1. My name – yeah yeah you all who have come here from a link on my original blog know that my name starts with M. I was named after the Bengali word for “estuary”. The name came to my mother while crossing a certain estuary in Bengal when she was to have me, and I must have told her in some secret mother-daughter language of my own from her womb that I was going to be a girl. The Sanskrit interpretation of my name means “charmer” or “temptress” (yeah right, mom should have thought through THAT one a little more!!). I was an after-thought all right, born 12 years after my sister, but a much wanted after-thought – born from and of love.
2. My childhood? Pleasant, solitary but pleasant. Two childhood friends, but they are my world. As far as I was concerned, my world could be made up of just those two, until a few years back. Now my world has expanded a little. I wasn’t popular as a child, but no childhood traumas, no monsters in my closet waiting to jump out at night.
3. I used to be mortally afraid of ghosts – I still am, not quite as much though, I understand a lot more about the after-life than I did when I was five – about those who come from the Light and those who don’t. Besides, two years back, one day out of the blue, I just turned around and said out loud into the emptiness over my shoulder that I wasn’t ready for them just yet, and not to come back until I was. Then I politely asked them to leave and they did. Honest. You should try it.
4. I still have nightmares, where I am trying to scream and no voice escapes my lungs, or I am running but can’t seem to outrun whatever is chasing me, and I wake up trembling in a sweat. I have a dream-catcher next to my bed now.
5. Even today, occasionally I see dead people, who have just crossed over, and I swear to God I am not shitting you on this. ‘Coz so has Deb. And we both know it to be true.
6. I also talk to myself. A lot. Out loud. And laugh out loud too. Alone. I am not mad yet, I might be pushing it though.
7. My girlhood days were bliss – I blossomed somewhere, and all of a sudden, I was everything I was not, as a cute little pigtailed child with really plump pink cheeks. I lost it all – all the flab, I grew collar bones the size of percussion instruments, and I couldn’t understand why my 24 size waist, and 100lb heavy/light (?) frame was suddenly the rage, and what the fuss was all about!
8. The attention (largely from men, and a couple of women too – in particular I remember being hit on by a very very beautiful bisexual British woman, who wanted to sleep with me on Christmas eve night in the winter of 1996 in England) didn’t turn my head.
9. Still hasn’t.
10. I’d rather be known for my brains than how I look on the outside.
11. Beats me how so many people in the world are so ugly inside, and are insecure and envious of the beautiful people. “I’m on the outside, I’m looking in…I can see through you, see your true colors, inside you’re ugly, ugly like me…” (Staind for all you alternative rockers out there).
12. I graduated from a really adorable child to an ugly lanky awkward teenager to a beautiful human being (or at least I’d like to think so – delusions of grandeur!). I also like to think I am reasonably pretty! Then I remind myself that physical beauty like everything else is ephemeral.
13. That said, I am not vain. I hardly look at a mirror long enough to straighten my hair and wear the minimalistic make-up that I do wear – read eyeliner and kohl. My best feature? My eyes. Anyday! Which I now cloak in hip librarian glasses these days. Artsy-fartsy? You bet!!
14. That said, I do have a fetish for smelling ravishing or at the least good at all times. I love musk-based perfumes (they seem to go down well with my high testosterone levels!), or spring-flower perfumes for workwear. My favorite day perfumes are Noa and Forever Elizabeth, and my favorite night perfume is Gucci Rush. I can seduce the brains and life out of a person when I wear Gucci Rush and an attire to go along with it.
15. I can’t look at a mirror without feeling scared about who will look back at me if I stare long enough. They say, water creates illusions. If after a hot shower, when a mirror gets misty, and you stand in front of it, and focus and center yourself, you can see the persons you have ever been in all your past lives.
16. I believe in past lives.
17. I have done the misty mirror thing once, I believed what I saw.
18. I saw that woman again – twice, and the life she lived once upon a time, a few centuries back.
19. Bittersweet Symphony (Verve) is all that life is all about.
20. I am heavily into the new-age metaphysical stuff – reiki, meditation, past life therapy, etc. And I have many many theories of my own. I could lend you a few if you ask nicely!
