Stealing a little something from someone

I read this one blog by a female and it takes me wherever she goes. Its like having a non fiction series and knowing that the protagonist does really really exists at this very moment, at least I hope so. This is only the kind of non fiction I have been reading last few months. I follow a few others but this one is the most proliferate and this female really has to write you can feel the urge as strong as wanting to throw up that too projectile style. I know thats gross but thats the type of emotions I'm talking about. I have read this before somewhere...that you are a writer only when you just need to write. You cant really stop and you don't do it for all the success you dream about. The writing is the result by itself and destiny unto itself.
Writing is such a stunning form of expression that someone light years away from me otherwise can convey feelings so close to my own. A lesbian, native of Alaska and a freight train hopping self proclaimed hobo her and me a straight sheltered female from a smothering Indian background a fairly recent immigrant in US.
This is why it feels like stealing something from someone, the whole nuance of her words they describe everything she felt in that moment. I adore that ability a few of us have by which we can transform the mundane into pure magic. It feels like stealing those emotions and sensations she had then and righteously so. As a writer she puts all her secrets out there for us to steal them and enjoy that guilty pleasure.
Someday, yes someday I might lay it all down like them, the great people that can honestly display all their hurts and joys in form of words that glitter like diamonds and gold in a jewelery case of metaphors and phrases.
Then others can steal what they want, what they can and use it as they wish....

Hot Tears on a Starry Night

I felt like it so I walked out
Late in the night out on the grass
I don't know about the moon
but the sky was filled with starry light

I was thinking hard
I don't know why
Of nights passed and other starry nights

I remembered then a tiny girl
who looked at the sky and the moon and the clouds
she knew not why the world was so
tilted at angles and hard to decipher
she was supposed to be warm
she was supposed to be safe
she was supposed to be loved
She knew all of it then

With my feet touching the moist grass
I thought of a tiny boy
who trusted me so
I remembered his eyes, the tears he never shed
I remember holding his hand
As best I could, as best as I knew then
I remember telling him stories about stars
of a world far away in a distant land

I see them both trying to help each other
him clutching hard to that pillow of his
her not knowing how to do it all
Most of the time she didn't know if she was coming or going

I remember them both like it was yesterday
That memory will never fade away

I don't cry for many things anymore
but if I ever do....
I might
shed some hot tears for those two on a starry night

Rainy Days

Its been a long long time since I have been to Mumbai. The city I called home for the first 22 years of my life. I gaze back and try to think hard what it was like, I mean the crux of it all, but all I remember is the daily, the routine the unbroken hum of activity and the rain, oh God yes the rain.
I watch movies, yeah the Hindi ones about Mumbai and they always portray how its heartless but people almost always band together and overcome whatever it is that is evil, may it be a huge scam, terrorism or any other ailing human social situation and if they cannot overcome it they at least have the dignity to die trying. And just to set the tone of this rambling lets get one thing straight, I have no such insights. Maybe some see it that way (big city, people as one etc.), my perception of the time I was a part of Mumbai is very singular, just me and all the rest as in people, weather, circumstances a huge part of the scenery. I'm not even saying there is no kindness and faith, all I'm saying is thats not what this post is about.
Mumbai for me set that tone, the city always threatened to swallow me whole and all I did was walk with my eyes straight ahead and accept what everything was and decipher the beauty as I went, from the whole scenery that was Mumbai.
By walking I mean the actual walk, I walked most of the time. Sometimes to reach destinations but mostly just for the sake of walking. I walked the city in the scorching May summers, the mild December winters and the season that is really the defining feature of Mumbai, the monsoons. I walked in the traffic, through the exhaust fumes, around the puddles and by the dusky sea shore. It was all about walking and thinking. I have also walked through the slums and today I wonder how I was never assaulted or killed, maybe I really was invisible the way I felt most of the time in the big sea of people in Mumbai.
I used to take the train from the suburb I lived in to go to Mumbai downtown and it was not work related so I could avoid the "crush" hours. I went to the British Council Library for reading and browsing and once done with that I just strolled the streets till it was time to catch the bus back home. This whole journey took on new meanings when done during the monsoons.
I thought just thinking about it would make me write volumes but now it seems like its so deep inside me and so delicate I can only feel it in the middle of my chest, very near my heart. The moist emotion of walking in the rain in Mumbai. The hazy misty dusks and dark gray early mornings with clouds so heavy with moisture and promises of downpours that they looked sagged down upon the city making it look cozy and where this sky met the sea it looked like a wet canvas that had no dimensions a place where a being could cross over into something surreal.
I have been away from Mumbai and its with mixed emotions I think of a lot of things this place represents, but one thing that I have unequivocal feelings about is the rain, and its all good.
Rain in Mumbai is a downpour calling it a shower is an understatement. Its not just a weather condition or a season, in my mind its a place. A place where I was a child one moment and then a teenager and finally a young woman of 22 when I bid it goodbye. Its a place where I carried the heavy heart that only a teenager can boast about, I shed unimportant tears that meant so much then in that place called rain. I fell in love and fell out of love with the heart wrenching and short lived fantasies that only youth supplies. And now in my heart I get to carry forever the bruise of all the rains I lived through in Mumbai. Every new place I have lived in since, countries and oceans apart, when it rains I'm back in that place called rain in Mumbai and my bruise hurts with bittersweet pain of youth that I hope and pray will never go away.

