She was a girl. An ordinary girl. There is nothing much that one can say about her and there isnt much that one can write about her. She was not exceptional at anything particularly and she was nothing extraordinary. She was just another mortal and she never learned to appreciate the gift of life. Although she tried, and once, she even thought that she had learnt to appreciate the gift of life, but that was just an illusion .. like the million other illusions her world was made up of.
She was not perfect, far from it actually and she never could really decipher what perfection meant. She was never a good student and there isnt much to speak of her achievements. She didnt have too many friends and she couldnt keep any if she made any. She liked to be with people elder to her and she found the conversation of her fellow people mundane. Her parents disapproved of her and her Ma never had the chance to call up relatives and tell them about how she had scored so well in her exams. Her teachers thought she was stubborn, arrogant and rude and her school mates whispered amongst themselves about what a witch she was.She was not someone who was very strong-willed and she was not ambitious.
She was not always honest and she didnt always have a clear conscience. She did things she was ashamed of and she said things that rued later on. She hated studying and whiled her time away. She ran away from home a few times, and she spoke words so hurtful at times, that they would slash through your skins like swords. She was disrespectful to her Ma and Da and sometimes in a rage, she would tell them that she didnt love them and so could they please disappear.
But she loved her Ma and Da. She loved her friends and she would give her life to a girl named guddu. She loved reading and she loved books. She had always thought that she should have been a character in a book or a pebble on the road, but not human. She loved Eliot, Frost, Auden, and Wilde and she thought that Godfather was the only kind of reality she could ever understand. She loved music. She loved the way music flowed through her veins and she would get high listening to Pink Floyd. The only time she was true and honest was when she was singing. She believed that the only thing that would truly remain hers even when she died was her music. She was passionate and her soul burned with an unknown fire at all times. She loved Ireland, colors, literature, blues, writing, smoking, pencil sketches, art, films, jazz, rain, Cal, wind chimes, snow, Calvin n Hobbes and the dark among many, many other ordinary, uninteresting things. She was a dreamer and she dreamed her life away. She lived in world of imperfection and vagueness and dreams and illusions. She liked to make people happy and she liked to help people. She never learnt to forgive but she never bore a grudge against anyone. She loved to eat and she loved chicken and palak paneer.
She was an agnostic but it wasnt because she didnt believe in God. It was because she could not bring herself to believe in God, no matter how much she tried. She loved kajal and disliked make-up. She was melodramatic and she used to say that what's life without a li'l exaggeration and spice. She liked babies and she liked the way men's cologne smells. She fell in love and she wanted to fall in love again, because she knew that it was one of the best feelings in the world, but it was alright if she didnt- she had fallen in love once and she was surprised at the amount of love she was capable of. And there were million other things for her to love.
She would always smile a happy smile and if she was unhappy, she could not disguise it. In a very strange way, she was honest. She had tried never to lie to herself. She wanted to become a writer and she found solace in writing. She wanted to go to England but at times she thought that it would be betraying her country. Dont ask me why, she was absurd. She wanted to do something in life so as to contribute towards something noble, even if in a very minuscule way. She was always scared that she would not be remembered with fondness when she died, but she always hoped she would be. She was always one to hope a lot. She had always hoped to achieve happiness, to make her parents proud, to be successful in her own small way. She had hoped that she would one day become a writer, sing for a good band, teach children English Literature, live in Ireland and die a painless death.
She wasnt much, but she was all that she could be. Perhaps you wont remember her, but if you are one who at some point of time, had made any difference to her life then think of her with tenderness because at the end of the day, she was not so bad and she loved you. Even if for a very short while, she loved you. And if she didnt love you, then she must have felt something else for you. But she did, for certain, feel something for you. And she always thought of the people that made her feel something because it reminded her that she was human.
Expensive even, Oh! Very- Telephone bills.
Arguments of Logic cease to exist,
Becomes rather Roman-ish, you see.
Sense & Sensibility? Not so, I should think.
Scenes of dragons and knights in armor
In the backdrop of a sky,
Roaring and thundering.
Classical. Quite so: this thing called Love.
Smell apples and vodka on his breath.
It's like a match. Strike it against
Another life,
And illuminate that desolate corner.
A house. White one with picketed fence.
In the midst of paddy fields. A horse
Is a must. And a Jack.
10 o' clock. Dim lights and
The sound of feet.. pit-pat pit-pat p.......
