Pandora's Box

Picture: J W Waterhouse

A secret prophecy.

Hidden. Locked. Safe.

In the deepest, darkest recesses of mind and heart.

A prophecy as unchangeable as – what? What, after all, is permanent, unshakeable, always itself…? Once, she would have said as unchangeable as love; now, it’s a word that doesn’t come to mind immediately.

Things change. Things alter. Things don’t stay the same.

They tell us and tell us – and tell us some more. The collected wisdom of the ages, the old stories, the authentic myths and fairytales, the epics themselves. They don't whisper it, or speak in riddles. They give it to us straight and unvarnished: things change.

But in our youth, our arrogance, our naiveté, we choose not to listen, to laugh in the face of impermanence, to challenge change itself. Because love knows itself to be immortal, and lovers acknowledge no weakness.

“THIS is forever." "THIS is different." "WE are different." "We KNOW.”

We stand steadfast in our convictions and we enjoy the sheer, heady, grand joy of what we know. (Or think we know.)

And then, time shifts.

One day, the secret prophecy is there. It doesn’t appear suddenly, abruptly. There is no jolt, no shocking assault on the senses. It’s just…there. As if it’s always been there.

It pulsates, insistent in its steady, constant rhythm, keeping pace with the beating of her heart.

She notices it as the days slip by languorously, lazily. It's insidious, omnipresent, niggling.

She contemplates it, this foreign entity within herself. She considers it from a distance, impartially. This secret prophecy seems to be an unknown quantity. Which is impossible. There can be no unknowns – after all, she is secure in her knowledge, which is complete. She *knows*. The prophecy is nothing, it is simply illusory. It’s superstition, lingering debris from years gone by, the wreckage of old notions that has buried itself into her being. Ignore it, she commands herself. It is nothing.

It is no use, though.

The prophecy will not, *cannot* be denied. It is as undeniable as – well, as love.

It beats, day and night. Like a dripping tap, it echoes in her mind until it is as if there are only two things in the world: the secret prophecy, and herself.

She concedes defeat – that too, was foretold. It was destined.

For you see, change is an impetus, an unstoppable force that cannot be staved off, cannot be stopped, cannot be reversed.

When it meets an immovable object, like love, the object realizes that it isn’t really immovable after all. Change is too strong, too hell-bent on having its way. And it always does.

She relents, she weakens, and the defenses come crashing down. The secret prophecy cracks open, and the glow of the unknown turns into the darkness of knowledge.

Where did love go? How did she miss it walking out of the door, bag and baggage? How did forever turn into a phase?

She is left, bereft. Her heart is not broken; in fact, she can't feel her heart at all. She grasps at all she used to know, trying desperately to recapture what she once felt – but memory is already working its deceptive enchantment. She remembers, certainly, that she was in love, a tugging, bone-deep, soul-wrenching, passionate sort of love – but she knows it only theoretically. She understands the surface meaning of the words, but she cannot reach the deeper meaning that lies within. Love has left the building, and she is all alone.

She stands in the ruins of yesterday's knowledge; all is broken, all is lost. Today is bleak; tomorrow, impossible.

Change has been here, too.

Where will it go next?

Becoming Your Own Sequel

Image: lubow

If it can be broke, then it can be fixed
If it can be fused, then it can be split
It's all under control
It's all under control

Do we lose fragments of ourselves along the way?
Does the compromising, the conversation, the cynicism take its inevitable toll?
Are the losses worth the end result? From the days and ways we choose not to remember, to the people we don't like to be reminded of?

All you need is time.
All you need is time.
All you need is time.

Castles in the air.
"Happily ever after."
Magical myth making enmeshed in our dreams and aspirations, thanks to Disney, romantic comedies, Bollywood blockbusters, and trashy novels devoured on airplanes.

The dust has only just begun to form.

New and shiny and pretty.
I can almost taste the glimmering joy.
This is how it's supposed to be.
Is it too late? For me, for you, for us?
Have we seen too much, done too much, said too much?
Have we made it impossible to create a fairytale conclusion for ourselves?

Mmm, what you say?
That you only meant well?
Well, of course you did.
Mmm, what you say?
That it's all for the best?
Because it is.
Mmm, what you say?
That it's just what we need?
You decided this.

Can I recapture myself?
Can you recapture yourself?
Are we irreversibly altered?
Is innocence forever lost?

