moving on.

happiness is not one place. happiness is not the swallows of a deadcity. happiness is not insomnia. happiness is not the distance in affection.

happiness is travel. happiness is a new road. happiness was never safety. safety and settlement are way too overrated. happiness is knowing that you can change. happiness is knowing that you can even do without change. happiness is hypocrisy. happiness is saying one thing and doing another. happiness is a labyrinthine; you'll never get out alive.

running around in circles. happiness is godot. happiness is out of reach.

for me happiness is traveling. vagabond-ish.

happiness isn't this blog, anymore. happiness is finding another new road.

http://leftoverseptembersky.blogspot.com/

happiness might just be a leftover canopy of clouds. =)

As I suspected, I grow more and more inward than I am expected to. Home is living out of a suitcase, and life is only just reading and music. And I have a plan. Also, there is work. Tucked away is a sheaf of paper persons not even worthy of mention. And, some thrown away also. Fake and talkative. And yes, did I mention work? There is so much to do. So much to look forward to, and yet, so much to leave behind. So many to leave behind, in fact.

There was never an easier way to let go. Closure and work. The Formula, yes.

only if you could be me, now. there is nothing that i do not have. nothing. i have everything. everything that you, if you were not me, would be jealous of. everything that you, if you were not me, would have regrets about. everything that i hid from the world. everything. i have music in the folds of my skin, a plethora of words under my tongue and the rainbow in my eyes. noone, not even you, can take this away from me. yet, if you were never me, you would be a bead wrapped in envy and regret.

yes, only if you could be me, now. i have everything and nothing.

i promise i will look for your face in every photograph. i promise. you are not the boy i love. you cannot be the boy who wants to become another peter pan. you are not him, you never can be. however, i will always search for you in crowds when i am alone. i will sing songs of you to the skies and they will draw patterns of you in blue and white and orange. i will conjure up words and poems to think of you. i will run away from people and places and blame you. and at night i will empty the sepia of my eyes to my pillow. yet, i will search for you. and find you, perhaps?

in some photograph. an old class photograph. not visible at first. but then, perfectly discernible. i will chart the laughlines on your face with my eyes, and some archaic voice of you will laugh in my head. it will be almost maddening how parts of you will have survived still, and how they will continue to haunt me sometimes, despite being safely buried in the sepulchre of my heart.

you are fear. yet, i will search for your face. in photographs, in crowds, in farawaylands. in unwelcome dreams. in songs. in poetry. and somehow you will live right inside me. parts of you i couldn't let time gnaw away at. and someday i will stare at one of the photographs long and hard, and try and scan through them to see you grinning. and wonder if the smile you are wearing is the one i left you.

i promise i will look for you in unknown, tucked-away photographs and new ones, too. and wait for that grin, the one i left you, to disappear. and for a new one to appear. that is the day my world wouldn't come off in pieces.

Because I don't write regularly.

I have no clue when I began to keep my private life away from my life in public. I began thinking about this a couple of days back, when I read Mandy's recent post where she mentioned in a supranote that hers isn't a feelings blog. Somehow I feel even I have divided my life into a thoughts blog and a feelings blog. The feelings blog, however, is locked and available only to very very few people. Anyone who reads my private blog would know the kind of emotional spill I go through on a regular basis. People who aren't invited to it and read only this would readily conclude that I hardly think, and that this blog is dying.

Maybe it is. And there is nothing much I can do about it. I refuse to be angsty and wear my heart on my sleeve in public. Plus, I like being discreet, now. Also, I hardly get creative urges now-a-days. Hopefully it is just a phase.

Well, it is the Freshers' Week in college, and I cannot make myself any clearer - I don't feel like attending the crap - silly 'breaking the ice' competitions et al. Instead, I like curling up on my bed in the afternoons, and reading/watching House till I fall asleep, totally disoriented. I've missed being with myself for a longtime, and since I get the afternoons free (with afternoon classes canceled, and N staying in college because she is one of the biggies for the Freshers' events) I take full advantage of it. Yes, you could say I am unsocial. Well, I don't care.

Also, now-a-days I end of spending a lot of time with A. Studying, talking, eating, going to Oxford, reading, discussing things I cannot with anyone else. Being as politically incorrect as I can be. I think we make a great team. We have two papers to complete (one of them has been long overdue), and I am anticipating attending at least two other conferences this year. I like the adrenaline rush of talking about my work on stage, though I'm terribly afraid of it at the same time. A, on the other hand, prefers mooting to speaking in conferences. I wouldn't mind moots but I like researching better, and our college won't have a researcher test for moots. So, I doubt if I'll ever have any national/international level mooting experience because I wouldn't ever go as a speaker.

