I Disappear

One of the most terrifying things in the world, I think, is disappearing. I don’t mean disappearing as being physically out of sight. It’s more about being forgotten, disappearing from people’s memory, not being remembered, being lost among all the wires and electric signals and forgotten things in somebody’s brain. Somewhat like being stuffed in a box with all the other useless things and pushed to a corner and forgotten and one day someone will discover the box and ask the owner “Who is this person?” and the person will rack his brains and try to recall who you are and why you were in the box and he might say “Oh just someone I used to know” or he might be embarrassed and start lying in all directions but it wouldn’t change anything because you had been in the box all that time. 

And so we try to attract attention, in all the ways we know. We dress outrageously, paint our faces, wear flashy watches and shoes and drive noisy vehicles. We talk and laugh loudly and drown everyone with our opinions and play our music right in their faces. 

And we go online and tell the world what we did every waking minute of our lives. And not being content with that, we blog and ask everyone to read it. 

But after all this, nobody thinks about us as much as we hoped or feared because they are all too busy obsessing over themselves! Hahaha! 

Stupid post, I know, now you can go and check out my photoblog at wordpress. :)

How about it?

I don’t understand poetry much, but I still love the popular ones like “How do I love thee let me count the ways”, or that one by Yeats that goes “ I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams”, or any of Pablo Neruda’s bittersweet poems (Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring. I have forgotten your face, I no longer remember your hands; how did your lips feel on mine?)

But, I am a big fan of love songs. HUGE fan. Maybe that was one reason why I was so keen on songbooks and writing down song lyrics (and eventually losing the songbook). It could be any song, any love song, sung by anyone, The Eagles or Taylor Swift or John Mayer or Zirsangzela or Maroon 5. If it has beautiful lyrics that makes you want to grab a pen and write down the lyrics, it is good enough for me.

And once in a while you come across lyrics that just blow you away. Completely. Off the seat of your pants. And sometimes the lyrics are not even that sweet or sad or melancholic. Some geniuses have a way of putting together words that just feels so right, so perfect, that you want to write that song down on a chart paper and stick it on the wall beside your bed (Actually I have done this, and I think it was a poem, don’t remember which one, it was millenia ago).

So who is this week’s lucky winner? It is an old song, well, that really depends on when you were born. Do you know that the songs we listened while growing up are now played in the Retro channel? Makes one feel ancient and old fashioned and not-with-the-times, but anyone who knows me knows I'm not really bothered about being hip and wearing the latest clothes and listening to the latest songs.

Romeo and Juliet. Dire Straits. 1980. I will not bore you with the facts like who wrote it and why and who covered it and all that stuff. Google it.

The song is soo soo sad, and, to use a word for the second time in a blogpost, bittersweet. Lost loves and people meeting at a wrong time in their lives. And the Romeo and Juliet title makes it even sadder because we all know that R&J were the personification of true love. In the song Juliet is portrayed as a fickle girl who throws away Romeo’s love. Uses him and leaves him once she tastes success and fame. And poor old Romeo roams the streets singing about the old times and serenading girls who do not want to be serenaded, much less from under a balcony.

The lyrics, oh the lyrics!

When you can fall for chains of silver,
You can fall for chains of gold,
You can fall for pretty strangers
And the promises they hold.
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin, yeah!
Now you just say, "Oh Romeo? Yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him".

Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry.
You said, "I love you like the stars above, I'll love you 'til I die".
There's a place for us, you know the movie song.
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

I can't do the talk, like the talk on TV
And I can't do a love song, like the way it's meant to be.
I can't do everything, but I'll do anything for you.
I can't do anything, 'cept be in love with you!

And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be.
All I do is keep the beat... and bad company.
Now all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme,
Juliet, I'd do the stars with you any time!

And a love-struck Romeo sings a street serenade
Laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade
He says something like, "You and me babe, how about it?"

You and me babe, how about it?

What the F?

It all started when I went home for my annual holiday. Thirty uninterrupted days of not doing anything, not worrying about the rent, or about how well stocked your fridge is, or about how far behind you are in paying the electricity bills resulted in the scale tilting a bit to the right. Everyone remarked how plump I’d become, and I happily laughed along because being thin never really suits anyone, or so I believed.

Wait. I take back my words. It all started before I went home, but another month of inactivity resulted in it being blown out of proportion. Literally. Cheeks, arms, thighs, tummy, even the ankles, everything got blown up. And it is not funny at all.

