The written word
17:59 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments
The written word is always a company in the most desolate of all moments. It embraces you with the warmth you seek lying on your bed on a winter morning. It listens to you like an old pal without getting tired. When words flow unimpeded, the hearts feel light like autumn leaves that float in the air - almost weightless. It grows fonder thinking of things define life in subtle tones. Written words are like a candid conversation with God. They have the depth of the ocean, sometimes the turbulence of the sea, maybe the restlessness of the rain drops but most of all they have the tolerance of the earth. They are like a well-kept secret of the writer. Each one construes them differently and assumes a meaning. Yet, the truth is what the writer meant them to mean. He owns them. He possesses them. And in return they possess him, engulfing him at times when he runs out of conversations with those around him.


Desire
17:57 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments
Today life said cry me a river. And I did. Like my city that's parched before the onset of monsoons I was parched and had slowly grown lifeless until tears washed my face like the torrential rains in Mumbai. The city that I live now only in my dreams. I felt something crazy inside of me. Something that seemed to be liberated like those tears that flow incessantly from my eyes that begged for sleep helplessly. Life was ruthless today. It annoyed me in the simplest of ways and killed my sleep like it was some cold blooded murder. I lay on my bed twisting and turning as if there was some escape. There was none. I couldn't stop the tears flowing as I let out silent wails that only drowned in the loud noises from the road below. It was like the world said 'We don't care' I wonder if anyone does. I wonder if anyone is obliged to. Those who do, are either too far away in my city watching the rain while I soak myself in a different one miles away or are right here yet separated by a wall and oblivious to what lies beyond. By all means am alone and yet not quite. The roaring sounds from the road below remind me that am not alone or rather that they will not let me be even if that's what I have been wishing for since the past hour and a half. The day has long ended, the night has arrived in all its splendor, but the road below refuses to offer silence even in alms to eyes that have only known to beg. They would be sore now like the ears. I wonder if the lack of something was ever so deeply desired.


A famine of dreams
17:39 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments


A famine of dreams
She spilled an assortment of things from her tote bag and they landed on the floor creating an orchestra of sounds, some of them went rolling without direction like school boys during their lunch break running wild, some others bouncing off the ground and landing in unattended corners of the room gathering dust. She was late in her usual style, hair left uncombed, earrings missing, choosing flip-flops over shoes, and her sweatshirt held messily in one hand with its arms dangling close to the floor just avoiding a sweep as she walked. It was a lovely Saturday afternoon, the air not too humid, the sky slightly overcast, cars gliding on the road with no signs of jams in the distance.

She gathered the things that she could notice in front of her, not thinking twice if she had missed picking up anything inadvertently, dumped them into the bag and shut the trunk of her two-wheeler with a thud. She vroomed out her bike which had not been cleaned off the grime from the last ride, its sleek metal body devoid of any scratches or dents, the black colour of the vehicle accentuating the dirt marks and making it look uglier than it would have had it been any other colour. They had decided to meet up for brunch at a nearby café extremely popular amongst college kids. Office work had summoned Himanshu back to the city where he had finished his computer engineering with Riya three years back. Since the day he step foot out of college he never had an opportunity or even a reason to come back. He had gotten busy with the work in Delhi, his home town. Riya on the other hand was travelling all the time, visiting places, losing her passport, getting her bags stolen, carrying three different sim cards but rarely accessible on either of the number always having forgotten to pack her charger. On the occasions that she had been to Delhi, she had never bothered to call him or even drop him a message afraid it might make her look desperate to keep in touch with him. She had made it evident in more than one ways during her college days that she liked him, yet he seemed to ignore all the cues in a way that didn’t hurt her. He had learnt about her visits nevertheless through friends and her tweets. This time when he was in her town, he decided to give her a buzz and check if she would be free over the weekend for a quick meet up. She was so surprised to see his name flash on her cellphone screen that for a moment she thought it was a bug in her phone. She spoke on the phone without making any attempts to hide her excitement on hearing the familiar voice after three years. She had done a silly thing of saving all the SMS sent by him in a folder, not knowing if he would ever send her the stream of messages again. She also saved some clips and voice recordings of nothing in particular but which had the essence of college life and glimpses of him when he was finishing his assignments at the last moment, or sipping a cup of tea or his voice could be heard in the background, the strong thick accent from north that he carried.