So So Common Place

Here I was, so glad I could string words together and actually make sense. Yup I could serve up a poem if the mood hit me right that may or may not rhyme...but it was an honest one. As in not thought up word by word to actually match or sound jingle like.
Then I got into this habit of checking out random blogs, common people's blogs as in not established writers...and whoa!!! everyone has a story to tell and we are all writers, this fact got so obvious that I felt I fell so short in literary department...I felt ashamed to have thoughts in my own mind and a little voice kept nagging, saying "so what? probably someone else would have a better take on it and even a more interesting argument".
Well now this rambling in the previous paragraph is what is making me write further, it is to simply quiet that nagging voice. Alright so I have a very commonplace attitude and since I may very well be the only person visiting here, since this blog is just my very own "Vent Room", I'm going to be my common place self and put down my commonplace ideas and in general this blog will be one mundane stomping grounds of my whims and fancies as they are.

Beauty

Silly, volatile, tangy love
Sunny, transparent candy floss days
Lemony dappled sunshine
Sweet honey warm sunsets
Spangled sprinkled sugar stars on velvety blue evening skies
Foamy, milky, frothy high tide waves
Tickling, balmy breeze so invigorating
Silvery, grainy very soft like clouds under my toes..the tender sand
The glorious perfume of briny ocean
Salty chipped diamond tear stains
Thats me right there on the seashore
Barefoot, engulfed and overwhelmed by the beauty that is life.

I learnt being nice wont kill me......

No yesterday wasn’t a bad day. In a new place, a new town riding the bus to get to an interview that was more unlikely to be positive than not. I was taking it in my stride though and I stood waiting for my ride tuned in to my iPOD.
A while later I saw him coming my way, he walked with gusto. Soon I saw him saying, more like miming something to me. I tried the usual I can’t hear youuuuuuu I got my ears full, but it was not to be as he kept at it and I can only be that much rude.
Soon, there I was telling him which buses go from there and what not. Then the most obvious conversation maker, time wrecker and small talk initiator question was asked by him "are you from India?" and I contemplated “No Nicaragua, Uruguay” (some country he might not know about so he couldn’t discuss it further)….anything but India. But out popped “Yes” which I couldn’t believe.
Oh yeah and this “HE” isn’t some tall, dark and gorgeous kind of he….not that if it was Adonis himself I would have reacted any other way, because when this girl is preoccupied she’s preoccupied. This was a man in his later sixties, of course from India, retired probably visiting his children here in the US and looking to make his time pass by hitting off a conversation with a DESI stranger. This happened to be yours truly today.
From there on I learnt he was a widower, retired and visiting his daughter (and the winner of the guessing game is…myself). I was making all the appropriate noises at all the appropriate moments and seriously I was beginning to feel sympathy for the old guy.
The bus soon arrived and we both boarded it and by this time I was being the studious listener and correct comment maker. I was telling my self what a great humanist I was for taking the time to be nice to this old man, who else but me would be this generous with their words and ears. He was telling me he was off to some Indian senior center and how he planned to give a presentation on spirituality and he read me his notes. By then I was so taken with my innate goodness that I actually heard the whole presentation and extended myself by making careful observations that I knew he would appreciate.
Now he had decided it was my turn to be the talker and he was asking me where I was headed and I told him where and for what (the interview). He had guidance ready for my this endeavor and he proceeded to tell me how I should present myself, extend my hand and smile even if it killed me. Then with a wink he added that having God on my side couldn’t hurt so I should think of Shiva in my mind and breathe through my right nostril 3 times and enter the interviewing room with my right foot. I was indulging him with my benevolent afore mentioned "smile even if it killed me"….smile.
He was wishing me luck in all the languages we had in common between us and asking me wasn’t I lucky that I had met him and now had this fail proof mantra for success. This was the exact moment I saw my stop pass right before my eyes and the bus climbed the bridge which means no stopping till it reaches the other side….hence the metaphorical point of no return. My only option was to stay on the bus till its last stop and then when it turned around after a 20 minute break get off on my stop.
My face must have shown it, my smile must have dropped and even when I was controlling it the near sob must have made itself apparent. Before me the old man had transformed too he looked seriously apologetic, like he blamed himself (which was pretty much true). I was more upset about my schedule being disrupted than the interview, for which I didn’t hold great expectations.
So there I was thinking "what the hey", in the least I had been an okay companion to a lonely older person and someday if I was lucky to reach that age and be well enough to get around I hope I meet someone like me on a lonely day too. I may not be a candidate for sainthood but man at least I tried to be a nice person (when I wanted to that is).

Moment

When is the exact moment we realize, we are not immortal

When is the exact moment it dawns on us that our loved ones can die

And leave us abandoned with nothing and no one to blame

When is the exact moment we feel the huge misery which cannot be contained in the whole world

At the same time we realize our own smallness in the universe

Helpless and waif like, weak and distraught

When is the exact moment when we overcome the life's greatest epiphany

that no matter how much you know or believe you cannot go on with the loss you endured

you still move on ...

The people you once held precious in heart become faded memories....life waits for nothing

When is the moment we succumb to the fact that even after reaching the peak we aimed for

there are still battles to be fought and wars to be won

When is that exact lightening moment that it finally becomes clear

Our best is not enough its not even close

And so it matters none

One or hundred, the effort, the total, the sum

When in that moment instead of breaking down and crying

We marvel at the challenges that are out there for us to conquer

We pick up the meagre pieces of our life and set sail, because new horizons are still to be found

Broken and undone, we might be then...

But still in that moment we choose to play the game.