Things She Taught Me….
Relationships are all about learning, each day that we spend day together unravels a series of realizations, things which we realize about ourselves and emotions- justifiable and unjustifiable, reasonable and unreasonable- which we never thought we were capable of and it’s not just about her or me, it’s about us. What we say, what we feel, what we realize when we look deep inside ourselves that makes us know about each other, about the indelible bond that we share, about us. What I was, what I will be, I don’t know but what I become when I am with her, is all that matters to me and sometimes I can’t help but be proud of the perfect love which she gave to me. And I know in this world where nothing is what it seems like, it is this belief and pride of mine that will make this union a beautiful one because nothing could ever be beautiful if you don’t think of it to be.
Every day, each moment, I learn, I feel something new. I used to believe once in the unconditional love and all the stupid notions which a lot of stupid people have preached but now I just know human love could never be unconditional. But yes I do have a hope that maybe someday when both of us would have fulfilled most of each other’s desires then maybe we will end up loving each other just for the sake of loving for this love is what that has redeemed both of us. And I learned that love isn’t in the roses or blooms that you may buy for each other, love lies in those moments when you went out of the way and begged to the florist to give you an extra rose bud, love lies in the moments when she has to come up with an incomprehensible story just so she could keep the flowers in her living room, love lies in that one smile that she gave me and love lies in that underlying happiness that I knew she felt but never showed. Love lies in those distance that we walked, love lies in those moments when we held each other’s hand, love lies in the steps she took despite of herself just to please me, love lies in tears which my words often bring to her eyes, love lies in the longing which often fills our heart and love lies everywhere in each gap and in each of our breath.
I learnt to understand though she would beg to differ but then when you have lived your entire life for yourself; it often gets difficult to see a point other than the one that you are making. And yes now I can say I have grown for now I know how to live my life for someone else and even though money can never buy love but every now and then it could be spend to make the people you love happy. It’s not the gifts that you buy for flowers and chocolates and stuff can never last forever for when your flowers have all crumbled down and roses have become a part of some book even then your love will bloom. But yes, once in a while, it doesn’t hurt to do things that would end up taking her breath away like a kiss on a rainy day, underneath the blue sky, on a wide open road for kisses such as these would always linger even when your lips have parted and you are no longer with each other. And it’s not for her to let her guard down and feel carefree but it’s you who have to provide her with this feeling, it’s you who have to take her mind, heart and soul away, it’s you who have to possess for hearts beat a lot better when they are possessed.
And I learnt nothing could ever beat the feel of cool breeze on your skin on a rainy day and nothing could beat eating corn while sitting breathtakingly close on a moving bike and nothing could beat the feel of holding that corn so that she have her bite and nothing could beat the feel which you get when she all of a sudden ends up telling you about some long forgotten liaison and all you want to do is to stab yourself to death with the very same corn and then you close your eyes and all you can see is her face and all you can smell is her sweet fragrance and then past simply seems irrelevant for you know it’s not the past but rather the moment which matters and besides no one can stab themselves to death with a corn.
And that is not all I have learnt but yeah now I do know, the best moments are not the one which you plan for, best moments are the ones which happen by themselves, best moments are the ones where you just go with the flow, best moments are the one where you stop in the middle of the street and pluck flowers, best moments are the ones when you slip an innocent and childish flower ring into her finger.
The Song of My Lips
So many roads that we took
So many roads that we walked
So many times when our mind went blank
So many times there were no thoughts
And today these raindrops splatter against our faces
Soaking each and every corner of our soul
And now when our love has ridden the wheels of desire
I wait for the moment when you would come and make me whole.
So many words that never escaped our hearts
So many things which we left unsaid
So many emotions that we went onto suppress
So many nights when we tossed and turned in our beds
And today when I stood amidst these tides
Unbecoming unraveling untying the desire with my fingertips
And now when we have came along so many miles
I know it was not our lips but rather the moments that defined the kiss.
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.
Story That Never Begin..
A broken chair, a friend and an unlighted cigarette
Somewhere away I stared far in the distance
Through the rain and billowing winds
I saw a lot in life as it was blown away with the smoke.
Tonight clouds have encompassed again this desert town
And the dunes wait for the heavens to finally pour
But I can’t wait for these sand storms to stop now
For tonight is the night when I have finally found my home
A lonely lantern, a solemn heart and a dream of a lifetime
Somewhere hidden in these skies is a place
Where they say all your dreams come true
And I found that place finally when I fell in love with you
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.
