Wet-eyed Contemplations

It feels like I am a Wednesday - present in the middle of every week, existing, breathing, contributing equal minutes to sapiens as Mondays and Saturdays do, but am never talked about.

I am that odd kid in the classroom who's always quiet and whose absence weighs just equal to the weight of an 'A' written in front of her name in the attendance register. I know nothing of young bloods claiming to be Saturday nights, which is to say that I don't know about people who feel themselves as Mondays either.

But then I do know of throat lumps and how many gulps, on an average, it takes to shoot their heads off to not let tears win the war. 

I shoot my throat lumps in afternoons when everyone's around me. Nights are covered all alone in my room, so I let them live and let tears fall like confetti on my pillow. Sometimes this leads to insomnia, which is to say that sometimes my wet eyes get tired of staying shut while I'm not able to sleep, so I open them instead and stare at the walls of my room, which is to say - I think a lot at night.

Sometimes I wonder whether insomnia could ever be kind enough to wish for getting itself diagnosed. But then insomnia is (as I am) a Wednesday too.

Here, but still not.

Perhaps insomnia is a novice that's trying to stay and evolve into cancer, which is to say that everydamnthing in this world has someone to get inspired from, which is to say that everydamnthing includes me as well and this whole wet-eyed contemplation has bucked me enough to make people born on Wednesdays as my inspiration.

There’s more to us

Don’t just tell me you love music.

It’s not enough.

You don’t simply love anything until it does something to yourself.

So, tell me what music does to your mind.

When listening your favourite song, does relief creeps in your veins and makes you close your eyes sometimes? Or suddenly opens them wide instead?

Does it make you travel time?

Does your mind keep music and weed in the same category?

Do mountains give you rhythm? Or do they provide you peace? Are rhythm and peace even different things in your mind?

Tell me how often you keep your headphones with you. 

If your answer is “all the time”,

is it because you like zoning out from the crowd ?or do you love to watch the world around yourself with a background music all along the while?

How often do you realise you had been humming tunes? 

Humming are like dreams, you see!

you’d never know when they started. Sometimes, you’d not even recall that they existed.

Don’t bring me hefty music instruments,

Tap on the table and show me you know rhythm.

Sing me the truest lyrics you know of,

I’ll understand.

So yeah,

the favourite colour is blue.

Nothing can replace Chicken tikka masala and pizza and tunde kebab. 

With no better reason, I love Harry Potter.

God just might be there. Or maybe not!

Hills over beaches. 

DNA is the secret. 

World peace is a myth.

But do they matter? 

Insignificant

There are men dying.
There are men dying.
There are men dying every day.
There are men dying every day for you.
There are men DYING every day for you.
Strikes a cord?
Nevermind, cliches never will.

There's a girl you see. 11 years old. She's standing before her Dad's dead body. Her Dad is wrapped around with the Indian tricolor. Tears meander out of her eyes and reach her cheeks when she decides to lift her right hand up and salute the brave officer her Dad was. Her hand shakes as she salutes and yells out her father's regiment's battle cry. Soldiers scream along with the little girl in unison, a total of 3 times, as if the war cry was a way of weeping for their dead leader.

She knows!
The little girl knows how important she is.
And by 'how important', I mean 'how unimportant'.
We're not brains, flesh and bones. We're meat, ready to take bullets till nothing remains of us.
How unimportant!
How insignificant!
How mere!
Just like fireflies in daylight,
just like night shifts in small towns,
just like 'there are soldiers dying for you' has lost its meaning with repetition,
just like 'there are kids waiting for their Dads to come back home alive'
just like 'kashmir's situation is sad'
just like 'I'm proud to wrap my country's flag around my dead body.'
Every tear dropped for a fallen hero has been puffed away into smoke in this land of 3 million Gods.

She knows of fabrics colored with safron, white and green. She knows of olive green uniforms and the ranks they carry.
Each time she holds them in her hands,
she feels like an infant placing her little hands on her mother's arm as if making herself aware,
of how protection is what she'll get and in turn shall be responsible of,
of how trust will always lead to lethal levels of submission,
of how with every touch she'd be taught of patriotism as a moral from a fairy tale she must believe in.

She's never been to battles.
She's never held a weapon.
She never killed.
She never took a bullet.
But she knows of combat.
She's not her Dad.
She's the one waiting behind.

We've always been the ones waiting!

O' dear men of the higher seats who make boundaries out of people and play war, you have made victims out of us and all I seek to know is
"How proud are you to be an Indian?"

