Hush, my Darling.

Hush, my darling,

press your lips together,

and let not a word forbidden escape.

It's not safe, my darling,

lest they should know

the colour of your thoughts and their shape.

Hush, my dear one,

isn't it painfully beautiful

to see it all fall apart?

Hush, my darling,

don't say a word

and let it all rot in your heart.

Play strong, my darling,

though you are weak,

but your thoughts I must not read.

Hush now, my love

for I need not know

that it's me that you need.

Stay mum, sweet one,

don't give it away,

why must you let me in?

Make a scar on your soul

while you cut deep into mine,

How else, this battle, will you win?

Oh dear, little one,

your scars are precious,

and why must you let me see?

Cover yours

and I'll cover mine

with another tragedy.

Hush, my darling,

pass me by,

and make sure no word is said.

Crush our castle to crumbles

lest it should stand,

and bury its ruins with the dead.

Hush, my love,

you're almost there,

don't let me see you cry.

Wear your mask,

and weep alone

behind the wall you've built too high.

"Mera beta," she said in her shaky, low-pitched aging voice, "let me apply some oil on your hair. See how lifeless it's become with all this stress you've been under because of college and all." 

I felt her warm, wrinkly and soft palms caress my forehead as I rested my head side-face in her lap.

"You're only here for a couple of months, beta. You will be gone again before long. I miss you so much when you're gone." Her sing-song voice fell softly on my ears, reaching out to that 6 year old little girl in me whose life once only revolved her grandmother. A tear flowed down from my watery eye, meandering through the unevenness of the skin of my face and making its way over my nose to finally drop down and blot on her impeccably white salwaar.

I turned and looked straight at her looking back at me. I noticed the lines decorating her face. Her face had not changed, because she had always been old (or so I thought), but the lines were definitely fewer fifteen years ago. Those wrinkles had mated with each other and multiplied over time, and you could also see their little kids playing here and there on her face. My gaze went from her crumpled forehead to her neatly combed hair; spotlessly silver hair, just like the clothes she wore. I had always known her hair like they still were, like of a fairy Godmother from the princess stories I read as a little girl. But those were never my favorite stories. The ones I liked the most, and still did, were the accounts from her life that she told us whenever she had time. And she always had time.

"Daadi, nothing seems right in my life right now. I feel so estranged and hopeless. I wish I could go back," I said to her mawkishly. Somehow, I did not have to keep up my tough, careless pretense around her. 

She chuckled and blew away the lump in my throat with that. "And what is it that is making you think you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, my sweet little child?" she said with a benevolent smile. Had it been someone else undermining my mental and emotional baggage, I would have gotten upset and probably tried to get back at them with a frowned defense. But with her, it wasn't the same. 

"You don't understand Daadi. You think I am still a child, which is why you give no value to my problems. You, papa and mumma too. Everyone. I don't know how to deal with this. All of my other friends seem to be doing good. They have jobs and careers or plans. I, on the other hand, have to deal with this family drama everyday. I'm just not used to it anymore,"  I sulked.

"I know, beta. But you still have time. Nobody is forcing you to work or study or even to sit at home. Well, not anymore, at least. We only want the best for you. Now, your papa might get angry and shout at you but he does it only because he is worried about you, just like your dadaji was worried about him. When you have kids, you will scold them too, but only because you care for them. You will realize it one day."  Sweet honey dripped from her mouth in the form of words, the nectar of innocent wisdom collected over so many decades. "Did I ever tell you the story of the two mismatched friends?"

"Is it a real incident, or just a story?" I asked with child-like enthusiasm.

"Hahaha. I won't tell you that. You must decide that for yourself,"  she answered.

I smiled a smile I hadn't smiled in weeks. The story was of little importance to me at the time. What really made me happy was what followed all her stories - delicious food cooked by her. She sometimes made halwa, or choori, or sandwiches, or sewaiyaan, or daliyaa, or parathas, or her special signature maggi. I would always get so busy  stuffing myself with them that I never took time to appreciate her cooking the way she did mine.

"Nobody makes a tadkaa better than you. You do it like a professional chef,"  she'd say to me every now and then. Sometimes I couldn't help but feel uncontrollably sorry for letting her down for reasons I could never know. Probably because I knew she had never let me down but always lifted me up, and I doubted if I was even capable of that. I can still recall the first time I tried my hand at cooking pasta in white sauce at home. I had been really disappointed with the way I had cooked it and had kept going on about how bad it had tasted. She, on the other hand, sat in front of me with a bowl full of that ugly looking dish and reassured me, "It is lovely. I have never eaten macaroni that was cooked this way. It's very tasty."  She sat there trying to eat that under-cooked garbage even though I asked her not to before I left the room. About ten minutes later, I saw her coming out of the kitchen looking left and right as if making sure I did not see her. I went into the kitchen to find more than half of the pasta from her bowl in the garbage bin.