21. Will I write a new age “life from the beyond” kind of book? Maybe not. Will I write a novel? Maybe yes, I am on my second chapter – only!! But it will be a masterpiece – I say so! Will I write a book about the rite of passage that is life, and tell people what to pack for the journey? Maybe yes.
22. I don’t believe in absolutes. None at all. The only absolute I believe in, is that hurting anyone is bad. That’s what mommy taught me and I believe in it vehemently. In the light of that fact, every human crime has two perspectives. There are only relatives, no absolutes, only greys.
23. Therefore, I also have never learnt to judge. And I cannot stand judgmental people – for the life of me. Judgmental people in my eyes are closed people, who cannot see life or perspectives apart from their own. I don’t give ANYONE the right to judge me, nobody, not even mom. Although if she does start on that path, I listen politely, and quietly go my own way. With others, I pick a mean fight.
24. My pet peeves – stupidity, and meanness. I cannot stand dull boring people. I cannot stand neo-intellectuals either. If I like you it shows, if I don’t, it shows. I haven’t learnt to be tactful or diplomatic, don’t plan to start now. And if I find you boring or otherwise don’t like your company, trust me, I WILL get up and leave without a word, in the middle of a conversation (yours). I am notorious for doing that.
25. I hate to be told what to do, I hate being pushed. If you do either, I WILL swing. That’s a promise. And no exceptions to that rule – whatsoever – not even for mom and dad. Force me/cajole me/push me to do something and you can be pretty sure I will never do it. Or do it in my own sweet time. Leave me be, and I will eat out of your hands! That’s the secret to getting me to do your bidding!
26. I am easy in relationships – I don’t expect much and I expect the same in return.
27. All I do want with all my heart and soul and body is luuurrve!
28. I am an easy to please woman from a boyfriend perspective. I don’t want any gifts AT ALL – more so expensive gifts – expensive gifts make me awkward and I feel strange about accepting them – most of the time I politely ask them to go change it for something everyday-ish, or return the gesture in kind.
29. Besides, I am fiercely independent. I hate being obligated to anybody for anything.
30. An ex once gave me a gold-edged Swarovski ship with a sail for Christmas, I still keep it in my treasure chest, because he knew what I was about – a free spirit, and his reasoning – even for a free spirit with wings who redefines wanderlust, transportation is essential! I loved him then and cried and laughed and hugged him when he said those words and could not find it in me to ask him to replace it for something everyday-ish.
31. He also gave me a Swarovski pine cone that same winter, because the pine tree outside my house was grazed to the ground, to pre-empt lightning threat. And my pine tree and I were best friends, confidantes, she used to bring the moon to me at night cradled in her branches and we, all three of us used to talk well into the night. And I never loved him more than at that moment for remembering and commiserating with me. But love didn’t stay in our hearts forever.
32. He is still a wonderful man, a good friend, but we are not together. People grow, and sometimes they grow apart. And I do not like being clung on to. More importantly, I don’t think I was ever madly or hopelessly in love with him, and that is the only reason one should be in a relationship. One should never be in a relationship out of pity for the other person, it eats away at the relationship like a termite.
33. I am a free spirit. In the truest sense of the word. Ask anyone. They will all vouch for it.
34. Need is a very bad word in my dictionary. Cruel thing to say, but I do not need anyone, nor do I have any need to be needed by anyone. We all crave love, as a human being, that is pre-programmed into our brains, but I have no need, no desire to need or be needed and no dependence on others.
35. I crave independence and my own space. I can be vicious (well, almost) if I feel my space is being encroached upon. By anybody.
36. There is no reason in my life, rhyme maybe, but no reason. I was modeled after the Random Walk Theory. I am as random, as arbit as it gets. Unpredictability? I have refined it to a fine art!!
37. My friends don’t hear from me for months, sometimes even years, and just when they assume I might as well be dead, I rear my pretty little head!
