Dead blue

Blue
light blue
cobalt blue
emerald blue
midnight blue
your teeth on my tender neck blue
young peacock blue
Over-chewed bubblegum blue
color of our chats blue; Facebook blue

Litmus blue: trails of high school
dried watercolour blue: you once wanted to paint me in it

Blue
cap of Fevicol blue
‘You’re always fiddling with tiny things.’
‘I am appreciating its skin.’

Sky blue pastel blue baby blue
sad blue Monday blue
happy blue aurora borealis blue
blue

antiquity blue; drunk on my sweater -puke blue
dead bodies in stage 2 blue
blue

dead
blue

 

They were meant to be

Caught between the convenience of empty sex and detachment, and the fantasies our favorite books had drafted for us at the age of 12, we linger in the middle trying to search for the meaning of compassion in sarcasm and love in physical abuse; an uncomfortable hybrid of creationists and realists and artists with internal wounds, we have learnt to tackle solitude with cheeky poetry, anger with dark humour, passion with lust and everything in that spectrum with variants of simpler solutions.

‘Let’s meet’ She says

‘It’ll happen when it has to happen’ he responds

She wants to combat it with ‘I want a hot chocolate, but I can’t lie in my bed hoping for it, I need to order it!’

‘For someone like me, this comes easy and risk-free’ is what he means.

‘For someone like me, we fall easy and hard, and the more time we give, the more anxious we get, destroying our self esteem eventually’ is what she means.

Both are right, we may agree, but love is so rare; is it correct to let it pass for the comfort within our heads, the deep hole we’ve dug beneath that Palm tree, the idea of the Universe acting cupid;is it correct to challenge pixies of love against the evils of time and space, is it?

A constant dilemma: to confess, or not.
A constant fear that trails along. A constant need, a desperation, a way of living.

‘I am beyond fucked up. I am like a candy store, it’s fun to come in and buy some things and click photos against the pink walls with glitters and rainbows, but spend a little more time here and even the smell of sugar starts to nauseate you.’ he wants to justify

‘I am beyond fucked up too. I am like a dejected dog; I’ll be around, waiting for you to respond to my texts, read my blog and tell me how much you appreciate it, and I’ll hold no grudges if you text me back after 10 years, because I’ve made you my world and I can’t wag my tail any place else without feeling guilty for being so needy’

‘I need people to love me’

‘I need to love people.’

They’re made for each other, we may agree, but are relationships a form of transaction afterall? An exchange of neatly folded envelopes with fake stamps and wrong addresses, are relationships about trying to fix each other and fit into this puzzle that we’ve bought out of a 99$ only store?
Are relationships about finding the ‘right person at the right time’ or are we being extremely juvenile in considering that time has no role to play in this business of love?

‘We will keep in touch’

‘I am not the kind who does, and with me probably shifting to another country, I see no possibilities’

‘I see plenty’ He justifies

Future- we all fall prey to this word and the dreams it sells; we all believe in it vehemently as if our disbelief may slit open our throats and sell our feelings to the wolves at The Broken Hearts Club; we treat it as a luxury that is presented to all, slowly forgetting that a desperation for destination always downplays the importance of current delegations.

‘See you later’ her phone blinks

‘Talk to you later’ the (1) on the Facebook tab on his laptop reads

They were meant to be together, and no amount of ‘Ands’ and ‘Buts’ may make any difference to the intimacy they share, and that’s all there is to their story.

*(The title ‘The Broken Hearts Club’ is credited to the Sass Queen- Shubham Ladha)

**(This blogpost is a consequence of my personal attempt at compassion and the conversations I’ve been having with my friends lately, especially today’s virtual rant with the Whiny Granny- Ranjani Madhavan)

One direction

“Excuse me…”

“yeah?”

“Can you tell me where the Hyatt Hotel is?”

“Um…go to the main road and ask for Phoenix mall. It’s around there.”

He moves a little over his bike and points to the road.

“What road?” He says, slightly out of breath

His sentences are abrupt and irrelevant to our responses, and my friend and I spend the next five minutes explaining to him the directions to the Hyatt Hotel, but there is a growing sense of misunderstanding between us.

“Arre…

I go closer to his bike to point where exactly the road starts and how to take a left and where to take a left from, as any person would do

“Go to that main road there. Then take a left and then ask for”

His voice is deep and his helmet is bulky. He is covered in a heavy leather jacket and dark colored formal pants. His English is above average. ‘Educated. New to Viman, possibly’ I think

“Someone told me it’s near the IT park”
the sentence is too hoarse, so I get confused

“What? Where?”

“IT park…”

“Oh yeah, it’s near the IT park!”

