My Reflections on Love, Life, and Literature!!
Elise. For long I thought I had forgotten you, but a split glimpse of you today, a photograph – a dream –, and the house of cards fell apart.
I am missing you like a poet misses a perfect word and a musician misses a perfect note until they find it.
Elise.
A beautiful evening this is. I came home early. Sitting on terrace with my laptop. The heat has cooled down. It’s breezing gently. It’s end of May. Perhaps we have already past the hottest days of the year. Monsoon will be around in a couple of weeks.
I can call it a perfect evening. I’ve switched off my phone. No one around to break my peace. A perfect weather to scribble some random lines. Peace, ephemeral, yet heavenly.
What are the worries that hung around all the day? Not a trifle certainly. Like Meer calls it, “ishq ek ‘Meer’ bhari patthar hai, ye kab tujh naatawaaN se uth’ta hai..” Those worries stay around. Despite this peace. Just waiting for this peace spell to wear off..
Love is one huge stone, O Meer! How could you weak lift it up?
I am afraid of this wretched evening. Sitting in a corner of a whole emptiness is me. Clock ticks its seconds. Evening passes by. “Waqt ke sog mein lamhoN ka juloos, jaise ek kaafila e nauhaagaraaN..” In sorrow of time, this procession of moments, like a caravan of mourners..
Things need not be this bleak always. But evenings are not things. Evenings don’t understand. Perhaps, evenings are like people trying hard to make you happy. Evenings don’t know to leave you alone when you need to be left alone. Evenings are hell in the same way as Sartre said “Hell is other people.” Evenings are not nights.
I woke at 1 a.m. last night. It was the same room, but the emptiness didn’t feel empty. It rather felt serene. Why can’t we have all nights and no evenings? I’ll perhaps need some other evening to find an answer.
Last night, when I was awake, I was actually feeling calm, at peace with myself. If I think of it now, it feels like it was a complete different person. Perhaps, it was me; a me very different from a me I am at evenings. I checked my twitter. I read my book. I hummed my poems: yuuN gumaaN hota hai garche hai abhi subah e firaq, dhal gaya hijr ka din, aa bhi gayi wasl ki raat.. It feels like – even though it’s a morning of separation – the day of staying away has just gone, here comes the night of togetherness.. At night, even separation doesn’t feel like a separation. At least, it didn’t feel like that yesterday.
But it’s not a night yet. It’s an evening, and a wretched one at it. I am sitting in a corner of a whole emptiness. The clock is ticking its seconds. The moments are passing in a procession, like a caravan of mourners.
Exactly what were his thoughts he did not know. It was an evening, already getting dark out. He was hungry with little idea about what he would have for dinner. This was not very unusual for him. He had had many evenings like this. This evening was not a different one. He was just sitting doing nothing. “I’m having a little headache perhaps”, he thought, “but it doesn’t really feel like an ache. It’s more like something is stuffed pack in the skull and it’s making pressure from within.” It was not unusual.
He lay back for a while, rested his head on the pillow. Eyes closed. Trying to feel his breath. It was such a silence. A servile fan whirling above his head. His hunger was making a call.
“Why do I need to be so tense all the time?” he thought, but then he suddenly shirked off the thought and started staring at the fan. He was still not feeling alive enough to get up and get something to eat. “It’s just a waste of life”, he murmured. He could find no reason for anything he was making through.
Today, it’s place A. Tomorrow, it’ll be place B. He had no affinity to places, but these places grow up on one’s self. This cot crackles when he jerks off on it. These bed sheets and blankets and pillows – no, he doesn’t have any attachment to them. When he leaves them tomorrow, he won’t feel any sad, just a little hurried lest he couldn’t go if he makes it late. Then it would be an end. He would find another cot to jerk off on.
What was it that was holding him together so long, he wondered. He was not sure. He was not sure even if he was still held together or was already fallen apart. “I would save this question for some later date”, he said to himself. Was he afraid? Perhaps, he was. But what was it that would make him afraid; he was not sure. It was only an evening, not the end of world.
