My Sunshine

Let's go around the world for a change, let's forget everything that happened in my life. Yes, it's more important that you forget everything or you will keep bringing them up. It's your habit. And my face, my eyes, they are too difficult to ignore. Do you see him in them? No, I never mention him, his name, anything about him or of him. But you still have brought him up many a times. Have I asked you to bring him up? Have I?

Silly name, silly guy. The entire world knows of him as Sunshine. Snehu's Sunshine. And now he is gone. Was it me who pulled down the blinds? Yes. I, the arrogant girl, the girl who doesn't want to leave her couch of self-admiration, flattery, the girl who is afraid of guilt and all the pain. "Sneha Balraj is a dark cloud that engulfed Sunshine." I made his life miserable. And now when it's time for me to feel guilty, in a master act, I change my phone number, I don't give him a call. How easily have I wiped him away?

May be it's true when he said that I get over guys like mirrors over reflections.May be. I have always been impressed by charm, true or phony doesn't matter.I have always swooned over long legs, silky hair, and polished accent. This girl, this so called girl has always run after sophistications in life. And now, when she realizes that it was life's forgery, she doesn't have anywhere to go.

Blog? What is it? What the heck is this place? Pour out grief and wait for people to peck at it? Oh! Sympathy gives me relief! People would swoop down on me, pat my back and leave. Leave, just like he did. But I made him leave didn't I? I just made him leave. And he just left. He didn't turn back to ask me if he could drop me home, if Dad was coming to pick me up, if Anjali was home where I could shack up for the night. He just turned his back on me and walked away. I deserved it. I deserved such rudeness.

All these years I leaned on him, my heavy ego and my heavier sack of grief and break-up stories. He carried me all the way long, and not even once I asked him about his half of life. 

And when he screamed at me that day," What do you know about me? Have you even tried?" I had whimpered back," Tum bolte kab ho?"

The idiot, even then, had made me laugh," Tum bolne kab deti ho?"

Girls like me shouldn't get friends like him. And sometimes I think it's for girls like me He creates such friends. Without him I would have lost myself a long way back. He kept me on a love-leash. Can I use "love" here? 

To the one I miss.

For some reason you have fallen silent, for some reason you have become wordless. For some reason you have left me to the narcissistic ranting of "I", "my love", "my pain", "my joy" around me, for some reason you are on your own. Silence has become you...you have become the silence.But you wouldn't tell me why. Why would you tell a stranger?  

There are no nostalgic moments that once arrived as mystics and raptured me with their recitals, no more breeze that moved like a widow's walk, no kindred spirits over the rocklines, no love, no longing, no sorrow that pricked the me who lives underneath me. You have fallen silent now...wordless.

Why, did love fail you? Did someone fail you? Or was it the other way around in both the cases? But you wouldn't tell me. May be you have become the tenant of vacuum bubbles. May be you have found your space on those billboards where you used to lose you adventurous eyes. And now you are wordless.

Can't say when will you return but I will be waiting. Can't say if you ever will return but I will be waiting. See, there's no attachment between us, there's not even the chance of a spittle-thread that we are related but somehow your words bite into my skin and nibble away my sweet flesh.

A VERY HAPPY DIWALI TO YOU!

The Long wait.

It was raining today. Behind the glass panes of a bakery, this slender girl of 20 something waited for the rain to stop. Or was she really waiting for it stop? Sigh! Love was in the air...Gosh! That's so cliche`! 

But heck~ Love is in the air. But who is he, I don't know! How strange that I feel romantic but I don't have a face to romance with...My diary is filled with mushy confessions about faces, all the charming, young men who can steal any girl's heart but none of them close to mine the way I desired. Yes, they have made this girl clutch her pillows tight and and close her eyes tighter at nights, yes they have sometimes sprung straight out of some line of Norah Robert's novel, forcing me to underline that line again and again with my Bugs Bunny Pencil! But there's something missing in them, something that is necessary for their existence when I move beyond such fantasies. Something...that only a girl knows. She knows when she finds that missing something. But she doesn't know in what package will it come, a skewed smile, a casual wink, a touch, an embrace, a ruffling of hair, I don't know!

