She had smiles for breakfast, and twinkles for lunch. She searched for rainbows and fairies and roasted them for dinner. All things nice and everything magic was what she craved. So she ate them all. She ate them whole. She ate them pretty. 

The difference between right and wrong were opinions in this case. Prejudices were running high and the pit of the stomach churned out anger, despise, disappointment like it was nothing. People close to her did not know what was to be done. People who did not know her thought their understanding of her mentality was supreme. Other people probably did not give a damn.

She had always asked herself what she would do when faced with an impossible choice. Would she choose logic and rationality and principles or crude and unfounded sentiments of close-d ones? The time had come when it was taken out of her hand and handed back to her with plot twists that make thrillers look tame.

The choice was simple. Choose what is right. The difficulty being that her right was so very wrong for the unpolished minds of the middle-class.

She had come to the conclusion that she would still stick with her ideals. Morals and principles were important. You’ve got to have a spine. Stand up for what you believe in. Otherwise you are just another hypocrite you don’t like. And she hated not liking herself.

The chaos in her head was organised it seemed. It was armed and ready for attack. She was surprised that anything in her life could be so organised; so ...so planned.

The price was too much to pay, or was it? Can you really forgo something you love for someone you love? Time will tell, wont it? She was getting tired of the questions. All it bore were more questions.

All her life she had thought she was a good person. She thought she cared about others in her life more than she cared about her needs. She just never thought she would be in a position to test that theory. Expectations have always been a burden. But, aren’t you supposed to be able to move mountains for people you love? She didn’t know. She just did not know.

Going through the motions of it all, she was tired. She was tired of questioning herself. She was going to let the chips fall into place. Meanwhile, the dark corner of her head, where everything was mundane and nothing spoke or stirred, beckoned her more and more.

She put her head to her knees, closed her eyes and hummed an old tune. Her dark place awaited. 

She knew he had seen her just fine, standing at the edge, arms wide open, eyes closed. She was glad he had not come to her, glad for the heroism he lacked and the empathy he did not have. 

She knew he had looked on, wondering what her next move was. He had watched her legs shaking and her hair blowing in the wind. She was glad that he had walked away; glad he had never bothered to look back.

She had taken the leap. She had fallen; fallen on to the soft clouds of relief. She had walked through the slowly lifting fog of pain. She had survived the haziness of repressed memories. It felt good. She was glad he was not a better man. 

She did not what to say. Or think. So she brooded over the dilemma.

Her mind felt like a bottomless pit. Talking was a chore. Thinking was work. Working was automated.

She used to be able to fight. She used to be able to cry. Now she gulps it in and later thinks about not talking about it.

Is it better this way? Has it made a difference? At what age do you stop making mistakes? At what age do you learn to be exactly what you wanted to be? She did not know. She did not even try to think whether she cared.

Mistakes are a part of life. She had learnt this lesson so early in life that it did not hurt anymore. She knew her mistakes were of the grave kind. Kinds that changed her a little bit every time. However, these were as much a part of her as were her pains and her smiles.

Fighting was so much harder now than before. It was easier to ignore. Tomorrow is always a new day. 

“Oh you thought that the universe carries some sort of justice system? How very smart of you! No one gives a shit! “

And with these profound words chiming in her mind, she continued the conversation with herself. Sometimes that was what she needed the most; a good shakedown from her worst critique- herself.

She had once named her alter ego- Elizabeth. The name was not thought out properly. It was the first thing that came to her mind, because of course Pride and Prejudice is the way to go if you are choosing names. She had abandoned that name a long time ago, but the memories stuck. The time spent with Lizzy was worthwhile. She had learnt to believe in herself that way. That was how she had talked herself out of many situations. That is still how she manages to calm herself.

She wonders sometimes how her alter ego is so wise when her real self has the biggest foot-in-mouth syndrome. Then she thinks about something else. Lizzy does not have the answer to everything. Although, she does have some witty quips.

So, yeah, the conversation. This time it was about how people get what they don’t deserve.

A bit old, don’t you think? People get what they get. They don’t get what they deserve.

Yeah well, she remembered the line. It had seemed so practical that it had hit her like a cold wind in june. Doesn’t mean it’s fair, is it?

Yes like everything is, isn’t it? The world is messed up. Deal with it.

Profound! Did you just come up with it?

And she went back to looking for things to do while at the back of her mind, a little her was pounding the hell out of a dude named justice.

She could never forget herself, but she knew what it was like to be forgotten. She could see it, feel it in her bones. Missed messages, calls unanswered. And then slowly making you feel like you are fading away from their memories and present moments. They don’t remember you when they see something you would like. They don’t laugh about happy memories anymore. You just cease to exist in their daily humdrum of routine-ness.

Even the expected can cause that sense of sadness that no matter how fleeting burns through your conscious. She nursed the burn with the wet coldness of trying-not-to-think-about-it. The paradox laughed, rolling on the floor. 