He moves around his bike: slowly, rhythmically, only his eyes looking at us. I go even closer to explain the directions to him, as innocently as my friend looks down from his face.

Suddenly, nothing’s right.

I can feel my friend tugging at the back of my T-shirt, time has slowed down. The only light on the street is flickering to a bad Item song and I can see his naked eyes feeling me up. They’re crawling over my undressed legs, over my thighs, and they’re making way to my breasts. Fucking asshole!

I can feel his eyes looking into my eyes, the satisfaction they bear. I can feel him smiling behind his helmet, his hands moving around his crotch.

But I’m unfazed;more like, caught off-guard in a bottomless sea. I can feel the dread, I can feel the heat rising in my nose, I can feel the hatred building up in my limbs.

We’re angry. We’re very very angry. We’re angry, my friend and I.

His eyes are still on my face, when he shifts on his bike and buckles his belt.

Fucking asshole!

But he’s fled.

He’s got his dick flying around in pride. He’s got his satisfaction. And he’s left behind two emotionally and mentally disturbed 20 year olds who were just then joking about walking around in shorts and getting molested if they were to walk on the other side of the road, the side with no street lamps.

There’s so much anger in me, it makes me cry scream run throw my phone around. I punch the bonnet of a SUV parked nearby. I’m angry. My phone is broken, its screen smashed into several tiny pieces of souvenir to the frustration of being a woman. My friend is just standing there, hugging me, trying not to lose herself to her past.

I’m so angry, it’s inevitable I want to hate men when I see them in their eyes the next time, but my friend- that’s who I should be worried about.
This wasn’t her first time. She was just a witness to a horrible act by a horrible man, and this is not her first time.

This is her fifth.

That doesn’t anger me, it saddens me. A fifth in the lifetime of 20 years and I have educated classmates who tell me to ‘Leave it’/’Forget it’/ ‘Don’t ruin the mood, man!’.

But how am I supposed to forget something which just stole my safety from me, and flung it across its fucking dick,?! How am I supposed to give up my dignity, my freedom, my ability to feel secure?!

I’m so sad and so angry and so hurt.
But he’s gone, and we weren’t courageous enough.

We acted like cowards; actually, we didn’t act at all.
That makes this worse.

We were fucking cowards,we were too slow.
We should have leaped at him, should have thrown him off his bike, stamped on his fucking dick, slapped the shit out of his face, but we couldn’t.
I was too hooked on. I was unaware. My friend had been transported to the first time she had been groped. My friend was too lost in protecting me from further harassment. We were cowards.

And I am going to hate men the next time I see them in their eyes, especially the ones who wear helmets and ask for directions.
I surely will.

And that makes me angrier and sadder. Fucking asshole!

(I’m already tired of all this, and I’m just 20 years old, so please keep your opinions to yourself if they involve anything about me over-reacting and ‘creating fuss over nothing’. Thanks.) 

Thank You

I came into existence.
I died.

It is in between that I experienced both, and realized how futile climaxes are.

I wrote about love.
I despised it.
It is while loving you that I realized how irrelevant it is to have opinions on love.

I met you.
I disliked you.
It is while not knowing you, I realized how precarious my prejudices could be.

I died.
I got resurrected.
It is in this space that I realized what you possibly meant to me, and how much I hated sketching the climax to our relationship- the clause that we both held uptight in our cowardly throats.

So let me just walk up to you, and thank you. Thank you for existing.
Thank you.

The amputated Soldier

New beginnings can be new endings
just the way it is when I
spend 240 Rupees on my luxurious Strawberry Cheesecake flavored ice cream
and 100 for the child who wants Vada Pav and limbu paani
and I come back and sleep off to numbness
feeling
like an amputated soldier who’s troop won the war

People who shouldn’t be loved

You know you’re messed up when your blog has posts about ‘loving him’and ‘loving yourself’ but never about the person who loved you back- the person who waited and held out and took his time to understand you- the many kinds of you that you passionately talk about, the person who didn’t let go of you when you pulled yourself back into the cocoon like an undernourished hibernating raccoon, the person who didn’t judge you when you stopped conversing for months, the person who didn’t abandon you when you turned silent and boring and had no more riddles or artworks on you, the person who didn’t run away after a failed attempt at saying ‘i love you’ to you; you know.
But don’t feel sorry for yourself already. You don’t need to.
You’re just a shitty fucked up person and it’s alright to be one; you don’t need to feel sorry for yourself and make yourself appreciate this version of you, as if it’s the only thing bothering you; you don’t.
People write poems on lovers like you: lovers who leave each other stranded because the ship’s sinking and both like entertaining climaxes.
You don’t need to feel sorry for yourself as if you really deserved to be saved on that ship.
You never did, and that’s alright too.

