I sat on the park bench today and cried my heart aloud. I was being a baby. You don't sit on park benches in foreign countries and cry out aloud unless you wanna look like a fool. I felt like one. I felt down, low, disillusioned. I am tired of finding happiness inside of me time and time again. I am tired of being my own knight in shining armour. It isn't easy. I know I can be alone and happy and independent but now it is tiring me. I wanna lean on someone. I am tired of doing this entire jiggy alone. On bad days or rather when some bad news disturbs me, I sometimes crave for a hug or to be just held and to be told it'll be alright. I know I'll have to continue this show alone cos tears are not the answer to anything. Crying it out doesn't help. The tears stop, you get up, wipe them off and walk on. It helps when after all your howling on that park bench you get a text from a friend saying "coffee and icecream"? You can't believe your luck. You text them back so relieved that atleast someone heard your crying prayers. I remember this Richard Bach quote I read when I was younger and some part of me took it too seriously. Arghhhhh! "We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks .All these years and at last we met. Imagine that...." I know I am strong, I know somedays I feel like magic, I am funny, I am smart, I am quirky and all of this and that. I can be rock solid,I can be ridiculously stupid, silly, I can make a complete fool of myself, I can be a moron, I can be quite the brazen hussy, I can be the Queen Of Self Pity, I can be an embarassment, I can hate myself, I can be a love sick heartbroken looney for years, I can be this pining, needy, clingy girl, I need self assurance every now and then, I can hit rock bottom, I can shock you, I can be the bestest friend to some of my friends, I can be quite the bitch,I can be lost in the dark, I won't recognise myself then, I'll hate myself, I can get out of all of that self hate and self loathe and find myself again, I can manage to metamorphose into this woman I am today, this woman I knew I could be, wanted to be, but somehow hadn't had the courage to be, this woman I am growing to love. I love myself on most days these days. I love my curves, I love my big butt, my big bust, I never thought I would. I made peace with my scanty hair, I love the brown colour of whatever hair that is left, the fact that it looks brown in the sun. I found something I love to do. Is that the reason? I don't know if I can manage to do that for the rest of my life though. I wish and pray I can do this forever, earn a decent living through this. I never ever thought I would find this "me" again. I lost this me for 12 whole years. I wish I found love though. I stopped looking for it as much as I did my entire twenties. The kinds that'll fill my emptiness and take this ache away. I don't need to find myself through him. I just need him to walk by my side. I already found myself, I did. And I did all of that all by myself. But now I need a partner, I so do. I don't want crumbs God.

I shall live. I shall live.

When I was 23 a friend set me up with her bookish cousin who in hind sight was a sweet boy. He was a book worm, majorly into sci-fi books and animated series and flicks. I would actually wake up at 6:30 AM every day and sit yawning in front of the TV to catch the latest episode of the cartoon series just so we could talk about it. Some days he would wake me up through consecutive missed calls ensuring I didn’t miss the episode. Those were the days of the missed calls. Missed calls meant call me back right now cause I don’t have balance or it meant call me back later cause Mum won’t let me use her phone and she gets an itemised bill that shall give her all the gory details about me at the end of month and she’ll get to know exactly which boy I have been romancing over the phone, at the most unearthly hours. I digress. So the boy took me out a couple of times and we went trapezing on his bike around the entire city, went for walks on the beach, had ice creams and one day he got me a soft toy. It was a dog and I named it Jumble. I was young, just out of college, waiting to begin my first job and despite thinking I was mature beyond my years I actually loved that soft, fuzzy toy. Jumble got lost somewhere along way, shifting cities and jobs, time and time again. The boy and I parted as we began, as friends. Boys and men have come and gone. We meet and we part. Like someone said men come and go and they indeed do. Now that I shall be 30 in about 7 months, people also tell me that it won’t always be like this. There’ll come a time when age would have played havoc with your looks and men won’t find you attractive anymore. In short they are warning me against the perils of being the possible old maid or spinster. I laugh and ask them what makes them think that I have always had constant stream of admirers throughout my twenties and not that I surround myself with men who fancy me and have never done so. I don’t flatter myself about the men in my life. Of course I do like the periodic bouts of incessant attention but there has never been any guarantee of uninterrupted attention and no stable relationship and it has all been so transitory. So yeah for now I am gonna hope something good does come along someday and if and when it doesn’t come, well I have my work, my life. That is one thing I have had, I have and I shall have. And I shall live. I shall live.