Don’t bring anyone else down with you. That’s what goes through the mind of an anxiety prone depressed individual, who is striving to care. Striving to belong. Striving to understand the notions of companionship, friendship, social conduct and other things that seem vague and caricature-ish to her.

She woke up with her mind full of the things she had seen all through the night; believing it; despising it; yet so unable to get out of it. Everything she loved and believed in had been so grossly butchered. Dogs dead. Perverted family members. People with ulterior motives that have their own ulterior motives. The story had been  graphic and she was trapped as a part of it; sometimes even venturing to make things right only to see that she had been plunked back to square one.

When she woke up, she looked around her to realise that it had all been a dream. Then it struck her. She had forgotten her medicines. Those tiny little round things that control how her mind would work. The headache was unbelievable.  It was hard for her to concentrate, to balance herself on the steady ground. Yet she woke up. She had to pretend to be a “normal” human being and go to work. No one would give a flying fuck about her nightmares or herself loathing or her inability to be all the things she wanted so bad.

So she got up. Steadied herself. Walked. Walked all the way to office, where people are sane, they are “normal”. Her head spinning, and aching and throbbing, she tried to concentrate. The overwhelming sense of her life being controlled by everything else but her took over. She shook it off and continued to try to be interested in what was going on around her.

She had come to the hard realisation, she would never fit in. Then she asked herself, did she want to? The bipolar answer she got enraged her. So headphones on, she started writing it all down. Seemed like the keys would do her justice. If it6 was out there it would make sense. What does the written word hold? A power to make thoughts permanent. Once it is out there it would make sense to someone else. Maybe.

Finding solace isn't what she was looking for. She was looking for disturbance; a little tremor somewhere. The quietness of the last few days had gotten to her. She looked in corners and behind doors. She peeked beneath the kitchen sink and under the bed. She looked for that escaped scream that refused to come back to her. It was all so suspiciously still. So silent that even the clock had stopped in protest.

She had a bewildered look on her face as she searched on and on till she decided not to. Curled up into a ball on the sofa, she rocked herself back and forth. It’s okay. A little silence does not lead to a lifetime of quiet, she told herself.  

Suddenly she heard someone move in the next room. A melody filled her ears. It was so much better than the tremor she was searching for. The footsteps were music. She listened attentively to the clearing of the throat, the shuffling around, the opening and closing of drawers and then waited for the call. She smiled. The clock had started ticking again. 

She liked letters. When she was little, she used to see her grandma’s face so alive when she tore open the letters from her masi who lived in Mumbai. She remembered that smile now. It always gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Those blue sealed letters were so special. There were little titbits about Masi’s life, how she was coping in a strange new place and even what she had cooked recently. When her cousin grew older, the letters even contained drawings he had made of her, her brother, and everyone the toddler could think of. These letters she could only remember by smell, visions, sarees her grandma wore and bits and pieces of smiles and almost tears.

She grew up in the era of emails and then smses. She disliked those perfunctory words, the phrases that did not have a slant and details of one’s personality. She had written love letters once. They are as lost to her now as the person she had written them for. She still thought of letters. The scrapes and scratches of personalised emotions. The tip of the T, the missing dots of Is. The quality of the paper, the fineness of the ink. She jumped up and looked for a page she could write on.

Continuation of broken pieces

Sometimes you remember the simpler times and smile. Sometimes there aren’t any simpler times to remember. At other times, there just aren’t any smiles. With that thought in mind, she looked through the photographs that had been quietly slumbering in the depths of her hard drive. She went through them meticulously. Remembering, all the times that were captured in photographs, she realised that she wished she had captured moments that she needed to remember. These were things she had forgotten. These photographs had no more meaning in her life than the tissue she had just ripped to shreds while looking at them. She wished there was a way to capture emotions, tears, stains...that sudden prick you get in your heart when you get hurt. Those she would have loved to look at. And laugh. Laugh so hard. She needed a smile, and the photographs didn’t help.

Broken thoughts of a lost soul

Recently, she had been thinking of the word marooned a lot. She remembered she had learned the word in school. It was in a pirate story. She was sad for the poor sod who got marooned on that sad sack island. But, since then, every time she thought of the word ‘marooned’, she had images of darker hues of red and someone trapped in it. It was like watching a man roam around with lonely eyes and lonelier expressions in the smoky maze of red. It was demure. She closed her eyes and tried to think of blue, yellow, green...black. And the black stuck. The silence in that colour struck her conscious like a piece of ice on a hot summer day. It encompassed all the thoughts and swirled about finding debris and sucking them in. All that was left now in the hollow of her reminisces was blackness. It was calm. It was peaceful. She slept.

Violence

The word violence never had any special meaning. Not for her. She always took it to be something that was part of her life, like transport or rent or even the random guy who tried to touch her bossom every time she took a bus or traveled in a train. Violence was synonymous with everything she had been through in her life. It was trivial. It was petty. 

