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​10 Feb 2025 ​My first day at attempting a public journaling sesh... Why public? Because it would help me stick to my commitment. I used to be a voracious journaller back in my teens. And my teens were in the 1990s, so I'm sure not the only one.  But then by 2013, it had gotten digital, and by 2016 I found myself telling people that I can't think unless I have a keyboard at my fingertips. Meanwhile, medically I have battled bipolar, borderline, anxiety, mania etc., all of whose therapy mandated journaling, and all of which I fulfilled with some scribbles and doodles on the backs of rejected A4 size print outs from my office. Who would judge? ​Today, as I complete a quarter and half past thirty five on this planet, I feel lesser than I did when I was barely twelve. I used to write poems, draw pictures and steal money to get all of them color-printed from cyber cafés back in the day. I thought of myself as the biggest and the best who deserved to be seen and heard. It's a different matter that the mother of my then-romantic interest happened to be a prolific litterateur who critiqued my love letters with more details than the person whom I loved ever did. But the job was done. I did impress the parents, and the parents impressed their child and I managed to have a happy, fulfilled romantic life... till I fell in love with another; invoking the wrath of the very mother who was once my Cupid's assistant. ​A decade and a couple of divorces later, I can retell this story. But, today, the topic is journaling. At the age of twelve, I didn't know the difference between writing for oneself and writing to someone else. So, much of my love letters read as rants, as Gen Z peeps would say. But, at least I wrote. With age, it became very clear to me that no one is reading me. Except, my father, my ex-love's mother, my then best friend and myself.  Funnily, this very fact that became a deterrent to continue writing, is today my biggest safeguard against writing. I can now write freely, knowing for sure that no one's gonna read. That's freedom. Until next time, T!

So why does she need him? Him, who makes her happy only in the intervals of life's drudgery; who torments her by making his absences more important dates to remember; and whose sentimental refusal to be a part of her façades and charades makes her yearn for an unattainable pleasure; whose mere presence makes her feel that this must be love, that thing that the poets have sung for eons. A gaze into her yes, even when it’s filled with hatred; a touch even when it’s careless; a hug, even when it’s formal; a breath taken together even when in vengeance: miracle and love are all interchangeable understatements in all these rendezvous. Because, everything good and bad and purely evil becomes so unfathomably profound and immeasurably meaningful in that sudden moment when her eyes meet his. Even the most prosaic, cynical and idealistic of human beings would start lying to their families, if they had the misfortune of experiencing this even once in their lifetimes. Even the most despised and despaired of men would hold on to hope and salvation, only so that this lasts forever. The etymology of magic wasn’t studied by the believers of logic. Trouble starts when this love asks for its own legitimacy; when it desires a bed every night instead of just the New Moons; when she takes her lover's hands, holds, feels, wraps her fingers she around, and pulls close to her breasts; this love, without which they have lived forever, suddenly claims to be no more. This love, who realised its place in the story a decade too late. This love, which is cloaked in the coping mechanisms of broken souls. This love that swears on Charles Dickens and Lord Byron that it has a safe password to the pleasures of flesh, even when there’s poison running through its victim's veins. This love claims for the luxuries of a perfect present before it can claim the honour of fate.

We used to lie down on our backs in the unkempt lawn behind your bungalow, and gaze at the stars when we were fifteen. Fifteen years later, we find ourselves watching crowds from fifteenth floor windows. We categorize the hairy and the hairless into neat boxes, traced with all twenty of our fingers in the evening air that get entangled trying to count and calculate these mortal patterns that we see on the masks. We wonder if the faces beneath are celebrating or questioning how our lives are getting a little worse with each passing leap year. Once, we debated if time heals, or simple despair does. We went into our hearts, with all twenty of our fingers and untied the knots just in time. No one wants the agonies flooding our city’s slippery streets again. We’d rather take death in little daily doses, and let it trickle past the walls of the esophagus. It’s like liquid lava that erupted without a notice and now wants to make a mark on the ruptured ground, before drying up into a rock itself. But when death has seeped deep into the bone marrow of the living, polluting the veins, arteries, nerves and organs irrevocably, we turn back to take one last look at the happy children on the unkempt lawn, who plucked the stars out of the sky and then, blindfolded each other. The lyrical madness of youth engulfed us and now we can’t find the stardust that we had so carelessly discarded as waste.

