On the new year.

The new year is here! And for the life of me I can’t quite wish absolute new-ness, happiness, shiny-ness and joyful things for a whole year. Because a whole year will not  never be like that.

The year will be quite insane, with moments of unbelievable excitement and then some sadness. There will be friends who will stay, come what may. There will be friends who will leave you and move on with their lives. There will be family drama and gossip sessions over tea. There will be laughter over dinners and there will be some lonely nights. There will be tears. But there will be silly smiles as well. There will be headaches due to heat and illness and fatigue and then some stomach ache from excessive laughter. There will be new clothes and new shoes and then no money for new clothes and shoes. There will be new books and the smell of old books.

There will be all of that and some more.

As for me, if the first day of the new year is really an indication of how the rest of the year would be then I’ll be getting up at noon, drinking tea and ordering pizza, sleeping, reading books and having friends over all through the year. We will check on that in a few days from now, shall we?

Happy new year guys! Hope you all rock it!

On a bit of truth about myself.

I am a sensitive person. I am a sensitive and quiet person. A sensitive and quiet person who is usually nice and laughing. But then, you come along. You come and you think all the quietness and niceness and the laughter would always be there. So you walk around and come over to my wrong side. I try shrugging you off from there and lead you back to the other side but you are adamant and decide to stay. Because you think, even on my wrong side the laughter would stay, the niceties would stay.

 Let me tell you what happens instead. The laughter disappears. Yes. It is replaced by a stone face that will not even attempt to smile at you. The niceties disappear. Replaced by nothing. The quietness becomes silence. I engage in absolute disinterest in your presence in my life. You are stunned. You would be because I do not care and will never bother to give you reasons for such withdrawals. And usually you spend a lot of your time telling yourself how I withdrew and disengaged inspite of you trying and never gave conversation a chance.

 You are right. I do not believe there is any need for conversation when you take everything about me for granted. I believe you should have introspected and have had the conversation earlier. And no, I do not come with warning tags. If you claim to know me at all, then the taking for granted would not happen. At all.

 You may think, I am probably very bothered about this shrugging habit that I have. You are right. I am bothered deeply when it hits me first. I stay up nights and talk to myself during the days wondering what is it that went wrong. I wonder why would say what you said or why you would say that in that manner. I go back years, think of all the times that I had decided to overlook the little mistakes and wonder why I had not said anything then. Most of the times I decide I should have said something earlier, much earlier, when there were warning signs and not waited for this to happen. But then, it is also true that I am who I am. I am quiet and I am sensitive and I do not say anything. So if you know me, at all, then you would know that too. And you wouldn’t take the quietness and sensitiveness for granted. Ever.

 I must also tell you that all the heartbreak also goes away. Sooner or later. And with time, I see it is increasingly easy to accept no nonsense and move on. There is less staying up at night and less talking to myself. There is less need for rationalising and reasoning. There is more of it is what it is. There is more consideration that I grant myself.

There are four of you in my life. Two from my family and two of my closest friends. One more person from my family has been very recently put on the same track.

 One of the family members has been very difficult to deal with. I have taken years to understand the complexity of the relationship, the power imbalance and the emotions in that relationship. Very recently, I have decided that I did deserve better, that more than the relation itself, I must look at myself as an individual engaging with another individual and certainly an individual deserves a better in a relationship.

The friendships that I have consciously disengaged from have also been rather hard on me. Yes. The friendship itself was hard and then the process of disengagement was probably harder. I wish I could be more specific but I this is the best I can do for the time being.

 So, yes. That’s the truth about me, a part of me. I am quiet and sensitive. But if you say you know me, then no, you don’t get to treat me as a doormat and walk away with that.

***

 Note: This post was written after a year of continuing therapy where I attempted to untangle some of the knots of my mind. Therapy helped me. I could sit down and write this without breaking into tears, dissociating and floating into outer space and staring at old pictures. There are other knots that are still there. I will untangle them in my own time. I am still in therapy and will be for as long as I think it is necessary. 

 There were doubts in my mind about putting this in my blog. But then this is who I am and this is how it is. I trust the ones I call my friends. They would know what I am talking about. And I trust my readers. You have a right to form an opinion about me.

Open letter to the Prime Minister.

Dear Mr. Prime Minister and others who may or may not be concerned,

I read you have “directed” Mr. Shinde to restore a sense of security in Delhi and see that incidents like last Sunday’s gang rape do not recur. And Mr. Shinde, I read, has assured you that he is monitoring the situation personally.

I was refraining myself from commenting, from reading too much, from saying anything at all actually. All for personal reasons. But that “direction”, Mr. Prime Minister, made me laugh and convinced me how nothing is ever going to change – not in Delhi and not in the rest of the country.

