W - Wasted

She clutched the neck of the bottle like it was a lifeline and took another swig. Her step staggered just a little bit but her glazed eyes gave away the number of drinks she had downed before she had laid her hands on the bottle. 

Hours ago, when she had taken her first sip, the alcohol had burnt at her throat. Now, she didn’t really feel anything.

And that’s pretty much how she liked it. Numbed.

Numbed from the pain of reality. Numbed from the wreck of a family which had never given her any security, let alone love, the pain of being stuck in a dream job with a boss who put his hands up her skirt every single chance he got. Numbed from the complications and implications of having too many people wishing her a happy birthday but too few friends.

Today, she reveled in that state of numbness when the only thing she could feel was the buzz in her ear. Today, she took pleasure in the buzz even as her head sagged onto her shoulder and her spine slumped against the couch.

Today, she got wasted. For tomorrow was going to be a fresh battle.

 
P.S: There is something very mysterious about people who drink alone.

Of Broken Wings

Note: The owner of this blog is a stupid fool. Why? Because she blocked herself from Blogger and Facebook with great intentions of studying for her exams. But the plan failed when she found out that she didn’t know how to unblock herself and spent the rest of study time trying to find out. Which defeated the whole purpose of blocking herself in the first place. Hopefully they’ll help me unblock myself within the week. Anyway, till then my dear beau has agreed to post for me, so please don’t mind if I don’t reply to comments or even publish them, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t. Yes, I know. I’m a stupid fool.

This is fiction inspired by an tiny incident in Fringe. Hope you like it:)

***

They loved their break. And I loved watching them on their break.

Knees getting scraped, silly but serious games in play, fights for the swings and that one child who always shares his snack box with every single child around… I had always loved children, their innocence and their unblemished view of the world.

I liked watching the future of this world at a stage before they get caught in the rigors of human existence.

I loved KG B dearly. I loved the way their eyes lit up when they saw me come in, their haphazard sing-song good mornings, the way they kept looking for reasons to touch my skirt for they loved the feel of the satiny cloth. I was touched when the shared their last cookie with me. I was flattered when they brought me flowers picked off someone’s backyard. I was proud when they could say the entire alphabet without forgetting the ‘q’ and the ‘s’. 

They constantly surprised me with their ability to question everything.... why the President wore a sari and not a suit, why the canaries are yellow, why lead pencils don’t have color in them, why they can’t eat glue, who was the teacher who sat with me during lunch, did I have a monster under my bed too…. It was a perennial barrage that they kept up but I enjoyed the challenge of answering each question with what it took to see them skip off to their chair with that satisfied smile of having learnt that much more about the world.

Each child was unique with their own special quirks, habits and needs that it made each of them close to my heart. I prided myself in knowing each one of them better than anyone else, even their parents.

Which was why I was perplexed when Sumi joined KG B.

Oh, there was nothing that made her stand out from the rest of the class – well dressed in a red frock with white polka dots, matching shoes, socks that she pulled up to her knees and a Ben 10 bag that she clutched to herself. She didn’t like her water bottle and tried to lose it in the first few days, sighing when someone always found it out from behind the rose bush.

It was about something that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. It was about a six year old being so quiet. It was about the way she sat staring out of the window munching her Wonder cake silently. It was that she always chose the corner most seats in class. It was that she never used colors, only black and grey in all her drawings. It was that she even talked quietly, softly when she had one of her rare doubts. It was that she packed her things so fastidiously before she walked to the car herself and raised the glass even before her mother could get in.

It was only that she behaved as if she didn’t like existing.

I’d never had trouble making friends with the children; it was enough that they’d found an adult who’d actually sit and listen to them, cared about their lives and their thoughts and fears, which made them trust me implicitly. They had no qualms telling me about their hate for the cabbage their mothers made them eat, their delight at the bubbles in the air and the fear of the Yeti in the closet.

But Sumi was different. She never talked to me, she never let me hold her hand.

I tried talking to her mother about her reticence to come out of her shell, probing a little to find out if there was anything wrong at home, if Sumi had lost someone she loved to make her withdraw so early in life. But the thin, pale, sickly-looking woman who looked on the verge of a breakdown herself couldn’t, didn’t help me. She nervously said something about a pet hamster dying and left with shivering hands.