I also gave up writing a paper I really wanted to write. But I could not get myself to understand the legal propositions of the topic, and lost my sanity over it. I feel terrible giving it up, and I know it'll be difficult not regretting about it.

I shall not comment about my friends and acquaintances, here in this blog. I am really close to only a handful of people in college and they know who they are. About the rest, I am trying not to care. Among other things, facebook has become a recent addiction. Also, House. I absolutely LOVE House. And I am really really glad that A gave me the episodes. One of my closest schoolfriends has shifted to a college faraway and I won't be seeing her much of her for the next five years, I guess. Another lives just forty minutes from my college, yet we cannot meet for our erractic college hours. Another gets lonelier in our city.

And, everyday I tell myself to write to them. I want to. But I'm too lazy. Often believing that it wouldn't matter if I didn't write; we'd still stick together (which we will, I am sure). I have the most believable excuse, of course. The course in college. It is vast, though I don't take much of the academic attyachaar. But I am liking the course this semester, at least most of it. Constitutional Law I and Criminal Law are, in fact, very interesting. If only I studied regularly.

Imagine (I did this tag.)

Well, I am jobless. hahaha Read on if you are jobless, too. :P

If someone says ‘Is this Okay’? You say?
You're Beautiful - James Blunt.

(Who you? Eh?)

What would best describe your personality?
Shiver - Coldplay

(Don’t you shiver… I’ll be waiting for you! – I am reliable, I suppose.)

What do you like in a guy/ girl?

Not Romeo Not Juliet - Bryan Adams

( True true.. How very true!)

How do you feel today?
Bridge Over Troubled Waters - Simon and Garfunkel

(Did I play the bridge somewhere today?)

What is your life’s purpose?
If I let you go – Westlife

(I don’t think I shall let you go.)

What’s your motto?
O Re Pia - Rahet Fateh Ali Khan (OST Aaja Nachhle)

(Hmm. * wonders *)

What do your friends think of you?
Junoon - Abhijeet Sawant
(Yes, I guess they think I ‘junoon’ personified)

What do you think of your parents?
Everything Fades Away - Poets of the Fall.

(Everything fades away…you both don’t J)

What do you think about very often?
Paint My Love - Michael Learns to Rock.

(Hmm. Do I? A, you hear me?)

What is 2+2?
Late Goodbye (Max Payne Theme) - Poets of the Fall.

(Yes sometimes 2 and 2 make miserable goodbyes.)

What do you think of your best friend?
Falling Down - Avril Lavigne.
(Yes hold me as I fall down.)

What do you think of the person you like?
Parachutes – Coldplay

(Yes yes… Be my parachute *smiles*)

What is your life story?
Forever - Jesse and the Rippers.
(My life story is immortalized..YEAH!!)

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Pichle Saat Dinon Mein - Rock On!!

(Errr.. As usual I am confused.)

What do your parents think of you?
Live Forever - Oasis.

(Na na… I don’t wanna live forever.)


What will you dance to at your wedding?
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - The Beatles.

(Whoaa!)

What will they play at your funeral?
Rise - Eddie Vedder (OST Into The Wild.)

(Yes my soul will rise people.)

What is your hobby?
Naked - Avril Lavigne

(WHAT?! No I don’t like roaming around naked)

What is your biggest secret?
I'll Be There For You - The Rembrandts.

(Is that even a secret??)

What do you think of your friends?
Shine On You Crazy Diamond - Pink Floyd.

(Don’t worry… you all will keep shining and glowing in my company..)

What should you post this as?
Imagine - John Lennon.

(Imagine how much time I spent on this instead of doing something constructive… hahaha!)

i let you touch my body one last time,
last monsoon.
But your manhood had not seeped
down to my soul.

this year i am only rainkissed,
and peeled naked by the sky.

If I were...

Anjali and Natasha tagged me. So here goes.

