ye mausam bhi gaya

main hun kisi beete saal ki calendar ki tareekh / part 1. writing this was part of my cleaning routine.

There were yellow uncapped markers everywhere that day. No matter where I went, that yellow plastic cylindrical motif followed me everywhere. I hate yellow. Hate might sound too strong but the colour makes me want to just wash my hands, touch my face to make sure there is nothing wrong. Could a colour make you nervous? That beginning of summer, everything was making me nervous, so I didn't want to rain down too harshly on the sun, the honeybees and Vincent van Gogh’s appeal. The sun had lost its yellowness in the awning of April, spreading it all across the city over the span of one of the most hopeful month’s of the year. A tree I climbed one night with M – telling him about how it blooms yellow in the summer and makes the road a patchy yellow too, like the sun walking with its stained feet all over in a drunken manner – had shot its lemony load all over the concrete the very next morning. I should still point out, in my bid to be as truthful as possible, that the tree I climbed was the wrong one. The actual tree possessed by potential yellowness was just one more block away. The place I used to live in was like a labyrinth. The roads ran straight, lined with trees all over, so you never knew. It was like My Own Private Idaho. Nobody paid me and I loved everybody. And I was sad. So fucking sad. All the time. Now I am sadder but I have other things to do all the time, so it gets balanced out.

The further you walk down that neighbourhood, there are vast expanses of rocks, of trees, of telephone lines being steel crickets in the silence of the afternoons. The buzz fills the air, it fills your lungs. Suddenly you want to get stoned. You want to go swimming. You want to run naked on the road and scrape your knees and have somebody come over and lick the blood off of you. These things, they just get me sometimes. Anything that is not a person, and does not carry the weight of personhood and the danger of being another bearing in my mechanism gets me in the best way possible. I have spent hours walking across places, circling back to the same places, because it keeps me away from people, away from my room, away from myself. I am convinced that when I die, I will not turn into dust, but instead a hardened rock, nestling somewhere amongst rich greens of nature, and maybe somebody will throw me in a water body wherein I will settle until Evolution 2.0 comes.

Yesterday when I was making my way to my boss’s cabin, a student dropped multiple pencils in the corridor. The pencil that rolled over to my feet was one muddy yellow, like marigold wilting away, or rich laterite soil paled four to five shades by probably mixing the granite that is dumped behind my house in heaps big enough to make me fantasise slamming my forehead against it and see a splotchy redness come to life. Picture Fargo. Lootera. Haider.

What happened inside the cabin was your usual run of the mill “getting fired” routine. Except it wasn’t. My contract ends, she wants me to discontinue beyond it. But saying “I’m fired” sounds so much more grotesque and is like a tragedy on the nose. Yeah I hated my job but I would hate being jobless even more. What will I even do with my days? Where will I even go? How many cigarettes can I smoke if I stop buying milk and fruits? Such stupid, personhood questions kept tugging at my hair – even though I cut most of it recently– as I made my way back to my flat.

My coworker slash roommate slash my only current friend told me to take light, a slang very popular in the area she comes from. Take light, I thought, laying on my dirty bed (I have to clean my room and bed when I reach home today and I am already dreading it), topless and sweaty and my underwear definitely soaked in all fluids bodily. No fan, peak of heat, room on the top floor, still air. Light from the balcony falling on the marble floor on which I fell last month and bruised a little mahogany at the knees. Take light. I wish I could open my mouth and take in all the light. Feel its velocity within me, aglow from holes fuckable and beyond, floating in the middle of the room, the air still but buzzing.

When we were done with all the cigarettes within our reach, we decided to get up and go to the field near our flat, a vast space that is sparsely grassy and mostly just animal excreta that serves as a reminder that a horse lives in my vicinity. We walked inside until the breeze turned cooler and the perspiration served as a pleasure medium for the air between my chest and the t-shirt. As soon as we stepped on one wrong twig, a colony of bats just started swarming overhead. Raised in families with similar beliefs, we both automatically covered our ears, our rational teacher brains melting in the April heat. Bats bite your ears, the most common misconception in mostly northern plains of India, so you sleep with your ears cupped, hoping the kala bandar aka muhnochwa aka the urban legendary face scratcher doesn’t decide to pick up the night shift instead.

As we stood with our ears cupped, the cigarette smoke billowed in the wind under a darkened sky full of these chiropteran winged beasts. The cries were intense. This whole thing unfurled within minutes and the bats settled back again. The wind stopped, the t-shirt started to feel too sticky and I could feel my nipples.

My roommate slash coworker slash friend then bid me farewell to go see her boyfriend, while I made my way back to my room. Same route as a few hours ago, but the mundane questions were replaced by an age old conundrum that has shaped half of my being into nothingness. Will I always be the weird girl who will never fit in? Why do I have to eat lunch alone even at the ripe age of twenty three? Why do I not have friends, in the hyper specific definition manner that I have carefully cultivated throughout the years within me and never told anybody? But I have tried seeking it, and I have come close (so close, Tara), but I have never won. Is friendship about winning? Or is it about both of us having a good time together even though one of us is fated to get the better end of the stick whereas the other person can choose to stuff the remaining up their ass and feel that fucked up sensation their entire life. Or something.

With these musings and an orange juice in my hand I reached my terrace and got mean with M and hung up on him.

Every time I get mean with him I feel this pang and stab and punch inside of me, a small beast getting violent and screaming don’t ruin this thing don’t ruin this thing don’t ruin this thing you idiot. I remember the pathetic lunch we shared in that too bright family restaurant, my tongue slippery until the wrong thing slipped out and then my throat closed up and I felt shame. M was kind, patient, a lost child trying to fix something he clearly cannot.

After disconnecting that call I immediately called my younger brother and cried to him for the first time in years. It was like we were kids again, and all he could do was try to fix something he could not. He asked me to eat ice cream. He told me I will figure things out.

Throughout it all, I just didn’t know how to explain to anybody that it is bigger than the immediate present, the current disaster. It has always been something too big for me to handle – this life.

Fired. I am fired. It sounds like such a paradox. I am fired and shot from a cannonball. I am fired up to do something. But that has been my edge my entire life. I am ready for something but what that something is has always remained an elusive phantom haunting me.

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hello, this is only part one of something that can be termed crashing out.

If you are still reading, please go to these links — one two three and see what is happening at university of hyderabad. read, share, tweet about it, reach out to me if you want to help more in the domain.