The child was wilting away in her self-imposed prison, or so it seemed. And I felt useless because for I didn’t know the problem to implement a solution. I went home every day thinking of new ways to make Sumi smile, everyday failing at the one thing that would have made all the difference. I kept trying.

One evening, her car didn’t come. After an hour I looked up her home number and informed the maid who picked up that nobody had come to pick up Sumi. She said she’d inform her father; her mother was apparently out of station and her father had forgotten to pick her up.

By now all the others had left and Sumi was sitting in the last bench drawing in her notebook. I went and sat next to her.

She shifted ever so slightly. 

“Are you hungry?”

She shook her head.

“Do you want to share my brownie?”

I saw her big brown eyes light up at the prospect. But they died down almost as quickly.

She shook her head. “No, Miss. Thank you.”

I opened my contingency brownie slowly making sure the delicious smell wafted towards her. She looked at it doubtfully and sniffed. Then went back to her drawing.

I broke off a bit and put it in my mouth. “Mmm, yummy.”  

Her little black head remained bent over the book.

“Want some?” I asked again.

She shook her head without even looking up.

I wondered yet again what had given the child so much self-control so early in life.

“Don’t worry, your father will come to pick you up soon.”

She stopped drawing. “Mamma isn’t coming?”

“No, your maid said she’s gone somewhere for work. Daddy will come soon ok? Don’t worry.” I’d detected a note of panic in her voice.

“Mamma isn’t coming home tonight?” she looked at me her eyes filled with fear.

I was taken aback at the pain, the terror in those eyes. It was like she was mortally scared of something.

Then it struck me then that she might be afraid of losing her mother. She might be terminally ill and the child must have picked up on it. Put together with her mother’s weak, pale countenance, that made sense. She was living with the fear that today might be the last day that she would see her mother. Enough to make even adults fall apart and Sumi was just a child. I hurt at the ordeal the little girl was put through and I cursed God yet again for the injustice I perceived that He had in store for her.

My heart went out to her; I wanted to gather her small form into my arms and hold her close. I wanted to tell her it’s ok and kiss her fears away. I wanted to see her smile more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life.             

But I just sat there helplessly for she wouldn’t let me even take her hand.

The peon came in and said that her father had come. I asked her if she needed help with packing her bag and she shook her head, yet again.

She was slow today. Her hands shook and she fumbled with the bag’s zipper. She kept looking furtively at the door. It was like she was stalling for time.

She shuffled slowly to the door and started walking out as I picked up my tote and locked up for the day.

Her father was waiting on the steps; he was a tall man, well dressed. He apologized for being late and said that he’d been held up by work. His manners were impeccable. Nothing in his manner or form indicated that he might be undergoing a traumatic period in his life, like I’d inferred, yet I knew that something wasn’t right. Sumi stood by, expressionless now. He thanked me and then held out his hand to the child who took it haltingly. “Bye Sumi, see you tomorrow,” I waved.

Then she turned around and looked at me. The desperation, the plea in her eyes screamed out to me. It was like she was begging me not to let her go, to keep her safe.

And all at once I understood that it was never a dying mother that was her problem. It wasn’t the slow threat of death that had all but broken her inside. It was the loss of a parent that had given her eyes the look of the haunted.

It was the father who caused her unnamable pain. Every night.

When The Dust Settles...

You know that period when all the initial excitement in a relationship has faded?

You are past bending over backwards for his every little need, you get over daydreaming of various scenarios of the future, you get over marveling the way his melting brown eyes seem to twinkle at one of your inside jokes?

When he’s done wearing crisp shirts and reverts back to his grunge look, when he’s past centering you in his world and starts becoming vague during one of your endless yakking sessions?

The seemingly endless hours on the phone starts dwindling to just an hour at night?

That’s when the real mettle of the relationship is tested.

You feel he’s changed.

Earlier all he needed was you. Now he’s finding a way to balance his social life with you. Earlier he used to be supportive of every little thing you do, even painting your nails black. Now he questions the sanity of getting that fourth piercing you always wanted. Earlier he never felt the need to talk to other girls, not even friends. Now he justifies his need to have female friends just as you do.

Earlier he loved every dress you put on, his eyes shone when you twirl around after spending hours dressing up for him.

 Now you neither feel the need to dress up nor does he notice.