You see, Mr. Shinde is not quite doing anything personally. No. Because last evening, my friend while sitting in an auto at a traffic signal in South Delhi, felt two arms coming from somewhere, squeezing her breasts and leaving. She was too scared to step out and even look. The auto driver was smirking. She got home without being raped. She only had her breasts squeezed and she found herself thanking God for that.

This morning, a friend of mine, boarded the yellow line of the Delhi metro. She got into the general compartment. She got off two stops later. Not because she had reached her destination but because she was done with hands “accidentally” brushing against her buttocks. She tried screaming, but everyone just either looked on or looked away.

Another friend of mine was on her way to the protest at India gate in the morning. She was walking to get to the cycle rickshaw stand when a Ford Icon pulled up next to her, honked several times and two guys asked her if she would like to give her “jawani” up to them. Before she could react, they laughed and zipped away. She still went to the protest, held up her placard , stood against the water canons and tear gas.

Should I just stop here? I don’t know, really. I have many more of these stories. We all do. Just too many for our own good. And these are just three incidents since last night. Three incidents where each woman was thankful that she did not get raped, on that day. Three incidents that could have been rape.  And I don’t even want to get into what is happening in the rest of the country. Although you may have some idea- like the three year old who was raped in a play school in Delhi, or the woman in north Bengal who was gang raped and set on fire, or the girl in Bhubaneswar who was gang-raped by 5 men.

So, Mr. Prime Minister, you see, we don’t need a sense of security in Delhi. We need a sense of security. Period. In the whole country, in every space, in every relation and at all times.

You know, just as well as I do, that a death penalty is not going to do it. Chemical castration does not yield anything at all either. We need speedy justice, yes. Fast tracking of rape cases, collection and preservation of evidence are the need of the hour. But all that will come after the rape. Even the death penalty and the castration. And what needs to stop here is the rape.

How does a society stop rape? I should start with what we don’t need. We do not need political leaders assigning “chowmein” and “free mixing of boys and girls” as reasons for rape. It is shameful that when India is being looked at as the emerging financial power by the world, we are struggling to establish the fact that it is the rapists rape. Nothing else rapes. Talking to strangers and half a bottle of vodka definitely do not have what it takes to rape. I don’t know though, where to begin with what we need. I am wondering if I should start with my very well educated neighbour who wants to slap girls who talk to strangers and ask to be raped or if I should start with the yellow eyed Police man in the Jangpura police station who had had a whole conversation with my breasts a year back about a lost phone. Or maybe I should start with the very important people in the central government that I met in my professional career who sat in their crisp suits and told us that the government has done enough for “all this violence and all” and that they need to focus of social-empowerment of women. Without doing anything further for “all this violence and all” though. I wonder how that agenda of the government has come along!

Ah! How easy it is to digress!

So yes coming back to the point. Mr. Shinde is not quite personally monitoring anything. We haven’t heard one word of apology from the Delhi Police or our shinning chowmein-hating-free society-abhorring political leaders. Mr. Shinde might be giving you reports every night, but, dear Sir, you must open up first to listen to the citizens who voted for you and trusted you with their safety and security.

I don’t know, Mr. Prime Minister, what your “direction” consists of but if I were you I would have put two words in my directive- STOP RAPE and then looked at my monitoring reports every night to see what we have achieved.

Do tell me, tell us, when you have time – what exact directions you have given thus far. We, the people, have the right to know how exactly you are planning to keep us safe. The tears in the Parliament, the water cannons at India Gate and the silence are not quite working for us.

On someone not being there. Anymore.

I can’t write at the moment. Of course, I have a hundred things to say, but then I can’t quite seem to write them down.

You see, my grandmother passed away. She slipped away quietly, at home possibly and hopefully in her sleep. We don’t know. No one was by her side. The nurse realised when she went to give her medicine in the morning. She called my Mami. My Mami rang me up with the news. My mom was here. With me. I told her. Neither of us cried or screamed. I think our hearts sank way too deep to elicit any reaction. I just remember the morning being way too quiet and the head feeling way too light, too empty.

My grandmother is the only grandparent I have truly known. She was bedridden after her stroke and in a lot of pain. Now she smiles peacefully from a pretty silver frame in a corner of a shelf in my home. And somehow still watches over me with a twinkle in her eye.

***

Yes. There are other things to talk about as well. But I’ll have to stop for now.

On where I am.

At the moment, I am at the “Holy Trinity of Assertiveness”*. It is made up of:

1) NO

2) I DON’T CARE

3) FUCK OFF

It feels good to be here. Finally. And yes, I’ll be around for a while now.

—

*This is in quotes because I did not come up with it 🙂 

On moving.

I don’t know why I haven’t written about me moving. Us moving. R and I. Yes. Packing our stuff up, quitting jobs, leaving friends and moving. I don’t know why I didn’t feel the need to write anything about it.

