House like a Coffee Shop

It all started a long time back. When exactly, I don’t know but it was always there, that thought at the back of your head which slowly steadily becomes an attribute. It just happened one day, the realization, of course, sitting in a coffee shop and telling the person, whom I accidentally happen to love, about how I would love to live in a house such as that shop. A glass front, a walk in kitchen, a small living room with a spiral staircase leading to a bedroom and well, I did muttered something about a Ducati parked in the driveway but that was it. All I wanted was a place for myself, a place where would exist as I have always wanted to, a place which I would fill with my books, my music, my iDevices and my idiosyncrasies. I place where the only sound would either be that of mine or guitar strumming punctuated by drum beats.

I often wondered when people said they needed to be alone, to think or to do whatever they do. I wondered because solitude always quietened my thinking. Only thing I need to think when I am alone is what to cook for myself or what to read next and yes I do think about what I read but that’s just a part of the process. I read, I think and if I like it, I let the idea lie at the back of my head. It’s not that I don’t like people or that I am anti social, well I am to a certain extent which involves eschewing all forms of meaningless conversations and goodbyes and I often don’t say hello to people because I don’t like exchanging pleasantries post that, but it’s just that I don’t feel the need to go out, extend a hand and relate.

That brings me back to the thought that became me, the thought that I could possibly live alone for the rest of my life. The thought that I am complete in myself, that what I need is within me. Companionship, appreciation, belonging, the feeling of being home, the things which people so desperately crave but even after trying hard, walking round the fire or down the aisle or accepting someone through a muslin cloth, still couldn’t find. To be content you have to be complete and you have to be complete in yourself, thinking someone else would come along and fill the holes in you would just leave you with a perforated yarn, scaffolding so fragile that an iota of doubt could make it shiver.

I want to be alone and free until I outgrow the void inside me, until I have been and done what I wanted to do, until I have fulfilled every last desire inside me, until the fork between solitude and companionship becomes one, until I have something to share with someone, something which begs to be shared not for the sake of an entitlement but just for the sake of sharing. Until then all I want to do is live in is a house just like a coffee shop.

Questions- That never were asked

How to act when you are meeting your would be brother in law for the first time or how not to stupidly grin and for a change have an intelligent conversation with him?? Speaking of intelligent conversation, the last time I had one was with my girlfriend though at that time she wasn’t my girl friend and I ended up staring blatantly at her face. More so because she chose to dress up like a Barbie that day and with cheeks so pink and hair so ravishingly long, even demigods would have stopped in their tracks to adore her. Speaking of dressing up, I now kind of know for sure that this is something that runs in her family because the moment I stood next to her brother, I felt grossly underdressed in my tattered jeans and sweaty t-shirt. But then it doesn’t usually take much to make me feel underdressed and her brother was dressed resplendently in shirt and trousers with belt and shoes with socks. Dressing and under dressing apart, the one thing that I realized though much later in the rendezvous and that was to never have a conversation about technology and mobile computing, especially when all you have done is chase around girls and sleep through three years of your post graduation.

Well, we met all three of us and what happened isn’t much of a consequence now more so because nothing much actually happened. I went there expecting a volley of questions and I was all revved up with explanations and all I wanted to do was to convince him of the love that I have for her sister but instead all I got was a pair of really calculating eyes. I can’t blame him though and maybe the word of her sister was enough to convince him of the love that both of us share and maybe he was there to just see for himself how good her sister choice is. At some point in our conversation he did ask me something that actually took me by surprise and that was as to what I think about him. Now there are people you don’t need to have an opinion about, there are people whom you can do without being friends with and expecting love from people whom I happen to be in love with and giving and expecting indifference from everyone else, is the way I live my life. But then love is all about going where you never have been, meeting all those you have never met before and loving all that you never have loved. So yes someday I will have an opinion about him but till then I am happy to look through her eyes and believe whatever she tells me.

And it all ended pretty soon and I walked back home with a lot of unsaid and unexpressed feelings and it was then I realized that I was the one supposed to be running the show but then I have never loved anyone this much before to actually bother meeting their family and try to make an impression. And now I think as long as she is convinced of the love that I feel for her, I don’t need to make an effort and convince anyone else because people who love you can actually sense the conviction in your voice and that’s all I think her brother was looking for.

And now I live my life in a flux, expecting the unexpected, going where the love takes me, saying whatever my heart conjures up and dreaming each moment of time when both of us would be together forever. Love, hope and the sweet smell of her skin, that’s what I live for now.