Pasta, wooden tales, old fashioned latches.
I soar, and soar high up, beyond the skies
Carrying with me, some
Diamonds and some Rust.
I grope, I can't.. I fall.
It ends. Bittersweet, perhaps,
But love. Love all the same.
(photo courtesy: reetika ghosh)
I am not of any consequence, and shall never be.
I am not the hills or the seas,
I am not your happiness or your imagination coming alive.
I am not your madness on the blue canvas, and
I am nothing that you wished for.
I have not known you, and you remain unknown
To my eyes, soul, fingers, skin.
The shades of the gulmohar tree know me alone,
They have not known your breath.
And yet, for you my love
I bring dawn to dusk.
I turn seas into sand
And snow into fire.
For you, my unknown
I covet the dark corners of my heart
Where your thoughts lie.
For you my love, I breathe
Every burning breath.
For you my unknown
I sketch the impossibilities of a dream.
Until now.
Until I sat by the window in my room, that looks out onto a playground, where every morning I see boys getting together for a game of cricket or football, beginning with affectionate obscenities and some backslapping, And thought to myself this was a place of a lot many firsts.
A first home, a first love, a first passion, a first blog, a first dreamer, a first musician friend.
6/69 was my first home. Not that I had to take to the streets before that ! but wherever I lived, I lived there for such a short span of time that I didn't really get an opportunity to make it home to me. But then, 6/69 happened -- and oh ! what a wonderful thing to happen. From the balcony that looked out at the shimmering skyline of the greatest city in the world, to the drainage outlet that clogged every two days -- every single aspect of that place was beautiful. The drawing-dining room, the kitchen, the room with the idiot box, which had to be hit upon on the head to make it work, Ma and Da's room, and my room. My room.
It was like a whole new world to me. A world which was mine, only mine. A world where nobody could break into unless I let them. It had pictures, a lot of pictures. And secrets, here and there, that only the walls knew about. And thoughts, and promises, broken and kept, and illusions and dreams, some of which shattered without a sound. And four glorious years of my like. A love, a lot of love. Some indifference, and some dislike as well. Every emotion that I ever felt was a part of that room.
And there was, of course, the improvised ashtray, some letters and gifts not meant to be shown to anyone else, and a few other forbidden things -- but it was all, all a part of what made that place home to me. And this home was a part of Turf View.
During winters, I would walk down to the park, where there were these tyres hanging and one could swing on them. I loved doing that. It was the time of a great many contemplations, introspections, decision-makings, crying, laughing, singing, talking, and looking at faces at window seats in the buses that rolled past. It was also the place of two very mundane activities of making and destroying worlds, and committing the seven sins, inside my mind. And then of course there was the shopping complex, where one could buy almost everything from graph-sheets to hot dogs. And a very bad restaurant called 'Hot-Spot' which was stupidly expensive, but then it was better than nothing. There were walks with walks with Shikhar and Malvika, and spending time with Didi under that tree outside the shopping complex. There was sitting with Guddu on the ledge on the terrace of the 6th Block and talking about the silliest things, like which color of an umbrella is nicer (blue or yellow), to the most intellectual things (which I don't remember !). There was standing under the 12th block and listen to Dhruv playing the hell out of his drums.There was lecturing Abhisek on how to lead his life in a 'righteous' manner ! There was sighing-gazing-sighing-gazing at Dhruv, Malvika, Shikhar, Somesh, Zicco, and the whole lot of them and, wishing that I was a part of them.
And then, there was the terrace of the 19th Block and 18th Block, where I would meet ... someone. In secret. We would be scared of getting caught. All the time. But oh ! it was worth every moment of it. It was the place where for the first time I looked into someone's eyes and I knew that if he was there by my side, I wouldn't need anybody else in the world. It was where I fell in love, over and over again. It was the place where reason paved way for desire, and it was the place where I wanted to make every moment last an eternity.
We eventually shifted to 15/175 because Da got posted out, and saying goodbye to 6/69 was very difficult. But then I realized I didn't have to, because 6/69 was imbibed in me. It's a part of who I am. It's there in my first poem, my first song, my first love, my first heartbreak. It is there in those four roller coaster years of my life. And so is Turf.
It is not one of the places I love or am passionate about. But then you don't need to be in love with something for it to be important to you. Very important at that.
Turf View is like an unwritten poem waiting to be put down on paper by Frost.
Turf is that place which has a little bit of my heart in some desolate corner of it.
