Fist falls

Fist falls and raindrops. Far, far away the engine toots along. The coming is inevitable. There are a lot of feelings which scare me, but none as much as a yes. I’ve said this to myself over and over again. In the shower, in the muffled sobs in a cold bathroom cubicle, in that mad crying part of my head while I’m smiling at them. But she just doesn’t get it. And it just doesn’t stop. I thought the pain would make the difference, but she doesn’t seem to care anymore. I said forget it, so she filled her head and those filler moments with him and another him and yet another him. It was almost funny how they played out this circus and when the audience danced with the clowns, the masks melted away. Security is a curious thing.

Last night was cooler than what I was used to. And I went walking under the stars. It felt like a different place; one with so many possibilities and palate of hope. I could’ve been anyone and no one would’ve been the wiser. On nights like these I wonder whether I would miss it all, had it turned out any other way. My trusty Cosmo insight says that whenever a woman desperately feels the need for change or just to get out of the rut which she is slowing sinking into, she does one of two things – goes in for a haircut or buys a whole new wardrobe. Funny huh, how the theatre and well, arguably art as a whole seeps into the very fiber of your being and you never even know when it is happening? The masque, the feisty pantomime backdrop for so many staged altercations – it isn’t that far away from what we pride as real. Throw the TV remote aside, scrounge through leftover pizza and fall asleep over a bucket of chocolate ice-cream. TV feels safe, movies in dark cinema halls feel safer and I wrap myself in music when youtube has been exhausted. ‘Willing suspension of disbelief’ penned Coleridge, way ahead of his time. It’s a bit like pop-up books or do-it-yourself mystery stories where you’re carefully threading a puzzled conclusion. The story just jumps out at you, almost challenging and even impertinent. And before you know it, you’re a part of it.

Sunshine

Ghosts were everywhere. It was silly. I knew it was so damn silly, but I couldn’t keep my fingers from running across the red brick. It hadn’t been decades and this isn’t a movie. But I’m searching for belonging and this was my pilgrimage. It’s strange how places are people. Things are people. And people? They’re the ones who end up being the places and the things which they gingerly finger. Laughter, whispers, Jan Test moans, dirty socks and the signature Sarojini jholas, darker kajal and unkempt hair. Chai tasted the same and I can still fit curled up in the chairs and pick and the little wicker strands. Gravelly and saltless, the cheeky Mince challenges me. For a moment, I’m impossibly young again. It is darker inside and the paintings on the walls are atrocious. But you can sink back into the crevices and watch from a long long time ago. They remember my name here. It makes me want to cry a little. Possessiveness surges. This was mine. This is mine. I want to tear down the curtains and break open the main door and stand there and look up at my room with the pretty white curtains. There’s a funny smell inside here. Like something which shouldn’t quite belong has been left behind. I guess that is me and well, all of us.

Change. I can hear that annoying voice repeating – the necessary evil. Call me regressive, but I like status quo. You work so damn hard to get it right and then just when you’re starting to get comfortable, it gets whisked away from right beneath your very nose!

I smile back. And it doesn’t feel like it was so long ago. I’m confused. Someone has smiled this very smile at me, probably last week. But who? And the same smile? I found my own way of coping with the disturbing melting pot of time. If you carry a little bit of the past into your present and dream it into the future, then just for that little while, you can cheat. So I look for it in the way he drums his fingers on a table or the way her eyes soften when she is tired and in that way it feels to have an arm around my shoulder again. Déjà vu. And then it all tumbles down.

Late night phone calls were always muffled whispers and we would sneak them well into the early hours of the morning. You know what I’m talking about. It is that first rush of discovering these seemingly magical bonds over shared secrets and dreams. And it isn’t tiresome to explain yourself and be mapped out by an entirely new person. The getting-to-know-each-other is an excited heady rush, not tired and impatient. On one of these nights (there were so many that sometimes they are confused memories blending into one seamless never-ending chain of talking and discovery) a boy I once adored and haven’t met in years said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. And it came back to me as I walked the sun-kissed stone paths that afternoon. Just imagine. Right now, even as we speak, the person whom we will spend the rest of our lives with is living his/ her life somewhere and we just don’t know it yet. Or maybe in some strange way we do. This thought, clubbed with a familiar threat from Ma from those times when we children were caught in yet another squealing squabble – just imagine, the four of us could have been living in different parts of the universe, never having know each other – is the scariest of all things that I have ever heard. The thought of some invisible hands drawing names and existences at random out of a bottomless sack makes me sick.

Yet, there I was, walking the corridor of my dreams, smiling at the same window sill where I had spent so many afternoons watching the lazy sun in the sky and thumbing through yet book. All those questions that I had back then. I knew the answers now. To all of them. I could almost see the younger me balk at the crystal ball. All I could manage was a tremble. I wanted to fit in.

I did everything I could again. Ate at the same brightly lit cubby holes, walked on the wet grass and smiled down at my messy feet, smiled down at cute college boys from the balcony and cringed at the bell, but it wasn’t me. It was just not real. I never did any of things that I had set out to. I became a whole different person in what is an increasingly alien world, divorced of all things comfortable and familiar. I’m still neck above water though, except for this guilt which weighs me down.