"Once there was a beautiful boy, who was rich and tall,"  she began." His best friend was a poor boy, who on the other hand was not good to look at. The poor boy would feel jealous of the rich boy every now and then. The rich boy felt secure and proud because he did not have to work hard. He thought he would later join his father's, business. The poor boy had to study hard because he had to find a trade to make a living for himself when he grew up. One day, the rich boy's father passed away. He took over his father's business and money. It wasn't enough for him and he wanted to expand his business."

The plot seemed to have thickened and it suddenly had caught all of my attention, which till now had been rather astray. I lifted my head from her lap and sat up looking directly at her as she brought her story alive with the right expressions and tones, the signature of all good story-tellers.

"One day, both decided to leave town. The rich boy, for merchants and the poor, for an occupation. They had to travel through a lot of villages and dusty roads before they could reach the town. While on their way, a group of bandits caught them. They asked them for money. The poor boy did not have much. He told the bandits that the other boy was rich. The bandits took away the rich boy's money and beat the poor boy black and blue. The poor boy felt so sad for being so poor. He cursed himself, his life and God while the rich boy grinned and felt smug. Then they stopped at a village for the night. At midnight, a group of cult fanatics came and caught both the boys. They were looking for boys to sacrifice to their God. They looked at the beat up, bruised boy and then the handsome, rich boy. 'We don't want an impure sacrifice for our Lord. Let's leave this ugly boy here and take this good looking one,' said one of them. They took away and slaughtered the rich boy and let the poor one go."

I was dumbstruck when her story ended. Her stories had never, ever been so macabre. 

"This was a disturbing story, daadima," I said to her.

"Life can be, beta," she said as she started to get up from the bed in the only pace her body knew, slow." You see, sometimes you do not have much control over the things happening to you. And sometimes, the greatest problems you face can become your greatest strengths. They say that there is no hero or villain in real life. And my point is, if you find yourself broken because of a problem, fear not for it might even be a blessing in disguise."she said as she stood up.

Though shocked I was at the cruelty in her story, I couldn't help but accept that there was a certain raw, blatant truth in it. I had forgotten all my sadness but instead was taken over by an emptiness. 

"Now cheer up, beta. Let's go have some kheer,"  she said. I rejoiced at the very thought and forgot about everything else.

R.E.M Diaries: II

She had never seen so many people together in one place since her childhood days when her Dad used to take her to 'Mela's' (Carnivals). She still remembered distinctly, the gigantic rides and coasters that she was always afraid of. She wasn't even fond of the comparatively smaller rides like the merry-go-rounds. She'd take them because the kids of the Verma's, and the Gandhi's, and the Chugh's, and the Makkar's always loved them; and she couldn't digest standing aside quivering alone while the others made the better of them, even as a kid. She loved the shops that sold ice-creams and candies that could only have been produced in dreamlands far far yonder, but she hated the fact that she couldn't have all of them at once so she'd ask for none. She remembered the enormous tents where wizards and magicians performed things that confounded her, like making money out of a garbage box, producing a bunch of flowers out of thin air and spilling water from a jug that never seemed to run out of it even without refilling. The tight-rope dancers, the heavily made up bozos and jesters, food from every corner of India and the world (at least every corner she knew then) and the cacophony of incalculable colors and people mystified her beyond description. She remembered vividly all the animals in the cages, roaring, pant-hooting and growling. The chimpanzees beat the floors and ceilings of their metal cages ferociously, and people teased them or enjoyed them squeal from a distance. Many threw peanuts and popcorn at the lions and tigers from a distance and laughed as they roared probably in disapproval. She also wasn't fond of the caged animals. They made her sad and uncomfortable for reasons that her puerile mind couldn't understand then. She wasn't too attracted to any of the individual segments per se, but she loved to hold her father's firm yet soft hand and gaze at everything like it was the last time she would get to look at it.