When she reached the restaurant it was filled with college students dressed up in vibrant clothes, guys sporting spikes and a goatee, thick rimmed glasses, girls with figure hugging tops, their hair streaked in odd colours, with piercings that were painful to think of, bustling with the pandemonium they usually bring about in their presence. Her eyes floated around the place like untied buoys in the river, and her heart started to throb due to the loud music that blared from the stereos. She spotted him in a corner flipping through the pages of a tabloid printed on cheap paper, its ink dull and smelly. “Late as usual”, he seemed to say, words hardly audible but she could make out from the way he rolled his tongue in an exaggerated fashion as if asking her to lip read instead of paying attention to his words. She just smiled and before she knew, he hugged her albeit in a platonic manner. She believed he would have felt her heart thumping, for the brief time that their bodies met. They settled on the table and ordered their drinks and sandwiches. She observed he had built his body and was no longer the lanky fellow she knew in college. His eyes were still the same. Killer! His auburn hair, she could tell even without touching them, were as smooth as silk. He had grown a shade fairer, maybe he didn’t play as much cricket in the sun now as he did back in college she thought. The music was making it difficult for them to talk, and they had to lean closer. He pulled the chair that seated her frail body next to his and occasionally their hands brushed when they made animated gestures. Her mind started to drift away to the days when she had admired him secretly and had mentioned his name on list of top guys – tradition which all the girls were forced to follow on their birthdays in college. He had always been teased with Shreya, whom all the girls envied for her absolutely perfect body and an equally perfect sense of dressing. It was some incident that had led others to tease them as a couple; otherwise she had never seen them together, not even by chance. Riya was probably the only girl who had spent the maximum amount of time with him alone, sometimes at the canteen or preparing for the vivas since their names started with the same letter and were always in the same group. He always guffawed when others teased him with Shreya, and responded back with a witty remark. But on that one odd occasion when the guys decided to tease him with Riya, he had become aggressively defensive. Since then nobody bothered mentioning their names together.

When they were finished, he asked her if they could spend some more time at a quieter place. “I was the only one talking amidst all that noise! I don’t even know if you heard me or if you were simply nodding your head to the tunes”, he remarked. Of course she had not heard him. She had found his mere presence next to her utterly distracting and she had started noticing minute details about him without caring the least about what he spoke. The music served as the perfect alibi to her absent mindedness. 

They walked up to a nearby park, and occupied one of the benches under the shade of an enormous tree. Despite the odd afternoon hours, couples dotted the lush green lawns engaged with each other as if the world around them had ceased to exist. Those who wanted to get slightly more intimate had opted for hidden corners, and one could see the bushes ruffle violently with brief intervals. The sight made Riya awkward. Himanshu aware of it, pursed his lips to avoid a smile on his face. “So, have been in touch with anyone from college?”

“Umm… Meena obviously. She lives next door. I bump into Shreyas and Atul sometimes at the gym. Then a couple of others Ashok, Abha, Ritu and the gang through facebook or I chat with them online. Plus most of them are abroad, so it’s quite difficult to keep in touch. I had met up with Ariya when she had come down for her Christmas break”

“Hmm, that’s a long list…”

 “How about you?”

“Hardly anyone! You are an exception ofcourse. I guess I didn’t put in too much effort to stay in touch with anyone and I don’t think they did either. Even you didn’t call up when you were around. It’s like unrequited love, unlike these couples here!”, he joked.

She looked away and blushed as he mentioned the couples openly. “Well yes. But we met now. They say meeting old friends is as addictive as not meeting them.”

“Am not surprised why!” he exclaimed nudging her softly with his elbow.

They continued chatting until it was dusk, their conversations often interrupted by the beeps on his cellphone. Sometimes he looked at them and just smiled, at other times he had followed it up with a brisk message, his fingers movingquickly across the qwerty keypad of his cellphone. She wondered if he had a girlfriend. The thought troubled her even if she herself had had two boyfriends since they left college. But she was single now and in an absurd way she expected him to be single too. She was too proud to ask and she didn’t wish to pick up the topic herself, giving him a hint that she was falling for him yet again, only this time more strongly.

