Gotta hustle, kid.

In the absence of a routine, after enjoying first, then wallowing, then despairing and eventually resigning myself to the lack of a centre in life, my brain comes up with a prisoner's routine. It's to stay sane. I exercise using as little space as I can use, read, eat and watch things on my bed. I have the whole world open to me, and yet I behave like I live in a 2 x 2 cell.

In the promise that I will be "let out" soon, I perform my day like a religion. I write, I watch, I read. Actually, I'm only trying to watch and write and read. One video leads to another, which leads me to read up about something which will land me on a blog that references a book in a particular genre that suddenly seems like the Only Thing That Is Interesting On Earth and I jettison all other intentions to read an article online, write a long-thought blogpost, watch a favourite TV show episode for it. I observe now, in the afternoon shade of all things -- not in its morning light -- that I am deferring everything. Derrida said there is no meaning, every word leads us to another word and meaning never really comes. I keep deferring things, desperately latching onto whatever takes my fancy. I suppose I finally realise that my mind thinks this isn't it. This can't be life. This is only a simulation of life, inside a small cage.

I wonder why I feel that. But I think I know. In either case, I'm also sick of sitting and wallowing. So I'm being pushy and forceful with myself. We create our situations, and it's a vicious spiral to get into - this doing n.o.t.h.i.n.g and then feeling like life is nothing and there is nothing to be done.

I've ordered 6 books today. I intend to read them all. I intend so many things. All this potential energy just keeps buzzing, first encouragingly, and then threateningly. Life na, is basically running along the treadmill. You gotta keep hustling. You can't slow down your pace without a thousand people around you tsk-ing in exasperation, you gotta move, chop chop, move it mister!

And I'm in The city of hustlers. I should know.

If it's too good to be true, it usually is.

It surprises me how little patience I have for something that doesn't seem to be working out for me. At what point does standing up for yourself mutate into being un-flexible. 

Entryways.

Every now and then, you're privy to a life of someone close to you that didn't involve you. Your parents' before you were born, your brother's at school once you both decided to never go to the same school again, your friends' before you were introduced to them. And the odd beauty of inside jokes and references is not only that it makes the newcomer slightly awkward, slightly apologetic for being there, but that it also tells you that lives are intensely private. You can not know everything.

Of course the very politics of using inside jokes in a group with some new people for the night, the right to assume, either that everyone is on the same page, or that the one or two who aren't can afford to not know, ever, is another story.

It's like a younger me once wrote, so succinctly: There are some circles you will never get into. For everything else, there's a book.

How

How does one confidently chart out a plan to marry someone, to go from loving them at Point A, and intend to go to marriage, at Point B. I've been so used to nothing working out in life, especially when you make a plan, that something as simple as applying to Universities next year and actually getting through and getting in and moving to another country seems like it's risking too much attention from Fate.

How. How does one retain any faith in planning to get from Point A to Point B and then actually get there?

Barter

I find that as you grow into your years, there seeps in a quiet resilience, you don't need to look at your resume any more to know or remind yourself what your strengths are, what you bring to the table. You do it without the cue cards, it comes as hands-on experience.

You often wondered if everyone eventually comes down to "take it or leave it", and it turns out, you needn't. You might not need it, so you may leave it, and naturally so, but it'll always be a particular brand you're never getting from anyone else again.

Pick your battles wisely, kids. That's a cliche that'll stay.

The Mathematics of Language

The mathematics of language, he says to me, so casually, like tossing the day's mail from the postbox on the table with the car keys, without much thought. Unbeknownst to him, my heart wants to do something that tears through our haze of lived reality, out of ecstasy, cry out to God in the possibility of the thought that that knowledge could also be mine someday, that I could watch an artist work out what he wanted his art to be, and if there was no God, I'd invent him all over again, just to cry out in irrecoverable glee. 

Sometimes you need to hurl things into the horizon, out of the stratosphere, into the darkness of space, outside our bird's eye view of life, precisely in the hope that there is someone to catch it. This is why we invent God. 

Madeleine

I happen to think that Madeleine is the world's prettiest name. For anything. Or anyone.

Madeleine.

Madeleines.

Madeleine with tea.

