NaPoWriMo Day 5 - Home

I own homes, way too many

To remember each one of their addresses

In their articulate spaces

And yet I know, every single nook

every single lane, every other crook

I run my fingers along their edges

Nourishing myself, pouring them into me

I learn, I breathe, I bloom

Cherishing every stay

I return in happiness and in gloom

They hold me, they cherish me

Make me feel one of them own

I am taken to travel, I am taken to meet

People so many

Humanity, human psyche

Black, white, grey and everything in between

Emotions, unnamed, understated, unknown

I have known from these

I live amidst all the books I have read

In their pages

Lurking between their spaces

They have my heart, they have my head

No matter what

I wouldn’t trade this home for anything ever instead

# Writing for NaPoWriMo attempting to everyday for the month of April. Combining this with prompts from The Alipore Post 

NaPoWriMo Day 4 - Unsolved

in that irritated tone for no reason

in that everlasting smile 

in every season

the anger that piqued without your permission

in those excuses given for canceling plans

in the fear of being uncomfortable amidst new

and yet, in the inability to say ‘no’ to even a few

in that obsessive gulping on books and booze

and even in the smugness that you choose

in judging your own actions

and denying self-care

hinging your identity to people

who are hardly there

living with the feeling

that you always belong else somewhere

in feeling like a walking apology

balancing everything on eggshells

being somebody to whom everything overwhelms

in lashing out

when you actually need help

in the muffled cries

when on paper they are dealt

in being afraid to make mistakes

the unending feeling of everything

being always at stake

it hides itself

festering from inside

unprecedented, unmoving

visible, yet invisible

this unsolved, unknown trauma

# Writing for NaPoWriMo attempting to everyday for the month of April. Combining this with prompts from The Alipore Post 

NaPoWriMo Day 3 - Distance

the distance between us

can be measured in meters

but, the distance between us

cannot be measured

# Writing for NaPoWriMo attempting to everyday for the month of April. Combining this with prompts from The Alipore Post 

NaPoWriMo Day 2 - Patterns

lines, dots and crosses,

some twisted, some turned

a few straight, others overturned

molding gradually into soft designs

they must fit tightly into their confines

it holds you, beholds you

captures and enslaves

in its beauty, in its calmness

in symmetry and finesse

control your hands

and patient your mind

only then you will understand

that a Mandala is

not just some pattern and design

# Writing for NaPoWriMo attempting to everyday for the month of April. Combining this with prompts from The Alipore Post. I have suddenly become fascinated towards learning to draw a Mandala and this post talks about just that.  

NaPoWriMo Day 1 - Gentle

They say it hits you like lightening, sweeps you off your feet and makes you walk on moonbeams.

The books told me it would make you hear violins in the sky, fill your stomach with butterflies and make your heart flutter with bittersweet anxiety every night.

The movies showed that I would get lost all the time, smile unknowingly at strangers and burst into dance sequences in the middle of a railway stations.

I thought it would make me lose my sense of time, fill me up with candyfloss giddiness and let me dream with eyes wide open.

All it did was take off some invisible burden from my drooping shoulders, joining them with his own and showed me togetherness in everything. Who said love couldn't be gentle in its arrival?

# Writing for NaPoWriMo attempting to everyday for the month of April. Combining this with prompts from The Alipore Post 

You know this person's story

I saw this image on instagram some months ago and my perspective towards individuals changed. I stopped myself in the middle of every conversation I was having in my mind about any person or situation and said just this one line to myself. – “You don't know his/her story. Why judge. Who knows what is making them do what they are doing or the way they are.” And that stopped every judgmental thought that came to my mind. 

Although, my behaviour never reflects my thoughts for the person or situation, like everyone else, I have erred many times. I still do. But now, I catch my thought process and stop my thoughts in the bud about people, about situations. It is exhilarating in some ways, seeing yourself free away from the clutches of your ‘sometimes’ judgmental self. 

But there is one person I cannot spare judgement on. There in one person who I judge the harshest, who I question the most, who I criticize the worst. I don't cut this person any slack, any time. Although, I know, I shouldn't. Although I know this person gets affected the most by my words and yet, yet I do not relent. I do not give up any opportunity for being anything but cruel to this person. And guess what, I know this person's entire story. I know the circumstances, the weaknesses, the struggle, the effort and yet I am hard. And these talks of 'Stop it, you actually know this person's story' do not work. 

And after I am done, what remains is an ashen bitterness in my mouth that rises from the gut and thoughts that feel toxic, as if they are covering my entire body. 

That person is ME. And all the pages about self-love, quotes about not being hard on yourself, posts saying that you are doing good today - do not work. They just don't. Out of all the love I have inside me for all the people I love in this world, I cannot spare any for this person. 

