The Perennial Nightmare

I feel it today. Just as I wake up, it uncoils itself languorously and I feel my heart sink to meet it. Slashing at all elaborate plans of hope, faith and prayer. Gnawing like a hungry dog at the house of cards called confidence. Venomous, malignant, it stands there at the door, laughing, mocking. And I shiver as I watch it enter my mind and own me. ‘It’. The unnameable. A fear, a cry, snake-like, that dwells deep within and spreads its hood whenever whim strikes. Digging its talons into me, drawing blood, poisoning it. Red to blue. Beautiful but devastating. Always unexpected, always when it seemed like it had bid goodbye forever.

Do they have a name for it? ‘Fear’ is too simple, ‘depression’ too complex. I hope that intellectualizing it, pigeonholing it into a definition would loosen its grip, distance its glare. Perhaps in trying to understand it, I could dilute its presence. Shake myself free. I’m not so lucky. It grabs me by the hair, heaves me through the air. I form a dark arc as I fly, petrified, gravity-defiant.

Questions drop querulously through the head into the heart. Questions that question everything I can do or be. I cling to my pad, scribble into it. After all, I may do nothing but I can write. There’s a cackle. Cruel. Callous. All I am is a cold cipher. Disintegrating. Like the morning light that liquefies on the moss-laden walls outside. A thought is planted in my mind. Not mine, I know. But I am forced to think it. The words could dry up any moment, any day. Discard me and never walk back again, while my thinning perception calls out in desperation, sucked into the valley of nobodies. Echoless. Turning into a dark disease. A gentle Anonymous.

I walk to warm myself and pass by the mirror. It’s always been an enemy. And now it reflects a ghastly ghostly scepter, a formless smoke, rising out of a snuffed candle. Hiroshima hit. Mon amour, I’m not. My body’s a square lantern, the light gone out. My head a round bald new moon. I think of beautiful people, friends, acquaintances and I cry in despair. Who’s the fairest of us all? I’ll never be one of them. But they’ll all look at me. Point and laugh. Vanity, thy name is I. I’m revolting but too solid to disappear. A paper heart is all that I own, immensely delicate, patched and torn.

Pills. Red. Blue. Also Yellow. I swallow them and they burn down like an acetylene torch. Not losing their color, they flare inside. Red. Blue. Also Yellow. Killers all. The pulp of my insides bunches up some more. I coil, snail-like on the chair. Trying to vanish into myself, trying not to board the bus that I can never get off. A light is shone into my eyes and blinded my spirit escapes like steam. I’m ironed out, straightened again, visible like a tree. I need to disappear soon. And it’s not yet noon.

I’m afraid of the maid, the driver, the watchman. Snap and snarl and shoo them away. Then hurt at being left all alone. In the kitchen, the therapeutic kitchen says my friend, I bang some pots and pans. Water boils over. Scalds me. The tongs drop. Bruising me. There’s Medusa on my hand. Samson on my leg. The colorful tentacles whirl around like joyful blubbery breaths. The onions makes me cry. It’s top cut off, the white orphan hangs like a fingertip. And I run, I scream. But I’m crippled. I’m muzzled. Paralytic.

The book I try to read melts as my eyes lase through the paper. The black ink stains my fingers, and water coats itself like gelatine on me. I can’t wash the print off. Only cast my skin aside. For a while. The book, the beautiful book remains stillborn. Losing its limbs. Evaporating even as I stare at it. Erato, the muse, vanishing like a spectacular sprite.

I breathe, my iron lung is rusting from within. A white mist like an overexposed print erupts from my cold mouth and wraps itself around me. Nothing makes any sense. The sky is red. The stars are blue. And the night is still new. Why? Why? Why? Am I the chosen one? As absurd as sunlight in the night. Do others have inhabitants within? And do they move through this, a day when self-doubt and self-loathing burns a black hole into their hearts and leaves scratch marks on their bodies and their minds sink into legendary decay? Or will tomorrow be another day?

Reading Maps

All our loves write upon us. Our body is their graffiti wall, our heart their Post-It, our soul their personal diary. The tattoos are invisible but it’s indelible ink. Seven years ago, I saw first proof of this in A, after the heartbreak with C. I saw for the first time how a person unraveled, fragmented, disintegrated until their DNA helixes with the floating sugar-phosphate backbone were the only upright things within them. I followed A like a shadow, tried to gather the pieces that were strewn with callous casualness never wanting to be found again, said ‘Enough’ when the drinking got so much that table-tops turned into dancing floors and snide knowing laughter followed us like a ruthless horde of bees. I held back A’s hair through the nausea of self-disgust on mornings after black nights of sex with strangers. I watched. In pain. In vain.

