A letter to my 3 day old sister

Dear baby,
I wonder what your world will be!
You’ll outlive me by a whole 26 years
I wonder what all you’ll see!

I have seen a tiny, tiny virus
Outsmart mighty, mighty empires
And our little wicked schemes
Taking down a rat’s race that thought itself bigger than nature’s scheme.

I have seen forests consumed by hell-fires
But nothing more consuming than desire
Of harrowed men trapped,
In a never ending stream of wanting.

I have seen faith,
I have seen love,
I have seen all you can,
And what to do when you cannot.

I have the felt the fresh breeze off mountain ranges
I have dipped my soul in holy Ganges
When I have washed off my sins,
I have added his name afresh.

The one that still makes me feel a million things,
Yet let me tell you
Most boys will break your hearts
Even if  butterflies and unicorns – are what you feel in the beginning.

But you’ll always stand,
Taller than ever,
Your heart will love harder than ever,
And at the end of it all, you’ll fall in true love – the one with yourself.

I have seen friends
I have seen friendship
Sometimes both seem different
I have wondered why it is.

I have had family though,
Mine and ours,
Standing by when noone did.
Cause blood respects blood but water takes the shape of every vessel it’s kept in.

Respect everyone,
Expect from none,
And maybe when you live another year after year,
You’ll thank your sister who lived 26 less, albeit happily.

Letting go

A lot of time has passed now,
To make me feel okay
About everything that went wrong
And everything that went our way.

Some days I feel it’s my fault
Some days it’s yours
Some days when the fight won’t resolve
Destiny takes up the blame for what should’ve been just ours.

You see,
I don’t hate you
And now I can’t love you
The wound you gave me was just too deep.
For any healing that might have taken place
That one careless word you said –
Is enough to make me rethink
And re-evaluate what traipsed between us in deeds.

Even fate has put me far away,
To ever take that road back to you.
I wonder if I should accept it as the logical end
And move on from something that I had very well thought through.

They don’t understand why I am hung up,
They don’t understand because they haven’t tried to understand you the way I did,
But knowing how you took one second to unravel it all in your ego
I wonder if I ever understood you at all to play by it?!

So be it,
I let go of you
And I’m not naive anymore
To believe in setting love free and to wait if it’s true to come back to you.
If I let you go, I mean it’s gone
Or will there be some karmic pull of true love to make me run right back to you?
Nevermind,
Anyway,
Another man another day,
For tonight I let go of you.

DEAR VIKRAM FROM #THAPPAD – WHAT YOU AND I BOTH NEEDED TO LEARN FROM AMU

Vikram, tumhari galti nahi thi. I needed to start with this. You know, few days back in my locality a neighbor filed a domestic violence against her husband; when her husband hit her she filed an FIR, she stood in the dead of night in the rain not going inside the house – it surprised me in the most surprising way. I thought it was brave of her, not that it was logical – why didn’t I think a man hitting his wife is something that can be resolved, Vikram? Maybe because I have seen a drunken uncle beat his wife and watched her never walk away and people hail it as the ultimate sacrifice for keeping the family reputation intact. Maybe because I have seen the women in my family being taught their place too. Maybe because my mother defends that and tells me I should obey when my husband will ask me to do too. Maybe because my mother tells me stories of how when a man cheats on his wife it’s always because the wife never kept him happy; not that he cheated. Maybe because my father would tell a woman who speaks creates family problems. Maybe because the guy I dated in college told me he didn’t consider me wife material as I have a lot of opinions. Maybe I did tone down for him – removing myself from social sphere, wearing only ethnic, lowering my voice and self to find his place under him. Why did I want to be under him, Vikram? Do we come from the same conditioning? Do we think everything can be compromised as long as we seem perfect to the world with having a relationship than working out a relationship?

How can it be your fault when even my mother, my Maa, my aunts, my conditioning of years and years has taught me to compromise. How can it be your fault when I see what you did and I found Amu’s response unreasonable too. How can it be your fault when I saw those one or two kisses or a hug you gave here and there to the efforts Amu made and thought it was enough too. How can it be your fault when in my family men decided what women wear, how they talk, how they behave, their pitch for years and my mothers never chose to protest; sometimes not even me. How can it be your fault when a family’s reputation is always greater than a woman’s needs. How can it be your fault for doing everything a middle class man has been taught to do?

