After a hiatus...

My hiatus was owing to two reasons, and I assure my still loyal readers (if there are any, that is) that is not a dearth of thoughts or matters to write about. The thoughts come flowing everyday from the right and left lobes of my brain, from the logical part and the underdeveloped right part of my normal brain. The first reason is laziness which was aggravated by the self deprecating thought that I had nothing new to say. See, I also belong to that category of readers who can't appreciate mediocrity beyond a certain point. So when I write the writer gets intimidated by the snobbish elitist reader. Sometimes when I sit in Sree's room sipping that awesome chai she makes for me and look out of that window with a view, words string themselves together in my head. I know I get that pre-occupied blank look in my eyes when Sree asks me "penny for your thoughts?"...I rush out of the room mumbling some excuse to my room, turn on my system and then I stare at the Blogger home page and all I can think of are those mediocre posts in Facebook, Twitter and Blogger flaunting/celebrating/publicizing everyday life and I remember what I thought when I read them. Another which often prevents me from posting here is the unnecessary association made between my posts and my personal life. Well, I do not owe complete allegiance to the the "author is dead" school of thought and I know I have rechristened my blog "Measuring Life" but it is NOT just MY life. I'm not as narcissistic as I seem to be...so here I am throwing caution about these reasons that I just stated to the wind and once again trying my hand here. An attempt at de-rustifying my mind which seems to sink into a stupor as each day pass by.

Yes/ No

I'd walk to the Red Deeps

More than anywhere else

So when my delighted Will,

Left to wander free for the first time,

I walked straight to the Red Deeps

And I say, a pleasure it is!

In those arduous hours of renunciation

I thought- let me deny myself

This indulgence in the Red Deeps...

But then a young heart, can it give up

Longing and wishing while

It is thoroughly alive?

Entreatingly he said, "Do come,

It will give you pleasure"

I hesitate

It would make me in love with this world

Again!

As I used to love

It would make me long to see and know

A fuller life.

But a young heart performs what it intends

Subdues every counteracting impulse

It brought me the defeat

The defeat I love better than victory...

Dalliance

Everything was white around me in those times, plain and simple. Then red was sprinkled, it left some spots here and there, but nothing everlasting. Some, who cared to look spotted those dots and they wanted to know. Red, my physics teacher had told me, with the longest wavelength is picked out by the human eye first even from among a million colors. I should have kept it in mind. I should have done something to hide those spots. But but by then my red became the butt of jokes...as if they found it ridiculous that I the white lady had no right to those red embellishments. Slowly I started to pretend that the red didn't exist. I stopped putting vermillion on those spots to make their hue deeper. I let them fade. Along with the fading red, faded my memories of a dalliance.

Red is such a stubborn color! It came back at the slightest nudge. And me? As stubborn as red! I let the plainness of my white be splashed with red. But I was also careful to hide it from them. I didn't want their cutting voices telling me that this is just going to be another dalliance..."the blotches are going to be hard to remove, and then you will regret"! No, I didn't want that ringing inside my head...I just wanted the red to engulf me in it's passion.

Dear Red

Is this a dalliance for you?

I don't know yet what it is for me

You red and me white

let us just indulge in this

...

I know I'm not quite elegant when it comes to dalliance with words, but then it's not just the litterateur who feels the need to write...

Written when my days seemed to be full of comas and ellisions...

Tapping my finger tips on the keyboard I'm waiting for a thought to emerge from my mind, to cross the synaptic hurdles, reach my fingers and henceforth on to the screen, this wait is terrifying, when the blankness of my mind and at other times the murkiness of my muddled mind make themselves seem as the blatant truth of my purposelessness. I thought it was not really important to be ambitious...great are those people who can think in categories, the personal in one box, the political in another, Me? My personal and political is one big mess, now they say it's a disease, manifestations being dark circles around the eyes, staring into space, fixations on objects, i think i need a practical philosopher, not hocus pocus or being lost in each others' eyes magic, I need to find out the causa efficiens of my life...