This will take him nowhere, he knew. But it was not that he was planning to go somewhere. He was content in standing where he was – but this goddamn headache or whatever! The evening was getting darker. Some kids are playing in the backyard downstairs – happy and yelling. They’ll get tired and go home and straight to the dinner table. Mother will ask them to wash hands and such. Good kids. Mama will hold them close and caress through their hair. Kids don’t have headaches.
It’s useless, he muttered. Why on the earth that it was those kids and their fathers and not him? He was not sure if their fathers had headaches or not, but he was sure they don’t jerk off at least. He knew happiness doesn’t come for free, but he was tired of this headache, this constant buzz he was holding in his skull for so long. Something was missing. It had been months since he had been in bed.
Nothing is helping. It rained this afternoon. The air has changed suddenly from hot and humid to cool – and romantic. I tried things – played hill racing, read all my timelines, news – ate the stuff I’d bought – sat in the balcony for a while. Everything is making it worse than better.
Na, it’s sure not that simple. It’s something bigger – that I’m afraid to grasp – something deep – something dark! I’ve stopped going to depths lately – all these hot and humid days! I would rather sit the evenings in the balcony, playing hill racing.
But it rained today. The weather has changed suddenly, and for whatever, the hill racing isn’t helping any this evening.
A day when you leave home in the morning without taking your wallet. You also forget to take the access card that opens the doors at work. You need to ask someone to open the door each time you get up from your place. And they have locks for everything: parking, canteen, coffee/drinking water kiosk, etc. Even if to go toilet, you need to ask someone to open the door. You don’t even notice that you’ve forgotten the wallet until you pick up some snacks for breakfast. So kind of the shopman to allow credit. You somehow manage the day. Finally, you bike for home. You don’t remember exactly when you had filled petrol. You know that it’s on reserve. You devise a plan. Bike runs dry. You leave it at the nearest parking place. Fortunately, it’s within few meters. And you start walking. It’s your favorite hobby. Ekla chalo re… You start GPS (such a geek you are)! You have fun waking, as always. You get a call. One more reasons to live. You explain the other person how the ancient Indian mathematicians wrote big numbers, like value of pi up to 17 decimal, in shlokas. Your life is wonderful. You walk. You reach home. You no more care about the bike. You can even pick it in the morning while you go office tomorrow. It’s just 1.42 km away (geek!). You walk out and walk in opposite direction of where you had left the bike. You come at a street food place. You order for fried rice and check in on foursquare (geek). You start writing a blog while you wait for your order, and here it comes. This is how you chill your evening.
It’s a weary evening after the first working day of the week. The empty evenings feel scary after an all eventful day. Emptiness, sometimes it brings a kind of longing; sometimes just makes me feel awed with magnitude of the yet-not-happened, but never a sense of relief.
This empty evening. What shall I do now? Nothing!
P.S. The above creature is myself, yesterday, on a hair saloon chair, the same empty, looking for a metamorphosis.
I want to write something today! Write just something that would fill a complete page, because a full-page transcript looks good! I have no other reason to write, why should I kill time in such a nasty job? This is a Saturday night, a night before a long-awaited weekly holiday, and I can get good sleep tonight without thinking a damn about getting up tomorrow morning!
Yes, so as Ernest Hemingway advised, keep the first paragraph small–going good! Shall I fill this page with spaces? It won’t look good. I want to write, and write a complete page, because it looks good!
So as I was on the Reshimbag Ground, the lawn was nice, lush green! What irritated me were the red ants crawling everywhere! It seemed they are irritating even in my ears, like I’m a giant elephant with huge broad ears and a silly ant irritating me.
An Evening at Reshimbag Ground
People are just people, we can’t blame them for being so, but I was happy. Why should I think about the two guys sitting next to me who were smoking? And an uncle there was training his wife to ride a Scooty. It was a nice evening and I had a nice time there.
Did you find me out of stream? Out of flow? Writing just for the sake of writing? Because I am so! Or shall I write about the last night, which I spent almost homeless?
Okay! I should write nothing and go to sleep! This is Saturday night, tomorrow is Sunday!
The Blog of Reflections 