You are living him, and I'm living you.

People have been advising me to stop writing to you. The reason that they present for this befuddles me. They say that you should make the woman wait for you, that you should make the woman miss you. They say that women are drawn towards men who make them wait, and that they outright reject the ones 'who wag their tails behind them.' Well, that was the phrase used, in Hindi of course, by the last person who gave me the advice.

I laugh at those people. Some of these advices have come from women themselves. Which means that they know that this happens, they know that it hurts the other person, and yet they are willing to do nothing about it. They say these things with a sense of vindication and pride on their faces, as if to tell men that the more you're into me, the more you're going to get ignored.

Unless, of course, I'm in love with you. Then, it is a different ball game. But not so different, isn't it? After all, this is what he did to you. He made you wait. He made you wait for months, gave you excruciating pain, and yet, here you are, writing your Instagram bio in his template and using his locations in your stories. If you tell me that 'Berlin' came up out of the blue when you sat down to write that, I won't believe you.

Now, before you go bonkers again, and as I've already grown tired of telling you, this is not written to belittle you. Rather, I'm writing this to appreciate your courage and bravery. Also, in the same breath, let me tell you that as much as I hate him from the core of my heart, I can't judge him. You say he never said a word that hurt you. That already makes him the better man, after all the spears that I've thrown your way, however painful that might have been for me, as I had to rip open my heart every time that I hurled them at you.

You had told me about the time he arranged a bandage when you experienced a muscle sprain in your leg, tied it around your feet and made sure that you're comfortable. I saw the look in your eyes when you'd told me that. Your eyes spoke of how much you wanted it to happen again. They spoke of how ready you were to hurt yourself only so that he could touch you.

Like the way he would have touched you that night. You told me about how you two talked about the world and its stories after it was done, but you didn't tell me about how he travelled your world and drew stories on your bare body using his bare hands and bludgeoning lips. You didn't tell me how you shared the moles on your tongue, the ones you had hidden from the world, with his, and how you got the life-altering serum in his saliva.

You must tell me about the way he held your breasts and switched them between his hands and his mouth. For I've been there too. I've heard your moans in their most subtle form. You must tell me how you cried, almost helplessly, when he slithered under your sheets, buried his face in your neckline and crushed your breasts with his. It destroys me to the core to think of that night. It destroys me even more to think that maybe our night was a recollection of the past, or worse, a dress rehearsal for the future.

But you know what? I'm okay with it. I'm okay with having the second-hand experiences of your famished youth. As long as I can be of any help, of some comfort, I'll be ready to play second fiddle. It hurts to see how a few beautiful months spent with a relatively strange man can overpower the years of warmth that we had, and make him the centre of your life, or to put it bluntly, your bae.

But that's what love is, isn't it? It blindfolds you first, and then, depending on how flabbergasted your heart is, it either gives you a mirage or a miracle.

I'm happy to be your mirage, if that is what it takes for you to reach your miracle. I'm happy to be the guy who couldn't make you feel anything, if that makes you love him with all the heart you have left. Or maybe, love me back with some of it.

You are living him, and I'm living you.

Photo courtesy: Berlin Artparasites

Remember me in parts

I have a constant picture stuck in my head. It's of you, but just your face and a blue dupatta matching your white kurta. I might have picked that up from one of your pictures. And I find ancient architecture in the background. The pale yellow walls of a fort, with dilapidated paint and scrapings peeling out of them. I see the Sun in the background, its rays shining against one-half of your face, thereby darkening the other half.

You look towards the sky and smile. You don't look at me. I'm not sure whether you know that I'm there. You smile, I look at you, and I smile back. Of all the places and forts that you have been to, I remember this picture vividly. Maybe because you took me along with you. It's not just me who takes you to places, you do that too.

So you can wander all you want, to all the places you wish to, I'll always be there smiling at you. I get this dream repeatedly, even when I'm wide awake. Someday it will turn into reality. It might not be in the way I've always expected it to be, but someday I'll live to live this dream.

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You wake me up from the slumber. I look at you and recall that you'd slept with your bra unhooked. Your breasts would have felt free. I was looking for the signs of guilt on your face in the morning. But there were none.

I'd asked you the previous night whether you'd go home or not. To which, you'd replied that you have no home. I wanted to kiss you right there when you said that, but more than that, I wanted to take you home. You got up in the morning, left the bed, stood up facing me, and hooked it back under your kurta. A small piece of your belly, perhaps that spot where my lips had made you moan the loudest, was visible for a few seconds. It reminded me of the few seconds that I had with you. Few seconds, out of the whole dark night.

You washed up and sat against the mirror, I appeared with a bottle of water and placed my lips on your left cheek, despite having the fear that you'd push me away. For the night was over. For it was way beyond 9 AM. But you didn't. It was then, that I felt I had loaned you a home, albeit only for a night.

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You ask me to remember you in parts. A whole is the sum of its parts. You are my whole and my parts. Yes, I can only remember you in parts.

