Bipolar

I have been called Bipolar several times, that I ‘swing around’ and surprise people. Usually it goes something like- "You are more mature than your age." or “O I never knew you were this fun!” I don’t necessarily take this as a compliment. But yea, whatever! I have two sides of me that I juggle with. The first impression people have of me is always wrong. Coz they see only one side of it. I am not a stereotype. You can’t fit me in one box and judge me with that label. Just because I work efficiently, does not mean I can’t have fun. Just because I am sarcastic, does not mean I cannot be sentimental. Just because I dress modestly, does not mean I am tamed. I feed the crazy in me, but don’t let it come out that often. I don’t want to drive people mad with my crazy. I get bored easily; the crazy mind keeps me going. What I am outside is the toned down version of what I am inside. And it is only a very few people who can break in and come inside. When you come in, you will again see two people inside. One is scared and insecure, and the other is wild and childlike. There is a child within me, who I can never let die. I thrive on the child within me. A child who is amused by the world around. This childlike curiosity keeps me alive. 

Will I ever let the ‘inside’ come outside? Or will I be a bipolar all my life? Will I always wear this comfortable garb of sanity or will I ever become comfortable to step outside naked?

My last story- Free bird- was essentially about this. About coming out. The feeling of freedom, of flying in wild abandon, knowing that sky is your place. But is there really any such thing as free? Was the bird ever free? Inside or outside.

P.S: This is a follow-on post from my previous story post (link above "Free bird"). The word 'Bipolar' here is not used in terms of medical disorder.

Story time: Free bird

Another story I wrote for training in creative writing...

Free bird

Tia fluttered her royal blue speckled yellow wings and sat in one corner pecking the seeds lying in the cage. A little 5 year old boy sat under the tree colouring a house and a road in his book. Tia’s cage was as big as the boy. She had no qualms; there was a swing and a slide inside the cage. There was also a water fountain to drink water from and a plate that was always filled with sunflower seeds and peanuts, sometimes almonds that the boy threw inside.

Swinging inside her cage, she would look at all the birds flying in the sky. But she was happy in the cage, although she had never stepped out. She got her food on time, never had to hunt, she was the entertainer and the entertained.

One day, Tia was left outside under the tree. It was getting dark, Tia was scared. She felt a soft dense mist enveloping her. She turned her head in different directions, and squeaked hoping to catch some attention. Losing all hopes, she curled quietly in one corner. Just then, she heard some sound. A titter she was not familiar with. Soon, it became loud. Tia looked up to find a sea of shining eyes; all the birds were laughing at Tia. “Are you scared now, pretty? Where is your human family? They are supposed to take care of you, right? ,” said one of them with a smirk. Tia could feel a fiery glaze outlining her wings.

In the morning when the first ray of sun hit the edge of the cage, Tia woke up and started pacing around. The family was nowhere in sight. She looked at the last few pieces of nuts left in the cup. She heard a voice from above, of a black bird sitting on the branch of the tree. It had red eyes and a velvety voice.

“Why don’t you fly out of that cage? Do you like to be limited when you can soar and see the world,” the voice said. “I don’t think I can fly. Besides, I think this cage is locked,” said Tia. “Don’t fool yourself. You define your boundaries. Have you even tried to fly out? Come fly with me and you will know what you are meant to be.” Tia thought hard. The little boy and his family could come any moment, and if they didn’t find her, they would be disappointed. Tia liked them and felt attached to the little boy. He fed her peanuts every morning. The bird coaxed her again, “What are you thinking? Come fly with me.”

Tia slowly stepped out of the cage. A strong wind caressed her light body. She fluttered her wings fast. Within seconds, she was flying. She had finally left the cage, she was free. A free bird. Just then she heard a deafening sound. The black bird sitting on top of her tree was shot, and fell down two feet away from Tia. She looked at the blood red eyes and saw it leave.

Getting attached and detached- how easy or difficult is it?

When you have lived a vagabond life, how easy or difficult is it to get attached to something? Do you always know at the back of your mind, that everything is ephemeral? That you don’t have to fall in the trap? That eventually, you are not going to be ‘here’. Or have you really become a wanderer deep within and you don’t want to be in one place anymore? What do you do with the restlessness in your heart to move, to keep moving, and not become stagnant?