If I were a beginning, I would be: the beginning of a circle.
If I were a month, I would be: september.
If I were a day of the week, I would be: thursday.
If I were a time of day, I would be: dusk.
If I were a planet, I would be: venus.
If I were a season, I would be: the interim between monsoons and retreating monsoons.
If I were a sea animal, I would be: sea horse.
If I were a direction, I would be: east.
If I were a piece of furniture, I would be: a cupboard.
If I were a sin, I would be: lust.
If I were a liquid, I would be: raindrops.
If I were a fraud/scare, I would be: the exorcist.
If I were a gem, I would be: amethyst.
If I were a tree, I would be: a cactus.
If I were a tool, I would be: a hammer.
If I were a flower/plant, I would be: a rose.
If I were a kind of weather, I would be: cloudy.
If I were a musical instrument, I would be: strummed too often.
If I were an animal, I would be: a killer whale.
If I were an emotion, I would be: envy.
If I were a vegetable, I would be: carrots.
If I were a sound, I would be: the sound of raindrops at the windowpane.
If I were an element, I would be: earth.
If I were a car, I would be: a rolls royce.
If I were a song, I would be: be played on rainy evenings.
If I were a food, I would be: chicken tandoori.
If I were a place, I would be: paris.
If I were a material, I would be: lycra.
If I were a taste, I would be: salty.
If I were a scent, I would be: elizabeth taylor white diamonds.
If I were a religion, I would be: peace.
If I were a sentence, I would be: "don't leave home."
If I were a body part, I would be: the neck.
If I were a facial expression, I would be: a smirk.
If I were a subject in college, I would be: literature.
If I were a shape, I would be: a circle.
If I were a quantity, I would be: a little toomuch.
If I were a color, I would be: purple.
If I were a thing, I would be: a novella.
If I were a landmass, I would be: europe.
If I were a book, I would be: a cross between the alchemy of desire and the kite runner.
If I were a monument, I would be: the leaning tower of pisa.
If I were an artist, I would be: the one with a million colours.
If I were a collection of poems, I would be: twenty love poems and a song of despair.
If I were a watch, I would be: the one that turns back time.
If I were God, I would be: perfect.
If I were a vowel, I would be: A
If I were a consonant, I would be: D
If I were a formula, I would be: the formula for success.
If I were a Science, I would be: psychology.
If I were a theory, I would be: the theory of evolution.
If I were a famous person, I would be: too busy to do this tag.
If I were an electronic equipment, I would be: an ipod.
If I were sport, I would be: brainstorming.
If I were a movie, I would be: into the wild.
If I were a cartoon, I would be: captain planet.
If I were an explorer, I would be: in faraway lands.
If I were a scientist, I would be: a disaster.
If I were a relation, I would be: the one without a name.
If I were a river, I would be: a seasonal one.
If I were intoxication, I would be: vodka on the rocks.
If I were alone, i would be: traveling.
If I were a question, then I would be: "do i know me? "
If I were a hobby, I would be: writing.
If I were a habit, I would be: difficult to let go off.
If I were in an atom, I would be: neutron. completely neutral.
If I were an end, I would be: the end of love.
If I were you, I would be: taller.

the purge.

we have this quadrangle in the hostel. the place we dry our clothes. if seen from the sky, the quadrangle would seem like the rectangular figures in the math textbooks of class ten where we had to find the perimeter and area of the given figure. add x metres to the length, subtract y metres to the breadth - add, subtract, multiply, divide! calculate and purge the mind.

somehow, the quadrangle too seems to be something that helps in calculations. emotional calculations. we go round and round to add, subtract, multiply and divide emotions. alone, in dyads, in groups - it doesn't matter who goes, or what she thinks about, the person always ends up calculating. emotional calculations. talk-think, talk-think. walk-talk-think...

i have walked around the quadrangle many-a-times. sometimes alone. and often with people i only claim to know. and we purge our minds.

today i walked again. with someone else this time. love. friendship. self-pity. battles with the self. organ transplants. death. rain. the city. people. love.

the best thing about the quadrangle is that it is not judgmental. we talk to forget. we listen only to purge. it is a cycle. talk-think, talk-think, walk-talk-think-listen-purge. purge-listen-think-talk-walk.

today we walked and breathed in something more than just moonsmoke as the desire to play with the raindrops washed our faces. later i sat up in bed with a bowl of soupy noodles, millions of thoughtpuddles and an unfinished book.

there shall be no sleep tonight. only just rain.

We became different people in different settings.

Aristocrats in the bathroom.
Plebeians in the kitchen.
Students on the veranda.
Adulterers in the living room.
Lovers on the dining table.
And in the bedroom partners and soulmates.

And in doing so we discovered that the greatest lovers are not those who are blessed with constancy and sameness, but those who never stop changing. Those with the gift of being different people at different times.

- Tarun J Tejpal, The Alchemy of Desire.

And if I may add, the book is overwhelming.

Cities Are Like Tattoos.

Another serenading suicide. Another trip to insanity. I hate this part of the city. The part that surrounds home. There are stories written in the wind. Memories are scattered here.

I walk on with a lonesome song blaring in my ears. I want to walk to those parts of home that trouble me, that madden me. Autos, blue buses rush past. I walk past the 'favourite chicken roll' shop, and then, pass that old I-pill medical store. Noone knows what I'm thinking. Not even close people can guess that I'm constantly comparing myself to that girl in the picture postcard, whom I wasn't even supposed to find. I get flashes of the photographs I saw last evening. I create stories about that girl in my head. And wonder how this idiot wind with infinite memories could never ruffle her thoughts.

