Reflections on love, from the uncool and wiser

To live, is to encounter opportunities to love. To live well, is to surrender to these opportunities. And once we become consumed by the idea that we control our own lives, love is always a choice. To love or not, and to what degree, is an hourly act that we must commit or not. 

And yet every love we surrender to and nourish, is built from the brick and mortar of our own hearts. Loving is a constant ebb and flow, a shifting tide of effort and energy. And when we truly allow ourselves to love someone, when we commit ourselves to caring, beyond our selfish attention spans, beyond our petty worries and aches, it is then that we open ourselves to the greatest hurt. 

Because unconditional love has but one condition. Do not go away, it says. Be within the protective circle of my love it says. Because fear is the flip-side of all love. The greater the love, the greater the fear . Of having a ruin-shaped blast site, knocked out of our hearts. 

I see my parents, the riverbed, the mooring, the very ground that my life runs unheedingly over. I see them soften and become more vulnerable every passing year. They are my compasses, my agony aunts, my bank, my recipe books, my teachers, my almanacs, my repositories of faith, the bearers of my identity, they are the witnesses of all of my past present and future, they are my place to go back to, they are home and escape and memory, they are the language of my story. How does one not cower under such immense, uncontrollable, fragile love. 

I see my sister, so terrifyingly delicate that it’s a wonder that I don’t wrap her up in cotton and hide her in my closet. I see my nieces, two tiny spun-sugar wonders, so heartbreakingly innocent that they make me want to halt time.  

I see my husband, my ‘You are here’ marker. He gives corporeality to the life that I am making up as I go every day. He is my mirror reflection, my daily rhythm, my co-conspirator. He is, I know, the only one who will lend me his heart when I run out.

I see my friends. 

One a doppelganger, my answering echo, my deja vu once removed, the seasoning my mind craves and must inevitably taste. 

One - comfort, a guide and confessor, my touchstone of reality. A refuge from a world that refuses to stick to the script.

One my foil and playmate, the unswerving voice of truth, an unreasonable, idealistic call from the edge of sanity.

Some days my knees buckle with the weight of each of these loves. Some days I want to be a coward and say no more, that’s it, we’re sold out here. Some days, I forget, that this weight is what holds me up in the first place.

The Confessions of a North Indian Man.

A piece my beautiful husband, Ravinder Singh Nain wrote, that I believe must be shared.

A girl was raped in Delhi.

I am a Jat, from Haryana.

Did you just picture me? I hope I am not that picture in your head.

It's a monster you imagine, right? I don't blame you. I don't blame the media either. I blame every monster who wasn't man enough to respect a woman's dignity.

I always thought dignity is the most important of values for a Jat. That is what my parents always told me. Like everyone loves their home, I love mine. It was never a place I would one day compare to the most regressive places on earth. I was always proud to be a product of my home. I feel ashamed today.

A girl was raped in Delhi.

I don't have the courage to even imagine what she is going through. I would not have come out alive, if I was her.

Are these the same people who form my dream of that beautiful place that I call home?

Every time a woman finds out that I am a North Indian (add to that a Jat), I become a small bit of the monster that is a North Indian man, in their heads. My identity and dignity take a beating. I feel ashamed that I have to justify that I am not a "North-Indian man" as they know him. Even if the justification is not verbal.

I have avoided talking about the issue. Not because I don't care, but because I am ashamed and I know where it leads and I can't take it. I don't have a solution like millions of others. No social networks.

I always thought treating a woman with respect and the right to be equal is not a man's to give. I always thought it's something a human being just knows.

A girl was raped and I was raped with her. The dream that was my home and its people, has ended a day before the apocalypse. 

I'll check my calendar

What with so much
left to try,
I'm kind of busy
till I die.

Unlived

Some memories come from the future.And the nostalgia for a memory from a future left behind, is much more brutal than the memory of a past left behind.

On my knees

Sorrow makes furrows in the soil of your soul. It lets you bury your feet in the rich deep dirt, the heavy loam that is your identity. It allows for water light and air  to fill up the spaces making you fertile, real, alive, aware, capable of rebirth, growth and epiphany. Sorrow makes you richer.