Masks come off.

Faults become apparent, ones that you previously saw but conveniently chose to ignore.

Fights become the order of the day. Not the cute ones, the ones where you ‘roothify’ and he ‘manaofies’. The real, bitter fights.

Monotonous patterns of conversations set in.

Egos start clashing.

Somewhere between all the name-calling, crying, hating and tentative making up, you reach a point where you question the meaning of your relationship.

You drag on with all the doubts in your head, first trying to recapture the magic swearing to yourself that it’s just a phase and you’ll get over the rough patch, later resign to the fact that it’ll never be the same again.

You wonder what you are doing wrong. What he’s doing wrong.

Then one chilly day, your world is knocked over. You are rudely awakened to the fact that your world is not cozy and all people are not angels like you believe them to be. You get the worst end of a crappy deal, you lose friends and your family very nearly disowns you. You realize that pain can sap the life out of you, that you can feel your insides dying slowly.

You go through the worst nightmare of your life and come out the other end, fragile and shaken to your very roots.

He sees you at your worst, sees you make mistakes and stumble, sees you broken and curled up into a tight ball of hurt and he stood by, holding you, saying nothing. 

You gave him the option of walking away, he chose not to take it.

Instead he stuck like a burr to your side.

And you realize that the only hand that held on tight to yours and never let go, was his. The only shoulder you leant in on without having to worry about betrayal, was his. The only person who even listened to what you had to say, was him. The only one who defended you, like a tiger protecting his pride from the hyenas, was him.

And he says, we’ll get through this. We will.

Not ‘you’. But ‘we’.

That’s when you know that it’s not the rosy tinted glasses and the eternally mushy blog posts that make up love. It’s not the sweet-nothings or the wild want that makes up love. It’s not the talking on the phone 24x7 and knowing where the other is all the time that makes up love. It’s not even the frequent ‘I love you’s’, the diminishing numbers of which had you worried. 

Nope, all that might be part of what makes it beautiful but it's most certainly not love.

Love is that when you know it’s much more.

Love is when you go through fire and emerge as two halves of a whole.

P.S: I'm not going through any dark pain, unless you count a nagging headache and this is not my personal story or anything:P This was supposed to be a mushy love story, just ended up veering a bit to the dark side.

Real Beauty

She wakes up at 5 in the morning. Being a middle-class single mother of three at the age of 40 in India doesn’t give her the luxury of sleeping in.

After the daily rituals of bath and lighting the lamp, she makes coffee for the whole brood and sits at the window watching the rising sun, the only time of the day she has to herself. She thinks back to happier times of her childhood when life was simple and ordered. She wonders what she did wrong and wipes an unbidden tear away. Life had dealt her too many khota cards and her shoulders bowed under its weight.

The calm and the nostalgia lasts all for about another minute as her youngest Nini, all of eight, tugs at her sleeve and says ‘Good morning, Mimi’. She ruffles her hair fondly; she’s the only one of the three who takes after her, looks and character. She starts the routine off – cooking breakfast and lunch, packing an assortment of tiffin boxes, water bottles and snack boxes, waking up the two older ones, hair-plaiting, recovering lost socks and all the rest that goes with the territory.

‘Ma, dekho, he’s stole my Netconnect. College starts in half an hour and he’s going to make me late! Vaapas de, nahi toh ek thappad lagaoongi! ‘I didn’t take your stupid netconnect, jhooti kahin ki’… With a sigh, she simmers down the gas and goes to the kids’ room to play referee like every other morning. “Nitin, give her stuff back right now and GO for a bath, kitni baar keh chuki hoon? And Naina, keep your important things away from the kids, for the nth time, I won’t be rescuing anything if it happens one more time. Ab aake nashta karke nikalne ki soch”. With identical huffs, the two disperse in opposite directions. When all three finally make it out of the house without any major mishaps, she heaves a huge sigh of relief.

No respite though, she has to be at work in exactly and hour and she hadn’t even started getting ready yet. Today was a special day, her performance appraisal results were due and she was the office favorite for the plum promotion. She usually didn’t allow herself or her children to count chickens before they hatch. But this one time she had already started dreaming of the improvements she could make in the department.

