Window seats

I once read a book just because the title interested me. I didn’t enjoy it much but I read the whole thing. ‘Window seat’, was the title.

Every average person has this obsession for a window seat, I do too. I love window seats; I am the most satisfied person on earth if I have a window seat.

In trains I love A/c, SL (side- lower); you get a whole long window for yourself, yes luxury, so what? You can lie half awake looking at the blue sky, even better during monsoon, you can sit up and be fully awake and see the paddy fields that go by, the stations and the people, the cattle and cattle people or should I say cow boys?, and the blackness in tunnels. In busses too I prefer A/c; yes I ‘prefer’ luxury. Feel cool even when the sun is scorching bright hot, get stuck in traffic and chaos and yet not feel any of it, enjoy the silence and stillness. Sit at ease and see people engaged in their lives, shopkeepers and customers, pedestrians, stray dogs, stray people, stray babies. 

It feels like watching a fiction, where you have no part to play, where you can just be a mute spectator enjoying the form of art and where nobody expects you to do anything or where nobody even knows of your existence. You are so free of responsibilities. It is so relaxing to be away from reality, to not care, think light, and feel good. Only luxury lets you do that. No general compartment or ordinary busses lets you to be a mute spectator, they get you involved, you have to take the heat, the sound, the chaos and the air and its smells, and you have no choice but care and when you care, feeling good is tentative.

Behind a luxurious window you see, behind an ordinary one you live. Fiction is enjoyable how much ever tedious it may look but falling into it and being inevitably forced to live in it needn’t be so. You cry watching fiction, you remember it, it changes you, you learn from it and you evolve yet there is always an incorrigible distance between you and that fictional account because you don’t really know how it feels to be that fictional character, to face those problems. How much ever empathetic you are there is a threshold up to where you can go, beyond that it is purely the victim’s own, something that is unique and one of a kind. Every individual has this fortune of holding unique pieces of knowledge, and every individual has reason to be respected. Nobody knows it all and nobody has it all. Whichever window is it that you are looking through you have enough within you of which you can be proud of and you have enough to be ashamed of. Making an effort to go up to that threshold and accepting the fact that there is a lot beyond it makes all the difference.

Some get to see bitter fiction while some get to live bitter lives.

Anyway, I was trying to talk about window seats and I have failed to do so, even there comes up richness and its antonym. Well, what I wanted to say was I enjoy looking out of windows and seeing the sights outside while travelling like almost everybody else. I don’t know where all that rant about fiction and threshold came from. My intention was to speak of window seats and only simply that, may be that was a mistake. I am not good enough to write paragraphs about window seats. So I guess I should stop.

Open all windows, see and live, live and see.

Abyss

My eyes are closed and I am seeing it, I can even feel it. The green tall grass, the shrubs, the trees swaying in the wind, I can feel that wind in my hair, on my face, it is so good. I can see a pond there; it looks beautiful amidst all the green. I am leaning onto a rock, the rock under the blazing sun isn’t burning hot, I wonder why? This is a new feeling, a pleasant one though, to be a tiny speck in a vast land of green. There is nothing blocking my vision of the sky, there is nothing intruding the sound of wind and birds. The woods look rich with the wildlife hidden in there. Everything looks so perfect, so pure. I don’t want to open my eyes but I have to, I don’t want to let go of this beautiful vision but I have to, because that beautiful place isn’t where I am anymore. I am in the man’s land again, the land that was given birth by murdering its own mother, nature. I see the shadow of a broken and bleeding family here, the mother nature married to the dangerous species called human being to have a baby that is monstrous enough to kill its own mother and eventually and inevitably its father too who for now is blissfully ignorant of that awaiting ill fate. I look up from there and I could see that mountain there, where everything was pure and perfect, standing tall and gay, but I could sense the slow movement of the monstrous baby beneath me, nurtured by its ignorant and arrogant father, crawling up towards that beauty, all armed to consume it, to take away the faint heart beat of its weak and dying mother. A dark cloud was hovering over me, plunging me into darkness, the cloud had moving figures in them, white and smoky, and they were featuring a story, a play rather. I saw them act before me and I began to enjoy it.