Madeleine curled up in my lap in the afternoon sun.

Madeleine writing letters to people on pretty monogrammed stationery.

Madeleine with a fine bone china cup with a chipped edge, something she took from her grandmother.

Madeleine with biscuits and books.

Madeleine with sparkling red gumboots making her way through a downpour in the city green to the electronic music playing in her iPod.

Madeleine smelling of lemongrass and orange cake.

Madeleine with ticket money, diaries and pens.

Madeleine living the life I want to, somewhere.

The Trip (Part Six)

Although they don't look older than when I first saw them some 20 years ago, it turns out Surya uncle and Jai aunty have been married for 21 years now.

I ask her if it becomes harder, instead of easier, to live with someone as each year goes by. She thinks about it for a second. "I think, after a few years, there comes a point where you realise, living with someone else, learning how to compromise again, attune yourself to someone else's daily wavelength, is just too much work," she tells me, with a laugh.

                                                               ***

I ask him, another time, if it gets boring living with someone for so long. "Nah," he dismisses it scornfully, "we have our own lives. We have common interests so we grow together, but I have a busy, fulfilled life of my own and so does she. Aur kya chahiye?"

                                                              ***

I look at these two, and friends like Inayat and I am assured that it is possible to come back to your country after living outside. To travel the world, study in a wonderful foreign country and want to return and work in your own. That there is resolution, there is will, and there is homecoming.

The Trip (Part Five)

Turns out, it is in the middle of a family holiday, in the midst of a carrom play-off in the living room, hearing my dad talk about politics where the realisation occurs to me, so quietly, so unceremoniously,

my father's political views are not my own.

The Trip (Part Four)

These smaller city sounds. The bird song piercing the heavy lime and dhoop scented early mornings, the sound of the milkman on his cycle, some chai brewed with mint leaves that are grown on their terrace. These are to be found in the city as well, but that is an active seeking. Here, it comes to you on its own, like a wild animal which has decided to approach your vicinity after having decided you mean no harm, you're safe. I write, undeterred by conversation humming around me, in a quiet nook of the garden.

Surya uncle shows us his new office space that they're building on a plot of land in the same tiny colony they're now living in. While listening to different people talk about their professions, it's their casual, off-handed knowledge that I love the most, coming in and mopping up after them like bread to pasta gravy. So I learn that this office space is being made completely devoid of cement. The bricks are made of limestone and brick dust, and the binding between the bricks is chuna, not cement.

"Is it as good as cement?" Amma asks him from the car's back seat. "Hmm?" he asks, distracted by some detail that is blind to us, I imagine, in the construction of his office, "oh, it's better! Limestone gains strength over time, right. It becomes stone."

Back at home that night, he takes us around the house, showing us the rainwater harvesting tank on the terrace, the tiny terrace garden growing spinach, mint, coriander, brinjals on the third floor, the air chutes that bring cool outside air and the scent of jasmine and lemon grass permeating everything. He explains how the house doesn't get hot even without an A.C or in peak summer. "It's because when we say it's hot inside the house, what we really mean is the building is hot. It's the building that retains heat. With this garden, the top of the house has a cover of soil, and the rainwater tank, the solar panels and wind-catchers also add to that. That's the whole thing isn't it? When we switch on A.Cs, the A.C is cooling the building, it's making the walls give off their heat, but it feels like it's cooling us. When you build a house that doesn't latch onto heat, you don't need A.Cs at all".

The office is going to use the same minimal carbon footprint method that this house has. Natural air-conditioning, rainwater harvesting, no cement, their own terrace garden (which is by the way, tended by them, there is no maali here, they fight ignorance at a discipline by teaching themselves it). As we drive off from the construction site, the office behind us soon becoming a speck, he mentions, "Apart from the municipal water connection, we're trying to think of ways with this office of going completely off the grid."

The Trip (Part Three)

Of course they have Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space on their bookshelf. Of course it is an old edition, dog-eared and well-thumbed.