But even when you think you are a wandering soul, is it easy to detach yourself? Do you ever truly get attached, or detached? Do you believe that something can really last? Do you attach yourself with a hook, which is easy to take off or do you glue yourself, wanting to stick? When it comes to detaching yourself, while the hook comes off easily, the glue peels off the surface with it. You lose some of yourself; you scrape a part from others. Whether it is a hook or glue, how easy is it to detach yourself? To step away from all the chaos and sip a moment of silence. Does it happen at the flicker of your fingers? Or is it like a big heavy rock that you try to push off the cliff?

Age- Does it matter?

Right at this moment, I wish I was 20. Not like go back to the time when I was 20, but NOW where I am, I wish I was 20 years old, and I had 10 more years to hit that milestone of 30. The second decade of life is so short. You blink and it’s gone. I will turn 25, in a few months. While I liked the idea of growing up till a few years back. Now it is just daunting. Can’t I be 25 all my life? I remember that song, 18 till I die. And I understand the whole thing about- nothing can stop you from doing what you really want, and all that shit. But only people who have reached somewhere in life, can make such nonsensical statements. After the struggle is over, everything always looks rosy.

Or I wish, I was a man. A 25 year old man. Perhaps, that would have made things easier. I could work my ass off, earn a good name for myself, save a lot of money, and take my sweet time to decide when I should settle down. Live life in my terms, however cliché it may sound.

There are two ways of looking at my situation right now. I am 25, I love my job, I earn more than I ever expected, I am in a steady relationship, I should get married in a couple of years, settle down and have kids, and perhaps, live happily ever after. Except, the question hovering in my mind. Will that really make me happy?

I feel I was sleeping my whole life, and I have just woken up. The world is revealing itself to me. And now, you just ask me to lie still in the bed? I want to see the world, I want to learn, I want to experience. But I am 25. I am expected to get married and pop babies before I turn 30- which gives me exactly 5 years, of nothing. 5 years to settle down in that monotony that waits for me? Now, exactly, at this moment, if I were a guy and not a girl, I would not need to care about any of this. Not my hormones, at the least. My parents, who were extremely supportive all my life, to be “career-oriented”, whatever that means, suddenly want me to settle down as soon as possible. What they wanted for me was to get a job so that I am not financially dependent on my ‘significant other’. I am financially independent, yes. But is that all? That’s what I worked for all my life?

Would things have been different, if I was not in India? I see a lot of my friends- Indonesians, Thai, Americans- they don’t have to think about any of this. They do what they want, without any pressure. That way, they give their 100% to what they are doing, work or play. Isn’t that independence? The real deal? Even a person earning 10,000 bucks a month, is ‘independent’ financially.

So what would be the right time to ‘settle down’, as they say? What happens when you work all the way up, do well in life, and don’t find your ‘perfect match’? Then you settle with what you get. Is that better than leaving your ambitions behind and settling down as expected?

What about those who never realized that the time was passing? They woke up one day and realized, they were 30 years old and they haven’t accomplished as much as they would have liked to. What does one do then?

I wish there was a slow motion button for this second decade of life. I wish, just for these 10 years, I could control the time.

So yes, to answer that question, age does matter.

P.S: Yayy! I am back. Haha. This post (finally!) is a culmination of a long battle of conversation, I had with a friend, a fellow blogger, that made me 'think' after a long time.

When I saw mom cry

I have been out of blog circuit for quite some time now. And this is my step towards coming back. But I am lazy. Haha. So I am going to post the flash fiction that I had written for a short story writing course that I am doing. All feedback, positive-negative, appreciated. This is my first time with storytelling, so I definitely have a long way to go.

When I saw mom cry

“Did you ask dadu how he is feeling?”, my father asked me as I threw the stone on the last box of the pyramid. “Neh! He is doing naatak. I know he is fine. He likes to grab attention by acting like that. He does it all the time.”, I said as I peeped into my grandfather’s room from the windows outside, with my hands curled next to my eyes and my nose pressed against the glass. He was sleeping. The room was dark. “I will talk to him after I come back from school.”, I said trying to appease my father. Leaving for office, he drove out of the garage as I caught his glimpse in the rear-view mirror of the car. I waved. Hopping on one leg, I turned and continued playing stapoo while waiting for my school bus to arrive.

Dadu-thamma visited us once every year and stayed for a couple of months. First few weeks would be fine but soon I start counting days. How did I become so averse towards them? When I was younger, I remember going with them to Shiva temples in the mornings during holidays. Thamma would pluck white flowers and give it to me. Dadu walked with his tan coloured laathi. All the stray dogs were scared of that stick. Though my grandparents were fond of me, I could never reciprocate.