You don’t have to listen to these philosophers and artists and psychologists who preach about love being a universal need. It isn’t. It god damn isn’t, you sly motherfuckers.

It’s okay to not be loved by anyone- even yourself.

Maybe

it

is

not

okay

But it doesn’t matter, anymore.

It doesn’t matter, because now you’ve convinced yourself that you’re just a piece of shit and you can’t love anyone or accept any form of kindness because all these compliments and generosities only make you feel like a mannequin on sale at a fucking market for the gods!

Oh dear, you’re not a mannequin. You don’t need to be pleasing and romantic and lovable. You don’t have to be funny, or goofy or awkward or intelligent or talented. You don’t need to be a mannequin to be loved, if that’s how these people see love as.
You’re just a piece of shit who doesn’t know how to cherish the little things in life or even the big ones, and if that makes you any less lovable, then you may as well live in solitude than surrounded by people who only want you around for the way you make them feel about themselves.

And the next time somebody says you’re too difficult to love or too easy to be understood, please walk out of that environment before you turn into that TV set being used for your school play.

Sincerely,
The girl who got lost in his thoughts

The lost screw

You are trying to wear an ear ring when you suddenly drop the screw and you cautiously tiptoe all over the room with eyes as searchlights and a dedicated optimism
you bend a little you pull up the loose T-shirt that’s falling off your shoulder adjust your pants and try on a new tactic
you start feeling the ground with the tips of your slender fingers
fingers that are too used to scavenging for lost items on cold spaces
yet
yet you cannot find the tiny screw
‘enough is enough’ you whisper to yourself and lie down with your body spread out as if you’re trying to make snow angels on the floor your fingers are still slender and the ground is still cold
you enlarge your eyes to the size of your heart and pause your breathing till you’ve ransacked each inch of the tiled square
yet
yet you cannot find the screw
‘urgh’ you wither like a walrus or maybe a snail or a penguin you roll around fondly and breathe out a few cuss words because now you’re dejected and you need a break
you get up
finally
you stand and stare at the floor with your slender hands with the slender fingers arched upon your waist
you think you ponder you stare
you simply stare
you have no more attention and desire left though you secretly wish you’d stumble upon the screw while walking around casually

so you leave the room with an inflammable hope and a kindred dread
a dread that maybe you’ll find the screw a little too late in life when you don’t even need it or maybe
maybe you’ll find it when it pierces through the hard skin on your foot
or when your dog will scream out of pain and you’ll tear open its mouth only to find
or when
or
the endless ‘when’s scare you
yet
yet you know there’s always a hope of finding that screw and that keeps you content

You are that screw to me

–
The girl who never gave up on her first love
or any of the lost loves

Writers and Tinder, writers on Tinder

The two kinds of people on Tinder:
Creeps who use cheeky pick up lines that equate your smile to a weapon
and
writers

That’s what being a writer has come to; maybe that’s what it has always been about.
I mean, look at Bukowski: drunkard who liked his women plump; never had a lover, mostly wrote romance.
Kafka: womaniser, “tortured by sexual desires”, most influential writer of the 20^th century.
Plath: mentally unstable role model for high school goth chicks, married once, loved so many-she lost count when she put her head in the oven.

Add the contemporary charmer Woody Allen, and that list- right there- is one of the most symbolic of the mindset of writers and their inner nuances.

I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how to explain this, but somehow, there is something here that makes me believe that writers are the most complicated lot in the business of Art and somehow, that’s exactly what sells them.

Often introverted, fond of old school Romance with a constant desire to fuck someone in the ass, most writers are the perfect combination of Tim Burton’s characters and Linklater’s scripts.

I guess I’m not very coherent in my thoughts right now.
Afterall, it’s difficult to decipher a case study if you’re its latest chapter.

There is no story here, no point to be noted down, no dialogues to relate to, just an observation.

Just an observation that has been nibbling at me since a few weeks and I can’t help but resort to my only resource- words, to find a solution to this internal brawl.

I mean, I write about words, I write words, I write.
And that’s addiction enough to drive me absolutely bollocks.

Words. Fucking words.

(I shall leave this here and come back later to write more when I can make sense of it)

You liberate me.

You’ve begun meaning a lot to me.

When we decided on a ‘break’ per se, I couldn’t keep away from conversing with you; I apologized; maybe it wasn’t even my fault; but I did.
I had to talk to you- no, I ‘have’ to talk to you.
Every minute, except those when I’m in slumber, I think of you.

You don’t understand.

I think of you when I’m chewing on the almonds, I think of you while reading my book, I think of you while tying my shoelaces, while rubbing my hands together to create warmth at nights, while brushing my hair, my teeth, while walking down to my room, while typing, while thinking, while listening, breathing, I think of you more than I think of food, and honestly, you should be blushing by now.