After the storm came the calm. A finally talked. And I learnt my first lesson of love. Over Bacardis with lime for me and Vodka martinis for A. Shaken stirred and shattered. Love kills you. Then resuscitates you into something else. A blend of you and your lover. A plus C. The CPR of life. You’re never whole again. Because two pieces are ripped off, and two new ones attached. Two pieces of the one person you want to escape, the two cells you want to shed more than anything in the world. But they are now embedded within you. Tainting you forever. And you are now a venomous cocktail of love. A was never the same again. Never laughed the same, never cried the same. Never talked the same, never thought the same. I cried for the loss. And told myself – naively, oh so naively – I’d never allow this to happen to me.

I’d known G from the time we were both kids, we grew up together. Cool-headed, rational, sensible G. None of the volatile, impulsive, edgy fire that characterized A. G was A’s antithesis. Or so it seemed. Until M walked out on G. And I watched another erosion. Another subtraction and another addition. It could’ve been the same movie. A and G, they both bled. Until the floor turned black and their hearts went white. And I learnt something again. I saw how power corrupts. The power that you give someone. Or that someone gives you. The temptation is irresistible, you want to use it. M did just that. Played with the power that G gave away so easily, so simply. Wasn’t M’s fault. It was there to be used. Don’t we do that sometime or the other? Make someone cry because we know we can make them and they will. Say those words that we know will hurt. Press all the right or wrong buttons and sit back to watch the play with idle, interested curiosity. The perverse pleasure of power. G changed too. And again I decided – naively, oh so naively – never me, never ever me.

S was the frailest, the most vulnerable person I’ve known. Not a single section of S was unrecorded, no part was blank. Too many had written on, too many had taken away and too many had left their pieces. I don’t think S recalls ever being whole. So afraid was S of walking away from H and probably losing the last two pieces that were S’s own that pain after pain, infidelity after infidelity, hurt after hurt went unresolved, just absorbed. Until S walked in one day and I saw one giant throbbing sore, a grieving mass of unbelonging pieces, haphazardly held on. A glue of tears and fears. S laughed – gently, sadly – at my declarations, ‘You will never be me’. Wise knowing S.

Many years have passed now. And I’ve been slashed in red ink. Not too many writers, but the writings cover every square inch. I’m no longer bare, unadorned. I’ve been removed from, added to. Until I cannot tell from the cauldron within where I end and my past or present begins. Experience has taught me, like everyone else, a lot about love. But my understanding of it remains as distorted as a dyslexic’s performance at a Spelling Bee. And I learnt another lesson. You’re not written on only after the death of a love/ lover. The scribbling, the nibbling away happens from the beginning, through the entire period of love. Which is probably why people who’ve been in love and lived together for years and years seem like mirror images of each other. One’s pieces have been grafted onto another. A ridiculous face/off of cells, sloughing into each other.

Older, wiser, today I watch E plunge hopefully into a new relationship, after things ended with Z. Watch the phases of powerfulness and powerlessness carry E through and I wonder why we seek love so desperately, with such frantic recklessness. I had done just what E did. Sought love to heal the pain of love. Perhaps the most idiotic solution – cutting your hand and drawing blood to heal the bleeding in your leg. But we all seem to do that, we keep going back for more. We even have a sardonic word for it – rebound. So, are we all masochists? Or just hopeless optimists?

A drunk evening with my closest buddies and our alcohol-loosened tongues fearlessly talk. Of lovers. And love. Theories abound. Past amours are dissected, analysed, compared, rated. We all agree that it feels good. Talking about those that were, those that we still carry like scars of battles or wars in our bodies, in our souls. We are all protective about the loves that we lost. My dearest friend A had always hated K. But I defend him, make excuses for him, remind A of something special that he did. Something that only I remember. Part factual, part facetious. I want A to forgive him as I have. Why is it important? I don’t know. It’s strange, but only the good memories stay. There’s a smile, albeit sad, but a smile nonetheless, as funny, warm, sweet moments are pulled out. S speaks with only affection and tenderness about H, whom S finally let go of a couple of years ago. And sought love again. Just like E, just like me. And found it. Just like E, just like me.