In the play, the shadowy figures, the beautiful mother, the cruel father and the monstrous baby, enact their story in silence. They spin and turn, they split and shatter. The play ends and the last scene has the baby growing by consuming the dying mother, there is a red glow around the non consumed parts of the dying mother, the father is huge in number, the entire species of human beings sum up that one father and this father has a lot of characters, a lot of cruelty, a lot of anger, a lot of ignorance, a lot of beliefs, a lot of helplessness, a little love, a little purity, a little intelligence and a little joy. All those little characters are white and glowing but they are so small and easily suppressed but one can see a faint glowing line linking all those little ones, and the big black ones going listless and hollow. I felt myself being absorbed into that cloud, I was being pulled into the hollowed black figure but I resisted and I lost the ground beneath my feet and fell into an abyss. I was falling, the fall was forever, and I wasn’t hitting the ground. My eyes were burning, I had to close them, I hadn’t yet hit the ground, but I had to close my burning eyes.

I closed my eyes, I wasn’t falling anymore. I could feel and see things the way it was. I was back in the normal world with normal people and normal stories. All of us had our eyes closed and happy and not falling.

All of us know that the fall hasn’t stopped; we have just closed our eyes and shut off the unwelcome things. The monstrous baby will soon perish with the ignorant father; the mother will be born again.

Humanity is falling and one day it will hit the ground and die. We are falling into the arms of death. We can save ourselves, if together we can open our eyes to things and look out for something to cling on and save our lives from the waiting arms of death. Let us open our eyes together before it is too late, before the arms of death sweep us away. Let us treat the mother right.

Here I am

The silver dawn and the sound of birds, the cold floors and the creaking doors, the cool breeze and the smell of flowers, the dew covered grass and the wet soil. The moss faced walls, the cobwebs, the old huge trees, the dry and brittle tree barks, and the dry leaf smothered earth, the centipedes, the grasshoppers, the ladybugs, the touch- me- not plants.

There is more…

Silent, un tarred roads and the trees that lean into it, the narrow flowing streams and the tiny fishes, curled up snakes and sprinting mongoose, the fierce stray dogs and cats, the wells and the frogs, smiles and tears, games and laughter, genuine bonds and a lot of time.

I am tired, tired of trying to speak of things that I have hardly savored. I have got a glimpse of all that, sometime back, a quick little taste of it, before I was forced to retreat or rather, before I joined the others in forcing it to retreat. I never realized that I would grow up to miss all of those so much, so much that their absence would define me. I never thought that they would go extinct.

That was a dream. In reality, I live in chaos; wake up to the sound of vehicles honking, too busy with technology to take note of anything that doesn’t include technology. Live in the seventh storey of a seventeen storied building, away from the ground, away from life. From the balcony I see similar tall concrete buildings, busy roads, and somewhere in between a lone tree.

Some days I decide to go for a walk and so I step out of this place that I call home, go down and down to touch the ground, walk on the broken and unevenly cemented footpaths of busy roads, inhaling in a lot of vehicle smoke, avoiding the hungry gaze of starving stray dogs and greedy palms of beggars. I walk plugging in music to my ears and trying hard to ignore the honks of vehicles that intrude the music.

The other days I become one among those in the honking vehicles, battling for dear life in the crazy world of automobiles.

I see no grass, no trees, no grasshoppers, no dew, no un tarred roads, no birds, no streams, no wells, no frogs, no touch- me- not plants, no snakes, no mongoose and no smiles and games. I live somewhere else, where nobody knows why they exist, where technology is the supreme power, where life is a mere charade. I live in a country that is developing and here people make homes on top of other’s homes, here we cut down trees to make room for people, here we dig down deep into the earth to get some water to bathe in, here we have time for nothing, here we live and die worshipping technology.

I live in a country that has lost its grip, being beaten and bounced around by others, helplessly going further away from it, plunging into a state of insanity, struggling to find the lost track or finding a new deformed self.

Here I am losing myself in my lost country.

