Walk free

Dear Story,

Its hard not to think of you today. It’s today that we met. You and I my beloved story.I don’t know if I walked into you or you walked into me. But it was quite a thing (this meeting) I always knew you were larger and bigger than what I could handle. But I trusted that I could carry you out. How wrong I was.

I remember the first time I looked into your eyes and dared to tell you that I was infact planning to bring you out. I could almost see the angels standing up and showering flowers. Here It was happening in real time. You would live forever, and I through you. The great beginning! Golden and Inevitable. For how could It not have happened? Every little twig, every bloody flower was whispering about us. Propelling us on this journey of coming out in the world to create.

I was so young and earnest that I never believed that any story that began like that could escape immortality. There were one thousand dreams that took of that day about what all would follow once you came. They were like parachutes of rainbow that started circling everywhere I went.

The DND at 90 Kmph. Swooosh! 5parachutes, Brahma studios Swishhhhhhhhh 15parachutes, Ruby Tuesday Fshhhhhhhwwww 500parachutes. Rao Tula Ram Marg Trrrrrrr 350 Parachutes, Krishna Chowk chssshhhhh 80 parachutes, IHC Drrrrrrshhhhh 5000Parachutes. Spice Mall trisshhhhhhhhh 43000parachutes. (They have still not all come back to me! I see them flying much above where I can shoot them down to come back to senses!)

And then I started seeing your cruel will my story . You didn’t want to come with me! Escaping me in big and small ways. You would run to others. You would disappear and appear in a stranger’s gaze. You would keep me waiting for hours and hours for just a few words. From just being my story you started becoming this great catch which ran faster and faster ahead of me!

There appeared no Blue pearls on the white immense paper of my notebook. The days and days and days and nights and nights and nights that I lived with a pen in my hand waiting for you. Struggling for a line that would take us ahead. Me and you. You and me. Me and thoughts of you. Me and me and Thoughts of you. No you! Only the palpable desire of straightening you on a page. I ran so hard. So hard. Got so bruised so bruised.

I didn’t know stories had their wills and ways. Such persistent cunning and morbidity. Even when you danced around my pillow , we slept alone and never met. Oh how hard I dreamed and prayed of bringing you out. The tears I cried when I thought of your cruel will You wily story!

I give up today my story. At the peak of my strength will and love. Go where you must go. Be whatever you must be. I won’t curse you anymore ( I never meant it anyway!) Go dance around like a cottonsilk seed. Drop where you really must grow. Die unplanted if thats what you like.

I have broken my pen today. Walk free of me my story.

Walk Free!

Saving me with a book

Dear Natalie Goldberg,


I will never forget how I met you at that cramped Cyber Cafe in Aligang, near the Gulacheen Temple in that graceful city of Lucknow where I lived when I was 16. There shuttling on the internet between online romances, smart quotes, and Post graduate courses( to find a respectable career) I found that online version of Writing Down the Bones. I lived with it many days before I felt a sense that couldn't live without a Hard Copy of that stuff(It really was like dope!). It became my Bible and you became the woman who walked in front of me telling me just how real women walked.


There were so few ideals then for a girl of my size growing up in a city without any considerable distractions of male attention. I held on to you like nothing else would save me. And nothing else did. Not the degrees I took. Not the heady work I did. Nor the Company of Television Heroes I was so enamored by. Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sankarshan Thakur, Tarun Tejpal. All of them have lost that slickness in life.Why even real people that I fell in love with did nothing to save me. They all crumbled right in front of my eyes.


In the agony of stony places. In the glint of adoring eyes. In the ennui that lasted and costed me a considerable amount of life...You stayed in my bones. Keeping me strong. I always knew something was gonna grow from it. This writing practice that got into my blood stream gave me the ceremony to mourn my losses. The color to paint blazing colors from the sallow tastes on my tongue. The rhythm that played in my ribs when there were no dances I was dying for. 