38. I hate birdbrains
39. I cannot resist creative people – my favorite beings are poets and musicians
40. I was married to a darn good musician once, who will get around to/already might be cutting albums in the very near future. I hope so, he deserves it, he is quite a talented person, just not made for me. That’s all.
41. I will marry a musician again, or a poet, if I ever do take the vows again.
42. I am not a musician, maybe a poet, on my better days but I make my living out of crunching numbers.
43. I will have a girl when I find “the” man. I have three names for her (one of them is Rheannon), if I have a boy I shall call him Adi or Noah.
44. I am not ashamed of anything that I have ever done in my life. I am 32, single (married once, but that’s okay) and have half a century ahead of me. Darn!
45. I could sleep my life away and wake up just in time to die again!
46. I could die tomorrow and not miss a thing about living. Living is different from being alive. Biiiiig difference there.
47. Music defines my existence, gives meaning to my life, without music, I would have pulled the plug long back
48. I maybe a cynical bitch, but I believe in love, God, how I believe in love. Even when I loved hopelessly, helplessly, and my heart got ripped out of my chest, I found it in me to put it together again. I am an incorrigible romantic. All my poems are about love, in some sense.
49. That’s why I know when I am too much in control, when I haven’t lost myself completely in a relationship, head over heels, that I possibly cannot be in love.
50. I have only been in love like that twice – hopelessly, passionately, helplessly, madly. But it was enough. Even if I never find it again. A love like the ones I have had is hard to come by – it is what books and movies are about. And I know I will never heal, but that’s all right. At least I know what complete surrender feels like.
51. My last (second of the two loves) boyfriend quit with no “preamble” (shamelessly borrowing from Scarlett here, because I could not find a better word), and I never saw it coming. Or maybe I did. But I still didn’t do a damn thing about it. Pride got in the way, as did “to let that which goes, slide…” But I carry him in my heart to this day wherever in the world I am.
52. I find early morning cuddling with the person you are in love with, the best goddamn thing in the whole fucking world. No parallel to snuggling close into somebody’s shoulder in the wee hours of the morning, and hear them breathe, and their heart beat underneath your head.
53. I don’t believe in PDA – you will hardly if ever find me uttering words of affection on public zonkboards. Can’t say the I-love-you’s and I-miss-you’s very easily on public domains. Just can’t. When I do it, I come out sounding shallow and fake. I hate being fake.
54. I am foul mouthed – I was born that way, with PMS and an attitude the size of Godzilla.
55. I believe sex is a good thing, a beautiful experience, and nothing to be ashamed of. I have had awe-fucking-some good sex about thrice in my life (with one of the two loves I spoke of), but if I never find it again, I will still die happy. At least I will never have to fake the big O!!
56. I sleep in my jammies, which have blue clouds and blue starfish on them – always. I have two pairs of the exact same one – I like the pattern so much!
57. I have seen The English Patient seven times – and each time I howled at the end.
58. The Matrix Trilogy is the best that could be, so was High Fidelity. If I were a man, I’d be Rob Gordon.
59. I have been making Top 5 lists all my life in my head – Top 5 everything, Top 5 break-ups, Top 5 moments, Top 5 songs for any goddamn situation in life. You name it.
60. I am into younger men or older men, not men my own age – for some weird reason even I can’t, don’t understand!
61. My last boyfriend was in his mid-20s (one of the two I spoke of), and after we broke up, I went out with Mike, who was 51. They were both amazing human beings, and I have no hard feelings, just a feeling that it didn’t have to be this way. I am dangerously close to going out with a man in his early 20s again! Darn!
62. My friends are all men – again by accident, not by design. Besides, men are less hassle-free to be friends with – they don’t end up complicating simple things, they don’t bitch, they don’t get envious or possessive if you make other friends, and they let you breathe.
63. I collect black and white photographs, large framed ones – am crazy about them in fact – old bridges, monuments, lakes, mountains, faces, women, angels, in black and white. If anybody ever really really wants to give me something, I just tell them to give me black and white photographs. For a person who doesn’t believe in black and whites, I have a strange fetish.
