Musings of a sachharine-bitter soul

Midway through the 7th episode, a song started playing and the dancers started swaying their bodies rhythmically. I was nestled in pillows and blankets. But I had to get up. I wondered why the strain sounded so familiar; it felt like someone has flicked a wand, and silvery wisps of my childhood have appeared. Too hard to miss, too thin to grasp. But then life knocked on my door and I stopped trying to remember. A few weeks later, I heard the same tune playing as the background score of a 70s film. Damn, I thought. I have to get to the bottom of this. The dark labyrinths of WWW gave me an app. I hummed into the speaker, and in a second, Hava Nagila. Someone told me once, associative memory works in funny ways. You see the rising sun, and you think of an orange. That's how I knew that right now as Belafonte's deep voice fills up my bedroom, I am also witnessing the face of my father, who, half-reclined on a sofa, sings "Jamaica Farewell". I am also seeing a 13-ye...

How do you create a home?  You plant a sapling in a desolate space.  Then go away.  Let days grow into months  and months grow into years.  And then one day, all the roads that led to your hitherto-home will have thorns growing. It is then that you will return, with blood-caked feet, and sit under your tree, and have its yellow shadow envelop you. It is then that you will thank that stranger who put seeds in your palm on a dreary morning and told you that second homes can grow in the most unlikely places if one dares to plant Hope.

She plays this little game in her head. It revolves around mispronouncing syllables within words deliberately. For example, “agape” would become “aja-pey” (after all, if the “g” in “agile” can sound like a “j”...); “”nutrition” would turn into “nut”(pronounced how the hard-shelled seed is pronounced)-try-shun.” There was a reason why she invented this game. It can be traced back to her tryst with the printed letters. It’s incredible how much of her thoughts, principles, ideologies have sprung from or been inspired from the books she read, much more than from the people she met or the experiences she garnered. Therefore, it’s reasonable to construe that her encounter with a lot of words had been through the printed alphabets. The first time she came across the word “ricochet”, she marvelled at the wondrous way the syllables seemed to arrange themselves to convey the exact meaning. She felt an odd respect for whoever coined the word. It was perfect and no other word would come clos...

For a longlong time I did not touch the pen. Under the tranquil surface, the words raged a little war of their own. After a while, they retired. And I thought, so did my soul. But then, you came. And with you came a gush of wind that cut my skin into half. My blue soul was all exposed. The words tumbled out. And then lay down one by one like defeated soldiers. Everywhere. On my bed, on the window sill, on the yellow leaf that flew in on a winter afternoon. Every bit of my world was drenched in words. I sifted through them like a hopeless idiot who knew not what to do. Do I gather them all and arrange a little bonfire? Do I take a handful and break them diligently till they die a pitiful death? Or do I just let them be, till one day, they bury me deep? So I sat there. One blank night after the other. Unknowing of how you were tirelessly nurturing them with love. And so when the time came, when all my blues wa...

There is a little boy at the 7th street who walks to his school so that he can buy comic strips with his leftover pocket-money, sit down on the park bench, and laugh at important things like the lopsided nose of a character. There is a 15-year-old girl who smells like lavender and speaks like autumn, and listens to her favourite band all day long. Be tween vapid classes and during the bus journeys back home, she would shut down little and big noises and feel quite triumphant.  There is a man in his twenties who lives in a castle of newspapers. Unemployment has its perks, he says when people ask him. He sleeps quite comfortably and sometimes hunger propels him to chew the white edges of papers. There is a woman who has snowflakes in her hair. She romances her husband's estranged guitar on Saturday nights. The guitar speaks to her of times when there were mistletoe, and beach holidays, and he would do a horrible chicken dance upon the bed. She used to laugh her guts ou...

The morning after his first heartbreak, he stood huddled in the group, flashing a toothy grin while his insides had red hot blisters erupting everywhere.  You see the problem with Polaroids? Years later, sifting through the school yearbook, she would find a girl with chubby cheeks and eyes that spell out rainbows and life in big screaming letters, an d she would throw the vase of flowers at the television screen in helpless fury, refusing to believe it was her. You see the problem with polaroids? He was an earthquake contained in skin and she, a tranquil lake. They brought down the wedding photo from the wall together and left it on the kitchen sink, that night.  You see the problem with polaroids? When deadlines seemed to choke him and corporate rankles stung his worn-out soul, he stood at the terrace and blew the Rhododendron leaves, his little niece's wonder-struck eyes, the purple sundown, and the brittle nails holding a cigarette -- moments locked in ...