The Notebook

I have a notebook. I call it smoke.
It lays down on my room's table, like a corpse,
ready to be rescued
but
scary enough to wait for some brave hearts to carry itself away.

The corpse narrate tales of its life
and if you flip hard enough,
maybe,
just maybe,
you'd find the most beautiful poetry you'll ever read in your life.

But the truth is you're not a brave heart. The corpse scares you.
It carries with itself realities of the wordsmith's world which is no less different than yours.
And you don't read realities.
You read words.
Just words!

The world inside that notebook, to you, is like the enourmous ice-laden mountains of our country that have been named as field postings,
beautiful,
yet untamed,
not ready for the general public,
only a few brave hearts.

I have a notebook. I once called it 'reality'. Now I call it 'smoke'. Those words are nothing else.

All of us and #you

1.The "Be happy. Stay sad" generation that smiles and smokes is us. Smoke harbours happiness and the air around us is sad. We're blowing puffs of smoke into the air thinking that the sadness around us will wither away by those little hazy pretences emerging from our mouths.
But pretences don't submit. They never will.

#I've learnt from you that there will never be a situation from where I can't get myself off. Some circumstances might look scary from afar. But they only look gruesome until they reach. Once with you, they are the easiest goddamn things to deal with.
*Jabh hota hai na, sab ho jata hai"

2. A,G,T,C had the audacity to come in numerous combinations as DNA codes and forge the living.
So does, happiness, sadness, fear and anger.

#There was a day, a terrible one, when your dad didn't come back home. Lifting such weight with yourself, you've time and again said to me :
"Sonali, your Dad never said goodbye when he went for his duty,
for he knew he'd come back.
And you understood that he might not."
That sheer beauty of thoughts and mind! I can never be you.

3. Rains don't feel like rains when they arrive daily.

#You've changed.
In this world of *be yourself*, *know thyself*, *first priority must be me" "never change" "fuck everyone" generation, you've chosen to be kind and showed that we can change without knowing ourselves in the first place (for what is there to know in this temporary mortal existence?) and that can be the most beautiful thing one can do for oneself.

4. Men and women have made their  feelings into toys and played war.
Some have kept quiet for far too long and then there are some bragging of their naked brains.

#You've showed that love is all about the "I", not the "you". Love doesn't come from another person but it comes from within.
You've proved that the love we seek doesn't reside in the man we love but it blooms within ourselves and to understand that means to never letting men hurt us.
While most simply gives it a bad name and swear to never fall for anyone, you've had the nerve to love all over again.You didn't let one man decide your defination of love.

5.Every imagination ought to be first named, classified, then thrown away into sealed boxes.

6. Naked feets of men have walked on flowery roads without bleeding. They now know nothing of rocks.
Meet us.
The generation of the weak.

Debika, you're the answer to why people should speak of themselves more often.
People should speak of them.
We must speak of us.
You've showed we're all weak until we speak.
Thanks for letting me know I'm strong.
I know you are too.
We all are strong.
We were just quiet.

Headphones and metro (notes)

1.Headphones and metro gives me the impression of being what maggi is for mountains and rhyming is for poems.
Everybody seems to be obeying the pseudo-directives.
Still some are not.

2.Most of the girls around me have headphones in their ears, head down, plain countenance, eyes on screen with their minds searching for some hints from men they never speak of, or words that could substitute books as our times have witnessed patience and time shrink down to tiny peepholes or simply the next song to play.
We all look the same.

3.What would happen if I withdraw headphones and mobiles from everyone around me, as if they never existed?
We just might've stared each other.
Smiled? I don't think so.

4.Kids boarding metro have this tendency of grabing the pole and rolling around it.
I wonder how they know what's the "in" thing among children without social media?
Pretty surprisingly, I just saw a girl my age roll around the pole.
I like this girl.

5.Four notes down, I have headphones in my ears and have no idea which song I have been listening to this while.
I don't like the song. I won't change it anyway.

6.Windows in metro are quite big. I like them.
I wish the windows had been on top as well. This could make us see the sky or stars with music in our ears.

7.Now I should change the song to the one I like - *Things that stop you dreaming* by passenger. That's a good choice.
This song starts with a violin's soothing tone that reminds me of Sherlock playing it, standing by the window in his gloomy 221B apartment in bakers street. Now with drums accompanying the violin's tone, suddenly Sherlock's gone and I watch the city lights and moving cars shining like fireflies inside dark green hegdes through the big moving metro windows.
When everything else around you is drifting away with a guarantee of them not getting back the same as they were, everything inside yourself seems to come to a standstill and there's a sudden awarness of your unwavering existence in your bones. That's what I'm feeling right now.
With Michael Rosenberg's lyrics in my mind, this felt like "I'm here, on earth of someone's daydream"

8.It's difficult to put a straight face with a good song on your headphones. I'll just sway my head a bit.
My legs are tapping. I can't control it.

