Sunday, June 5, 2022
it's time
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Why?
Thursday, April 1, 2021
After a cry
Monday, March 29, 2021
Bright nights, dark truths
Friday, November 20, 2020
an almanac of despair (and hope perhaps)
Monday, November 16, 2020
Lost in transit
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Overwhelmed
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Let's leave
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Whispers of this evening
From a new place of love, I try to start a chapter again, discovering the purple shades of my heart, I watch the bubbles that form and burst.
I feel my soul expand beyond my skin, as if to feel the passing wind, as the greying light from the sky, bathes me softly all around.
I look with new eyes, at the sky, till that endless point where it circles back to my earth, complete as every life should be.
Lighter, a little freer, I am asking no questions tonight, no sounds in my head, just the silence of the sailing-in night.
This indigo that breaks slowly across the sky, I am with me and all without, just this journey inward that I am on tonight,
As I discover this place of wonder, and the things I never knew I have been carrying around.
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Question
Shining light
Friday, June 5, 2020
My life a road
Friday, April 24, 2020
Mist of my mornings
The stench of a broken heart hung heavy in the evening air, he knew about life and its habit of stomping over dreams intimately. It had been some time since he had talked with anyone. In his younger years he told everything to everyone, dreams, despair, hurts, ego trips, everything got spoken out. Now it had been some years since he had truly spoken to anyone, conversations had become mostly superficial, getting something done, talking about things, but never about things that went on inside. Somewhere along the way of life, he had failed to find a person he could truly talk to. Also, a person who would want to listen.
Not talking, it eventually creates a sort of void within, you disassociate, slowly but surely, with the superficial relationships around and begin to wonder, if the eventual loneliness that is the fate of humans, would actually be difficult because, at a truly emotional level, you are already alone.
As he sat there contemplating the nothingness, he saw a distant moving silhouette of a person, making their way through the trail that cuts through the pines towards the top of Albo, as the trail curves and bends there are a few rocky patches that are visible through the sea of tree canopies from where he sat. Even from the distance, he instantly knew that purposeful gait.
She had moved to Tolu only a few months back with her husband and a dog and had struck an unlikely friendship with Narda one Sunday morning in the small market down in the center of the small hill town. Nobody moved to Tolu, people moved from Tolu. So if you were not a passing traveler, you had no business being in Tolu. This had prompted Narda, an unusually reticent proponent of small talk, to mutter a surprised hello to her, while picking groceries in the store he went to once a week. To avoid meeting people, Narda would show up in front of the store, usually ten minutes ahead of its opening in the morning. People avoided the cold of the morning and he would be the only person around. But this stranger was there ahead of him.
They spoke for a few minutes, her dog and Narda, quickly developed a mutual dislike, and then they moved along. He didn't expect to see her again, but the next morning as he was waiting for the sun to show on his portico, she showed up on the gravel dirt road ahead of his small apartment, on her way back from an early morning run. Recognizing him she waved a hi and he raised the piping hot cup of tea in response, and she asked you got more of that and that was pretty much how an unlikely acquaintance began.
The purposeful gait was below his stairs and flashed that momentary large grin, the one which showed her two slightly crooked incisors at the edges of her lips. The sun showed up, its first rays cut through the sleepy heaviness that hung over the hills. The morning tea stop bad become a fixture, she said she was not a regular tea drinker, but the days that she did want a warm cup, she was too lazy to make one for herself. So once a week or sometimes more, after her morning run through the woods, she would invite herself for a cup. Her dog had to stay at the bottom of the stairs, Narda wasn't fond of him, after a few days of whining, the dog had reconciled to this as well.
Chapter 1
That morning, her usual banter of the morning was flowing slowly, her mind as if too heavy to galivant from one thought to another. Narda was the listener between the two of them, and would generally just lounge in the chair on the right with his left ear towards her and listen to her talk for as long as it would take her to drink a cup of tea in the cold mountain mornings. Her awkward attempts at conversation this morning prompted him to ask, 'what's on your mind?'. 'Heaviness' she replied after a substantial pause.
Chapter 2
Sometimes our happiness is only a camouflage for the fears, and the pain that we carry hidden behind the smiles and normality of our life. Narda had lived that life for the longest, apparently successful by many measures, he had burned away slowly from within, until that day of reckoning, a year back. Keeping busy was his way of coping back then, afraid that any moments spent not being busy, would bring him to stare into the darkness that had slowly expanded and taken away all the space inside him. But eventually, life caught up with him, and one early morning he woke up and burst into inconsolable tears. Later in the day as he went to work, he could no longer bear to do the things that he had spent his life doing. Courage wasn't his strong suit, fears, so many of them, always held back any momentary bursts of courage.