He stayed back for a whole week and for the entire week they made plans to visit places that carried with them a lot of nostalgia even if it were something as small as a tea vendor on the roadside where they used to stop for masala chai every evening after classes. She could notice he had become more talkative than before, that he had a very flattering tone in his words when he spoke, he used a lot of superlatives while describing places or things or even people, his words flowed with much more ease and not as if they were forced conversations which she felt at times back then, or maybe she was being too judgmental at that time. From their conversations now she surmised he was probably the one who had attained success at an annoyingly faster pace than her or most in their batch. He had managed to procure a managerial position in one of the coveted firms and had taken the monkey of programming, coding and debugging off his back sooner than one could have imagined. While others were busy devising ways to step on to the next rung of their career ladder, he had already reached at the top and he was not stopping to look back.

He was an enigma, back then and even today. Someone of whom everyone was desirous of but he seemed to have fortified himself against everyone else. No wonder he had no friends in Delhi where he engrossed himself in work all the time and had already started taking home a double digit salary. He was too ambitious for comfort and she could feel it in the way he spoke at times with a hint of arrogance and ruthlessness not to her but to others. Like when the waiter accidently dropped a glass on water on the table and apologized at the very next moment almost shuddering for the mistake he had committed. “These men will never make it big in their lives. They were always born to clean tables. It’s a pity they can’t even do that!” Despite his lack of humility which her mind had very well observed by now, her heart kept deceiving her. It played foolish games, beating rapidly every day before they were about to meet, feeling dismayed when they had to part in the evening or when he had to divert his attention to his cellphone. It made her melt like an ice cube on a summer day every time he passed a comment about her or her mannerisms even if most of the times it wasn’t a compliment in the remotest of ways. But just his attention made her heart leap somersaults.

When he left for Delhi, she had seen him off at the airport. Despite an entire week that they spent together and the occasional spells of flirting they engaged in during that time, when he hugged her at the airport she felt it was cold, as if the invisible wall around him that had started to crumble in her presence had strengthened again, filling up the little crevices quickly to hide any weaknesses. She waited long and watched him through the glass doors that kept opening wide and shutting close relentlessly as passengers walked in and out of it. She walked back to her two-wheeler in the parking lot, hoping something to happen even if it were as bad as his flight getting cancelled so that he could stay back for at least another day. But nothing of that happened.

While walking back to the parking lot, she kept holding on to her tote bag tightly which felt surprisingly light and empty. Like her bag that had spilled all over, it was her heart that seemed to have scattered all over the place this time. He had come like the monsoons, showered on her like a thunderstorm and then left her in a famine of dreams that she always knew were too good to be real.


Your perception of me
18:08 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments
Show me not the way to where I should lead
Instead, grant me the freedom to choose to be
Tell me not stories of heroes of the past
I ain't the clay you can mold in a cast
In your present I shall write history
With my dreams, in letters big and bold
And borrow for a while, my soul that you've sold
My dreams are young just like me
They are drifting like the clouds above
Sometimes vibrant like the palette of the rainbow
Sometimes just shades of grey like grandma's hair now
They are my life now, my blood, my breath can't you see
Yes they could be flawed
But so's your perception of me...


My best friend's wedding
19:02 - Posted by Shilpa K - 2 comments


Best friend’s wedding
The pleats of her off-white saree with the dull gold border had ruffled at her feet like the leaves of a fully bloomed cabbage flower. In her ears she wore big gold hoops in a traditional design and if one looked closely, one could see her ears droop a little by their weight. Her hair was pinned neatly into a bun which was laced on its well defined circumference by a string of delicate saffron and pale white flowers. Behind her ears she had applied liberal drops of her favorite French perfume, placing it exactly on the nerve endings, leaving behind its sweet smell as she moved with confident steps in and around the cloth canopy. Her neck was bare except for a weightless gold chain with no locket that she always wore. It was gifted to her on her tenth birthday by her parents & she had never removed it since then. She seemed to have grown in it and it fitted snuggly around her slender tall neck. The air buzzed with the conversations the guests engaged themselves in and who by now were seated uncomfortably under the canopy in their embellished attires and awaiting impatiently the arrival of the bride and the groom.

