In the defense of a romantic

I was called an ‘out and out romantic’ today, while chatting with someone on a dating app. The comment took me by surprise and I was ready to pull out the sword and fight him tooth and nail for ‘reducing’ me to a flimsy label. I was ready to defend myself by proving how serious a person I was; until I realized he was right. I am romantic. I am a romantic. I also realized that I was being defensive because in my socially conditioned mind, I myself had reduced it to a flimsy label. A word that connotes flowers, sweet nothings, waiting around for someone else to become your savior, the ill-famed damsel-in-distress, the one who needs love.

Somewhere along the line, the one who needs love has come to be equated with weakness. You are weak if you want to be loved, and love in return. You are weak if you let the world know that sadness lies at the core of you, that the happiness for you comes from thinking of the streets of Calcutta on winter evenings, and chai and sutta at the corner of Vijay Nagar in North Campus. You are ‘emotional’, you will never get anywhere, success will never find you, you are not pragmatic, you live in a dreamscape, you are escapist and get real, will you? 

Looking for love takes courage and faith, and it takes a romantic to have both. And a romantic will not just look for love in one person, or ‘the one’. Love lives in all things, beautiful and ugly. Love is my dog’s pawing at my blanket to be let in because she feels cold. It is that one moment of clarity in a conversation with a stranger. It’s your favorite song or a sudden line that you hear, and sing over and again, in a new and strange song. It’s the sudden smell of an old lover’s breath that reaches you, in the middle of the most unexpected places. 

Love needs vulnerability, and vulnerability needs strength and power. I am afraid to admit that I have the former, and I am even more afraid that I have the latter too because then I’ll also have to accept that I am probably on my own. Loneliness is an inevitable companion of the romantic. But then if the world could quiet down for a few seconds, turn a deaf ear to its cacophony, it would find that we are all together in this vast ocean of loneliness. It is this loneliness that makes us fall back on nostalgia- the world we live in is too cruel, too inhumane, it doesn’t and it won’t let us have peace in the times we live in. Nostalgia is the fire exit of the lonely human mind- you can still be with your friend from Dhanbad, you can still be the little girl whose sisters would steal her kaju aur kismis and make her cry.  

I am tempted to ask if you don’t want to live the dream wherein you are no longer running. Where you are with the people you love, where you are in love. Monogamy or polyamory, whoever you are, you are accepted and loved. You aren’t fighting your demons and denying yourself your deepest desires. I am tempted to ask you if you really want the ‘real world’.  

And if your answer is yes, if you tell me you want the real world, then that’s fine. I am just begging you to let me live in mine.

She

She had walked down this path many times before. The same pattern, repeated over and over again. The same conversations, but different men. Different men, who looked alike. Different men who listened to the same kind of music, wore the same hair, rolled up their sleeves to their forearms in the same way, and said the same things. She had heard it all before, but wanted to hear the same things again, and again. She wanted to hear that she was beautiful, that she looked sexy with her nose pin and eyebrow piercing, that she had a voice that brought those men to tears, and that her poetry gave those who read it, visions and moving images. Over the years, from the yahoo chat room, to google talk, to orkut and facebook, to tinder and hinge, she meandered looking for a home to settle in. A home, that would have a dog, and a field for both of them to run freely in, picketed fences, and a swing on which she and her lover would spend drunken nights. She moved from room to room searching for a yellow light, for she loved halogen bulbs, but could never find any. She drew lines with sand and blew them away, crossed the threshold several times in territories full of carnivorous animals who had tasted human blood. She saw trees bereft of life and leaves from the windows of these rooms, and snow mingled with mud, relentless rainfall, and she felt cold.

We don’t know who these men were. Some were very important to her, some she loved, and some were there, whose names she doesn’t recall. Somewhere in the quagmire of her memory, they are all one. All faceless and nameless, their bodies swaying into one another, all calling out her name. T-shirts and jeans and chappals, cigarettes and guitars, all hazy and translucent. She must have been dreaming, for we all know that people are made of flesh and blood and caste and sex and religion. They are not made of love, and tunes, and words, as she believed. She was very foolish, you see.

