The Parting Gift ( Part 4 )

She woke up feeling restless in her bed. Her legs were aching and her hands felt like lead. Her head hurt and she told to herself bitterly, "There you go! Again such a great start to my day".
This was the way her days started lately. She would wake up feeling miserable. Every day. Every single day since the past few months. However, she was a tough lassie. She was the kind who would not give a damn. The kind who would look at the upside of things.Though, this once, it was becoming difficult for her. 

Chitra got down the bed and walked to the mirror to look at herself. She was apprehensive of looking at what met her eye. She was barely 20 and her skin had started losing its glow. She did not have those rosy cheeks she was once so proud of. But she still had her smile. She flashed it across her pretty face and her big Bengali eyes curled upwards very graciously. She let loose her hair and saw the locks of her hair slowly reach down. She took her hair from one side and tucked it behind her other shoulder and looked at her neck. She ran her hand down her neck and shoulder and wondered if she was pretty. She looked at herself and wondered if any guy would ever love her. 

She had been with a guy once and that 'jackass', as she liked to call him, had ruthlessly broken her heart, stomped on it, and left her alone to gather the pieces of what was left of her. Not that she was a sad wreckage or debris, but her heart ached in the most loneliest of times. She cried for three days, and the fourth day she did not give a fuck. She was that girl. Not that she did not flinch when old memories came up, but then,"retrospection was for morons", she told herself to keep going.

But today it was strange. She did not know what was going on in her body, why she kept growing so weak, why her skin didn't glaze any longer... It was driving her crazy. So many tests, and medicines, then again some more tests and more medicines. She never really bothered to know what was up with her, but now she was getting restless. 

 However, these were the things she admitted feeling. What about all those things she felt but did not agree to feel? What about her parents? What about the divorce? What about the fact that she hadn't spoken to her father in years, not even met him despite all the efforts he had made to make it up to her? 

"You never get to make up a broken marriage Baba. I'll never forgive you". These were the last words she had told her father many years ago, when he had come to meet her. 

But she had. She had forgiven him years ago. She just did not want to admit it. But why? 
She did not know. Maybe because forgiving a father who walked out of years of marriage seemed like a very un-cool thing to do. Maybe because books and movies and friends had told her that she did the right thing by not forgiving.

But then why did she forgive him at all? Maybe because, she had realized what many people fail to. That forgiveness is easy. At least easier than hate. Forgiveness must be extended to a father who had loved her. To a father who had been trying so so hard to mend things with his baby girl. Maybe she did not want to do both the things, the forgiving, and the admitting. So she continued to be that grumpy girl who never ever talked to her father. 

She brushed these thoughts away as she took a heavy breath and sat down at the edge of the bed. She felt tired from all the standing and she hated it. She was tired and angry at God. Very angry. Her wrists were tired from all the writing she had to do in her class. Her eyes were tired from all the drooping in the lectures. Her back hurt when she sat up for long. But what hurt the  most were her eyes, too tired from holding behind her tears that had been wanting an out. She was hoping for a miracle. Her miracle. That one miracle that would change her life. 

Little did she know that the next few months would bring a change in everything. How she looked at her father. How her mother looked at him. But what none of them knew was that all this came at a cost none of them were willing to pay. 

The Parting Gift ( Part 3)

They were sitting at the table by the window. He looked out and he could see raindrops trickle along the glass looking like random tears. The raindrops played with the lights of the cars, shining at places and then glowing very bright before they trickled down and could not be seen anymore.

He could not make himself look at her. It ached him. He felt like he was staring at the biggest mistake of his life. He knew he broke her. He just did not want to look the wreckage in the eye. 

However Asha seemed indifferent. She was looking at his shirt and noticed that he had tried to iron it and had failed miserably. It had the creases at the wrong places, the cuffs were badly done too. However when Arush cleared his throat, her thoughts shifted back to why they were there that evening and her heart sunk. Chitra , my little baby girl. She thought to herself. They had been to the doctor and he seemed worried by the results. Chitra had been getting a lot of tests done on herself. The results weren't pleasing any one. Her WBC counts had increased alarmingly. The doctor wanted to meet the parents before any decision was taken. She was immersed in her thoughts and didn't even realize what Arush and Viren had been talking about. All she cared now was that her baby wasn't okay. 

There was a sudden shuffling of feet and when Asha looked around, she saw that both of them had got up. She turned to Arush to ask what happened. 

"We're going to meet the doctor now. Come."

She walked behind them as they walked to the car. It still drizzled a little. She sat down in the backseat and started thinking about the articles she had been reading over the Internet. Increased WBCs were not a good news and she was trying to prepare herself for some pretty hard stuff to deal with.All this while she hadn't said anything. But now she chose to. 