We live in a world of glorious uncertainties where the scales keep tipping from one end to the other. Nothing is guaranteed, not success, not love, not money and health the least of all. Nothing at all. We live one moment at a time, one day at a time. We tiptoe into the next day rather cautiously most times and happily those rare times. When something that might be joyous reveals itself slowly, bit by bit, one step at a time I have to pinch myself to make myself believe that this might be true or am I imagining this? No you don’t know who you are but surprisingly you make me smile. I shall leave it at that.

For starters I realised last evening, after two consecutive allergy stricken weekends that anti histamines do not make me sleepy. They just don’t. I can gulp down the strongest allegra and be just as alive and kicking as I was without a hint of sleep or drowsiness clouding my thoughts. I have wanted to write but guess I am going through a bloggers block. Does that term exist at all? I am guessing it does. On one hand I had this imaginary post in my head last night but I just knew that by the time I had battled the sultry heat and humidity in the morning and managed to reach office way before the mandatory in time the words won’t be spouting off me. So here you go. They just aren’t. I have travelled a little bit the last one month. Spent the laziest three days in my Aunt’s gorgeous house in Chennai doing nothing but catching up on my sleep and hanging around with old friends. I had such a great time hanging out at Zara after years and drinking glass after glass of Sangria and chatting and talking about everything under the sun. How tired I am of Calcutta already and how I miss hanging out with warm, friendly people. Sigh! They were three days so well spent. There was also this exceptionally uninteresting weekend spent in Shillong quite by myself. After doing the usual touristy stuff I was cooped in my resort watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy. I couldn’t even walk around that hotel property cos the Prince of Tripura who owns the darned place lets open his dogs at the most inappropriate times of the day. Anytime I’d put on my walking shoes and wanna head out the Security would scare the living daylights out of me with gory descriptions of those canines. Eeeyeeeeww impulsive travel plans don’t always work out. Lesson learnt. I am not living in my imaginary what if world all of a sudden. All of August all I wanted to do was to run away someplace far far away but come September and I am living in today. I need to remind myself of that what if world to try and get there or else I’ll get caught in the humdrum of everyday life and give up on getting out of this place. Sometimes I can’t hardly wait for things to change then of course you come across welcome distractions and you ask yourself come on not now when it was all sorted out in the head. All I want is to get out, run away and then I still want to run away just as much but only if I could fit in the beautiful distraction in the plan to. If only it was this simple. What fun it would be planning our different lives out and living some of our dreams knowing you’ll be right there walking by my side or waiting for me at some point or the other when our paths would merge.

And despite all the cynicism, the bitterness, the countless disappointments, unreturned phone calls, stupid impulsive trips made to different parts of the country that amounted to nothing but foolhardiness, one fine day at the neighbourhood coffee shop you come face to face with what life could possibly be or so you think. What do you then if that bit of yourself you discovered that day is going away? You let it go away because now you are all realistic and you distrust lovely dreamy strangers with long hair and guitar playing abilities. The you that grew up on an over the top dosage of romantic comedies died sometime back and got a fitting funeral too. It died time and time again until there was nothing but charred bits of your heart left. You blew those ashes away into the sea that February evening while walking down Bandstand. You believed that was the end of the romantic in you and life will be carefully distributed in different boxes of perfect shapes. You’ll know which emotion to put into which box for safekeeping. What you didn’t expect was to deal with a deluge of emotions all of a sudden one balmy monsoon evening? Now you can’t seem to find a box to put all these newly found desires in. No you can’t cos this doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere yet its brimming with possible happiness. Are you gonna walk away and let this be knowing there was someone with whom you perfectly fitted right in with? Maybe some stories are best left without trying to pre-empt an ending. Maybe happiness is also in spending a lifetime with the wrong person and knowing there was someone just right for you. Maybe happiness is just making peace with what life is serving you on a platter.