The Trip (Part Two)

The Buddhavarapus, my father's side, are a generous, gregarious clan. Historically, we were brahmins whose realm was outside the repositories of traditional, Vedic knowledge, outside the temple and priestly services. We were ministers in the courts of kings, accountants, clerks. Individually though, we're mostly shy, mild-mannered (but privately, and famously temperamental) folks, but when they come together - this clattering, stumbling wave of family, especially in times of death and mourning - they're a hive mind of comfort and laughter.

My father's family was a lot less well-off than my mother's when they were growing up. He tells me about how they used to save their rotis as kids, hoarding them, unsure of when they'd get to eat them again. It wasn't all through their childhood of course, just that he knows the feeling of going hungry -- something my brother and I don't. It's because it was a joint family, mostly of unemployed young men at the time, a victim of their own ill-fitting education and the times. Ironically, it is the niyogi brahmins (which is what the Buddhavarapus are, apparently), who emphasise upon the necessities of modern education, eschewing the power  and tyrannical jurisdiction over knowledge that is typified, and by now caricaturized, of this caste. And in a family where the contours swung wildly to accommodate as many relatives as possible, averaging around 20, it was only my father's father who brought in any money as a prosecutor for the CBI. (He would hold that job down for 50 years.)

My mother's side - Kuchibhotlas - were more educated, fragmented as they were into more sustainable models of nuclear families. They're extremely private, tending towards reticence. Brilliant economizers, deft at "making do" with the money they have. Where my father's side are hearty, unafraid spenders who value the feeling of a good (spontaneous) buy over the permanence of money, my mother's side is frugal, but lenient. While they never had any money to spare, my mother says they didn't go hungry.

"Amma could afford to cut corners because there weren't so many mouths to feed," my amma tells me.

                                                                         ***

Interesting then, that my brother and I have in us, like an evolutionary trait, ingrained a sense of respect towards food. Hours spent agonizing over wasted food on plates have been scribbled guiltily inside diaries, whispered as confessions to parents. So I end up eating, and this is typical, everything on my plate in the train. It gets mistaken for gluttony, but it really is an unconscious anxiety of leaving food on my plate. My stomach is full, but there's a little bit of dahi left. I don't want it to be carelessly splattered around some train track somewhere. It is food. It is a luxury.

Another habit, I notice with surprise and bemusement, is how my father and I clean up and organize table clutter post meals, especially when being served outside our house. We polish off our plates, stack the spoons and plates and cups together, go around the table collecting wares, organizing them in neat piles that can be picked up easily by whoever is serving us. Unlike my mother and brother, we find it unbecoming and disrespectful to throw rolled up, used tissue papers in dregs of gravy, little balled up representatives of our power over their service.

"So I've noticed," my dad says at the end of one such meal, "we're one of the few people in this restaurant, if not the only people, who look a waiter in his eye and smile when refusing or accepting whatever they're serving us."

                                                                           ***

Having grown up in a family that believes in cooking more portions than necessary at any given time, especially when guests come over (there should always be enough food), it always makes us a little awkward to eat at a house where the portions appear small. The serving bowls are tiny, so each of us quickly, mentally calculates and approximates how little to serve ourselves so that no one is stuck with the horror and ignominy of finishing the food. Unsure, I suppose, of whether this is all there is, or there is more of each back in the kitchen. The balance is nerve-wracking. What is supposed to be a comforting meal becomes instead one of calculations to avoid any embarrassing moments. What if one of us asks if there is more daal? What if we're eating this sparingly, but there is a lot more food inside and we're only making our hosts distraught at how little we're eating?

Back at home, you see, it's the visual of huge portions that we use, as symbol, as sign, as signifier, to convey this: do not approximate, this is feeling, not mathematics, eat till your heart bursts.

So when we eat our meals at Surya uncle and Jai aunty's, we're a little thrown off by the portions placed on the table. The Raos begin their mental maths.

"This rice and atta comes from Jai's mother's farm," Surya uncle tells us while signalling the house help to refill all the bowls with more food.

Turns out the rice and atta have been grown using minimal to no fertilisers. Turns out it was only the appearance of frugality.

The Trip (Part One)

(For Jeeves)

14.8.2014

The first thing that strikes you as you step out of the Ahmedabad railway station is how easily this could be any other town. Indore, Jhansi, Nagpur, Amritsar. Of course, what I really mean to say is that it could be any b-town. It is bustling, but not robust.

