Diary - Day 2

Winter is here. And so are those chilly mornings & evenings. Hyderabad's winters have always been special for me - not for what they bring  into my living but by their mere occurrence and the associated pleasantness. Maybe it has got more to do with my inherent disliking for subcontinental summers. Unpleasantness of broken skin & the unconsummated desire for chai form the flip-side though.

Yet another winter is is in passing, with normalcy. This diary is only one day old in its existence but it has found its way into my list of looking-forward-to things. The list has no other things.

I am writing this with a sense of urgency but I'm actually enjoying this urgency which my life has not experienced in quite a few years. I like the way in which time seeps from under the notebook in which I am writing this. 

Diary - Day 1

It has been a banal Monday so far. No remarkable happenings that will make me remember today in the days to come. This piece is nothing more than a starting point to the promise I've made to myself to reembark on writing: this time as a craft - in a methodical and auto didactic fashion.

Well, afternoons are deprived of motivation that mornings usually contain. They are uninspiring and so, they seem long than they last. Let's not talk about evenings because I usually spend them in retrospection and hence, self-retribution. Like I had to quench my ego when someone said something nice to hear about an absent somebody - I pitched in to prove myself too (An incident that refuses to leave my memory and comes atop me every night to put me to shame).

I've read quite a few number of books in the recent times. Running a blog post with 3 liner reviews sounded like an exciting idea initially but you know, excitement bites the dust when its cause wears off in its age. So, like many writing ideas, the mini review thing also took a backseat in my head as one of the remnants of a receding enthusiasm to try and adopt new, healthy habits.

As I've mentioned that this piece is the starting point to a promise made to self, I don't want this to be extinguished before it can make its due journey.

Hope to see you again tomorrow, against the pallid white backdrop.

Water puddles

It was a rainy weekday morning. As clumsy as it can get, the city was enmeshed in the incoherent bawling of its people on the roads. As someone opined about the city once with a sigh, everyone rushes past the others and no one makes it in time.

There was a clear, tacit hierarchy & its associated condescension within the city's traffic. A luxury car driver looked down upon a mere hatchback's owner with contempt that was bred due to the former's repudiation of the latter's possession of a car. Same was more or less application to the duos of car-bike, bike-cycle commuters.

Small puddles of water came into being on the roads; sometimes concealing hungry & dreadful manholes beneath them, but most of the times the puddles had deeper throats than one anticipated and created problems for vehicles and their owners.

This guy in question was already later of office. Let's call him Giq - going by Guy In Question. An auto rickshaw sped past Giq like most auto rickshaws do in India; conveniently throwing fellow commuters' safety for a toss. Wile speeding past Giq, one of the rickshaw's tyres landed in a puddle and that splashed water onto Giq's bike. His trousers also received some painting.

Giq cursed the rickshaw driver explicitly by making obscene gestures too; but his shouts only acquired a sense of disjointedness and incoherence - losing their meaning to the cacophony of the traffic around.

The spattering only made Giq's rest of the journey a bitter experience; until he was just a U-turn and 100 metres away from his office. He stunted a jerky U-turn with another water puddle waiting for his rear tyre to be dunked into it like a basketball.

With that dunking arose a spatter of water that landed on another guy who was making a rather controlled U-turn. His right side of the bike looked like it was artfully smeared with wet chocolate while his face looked like that of a soldier's who crawled on a wet marshland in Indonesia dodging bullets.

Giq thought it wasn't going to be just bitter but would instead turn to be resentful with a possible altercation with the Indonesian soldier.

The other guy gave an amiable smile to Giq which reflected the reassurance of empathy saying, "It could happen with anyone on a bad day" and drove on.

The auto rickshaw driver found his way to bring his auto to a halt right beside a stupefied Giq, looked squarely into his eyes and sped off nonchalantly, avoiding another big water puddle with a dexterity only seen in Indian auto drivers. 

Darkest Clouds with Silver Linings

There are these pangs of despair that teeter between pointlessness & ennui. The two extremities are poles apart (or do they just seem like that? doesn't the former precede the latter?). But isn't it the strangeness of human mind to bring 2 unrelated entities and try to stitch them together with a thread made of human experience?

I sit there, passively lending one of my ears that faces the talker who blows incoherent lumps of words into me. I zone out - literally. It feels as if the talker is saying something that I try to fork out from the crevices of my brain but the space called 'grit' is busy fighting the pointlessness of all of it.

I'd resort to a very cliched maxim here - even the darkest of the clouds have silver linings. They do. Amid such chaotic bouts of striking pointlessness, all that helps me in hanging in there is a faith-filled patience. And it always has paid off.

A synergy of ambition and optimism emerges from each of those dark bouts that breathe in the necessary fuel to go on about life. It could be lending my ear to a welcoming piece of music or a spectacular line from one of the books I read at such times or an insightful offering by one of the regular stops I make on the internet.

Of course, the need to be heard is always there. Incessant that, indeed. Blow back all the gathered melange of thoughts into an ear that sucks everything in & spits out a 'hmm' here and a reassuring smile there.