Sunita – the bride, was Riya’s best friend from school, the kind you go around distributing sweets with on birthdays, the one with whom you venture out on bicycles outside of your building gates, with whom you have night-outs for studying, with whom you share your stories of the first heart-break and twelve years from then you throw a surprise bachelorette party before the nuptials. Riya was doing a last minute check on the food arrangements, when all heads turned to watch the bride arrive in an elaborately decorated palanquin. Riya had missed most of the pre-wedding ceremonies while she was making sure all things were in order from the flowers on the table where the guests were seated, to the ribbons that were tied on the chairs where they made their backsides comfortable, to the food arrangement which was a lavish spread of cuisines both Indian and international, to the accommodation of close family and friends and giving away sweets and return gifts to them. Sunita was the only child of her parents who had conceived her at an age when her mother had already crossed her mid-thirties. They treated Riya as their second child and could dispense authority over her with no second thoughts, also showering her with affection in equal measures. Riya was orphaned when she was fifteen. Since then she and her younger brother lived with her maternal uncle and aunt who had three kids of their own, all younger than Riya and her brother. Riya never sensed affection in their interactions with her, neither did she sense disappointment or hatred. Instead, she concluded that they had assumed this role of raising two additional children as some sort of a responsibility. A responsibility they assumed that was bestowed upon them by a higher force, a greater power and hence they carried it out with utmost sincerity. They believed something unfortunate would happen to them or their own children if they relinquished it.

 Riya used to spend most of her time in Sunita’s house, her mother making the girls evening snacks as they finished their notes, driving them to the mall for their shopping excursions, and accompanying them to their dance classes where they learnt classical dance forms. In a way Riya filled up the space of another child that Sunita’s parents had always yearned for but could not find the strength to conceive. Yet, they never considered adopting Riya when her parents were gone and her uncle decided to shelter them. The thought had crossed their minds, and unsettled them for weeks but they never discussed about it and let it pass. It had occurred to Riya only once, when she had felt extremely lonely at her uncle’s house while her brother was busy watching television in the same room. She let it pass too believing her brother would be an added burden for Sunita’s parents.

 She stopped to look at Sunita, who was wearing a peach netted saree with silver sequins, a silky glazed petticoat inside, her dusky complexion bore a soft luster partly out of the well done make-up and partly because of the excitement of finding the right guy after all those stories of heart-breaks that Riya had talked her out of. Riya felt envious of her in a weird way. She stole her look from Sunita and got back to stuffing ornate envelopes with crisp five hundred rupee notes to give away as part of some ritual she didn’t know. However, the feeling refused to shy away and only grew stronger with every passing minute as the nadaswaram bugled in the background and the notes became faster and more palpable like her heart now. The more she observed Sunita from the distance, her face set aglow by the incandescent lights that lit up the altar, the smile never leaving her, the more the thought pronounced itself repeated in her mind. Sunita was three inches shorter than Riya, about a handful of kilos more, her complexion darker; yet her poise, her elegance and her demeanor was something Riya had always coveted. Today, it was the same elegance that graced her and made her the beautiful bride that everyone talked about. She looked happy, happier that Riya had ever seen her and she had seen her in all her times - of happiness and of grief.

 Riya had never sought a friend outside of Sunita. When they started working, the only thing that had separated them as individuals if not as friends, Riya had always been contented with the weekend meet ups with Sunita. On weekdays she used to spend time reading amidst the television set that her brother rarely ever turned off, or helping her younger cousins finish their homework, or helping her aunt in the kitchen with chopping and grating, or working out her finances. Sunita on the other hand had acquired a circle of friends who decided to hang out often after work on weekdays and made movie plans for Sunday. She never missed inviting Riya for the weekend plans. While initially Riya joined them to keep Sunita’s heart, she started to feel distanced from Sunita with every passing week. Her choice of topics didn’t seem to interest her, her speech seemed foreign, her attempts at humor felt superficial and her mannerisms forced. She missed those days when they just sat in the balcony outside Sunita’s house for hours, watching the road and the lawns below, the road which had lesser trees than it had when they were kids, sipping coffee, discussing little nothings. However, Riya always made it a point to drop in at Sunita’s when she could to meet her mother even when Sunita was away at the movies. Her mother had started to take the place of Sunita in Riya’s life. Both of them acknowledged their loneliness in the company of each other, for one from a grownup daughter always away from home and for the other from an outgrown friend.