The Table Art
“Impossible is possible”, this was the line scribbled alongside a quirky remark about life and girlfriends and how they both sucked and an almost defaced, probably by a jealous lover “Kiran loves Shobhana”, there were several others as well love notes, phone numbers and lots of names, all scribbled across the desk I was sitting. The drudgery of endless classes and lectures could transform a simple student into an artist, I wondered as I thought about the school days when almost each of us wrote our names as well as the name of the girl we had a crush on, all inside a tinny weenie heart across each and every desk in the class, perhaps we thought scribbling or engraving our name across the desk would reserve for us a place somewhere in the memories of people, it was like immortality was just a stroke of scissor away. I as a matter of fact never got to do that because I always had a strong predilection towards falling in love with the girl sitting next to me and writing her name alongside mine, much more than tacky felt dangerous because what if the girl read it and complaint to the teacher. So more often than all through the childhood and as well as a greater part of adulthood, my love went unrequited more so because of my propensity of losing the people whom I loved the most in life and partly because I feel love is about happiness and keeping your beloved happy and I think people are happy without me being a part of their lives. Our class room desk weren’t the only place where this war for immortality was being fought because all we needed was a pen or a compass and then almost every empty wall felt like an empty canvas waiting for our master touch, so even the walls of our school toilet were filled with endless testaments about an undying love to an extent that my school people have to tile the restroom walls ceiling to floor but who so ever came up with that idea perhaps has never heard of a thing known as permanent marker and pretty soon the walls were once again painted in black, red and green albeit this time it was the name of our principle along with vituperations in seven different languages that was scribbled to the depths of infamy.
When I was a kid I remember engraving, much to the dismay of my mother for I used her favorite scissors, the names of all my friends along the bark of our garden tree, the names are still there but that insouciance is now long gone leaving behind just a remembrance etched somewhere along the bends and corner of our minds. One place that I tried but could never leave my mark was the Delhi metro, compass, coins, scissors, nails or keys all redundant against god knows what resistant paint, though that didn’t stop us from using markers and crayons but the cleaning staff was so damn efficient that not even a single mark survived of our delinquencies but this summer while commuting I found the spot where my girlfriend once scribbled our names in the space between the backrest of the seat and the compartment walls. The heart and the name was all effaced like the last remnant of our relationship and as I ran my hand across the emptiness where once her name had been, I wished for a worm hole to suck and take me to the time when we sitting huddled together have tried to immortalize our love, one thing for sure that permanent marker was a damn good one for its ink after all this year’s refuses to fade at least from the tomb stone of my heart, something’s you just can’t leave behind especially the engravings and scribbling along our palms and forehead, itched by the treacherous hands of fate.
Death, Life and Fighting Back
Some days back my friend asked me, if at any point in my life I have felt like giving it all up and embrace death for all the tranquility and peace it exudes. Though her words were not as eloquent as mine and she might have just been trying to prick me with this notion or may be an argument with her best friend over which dress to wear might have sparked this chain of thoughts. But that apart, her question actually got me thinking as to why people with perfect lives need to bother themselves with such notions; may be because it’s only these people with perfect lives who can entertain such conventions or perhaps because there isn’t anything perfect as far as this life is concerned. I didn’t need to ask myself if I had ever considered death as an escape route, as an exit strategy may be but never had I thought of death as something peaceful or something delivering. More so because I am too disillusioned by the way things around in this life that all my hopes for finding salvation in the one after this are already shattered beyond repair. I would rather prefer to stand up and fight each time this life tries to pull a Waterloo on me because I believe that you don’t get to bow down and surrender when this life is throwing its best punches at you. When life throws something at you, you stand up and throw it back. So what if I ended up losing every other person I loved in life, that’s not the reason enough for me to stop looking for love, maybe I am just fooling myself by hoping to find love in the arms of some stranger, maybe by the time I do find love my heart would be so broken that there won’t be much left of it but I am not going to settle for the crumbs that this life throws at me. I am going to stand up, dust off my bottom, and look it in the eye and fight because some of us are destined to fight against our own destiny and it is in this recalcitrance, defiance and un-acceptance that I choose to live my life.
We wake up each day, battle the cold, sleet, rain or sunshine and we make choices at each step, choices which no one else can make and it’s is these choices that make us unique. Some of us may choose to accept life as it comes , some of us can make peace with our pasts and for some of us past doesn’t even matter but ultimately all of us have to choose our own addictions and it is in this defiance I happen to find mine. May be it’s my hope that I have already faced the worse that keeps me going and it’s not that I don’t love peace and this relative solace and it feels really nice to stop and look around once in a while but ultimately I have to get up and move along, taking with me what I could and leaving behind just a trail.
To pin your hopes on death is like pinning your hopes on what will lie beneath a darkened cave, it would be like trying to find light in the darkness or putting all your hopes on the hopelessness. We all have messed up in life, we all have made mistakes but whether you choose to live in past for the sake of your future or you live for the present, whether you choose to accept what you have or you go chasing an utopian dream, either ways always try to live life on your terms. Like my friend said, look back if you have to but don’t regret because no one can ever make the choices you have made and no one can ever be you.