Love and Hope, Thats all I Live for Now

What does it take for a life to do a one eighty and turn itself around? Well, I don’t know about the world and seriously it is far too hot for me to go out and enquire about someone else’s life but as far as my life goes all it took was three or may be four simple words and nothing was same ever again. It’s been a month and I have woken up every single day, filled with new realizations, filled with newer feelings and in the nights when I would lie in my bed listening to her voice I just couldn’t help but be lost trying to rediscover this newer person whom I have become. Being with her now makes me feel as if I have never been in love before, I don’t remember ever feeling anything this poignant, this ecstatic and sometimes I can’t help but be amazed as to how my heart, which at several instance of a time has been deemed dysfunctional, could even conjure all this that I feel now.

Someone told me once, a whiff of love is all it takes to send your head reeling and nothing could be more heady than this sweet intoxication. Yes, I am intoxicated, lost, dazed and if my friends are to be believed than beyond salvage and yes, now I walk these streets looking for her in every other face that I see and now I want each of my step to be the one that would bring her closer to me. I always believed in God but now when I stand at the altar, my mind goes blank because what else would a person who had got everything in his life could ever want.

We meet, we talk, we text but still I just can’t get enough of her, all I want to do is with her every single moment and after each good bye as I sat alone in a rickshaw and watched as her silhouette faded away in the distance, my heart was just filled with a silent melancholy. And yes, I miss her even more after each time we meet because nothing could ever match up to the way this life and this world feels when she is with me. And yes, when she is sitting next to me this world simply disappears for I step into a new one, the world that is made up of aspirations and expectations, contained within her tiny kohl lined eyes. In that very instant when our eyes meet, I just know that I won’t mind living my life fulfilling every whim, every expectation of hers because in that very instant all her dreams simply become mine.

And yes, I felt safe when she tentatively placed her warm and gentle hand into mine, I felt safe because in that very moment I knew that these would be the hands that would always reach out and hold me strong. When we sat there holding each other’s hand, there was a lot that I felt, there was a lot that was unbecoming inside of me, there was lot that stirred and was washing me over. And yes when we are sit together I go speechless and I get confused because there are just so many things in my heart that I would like to say to her and I don’t how. But I know someday I will find some way to show her all that is inside of me because until the day when both of us would be bound together forever, these words are all I will have to take her heart away. And yes I live on hope that things would always be just as beautiful as they are now and really I can’t help but be filled with this hope when I look back of the last one month because life gave me everything in an instant and now hope and her love is all what I live on. And yes, when I am sitting alone in that rickshaw, it’s this hope that makes me look for her at every bend and every corner for one day when the world within my eyes would have become hers, I know I will find her waiting there for me to come and take her home.

And Finally I am in Love…

There is a thing about love, its life altering, intoxicating and all encompassing and all it takes is a whiff and the world around you does a somersault. All your dreams, aspirations and expectations in life and all that you have lived for so far, simply become meaningless and all that matters is love and its sweet blissful scent that seem to infatuate each and every sense of yours. A week or so and my head is still reeling with exhilaration, being with her is so unbelievable like a dream which stretches and becomes your reality. And yes, I have been counting days, minutes and seconds and I am going to do so for another 12 or so odd days until she and me can be together and what a union that is going to be, sitting with her, hand in hand, driven to the brink of speechlessness by a reticent onslaught of these crumbling emotions. And yes each time these clouds roll on, my heart cries because only these tears could possibly enunciate this melancholy of separation but I am just too happy and kind of light headed too, as if her love has been the intoxication and a final deliverance I have been waiting for.

And I am a poet or this is what her love has made me and through this incipient and nonsensical poetry, I tell her all that I feel inside and sometimes I fumble for words because I have never been this madly in love with anyone before and now it feels like as if I have never been in love before until the moment I fell in love with her. And my past and my future do not matter to me now for my past is over and with her lies my future. And yes I have never been this sure about anything in life because never before I found the contentment I have been looking for.

