Mirror, mirror on the wall.

Distance is an unknown variable.
There are many unknown variables but distance is certainly one of the most uncertain.

If I were to be a cynic tonight… what would I see? What would I choose?

There are vignettes of feeling, of sensation… like memories from a previous life.

flaming flowers that brightly blaze
swirling clouds in violet haze*


I love that line by L.P. Hartley: “The past is like a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

How do they do things? How does one locate, retrieve, and archive the old ways?

I look.
I delve into the depths of the sea and grasp blindly at something hidden between seaweeds and fragments of shells.
What have I brought to the surface? What have I retrieved?

I remember K. and R.
Vivacious, steady, bright-eyed K.
Who went away to a faraway land and refused to stay the same person. She grew and changed and she became an older, different K. It would be silly to say “better” or “worse” than before. She was just different…
And tenacious, steady R. became the past- he became part of the foreign country and she no longer knew him, or loved him with an everlasting passion like they had promised one another.
Is such a promise viable? Realistic?
People change after all- how can we blame someone for evolving?

You said you were going to conquer new frontiers**


Then there are D. and B.
She went. He stayed.
She tried. He tried.
They both tried- really really hard.
But they fell apart anyway, and she smiled her way into the glimmering life of money, and he stayed back and began to look for love again.

We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?**


W. and P. would have tamed the world.
They would have fulfilled the fairytale fantasy of love-across-the-seven-seas.
Except that W. didn’t make it.
If ever someone has searched in a possessed, frenzied fashion for some sort of saving grace in an unexpected, inexplicable death, it is P.
She’s still trying to find it.
She’s found other things along the way- but there are no more castles in the air.
Perhaps it’s easier to think of them making it because circumstances allow for that romantic possibility..?
But no… I think not.
I really think they would have managed…

We laid her next to him beneath the willow
While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby***


But while distance is an unknown variable… and the past is painful and incoherent… it seems there may be a mantra of sorts…

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
…
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)****


Nothing is known. To attempt certainty is to defy the very laws of life, isn’t it?
Yet we strive and strain and search and seek…
Surely even the most “rational” among us cannot resist the occasional glance at a horoscope prediction..? Surely there is an inevitable thrill of expectation as we crunch open a fortune-cookie after a Cantonese dinner? I know I am susceptible. The temptation to know is ridiculously powerful.

However…it is impossible to really, truly know… So where do I go from here?

It’s easier when you go with the flow, and believe what makes the most sense to your heart.
It’s easier to find a mantra, and let it cartwheel and echo through the void of distance.

So then…that is what I choose, I suppose.
I choose to enjoy the dynamic of love.
I choose to believe in it.
I choose to have faith in the concept of bridging distance, of transforming unknown variables into manageable realities.
I choose to be talk about it, to write about it, to revel in it, to learn not to hold-back-and-keep-some-part-of-yourself-as-insurance-just-in-case…
I choose to believe that I have a choice…surely the greatest illusion of all?

I choose not to be a cynic tonight.

So here we are reinventing the wheel
I'm shaking hands with a hurricane
It's a colour that I can't describe
It's a language I can't understand**

Chaos meets sunshine meets destiny.




* “Vincent – Don Mclean
** “The Pioneers” – Bloc Party
*** “Whisky Lullaby” – Brad Paisley
**** “i carry your heart with me” – ee cummings

Never Got an Answer...!

“I’ve heard that it’s something that happens between a boy and a girl when they grow up,” said wide-eyed, curly-top Vikram, my best friend in class IV.

“Listen! I swear I’ll complain to Kumud Ma'am if you ask me dirty things like this again!” screeched Sonia the snob, my class monitor in class VII, as we returned for History class after recess.

“Don’t you ask me such smart-Alec questions! Why don’t you just focus on your studies like other 12-year olds? Huh?” admonished Radha - my imperial sister, six years my senior.

“Listen kiddo! I’ve got to rush for my football practice. Later, OK?” Rajan - my brother, my idol, my hero (just two years older than me), barked rushing past me.

“Nothing yaar! All bakwaas!” said Ronnie - the senior school swimming champion, lazily chewing his gum.

“Uff-oh! You’ll find the answer when it happens to you. Have patience dear!” said miss-know-it-all, class topper Surbhi with a saint-like look on her face.

“It’s all give-and-take business, pal!’ said Vanraj - son of a diamond merchant , my colony friend, with whom I had smoked my first cigarette.

“It’s……..I don’t know……..umm………I think…………how do I say………….rather difficult…………it’s like…………” mumbled Udita behind a veil of hash-smoke in College canteen.

“Sacrifice, beta! Sacrifice.” Said Ma and sighed!

“Good question! Hmmm...” said Pa and walked off.

“A time-pass for sentimental fools,” said Aditya- the secretary of the College photography club.

“Who’s got the time dude? Focus on the presentation,” said Iqbal - my first colleague at work - and rushed off to the conference room.

“Kyon pooch rahe ho? Pehle batao. Batao na…..!” said Rani Malhotra, fluttering her eyelashes from behind the office reception.