StoryTeller: Tale of 2 Stairs and a Tree
The Two Stairs and the Tree
Some stories are just too strange, especially the one’s which are derived from life but could this life be called a story? Perhaps, for like stories it has a beginning and an end but sometimes for some of us life is nothing but an endless concoction of beginnings and endings, we move on from one story to another, from one life to another life. In this moving on and in this flux some of us do find a perfect story that we could hold close to our heart and this is perhaps the difference between life and stories, stories end but life goes on.
I don’t know when it actually happened for some happenings, unlike love stories which have a particular start date, are spread over several instances of time. Well let’s say it happened over several nights and I don’t know what night has to do with relationships but yeah this one blossomed over several of them. There isn’t any love if your hoping for, at least not the kind which most of us seek in life but yeah there are tears and lots of them, a heartbreak which ironically brought them closer, a death which both of them survived, several villains though they were some poor unsuspecting blabber mouthed people who couldn’t have possibly known about the part which they played and yes, last but not the least, two stairs and the tree. Now you would ask me what a tree and two stairs has to do with everything, well nothing actually but then I am the one telling the story and I happen to be in love with those two stairs and that tree.
I am a lousy storyteller as you may get to know for I don’t care much for facts but rather I care for things which I feel and really I am not here writing a year book of some kind, I am here to tell a story. There isn’t much of a story actually, just a collection of several, unostentatious, hardly remarkable coincidences but then some coincidences are meant to be, probably because sometimes coincidences are tied together by an almost diaphanous string called destiny.
Like I said there isn’t much of a story but then I have to begin somewhere and this beginning is what I am afraid of for some stories do not start at the beginning and neither did this one. Did it actually have a beginning I often think and sometimes it’s only after thousands of miles that you discover the people whom you have been walking with. But nevertheless for the sake of story or rather the sake of simplicity let’s take this discovery to be a beginning of some sorts. People meet, they say hello, they meet again, say hi, talk for some time and then they disappear only to meet at some inconsequential juncture in your life and only to repeat the above given sequence. In this story it wasn’t like that, they met but never met, never said hi or hello or how do you do and all this would have been fine had they not known each other, they as a matter of fact knew each other from the time when both of them were pimply and zit ridden teenagers though her pimply phase happen to start much later in life.
Well enough about the beginning, let us just say it begin just like that and just like that they came closer and just like that all those tears, villains, heartbreak and everything else somehow fitted itself in between and just like I said I am a lousy storyteller, I don’t care for facts and really the facts are known to the two people whom the story is about. What I am here to tell you is that there are still something’s in this world which are beyond the conventional definitions, things which go beyond conventionality, things which don’t make sense but still are true for they could make you cry.
It has been a story less story so far and really I have no story as such to tell apart from the story of two stairs and a tree. Let’s say tree is some tree whose big overgrowing branches form a kind of canopy over those two desolate and lonely two stairs and ironically enough neither the tree nor those two stairs would be complete without each other. It’s on these stairs, right underneath this tree both of them sat one day and talked about every god damn movie that has ever been made and in those instants when their eyes never met both of them were lost in a world of their own or probably this world dissolved into a void. This how it all begun, not the story of two friends who found each other but rather the story of two stairs and a tree and in this story at least one of them would be incomplete without the other and it’s in the distance between those two stairs and the tree where all their expectations, aspirations, arguments and promises will thrive. At some point of time both of them must have gotten up to walk along their respective paths, probably they met again and probably things were just as easy as the last time but still one or the other of them always tried to recreate the magic which once they both have felt. Where they able to get where they wanted to, would they as people say be friends forever, is it their destiny to be just friends or does the future holds something more for them? Probably time itself will answer these questions but one thing for sure; you don’t get to fall in love, at least with your own character especially when you are the StoryTeller.
