A Bridge to Forever

This love is silent. No words, complaints or promises are shared No holding of hands, fingers entwined in passion or comfort No delving deep into the abyss of the others eyes. This love is eloquent. No exchange of forever or till death do us part, No hope of creating a new world of memories. No coming back to the nest in the dying light of the dusk. This love is blessed. No jealous gestures, no obsession to possess No apprehension of loss, no pain of waning. No desperate need to be the other’s cause of happiness. This love is a bridge. Two people, years, oceans and visions apart, Connected by an invisible, gossamer thread of emotions No hope of always, no bliss of togetherness, But enough pain to last them a lifetime, Enough love to build a bridge to forever.

Of Love,life and thereafter.......... The smell of fresh brewing coffee in a winter kitchen, the heady smell of musk in a summer night, the aroma of the first drops of rain kissing the parched earth....love comes to me associated with all these fragrances. So much has been said and written about this four letter word that I was quite in two minds to take up this cliche as my next. Words however are as willful as nature. This has been haunting me for quite some time, and till I pen them down, I will not rest in peace. This little word holds in it the power to change one's life, one's entire equilibrium. A mad gust of wind, it dishevels all your beliefs, promises,your strength. An emotion verging on the borders of madness, it is arrogant enough not to give you any explanation, rhyme or reason and simply pull you along with itself like a helpless leaf carried along by the Autumn wind. A pair of eyes, brown, black,blue or fawn....becomes the center of a one's entire world, the ears poised to drink of the sweetness of one voice, the senses aware of each touch, however brief and unintentional it might be. Its strange how people can be made and destroyed by this emotion. It un- nerves me as I prefer being the spectator and watching around me with detached indifference. Having experienced love and calmed by it, I am now an audience to the sagas playing all around me. It is, however impossible to feign indifference to the power this holds. A tempest of insane magnitude, it has the quality of a rushing mountain river. To be carried away by something so overwhelming is a blessing that the humankind has been granted. An approaching dusk spent on a terrace walking together talking away happily unaware of the time flying by, waiting for the rains, listening to music for hours altogether, laughing at little inconsequential things,for me its almost a religion. There is no such thing as fidelity, you either love a person, or don't. As heady as the fragrance of rhododendrons as you trek up a mountain, its helps little to try and reason against. It sets you free yet keeps you tied till you yield. You believe in things you never would, otherwise. I'm falling short of words here, as memories rush to engulf me. So people, go fall in love, laugh, sing, live....and thereafter....who knows what?

Till light..

Till light………. The heart is accustomed to darkness. It is the eyes that pine for light always. We all tender a strange relationship with darkness. Like or dislike are apparently very precise terms we use to proclaim our choices in life. However, these two words are too little to describe our emotions related to the dark. Before we opened our eyes to light, we were immersed in an almost divine darkness in the womb of she who brought us to light. So, life starts in darkness. Darkness binds the mother and her child in a bond so deep that it becomes the foundation of all the other relationships formed in life. A child learns to be afraid of the dark only when he learns to perceive light. The season of festivals has begun. Be it Navratri, Diwali or Christmas, we seem to have quite a step-motherly aversion towards darkness. Thousands of lights illuminate up the skies during festivities. We eagerly switch on every possible source of light in all corners of our house to welcome the joy of celebration. All of these are known facts. What is amazing is the alacrity with which we switch the lights off when it’s time to retire. We heave a sigh of relief as our senses soak in the balmy darkness and cajole us to sleep. Light seems to me a necessary commodity like many others….but it lacks the beauty and depth of darkness. All that we see is light and all that we sense is darkness. To see is to believe, we believe the existence of all that we can see. However the things that we see don’t have the charm of the dark. We relate evil to darkness. Hence the customary diya is lit every evening by the woman of the house to ward of all that is evil. But who then is evil? One who challenges good? Strange, but who then is good? Good is nothing but the negation of bad, as light is nothing but which illuminates the dark.. Light is the power of fire, we say, and we use light to worship goddess kali who is herself dark. I fail to comprehend why darkness is so abhorred in every religion and custom! Darkness is the epitome of peace. Imagine yourself in a brightly lit room amidst a migrane attack or even worse when you are howling your mascara down your cheeks! Imagine closing your eyes and seeing bright light after a day of hardwork! Darkness is a salve for broken hearts, a haven of peace for people in love, the power of meditation for an artist. We celebrate light in all its forms for the robust warmth it gives us. I embrace darkness for being my mother always, for never failing me. I have fallen in love in its scented gloom, I have known the mysticism of music in its silken breath, I have been born in it and when I die……..light no lamps for me. Do not fear for my soul, as in darkness I will embrace eternal light.