The part where the lip gloss barely hid the chapping lips. The part where the scars on your face overshadowed the moles I'd drooled over. The part where your rebirth looked more beautiful than your scarred body. Also, the part where I fell in love with all these parts more than I'd ever loved the whole of you.

But, it wasn't enough to make you feel what he had made you feel on that night. I realized that there was still a part missing. A part I can neither seek nor produce. That can only be given to me by you. A part of you.

Picture courtesy: Berlin ArtParasites

Somebody, please?

Will somebody please?
Will someone please talk to me?
I've been weighed down,
By deeds I wish I could explain
To the world that they weren't my fault
Will somebody please talk to me?

The world only witnesses the brave,
And condescends the timid.
Why is timidity such a bane?
Is it not often gifted by pain?
I've become timid and I wish
I had someone to explain!
Will somebody please talk to me?

The night isn't just time
It's a pathway, a storyline,
A graveyard, a cold storage.
Where things just lay
As barren as they are
As naked as they are,
Frozen in time, buried within layers,
Waiting for darkness to set them free.
Will someone lie down next to me?
And spend the night for free?
Will somebody please talk to me?

I'm not a person with many shades
And thus invisible to the world that's grey.
But I deserve my happy days,
Which the world often takes away.
They say it's you, and not the world,
But that's a fecal lie,
For the ship doesn't drown on its own,
Unless dismayed by the tides.
They ask to pursue happiness,
I ask, why?
Why doesn't it come naturally?
Like the rains from the sky?

I have sundry wishes,
To write the story of my life;
And make sure it's a good one.
To dictate terms, once in a while,
To fuel my ego, but drown my pride,
To hear my name resound through the aisle.
To spend without constraints,
To compete and defeat big names.
Strong biceps and a broad chest;
To lie peacefully on her naked breasts.
Will someone please talk me out of it?
And convince me that not everything is there to be had.
Will someone please talk me out of talking to people?
Oh, the irony!
Will somebody please talk to me?

Why does a writer write?

Why does a writer write? I have been pondering over this question for quite some time now. Does he write because he wants to or does he write because he has to? Do you know what happens when you choke on a piece of bread? When it gets stuck in the throat? You drink water to gulp it in or you try to spit it out. Either way, you try to get rid of what chokes you. And you feel relieved when you do. A writer is the one who has to do both of these things, because none of them, whether alone or collectively can bring him relief. He needs to gulp it in and spit it out; gulp it in and spit it out; and the cycle continues. The cycle continues so that he can keep the choking at bay. He still chokes, every day, but just tries to keep it at bay so that it doesn’t kill him.

But what is it that he chokes on? What is it that kills him? It is the same thing that kills all of us- Pain. Except for the fact that some choose to live with it and others try to evade it by surrendering themselves to the pursuit of happiness. But I question, why are they pursuing it? Why do they need to pursue it? Is it not something that naturally comes to them, like breathing? Like there is a class that pursues happiness, there is a class that befriends pain. They are writers. The thing that chokes them in the throat is pain, some of which, they gulp in, the rest, they spit out. Writers don’t write because they want to or because they have to. They write because they need to live; they need to survive.

They aren’t some benevolent magicians meant to save the world through their works. They are humans, who are just as fallible as the rest and are trying only to save themselves. They do not necessarily need to be polite, humble and generous people who are meant to be empathetic towards others. They can be rude, arrogant, angry creatures trying to battle these issues within themselves; or maybe these issues are what propel them to write. Maybe their inability to maintain calm in the state of chaos and loss thus incurred and the pain thus suffered is what they want to write about. They want to write down what they couldn’t speak and also what they did and why they did so. Why did the past creep in then and made them who they are? Why and how have they been moulded into someone they never were?

These are the questions that they can either choose to gulp down and store in some corner of their hearts as pain’s indifferent token, or spit the answers out on a blank canvas with such intensity and ferocity that matches the magnitude of the glitch in their throats. They keep the bug from troubling them for as long as the time that the bug takes to replenish itself, for the world feeds it a lot of fodder. It is the reason why a writer observes the dog limping, the child crying, the old man’s eyes, and a common man’s cries. He observes the world around him and feels sad. He finds that the others are no different. He finds that others are there, right in the eye of the storm; and he finds that they have no means to fight back. They are there as if they have been destined to be there. It makes him sadder.

But why does he write then? Does it help him? Or does it help them? Does it change the world? I don’t know. But what it surely does is that it changes him. The fits of the former self do come back to haunt him, but more or less he comes out reformed; not perfect, but reformed. He sees the bitterness around, and realizes that a moment of kindness even if that goes against his comforts and even if it doesn’t bring him any sort of relief, can do wonders. They feel good for the person, but they feel numb within. It is a strange kind of feeling that perhaps they themselves cannot explain. A writer doesn’t know what he wants when he writes, he doesn’t know how would it help him, or how would it help the world. He just writes; plain and simple. He is a wanderer, roaming around, observing the world, carrying another one within him, and trying to bring the two at par. All of this for what, he doesn’t know!