64. I also love shoes. I can never have enough shoes (though I made myself stop at nine), and enough white shirts. My wardrobe is full of black and white.
65. I am also into sexy sarongs, and sarees (rediscovering my roots I believe). I look good in a saree, or so I have been told whenever I have worn one, wherever I have worn one!
66. I have a zip fetish – I always have a bad feeling my front zipper is undone whenever I am wearing jeans or any pair of pants with a front zip. I check it every two hours. I once walked out with my zip undone in an airport lounge when I was 12. I haven’t lived it down to this day.
67. I also peed with the boys in kindergarten or prep school, I think, when I was five. Then I went home bawling to mommy that I was missing a very vital organ and that my pee wouldn’t sprout like a fountain (because until five, I believed I was a boy).
68. I am deeply affectionate, but subtly so, I cannot display affection overtly. It demeans the true feelings of the heart by making a fucking public display out of them. Telling someone “I love you” is highly overrated. Most of the time, my subtleties are lost on people, and I come out being labeled “cruel, heartless, unfeeling, trampler-of-hearts”. Why? Because I cannot say the magic words as easily as others. Hence misunderstood.
69. I used to worry to death, now I don’t. Now I simply analyse everything to death and then do it over and over again, even love.
70. My biggest regret in life? That I am and remain misunderstood by the world in general and by a man I loved deeply with every pore and core of my being, and never found it in me to tell him so, even when he was breaking up with me (for other reasons – his own). Never found it in me to beg him to stay. Together, we might still have made it out of earth alive.
71. He taught me a lot of things about myself I didn’t know until then. For that, I am and will be eternally grateful. It was a tad too brief, three months, and the end was knocking on my door even before I was done with the beginning.
72. Now I am not so sure.
73. I do know though that emails are the worst ways to break up with someone, next to sticking post-its on the mirror. I was dumped via email – both times.
74. I have no fascination for jewellery, but if I wear it, I look pretty fine! I can look glamorous without any gold on me, never understood mom’s fascination for adorning me with it! All I wear is a pair of earrings that will stop my ear-lobes from closing in on me.
75. I also wear a diamond ring on the third finger of my left hand. Figured if I waited for a man to come along and put it on my finger, I’d be waiting a long long time indeed, if at all. Besides, one flash of the fingers, and it halts the wrong men in their tracks dead. Works like magic. You should try it!
76. My only and most precious piece of jewellery is an Egyptian eye made of smoky quartz enclosed in a silver triangle, which I picked up in Salem, Massachusetts. It is said to ward off evil and help in meditation discipline, aka seeing other realms. I liked both the reasons. But I liked the pendant more. It also has powers, it carries impressions of places and people I have been with.
77. I plan to get a tattoo on my navel – a tattoo of ð. The irrational number, the never-ending decimal. Magical. And exotic.
78. I ADORE books, without them, I’d be dead. I read widely and extensively, just NO pulp fiction, and no soppy M&B’s nor Danielle Steele’s – never read them. I scoff at them. My library is quite impressive – all into five shelves and overflowing.
79. Books I like – I completely soil. I make notes in the margin heavily and underline and dog-ear pages!
80. Even then, I adore me to death. And my friends.
81. I have learnt to let that which does not and should not matter, slide. I don’t hang on to things or people for too long, if they choose to leave from my life. The heart also comes around eventually, it just takes time but it does.
82. I believe in God and in miracles. I am not into religion, no organized institutionalized religion for me, but I am deeply spiritual. Again, biiiiig difference there. I am not a temple-goer, no rituals for me either, but I talk to my God every day. We even share a joke occasionally and wink at one another!
83. I try not to forget to thank God for all the blessings in my life. I have never been completely resource-less and I have always had some absolutely amazing, loving and caring friends who would walk to the end of the earth for me if called upon and that’s all one needs to go through life.
