THE NOSTALGIA !!!
Monday 12 August 2024
one of those
Saturday 20 April 2019
Memoirs of a Heart Break Queen
MEMOIRS OF A HEARTBREAK QUEEN
Forever ago I met a girl. And she was a heart break queen.
Until I had met her, I was of the opinion that breaking someone’s heart was a sin. It was after I met her that I realised that it was a talent. It was a hobby some people have been marvelling over the ages. They grew old revering it. It was absolutely fine for her and this wasn’t the worst thing about her.
The worst was that she was beautiful. Utter beautiful.
The kind of beautiful that makes quite a big deal about itself. The kind of beautiful that fails to go unnoticed, that poets and writers over the ages have been writing about fooling people around the world that it was not so much about the beauty but about the heartbreak. Now here is a truth. It is actually about the heartbreak. And I say this because I have been a writer and I have gone through a heartbreak. I can so bet my life for it and vouch for it. It is not about the beauty.
We were like poles apart and we did not attract each other because we were unlike. We did because when all things that were repellently unlike in us were exhausted, there was this one thing that was left. Reading. Our shared love for literature. We were stuck amidst the sonnets of Shakespeare and the literary classics of Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens. We travelled through Hemingway and Orwell and Bronte. And it was like two diverse rivers that fell in the ocean. Some day she introduced me to Rumi and the other days I took her for a stroll in the corridors of Mir Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Someday she acquainted me with the contemporary romanticism of not so acclaimed Nicolas sparks and John Green, the other days I took her into the simpleton world of Khalid Hosseini and Haruki Murakami. And as the reader in her reverently remarked the writer in me “bask in the afterglow of the beauty of reading” and that “writing is a wiser daughter of reading”
I wanted to know more of her. And she would bluntly deny. Not that she purposely kept me away. She was just like that to the world. Too old school to socialise too quickly. And then she believed “it takes a lifetime to know a person inside out” and when I would complain about her lack of socialising she would unapologetically defend “I could socialise more people were books”
But not all that glitters is gold. It could be fire as well. And she wasn’t any less of an inferno. She was the volcano that engulfed the whole of me in a manner that when she was done with it, all that remained of me was ash. I was a total wreck. A wreck that had no meaning in today’s world. But I wouldn’t blame her for this. It was my own faulty. It was my own doomsday that was written forever ago. We all have someone who ruins us in a manner that no home can recover us from. All rehabs fail to help. Some are ruined by situations, some by subjects they don’t understand, some by the love that their loved ones don’t understand and some by a calamity. I was ruined by a beauty and then Milton says a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Irony.
I have never met her. So I can only imagine what she would be like. Or who she exactly is. I wish to meet her. Not to settle scores. But just to see her. We all deserve to have a fair look at what made us who we are. I don’t wish to have a nice conversation on the bank of a river or a sea shore or something like that. Just….. If only words could suffice.
I perhaps some day before the sun in my life sets down beyond all the mountains in my life, I would like my moon to occur, what if it’s an eclipse. I wish to be doomed again. By the same moon. By the same calamity. By the same beauty. To bask in the afterglow of her existence.
Till then, my earth waits for the return of its Saturn.
Thursday 22 December 2016
Death Notice.
The unacclaimed corpse found on the doorsteps of gate number 13-West of the National Library in Rio is learnt to be of an old man speculated to be in his ninetees.
The first witnesses said that the old man was found lifeless with his face burried in a mid 19th century classic fiction Lolita.
A bag containing the handcrafted diary that constituted memoirs from the life of the old man was also found in his mortal possession beside a bottle of old Russian vodka and 0.5L inkpot and a rusty old fountain pen. The alleged memoir is supposedly the only source of information about the old man although the handwriting seems rather illegible to be read. Experts claimed that he was either too poor with it or too stoned to realise that he was writing.
His possessions were sent to professional analysers to detect the DNA or any other source of identity about the who’s who of the old man.
It seemed that the last book that the old man was allegedly reading had just enough amount of pages to exhaust the remaining breathes sustaining in his lungs. Meanwhile the memoir speaks of the life left behind by the old man that included his mortally struggling state until the age of 24 post which he decided to ascend towards the woods with his literary collection.
It was also stated from the verified sources that the old man had no social contact with his friends and family post a certain age which after he only roamed around unknown places to fathom the anonymity behind the aim of our mortal existence.