Slowdown.

Willie Dixon saunters raspily in the background in his coffee-roasted voice. Slowly, but slowly my twitching feet are lulled into a steady tap. But how long will this little fix of musical tranquilizer last?
Happiness is like that I suppose. A steady, sweet rhythm. How do people do it though? Settle into the unwavering, unchanging and frankly terrifying pace of happiness. How does more and more and more of sweet and okay not scare them out of their wits?
Safe is lovely. Safe is warm. Safe is same as same as yesterday. Safe is here to stay. And then what? How do they keep their pulses steady through the unchanging world of safe. How do they stick with it long enough to see if it works. How do they not toss away their blankets and run out screaming with unspent life and longing into the cold and dark.
Growing up is hard not because the world is tough. It's hard because after a while, what if it's too easy?

Mr. Bukowski

I get why you don't cry. But I'm going to let my bluebird out now.

Nicotine Patch.

Hush now, there's time yet.

Hold, hold, hold.

You'll spoil it all for everyone,

With your sudden urge to bolt.

Hold back on the reveries,

The sickly, sweet memories.

The unwieldy, loose-limbed laughter,

that you regret the morning after.

Hold on to your drama darling,
Give us all a break.
Your hysterics are very charming,
(But they seem a little fake.)

Hold down your restless feet,

Once in the morning. And then, repeat.

Hold down your grasping fingers,

Yes. Even if the craving lingers.

Hold back on the hunger for,

more and more and more and more.

Hold back on what you did before,

the time you really knew for sure.

Where is this time that you've been spending?

hold, hold, hold.

What is the point of pretending

like you're never getting old?

Ammi

Talking to mothers is the greatest, smartest thing you can do for yourself. They listen, they have no agenda and not only have they lived decades more life than you, they've lived every minute of yours more intensely than you have. They've seen you become the semi-human cocksure ape that you are from the inhuman ape that you were. And you've probably done enough embarrassing things in front of them, for nothing to shock or surprise them.
In short... they know, they get it, they understand, they forgive you and you're going to be fine. After all in a world, where you're always probably headed for your next big fuck up, it should almost be mandatory to steel yourself with some good old fashioned mom time. After a long long time I got me some.
And just when my world-weary wobbling had begun to subside, the real world shoved it's way in. It rather rudely interrupted my ginger attempts at reentering utopia for a a brief and long overdue hiatus. It jostled me and tried to tell me, there was no escaping the job list.
But guess what, as we enter adulthood, sure life can sometimes get to being a drag, what with constantly dealing with the consequences of your actions and all that jazz. Sure there'll be days, months, years even, when you feel every minute like giving up. But the grand thing is no matter how many times you give up, your mother never gives up on you. And if you think your failures hurt you, trust me, they'll never hurt half as much as they hurt your mother. And yet well past her time to baby sit you, she'll be there cheering you on. And you think, that has to be the most terrifyingly, heart-breakingly tough job in the world. And then you think, look how fragile she is, how delicate and becoming more and more delicate every day. And then you think, if that woman has the strength to be happy in the face of the pain-in-the-butt terror you are for her, then who the hell gave you permission to give up. And then you think, get over yourself.

Can of worms

Oh come on. Spring for a bottle. Or a shot if you will. Don't tell me it's too late and you want to be sleeping. All long, lazy, loose and heavy, tangled into the sheets and full off righteous adult exhaustion. It's all just beginning isn't it?
I would buy a round for the road, but I got bills to pay. The lessons those bills teach me. They talk to me I tell you, with the deep, groaning ponderous wiseass baritone of a guru reborn. They tell me stories, they hold my collar, they hold my head under the water. They tell me bullshit stories of the good old days, and look at me with the patronizing disgust of someone whose waiting for you to catch up. In a decade or two.
I got them sitting with the patience of a predator, for the night to be over and for me to walk in, foolishly happy with my evening's worth of escape. They're sitting right now, at the living room table, waiting to make me feel like detention again. When I walk in, they look down at the watch and shrug their shoulders at me.