Vikram tumhari galti toh bilkul bhi nahi thi. You went to office, you worked, you tried to best in your work – it was great, I cheered for you. I am a career minded woman – I know how difficult it is. The pressure of having to perform, the office politics, the deadlines, the meetings, the appraisals… you know. It’s perfectly reasonable to burst out – I do myself – on my Maa, my mother, my best friend, my sister – but I wonder why never on the guy in my life. I thought I was a feminist, I am the equal in the relationship – but I never make it hard on the literal “man” in the relationship. Maybe, a part of me has accepted the conditioning and compromised. Maybe a part of me feels, it has to bend to a man and massage his ego always. How can it be your fault when the woman never knew how she deserved to be treated? When Amu admits that “hum dono mein sab baraabar ka tha.. woh office sambhalega aur mein ghar”, it sounded so simple – hogayi hai emancipation – but home is not only about household work; it has relationships and emotions too; she never distributed that load with you – how is it your fault?

When you went to Amu’s house after she leaves your home after you hit her and offered her a hug, a simple apology and an ornament as a gift to ask her to come back – I was floored. If I was in her place I would’ve come back – why are my expectations so low, Vikram? My father always taught me how I should be ruthless in my career, i followed it; he taught me to be ruthless in the world and reign over it, I try to do it; but that night when he and I were discussing he said how Sita should have towed the Lakshman Rekha and she faced all she did as she didn’t listen to the advice of her elder. I asked him who is the elder – he said Ram – I asked innocently, “By age?” – he replied, “No, by being her husband.” “How being someone’s husband makes you their elder?”, I told this to my father and he said I will have a lot of problems in my marriage in future. Even my aunt tells me this every time I tell her a guy treated me poorly – she tells it’s something I have done. She never sees how the guy mistreated me in the first place for me to burst out on him. In the end you said you hit her because you thought you had a right on her; is this what my father and aunt meant too, Vikram? Is making a guy my husband or my partner allowing him to draw the lines for me? Is it letting him treat me whatever way he wants and me having to be the one that compromises and massages his ego each time? Don’t I need to be taken care of emotionally too?

Vikram tumhari galti thi aur meri bhi. You know I love fairy tales. I was even obsessed with Twilight. Now that I am 26, my best friend tries to convince me of even liking Christian Grey. But you see the pattern right? Emotionally unavailable men, with supernatural skills or unnatural wealth as their only saving grace. Unhealthy romances with the guy being so unsure of his feelings he decided to fuck up the girl’s brain too; the love is in the chase – not the man. The love is in the outer covering, not the insides – when millennial girls are raised on these, will they demand healthy guys who know how to treat a woman right ever? They won’t. I have seen the media of our parental generation – if it taught them unhealthy marriages; my generation media and movies has taught unhealthy romance. Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh is famous – psycho guys who control the woman of their life and are toxic to every other girl calling it love. I think just like Amu and you took a break from each other finally to understand how you both can grow as healthy individuals to begin again with or without each other in the future – our generation needs to revaluate what’s love and needs to grow too.

I hope you and Amu find each other again at a later point of your life when you have figured out your shortcomings. Yes, I don’t denounce you as bad – how can you bad when you were conditioned to behave that way. We can’t decide where we came from – but we can definitely decide where we to go. I hope you find your place, even if it’s not next to Amu as her husband again – I hope you both are great parents to your child.

Love,

A girl who will try to be Amu from now on.

***

PS : I am glad to be living in times when a movie like #Thappad is being made. It has taught me how to demand not only a financially secure future with a man but an emotionally secure future too. It has laid out roles for everyone in this. If you are a girl’s father you get to look at Amu’s dad who was rock solid support for Amu from start till end – and even didn’t hesitate chiding his son from misbehaving with his girlfriend trying to save him from being another Vikram. If you are a mother-in- law it teaches you to be like Amu’s mother-in-law in the end letting her go and be happy. If you are a neighbor it’s being like Dia Mirza in this movie refusing to give false witness to save Vikram’s ass and tell that she had a wonderful husband who respected her and treated her the right way – he shouldn’t try to obliterate the respect she has for men-kind. If you are stuck in a bad love marriage like Nethra looking for escape outside marriage, trying to find your lost lover in another guy, maybe you need an escape from the marriage itself; not try to honor lost love by sticking to an unhappy marriage and fuck up the guy’s life outside your marriage too. I thought the housemaid’s ignorance and acceptance of her poverty and living will always let her accept that her husband bashed her up to show that he is a man every night. If she could rise above that to stand up against her man – can’t we? We can. If you are the man who I build my future with reading this, I hope you know now what we both need to bring to the table. I won’t compromise and I won’t let you too. Let’s be equals, for real.

“Just a slap?”

“Just a slap par nahi maar sakta.”