"When will the other reports come, Arush?"

"They must have come by now, we'll pick them up first and then meet the doctor."

"Hmmm."

Their car smoothly stopped at the entry to the hospital. She and Arush got down.

"You both move to the lobby, I'll park and come", said Viren.

She kept on walking till she reached the help desk. She was so preoccupied that she quite involuntarily went up and asked the lady who was noting something down at the help desk. "Excuse me, from where should  I find the reports to a test we did early this morning?"

"Ma'am, take a left turn from straight ahead. You'll see the pathology labs. There at the desk, you may ask for the reports."

Asha turned away quietly without a word. She walked as told and found herself standing at the desk.
"I'm here for the reports of the blood tests of Chitra Ganguly."

The person at the desk shuffled through a few brown envelopes and handed her out one with a lot of cold indifference. That man there, with those envelopes , had so many stories sitting at his desk. The story about the father who has cancer, the story about the grandmother who'll live a few more days. The story of the son who needs and Appendectomy, and the story of the teenage girl who was unaware of her Leukocytosis.

The Parting Gift (Part 2)

He took some time disconnect the call.

The thought of having to meet Asha consumed his anxiety in a very sudden way.  Two years it had been. Two years it had been. Two long years.

He parked his car in the garage and quietly unlocked the door to his apartment. As he reached the table, he slid his car keys across it. They scratched the glass and 
landed on the cold marble with a heavy clank. That disturbed him. IT jolted him back to his anxious self. Strangely enough , this time the anxiety pulled him elsewhere. It pulled him to a part of his wife he had chosen to keep. It was a mere piece of paper he had torn from her diary the day she left. She used to write well, he thought ,and this was his favorite.


" I'll tell you how it feels, a heartbreak. 

It can be the melodramatic heartbreak. Every one can read it off your eyes. Where it feels like heavy metals have been melted hot and poured into your blood. Left to ruthlessly run around every inch of your body, reminding you of stories you want to forget. Hurting every time you choose to blink or move your feet. Or every time you breathe in and breath out. Or every time  you tell your pillow a story about yet another teardrop. 

Otherwise it can be a silent one. The one where no one knows what happened and no one has a clue. The one where the heart broke a little everyday. One part at a time. The one where you outgrew one tear with the next in silence of those nights. The one where your eyes have no story to tell anymore. You become unaware. So unaware, that even your hands didn't know which way to shuffle when you got accustomed to the eerie sadness.

And I'll tell you what is dangerous. 
The un-preparedness of not knowing in which way your heart shall choose to break. "

Every time he read it, he felt a twitch in his heart. But this time, a tremor crossed his hand as he folded back the paper. It had grown crumpled by now. The creases had their own little stories. They knew his favorite lines, because they were the ones where his fists clenched tighter onto the page.

He wondered why he chose to walk away. What came back in answer was not what he wanted to hear about himself. So he chose to look away and not listen. He had stopped asking himself questions he was too afraid to know the answers to.

The Parting Gift (Part 1)

"Sorry Sir, but Chitra asked specifically to not let you meet her. I'm afraid you'll have to go back again.", said the man at the apartment lobby.

Thanking him, Viren said a goodbye and left.

It had been three years since he had met her. This was another of his efforts to reach out to her. Another of his efforts gone in vain. She never took any of his calls. Never called him back. Never. The last time they had spoken was on her birthday 2 years back. It had been a curt conversation. Her voice had seemed as sweet as it could.He imagined her wearing her birthday dress, with those feather earrings he had sent her. He was sure though, she would have never worn them in real. Yet his thoughts were a kind of a sanctuary where he could think of his daughter in any way he wanted to. He wanted to imagine her like that little girl who used to wear that pink frock and used to give it a swirl and see how big the swirl went. That was a picture he always drew in his mind. And then the way she used to---

Suddenly a shrill ringtone pierced his ears, and gatecrashed into his train of thought. 

'Arush'. The phone screen said. He did not know whether to take that call or not. Their past conversations had never really ended well. Not that he expected them to, after all, he was his ex-wife's elder brother.

Nevertheless, his calls were never without a good reason, so he took the call anyway.

"Hello".

" Arush here. Are you free? I need to talk to you."

" Yes sure, go ahead." 

He realized he was nervous and his hands were beginning to sweat a little.