We'll be walking the roads all yellow from street lights, and laughing at things which aren't really funny. To anybody. We'll be pretending that this means something. And saying things which definitely have the potential to possibly, almost, kind of mean something-ish. We'll be patting backs and toasting toasts to anything worth hanging a coat on. We'll be forgetting we're dying and trying not to. We'll sometimes even let something real slip out. And because the only one's we're fooling is ourselves it won't cost a thing.
So cut me some slack. Give a beggar a break and buy us a drink won't you love. You won't have me do  this sober, now will you.

A bit much

No more.
The waiting for distant tomorrows.
The imagining of things bigger than me.
No more.
The unshaken belief in better things.
The proclamations of what is and what will be.
No more.
The careless nudging aside of inner demons.
The sculpting of reality to fit frames on a mantlepiece.
Not now.
The parody of picture perfect.
I could do with a touch of ugly.
No more.
Not now.
Not even if.

Mug Shot 2

Left, center, right.
Lean, endless, calm as winter sleep.
Innocent of sin and hunger.
Hands like hammers, fingers lean, bony hard.
Forearms browned and pulsing with corded muscles.
And yet he lets them listlessly lie.
Leans back with the lazy ease of someone in no hurry.
Not because there's plenty of time.
But because he has nowhere to go.

Mug shot 1

Bare. Stripped naked down to the balls of my feet.
Clean on the outside and dirty within.
Sated. Only by constant hunger.
Hungry. Only to be consumed.
Simple. Only in knowing too little of what's right.
Complex. Only in knowing too much of what's wrong.
Tired. Drawn of knotted muscles and aching bones.
Happy. But only when I'm in pain.
Ridiculously small where it matters.
Hideously big where it doesn't.
Waiting. Only for the arrival of departures.
Reaching. Only to want to leave.

Look ma, no hands

Women. Terrifyingly fragile, fueled by guilt and identity, threaded through with the strength of corded ropes, strung together by shared insecurities, the bartering of flaws and soothing away each other's imperfections.
Men are cruel outwards she said. We turn brutal inwards. Even our vengeance is an act of pulling in. Withdrawal, silence, the caving in of lofty expectations and not the dynamic catharsis of demolition.
How slender their wrists, how translucent the napes of their necks.Bodies that refuse to be drawn in straight lines.Frames that meander as if moulded to accommodate the brutal linearity of men. Bodies that betray them. Already burdened with meaning. Each body part invested with its own mythology, its own ability to profane.
Women, I thought. Look how they smile with the fondness of mothers. Look with what heartbreaking courage they hold out their arms to be held down and twisted.

Something's got to give

The business of living can really take the life out of you. A million threads trail from your palm behind you. Keep one untangled and a hundred others tie themselves up in knots. Get to untangling those knots and the first one proceeds to become an insurmountable mess. It seems to me, the people whose lives seem one fluid string of silk, are either not moving forward at all, or they must be carrying out this balancing act at the cost of sanity, precariously held together. Or maybe it's just that I am incapable of knowing which strings to let go of.

Love Shmove

Causation is a beautiful thing. The chain of logic is perhaps, the most liberating idea you can bind yourself to. Almost everything eventually succumbs and unravels before the persistent gaze of reasoning. Ideas, ambitions, the day-to-day business of running our lives. There may be days when something hovers over us, a seemingly unsolvable conundrum, a mangled insurmountable mess of whys and whats.
But pull back and pluck piece by piece and eventually a pattern will emerge. In fact if you're in the mood to play, several alternative patterns will emerge. Then it becomes merely a matter of choosing which of those arguments (and sometimes miraculously there is no second argument) is more true to your life and moral code.
Wonderful, you think. Well this is simple. I can argue my way out of everything in life. And once the argument is right, it's always simply been a matter of setting your teeth and getting to it. Somehow as long as the logic of an action has seemed fine, the actual act no matter how painful or exhausting has never daunted me.

