Who are you?

[7:18 AM]

It's hard to form sentences right now. My thoughts are all over the place. I woke up at 6 and then slept again only to see a weird dream. I don't know what it means.

I met my school friend who recently got married in my hometown. She told me that she and her husband are living separately because it was good for her career. She also said that she was becoming dependent on him a lot for her happiness.

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I was an obedient child. I was raised to be one. I always thought that if my parents are giving me freedom and letting me study in the best school, I should be grateful to them. I strived to be a good child and consistently sought their approval. I thought I needed to do that and only then will I be allowed to go to a big city and follow my dreams.

I didn't have dreams though. Apart from moving to a big city and earning my own money. My only motivation to do well in school was that I didn't want to be one of the women I grew up with. 

Even though deep down maybe I am?

As an independent young adult, technically I should be very comfortable doing my own thing. But I am not. I constantly feel the gaze. I still subconsciously seek their approval.

I read somewhere that - 'You can only be free when you are ok disappointing people'. It seems simple but somehow it's not. At least not for me. I know how hard I work on it every day. I am hoping that someday all this work will finally accumulate and show. 

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Last weekend I was talking to another school friend who said that among all the people she knows, I changed the most when I moved to Delhi. I also think so.

I was completely different in college, especially during the first two years of graduation. I was doing everything that I judged girls for in school. I won't say I became my own person. But I was not the person that I used to be at home.

As a 27-year-old, when I think about this, it gives me an identity crisis. How will you know who you are, when you are constantly trying to become what others want you to be? The voice that keeps telling me things in my head. Is it really mine? Did I not like dressing up and decking up as a young girl or did I not do it because I was a 'good daughter' and this made my folks happy. There are hundreds of examples like this. I don't really know who I would have become if I didn't follow the gendered code of conduct that was passed on to me. I don't blame anyone for this. Because there were still girls around me who didn't conform. They were ridiculed, mocked, and scolded. And I was happy being a good child until I wasn't, which happened very late.

Everyone rebels in their teens but I didn't. I never understood 'rebels' like I do now. Because I am a rebel, maybe a silent one most of the time, gathering the courage to speak up.

Rebels don't fit it, no matter how much they try but they don't. Once they realise this, they have two options. One is to live a life that's a lie and pretend to fit in. The second is to defy the norms, be a 'rebel', and be someone who is not liked by most. This must be difficult but I feel it's especially difficult for women.

It must be hard to be a bad woman but it must also be extremely freeing. I want to feel that freedom. One day, hopefully. 

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Time to go. I have to go to office again today.
Bye!

And it begins!

[7:24 AM]

It's a Monday morning. I have woken up like a zombie. Didn't have a good sleep. But turns out, that it's a good day to start something that I have been wanting to start for weeks now.

Julie and Julia + Rumlolarum + Atomic Habits + My own desire to call myself a writer led me here. It took me so much time to start this because I was terrified of failing. It's not easy to do something consistently. I didn't want to add this one to the list of unfinished things that I wanted to do but could never do. But now I am here. 

I am going to start blogging. Everyday. Yes. Why? I will tell you:

1. I want to write every day even if I am not getting paid for it. I think if not better, it will at least make me a more disciplined writer.
2. The idea of having a ritual or something that you do every day, on good and bad days fascinates me. It's extremely challenging but also exciting. 
3. I have a lot of thoughts. Too many thoughts I would say. And a release might just do good to me and my mental health.
4. Obviously, I want to be Julie and Carrie Bradshaw. I might not be as interesting but I can try.
5. No one is going to read this blog but I am still scared of putting myself out there. I want to get over that fear.
6. I love archiving my life. I love the idea of being able to go back and see how I felt in the past.

That's it. I think that's a good number of reasons.

Generally, I work from home on Mondays but today I have to go to the office. This is the first time I am spending two hours every day travelling for work. And surprisingly, on most days I don't hate it. 

Although today might be an exception. I need sleep to function. A lot of it.

Now, before I start rambling in the first blog itself, I need to end this. 

Bye! See you tomorrow.

I want to be alive till I am alive

If I die today, everyone else’s life will still go on. My husband might go back to work a week later? Or two weeks later? Maybe a month later. But he will go back. His days will fill up again with emails and work calls and presentations and deadlines. He will sleep in my bed. He might have trouble sleeping. But eventually, he will go to sleep. My side of the bed will be empty. I don’t how that would make him feel. It’s a large bed for just one person. There will be two kindles in the room. One won’t be used anymore. He might give it to someone else. I don’t know what he will do with my clothes. So many of them. We plan to learn French together and join dance classes too. I don’t know how he will do that. He might eventually learn French. But I won’t be there to see him speak.