It was on one such evening that Riya was spending with Sunita’s mother that her mother started talking about the wedding planning for Sunita. “I thought she would have told you already about it! Silly girl”, her mother exclaimed when Riya showed no signs of knowledge about this life-event. Riya kept quiet and vowed not to congratulate her until she broke the news herself. “I deserve to be told”, she reminded herself. That night, Sunita updated her Facebook relationship status to ‘In a relationship’. By the time Riya noticed it, others had already poured in congratulatory messages and the post had acquired close to a hundred likes. She did not comment on it, angry that she had to blurt the news in a public forum without even having told her.

 As the date drew closer, she started helping out Sunita’s mom with the wedding preparations and volunteered to take up the role of the wedding planner. Her mother in return trusted her completely. She had always been the diligent one of the two girls and it eased a lot of the pressure that Indian weddings usually bring with them. On first of the shopping trips for the wedding, the two girls met after a whole month. Sunita was her effervescent self, clearly excited by the thoughts of her wedding. It still bothered Riya that Sunita had not spoken to her directly about it and even today she was comfortable having known that it was her mother who had told Riya about it. Their eyes floated on the sea of sarees flung open to show the intricate work, they felt the texture between the palms of their hands, occasionally carrying a few sarees outside to confirm the color under natural light. The contrast in their choices became obvious when Sunita remarked “too old fashioned”, “very dull”, “I’ll look like an aunty”, “these make you look fat” to most of the sarees picked by her mother and approved by Riya. The salesman unaware of the relationship the girls shared now, also passed some unnecessary wise comments on their drastically different preferences to create some light moments, grinning as he talked revealing his scarlet red teeth stained with beetle-nut juice. When they were confused between two sarees, he used to make Riya stand next to Sunita and drape the other one around her. Every time this happened, they always ended up choosing the one that was draped on Sunita while she posed in the mirror, looking this way and that. Riya felt that she couldn’t do enough justice to the sarees and it was her fault that they went ahead and made all the wrong choices. It was one such ‘wrong choice’ of netted peach with silver sequins that seemed so perfect on Sunita’s body right now.

Early next morning, the canopy had been pulled down. Folded chairs were stacked in a corner one above the other, ready to be loaded into trucks. Sunita’s father was settling some last minute expenses with the contractor; odd little crushed paper cups were strewn across the lawns reminding them of the guests from the previous night who had seen the couple off on their honeymoon before retiring to their homes. Sunita’s mother was dabbing the corner of her eye by the tip of her pallu in the balcony overlooking the lawns and the road; the same balcony where Riya and Sunita had spent hours chatting and sipping coffee. When the wedding photos arrived, Sunita’s mother had called Riya over. They went through it one after the other, noticing minute details that they couldn’t notice on D-day, crackling up in bouts of laughter. They went through the thick deck, her mother leaving her finger prints on the corners of the photographs that were yet to be arranged in an album.

 “Where were you hiding Riya, you don’t seem to be there in single photograph. What’s the use of having all these unwanted people in the pictures – these uncles and aunties standing next to Sunita? Look at them; they stand next to her as if they are so close. Am sure they didn’t even give her any flowers, let alone an envelope!”, her mother remarked. There were only two pictures of Riya in the entire deck, one close-up and one full length which Sunita’s mother had reminded the photographer to take. “Oh how pretty!”, she said when they looked at those pictures. “These are perfect to be sent for your wedding proposals”, she said teasingly. Riya smiled in return. The thought of her wedding had never been on her mind, and it suddenly occurred to her that she would need to go through the entire process again, this time choosing sarees for herself. She wondered if Sunita would ever accompany her for her shopping, if she would stand awkwardly next to her as she had allowing the salesman to drape a saree just to compare and choose, she wondered if they would still pick the saree draped around Sunita.

