Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.

Now I need a place to hide away.

Siesta

The midnight blue sun bleeds feebly outside my window.
"Love me tender, Love me true, all my dreams fulfill..."

Your warm silhouetted figure passes gently by the bed.
I reach out with my fingers to touch you.
Cold tipped fingers brush against a warm palm.
I shudder involuntarily.
"I knew I'd find you here."

I feel the pressure of your knee as you shift your weight onto it to climb into bed with me.
I have waited for this day for a very long time.
 I feel a buzzing in my ears as a heavy weight settles in the fold of my breasts.
I savour the weight nostalgically.
It is where my heart used to be.

And then the phantom weight is replaced by your arm as you wrap it around my breasts from behind.
Trapped. A love-grip that I never want to escape.
Instinctively I turn towards you in the dark and my lips finally find yours.
You taste like smoke and a vanilla star.
And your hands struggle through my hair and my breath is hot and my tongue is parched
And I don't know what I want but I know I don't have it yet.

You briefly prop yourself  up on your elbow and lazily draw a pattern down my breasts and my stomach, stopping precariously.
I can't see your face but I know what you're thinking.
Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place.

Your body presses into mine slowly, probing, slowly, too achingly slow.
Throb. Throb. Throb.
A dull pain that doesn't seem to stop.
Till you part my quivering thighs and penetrate me with your tongue.
A love-cure.
And all I can do is close my eyes and squeeze my toes together and...

"Take me to the place where you go
Where nobody knows if it's night or day."

I squint up as my bedroom door is flung open, flooding my room momentarily with a harsh morning light.
"Did I wake you up baby?"
I smile weakly at my boyfriend.
You have fled again, before I had a chance to ask you your name.
Someday...
Till then this is our little secret.

"You may say I'm a dreamer..."

In Light of Recent Events...

People ask me why I declined all invitations to join in the protests that are happening in the city I now live in- New Delhi - why I never signed any petition they posted on my wall- Why I never changed my DP or shared pictures online to support the cause.
The truth is- I don't know.
Today I see the youth of India want change. Delhi wants change. They have been rudely shaken by the fact that an educated girl who would chose a movie like 'The Life of Pi' at a South Delhi multiplex could meet such an end. Suddenly, the threat is not in the outskirts or lower class women- domestic help, Dalit women, jail inmates etc

The shock was more personal than I had expected it to be- after all, I too had watched 'The Life Of Pi' at Select City Walk, Saket,with my classmates on December 4th. The show got over in the evening and I made my way back home.
I was lucky.
People all around the country are wanting change.
They want women to be fearless and stand up for themselves.

I was at CP, Jantar Mantar on 23rd December. I did not join in the protest. It took me an hour to reach home, the streets were blocked due to the protesters. My auto was immobile due to the traffic. a bike on my left hand side drew my attention- the pillion rider was staring at my face. Unlike other times however, I did not turn my face away. I pulled my muffler down and stared back at him. As he had slowly leaned toward the auto initially, I leaned toward him. He slowly drew away. The auto driver looked at me in the mirror. The traffic started flowing as usual.
Strangely, I did not feel triumphant.


Recently, I did something where I thought I was standing up for myself- albeit on a public forum like FB, and I had to face a lot of flak for it. People I did not even know were inboxing me and asking me to keep my issue private- to keep it off FB- to keep quiet.
I had done that for a year.
Now there will not be too many people who read this post, and those who do, will think it is unrelated to the national issue.
But I can only decipher what is happening in the world in terms that are familiar to me.
I see a sea of opinions against a woman who wants to take matters in her own hands.
Does the mind, the body, the very will of a woman depend on the people who will talk and talk and do nothing?
Who will label a woman because she decides to give her body to one man and not six?
The youth demand justice for rape, but do they understand that their mindless gossip, abuse, slang-rapes a woman of her dignity?
It is done without a thought. A woman is a slut, a whore, a bitch, a cunt. There are many choice words that I don't know in Hindi and Bengali that might have similar meanings used on a daily basis. People don't mean them. It's just habit. An ex of mine had no qualms calling his friends 'chooth' or 'ma ka bur' or 'maagi'- only later, much later, when I realised the meanings have I abhorred them.
But now people reading the post will think I am being too sensitive. Maybe I am. Maybe I live in what my favourite professor an my University called 'the climate of fear'.
Ironically, he used it with respect to the Incidents post 9/11.

9/11 will be remembered in history. But 16/12 when the crime was committed will be forgotten.
I had this horrible idea of reading about rape cases in India. I really shouldn't have. I started with the Mathura rape case of 1974.
After going through ten different rape cases, spanning thirty years - I had a dull ache in the lower part of my stomach.
Medically, it is where my intestines still lie.