The clouds have followed us from Bombay, the dark grey trail of clouds first making their presence felt as we move from one local part of Bombay to another in the Shatabdi, then mutating into a threat over the shamrock green fields that border the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. These are the things one notices in fleeting glances: a vermillion umbrella moving against the neon green; cranes lazing indifferently around cows in what seem to be paddy fields; a fakir standing at the open door of a matchbox house built on the railway tracks. I assume the lady of the house (for at that ripe afternoon hour, it always is) has stepped inside to gather leftovers from a previous meal to give him.

All photo credits: mine.

 Varun and I sit and watch the streaks of fierce green pass us by. "What I really want, are endless fields of weed," he says, looking out of the window. I tell him quite seriously that the trees we're looking at are in fact "weed trees", and the farmers are waiting for the overripe weed fruit to fall on the ground, so they can dry them in the sun and make weed. He guffaws delightedly through my flawless performance, leaving a fond shake of the head for last. I suddenly dearly miss the days when he would have believed that story, retaining a goggly-eyed devotion for whatever came out of his sister's mouth.

I notice a man and a woman with their young son in the the seats in front of me on the train. The kid is about seven or eight years old and hyper active. He keeps yelling out any communication required of him in a decibel that his parents are now attuned to not even register as yelling. The man is hands-on with the kid throughout the journey, over-compensating almost. He tries doing things for the boy that border on the unnecessary and stupid even. The mother, like all mothers, deals with the kid with a detached patience. Mothers perfect the art of running on minimum energy input. She has decided this, this 8 hour journey, stuck with her yelling child is not her battle. Not today.  So obviously, I make up a story in my head.  The man - the husband and father - clearly over-compensates for some absence in his son's life. Maybe an army man then, or someone who works in another city or country. I feel a little happiness purr inside me, for having observed this little fact; of knowing their secret. It is only at the end of the 8-hour journey that I have another, equally plausible alternative. Couldn't it be, per chance, mayhaps, that they weren't husband and wife? Her brother, maybe? I take the knock on my head and learn my humility tables all over again.

This is also the first time, on a train to Gujarat, that I realise that I don't like the sound of Gujarati. My visceral reaction to it is irritation. The Gujarati man-boy in his cargos and paunch-hugging red t-shirt sitting behind us can be heard telling someone on the phone, "Haan please mereko resume update karne mein help dena padenga. Kya hai, bluff bhi karna rahenga toh thoda limit mein na," in perfect Bambaiyya hindi.

                                                                    ***

The house of course, is beautiful. It's exactly what I love about and in houses - intimacy. It's built on a modest plot of land, the area that say a log cabin at a resort somewhere would take up, but three floors and a terrace up. Surya uncle and Jai aunty are old family friends, having known us since our days in Ahmedabad, which we left in 1996. He's an architect, Telugu. She's a graphic designer, Gujarati. The two of them, hitting 50 now, met at UCLA while studying in America. Jai aunty now lectures in colleges (NIFT, A.U, CEPT) and runs an NGO that teaches fine arts to women and school kids. She's slender, waifish, tall. A straight, beautiful aquiline nose and grey-green eyes. Her soft-spokenness a perfect foil for Surya uncle who is almost military-man like with his impressive mustache and devotion to fitness. Jai aunty hasn't aged a day since I saw her last, almost 20 years ago.

Everything about their house is a perfect reflection of them. There's a zen garden outside, the curtains in the house are made from old, worn sarees. Not brand new curtains that are supposed to look like old sarees. These are sarees she's owned and worn. Each window is a living receptacle of her touch and memory. A small fish pond with lily pads has tiny fish sized like little tadpoles. "These fish feed on larva, so they keep mosquitoes away," Surya uncle tells us. There's an expensive high-end bircycle hanging on a huge peg at one end of the garden area, its tyres muddy. Nothing here is a simulation, it is the thing itself.