School Days and a dead friend – Final Part.

Sikha and I had got into a pretty bad fight in school in the morning.

In those days, since she couldn’t drive a scooty, she went along with me to tuitions. I had our driver take a by lane to her home and pick her up for tuitions – like we needed even more time together – as we sat in school together, were cracking jokes in break together. Even when school ended, we were on call together. Hundreds of rupees were wasted to support our highly important, couldn’t wait till next conversations about what my crush did or what our classmates did. Now we have free talk time, Jio, what not – yet I do not have my friend whom I desperately want to talk to.

She got into the car silently. I didn’t even greet her hi. Even the driver must have sensed the air in the car. When we reached Baburam Sir’s tuition we sat even on the bench together silently. So much commotion, so much joking all around us, yet for the first time the two epic best friends were not talking to each other. The class started. It progressed through a few concepts; there were so many potential jokes I could scratch my eyeballs from not telling her; but I was me, I had the patience of a stork, you can’t move me – she had to make the first move.

“Sanu.”

Ah yes, truce was near.

“Han…”, I suppressed my excitement.

“I am not able to stay without talking”

Oh yes, finally!

“ME TOO!”

We laughed, and caught up all the jokes we had been meaning to crack through the entire day. The ice was broken. While going back in the car to home though little vestiges of the fight could be seen; and I wondered were marks, entrances more important than friendship?!

Sikha calmly replied, “Of course. If I get in a medical college, would I give you my seat?”

That sentence seemed innocuous when I heard it, but it got deeply embedded to ruin our friendship for good. I wonder if she knew this.

***

When we entered the latter half of class 12, you could see only one thing written on everyone’s face – ENTRANCES.

Nobody was anyone’s friend anymore. Everybody lied – about the number of hours they were putting in to study, the number of hours they wasted, the place they were roaming; when they were just sitting at home and studying. You could see an MCQ book in everyone’s hand. When normal school classes went on you could find an Aakash Institute Botany module hidden carefully under my desk while a Mathematics class went on.

“Sum no 23, Differentiation, answer please?”, Ma’am droned.

I looked over at my NCERT mathematics book, calculated in my head – “2cos

(2x)”

“Correct! Very good, Parnini”

“0.5 seconds”, Sid congratulated me from the opposite bench. I smiled and went back to the real book which would help me for my entrances. Sikha knuckled me from my side. I looked up annoyed. She made desperate eyeball movements to tease me about a guy’s sudden interest in me. I made a face to show my helplessness.

When classes got over, we dragged ourselves from the schoolroom slower than the slowest snails.

“Everything is ending”, she said.

“No, we are just moving on, to another phase of our lives”, I replied.

“I feel you have changed”, she probed.

I thought about how my father had brainwashed me once again to consider marks above people. How he had scared me that I was too naïve to believe in friendship; that these so-called friends would progress with their careers and leave me behind. How I was wasting time playing best friend in the most important year of my career. How I had been ignoring Sikha’s calls lately.

“No, you have changed. I text you, you see it but you never reply”, I countered defensively.

“You know I use my mother’s phone for texting. Your messages go to hidden folder, and I miss out on them. Also, Boards are near and now she sleeps with me, when can I text back?”

Lies, I thought in my mind. She was preparing for medical entrances as well. I was sure, she was trying to outsmart me.

Dear kids who read me, here’s a tip for you: In life there are bigger things than ruining your friendship for exams. Trust me. You’ll have even bigger exams and the people who’ll actually help you sail through them will be your friends. They are not your enemies – that’s just an unhealthy culture created by our parental generation thanks to media celebrating rankers more than caring about failures who commit suicide under pressure; but when you screw your viva, you’ll need your friends to hug you and get you ready for the next one.

I didn’t know this then. We grew further and further apart. Small things about her irked me. Her disapproval of my crush irked me. Her disapproval of my Carmel friends who had treated me like shit earlier but now were warming up thanks to new found popularity irked me. Even on farewell you couldn’t see us sitting together – it’s the biggest regret of my life.

Boards started and then talking to anyone wasn’t even an option. When boards ended, two days later we had AIPMT. I had spent so much energy for boards that I had none for entrances – and very expectedly I couldn’t even clear the prelims, Sikha did, my father created a scene over it – whatever warmth and missing I had towards her ended. Days were passing by in haze and tears for OJEE. I cleared OJEE Engineering with a rank of 154 and AIEEE as well; OJEE medical was a far shot – I only qualified for a newly built college in my home city. I told at home I’ll take in engineering college; they didn’t agree, it was their dream to see me as a doctor. They decided to send me away to Aakash, Delhi. I packed my bags.