Tears of Happiness and of Pain
There is something about pain which make us seem insignificant, almost pale and diaphanous in comparison because there exists just so much of it in this world, at each and every step, nook and corner that whatever we are going through no matter how much emasculating it may be still doesn’t even come close to the real thing. There are people living through this pain, deprivation and poverty, people who can’t even hope leave alone cry for things which we want but these people are also the people whom I think to be the happiest because these people have a hope that someday things would once again get better, their belief in goodness is still intact and this belief is what keeps them going. Pain, if you ask me is the biggest of all levelers, it just brings about a relative simplicity to our lives, it brings about a kind of humbling feeling which makes you live for what you have even though what you have are just vestiges or excerpts of what you want. It’s when you see around yourself and allow yourself to feel something which people around you are going through, you just can’t help but cry, cry at your insignificance, at your own ineptitude in making something out of your own life. It’s always easy to cry for our pain but we have to teach ourselves to feel the pain that someone else might be feeling and believe me it’s not that tough to cry for someone else because pain is universal and all of our tears are related at some level. It’s not just about tears but the way you relate, the way allow yourself to feel and at first nothing of it will make sense more so because we as a generation have been taught to hold everything inside. The day you learn how to cry for someone else’s pain is the day when you could be truly happy because nothing could bring about more sanguinity in your life then the realization that there is still something inside of you that isn’t dead. I remember seeing my grandmother cry whenever I would return from college and also whenever I would leave, to me her tears appeared all the same but now when she has gone somewhere far and away from me, I realized all the prayers she would have said just so that she could once again see me walk back through those gates. In that instant I realized about those tears which so willfully flowed streaking her cheeks, those were the tears which flow when all the promises that you have made yourself are fulfilled. I remember the night when my friend told me about her boyfriend who cheated on her, that was the night when I first truly cried for someone else probably because the fact that someone could even think of scattering a heart as beautiful as hers was something I didn’t know how to react to. Life teaches us in retrospection and when you look back you realize there is just so much that you should have felt but never did and when you think of it you just can’t help but cry. Now when I look back, a lot of things, a lot of tearful moments make sense to me, like when my mom was pregnant with my sister, I remember placing my hand on her tummy and feel as my sister would kick and I remember clearly my mother cried at that instant and I thought it was probably because of the pain but now I know it was the joy of bringing a new life in this world was what she cried for. I don’t know what it is with me and kids but whenever I see kids I just am filled with an overwhelming sense of well being and I feel as if all is well with this world and when one of them holds my hand I don’t know why but I feel proud of offering them the sanctity which they need. Life is about giving and I don’t see why we can’t cry for someone else and believe me nothing will bring you greater joy then the fact that you have related with someone who was in pain. Pain and ecstasy are one and the same, just identifying with one brings you closer to the other. I read in a book that these tears are symbolic of our humanity; the civilization which cannot cry for itself is the civilization which invariably dies, there is nothing wrong with crying for it is one of the first things which we do when we are born and probably it’s one of the endless ways that makes us feel alive.
A Simple Little Thing Called Love
Love is like the most amazing of all things, more so because the way it hits you right across your face and makes a blabbering idiot out of even the most impervious of us, is a feat which nothing else, with a probable exception of alcohol, could ever match. I think much more than anything it is our heart which deserves the credit for beating or skipping a beat or two at just all the right moments and with just all the right persons and still being able to pump blood like clockwork, really what an amazing pumping organ our heart is. Well, they just won’t call something the seat of human soul for nothing but this entire litany regarding heart and it’s mysteries notwithstanding, I sometimes wonder if any of us actually get to know what love is or is that we simply go onto accept whatever definitions that have been given for it so far? Well one thing that I have learnt about love is, the amount of grey in your hairs is rarely of any consequence when it comes to these matters of heart because very few of us are actually left with any hairs owing to this global market slowdown and perhaps also because once we start to grow with our life we become like bundles of accumulated histories, overflowing with our knowledge about everything which doesn’t work and everything that isn’t love that sometimes we end up complicating what happens to be the simplest of all emotions.
Remember the time when we were young and would fall in love so easily and at that instant all that mattered was being in love because being in love seemed to be all the more meaningful and believing in love seemed to all the more believable. Talking of childhood, I remember my friend telling me about her belief that kids like chicken hatched from eggs and hers was a dancing egg because she used to dance quite a lot. She did went onto hold this belief right up till eight grade when probably a health education book got better of her but nevertheless it was easier for her to believe because her theory was so simple as compared to my belief that kids were dropped from heaven straight into a hospital yard with parachutes tied at their backs. Clearly it didn’t took long for my theory to go bust more so because my mom failed to produce the parachute that I came with and really with the amount of preconditions and incredibility that like fine print were attached with my belief it was like a pile of dry leaves, waiting for a wind to blow it away.
This is exactly what we all do to love, we never let it be, we just go on to complicate or I dare say pollute love with all our inhibitions and beliefs or unbelief’s. I just can’t understand mankind’s obsession with untangling everything, why can’t just we accept something’s which are beyond us? I know to think is one of the most fundamental of human prerogative but there are times when you have to let things be for you are only acting as a deterrent by exercising your brain cells but if had it been this easy to detach this jelly inside our head, we for sure would have had a lot to live for in this life.
Finally, given my ignorance and the fact that my college has been closed, I could still feel a preponderance of love in each of the breath I take so much so that I am beginning to wonder if the air around our town has actually gone cleaner but then isn’t it what that happens each year right around this time. I think St. Valentine couldn’t have chosen a better time to die or whatever that he did and really valentine’s day or otherwise it would do all of us a lot of good if we could let that beating and pumping organ decide for us.