Perhaps that is why the idea of love often leaves me bewildered. If you argue long enough even God will disappear in a cloud of logic. Sometimes I think love, like god is a symptom. In fact while god is a symptom of human insecurity, love is a collection of symptoms, a syndrome if you will.
But unlike god it refuses to play by the rules. It refuses to be defined, controlled and argued with. Unlike god it does not feed off your faith. Nonbelievers have been known to succumb suddenly to their utter surprise and annoyance. It refuses to conform to the ethics of good and evil, the rules of aesthetics or pragmatism. It follows no life-cycle, enters and exits arbitrarily with a dramatic flourish often leaving behind in its wake, utter and complete chaos. And even the most war-hardened love atheist is almost always, merely a love agnostic, hoping ardently to be proven wrong. Perhaps if we could define it, it would be easier on the logic afflicted human mind. Definitions invited.

Excuse me sir,

would you mind shifting a bit, you're getting on my nerves.

Goa Take 2

I missed my flight this morning. After a sudden and very unexpected encounter with food from back home, I think my mind gave up on intelligent thought and settled into a mushy mess of nostalgia. But to be fair, what food! (Yes, I know, I know, an exclamation mark, how vulgar. But this meal demanded, not one but several exclamation marks. Specially because it turned up oasis-like in an underbelly lane of Bandra). Galawati kawabs that melt depravedly on your tongue, the rich malleability of warqi paratha and give-the-pmsing-girl-a-break...Lucknawi dum biryani.
Now if I could speak the language of Mirza Ghalib, perhaps then and only then, with the lace-like filigree of Urdu, could I capture what this food means to me. You see, it is a way of life. Strike that, it is life itself. It has highs, lows, drama, smoldering sensuality, even parables of every-day philosophy. It talks of a world where the elegance of experience overrides convenience and speed. Awadhi food traces a leisurely, layered path from the kitchen to your tongue. It urges you to slow down. When you take a mouthful it unravels tantalizingly, revealing harmony upon harmony of fiery flavour, subtle against harsh.
Take the making of biryani for instance. Mutton, massaged into submission with spices that run true to the bone. Whole spices - altos of cardamom and saffron played off against tenors of bay leaf, ginger, garlic and peppercorn. Buttery basmati. And then we start to dance. A king-sized  degchi with ghee spluttering. A layer of rice and spice, meat and rice again, and meat and rice again, and again and again and ... you guessed it...again. Seal this wicked little orgy with flour on the rims of a plate and cook..but gently. Eventually the meat surrenders, seeping its succulence into the swelling rice, loosening its grip on its bones, flaking and melting into a truly orgasmic whole. And that is what we call Biryani.
So if i though 5.20 in the morning was too much morning for me and 7 sounds more like a plan, after this, perhaps I can be forgiven.

Why dingy bars work

And there it is again. The sudden need for a conversation. Any conversation. Dark, delusional, desolate, hungry, funny, tragic, ridiculous even. Anything but mundane. And restless enough to ferret itself within the claustrophobic folds of my mind.

Whimsy

Opportunities are dreams waking up with a start. They lie slumbering within, just below our skins, infesting our blood with hunger and a relentless urge to shift from foot to foot. Lie still, curtains drawn in the dark and they are soothed and lulled into oblivion. If you want to see them you must take them by surprise. Shock them with a sudden brutal wakefulness and they become flesh and blood beings, birthed by your unwillingness to lie still, wailing in protest. See if one lies at that pulse on the softest part of your wrist. Or maybe at the hollow of your neck.Perhaps even as we speak one has curled up soft against the inside of your temple.