Katagiri Roshi The teacher who taught you to watch your monkey mind came to me through you Natalie. I know that man, his straight back, his coldness and wisdom and his smile. I met him on a lot of your pages. I am afraid I fell in love with him too. And I realized how he was just supposed to be a teacher and not a alive presence. I never knew his smell though.( And I know why you kept it from me!) I know all the hamburgers you ate and all the houses you lived in. Your father and your Mom. Your sister and your car. Your divorce too. How did you transcend so many blocks of distance/age/country/culture to hold my attention( AND REVERENCE!!!!) for such a long period of time. Surely you too will pass from my life, wont you?


When I read you I feel I have a life that can be made something of too. You had fallen where I had fallen and you got up looking respectable. I too would. There were no children who had made your existence more profound than mine. There was no soul mate you had met and I had missed out on meeting because of my dumbness. There was no  home where people waited for you, there were no friends which you had which were warmer than mine. We are so same same. Teacher Guru. Mad Women Mad women. Mad women making sense of the nonsense!


You live so far away in Santa Fe in New Mexico. I dont even know where it is! How much does it cost to reach there? How much to just deliver a parcel? Would you mind if I land up outside your door one day? I'll get purple flowers. Just to mark my gratitude. And when those flowers sit on your writing desk..Will you know what you have given to me?

Love and Gratitude
Pearl

PS- I am so proud of myself I haven't married the fly! :)

All that passes from my hands..

Dear Writing Gods,

I wish I could give the ligthning and thunder of a new life to my writing. But when I sit down on the floor with my laptop , mosquitos bite into my blood my unwaxed skin itches with dryness. I cant create magic. I had assumed that writing would open new worlds but this writing only takes me deeper and deeper into the same old stories. I keep returning to the past. Where is the new sparkling life I was promised? Instead of letting go I turn to clasp tighter!

I go back to my old birthdays, the times candles could be placed on a half kg cake. The gifts that I wanted to get but never got. The friends that I wished would come. But never came.
To the warm smiles of my friends who stood with the their (now) exes. They looked so good together! Where did the magic disappear between them.
The flowering trees which shouted about the changing season. I only have pictures of them on my web albums now.
The songs I loved hearing. They still keep lilting in the past. The sweet songs of love (sic) I will never hear them anymore but they sounded so sweet then!
Oh and the rivers I would run to purge myself of the madness. The madness keeps returning.

Maybe it happens because of the time locks that I put to each magical moment. The times when the moment was so precious that I would close my eyes and put a psychic lock. Click! Please dont pass me by. Stay! Grow!
And they grow. In the past and in my writing. Like remember the first time I was flying to Pune.. I closed my fists so hard and pushed and shoved god! This should happen more often! I keep going back to that flight now. With the appetising taste of a new city and new people. I have no buisness left in Pune anymore. And yet every now and then I am back into that Air India flight. 18 years. Dressed in blue jeans and white top. 15 kgs overweight. Happy to be on an aeroplane alone to say a big hello to a new world. Those people that I didnt meet come back to haunt me.
The time I stood squinting at the statue of Ahilya Bai Holkar at the Maheshwar fort. The pandits were rolling 5000 shivlings of earth to be given out to Narmada. She started worshipping shiva after her husband died. She was the most compassionate ruler the whole of Malwa had seen. I felt the rigor mortis of the dead husband descending into my system. All of this woman's glory started with the deaths of men around her. My guess is she never let them die. Held on too tightly ! I stared at the statue of this tall gangly woman dressed in white. Sometimes stones stare back. I stapled that stare into myself. I was going to use this. This was no ordinary meeting of women. I had said Hi! to a woman who had who had changed the shape of walls by the iron in her will. I could certainly use this high of meeting her somewhere in my life. She came with me in memory since that day. She is a big person to carry around! But I have lugged her around and spoken to her on the long way from my home to office. It isnt a long way from Ghaziabad to Gurgaon. I couldnt ever finish one conversation with her about how much I liked doing what I was doing! She smiled at me when I told her all that..I hated people who thought it was a waste of time to travel those two points. She didnt come out to talk to me on any other route!
Its all passed me by now. It lives more ferociously than ever before.