9.A kid in front is eating lays. It's the yellow packet, the one with only salt on the chips. Scientists say every color packet has a different chemical that different brains get addicted to. That explains our likeness for only one or two types of lays.
I pity the kid and his mother.
But aren't my life choices same?

10.Most people prefer to stand by the poles in metro. It's easy to stand by the pole. You can lock your arm around it and rest your head on it. You can grab the pole with a firm grip, preventing sudden jerks. You can also rest your heavy bag by the pole. Getting to stand beside a pole is strategically the best place to stand in metro.
But when there's a lot of rush, atleast 5 hands grab around one pole. When one hand leaves, the other hand comes so fast that it can feel the warmth of the previous hand on the pole.
Most people I know have been this pole.

11.Though some talk over headphones, I use it only for songs.
When someone calls, I remove my headphones and place the phone on my ear to talk.

12.The right piece of my headphones sound more clearer than the left one and I want both.

13.There are people who give music to poetry and then there are the ones who give words to music.
I hope both the groups are convinced with each other's work.
I like the first ones though!

14.Different places call for a different song.
Pulbangash wants "the A team" and "thunder" goes well with "Netaji Subhash Place".
I tried the other way round yesterday. I hoped to feel bricks at NSP and city blues at Pulbangash.
I didn't.
So I closed my eyes instead.

15.I just noticed the variety of colors that headphones come in.
White, black, red.
White is more in number around me.
Red seems cool.
Mine's black.

16.My station's getting nearer so I keep checking on the station names on the screen above me every minute because I can't hear the announcements with the song banging my eardrums. But the other girls are not checking!
How are they managing?

17.The girl standing next to me is watching what I'm writing.
Though I don't like unnecessary interferences, this time, surprisingly, I'm glad.

18.She read the above lines too.
She said "thanks".
I'm glad, again.

19.She's laughing now.
She says thanks again.

20.Okay, I'll stop this here.
I'll talk to her until I deboard.

Rose and the rose slayers

"You're a rose, darling!
Don't let yourself land into a boy's hand.
He'll take in your fragnance and smile.
He'll take off your petals one at a time and smile.
Or he'll let someone's soft hands have you and smile.
Boys, the rose slayers! They're always smiling.
You're a rose, girl. Don't let anybody take you off from your home. Be where you are. Just be! Let the boys come, stare and go.
Be a GOOD GIRL."

There are voices all around, of both men and women.
Heard under sun, remembered under moon.
Floating, smirking, like ghosts.
My brain quivers every time they strike.
"You're sensible.
The one who doesn't wear make up. Or doesn't need it.
You're cute.
You're humble.
You're intelligent.
Everyone loves you.
They look upto you.
You inspire people.
YOU ARE A GOOD GIRL."
I greet these voices with a smile, eyes aiming the ground, hand on my heart, bowing down, burnt cheeks, saying words I'd never want to say whilst my mind still quivers, seeking the truth.

I am a good girl.
I am a rose, who let her thorns do the talking.
Never been with a boy.
Never embraced a rose slayer around my arms, because if you let, the thorns could lose their sharp edges.
I am a good girl.
The thorns are sharp.
So I never let a boy put his lips on my skin.
Never let anyone enter my mind to stab a sword through the limbic flesh and make it bleed.
Never let smoke enter my mouth.
Whiskey and rum still think i'm an  egotist.
"Roseslayers beware" is painted in red on my forehead.
Roseslayers are a forever never shot.
Never did.
Never wished.
Never could.
Or simply, never chose.
Funny! Just some little choices and they start adoring you.

Watch my hands.
They're white.
Spot-less.
Pink palms.
Soft skin.
Red nails.
Feminine.
Hold them to know they're cold.
Hard bones.
Lines on my palm says "no emotions"
They don't wipe off tears.
They get bruised now and then.
And they punch hard.
Girls with such convictions are called tomboys.
T.O.M.B.O.Y
B.O.Y
B.O.Y
Boy.
Fuck it.

Here's a call out to other girls.
A loud one.
They'll tell you to be a good girl.
They'll want you to be me.
Don't be me.
Don't be a rose.
I'm not that thing.