 When they were done going through the pictures about three times, each time discarding a handful of pictures because they were either not very clear or were not suited to go in the wedding album, or had people her mother didn’t particularly like, Riya sat in the balcony and arranged them chronologically in the album. She knew the order of events as if they were scenes from her favorite movie. She tucked away a picture of Sunita, believing it would be the last thing of hers that she would be able to keep and which would survive longer than their friendship had. The past few months were like a marathon, where she had given herself completely to the feat of achieving the Great Indian Wedding dream for her best friend from school and for her mother. Now that it was all over, she wondered if she would find reasons to drop by again at their place, she wondered if Sunita would ever bother to meet her again, if she would be left with nothing to do on the weekend, that for the first time in her life would she be alone? The thoughts grew in her mind and exploded like the long string of firecrackers they burst right after the wedding. She left hastily when she was done arranging the album, with a smile that had survived an outburst of tears, the tip of her nose red and her eyes glistening with the first signs of tears. Sunita’s mother sensed her state of mind. Mother’s can read signs of human emotions like no one else. That night Riya kept tossing in the bed, the picture of Sunita, tucked between the pages of the book she was reading before going to bed. Her cellphone beeped in the middle of the night, filling up the corner of the room with the fluorescent glow of her screen light. It was Sunita. “Hey, just wanted to drop in a Hi. Missing you and mom too much L L. We are in Switzerland ^^ right now, and have a balcony with a direct view of the Alps. It’s beautiful. I wish we could just sit here and sip our mugs of coffee! I am so tired from the wedding L Need to come home and catch up on some sleep zzz before returning to the routine. Will be back next weekend…Mom said the snaps have come out great. Am dying to see them! Will see you then! Take care J”  For the first time after many days, Sunita had initiated a conversation, she had mentioned her mom and Riya in the same sentence, infact Riya first, she valued the time they spent in the balcony so much that she reminisced it, and hinted from across the distance that she felt a desire to meet her like old times. The next morning Riya scanned the picture she had carried with her home and posted it on Facebook with the caption – My best friend’s wedding.


Just not good enough
18:49 - Posted by Shilpa K - 0 comments


Just not good enough

It was yet another Monday morning, and Riya was seated at the back of her chauffer driven car on the way to work. Her ironed linen shirt had started to gather creases as she made herself comfortable for the long drive, the driver adeptly maneuvering the car and wading through the stream of slow moving traffic. Her shirt had become wet from her damp hair she had let loose. It had acquired a transparent see-through mark at the place where the tip of her layered hair met her back, slightly revealing the hem of the white cotton slip she wore underneath. She had rolled down the windows hoping the wind to blow dry her hair which she hadn’t found the time to set before stepping out of the house. Instead, dust powdered the clear skin of her flawless round face as cars and two-wheelers scurried over the unpaved sides of the road. She amused herself by the unusual sights the road offered. Light music played on the car stereo mostly muffled by the noise outside, except for a few high notes which were feebly audible. Ladies clad in salwar-kameez, with dupattas draped around their face leaving only a slit open for their eyes, wearing gloves that went right up to where the sleeves of their dress ended and open slippers that exposed their toes that hadn’t experienced a pedicure in a long time, had their feet dangling by the side of their two-wheelers which showed the level of confidence or rather the lack thereof while they rode on the uneven roads that led them to their workplaces. Men stuck their cellular phones against their ears inside their helmets and with great dexterity, as if it were some kind of a circus act, rode on the road with their heads tilted to the left supporting the phone. They passed by traffic cops who were too busy to notice them, either fiddling with a gadget or adjusting their cowboy hats with one side upturned, or just seemed oblivious to the dearth of law and order as unruly traffic clogged the roads. She engaged herself in a silly game, observing those seated in the rick and trying to guess what they looked like basis the shoes they wore, the bags they carried, the color of their nail enamel, or the way they had crossed their legs. As the car moved ahead of the ricks, she turned her head casually or noticed them from the corner of her eye, keeping a mental score of the hits and the misses. Despite the viscous flow of vehicles, occasional brushes of metal against metal led many to exchange irate looks. The scratches on the sides of cars signifying the lack of patience that the city had started to inherit from the migrant population from up north to this Silicon Valley in India.

It was in one such IT company that Riya worked as a junior analyst, a job her father had secured for her through this high-profile business contacts. With her low grades she wasn’t eligible for the aptitude tests of most companies during placements, and the ones for which she was eligible were all based outside of Bangalore. Her father had decided against sending her outside of the city, for he had nestled her in the lap of luxury and knew that she wouldn’t survive long in the absence of it given her levels of maturity. Her father had worked hard all these years to fill up the void that her mother had created when she left them for another man. As years passed by the lack of her mother’s presence didn’t seem to affect Riya as much as the presence of her father did at social gatherings when he always kept introducing her to everyone, or when she was out with her friends and he called to check if she was okay, or the time when she flunked her exams and he had offered her a sermon when all she wanted to do was hide her face under the pillow and sleep over it. However, that was three years back. And work, no matter how menial, makes you grow as a person and come in terms with the realities of the world. Her father now thought of her as more responsible individual, even if she attended office in a chauffeur driven car and refused to go by public transport, or blew her paltry salary over needless clothes, or still received pocket money from her father which was more than her salary, or had forgotten to wish her father on his birthday last year.