"Well, the thing is we went to the doctor again today. He has asked us to get some tests done. Look, you know I'm not fond of you, okay? But here it's about Chitra. She has lost a lot of weight recently and her mother and I have really been worried. You know Chitra won't agree to meet you, but then, you still are her father. So there are things you need to know about her life. Asha won't call you, so as her brother, here I am breaking the news to you. Chitra has tested positive for a few tests. This worries the doctor. Doctor says her WBC count is going up at a steady rate, and that is not good. So we were wondering if you could meet us--"

"Us?"

"Me and Asha, tonight. There are things we need to discuss."

One Stormy Night

With everybody huffing and puffing about the cyclone Phailin, insignificant and puny creations of Mother Earth like me feel really ignored and unimportant. So a ‘sparkly-eyed-bibliophile’ me decided to put my time to good use and I was all set to start reading a new novel.

God chose to unleash his fury on me in a much subtle way: by mysteriously evaporating the novel from where I had kept it. It simple VANISHED! After a treasure hunt and nerve wrecking few minutes of ‘Where could it go’ I deciding to let it be and not to prod the landslide prone bookshelf this night. I then thought to console myself with something else to do.

So now a crestfallen me stood in front of my old cupboard and pulled it open. This was a sanctuary. School memories, the scent of those old books, those question papers piled up and lying ignored in a dusty corner, those crayon boxes, and then my eyes suddenly caught the sight of a yellow bag.  This yellow bag triggered a few neurons up there but I could not really explain why my eyes lit up at its sight.

So with a curious frown I reached out for it.

It was a sunflower print yellow bag that I did not knew held a sea of emotions. Inside it I found the following things:  

1.  A fancy card I had started to make for Srishti Saraogi but could never finish it, owning to the lazy sloth I was.

2. A New Year card by my Dada.

3. Friendship day cards by Ankita Soumya and Srija Choudhary . Two and one in number, respectively.

4.  A ‘Welcome Back’ card by Vaibhav, Debashish, Richa, Zoya, Diksha, Shruti, Rohit and Sudarshan.

5.  A ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ card by Shrini.

6. A six page long ballad I had written in class 9, about a drug addict who successfully sees it through rehab.

7.  Valentine’s day cards by Srija and Ankita.

8. A ‘ I will miss you a lot’ and 2 ‘happy birthday’ cards by Shrishti.

9. A fluorescent star that glows in the dark. On one side of it, a message by Shrishti.

10.  A Cartoon Network Birthday Blast card that had come to me by post.

And lastly..

11. An ‘Autograph book’.

This 11^th item was the most intriguing one in terms of ironies.

It had those usual fields like address, birthday, aim in life, etc.

But the field that set my laughter off was ‘Best friend’. Everyone, but a few, had this annoying and typical-to-that-age habit of mentioning ‘YOU’ as a best friend, simply because it was YOU’s autograph book. It did not matter how hateful girls can be of each other, they really know how to fake it well. Lies flood the paper at alarmingly high rates as things like ‘You are the sweetest person on this planet’ are spurt out in the shackles of social protocol back in school.

However, a few people clearly have stood the test of time. One of them being Pallavi. She wrote:

“Best Friends: Nikita, U, Anu”.

Ask her today and she still will give you these names.

It is funny what a few couple of years can do to you. Half of the then ‘Best friends’ don’t even talk. They might not even know where they are. And the irony lies not there, but in the fact that when today I look back at this pile of memories I still see shadows of people, friends and relationships struggling and trapped in time and space rather than the people they are now.

You may not know any of these people I am writing about. You may have not met them. But you know them. You all had these friends back in school. These friends, who were in some way responsible for who you are today. In good ways and bad, time changes all of us.

You are not the same person you were a moment back. All these people you meet and befriend, they twist your soul in a weird and funny way, and that part of your soul can never un-twist itself back.

Friendship is a very powerful emotion. Know how to keep friends. You may not like it always, but that clever man up there has a weird way of completing our lives.

So yes, I did not start reading a novel, but I guess I am done with today’s quota of soul seeking. 

I am jolted back to reality as the cold rain slaps against the glass windows of my room. I decide I must wind up now.

So

as I put back these cards into that yellow bag, I wonder if a few years later when I again open this treasure trove someday, will I still feel the same thing I feel right now? Or will I be someone else, trodden upon by tides of time, and made into someone entirely new? Whatever it shall be, today I know I have had good people, friends and memories in the past. No tide of time, no matter how strong will wash that away. Ever.

Little Pieces of an Indian

"Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

These words of Tagore, still manage to send a shiver down the back of my neck, for it reminds me of one of the most imporatnt words in my life.

Freedom. 

Freedom of what I choose think and of what I choose to become.The freedom to be the kind of person I'd want people to remember me by. The little pieces of an Indian I'd like them to find, when they choose to break me open.