To Argha....For the times I forgot to say.......

In the mad mad rush to live, to exist, we let go of our past, at least we try our level best to do so. It seems only fair to forget all that had happened, history being a tough subject to learn by heart, coz there are so many things to remember. It seems to be a tough ask to remember all those stupid things we did in the past, most of which realized were mistakes. For all those things that were right, there was nothing wrong about them, so why take the pain of remembering them. They were right, for God’s sake!!! And so we go on, right from getting up in the morning, to eating our first meal on time, trying to get our younger ones to eat their breakfast, packing healthy meals, fruits, organizing the house, reading the newspaper to remain updated, meetings,lectures, pp presentations, politics, fashion, future planning, finance, renewal of insurance, paying premiums, calling up people on their birthdays, buying gifts for our parents….Oops! In-laws too, and then its time to go to bed. Our hours, days, months rush by. Years go past us without realization. Suddenly you are thirty, and you have to decide which age- defying potion to buy, and not forget your calcium along with your partners vitamins.
One fine day, you realize you are old, and life has just gone by. You are all alone, by yourself, have all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it! There is no one to talk to, one to fight with, no one to blame, no one to laugh with, no one to cry with! Worse even, one fine day, your partner is taken away by a cruel joke of fate…. And you are left by yourself. Well, the logical solution would be to mourn the loss, and go on with your life because life as we know it waits for none. But then, would it be all the same? Would starting all over again be easy? Would the same struggle to live, the same need to look good, stay healthy, be successful start all over again? God! What have we become? I would really like to say, I have started getting freaked out after realizing how mechanical everything has become in my life!
What made me suddenly this wise? You guys can stop the guessing game now. It is my favourite mush movie that gave me this rude shock today. Sony pix was airing ‘PS: I love you’ since 2:35 this afternoon. It is one of my best seen romances till date. Suddenly while watching this movie I got the scare of my life. What if suddenly I didn’t have him by my side? What if I had to live in a house alone? What if all these mundane monotonous chores lose all their significance in a moment? We all forget to tell our partners we love them after a few years of being together. Actually after spending a long time together companionship becomes a habit, and after becoming a parent it often becomes very inconvenient to express your emotions. I mean it would seem very embarrassing to suddenly stop him while he is going to office after dropping the child to school and give him a passionate kiss. So a brief hug it is, and a quick cursory brushing of lips, and “have a nice day.” After a certain time we forget how wonderful it was to sit quietly holding hands, listening to a favourite song!

And to think of it, I had fallen so madly in love with this guy before I married him! Sounds familiar, right? Most of us married out of love and choice. But as time went by , our responsibilities increased and we lost that precious incredible feeling called togetherness! Only those who have lost it young or after decades of being together can tell us what it is not to have someone to hold you, when you are sad, or lonely, or scared, or simply for the sake of holding you close. It would be so terrible to know that you loved, and that your love had been taken away! It would be the end of life as we had known it to be! I learnt a lesson today and thank goodness not the hard way. Guys, we all need to slow down and enjoy our lives now. Carpe diem is the way to go. Why plan tomorrow so meticulously, when we don’t even know what is waiting for us the next moment? I know it seems all mushy and sugar-candy stuff, but I guess this is what is actually we live for!!!

For a Peacock : lines written on a Thursday morning

There is a peacock, a peacock”, yelled my maid hysterically. “She must be nuts,” I muttered under my breath. It was 8:30 in the morning; a time which haunts every woman for at least thirty years, if not more! My husband was running late for his appointment at the passport office. I was “like “Wallet...Check, papers…..check, cell….check,…..pen….check.” My maid was still going on, “didi….didi…. mor, mor, “What the heck! I peeped out for a second and saw a sight that I had least expected! On my terrace there was really a peacock! In all its be-plumed splendour! It was moving around regally as if it was the most natural thing on earth for it to be on my terrace. As if it was a regular haunt of it’s! Time stopped, the rush of mundane life stopped; everything came to a stand still for a moment. There was a PEACOCK on my terrace.

As my husband drove away, warning me time n again, “could be aggressive, please don’t try to get too close,” I stood there for minutes watching the peacock sauntering lazily. It was so breathtakingly beautiful that I stood in awe! It turned and looked at me with eyes that seemed outlined with white kohl, and my God! Was it splendid!? I regained my senses n ran inside for my camera, but it had flown to the next terrace by then. It looked so out of place in our concrete city! I would like to correct myself; our concrete houses looked so out of place in its backdrop, so ugly, so lifeless! And here it was, moving with such a majestic grace that had me spellbound!