That day when she reached office, her manager called her in. Overall the mood on the floor was grim, as if some sort of calamity had just announced its arrival. She saw Sabrina, her friend from college days who was working in the same company but with a different team. She was packing her things clumsily in a brown cardboard carton, trying to hide her tears but doing little to hide the phenolphthalein pink complexion she had acquired, like in the experiments in the chemistry lab she had helped Riya in. Another girl was crying in a corner and was being consoled by some of her teammates. “What the hell is going on?” Riya murmured to herself, as she walked into the meeting room and closed the door behind her. Her manager had called for a meeting with her, something that had never happened in the past. There was nothing about the work she did or the profile she held that ever demanded such a thing. Plus she also felt it was too boring for someone to be called into a meeting to discuss performance, too lame to discuss future plans and definitely a sheer waste of time to discuss career growth.

“Hi Riya! Come have a seat” he said to her, his voice dampened by the news he was about to give her. He pronounced her name and addressed her as if it was the first time they had met. Of course there were no occasions where they spoke before. She smiled awkwardly, not sure what led to such a meeting. “You know we have been downsizing owing to the financial turmoil in the west. We don’t have enough projects coming our way with the cuts on technology spends. So the management has decided to layoff a few people…” he took a deep breath before he spoke further as she stared at him closely, her hands tucked under her thighs on the chair, shoulders hunched and a slight lean of the body towards him. “Sorry to say Riya, you would need to leave. But am sure you’d do well. I know it’s tough to be in a situation like this but…” he continued for some time as she absorbed the words that had just fallen on her ears. She had stopped listening after he let out the news. But he seemed to go on with the ease of a rehearsed speech that tele-callers have.

She returned home in her car, this time the windows rolled up. It wasn’t the first time she had failed. It wasn’t the first time that she had been rejected, or that she was considered a second choice or not considered as a choice at all. She had felt no shame in mediocrity which she maintained consistently throughout her schooling and days of attending college. Yet today, she felt something inside of her growing weak. She remembered the day when her mother had walked out of the house never to return, with a man of a hefty built and a thick beard who refused to look at Riya in her eyes. Her mother did not seem to have any remorse in her eyes as she left, and left behind a part of her as easily as leaving behind an abandoned piece of furniture in an old house. She felt hurt even then, but was too proud to cry and she had fought back her tears like bunds holding back rain waters on the streets. She had gone back to her room and torn off all pages from the photo albums that pictured her with her mom to erase all memories of her. It helped little at that age, but time blurred the picture of her mother in her mind and she could barely remember her face or the color of her skin or how she spoke. She remembered the day when she had to leave behind her friends and shift to a different city. She had cried the whole night, in the morning her eyes were swollen like buds of pink roses that grew in the balcony of their old house. They hadn’t flowered since her mom left. With the new city, came new surroundings, new people who asked her new questions about her old past. Of where her mom was, of why she never attended the open house at school, if she were dead.

She withdrew herself from the company of others and had no friends. Not until she entered college, where she didn’t have uncomfortable questions to confront. She discovered a new life, she found happiness in the spells of SMS that beeped throughout the night, she found freedom at movies and at malls with her buddies, she picked up new hobbies and bunked classes to pursue them, she made friends wherever she went and instantly added them on Facebook, her network of friends growing rapidly - the guy she met at the book store and cracked up a conversation with, the girl who sang at the concert, the old man who was playing the piano in the hotel lobby – she spoke so much that her jaws ached at night. Amidst this frantic socializing she drowned the fears of her past, her days of loneliness when she had sat alone in her room watching the DVDs of her favorite sitcoms over and over again until she grew sick of them and dumped them away and cried silently in her bed while her father was away at work. Her grades lowered at school. Yet as she always told her friends she was “high on life” and nothing else mattered. She had fallen in love with life again. But today, as she held the pink slip in her hands, seated in her car she felt she had crossed boundaries in her attempt to embrace life again. That her ambitions were limited only to planning the next movie outing, that her skills were recognized only in her circle of friends and tags on Facebook – Style icon, fashion fiesta, chatterbox, Party Animal; that she had lost a lot more than she had thought she had gained as she walked on the path of wilderness. She wondered why her father never stopped her, why was he always in agreement to her pettiest of all demands, why did he not ground her like other dads did when she had failed the exam, why had he been so complacent to her outrageous habits?

