Yeh anjaana saa darr ajnabee hai magar

khoobsoorat hai jee lene de

ye lamha filhaal jee lene de

The first time I had listened to this song, it was on an audio cassette and before the film was released. The Gulzar magic was all over me then and I’d listen to anything that I could get my hands on. Asking money for this audio cassette was one of the few audacious moves that I had made. For any other music I would make do by borrowing. This was last few years of school days before college and between school and college this was the phase where film watching wasn’t a priority unlike later. It so happened that I never watched the film even though the music and the words were always there in my playlists across devices – music player, MP4 player, computer, and phone. I learnt superficially about the subject and I don’t remember not listening to the songs intently, ever.

There was always so much to appreciate and it always moved me but I never got around to sift through the words and look at them like I did recently.

The song showed up one late evening as the first one from the shuffled playlist, when I was out on a reluctant walk and it felt like the words have shown up anew.

****

One (self) criticism I contend with all the time is that my writing voice sounds like I am perpetually worried. Or that is where and why my words come from and about? There has been no direct feedback as such, I don’t have that kind of readership and people are unusually kind and thank goodness for that, but I do that job for myself and I suspect readers might also think like it’s coming from an unnecessarily intense place.

In an advice column from the series Dear Troubled Reader in the Hyphen Connecting Literatures – a magazine I am thoroughly enjoying – Suresh Menon answers how “we can dislike something everybody else loves, and vice versa” in response to a reader’s question and mentions the value of a review/critique. Engaging with the work can help us appreciate for ourselves, and the reviews can add on. There are critics, whose reviews and critiques we can engage and agree with and reject, and move on, and then there is an inner critic that keeps you at work all the time.

I can work with this voice of this inner critic, but some days get the better of me. The Friday evening was turning out to be one when the end of the day brought a situation that triggered me like I had served myself on a platter.

****
The morning that day was the perfect companion of the evening and night.

School holidays, especially the ones that come at the last moment, the ones that don’t feature in the holiday calendar and show up as a notice on Thursday, tend to be the harbinger of such days and nights. Between I and my partner, we wanted to undo the lament of the notice and the tyranny of an unknown and unplanned Friday ahead.

We, all three of us, went out for breakfast to a place we have been to many times but hadn’t been recently. Against the wishes of our person of privilege we took an auto and thankfully there weren’t many dull moments in the ride like one would expect in a neighbourhood like ours. We spotted everything from railway lines to football-cum-basketball ground to an Ambedkar statue to Ganesh Puja Pandal preparations before we reached the place and we were ushered into an unusually quiet corner on the ground floor. I got the prized sunny spot near the windowpane where the only way to keep myself and my eyes away from the sun was to remain still and upright. Little did I know that the still and the upright, with a generous dash of quiet sombre would define the evening for me.

A good part of the day was out of the way when the son declared he wanted to go out to the park with his frisbee to play with his friends. Carrying frisbee wasn’t the only first in a long time. It was earlier than usual. For a kid who doesn’t like to go out much and for a parent who tries hard not to accompany him everywhere he goes, there wasn’t much to protest. I told him it would be a while before the friends join in but he was intent on going out and I let him go feeling sure he wouldn’t stay for long without the friends.

Like we have come to expect, we soon got a call from him.

I was preparing myself to ask him to wait, for the friend’s parents had informed us the friend would be delayed by a few minutes.

‘I am going to wait for them. I want to be on my own. I want to take a walk around’, in came the response.

I couldn’t stop asking him to come back home, but there was a calm insistence from him to remain outside. It was a bit before the friends arrived and I was duly and happily informed by another call.

I was also informed that they had planned a play date at one of the friends’ houses.

And, the children played like they would on an evening on a holiday before a holiday.

The sun had set and I found myself catching up on that chapter of a book, an essay from a magazine, a reel on the phone, but totally and a little uncomfortably, on my own. I switched to an audiobook and stopped it soon after. I wanted the day to get on with the day like every other day. He comes back, we have dinner, we brush, we go to bed, he sleeps, and I carry on for the rest of the night, on my own.

It was about half-past seven now, in the evening, and I was looking outside in the dark through the mesh of the window from our well-lit room. I had run out of things to do.

I asked the friend’s parent to inform me when they are done.

Obviously, I couldn’t wait for when I’d get the message, so, I got up to step outside of the room and the house. I went to my partner, who was in a call, flipped my hand upside down and walked my index and middle fingers through the air, on my way out. I couldn’t stand the idea of the time to go by before my eyes and I sit still and in a weird anguish about things not going the way I thought about it.

I stepped out, spurred on, and walked with my eyes outside and downstairs to exit, only to turn towards another exit, to the basement, away from the sitting junta on the ground floor. Nothing works better in pursuit of solitude than stepping out to a dim-lit deserted space, at least for fifty metres.

****

Matt Duncan argues about the legitimacy of one’s awareness of experience as “knowledge” in the essay out of the indescribable phenomenon of “introspection”.

This special way you know your pain and other experiences is called ‘introspection’…
…No one has access to your pains – or thoughts or feelings – in the way that you do. This access is also especially secure. You couldn’t be wrong about what you are currently experiencing in the way that you could be wrong about other things. Even if you’re dreaming – or in a computer simulation, the Matrix, or some creepy Black Mirror scenario – and don’t know what’s going on around you in the external world, even then your experiences exist, and you know what they are.

****
That night, I walked and walked, out of my head, to some relief with the help of some music and some words and a lot of adjacent introspection until I received the message that they are done and they are on their way home.

I knew what the film and the song was about but discerned it only that evening: apprehensions and hope around pregnancy, motherhood, parenthood, the changing dynamics of relationships, the known unknowns of a life about to unravel in the ever-evolving days and life at hand. I don’t think I knew these the day before (also that it is ANJAANA SAA DARR and not ANJAANA SAGAR) and that it wasn’t only the control that I was losing on the evening.

We caught up soon while the kids were getting back home. I met him like I had just happened to, while walking, and he met me like his most upbeat and happies self ever at 8:30 in the night, and with a drawing.

For everything I felt in that hour or so when he was not home, I think I just couldn’t bear the idea of him being away for so long.

He stopped at the map in the beginning as I pointed him to India of the two hundred years ago and he construed Russia looking at the vast borderless expanse of Central States Qing Empire. I didn’t say much of the India then and we moved on to get ready for the day.

****

I was back home after seeing him off to the bus and I was recounting our conversation, as it is, to my partner.

‘How you quelled the stand-up comedy career of our child’ was my partner’s ruthless response to my admission of guilt. It had occurred to me already that I had come back to a funny question from my son with yet another opportunity to deliver gyaan.

****

It is 14^th August and the son had to get ready in one of the tricolors.

I find this a little funny: to create an event of celebration out a festival day or a national holiday, 15^th August in this case, schools do these all of this a day before.

He was wearing a white shirt with light brown stripes with a light-blue jeans. We put a tricolor badge pin to go with it and the happy face of the son made it totally worth. We headed out and I thought I’d tell him something about today.

Going down the steps, watching them, helped me watch my words too because what could I say and how about the day before the Independence Day that’s not too precocious for a six-and-a-half-year-old.

I probably underestimate, but cautious, as I was, I found a refuge in Mr. Jawahar Lal Nehru.

‘Did you know 14^th August is Pakistan’s Independence Day?’, I asked.

The ‘What’ that came after was a relief, I can’t articulate in words.

The relief was partly because there was no such response or counter question that would leave me in a spot that I wouldn’t be able to come out of. The question and the point, in my mind, was such that I was very sure I would mess up trying to explain it to him. I was wary of a response that would leave him with disinterest or some misplaced alienation. More questions would be fine but more alienation, may be not. I know I am assuming so much here; it’s not only because of the topic but also because of the way we, father and son, behave with each other already. I sometimes feel it’s unique to us even though I suspect there is some universality here; all fathers feel similarly and so do all children, and for years, these dynamics go like this. Whenever there is so much history to contend with, things get complicated.

I was also worried about what could he have learnt already that I don’t know about this day and tomorrow and the country that we are, and that we are becoming, which has so much to talk about its neighbor, while all they end up saying is to talk about themselves.

The ‘What’ was only a pleasing surprise and I can only thank the day and the color dress for the day.

‘Pakistan got its independence on 14^th and India got its Independence on 15^th’ I concluded. And, without any further delay, avoiding any interjection or further questions, I gave him a glimpse of the past to promise something for the future, when he comes back from school.

‘There is an iconic speech’, I said, that Jawahar Lal Nehru gave on the midnight today 79 years ago. I promised him when he comes back, I will play that speech for him. I didn’t stop there and even said the words that I remembered:

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

These words were enough for my son to come back with the question that I only retrospectively thought was funny.

‘Is India nocturnal?’ was the question.

That I went on to not pause over it and instead went all literal by talking about how awake meant about new beginnings etc. It was so bad that I don’t even remember it now and I was only cursing myself for not paying heed to the funny him.

It was only fair that my partner pulled no punches to make me feel worse about it and I was trying to make light of it and also recover from the debacle, and so I did, but zooming out further, thinking over it again, I can’t let go of my intrusive thought with that innocuously funny remark.

My musings and the piece should have ended here but before that I ask the question again:

Is India nocturnal? This dictionary definition should suffice: Awake and active at night and asleep during the day.

I am reminded to think of the episode 116 of Everything is Everything where hosts Ajay Shah and Amit Varma talk about measuring the nighttime lights of the places in the words, the methods, and what they could mean.

One of the things Ajay Shah mentions clearly is:

It is clear that nighttime lights is correlated with prosperity…

The hosts further conclude about unconventional metrics can be insightful, and thinking about it and the question, I can, on a very superficial level, think about this question is that India is probably not as nocturnal as we would want it to be.

Whether it’s the question of it being lit up enough for it to be called nocturnal or just the sense of safety and freedom of its people to feel free going out in the night.

****

Every day when I go to pick up my son from the bus stop outside the community gates, several buses pull up in the span of five to ten minutes. All but one bus has female staff on the buses who coordinate the exit of the children to the parents who are there to pick them up, or just their exit if the children are by themselves. That one bus also happens to be relatively sparsely filled. It’s quite possible that many children get down at earlier destinations. There is a middle-aged guy who looks like fills up for the job of the attendant but he is never there checking on the kids getting out at the door and he is always just seated and doesn’t look as interested or even careful, assuming that’s the job he has. Apart from him, there is that male driver who is the one more vigilant, obviously, because he is the one at the steering and he has to move as soon as the children move.

I mean no insinuation here and I am pretty sure everything is working smoothly for everyone there; to be even talking about it is a privilege I can’t be more thankful about. And, the privilege of being able to voice this insecurity or even the hidden concern here. What better day than on the eve of the Independence Day.

To many more questions, to many such privileges, securities, and insecurities that birth these questions.