They wouldn’t have noticed all of this with the way I was lining them up for photographs. It was the least that I could do. Had someone told me earlier how this would feel, I would’ve spent that extra couple of seconds wrapped in the hugs which we would pose for with such abandon. I don’t want to mope all day long. She smiles back at me and there is so much that is unspoken. We had to move on. Because this was not the place where the hurt could have happened. That was somewhere else. This was my happy place. That secret little coop which I dig into on nights of chocolate fudge, dry maggi and muffled sobs.

I pulled out old photographs that night and poured over them. But try as I did, I couldn’t fit back into them. Because I knew too much about what was to come. My own words, penned pensively on a late January afternoon came back to haunt me. I will never be twenty-one again and dreaming my impossible dreams on Andrews Court.

You

I’d almost forgotten that every story needs a protagonist. You can’t walk in and out of memories and weave the lost endings together. Cinderella gets eaten by the bad wolf and Rumplestilskin stamps his way down into the pretty glass coffin of a Sleeping Beauty. But I’m still blushing at the last message he sent me. And it is like I’m sixteen all over again. It has been so long. And I’m so damn tempted to reach out. I feel like I’m walking in and out of different lives. When I was little, I would spend hours ensuring that everything I had was colour coded. From Barbie to crayons, everything had a definite place. Because when you have a definite place, you belong somewhere. And when you belong somewhere, someone there will love you. And you will be happy. It is almost embarrassing how the equations pile up and I’m so aware of what I’m doing. Nothing much has really changed. Everything still has a place. But they are different places. So my heart lives nestled in memories of a yesterday which has been wrung so dry of realism that it feels like a part of an impossible dream. And I don’t quite know if I really was there. If his skin really felt that warm and if the grass was that moist.

She looked at me quizzingly through those damp brown eyes which I know so well. Why is it always the wrong guy? Because Prince Charming doesn’t come in a one size fits all range! Because he is scattered across so many damn guys that stringing them together is exhausting. Ever scraped sand out from under your fingernails and then dusted your shoes, hair, clothes and done the wet dog body shake, only to find more just when you crawl under the immaculate sheets in a far away hotel room? He is my sand, quite simply put. You think you’ve done all the right things, wiped everything clean and walk around with a safe smug smile, but then one nondescript flick of the head turns everything upside down. I can see it all so clearly even now. Like he was just here. In bits and pieces, which don’t add up. The dark eyes, dancing with mischief. The smile which makes me blush like a schoolgirl in pigtails. And I want to hear him say it all over again. Art imitates Life imitates Art. I’ve been over this so many times in my head. We’ve walked through moonlit groves on SMS and eaten bowl after bowl of ice cream to keep the night from ending. I think I’m starting to get confused now. I wake up and the room is dark and I’m not quite sure when he left. Or if he is still here. I find the bed too large and he feels stifled. As a six year old, I would prance around the house with the snowy white trail of imaginary wedding gowns. Impossibly intricate and laced with all the hopes and sighs of the years to come. When I was fourteen, I read about Miss Havisham. White never did look good after a couple of wears. Daag acche hai, is what he says. I want to throw something at him.

I am so many ‘me’s. Something like shape shifting. And they still think that I’m smiling at them. There are a couple of things that I picked up a while ago and the years of drag classroom lectures only perfected them. I could be sitting at my desk in my most perfect of all avatars and yet all I see before me are rolling green fields and an unreal blue sky. I’ve learned how to dance. In my dreams. Not the drunk excuses for the unabashedly Bollywood table-top performances, but the taunt with desire, almost war-like exhibition dances of the seventeenth century. I used eye make-up today. Just like with the contact lenses before, it just happened one day. And I think I’ve fallen hard this time round. I’d almost forgotten how good it feels to hold a damn pen again! I feel like the syllabus at Delhi University! There was the solitary seriousness of the ancients, the promise of the pre-Romantics, the young, wild and soon to be dead desperate talent of the later day Romantics and the stoic Augustan desolation. More often than not, it is down the rabbit hole. And I’m Alice all over again and the Queen of Hearts is shrieking. Off with their heads! I want to grab her annoyingly fast hands and hold them down, but I’m rooted to the ground. One minute I’m Alice and the next I’m her. And then I’m neither and I’m curled up watching the spectacle below. Is it because I have stopped caring? I ask myself this over and over again, with the fierce resolution to be honest. And I can’t find the answer. Is this hide-and-seek just because I’m lost? It started out like that. I couldn’t be happy where I was and with who I was so I looked for alternatives. When I lost him and it broke my heart but the tears just wouldn’t show, I think I drowned a part of me inside. And I looked elsewhere and then never stopped. No. I’m not searching for him anymore. In fact I don’t even allow myself to think about him anymore. But like everything that I hide from so desperately, the annoying tickers show up when you least expect them to. And the familiar heaviness starts forming in the pit of my stomach. The tears well up and I watch someone I will probably never know swing his daughter high up in the air.