I noticed something common in all their annual trips. My parents argued and fought a lot in those two months, when my grandparents visited us. I could never follow what they said or what they fought about, but both of them would always be screaming. I also saw ma wiping her tears in the kitchen one night. Dinner, on the other hand, was eerily a quiet affair. Five of us on the table, and nobody would say a word. You could only hear the sound of the cutlery and the wall clock. Sitting there, I would observe people’s eye movement. Thamma would look at dadu and ma, dadu would look at thamma, dadu would look at ma and ma would look at baba who would have his eyes stuck to the plate avoiding all eye contacts. Nobody looked at each other at the same time.

Eight days and ten hours for them to return back, I counted. Ma was coming back home today after three days of business trip. That was the only thing I was looking forward to that day, as I stepped into the school bus. The day at school felt very long and extended. I was waiting to get back home.

I ran towards the house without turning to wave at my friends sitting in the bus. There was a swing in every step despite the sultry 2 o’ clock loo in the afternoon. As I reached near the house, I realized that the front door was open. Usually we kept the front door closed, and used the door at the back to enter. That day the front door was open, and I understood that mom would have just arrived. I sped up my steps. When I reached the main gate, I saw there were a lot of shoes and sandals lying outside the door. I saw a few people coming out of the living room.

As I entered the house, I saw my grandmother weeping, she had never looked so ugly, her eyes were swollen, her teeth seemed to be falling out. And lying there next to her was dadu, motionless. Through her loud sobs, I could not understand what she was saying, but her continuous hand motion, flickering her wrist in the air indicating ‘gaya’ made it clear. Gone indeed. A moment of lost hope dawned on me. A moment when I realised nothing can be undone, like the arrow which leaves the bow, can never be taken back. Irreversible thoughts and actions crept upon me.

I felt like I was in somebody else’s house. And this was not happening to us. I looked for my mom. She was nowhere. The house was full of people, and I couldn’t find a familiar face, until I saw my dad sitting in one corner of the bedroom with a phone on his ears. He was talking to someone. I went and sat in the other corner of the bed which seemed huge now. After a few minutes, he kept the phone down and looked at me with his sharp narrow eyes penetrating mine. He told me about dadu, as a matter of fact without batting an eyelid. I asked him, “Where is ma?”. “Her train has been delayed by 8 hours, she will reach by 4-5. I will go and pick her up in a while.”

I sat there, as my dad dialled another number. I could hear my grandma’s wails from the living room. Strangers walking past would caress my head, giving me a look of pity. I sat there in that corner for what seemed like hours. My stomach was making strange noises, like a knot which does not disentangle. I heard people talking, murmuring as if a little higher decibel will crush everything around like dried leaves lying outside in the garden. Dadu died in his sleep. That’s a peaceful death, they say.

My father left the house to pick my mom from the station. He was pale. I didn’t see any tears. Neither was I crying. But there was a weird pit in my stomach, where I felt my heart drowning, slowly slipping down in the swamp of my stomach. Dadu-thamma were not good to us; I didn’t feel obligated to cry.

Ma entered the living room and dropped on the floor, crying out loud. The two cries were clearly distinct, thamma's and ma’s. I peeped into the room from the corner of the door. I was surprised to see ma crying in spite of all that she had gone through because of them.

Somebody asked me to get a glass of water for mom. Hurrying back to the kitchen, I saw all the glasses were dirty. I felt a heavy air on my shoulders, as I cleaned one glass under the cold tap water. I walked back to that room and gave the glass of water to my mom. She leaned back on the wall and sipped on it slowly.

I got up and left the room. I went and sat in that corner of the bed where I was sitting before. Then I lay down, staring at the ceiling fan rotate, so fast that I could not see the blades. It was like a trembling circle in the centre. I had never seen ma cry like that before. I had never seen a dead body before. It didn’t look any different. It looked like dadu was sleeping, and I could wake him up any moment by making noise in the adjacent room. And ask him how he was feeling. Staring at the ceiling fan, I felt that the fan was about to fall on me and I screamed putting my hands on my eyes. My mother rushed in, my eyes were moist and my heart rate had increased. Scared to remain under the fan, I leaped into my mom’s lap and cried.

Knowledge

My biggest fear is not ‘knowing’. There are so many things I don’t know, I am not aware of. Thanks to internet, now you can google anything you need information on. There isn’t a question in your mind, which somebody else in another corner of the world hasn’t already asked and been answered.