So my search is still on. Despite of those two heartbreaks, despite of those few guys who gave me false hopes of turning out to be the perfect one but who ended up being such jerks and gave me quite a funny, ticklish kinda sting to my heart; despite of the loneliness, of all the sobbing and sniffing with Sunshine, despite of mom's scary, now almost an accepted but yet to be proved ranting of "Iss ladki se koi ladka shaadi nain karega!", despite of all the despair, the tears, the buried pain that sometimes explodes from inside and crumbles me like a clay doll, despite of all the cynicism that the world is preaching about love, and despite I being Sneha, I am hopeful! Love will find it's way to me and I have to be ready for it! I can't afford to show him my puffed up lips, my swollen eyes, my sunken cheeks! I have to be pretty and smiling and jolly good! Sneha madam! Tere ko chudail nahin, superhit dikhna hai! Right now,  all this girl misses are two cute dimples on her cheeks! I am jealous of girls who have em!

Pain, it's inevitable. And there's no choice but to face it, to cry, to break under it, to let it coil around you and strangle you till you gasp for breath, and you have to hold yourself when you shiver. There's no escaping the suffering. The one who gets the wounds she alone suffers.  But then,  I won't let it win over me so easily, I won't. I will love and like everyone I too deserve to be loved. And someday I will have it.  I am waiting and I am happy waiting for it. I am happy doing all the calculations, the permutations, the combinations! Hell yaar!

A friend tells me, " You don't know anything about love and it's pain. How can you be so happy after you had a break up? Don't you miss him? Don't you remember the moments?" Well, Sri (Oops! I just took her name! But she doesn't know about my blog! ;-) ) I loved and my heart bled like every heart does. When it ended, i was shattered, i was broken, and oh yes I cried. But I don't know how to express it, I don't how to tell it to world how I suffered. So you would be happy if I tell you that for a week I missed my classes just because I was stoned with grief? Will my confessing that I had to take sleeping pills to sleep assure you that my love was real and not just a fling? But why should I do anything to prove anything to anyone? It was my love! I loved him and I loved him with my life. We separated, I suffered and that's it. I don't need a "Certificate of grief" to quantify my love for him! I LOVED HIM! That is all you should know. I didn't get what I deserved but I am hopeful that someday I will! :)

I am waiting for my time...AND ALL HELL WILL BREAK LOSE WHEN I WILL FIND HIM! 

 :-D

Excerpts

1:

The dug up roadside has dried too,looking like a miniature mountain range of valleys and dried rivers.The potholes have dried and the pebbles in them lay like unearthed treasures.  When the trucks ride across these holes they thud and throw dust in the air but no splashes or artworks of muddy water on tarmac roads. Rain's gone. Look how the panes collect sheets of dust, as if waiting for someone to write a name or just daub at them. And there, I have written my name, the curves so distinct before another layer would smudge them. Look how every morning the sun glows against them and each mote of dust shines like gold dust. Look how the rain left without warning.

It now fogs late at night and the streetlights release a hazy light. Every smell hangs close to the ground, every 

2:

It was quiet; kneel and you could hear the moist grass  crunch under their shifting feet. It was that quiet. The wind blew, gently drawn towards the vast empty stretches where it could go wild. That night it was as dry as a spinster's love but as gentle as a widow's walk, crisp with longing. It was warm though, as if it had escaped from under the folds of a Kashmiri Shawl. The park bench was lit by the solitary street-lamp that bent over the the bodies as it eavesdropped. It's nocturnal company, the mangy dog lay curled next to it with it's ears up in distrust for the unlikely neighbors at such an hour.

3:

But every evening, we smuggle ourselves, steal each other from under the weary eyes of the day and come to this place. For a brief moment our worlds touch each other and we shiver, as a welcome intrusion flirts with our closed lives with unfamiliar caresses.