It was the last week of March. I don’ remember the exact date. A would remember, I’m sure. Considering he is the only one who cried at the airport while we pressed his belly and wondered if his hormones are shooting up! A was the only one cried at all times, actually. The day we told him. When we met him any time after that. When he came home looking for biriyani, beer and shelter. And then at the airport. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes while his nostrils turned slightly red and said “Well. Someone has to cry!”

And then there was C. He went around with a stupefied look for one whole month. He would come home, sit in a corner with his glass of scotch and stare blankly at everyone. With his mouth open. Sometimes he would say “I can’t believe this is happening.” Yes. He was dumbfounded the night before we left. He didn’t want to leave and was dying to run away at the same time. He didn’t want to hug and couldn’t let go. He did not want to say “don’t go” but he said “don’t go” before he got into his car. He thought he would wake up the next morning and find out that he could still crawl into our house completely drunk and crash on the sofa with a lit cigarette in his hand.

There was P. Slightly undecided whether she should embrace her feminine side and “chick-cry” and whether she should be more masculine, gulp her drink, blow smoke rings and just, you know, be. She did the latter of course. Very bravely, she asked us to take care and have a good time and then left. She cried later, of course. And that little shattering of heart also happened. A little bit of roaming around aimlessly happened. Despairing happened. “I am going to go right now because I do not want to cry. Ok?” also happened.

And S&S. One got so busy suddenly with her work that she decided to appear sparingly and when she did she decided to be unnaturally chirpy and smile-y. It was strange since she was the one who sit in one corner and keep wagging her finger and scold (yes, scold) everyone about everything. The other one decided to, well, just continue be the really nice guy that he really is. He came over, called, helped, poured drinks for everyone, sang himself silly, drank himself silly and talked of hope and another universe.

A and S dropped us off at the airport. They refused to let us call a cab even with our extra suitcases. So, before we could realize suitcases were hauled from our flat to the two cars waiting downstairs. When we reached downstairs, A very bravely said he would drive by himself because there was no space left in his pretty little car. I threw a tantrum and said I would ride only and only with A. So. Car doors were opened and suitcases were rehauled while I stood around and made faces. But I rode with A. And thankfully he didn’t cry. We didn’t talk either.

And THAT is how we moved. Yes, notice was given to the landlady, car was sold unexpectedly within a couple of hours, telephone connections were done away with, things given away, things taken away, things thrown away. Frantic breakfasts, lunches and dinners were planned with everyone we knew. Coffees and teas were squeezed in between.

Everything just went by in a flash and it was over even before we realized.

Now, five months since we boarded the flight from Delhi to Singapore, the heartache still lingers. We rarely bring biriyani home and don’t stock our fridge with beer because A won’t coming looking for them anymore. R saves his best scotch for S and C and hasn’t opened a bottle since moving. I don’t google vegetarian recipes because P is not coming to spend the night anymore. And there are no unexpected Sunday lunches anymore because the other S doesn’t live down the street anymore.

This is why I didn’t talk about this at all. Because it is difficult to take apart your heart piece by piece and describe the aching bits all over.

The wind this morning.

Today, in the morning, I woke up to a sound of a flower pot crashing. When I rushed out to my balcony I saw it was not one of mine. I opened the balcony doors, the windows in the bedrooms. Things fell, photo frames collapsed. R stood around trying to balance a vase in his hands and stopping the bedroom door from slamming shut with his foot. My mother was blissfully sleeping, snoring softly and completely ignorant about things crashing all around. I was in the kitchen stirring some sugar in my very large cup of tea and suddenly found myself wondering rather aloud “Where is the wind coming from?”

No one really  knows. Do they?

Wind on the Hill

A.A.Milne

1882- 1956

“No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows”.

 

On having a blackberry. Or maybe not.

So I have been wanting a Blackberry for the longest time. Various petitions have been made to R and a few friends, much effort put in with “I am the only one left without a Blackberry”, “You guys are always on BBM and all of you have stopped replying to my messages”, “You guys are logged into your emails. I don’t have that.” All of this didn’t work.

Then I tried my usual “Guys, I work with an NGO, I don’t get paid, I can’t spend money on a BB”. Which did not work either. The explicit plea of “Please buy me a Blackberry” / “Please give me your old Blackberry” was trashed as well. Hmph.

And all these days I was really really convinced about having a Blackberry. I thought I am missing out on oh-just-so-much because I don’t have a Blackberry.

Until I saw this advertisement. And thereafter it took me about a minute and thirty six seconds (which is the length of the advertisement) to make up my mind about not having a Blackberry. Take a look. What do you guys feel about it?

 

PS- And you know why this advertisement moved me so much? Because I just feel SO invisible at times. Really. That one email cannot wait for five minutes? Just let me finish telling you how much I love you. No?