84. I contemplate death a lot – for no reason, but that it brings life into sharper focus.
85. I suffer from chronic migraines and breathlessness and bad seasonal and dust-induced allergies. That’s all. No other life-threatening diseases.
86. I can count the number of times in my life I have caught a cold! I was actually afraid that I was abnormal because I went through years without catching even one tiny measly little cold, even in peak cold and flu season, then about three years back, I came down with severe bronchitis and was incapacitated for a week, and survived only on antibiotics, and all the years caught up with me in one shot. Fair retribution. Since then I have never asked God for proof of my being normal.
87. But I do abuse my body and my naturally good health very much. I don’t drink water at all. I forget. And I drink tons of coffee and tea and am a sworn workaholic, I work through nights many times. I work best at night – most alert in fact.
88. I strongly believe in love, magic and friendship.
89. I am very empathic – I feel everything in my solar plexus. That’s where I house all my feelings and emotions. It is also easy for people to tap into me and steal my positive energy, and leave me with all their negativity. I don’t shield myself well. I forget to.
90. I am also prone to introspection and depression – they go hand in hand don’t they? Sleep gives me respite from both, so I have fewer waking hours to deal with then.
91. When I build my own house, it will be very Zen-like, with minimalist furniture, lots of floor-to-ceiling glass panels, French windows the size of doors almost and walls made of glass wherever possible. It will be on a gentle slope, and the wooden porch at the back raised on stilts, will face either a forest or a lake, and I will sit on that porch and write books till the wee hours of the morning, with crickets and toads and a white Norwegian elk hound for company. And a couple of dragonflies too. For Deb.
92. Mountains and the sea fascinate me. I would like to retire in a pine cottage high up in the Appalachians or by a little shack by the ocean, and die quietly in my sleep, with yesterday’s ink and words still fresh on my journal. I plan to quit corporate life in a few years, and then write books full-time.
93. I am highly sensitive and high on testosterone as well. I am a walking paradox. I talk very softly, I have a lovely voice (or so I have been told), but I also hold very strong opinions and for my opinions, I can fight to the death.
94. When hurt, I shut the fuck up. And stay that way.
95. I have strength, I also have softness and grace and elegance and a quietness about me. And I am showing off now!
96. I hope to evolve one of these days.
97. I am still suffering from, always will suffer from the “don’t-want-to-belong-to-any-club-that-wants-me-as-its-member” syndrome. I love my own company – to death, and prefer it that way. Except that it gets somewhat lonely at times, but not unbearably so. I can think in silence and work can fill up a lot of voids in life.
98. I am happy for my learnings and experiences, all done the hard way, and I wouldn’t trade any of my life slip-ups for the world. They made me the person I am today. For that, no price is high enough. I have met people more than half-way, I don’t intend to stop.
99. I might still make it out of here alive, with my obsessive compulsive need/sense of hygiene and cleanliness intact – one of these days.
Posted at 04:52 am by Heron
This is going to be a long and serious one, also my most personal post till date, so if you are rushed now, I suggest you come back later, else get yourself a cup of coffee and bear with me while the orange and gold leaves of Fall weave their way up to your doorstep. While you free the sad summer’s song tangled in your head somewhere, let me tell you a story - mine. I will not appear for quite some time now, so let this sink in for a while…
There is a road somewhere out there which leads to nowhere in particular but along which are scattered some cranberry stained memories, that bleed the same way that hearts do, but this is not about bleeding nor pain, this is about redemption and hope and people with voices that come to you and whisper to you in the dead of a hopeless night urging you to live. And this is what this post is about. “I am too close to Heaven for this Hell to be mine…” My cotton candy fingers are tracing silhouettes of faces in the misty window panes even as I write this.
Six years back, I was just a nobody living in the flow, not fighting it, nor resisting it, going through the motions, not moving forward nor backward, not deliriously happy nor despairingly hopeless, but I was there somewhere, in a sort of suspended blur of consciousness, and today I look at me, and I have to thank the Lord for all the people He has sent my way – that have helped me grow and become who I am today. And on Thanksgiving, I recount and remember them all, all of them in some sense constitute family for me or ought to at least.