Unveiling of holes

Strangers surround one in this world more than one can perceive. There are strangers everywhere, every time. It is difficult to ignore all of them, and it is difficult to notice all of them. Most we don’t dare to look; others we don’t care to look or we don’t see them. Some meet our eyes, lock our gaze, share a moment, take away that moment, give us a smile, and grant us a brief moment of discarded joy. Some we share with a common plight during that short locked gaze, plight that we don’t speak out, plight that we all know of, plight that is not worth acknowledging, the plight of remaining a stranger, the plight of living with distrust. Some gazes tell us a story; invite us into those deep eyes, deep enough to dive into, deep enough to live in, deep enough to drown in. Those eyes are scary because we recognize them even without looking in; they are so prominent, so loud, so flooded. We carefully avoid their gaze as we are scared of drowning; we are terrified of it, its power of survival. Those eyes are everywhere, every street, every lowly hut, every footpath, in every homeless dog, in the dark shadows of partial development. They are plenty in number, still we avoid those gazes, and we are skillful enough to see through them, to overlook them. Often when our skill backs away our eyes meet theirs, we fail, and we drown. The pang of guilt and sorrow heaves our whole system, it tightens our conscience, and we let them show us their grief, their hatred, their anger. It becomes grueling to hold that gaze but still we do because we feel locked, locked in that grief, in that immensity of injustice. We know what they need, their eyes are loud enough, yet we don’t do it, yet we back away, we reason out and alert ourselves the practicality, the very essential normalcy of our lives that we do not want to give away, we cling to the self centering. We gain the power to restrain the grief from swallowing us, from acting for us. Then we unlock the gaze, we break that invisible thread. The thread through which we saw a life, many similar lives and their stories, their needs and their grief, their hatred and their anger, their power of survival, their frantic breathless souls sinking in the ocean of injustice. We walk away, we let them sink. As we walk away our conscience screams at us, stabs us and makes holes in us, yet we walk, we listen to loud music hoping to silence the inner screaming voice, we laugh and eat merrily, merriness that has veiled the holes that smell of sinking bodies, of murderous grief. In some the holes unveil themselves, the inner voice grow louder than the music, the merriness fails to  survive over the grief, they step up, they pull up the sinking ones, one by one, as many as they can. They realize the beauty is in grieving along with the grievers rather than veiling it up piled up in ugly holes. They realize that the real merriness comes with no veils over nothing, without breaking any gazes, with listening to the inner voice, with giving away the normalcy of life to welcome the excellence, the seemingly impossible. Such people help the humanness survive, the plight of distrust reduce in power. They help the suffering diminish, they save the suffering ones from dying under the majestic footsteps of the massive ugliness of development. It is true; such people are just a few. Can’t we just follow those few? Listen to our inner voice and let our conscience act for us. Yes we can do that, I am sure we can.

The supreme

Feet dangle in free water, searching frantically for something, something to keep life alive. The search goes in vain, frantic feet do not even ripple the water surface, the torso sinks, the hands are swallowed, the face is eaten up, and breath goes lost, like a child separated from its parents in a busy street, lost completely. Underwater is another world altogether, a world with its own ways and customs, beliefs and rules, language and life, death and survival. Penetrating in with frantic feet and stretched out beating arms and the cold fear of death is never welcomed. That world conquers it, beats it, and takes everything it has and then banishes it, useless. As the body is taken, as the penetration unwillingly happen, the cold fear of death slowly seeps out, mingles with the water, take leave off the body to be a mere spectator, a referee maybe, an unfair, partial one. Open eyes get blindfolded without cloth, the green water lie over them, thick and immovable. Closed eyes have visions in them, visions of a familiar world, a lost world, lost breath. Nothing to hold on to, nothing to block you, no obstacle, no walls, no traffic, no ropes, no breath, it is as free as it can get, a small price for the freedom, the breath. The arms relax as hope abandons. The search for the way back to life stops. Body relax, mind surrender. Visions of that familiar world tease you, poke you, and stab you. Water takes the body on a smooth ride, downward a straight path, quite, calm, free. The mind bids farewell to the lost world, prepares to enjoy the ride, the brief free peaceful ride, road to death, to die as an alien, to visit the lost world later, lifeless. Mind embraces the body, scared to let go of it, apprehensive of what lies ahead, if there is something ahead at all? Then a last desperate frantic search for life and mind resigns, body sinks only to rise later, alone, dead.

Water stays calm throughout the process, a smooth operation, an effortless take away.