If I die today, everyone else’s life will still go on. My parents will still look after my younger siblings. My mother will wake up and make breakfast for everyone else. She might miss me while making bhindi paratha but she will still make it. My father would still go to work, get my siblings educated and one day will get them married too. I won’t be there in their wedding album. But everyone else will be there. Dressed up and smiling.

I recently saw a 14-year-old die of COVID-19. I met him two months ago. His voice keeps ringing in my head. He was polite and soft-spoken. The way he greeted me when we last met made me feel like he was fond of me and it felt nice because I didn’t know that before. I wanted to talk to him but he was playing with other kids so I chose to just stay there and watch them. The world was not normal even then. I used to be mostly in my room. My only solace was to watch dogs and kids play on the road in the evening. So I stood there and watched him play. His face was red when he was sweating. I never knew a lot about him. But I saw him as a baby and then also watched him grow up. He was on a ventilator for a week. I was scared but the thought of his death did not occur to me. Then one afternoon I got a WhatsApp message from my mother saying that he is no more. It’s been two weeks since he died. I heard from my father yesterday that his father is starting office from today.

Last week my husband’s colleague died. He was 35. My husband and I have talked about him multiple times in the last two years. I have never met him but I know how he was at work. I know what kind of conversations he used to have during lunch. I have seen his pictures. I have seen pictures of his wife and kids. His last messages to my husband were mostly about how his oxygen level is not increasing despite medical support. I keep wondering if he saw it coming. If he knew he was going to die.

I am 26 years old. Thinking about death is not new for me. I got really sick once in the pre-pandemic world. I was 21 then. It was a sudden rare sickness because of which I had to be in the ICU for two days; or three days. I am glad I don’t remember the details anymore. However, I remember how it felt to be there. I remember how badly I wanted to survive and live. I remember being terrified of death. The world was normal back then. Forgive me for saying that, but it was normal for people with privileges.

A lot has changed now. Every alternate day I hear about people dying. People who are friends of friends or someone who I knew through social media, or someone who I had met but was not in touch anymore. I hear about zoom funerals. There is no pattern now. No, they did not have comorbidities. No, they were not old. They were neither careless nor unhealthy. There is no pattern. They, who died, were no different from you and me.

It does not seem abnormal to contemplate death, does it? My mind craves for hope. But I don’t know where to look for it. On some days I wake up feeling grateful. Grateful for being alive. But then it does not take long before the thought crosses my mind that why me and not them? Why do I continue to live? And why did they have to die? There are no answers. Planning life seems silly now. Living in present makes sense like it never did before. I want to be alive till I am alive. That’s the only plan, I guess?

A Love Letter to TISS & Bombay

This post is long due. It has been 9 months and 26 days of being home, of leaving Bombay. And in these nine months, there has hardly been a day when I have not thought of the city, of my college, of friends who I had to leave behind in a haste. Despite posting umpteen number of pictures on Instagram, doing so many 3-hour long video calls, I somehow don't seem to get enough of the two years that I spent in TISS. 

I wonder if things would have been different if we had not been asked to leave the way we did. 

On 17th March 2020, I booked my tickets for home after being told that we have to evacuate hostels. Amidst packing, I went to tapri with friends for some chai-maggi. My father called to discuss the logistics and I started crying. I don't know if it was the fear of the virus or the uncertainty of the future or just this forced rushed up good-bye that I was supposed to say to my college that has given me the best two years of my life. 

The plan was to submit the dissertation and the final film and then stay in Bombay for one and a half more months till convocation. Sure, it would have been hot and there was no cooler or AC in the hostel but the idea of staying and exploring Bombay still seemed nice. I was making a list of places that I would visit. I was also planning on buying a new saree for convocation. I had imagined the convocation so many times in my head but not once did I think that I would be sitting miles away from the TISS quadrangle looking at Nagesh Sir taking our names one by one through a screen. 

I imagined my convocation to be on a humid sunny day when everyone is running around, taking pictures even with people who they don't like much, showing parents around, and absorbing the beauty that TISS is for the one last time. And here I was sitting in layers of clothing in my bed watching the convocation that seemed nothing like a convocation. There were no hugs exchanged this time, only screenshots taken on the google meet that I reluctantly joined thinking that it might be better to laugh it out with friends than cry alone. 

I have thought about writing this blog many times but there were never enough words. I don't know what it was about TISS or Bombay that thinking about it still gives me heartache. When I look at old pictures I think it was my short hair. Haha. Does that make sense?

I miss the person that I was. I miss how TISS and Bombay gave me the confidence to just be. There were no frills. There was never any thought put into how I was looking and what people are thinking about me. Bombay was too far from the familiar. From North India. From the kind of people, I have lived around all my life. Bombay was different from anything that I had ever seen or experienced. It embraced me and gave me the kind of anonymity that was liberating. 

