Dareechey

"I have always imagined love as the remnant of two shadows
that coexisted on a wall for a brief moment - only to flutter away."

Imagine this if you will - you receive a diary courtesy of the most popular insurance company in the country. The pages are the shade of that butterscotch ice-cream that you have always been very ambivalent about and are too thin. You hate it when the deep blue of your favorite ink seeps into the following page abruptly ending your perfect tapestry of thought, plot, and imagination. Maybe, you were telling a tale that has been told before but it felt new to you. Memory occupies a part of this story as it does in your life. Things are forgotten - a stray piece of wood in the courtyard of your home, a small sapling that bloomed unceremoniously at the base of the eastern wall of your residence. Yet in your heart, you know that you cannot forget things and certain details appear with much fanfare and vividness on tepid summer nights - a full moon night where your grandmother spoke of the poltergeists in the adjacent field, a funeral where you witnessed yet did not perceive mortality, and more importantly, a smile that has haunted you for weeks on end till you realised that life in these vignettes seem to matter more than your mundane existence.

So, you have a diary and now you begin to wonder if you should write something. You have read your first novel and are mildly pleased at this achievement. At school, the friends are envisioning a thriller that borders on bravado, conspiracy, and two superpowers that are at perpetual loggerheads with each other. You wish to write about the same but all you can do and all you will ever be capable of is to write about the heart and the wonders of what it means to feel, to feel intensely, and then to feel nothing at all.

So, you pick up a pen and begin thus :

"On a hot summer afternoon, he walked out onto the roof and noticed his neighbor at work as he put up a signboard..."

Why must it always be summer?

"I have always imagined love as silence, and the patience
to bear the same - and the impatience to have the babble whisper again."

Why must it always be the summer of our adolescence?

Before vehicles outnumbered the human population, there is a particular road closer to your part of the town where a particular tree would bloom into yellow blossoms only when May arrived with the vacations and without respite from the heat. When you will be twenty-seven, you will often choose this road to take a detour during your evening walks with that foolish hope that maybe you will see them bloom in fury and with gusto one of these days. All that remains however is an empty road, some vehicles parked unceremoniously, and an internet cafe where the usual occupants have now moved to different cities, and enjoy their lives. This corner of the world lies absent from their recollection, perhaps. You peek through the glass window and stare at this fragment of a time when it was easier, simpler : dust accumulates on archaic looking PCs, and the chairs seem to creak in silence.

You wish to write about this town in all its monotony and all you can conjure are empty spaces. Old houses that seemed to be possessed by the specter of old residents are now replaced with fashionable rectangular living spaces with all the modern amenities. The moss on the wall will soon be washed away, and you recollect that your friends had speculated about a particular property being haunted by a nameless and faceless ghost. That property now belongs to someone else and you admit that the apartment is colored too bright and stands as a happy citadel against the backdrop of a gloomy sky.

So, you type into the first computer that you have ever owned :

"When the first rain of the year arrived, I was not at home. I cannot recollect where I had been but all I can remember is you arriving at that moment..."

Why must it always be monsoon?

"I have always imagined love as the last breath of everyday
sinking so deep within you that it emerges as hopelessness."

It has always been monsoon.

You are now in a different city - albeit one that is not too unfamiliar to you. You have been here before - when you were in school. Now, you try to take in every inch of the space that you tread on because you are going to spend five years over here.

This is the first time that you feel that a part of you is yearning for the comfort of familiar spaces. Every night, you stare at the creaking fan and the pillows seem to weigh under the burden of distance. Don't worry, you will get used to it. Within two months, you will develop a taste for tea with extra sugar. You will make notes, you will make friends, and slowly create a new idea of a home far away from a room with green walls, bookshelves lined with narratives that you have carefully collected over the years. Radiohead will arrive in your life and never leave. A tall guy will introduce you to the world of progressive rock and it will become the cornerstone of your audiophilia.

Yet, you will never be at home.

The vacations arrive and your priority is to rush to the alleys and the cul-de-sacs that are more familiar to you than your life itself. People will ask you about your desire to run back home and you will only appear with a simple excuse of how much you miss it, but what is it about this town that you wanted to leave and now you are yearning to return?

Is it the people? Is it the tepid heat that persists from April to June? Is it because the winters are not as cold as you would like in order to warm your heart?

It is perhaps because the words were never about your new home, anyway.
Your words like you, are homesick.

The monsoon has always been the monsoon of your town. The clouds have this streak of orange and purple before the sky breaks forth - you know this, you have always known this.

Why must we always return?

"I have always imagined love as returning to discomfort
and working to make it comfortable again."

May, 2024.

In the deep recesses of what is termed as old e-mail ids, I discover the draft of what I would consider my magnum opus back in 2014 - a novel about memory, remembrances, and forgetting. Was it about love? Maybe.

I apologize to the few people I had sent that first draft of roughly three and a half chapters. Nobody was meant to read that. Even, I wasn't meant to read it today but it was worth going back to the time when maybe, the greatest criticism from anyone was in their confession that they didn't find the story too interesting.

In the course of a decade, I would never end up completing a novel despite my desire and the sheer will that would predominate for twenty four hours only to fizzle out by the weekend. Were they all about love? Maybe.

The shift to poetry was no accident - I could almost always end up completing the verses that I had in mind even if most of it emerged out of pure accident. A part of me still regrets that prose is where I falter beyond a point, and yet one must persevere.

Oh, I am typing this in my laptop, for reference. That old PC was sold five years ago for a very minimal amount, and that diary has probably been sold for scrap. Most of my notebooks now contain notes for my preparations for various exams. I haven't been able to pen down for almost five years now.

Also, May 2024

For a brief moment, you seem to recollect yourself when you were fifteen.

You imagine this younger rendition of yourself as a dreamer and an optimist. The only thing he was worried about was writing a new story and sharing it with his peers.

Now, you can barely fumble across syllables.

This is a threshold you stand at when the world starts to make sense - it might not have been the same when you were fifteen but you can still look at it with the simplicity of your teens. 

"I believe, firmly so, that love is a threshold between who you were
and who you will become - it is change, qualitatively."

So, you pick up a notebook which has been provided by the second most popular health insurance provider in the country and pick up your new favorite piece of stationery :

"I am not sure where it began, really."


(This blog is dedicated to Arundhoti Palit - the first reader for everything that I write and without whose support this blog wouldn't have even taken off)