Things I want to feel again

1. Breathlessness after a good workout
2. The soreness of my eyes after a night spent reading, unaware of the clock 
3. The joy of tasting what I have cooked and it turning to be absolutely the way I had wanted it to be
4. The audacity to go anywhere without carrying any medication
5. The smell of parijat flowers blooming in my backyard
6. The glow in my eyes after writing my heart out
7. The wind on my face staring at the horizon,sitting in my balcony, tea in my hands, made just the way I like it
8. The jitters in my body on your touch, the flutter of my heart every time I saw you smile, the softness of my hands in yours and the warmth of the browns of your eyes on my skin
9. Listening to my favourite songs and feeling the rhythm inside me
10. Hope

Pic source: Me

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi - Book review

There are books that break your heart. And then there are books that create a hole in your chest so deep that it may take a long time to get repaired. These are the books that touch the nerves inside you that hurt the most, strip you of all the faux coping mechanisms under which you have covered yourself and then leave you out in the cold letting those nerves hurt, and hurt hard.

Paul Kalanithi's 'When Breath Becomes Air' is one such book for me. The book though started on a bleak note with a long foreword and a lot of details about Paul's education, his words started touching those raw nerves when he talks about his journey, first as a medical student, then as a doctor and later as a patient.

'When Breath Becomes Air' talks about mortality and life in the rawest words possible. Paul's confessions as a doctor, sympathy towards his patients, the urge to understand the patient-doctor relationship that is laced with limitations and exhilaration both, his responsibility as a neurosurgeon and his quest to understand life and death make you adore him for the person and the doctor that he was. The only thought crosses your mind at this point is 'If only. If only all the doctors in today's times were like him.    

And then starts the narrative of his own journey as a cancer patient at the age of thirty six when life was looking more promising than ever. But as they say, life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. During his suffering as a patient, he keeps going back to thinking about the times when the roles were reverse. 

All through the book, you can feel the urgency. The urgency to tell so many things, the urgency to pour everything out, the urgency of time - the most limited resource he had. The book tears you up with a epilogue written by his wife. The details she captured about his death, about her climbing into the bed with him one last time when he was about to let go is heart wrenching. 

I don't know if this book tore me apart because I have a history of losing someone too close to this disease seventeen years ago. And it still hurts the same. But then it is said that when something comes straight from the heart, it hits hard. And a dying man's words couldn't have come from anywhere else. 

This book goes undoubtedly to my list of most loved books. Go read. And get your heart broken a little bit. 

Quoting a few lines that I loved from the book. 

“All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the worlds and then back out. Seeing the body as a matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering”.

“Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.”  

“When there’s no space for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”

"If the weight of mortality doesn't grow lighter, does it at least grow familiar?”

“Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day”

“Death may be a onetime event, but living with terminal illness is a process”

Tonight is imperfect !

Tonight is imperfect. The air is hanging around me, too full with longing and despair. The longing is so harsh, so hard; it has created holes in the night sky and is melting the moon. The moon drips, drop by drop like yellow salted butter. Over plants with white buds and trees with yellow leaves. The trees are my friends. They will not give away my secret. They hide my despair between their thick branches and yellow leaves. The flowers are traitors. They always have been. They sometimes convey feelings that the giver hasn't put inside them.

The traitors will bloom tomorrow. Not white. But Yellow. They will bloom yellow, fragrant with my despair. Everyone will then know I have been radiating sadness, creating holes in the sky and melting the moon. 

Tomorrow I will have to eat those traitors. They will taste of salt and unnamed emotions. Maybe then I would reek. But not of despair, not of sadness. I would reek of 'distance from you.'

Different yet alike or Alike yet different

He was a part of them, and yet not one of them. He looked like them in appearance but not in the mind. He appeared to be on their side, and yet always followed his own path. He was the youngest in the group, yet mature in his thoughts. He was like that as long as he could remember. 

At seven, when other young boys in the group bathed in the river and played on its banks, he dreamed about sitting with his mother and listening to her songs. At nine, when other boys in class got into fist fights, he talked to his sister. At fourteen, when others talked about girls in deriding manner, he told them stories about brave queens and goddesses that he had heard from his mother. At eighteen, when other boys mistreated their wives, he stayed mum about the way he treated his own. 

He didn't mistreat his wife. But neither did he treat her any special in public. He was educated. But not so much to be able to avoid the social stigma of being called a henpecked husband surrounded by illiterate people he called society.  