Excerpts from the diary of a part- time existentialist

Life for me was a serious no- nonsense affair, like Upamanyu Chatterjee says in English, August, " a blend of Marcus Aurelius and the Reader's Digest"...when did that begin to change?? When did I begin to feel quite apart from myself??

I was enraged at myself, for agreeing to this...for agreeing to something that compelled me to be polite to him, for being in the 'fix' I was in, for not having planned this with intelligence, for having followed my heart rather than my brain, for having dared to believe that I was adaptable enough to anybody and any circumstance, for not knowing how to change either...I couldn't believe I had brought myself into this!

I think one sees significant moments in life clearly only in retrospect, the events of the past seem to mock at us, they leave in their wake regret, desolation and very rarely we are satisfied at our attempts. Regret about past create a series of atonements and attempts at reparation. We feel like calling up a friend we had hurt and tell her "sorry" or spit out certain words which got caught in the throat due to a tension with the ego. Either you learn to accept and compromise or you surrender yourself without grace and slip into despair. The latter option sometimes appears to be too tempting but then temptations are to be overcome and not indulged in...

Everyday I listen to her explaining the nuances of essentialism and non- essentialism. I swing between two extremes- at one end it seems to me that Reason, exercised in the right manner, explains everything and on the other hand I feel that the human reason is so inadequate. I want Reason to show me the implications of an act before I committed it. I believed, and still believe to an extent, that it was good to be rational, but some overwhelming WHYS are too overwhelming for Reason.

"I don't want the friends of the different stages of my life to meet. Their encounter would mean an encounter between various facets of myself, face to face. Whatever would they say to each other? I wonder, and then I immediately correct myself. It was foolish of me to think that 'I' would form the topic of their conversation. Is it pride which makes me imagine such atrocities?" Everytime I hear that my friends are hanging out wihtout me, I check myself from dreaming about a conversation which centers around me and my absence by going back to this passage which I had jotted down from some book I had read in my teens.

Fading Nights and Breaking Dawns

The night is fading

Dawn is breaking at the horizon

A while did it take

Before I made out

The rules of this bewildering game

The vicious circle of bitter and sweet

I set out, never telling anyone

Disappearing into the fading night

To play this mystery of a game

The light from the horizon illumine my senses

Of the truth that a young heart is not familiar to loving

Back then it was an act he says

"Now I'm being truthful"

Like an arrow in the hands of a novice archer

I'm tossed around

Now I have to dream to see him

Fight for your kingdom, dear!

But not for your love?

Run from his intimacies, his entreaties- warnings which

Echoed meaninglessly in the night

Now drown me in the salty waters of guilt and remorse

In the breaking of dawn

What is the mystery of this game?

There are too many unexpressed thoughts

The onus is...

Next time I see Mystery I can call him by his name

All said and done It never dies

I still live with the thought that

The same sun shines over him and me

Love and rebellion, two sides

Of the same coin, disappointed

In one we turn to the other

I became a rebel

But I'm lonely

But the irony is...

No one believes me!!!

When I tried speaking

"I will conceal nothing", I told myself when I put pen to paper. I loved Kamala Surriayya's (I prefer to call her Madhavi kutty)short stories. Is it the stories and their narrative tropes which lure me to read her tales again and again and again or is it because it is connected with the first ever act of rebellion in my life? Kripa warned me that I should think of some other writer in Malayalam for the activity that the Malayalam teacher was planning for us...but I was too loyal to Madhavi kutty to listen to Kripa's sensible advice. The teacher looked at me with distaste and informed that the writer of my choice lacked "literariness", "a whimsical woman!" ...if I remember correctly it was with great difficulty that I blinked back tears. It always hurts me when a sensitive woman is derided. The disdain lodges in my heart and hurts every time I think "I will conceal nothing" when I put pen to paper.

I think, I am not happy. I will be open. I start writing...If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips, clenched together like the pieces of a puzzle put together...I freeze in my tracks...No! I strike out what I wrote and write about more "sensible" stuff...nature seems to be a safe topic...Maybe I will wait till I have the security of wedlock to venture into more daring stuff...