Every thing in this house and outside it is exactly where it's supposed to be because there are such few things in the first place. It encompasses what they're about so well. There is no TV. All the wood used in the house are rejected pieces from shops/sellers because of various non-uniformities. The flushes in the house use waste water from their washing machine. They've designed the house in such a way that there this a wind-trap on the terrace that funnels air into every room in the house. An elaborate network of chutes that trap the outside air, as a result of which, like magic, like physics, they work as natural air-conditioning.

The books however, are endless. They're on every floor, every nook and corner, threatening to call mutiny. On careful inspection of their old editions, one is reminded immediately of college libraries. Literary theory, architecture, occult, philosophy, business, gardening, farming, music, fiction, dance, photography, ecology, urban landscape and policy wrestle for space on their shelves.

When I spot Pradip Krishen's seminal book on trees hiding behind some tomes (not the one pictured above), I am not surprised. As I struggle with my urge to pick up every book and cuddle with it on a ready mattress, I decide this is what my house will be too. These are the things it will, it has to represent. I pick a few books to peruse for the day.

As I walk downstairs with them, I notice a book on their bed - one of them must be reading this in bed - Natural Capitalism, says the title. It makes me smile. But of course they do.

 Just after our lunch, Surya uncle and Jai aunty excuse themselves to go back to their work day. I listen to him explaining the mechanics of the flush while I'm drinking a glass of water. I can hear Jai aunty tell my mother they prefer not to have processed or packaged ingredients at home - they grind all their spices themselves, or use them whole - in the background. I seem to have hit the glass ceiling of wide-eyed wonder and amazement for the day. There is no space for me to take any other information in.

Just as he's leaving for his car, I place my glass down to shut the front door behind him and he tells me, off-handedly, which you have to understand is what makes this, "Oh, the water we're all drinking? Rain water".

Compass.

I haven't stepped out of my front door in the last two weeks.

There really is nowhere to go. I want to take a bag, pack all my documents, whatever little money I have that is mine and just go somewhere, anywhere that will give a job and live on my own.

For the first time in my life, all options look the same. The happiest option, the saddest option, they're all level. Each of them is followed by a voice in my head asking me "Oh, and then what? And so what?".

Static.

I sometimes wonder if I'm just the radio static leading towards that point when you've tuned to the right frequency. Never the station itself.

The rituals of a day

I woke up at 2.30 pm. Immediately opened my laptop to check what I missed when I was sleeping. Turns out, I missed absolutely nothing.

This waking up in the noon has been happening for the last couple of days. You know how it goes, the unease builds up slowly, snowballing quietly, until you wake up one day, like I did today, completely ready to snap because you're tired of waking up and feeling like you've to catch up with the world. Absolutely disgusted and groggy with myself, I decide I'm not going to check my phone, Facebook or Gmail for the next two days. 48 hours, I tell myself.

I intend to stick through. The rest of the internet quagmire, however, is fair game.

I make a huge mug of green tea, making a note to buy some more tea, we're running out. But my birthday is coming, maybe someone is already sending me tea. I decide to wait it out. In a week I'll be 26.

I google the best episodes of Inspector Morse. Reading the synopses of each episode, I make a list of which to watch on YouTube first. That'll be an hour and a half taken care of. Then, I'll finish Tove Jansson's wonderful collection of short stories that I was 1/4th of the way through; before sitting down and seriously considering which book to read next. Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph, some short stories by Lydia Davis, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith and The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Garrard are the immediate contenders.

I told a friend I'll read Colum McCann's Transatlantic immediately, as he reads through Let the Great World Spin by the same author. It is a book I gifted him. We had decided it would be amazing to discover an author together. But I don't feel like going there right now. I feel like going nowhere.

I check to see if any new episodes of Jonathan Creek are out yet, and I learn that it was a season of 3 episodes. I also have the Korean drama I was in the middle of, to finish. I've downloaded some 20 books to my Kindle, all book I've been wanting to read for the longest time. Then there's the fluff I need to catch up on. Really bad reality television. It is as much a job as is a good series, I must tell you.

I brought with me to Bombay only the books I hadn't read (which was still a hefty lot) and a couple of immediately accessible favourites. I think that's why I'm struggling. All this is giving me a little anxiety. So much to be read, so much to be watched.