 One on one battle against nature is a lost battle, nature wins easily. The power of nature is incessant, supreme. Nature sometimes gives us warnings, warnings that can shake us badly, change us forever. It is easier to live in ignorance, but, life is fuller out of it. Nature never stops surprising, all you need to do is keep your eyes and mind open to the sights around. The more you let yourself be surprised, the more you smile, the more you smile at the small things, the wiser you are. Wiser you are, fuller you live.                  

India’s only daughter?

The whole nation is mourning the death of a woman who was gang raped. Protesters are protesting for justice for this woman, the whole nation shoot out different opinions regarding how the convicted men are to be punished while media reports efficiently, a little over perhaps, about the case. The whole nation follows the news intently, waiting for more updates every passing minute. Social networking sites had people gushing out their anger, fear and sorrow. Newspapers reported elaborately by using over a sheet. Every day the size of the reports increased, the letters to the editor became intense. It seemed to look like the newspapers had to have a separate section called Rape, like Business and Sports, because each passing day more than a dozen rape cases were written about consuming a lot of space and print. The very next day after the Delhi incident newspaper along with elaborate portion of Delhi gang rape case report had few other tiny, less space consuming, print wasting reports of other females who were raped, gang raped by other males. One of them being a forty-two year old woman gang raped while travelling in Delhi again. People spoke of it as though it shocked them. Nobody could imagine another such terrible event happening soon after this terrible event. Everybody was agitated, but those cases like the tiny newspaper reports failed to get the recognition that the space consuming one got. Still, rape was the subject; common was the object, female, twenty-three, fifteen or forty-two, the objects were female. The nation went on praying and protesting for the twenty-three, the prayers hopefully divided themselves between all the objects of the subject, all the females who have been, who are raped. All kinds of news emerged, all kinds of descriptions came out regarding what happened to the twenty-three, how it happened and how she is faring, even what she had in her mind right then and right now. Days passed, the year was about to end, rape cases never ceased, newspapers divided their space and print for tiny rape cases and bigger ones. The hard part was only to decide, decide which rape case deserved more space, more acknowledgement, more print. People knew the twenty-three year old well enough, well enough indeed! That now they wanted to see a picture of hers, just to know how she looks. The picture was never released, the twenty-three year old was closer to death, and the government and the doctors decide to take her out of our beloved nation for better treatment. She dies. The nation mourns. The media call her India’s daughter.

The nation praying, protesting, mourning is the people who have access to internet, television, radio, newspaper, education, intellect, purity, goodness and morality. This group of people cannot be called the nation. There are a lot of people who have no access to these gadgets. What of them? They aren’t part of praying, protesting or mourning. They just use their self for the act of destruction and in some cases indifference to destruction. Destruction or indifference doesn’t help but can be dangerous, is dangerous. It is the danger that our nation faces. How to make those dangerous ones listen to us? How to make them have access to the gadgets that we have? Without giving them or letting them or forcing them to have access to these gadgets can we hope to eradicate danger, dangerous men, and dangerous women? The answer is no. Is there hope for a better nation with all this talk, over an issue, when there is dangerous people who are indifferent, angry at all this talk? Is there hope for a woman to walk free at night with all the newspaper essays supporting women’s right when there are people who don’t read them, who disagree to it, who don’t understand them? What do we do? How do we reach them, their brains? How do we alter their intellect?

It is difficult and a time consuming procedure. Women meanwhile can learn self defense, carry around with them a weapon and go on living life to the fullest. It doesn’t help if women stay home, scared. It doesn’t help if parents make the daughters stay home, scared. It helps if the girls are brought up by making them realize their power. It helps if the women overlook the male chauvinist society and the norms and rules that come with it. It is time to act. Face the danger, fight it and you will know that you are capable of winning that fight, and you have always got your boyfriends, lovers, brothers, fathers, uncles and grandfathers. So common women, be prepared to fight the war and raise your sons as good men who have access to all the gadgets.            