Happy 79^th INDIA!

In the middle of this (slow) unravelling, I check in on my parents for their upcoming trip to the US to see my brother and the family. We join in a month’s time and between us, we are trying to get some things from India. This important task is spearheaded by my partner, who has the coolest head in the world to manage the shopping and return, both online and offline. I accompany her for any related errands, sometimes even when she is half expecting me to. (You see, I do not have very high expectations of myself but I have a very low margin of error. And I rephrase: because, I don’t have high expectations, I am likely making up for it by putting myself to test with a very low margin of error. This is not about going out with my partner but about my never-ending struggles to keep up with the commitments of reading, writing, and showing up in certain places.)

After the walk and the work-out, I was trying to make right of the time I had, putting some words to thoughts that have led to this, I decided to accompany my wife – she had planned some time out from her day at work for this, and we went out.

We walked out, stepped in a hail-auto without asking, or as it turned out after few minutes, without confirming the fare for this route with known standard rates. When we reached our destination, I asked how much it was. I had no intention of holding it off or even arguing about it but I still wanted to know because – we cannot reverse time (and I can’t go back in time to ask the fare or even undo the trip) and this life, which moves only in one direction, has a built-in bias towards randomness, and pursuit of knowledge is the only way to embrace it without thinking that I am stupid.

That I felt the same, nevertheless, is not what I am going to dwell on because we moved on too.

Buoyed by the prospect and reality of being able to walk in a not so sunny middle of the day in the middle of the week, we discussed the despicable state of roads and the ever-continuing changes. We walked one such work-in-progress service road with road-rollers at work without worrying about being a pedestrian parallel to a traffic that has forgotten there are people who still walk on the roads. (I crib about it when I am not steering my car and when I am steering the car I crib every other moving thing on the road.)

A slight left took us closer to our next destination.

I felt warm and my partner a little spooked, by the dogs resting unaware on the steps. We moved enough to wake them up but not enough to move them and decided to find a way around. Dogs in neighbourhood is not a rare sight, not even outside shopping malls, but their ease was comfortingly reminiscent.

So were the dangling strips of sachets of different products, in what we ordinarily call a local store or a provision store, names that only sound one to my middle-class small-town ears – kiraana dukaan.

We waited for our turn while other customers – the odds of finding fellow residents are as much as finding a store like this in the five-kilometre radius of the locality – before us got some mudhi aka puffed rice. Their buy further empowered us to ask for bhagalpuri katarni choora and chanaa sattu. We topped it up with some kopiko candies to fill in for a regular stop at Third-wave coffee and Fatafat chooran for the sake of nostalgia (I never noticed this and may be this is the new branding but trust me this is the only ayurvedic thing I have consumed and that too never for indigestion).

We headed back; I was talking about the etymology of kopiko while my partner was enlightening me of its constant presence in K-Dramas. (It appears kopi, which is audibly similar to coffee, is the Indonesian and Malay word for coffee. The etymological details show its origins (Ethiopian Kefa/Kaffa), spread (to Arab), and derivations (through Dutch and SE Asia). About its presence in K-Dramas, article in The Korea Times calls it “reverse-export advertising strategy”.)

We said our goodbyes to the reluctant dogs, and took another auto, this time an app auto, without the worry of having to ask or argue. (Capitalism & Gig economy rock)

An interjection after an interjection before the next bit – “There are two kinds of people in this world when it comes to the way you deal with the candy that you like: ones who chew their candies and the others who savour it till it dissolves.” And, these two kinds of people can easily walk into a contention after such a contest. Between siblings or friends, if you are the one to polish off your ice-cream or bite down the last bit of a lollipop, then my sympathies are with you, not because you didn’t have any left, but because I was that younger sibling and that impatient kid once. But after I married a fellow early finisher, the contest got even, where either one of us could tease the other.

That afternoon, I was the one to show off the traces of unfinished business of kopiko by sticking my tongue out in the middle of the auto-ride when my eyes met another pair of eyes (not my partner’s): that of a passenger on a mini truck brushing past our auto. I don’t remember how the passenger looked but I was smiling while my partner had half a smile left on her face. Inadvertent though this act of mine was, I found myself shrugging it off, suitably aided by the auto swerving around and across the ditches on the road.

We stopped at one more store, a hundred metres before our final destination, our doorstep, before I looked at my watch clocking 3.30; enough for us to be back before the school bus arrived.

It’s been two months since my last day at work. I am still trying to find my feet between the mornings and afternoons and the evenings, but I guess I am getting a sense of what it means to feel freer.

I can clearly remember the ordeal of my parents who couldn’t stop dissing the system that evening and for another week till the revised date came in.

This was 11^th April, 2004; CBSE PMT was cancelled just hours before it was scheduled to begin after Delhi Police unearthed a massive paper leak. Lakhs of students appeared in that exam and in many such exams.

*****

20^th July 2026:

“The tall yellow barricades have been put up. They are now being welded", a News Laundry reporter claims.

I can’t stop looking at my phone but I can’t keep looking at it. I have my air pods on. I look when I can and I move my left hand off the keyboard of my laptop to the phone screen to keep it alive. One feed gets over and I turn my eyes away to scroll and find the next thing that I haven’t looked at. I want to know everything that’s going on.

When the updates get scarce, I stop at a reel, let the screen on, and start typing. I turn again, refresh my phone screen and I notice – 13 minutes ago. I stop typing and I start looking at my phone. Mr. Zuckerberg has my attention.

Skin head, dead head
Everybody gone bad
Situation, aggravation
Everybody allegation
In the suite, on the news
Everybody dog food
Bang bang, shot dead
Everybody’s gone mad
All I wanna say is that
They don’t really care about us

“Michael Jackson – they don’t really care about us”

A sociology student has been joined by her mother from Assam. A man from Rajasthan – lost his very young kid to bullying and is fighting for justice for months now – remembers his daughter’s birthday as he serves food to the crowd. There is an old man in a white shirt giving away slices of coconut from his plate – it looks like it’s his rozi-roti. There are many others who are holding their children in tears, angered defeated voices, and in photo frames. There are many young boys and girls from my country – Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat.

There is a lady from Wardha, Sevagram Ashram, sitting on the top of the ambulance and holding the preamble of the constitution in her hands. There are many people and stories that have come about in these last few hours.

And, now, I learn that the internet has been jammed in a part of the national capital of my country.

There are not enough updates coming by, but I have internet, and my body and my brain and my heart are working just fine, so I write.

बोल ये थोड़ा वक़्त बहुत है

जिस्म ओ ज़बाँ की मौत से पहले

बोल कि सच ज़िंदा है अब तक

बोल जो कुछ कहना है कह ले

“फ़ैज़ अहमद फ़ैज़”

****

I am your typical privileged Indian male born in a Hindu family in the mid-80s when the green colorr putty of the wall of the house was adorned with a typical Gregorian solar calendar which had a saffron-clad bare-chested beautiful looking Ram with a gentle face, holding a bow, and from his feet leapt the waves of – I don’t know what – an ocean or a river.

Years passed; that picture lives rent free in my head and the words reverberate like a set of forlorn words that once took the garb of a cause, that you once thought would go away after it’s realized, but they continue like an unending vicious curse.

कसम राम की खाते हैं, हम मंदिर वहीं बनाएंगे।

Ram Mandir Movement was a part of the household and has been deeply embedded all this while, even when I can comfortably claim that I don’t believe in any religion or any God.

Yet, I invoke Seeta kay Pati ko for so much that has gone wrong all along, for it changed the way our homes got and continue to get radicalized. That this was in the making is important too, but this was a moment that first nourished and the unleashed the Great Indian Hindu Bigot in the 21^st century.

But my country is a paradox, a thriving one at that, and as the famous quote from the British economist Joan Robinson goes:

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true

Or we, or maybe just my family, were outright non-committal and did things for convenience for what explains the behavior, commitment, and even existence of an honorary General Secretary of a Bank Union, who remained a Clerk for a major part of his career, refused promotions, earned him the unenvious jibe of committing to Unionbaazi, fighting for the workers’ rights, getting suspended, while being the only earning member of a family of four or more depending on the situation.

My father was also too busy when I was remembering the Preamble to the Constitution in Class VIII while I as putting it on a color chart paper for a project – probably the only project; that might as well be a reason why I remember it so vividly.

“If you are not a communist at 20, you have no heart. If you are not a capitalist at 30, you have no brain.”

Many wise people who I adore, quote this often, and I understand this doesn’t have to be the thing to do or be, but for the context of this piece, let’s consider this as a standard. When I look at it for myself, neither did I have a heart at 20 nor did I have a brain at 30, but to be fair, I have only been slow and that has been enough to hold me in stead to consider and re-consider everything I come across. It never stopped me to voice, claim, and re-claim what made sense all along, but I concede things have looked like going down a spiral ever since 2015-2016 and everything has just felt worse and irredeemably so; it has only been disillusionment piling over tons of other disillusionments.

*****

My parents now live in the apartment next to mine; I met them yesterday like a regular weekend visit. We speak nothing about it; we don’t talk anything about politics anymore and we continue like nothing that happens outside our houses matter.

I attended a kid’s birthday party last night and there was a magic show which was a hoot among children and parents like. He ended the show with the Indian Tricolour and everyone clapped a little more.

There is nothing for me to look into any of it but I think was I trying too hard because things were bothering me.

Truth be told, four days ago, I wanted to be there but very soon, I looked around and I thought myself out of what felt like a very impulsive thought. I was scared then for myself, and I am scared now, for all those who have turned out.

I have heard history repeats itself and it might be the moment but one can never underestimate those in power — we shall wait and watch!

तुम से पहले वो जो इक शख़्स यहाँ तख़्त-नशीं था

उस को भी अपने ख़ुदा होने पे इतना ही यक़ीं था

कोई ठहरा हो जो लोगों के मुक़ाबिल तो बताओ

वो कहाँ हैं कि जिन्हें नाज़ बहुत अपने तईं था

“हबीब जालिब”

I stopped for a moment, picked up my phone from the bed table and scanned the screen to stop at the camera on the top right. Before I could open the app, my eyes strayed to the top left – it was five to eleven. I slid sideways on the screen to reach the music app, selected the “Hindustani Classical Essentials” before I put my phone back, put on my air pods, and settled in the space behind the table. I also located the delaminating bookmark – it was somewhere in the middle of the book – and I started reading.

I was looking at the words trying not to look at the pink sticky note on the top of the page.

I was reading and hearing the words that I was reading, in my head. Thoughts were spilling over to the page; in the spaces between the words on page and in my head, when the sound of a message stepped in.

I checked my phone and it was not important – the message – but I slid the screen upside down and my eyes lit up. It read like the precise coordinates of a place: No mention of prepositions like near, after, behind, besides. I opened the message and checked for details and I was now breathing a little slower for the address had arrived.

