April Chronicles...

Dreaming April

For as long as I remember I have spent my birthday on April 26th in the mountains with Ruskin Bond(in my dreams silly!). This started at the sweet age of 8 after I was hijacked into his world on reading the short story called 'Women on Platform No 9'.

The story beautifully transcended the margins of sexuality, geography, age and race. It was so 'ME' that I started thinking of this writer as a 'cooler extension' of me living in the mountains. Slowly the duality of the writer and reader disappeared. He wasn't a separate man writing about his life. He was just another 'me' living in Mussorie with Prem and his children smelling the onions frying in his kitchen. This kind of familiarity was turning really difficult to manage on a practical level. So I took in into my dreams to process all the business that we had together. Him and Me.

I could have met him in real life too but for what? What would I say to him when we met?

Hello Mr. Bond. My name is Ruskin Bond too. Pearl Ruskin Bond Sandhu! 

I think its really cruel that you don't know but you ought to know that I have been in love with you since I was 8 years old.(How come you didn't know? You started this whole business by writing Didn't you?~!) Ah no...So it was going to turn into ugly real life if I ever met him really...So I haven't in all these years.

Mr Bond I fondly remember the times we slept together. The times you were whispering stories of the cold sweet mountain air in my ears. The times you told me about your lost loves, poverty, and your tardy typewriter.Oh and It was such a sad walk that we took together the day you met your mother for the last time in hospital. I wish you had let me hold your hand but you were walking so fast in that Delhi heat. Oh and that Vietnamese girl that you fell in love with? Vu Phong. I became her that night you made love to her and the Jasmine and honeysuckle shook in the wind outside our window.

Thats how the dreaming opened doors to my real life. The life that had brought me in touch with this man who meant so much to me that that dreaming was the only real way of meeting him!So like a well behaved young lady I never told anyone about this great elderly love of my life.( Off course I don't love his old age. I love him for his madness!)

So its become an annual ritual now. I dream of being in Ruskin Bond's company every year on my Birthday. We sit down over cups of tea and Cherry cakes. He looks at me lovingly like he has known me forever.  In my dreams he is a vulnerable lost man who desperately needs to know how much I love him. And I really do. And we discuss writing books together. We tear down our silly publishers(but we never make fun of readers!). He even writes funny forwards to my travelogues.

The mountain wind whispers on our dinner table. The 44* Degress of April (of my not loved reality) outside completely disappears in the drones of crickets playing outside his Ivy Cottage home in Mussorie. Thats when the window closes and I can only see warm lights from a distance. I never know what we do in that house after I sleep in sweaty  April heat of my physical reality. But I swear I get up with a sweet after taste of cherry cake the next mornings.

April Chronicles..

April is my most cruel month.Its hot and ungracious. Its unrelenting and hopeless. It also is too long for my liking.

April Memories

Once when I was younger Mom Dad took me to visit Kang Farm in Sasaiyan where TT Uncle had married and settled with his Australian wife 'April'. Theirs was one of those plush mechanised farms in the Terrai. It was so exotic really. They had  Grey Hounds and German Shephards running around without leashes on the farm. The lovely garden which flowered even in April and offcourse those star shaped cookies they served with Tea. It was all too much for the poor little small town  me. But what I most of all I remeber is April, the first blond  relative I had acquired. I must have been 6 years old then. She was so tall and so pretty.So much prettier than my dusky old familiar mom . The registeration of her presence in my memory is like a shock of white heat. A bright patch with lot of light and excitemnet but no details.


Years later one got to know that Uncle had got divorced and April had left him, leaving behind a daughter with white skin and black eyes called May. May wore pink flannel frocks and spoke cute english and was so much prettier and adorable that the natty 12 year old me. By now the farm had 3 Great Danes and a Pomerarian and 5 hens running around . The garden was unkempt and Uncle TT had setlled abroad leaving little May behind in the care of her very feeble and old grandparents who did not understand her language. I was always afraid that the huge dogs would eat May.


The farmhouse slowly lost its charm for me except that one memory of Aunt April that has stayed all these years. For me Aunt April would always remain that enigma I had found walking on Uncle's farm.  That tall strikingly beautiful woman who blasted everone with her sizzling chemistry even when she just walked beside much shorter Uncle TT. Her orange lipstick, her sparkling blue eyes and her loud manly laughter. In burning April afternoons I often remember her peeping through the net of the wooden door calling  Uncle TT to come in for Tea. She was so beautiful and hardy that I dont belive that the house ever divorced her memories although Uncle TT found another australian wife who never visited the farm in India.(for good reason I am sure!)
In the naked heat of April the sharp colours of memory too turn cruel and I remember Aunt April. She gave Kang family that eternal space in my memory with her shadows passing through the thick April sunlight. Strong colourful and cruel. Not to be kept but only remebered.

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!

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

A day like all other days...

There is a drone of Cicada in the air, its your ring tone.
Somebody is calling...nothing important you know.
End of March and the weather gives pleasant surprises on some days.
Like just yesterday you got up feeling happy for no reason really.
That slight headache from morning has become like a ticklish fog circling your eyes and forehead a pleasant sensation of wheeziness right now.
There is work but not too much.
Today is just the day to be lost in your thoughts.
You are remembering that old song that you hummed when you were younger.
You got up with it playing in your head today!
You caught yourself blushing thinking about that thing that happened yesterday! Strange!
That one thing that you wanted to do for a long time, seems more and more likely next weekend?.Rafting? Vipassna, Rishikesh, Holiday, Yes!
All those life and death matters have suddenly become dour.
The truth has settled on you like a shaft of evening light.
Filtered through lace curtains dancing on your arms and hands.
A world of memories and sensations open up.
That black and white picture of yours that youve kept in your wallet for a long time flashes suddenly.
The edges of it are wearing of but that sharp look in the eyes just doesnt fade.
It surprises you some times. That aliveness and magic where did it come from?
You remember that gust of air that hit you on the face through the train window when you were travelling without a ticket.
You loved travelling without ticket, although you havent done it in a long time.
Someday soon you promise yourself.
And you never keep your promises!
Its just another day...