But more important to her was the pay raise. She could almost see Naina’s huge ear-to-ear smile when she got her new white Corby and those pumps which she’d wanted forever. And those new Ben10 limited edition sets for the kids. And now she could finally take them on vacation somewhere. The children never bothered her for stuff; they understood and loved her too much to break her heart over small, immaterial things. But she was their mother; she understood every unspoken word, unshed tear and untold wish. And it cut her up inside every day that she wasn’t capable of giving them these small pleasures, deny them the happiness of childhood. Now all that would be past, their lives would finally get better.

She took particular care with her clothes today, something she hadn’t done in a long time. The sari she’d gotten for Diwali four years back was still good enough and had a matching blouse as well. People said the rich brown brought out her eyes. She lined her doe-eyes with a hint of kohl, applied a coat of lip balm and rolled on a little of attar. The fragrance always calmed her down and quelled the butterflies. She inspected the reflection in front of her; the face was lined now, the youthful glow was long gone and the eyes spoke of too many sorrows. She looked for a long minute and then shook herself and said to herself this is my life now.

The bus ride was, as usual, a struggle for survival…. one of the few times she regretted giving Naina her Bajaj Spirit. By the time she got down at M.G Road, she felt like she had been through a juicer-mixer-blender. She walked swiftly inside the office, greeted her best friend and set her things down at her cubicle. My last day at this desk, she thought. She was jumping inwardly. So many benefits to the promotion… the company car was available to the managers, she could be back home soon –more time with the children.

The excitement in the air was palpable. Everybody had taken their seats around the table and Mr. Chaudhry had the envelope in his hand. He welcomed them all and started droning on and on about the position and the responsibilities that go with it. Blah, blah, blah… kitna baat karega takla, said Geetu from her right. They both giggled quietly and she thanked her silently for trying to dispel her jitters; Geetu was her guardian angel from God, her rock, her best friend. Finally the takla got to the point , ‘And after grave consideration and discussion, the senior members have decided to award the position to Ms. Kirti Prasad from HR.

There was silence. Then a smattering of applause as Kirti got up. She straightened her crisp Prada suit, sashayed down to the head of the table and extended a perfectly manicured hand for Mr. Chaudhry to shake. The rest of the table just sat there with expressions of disbelief. She felt her throat close. She hadn’t gotten it. She felt Geetu squeeze her hand underneath. She needed to get out of there.

She heaved in the ladies’ room with Geetu holding her. ‘Naina… Ben10… all broken… all gone’ she blubbered. Geetu tried consoling her, she was filled with cold rage knowing that they had given Kirti the position that her friend deserved only because she had slept with half the board. But she didn’t know that they would stoop so low as to take it away from a deserving candidate.

Three hours later, she was at her desk. Filing files and writing reports and continuing as if nothing happened. She was used to disappointment and pain. Her only regret was that she couldn’t fulfill her children’s dreams. That’s ok, she told Geetu. I’ll be getting a bonus on my company shares, I’ll make do with that. And there’s always another post, another promotion, another appraisal.

Her sole reason for living was them. Her happiness was in those times they spent rolling on the beds, pillow-fighting, the star gazing she did with Nini, the times she beat Nitin at NFS and the long woman-to-woman talks she had with Naina. They were the reason she put one foot in front of the other every day. They were the reason she pushed forward and performed better. She wanted to give them the world because they were her world.

This is my idea of a real beauty – She was born a princess and raised as one. She was used to the crème of material things; designer clothes, foreign holidays, elite parties and the latest in everything. She left all that for love and lost all of it when he left her high and dry for a younger ‘piece of meat’. Yet she picked up the broken pieces of her heart and moved on. She brought up their children, loving them so much that they didn’t need a father, ever. She is one who lives for others, one who puts the past away and moves on. She has developed that inner strength to take on whatever is thrown at her, life had hardened her to sorrow. All she cares about are them, their well-being. She’s the most amazing of mothers and she’ll do anything for them. A true beauty, a force of Nature…. one to reckon with.  

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Summer, Winter, Spring...