Anyway, she walked like the world was a dreamscape and she the narrator in this dream. Her eyes half closed, she smelt the smell of cinnamon and bay leaves from her mother’s kitchen and remembered the smell of her father’s sweat. Everywhere she went, these smells followed. She touched things with the intention of crushing them in her fist and she looked at them with a stare that would burn them down. Her dream was a burning furnace and if you stood too close to it, you would be scathed.

What becomes of her, you ask. Well, we don’t know. One day while walking in the woods she tried following a sun’s ray all the way to the middle of earth. They say she blended into the mud and split into small pebbles that now lie in the pathway of a luxury hotel. Some say she followed the sun ray right into the sky and became a cloud that wandered without rain, always thirsty, always crying dry tears. Some say she lives in the roots of an old peepal tree and she has squirrels and birds for friends. There are many stories. But just like her, it would be difficult to find which one is quite the truth.

?

now love is all about 
rum and coke, and
wild, sweaty jazz.
not the kind of jazz 
that those white-skinned
pretending bastards play.
no, no ! not that kind.
the hat-wearing, 
cello turning black jazz.
and the sheer sexiness
of wearing a red shirt

Poem

Here, I give my body to you.

but is my body mine?
And to give?

could I have any entitlement
when my body is writ
with the rules of the father;
the blood that runs in your veins
bring power and glory
mine begs to be washed off
with cheap detergent
early in the morning,
lest anyone knows that I bleed
through the openings of life.

if I ask you to not enter my body
could you imagine
a love without violence?

what will you do with my body?
with me?

Poetry

I have become slow

No i havent become old, it is not my age

I have become slow

My body drags like melted wax off an old mirror stand

If i look into the mirror i find that my words escape from eyes ears my skin

And i shudder scream scramble to snatch back my words from the wind

I cannot hold on to my words and i cannot make sentences

How will you understand me if i cannot say what i know is dancing in the front of my eyes

Here, my poetry dies.

FATTIE

People i run into everyday,

Women, and mostly men,

who have been friends and lovers

for moments on sultry dawns,

tell me they cannot recognize me,
as they run into me on streets and corners, 
tell me, i have become very fat. 
baths, mirrors, and clothes and sweat in crevices
and other secret folds of the neck, armpits and belly
remind me that I've become fat. 
Today i have spent the entire day

hearing from every second person,

how i have become fat.
being fat is a strange thing.

for me, it begins with itching

that large piece of skin, that

does not get any air, because

your belly is hanging,

till where it should not.

usually, that part of my body

itches at night.

when the chores are done

the lights put out,

and i'm thinking of all

the things i've done in

the day, that i shouldn't

have,

it begins to itch.

itch, like the things i did

that i ought not have done.

the sweat, the rawness of

skin, the fat and that

itch--

it is almost as if i am

paying for my sins.

Of Men and a Woman

Checking my phone in between writing

Shows ‘no notifications’.

Not getting WhatsApp and Insta messages

Makes me feel forgotten by the men

Who remember me when they are horny.

My life revolves around men

For them I postpone my heartbeats

And adjust the pace of my pulse.

I am trying to learn self restraint-

In this, one cannot give away one's tinder stories.

Like the time a guy climbed off of you

And said “I am done.”

Or the time another one

Looked down your bare back

And said “whoa you are hairy”.

I mistake longing for love

And desperation for love

And loneliness for love

And silent screams, for love.

I am naive and stupid

All their synonyms and everything in between.

I scroll through profiles of strange men on dating apps

And send them clever one-liners

And questions that I think will grab their attention

Because I have reduced myself to an existence

That depends on the might of a man.

I say I am a feminist

All I am is a lonely little bitch.