There is something about your hair not covering your neck. It feels light as if the weight is gone both literally and metamorphically. 

Everyone I met was kind and somehow knew that I was new in the city. I remember my first cab ride from the airport to the TISS campus. The driver was a chatty fellow. Being from Delhi, I had a kind of cynism that pushes you to have your guard on in front of strangers. He asked me where I was coming from and I reluctantly told him. As soon as he got to know that I was new, he told me about the weather, what I can expect and the places I should definitely visit before leaving. 'Bombay is the city to be seen in the night', he said. 

Getting into TISS was a dream I had been living with for two years. So when P told me about the history of TISS and how old the college was, it charmed me. In the class, AnJ talked about their journey and how TISS has been an integral part of it. Both of them were newly married when they came here, they had their daughter on the campus and now they retired in 2020. The library, hostels, quadrangle seemed like places where so many stories like mine must have unfolded. I watched women who are now in their sixties talking about what TISS meant to them in the eighties and nineties on Youtube and imagined myself doing the same someday. I was beyond happy to be a part of this institution and that happiness never faded in the two years that I spent here, not even on the longest days. 

I remember sending an audio note to R and telling her about how much I loved the classes here. I liked the course so much. The realization that I had chosen something that finally fits hit me on the very first day. I was in awe of most of the things that I was reading in the class. My world suddenly seemed to have become bigger and complicated but also simple. I was getting my answers. I was reading definitions and names for things that I have struggled with for years. It was humbling to know that everything that I feel has been felt by so many people who have come before me, and they have written about it. 

There was just so much to learn and unlearn from everyone around. I met students of all kinds, from all parts of the world, teaching me just by being. TISS pushed me. I pulled all-nighters to finish assignments, learned how to shoot and edit despite being supremely uncomfortable with technology. I started writing and publishing. I became my own person. For the first time, I knew what I want. And as someone who has been indecisive all their life, it was a big thing. TISS also gave me the courage to clearly see and separate the things that I really wish for and the things that society has conditioned me to desire. None of this happened in one day and if it did I can't pinpoint which day it was. Everything flowed and the change was so gradual that it never announced itself. 

My gallery is filled with pictures of sunsets taken at the Marine Drive. I can't even begin to describe how it was to see the sea for the first time. Most of the people don't remember their first time or they have just been familiar with the sea all along. For me, it was about imagining Bombay all through my growing years and then finally seeing it only to realize how all those beautiful poems and songs written for and about Bombay are true. 

The city gave me a 24-hour clock. Nights were not unsafe for the first time. I was happily surprised to see families and children and friends chilling together at Marine Drive after midnight. There was nothing not normal about it. This is what they have known all along. Bombay is kind and gentle and accepting. For someone like me who has been used to rushing home/hostel at 8 PM because that was the curfew time, nights outside were more like a forbidden fruit. 

Also, in Bombay, the world seemed to be less like a man's world. I never found myself alone. There were always women around. Women of all kinds, of all age groups. Just knowing that they are around was comforting. And so me being anywhere at any point in time never attracted attention because there were many like me, who looked out for me by merely existing.

Two years in Bombay were also about seeing pain and misery very closely. And on somedays also living with it. I was a part of a community where people every day were struggling to wake up and make a difference, to do something that makes them sleep better at night. TISS taught me that kindness does not come easy but we still need to strive for it. It humbled me in so many ways to be aware of my privileges. I learnt the meaning of solidarity, and what it is to be there for each other. 

There is no end to this blog. No concluding line. 

I have no two lines to sum up my experience. There are still big and small details that are missing, that I want to put together. 

So I am going to leave it here hanging abruptly and would come back to it someday. Till then, just want to put it out there that I am very grateful. 

Lockdown Chores

There are certain things out there in the world, in books, in movies, in memes, in poetry that we don’t understand or relate to. One of those things, for me, has been the love for chai (tea).

I have never understood that uncle who asks for 10 cups of tea in a day, never understood friends who attach tea with nostalgia and limerence. It’s not just people, books and movies are also filled with romantic anecdotes of tea. Tea breaks at Tapri and tea dates at Irani cafes were sacrosanct in college. Some people paired it with Brun Maska and some with cigarettes (chai-sutta). At times, tea became the glue that gelled people instantly. They said tea can be a comforting company on a lonely day or something that one turns to after a tiresome schedule. Long-distance friendships were also rescued by tea; tagging each other in chai related memes became a thing.

Sigh. I was never a part of this party. I have had tea but only to give company to people. I have even been borderline irritated at friends who made assumptions and ordered tea for me without asking. I am in my mid-twenties and somehow a cup of tea or coffee never made their way to my daily routine.