The place she found herself in right now was hauntingly similar in feeling to what she felt going to the carnivals when she was a child. There were multitudes of people crossing her every second, sometimes individually and sometimes in swarms, people of all races and ages. She was on a sidewalk; to her right were huge stores with items at display beyond a glass wall and to her left was at least a 200 ft. wide road, across which were equally huge stores alongside which ran a similar sidewalk full of similar people. The time would have been sometime around the dusk, because the LED's on billboards and the giant screens above had just started to show their true colors. But the sky was still blue and bright of sorts, coz the white cotton-ball clouds were still very much visible. She looked ahead as she walked in a state of semi-aware delirium, Tool's 'Schism' faintly playing in the background in one of the stores probably,  and saw 'Virgin' written on a huge billboard on the beautiful modern building in the middle of the road, and the road diverged into two roads from that point ahead.

"Hey!! Poouuurrrr!! Lookie here!" came a voice from somewhere. It was her father's. She turned around and saw him walking candidly through all the traffic towards her from across the road.

"Papa!" she exclaimed and started to cross the road towards him.

The traffic on the roads started to diminish mysteriously, just like the crowd. But she couldn't care less. She had found her purpose in all of the choas, even if it was horridly ephemeral.
He started to smile at her as he was joined by a myriad of familiar faces, friends, relatives, loved ones, some even lost and forgotten. They all smiled at her as they took the road to themselves, and she smiled back at them.

"Upar dekho", "Look", "In the sky! Look to the sky!" they started to shout.

She lifted her gaze slowly, and saw confetti and frills flying halfway in the air. Fliers of bright colors came falling down and thousands of balloons went up into the sky from absolutely nowhere. March music filled the air as everything else fell joyously silent. She was overjoyed and started to interview her inner self as to what she had done to deserve so. There were trails of meaningless colorful exhaust near the clouds that suddenly started to make sense; it was shaped like the letters of her name.

Amidst this implausible and utopic euphoria, anxiety silently came and took the empty middle seat in her brain and started to buzz like a drone feebly. She intended to ignore it, as always, even as it grew louder, as always, and hoped that it will disappear as it did always. But this time, it grew louder than it usually did, and everything else fell eerily silent. The smiles on the faces disappeared, and a discomfited look took its place. She was savoring the fact that all their eyes were fixed on her, but now she wished that they'd just look away.
She turned to her right and looked up in the sky, and there she saw it! Right in front of her eyes, at some distance but constantly growing closer, was a colossal battle aircraft. It was bigger and deadlier and more lustrous than any jet that she had ever seen on the television. It looked more like a flying submarine than a jet, and it had two pairs of wings which were hardly 1/5th the size of what its wings should have been.

As it grew closer, the noise grew louder. When it had reached exactly above the buildings opposite to her, the noise had become so uncomfortably loud that it broke all the glass doors and walls of all the stores. Pieces of glass blew out of the stores and flew in the air like arrows in an ancient battle field. The ground trembled, and the tremors seeped through the soles of her shoes and inside her veins and shook every cell in her body.
An automatic door below the plane opened and dropped a missile onto the crossroads of the street behind the one she stood at. She saw the bomb drop, and everything fell completely silent again. She didn't move an inch though she wanted to run. She saw monstrous orange flames emerge out of the point where the bomb fell. Time had switched into slow motion, so she could savor the tiniest details of this horror that ensued in front of her.
The flames started to propogate in all directions from that point and melted everything in their way into themselves. Everyone stood still in their spots, looking grim and dissatisfied, and their faces contorted like they were hollering curses at her. She saw the flames coming towards them as they kept their backs to it.

"RUN!!!! THEY'RE COMING FOR US ALL!!!" she shouted as loud as she could, but only a whimper managed to escape her oral cavity.

She watched the fire flood the street and devour everything in her sight. It sucked each one of these people into itself. She didn't run, and she didn't know why. It was coming for her now. She expected her heart to explode just about then, but on the contrary, a calm swept her over. She felt a rain of tranquility drench her and soothe her nerves. She looked around her one last time and said to herself, "This is not it. This is Times Square. I know it. What the fuck am I doing here?"
The flood of fire was ten feet away, and she could already feel the heat burning her skin, but she was calmer than ever.
"This is a dream. I know it. This can't kill me," she told herself as the fire grew closer.
When the flames came so close that they were only a couple of inches away from her nose, she uttered, "Deflect," and the flames deflected away from her and drained away sooner than they came.

She was back in the busy sidewalk, just where she had started. Her lips curled into a quirky smile and she got lost into the anonimity of the crowd.

R.E.M Diaries: I

"Sometimes... I, " the voice, slightly thicker than the usual female voice, paused for a while,  "... I wonder why I feel these conflicting extremities." 

"What do you mean?" replied a man's voice that almost sounded like a boy's. It was soft and melodious yet it thickened into a persuasive, intelligent baritone at times.