It had been a freak accident. Sameer was a good driver, this shouldn’t have happened to him. But Fate had different plans for us. Fate had a drunken lorry driver who would skid on slick ice, hurtle at 150 kmph towards our sleek, little SUV and flatten it better than my failed batch of cupcakes. One minute I was a happily-married-to-high-school-sweetheart NRI with a flying career, seemingly everything anyone could want and the next I was in the ICU in a godforsaken hospital fighting for my life. It took me seven days to wake up and when I did, they explained to me the seven, different places in my body where they had to put rods, plates, saucers and whatnot, how my insurance was valid only for another week, how my husband was no more and why I had to sign the release documents for his organs. And, in that order necessarily. I couldn’t process any of it. I realized we had been in a major road accident and that my life would never be the same again but the rest took a long time to sink in. I was penniless, the female version of Iron Man and widowed. They flew me back to India and for a few days I was safe under Ma’s wing; the vultures swooped in soon enough. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’, ‘He was so young and handsome, you looked so good together’, ’It’s God’s will, beta, what can we humans do’. I wanted to scream at them, tell them where to shove their false sympathy even while they were branding me a manhoos, unlucky. I still refused to realize that my world didn’t contain Sameer anymore; I didn’t want to think about it. I never cried. It was a cold winter.

Days and nights wore on. Insomnia and depression crept into my life as surely as ants into sugar. PJ’s had become my haute couture. Physically, I was making progress – I could walk again, eat by myself. The local hospital even decided that I didn’t need a couple of the rods. But mentally, I was stuck in the previous summer in New York, the glorious summer, the last summer of my life. A fleeting wedding, our parents flying in for the celebrations which lasted almost a month, flowing champagne, laughter and him. Blissfully happy days with Sameer taking me everywhere, everyday. Quiet dinners at the Plaza, rappelling in the Rockies, the long walks through Central Park with him making faces at the ducks in the pond and me giggling uncontrollably, that one crazy night in Vegas we spent winning a total of 8 dollars.. all of it seemed like a movie that I had seen and then the lights came back on and I was back in reality. Every time I closed my eyes, images of that life came flooding back, bringing with it, an iron clamp around my heart; the pain made me want to curl up and never wake up again. There were torturous times when I could see and feel every detail in high definition – the twinkle in Sam’s eyes when he was horsing around, his soft fingers brushing the hair away from my face, the heated, humid air laden with delicious smells of the tiny pizzeria that last day, the crunch of capsicum I hated, the brilliant colors of the flowers, the bad décor we laughed at. And I would yearn for a moment more, snatch a second from eternity…to go back and not let him drive, to have taken a cab, to have ordered take out, gone hungry, anything but. The summer, I realized, had been my fleeting moment of fulfillment and happiness.

My desperation rose and fell like the tides, as months went by. The vultures had left; everybody’s life was back on track. Everyone, except me, that is. I felt useless, worthless and soul-less. The ache in the pit of my stomach had become a permanent fixture. Everything reminded me of him, so basically, I could do nothing. I gave up chocolates, Coke and chappatis – the three things we had lived on. I looked into the mirror and a gaunt, rail-thin old woman stared back at me. There was rock bottom, ten feet of trash and then me.

Ma watched me from afar, never interfering, never ‘imparting wisdom’. She knew better than to sit me down and have the ‘it’s a part of life, you have to move on’ talk. She fed me, clothed me and held me when I jerked awake at 3 a.m reaching out for Sam, but not much else. But the day she caught me staring at the steak knife a little too contemplatively, she knew. In no time, she had just bundled me into the car and drove in silence. We had reached the cliff-head when she stopped and nudged me out. Sunset had given the place a glow and the long rows of cherry trees cast their long shadows. Ma took me to the very edge of the precipice and gestured – on one side was the deep, endless crevasse, rocky and formidable and a solution to my endless pain and on the other, I saw my mother, my guardian angel, my rock, frail and old, but iron-strong in spirit, standing on a carpet of the spring’s first cherry blossoms, arms outstretched.  She had tears in her eyes. All at once, it struck me – she knew exactly what I was going through. She had had the same choice and she was giving it to me in the hope that I would choose her, that I would choose life and sunshine and the chirping birds. It seemed a long way toward her but once in her arms, she held me tight, promising never to let go. I knew then that Sam was gone and life would never be the same again but I had to go on. I smelt her woodsy scent, wild and flowery, exactly like her and the darkness started ebbing out. The sun’s glow brightened up my life a wee bit and I could smell the flowers again. Spring had arrived.

p.s: my first attempt at fiction.