The glitch

Remember. High ceilings, white uneven cool plastered walls. Cold, hard floors. The smell of nostalgia and loss and innocence - freshly washed cotton and summer. And the sudden urge to scream and scream and scream. Only you don't. Your jaw gapes to the point of cracking, you feel your throat stretch taut, your spine arch, your mind fill up with a surge of angry blood, thick and clotting even as it flows. And you feel your breath lock at the nape of your neck. Your skin prickles in protest. But no sound escapes. Because you know if it does you won't be able to stop. You've been here before. On all fours like an animal. Hands fisted to the point of breaking. Screaming and no longer remembering why. And you're afraid to let yourself go there again. Because you don't know when things splinter, when they crash. You don't know when your mind will crack eggshell-like and spill its messy yellowness onto unyielding surfaces. You don't know where the line lies. Where the mind suddenly untethers and proceeds to spiral. So you scream inside. You feel it building like the cooling of steel into a hard serrated knife. And you know its that easy and tempting. The effortlessness of insanity. Why did I pull back then? How do you know oblivion isn't better than it's cut out to be?

Don't call me babe.

Today one 'foreign return' type decided to sweep me off my feet. First he told me about how he has a fabulous home, lots of friends, fuck buddies even but how for years he'd been waiting for looooove. Fancy that! Foreign return, loaded AND looking for LOOOOVE. And then he tells me about how, he finally has a girlfriend. Oh me! Be still my beating heart!. This pretentious, moronic little bundle of money, cliches and intellectual black-holes is actually taken. How will I survive this!
He then proceeds to tell me about how I should take care of my body, since I am eventually going to have a baby. Right then. Off course my sole purpose in life, since the very moment I was born was to become a giant, all encompassing, all-giving womb. Waiting to be 'completed' by child-birth.
Wait for it. That's not enough. When I ask him this, he tells me 'What, you're just going to leave the marriage open?'. Riiight. Why did it not occur to me before, my life-long goal of finding a man accomplished, I must now neatly tie it all up with a little bundle of joy. Preferably male I presume. After all, if I don't have a baby my marriage will fall apart. Nothing to tie it all in, you see.
During this completely mindless and unbelievably uneducated rant this gentleman then proceeds to call me 'Babe'. He enlightens me about how all women have an aura, how love is the secret of the universe and not 42 (talk about missing the entire bloody point of the book, Douglas Adams just woke up from eternal sleep and shot himself in the face) and how he can read my aura. When I finally tell him to stop calling me babe, he proceeds to justify it by telling me all of the following arguments. See if you can follow them and tell me what I should do

The reason he's calling me babe is because:

1. Men watch porn.
2. Women watch too many serials and are basically insecure
3. Indian women are uptight
4. People pretend to be 'from abroad' but he has actually been abroad
5. I have not been abroad and it shows
6. Of the hundred women he's called babe, 50 have objected and they've all been Indian
7. No matter how forward-thinking I pretend to be I am an Indian woman ( Note to educated women everywhere: To establish that you're forward thinking and not really an uptight 'conventional' feminist bitch, you must be willing to be called babe, take advice on your fertility and must break into uncontrollable high-pitched giggles, every time a foreign return type passes by, while noticing your aura. Most importantly, do not, I repeat do not be all Indian-like. This is the path to being 'cool' and 'with it'.)
8.  and best of all I should relax because our minds are being manipulated.

Suggestions, hopefully of the violent, abusive and brutal kind, regarding the fate of this gentleman are welcome. And when the vein on my forehead has stopped  threatening to explode perhaps I shall muster the energy to explain why, unlike Pamela Anderson, I actually mean it when I say, don't call me babe.

And they're back.

Gossip is a strange phenomenon. For years I have watched it swirling around me, in eddies and currents of hot, angry air. The currency of the insecure. The language of the empty. 

I understand the basic premise of it. You know or think you know something terrible about someone else and you must pass on this little nugget of dirt. Pass on the ugliness so that maybe in this act of belittling another's life, you will feel a little better about the nothingness of your own. See that's the theory of it.
But somehow I cannot really grasp it. It's like trying to empathize with fanatics, cultural chauvinists and moral jingoists. In rare instances you can trace the arguments that allow a person to believe that killing a large number of innocent people is the only path to personal salvation. But the second you see the hideousness of the argument laid out before you, you shudder with revulsion. You wonder, how is the human mind capable of justifying this to itself.

