Thoughts Mid-air

 The city looks tiny & flickering below.

As the aircraft soars its way through misty clouds,

the city below reduces to a faint ball of light.

I tilt my head gingerly to stare into the endless darkness,

and I find the old moon staring back at me warmly.

The moon - of which tales have been told & on which mankind has trudged,

reminds me of the 'giant leap' taken decades ago.

A leap of faith that attributed familiarity to this milky white ball of a moon

A reassuring though amid the indifferent sky - to know that man has only captured it, but not capsized by its vastness.  

A Transient Breeze of Warmth

 I took the left to take an immediate right that'd put me on the service road, as we colloquially call here. Something like an ignored, unassuming younger sibling of a prodigious, elder one. 

That guy was there, standing in his usual position - behind the iron block, which is a dosa pan for commercial purposes. He splashed a handful of water on the iron slab to wipe it off with a broom before he could scoop a few mounds of dough and make dosas for the impatient customers.

That sight has been etched in my memory since its capture. A sight that made me feel home & belonged. For inexplicable reasons - rendering me failed in articulating. I turned the wheel back to stay on the service road, and on my left, I spotted another figure whose presence reinforced the familiarity of the frame. A warm familiarity that put me ease at once, in my head. 

What do sights like these mean to me? Do they induce warmth because they constitute the 'home' I have built up in my head? If yes, does that make me a person frightened by unfamiliarity? 

I thin this longing for familiarity has inadvertently driven a lot of decisions over the years. While I have partner who's ever willing to handhold me into new adventures, my proclivity for the familiar occasionally teeters into obduracy. And, I recognize the sense of annoyance it can trigger in normal people, who want to explore new things in life.

As I write this, an early childhood memory flashes transiently. Of how I used to not let my mother go back home from school after feeding me lunch - and the maximum bargain I could take was an (obviously fake) assurance from my mother that she'd wait for me at the same spot for the next 3 hours until I'd be done with my classes. 

Back to the 2 figures who put me to ease by merely featuring in my mental image of 'home,' how oblivious they were to what they made me feel & how they added warmth to my mental imagery. Both of them - fighting their wars one day at a time, to be somethings and to not be someones, yet brought a rare warmth to my ever-freezing melancholic spirit. 

I may not see them after that day. Or even if I do, I may lack the mental faculties to recognize them. But I'll remember that they once made feel home, despite being unaware & distant.

A Journey with No Return

Wintry morning. He'd seen many mornings like this one before. When he'd helped his father deliver milk to townsfolk and steered his cattle towards the unsullied pastures for their daily grazing. 

Yet, this morning - he was feeling different. The air felt cruel on his cheeks that were already cracked from cold water splashes earlier. He stood under the emerging shade of the village's bus-stop - where buses to and from the capital halted to transport aspirations. 

He held an old, ragged duffel bag, probably acquired by his now-dead father where there had once been a prospect of him going to the city and continue his education beyond 10th grade, before that year's crop mocked them with abysmal buyout prices - like it had happened earlier and later, many a time. 

He had been to the city before. On multiple occasions for short visits - each visit punctuated with a sense of home he'd had left behind as buses that carried him gruntled ahead. Rides back home filled him with an increasing sense of aplomb with each mile closer, for he and his village were one and inseverable. 

This morning, all that was about to change, and he was painfully sound of that. He was making a one-way journey to the city. To start a new inning - as a watchman at one of the newly-constructed apartments, to break bread with people who spoke an incomprehensible dialect of his mother tongue, and used things he didn't know existed. 

He boarded the bus, and the bus lumbered towards his new home. 

At that moment, was he aware that: 

• He'd find a partner for himself and form a family in the years to come? 
• His kids would suffocate in the city for their smallness and in his village for its smallness? 
• He'd no longer spot pigs around - uninvited, yet unfailingly present around him in the village that were considered disgusting in the city and had no habitat to live and breed in? 
• He'd forge friendships that would enrich and belittle him at the same time? 
• He'd be slapped by one of the homeowners in the apartment for standing up for his inalienable dignity? 
• And he'd take it lightly by washing it down with a quarter of whiskey - something his old, village self couldn't have? 
• He'd grow gaunt, burdened with 15 cars to clean and 5 floors to sweep & mop before the sun rose every morning? 
• He'd forget how pristine the fresh air in his village felt to breathe? 
• He'd spend long, unending afternoons swatting away flies and salesmen from the apartment? 
• That he'd die in the city, amid his daughters, their partners, and kids - none of whom knew about that morning, its weight, and its irreversibility in his life? 
• And he'd be made a part of the city's soil, alongside tens of thousands of other, nameless, forgotten dead - who made the city it was and will be, on their backs and with their hands 

He wasn't.