In such vulnerable moments of that need, I am increasingly finding ways to be more than a man I already am. To deserve the ear I desire.

All in all, through those sporadic fits of existential despair, I am struggling to keep my feet planted. One day, the despair recedes and the firmness of my feet will remain resembling a tree trunk that has been tried and tested. Or I at least hope they will remain.  

Discovering the Material

It has been a few months short of two years that I met this men who hails from my father's extended family. That meeting had been long due but like long dues usually jinx - the meet wasn't fruitful. I couldn't get him to talk about his life except for a few stares he threw into nothingness when I broached topics privy to him.

Nonetheless, I chose him as the material for my first attempt at long fiction. I have been able to empty a few drops of ink but things got stuck beyond those few drops. I have known it by my heart that unless I closely examine his life for a stretched period of time, I cannot bring the earnestness to the story. Neither have I been able to afford the time to travel to that village, stay there for a while and spend time around him (blame the corporate half of my life).

They say traveling is remedial. I have always been skeptical about the remedy traveling offers to ailments of human mind. My traveling found its ignition key a few months ago & the engine hasn't been turned off as yet.

There's this drive I took to Bangalore recently. The trip was all about gala and friendly yapping with old pals. However, the drive back home was remedial to the disease I had been suffering - called "Inadequacy of Material".

A series of thoughts cast some light on my own life, which has been under sheets of inadvertent obscurity for long now. My life has gathered enough incidents, which smudged & smothered with paintbrush called Fiction, can be retold. This occurrence of material from the most unexpected vertex got me thinking.

Conviction - that's all it boils down for me. My story. I have been in the front seat of the ride that chiseled, with twists and turns, through a spaghetti of incidents. That leaves me with the utmost conviction to tell my tale. I know why the characters behave the way they do and precisely the way they emote.

That man from my father's family has taken the backseat ever since but only for now. Surely one day the world will read about him. But for now, let me whistle that quote by Oscar Wilde - "Given the man a mask, he'll tell the truth."

Material Discovered.

Inside the refugee's heart

He stepped off the tube to find 20 different faces with 20 different sets of features that represented 20 distinct races. He came from a place of war to a place of existential battle.

 

His soul would not forget that sight. It was going to have a lasting impression on him. He adjusted his bad that slung to his shoulders & wearily scurried out of the train station.

 

There was a red headed destitute staring into him from afar at the corner of the long pathway that led him out of the train station. Only a year's savings that amounted to a few hundred dollars in this country stood between him and the red head from sharing the brotherhood of destitution.

 

He wandered aimlessly to find a place that could let him call it his home. He had long gotten used to the idea of shifting places to escape bombings. But this was different. Here he didn't know where his search could marginally end up.

 

He ended up at a drab burger joint with bland walls to have his first meal in two days. Having come from southern Africa with poorly bartered local currency, he pulled out a wad of notes to pluck out a five dollar bill to buy a steak roll.

 

The wad did what a wad does. It drew a bunch of young thugs - this led to a melee between him and them. One of the thugs could eventually grab the wad from him & dashed out of the burger joint. The swarm let him loose and the thugs ran behind their partner to have the wad apportioned among themselves.

 

The feeble yet resolute legs of the man chased down the wad grabber & yet another brawl began. This time, outside the burger joint - out in the open.

 

This caught a patrol officer's attention who was patrolling close by. He, alarmed and flummoxed by the brawl, pulled out his .45 mm revolver and the bullet found its new nest inside the refugee's heart.

 

 

A buzz and a whack.

He was reading "All That" written by that dead writer who killed himself at the helm of worldly indifference. Before that, he read "Amundsen" by that Canadian short-story writer. And there were others before these two shorts. For reasons unbeknown to him, his intrigue ceased as he strolled halfway into a short. Only his resolve to finish the unfinished was having him going on until their ends. He was so out-of-touch with pen that tiny muscles in his palm were beginning to yelp at sudden pressure the pen was exerting on them.

He long stopped having a tale to tell his world. When there's no tale to be told, narrative dies a lovelorn death. So it almost did. He was being delighted at the discovery of new sites that offered him endless avenues to newer unknowns of the world. He was being actively passive. So passive that he almost inherited a collaged perspective with nameless individuals contributing countless miniatures of perspectives.

Ask him what he had & he did what he had been doing. He kept to the silence & rejoiced in its warmth. The warmth was so comforting that it made him numb to bugs & their bites. Only the early morning's blood blobs, as small as those biting bugs, on his sheets, dried & stained on his calf muscles and ankles, spoke of the sucked blood. The blood was composed of ambition to explore, seek and write.

Sure, there were occasional attempts at reigniting the lost passion to write. But to write, he was in need of exploration. All he found were faces, inexplicably happy at the dusk of Fridays & predictably gloomy on Monday dawns. They were the very same faces, gesturing at him with their grimaces, perhaps welcoming him to join their mindless madness of living from one more dawn to dusk.

He sat down to write this with an obstinate rejection to join the herd. He once again determined, indeed staunchly, to keep writing. To stop the blood for being sucked out of him.