We were in Cuttack station.

I saw a figure close to me which I knew like the back of my hands, standing with a man. It was Sikha and her father. I was leaving the state for a year. Drop years required hard work – I was not supposed to be in touch with anyone. All social media accounts were deactivated. This was supposed to be our last meet.

“Hi”, she said. What a far cry from our old days!

‘Hey”, I said.

“How are you?”

“Okay.”

“What was your percentage in boards? 80?”

“89.7% overall, 94% in science”

“Where did your marks go? Physics?”

“Nah. I got 96 in that. English. . .”

The ice was broken. We started laughing. An ex-ICSE student had performed shittily in English in CBSE Boards exam and ruined her aggregate. We talked comfortably after the. She didn’t let me apologize for my behavior over the past few months.

The breeze was odd or the lighting. It felt eerie, like something was ending. It felt like our last meet.

She was advising me in her characteristic Sikha way who needed to baby sit me.

“See, Sanu, you are very gullible. Don’t let people take advantage of you. I can’t take care of you from now on. No one else will.”

“Okay.”

“Be careful when you fall for a guy, you know your taste is pathetic.” Ha-ha! This one’s so relevant even now!

“Study hard and get through medical entrances. Don’t get diverted.”

“Yeah. You too. Take care.”

My train arrived. I bade her goodbye.

That was our last meet. The last time I saw her.

 

***

Dear Sikha,

Sanu here. 7 years have passed since you are gone. You would have been 27 this year. The world has changed a lot. We have free calls and WhatsApp now – imagine the amount of money we wasted to talk to each other? Such luck kids these days. Do you know we are under lockdown for Corona? Apparently, some virus has hijacked the entire world and my life.

My life you ask? It’s very different from the way you left me. I can talk now. I can be angry now. I can express to some extent now. Can you believe that? I used to write in the back of notebooks poems which you read and now I write on blog and leave it for the world to see.

I am still a drama queen; just that instead of you my best friend Ani gets to see it. You would have liked her – she was just like me when you adopted me as your Sanu. I am the Sikha to her. I protect her the way you protected me, but now she doesn’t even need that; just the way I didn’t need towards the end and left you – which is a good thing, I guess. She has matured to take care of herself. Sometimes when she doesn’t talk to me, I feel as if history is repeating, and I think of the way I treated you. You must have been so alone. I am so sorry. You told me how all your friends had treated you and I became the same. I am sorry. I hope you have found peace. I hope you have found love.

I did. I never told him. You said I should beware of guys, I did just that and let a lot of moments slip into silence and tomorrows. I am regretting now. He has genuine eyes and a silent demeanor. You would approve of him too. I wish you could advise me what to do about him. I really need a Sikha right now. No one has taken care of me the way you did after you are gone. You were right, I couldn’t have another you. I didn’t even want a best friend for years – Ani practically forced herself into my life. She has that quality. Irritatingly lovable git. Maybe love will force his way into my life too. I hope so; but then, both of never had any luck with love, no?!

I am happy now. Happier than I ever was then. I am done with MBBS. That was a dream stronger for you than mine. Did I tell you I dreamt about you once after your death? You were wearing a completely white salwar suit with a flowy white chunni – YOU! IN A SALWAR SUIT! I literally rolled out of my bed laughing. It wasn’t you, was it?

After you died, I wanted to go to your funeral – papa, mama never let me as I am too sensitive – I wish they had, I would have got closure. For two days I sat in shock on the swing, crying, not studying for entrance exam which was 7 days away, not meeting any one until Ronak called me and talked to me for hours. He died too, one year after you were gone. I lost the closest semblance to best friends I had ever had in a short span of time. People used to come back in holidays to meet their friends and post stuff and my true friends were dead. No one from DPS stayed in touch. Our batch and our group felt so cursed – three dead. Whenever I went to Sector 5, I would look at your house but never dared to enter – entering meant accepting you are dead. I can’t . . . couldn’t accept you are dead.

Not talking to you was my biggest regret – which is why I started giving more than required of me to people. Now that is my biggest regret. They don’t understand why I live my life like it’s the last day– because they haven’t felt the pain of how abruptly, how shockingly, how without any notice life can be snatched away. They don’t understand how your favorite person in the world can be snatched from you; and all you are left is with regrets, silence and writing in a blog which everyone can read but not you. They don’t understand why I am nice to them or overly emotional or loving – that’s just penance for not being that to you. They don’t deserve it. Most don’t.