She had seen it in her eyes of her father, when he had repeatedly struck the wall with his fist, when her mother had come home one day, eyes smeared with shame and her kameej half torn. Some hooligans had molested her. She did not get a chance to get a good look at them.  Her father had refused to lodge a complaint against the faceless, nameless culprits. He had just asked his wife to freshen up and not to tell the neighbours. She was nine, and had seen the violence in his eyes. She had also seen it slowly wash away with the drops of blood on the wall and the tear stains on her mother’s face. She thought that’s how it is supposed to be.

She was fifteen, when her best friend had come to school with a blackened eye. Her refusal to say anything about it was annoying. They were best friends. There wasn’t supposed to be any secrets. She later found out that her friend had been sexually abused by her uncle. When she complained to her father, the black eye was a punishment for telling lies. The violence had struck her hard. She could not fathom why the wrong person was at the receiving end of it. She had seen the residual violence in her friend’s eyes when she had gone about her days getting quieter every day. 

She was in college, when she fell in love. She did not know whether it was because he was so charming, or because she was naive enough to think that good looks and better clothes was what a girl looked for in a guy. He had taught her how it felt when he ran his hands on her thighs and planted a carefully careless kiss on her forehead. He had taken her hand in the dark movie theatre and she had thought this was it. He had eased into it. He had taken her home because it was raining. His room smelled of freshly laundered clothes and old cigarette butts. The first kiss was awkward. What followed was unexpected. When stopped by her repeatedly, she was startled by the violence in his movements and the tone of his voice. She was puzzled when she was asked to get lost, and not so politely given a shove. On the way home, she shed tears for the part she did not play. She wondered if what she had done was foolish. She had stayed up all night and was still unable to figure it out. 

As she grew older, she had come to understand what violence was. For her, it was not what was apparent, but what went unsaid and unchecked. The movements, the flickers of the eyes, the midnight tears, were all part of the vicious cycle. She slowly adapted herself to the world, because the world refused to budge from its place. She learned to look around her with fear when she walked on a lonely road. She learned how to use her bag as a shield when she travelled in a bus. She now knew that men were not to be provoked, because in the end, no one will be able to save you. She was adept at putting on the veil of obscurity and walking away when the stranger licked his lips at her or commented on her ass. She was the epitome of womanliness. Or what she had learned was necessary for survival. 

Violence is trivial. It is petty. The truly condemnable is what brings about that violence. She had learned not to give it another thought.

The fallen epiphanies on the woven path of feathers
The stolen doorsteps you collected
The drunken mistakes and the sober regrets
Sitting on the steps of knowledge
Closed doors and hurried footsteps.
Dont think the stoned saw you make a fist
And the broken realised you were crumbling
Lonely  in a mind-field
You are your own carrier.

Dog days and cat lives,
Jumping off roofs and through hoops,
Fitting in a bowl would be easy,
But floating through life is fun.
Salt water mesh on the bathroom tiles,
And undergarments strewn across the boundaries,
Blood on the lips,
Flowing upwards till it flies,
Passing by petty clouds and foams.
Cold, soothing, it touches arms,
and resurrects;
What's left of it will never know what was.

The cigarette drooped between her loosely held fingers. The ash did a free fall on the wrinkled bed sheet. Her eyes were tightly shut while her body convulsed with suppressed sobs. She hardly heard the song that was screaming for attention and adamantly played on in her ears. She was lost, lost in a determination to overcome the all consuming nothingness. 

Happy thoughts. Yes. Think of happy thoughts. Chocolate cake. Truffles. The aroma of a freshly baked cake. The way a good pen feels in your hand. Smell of books. Reading books. Friends. Smiles. Long chats. Clouds. The moon in all its glory. Darkness. The feeling of someone beside you when alone in your mind. Someone...

No. Not someone. Not anyone. Wrong turn sweetheart. Nothing but nothingness ahead. Make a u-turn. Now now NOW! 

She lifted her head and jerked her eyes open. A Tear drop slid down her cheeks on the sly. She noticed that the cigarette had breathed its last and was about to kiss her fingers a hot, burning warning. She put it out. 

Her throat was dry. She got up and walked a few paces in the dark hoping to stumble across the cursed water bottle so that she could give up switching on the lights. She stumbled. God Dammit! Who keeps all this junk lying around? Oh, it's the bottle.

Her thirst quenched, she started thinking about everything and nothing at the same time.Her head spun. Lie down moron. You need rest. But she failed to recall why she was this tired. She had done nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, she had not even done the ordinary in a few days. 

She lit another cigarette. Resting her back against the wall, she looked at the shadows that played on  the opposite wall. she hated it how it was never completely dark anymore. There was always some light or the other creeping in through the window or under the door.Always! She flickd ash in the ashtray by her side and hummed a song. Then she started singing out loud. 

Now she was sleepy. she put out the cigarette, moved the ashtray to a far corner of the bed and placed her pillow at one side of the bed. She fumbled around for her ipod and found that the earphones had entangled themselves quite happily with each other. Not bothering to untangle it wholly, she put them in her ears and hit the play button. 

And Iiiiii will allways love youuuu...

She closed her eyes, smiling at the irony of it all.