I went back to the book and this time I didn’t stop my eyes to stray; they went straight to the pink sticky note to decipher my handwriting: a swarm of words jostling for space under four words with legible letters – “A Letter for birthday”.

And, then, the bell rang – in my mind and at the door. A voice was looking for the most sought after and the most dreaded three letter word in the Internet age: OTP. I was checking my phone, yet again. My response time, which was inversely proportional to the time I spend on my phone, didn’t deter the person who seemed like a zen, although a standing one, to my mind. I took the package and took my time to open the package with a confidence of someone who knew what it was, and yet I stood there a little more to not just look into the package but also turn to smell a few fresh pages of the new book. The smell spurred me and I moved back to my room.

I picked up a white blank paper and wrote the first words of the letter Dear… and continued.

I was looking at what might be the last quarter of the other side of the page and I could see the letters getting smaller till I reached the fag end which had enough space for Yours… I heaved a sigh of relief when Alexa chimed in – time to switch of the TV. My eyes, which felt like had receded in rest somewhere inside my eye socket, crawled back to look at the time on the phone—five to twelve.

(Image created using Gemini)

I folded the paper, headed out, and brought my brightest smile to ask the son to switch off the TV. And, I proposed we go out to the courier service for delivering a “document”, and if he had a message for his brother. He switched the TV off like he didn’t know what it was, pulled out a paper and some pencils of different colours, got down on his knees, and started writing and drawing: “Let’s pick some strawberries”. The swiftness, the precision, and the brevity of the message had me staring into the floor as I moved my hands enveloped around the said “document” back.

****

I have clear memories of the times when the sympathies of the society were with the person delivering the letter, and not the writer; at least not in my mind. A postman was a recognizable face; there was often one middle-aged or old man on the job but I don’t think I appreciated enough the efforts of the writer then. Little did I know I would endeavour to write one myself when writing it on a piece of paper with a pen is not only not in vogue but also extremely difficult, especially when it was going to be my first in a long time, so much so that it feels like my first ever. (There are strikethroughs, a term I only use and find in context of MS word doc these days; uneven size of words; multiple inverted “V”, which I understand are called carets; and no help of – forget about AI, not even a device called computer and a service called internet – without which life is already becoming unimaginable. No one told me to do all of this. If anything, this was like a wish, even an effort to write back to all those letters/postcards that I received from my bother when even our cumulative ages didn’t match how old either one of us are today.)

But beyond all my impossible sentimentality and not without zest, my only hope, now, is that it doesn’t read like my first ever, because if that happens it will be tough to redeem myself, although I trust the warmth and grace of my intended reader, and because they are that, they might even excuse the charges I have incurred in sending it because – why did I have to spend so much to send a letter – and because there could be so much that, at least by weight, could be sent along with it with the same charges. But for now, I have written and sent a letter to my brother after thinking about it for—what feels like—ever.

This was just another morning when we were headed to my son’s bus stop. These walks are turning out to be a fun segue for me – I hope it is fun for him too – every morning. I try my best to remember the lessons of listening but sometimes the excitement gets the better of me.

He was listening to Alice in Wonderland early in the morning and I had asked him if we have Beatrix Potter in his library. He confirmed and told me the titles and I realised it was not a book but the name of a writer; the perfect display of Chiraagh Talay Andhera. (I trust my readers here, but just to clarify the “Andhera” is writing here looking for some illumination)

I was adequately explained with another similar sounding name to help me understand—a boy called Harry Potter. The explanation came with a supplementary question: How did they get this name Potter? I regurgitated my rehearsed answer, which I never forget especially when I don’t know the answer: That’s a good question.

My son understands that, I assume, and even if that assumption were not right, he is so quick to get to the other thing that we are always saved of any quiet gaps. If you have to get to your point, you have to put it across, you can’t wait because there will always be something in pipeline. And, I did have a point to get to with Beatrix Potter.

I had read in an essay that Margaret Atwood read Beatrix Potter when she was four and how she understood reading between the lines and even things that were not explicitly stated.

The author Margaret Atwood notes that her own writing was influenced by Beatrix Potter, whom she describes as a master of oblique discourse.

And, so was the disclaimer that Margaret Atwood was a precocious kid.

Atwood was undoubtedly a precocious 4-year-old, but there is evidence that average children can pick up such dropped clues, and that this process not only activates mentalizing networks in the brain, but that it hones these skills even more than the explicit labeling of mental states.

I think the larger point was also to also not expect the children to do those precise things; I know such a parent very closely. Self-awareness helps but only till a certain point.

Now that I had asked about Beatrix Potter, I couldn’t stop bringing Margaret Atwood up in our conversation. This is also me overexplaining myself in the garb of bombarding the kid with information; guilty as charged. Swabhaavgat Vivashtaa. (A phrase Mrinal Pandey Jee used in an episode at Amit Varma’s The Seen and The Unseen)

I told him someone recommended Beatrix Potter and that she was Margaret Atwood, a writer herself, who read this as a child. After correcting him on pronouncing the “Margaret”.

“I think she has written the Lillabo Express”, he said.

I remembered it wasn’t her. How could I get this wrong? This was the first book that we got for him when we came in the city five years ago. He wasn’t even two when I read it to him. I still do it sometimes but somehow, I always feel he didn’t appreciate the book as much as he should have.

He doesn’t remember as fondly as I do and that’s okay, I reassure myself.

What he continued to say further, kind of, shook the notion out of me, and it turned out reflectively redeeming too. In the meanwhile, I checked the writer; it was Sophie Holmqvist. But I didn’t stop there and so didn’t he. I added that the protagonist in the book is Margaret and that he was confusing it with the author. And, he continued that she must have written it like her four-year-old self. He was not able to reconcile with the fact that she hadn’t written it and that we had reached the bus. He had to now move into the bus. I was also just beginning to get a glimpse what he was trying to say because it sounded like a reimagination and I was not understanding what he was saying; there was a clear gap.

I stopped him for a bit; the bus was still away from its departure time. I would have waited to listen to him anyway but I was thanking myself in the head for all the rush that I subject myself to, for this easy walk to the bus stop and those five minutes to see him off; both of us waving at each other.

“I am not saying she is the author; the author must have thought about herself as Margaret as a kid”

It took me a bit to get out of the facts and think something that was a little, not a lot, tangential and alternate.

He was only associating the four-year-old Margaret reading Beatrix Potter to the Margaret in the book, and thinking that the writer was writing about herself.

He had moved on and in the bus but this thought had me for some time.

****

It’s a fact our brains are wired to see patterns and both of us saw patterns. It is not surprising but I definitely found out how the tendency or ability – depending on what it brings and how it’s worked around – to see patterns plays out differently to suggest biases as well as creativity.

Apparently, children’s brains are quicker to jump to a pattern and slower to rule one out; they haven’t yet learned which patterns to keep away. Research on early learning shows it’s the same wiring that makes a toddler say “goed” instead of “went,” overapplying a rule too eagerly, and the wiring that lets a child get to an explanation an adult would never have reached for.

I – and I am sure I am not alone; many adults would tend to do that – am clouded by everything that I already know and I am already considering it to be likely. Furthermore, the search tends to be narrower and more towards an accurate place, but with children, the search is wider, and they might get it wrong even, but the way they arrive there is what’s unexpected and even ingenious.

****

I have been accused of reading too much into things but that’s also my way to go about my days where I have the luxury to see the child do and say things they do, and even though I am not acting/writing form that mindset, it would be such a waste to not savour every bit where almost everything is bitter sweet.

You are living everything but you are also leaving behind so much but there is always something to hang on to.

I carried it for years, through college and then a few years later, until I lost it in transfer or I should I say I let go of it knowing it’d be of no use to me after all.

I’ve carried so many of my diaries over the years, I could have carried it this too. But I didn’t.

These days, I remember things and instances from the past like I’d never be able to get to them at all. It shouldn’t be as precarious as it sounds, but I feel haunted by the past as I scramble in the present to pave a path for myself.

A Lagaan memorabilia - a letter pad from Archies Collection from 25 years from the time of the film’s release - has been on my mind. A school friend gifted this on my birthday that year.

It felt so precious then, that I kept it like a treasure I was unworthy for until I lost it, and I now yearn for it like I feel I deserve it now, but it’s nowhere to be found.

Baagha held on to that catch eventually but I missed it.

I turn through the pages of my memory, as I type this on the pages on my phone, remembering what it was like.

*****

Lagaan released 25 years ago. I recall this, thanks to the recent events and promotions to celebrate the film and its legacy. I also remember it today for all the associations I can make from it, and for what has endured and what was left totally untouched, like the diary, I forever waited on but I never got to write on.

I was crazy about the film. The promotions for the film, I gather now, were unprecedented and to my impressionable and unexposed mind, it was the ultimate inexhaustible source of dopamine.

Liberalization must have been late to my town but it was definitely later to my home. We had no cable TV and channel 9 GOLD was the only source of all things glossy and flashy. Promos, more like teasers when the term was non-existent, at least for me, landing on our television was the best thing that could happen for film lover in me.

The coin with the queen’s face landing on what looked like an esoteric map with some unrecognizable lines - it must have been British India - in the background of the great Bachchan baritone looked and sounded the world to me, when I was busy trying to focus on my studies.

I’d rush to take a sneak peek into it and, to my parents’ credit, they never stopped or asked me to not do so. I had never witnessed anything like that ever before, so much so that every time I’d hear ghanan-ghanan I’d rush to look at it. I waited like Champaner waited for the rains. And, I can assure you I watched it every single time it aired.

Obviously, I had no idea the classic it was to become and I have nothing to suggest I did, but it felt really special. (I later learnt how so many filmmakers talked about it with the sense of fervor I felt only I had. I had the first experience of this, much later, in Satyanshu Singh’s screenwriting workshop. The way he went into the details reinforced my feelings for the film.)

Music of the film was gateway to what the film could be; I knew every song of the film by heart and I thought no one appreciated the sound like I was doing. I’d bet and argue with any one at the slightest provocation. I was passionate, unnecessarily so, about it at a time when my tenth board exams - scheduled for March next year - was on everyone’s mind including mine but I could still make way and space for Lagaan to come, live, and stay there.

All things considered, there should have been no reason for the film to be as memorable as it became. This was a great film but the irony was I actually never got to watch it in the cinema hall and I can’t remember why.

I watched the films in bits and pieces; knew, heard, and read everything around it from others, and all of it just added to the myth that Lagaan was becoming in my head: the reality around the fiction of the film took over and elevated the fiction to an unerasable reality. (I think, for a similar reason, the documentary of the making of the film - Chale Chalo: The Lunacy of Film Making - which I watched much later, has had an impact that’s as profound.)