However, things change. As they say, these are not normal times. While in the last five months the world around me has changed drastically, I couldn’t help but notice how ‘tea’ tiptoed its way into my life. I have been home since March. When the house chores got divided in an unstated way, brewing the evening tea became my job.  I was indifferent. I had no business with tea. I did not make it for myself and only followed the regular obvious way of making it without giving it much thought.

However, eventually, after doing this for a few days, I realised that I have started looking forward to it. It gave structure to my day. Now, I knew exactly what I have to do as soon as work got over. Honestly, when everything in the world is bizarre, predictability becomes comforting.

I started walking towards the kitchen with a little jump in my feet. From a ‘chore’ it became a part of my day that helped me unwind. Long days of work became better by watching the simmering tea change its colour from milky white to sunset orange. It was my time of solitude. I stared at the tea, imagined shapes in the froth as it subsided and thought about nothing. It calmed me down. 

Yesterday, when the tea was almost done, I let my face soak the steam and lungs fill up with the essence of ginger, cardamom and tulsi. And there it was my ‘Julie and Julia’ moment. I think this is the closest I have come to tea. 

Not a cup, but a pan of tea has certainly become a part of my life now. 

Incoherent

Are there days when you feel a lot like a little too much. Days when things feel more painful or happy or frustrating than they actually are. Or maybe these are the days when you are not able to brush your feelings away under some numb activity like scrolling or Netflixing.

You close your eyes for some respite and suddenly see yourself sitting on a bench with someone you knew seven years ago but don't want to know or remember anymore. Memories are persistent and stubborn though. They stay. The bad ones sometimes longer than the good ones. Or maybe I am just self-pitying and cribbing here. Maybe, all memories are equally persistent. 

It is difficult to write coherently on such days. Your mind is full of so many thoughts. One can say that why not write all of them. But it is still difficult, you know because while you are writing about one thing, the other thoughts start hitting the walls of your brain. Wanting to come out. I am not sure if they want to come out or if you want to get rid of them. Does that happen? 

Adults are a sugarcoated, superficial, glittery bundle of shit. On most days I don't like them. However, I am an adult now and maybe I am becoming exactly what I despised. 

I like observing my sixteen-year-old brother though. His energy is infectious. While I am typing all this grimness frantically on my laptop. He just entered the room with a lot of ice in his hands. He was playing with it. Sometimes, I feel bad about not being responsive enough when he is in a playful mood. He looks happy. Was I also like him when I was a 15-year-old? 

I am not sure if it's a good thing but in my head, I was never young. Maybe it's because of the good old stereotype where you say 'girls mature faster than boys'. No, they don't and even if they do, it's not nice. My most prominent memory of my younger self is writing diaries. I used to write poetry and other random things. I had several diaries. I remember once on Rakshabandhan my brother gifted me a lock-diary. I was very happy. But I could never use it. It was too pink and small. That's not my problem though. It was just not comfortable to write in it. The pages were fancy but loose. They would come out easily. I guess the priority of the makers was to make that diary look pretty. They never focussed on making it useful. Sounds familiar? Might sound familiar if you are born a female in a patriarchal world. 

I read a quote today. 

If you want to talk about anything, you have to talk about everything first.

It's relatable at this moment. I don't know what I am writing about. But it also feels like if I want to share just one thing with you, I will have to share a lot of things, which I would love to do, but some other day. It's been a heavy day. I can list the reasons but I prefer not to archive them. It's better to not archive. I am not a fan of archiving anyway.

I don't think about the readers of this blog much because I know there must not be many. But today I am thinking about them. I am thinking about you, in case you are here, reading this. It's weird. Sometimes I like it because this blog is a way to put things out there. In the universe, I suppose. But today I am getting creeped out. What if someone I am not fond of is reading these random details of my day. 

There are days when I romanticise the existence of this blog. I watched Julie and Julia and was elated to see what Julia did with her blog in a year. It was also on Blogspot by the way. But then there are days when I am just bleh (cynical) about everything in life and the world, including this blog. 

I think it must have been one of these days when I destroyed all my personal diaries. In my defence, I was just trying to save them from the eyes of the world. 

Pandemic Poetry

reading a poem

has lately been difficult

i read a line, the first line

and then the second

and then again the first 

to make sense of it

i still don't hear the poet

i don't get it.

what is she trying to say

the metaphors take

too long to unfold

i feel an itch on the nose

read the second line again

drink a glass of water

come back to the poetry

read the third line

while thinking about 

the image of that hungry man

drinking milk from the road

with the dogs

read the fourth line

about the blossoms

i get that

it reminds me 

of the rain flowers

and the rain and 

the muddy feet

the phone vibrates

and i scroll 

through flowers and skies

and empty roads

some random numbers

talking about death

i come back to the poem

go on to the next stanza

the metaphors ask 

for my attention

but my mind wanders

art heals? it does.

who does it heal, though?