Some things in life, certain incidents teach us once and all that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever!” I so envy Keats! He did not work for a private concern. He was not worried about losing weight; he had no idea about passport renewals, and never had to pay his credit card bills. If I were Keats, I would sit down and write, “Ode to a Peacock” and posterity would read it with awe and worship! I am not trying to be funny. No seriously speaking, I don’t love the way I am leading my life. I hate waking up with the alarm, eating muesli for my breakfast; coax my little baby to get up for her school so early. I despise malls, I hate odonil and other synthetic room fresheners, I am sick n tired of waiting in a queue at the counter of the grocery store. I feel so repelled with what I do with my life daily. I would rather pack my bags n head for the woods for a lifetime! Or better even, grow vegetables for a living with my family on some far away mountains. But I can’t. I don’t have the courage to do so. So I make do with this lifestyle as millions of human beings are doing! I don’t have the guts like those handpicked few who can denounce worldly pleasures for a life they want!

So I stand and watch the peacock that came to my terrace from some other world on a Thursday morning to give me a reality check. To show me a mirror of how dissatisfied, how ordinary and how helpless we were in our quest for success, in our race to be excellent. And as I stood deep in reverie, suddenly it turned its head towards me, looked me deep into the eyes n flew away, leaving me thinking, would it be able to go back to the Utopia it had come from? Or will our cruel, selfish, bloodthirsty city life snatch its life away? The answer came to me as if by itself. Peacocks don’t die; I do not ever remember seeing a dead peacock. They come back to us suddenly one overcast morning as an emblem of beauty and bliss, as a denizen of that world we dream of, but never dare to create!

Of monsoons, pakodas and nostalgia..

Certain smells live in our memory forever. We are exposed to a world of senses at birth. We grow up with them and they grow on us. As children we associate smells with our feelings, moods and even people we love or hate. As we grow up, those fragrances bring back memories of certain moments, places and people.
Monsoons have just arrived in North India. The weather is overcast, the wind bringing with it sudden wafts of mogra, jeera hing ka chhonk and roasting phulkas. Sitting alone in my drawing room after the morning chores, while my daughter watches her favourite cartoon on TV in the bedroom, I suddenly feel very vulnerable to the beauty just outside my threshold. As I take a sip of good ol’ Nescafe, the rich brew brings back a plethora of images. Memories rush to engulf me.
The very first whiffs from my childhood that I can remember are those of boiled eggs, cucumber and a certain kind of lemon found in West Bengal called the ‘Gondhoraj’ or king of fragrances. Yah! Right! Quite a weird combination, I agree. I guess it starts with my staple diet consisting mainly of boiled eggs. I used to have them always; specially for breakfast. Even now, when I boil eggs for my family’s breakfast, I go back to those early mornings before school, sleepy eyed and groggy, the scent of hard boiled eggs hitting my empty stomach with a jolt. Cucumbers! Ah! They always have been a favourite. Their crisp, refreshing fragrance takes me back to bright, warm summer days of my childhood!
Talking of childhood, quite a number of smells jostle for priority. To name a few, like a true bong I will shamelessly go back again to my priority….food. I don’t know why all the best things in life smell like chocolates! A bar of dairy milk smells so much like love, like happiness, or for that matter, bliss! Chocolate reminds me of the other indispensible necessity, the faithful Nescafe, a luxury as a child! A cup of mélange(half milk, half coffee) as a child, brauner(with just a dash of milk) as I grew up. Being a coffee enthusiast, I had picked up these words in German from a book. The heady, rich aroma of coffee I somehow always associate with winters. Warm snug woolen clothes, a soft cosy blanket, holding the mug of coffee in your palms, the waft slowly filling up your senses with a pleasure so intense, I rank it only second to falling in love!
Fragrances can really be so intriguing, so funny. I still remember the scent of freshly crushed tender mango leaves in my palm. The heady scent of summer, of teenage, sleepless afternoons on the terrace or day-dreaming in the biology class in school, always the second last period of the day.
Years pass, and as we mature, these scents mature with us, making us aware of what we are, what we have been.
I stayed in Mumbai for only a little more than two years. But it has given me a fragrance I will carry with me for the rest of my life……the crisp, steaming-hot, mouth watering fragrance of onion pakodas in the monsoons. It will always bring back flashes of the waterfall just a hundred meters from my balcony, the dark, endless clouds over the national park as we drove past it.
My coffee cup has long been drained, and though I could have went on and on, I’ll have to sign off here today. It’s almost one o’ clock and I forgot to make lunch!   