Laughing at the joke you didn't quite catch. Keeping your blanket close for five extra minutes on winter mornings heavy with longing.

You.
Vomit on your sweater. Shifting uncomfortably in a room full of people you don’t know. Thinking of the foliage from the last fall carefully preserved between the pages of your journal. The butterflies in mason jars. Distant scent of mildew in the otherwise fresh air brushing past as you run. Stopping a while later. Bending on your knees . Heaving. Catching breath.

You.
With your lips. Raw. Eager. Slightly parted. Tracing the hollow between her neck and collarbone. That piece of flesh you've always wanted. Her cold fingertips composing random patterns of yearning at the back of your neck. The soft signs closing the space in-between.

You.
Conscious and clumsy. Hiding your face. Marks of anger running down your arms. Making pretty pictures. Listening. Being told that you are what is wrong with the world. Reading. Creating. Feeling infinite.

You.
Separated by exactly six degrees from another person. A door. An opening to the world beyond. Just five acquaintances away. Absorb the thought. The endless possibilities of it.

You.
The walking evidence of constant evolution. Sixteen percent Carbon. Twenty three pairs of chromosomes. Ten pints of blood. A DNA like no other and yet bound closely with the common fear of falling.
You never quite fear the heights, you now realize. But, the fall.

You have left an impression. On me. On us. 

Veil

I saw you.

December of two thousand eleven. Just another Tuesday. Middle of the fifth semester. Nine of us had been roaming around the city streets. Talking. Laughing. Making memories. On three fingers of diluted single-malt scotch. Stopping, in between to eat at food joints we’d discover out of nowhere, whose names none of us remember now. I, however, recall this song. A fast paced peppy number coming from a small cigarette shop on the curb. I wish I could remember the lyrics. Or the artist. I hear it sometimes at night, when I’m lying on my bed, my subconscious wide awake, while the rest of me is drifting off to the distant sound of wood crackling in the fireplace. It’s been a long time I realize. Long long time.

I saw you.

For a split of a second. Looking over your shoulder with this look of slight indifference. Like you were almost waiting for everything to fall apart. Right that moment. I caught you at chance. And because I did, it changed something inside me. Forever.

There were two of us calling each other crude names. Three were busy holding up this other friend who had downed too many whiskeys. One, with his shoulders hunched in a threadbare pullover, was walking ahead of us all, phone to his ear, whispering sweet nothings to this girl he never told us about. And I, I was just cold.

Later, you smiled at the photograph we all took just before we became silhouettes in the dark that was closing in.

I saw you.
Just so you know.

Stateless

Your love,

A bubble,

With shiny little rainbows,

Hollow nevertheless.