“Bus hai! Kucch khaas hai, bacche!” said Guruji - my music teacher - with a faraway look in his eyes

“Faaltu baaton mein time mat waste kar. Kaam kar apna,” said Andrew, my trainer at a three-day workshop on interpersonal relationships in Goa.

Never got a straight answer!

Never got an answer!

I no longer ask “What is love?”

I don’t want to.

I don’t need to.

I’m happy soaking in it, showering it.

Whatever it is……………………………!!

There is so much love that I cannot find any

Is love this composite chemical or this cosmic light that binds the world that we can only experience atoms of and are then left craving for more eternally? Or is love such a huge volume of emotions that you can see it all around you but can never find any for keeps, or even to hold for a little while? Is love existing in such a myriad of ways that it is difficult to pinpoint one avatar and say I like it best and want it to linger most? Or is love this ability to give up being loved and say I have loved and been loved so I know it cannot last forever? Or is love this magnificent feeling that really can last forever, but that not many stumble upon?

My story in love??? That's too long to keep you riveted... Suffice it to say for now that I have loved more and been loved less. Except for the two tender hearts whose world I have built, I can confidently say. And I am now at a point where I am contemplating what is contemporarily an EMA (extra marital affair). That's material for another post.

Fashioned on a tag, but is really a post.

10 random things about me and love I insist on telling you

1. When I met J, I was already with G. When I met G on my second day of college, I was seeing S. When I met S with the help of a cousin, I was with K. When K met me in Math class, I was fourteen. You walk towards the light, you walk into darkness, either way you are blinded.

2. One of the above-mentioned letters wanted to slap me in public for leaving him. He hatched a plot to get me to meet him in a place crowded by our peers and involve me in a loud row and slap me across the face, to let the world know I had hurt him. Sometimes, I wish I would have let him. I broke his heart and I remember that I did this.

3. There are two novels you will never understand fully, unless you have loved and lost the one person who made you believe in soul mate, or even soul for that matter. Devdas and Wuthering Heights.I unfortunately, wholly, completely understand both.

4. To this day, I regret refusing to kiss my fifteen-year-old first love. In a span of five minutes, he first mocked me, then looked amused and then moved to irreversible and total indifference.

5. When I was 17, G sat next to me under a tree in the rain and said, “You look so beautiful.” It was like he had complimented me into a coma. Not only did I not look at him and speak to him, I disbelieved him. I remember looking down at my muddy feet, shabby sandals and focusing on a tiny scab on my big toe and thinking, “I hate him so much for making me feel so ugly.” You gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

6. In my life, I have learnt the hard way, that when you are trying to run away from someone and that someone clings on to you— not just that he holds on, but tries to hold you back with anger and love and resentment and love and spite and love, clings on so hard that he has his feet dug into the ground and his nails are clawing into your flesh— don’t leave.If you want to cling on to someone who is leaving you with your teeth and nails, don’t. They will leave.

7. “ I want to see you happy”…… “Actually, no. I don’t want to see you happy with someone else. I hope you are never happy. I hope you are never well.”I know love is not wanting your loved one to be in pain. But I also know this is nothing but love. Flawed, selfish, human kind of love.

8. I have barely ever had intense romance with anyone other than G. But if you rock the boat too much, even if you don’t fall out, you will get nauseous. I got positively sick. So I decided never to love anyone like a crucifix. I was not being stubborn or careful. I was just being curious.

One night when I got home from work, J and I sat on our beds, silently. The music was on, I was reading, he was playing a violent video game. We had a box of chocolates on the bed. Each of us silently ate one piece at a time, without looking at each other or talking. Slowly it became painfully sweet but we were being so greedy. The need to put one more piece into the mouth became more and more urgent. I don’t know when we both passed out from the chocolate. Through the whole thing, we had not spoken one word to each other. I cannot imagine one other person who I would do this with— abandon control, be nakedly greedy, be sloth, be gluttonous, be completely unmindful of the self—except for my husband, J. I have since abandoned my curiosity.

9. At parties or social gatherings, I sometimes try to make up for my skin and hair, back fat and belly fat with cutting wit and sarcasm. Mostly it works. If I really want to, I can shine and glitter, sending the hottest girl at the club crying to the loo. My eyes twinkle and I become a whole new me. Then I look across the room and I see J thinking, this is not really her. This one quizzical look, the knowledge that he knows who you really are, is being in an intimate relationship in my book.

10. Pick out a scar and explain how you got it. It’s a game I only play with the man I love.

____ makes your world go round?

What is it that lights up your day?

With sunshine and laughter and rollercoaster thrills?

With moonbeams and sparkling-bright-eyes and tapping feet?

What is it that keeps you going?

Through winter-spring-summer-autumn?

Through the meetings and assignments and the myriad trials and travails of earning a living?

Through the addictions and the despair and the I-just-can’t-go-on-anymore?

If love, or the possibility of it, lights up your day and keeps you going, welcome to Pyar Durbar and do-do-do take a couple of minutes and jump in with your love wisdom.

If love, or the possibility of it, does not make your world go round, welcome to Pyar Durbar and do-do-do take a couple of minutes and jump in with your reality check!

Cheers!