A sense of Loss & Inadequacy

Today I am here, writing this. Almost a decade ago, I was in a foreign country - going about my business - perhaps walking towards my college from the train station. I don't remember the specific time and date of such a day but I am pretty sure I felt the same way I felt today. Out of nowhere a passing thought about my grandmother (maternal). Such thought must have brought warmth to my heart on that day, I can confidently guess. But today, such thought only disheartened me out of incapacity. 

My grandmother - she had never known anything about human ambition; for her ambition only existed amid the four, soot-smeared walls of the kitchen. Since she had not known about ambition, she had never seen a reason to worry about her grandkids' academic endeavours. She was just bothered that we didn't stay on the shady side in summer afternoons and ensured we ate full and beyond.

Me being an unenterprising boy by nature (but aspiring out of peer pressure), I had found great solace in her affection sans concern. I had hated the ennui of never-ending afternoons (blame the incessant power outages during Indian summers in the '90s) back then, but now I reminisce them with her breezy smile slapped all over my memory. I cannot forget the twinkle in her eye, the dimple in her smile and the cups of her large palms stroking my back when I hugged her.

Today's reminiscence of my grandmother was triggered by an old lady who works on my work campus's Building Management System staff. I and a colleague went down for our postlunch walk and I saw this 60-something lady, dressed in a depressing uniform, standing there accompanied by a broom and a trashcan, staring into the distant green of a manicured lawn. I noticed her alternating her stance between her tired legs. There, that stirred a pot of memories, served with a scoop of overwhelming nostalgia.

I stood there, leaning against a wall, at an obtuse angle from her, looking at her, allowing her to paint a picture of my grandmother in my head. She looked tired. She had a limp - out of dotage I suppose - yet she was there, at her workplace, toiling away and taking moments to stare into the manicured lawn before she resumed. The sight filled me with a feeling of sorrow I haven't processed yet.

I walked up to her and told her she reminded me of my grandmother. 

She flashed a faint, fagged smile and said nothing.

I hesitantly pulled out my wallet and offered my inadequacy.

'No no,' she refused with a sustained smile. 

'Can I buy you a cup of chai?', I meekly proposed.

'They serve us at 4 pm,' she said.

I gritted my jaws in loss of words when she picked up her apparatus and slowly limped away from me, but before that the smile sustained.

Both women deserted me. Grandmother lost her mind to Alzheimer's and estranged herself from me. The latter, she took away from me someone I wish I had. 

Unions end in either ways and more

We as a race are suckers for duality. Anywhere between right and wrong, anything between black and white unsettles us and unsettled, we try to grapple with those anywhere’s and anything’s. After a few failed attempts, we let them be and go about our lives.

Of non-platonic relationships, we are fed with and taught a very distorted idea. People unite, in the name of matching wavelengths or finding similarities with people amid their worlds full of dissimilarities. They long for physical and emotional warmth a person can offer, and they call it Love.     

Sure, there are people with whom relationships define you positively and there are people who break you with the sheer destruction their relationships with you yield. But there is a middle ground. A hazy, ambiguous, undefinable middle ground. There are relationships that leave you perplexed – torn between your inability of categorizing them and ineptitude of mending them.

You meet someone, call yourselves to be in ‘love’, make plans and work towards them, face obstacles in working towards the made plans. Somewhere in this sequence, life presents to you a facet or more of their personality that perplexes you. It welcomes you to the hazy, ambiguous, undefinable ground where duality loses its meaning and you learn to see versions of truths and fallacies previously unbeknown to you; where exactly your core goes through a grind and your moral standing is tested to its tooth.

You question the union that got you here, heck you question everything that led you and the opposite to this point of ambiguity. For some, meaninglessness triumphs out – for some more, grit emerges domineeringly and there are other ‘some’. Those who find out that they are lost. Those who find strength in such finding out and those who just feel anything and those who just feel nothing. Those who wander out in search of something and those who slump down, reminiscing the past.

Some come out shining and some let it mark the beginning of their fall. Some feel it as the microcosm of everything and something don’t feel it as resemblance of anything.

Unions end in either ways and more.

Malakpet

People move; in search of survival, progress, ambition and change. People arrive in a place, own the place with their routine: like visiting a grocery store every other day or frequenting a meat shop every weekend – they let their routine smear a place with their footsteps.

In search of progress, my father arrived in Hyderabad on a fateful day in May 2001. Clinging to our belief in dad’s superpower and mom’s reaffirmations in positivity, I and my brother arrived too – wide-eyed, gaping at this city and its constituents with a never-before wonder in our minds and fear in our eyes. Wonder for having never seen such a bustling city and fear for the possibility of drowning in its hustle and bustle.

Days wore by and we settled into a routine – intercepted by events that now we reminisce with a touch of nostalgia and a rusty taste on our tongues. In Hyderabad, it so happened my dad chose this characteristic neighborhood called Malakpet.