There was so much going on in my life, and the film - kind of - bookmarked everything for me. Films do that for me all the time: whenever I have to remember any time in the past, I go back to the film releases of the time, and I can get a sense of month and year.

That year, for some reason, my mother had decided that they would celebrate birthday at home which also meant we would host people. This was not common for our household. Birthdays only meant special food at home.

I guess she figured it’d be my last birthday at home - come next year, I’d be away for my +2, and then college, and so on. I didn’t resist even though I wasn’t entirely sure about the proposition. Boys only gathered outside or on the way to school and tuition classes; homes were out of scope.

Things rolled as planned, my friends visited and - lo and behold - I got a gift that now feels like something I won’t forget in my lifetime.

The Lagaan letter pad with poster images imprint on every single page.

I doubt myself if it’s only memorable because I lost it on the way, but before I did, I always kept it like a keepsake.

I love films; writing is and has been a great romantic notion, and this memorabilia was an artefact which, I now lament, I couldn’t preserve. Things evolved and so did I, and as writing shifted from being a daydream to a reality of my days and nights, I value it more than when I had it.

*****

I remember the friend, a school friend, I grew out of touch. The last we connected must be about 12 years ago. It was brief but enough to know that another connect would be very unlikely.

The gesture of a gift in those days and in the place was not common - most of us wouldn’t hesitate to frown or even mock it and I would not exclude myself. Saying that ‘I or we didn’t know better’ would be an understatement. We knew nothing outside text books and TV screens.

He was a topper and a very sophisticated, street smart kind of a guy who sounded aware and always knew about many things that I’d only listen to.

He was the kind not many in the class liked. I was surprisingly secure to be friends with him, but our friendship started and ended in school.

*****

Things and memories of things have a life larger and even longer than we would like them to be.

Nevertheless, this landing in my essay today, I urge dear reader, is opportune and not forced.

Meanness Might be Gender Agnostic but In Children, it’s Probably Not

This last week, one of the joys to grace me more than once was the hearty conversations – I could tag them as monologues because “hmm” and “umm” don’t feel like worthy elements of a conversation, yet in hindsight, they turn out to be effective, because I see, the more I stay quiet and listen, the more I remember things – with my son on our way back from his swimming in the evening. He exudes a cathartic calm and at the same time, in the same breath, makes very ambitious plans –either for the day’s dinner or for his birthday, which is months away, and he doesn’t forget to (re)iterate that it’s his most favourite day of the year – only to pause to let me know of a possible problem.

‘I want a butterfly tiara for my birthday but I think I should not do it because my friends might laugh at it’

It overwhelms me to hear him articulate – I love to listen to his monologues – but it breaks my heart to see him be apprehensive about things that he wants to do and be. We, I and my partner, spoke about it and we are fairly sure about the friends that he has: we have seen they are all protective about one another and we trust this should go as we plan.

I feel a little odd to put it like this because it might not be as simple as I perceive. Many of the friends that my son has are girls and we see they are all comfortable with one another as they would be (I am tempted to say of “opposite gender” but I resist because I am still learning). At the same time, there are adults and children who have been mean to him for his choice (this sounds such a big word in the context but I think it’s only appropriate) of, let’s say: a fairy princess or a unicorn or even the color pink. I might be generalizing here and I am happy to be corrected but the boys, as I see them growing in the last five years or so, tend to be much meaner, and I don’t exclude my son from the group, but he doesn’t want to hang out with many such boys and I really feel he is better off like that.

Women and Women Role Models in Our Lives

How many women do you think a young boy of about 7 years know growing around in the mid-90s in North India? And, how many women role models do you think they have had?

I tried to put some guesstimate in place and it’d be fair to say that balance would tip slightly in favor of exposure to men in visual social circle, but when we talk about role models, the boy, unfortunately, would have far less women role models. There is a big role of luck here: we don’t know how it played out for any individual and we know little of the interior and personal lives of those around us, but all things considered, I pity that child a little more who could only appreciate a Sachin or a Shahrukh or a Sonu Nigam and not a Karnam Malleswari or a Manisha Koirala or an Alka Yagnik.

I also wonder if they did what they did because they didn’t know many women or maybe it’s just a lazy excuse.

Case in Point; A List

Looking at a particular individual and their personal lives, I put across a case in point of myself and my partner; consider this:

My partner is one of the four siblings three of whom are women. I am one of the two siblings; we don’t have any sisters.

She has five mausis (mother’s sister). I had one.

My mother-in-law grew up with her siblings all of them in the space of ten to twelve years of age difference. My mother is the second youngest and my Mausi was the eldest of the siblings.

I only mention the above, at the risk of overexplaining myself, for perspective—something that has taken forever to shape up and is very much a work-in-progress.

I share this list to suggest the very few women who I saw growing up and those who I had also didn’t have many women. I am also comfortably sure to say that women have much richer inner lives and I’ve seen that in my partner and many other people I have known.

The Game of Kitkit or Kith Kith

That’s hopscotch in English.

A quick note on its origins:

Many believe hopscotch began as an ancient Roman military drill and tough originally played mostly by boys, it became heavily segregated on 20th-century playgrounds. Researcher Derek Van Rheenen notes in “Boys Who Play Hopscotch” (1998), the activity evolved into a game primarily associated with young girls as boys abandoned the grid for more aggressive team sports.

The boy who preferred Male Film Stars, Singers, Sportspersons once played the game of Kith Kith. I played it a few times as a kid. This is a game played by girls; I thought so for a long time but I am not sure since when. This must have been around the time I had stopped playing.

The girl who I played with had two other brothers: they were the eldest and the youngest of the siblings. The family were our neighbors which meant we saw all our lives unfold before one another. For what it’s worth, the girl turned out to have the most functional life of the three children.

I don’t see a lot of kids playing hopscotch but the gendered view isn’t just apparent but also obtrusive. There are more boys in taekwondo and there are less of them in classical dance or music or singing.

As the parents start thinking about attaching gender to things one does for love, they also start segregating the boys and girls – first in the playground and then in the classrooms – until the children start walking their own ways, in the fixed gendered patterns, only to come back together to live together to not understand how to be with another.

Boys – they might or might not have had the chance to have women (role models) – have to put that extra effort to do better: as friends, siblings, partners, and parents.

Conclusion

Truth be told – I felt a little bad but I was okay my son had made it up for it, but I’d have felt if that delivery bag had celebrated fathers. I pretended to laugh it off by chewing out that cliché: every day is a Father’s Day. The mother, my partner, in this case was chill and sport just like she is on every Mother’s Day. Did I say that boys got to do better? Never mind, repeat after me!

(Source: Rekhta - SHER OF JAUN ELIYA)

****

Days ago, I was trying to write something and I was looking like myself and that – I have been told many times – looks like I am angry and frustrated and struggling, when my son came asking for his TV time and he said something that I haven’t heard from him ever. I guess there’d be many things in the life of a young parent’s (I am not young but my child is like six-and-a-half so I am a young parent) life that would be a first time but this was funny and manipulative and obviously very cute. ‘How can you ignore such a cute face?’

Before I could respond, I could just feel the tension just melting away from my face but in moments he shifted gears and started peeping in my diary and changed tracks like a pro: ‘Are you writing anything about me?’ I didn’t respond anything then but words dispersed between us: some landed on the paper and some made way to the screen, and here they are:

****

At 7:52 in the morning, we had everything ready to move. The schools started today after holidays—an agonizing delay from the earlier scheduled last week Wednesday opening. The delay didn’t stop us from getting things ready in time and we made the most of it ensuring we get to the last moment, and feel awesome that we had enough time to go down the stairs in place of taking the lift—you have to first wait for it and then scramble for little space that feels totally impersonal at the time such as today for school after a long time.

I am not sure who wanted to settle their nerves more: I or my child.

‘I feel nervous’ he had said, while still inside the house and I gave him as quick a hug as I could and said something I don’t recall, for there were things to do before we step out. I recall this now; none of this was on my mind when we walked down and out. And, now that I think about what he said next, this makes some sense.

‘Good that you are not going to office and so, when I come back, you will be in the hall with your computer or you will be in the other room on a call with your computer?’

I feel overwhelmed when I write this, but I asked him to say that again when I realized I didn’t respond anything.

In a day, there are many moments where you’d want to stop and slow down to breathe a little slower, take a little longer, to process and respond. You let go of many without knowing, there are some you remember because you know you wanted to but you couldn’t, and then there are a few where you take the sensible call to stop and ask and pay attention like it deserves—this was one such moment.

‘You know where I will be; I will be at the bus stop waiting for you to pick you up and bring you home’ I said.

These last few months before summer vacations, the schedule was such that none of us could go and pick him up from the bus stop. We had to take my father’s help for it who was doing it very happily, even though the kid was more than ready to come back on his own. He still can and can do it better now, but I want to be there when he steps out of the bus and appears in the middle of that mess of a maze of people waiting to make themselves visible. I want to be at the back looking at him, not rushing at all, for us to catch up and go back together.

Together is a place I have been looking for long and now that I get to experience some of it in these past few days, I am not counting them but I also don’t stop holding on to them because, in a way, they are where life springs from, when you expect it the least.

I yearn it more when I can see, moments can equally and easily be a source of sadness, anger, frustration, or what a 6-and-a-half-year-old can show and not just show but exhibit such complex emotions that will put you in shame for not feeling enough. My child, I am assuming like many other children and it’s immaterial if there are none, is as prone to these as he is to excitability or joy or just plain happiness but as parents, putting ourselves at the center of it is a boon and a bane.

You don’t want to be at the center of it because you left that space – within and without – the day they came into your lives. Leaving that space often creates an unintentional (or even intentional but I can barely tell that now) push and pull that puts you in the unwanted situation of being the reason of their feelings. I almost feel like I am playing with our moods, as if I were testing if we can bounce back, solely relying on the fact that the child is as malleable as I am rigid. I dread he will become like I am or I’ve become. That he will not have anything to respond to my call—of love or anger or both. Will he switch off too, like I do, when my father starts talking – he doesn’t do that a lot these days - about the presence (or I think he means absence) of a certain kind of food, faith, and opinions of the world.

I spiral and sway but I am always brought back to the surface whenever I am drowning.

****

‘I remember that I gave birth and the nurse gave him to you and I dozed off. Looks like I gave him to you and he’s been with you since then and I am not complaining.’

My partner told this in jest but I have taken it in all seriousness and I continue to take it so, except that last bit which felt sweet and sad. Thing is she loves her job and gives it her all, which also means she is not able to give as much time as she’d have wanted to the child, and this frustrates her beyond I can think. But she also trusts him with me which I can see is some solace to her situation, and that’s the leveler to my erratic ways, and I hope I show up for the two of them every single day: may be with my flaws sometimes, but never without myself. I will continue to live and write about it as long as I can.