The History of 'I'

I am not about the men who chose not to be with me. I am not about the loneliness that threatens to engulf me every now and then. I am not about my nightmares that petrify me in my weakest moments. I am not about the hideous thoughts inside my head that don’t always wish other people well. I am not about those 12 glasses of mojitos that overpowered my senses that evening. I am not about that therapist I visited one summer afternoon so unsure of everything I was. I am not about my old failures that kept me from following my dreams. I am not about the job I hated, loved and lost all at the same time. I am not, definitely not about my stammering speech anymore. I never was just about all of this. I am so often about cheerfulness and glee. I am about mindless humour and laughter till your sides split. I am about picking and choosing my own battles and only those that are worth fighting for. I am also about newly discovered irrational anger that I am learning to tame. I am about following my oldest dreams a tad bit late. I am about the phoenix tattooed on the back of my shoulder that rises from the ashes. I am about wearing the bright, brighter, brightest colours when I am at my lowest. I am about red, gold, electric blue, shocking purple, neon green and the effervescent fuchsia. I am about running every day till my feet ache and my lungs are gasping for breath. I am about giving advice on life and love which is mostly spot-on and legal advice that is not always fool proof. I am the peace, the calm inside your head and your strength. I am the one you belong to. There are times when I am nothing yet I am everything.

The other day at night I dreamt of Baba. I dreamt he died all over again from all that pain. In my dream itself I tried to rationalise the feeling by telling myself it is alright. He cannot suffer all over again. It shall be exactly three years next week from the day he died. It seems years ago but it didn’t happen so far back. Sometimes I remember that day so clearly, I remember every feeling I underwent, the fact that I was probably on the phone with Shivi at that exact moment when he passed away. I remember living in denial for months and how I convinced myself life was going to go on just fine without him. It didn’t go on just fine. It went on definitely but no I miss the man every single day. I miss him when S talks about chilling with her Dad over drinks and dinner and having fun, I miss him when T exclaims how her Dad is so kind and would give her the world. I often wonder how we deal with grief. How we have to, so have to put on this brave face in front of the world and and how people always empathise with you or say you are so strong. I have heard that I am so strong statements or how magnificently I am doing statements so many times after Dad’s death. I wasn’t even doing that well, hell I went through such strange phases in my head and the cracks appeared so much later. How that insecurity of him not being around manifested in ways that I am not too proud of. Yes I realise grieving and healing is a long process. You don’t get up one day in the morning and it is gone like whoooshhhh. Naaaa it is long and tiresome. For some people it is an intense period and for some like me it took time to even for me to realise that he wasn’t around. Death has this debilitating effect. It can make zombies out of us. Besides sometimes you are expected to justify every single emotion you go through and the world only likes happy, sane people in control of every emotion, every action. Besides nobody likes sad people. I don’t and nor would you. I think I did a such bad job with my love life last three years or so. Some of the men I have been with in the past actually give me the creeps now that I look back. Why would I even give them a shot? I was running behind that elusive fantasy of happily ever after. The only predominant male figure of my life had ceased to exist. I tried to see bits of him in all these men and my God they were as farther away from him as they could be. I think I turned promiscuous for some time. I tried too many of these men. I was wrong about most of them. This realisation has crept in very very slowly. Must’ve been after my engagement broke up. That one month after my engagement I actually introspected only to jump into some needless emotional relationship all over again to realise once more this was a sham. I was wrong but this time I did not bend backwards, this time I did not beg or plead. I let go silently. Slowly and steadily I have realised that being in love and being in something which is excessively emotionally dependent is different. Love for me shouldn’t be this constantly craving feeling, it should be something which is just there, silent, stoic but there. Yes that is the love I am in search for. That “just there” and “it is understood” feeling.