Remembrance

You flash into my head
like a bolt of lightning.
Illuminate corners
long dark and dormant

You bring memories
of days warm and sunny;
memories of ease and comfort;
of walls broken down.

When you delved deep,
it always seemed natural.
Like water that flows
downhill.

Radiant, innocent, joyous, beautiful.
You are all that this world
is meant to be

You brought that into our lives,
filled rooms with your tinkling laughter;
thoughts
with your soft voice.

Your voice
still fills the spaces in my head.
And I talk to you
in my night's dreams

Images: A Series of Vases Inspired by Memories and Loss by Hadar Glick

Imagination

I imagined us at 30... plotting milestones, celebrating those of the decade past, pondering mistakes, vowing to be sillier.

I imagined us at 40... exchanging recipes, dragging a few brats around, watching them grow, borrowing books and reading lists from each other for them.

I imagined us at 50... with more time on our hands, more curious than ever, seeing the world, discovering it with all the years behind us.

I imagined us at 60... brimming with ideas, things we could still do, just for the love of doing

I imagined us at 70... sitting comfortably, talking over endless cups of tea, of the things we were still falling in love with, the ideas we were discovering, of the world changing around us.

But suddenly, there are only two left in the three that should have been us. You are gone and I realise how much your presence meant.

In my head, I'll carry you as the voice that always speaks when it matters most. As the voice that always read between the lines. As the voice that listened, completely, before it spoke. As the voice that always had a smile and a ray of sunshine in it.

On the edge

Pic by Rehab

When she first moved to Mumbai, everyone told her to be careful on the trains. "Don't stand near the door... it's so crowded that you may fall off," they told her. It wasn't an act of rebelliousness or even fool hardiness, but right from day one, she always stood by the door. Right there. On the edge. She loved how the wind whipped her curls - sometimes over her face, sometimes away. In that 40 minute ride, she forgot how sweaty Mumbai was. She forgot the smoke, the claustrophobia, the smell of sewage, trash and too many people living in too little space.

From her vantage point she could see the clear morning sky, sometimes with puffy white clouds. The greenery along the tracks was the most greenery she saw in any one place in the city. It brought back memories from childhood... of walking along wide roads bordered with trees, sheltering her from the harsh northern summers. The fresh, cool air transported her to the hills, to the treks that she went on in the monsoons.

Standing there also seemed symbolic of her life. Sometimes moving so fast that she just about managed to keep her balance; sometimes precarious, forcing her to pay attention to every little move lest she do irreparable damage; sometimes carefree, like free, unobstructed wind; sometimes a wordless conversation with a nameless stranger. Everyday that edge became a different metaphor to an ever changing life.

Each day now, as she walks the 10 min walk to her office, she sighs, almost wistfully, in memory of those two years.

Home

A per chance conversation had me thinking about "Home" and I realise that whenever someone asks me that question, I don't really have an answer and my answers are hardly ever the same. Today, "home" might be Delhi, tomorrow it'll be my little flat in Mumbai and day after, it'll be Chennai. I don't have a definite space that has been home since i can remember. Home for me has been transitory, changing, more a function of where I find comfort than a specific house in a specific city.

It's this way for several reasons. I've grown up and lived in several places - Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi (which was my longest stint @14 years and even there I've moved three houses), Ahmedabad and now Mumbai. Till some years back, it was really simple. Delhi was home. I'd lived there the longest, made some of my best friends and happiest memories and my parents still lived there and I still went back there for little breaks and holidays.But now, I haven't been there in almost three years - since my parents moved back to our "home town" of Chennai, my friends have move out and some have moved back and Delhi, people tell me is no longer the same. I definitely need to go there sometime soon... walk the streets of where I used to live and the nostalgia of times really well spent.


Today, for every long weekend, every festival I go back to Chennai. In my head Chennai has always been the city in which my grandparents live. It's never been happening and visits to Chennai have largely consisted of relative visiting, eating, more relative visiting and more eating. Some of that has changed. Now it's where my parents live and some of friends work there now and I get to see a slightly different, "younger" side of the city. However, though I try to think of it as "home" in the more permanent everlasting sense, it doesn't quite seem that way. Visits to Chennai or rarely ever comforting or even relaxing. If anything, they end up being more hectic and with more decisions to make than I do in my working week. It doesn't have the ease and innocence of childhood, nor any memories of the same (all those are in Delhi, remember). PS: And it seems like I don't even have any pictures of Chennai. Must click the next time I am there.