****

I leave you with some words from Anaïs Nin:

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...”

I was also lamenting the late nights because I had been thinking about my daily notes, which I have been enjoying a lot, so much so that it’s hard to switch off to sleep at night, after I’d spent all day thinking about what to write and how much to write.

For me, excitement and worry are those distant cousins who come uninvited to each other at the slightest impulse and often threaten to be inseparable.

I am so used to this now that before I realise, I want to do this magically morphs into I HAVE to do this, and strangely enough the awareness of this never ever means that I can get rid of it eventually, and I start hoping if ignorance in this matter would be a better ally.

Speaking of allies, I was ruing all this and more, with my wife when she said something so eloquently that I almost took it as glib. Because why not, and that’s what men do – they think they know it all but the truth is they know nothing about listening and sitting with something. Did I say something about bail?

“Think about what you want to write about this day that you have lived like you’d have wanted to. Put this out like you got this – not as a burden or a task but like you want to share what you have earned.”

Thankfully, in a true me way, it stuck with me and it clicked. Not the least because, she followed it up with something I felt totally gratifying and even flattering and it made a lot of sense, if I can say so myself. It was an excellent advice wrapped in the appreciation of what I’d been thinking but wasn’t sure about – pardon me if you sense a “I knew this” self-absorbed man here.

“You are getting to do what many people don’t get to. If you have got the privilege, even if you think you have earned it and especially if you have earned it, give it the joy, hopefulness, gratefulness or whatever good that you make of it, and not as a worry or a burden.”

Things are what they are and as we spoke a little more about things-to-do, that again read as liabilities in my head, I did see, at least for that moment: whatever break we are allowing or getting myself, I’ll do ME for as long as I can without any worry; not as a responsibility but as a response to life at hand. This spoke to me like I needed to hear it.

This was also the end of a day that felt like was a long time since we last went out, when in reality we went out the last weekend. The last week or so, when I think of it, does feel like long, not in a loathsome languishing way – far from it, actually. I only say long to sense the distance that I have felt since my last day at work. It’s not bad to feel far from those days and dare I say, I don’t miss any of it, though I tend to overanalyse the timing, but that’s a force of habit.

And, these habits, look like, are in the reset mode.

While I am getting to healthier ways of living and being – a big reason why I left my job – there are things that keep reminding me of who and how I have been. The rudest reminder of them all, the snappy irritability, which seems to stem from the frustrating habit of not willing to rest and sleep.

But I can focus on the bad times even on good days because we have sailed through days and that day too – it was a Saturday – fairly well, though, it took some blessing that comes once in a while like eid ka chaand.

There was a birthday party for the kid. It was windy and it looked like it would drizzle but instead we felt invited for a walk out together – an occurrence rarer than eid ka chaand but you don’t say no, even if you have clocked 10,000 steps for the day and you are tired like 20,000. We walked around and headed home after I conceded defeat for the first time ever in our ten-odd years of walking-together history (outside any kind of shopping zone). At home, again after a long time, we watched something really fun together with a well-placed interval.

Mid-way through MAA BEHEN, we couldn’t help but look at the watch and ask each other when would he be back: it felt like he was out for long.

We enquired the hosts first, and then checked again without sounding like those overprotective parents who accompany kids for everything and not let them out on their own for long. We probably are those parents, because even though I tried hard to not get there too quickly – I headed out at the first sight of affirmation form the hosts that I could come to pick him up – I was the first parent to be there, much to the dismay of our kid.

We try hard to manage his bed time, sometimes too hard, for this guy is a sleeping – whenever he does sleep because trust me it’s easier to wake up Kumbhkarna than putting our guy to sleep – alarm that wouldn’t let all of us be in the bed beyond 6 in the morning. Also, we are not used to be without him for long – sleepily or sleeplessly.

It was my last coffee at Deli Marche – more than 90% of these words that you see next were written on the couch on my phone. It wasn’t long ago that I had my first thing here. I competed five years this year in February. I think I first came here last month - only after I had resigned. I never thought I had enough time or as they call it “bandwidth” to sit here and sip a cup of coffee.

The daud for office would begin with seeing Piku off to the bus and then leave for office, and I’d also try and come back by the time his bus came, which meant I left earlier from office. It didn’t matter that I came early because apparently this wasn’t doing any good to my “visibility” - another buzz word I hope I never use unless in jest or joke. I just wanted to be home, not too later than Piku’s arrival. When the talk on “visibility” grew more, I took my father’s help in picking him up and I added an hour to my stay at office.

The stay ended on Friday – for good.

I took longer than usual to get ready that day. I think I was giving myself a little more time. I looked a little longer in the mirror as if I were asking myself a question - has anything changed or is it all the same? I didn’t look much different, obviously, but I knew it’s not going to be the same after, even though I’d look the same. I’d not be going to work from the day after.

I left the house, I pressed the lift button, and I knew I’d forgotten something. It was the ID card and I couldn’t afford to miss it. Of all the days, I chose this day to miss my ID card - I could laugh it off because it was my last day and I didn’t mind when my partner said you could always come back to get it. I take comfort in hearing how I can never think. I have forgotten things in the past and I have come back to pick it up but never without frown or worry that I seem to embody all along. I have attached way too importance to these things and it’s a shame when this comes to my mind as some kind of achievement that I’ve never ever missed my ID card and I’d never had to get what they call the “TEMP ID”.

As I drove out, I dialed in to my partner like all those days in the past and now for one last time, on way to office. I’ve fought, argued, shouted – making use of the solo closed space inside the car on the driving seat to the fullest – listened, disconnected but always called back once I reached. The conversations with all the arguments started getting so interesting at one point that I thought there should be a series or a podcast or some documentation of all the gyaan we exchanged and it helped greatly that I was only listening – a gentle flex but I am good at that.

I took a turn and saw one grey Škoda squeeze away from my right. I swore and then moved on as I saw that car move away crazily and it struck me, he was probably having a bad day or maybe he wasn’t and he was just another guy thinking he could get away doing anything and it was the world’s responsibility to deal with it. Because the way he was moving, he could have probably messed someone else’s day and life. “The world is not going to change. It’s going to treat you all the same. Don’t think too much”, my partner said.

I was settled in my driving seat once again as I cruised to office and we spoke of all the ways we are going to beat the world – in zamaane ko dikhaana hai mode – at its own game when they ask me why I am not going to work and why this is okay. I have had only gentle and concerned enquiries so far but one should be prepared right?

I was one turn away to making an entry but the traffic. which was stuck just before the entry gate, looked like it wanted me to wait: just a little longer. I was in no rush - there is no love lost between me and my workplace but I carry and retain deep respect and admiration for all humans I have looked at from a distance - the parking and entrance support staff and the cafeteria folks, and all the non-living things too that support the structure - the cafe, the sofa, the lift and the steps, that I have always found encouraging and inviting.

I parked and as I was moving the steps to the 6th floor one more time, I came across a man I’ve often seen but never greeted. I have always found it weird to say hi or smile at someone passing by and it helps that no one expects you to do that and you don’t feel obliged to do so, like Americans do. It looks polite and it’s nice but I feel it adds more to the mechanical non-feeling way of the modern human. I need to have some interaction to be able to do that. And so, I passed that person one last time and I didn’t greet him and I continued stepping up until I reached the 6th floor.

I walked and I disappeared in the sea of empty desks and chairs to get to my chair and took the view in from the massive window pane. There were no takers for the spot at the time – not many people come on Friday around holidays.

I have very little to write about the time on the floor where I chatted indiscriminately with whoever was around and when I was done with those around, I got on the phone to talk to family and friends and said hello and bye to a few of the fewer people before the day was done and before stopping by – this felt forever – at the IT desk and heading out to hand over my ID card to get done with the exit formalities.

****

I was coming in from about 3 to 3.5 years of what was then called as coaching and/or preparatory center. I see those words in an entirely different light now. My eyes get moist as I write them. These words sound so different in my head. What they meant then and what they do now, the perceived and the usual dictionary meaning, are so far apart that I still flinch and pause whenever I mention. It’s hard to shake off what those words, drilled into the memories of a 10-year-old, evoked then.

But yes, that’s what they were and there were so many of those centers in that small town of ours.

The schedule in those classes was nothing like the usual schools. The days were long, often extending into evenings for special classes to cram in extra preparation for competitive exams at hand. Sticks and beatings were common. Through my eyes the Darr kaa maahaul was all pervasive. So much so that the students would keep their ear on the sound of the Director’s LML select scooter vrooming in and out to gauge the potential outcome of any indiscipline.

I was at the receiving end of the sticks a few times. The first time it happened was at the hands of the Hindi teacher. I still remember her name and face and I still remember thinking she wouldn’t be as cruel. She was one of the only two lady teachers there. In my mind and I am still convinced; they didn’t hire lady teachers because they couldn’t be brutal as needed in an all boys’ set up. She fit the bill even though she didn’t look like it and I was so scared that I started crying even before the first stick landed. She was committed to the deed as if her salary depended on it. The sticks were rationed depending on the number of mistakes.

My crying did not deter the teacher or anything, instead it became a point of contention when my mother came asking clarifications after those green/purple marks on my palm. The teacher was like: I was crying even before she started hitting. My mother coming and asking questions meant they didn’t hit me as much they did to other kids which was a norm and for me the fear just got worse.

I’d see kids being beaten and I felt guilty that I was spared and I often think I’d have been better off being punished depending on the merit though I also dread what would become of me because I was pretty average in studies.

This was the case only in the first year of coaching. Second and third years didn’t have as much corporal punishment though I think I’d internalized fear and it became a second nature inside the classes and constant irritability in whatever social life I had, outside the classes.

The schedules remained a challenge; I just got used to them like a seasoned player. None of this translated to passing the exams that I was preparing for.

When I moved out of these coaching classes to the regular school, I think I sensed it wasn’t half as hard as before. I was also looked at differently – not in a bad way – and I got from the surroundings that this would be easier.

****

That day I went on that stage I was there with a strange and a rather misplaced sense of pride and for what it’s worth now and if I may say so myself: I completely nailed it.

The cloudy day in the middle of the rainy season, a crowd of people, I at the CenterStage in the spotlight – all the ingredients of an impending disaster that makes my heart flutter even today and it hasn’t got any better – couldn’t do a thing.

****

I feel compelled to call it beginner’s luck or some such – I can look for another framework to look at it better. But I won’t, for this was no beginning and this is not the end of what I am trying to comprehend.

I didn’t continue in that school for long, mother left it too – all stories for another time.

Nevertheless, I did well for a few years – till class tenth – after which I felt like I was on a downhill but that was also when I started to try and become more of myself: a khichdi of multiple and tangential feelings and emotions, a mess that I could own up and live with.

