The Unforgettable Desire

Imagine an attention deprived 14yo girl getting not only attention but also love and care for being sick. A girl who knew everyone in the school before her illness, a girl who was known in the entire school after. Attention, though enjoyable, can also be scary. From wanting to be seen to living in the fear of being watched, a lot can change for a teenager through her illness. For the most part, having known suffering, having seen suffering, despite her tantrum-throwing self, she learns to be grateful for a life that she earlier despised. It doesn’t help when everyone around her, beginning from her doctors in the ICU to strangers on the road, call her strong. What has she done to survive an illness? Will power, her doctors said. She wondered, really? Maybe. She was just a kid who got her kicks from scoring 100 in Math and wanting to be 'the' topper in class 10 boards. It was the only form of recognition she knew, till she was sick. And the verdict of being strong, of never wan...

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...

I hum a lot, everyone does, I suppose. In last couple of days, I have hummed the songs that had been composed by people I personally knew, which includes a couple of childhood friends and an almost. I have no idea about what they are up to these days, haven’t been in touch. Often thought about getting back together despite the circumstances of separation but couldn’t find a reason to do so. I don’t know who needs to pass the bill, but someone needs to call the useless pursuit of understanding emotions a crime punishable by death penalty for people like me to stop. Useless, because, after all these years of ‘observing’ and ‘experimenting’, all I know is that even if we get rid of social conditioning (if that’s possible), there will still be things beyond our understanding. Maybe even centuries of philosophies later, we still have not figured out a way towards deciphering human emotions or maybe women weren’t working on it before (seriously!). I am going to call it a good assumption. ...

I held out a coffee tumbler that I had bought a few weeks ago, after I decided to quit drinking coffee. My grandfather took it from my hand, read the text on it – Do what you love, love what you do. ‘This is what I used to tell my students. I didn’t use these exact words.’ I turned my head towards him, ‘This is what I often tell my friends and juniors too!’ He continued, ‘Accounts is a subject that I love. I used to tell my students that to understand the subject, to do well, they have to love it.’ I was excited. ‘I say the same for English!’ There were a few other people in the dining room then. Different conversations were taking place at once. No one was paying particular attention towards us. I had been making a presentation of coffee mugs and the equipment that I used to brew filter coffee. My voice itself is a people repellent. I talk so much for so long that people lose interest. They are also aware that I won’t stop until I am done showing everything in my agenda, so they re...

It’s a Saturday morning. I sit at home and exist on all days of the week. For the most part, I forget to keep a track of the days that pass by. It’s only Saturday that I check up on. I was once told that I shouldn’t start anything new on a Saturday. It’s inauspicious, the work would never be complete. Given I have been said what (not) to do, I look forward to begin everything on Saturday. I do not plan it, but find myself motivated. Perhaps the sinking realization that yet another week had passed by doing nothing did the trick. So, if it hasn’t settled in your head – It’s a Saturday morning. My alarm went off at 5 o’ clock in the morning. I woke up at 5.30am. I decided that I should restart my morning walks, but not till another 30 minutes. I woke up an hour later. Light was peeping inside my dark room from the corner of the curtains. I looked up at the soothing light that would pierce my eyes in a few hours. I looked up and thought, “I have always taken pride in being alone bu...

Last Monday five people asked me, “How was your (first/solo) trip?” I found it terribly difficult to answer them. The more I tried to answer, the more it felt wrong. I told every single one of them, “I need time to process the weekend, let me put the experience in words before I talk about it.” It wasn’t acceptable, beyond doubt. They wanted the excitement, the stories of adventure, the amaze-feels of going alone to another place and also, the mishaps, if any. I felt none of that, precisely because I wasn’t on a soul-searching-through-bungee-jumping-trip. I managed to say, “it was perhaps a much needed break to realize that I am not stuck, I am subconsciously choosing to remain stuck.” They responded that that’s the charm of travelling. I wondered if I could call it travelling at all. Going to another place to sleep in all day – does that really count as travelling? The most common emotion that I felt in the four nights-three days’ trip was anger. I felt that I was divided in...

In a world where mental health is being acknowledged, Where people are willing to hear stories, Hoping it will help the storyteller to live that day, Sleep that night, wake up the next morning, Without the thought of killing himself/herself; In a world where people are trying to understand, The beginnings of anxiety or depression, And ways to cope with it, My mind shouts, “Screw you.” For as far as my memory allows, I remember the desire in my 8-year-old heart, I remember the desire to die. It wasn’t a desire that came in the pre-teen years, When I began believing no one understands me in this world. It was a desire that I truly wished to be true, So I asked my then believed ‘god’, To give me end stage brain cancer, On the days that I cried as well as when I laughed. When I was diagnosed with initial stage of cancer, I began believing that there is perhaps someone out there, Who heard my voice and responded wisely, To my unthoughtful, pe...

Luck. My oldest memory of the word goes to the casual use of ‘Bad luck’. Then, there’s the memory in which my parents say, ‘Best of Luck’, before exams. Many a times, luck seemed to be the word that filled gaps, in conversations, that people wanted to avoid. There were times when it was used according to the need but those times were rare. Luck has been perhaps one of the most used, if not exploited, word. After a point of time in school, I told my parents to wish me All the Best instead of Good luck or Best of luck. I was uncomfortable with the idea that my performance depends on my luck. I was willing to take the burden of failure on my shoulders or success for that matter. But, to give my power to an unknown third party simply didn’t seem right. Growing up, I began using the word privilege instead of luck. A few years ago, I would have said, “I am really lucky to have such parents.” Now, I choose to say, “I am privileged to have such parents.” The difference is simple. Wh...

Cancer. It gives people the scare. Leukemia, not so much because it’s not a common term. It gave my father a scare because he had heard the term in the movie Akhiyon ki Jharakon Se . It gave him the scare because the 1978 movie showed that Leukemia had no cure. Thirty years later, little did he know that his much-loved daughter will be diagnosed with the same. As for my mother, I don’t know how she felt. If I ask her today, I don’t think she will answer my question. She’s probably one of those people, who can keep their emotions in check when the time demands them to act. My brother’s Class 10 board exam results were out. He says that I was the one who called him to declare his results, that he had secured the second position in his class. I do not have the memory. Although I imagine being immensely happy while shouting his results on phone. I do not remember the date when I was told the name of the disease, whose symptoms had made me slowly immovable over the course of six months. ...

There comes a day when we have to stop using our past as an excuse for who we are in the present. Past is supposed to be accepted. Many a times, it does seem that we have accepted it. It does seem that we have made peace with who we have become because of our past. And, if it is bad we do hope to take charge of what we do now, because we do not want to blame our today for the things we do in future. True that. But the haunting question is, what do we do with our past where we weren’t the protagonists? What if, our past has been entertaining others with its limelight? We were not backstage and we had no role to play apart from being an audience. We laughed when the acts got funny and we cried when grief took over. And, every time we had the stage to ourselves, we thought about what the acts of others left us with. We didn’t have the brain to analyse it. We missed a few shows at times, perhaps, escaped the theatre because we didn’t know how to live just as a mute audience. It i...