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

What about the promised wisdom? The promised lessons learned from experience?
The honing of spirit that pain is supposed to bring with itself?
It is hard to feel anything except like a patient etherised upon a table.
Was the story supposed to turn out like this?
Really?

i carry your heart with me
i carry it in my heart

There is no escaping it.
There is no going back to the start.
There is only change - now and for ever after.

There's still time for you,
Time to buy and time to lose
There's never a wish better than this
When you've only got a hundred years to live.

This is it then, I suppose.

I have become my own sequel.

A Monsoon of Quiet Loss

A ramshackle heart. 

A balcony. 

And monsoon.

Rain that brings with it memories of joy and love, now long gone. A breeze that carries the notes of freewheeling days, splashy puddles, raindrop-fresh giggles, and crystal clear convictions. 

A day that reminds me of Before. 

Before the anticlimax, Before the petering out, Before the endless vacuum.

Most things in life don't come to an end with a flash and bang, with drama and effective stage exits. They just...fade. Not with a bang, but a whimper - isn't that how the world ends?

Fleeting, fleeting love. 

Oh-so-deceptive as it first makes its way into your heart and your life. 

Whispering of ever-afters and rock-solid permanence. 

Singing of beloved tales and classic films that seem to bear testimony to the sheer dependability of love. Lulling you into believing in the magic. 

Love.

It makes the world go round, it's all you need, you can't buy it, it'll see you through the time of cholera, it is a story in itself, it's hard on the knees, it bites and bleeds and lives and dies and begs and pleads.

So when it finally happens, when it's-there-one-minute-and-gone-the-next, you feel like you've been punched in the gut and had the wind knocked out of you. It's not like it went kicking and screaming, on the heels of terrible betrayal or irreconcilable differences or one of those equally loaded phrases. 

It left quietly, one morning, while you were making toast for breakfast. 

So, you try desperately to retrieve it, rescue it, bring it back - at any cost.

But it's gone. For good. 

The devastation is heart-stopping, because it's the aftermath of a storm so silent and insidious that you never even realized it was there. It's left rubble in its wake, a debris of pointlessness and dreams no longer dreamed, of songs that just sound like empty words, of broken promises, of dangling conversations that are punctuated with sentences that mean nothing. 

It is a wreckage that reeks of absence, of failure - not of high-strung emotions like anger and grief and guilt. 

A quiet collapse. 

Love: a house of cards that the slightest random bit of breeze can topple with a soft swoosh.

Thus, the balcony.

And the ramshackle heart.

And a monsoon of loss.

Subtle, insiduous, and maddeningly insistent

Image: Bruce Dale 

Don't look for structure in this one. Or plot. Or beginnings and conclusions. Or articulation of already-formed thoughts and storylines and concepts.

I have none of those things to offer at this point in time. I'm too busy trying to make my way through a maze of thoughts that have gotten too numerous and inarticulate to make for a decent blog, forget a decent night-time conversation with the self. So this one is for that old cliche: resolution through words.

There's enough that comes to mind.

There is suffering and illness. There is misery and hospital beds. There is the ICU - a word that struck terror in all of our hearts at first, till we became resigned to it in the weeks that followed, and then said "ICU" in the same tired voice we had first heard the receptionist say it.

There is hope and then the loss of hope, and then hope again and then the loss of hope again, and then- then, there is death. My first conscious encounter with death, a loss that matters in a way that none before it have. The pain of it is sudden and overwhelming. But it can be dealt with. Because of the reassurances we have, said constantly by everyone to everyone till they become the mantra in the weeks afterward: "a long and fruitful life", "released from his suffering", "better to go like this than have stayed on without independence"... It is made easier by the fulfilment of his last request. A family mends itself slowly and surely, as it comes together to honour its greatest and most enterprising member; but it is too late for the architect of this process to enjoy what he has brought about.

There is an already half-disappearing image of an old man sitting in front of his dead brother's photograph and crying for forty lost years. His regret is so powerful that you recoil from him, and you shudder and hope you will never taste regret like that, so intense that it is almost acidic. And there is a renewed commitment to apologising- sometimes even when it's not your fault. Because the price of being righteous (or even right) is just too terribly high sometimes.