Where has all the pain gone? I remember tearing up every tangible memory of what is now one part of me. N reminds me of how I’d amputed a love – not clinical or surgical – therefore the pain indescribable. Every one of us remembers sitting after a loss and trying to kill ourselves, praying for an end to it all. L and I recall singing angry Alanis Morissette songs. “Does she speak eloquently? Would she have your baby? … And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” L adds with a naughty nostalgic smile, “And everytime I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, oh, can you feel it?” Where has all the anger evaporated? S tells them of the day that I – the non-smoker – had puffed away an entire pack of cigarettes within half an hour wondering why my love hadn’t called me for a week. The lover who’s promised to hold us until he died. But he’s still alive. As are we. Human beings and their ability to survive never ceases to amaze. And now sadden. Nothing kills us. Not even the death of love.

I’m surprised that we can speak so simply, so easily, so beautifully of those that we believed hurt us so deeply that we never thought we’d walk again, perhaps even breathe again. And yet, here we are walking, singing, breathing, hoping. All forgiven but nothing forgotten. And suddenly it strikes me that we can’t hate them because we carry them within us. They’re now part of what we are. They’ve formed us – for better or for worse.

Our bodies are the maps of our life’s experiences, the writings on them the sum total of what we’ve learnt. Branded by the ones that once owned us, just as they are branded by us. Anyone who sees us for the first time sees in us a complex whole, our simplicity contaminated not by experiences as most think, but purified, distilled by the pieces of others that have mutated us, mutilated us, made us. I look at S and wish that instead of disowning those pieces, S would embrace them and arrange them neatly because when the pieces fit, they will form a whole, a different one, but a whole nonetheless. I think I’m going to tell this to S. I pray that A stops trying to turn R into C and accepts the new pieces because they are going to keep coming. I wish G would stop running, D would stop seeking and we all would accept our present as easily as we seem to do our past.

Perhaps some day our loves and us – we’ll all stand in a giant collective confessional. Wait for the other to play God, dig up the past, raise the dead and beg each other for forgiveness. We have to, we don’t have a chance. Because each moment that we breathe, live, we play porter to each other’s pieces. And our bodies, hearts and souls form the other’s literature.

When Hamlet Poured Poison Into My Ear

Fool. Absurd. Impatience. Red. Walls. Cracks. Skulls. Numb. Fear. Foetus. Naïve. Brown. Eyes. Smile. Lips. Kiss. Warm. Wet. Rain. Naked. Night. Horror. Mirror. Glass. Sharp. Blade. Wrist. Blood. Sticky. White. Sunlight. Hot. Burn. Matchstick. Forearm. Welt. Black. Soldiers. War. Anger. Purple. Ink. Stain. Pain. Cell. Tumor. Cut. Scar. Tissue. Paper. Book. Shakespeare. Tragedy. Comedy. Joker. Hat. Dunce. Cap. Fool….

They singe their way through a numbing conscious. Meaningful. Meaningless. Swirling around like a mass of subatomic mist, tantalizing, teasing, barely out of reach and yet never close enough. They move out of the masses of books that I surround myself with – a paper fortress, its black-and-white opacity shielding the world’s vision –enveloping like a protective lover. “You are a rock, you are an island.” I remember the laughter still. Gentle. Mocking. And I wonder. Why do I and so many I know seek refuge in these seven-odd-inch-long bound sheets of paper, holding it to my face like a mask, clinging with a desperation turning knuckles white? What is my relationship with these books? Why do I need them?

I don’t know.
But I’m now trying to understand.

So, here I sit, in the waiting room of my oncologist’s office with my tools of flight. Scribbling words into my notepad that accompanies me like a faithful Jeeves. Lying next to me is a book containing the poems of Emily Dickinson and in my oversized bag – another faithful that’s more likely than not to aggravate my spondolysis – is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The good-looking gaunt old man sitting across me, waiting for his own appointment with hell, looks at me as if intending to strike a conversation. But as I hurriedly pick up Dickinson, he leans back in his chair, deciding to leave me alone. Need I say more?

Lying down on the rubbery seat in the sterile room, my fingers curling around the cold metal sides, looking up into the blinding light of a medical apparatus I’ve never bothered to get formally introduced to, I feel primed up for slaughter. And I urge myself to go to my happy place. My living room. And the beautiful volumes of books that adorn it like the Kohinoor once adorned the crown. “I am a Rock”.. At that moment with tubes, liquids and light passing in and out of me with familiarity and ownership, I feel more jelly, but I hum on. And turn a page. And wonder again. Why do I need this refuge…?

I think I have an answer.
Inaccessibility to experience.