Being quite at an insulated distance from the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium, Malakpet, like how it has a lazy ring to its name, has stood up as an emblem of the city’s much-romanticized charm  - with people taking their own sweet time to start their business hours into late afternoons and mildly sweaty evenings with underaged boys selling flasked chai, wandering from street to street.

It’s only in retrospect these things are occurring to me – because back in the day, I and my brother were busy leading our respective pubescent and prepubescent lives that revolved around our mom’s daunting and dosas, totally ignorant to the neighborhood’s charm and character.

Slowly time passed, and we moved across a couple of blocks, still part of Malakpet and a new chapter began with that relocation. I gained new friends, they showed me new alleys, abandoned playgrounds, and charming cafés.

It so became a part of us to stop at a café to enjoy a hurried cup of chai before bringing back my mom’s saree from a drycleaner store and to climb up the abandoned Raymond’s Tomb’s highwalls to reach the former French General’s memorial ground and bring out the hidden pints from our pockets and drink to the city’s lights at dusk.

Handful of friends scattered in and around Malakpet gave place to stashed memories in different backlanes at different times of the day – I only remember (and retained) a few friends now, but I vividly remember how carefree I felt while riding on Malakpet’s lanes to meet those friends and back.

I joined college and the perimeter of my friends’ houses extended beyond Malakpet to other neighborhoods in town. With new friends, outings increased and that’s when I discovered what a beautiful city I have belonged to and how unique is it in itself.

And then career surfaced into picture. I got busy in making a place for myself in the race. I grew to financially support my indulgences and that opened whole new directions to explore. New directions had new people in them and I waved my way through – stopping at each waving and spending a portion of life. All this while, Malakpet lurked in the backstage, silently being there as a neighborhood that still felt home at the end of the day by offering a homelike familiarity of its cafés and laziness – whenever (means, almost every day) I felt I was drifting away from where I belonged to.  

Career progressed well for quite some time and then I found my wife. She still tells me how I went on and on about Malakpet when I first took her to the neighborhood, with a glint of ownership in my eye and a sense of ‘at-home’ in my droop and gaunt.

And so, recently, I moved to elsewhere to find a new footing in life. I weighed in practical factors like distance and the associated distress because of commuting from Malakpet to work and back and so, I have moved to a new neighborhood. Quite distant from Malakpet and has quite a character to itself – for its own reasons and follies.

I have been visiting my parents on most weekends ever since I moved here. Weekends in Malakpet – that still gives me a chance to sit in cafés and slurp tepid cups of chai on stained saucers. I look left and right while ambling down the road to fetch my mother a sheet of tablets and I see one old clock store being replaced by a funky, modern furniture store, one more café giving way to an outlet of global chain of bakeries.

I sigh, and I remember – it’s the Malakpet I have been familiar with and will be increasingly unfamiliar, one new store at a time.

These days...

Okay, so I(we) have moved into what I'm constantly reminding myself to call 'our own place'. The prospect had long been on the cards but had acquired a sudden gravity and urgency over a lazy weekend's yapping between the partners. Boom! We kicked off the project and we found ourselves in our new place within a month.

Most of the few friends I have have already experienced living on their own. I did too but it was so long ago that it renders my memory hazy. Now I live in my own place in my brimming consciousness.

I can say, it's been a smooth ride so far. Thanks to my wife who's made my life easier over the last 2 years, on all fronts.

Apart from this update, there's nothing much to add - except I am afraid there is. It is because I've been busy living a nondescript, middle-aged man's life. With a set routine intercepted by aberrations of indulgence every now and then (from which I've to painfully recover to tread back onto the routine).

Personal goals - their half-baked outcomes; post-dinner evenings spent staring into the nightly darkness, wondering about how to roast the half-baked outcomes further and convincing myself that the desire to roast so adds up to optimism. All this before falling back into the ennui the routine perpetuates.

Purchased and unread books adorning the living room's shelfs but diligently ticked-off lists of films/series on the subscribed streaming platforms - this gives away the details of a lazy, mindless and gluttonous consumer of digital junk I've become.

My wife and I - we daydream as she folds the sheets & does the bed while I sit there juggling between channels hunting the next national scandal in brewing. We daydream about the places we'd want to visit one day and things to do - but we also conjure meticulous Plan Bs in case of a career outage; like opening a chai shop in a tier 2, mountainous town or something underwhelming yet alternatively romantic like that.

Next moment, we talk about the curtains to be bought and their ideal colour to go friendly with the walls. I spring up from my chair, go light one and bit my lips at being so sold-out. That's when she yells that my coffee is ready and steaming. I walk back into a world of sovereign slavery.

Now that's how life these days is. I'll have to go hunt for a new series on Netsucks.