The same holds true of gossip. While I can have a conversation for twelve hours on the meaning of the word nonsense (and  I have had that conversation), it takes me all of twelve seconds to get bored by the ugly details of someone's life. Why, in a world so full of fascinating phenomenon, delicious literature and unexplored journeys would I want to know what someone fabricated about someone else' life?

Are your lives that devoid of meaning in themselves?

In the past ten years of my life, every living minute has literally been overtaken with dreams that must be pursued, the ever-changing landscape of my own mind, the finding and enjoyment of love. Even as I greedily reach out with both grasping hands I am always left pleasantly overwhelmed with all the things that need to be reached out for. The possibility of taking time out from my life, long enough to be interested in even the truth about someone's life, let alone the fabricated truth, is beyond me. 

At some point you assume everyone will move on to overwhelmed , individual, adult existences. Yet inexplicably every few months I witness the return of doomsday stories about my life which have absolutely no basis in truth. I am bewildered not only by  a picture of my life which is the complete opposite of truth but also by the fact that people can still muster enough interest in the life of a couple who are completely lost in their own world. Does it not belittle you to talk of someone who couldn't give a fuck about whether you're dead or alive? Or is it that, you must needle them because they dare to not give a fuck?

And if you must explore the lives of others why must it be untruths that belittle them, why not fantasies that elevate them. Why does the human mind thrive on the imagined breakdown of lives?

If someone has an answer I'd love to know and understand. And not a theoretical answer, I would like an honest gossip-insider's answer. Any takers?

Till death do us apart

Marriage is a lot of things to a lot of things to a lot of people. From the day you are born you are primed to expect certain things of it. Movies of the pink and fluffy variety, project it as an endless loop of Ella Fitzgerals, wine and autumn colours. When you're young and beginning to discover the zone of 'with-it' your peers paint a dismal picture. It's supposed to be an inevitable downward spiral, the Captain Hook to the Peter Pan in us all. In 6 months, a year, 7 years or 10 (predictions vary) it is supposed to become an insipid mush of obligation, familiarity and compromises. The single-mingle crowd turns up its nose at the obvious corniness of a happy marriage. It is as if to be completely and openly in a happy marraige is to become a cliche from a Mills and Boons.
Both versions do no justice to the experience. It is not the finding of the one and only love of your life. It is discovering that love is in the act of commiting to the idea of one and only. It is not a compromise of your individuality but the finding of a quiet space to call your own, to always come back to after an adventure. It has not been for me the limiting of relationships to explore but freedom from having to walk a tight-rope of defining every relationship. It is not the end of possibilities but the certainty of always having a companion for your adventures. It is not roses and wine but a hug whenever you need it. It is not a candlelight dinner but an indulgent smile and a hot towel when you're green and puking. It is the deliciousness of always knowing that no matter what you become, what you achieve or don't there is something that will outlive, outlast and outshine the change in your waistline or paycheck.
Marriage, is to me the magical discovery that where everything is uncertain, a lazy Sunday afternoon awaits me within the quiet circle of a pair of sturdy hands.

And then there were two!

Another little girl came to the world today. My sister gave birth to my neice today. But somehow I am unable to rejoice. Where do I go and who do I share this with? What has happened to our prorities, I was at school when my first niece was born and working through a mundane work Tuesday during the birth of the second. Who understands the intensity of what I feel right now. Everyone who does or could or would is far away. For others its just something that happened.
Imagine an entire new human being. Complete, 10 toes, two beautiful eyes to see the world with, softly curling hair, a smiling toothless mouth, delicate delicate skin, a miracle of a mind, a tiny heart beating at an incredible speed. She is breathing right now thousands of miles from me. And just like Kuhu I cannot see her, touch her, smell her. I cannot hold my sister's hand.
This is homesickness. The suffocating impotence of the inability to share, to reconnect, to see. I see them only through pixels. The enormity of the birth a beautiful baby reduced to a 19 inch screen. However I find a measure of comfort. Even though I am far away I can see them. My three girls. My beautiful sister and two tiny shining bundles of giggles and pink ribbon and fluff tilting their heads at the screen.