I walk ahead. I curse S on the phone who has kept me waiting knowing how this place torments me.

I want to purge myself off this city. Of certain people. Even if it leaves bruises, even if it leaves me empty with an unendurable void. I want to close the doors to this part of this city. I want to return to that night in Delhi when I drank so much that I forgot everything and went to sleep with temporary memory loss. I want that retrograde amnesia to continue. I want this city to be devoured by that Korsakoff's syndrome. I want to search for an Axis Bank ATM, pick up whatever money I have and run away where this city won't find me.

S still isn't here. I cannot take it anymore. I want to rush back home. I want to be left all to myself. I want to go back to university. It's safer there. Even Delhi was safer, for that matter. At least, I'm not scared of those cities, like I'm scared of this one.

I look ahead into the darkness, with the same song now playing in my head. This place has long spells of loadshedding.
I wonder what the girl in the picture postcard must be doing with her newfound lover right now, and cry.
I am selfish, I think.

Update.

I haven't been blogging much. The problem is I cannot get myself to conjure up nice poetic things in my head anymore. No, it's not a block or a hiatus. It's more than that. I do write in my private blog once-in-a-while, though. In fact, I had actually thought of deleting this blog a few days back.

Anyway, I haven't done much since I came back from Delhi. Only read a lot, watched old episodes of Friends, Boston Legal and Full House, ate and slept. I also went to the court a couple of times and ran around in search of a second internship. Hmm, I haven't done much. Only thought too much about life and got depressed. In fact, I can't wait to get back to college (Yes, if Ma reads this, she IS going to kill me) to start the next semester and work my ass off, again.

I have been procrastinating. There is a paper to be written, and I haven't even read enough for it. I'm sure A and S (joint-authors, and very very close friends) haven't read too. I'm wondering what we are going to do at the conference if we don't have a clue about anything.

Hmm, in other news, I have become a quieter, more eccentric woman. People don't like me, and I don't like people much. I think I'm getting crazier, and my blog, it's dying.

I stare at you in silence holding a storm of words inside my stomach. The moment is perfect, the silence pristine, the nothingness surrounding us like a bubble. It is not evening, and the afternoon sun has not faded yet. We are frozen in time. Plain frozen in timeboxes that are more than just trices.

Come close to me. Keep your face close to mine.

The twinkle in your eyes is like silver stardust. And, the fragrance of your unkempt hair makes me want to feel the faded light that falls on your face. We are a single silhouette.

Let me hold you in my arms.

I want you to keep looking into my eyes, and pull me by my Om pendent and ruffle my hair a little. I want us to lie in silence, my head near your heart.

I love you.

But I don't say it. You don't hear it. Today there are no words. Only a single strand of colourful silence that binds our souls together.

in between the crumpled fragrance of candlelight and the half-awake, half-sleepy candlelit loadshdding evenings, you bartered my stories for all those little mellow smiles that i so proudly flaunt. we were a rubble that evening, all we had was a handful of giggles shared on a rickshaw in a paradise town and a few random photographs. then, during the long walk back to the haunted mansion we saw millions of stars, constellations up in the sky. i think i wrapped the sky around myself, shrouding myself completely, blinding myself, totally oblivious to people and places. all i want is you.

the candlelight brought us closer, i think. and somehow, i want to bottle up the moonbeams that touched your face so gently. your fragrance also. and store them up in the old cupboard like memories in photographs. your eyes reek of a love i've never felt before and your whispers carry the scent of a dream that we are both knitting with much fervour. there is a quietude outside this very room. a kind of pindrop silence that almost gives me a fright. in between these moments, you hold me close - our eyes capturing every one of those nude trices that come alive only in fairytale lovestories, something you'd never be able to understand; something i'd never be able to explain to you.

you peel off my pretences slowly, carelessly. and all i can do is nurse a delicious little agony inside. i stare into those huge hazel eyes, and wonder if you are just a couldhavebeen, just an ephemeral happiness. but your love hushes my anxieties. you bring a kind of neverland to me, and yet, you give me little boxes of reality, of logic when you paint us for me. in this candlelight, we are a space between a you and a me - a time wonderfully suspended between the months of september and october, a music in the bewildered mirrors of december.

the candlelight writes a never-to-be-read lovestory on its flames tonight. we are a memory. to be cherished forever, and somehow, it makes me wonder why everytime i try to run away from you a little, you know me a little more. it is a kind of newfound freedom that takes away all the pain from bonding. somehow, when you bind me, i fly a little higher.