****

How I couldn’t stop being dramatic and not avoid a turnaround or a resolution here: almost like I couldn’t help not feeling as grim about it. Sadness and emotionality are a big part of who I am: I can find sadness even in humor. Bleakness would be my middle name if I ever had one. I carry that in my writing too and having done the unenviable task of putting my messiness at display, I almost always put something in the end that’s not as bleak as everything before that.

A behavioral ecologist argues in a recent article that true resilience is not about bouncing back and that recovery might be a better alternative to resilience in approach and in deed:

The language we use matters. When we tell people to be resilient, we ask them to stay the same. When we talk about recovery, we invite change. One hides pain; the other honours it. One imagines a spring snapping back; the other imagines repair through time and care.

If I break my leg, no one expects me to bounce back. They expect me to rest, rebuild and rehab. We should offer the same grace for the invisible injuries – the social, emotional or moral ones. Resilience says ‘return’. Recovery says ‘grow’. I don’t want resilience. I want improvement.

This is hope, I guess, and this I can only conjure up while I am writing.

My partner notices my wistfulness ad never loses out on any opportunity to tease me, especially, when I complain of his disinterest in me.

Love is a verb and as much as parenthood has done things I never knew existed, I have fought with myself to not drift away from him. I have tried to be by his side anchoring myself to some regular chores but it’s an effort and I must keep at it to not slip into a space. I can get obsessed with myself and my own problems and to be a parent, you have to – at times – externalise to be present.

There is a passage in the book Tomb of Sand where the daughter has brought back home the mother who was just found having gone mysteriously missing. There is a freedom in the shared space between the two individuals.

Ma lay down for a moment and began to snore softly. Poor, bewildered Ma, thought Beti, becoming the mother now. Tears welled up in her eyes.

This is a feeling we so relate to; we feel so much love when he’s asleep and so does he to us when we are asleep, often to our dislike. While awake, both I and him are as far away from this show of love. I can see my cynical self when I re-read what I just called “show of love”. I was contemplating not including it here.

But I am also learning to appreciate this thanks to my partner, and that’s her ever present formidable love language that saves the day every single time. Not only in how I interact with my child but also how we are with each other.

Sometimes after an argument or a fight I keep waiting for it and often fear what if she doesn’t do that. What if she doesn’t want to do that anymore. I fear it but can never bring myself to do the same. I am learning, nevertheless, and it’s a shame she must keep up with it, but I wish I were as wise in such moments of vulnerability when I withdraw, and she reaches.

The lines continuing with the above quote are:

Whenever mothers see those they gave birth to in such a state, all their attention is pulled to a single point of focus. Then nothing can come between mother and child—no other person, no other desire, besides the desire to give one’s child everything: I’ll make my child’s stars twinkle. All egotism and success on one side, mother-daughter on the other. There’s no pride like a mother’s pride.

I go back to this quote in the book and I realise it isn’t as easy to unpack while writing as it was easy to relate while reading. I’ve felt that before and I have struggled with it.

I think it’s the same lightness and the ability to lighten things up with love that allows my partner to look at my child only the way she can.

A phrase that she repeats the most is: kitnaa badaa ho gaya hai! And I don’t always get it. I blame my memory and I move on. I think I’d love to borrow that from her: the way she looks. If only it was that simple. It doesn’t happen easily; it’s almost like there is a hard wiring inside against it. But I try and sometimes when she says, I listen and I see. I am beginning to speak that language.

It doesn’t annoy me and I get an inkling of what and how a mother can be to their child and I don’t envy the attention that he has reserved only for her.

I go out of my character — I don’t even know what and why I am playing one — sometimes to please him and pamper him. I do while I feel like because it’s very easy for me to think otherwise in the moments of anger and weakness. Like my partner says: there is no such thing as too much love, something I still haven’t come around. I see the point though; I always do.

I see the growing child in front of my eyes, and I also see the fondness growing in me for the times past and a wistfulness that doesn’t feel as hard to place within me anymore.

****

The summers are relentless this season. Between the two of us, I can stay farther from the AC and the fan. We have changed sides on the bed. Obviously, the child retains the centre spot.

My partner teases me how he’s always towards me in the middle of the night.

I don’t know; she notices it.

To my eyes: it’s him gravitating towards her in the morning. Apparently, in his sleep, he looks for me. While awake, he looks for her.

I had to play an audio story for him earlier in the evening. There was not much else we could do. It was terribly hot outside and he had watched TV in the afternoon, and the deal we had made would not allow for another viewing.

Both of us were bound by our words. He was more disturbed about it than me, and also more ready to move past it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much support. He had already read the books, including the new one. The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body - twice, including once with me reading aloud. It was like going back to basics for me, things I only encountered in much later classes. I don’t think I remember much from the earlier classes anyway, because I don’t think I truly learned it then either.

It was all grey outside, but he didn’t want to go out. There was a moment when he couldn’t contain it anymore and started telling me how he couldn’t wait to be 16. How I treat him like a little boy of three, that he is not so little anymore - he’s 6, and will be 7 this year, and that is closer to 10, and 10 will be closer to 16 sooner than I think. His words, not mine.

He was crying. I couldn’t resist pulling him close. I was cuddling him, and he was a little resistant. I just saw how big he was, and I said that out loud. He wouldn’t listen, of course. My partner keeps saying the same thing, and I keep telling her that I can’t differentiate like that, that I don’t hold on to the past clearly enough to compare. But maybe I could now. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little him in my arms - a little grumpy for a one or two year old, we’d joke, looking like his grandfather. His ever-worrying grandfather.

These warm, rosy feelings that I have now, with the benefit of knowing how things turned out, I want more of these. I want to go back in time to when it was happening: lying flat on my bed, him on my chest, stealing that forbidden nap while this restless, cranky bundle of joy felt settled for five or ten minutes, if I were lucky.

This is where I want to go, with the assurance of now, where I know things are going to turn out okay. Just okay, nothing more, nothing less. I want to go to a self that worries less about things outside my control, that can be a little more generous to the world around me, and a little more forgiving to myself.

I went to bed and felt like I could do with some rest. It’s always tempting to fall asleep beside my son, but I stop myself, there are things to do. Things I look forward to: sitting with my partner, talking, watching shows, sharing funny Instagram reels, talking about my unintentionally funny Urdu teacher, grumpy but graceful and always a tough taskmaster. The Urdu class happens every other night or so. This was one such night when I couldn’t resist sleeping, and I thought, if I wake up in time, I’ll get to the class; if I don’t, I won’t, and I’m not going to be apologetic about it to myself. I wanted to sleep and so I did.

As it turned out, I did get up, but later than the class. I took that as a sign, went back to bed, and decided to sleep again.

I haven’t been intentional about sleep. Like so many other things, I tend to take it all on at once. I decided to let things space out without trying to control them. To allow myself a moment, or a day here and there, and then find my way back to where I want to be.

I got up again. It was past midnight. For some reason, I thought I should brush my teeth, it was on my mind that this would be the second night in a row I’d missed it. Yesterday was similar, but today I got up. I was a little anxious but I got up anyway.

Back in bed, weirdly enough, I remembered a scene from my favourite film (Rocket Singh, Salesman of the year): the protagonist gets up to brush his teeth after a night of partying, and the screensaver of Guru Nanak Dev passes before his eyes. In the movie, Harpreet Singh Bedi aka Happy was indeed a happy-go-lucky do-gooder before he becomes Rocket Singh.

I was brushing my teeth and looking at my eyes in the mirror, a little more closely than usual, maybe because my father just had cataract surgery a couple of days back. It’s a simple surgery, I gather. But my mind is an expert at making misery out of simple things. And, I can’t let go of the fragility of the human body, and nothing reminds you of that more than your own parents. I didn’t stay with that thought for long though. I went back to bed and let the train of thought run with me.

For some inexplicable reason, I started thinking about teachers, and about this almost obsessive urge to learn and do things, always hurrying in pursuit of something.

I think I also know now where I don’t want to be.

I didn’t have the patience, maturity, and the benefit of hindsight to take me through what was ahead of me - 6 months of a life in sales in the field in places around Eastern and Western UP, even though I came from a small town in North Bihar. And, even though I had watched Rocket Singh: Salesman of the year; Haasil; Tanu Weds Manu.

I’d later know that the appreciation was not going to take me anywhere, but in that moment of laboured listening, I was just trying to “go with the flow” and hear what the Manager had to say.

After a few sentences that felt like an autofill, he resorted to a question that didn’t sound typical then: “Where do you come from”, he asked. “Muzaffarpur, Bihar”, I said. “Muzaffarpur se yahaN? Kaafi dúr aa gayay bhai!” I nodded in affirmation hiding my inability to make sense and to know how to respond to this innocuous statement which I guess was meant like a shabaashi but sounded off.

The thing with autofills is that they are never intentional and so was that smiling, warm Manager, who must have been a little older than what I am now. I ma sure didn’t mean much with that statement and he definitely didn’t mean anything otherwise.

I completed my internship, got placed in the company, only to leave it 10-odd days into the job. I later joined the - what was then known as - KPO industry at half the salary, perhaps looking for an easy way out from the life in the field and perhaps getting lured into the distant charm of a corporate life.

******

It’s not a coincidence that I am reminded of this when I am about a month away from my last day at my current workplace of the last five years staring into an unknown future out of my choice, and that I am building on a response to prompt(s) from the Ochre Sky Writing Circle.

I meander but I come back. So here it goes…

******

I feel extremely lucky to be where I am. On a bad day, I feel I didn’t do as much as I should have. The feelings are derived from perspectives. If I am not comparing myself to anyone and I only look at my journey and how things have turned out I feel lucky. I look at others and I feel I could have done so much more and I am behind. It’s not too bad when I write about this but it’s ominous to be with that thought in the head.

Whatever it is and wherever I am, this feels impossible at times. Nobody said it like this even though I feel I have heard something similar and that became a voice in the head. I could say not many people gave me this chance but even I didn’t give myself this chance. I didn’t do a lot to make things work and it often feels like plain luck and everything feels like an achievement. Growing up, I’d hear casual conversations around how I wouldn’t do well.

From where I come - even with all the privileges of a cis hetero Hindu upper caste educated male - securing a spot in a top college in engineering/medical education is the only measure of achievement and scoring good marks in school an essential precursor.

I was a distracted child. I didn’t know this and I came to know of it from not very kind words of not very common extended family gatherings. I was sheltered. That those things stayed with me speak about me as well. To be fair, they were not particularly rude or harsh. It didn’t feel good for sure but when I reimagine myself I don’t think I gave a different impression.

A weird detail for which I was often called out was my eyes were on the entertainment pages of a newspaper particularly the ones that told you of the movies running in theatres. I would have come across as superficial but I didn’t feel the sense I was getting from others. I was just being myself. To top it up, I was not very obedient and till grade 10 I had no credentials to prove any better.