Changing your clothes ten times every morning is not funny. People thinking you are the mother of your 22 year old niece is enough to send the most jovial of persons into a deep depression from which one can never recover. Discovering your favourite pair of jeans now feels a little too tight can almost make you swear to wear only wraparound skirts, which by the way you think is the world’s ugliest piece of clothing, and roam the earth like someone stuck in the 70s.

I wish I was one of those brave souls who could laugh and just shrug it off and say “This means there’s more of me to love!” I wish I was one of those energetic individuals who get up an hour early and tie up their running shoes and go jogging in the middle of the night. I envy those happy people who accept their extra tyres and heavy forearms and do not care about the additional layers of fat they carry around.

I know, I know, I sound like a whiner, an unhappy unaccepting un-selfloving person. Give me some time, will you? Let me get used to living with my chubby body and fat ankles and triple chin. Let me stop automatically comparing myself with every fat person I see. Let those feelings of happiness stop washing over me when I see someone fatter. Let me slowly learn to love and embrace this F word. Maybe the sun will then shine on me once again.

Thank God my shoes still fit.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Once upon a time there were two sisters. They had many other siblings but this tale is about the two sisters, so let’s be happy and forget about the other children their parents procreated.

So we have these two sisters, one elder, the other younger. (Obviously, because no mother can give birth to twins at exactly the same time. But wait what about those born via a Caesarean? What is the extracting procedure for twins? Does the doctor just pull out the first baby he sees? How do they decide who is older?)

Okay, so we have two sisters. In fact, if it was a hundred years earlier they would be princesses. Because their mother was a princess, a very beautiful one with skin the colour of ivory and hair like finely spun spider’s web. Our two sisters grew up as ordinary people, and worked ordinary jobs. The elder one married and became a housewife. Her husband was a relatively successful businessman, and they built a house at one of the best locations in town. They were quite well off, and when television arrived in Mizoram they were among the first to get one. I remember their house used to be very crowded, with the whole locality coming to watch any program that was showing. My mother often talked about watching the ’82 World Cup at their place, at a time when Rossi and Zico ruled the football world.

The younger sister got a government job, and was always posted in some far-off town. She bore three children, two boys followed by a girl, but never got married. The girl was slightly older than me, and was great friends with me and my sister. Because of her mother’s job she was always in one boarding school or the other, and we used to write each other, in English, and we thought ourselves very sophisticated because we wrote in English, even though it was never anything more than “How are you I am fine School is fine”.

Fortune didn’t smile on the elder sister, and she and her husband didn’t have any children. So they adopted (informally) the eldest son of the younger sister. They were very good to us (my siblings and I) too. We lived in adjacent houses, and she would, until this day, talk about the days when I was so small I couldn’t cross a small drain that was between our two houses, a drain whose width was no more than a few centimetres.

So the eldest boy lived with his aunt and uncle, and they spoiled him rotten. Gave him whatever he wanted. He had a happy childhood. Then he grew up, and he started mixing with rich boys and developed bad habits. It was the late 80s, and the rich kids had discovered drugs. Our boy too got trapped, badly, and it was very sad to see him decline like that. How his parents must have suffered!

One fine day he brought a wife home. She too was from the rich crowd, a girl who had never worked in her life. His parents were very happy, maybe they were secretly hoping he would mend his ways and settle down. They spoiled the wife, never let her lift a finger and never allowed her to do anything in the house.

Time went on, grandchildren came, everyone became old, and one day the elder sister’s husband died. Everything changed after that. The daughter-in-law declared herself the head of the house, and started treating her mother-in-law like a servant. Well, servant is too strong a word, let’s just say she was barely civil to her. The poor husband never said a word, because his wife was that kind of woman you don’t argue with.

Our elder sister, now almost 80, cooks and washes the dishes every day. Sometimes she would eat after everyone else. Poor thing, she had nowhere to go, and the person she called her son was too scared of his wife to come to her rescue. At an age when she should be enjoying the waning years of her life with grandchildren around her, she spends her days feeling like an unwanted person, an uninvited guest.

The other day my sister went to her house. It seemed she walked into a family argument, and it was very uncomfortable, so she told me. Sis walked in just in time to hear Elder Sister say she wouldn’t allow her bed to be dismantled / removed because it was the bed in which their grandfather had slept. Turned out the family had converted her room into a TV room and she had to sleep in another room.

I feel so disappointed with the human race when I hear things like this. True, no one is perfect and we all have faults and failings and eccentricities, but isn’t respect to elders something we’ve been taught all our life? In fact, it’s something that our common sense, our conscience should be telling us, without anyone having to drum it into our heads.

I don’t know how this story will end. And it is unlikely that a Sydney Carton will come to the elder sister’s rescue. I wish and pray for better happier days for her for the rest of her life.