I am lucky to be alive, lucky not to have been raped- yet.

For that is all that remains to keep me safe in this city, or any other part of the country any more.
That and the will of God.

No Where To Put It.

Sometimes there is pain but nowhere to put it. Where does it go?

Walking through the different levels of grief alone now, when we were supposed to do it together.
Or maybe it was all a figment of my imagination? The importance I pleaded silently from you?
 ‘ I could rest my head just knowin’ that you were mine. All mine.’
 But were you?
The human brain, left to itself, chooses to rearrange events, word, gestures. Dissolve barriers and create meaning in things you think held value.
I am losing my mind.
The last vestiges of sanity seem to be slipping from me, melting down and trickling into empty Void.
This schism between someone who is adapting, surviving, bent but not broken.
And someone who does not want to adapt, who does not want to survive, who wants to break.
I am tired of being the ‘strong’ one.
How much longer?
I don’t know.
Self-pity comes easily on a dry, cold November night. But this is more than this. What is the meaning of anything really?
The thing that strikes me more that anything else is that I may not have been all that important to you in the final days, that this is a horrible way of showing me  that I had got a chance, and another, and another, to love you, to understand you, to help you, and I had failed.
You, better that anyone else knew my fixation with what I don’t have. Possibly I never wanted you because I always thought I had you.

 The one day, one pure day of peace, such as I have never known. One day of unadulterated Happiness. When I was one with another body and more than that- I felt one with another soul. The way another being can mingle completely with you, without even touching you. Has anyone else been able to do it?

Rather it was me who came pleading to you that night, yes it was me. My conscious self says it was  somnambulism- but that is just defence. Yes, I can accept that I desired you! The tension that was palpable within four walls, heavy like a weight on my heart. These are Romantic terms. But then it was one day within A Week That Never Was. And then back to reality.
And things became worse. And now how do I accept this reality?
‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.’
Dead. Why dead? Why always Death? 
Why always strife? Why not Life? Why not Life?
And if Death, why then you? Why not I?
And if there was love then why not a word about me? Not a single secret letter? Not a post-it? No message? None.  No love? Loving me was done?
Words are incoherent,  sentences remain unspun, my fingers are shaking, my very thought is numb.
Mad girl’s love song. Mad song of a girl in love. At last. At last. At last.
Madness on a page by Me. She, on the other hand is cured for tonight and goes with tempest feet in search for Him.  Answers. She needs answers. She DEMANDS it this time.
A stretch of field bursting with wild purple flower with a solitary tree in the distance, flattened at the top, is it under those dark branches that She will wait for Him?
A winding waterfall that falls musically into a sparkle, its mist forming pale pink clouds. Is it in that cloudscape that She will find Him, floating on a guitar-shaped puff perhaps?
Or is it in that  room on the roof of the old house in which She last bade Him goodbye? The place where Her lips almost, almost touched His cheek, but never did. As if Her very being was informing Her that this was the last time She was seeing Him breathe?
She has six hours to find Him before She returns to Me tonight.
It is no wonder that I never remember my dreams these days.

November Blues

Everyone has a favourite time of the year,
For me it's November.
People shopping for woollens,
Autumn preparing resolutely for death.
Misty mornings, hazy afternoons, smoky nights.
That time of the year when you can leave your hair loose and let it cascade down your back and shoulders-
like a glorious, uneven black shawl.
When you can snuggle in bed with your dog, nuzzling in the soft, warm space behind your ear.
That time of the year when you miss him the most and search for starry patterns of his face in the night sky.
Christmas-time is close at hand and so is his birthday.
He was to be twenty-two this year.
(Oh crap! Focus dude! This was to be a happy, descriptive entry about the month I love, not the people!)
That time of the year when the walls you build around your heart are brought down brick by brick,
For a little Autumn-cleaning.
Before your build it up again to fortify against the chilling blast of Winter.
November is the time to listen to your favourite rock-band and pray for cold rain.
November is a time for love, for a little flame,
Ignited in the furthermost room of your blackened heart,
Where you don't have to be afraid of the soot-stains.
November is 27 days left and counting.
Disappearing like the rustling brown leaves on dry, flaky branches
and twigs that crack with a fatal groan beneath your approaching step.
But what I love about November the most -
What makes it so special to me -
Is it returning to me after it dies yearly.
Enmeshing me in a unique cycle of loss and victory,
Pain and patience and joy-
Unparalleled by any other thing or person I have had the fortune of loving dearly.