Sometimes I feel you’re looking over me, seeing what I am doing, seeing how your Sanu is living life after you’re gone – is that why I am unable to forget you? I admit, the intensity has decreased, now you’re just a blip in the back of my mind; but then – “Do the ones we truly love ever leave us?”

Love,

Sanu

PS: Let this be the last time I ever mention you. RIP.

 

 

 

to be or not to be ft. quarter life crisis

I believe it was the movie 3 Idiots that sparked the national creativity in imagination for the first time. The first time people/kids on the brink of choosing their career paths started debating for the first time if they wanted to fall into the cosy moulds set by their parents or take the plunge into fields of their dreams – fields they genuinely loved and wanted to make a name in. Unfortunately for me, when I was old enough to say T.V. my father decided to turn it 180 degrees – yeah, literally! The cable connection had been cut and the television showed whatever pixels it had to the wall that it faced now – strange house, i know right?! And my father considered going to the theatres a sin anyway, so that’s that, the three idiots revolution reached our hallowed family quite late – so late that I had been brainwashed and well stuck in the sinkhole to be a doctor.

I don’t regret it – trust me, I don’t. There is no other place I feel I could fit in than a hospital is what I feel on most days, but then, there are days when I realise as the great Ranchhoddas Shyamaldas Chanchad of fabled 3 Idiots and so many stalwarts following in his footsteps have said – when you do something you love, even your job wouldn’t feel like a job – that is when I ponder. . because honestly, this doesn’t come to me effortlessly. The motivation to study is something that is effortless because I love reading books, but medical books? that requires effort. The motivation to go to hospital and be there 24×7 working in the wards in effortless, but immersing myself in petty hospital politics? that requires effort. Who said that just because you love something it won’t require effort? Trust me since I was a baby I have always known I will be a doctor someday, but now when I am a doctor, continuing in this path is requiring a hell lot of effort.

People love to see prefixes. People are always people – they will appreciate you for your honey-combed words and everything that you put on as a sweet, sweet garb – but the day you decide to show them the real you? You become too much for them.

I have made my peace though – I have realised that I will have my days – my days of confusion, my days of wanting to take the easy way out of everything, my days of sheer frustration of being a part of the system that is so, so, so bloody mind-numbing, my days of knowing that I have to again face an entrance exam that will decide my future in a day, an exam for which I am having to lock down my skills in a box and hone the rat race creature within me. . . but somehow I feel, you can either try to change it or be a part of it.

I kept my head down and accepted everything for 20 years. I kept my head high and resisted everything and everyone for 5 years. Now that I am 25, I have made my peace. I have learnt to flow with time, space and circumstances. I have learnt a lot – from my mistakes in people and pride – at believing that good things happen to good people. Yes it might be, but not until good people make good efforts for these good things. I have always excelled professionally, whereas I have been a failure in personal. Somehow my grandiose thoughts of how interpersonal relationships should be have marred whatever I have attempted to create or people that had made efforts to be with me. I believed that if it’s meant to be, it will be – WRONG! How can something be without conscious effort on your part? I have been the worst judge of humans, the flawed judgement skills that has been passed down to me accompanied by my rebelliousness created a heady cocktail that downed my early twenties – which I am, to be honest, in retrospective, quite grateful for. For how do you explain becoming something – unless you have been through everything that happened to you? I do feel broken on the inside, but I would not change a bit of it – because somehow my flight for air has rewarded me with pleasure and pain that I had never known in my sheltered life before. Yes, I have cried a lot – but then why shouldn’t I? Like the great Dr. Jehangir in Dear Zindagi said – “Agar aap khul ke ro nahi sakte, toh aap khul ke has bhi nahi paogey” (or something close. Forgive me, I am all filmy but I don’t remember dialogues perfectly)

I have rambled for a quite a long time now. I can’t remember why I started writing this post – but I won’t edit or try to make it look crisp and well-written, because that is what I aspire to be from now on – unedited. Raw, real and rough on the edges. I could live my life trying to fit into social dictum, banging my head on the wall questioning why the world works the way it does – why is life so harsh, people so mean, why do people love certain people, why do I always land into scrapes but nahhh. . . what’s the fun in that? I have learnt to breathe and take life in as it comes. To accept whatever comes my way, learn from it only if it is necessary, experience if it wants to be experienced and let go before it steals a part of me like everyone before. I might sound selfish, but now at quarter life crisis I heck as well deserve the liberty to care about myself. I can’t stumble around wondering why I am too much or too less for people anymore. What is, is and what has to happen, well, will work it out – might as well enjoy the ride.

Adios.