Before I start enumerating them, I will say this that most often we forget to thank those who tear us apart and destroy us, but they are the ones who deserve the most of our gratitude. For they take on a burden too heavy, heavier than others are willing to bear. They have taken on the mammoth responsibility of helping us grow and learn – more than we could ever hope to learn from all those who are “nice” and “kind” to us. Kind of like earning plenty of karma points in the after-life, but dropping stealth bombs on us during our existence here on earth. Few would agree to do that for us – least of all, those who are “kind” and “loving” to us. We all know it is easier to love than to hate with venom. You tell me, if you had a choice, would you take on the responsibility of being always the one to wound than the one to soothe? I know most of us would opt to be the one who soothes than the one that causes hurt, yet if you think about it from the perspective of the one that wounds, you’ll see that holding up their side of the contract takes a lot more out of them. When you go back up, please don’t forget to thank them, I mean it. I am beginning to understand it all now. Somehow the answers are coming to me, there is of course a difference between “knowing” the answers, and “understanding” them, even after the first two are accomplished, it does not always translate to “accepting” them and finally “embracing” them.
If life is all about experiential learning, then the ones who have touched your life but wreaked havoc in whatever “negative” way, make the best teachers of all. It is true – think about how much you learn and grow from an unhappy experience that tears at the very fabric of your soul, as opposed to a happy one. The unhappy ones win hands down anyday – they build and unbuild and rebuild you. So today on Thanksgiving, I am thinking about all those that caused me endless soulful hurt in whatever way we define hurt in the here-and-now, and I think I am finding it in myself to forgive (no, forgive is a very sanctimonious sort of a word), rather, to thank them for their karmic kindness. I am truly indebted and a little apprehensive too (for it means that I have to return the favor in some future lifetime) and sarcastic little me does not say this in my usual caustic vein, but I really mean this. And I would like you all who read me to revisit things and people in your lives you have been hurt by or are bitter or angry about, from the above perspective and see if you feel differently. I can assure you, you will, as I do today. I already feel differently towards my demons. I am beginning to understand them, appreciate what they have done for me, and before the year is out, I might even find it in me to love them enough to try to make some sense of it all.
And now, about the people in my life who are precious to me and whom I wish to thank for their very presence in my life…most of all, my cousin Enigma, who I am bonded to, beyond the mere commonality of the gene pool. She, of the large generous heart and laughter that reverberates from her very soul can bring a smile to my face even on my worst days. With the heart and spirit of a child and the all-encompassing kindness one gets only from a parent, she ranks up there. She talked me through all of life’s betrayals and did not slight me even when I felt defeated and lost and wept shamelessly – never said “I told you so”. She just opened her doors and her arms and her heart for me. For that, no words are ever enough. Yes, like all others, we have our differences, but we keep growing and learning and each year we grow more understanding of the differences and more appreciation for the commonalities. As sisters go, she is a true soul sister – funny, clumsy, glamorous, generous, and wickedddd and the best creator of chocolate mousse and apple pie a la mode, among other things, and the best giver of hugs and she also knows the best way to wake me - she just comes and sits on my face!
Deb – of Deb, I cannot even begin to say anything that would give meaning to the relationship we share. Sometimes, hearts connect instantaneously of their own accord, and they connect with no notion of nationality, age, color and no notion of how the friendship is going to be sustained across oceans, but the simple knowing inside that everything will be all right and that distances will be immaterial as will be all “physical trappings” but only that the unification in thought will reign supreme as will the connection, beyond life itself. You can all find her on my photos link. She with the wispy golden blonde hair, who dwells with make-believe elves amidst magical glades that end at the steps of a lake and on whose bosom dragonflies land as she and I recline, reading books on a lazy drunk-on-red-wine summer afternoon out in the country in her lakeside cottage with a picnic basket filled with crackers and olives, makes my eyes moist every time I think of her. Unpacking last weekend, I came across millions of small Deb reminders which she had tucked away in my boxes (without my knowledge and to my utter surprise!) as she had helped me pack, all had faieries and frogs and dragonflies somewhere. She sent me her special brand of sparkling magic in a white Container Store corrugated box. And I sat and looked at it all and cried, I have only spoken to her once since coming back to India, and she’s not even on email. But does it matter? Not really, our hearts are connected; we’ll find one another one way or another. We always do – days become weeks, weeks become months, but we still stay together, bound unto one another.