And finally, Mumbai - where I've been for the last two and a half years. It's a city in which I've truly lived alone, discovered many things, including much about myself that I did not know. I now have a little apartment here (on rent, but nevertheless!) that is my pride and according to me the most comfortable place to come back to after a day at work. Mumbai is full of advertures had, happy memories, sad memories, it is a place full of loves found and lost. At one time, I considered wanting to live here forever. But not anymore.

So I wonder where would I make home? Or for that matter, where is the place that has the peace and solace of good times spent with people who still matter?

And yes, slightly sentimental post to begin with but at least  I am writing again!

Kaleidoscope

A conversation between two women. An unlikely conversation.
Two strangers, if people who have something intimate to share can be called strangers. So what if they've never met before.
Inspired in part by a painting by Kasturee Kailash and in part by my slightly morbid, over active imagination.


I am profoundly jealous of you.


And you, you have my disbelief... no not disbelief, incredulity might be a better word.


Why are you incredulous? We are not the same after all.


Maybe even incredulity isn't the right word to convey what I think about you.


You do know that I think you are a fool to have let go of what I desperately crave. I am also thankful that you did. But still...


That is why I am... curious, yes that's more appropriate, curious. Curious to know why you crave it so much.


And I, I have a morbid curiousity to know why you let go of it.


Maybe, maybe we see the same thing but want different things.


Or maybe we want the same thing and see different things... like two people standing on either side of a wall with different wallpapers on both sides.


I wonder which one is real then.


Both. None. I'd probably plump for none. 


We won't ever know which one it was will we?


If there is such a thing as heaven or utopia and all of us reach it, we might.


Till then?


Till then you and I will sit like this. Staring at our portions of the sea, each seeing a different view.

In a Box

It is difficult to pack away two years in a box... things collected, memories made, that little life that was mine and is for a few more days. The simplicity, now lost, as I think about what to take and what not to take. The strings of attachment are difficult to untie and I wonder if snapping them isn't a better idea.

Curtains and rugs are no longer furnishings but a sign of something that I created, that were a symbol of a Life that I began alone; things that will now have to be put in new trappings. The wrenching away is almost a physical pain. Boxes are not enough for a lifetime of two years! :(

A Mnemic

At the Almost End

At the almost end
I'm left speechless.

Too much gone by
In too less a time.

I can't gather all the memories
And I can't leave them behind.

The cocoon is dissolving,
It's threads coming loose.

At the almost end
It's a walk in reverse to the beginning of the road.

Shared pasts?

They say a sense of past is what distinguishes the human life from an animal life. Each moment is, for a man, the sum of all past moments lived. Memories...

I found and interesting way of thinking about memories just yesterday. Two people share an experience or a moment but they do not remember or recollect it similarly. So when we think about shared experiences, are they really shared? And this is what probably makes each of us unique. That our memories are unique even if our experiences are the same. That what we choose to remember of each moment is different.

Nostalgia

Something I read that touched me very deeply... almost like seeing myself in the mirror. And so, for a second time, I will resort to quoting verbatim on this blog:

"Out of the mists of time when Josef was in high school, I see a young girl emerge; she is long limbed, beautiful; she is a virgin; and she is melancholy because she has broken off with a boy. It is her first romantic separation and it hurts her, but her pain is less strong than her amazement at discovering time; she sees it as she never saw it before:

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She see a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows.

One day, with her new boyfriend (platonic, of course), she turns down a path in the forest near the town; it is the same path she had walked a few months earlier with her previous boyfriend (the one who, after their break, caused her to feel nostalgia for the first time), and she is moved by the coincidence. Deliberately she heads for a dilapidated chapel at a crossing of the forest paths because that was where her first boyfriend tried to kiss her. Irresistible temptation draws her to relive a bygone love. She wants the two love stories to come together, to join, to mingle, to mimic each other so that both will grow greater through their fusion.

...

These coincidences amaze her. Never does she feel so thoroughly suffused with beauty as when the nostalgia of her past love blends with the surprises of her new love. The intrusion of the previous boyfriends into the story she is currently living is to her mind not some secret infidelity; it adds further to her fondness for the man walking beside her now."

A wonderful passage from a book called Ignorance by Milan Kundera. The past is indeed powerful, as it claims me from time to time.

Memories

I read a post on Dipti's blog a few days ago and have been intending to write this post since then. So now that I have gotten over my laziness let me get right down to it.