Also the old man has in his memoirs a mention of as countable as 4 friends which he named as FATAL 4 about whom he wrote just as voraciously as he wrote about an unknown girl that he supposedly wrote hundreds of unposted letters too which were found attached folded amid the pages of his diary.
The last mention of his meeting someone in person was at the botanical garden metro station in new Delhi India which is three oceans and two continents away from where breathed his last.
“Everything kills everything else in some ways” happens to be the only text scribbled in the inscription form on his left arm.
It is easy to claim that the old man will soon be forgotten as he should…for not giving away anything about who he was and what became of him post the 24th season of his life. The possession found from his old school bagpack was a literary collections of Vladimir nobokov, Ernest Hemingway, Rumi and Paulo Coelho besides his self scribbled largely illegible thoughts in the paperback form along with a heap of unposted letters tugged along.
His mortal remains were buried in the Central Cemetery of Rio with his possessions beside the grave number 1313 as mentioned in the concluding pages of his memoir. The final inscriptions on his grave owing to his subtle identity were as following
“The old man we knew nothing about”
Wednesday 24 August 2016
Until we meet....!!
Aparently the author writes it on the night before meeting the personified and humane version of imagination that forms the very soul of his work.
Dear,
To say that it's tough to swallow the fact that we are meeting tomorrow would be agonisingly an understatement. This is the emptiest that I have felt in a long long time. There is this inevitable hype about meeting you. It does beget goosebumps irresistibly but it's still such a different taste. It's not like meeting any other exciting stranger or befriending just another person who is a literary nerd. To be honest it's not actually about a stranger. I mean you were never one...were you?
I am as eloquent to you as I am with my skin and bones.
I am gonna tell you how it's like. It's like meeting your lost child if so to say. The child that you lost long ago in a war of midnight with the moon after which all the light that the life received was black in colour. Even in the dark you were born pale, pure and vulnerable.
That I had been deprived of looking into your ocean like eyes- deep and unfathomable, only barred me from finding you in the crowded settlements of my work. And that I could not for once hear you cry only kept me foreign and alienated from your mortal expressions of joy and sorrow. Perhaps these are perks of nurturing someone in the blessings of your imagination alone.
I have often contemplated how your silence echoes, how long does it take for your moist eyes to dispatch that heavy teardrop to run down the periphery of your eyes. I sort of wonder if you even visit your scars once in a blue moon. Or you just let them decay you. I have spent ages trying to decipher what part of a classic leaves you gasping or the ones that you stare blankly at thinking god knows what. Has any book cluchted you so hard you couldn't even move further for quite some time? What did you think all that while? Or did you just move on.
I haven't known any nomad as of this day who settles. Perhaps you didn't as well.
There are days darling when I sort of shudder when I think if what I had been imagining about you would ever be something real or if the saga ends where my book ends. What if you did not get my book to read. I would so want all the books in the world to vanish for a day just so you could read traces of your own soul compiled in paperback. That's my harshest imagination- purely a reflection of desperate obsession to be acknowledged by you. I mean what would a world without books be to you. That would be like barring you from your home. You are surely an orphan in a world without books.
Also I wonder if I should imagine about your looks. I sort of try not to think if you look ugly or ineffably adorable. But then I wonder how does the moon attract the calmest of oceans even with an infinity of distance between them and how does the moonlight forms the charismatic catalyst for every romanticised literary compositions. And you are lying if you don't know the moon's got a blot right in the face. So what? What attracts, attracts. Nothing else matters.
You are so the moon of my life. And all my life I had been waiting for this very night so you could show up on my land. All these stars around you will only tell you how you are the actual light of my life. Everything else just twinkles.
Until we meet, I remain in dark. Let your light kiss my cursed skin.