Cheryl – my teacher, my Reiki master, who taught me all the things I know today, either through her learnings or through my learnings which were gently coaxed by her. Again, by the weekend, I hope to upload Cheryl’s picture on my Yahoo photos, although I look like a starving Ethiopian in that picture, but you can’t miss Cheryl’s gentleness and her human spirit. She gave me affection like my own mother and more when I needed it the most. She helped me through my days and months of a long drawn out discontented winter of 2002, and through the spring of 2003, where I found love and lost it again. She gave me hope that I’ll find it again and told me the perils of dwelling on the Pygmalion Effect – in very simplistic terms, if you expect the worst, you will attract the worst. If I expected to end up lonely and alone, a cranky spinster with two cats, a dog and three goldfish, then that is exactly what I was going to end up as. There is no more singularly powerful force in the world than thought. She also taught me that emotion was good, any emotion. The act of “feeling” never made anyone weak.
D – yes, D. Just that his coming into my life served to open my eyes to what was no longer a way of life for me, had ceased to be one, for me – long back. And I loved him, how I loved him, with all of me, and yet I am a better person today, for him – even without him. We went through two years of a tormented tortuous relationship, marred by impossible odds of success and impossible circumstances – we were doomed even before we had begun, but that has never stopped lovers ever, has it? The knowledge that it can’t go anywhere. That was almost three years ago. Today he is married and happy I presume, I severed all contact and “disappeared” the day he got engaged, even in my warped and twisted world view, I don’t do that. I stay away from “taken” men. I only remember the last time three years ago in June, when we met for the very last time ever in a Mexican restaurant. I was three tequilas down, and I was going to ask him something, all I could say was “Is there…” trailing off, and he said “there is and always will be.” I never forgave him for being so candid and so in love and so intense yet so clinical about it all, knowing that we were not in a position to do anything about it; neither did I ever forget the look in his moist eyes (which he didn’t conceal very well), when he said that. I never told him I loved him. Not once. Not even then. Today, I am beyond forgiveness, I am touching gratitude, he was my first love in the true sense of the word, and he showed me the meaning of that most-often-misused word.
And in the years to follow, there have been many more people who have touched my life and altered it in some tangible way. Skipping quickly to the blog-world – people who have never seen me, yet touched my life in momentous ways….,real quick here…Morphus, whose constant presence and stubborn disregard for my pleas to “leave me alone and work it out in my head” often led me to ease my burdens, and unload and lose some of my demons, as he helped me understand truths I just couldn’t see nor understand. He has a great ear for listening, a vividly sharp perceptive and intuitive mind, a wonderful heart and a lovely bitch called Phoebe.
Maddie, whose infectious madness along with her depth and understanding of life, and her absolutely unparalleled ability to look life and herself in the eye and to laugh at it all and make light of it, gives me endless hope – that I might still make it out of here alive in spirit. We live in parallel worlds, we could have been one another in another lifetime, she is all I ever wanted to be – bold and strong and brave and gentle and beautiful, with the most luscious pair of lips I ever saw!
Samita – an eighteen-year old shaman teacher (of that I am positive) with the wisdom of a thousand sages and the confidence of someone very comfortable with her talents. Of all her talents, her best are the human ones, the humane ones, of understanding people instinctively, offering endless warmth and the much-needed human touch, and standing up fiercely for those she believes in. She warms you up inside. And makes you feel like a child again.