Small Things

Rain rained hard, the newly tarred roads looked new and black and the old tarred roads with potholes that were innumerable, like the holes that an inexperienced dosa maker’s dosa made, looked ruined, broken and smashed. The rain drops like silver lines shot down on earth and in it went, never to be seen again. The silver lines made small bubbles in the water in the potholes. The bubbles didn’t form a round, there was too little time for forming a round, and they rather looked like domes, domes of mosques. The sandal colored water in the potholes formed brown- orange pastries once the rain ceased, it stuck like wax to ones shoes if stepped on or in. The thick paste went in deep into the designed dug in roadways on the soles and stayed there like deep ugly secrets that have to be forced out for a light soul, sole. Anything that is sharp and thin would do to force it out, from a knife to a broom stick but not words, how much ever sharp they were. The thick paste if left in the roadways of the sole, it would make you feel them all the time, a bump under your shoed feet, protruding, heavy and irritating. Abandoning those shoes wouldn’t help as the rain would come again and potholes are disappearing nowhere, may be something else would help like not stepping on or in those potholes and not letting the mock brown- orange pastry get under your feet. The wheels of vehicles that go down into the potholes and come out of it paint themselves brown- orange and leave a trail on the new black roads, as a reminder of the past or even a warning of the coming future. The school girls in uniforms wear black slippers, giving their nylon socks and Bata shoes a rest, a monsoon holiday. The boys have brown- orange dots and shapeless patches painted on their shirts and trousers from the muddy afternoon break’s rainy football match. The relentless advertisement on radio and television of Poppy umbrellas leave the common man humming’mazha mazha kuda… ’. The nursery kids refuse to let go of their fancy umbrellas even when they bounce around in crowded buses without a vacant seat or footrest. The biker women cover themselves partly in ridiculous colors of plastic material, raincoats, and the wet sari cling to their legs once they get down from their bikes and walk into their work place. The men on bikes look like mini hulks as the air puffs up their fully covering raincoats. In the traffic signals the travelers in cars listen to the radio over the sound of the wipers. Darkness fills the rooms, humid air shrinks the doorway or enlarges the door making it a strenuous ordeal to close the doors and if closed, open the doors. The cloudy days and dark corridors make the day at college a romantic one. The sound of rain becomes the sound of music and adolescent lovers listen to a lot of music and do a lot of dreaming. The combo of hot chai and parippuvada or dal vada from roadside dhabas tastes tastier but the ice cream shops take a back seat. The washed clothes take days to dry and your favorite jeans are always wet and heavy on you in the rain. Students blame the rain for everything, “why are you late?” “Because of the rain ma’am”, “where is the homework?” “The rain wet it all ma’am”, as if they were inhabitants of a refugee camp with a leaking tent. Wet umbrellas are left open to dry in the balconies, porches, classroom corners, supermarket corners, office corners. Then, gradually the rain ceases, then stops, sun comes back, umbrellas stay home, Bata shoes prolong their leave for some more time, and brown- orange pastries turn into hard cakes, football matches happen in heat, women abandon their raincoats, men are reluctant to let go of their mini hulk form, college is romantic only for the lovers, the dreamers give dreaming a break, the doors and doorways behave better, the jeans dry up, the roads turn grey, the earth becomes dusty, the jingles of Poppy umbrellas fall out of trend, kids forget their umbrellas, students find another excuse for not doing the homework.

I love rain and all that it brings with it, or rather all that I think that rain brings with it. I don’t go around inspecting the world when it rains and see if people are actually humming the poppy jingles, but, I would like to believe they do, even if the Poppy stops manufacturing umbrellas I would still like to believe that people sing that song during monsoon. I think it is so with me because I have this memory of walking through the vegetable market, when I was a kid, near our house and there one of the vegetable vendors happened to be singing this particular song. I remember it so well for some reason and since then without me realizing it I was living with this bizarre belief that people sing this song in the rainy season. It is strange and stupid but I love it and I wish it was true. I also believe that, as you touch a tree bark with your palm the bark from within sends a glowing vibe through your palm into your heart which stays there forever and makes you stronger.

Some things get instilled in your mind and stays there without an effort. You don’t acknowledge them, you naturally over look them. Those small things are always there though, refusing to let go of you, linking you to your origin, your raw true self with that faint, feeble yet unbreakable thread of theirs. Whoever you are, wherever you go, whatever you do, the small things in you decide where you end up, as what.