I don’t have a face to put to these conversations and this brimming compassion in my chest for you, yet, I think of you.
I think of you to this extent that you can call me loony now.
A nutcase. A creep. An outcast in the world of romance.

I’m trying so hard to sound honest yet poetic here, like those love letters written by Kahlo to Bartoli, or that one by Alex Turner to his ex-girlfriend Alexa Chung which pushed the internet kids to listen to indie music while making out.

Anyway, thing is, I yearn for your presence.
My body, mind and chest- all have been caged by the idea of ‘you’, a faceless geek I met on the internet.
I imagine you next to me, explaining the science behind a spaceship. I imagine you playing your favourite Simon and Garfunkel song, asking me if I’ve heard it, forcing me to listen along when I respond in negative.

I need the idea of you.

It keeps me sorted.

No, not in the ‘sunshine through my ass’ kind; just the simple kind where I can be honest with you about any part of myself; it’s liberating.
And liberation, to a leftist and a slightly anarchist like me, is toxic.

You keep me sorted. You‘re toxic.

If reading this scares you, then it makes two of us.

Page 23, backside

“Is it okay if I talk right now?
No no, it’s alright if you’re busy with your assignments! I-just. Well.

I minimize the Word document on my screen and walk out into the balcony for a better network.

It’s a sunny pre-winter morning. My skater dress stinks of raw eggs and smokes, the same as my unwashed hair and chapped lips; days haven’t been as fun as ‘last days’ should typically be.
There are no birds in the sky; no clouds, no sign of art.
Just plain overwhelming blue.

“She asked your uncle if he was her older brother…
She asked me about you, though. And your dad.

“You uncle was suggested to admit her in Geriatric care. I vehemently denied!

“I don’t want to do to her, what she did to your uncles and me.

“What? Are you even listening? I told you earlier, it’s okay…it’s okay if you’re busy. I’ll call later.

Something slips down my throat and I try very hard to hold onto it, pulling and tugging at it, gnawing my chipped nails into its vastness.
It goes down and down all the way to my guts and I know it’s going to hibernate there for sometime before disrupting my insides- turning them upside down inside out left right shredded minced eaten with a side of no guilt

“It’s funny though. She’s making everybody at home laugh with her revamped relationships.

“Do you think you can make it here? To take care of- hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Listen- hello! Hello? Ca
n
Y
ou list
en Hell
o?
?

It’s hot and warm and kind of putrid
The blue is getting drenched in orange and green and a mix of purple with anxiety

“Hel
lo
?”

I’ve always feared one thing in life: what if I forget all the love we shared, without a hint of sadness?
All these memories gone poof woosh
in an instant
like a broken Polaroid camera with a working film

What if I just forget us? You and I?
I would have no self reproach left either, you see

Blue’s gone. It’s all purple now.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

“Didi! Oye didi!

My body jerks out of control and I leap to my feet, rushing to open the door.

“I have been calling out to you since the last ten minutes! What are you upto?

“What?
She laughs so hard, I forget that I had never earlier seen her even smile.

“Who sleeps-

“Who sleeps in the washroom?!

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Outside, there’s a mob of students, some screaming, most staring at each other.

“You suppose we should go and check it out?
yeah, we should. You never know, it might just be an acquaintance of yours.

His walk is swift and engineered to perfection like that of a charming man, deceptive of the muchness inside. He stops at the door and motions for me to come over.

“Of all the people there, how many do you recognise?

“None? Are you sure? Look carefully.

His lips curl up mischievously.

“I know no one too. But somehow…
the idea that someone somewhere might be hurt pulls us to them.
Now, imagine, if we gathered like this every time someone was hurting mentally.
It’d be such a wonderful society.”

……………………………………………………………………………………..

“Your article on that accident got published on the second page. You can be content now.

“Also, what are you doing this eveni- oh! Why do you always look so surprised when I ask you out for a date?

“I know I know, you’re not into women. Relax.

She chuckles and I lose my shit.

“I’m just trying to be a good boss, that’s all. You know of the amended sexual harassment clause, right? Don’t go soft on me, if needed!

She chuckles like a pig and that hot warm putrid thing inside of me slowly starts slipping further down my anus

Oh fuck oh fuck what the fuck

“Hey? You alright? How’s your grandmother at home? What did the medical report say?

oh my fucking fuck what is this slimy things why is this inside of me how is it making me so purple and claustrophobic I think oh fuck oh my good lord

“Alzheimer’s huh? Happens to most oldies. Don’t sweat it.

I heave out a sigh very close to an orgasm, a heavy heavy satisfied sigh

It’s out.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………