Pratish – for whom words are just not enough and whom I love dearly, because he holds me in the palm of his hand and always looks out for me, and regales me with stories and amazing songs (his own), impersonations and creepy-child voices, and treats me like a fragile Barbie involved in reconnaissance activity, and even grabs my arm and pulls me back when he sees me crossing busy crazy Mumbai roads as if I were taking a walk in a park on a warm July evening! He is utterly insane and utterly adorable, need I say more? Oh and he has an amazing voice!!
Paradox – whose friendship means more to me than I could put into words. Only the dearest of dear friends would feel the way he does – helplessness at not being able to help a friend fight their own battles and make their own way out of a minefield. I am forever grateful for the hand that is ever so ready and eager to make sure I don’t crumble and succumb to life’s pressures and betrayals. They say love is the most powerful thing in the world and the only thing that makes any sense at the end of the day. He understands it like no other.
He-who-shall-not-be-named – Oh well, what do you say, what can you say when part of you understands the motives behind why someone does what he does, and you try your damndest best to see life and things from his perspective and yet the human part of you hurts for the wounds that are left open. I have no ill-will towards him, I loved him, how can you bear ill-will in the same place where love made its home once? Love, like Lysol, is a great cleanser, a great disinfectant – doesn’t let other negative feelings germinate once you’ve washed it down with love. He was a great teacher too, and for that I will always be eternally grateful. And I am also grateful for the fact that coming three years after David, he showed me what it was to experience that emotion all over again and contradict my premise that there wasn’t much else to look forward to in life, and in some sense to give me “hope” that love is always lurking around the corner and you never know when it might jump out at you! He made a believer out of me for some time at least, that is enough. But mostly, gratitude is due for taking on a burden nobody else would have shouldered for me, for holding up his side of the karmic bargain and helping me grow and learn and become more of the person I seem to be becoming everyday – a better, stronger human being. In a strange hopeless sort of a way, he filled me with hope. It’s never too late.
And finally, saving the best for the last - Srik – my brilliant poet-musician with the kindest, largest, most compassionate heart that I have seen so far in life, an intensely private and sensitive person with the most answers I have ever seen in one place in one head and with more compassion than I could ever hope to muster. Like Deb, nothing I could say, nothing at all possibly could even begin to express all the things I would like to say to him, for all the things he has given me, nor could I ever hope to explain in a few typed words the meaning of this very nebulous indefinable but utterly beautiful relationship we share or all the things he stands for. He, who has been backed up into a corner himself for quite a few months now, fighting life against all odds from the most disadvantaged position, fighting a lot of existential material issues, finds it in himself to make my life more bearable, that my private hell bothers him, where else would I find a human being with such a beautiful heart, a human spirit that spills over into everything that he touches? It shows in his poetry, his music. You must read him – is by far the most talented poet-musician I have come across in my real life. On his 24th birthday when he should have been busy drinking himself to oblivion, he found it in him to sit and tell me all the things I should know and why they were the way they were and to hold my hand and to tell me that it would be all right and that the wind would cradle me, and that I was safe. I could have cried, I never loved him more, I swear I would have hugged him to death if there weren’t a goddamn ocean separating us! If I had to make just one wish for all of you today, I would wish that each of you find at least one Srik in your lives and trust me, you wouldn’t want much else ever.
With so many people in my life, how could I not be thankful? I see God everyday – in each of them, and in their little acts of kindness. Would it be trite to say I love them all? Perhaps not. If ever the three words meant anything to me at all, they do when I say them to you all today; I love you – all of you. And I am deeply thankful for your presence in my life. Just take care not to hurt anyone – that, if anything, is the only “absolute” wrong in a world of greys, and love the only “absolute” right. “Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.” – I forget who said that. Not my words, those.
I have made my peace with death, that is the key. Now I am ready to make peace with life and living and myself. I am laying down my armour today. I am thawing, “still a little frozen, still a little broken, but free…” Find me a piece of sky and push me over the edge – I haven’t used my wings in a long time. I am coming home now. Redemption sounds like a lovely word.
Posted at 08:13 pm by Heron