And now when I think of it, I realize my mom was right when she said about me being nothing short of a soothsayer in my previous incarnations and speaking of which my dad couldn’t have been all that far detached from truth either when he said about me being clubbed to death by the very followers whom I soothed with my philosophy. Yes, I have a lot of notions in my head about how a relationship should be, about how two people in it should interact, act and so on and yes I have been too disillusioned by this love before to believe in the permanence of all that I am feeling. But now I think it is this mortality, this evanescence that has made everything beautiful, tomorrow when the love that both of us feel would start to appear more believable then maybe these unsettling emotions may settle down and I will be able to talk about things other than us but even then I would be just as much in love with her as I am now. And I am not going to stop philosophizing but this time around I will rather find some newly in love couples and corrupt their minds with my notions, anathemas and thoughts because at least this relationships of mine could do without my soothsaying’s and philosophies about what work and what doesn’t.

And yes I still look at other girls but with a feigned indifference like a child with a big teddy bear when he find himself in front of a shelf full of Barbie’s would, he may stop and appreciate their long blond hair and unbelievably thin frame but in the end he would move on because he had all that he wants and he happens to be very much in love with what he have in his arms. And whenever I see a couple walking hand in hand I just feel like shouting at the top of my voice and telling them that I too have a girlfriend who happens to love me more than anything else in this world.

And yes I want to be with her for the rest of my life, count the wrinkles as both of us get old, go to sleep each night with the gentle touch of her embrace and look at her face as I wake up each day. Yes I am love and for the first time… truly, deeply and madly.

Parallel Universe-This is how We Begun

Sometimes when you look back and think about all the things that you have said or talked about with people, you can’t help but feel kind of flabbergasted or rather stupid. Well I can’t speak for the whole world but when I think of my life and way it was some 9-10 months back and when I think about all the stuff I used to talk about and that too with the people, well actually 2 people, whom I later went on to become really good friends with, I can’t help but be baffled or rather astonished. Astonished by my own impertinence like who on earth goes onto explain the theory behind Parallel Universes and that too when I myself have no idea as to what these parallel universes are? What’s more had it just been these parallel universes, I would have kind of, by digging my face deep in the pillow, faced this embarrassment but no, my audacity didn’t even came close to stopping with that. Destiny, love, marriage, afterlife, before life, meaning behind this life, the purpose behind our existence and what not always invariably seeped into our conversations and never even once did she wanted to initiate but she played along, listening, discussing, rebuking and sometimes even begging for me to talk about something else. Never once she complained but, and now when I think about these conversation, I realize that leave alone believe, I didn’t even understood half of the things that I myself used to tell her and I must say we survived because really the last time when I heard myself talking about all that crap, I ended up slapping myself and that too rather too tightly.

Why I talked about all this stuff, well I don’t know and really I am not a funny haired philosopher though my hairs, according to her, sometime do look funny.  That apart I think I talked about these things because I didn’t knew what else to talk about with her and despite our inchoate friendship, I always felt as if there was a connection between us that went beyond the conventional acquaintance and I didn’t want to lose her by letting this silence play a spoilsport and I guess I was right at least about this. We did came a long way from parallel universes to sharing even the most inconsequential detail about our lives and perhaps we did owe to these parallel universes for we won’t have been what we are now had it not been for our past.

Sometimes when we are having our arguments, I do miss all of my theories which I so used to philosophize about for she always used to listen with an utmost and rapt attention but then I think the bond between us has grown rather too indelible to see us through any conflict or difference in our opinion and she still listens to me albeit now that happens whenever I have really something indelible to say.

There is a thing about beginnings, they never last that long but nevertheless beginnings give us hope, they inspire us to achieve what we may not even have thought off and what you make out of these beginnings is what that really matters. Parallel universes were how we begin and it’s through this meager beginning that we ended up creating something amazing, something that we both miss, something that we both felt when we sat next to each other. Do we talk about parallel universe; yes we do whenever both of us are in a dire need of a laugh though my eyes still crinkle up in embarrassment. Sometimes I am amazed by her patience and also her courage when she first decided to come see me and given the nature of my crack pot talks, I wouldn’t be surprised if she ever  would have felt afraid doing so.

If you ever find yourself in a situation similar to that of mine, don’t be afraid, simply fire off with whatever incomprehensible theories you have for people who like you will always like you despite of all the nuisance and people whom you find waiting after all of your theories have exhausted themselves are really the ones that are worth cherishing for life. Finally a request, if any of you people have a slightest idea as to what the heck these parallel universes are then please do let it be known to me.