This false sense of a problem is basically due to the lack of a denouement. I'm amazed at what I choose to be affected by in this exact phase of life, as an unemployed woman.

But first, some toast with jam. And some more tea.

On turning 26.

I realise, with a sinking feeling, just as I'm beginning to make this new house a home, that I can't live with my family. There is just too much baggage. 

Every time I oversleep, it isn't taken as an incident within itself, it is part of a pattern, a link in a daisy chain leading to this person who is supposed to be me, this person who oversleeps. They come in the form of inside jokes or anecdotes, and you realise it is a thing. Somehow it will always be a thing. 

And I'm sure it goes both ways. I'm sure I do it to everyone else in the family, this inescapable labyrinth of people who have seen you and whom you have seen for the longest time. You tend to resent the knowledge they have on you. 

The pigeon-holing that family does, no one else quite gets to do it as expansively. 

My dad is excited about this new place. So everything is a rule. This is his way of grappling with the exponential jump we've made in class. There must be time to appreciate everything, a new-age "let's thank the lord". So we have to eat together on the table, we have to sit in the balcony in the evening and at least one of us must say "Ah, isn't this just great". We have to keep things minimal, throw all our clutter out, keep things neat. We have to find or create a place for everything -- things that lived and breathed with us without a place in Delhi.

But that's not even it, really. He's only doing things the way in which he knows. It's the rest. It's the not knowing how to interact with a 26 year old daughter, any more. I'm sure it's tough for them, because there is no jurisdiction. No "Go study", "Focus on discipline" or "Please behave yourself" any more. Interactions therefore, become a little confusing, a little strained.

I think all my life I've basically had to deal with one overwhelming necessity - to never, ever be dependent on anyone. It was as silly as teaching myself how to workout with any equipments or wax -- because if there came a day when I had to only depend on myself, I'd have these skill sets. So my whole life becomes an exercise in just detaching myself from things. Even in the throes of love, I'll always look for a reason to detach, to walk out, to turn my back (even though I don't); because there will come a day when I will be dependent on that person, and out of that will come devastation and sadness.

So I figure that I've been happier being outside my house than inside. The only reason I like being home is because I'm not imposing on anyone else. I'm not waiting on their kindness and generosity. Even this studying outside thing, will be on someone else's money and it will always weigh heavily on me. 

This independence thing is a disability, I think.

I need money. I need money for my own place, my own space. I need to get out soon. Just as intensely as I am settling down, I find myself wanting to get out.

the kindness of people

Coke sees me wake up at 12pm, and go right back to sleep on her mattress. She's right there when I wake up again at 4pm on the same day. She sees me sprawled over the bed, conscious of the fact that I might be feeling sad -- even though I will not acknowledge it.

I find a video of J, unexpectedly, and keep it on mute, on loop. I can't listen to the video, it's too personal, too private to watch like that. I keep watching it for a few good minutes, over and over.

She looks at me, with a face pack on her face slowly drying away like lagoons on a bad summer day, and says, "You need malibu and some sprite. I can't fix your heartache, but this is a good start."

When she's handing me the drink, hers in the other hand, she tells me with gentle conviction "I've made yours stronger".

She has.

                                                                           ***
Three of my friends get in touch with me immediately. Ask me if I'm doing okay, if my heart is okay. The first is the friend I've known for longest, and also the closest. The second is someone more recent. The third I met a week ago.

Relativity.

                                                                         ***
A week ago I was leaving for Pune, from Bombay. My father asks me when I'll be back.

"However long it takes for her to come back happy," my mom interjects.

My heart brims with those words every day.

new note

Sitting in a cafe that opens onto the road in Aundh. I've met JD unexpectedly for the fifth time since we said our final goodbyes. There's the smell of coffee. I'm having hot chocolate. I'm wearing his t-shirt. "Goooood time to quit factory rolled cigarettes," he says. We talk about food values, family, anthropology, our love for languages. The huge table umbrella lifts off and flies into the air, nearly spearing through a car window. The two of us exclaim loudly at the same time, "That was beaaaaaaautiful!".  The difference in the final goodbye now, being that we are not afraid any more. We stopped looking for catches. The catch itself never goes away (whether recognised by the two parties or not), but it does stop mattering once you stop desperately looking for it.