Day 3 - Picture prompt

‘I’m Writing Bravely for the Write Tribe Festival of Words – March 2019’

World upside down

I remember that day clearly. The day my world went upside down. It was around 8 in the evening. Sunaina, my wife was on her way back home. She had been a little late from office due to March coming to a close. The weather was getting hotter. Slowly, the weather Gods would be increasing their wrath, as if testing people’s patience or punishing them for their past life’s crimes. I had reached home on time and served myself a couple of glasses of fresh lime juice. The sugary sweet taste of fresh lime juice was a perfect anecdote for the weather. Meanwhile, waiting for my wife, I had cut vegetables and soaked rice. Tonight, we had planned on having biryani. I loved devouring my wife’s biryani. Not just biryani, I loved everything she cooked. My stomach churned a little and I helped myself to a few pieces of cake she had baked a couple of days ago. I left last two pieces as post dinner dessert.

Little did I know my world was about to go upside down in a few minutes. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be able to have my last piece of cake. Little did I know that I would not be able to have my wife’s biryani that day. Little did I know that my wife would come home with a doctor’s report making me a diabetic and snatching me away from the true love of my life – sweets.  

Day 2 - Picture prompt

‘I’m Writing Bravely for the Write Tribe Festival of Words – March 2019’

The colour of everything I knew

The first thing I noticed about you and fell for, it was the colour of your eyes. When we were on the dance floor, it was the colour of my twirling dress. When you held my hand for the first time, it was the colour of the chandelier in the restaurant. When you made me laugh lifting my spirits from its dungeons, it was the colour I saw fading from my mood. When time stopped by as we intertwined our lips, it was the colour of the sky and promises of a happy future. When you took my breath away asking me to marry you, it was the colour of the ocean below us and its reflection in my tears. 

After our first misunderstanding, because you thought I was lying to you, it was the colour of my bruises. As I sat for days and nights crying, it was the colour of the door I pleaded into. While you abused my body night after night, it was the colour of my numbness. When you asked me to cook for you over a call with a voice full of kindness, it was the last colour I saw when I switched on the stove.    

 Day 1 : Picture prompt

‘I’m Writing Bravely for the Write Tribe Festival of Words – March 2019’

Nothing but fumes

Sometimes, words are born from the crack in your heart as minor as an hairline fracture, take up space in veins alongside blood forming clots in between and get caught in the lump of your throat choking your voice. 

Because you cannot say them out aloud. Because saying them aloud would mean setting your world ablaze. Creating a pyre with the same hands with which you have nurtured happiness, one day at a time, using your spit as fuel and lighting the fire with your tongue. You are still sane enough to not do that. 

You thus let it bite you in the pit of your stomach. You let the carcasses of your words burn in the same crack in your heart where they were born. You let them rot inside the whole of you. The stench and burden of these words will then come out of your mouth as nothing but fumes. Visible yet invisible. 

How does your body treat you?

Do you ever feel betrayed by your body? Does your body ever disgust you? Or does your body ever scare you? Does it make you livid? Mine does. And I am not talking about all this in terms of the way your body looks, but about the way your body makes you feel.

Does it treat you like a jealous and a possessive lover that is insecure all the time? The one that keeps throwing tantrums to get your attention and keep your attention. Does it treat you like a stubborn old grandfather who refuses to accept anything new? The one who thinks that any deviation from its own thinking is incorrect? Does it treat you like a cruel step mother who wouldn’t let go off any instance to give you pain and discomfort? The one who thinks that being at rest or peace is not your right.

Mine does. All of the above. My own body makes me feel betrayed, disgusted, scared and angry at the same time.

I feel betrayed and disgusted because I didn’t sign up for a body that is weak all the time? In spite of treating it with utmost respect, in spite of trying everything possible to make it feel healthier, it changes only for worse. It betrays me for all the efforts I put towards making it healthier.

I am scared of my body, of trying anything with my body. Be it a new food item, a different sleeping pattern, a new cosmetic product or a mere different workout style. Because it retaliates. As bad as a teenager high on drugs.

It angers me to see other people healthy even when they abuse their bodies so much. Whereas I have been treating it with a caution of a new father holding his child for the first time.

And yet. It behaves the way it wants to behave.   

I can sometimes hear my body talk to me. Like a person. A person who is not an ally. A person sitting across the table scrutinizing and scorning everything I do. Keeping notes for times when it can mock me, smirk at me and take its revenge. I can hear it saying something like, ‘Ahan, so you want to pull a late nighter watching a show on Netflix. Just wait and watch how I make your head explode tomorrow morning’. Or may be something like this, ‘So you think you will be able to get away with eating outside food two days in a row, let me show you the consequences. I am not accepting this food.’

My relationship with my body feels like an unrequited love affair. An affair where I give. And only give. Attention. Care. And medicines. To get nothing in return except being bruised, broken and in nagging pain all the time. Being on medicines for one thing or the other.