Love
PS

Learning to lech at women.

I started this learning in a very cross state. I had to give up believing that women were also human beings (like children and men) Its a learning that happened because of an accident that paralyzed me for roughly three years. I was on bed with plasters and I could only see the world through another pair of eyes.(a particular man's eyes) I don't know if I am grateful for this learning. It has given me shameless eyes that zoom into a extreme close up as soon as a woman comes in the visibility range. A lot of my friends tell me that they get embarrassed by this leching. I try to explain that I am not leching for myself. I do it to perfect my understanding of the Maletric system of judging women.

So this man I learned from looked at women everywhere and kept imparting his judgments(maletric offcourse!). At traffic lights, in the plane aisles, at the hotel lobbies, in his office, in his veranda, in the studio. I dont know if the women who passed his examinations did better in life than the ones who flunked it completly. I however know that he was nicer to the ones who scored high on this mailtric system! He gave them better chances, praised them more often and yes he engaged with the hi scorers.I don't know if I failed or passed. I have had to work terribly hard to get over my preoccupation of scoring at (his/our) this test. Every point that I losed broke my heart. And offcourse I lost more points than I could have let go off!

I write this because I dont much like the way I look at women these days. I want to go back to the times when pretty women were just pretty women and not a pair of boobs competing against another!The old way of seeing them was so much more comfortable.But this judging is a trait that came from my old company. It kind of started gaining presence in me. After all it was a well defined universal system of measuring desirability of women.Besides it was goddamn empowering to just look at the boobs and never have to hear and engage with these other human beings!

So I started by copying that Stare ## Scanning 123........Too old*. Too Fat* Big boobs* small boobs* oh wow boobs* Great body* Dumb Fuck* Easy fuck* Rich bitch* Smart Bitch* Sweet girl* Powerful bitch*  Put her in a sack and hand it to me bitch*. Sweet talk kind*  Sad kind*  Eager kind*  Enthusiastic type* Married* Divorced*  With kids* deserves attension*  Ignore*  Vulnerable* Needy* Desperate!* Beautiful*  Ugly* Looked pretteir when she was slimmer*

It seeped into one. Offcourse women werent exactly human beings(They had two dangling boobs, legs and eyes and lips!) The whole (male) Universe had these gradings.The 'Maletrick system'. So the first rule was to figure out women. It wasnt an easy thing to learn. One flinched. A human being of whatever age was being sliced into a woman(boobs legs eyes and lips) And their stories always began with their boobs.(or whatever else flashed first in front of those eyes. mostly it was boobs)

So I remeber the first time those eyes grew warm at a yellow nylon shirt clad dumb bengali chic(yes there are! such ones too!) My eyes saw a being fumbling for words,with no hold on the language,  making silly arguments, pouting too much at lips and chest. Then the alter eyes took over- Great figure, 5feet 6 inches tall. Maroon lipstick. cheap hire. Interseting! Get her on.

That dusky thin girl with a dour smile. The alter eyes saw nothing. Drooping boobs, too much reticence, too much intelligence! Sorry we are closed!

The pretty girl with crooked teeth who smiled everytime she didnt catch sense? Yeah! The alter eyes remeber her. She wore nice transparent white tops and smiled coyly everytime looked at. Now that is innocence!

That intelligent girl with braces?( Hmm nice but you see wouldnt think of kissing her right so 5 marks down!)

That hardworking woman who stayed up the nights with an ill child? (It didnt exactly add to her ageing skin or make her a pleasant presence no?)

The whorish tall one who smelled of hairdye all the time?(Well she was good to sit beside on the sofa you know but she spoke so much that she could have nibbled away one's ear!)

The big boobed dumb one.( Big boobs can get tiring beyond a point!)

So I got on the same page with that man. I have his eyes in me now! It destroyed my eyesight. I wear big glasses now. I have  learnt forever the language of grading women. It has left me with a very low opinion of myself( there are always more luscious boobs and pouting lips walking around on longer legs!) But I can do it to other women, what those eyes did to me!