The orthodox Indian.

The educated Indian.

The old-school Indian.

The 'Chaar log kya kahenge' Indian.

The 'I hate politics so much that I never bothered to find out why I hate it' Indian.

The greedy Indian.

The needy Indian.

The free thinking Indian.

The 'Khaap panchayat ke neeyamo ke anusaar' Indian.

The 'Sab chalta hai' Indian.

The cricket-crazy Indian.

The panipuri loving Indian.

The movie buff Indian.

The traveler Indian.

The religious Indian.

The hypocrite Indian.

The scholar Indian.

The 'Mere baap ka kya jaata hai' Indian.

The non-believer Indian.

The criticizing Indian.

The 'Ladka-Ladki kabhi dost nahi ho sakte' Indian.

The corrupt Indian.

The 'deshbhakti geet on ringtone, yet a pornographer' Indian.

The struggling Indian.

The rapist Indian.

The fighter Indian.

The 'chai-waale uncle' Indian.

The foodie Indian.

The 'Kal kar lenge' Indian.

The happy-go-lucky Indian.

The 'Aur thoda discount milega' Indian.

The 'Rickshaw-waale bhaiya' Indian.

The activist Indian.

The homeless Indian.

The leftist, rightist, communist, socialist, and 'God-knows-what-type'-ist Indian.

The filthy rich Indian.

The tired Indian.

The 'I still feel strongly about the freedom fighters' Indian.

The young Indian.

The old, dying Indian.

We could be any, many, or 'none of the above' Indian. But what binds us together is the thread of history and belonging. We are united and divided, subsequently by the same social fiber of freedom and independence.

And ironical it may seem but freedom comes with helplessness. The helplessness that comes with having the freedom and right to but not being able to. While in the 67th year of independence, someone like me is writing about what she thinks of freedom, there are so many unlike me who still struggle to have two square meals a day. I sometimes wonder, what good is all this after all? All this writing things and putting up pictures on social networking sites about independence and freedom? And after quite sometime, I can reason out some feeble bits of it here and there. I realize, it is important. It's important for people like me and you to talk, read and write about the things we feel about. It's important that the ideas of freedom in my mind can reach out to yours. It stokes them and keeps them from dying. The notions and beliefs of freedom and joy that I have build up over years of education, good upbringing, good books, and good music are my own little treasure trove. For me, the right to vote, the right to information is a big big deal. Things have changed for the better. At least now there are more like me. There are more people who do give a damn. Things are changing. For as long as there is one person who keeps the fire alive, it is worth the call. We are worth all what happened 67 years ago. We have a Google doodle to our name this independence day, for Christ's sake! That's quite something!

While we might not be a good picture of a country that hits the 67th year free from the British rule, I still say we are doing it right. 

We are a diverse nation. We Indians can be a little of this and a lot of that. But we are trying to keep things going.And my freedom is worth every bit of everything. Always had been, and always will be.

Happy Independence Day, all. Jai Hind!

Not Being Okay

I sit down at the study. Paper on the table and pen in hand.A wall staring at my face.I wait for a while and try to write something.Nothing comes for a while, and then suddenly...these words that I had scribbled months back, creep back from some eerie corner of my mind.

"Lost in time, lost in space.Losing my mind in different ways".

And then like a sudden bout, my mind is covered in a haze of emotions fighting and wanting an out.All I can do is pen down a tiny speck of what seems to be going on up there.

When you let go someone, it's not exactly like your world ceases to exist. Things are the same after a few days. The sunsets are still beautiful. It still is fun to hang out with friends and to bunk a class. You still will like music. You'll still want to look good. You still will enjoy the wind on your face. You'd still feel about Harry Potter the same way you used to. Good food will still entice you like before. The petrichor will be as good as ever. The sunny winter mornings will still make your heart skip a beat. You'll still feel happy over your achievements, and when you put a smile on someone's face, there still will be the warmth you feel.
However, you'll feel differently when you are quiet. Different. Not sad. You'll feel things you have never felt before. Like that irksome knot in your throat while you suddenly remember something, or that time when that song reminds you of them, and you realize that you have grown over the phase where you'd change the song. These days, you'd rather listen to it and let it pass. You'd feel a strange kind of tranquility and peace you'd seem to have made with yourself.
It'll come back at times. That restlessness. You will tend to find yourself thinking about the 'What Ifs'. There wouldn't be much you could do or feel about those things. One moment you'll be fine and the next moment you'll want to lose your mind. But that's how it goes, not being okay and yet, being okay.