Before class 10, getting to worthy boarding schools cracking competitive exams was a thing in the community and I had had multiple attempts and I was still there. At home. Literally and figuratively. And seemingly comfortable.

I don’t think I wasn’t bothered but I guess I had the air or may be I signaled a personality of someone who wasn’t bothered, which was unintentional. I wanted to move out as I did after my 10th grade where I got lucky and scored enough to go to a school outside for 11th and 12th.

Those chatters stopped. The talks and the taking heads disappeared like they never existed. The uncles and Auntys were pretty much around but they weren’t there in my face. I also moved so there was a distance. But as Rushdie says in Haroun and the sea of stories:

..but luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning.

Getting admission in 11th seemed like the long shot that I was aiming for and I got it and that was all because it was all downhill thereafter.

Nobody said anything ever after - I was enough. The baseline shifted like I never tried to assess again and all I did was just “go with the flow” a phrase I don’t like and yet I type it here so the reader can understand my sense of disillusionment.

I feel all wise if and when I say life is probability but I really feel it’s all a matter of chance - right from where I was born to where I am.

Yet it feels important to reflect that there were things that didn’t feel possible. At times people around said it and I took it to it like a gospel truth and at times I said it to myself out of sheer restlessness or even a deep sense of despair.

But the truth is I am where I am. Aware and alive. Around people who care for me and I care for. And I am happy I gave myself a chance to struggle because once it did feel impossible.

24th April, weirdly, is always Sachin Tendulkar’s birthday in my head. And an anchor to other events, birthdays, anniversaries around this date. A core memory anchor of sorts. I say weird because I don’t have much to do with cricket in my daily active adult life. It’s one more thing in my life that has no real explicit value apart from the fact that it was a big part of growing up and a source of joy and engagement in a very mundane, aimless life. One of the things I engaged with enough to remember but not enough to get deep into, to either make anything meaningful out of it or even build and share opinion around it.

With the disclaimer out of the way, I must confess I am also one of those who often scoff at the IPL and the whole culture running around and after it, but one thing I can never overlook now is how the young rising cricket stars can and do inspire young kids like only they could in a country of billions of people.

I relate more in retrospect.

Daydreams Turned into Memories

Growing up, there was no desire or delusion that cricket could be a thing beyond watching, but it was a phenomenon I couldn’t escape. The influences were the elders, at home and in the mohalla I was growing up in. I kind of grew up all around it and it sure found a place in my daydreams without much awareness.

I have distinct memories of the 1992 World Cup when we were on holiday to the holy city of Deoghar at my beloved uncle’s place. The holiness of it got nothing on me in terms of memories except the horrible monkeys and the crazy stories around how they could snatch away things, which clearly shouldn’t have been a part of an embarrassingly young kid’s concerns. Or maybe I just happened to be at the wrong place, wrong time. There is nothing to be embarrassed about the cricket memories, though. Deepak Patel, an off-spinner, opening the bowling from New Zealand under Martin Crowe’s captaincy, I can recall, was a rage even then. I don’t think I got any of it then but memory is a funny thing; I am sure it got updated and consolidated over the years with all the random expert commentary gyaan to make me believe I knew this from then.

Tendulkar’s, however, is not a memory one could shake off. His meteoric rise meant a peak watching experience for me on the little black and white EC TV. And I am not talking about watching cricket matches. That was there: Sachin’s 1998 Sharjah desert storm is a story no film industry could script or even conjure. But that year the commerce and culture of cricket and entertainment of the world celebrated the master’s birthday with something that was completely unheard of. A TV show: Tendulkar at 25. It was a treat for the hungry eyes of a cricket fan. Cricket matches didn’t happen every day for months. The show is etched in my memory and watching the genius like that was a delight I can’t put into words.

It was like being in a fantasy simply because it didn’t feel so in the course of the cricket matches India played in those days.

The Real Happiness

The reality of it was nothing close to the carefully crafted ode to the master. India’s was a miserable team; there were more losses than wins and many of Sachin’s efforts were not for a winning cause. One used to hide the hurt of his non-performance in a winning cause; he was clearly more than the game for so many people. And there was no delight like the one when he scored and India won. The day and life felt better. It tasted sweeter when you had to work hard for watching those matches.

Now I can say nothing that hasn’t been said about the cricketing genius, but I can’t resist quoting a wonderful essay by Rohit Brijnath that feels fitting:

In 1989, when Tendulkar arrives, it is two years since Sunil Gavaskar retired, nine years since Prakash Padukone’s All-England badminton win, 28 years since Ramanathan Krishnan reached the Wimbledon semi-finals and 25 years since the hockey team won a non-boycott Olympic gold. I am an anxious writer, obsessive, searching. Every writer needs professors, not only grammarians and reporting gurus, but athletes who tutor, who inadvertently guide, who make you constantly aware of what you don’t know. Genius can be enjoyed from afar, but to acutely understand its ingredients and workings a writer needs interpreters.

Cable TV was around but it wasn’t there at home. We used to chase scores and matches like our lives depended on it. The day certainly did, depending on the outcome. There were no organised communal experiences like we do today with sports bars, theatres or even society clubhouses. You didn’t have to organise; it formed spontaneously and on certain days it felt like it was waiting to emerge. There is one of many instances that stands out, and I guess it was one milestone too. India vs Pakistan. April 15, 1996. Sharjah. This was the first time India scored above 300. There were two centuries in the match. One was more aggressive than the other and it was not Sachin’s, but what I recall is only him.

I don’t know what I was doing out there in the neighbourhood on a hot Monday in the middle of the road, standing in a crowd before a television. It obviously didn’t matter much. I don’t know why I wasn’t in school. Nevertheless, what mattered was that India won. My elder brother was there; he must have been back for vacation. It was a happy, sunny, warm day at the end of it all.

The clear skies of Frankfurt. The markets of Milan. The skyline of San Diego. The bustling streets of Madrid.

Places that are meant to impress. Places people aspire to live in, return to, settle into. And yet, in each of them, I felt a quiet dislocation. Not dramatic, not overwhelming, just a persistent sense that I didn’t quite belong.

For a long time, I thought this was circumstantial. That perhaps I hadn’t stayed long enough. That familiarity would eventually soften the edges. That given time, any place could begin to feel like home.

But over the years, something else has become clearer.

I am not sure I am going to feel at home anywhere.

Not in the way people usually mean it.

Not in cities. Not in countries. Not even in the idea of “settling.”

If there is any place that resembles home for me, it is not geographic. It is internal. It exists in words, in ideas, in the pursuit of understanding something a little better than I did yesterday. It exists in reading, writing, thinking, in following curiosity wherever it leads.

That seems to be the only place where I arrive without effort.

Everything else feels, in some way, foreign.

Even here.

Which is why the question of “moving abroad” has begun to change shape for me.

For a long time, it carried a certain weight. A promise, almost. Of a better life. Better systems. Better opportunities. A cleaner, more efficient version of existence, not just for me, but for the family, for the child.

And none of that is untrue.

There are real advantages. Better quality of life. Better educational opportunities. More predictable systems. A certain ease that comes from infrastructure working the way it should.

I acknowledge all of that.

But I also know now that these are potential benefits, not guarantees of belonging.

They don’t answer the quieter question.

Will I feel at home there?

And increasingly, I think the answer is the same everywhere. Not really.

Which changes the way I want to approach it.

I don’t want to chase that life anymore, the idea of an “elsewhere” that will resolve something fundamental. I don’t want to load it with expectation. I don’t want to treat it as an escape, or worse, a solution.

Because it isn’t one.

There is no panacea here.

Settling abroad is not a cure for restlessness. It is, at best, a different context in which the same questions continue.

So the question becomes simpler.

Not where will I finally belong? But what makes sense to do next?

If an opportunity comes, for work, for education, for a specific reason, I want to be able to evaluate it on its own terms. Without attaching a larger narrative to it. Without imagining a transformed version of life on the other side of that decision.

Just another decision. Like any other. Important, yes. But not definitive.

I don’t want to rule out the possibility. That would be another kind of rigidity. But I also don’t want to be pulled by it, by the allure, the comparison, the quiet pressure that comes from seeing others move and settle and seem to find something.

Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t.

But I know enough now to not outsource that question.

If home is not a place, then moving places cannot solve it.

At best, it can support certain choices. Enable certain paths. Make certain things easier.

And that’s enough reason, sometimes.

But it is not a reason to believe that life elsewhere will suddenly feel less foreign.

Because the foreignness, I am beginning to see, is not out there.

It is a condition I carry.

And perhaps that’s not entirely a problem.

If home exists in words, in ideas, in the act of understanding, then maybe it’s something I don’t have to travel to.

Maybe it’s something I return to. Again and again.

I rest to pick up on work. I try to slow down as my mind races to things I was thinking. To check what I thought. To gather what I remember. I breathe. I can’t recollect that line I thought I’d write in my farewell email while I was washing my face. I have considered not writing that email at all. But I feel kinder today. I like this tone when I hear myself. I know I am not going to draft it now. I can recall some of it and it helps. I am breathing slower and now I am ready to let go of that thought and draft. They say we should consider the angry drafts and emails for later. I discard the kinder ones too.

*****

It’s been more than a month now that I put down my papers. I don’t like the word “resigned” but “putting down papers” isn’t any better. It feels like giving up, like resigned to fate, like I have nothing in control, which I concede I don’t, but one functions like they do. If anything this was an act of not giving up: on my hopes of myself. But that moment of impulsive courage doesn’t sit very well with long and firmly held notions against letting go and not going after something that everyone expects you to. I have shaken myself out of a slumber, for sure, but it also feels like I am moving into another one and to counter that I am again biting off more than I can chew and it’s costing me.

I see my hard built habits come apart and it’s hard not to feel guilty. What I thought would free me has brought out the chaos like never before. There is a sense of ease at the day job because I have a sense of an ending there but it’s started taking away the binders that held me in stead as I went through the days to process. Writing, reading, and working out: these are all anchored to the work life that I have and disrupting that is disrupting this.

*****

The computer screen flickered. Demanding attention, like a call to action. I looked at it and tilted my head back to the wall. My wall of words, images, and memories. Memories; I want to have them all.

That’s what I am trying to do and struggling with. I look at those pictures and my day and my life flashes by and I ask myself what I want from myself. And, in that moment of hyper focus along with the rare calm, quiet, and solitude I think I don’t need a lot. I don’t want much. I just want to remember. Every idea that I think. Every stroke of brush that my child, my partner put on a paper. Every word that a writer puts in their most vulnerable and truthful moments. Every rousing moment of glory. Every crushing moment of loss. On screen. On paper. In life. I see a desert and I see an ocean and I want to hold them both in my fists. I know it’s a lot to ask of oneself and maybe it’s an exercise in futility but I want to live everything. And, this is everything.