Drafts

"Most days are spent. That's no way of living a life. But that's how it is," P writes to me.

                                                                 ***

"Kaatne ke liye kat-jati hain. But for a month there, I was alive.

It's in the act of someone touching you and bringing you to life do you realise that you've been dead all this while," I tell her.

I think it's these tiny touches that keep us alive in a journey that is headed only in one sure direction.

You say to yourself at the first sign of the day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day.

It takes this path - incantation, mantra, charm, hex.

                                                                           ***

To be the extraordinary glitch in someone's matrix.

And then to realise that that is also a part of the matrix.

There is no glitch, there is no spoon.

                                                                            ***

"No text from you for a while means your love life is back on track," he texts me with that steady hand. The words split like a pea pod at the centre, enveloping my night.

                                                                            ***

At some point in time, you'll have to bring something to the table. Otherwise it is donation. 

Momentum

I suppose there comes a point in life, where you're sure of just what you're capable of doing for people.

And then there's that point at which you need to ask, and what are you doing for me?

For J

You pack your bags. I pack mine. We take a bus or a train to somewhere. Anywhere. As long as it is the perfect length. Not too short, we need a night's sleep on each other's shoulder, arms intertwined in part desperation, part solace. Not too long, because we're fidgety and life always finds way to come in. 

We take the bus/train to our destination, and back from it. Then you leave forever, but at least we'll have had this. A window behind which we could sit and watch our love thrive, a window through which the world moved along with us, tipping its hat for once, that we were doing this. 

At what point does it evolve from being an escape, to being the path through which you go out and meet the rest of the world?

The escape itself is always the path, the arrow of metaphysics points strictly in one direction. 

A pattern emerges, in whatever little time we have spent thus. In the fitful, waking hours of the night; or the restless quiet moments of the day, before everything else rushes in. We find each other when there is nothing left to give to the rest of the world. We find each other at the end of the day's journey, weary but steady. 

We are raw. We marinate in words and kisses until, by osmosis, we are prepped for the world's taking again. To live and die like that. 

Falling through the cracks

What is this life even, we ask ourselves.

There is no ceremony of parting. Nothing to mark the milestone of surviving 12 years in a city that I didn't like too much. As my parents struggle, back at home, packing up 12 years of living and aspiring, here we are, two able-bodied children, both suddenly jobless, breathing like one organic ecosystem in the lazy heat of a Hyderabad summer, with our grandmother.

The last week at work (somewhere in June) was where I managed to calibrate myself with everything outside of me. I finally felt at peace. I'd look at these people I was working with, bemused at how little all of this meant to me, now that I knew I was leaving. That limbo of having put in your notice period and serving out a month, a gesture of goodwill on both sides. But by the time the last day comes, you're already a ghost. You've been exorcised.

I left Delhi suddenly. I left it with a truckload of letter coming in from the most unexpected places. Dependable, solid people, they told me, were hard to come by. 10 days in Pune, living like a nomad, and another week in Hyderabad, still suchlike.

Somewhere in the middle of waking up dehydrated due to alcohol and figuring out what the day looked like, the hours turned into nights, and the nights into days and the days into a dream. I sat there, in the midst of pitchers of beer, the one time I did not drink in the week because he wasn't there and things just didn't make sense.

We missed our train, but I felt like I finally got into the right cracks, the right openings. I fell through the cracks, even though I'd spend the last couple of years refurnishing everything and repairing everything. Between the dreamless sleep in his arms at 4 am and the panic in my throat as I left his disappearing visage in an auto, I fell in love.

                                                                              ***
"I think we should definitely meet", someone else texted me in between, from another world I have long forgotten.

No, we won't.

                                                                             ***

I could always tell at the first instance who would be the one to leave, when things came down to it. I love you, I'd say, but it was only the first half of the sentiment. I love you, and you'll leave me. I love you, but I'll leave you.

Because ultimately, two illusions broke. One, that this would not be done to me and two, I could not do this to anyone.

                                                                         ***

I'm turning 26 in a month. I feel so happy I want to die. Bursting at the seams, completely winded. I love you, I told him.

I love you, come back.