There are so many things to know, there is no end to knowledge. As a kid, I used to hate the G.K. classes. I did not make any sense to me. The entire education system did not make any sense to me, anyway. Why on earth do we need to learn History or Geography or Sanskrit, I often wondered and asked the elders around me. General Knowledge was one subject that I hated from the bottom of my heart. Primary reason was there was no syllabus- they could ask anything, that you are ‘expected’ to know! That uncertainty of questions always irked me.

And now when I have grown up, and especially after being in the Communication industry, I have realised the importance of General Knowledge and the need to be aware. There is so much to know! To explore! And I am not talking just about- Who discovered America, kind of general knowledge. From world history to politics to art to geography, one needs to have at least a ‘working knowledge’ of everything around. And internet I think has heightened this need a lot more, coz you don’t really have an excuse for not knowing!

If I am in a party, and I don’t ‘know’ what others are talking about it puts me off instantly. I feel like a misfit. Whether I agree to what is being discussed, is a different thing altogether- but not knowing is a paranoia. Of course, there are a lot of things you get to know from others, their experiences, their opinions- and that make for good conversations.

This fear of not-being-aware is not just for general knowledge. Even in personal life, when I find out something which was clearly in front of my eyes before and I never realised, I feel confounded. I have always been the kind of person who lived in her own world. I never bothered to know what was happening around me, coz most of the times it was an ugly sight. For a very long time, I did not touch newspapers, coz I was never interested in knowing what was happening in the outside world, a world which I have no connection with, I believed. I had a very few friends and I never looked beyond that. I liked spending time with myself, than others.

And then something happened- I can’t fathom what. But it feels like my blurry vision has come in focus suddenly, like how the camera comes in focus. Everything is crystal clear now.

Well, it looks clear for now. And the sight is ugly.

P.S: This post was not meant to be like this. Looking back at this post and the earlier one- I am surprised myself. I never thought I will write any of this before I started.

P.P.S: There are so many good movies I haven't watched already! (with that realisation this post came into being :P haha)

P.P.P.S: You should watch this cartoon movie called 'Mary and Max'- it is about pen pals (they have a lot of P.Ss in their letters- was just reminded :)) 

Dear Life, With Love

Dear Life,

It has been 24 years trying to find you, understand you, revel in you- celebrate you at least once every year. Last year in particular has been all about FINDING you. One moment, you were with me and the next moment you vanished. I saw a faint structure of you far away in between the fog. I didn’t know where you were going. So I just followed. I ran behind you, panting, losing breath, sweating- if it were a treadmill, I would have lost so much weight (well, let’s just leave that for another day). It seemed like a long winding road, uphill and downhill. I took detours sometimes, hoping to catch up with you faster. While I was at it, I met your twin lovers- Dreams and Reality.

Dreams was a lot of fun. He revealed a different side of me which I never knew existed. I would sit with him for hours, talking about you, sometimes us. Every time I spoke to him, the picture of you in my mind became more colourful. I discovered new music, met new people, explored places I’d never been to before, learnt new things, met his friends- surreal, divine and enigma, boomed with them and felt closer to you.

While I was flirting away with Dreams, one day I came across his alter ego Reality. I didn’t know who he was then. He looked straight into my eyes. I felt a strange connection, like he could read what was inside me. I turned away, not knowing what else to do. But that look stayed with me in my mind, my heart was busy taking care of Dreams. I remembered him often when I was with Dreams and his friends.

One warm evening, when I was tired running behind you carrying a hangover from Dreams’ revelry, I felt someone running behind me. From the corner of my eyes, I saw it was Reality. I slowed down. Everything around me became slow too. I felt the wind getting into my hair, the fallen leaves on the ground were flying in slow motion, my eyes felt heavy and head was in a whirlwind. I felt a flash of darkness in front of my eyes, I lost my balance… Reality was right there to catch me in his arms. I didn’t fall. Even in that moment of unconsciousness when my mind and heart stopped ticking, I could feel his broad arms and the intimate scent. I woke up to find his eyes looking at me. There was something about his eyes, which now made a place in my heart as well.

He explained to me how I had entered a limbo and while I thought I was running, I was actually sleeping. I was in such deep slumber that I imagined I had woken up.

Well, I am pleased to break this news to you that I am ‘in a relationship’ with Reality. And we are extremely happy together. We understand each other so well and he is a great lover! As I turned 24 today, he gave me the most beautiful gift- Wisdom. I have got nothing to complain!

Still running behind you, but with him by my side.

Love,

S

Edited to add: From the Birthday series - How S turns 23