We are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening season of songs and love. Just like ripples. We are in a crowd, dying to find each other. We are in each other's shoes, living each other's stories, yet we don't know us. We are dying, I think. Dying out of sight. Living on morbid whispers. Just whispers that once had the fragrance of a sunshine we basked in. You sit beside my tainted reflection and wonder why your dusks are not like your dawns, and why we use this season of careless whispers to dream and talk to our own shadows. I ask the mouth of sky inside me why it is falling and how the stars just died out. And, we let us fade away; we are being gnawed away silently by the ebony darkness we ourselves created for our comfort. We are the debris of our own hopes and dreams, deadened even more by our wishful thinking.

I think we are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening songs and love. We are waiting for spring. We'll sail through this. We'll shine on.

I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves ...

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You won't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not been possible in the world?

- AGHA SHAHID ALI
The Country Without a Post Office.

What came off as my mask was handpainted on sheets of paper, and hardbound into a thick brown diary only to be slipped away to a corner of your cupboard, and you still haven't mustered up enough courage to read scraps of my self-pity, have you?

I think we pretended to live in a dead city, like the one I'm living in right now, where the postal service didn't exist or letters sent were never received. Dead letters. Dissolved letters. Words spread out in black and blue ink. I remember singing mundane songs and speaking those words out loud to you; yet, you never cared to sift through the pages of the brown diary. You were a coward, still are perhaps, to some extent. You had no courage to see what you did to my songs and my words. Never have I sung or read poetry aloud to anyone since then. You live inside me like a void, a scar memory. And though I've gifted a part of me to you in pages, in whispers, in words and silence, I feel that part in me living and, dying sometimes.

I drifted away from that world. Thankfully so. The shift of worlds was planned and prepared. My last plan that worked. We don't share an umbilical chord-ish relationship anymore. Your world is but a chimera. Only a bubble illusion. Believe you me, I never want to run back to your world that waned at the weight of our dreams. You appear way better as fiction, as a part of the torn pages of a happilyeverafter fairytale. You look better as the crumbled tin soldier wrapped in a blanket of lies, someone who never made it to my world.

What matters in the end is that I have forgiven you and me for all the mistakes we made. I have edited my story and moved forward.

Note: I read the aforementioned quotation ages later and it triggered this train of thought.

you speak not in words,

you use the language of the blind;

you paint, you touch

you whisper with your fingertips.

and sometimes, you walk 

in and out of our deadened moments,

half-awake, and half in a dreamystupour.

drenched in moribund dreams

that shatter and break on paper.

and burn in the fragrance of candlelight.

you live and die

a million times in my poetry,

like a mythical warrior.

and i tell stories of you

that might just be lies.

you speak not in words,

you use the language of the blind,

and i have saved your poemscars

on my body.

The JUGGAD Act

For a long time now, I've been hearing about how in my future field of work "sources" matter more than knowledge itself. You become a part of a brand name. You become a product. And probably, it's not only law that I'm talking about. Almost everything is, in fact, based more on marketing and propaganda. Everything today depends on how market yourself. It depends not on your achievements anymore; what matters how many layers of well-fabricated lies you have on you, or how you can brag about your supposed accomplishments or how you can pretend to be something that you're not. And no, it's not unethical; in fact, if you look closely, you'll see that the ones who haven't been able to sell themselves this way, haven't reached anywhere. It's cut-throat competition out there, and noone, believe you me, noone cares about how morally bankrupt you become in the process of becoming successful.

I am sorry, I digress when I'm too excited or emotionally unsound.

What I was talking about is "sources" matter more than knowledge or character. If you don't have a source or a "Juggad" in the field, you are incapable of finding yourself at the pinnacle of success. You might just be reduced to a lesser mortal if you don't have a godfather in your field of work. Though I revel in the fact that my Father is in the Merchant Navy, I sometimes wish he was a lawyer or was somehow legally inclined. Life would have been a tad easier had he been a lawyer.

Anyway, I was reading Paulo Coelho's The Zahir the other day and it is funny how I found an entire chapter related to what I'm thinking now. What follows now is an excerpt from The Zahir - Coelho explains quite subtly the importance of "juggad" or what he calls rather politely "Favour Bank" :
( I wish I could footnote. Sadly, blogger does not provide for footnotes.)

'What is this Favour Bank?'

'You know. Everyone knows.'

Possibly, but I still haven't quite grasped what you're saying.'

'It was an American writer who first mentioned it. It's the most powerful bank in the worl, and you'll find it in every sphere of life.'

'Yes, but I come from a country without a literary tradition. What favours could I do for anyone?'

'That doesn't matter in the least. Let me give you an example: I know you're an up-and-coming writer and that, one day, you'll be very influential. I know this because, like you, I too was once ambitous, independent, honest. I no longer have the energy I once had, but I want to help you because I acn't or don't want to grind to halt just yet. I'm not dreaming about retirement, I'm still dreaming about the fascinating struggle that is life, power and glory.
' I start making deposits in your account - not cash deposits, you understand, but contacts. I introduce you to such and a person, I arrange certain deals, as long as they're legal. You know that you owe me something, but I never ask you for anything.'

