aur ye jawaan raat hai

written over the course of twothreefourdays

The past few days have been quite unsettling. I have been going to bed in a meditative state so that I fall asleep. I end up staying up until 4 am. It has caused a crack in my porcelain, a creak in the floor – indication that something heavy is on board and it is all going to collapse. Perhaps I am being overtly anxious, indeed things can’t go bad just from a sleep schedule getting messed up.

Currently listening to Tera Mera Pyaar, and Kumar Sanu just sang jaagi tu bhi saari raat hai… you too, have been up all night. So true, thank you Kumar Sanu for being there in my sickness and in health. You are indeed a patron saint of all emotions I go through in an auto, and when I am distressed because of my parents.

The music video of this song that was released when I was around three years old is very cute. What is actually heartwarming and a proof of life permeating everything is that the cameramen, creative director and everybody involved in the making of the video has commented under the video, recalling the sweet old days. No validity based on number of subscribers. These are people with families and children, probably living in a nice, homely 2bhk in a metro city, but at one point, they were wearing the notoriously popular loose tshirts and backwards caps, and taking a leap of creative faith.

I too want to make a music video. I don’t know how to make music. I will perhaps keep putting together clips from my life, find the perfect Aimee Mann or Broken Social Scene lyrics with a good change in rhythm and put over the compilation, hoping the moments all fit right. The vision isn’t to be shared with anybody, it is purely about the pleasure principle.

Most of the things in my life are about that, however it is increasingly hard to abide by it. Growing up means ever growing pains, and I do not know how to accommodate all my relationships and obligations within my beingness. I am worried all the time, I am failing at the art of romanticizing the small and erratic bits of this existence. I often spend my days and nights on my mattress, just watching something mind numbing, or thinking of things. A while ago I had an embarrassing day regarding food, I kept on eating and eating, it wasn’t even a lot, but in the end I felt like what I would feel perhaps four, five years ago. I wanted to punish myself; but the consolation of this rut that I am in leaves me with no energy – not even enough to inflict pain upon myself.

These things keep reminding me that shame still sits still in me somewhere. I am embarrassed about certain things. The ugly, watery pink on my walls, the small, crusty bathroom, the mess my kittens make that takes me three days to fully clean, my hair, my hands, my food, everything seems bigger than me. In these moments, I need to actively channel a different version of me – a happier, lighter version. You have a place, you have a bathroom, you have kittens, your shampoo smells great, it’s just a body, it’s just food. It’s like a grown-up tending to a child who is seventy percent cotton and eighty years old. A rag doll. Passed down the drains of the years, the stench of memories seeps through her, transforming her permanently, but just enough that she remains recognisable to people who have been in her orbit for years.

I try not to let this rumination leave me with pruny fingers. The more I sit within this pool of memories, the more my body and being get waterlogged – leading to difficulty in moving around in the present.

When I go to bed at night, I reread something that is an old favourite. If nostalgia is fighting for space on my bed, it will have to adjust to my solidity. I shape it into words that are comforting, stories that help scratch away a bit more of the calcified layers that have gathered on this world, unseen. Picture moss on water, sea salt in sea beds, and rocks that have a cave hidden within. All of that is out there for me to walk into. For now, these words do. They lull me to sleep, they invoke a newer element in me that had been undiscovered. Every time I have come back from hanging out with people, I definitely harbor love for and have self-doubts regarding my place in the world, I turn to a chapter, a poem, a saved piece of text in my notes. We got this – me and the characters that live on forever in my head. For the last three days, I have been rereading short stories by Anita Desai, each one a delight for the imagination. It gets easier to transcend into my dreamscapes where something horrible happens, but it happens in a place that is rich.

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I think of two different written pieces, a poem by Agyeya and one by Anne Carson.