A Not So Loving Love Story

It happened on a cold January morning, though I don’t exactly remember which month it was but it indeed was cold, if not on the morning which proved to be harbinger of events to come then at least the night when these events where been narrated to us by my friend who as well happened to be the protagonist of this story. Well, it was just another morning let us say and my friend was walking towards some place with a pail swinging by his side when his wandering gaze happen to fall on a girl sweeping the portico and no she wasn’t a maid but rather the daughter of the house and in that fleeting moment when their eyes would have met, perhaps several stars or planets would have found themselves in an odd alignment so as to rewrite the destiny of two unsuspecting teenagers. This game of making an eye contact and then looking away nonchalantly would have gone for a long time until one day when my friend decided to write his heart content and throw that crumbled ball somewhere where his paramour (to be) could find. Presumably he would have walked for at least a week with that paper in his pocket, trying to garner each day the strength to make that move and presumably he would have ran away like a cat with tail in between his legs, never looking back least someone might caught him in his little act of daredevilry but nevertheless what was meant to be made known was made known and the next morning (which oddly dawned a bit too early for my friend for he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with thousands of what if’s question playing in his mind) came the reply as crumbled and as stealthily as his predecessor has been delivered to the address intended. The content of the reply despite of been written by a hand yet to face the travails of this world, were still wise beyond the wisdom which so willfully seem to desert even the best of us when facing these questions about an everlasting love but if only that denial would have found it’s mark my friend would have been saved from the sounds which a broken heart could make and we for sure would have never heard this story. Things did went on to become a lot more happier and brighter since the last denial and indeed with his feelings out in open my friends couldn’t possibly have lost anything, so he pursued her until all her reservations were melted away and they became to everyone who knew about this clandestine affair, an epitome of a picture perfect couple.

Things conspired and I don’t know what were they for my friend’s voice owing to the alcohol in his veins and the emotions that were wailing up in his eyes has now reduced to staccatos and we too having seen the best one of us cry could not ask him to go anymore. We all moved along with our little game of impromptu truth and dare and completely forgot about that little love story which was rather too true to be a story. Like they say, old forgotten love always finds the most inopportune of moment to reveal itself and if an account of yet another of my friend is to be believed this is exactly what happened but not with my protagonist friend but rather with her paramour who was forced to live a married life along with her husband and a kid. Sometimes, when an institution as overrated as marriage fails to provide you with the love and comfort then whose arms if not that of our ex’s would you turn to, so rest of the story went on with the girl talking behind her husband’s back to my protagonist friend. If it went on for long or is it still on or does the baby belong to my friend, I don’t actually know and neither do I care about either of them, what I am actually bothered about is the fate of the poor husband, the prospect of loving and not loving enough, of marrying a person who pretends to love you every single moment only to sneak behind your back and promise her undying love to someone else has finally done to my notion of having a happily ever after with a girl picked up by my parents what August of 2000 did to Napster.  And seriously given the statistics and the way love marriages go haywire I wouldn’t even pin my hopes on them, perhaps this entire institution is worth going to dumpsters but what of love then and what of my hope of finding it in the arms of a stranger, are they worth the same fate or is there indeed some hope for me, I don’t know and I exactly don’t want to know and the reason why I would marry someone apart from having some beautiful kids is yet to become apparent to me.

Love or arranged, it’s all the same, what actually matters is how you make the most of it when given a chance, perhaps not all of us are that unlucky to be cheated behind our backs and if not all then perhaps some of us could have our happy ending but ultimately it’s up to us as to how we make arrangement for keeping a love in a love marriage or how we find love in an arrangement.

 

Matrimony??