He pursued women, with the single-minded objective of using sex as a way out of his darkness, initially it worked and kept him busy. The process involved enough mindless activities, to wile away hours and days and weeks. Eventually, though the act of sex with every woman he met, came out to be bereft of any connection beyond the physical. Most people, he met, were too busy to make anything meaningful, or maybe carried their own fears, or maybe it was Narda's own fear of eventual rejection and loss, that was mirrored by everyone he slept with. So beyond the few minutes of urgency and the smell of an alien skin, all the hours spent building up to the act, the pretenses, the fake conversations, the empty laughs, as if began to overflow his already full cup of hate. It had been more than two years since Narda, had touched a woman, and slowly, he was surprised, that his sexual needs had begun to subside. He could only laugh about that to himself, it wasn't something anyone would understand he had reasoned to himself. That was partly also because he had slowly drifted apart from his friends, they had families, kids, and lived in far off countries, the connection despite their best efforts, began to fade. The interactions were mostly about some tired forwards, a few likes, and those yearly birthday wishes. The Internet kept everyone in touch, but still, the touch was all but lost. The few friends who he could still talk to always told him how he had it lucky, not to be tethered down by relationships and how they would be happy to swap places with him. The superficiality of this response made him never to talk about his life to anyone.
In the next month, Narda winded up everything he thought was his life and began a trip back to those mountains in his head. After a few months of going from one place to another, he just happened to reach Tolu. It was a quaint town of probably only a few thousand, not much happened there, it wasn't beautiful enough for people to come as tourists and was remote enough for not many to pass through. But the town just grew on Narda, the silence of its mornings and the darkness of its nights, seemed to put balm on the emptiness he was carrying around. So he found a place to live in the remotest corner of Tolu. The place was basic but mostly served his needs. A large covered balcony, that faced the mountains, was a key part of his need. He had placed a big chair on that balcony, to spend all his morning and evenings, with either a cup of tea or a glass of whiskey. So had the life gone by in the last year, he did some work during the days, mostly on the internet, enough to keep some money coming in, Tolu wasn't an expensive place. The few people who loved him had reconciled to this change, they weren't happy, just reconciled.
The day was turning into a big sulk, the clouds had started gathering the evening before, as Narda had pulled his car into the gravel dirt road beneath his house, back from an errand. As a matter of habit, he woke up with a start in the early morning hours, and realized that the clouds were busy pelting down. The rains continued into the morning and the dampness of the day made Narda morose. He wasn't a big fan of rains, the clouds, the mud, the heavy humidity, had always made him long for the sun. Contemplating how he would spend such a day, he suddenly longed to smoke a cigarette, it was a strange longing as he hadn't had one for the last six years and he remembered well, how it was not something that went too well with his body. As he sat on his favorite chair on the balcony, looking towards Tolu, all covered in grey with low hanging rain clouds, the few green treetops that were still visible, he decided that this was not a day he could work or sit idle. With a sudden determination, he hastily put on his rain jacket and put on the boots that could wade through water and without a thought ran down the stairs into the rain. In a few minutes, he realized that it was rather cold for a summer day. But retracing steps had never been his thing, so he headed straight towards the forest at the base of Tolu. He knew that the heavy rains would have swelled the many small brooks that trickled down from Tolu and there was a mad wish in him to drown into one of those, not that it wouldn't be too difficult as he didn't know how to swim.
Friday, April 10, 2020
A million pieces
Monday, March 30, 2020
A color to paint the sky
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Locked in
Monday, March 23, 2020
Song of the whistling hill
Thursday, February 27, 2020
For you
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Moon
Lying sleepless, twisting and turning into the early am's of the night;
Vulnerable and tired, a little something wells up my eye, maybe a memory long forgotten;
Even as the weight of its wetness, stretches slowly across my arid face;
A soft wind swings the tree outside, and shining through its leaves, a resplendent moon;
Dissipating my veil of despondence, sleep it comes on a tip toe, as I smile at that silver moon.
Friday, February 21, 2020
The one
Ek Sach
Hum apne aap se bhi chup ke rote hain
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Lying on my bed, watching a small fading light bobbing around on the lake beyond the edge of my bed, I started wondering about life. Have b...
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From a new place of love, I try to start a chapter again, discovering the purple shades of my heart, I watch the bubbles that form and burst...
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As the sun went behind Albo, the tallest hill in town, everything grew suddenly colder and quite. Narda had been moping through the weeken...