We watch the lovers hide in their niches behind the rocks and hold a conversation with the sea- a triad symphony of unfathomable depths. We stand on the rocks and watch the tumbleweeds roll along the sandy shores, sometimes getting entangled but pushed along by the strong wind and our cheers. We exist on these rocks as anonymous, unnamed silhouettes grazed by the wind and spoken to by the waves. We watch every thing till it ignores us and the moment we feel that we are stared back, we turn our faces...we turn our faces. And when the night decides to cave in, afraid of losing our identity as shadows by the rocklines, we fade, we vanish, we break into a million wispy fragments....

4:

About a Prostitute and Beggar:

I am a beggar Rukhsana. I live close to the dust, the spit-balls, the leftovers and the licked clean leaf-bowls,the torn clothes and the split shoes. But I am fortunate that my only hunger lies below my chest and above the waist, where the insides churn and burn for a morsel. But then I see that we row the same boat, we stitch the same torn clothes. Deprived, dispensable gobbets of flesh to be used or mauled and then despised at the end. We both are paid only when we put ourselves down in our own eyes,and we have our defenses against our guilt. And one day we will die a famous death, I'll be on every pair of lips-"The man who crawled the streets died today." and so will you. But our fame will be short lived. And one night, under the same stars, the same sky and by the same alley one more of me will be asking the same questions to one more of you. We both are the indispensable and inevitable parts of our worlds...the deprived, dispensable gobbets of flesh.

That Blogger

There isn't much to life and it's intricacies. We are the ones who make it complicated. Life always poses us questions with "Yes" and "No" answers. It's we who taint it with a thousand shades, prolong the decisions and let cobwebs hang from it; we love making things difficult for ourselves. That is what I think of life. But then you seem to be a master at denying every thought of me. You have showed me that how relationships as simple as love can be filled with so many layers. You write in layers...The conversations you write have so many layers.No wonder the world, overfed with simplicity and obsessed with self , can't understand. Even I am one of them. When I read you, it all begins with jealousy, "Huh! What's so great about it! Even I can write like that!" But it's only after I close the Chrome Window that I realise that it was not about the language I should be concerned but about what were you trying to say. I shouldn't have been a critic, a reader, a fellow blogger there but a quite listener. But am I the only one like me?

Well, that's what I guess when I find no comments on your posts. May be what you write are too far fetched and only a dozen in a million would understand and relate. 

You are different from the rest. You are not like them, the ones who cry for love and do so with Cliche`s. I don't know who you are or from where you are but you are an intrigue to me. You write about women, about Prostitutes, about girls swooning with pride, about girls like me and unlike me, you write about love but then not about love. You are the only one I read who touches lust with the softness of love, who just adds a tinge of insanity to purity, like a drop of ink to a bowl of milk. That's what I think of your writing.

You write about nights, your lonely walks on the footpaths, the pariahs, children...You write about dispassionate love but only as conversations. I don't know who you are but you certainly are not one of them...

I haven't found you following anyone, you rarely comment and it's not strange that, no one comments on your posts either.  So, you are one of those "I write for myself" types. No affinity for the audience. Then why write at all? I know, no matter how many times one says that their Blogs are their personal space where they write about their personal feelings but the moment you put word to that page nothing remains personal. There's always that audience who controls your words. But you are different...

You don't wait for people to read you, you write almost everyday, sometimes twice a day and sometimes for days you just disappear. One needs to stalk you though, to keep track of what you write. You have this habit of sometimes removing the posts...

You use the most outrageous of metaphors.Most uncommon I should say. You are not like the rest who can't help write about froth when they write about sea, for whom the longing brings the word "Miss you" and whatever else they write sounds nothing more than that word ...you write about tumbleweeds rolling along the beaches, you write about whole gardens of silhouettes, you write about intoxicated men in sinful casts.

I wish I could meet you just once, I wish I could talk to you at least once. I am intimidated to even comment on your posts. You come to me as a stranger who better stay as a stranger.

"...wry notes of saxophone..."

Keep writing...for yourself. :)

Sneha

Boyce Avenue - Not Enough