I was having this conversation with my aunt the other day, kind of heart to heart wherein she in her sweet and endearing voice was hurling expletives at me and I like an obnoxious nephew was rethrowing them back at her, conversation that would have ended with me sharing and salvaging space with hogs in the dumpster had it not been for the technology and all the intervening distances between us. If you go by me then telephone had to be the third best of all inventions, first two being Maggie and Girls, because it has made possible for the human race to express their emotions without so much of a need of an eye contact and when you are far and away you can say whatever you want without any inhibitions and almost any consequence. Anyways, the conversation was about my mom’s new found interest and her desire to play cupid or a matchmaker with my aunt’s life. Now my aunt at a ripe age of 26 still believes in falling in love and marrying the guy of her choice so like a recalcitrant child she was in complete defiance of all this and I think this defiance springs from her derision towards anything that appears or seems to be normal or unpretentious and sadly, marriage happens to be one of those institutions. For the first time, in fact my thoughts happen to in complete congruence with that of my aunt and the reason behind this, much more than our mutual disdain for this rather ostentatious and abysmal institutions, happens to be that I really love my aunt and I don’t want to lose yet another of my friend to this social travesty and also with my aunt getting married it would be my neck next on altar and much more than my aunt, I love my singlehood. Singlehood is like a Lamborghini and a smooth tarmac and marriage is synonymous with a bumpy ride on a station wagon and I really don’t understand why people would want to give up a Lamborghini for a fat, ugly and rather cockamamie station wagon. Procreation could not be one of the motivations here because you need not be married so as to have kids and similarly sex could not be a reason because again you need not be married to actually get laid and marriage is a huge price to pay for your concupiscence. Perhaps it’s because of people’s fear of being left alone in their lives or rather they are afraid that once they grow up all old and grey, they will actually cease to desirable and by marrying someone they are trying to buy for themselves an indemnity against their lovability. It’s like being with someone just for the sake of being, you may love that person but again love shouldn’t be based on the premise of marriage though the converse may be true but then why would anyone like to marry someone whom they have known for so long? Marriage then would simply become a written with pen and paper and witnessed by all the signatories’ type of lifelong agreement, which more often than not would serve as nothing but an encumbrance, making it difficult for the person to walk out of it even if they want to.

Perhaps one day when I have grown up and old and acquired new fears and anathemas, my views regarding this excrescent institution may change but now the only reason why I could be marrying someone would be for that never ending sense adventure which comes when you are being with someone unknown, like waking up every day and discovering a whole new façade of your partner, like a confluence much more than corporeal where two soul lost in each other achieves the transcendental, like pillars of temple standing together but still standing apart.

As for my mom’s endeavors the computer at my home broke down so that would give my beloved aunt some time to rev up her defenses, not that she really needs them but still it’s always better to zip up your Kevlar when my mom is waiting to have you within her cross hairs.

before i get married

I am staring at my computer screen waiting for an inspiration to strike me. I want to write something and I have no idea as to what that something is. I have spent my entire day with the same feeling of wanting to do something and all I have done is to watch television and sleep. Perhaps it’s because I am getting older and now that I admit it, I want to really do something worthwhile. Getting older is real tough; believe me, each passing day brings with it a nagging feeling. You wake up each day and only to realize that you have actually lived through another day of your life. Each night before I sleep, I promise myself that I would do something worthwhile the next day but then the next day almost miraculously transforms itself into night and all that is left behind is yet another of those nagging feeling’s. It is not that I do not have anything to do and I am not 40 years old either but seeing all these years of my life slip right in front of my eyes really scares me. Sometime not far from now, I would really grow old and will develop wrinkles and my hairs would turn grey but this is not the part that scares me, I am as a matter of fact much more afraid of losing my desirability. Would I cease to be desirable and lovable as I grow old, would all those people who appear to be my friends, still love me? I have no answers for these questions. Perhaps, as I grow up I would find people, whom I could really relate with; they too, like me could be old but this is not what really matters. What actually matters to me is what I am actually able to achieve in all these intervening years.

I have a lot of plans and they are all languishing in some corner of my mind. Like my father said, when I told him my dream of wearing a Tissot T-Touch and buying for myself a really big plasma TV along with a play station, “Son, all of us have dreams and aspirations but very few of us are actually able to live up to those dreams”. My dreams are all about owning things and comparatively easier to fulfill but a lot of people whom I have met, have dreams about making their kids what they themselves couldn’t become or dreams of having a happy and blissful married life. Fulfillment of dreams is really a costly proposition because they require much more than your own commitment. Aspirations could make you dependent on people and people can really let you down. I have dreams and I want to actually live through them and I want to do this before becoming a part of someone else’s dream. I know in a year or 2 when I would start working, I could actually buy myself a Tissot and plasma TV but what about the things that I never thought of, things like marriage and kids and liabilities. Thinking about all this actually gives me jitters, I literally hate kids and marriage is like chaining myself to a tree and really, I do not have 20 years left with me before my parents bundle me up with some dame of their choice. I do not have time and I have to fulfill a lot of my aspirations and sleeping is not going to make me any richer. I do not want to grow old regretting about things that I missed in my life, things like riding a roller coaster or visiting Disney land or gettin **** with as many girls as I could.

Life gives no second chances and as I try to figure out mine, you better start sorting your dreams and while you are at it, please do guys like me some favor by removing us from your dreams and expectations.