That night after many months she was home for dinner and sat across the table while her father occupied his usual seat on the cherry wood table on which there was always space for four, and three chairs were always empty. She could notice he had a smile on his face and talked with the food in his mouth, maybe out of excitement. She listened to him silently, playing listlessly with the food in her plate avoiding him in the eye. She knew the news of her unemployment wouldn’t affect him, or at least not in a way that would wipe the smile off his face. Yet she felt guilty of proving to be a child that had only learnt to fail. As her father was describing an incident at work today, she cut him short and said “Dad, I am fired.” She grew red out of anger, grief and shame that seemed to have gripped her at the same time. She started crying incessantly not wanting to look up. This time she did not run back to her room to hide. Instead she sat at the table, head lowered, and her face hidden by a veil of her layered hair. Teardrops ran like rivulets across her face and toppled over her prominent cheek bone to land on the dinner table like rain drops from the tips of tree leaves once the thunderstorm is over. Her father was not prepared for such a situation. He had never seen her cry; he had never seen her disappointed at failure. He gently put his fork down, chewed the food in his mouth, gulped down half a glass of water, dabbed the sides of his mouth with the table napkin and placed it messily at the side of his plate. He crossed his fingers to create a mesh and then gently supported his chin on it, his elbows placed firmly on the table. “Did they tell you why?”he questioned. “Downsizing because the west is so messed up”, she replied. He sensed helplessness in her voice, as if she had tried to defend herself against failure and had not succeeded. “It’s happening everywhere. You know it right? There is news about layoffs everyday in the newspaper”, he said trying to make it look like an ordinary happening. “But why me, Dad? There are about a hundred other employees in that company! Maybe I know why…because I was never good enough for anything. Neither good enough to give mom a reason to stay back, nor good enough to answer back to those kids who questioned me about her, nor good enough to secure good grades at college, nor good enough to get a job on my own, and now not good enough for the company when it decided to clean its floor and throw all the rubbish out. I am just not good enough. And you knew it all along Dad. You knew it, didn’t you! Why didn’t you ever stop me? Why did my poor grades never bother you, even when you knew I could do much better, way much better so much so that I could have been at that guy’s place who handed over that letter to me?” He nodded in agreement and began to speak, “I thought she had left you miserable. I couldn’t see you being alone. I wanted you to have friends, to be in the company of people who admire you and want to be by your side, and not give up on you the way… she did. I guess I let it stretch far enough. You’d become the sole purpose of my life and in your happiness rested mine. All this while I was surely disappointed to see your low grades, to see how you had let them slip away so easily, how you had adopted a casual life of existence. Yet, I was afraid. So afraid to say to you anything that would hurt you. I am sorry. I really am…for being a bad father” Tears welled up in his eyes and he couldn’t talk anymore. The maid came in and cleared the dishes on the table while they were still seated, ignoring them as if they were invisible. They showed no signs of embarrassment in return. She had grown to understand them over the years, and also their vulnerabilities. She placed two mugs of hot coffee and left. Riya walked up to her father and hugged him, patted him gently, rubbing her petite hand over his broad shoulders trying to comfort him as he looked crestfallen by the weight of what he had just said. She knew she had pushed him too far to admit things that were better left unsaid.

The next morning she was awake while he was still watering the plants in the garden. She left a “Thank You Dad”, card for him on the coffee table along with a form for a CAT coaching class and left for the gym in her usual style. He smiled as he sat down to have his coffee. He picked up the card. It had no wordings inside, just a ‘Thank You’ in a Lucida handwriting font and her name she had scribbled messily at the bottom with a big heart. She had forgotten to put the date at the top. He was convinced that it was the reason why she forgot to wish him yet again on his birthday. He picked up the newspaper; the smile had dawned back on his face with the morning sun. The headlines read “Why 2008 is the best time to enter B-schools.”