To cut a long story short, her post was pondering upon how quickly she had fallen into the rhythm of things at Stanford and didn't really feel the void that she was expecting when she left home. Am going to start off by copy pasting my comment to that post.


"Maybe it is the excitement of a new place that eclipses the charm of the old ones for a while. The new discoveries overshadowing that which we already know. The eclipse will pass and you will enjoy both in a little time - the memories of old, the making of new ones.

And then again, memories are just that - remains of a life that was. So we all move on... to create memories that are better than the ones that we already have so that we may idle in a little more pleasure than we did before!!!"

I find this to be rather true for when I moved out of home for the first time last year, the first couple of months just went by in a whirl - seeing the new place, meeting new people, exploring, discovering. I never had time to think of the things that I had left behind and of the friends who were longer at half an hour's distance from me. The new is so exciting in its novelty there simply is no time to think of the old, to miss it, to feel its absence. It still happens to me... When I meet someone new or find something new to do, I get so totally involved in it that I really don't think of family and friends and other people and things.

To come to the second part, we do love making new memories don't we??? Contentment not exactly being inherent to human beings, we are never satisfied with the "quality" of the past, so we keep trying to do more interesting things, so we may tell interesting stories to other people about how interesting we are... my apologies for the sarcasm. I am not advocating contentment. Far from that in fact (considering that I am a restless soul myself!!!). But just something that I think we all do for we all like to have pleasant things to ruminate over in the few luxurious free times that we get during the day!!!

The Day Comes Ever Closer

As the days come closer, the emotions well up. A sudden memory brings a smile of longing, a thought unsettles the peace that I had found only recently. It feels like a paddy transplantation - to be uprooted from one place and planted in another.

I've lived away from Delhi for more than a year now but it remained home. The place I returned to ever so often. The place of comfort, happiness and cherished memories. Growing up - from school to college to MICA - it has been a part of it all. My most cherished memories, the most cherished people in my life.

I remember one night. 3 friends, we had just finished a highly experimental Japanese dinner at this restaurant with my friend's sister and the three of us just decided, at 12 at night, that we wanted to eat ice cream at India Gate. Not that the ice-cream there was anything special but just to stand there, on that long straight road, in the middle of the night, is something else altogether. So, we sat in the car and drove off. My friend driving, me in the passenger seat and the third sleeping on the back seat. We floundered our way through the circles of Lutyen's Delhi, trying to find our way to India Gate on one of our first excursions out alone on the roads. We weren't afraid of getting lost (in a circle, you'll always come back right!) and so what was a 20 minute journey became an hour long one as we wandered through the circles and radials. We did get to India Gate and the ice-creams finally but it is the time spent that mattered, that made the memory.

Many such moments - rediscovering friends on the streets of Chandni Chowk, in sophisticated restaurants, in a cricket stadium; walking endlessly in winter along the wide roads I found friends, loves, became who I am. Every cherished memory belongs there, has its roots there.

The city is still home I guess but that tangible place called home will soon be gone. I know I'll return to that someday but the wait is indefinite. It could be a few months, a few years. I'll see that home for the last time in a few days. Wonder how I will react, how I will let it all go, see it all put into boxes and cartons.

Wangdoodle

My wangdoodle for the day from Dipti... Pssst it's Wenger's and Dipti's camera is haunted. It takes these mouth watering, wangdoodley pictures all on its own!!!

A Million and One Memories

I realise I don't have photos to capture everything... but nevertheless... here is a feeble attempt! More to follow... As many as I can. This post will be updated soon!

A toast to our Cosa Nostro

We have spent hours, days talking stuff that makes sense only to us. I doubt if anyone else would consider our conversations as conversations. It has been 4 years since we left school and not a day spent togeter can be described as boring, the conversations have kept us up all night!

Aditi, Dipti and I. Who would have thought that three people who interacted as mere batchmates in school would become such thick friends as soon as we left it. It really goes to show.

Books, food, movies, guys - we have seen each other through all of it in the past four years. We have explored the city with a vengance, eaten out and spent nights staring at the stars, talking randomly.

It has been funny, amusing, thought provoking and entertaining. The sight of Dipti smelling coffee beans, deperately trying to distinguish different perfumes at a perfume shop, Dips hogging philadelphia cheesecake at chokola, Adi talking law at 3 at night, all of us wondering whether we would ever find men who would understand all our madness!