On one day.

Today I woke up without an alarm.

I made two cups of tea and shared it with a friend over good conversation and a plate of Italian lemon and white chocolate cookies.

I did some laundry.

I had left over mutton biriyani for lunch and watched a very old episode on Gilmore Girls.

I slept for an hour on the couch with the T.V. on and with the remote in my hand.

I walked to the parlor to get a haircut.

Walked back. Walked again to the DVD store to return a DVD that I had rented last night.

Came back. Inspected my hair. Hated it.

Made a few calls. Stared at a blank word document wondering what to write. Started watching T.V.

Watched one whole movie. Bruce Almighty. “Behind every successful man there is always a woman rolling her eyes”. (Do you agree?)

Ate noodles for dinner. Spoke to R. Wrote him an email. He is thousands of miles away from me.

Straightened cushions. Stared for a while at the worn out sofa cover. Made a note to myself. Switched off lights, T.V., air conditioning.

Turned down my bed. Let my body curl up under the sheet and bade myself good night.

Did not frown. Did not cry. Did not despair. At. All.

Today, I breathed easy. I made peace with the empty house, lonely meals and the heartache that exists for reasons I cannot explain.

PS – I know I have not been writing. I am just too tired. Too many things going on. My head feels heavy most of the time. Sorry, dear readers. Sunshine soon in this blog. I promise.

On my best friend’s wedding.

http://www.pringoo.com/custom-designs/Friends-friends/did-11306/mid-1/ppid-24

When I say my best friend of twenty five years got married, one would imagine that this other best friend of the best friendship in question, looked gorgeous in the wedding. Perfectly draped silk walkalam, perfect nails, pretty make up, sexy heels, charming, smiling and greeting everyone with perfect grace.

And I so did not live up to that pretty image.

Throughout the wedding I was running around like the mad hatter. Tucking her saree, looking for a pin, holding her veil, wiping her kajal, wiping her sweat (in January!!!), picking up flowers that fell from her pretty bun (she had about eight carnations and three roses in her hair on her wedding day!), snatching gifts from her hands as soon as they were given to her, shooing off unnecessary relatives and friends, checking for safety pins poking in unusual places (hers not mine), wiping her sweat (did I tell you she had a winter wedding!!), frowning furiously at the Pandit who kept on pouring ghee in a roaring fire, making her wear a saree, folding her clothes, counting and tucking away her jewellery, packing the gifts, getting her water, feeding her, taking her phone calls, doing the screaming for her, covering her in a blanket, putting her to sleep, sneaking her a drink when she needed it and occasionally reminding myself to breathe.

When she left there were too many people who were too eager to hug her and bless her. I saw her later, with her helpless eyes puffed up and all I could do was to pat her back, wipe off the kajal which ran along with her tears and let her walk into a mass of unknown people waiting to welcome her. I couldn’t see her at all when she walked into her in laws place. There were new people who tried to make her smile. I walked in last with two other friends with her bags stuffed with comfort clothes and the comfort night suit and the strawberry flavored lip balm and the tattered sweater that she needed at night and her good luck charms that the new people did not know about. I waited in the corner of the room and bit my nails off looking at the ones who were trying very hard to make her comfortable. I just saw her once when I had to leave and say goodbye. I left her crying and a small packet of soft tissues to help her wipe all that eye make up when needed.

A day later at her reception, I saw someone else helping her throughout. Tucking in her saree with safety pins, making sure her hair was alright and wiping her sweat when she got too nervous. Someone else sat beside her receiving gifts and getting her water to drink. I mingled with others, did my share of catching up with acquaintances and wondered if she was alright. I didn’t see her the whole night. Just before I left, I went looking for her and saw her standing lost in an empty room. I hugged her and let her cry.

It was hard to watch her getting married, you know. It was like a part of me had to let go of her. In what way and why I cannot explain. I don’t know why I died every time I saw her crying her eyes out over those four days. I don’t know why I looked upon her in laws, whom she had already known for eight whole years, as complete strangers. I guess I wanted to protect her, cry with her, sit beside her, hug her and smile with her all at once. When I look back I don’t remember much about my chipped nail paint, my mismatched make up, my clumsily draped saree and my spectacular absence in photo ops. But. I do remember being there when she needed to be held, I remember watching her smile, I remember what she hurriedly whispered into my ear right before she got married, I remember how she looked sitting in the make up studio restlessly twitching her fingers.

And being the very best of friends for twenty five years now, I don’t think I could have asked for anything more.

Edited to add later: This post was written on Feb 22, 2010. Was lying in my drafts folder. I was hunting some snaps of her wedding to put up to realize that I had not taken even one picture during her wedding. *Sigh*

My entry for Blogadaa’s Friends Forever Contest.