Saturday, July 23, 2011

I hope you will understand this; I am really gone. I can never come back to you, or to anyone.

I have tasted the Wind. I cannot tell you what it means to me, to go with the flow of shimmering waves towards the setting sun in the horizon. You know, the journey will never end because the sea cannot meet the sky. It is not practical to want to hold a wisp of cloud in your hand.

You know, that I loved you. I loved you more than I thought I ever could. And you know, I have been called. And when I am called, I forget everything and join the wind. If you call me back, I will only move more and more away from you. If you hold me back, I will rage like a tempest and break you into pieces.

You can wait, but I donot know when or if I will return. I may not return. I may die in my quest of finding that miracle I have been looking for. Or I may come back to you, without fire, tired and out of breath. Then, I am sure, you will not love me like you do now. You will not look in my eyes with that glint in your eyes, you will not want to hold my breath in the hotness of your breath, you will not want to draw alphabets tenderly across my spine.

You can just let me go. If you donot, I will anyways go. But if you do, we will remember each other with a smile, every time we remember each other. We will remember the good times. We will remember the peacocks, the crickets, the rocks and the raised platforms.


Remember, I will remember you. I donot remember anyone till now. But I know I will remember you.
I have started smoking. It is a shame, but it is true. EFLU spoiled me.

I am really sick these days. I am always out of breath and all my clothes are suddenly loose. Yesterday, I had trouble sleeping at night. I feel tired all the time.

I have stopped feeling homesick. I am alone but I like it, although sometimes I get very lonely and melancholic.

I have started preferring people only in small doses. Most people annoy me after a certain thresh-hold period of company. I get irritated by people who are snooty, more than I used to and I have started having CERELAC WHEAT, STAGE 1. Everyday, I boil water in my electric heater, mix it with 8 spoons of cerelac in a tiffin box, add sugar if there's any in the room and eat with a white spoon. My roomie strongly recommends me to wear Pampers to lab, so that I don't have to go to the loo in the middle of experiments. I love my roomie. She is amazing.

I do not miss anyone anymore. I have moved on like someone, and unlike someone else. I am auditing English classes. Yesterday I went for this awesome Socio-Linguistics class in the Department of English, School of Humanities. The professor was some 70 years old and we talked for 10 mins in the corridor about animal vocabulary.
On Monday, I plan to audit another class, a creative writing class, taken by a gay poet called Hoshang Merchant. I am slightly bored, in other words. In fact, I am so bored that I even sit and study these days. I am so ashamed of myself.

I watched a Hindi movie called 'Zindagi na milegi doabara'. I loved the Hindi poetry in the movie; which reminds me that I haven't written poetry in a long, long time.

My MSc project will start, come Monday. I got the lab I wanted. I'll work on DNA damage response in yeast. It is going to be a tough semester.

Finally, I realised something about life. It can get really boring unless you work on it. And everything including love, joy, grief is only transient. You just need to kill time doing something that keeps you occupied enough.


I also realised that I am not quite the girlfriend material.

Monday, July 11, 2011


I remember going to burn his corpse. It was a January morning. He was dead when I came down for breakfast. Nobody had cried. He was garrulous, stingy and a bachelor till his last breath, lived with all of us.


I disliked him sometimes. But sometimes, I felt so sorry for him that I would run to the terrace and cry.


Nobody took him to a hospital; when he was sick, the doctor never came on time. The day before he died, someone got into a fight about spending too much money.


They carried him on a wooden bed. There were fifty corpses that day to be burned before his.There were crying women and children. There were men running around.



I was in college then. I had never seen so many corpses together. Most of them were old, some looked younger; there was one of a little girl. She had a little wooden cot.When my grandfather's turn came, they picked him and placed him somewhere else. They broke his wooden bed into pieces as a part of the ritual. I donot remember much after that. I only have faint memory of a furnace and some chants and snippets of conversation with my father's friend. Everybody kept up a firm face and looked busy.



My older grandfather had died a few months before him. I used to like him a lot till his ears got weak. He couldn't hear much by the time he died.



I donot remember feeling very emotional at their demise. I kept up a firm face, too and everyone thought I were brave.



Tonight, many years later, I suddenly feel their absence. I miss them, I want them, I want to go back.

For years, I haven't been pampered with mangoes and eclaires or have held their hands to cross the road.


For years, I haven't hidden under the bed to scare them and for years I haven't cried on their shoulders.


I haven't seen them for ages now, and I will never see them again.