Only Dipti can gift you a napkin in an envelope as a parting present, only the two of them can want to take mad and sometimes embarassing photographs.

Now we, the three of us, stand at a parting of ways. Dipti is off to stanford, Aditi is yet to complete her graduation (sigh! when will she finish???), and I am off to complete my second year at MICA (who knows where I will head after that?). At this parting, here's raising a huge toast to our Cosa Nostro. May it stay alive through the distance ( a huge thank you to whoever invented the net! What would we do without it!!!) and may our paths meet again and again (at every vacation ;)).

Here's also a toast to the maddest, most intelligent woman I know (who still believes that she is a dud). Dips rock stanford babes... but let the place survive till I come a visiting next year, don't get lost and keep the weirdness alive and kicking! Love ya sugarplum!

Adi don't get jealous. Will raise a toast to you the day you finally graduate after your long n ardous journey through law school!

And on that note BOTTOMS UP!

K-18

31^st March, 2355hrs

The walls are stark and white, almost as I found them, the mirror, the curtains, the things on the shelf are all gone. The only sign of my having been there is a single quote scribbled next to the table in crayons. And even that will be covered by a layer of white plaster paint in a few days.

But to me the music of the past year echoes in every draught of air that blows across that small space. It still seems mine though all my things are gone… the rustling of the paper on the floor just a symbol of everything that Kachnar 18 had become in the past year – my haven, my home, everything.

I remember the moments of peace that I found here, listening to music, reading, or simply lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling. Moments of frantic activity beckon me as I recall the numerous assignments, I can almost see my friends sitting in their favourite places in my room. The noises resonate in the absolute silence, weaving their warmth, and their nostalgia around me.

It is stark and brightly lit, yet it exudes the serenity of the soft yellow lights that I am so fond of. That much I think has become part of that room for me. The subtle smells of the perfumes just packed linger. They will not be there in a day from now but that matters not for in my memory the room with the newspapers littered on the dusty floor, with a bare bed and empty shelves, unlike the room the night before as it may be, is still mine. It still smells of me, my music still fills it and rings in the walls. A few remnants of my days there – empty bottles and tubes, discarded case studies and the like – still remain there. That is the way I will remember my last day in K-18.

It is perhaps just as well that I will not have a junior staying there but some stranger whom I will never know for I would not be able to stand it if someone were to make of that room what I would not in front of me. In ignorance indeed lies the bliss. The memories of today will remain the lasting memory of that room for me – my first outside home, my first tryst with myself, and MY first home.

I say my byes sitting on the ledge outside – my favourite perch. From there I look in as I often have in the past. I say a quite bye to all the memories. Then I walk away. A few minutes later, I go in once again, pick up my luggage, turn off the switches and latch the door for the last time without glancing back. My first year at MICA has finally come to an end with that innocent act that is as symbolic as any. I shut old doors and get ready to open new ones. I feel somewhat like Alice in that corridor with doors on both sides. There is something behind each of those doors and I am as determined as her to find out what lies behind each before I make my choice.

The much touted rain dance!

The high point of the orientation came when it rained for the first time on the campus. As the smell of rain on parched earth wafted through the air, we rushed out in celebration, having convinced our professor to let us enjoy the rain. The more squeamish were mercilessly dunked and soon so were the willing. First in water, then in slush and mud. Music boomed in the Palaash courtyard. Some danced, others stood by welcoming the rains in their own ways. Afternoon class was forgotten by all but a few. The festivities carried on through the evening. We woke up in the morning to a bathroom full of dead insects. Insects – that bane of the rain that fills MICA’s air and soil and concrete during the monsoons.

Reaching late for class we found that an angry professor (whose first class it was) had departed refusing to teach a bunch of undisciplined students who were 10 minutes late to the lecture. Many apologies later, he condescended to come to class in the afternoon, set us a tough assignment in 10 minutes and disappeared. We slaved the night away at something we did not quite know how to do as the orientation drew to a close.

Each of us discovered the MICA way of life in our own ways. However, anything interesting always seemed to happen at night. Heated debates and quiet conversations, long walks and solitary evenings marked those days.

It was on one such evening, sitting on the main path at well past midnight that I decided to start writing – random thoughts, things I wanted to tell but to no one in particular, musings, questions. There is something about the air here. It has made me quieter, more introspective, sharpened my sense of myself, making me an observer in my own thoughts.