'And then one day...'

'Exactly. One day, I'll ask you for a favour and you could of course, say "No", but you're conscious of being in my debt. You do what I ask, I continue to help you, and other people see that you're decent, loyal sort of person and so they too make deposits in your account - always in the form of contacts, because this worls is made up of contacts and nothing else. They too will one day ask you for a favour, and you will respect and help the people who have helped you, and in time, you'll have spread your net worldwide, you'll know everyone you need to know and your influence will keep on growing.'

'I could refuse to do what you ask me to do.'

'You could. The Favour Bank is a risky investment, just like any other bank. You refuse to grant me the favour I asked you, in the belief that I helped you because you deserved to be helped, because you're the best and everyone should automatically recognise your talent. Fine, I say thank you very much and ask someone else into whose account I've also made various deposits; but from then on, everyone knows, without me having to say a word, that you are not to be trusted.
'You'll grow only half as much as you could have grown, and certainly not as much as you would have liked to. At a certain point, your life will begin to decline, you got halfway, but not all the way, you're half-happy and half-sad, neither frustrated nor fulfilled. You're neither cold nor hot, you're lukewarm, and as an evangelist in some holy book says: "Lukewarm things are not pleasing to the palate."'

Got Tagged After Ages!

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.
(Actually this is a Facebook tag by Beadysea but I cannot access Facebook because of the Wi-fi here, so completing this on the blog.)

01. I love chocolates, and somehow I cannot imagine doing without them. :)
02. I cannot get through the day without writing. It could be either on the blogs or in the diary but I've got to write. Writing and expressing in words keeps me sane. I feel rather disoriented if I don't.
03. Music keeps me going. Ask anyone and they'd say that I cannot do without my headphones. I'm always listening to music. I probably get my headphones off only when I'm bathing or when I'm attending lectures. Headphonic idiot ta toh emni emni bolena lokera. :P
04. I love walking. Long long walks. Maybe with a chocolate in hand. Walking alone helps me calm the chaos inside. However, if I had to walk with someone, it would always be either A or my best buddies, Sudu or Sweety. :)
05. I do a hell lot of random photography. On the streets, at home, in the hostel, in college - almost everywhere. And I tend to add words to the photographs to create poesy. Sometimes these very photographs become my muse.
06. I read a lot. If I cannot find anything relevant to read, I read up the Dictionary.
07. I have a fetish for weirdness. I'm pretty weird and prefer to be friends with weird people.
08. It takes me quite a long time to open up to people. I come across as an extrovert but I can be myself to very very few people. And when I'm close to people, I bare my heart to them so they kind of have all the opportunity to hurt me if they'd like. However, I'm not a weak person so I don't wear my heart on my sleeve.
09. I'm quite a foodie. LOVE and LIVE to eat.
10. I'm quite a romantic person, I've been told.
11. Ridiculous as it may sound, I love getting lost. I think the vagabond in me revels everytime I get lost on the roads or something. Sometimes, I just keep walking onto unknown, unseen roads in the hope of finding myself lost.
12. I'm a staunch radical feminist. :D
13. I hate people encroaching my private space. There are very few people who can toe the line and tread into "my world".
14. I can't stand insecure and weak men. I'm talking about those "mamma's boys" who cannot do a thing themselves and depend on their mums/girlfriends/sisters/wives for everything. It's weird how their macho-image comes to pieces when they have a crisis they can't handle, and it's weirder how they run to mums/girlfriends/sisters/wives then. Yes, mard ko bhi dard hota hai but please, don't make your dard so immensely melodramatic.
15. I'm a sentimental person, yes.
16. I can be aggressive and shrewd and hypocritical when needed. And yes, it is indeed needed at times, to survive in this BIG bad world.
18. I like to keep things to myself most of the times. Even if I get angry/hurt by someone's (even close people) behaviour I tend to keep it within. I don't call for emotional help until I explode.
19. I love the rains. Maybe it is something to do with being born in September, but I just love love love the rains. The rains do something to me, I suppose. I get into too much emo poesy during the rains. I think I get a creative high during the monsoons.
20. I either talk too much or too little.
21. I get myself into a whole lot of trouble. :P
22. I have a weird imagination. If there is missing information about something, I tend to make up stories in my mind about it.
23. I tend to be rather detached at times which is why sometimes I'm thought to be insensitive.
24. I value my freedom. I hate explaining myself unnecessarily to unnecessary people, and I hate being dictated. You get the best of me when you let me be.
25. I'm almost twenty years old and still haven't understood what "love" means. The term is a little overrated yes, and we tend to use to for almost everything. Yet, we never really comprehend what love is. Funny, eh?

