623: the day i looked good

-


Last night, I sat in the car after driving back from Phoenix. I'd returned from a work trip to Lonavala. I'd slumped off in the cab ride to office. By the time I reached work, I was shivering with hunger and fever. My neck hurt. A slow fever was taking over. I wanted to get away soon from work, so my friend and I decided to watch a movie. So after a 12 hour work-day, I drove to Phoenix. There was a mighty traffic snarl. Took me two hours to reach the cinema. My eyes watered and my knuckles were clenched. I was very angry.

It was again a really late night. I had started feeling weepy all over again. It's like clockwork how the dark pain unspools on nights. Then the song 'Kuchh toh bata zindagi' from Bajrangi Bhaijaan came on. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwrCYAIdkeM) I love that song and I love that movie. This song is picturised on Nawaz, Salman, and the little girl when they're looking for the girl's home. They haven't found it yet but the mood is still cheerful and soft. Like when you know that from wherever you reach, there'll be no further walking or struggle or the possibility of getting up an going again. For some reason, at that point, I just felt that I have no home. I don't have a situation from where I feel I will not have to struggle any more. And all this while, the many meditations, the abstinence from liquor or everything else - last night, it felt that I was punishing myself. Like I was serving time interminably. All that was making me brittle and I was crumbling.

I don't want to die like this. Even if I have to live with this weepy chaos every single minute of my life, I want it to be well taken care of. It is still a part of me, however it is. Long time ago, a man I loved very much had told me, in anger maybe, that it was my destiny to cry. Much of my time since then has been either trying to get him to take that back or prove him wrong or worry about whether he is right. He's not in the picture anymore but somehow that statement had become my dictum to live by or against for all this time.

I feel now I am done.

Today I had fever and some weird deliriums. Later a friend got kharvas which is a sweet, milky pudding made of the cow's first milk. It is so tasty! I sat and ate one square at time, just soaking in he sweetness. Not worrying how fat I'll become or whether my pants will get tight. We went out to a pub after. I simply wore loose clothes. I drank beautiful, ruby colored Absinthe. After so many years of not touching liquor, I had Absinthe. I swayed to the music. My friend and I sat somewhere with our drinks and giggled. She clicked us.

In the picture, I glowed. The hair looks glossy, my eyes are bright, the skin's glowing, and I actually look beautiful!

Sometimes I feel that I think that my destiny is damaged in some way. And when that person said what he said, I felt that if I argued long and hard, then that wouldn't come true. But a destiny, broken or not, is what has kept me going for so long. My pain, my joy, my other end of the parallel line...today, I drank to that.

Even a broken destiny, I'm guessing, can say 'Cheers!'





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more