gift wrapping

Parcels arrive in all kinds of shapes and sizes.
There were some that arrived all the way from Bhutan, packed with freshly-buttered parathas, pickles and kaju katlis. They were soaked in Meenakshi's mom's love. And I remember waiting for the threads of the packet to come unbound and for the parathas with all sorts of pickles to land on our use-and-throw paper plates.
Food never tasted as great as they did in the Loreto air, the Darjeeling cold always making you hungry for more.

Yesterday, my Santa's sack arrived.
With feverish fingers, I ripped open the packet and out of it tumbled, scarves, gloves and socks that will keep the cold away this Winter.

There's always a mother looking out for you. From some far-flung corner of the world, sometimes.
How did I get so lucky?

this special man

Leonard Cohen

you with your beautiful voice
and real words
i wish you knew
that on nights
when the window is an opening
to cold fears and hallucinations
your music keeps me afloat
and i drift into sleep

mist

the city wears a shroud today
of years
that we only heard of

this stillness too,
is yours

i mourn the loss of my favourite blog sometimes.

'letter to self' of sorts

Dear girl,

You and I talk all the time. Yet, I am unable to tell you that most of the time, I’m just sad for you. Sad, you are misunderstood. Sad that your willingness to give gets confused for charity. I’ve watched you change over the years. From that girl who laughed a lot but sometimes in secret, wanted a boy to turn around and look at you twice, you’ve turned into this girl, who’s so afraid of men.

Yesterday, I was looking at this picture of you Annie took just before she left ten years ago. You stand in the photo, near a monsoon puddle in Tinkune, your tongue, sticking out, as though you were thinking about Einstein when that picture was taken. You are not that girl anymore. What happened to that girl?

You don’t have to answer that question. But today, I want to ask you to do yourself a favour. I want you to learn to be more honest with yourself. This will not be easy. But listen. Be honest with yourself. Tell yourself what is beautiful is also perishable. Remind yourself that love isn’t  what people told you it was when you were growing up. Men don’t stay in love forever. And yet, I know how every time you loved a man, you loved like it was real. You cobbled dreams out of your aches and stuck a prayer on the bond—desperately hoping it would last. And when the love was moving away, you always knew that a man doesn’t know how to love. You longed for someone who knew how to stay. But men don’t. And because you knew this man has hurt the one before you, exactly the same way and would hurt the next one exactly the same again, you let him leave. You wouldn’t ask him to stay.

But sometimes, our dreams need an anchor, too. We want to find little crevices where we can hide a little light and hope they shine on us someday, when solitude becomes too much to bear. And yet, my darling, solitude is your only bliss. It’s the only place you will ever find peace.

Peace—if that’s what you want, you need to learn to stay away from this delusion called ‘man’. But if you think you aren’t afraid of what will happen to you when you are at the brink of an orgasm, if you are not afraid of what will happen when you wake up one morning and realize this man who held your feet in his hands and said, ‘so nice’, has left, if you are that brave to face it again and again, open yourself up to loving. Let them come as they will. Let them know when they come that you are not afraid of hurt and if hurt is the way you must go down, so be it.

Most of all, never be embarrassed of your hurt. Don’t be ashamed when your heart cringes in pain and you want to go down on your knees and ask the man to kiss you one more time, before he moves on. Who knows what memories that kiss will converge in? And even if it makes no memory, at least you know you didn’t give up without trying. Take heart, my darling. And learn to be less afraid of love. Be more vulnerable. But always, brace yourself with more strength than the last time.

Love,

me

i too
need someone
who knows how to stay

love,

we are war.
you and i.
there will only be ceasefire
with death.