Yours with timeless admiration
:)
Tuesday 1 December 2015
On the art of moving on
On more occasions than one I have attempted to recluse myself in this customised space of mine to scribble my thoughts on this certain title. Lying by my side are;like lifeless corpse enveloped in dust these blank sheets of paper. The evenly spread dust will vouch for how rarely I visit this space. My last few visits here (relying on the loyalty of my memory) have all left the same blank sheets on the table. I could only draw a blank each time I sat down to pen. The reasons why i am allured to this place are driven and indispensable. But if there is one presence common in all those visits, it is the spontaneity of innocense. I could never write about things I did not experience in person..or did not hear about from people in form of thier stories. (That perhaps explains my fondness for seeking stories in people) Ofcourse this idea is easy to be rediculed for you do not need to attempt a murder or be an eye witness to it to write crime fiction. but that is how it has been for me.
one writer that i follow ardently writes "we dont get to choose if we are hurt in this world, but we do have a say in who hurts us". It is something about pain that stays. May be its that prick..that sting...the relentlessly ever killing sting. And we, we on our part dont help it either. We only prolong it. Sometimes we are so much into it, we start feeling like we aint suffering but treauring it. But people, pain is no treasure. God knows no body has ever availed any good by accumulating it. And there is nothing heroic about suffering. Some people think it is beautiful to suffer and absorb all the pain that is inflicted upon us undeservingly. They think it is classy or that it makes their story worthwhile. But lets face it. It does not. It never did. And it never will.
So what is moving on actually like...? Trust me, my blog is no guide for it. Its not a counselling cetre for the wounded ones. I wish to reflect my version of it. I think moving on is an aftermath. and unlike most people (atleast most of who I have known) think..it is not a decision of the helpless one. its not the accepatance of the battle lost.
I have known people who have resisted moving on until a part of them died in them completely; a part of them which they so adored for its resilience and resistance and how they believed that it was the one that had kept holding them together and intact during the reign of solitude. I have known people who optimistically vouched that moving on is like quitting on what was entirely yours. I know people who believe moving on is like not being loyal anymore.
Yes, I do not wish to take you in a parallel universe with an atmosphere of perfection and cakewalks as metaphor of life. Lets get this clear. Adversity is inevitable. there comes a time in life..and this one comes in the life of each one of us; none spared and no exceptions, when we feel we are doomed. This seems to be the epilogue of the life. It looks like relatable to the last chapter of the novel penned by our own being or the full stop that reminds us of the end of the sentence epitomising our own being. There are only empty pages to follow. Or may be; just may be., that is just a part (and never the whole) of what we think about it.
My favourite cliche one liner of all those that made the world go crazy for SRK was "like all the movies..even our life settles at the twilight. and if doesnt then its not the really the end my dear friend". such is the thing with life.
Whats the way out?
Look for signs. They are always around us only screaming for our attention and acknowledgement like the almond-like eyes of a certain one I remember from schooldays. Remeber there will always be a sun no matter how long the night was. And light, my friend, was always more guiding than darkness will ever be. Perhaps that is why there is always a sun in the sky as long as it is day but you may not have a moon always in the night. Infact we seek moon and stars for the mere reason that they emit light when there is darkness in our part of the world.
I always wanted these people to know how moving on is more about you than about the other people or the memories. And I always wanted them to acknowledge that moving on isn't like accepting that you lost it. Because sometimes it is really ok to cry and feel hurt and remorse and curse the world for the undeserving ordeal that you have been subjected to. But then as they say, you can not have rainbows without the rain.
Moving on is when when you choose your smile over the ignorance that you had been living with. Its more like ditching solitude and accompanying the alone you. The strongest one liner i ever read as a piece of sage advice was "let go of what has served its purpose" One monk like hero of mine said this to me. Set everything that isnt worth you free.
Go for endless walks with your own company. if you dont think the world isnt quite as awesome as you are, trust me no one else in the world is going to believe that either. Brew your own coffee when you feel sleepy. Visit book stores. Read classics. Read stories that were written long before we knew about the age of time. Go for movies all by yourself. Gulp down a drink when you want to feel tipsy and sink in the fondness of all that you have been. Sing until the lungs get sour and dance like piyakkad baaraatees. This world my friend has so much beauty to absorb that lettting go of what was shit isnt anything but a favour. So much around you screams to treasure you and celebrate life with you. There will always be a beginning waiting for you to nod YES. There will always be doors for you to push open and take you to roads your eyes could never travel. There will always be so much of light to suck up all the darkness you had been soaking in. ALWAYS.
Take a walk with life, with your eyes open to see what you deprived them of all this while. No angel is going to come seeking you to fetch you out of it. We are our own healer. Only we can allow ourself to be healed in just the manner that only we can allow ourself to be hurt.
So when the page ends, please turn over. Seek what is next. when the full stop is marked, write ahead whatever your heart lets out. And when you are broken, and hurt and doomed.,let go of the wounds. let time take care of the healings. dont get stuck up. move on.