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.