0.2 Bigha Zameen

Seven years ago, my parents realised that we needed to buy a house. They gave up after a brief period of hunting in Bombay and Thane, and made a snap decision to use the land my father inherited in Kerala to build a cosy little bungalow there, like the ones we drew in our art class in elementary school.

“You call this cooped up place over another man’s roof a house?” my mother would say about flats. “A house must have its foundation embedded in soil. The soil we grew up on.” I rolled my eyes at her corniness, trying to mask my anger. At 17, I believed that my parents’ house would always serve as a base for me too, and I didn't want that to be a place I’d barely lived in.

The Seven Year Itch.

(Dated Dec 3, 2010. Reposting this here from my Facebook notes. Because I will always need to remember this.)

I’ve known him for as long as I  can remember, and that’s a really long time. I can never tell you when it happened; pinpoint the exact moment when I started falling for him. But I can tell you this, even with my uncertainty of early childhood memories, that it was love at first sight.  All I know is that by the time I was 15, even though I had no clue as to what the future held for me, I was irrevocably in love with him. Back then, I had taken it for granted that it was a lifelong affair, something you believe by default when you lack options.

But options were aplenty when I went off to college. I wavered, drifted apart, but I will never admit that I made the wrong choices, because I had what really mattered. I held on to him, incredibly, almost impossibly, as impossible as studying Math in the Arts field. Exactly like that, in fact.

Coming out

Unrelated to my previous post, this one is about all those cowards who hide behind their smartphones and laptops.

Long ago, not so far in the past that a 90’s kid couldn't remember, but long enough for the Facebook generation to not know, there was the era of pen pals. You could develop a friendship with a person across the globe or country just by corresponding through letters over a period of time, and perhaps never meet, or even know what the other person looked like. Remember, these were dark times, much before the internet came into being. The need to meet such a pen friend was completely alien to most people, and there was a certain beauty in retaining that level of anonymity, the fun of not-knowing, not just for then, but not ever.

When I was a little girl, out of the million fantasies I had of meeting my knight in shining armour, one of them was this- falling in love with a faceless entity, someone with whom I corresponded through words and formed an opinion of solely based on their ideas. It was a wonderful romanticism, and I hoped I would have the fortune to meet my soul mate this way when I was older. Today, this is one of the sharp memories I have that make me want to travel back in time to hold my younger self condescendingly to my bosom and exclaim, “Oh, Resh!”

The L word

Today, at work, as we shared a long session of laughs and gossip over coffee (which, mind you, doesn't happen too often in a college staff room), the conversation steered towards sex-change operations. It felt like I had to make a physical effort to not give my strong opinions an outlet. ‘Careful, Resh’, I had to tell myself. ‘You really like these people and they seem to adore you. You don’t want to mess it up.’ But thankfully, no one seemed to have an opinion about the subject, it was a general discussion of facts, about public figures, and people we knew in real life who underwent the procedure. And then, one of my colleagues commented on how a sex-change operation was still an accepted practice, but lesbians? Shee! I can never accept that!

I want you.

(Sometimes, I don't want to twist words into cryptic phrases that sound poetic. Sometimes, I  just want to adhere to a rhyme scheme and write poetry the way I wrote as a child. So here it is. Because I can. )

Unwanted

I resent

This resentment

Who sought no consent

Slithering through my mind

Soot-ing it with lies

I do not feel

Who told you

It was okay

To fill secluded recesses

With your smut?

(I had some dreams

To paint them

With mediocre faith)

Scour it out

Let the vacuum be

Being numb shall trump

Perhaps

I’d rather feel nothing

Than this.