"I don't know.. I can't explain this paradox." The sun was halfway below the skyline, behind a million little houses and buildings that looked like blocks scattered unevenly on the ground far below. "I feel like I am the perpetrator and the helpless victim of every atrocity happening to any random person on this planet, especially myself."

"Just be happy... We should be. YOU should be. 'Coz you're beautiful. But that doesn't mean you get to bogus the damn joint!" 

Laughter echoed faintly in her ears. She could see smoke, and the burnt orange twilight shining along the boundaries of tens of consecutive small domes through that smoke.The sky was slightly cloudy, and someone seemed to have artistically spilled a bucketful of purple all over it. It was the roof-top of some deserted medieval building, an old mosque presumably. She couldn't see the faces of the two voices talking. She tried hard to, but she started to lose focus as a boqeh of lights coming from the windows of the distant houses spread in front of her eyes like the back of her eyelids. 

A silent, momentary, blurry pause.

Then all of a sudden, her ears started to echo with long, not-particularly loud, ferocious and upsetting arguments between two people. She recognized the two voices; his was still melodious and hers still unbefitting.

"Why the fuck don't you get it? What part of it is tripping you out?" he said frantically but without stooping   an inch.

She couldn't see his face for her eyes couldn't see above his neck no matter how hard she tried. She was seated in a perfect cubical room, with un-besmirched white walls for as far as she could see, though she could only see hazily. There were no windows, and the only door was on a distant corner far behind the inflated chest of his glorious figure standing 7 feet away.  A silence replied. 

She felt her breath getting harder because of lack of air. She jumped out of whatever she sat on and ran for the distant door, as the door ran farther away from her. She was sure she'd get to the door if she kept running, and especially if she ran fast enough. But she tripped, her body momentarily in the air and then a painful thud.

"Trrriiinnnnnnn Trrriiiinnnnnnn"

A loud and digital ring of a phone echoed through the length between her ears. She stood up and followed the sound through a dark alley into a dark room. There were two figures presumably asleep on two separate beds placed carefully along two sides of the room and a third bed, placed in similar fashion along a third wall of the same room, was unmade and empty. The sound of the ringing was loudest in this room. In the darkness, she saw something twinkling beneath the sheets of the unmade bed. It was a cellular phone, flashing some numbers and a name.

"Hello?" she said, imitating the voice of the female she had been hearing.

"I'm sorry... I really am. I've been thinking about it and I'm sorry. How can I be mad at you when you're so beautiful?" said the same male voice from across the phone, only sounding digital this time, but melodious nonetheless. 

"Who are you?" she tried to say but before she could, she heard her laughter on the phone. Her face contorted into discomforting curves as it grew pale of bewilderment. A drop of sweat swept down behind her ear. She was connected to a con-call through the fibers of the fabric of time.

"I couldn't live without you.. " he said, with an added affectionate chuckle.

"I know... Me neither.. " she heard her smiling voice again in the phone's speaker, without having moved her lips or uttered a word.

Her ears were filled with laughter again, that faded into a white noise that cleared itself into a distinct, trivial chatter between two young females.
 "GET UP YOU BUM!" said one of them.

She slowly opened her eyelids, letting in a tsunami of bright and painful light into her eyes. She was in her room, amidst erratic strolling of her two roommates, now waking up in her make-do bed and rubbing her eyes as she got up.

"What time is it?" she uttered in gibberish, still only half awake from her sound, dreamless slumber. 

Oh, that one?

The trends pass him by
but he doesn't bat an eye;
Like a dead pig in his sty,
he's scared to step outside
And walks along the sides
the shame he calls his stride.
He gets stuck around the bends,
the one with no real friends
Refuses to make amends.
His voice shakes, he's not bold
He sweats a sweat so cold
And he does not what he's told.
His ends fight hard to meet
He'll sweep you off your feet
with lies bittersweet
that he soaks in finest wines
and sugars that sound divine,
The self righteous swine. 
He's fickle, he's a shame
And he always tends to blame
He's different, still the same. 
One of phony creepy men,
a treacherous scheming hen
And you never know when
He'll fiendishly change
Not dexterous, but deranged
Unpredictable and strange.
A lying, verbose tongue
Of a villain unsung;
On his blunders he is hung.
A fool to play with dice, 
A coward, but thinks otherwise
A junkie, a stale surprise.
Too twisted in his ways
He means not what he says
and he says not what he prays. 
A banal, boorish guy,
Like a needle in the eye,
You'd better leave him die.

Note 5.

There were about a thousand horns blaring at the same time, from vehicles of all shapes and sizes hurrying, scurrying and struggling as they crossed her. The wind was so hot that it seemed as if it were blowing straight out from an oven, and the sun was lousily busy sucking every last droplet of water out of her body. 