When he woke up the next time, he was aware and alert and even painfully conscious of every bone in his body. He swore to himself that this was the last time he will drink a drop of the fluid that had swallowed up more than a decade of his life. When he had first woken up after twenty days of drinking whiskey non-stop, he remembered finding his t-shirt and shorts and the bedsheet around him caked in a rancid layer of dried mucus-like substance. His hands felt limp and his legs, lifeless. He couldn’t find an ounce of energy in any of his fingers or toes or knees or elbows or any other joint in his body. He thought to himself with a smirk, this is probably how it looks like for dying old men with nobody to clean their stools after them. This is probably how the last few hours of hundreds of humans must have been. Before me. And will be. After me. So it’s okay to embrace death without feeling too bad about it. Since he couldn’t leave the bed, he figured that he needed to get rid of this noxious odour around him at least. Maybe the fastest & the most pleasant way to die would to be pass out with more alcohol in the bloodstream. He propped himself up on one elbow, and stretched his other hand as much as possible towards the bedside table. A plastic translucent tumbler and a glass bottle with some clear golden liquid stood on that table, a few inches apart, as if they had vowed to avoid any interaction between each other or even the human hand coming at them. He reached for the tumbler, but it refused to take shelter in his grasp. As the tumbler tumbled down the table, it spilled out whatever was left of the cloudy brown fluid staining its walls for so long. The smell was strong but also sweeter than the bilious concoction he was lying in. He decided to reach for the bottle and before he could open the cap, it fell down. The whiff of odour made him even more squeamish. He took a deep breath, and then another and then another. No, he mumbled. He needed to comfort his senses before death ends the need for any. He lowered his forearms and bent them to explore beneath the bed. His fingers began to feel around the floor till they touched a cylindrical container. He immediately knew that he had to be careful with this one, lest it rolls farther away from him. Maybe it was the knowledge that this vessel contained water, or maybe it was the olfactory discomfort, or maybe it was what he had experienced so many times after a phase of binge drinking for days: dehydration. He felt his mouth and throat drying up very fast and for a second he thought, if I vomit blood now I wouldn’t know if it’s the liver or the throat. He mustered all the power he could to keep himself from coughing, but amidst the swirl of sarcastic sentences he kept thinking of in third person, he was finding it hard to keep his eyes open or even concentrate on the activity he intended to do. He thought of giving one attempt at recovering the water from the other edge of the bed. His hand landed exactly on the bottle; and his grip was firm around the cylindrical body of the vessel. With the familiar confidence that comes only under the influence of his favourite intoxicant, he yanked his hand out from beneath bed. Instead of rolling back up on the bed with this trophy of a water bottle, he rolled outwards and toppled downwards. Banging his shoulder against the edge of the bed on this brief journey to the bottom, he lost control of the inertia of motion that he had so forcefully imposed on the bottle of water. As he lay on the cold marble floor, the sacral bone sent a tingle up his spine. He turned to look at the bottle of water which had stopped turning after hitting the wall more than a few feet away. Then, he turned the other way round and peeped underneath the bed. There was no light, no odour and no sight of death either. As the pain from the waist started rising upwards, and something sticky started dripping off the left eye-brow, he dragged himself into the dark cave beneath the bed. His back hurt too much lie on, so he curled up on the side, and rested his head on his right forearm. He closed his eyes. When he woke up the next time, he was aware, alert and painfully conscious of every bone in his body.

"If it's up there at the hallowed gallows, it doesn't deserve my wrath, does it?", said the tortoise inside the cage to its friend in the cage beside. The night that took the railway and the western landscape away from the ticking sticks, pushed his cerebral puzzles to unfold in the opposite direction and empty into a blunt stone pit. There, he glistened some, he listened some, and whistled the rest of the way till the uproar at the tunnel end became too loud to miss. "Electricity was their savior. Water was their salvation. And some dead bird's meat kept the savages alive till they could walk up to the middle of the crowded crossroad and leap up in the air and not come back." I remember the boy whose mother was killed by the police, and the stains on his face that shone in the streetlight making him look as divine as divinity could be. I don't remember his four-lettered name. He told me that the fishes that died with their eyes wide open could abduct our souls, and transmit it to someplace else. He also told me that if you watch the sun set, it doesn't come back the next day; a new sun comes instead. Polite daylight does not fight for space in his new home. He thinks he was a white horse in his previous birth. He doesn't believe that air is fluid too. He can stand on his toes for more than an hour. He thinks that there is a kind of spark between the t and h in the word 'death'. He wants to marry a woman with diabetes, because his diabetic mother had blue eyes. He wants to buy an hourglass without any sand in it. His eyes would remind you of Google images of black holes. I also remember what he had written on the canon ball with white aerosol spray: celebrate; and the dockyard where we had met, where an empty bottle lay on the ground with its mouth turned towards me.

An omnipresent specter possesses my clock: its lopsided hands embrace my evanescence like former lovers from a lifetime before. As time holds my clock captive in its passion sometimes too light, sometimes too tight, sometimes too pendulous, but never out of sight: Eros, Philia and Agape wrinkle away in cold, cruel cellars. Their cathartic invocations grow elastic and oscillatory; thus banished forever into a ponderous life. A heavy hollow drum stands in for the mirror image. Fleshy mallets batter its membrane, as Oil droplets drench a stack of hay, and Recycled bullets pierce through crystals glistening with greed till the dust calls everything back.