Home is Versova. A place so devoid of beauty, a garbage-dump seashore is a relief. ‘Sea-facing apartment’ is hyperbole for a view of couples making out amid plastic bottles and waste in front of the tired Arabian Sea. Where Barista is the Taj Mahal and Infiniti Mall – stylishly miss-spelt –the Eiffel of escape. The city doesn’t have quaint little cafes, beautiful winding pathways, sprawling fields of wheat, or even old abandoned mines or furyless volcanoes, no pine trees, no Pietas, no canals or windmills… And yet, people who live in places that have the Eiffel, abandoned mines, volcanoes or pine trees also read, don’t they?


Another conjecture.
Multiple personalities. Living several lives.


There are the characters. Living through the intense desire that Maurice Bendrix feels when he looks at Sara, knowing she’ll never be his… Digging fingernails into palms at Anna Karenina’s desperate longing and hungry passion for Vronsky, breathing the doom of its hopelessness. Feverishly suffering like Raskolnikov and raging in his guilt… Brings a drama into my world that I’d never know otherwise.. Allows me to place myself into Gaugin’s Paris and walk down snaking streets with an artist’s eye and equipment… escape into a world where no one knows my name… A closet schizophrenic.

The Nurse bustles in. Unravels me neatly. I feel bereft. But only for a moment. I cling to Woolf. And walk down the steps of the hospital – momentarily imagining stones in my pocket and water all around me, the road a river-bed. And suddenly, I’m angry. People in the real world never seem to behave with the romance and passion and intensity and volatility of their counterparts in books. They’re always drab. Always cold. Always rational. Or are they?

Not true.
Sometimes they do.

However when one acts like the characters in the books one reads, when one performs and speaks and behaves with the passion and intensity and volatility, one just looks ridiculous, idiotic. How many times have I gagged at the sight of two lovers necking and cooing and billing into each others’ ears… Never have I smiled and harked back at Romeo and Juliet. How often have we -- my wicked best friend and I -- spewed beautiful bitter bile at some silly declarations of undying love that someone has made to someone else. How corny have words of idealism -- spouted by knowing, meaning pretenders who want to live the lives of books – sounded, almost compelling me to break into a laugh.

Cynical. Sarcastic.
Poor people.
Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Why do I do that? When I seek this beauty, this romance, this fable – why do I reject it so disdainfully, so contemptuously when I face it? Is it because I know that the passion is presumed, the intensity is faked and the volatility is carefully engineered? The lover’s words are never real. The affection is for public display. The idealism is a sham. Isn’t all of this obvious? Am I the only one who sees it? Or am I seeing too much? Is there anything that’s true? Honest? Instinctive? Or are we constantly looking over our shoulders to see who’s watching? Constantly acting a part? Playing a role? And seeking applause….

Why do I write my words and send them to my friends and wait for their reactions? Why are the reactions important? The book I’ve written – yearning, longing, waiting to be published – how would it give me any more pleasure whether twenty million people read it or two? And if I write, knowing that twenty million people are going to read, aren’t my words and emotions and writings automatically, instinctively, subconsciously geared and censored and playing to a gallery that I know someday will watch. So the pain of my writing is magnified, unreal. The truth of a thought is embellished, rendering it plastic. The beauty of an emotion is consciously sketched out, turning it into a parody, a bad actor hamming on stage. And if one writer is conscious of this, aren’t they all? Woolf and Dickinson and Maugham and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – haven’t they all done what I do? Read the first instinctive words they’ve written, and then rewrite them – because it reveals too much, or too little. So why do I read these books?

Anger of a woman conned.

I’m still angry. But the rage is directed at the books. I decide I won’t read. Period. I step out. Go to a mall. To watch a movie. And meet an old friend now turning famous who speaks to me, but is looking over my shoulder at the people beyond wondering if they’ve seen him, recognized him. Measuring the amount of time he must speak to me. Too much would mean his eminence fades – after all I’m not famous. Too little and he would fall short in his own eyes because he hasn’t played his part well enough. It’s a performance. Not his best. But he’s getting there. All of this – in someone who isn’t even an actor. And I suddenly feel a slap on my face. A glass of ice cold water splashed on my face. A lightning piercing through my center tearing me into two. This is the reality of my world, everyone’s world. Too many masks. Too little honesty. All for effect. Nothing felt. Nothing touched.

Lying on my couch, hugging a book close. Begging for forgiveness. Going back to an old lover. Whom you know. Whose scent is familiar, moods known, failings recognizable. Maybe books are better than people. Maybe they aren’t. But they never disillusion you. So I’m back in my fortress.

A rock feels no pain.

And an island never cries.