मैं हूँ किसी बीते साल के सीले कलेंडर की

एक बस तारीख, जो हर साल आती है।

एक बस तारीख-अंकों में लिखी ही जो न जावे

जिसे केवल चंद्रमा का चिह्न ही बस करे सूचित-

I am but a date on an outdated calendar,

That arrives over and over

Just a date – not conveyed in numbers

But in phases of the moon.

sc credit weltenwellen on tumblr. Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

There are certain concepts and beliefs that I hold close to my heart. One of them is – I do get a sign when things are going to get bad. It is a little tough to explain, but it is such a clear experience. A while ago I was running late for work, on my bed, doing my usual skincare, and I remember seeing a lipstick that I rarely use. I skipped my lipstick because I knew I had the small makeup pouch I have in my bag. When I sat in the auto and started rummaging for that white bag, it was nowhere to be found. That small lipstick was a sign. I had already set myself up for a bad day and I refused to back out. That day was indeed, very miserable. Got three journal entries out of it.

It is always a motif, and it holds meaning. I have never been too careful – this thing strikes me at the weakest moments, when all I need is running out of cigarettes, or my dress getting caught in the door handle, or any small fuckup just being the straw that breaks this woman’s back, a back that is perpetually in pain and is never tended to. Perhaps this is the way my back (or the kid who lives within me) is fighting me – I will be in pain but you will feel it and that satisfaction will be pleasant enough to get through it all. If I am fighting myself, and I am winning, then who is losing? And to what ends will I go to defeat myself?

I feel like drinking a beer. I do not step out. I want to eat something. I do not cook until cleaning the bathroom makes me topple out of tiredness. I wash clothes, and I bring back the dry laundry. I do not fold anything today. I scroll a little bit, come across a video of Dr. Bashir Badr, demented, reciting poetry with his wife, Rahat Ji, prompting him. I start crying.

Going to defeat misogyny by saying it is indeed about to be that time of the month. My father is bound to visit me in two weeks.

I am already anxious, already worried where to prop the kittens away for the 2-3 days he decides to stay here. My barren flat has nothing that offers comfort or invites company – so we will have to make do with the mattress on the floor, the one multi-purpose vessel, and the dingy bathroom. There is nothing I am expecting from him. But I am hopeful about certain things. I hope he feels sad about the state I am living in. I hope he feels guilty. I hope he opens up and tells me something. I hope he asks me something. There is an altered version of how this trip should go already bubbling in my head, and I am trying to not indulge in it. I will be spending the days until his visit pent up, anxious and distracted. It is a bad thing I want to get over with. There is so much of me to hide away, even in an empty house.

There is nothing to hide behind.

I listen to Saalouny El Nas, lights off. I am typing things right now that should probably end up in a journal. Too private, too boring. Flaccid, perhaps. There has been no sign of life around me for a while now.

The self-reliance has taken an ugly form. It has mutated into self-disposal. Anything that I do not need on my mattress need not be paid attention to. I am not a cook, I do not know how to beautify a home, nor do I have the means to do so. Sometimes I feel a pang of jealousy when I see perfect little nooks of friends, and people on the internet, and I do not know where to go with these feelings.

Recently I took it to the family Whatsapp group and it did not go well; I ended up apologising in the end, and now I go to bed every night feeling less, small, and incomplete.

Sometimes, there is nowhere to turn to with the things you go through, except your own mattress. So, you buy a cheap but nice floral bedsheet, you prop your pillows, you take out your Bruce Springsteen biography, or a book from your childhood and read it until the tears go to the very back, and it is just sleep, until you have to wake up.

The friendlessness is not what gets to me, I have dreamt forever of standing alone in a/my kitchen in mismatched clothes, sometimes shirtless, smoking, making tea (my friend left me with about a hundred teabags, half of them already gone); what gets to me is the utter silence that never fails to deliver itself in the times of hopelessness and crisis. I can stare at my ugly pink wall as much as I want, but no woman inside of it moves, sends me a signal, not even of the hovering craziness in the room each time I step in. I am trying to begin again, all over.

The current life that I lead offers me nothing except a regular schedule to fit into my hours. I do not have much to do, and I do not have much that I demand. For the past week, I have done nothing but clean the house over and over, stressing out about things that I wish I had the privilege to not care about.

As August wraps itself up around me, I take comfort in the newness of it against the cold July air. Unknown days are on the way, there are so many ways to approach things.