Then, Agra. We are here because this death needs to be accorded its proper place, its proper meaning by the framework that sheltered this giant of a man when he was alive. It is a misty, cold morning. Winding deserted streets at the crack of dawn. A hall full of men and women meditating in unison. The head of this religious sect believes in the power of collective energies. Afterwards, there is a field of crops that are ready to be harvested. And there are plenty of scythes. It is almost surreal. I am in a field in Agra at 7:00 AM on my 24th birthday. (That has to be one of the unlikeliest autobiographical sentences I've ever written.) The harvesting is a community project run by the sect- we all sit down and proceed to cut the crops with scythes- it turns into a bit of a competition, a game, and we laugh and talk while quickly mastering the art of harvesting, as more seasoned members generously pass on bits of wisdom to us ("Make the cut right at the bottom of the stalk- no point wasting the last few inches!"). We are shushed at regular intervals by senior overseers, and our group (which ranges from a 19-year-old to a 62-year-old) subsides into chastened silence at periodic intervals- just until someone cracks the next joke in a muttered overtone.

The head of the sect arrives. A number of people in the field have come because there are problems they want his advice about. Some have come to share good news. A stern senior member makes us all gather round as he explains the process to us. There are rules and guidelines - "Don't talk", "Don't shuffle", "Don't interrupt" and so on. I feel like we're in school; no-one has spoken like this to me in many years. But it seems to fit- in this place, in this context, perhaps it could only be this way. We line up, waiting for the head to reach us. Progress is slow, even though none of the devotees speak. Why does no-one speak? Because they have already given short summaries of their problems to the religious committee earlier- and anyway, the head of the sect is omniscient so there is no need for conversation.

Finally, he reaches us. Fragments that will stay with me (and certainly with everyone else who was there) all my life.
"He was a good, good man."
"He went too early."
"All of you stay together."
"He did such good work. All these years that he managed Delhi...we've never had a problem from there."
"All of you stay together."

And that...was that.

Lost and Found

Image: Henry Weddiasmara

“Everyone belongs somewhere.”
“Maybe not everyone…. Maybe some people just get lost.”

There is a certain amount of charm in being that lost person. It’s undeniable. The whirlwind of cynical freewheeling, the moments of crisis on windy terraces, the bitterness of vodka as a Friday night savior, the complete disdain for long-term consequences, the vaguely haunting gestures of trying to get your bearings, the gloss of dismissive statements, the satisfaction of cutting sarcasm, and the haggard, yet real, smiles exchanged across a room, across a lifetime, across a dimension that is typically impassable…

There is also a sense of vacuous loss when you transition from being lost to being found, being fine, being happy…. Not nostalgia exactly. That would be to romanticize a time that cannot – should not – be romanticized. But even once the rose-tinted glasses have been relegated to the heap of dusty memories … there remains a slippery sense of having lost something in the present joy.

Lost…what? Is it the general madness? Or is it the rollercoaster extremes that lost people seem to thrive on…? And even there, to clarify, it’s hard to miss the highs, because those exist even when one is happy – almost exactly the same ones. So, impossible as it may sound, maybe it is the rock-bottom despair that is missed…? Of course, it makes no sense. Except in the most roundabout of ways…where it becomes clear that what binds us all together as a race is a complex whole of pain and happiness. And all of a sudden, it feels like only half the connection is being made. Isolated from the pain, and privy only to the content pleasures…

Humanity kicks in at this point, and it becomes easier to identify with the young boy at the signal, the tired-looking receptionist, the gas-tragedy agitators, the aging patriarch, the anguished colleague, and the numb friend. It is almost as if the capacity for pain needs to be reinvented...through improvised methods…in case one becomes totally alone in that solitary bubble of joy.

So the tears well up, almost inexplicably… at advertisements that you know are manipulating all the right strings… at songs that you would have classified as sentimental nonsense in another lifetime… at distant situations – the kind where it was easier to be a harsh realist when you had your own situations to deal with… at the third drink when you know perfectly well that you’ll stay stark sober for another two at least – but the mind plays tricks on you, bewilders you, leads you down that maze of sorrow you have inhabited once upon a time… Fighting your enemy is easier when he or she exists outside of you, isn’t it?

Have I got it right? Or is it just easier to complicate something and turn it into a shimmering smoky fable than to accept that, maybe, we’re just a dissatisfied race without the capacity to be truly happy…? Maybe the grass always is greener on the other side…? But, no… I cannot believe that… Reveling in joy, but having melancholy tug at you once in a while confirms the best of anyone’s humanity, does it not? In an essentially solitary existence, imagination is our only source of compassion… And how can we (and why should we) deny the best part of ourselves?