To be able to live and let live. To be able to express what you feel, who you are, express as is and let all the ġhubār out as it were. The structures of the world around come in the way. But I will hold myself here. I can easily slip into Guru Dutt’s Vijay of Pyaasa. Yes, Vijay couldn’t sustain what was unfolding before his sensitive, vulnerable eyes before he started getting into fist fights. It’s a diagnosis of not just the world but us too. But I digress and I don’t want to dwell there. I can’t afford to a thought that entices me and that I know will engulf me.

*****

I end this piece here and leave you with Jaun Eliya before I trick myself to humour in some more entanglements of thought if I start wondering what I am doing here putting all of this out.

aap apnā ġhubār the ham to

yaad the yādgār the ham to

uḌe jaate haiñ dhuul ke mānind

āñdhiyoñ par savār the ham to

There’s always some hope in this world beyond the sach aur jhooth of the world because why not!

(The one with red wings at the top is a fire phoenix and the one towards the ends on the right is a water phoenix)

For example, I have followed Amit Varma’s work for the last five years. Before that, there were recommendations from artists I loved - Varun Grover, Anurag Kashyap, and others. Observing their work planted the seed that reading was essential. It started with wanting to do anything related to films. Making films was the broader, grander desire. Writing about it came later. It started from the big idea of writing films which then transformed to thinking about them, making sense and then writing about them, which felt like the next big but accessible thing one could do. At least, that’s what I thought.

Films made me feel different things. They gave me experiences like never before. I felt I had something to say. I have vivid memories of movies making me feel things I never had. Some films that I can think as I write are Aankhon Dekhi, Birdman, Masaan, and others and I think I would choose that every time, in the theatres first and then on a computer. Excitement, drama, love, sadness, existential dilemma, angst, violence, romance, and everything else. With movies, I also found and myself getting into the music. It was always the lyrics AND the songs. I always felt the songs added so much to the context and feeling of it’ll it all. I’d go back to the OST after a film looking for the songs and the words that evoked those feelings. And I found some lovely gems. The “Perfect Day” Song in Perfect Days and “The Lonesome Town” in Pulp Fiction come to mind immediately. But this also meant I never went deep into the movie as it is. I moved laterally, to music and lyrics and the emotions. That was a big part of how I consumed movies. There was not much structure and diligence to it.

Meandering felt just fine because it got me to look at different things. I wanted to sing, and I sang (during college days) and it thrilled me. It also made me aware of my fears and insecurities. There wasn’t, and isn’t, much to showcase from all that singing. But looking back, it also moves me how I still sang after I failed almost every single time and sometimes miserably. To clarify, fail here means not winning any prize or position or some such. It also came from the feeling that I sing much better than what I do on stage. I also feel a lot kinder to my younger self now because I did what I did and shamelessly so.

Writing and thinking about writing was still around like floating in the air. Through my time in college I wrote one article across those four years and it was about Osho. I don’t think I was exposed to the idea that one could write what they saw or felt. I don’t know why I never thought that or maybe I did, but sitting and writing felt, even then, excruciatingly difficult. Writing exams, classroom notes - that was enough for me. As it is I was doing that in much misery and whatever time I had, I was happy listening, watching, singing and looking forward to those annual events where I could sing.

I never really felt the urge to just put anything out in writing. I say this because it happened later. It happens now. Sometimes I just feel the basal need to write and it feels cathartic. I didn’t feel it then.

It wasn’t like I was consuming content - as we would say now - but I wasn’t reading at all. I always found it hard to get myself to read, forget about writing. But in retrospect, I feel I would have definitely done something with that much time I spent trying to read the course book, making notes for academics but that was a necessity, and in my limited capacity, I couldn’t do many things beyond that. Osho’s recordings filled my free time. It’s hard to tell if I felt nihilistic because of that or other round. I was a big fan of this man. A follower, actually. My mother ruffled very many feathers in our religious, conservative family when she took to Osho and meditation in early 2000s. It’s a travesty and a topic for another time as to how - inspite of or may because of - even a provocative figure like Osho couldn’t hold ground. I say this with a distant distaste that we were part of a cult. I joined inadvertently and much earlier than anyone would have thought. No one asked me to. I listened to Osho for the first time when I would have been in grade 7 and I was blown away. I got introduced to some interesting thoughts, arguments, and above all. I feel I also did that because I just wanted to be a good kid and do something that everyone would like.

I can tell now I had started following people. I wasn’t totally aware of this as I am now. In a way, I was looking for and at role models. I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing, but getting tribal and fanatic about it is certainly a bad thing. I also see, beyond just looking for role models, that I was always looking for someone who could tell me where to go, what to do, how to go about things. I never did that for myself. I still struggle to. I have to remind myself every now and then, that I don’t need to make Gods out of people, and funnily enough, move on from them to find another one.

I don’t need to blindly follow someone, to not question them enough, to take something as gospel truth, and to not see things for myself - actually moving away from myself in the whole thing. I have been like this and haven’t liked any of this at all. I have not known the balance of questioning and figuring out, and keeping what’s needed.

Aasaan bhaasha mein, critical thinking hasn’t quite touched me.

I would read some movie critic and stick to their recommendations no matter what, and often justify it, not really knowing what I felt and not trying to examine my own feelings. I think it was just plain comfortable and lazy to do that. It was damaging.

(This was midway: A page worth pausing. Art work by Shiraz Hussain; Khwaabtanha collective)

But anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, doesn’t it? And I am glad nothing killed me, and I didn’t kill anybody.

Looking back, so much of this feels like a bonus. It sounds a little dramatic, but I sometimes feel gratitude and it doesn’t happen often. I’m a pretty self-loathing kind of person, so I want to document this while the feeling lasts: the blank pages in the diary of my life are not blank after all. Like the joy of writing - having words on a piece of paper that was once blank (I am paraphrasing Amit here)

Nothing exists in isolation. Things are connected. Someone else’s idea begets thoughts in someone else, and so it goes. For long, I thought I didn’t have anything original to say. I still don’t. When I got comfortable with saying and writing what I had to, I again started questioning the origins of it. I think I get a little frustrated with all the scrambling and pursuing I do when it comes to building my thought. I feel like I am moving away from myself. I get impatient, and I end up asking - what if I never do any of it? What if I don’t read any work? What if there is nothing to listen to, nothing to watch or nothing to be influenced by?

I think I know. I’d still be affected by things, as I was when I didn’t have many options or didn’t make those choices in my growing-up years. I am paraphrasing another teacher here and at this point it’s only fair to concede that I have come to consider myself a student and look to the world and life around me as teacher wherever I can learn from. As Natasha Badhwar would say - I had life all around. Every experience is valuable. If you want to write, you just have to find the words. It’s not just reading that helps writing - of course reading helps but that doesn’t mean we think less of our own experiences when it comes to sharing and writing.

I have transitioned from a follower to student and I guess I need to just live closely. It’s definitely easier said than done.

Now I wonder how wise I can be in my diary but I know I’m going to need a lot of that in the day ahead.

****

(By the creator-in-chief of the house - my child - without whom this rather long - by my standards - piece wouldn’t have been possible)

(From Ghazal by Firaq Gorakhpuri “bahut pahle se un qadmoñ kī aahaT jaan lete haiñ” accessed on Rekhta)

I was reading Firaq Saheb the other day. Raghupati Sahay Firaq aka Firaq Gorakhpuri. I say the name as if I have known and read his work all along. I am aware of his stature and of my own limited acquaintance with it, so pardon me if anything sounds out of place. I am pinching my ear as I write this. I cannot recall a single couplet of his except the one Farhan Akhtar’s Imran recites in ZNMD:

Shaam bhi thi dhuan dhuan

Husn bhi tha udaas udaas

Dil ko kayi kahaniyan

Yaad si aa kay reh gayin

Javed Saheb’s admiration for Firaq Saheb is well known; it is no coincidence that the one couplet the character recites is his.

I have watched that film many times. It has become my safe space over the years. It released around the time I was moving out of college, or more precisely, going out into the world, as it were, with all my flaws and vulnerabilities, completely unaware of the sheltered life I had lived until then. It is not easy for me to articulate what the film meant to me then, or what it has meant over the years. To my rather naive inner world, it felt less like something aspirational and more like something that spoke to me the way I speak to myself. That is probably why I have returned to it so many times. Its philosophy - whatever it was - aligned with what I made of life and the world around me, and it still does, even after all the additional gyaan and insight I have gathered since. But I am not going there in this post.

What I am getting at is my interest in the Urdu language and in shayar, or what I have recently learnt to call sukhan.

Within three or four years of my working life, I got interested in poetry, and as with most things, films were a good reason for it. Perhaps the sole reason. Masaan had happened. It opened with lines by Chakbast, and then the characters casually dropped lines by Bashir Badr; it was a delight. I later learnt - Varun Grover spoke about it somewhere - that this is simply how people converse in UP.

I was brought up in Bihar, and if not for a generic disinterest in the world around me, and for the daydreamer that I was, I might never have been exposed to television, films, and everything else. Everything revolved around academics, and my efforts to evade it were largely superficial. I barely scratched the surface with stories, cinema, art, and poetry. I remember and it is a shame that I never really explored. Dinkar, Nirala, and Jaishankar Prasad were names thrown around casually because my mother had studied Hindi literature. But by her own admission, which she still laments, her engagement with it was superficial, a means to an end. We tend not to go deeper into things, and as chance would have it, we often find ourselves in the company of excellence and genius and remain entirely untouched.

I wanted to read more Urdu poetry because I - like gazillions of others - was fascinated by Gulzar Saheb’s work, on paper and on screen. Dil Se did it for me at the time of its release. The film might not have been age-appropriate, but who cared - we had watched worse. If anything, it cleansed the aesthetics. Javed Saheb was obviously and equally at the top of his game, but somehow Gulzar Saheb caught my fancy like no one else, perhaps because he was hard to get at times. I know now the genius of Javed Saheb - not just for his wisdom and intelligence (reels are better because of him) but for his poetry, which I discovered later. His simplicity in lyrics is unmatched, and I have grown to like and revisit him more. I think he has written one of the most affecting lines in Hindi film lyrics, at least for me:

Sapnon se bhare naina, toh neend hai na chaina

My relationship with language - the everyday Hindustani I use - has evolved over the years. English dominates most of it, for good reason, and I have no grudges. It is useful. But I dream in Hindustani, even though I do not dream often, and even when I do, I rarely remember them. I talk to my people - family and friends - in Hindustani, though not a great deal.

But I am getting back. To Firaq Saheb, to shayari, to Urdu. I have just enrolled in Urdu classes, and in the very first session, my teacher warned us not to start with Ghalib. I could not say a word, for I have sinned. I am now going back to the basics - to the script, and with it, hopefully, to a part of me that feels most alive in its company.