Phew! It's done. :D

"Listen. Can you hear it? The music. I can hear it everywhere. In the wind... in the air... in the light. It's all around us. All you have to do is open yourself up. All you have to do... is listen. "

There is chaotic tranquility in me, around me. All I have to do is follow the music. The music inside me, the inexplicable void that speaks not in words, but in a tune only known to me. Despite, all the noise, all the contention inside, all the commotion, the music hasn't stopped. It is a faint, dissolved tune now. But if I let it play inside me a little longer, I known I can add words and lyrics and turn it into a pretty little song called Life. Follow the music. Believe in it. Let it touch you. Let the light of music reign supreme. 

"Sometimes the world tries to knock it out of you. But I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales."

Photo courtesy: August Rush

drain.

all the myths churned,
stories died inside an unbuttoned shirt,
your barechest didn't have a skyful of stars today.
only a tiny hole in your heart.
somewhere i would never fit.
so, i passed through a hole in the backyard.
and left, left through a drain.

left. left. left.
left with a mouthful of silence,
with a head resounding of mocking laughter,
wondering why i didn't check
the warning sign near the flowers.
wondering why the only escape was through a drain.
why did i become that escape?
why?

Child Inside.

I feel old. Quite quite old. Too old to be feverishly in love. Too old to drop coins into wishing lakes and pray for a story or two to come true. Knowing well that fairytales remain lifeless pages in Grimm and Anderson's. Knowing well that more often than not, we do not live happily ever after and there are no charming princes, no mirror mirror on the wall, no Cinderella and definitely no magical romances. We make do with what we have. It's not like I've stopped having my illusions. I still dream. Perfect, flawless and impractical dreams. And build up stupid dreamy stories in my head. But these dreams, these stories, this part of me is tucked in old yellowed pages, pressed between old diaries like red roses. It's not like I'm not happy. But there's a part of me, broken and lost and that part noone shall ever see. It's a part made up of wishing lakes and fairytales and Cinderella and lived happily ever afters.

I think I've grown up. Sometimes I stare into the mirror and wonder if it's really me. Do we all outgrow ourselves? Do we all keep losing bits and pieces of ourselves like this? Maybe it's a part of becoming rational and prudent, and yes, practical. Maybe after a time in our lives, we are ashamed to tell others that we dream, that we are still children inside. So, we repress a part of us and let it grow in ourselves, deep in our hearts. This child, this love for fairytales keeps growing inside until one day, we explode. Explode like fireworks in the moonless sky. Beautiful colourful explosion.

I feel old. Almost like a veteran. A loser, sometimes. I show off my scars with pride and proudly proclaim what I could have but never did. I tell people I've grown up, I take unbearable responsibility to prove it. I don't believe in fairytales, or so I say. Deep inside, secretly I still wish for a story for me; I still wish for a star when we kiss. I still nurse the child inside in words and silence and photographs. Yet, in front of you, you or you, I'd be the girl almost two decades old and ready to take on the big, bad world without any trace of silly dreams or stories in her palms. Sometimes, only sometimes, I wonder if happiness could be slipped into Christmas stalkings.

Someday I'd want to a child again. I shall throw caution to the winds then. Till then, you, you and you could drop coins into the wishing lake and live my erstwhile stories for a while. The stories that lie dissolved somewhere inside the lake and behind the trees and smokecircles where fairytales are said to grow.

I want to be one of the masks that you wear. I want to be a part of the masquerade too, you know. I want to be the song that creeps silently onto your lips when you're leaving for another of your wanderlust-satiating trips. I want to be the nothingness that you bury yourself in, sometimes. That darkness that cripples others, gives you security - I want to be that darkness and wrap you in my arms when in the dead of the ebony night, you are staring at the fan on the ceiling and wondering about your sepia-tinted evenings. I want to be the tear you never cried. I want to be that scar on your knee, the bruises on your elbows and the birthmark on the back of your left palm. I want to be the dim sunlight that falls on your face in the morning. Your train of thoughts. Your silence during our long long walks. I want to be the dischordant voice that lives inside you. And grows louder everytime you grow. I want to be your wanderlust, like I'm my own wanderlust. Those inklines around your lips, those old town blues that leave you a little like the storyteller you're in love with. I want to be the melancholy in your heart. Your jagged, broken smile when your world is upside-down. I want to be the laughter that follows you, everywhere, all the time. I want to be the one stolen kiss in the mundane crowds in this old dead town.

Yes, I want to be love. I want to be the voids that you leave in your sentences, that make you muse enough to be the poesy I try to pen down.

