The Unforgettable Desire

Slow fever.  An infection.  Two weeks now.  My eyes feel dry.  I am, frankly, paranoid.  Consulted the doctors.  It cannot be Covid-19.  Have you travelled?  How long has it been?  Nah, it's not possible.  Are you breathless; cough?  You don't even qualify for the test.  I know, I know.  That's what I tell myself.  It's not my life I fear.  I am terrified, true.  Will I get a diagnosis this time?  Will my heart not skip a beat when blood is drawn?  History of unusual symptoms.  Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.   Didn't your body temperature fluctuate when you had cancer?  Results are not here yet, let's not draw conclusions.  Stress, worry, paranoia.  One set of antibiotics down.  What could it be?  Is it worth going again to the doctor?  I come home to a mother who isn't well-rested;  a brother who's self-isolated;  a father switching channels to watch Mahabharata;  a family.  Will they be safe?  Are they strong enough?  Will I transmit my sick

I was up on many nights, overthinking, searching the internet for information on ovarian endometrioma. I ended up watching a video of an ovary removal surgery. All I could think was, we look like chickens on the inside! My lower back was hurting for a couple of days now. My go-to response to it was, I can take it. Over the years I made it a point to remind myself that just because I have a high pain tolerance threshold, it doesn’t mean I have to tolerate it that long before making it a matter of concern. I kept telling my mom, it hurts exactly as it does during periods. There’s a cramp in my right leg too. It was weird because I was nowhere near to the call for battle – that’s what I like to call the 48 hours before I begin to bleed, the time when it feels like nothing in my life will work out ever again and I’ll die in living hell. It’s actually a thing! But, there I was, unable to move from bed, unable to find a position that will help me sleep, almost wanting to pass out somehow a

 I am probably saying this one last time: Bad things happen, life is unfair. People describe their experiences of suffering from anxiety that make it feel like a collective experience. Just that, they don’t stop a certain section of their life, they aren’t paralysed from shock, unable to comprehend their life. Their hearts race, my heart felt like it’d stop any moment, as if I was physically dying from the inside. Now I tend to not speak about it, all the place-time displacements, and actions based on made-up scenarios in my head. Sometimes I miss the multiple voices having a roundtable conference inside my head, afraid that I lost my ability to express, to write, when I killed them. I often wondered in the year gone by, was it my madness that brought me stories? I spent months in silence, looking for words that used to flow like blood through my veins. I did the only thing I could do then, in my search for words, I read. What is the point of reading so much? I don’t read so much.

  When identity politics begins to seem overwhelming you enough to want to get away from it entirely, the go-to book is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It’s a go-to book on any bad day when hope seems too far away, life doesn’t make much sense, meaninglessness reigns, and peace is forgotten. To me, it was a return to the real world, a world I had shut myself away from because it seemed too cruel and hopeless to change. It was a resurrection of faith in kindness. MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT Linus Baker works as a caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He visits orphanages for magical children, interacts with the masters of the place, and at times, with children if needed. He files a report recommending whether the orphanage should remain as it is, or be shut down. He lives a quiet, solitary life, abides by RULES AND REGULATIONS of DICOMY. He is so good at what he does that he is selected by the Extremely Upper Management for a highly classified job – to be a ca

Once upon a time (not so) long ago on an uneventful night I decided to talk to a friend in something roughly resembling poetry . He, being the poet that he is, obliged in response. I ended up saying something I was toying with for a long time, that we have imprisoned ourselves in clocks only to say, time is running out. I know the argument often is that irrespective of clocks, the sun sets and rises, time passes. Yet, it is a human construct, isn’t it? A construct made for our convenience, mostly? My relationship with time isn’t a smooth one. I didn’t understand in class 1 why the year 2000 was being called 21 st century. Where was the 1 in 2000? Why did the new class teacher keep saying so? Should it not be 20 th ? It didn’t get better. I disliked history because I couldn’t remember the dates and years of so many wars. Even now it boggles me that Mughals reigned right before Britishers, like 200 years ago. Are not they supposed to be ancient history? How does 16 th century not fee

It was December and I was in Delhi. I am always happy to see these two Ds together. Winter, blankets, too much coziness for my privileged ass. It was a different thing that as I got comfortable in bed one night, my cousin, who was in class 9, asked, Why do poems get complicated as we get older? How can there be poems without rhymes? To my complete and utter disbelief, I began talking about different types of poems, sonnets, odes, lyrics, elegies, etc. Not just type, but metre and what forms a metre. He kept asking, I kept answering, till we mutually decided it’s too much information that isn’t needed for his test the next day. I slept with pride that night. If I had been asked those questions a year ago in 2018, I might have cursed the poets and whoever gets to decide the syllabi. It is a little known fact about me that I absolutely disliked poetry for the five years that I studied literature. I could not understand what stressed and unstressed syllables were and even when I did, al