Do you know how much amount of time, energy and mental space your own body occupies in case it treats you like mine does? Immense. When I sit and reminisce, it fills me up with regret. Regret of things I could have done if keeping my body in a healthy working condition didn’t occupy so much of my mental space.

So, if yours is treating you well, be grateful. And work towards keeping it that way.

Source: Google images

PS – I am not sick due to any terminal illness. I am just not healthy enough to live without medicines.

Every time you leave

Every time you leave

I start counting backwards

Holding my breath

And your memories

For the time when I will again

Hold you in my eyes

And be held in your arms

Every time you leave

I get engulfed

In an arid sadness

And dizzying loneliness

That only gets cured

After getting inked 

With your smoky lips

And warm embrace

Because whenever you leave

You take a part of me

Leaving your bits

And slow and gradual

I am

Not me anymore

But a reflection

Of nothing

But

You.

Careful

If there is one word that defines my state of mind since a long long time, it would be ‘careful’. That’s what I am these days. All the time. All day. All night. Whether at work or at home. I am careful. It feels as if I am walking on a glass world around me with everything so fragile that one wrong move on my part and it would all just come crashing down. And then, I wouldn’t have anything to pick up from the ashes. The shards would hurt me hard but I wouldn’t have any place to go because those shards were my world. The one I just shattered with my own incompetence.

The planets revolve around their sun on an invisible orbit. They don’t change their route. They can’t I guess. I feel stuck like them. On that invisible orbit around me. Any wrong path I take, any diversion, any digression and I will tilt the whole balance of the universe against my favour, leading only to destruction. Which means that I tread carefully, very carefully. In everything I do. In everything I say. Everything done is measured. Everything said is to be weighed. In a monologue with myself. The consequences of saying and not saying discussed. The repercussions of things done and not done analyzed. And all this weighing, this measurement, this carefulness is burdensome. So much so that it has started affecting my health, my well-being.  

When at home, I fear doing things that aren’t done in a way they are done. At work, I feel out of place. Last year, I did the mistake of making changes in my personal and professional life at the same time. And I think I have been ‘careful’ since then.  

I was never this ‘careful’. In fact, I was somebody who believed in disruption. Not in a destructive way, in a fruitful productive way. I read somewhere that disruption leads to growth. I used to be someone like that. Someone who believed in doing things their way. Someone who didn’t need to follow the norms. Not anymore though. Now, I am careful. Careful of everything. Careful with everything. 

Language

Language. Something that I have always taken for granted. Maybe, because I have always had complete command over the ones spoken around me. Having lived all my life in one place, I took language as a part of me – it was there but invisible, maybe in the background, silent and quiet.

It is only when you are put up at a place where you don’t know the language at all that you realize how big a role it can play. It is then that ‘language’ becomes the ‘visible’ part of your existence, gaining all the importance it deserves, mostly mocking you for taking it for granted all these years, at times being kind throwing a few familiar words in your direction, maybe having the same origin in the languages you have been speaking. It makes you feel primitive because you go back to using gestures with people. It makes you feel alien reminding you that you still don’t belong there. It looks at you in the eye, challenging you in a duel and it knows that it is going to win. It commands you to surrender to it, to accept its superiority.  

It can be irritating initially when you are amidst people speaking a language that you can’t make any sense out of. It is nothing more than a sound to you. Like a constant buzzing around you. They would suddenly start laughing only to make you realize that somebody cracked a joke. You try to fathom what they are saying on the basis of their facial expressions. Oh, he is being shouted upon. Maybe he is trying to explain something difficult. Did he say something so foolish that the other person’s expressions changed so much? Are they commenting on you knowing very well that you don’t know a bit of what is being spoken? Questions. All sorts. With only wild guesses as answers.  

That’s when you start observing the language. Keenly. Minutely. It takes time. It takes effort. But it’s worth it. It throws surprises in front of you everyday. You can accept it, be frustrated by it, revel in its beauty or have fun handling it. Maybe, it’s like understanding a child. It can be like a stubborn one, not letting you know what it wants and yet crying incessantly around you. And sometimes, when in a good mood, it might let you peep into itself, it might let you feel familiar in its territory.   

Every language has uniqueness to it, a particular manner in which it is spoken, the way words are pressed or emphasized, the way the tongues are rolled, the way the tone is pitched. Language – if you know it well – is like something that could be lying around you like the non-existent but useful furniture item, its presence felt and unfelt at the same time. Or Language when you don’t know it – is like that one useful thing that you need miserably but can’t remember where you put it last time.

Kakinada.  A small town in coastal Andhra Pradesh. That is where I have been putting up since last one month. That is where I had my first stint with an alien language; with Telegu.