 The busy Delhi road, like every other Delhi other road, was alive with all forms of animate and inanimate life, like a swarm of drugged bees that buzz hysterically and hover in all directions chaotically. People walked past her with a frenzied calmness as she walked past them in a calm frenzy. She was approaching the bus stop on her way, which was always crowded with eager eyes waiting for the right bus to come. It makes it easy in such places if you know where you have to go, when you can even change buses for a longer journey which will eventually get you to your destination. The thought made her feel a little out of place.

She took a prolonged look at the anxious countenances as she walked past the bus stop, when something like the sound of heavy thunder startled her and shook her out of her daydream. A bus, a giant green growling beast, drove right past her, almost brushing against her right shoulder. She froze in her spot, as she felt a shock traversing through her nerves. Her heart was leaping, her breath was racing, while she was was stuck motionless in her spot. Her eyes were heavy from the stoning, yet open wide, causing extra strain on her head. A group of youngsters, which had till now been dawdling back and forth a certain length of the sidewalk, broke into a chain reaction of giggles as they took turns in staring right into her eyes for 5 seconds each.

The horror of that moment was grimly laughed over by the bus driver as the bus's rear farted out an extremely hot gush of exhaust in her face. Gathering herself again, she took a deep breath and jay-walked to the other side of the road. Her face had started to counter the temporary bleaching action of the incident as she turned her head towards the bus stop before entering the honey-comb maze of the 'mohalla'. Everyone was waiting. Most of us are always waiting, just like all of us, she thought and walked on.

Note 4.

So it was just another one of those days, getting low, then getting high by getting high. Randy Blythe blared electrically through the ceiling fan still, for laziness had personally asked them to delay calling the electrician to fix it. She, in particular, felt obliged in not getting it fixed. Because being obliged is one of those phrases of the English language which have two genuine, completely contrasting definitions. When she felt obliged, chances are that she might not really have been obliged at all. 

She didn't particularly like going out too much now, especially after the episodes became frequent. She was particularly afraid of the evenings and the nights outside, because those triggered her "episodes" even more. She liked the wind in her face, but the traffic was maddening. Literally maddening. 

The first time she saw her, she wore a pink worn-out Saree with faded purple grapevines printed on it that now looked like dead branches that hadn't been watered for at least 30 years. She must have been in her early fifties, but she looked eighty years of age. The wrinkles on her face were carved carelessly and in a hurry, and her face was unevenly sunken from both sides. The measly layer of skin on her arms was dark as ebony from the lack of sunscreen lotion, and an air conditioned cabin, or of empathy, all or none of these. But you could tell that her face was still bright, from the glimpses you stole from beneath her pallu covering her head and clutched between her teeth from one side. 'Amma', as she was known, smiled at her through her half-clad face. Now that she had finally stepped out from her shack after a long time, she decided to walk over to Amma's little establishment on the sidewalk.

"Bohot time ho gaya gudiya, tumhe dekhe," Amma said to her with a suppressed child-like laughter, that burst out in weary chuckles between her sentences. "Kahaan rehti ho aajkal?" Amma inquired with an affectionate smile, her eyes gleaming like a mug full of sparkling, freshly poured beer.

She didn't know what to make of Amma's question, one of the apparently simple ones but the most hard to answer. What do you tell someone when they ask you where you've been all this time? Do you tell them a detailed account of all the places that you've been going in and coming out of? Would they really stand and wait to listen all of it? And even if they do, do they really give any tiny speck of fuck? So, realizing the sheer futility, after thinking for a few seconds sometimes and sometimes just shooting right out with it, you say, "bas, yahin kahin. Idhar udhar..."

Then, the psycho-actives took the better part of her. You know, how they make you paranoid, and helpless in controlling and managing the million thoughts shooting through your neurons like forest fires. What did Amma really mean? Was she trying to tell her something? Because really, where had she been all this while? Should she describe the dark tunnel she has been mentally living in, with its scurrying rats and despicable creeping insects? She didn't know. It was as if eons had ended within a fraction of a second. 

She stood gaping at Amma's stack of fresh but dead vegetables, each covered with a million little water droplets and lying in perfect symmetry on a bed of moist gunny bags on the sidewalk.

"Busy rehte hain Amma... time hi kahaan aaj kal..." she spoke after a while, in utter detachment. 

She realized that she had forgotten why she had come out that day. She fell silent again, and a befuddled and delusional look spread all over her face as she froze in her spot again.