"How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here. "

The World In A Room.

They are dressing these moments up in red. A kind of tranquil, sublime red. Something like the scarlet sky blushing like a bride. Or maybe it was a nuder shade of vermilion. Like the ladies on doshomi, smearing red onto each other's faces - shindoor khela, they call it. Aaschhe bochhor aabaar hobe. And it is stark and almost ironic how they stain each other.
In the next room, they are playing a shindoor khela of sorts. Smearing each other with words. Playing with words. Stealing every word and stabbing it a million times. And I hear sobs. The words are unnecessary. The tears are unnecessary. Them playing such a pitiable game is absurd. I feel like stopping them, telling them what they are doing is wrong. They aren't only playing with words; they are playing with lives, with friendships that could have lasted forever; they are playing with the happiness that is a part of them. They are playing with love. They are smearing parts of themselves on pieces of broken glass and watching themselves drip like the shindoor-aalta words. Like blood. Knowing little that the wounds will show, the stains will remain.

There are pregnant pauses in between. And everytime the hiatus is broken, it is as if one of them has deliberately picked up the words said before hurled against the other. Each battle of words, each new round of shindoor khela creating a stronger barrier between them. It's disturbing. Even for someone from a completely different world. Someone who hardly cares to look into their world, their little biosphere which they are now tainting with a maddening shade of red. Someone who'd smear a nuder shade of scarlet in her eyes in the middle of the night sometimes, making sure noone is watching. I'm the detached one and yet, this game is too much for my detached sense of fun. I see others gathering outside the wooden door of their world, some giggling, others mocking at what words can do to even the "bestest of friends" or how they knew "he only used her". It's crazy how in the middle of the night a world is exploding at the force of words and people are actually picking up the pieces of each monologue trying to make sense of the weird but true jigsaw puzzle. They find it fun? Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

What about her sitting and staring silently at the others, wondering, probably,whether she'd use still more fierce words or silence to calm this coup of words? All she can probably think of now is her world falling apart. Bit by bit. Her beloved world. Falling apart; being blown down. Only the debris at her feet. Only a silent murmur of the million words she's heard tonight in her head. A deep shade of scarlet-vermilion red in her eyes.

It's perturbing for me. The words throb at our walls. We have no world of our own. Yet, it penetrates into our make-believe walls too. And I can hear a feeble scream or two, sobs and a deafening silence instead of a glowing laughter that normally echoes in their world. It's more than shocking for a vagabond like me. I'm afraid of worlds. I fear being the part of a world for too long. So I transcend from one world to another. And I like this painful but painless process.

I look into the sky from the window at this hour. The darkened clouds give way to a reddish hue almost like the words they were painting each other with.

Marble Moments.

In between whispering to the winds lines that are meant only for you, I think I spend most of my afternoons daydreaming on the kitchen floor. Imagining the fragile moments of you holding me so close that I can almost feel the fragrance of your unkempt hair seep into me. Imagining counting stars on your bare chest. I think most of the times I'm too tipsy during the afternoons, or too sleepy. Or, maybe I just get a high just thinking about you. And on cold winter mornings like these, my reveries keep me warm and I think about playing with your scent and kissing your brow while you're asleep.

I've tried shaking these thoughts away but they get to me, you know. You set me free, somehow. I see my unchained skies in your eyes. When you smile. When you take off your glasses from all that silly laughter we've had, you enchant me, your eyes - they leave me a little breathless. And to be with you, around you is like walking under the rainclouds. You are love. Love is you. I don't know what love is. I'm curious to know who you really are. You, like love, are nothing and everything. To me. You are silence, like love is silence. We walk together in this silence, sometimes. We know when to fill those voids with words and songs. We smile, and don't let us know. I think we're in love and yet, we do nothing about it. Sometimes we do almost everything about it. We don't know we're in love; we don't know we're silent. And, you don't even understand how at times I steal our metaphors to capture into poetry in vain.

You intrigue me. You and your words, and your ability to keep things inside and yet, smile. I wonder how you glow like a tiny firefly in complete darkness. No, you aren't really a firefly. Fireflies die everynight and fireflies come back as marbles; they bring back memories. Fireflies become tiny rounded colourful marbles that stare right into your face reminding you of trices that you couldn't hold in your palms. Nay! you are not a firefly or a marble. You're you. You're silence. The partial absence of words. Love. An ennui. Shards of daydreams cascading through the blinds like sunshine on lazy afternoons.

You're the road I take with you. You're the long long walks around the old storyteller town under the moonlight. You are the crevices in the hills where we find wild purple flowers and capture them on polaroid. You are the poem you don't understand. You're nothing and everything to me. You're love.