Love Is Matter

Love is a need like no other.

Love is matter.

The terrible, unstable kind, yes?

The wild, sweeping kind that rips every notion apart until only nothing remains. And you weep, your tears are diamonds.

Or perhaps the luminescent, sublime kind.

The soothing, balmy kind, that caresses every scar, contains tides until only stillness remains and your smiles are rainbows.

Ah, of glorious hurts and shimmering pools of blood. Of nightskies dark with longing and days bright with impudent hope.

Of quiet acceptance that every drop of blood and sweat is mine, is thine, is ours.

Of every kiss that proclaims the tongue and every ache that screams for a union.

Of shivering limbs that crave steadiness from firm but gentle arms, but alas! Love must steady itself in its own whirlpool of collapse.

Of looking for answers in a beloved's eyes and the stoking of yellow embers that burn beneath the lids all night.

Of finding yourself staring back, a splash of white in every black; wind chimes tinkle in solitude and hearts splinter in gratitude.

Of blue cowherds and song and milkmaids and dance.

Of a day that won't see dawn on the banks of a swollen river, forever in spate.

Love is so many things, yet I know only your face.


I love so many things about you but all I can do is look at your face, helplessly, hopelessly.

(Co written with @URM1 - also on http://karma-and-some.blogspot.in/2013/09/love-is-matter.html)

Listen

When you are silent inside, you have very little to say outside too.

Have you wondered why the world is so noisy? Because behind the noise, there is silence that makes it possible for us to hear it all.

Can you tune everything out and listen? Try it. Listen anagrams to silent, after all.

Stopped Clocks

(Author's note: This is not a work of fiction. But then, who can define reality anyway?)

I was eating a cheesecake and a banoffee pie with my husband when one of the most important people in my life was on the verge of suffering a massive stroke.

I was making one of my favourite sambars when he went into surgery. It's my husband's favourite sambar.

I was planning a pasta dish when he died. Fusilli in a nutmeg tomato cream sauce to be precise.

My husband and I had just finished our dinner when we got the call that changed our lives.

I was halfway through washing the dishes. He was working on his laptop. The TV was on.

We knew we had to pack up and leave. I spent the next half an hour packing. Finishing those utensils. I remember every detail, every bit of cloth and toiletry I packed. I remember everything I said. I remember every call I made. No, it did not pass in a daze.

I was acutely aware of the things we would need, toothbrush, toothpaste, oil, towels, slippers, cotton, shampoo.

You know, you have to take a head bath after you come back from the cremation ground.

So, shampoo.

My husband told me to not bother. But I did.

Because while this breath is passing in and out of the body you inhabit all the time, gloriously unaware of its fragility and transience, you are life and your grip is tenacious. Strong, immovable because right now, it's meant to be here.

But when you let go?

When you let go, you slip away so quickly, it probably shocks even you. You forget names, numbers, places, faces and every little detail you felt was a part of who you are.

Do you know why? Because they are not who you are. So it's easy to forget. It's easy to let go. It's easy to drop it, like a hot potato. You know it's over and you jolt it away like it was never yours. Your body perishes. You slip away. The rest of them are left coping with the screaming, silent vacuum that you left behind.

I know death is painful. I know you think you will never get over it. I know you think life is going to be an endless journey of coping, of remembering and hoping that one day, you will be able to smile at their memory. Not break down like you do now.

That's what my uncle also thought.

If you had exactly 24 hours left to live, what would you do? Because you know, one day, that will be the truest thing anybody has ever said to you. Even the clock that has stopped is right, twice a day.

Disowned Cakes

An unbaked cake
Eggless because you
Carry odd allergies.
Deprived of pastries,
Imagine that!

But perfected cakes
Now arrive
To a disowned platter,
Spoons and forks, knives
No tinkles and clinks.

This oven is rank
Stale and old and rusty,
From all these
Years of waiting
Mostly in vain.

Do they have cakes
In heaven or it's gates?
Is there a mailing service
To send these things
Your way?

Haunting The Dead

Death used to a simple matter some years ago. People died. We gave away their belongings to needy people, framed a photograph and hung it up the wall, sometimes with a garland dangling around it. That was it. Perhaps a shirt or a saree was kept, in remembrance. A watch, probably a ring they wore.

Which always brings me to the question, the person who removes the ring from the dead body, or a necklace, how do they bring themselves to do it? I'd bury or cremate everything on their person. It's mysterious, the tenacity life holds us with.

And then people moved on because life went on and surrounded us constantly.

Things are different now.

We are no longer constantly surrounded by life. We surround ourselves with gadgets and solitude by default. We live online. Suddenly, the dead have social profiles that they have left behind and you can still see what they said on October 18, the argument they had with you and another friend freezing over in time. You can always go back, you can always relive bits of it, there is no full and final closure.

You haunt the dead. You never get over them. You keep going back. Their face still comes up when a social site reminds you it's their birthday. Only, you have a void staring at you where a person once was, nobody left to wish. You cannot get yourself to unfollow them, you cannot get yourself to unfriend them either. Every now and then, they pop back, like an indecent tease that will never come to any fruition.

In our world today, death is still a norm. Only, more painful. But just like it used to be, you never quite get over it.

It's mysterious, the tenacity death holds us with.

What Is Rape?

Women can be very Zen about the fact that men don't ask before making plans. It is the spiritually upright way to go about it.

Or women can be deeply disturbed that men don't ask them before they plan the simplest course of action.

Because women always do. It is the emotionally right thing to do, as a woman. To check. To ask. To know. To ensure they have provided for, before they can go seek their own little dreams.

Because by saying that it is okay to let it be this way, women submit to the way their twisted society is wired. That a woman must ask, but a man can get away with informing.

Women of my world who burn other women to death for money, who kill girl children, or who are less obviously harmless because they give preferential treatment to the boy child over the girl, to the son-in-law over the daughter-in-law, will tell you that men are simple beings, they don't complicate things, they don't "overthink".

They are right. Men do not "overthink", or for that matter, don't think at all about how the smallest of things can demonstrate who the boss is.

If this blog is being read by a man at the moment, please ask. Ask if your decision concerns a woman in any way. A violation of this basic dignity in its cruelest form is called rape. Often, men do this without realising they are doing it. And women take it thinking it's normal.

But just because something has been done in a certain way for centuries, does not mean it is right.