The curse of the emotional

‘How do you feel?’


  God somehow brewed the human race out of teeny-tiny molecules and ensured that they continue their existence on this planet. He made men, women, others and he made vaginas and penises. He ensured that the endometrial lining of the female uterus changed itself every month and also saw to it that the corpus spongium soaked up enough blood to give someone a hard-on. He made sex. And he made it pleasurable, because without that, the human race would have been wiped out eons ago.


  But what if they broke out on a rampage and screwed anyone and everyone? I mean the human race had a chance of turning slutty. And polygamous.
So then he decided to invent emotions! Viola.


Oh wait, where the fuck is the feminist in me? Why am I referring to God as a ‘He’? For all we know, God might be a woman. Feminism, right back on. Okay, so She decided to attached all the clitoral matters to the heart.  So that we get attached to someone we share our coffees with, attached to someone who would do something as simple as give us their attention.


  Oh the curse of emotions.
But this is even worse for the attention depraved souls who grew up to take care of themselves, and so much that they believe anyone who’d give them a figment of their time, and they’d be all melting and stuff inside their hearts.


  That is the problem with big hearted people. They give and they give and they give and don’t know where to stop. And when people, being people, are selfish, they get their poor little hearts broken. They sit in some corner of the room, trying everything from coffee to music to Marquez to heal their broken hearts but what’s done is done, right?


  There is a certain drawback when you feel things at the depth that most people can’t seem to process or understand. At times it gives you an uncanny advantage because you can read the other person like an open book and be exactly a version of yourself that they need right then and there, and that is why you are so comforting. You are a chameleon of emotions. You are too many people at once and so much, that it becomes dizzying trying to find your own true self among the alternate versions, which are also in fact, very much you.


  But most of the other times, people have a hard time assessing what and how you truly feel about every little tiny detail. They will have no idea in a zillion years that every little detail is thought of, over and over again inside the dark and messy corners of our minds until fact and fiction become one and the same. We live in a maddening world, inside. We have a hard time trying to stay afloat and appear sane.


  But somewhere in this, there lies beauty.
After all, what is the use of a sparkly clean mind and no thoughts inside? Our eyes would be blank and there would be no depth to stare into.


So let the people not get you. You do not need that kind of love which comes in calculated doses. Walk away from people who do not know where you begin or where you start cracking, where you find peace and where you find chaos.


Just walk away. People cannot understand the depths when all they can do is swim in the shallow waters.
  You keep your emotions, you keep them.


Somewhere, sometime, everything will fall into place.

The witch

She kept going to the river to pray that year.  The mighty river that flowed down with all its strength, whose belly swelled up when she was angry;  her waters churned and splashed  and uprooted houses, took away  people and cattle with it alike.  She prayed to the river God to keep the baby in her belly safe, to keep her safe. Also she needed something to wash away all her pain.
 It was just like every other day that night fell while she was down on her knees praying.  Just then the birds returning to their nests were interrupted by a mob of angry villagers moving towards the river through the forest, carrying drums, blades and spears, looking for blood. She knew they were coming for her, she knew she had to escape.

Finding her way through the forest wasn’t difficult; she knew it like the back of her hand. As she ran through the darkness with another being inside her belly, all she could remember was the time when she and her brothers used to play fetch in the same forest and how she’d always win. And now this cruel bitch of a thing called destiny had been too fast to snatch away her precious childhood and leave her full of estrogen and other disasters. She ran the farthest she could and when she was sure of being out of sight, she sat down beside the largest tree she could find.



Mhaya was born in a tea tribe; everyone in her tribe knew nothing but tea. When in the 1800s the British first planted tea gardens in Assam, labour was bought in from the neighbouring states to compensate the lack of people to work in the gardens. Rules were laid down and till today nothing has changed; nothing, apart from the faces. Her village was all but a few tiny huts and dusty narrow lanes that wind down between the houses and lead to the tea factory on one side and the tea gardens on the other. When spring came the orchids bloomed, creeping on the betel nut trees and the village smelled of fresh children and stale superstitions.  She was born a month early, her tiny little hands and feet clasping together tightly, as if she was holding onto her life. She was so stubborn; her head had an argument with her heart every time it tried to stop beating.  She grew up to be a bright eyed, fresh faced petite little girl and her mother would always bring her little things from the Saturday market after everybody got their weekly bonus. Soon it was time to stain her hands red with henna and say her goodbyes; it was time for her marriage. The adults had found a suitable match, in a suitable family, in a suitable village nearby. She was sent off draped in a white saree lined with a red border, her hands stained with henna and her cheeks stained with tears.



Life was mundane; her husband worked in the tea factory and occasionally as a gardener for the tea factory’s sahib. Flood was every year’s business and the rising water levels did not scare even the faintest of the hearts. People washed away with the water were considered offerings to the mighty river God.  Sunrises were too early and sunsets made the paddy fields behind their hut give off a golden glow, like gold vapours evaporating off the ripe harvest. In the first year of her marriage, the water level had been a few metres higher than usual, five people were washed away.  The next year a fire broke out in the tea factory and two employees burnt to their miserable deaths. Everyone prayed a little harder and soon the silent lull of everyday life mixed with the fragrance of freshly plucked tea leaves, bringing normality back to their village.
Three gunmen covered in black stealthily entered the village at twilight, shot the tribe headman, his family, and their neighbours and escaped into the forest. Mhaya was away praying at the river and came back to find her husband lying in a pool of his own thick, sticky, red blood with his body pierced by bullets  at more places than she could count. All she could remember was that her head felt light and her bosom felt heavy with emotions. The villagers surrounded her hut with their grim, awkward faces, their murmurs mixing with the fog and the scent of dead human blood making the air taste acidic.



‘It was her, I told you she’s bad luck the day she stepped into our village!’ a woman murmured.

Yes, yes, yes, they all agreed; the flood, the fire, the killings.

Yes, yes, yes, she is bad luck.

‘A witch!’ someone cried.
  ‘A witch!’ they all cried.



All she could remember was her mother in law screaming, her neighbours howling and the mumbling of the villagers; the angry mumbling.  She ran to the river, praying to the river God; praying, crying, it didn’t matter. She knew they were going to do the same thing to her that they did to every ‘witch’; tie her up on a pole, make her confess to every sin she didn’t commit and then burn her in the name of the holy God. Witch hunting wasn’t uncommon, every other day a woman lost her dignity and her life to it.

She woke up to find dawn breaking and the birds waking up from their slumber. After feeling her belly and knowing that her child is safe, all she wanted was to go home.
But home was hostile, her own people would now put her on a stake and burn her alive. Death smelled nasty, and worse, it smelled near.



But no, Mhaya thought. No, no, no.



I will live, this life is mine. My baby will live.
She couldn’t let death snatch away the one thing that was truly hers: her life.
It took her three days and two nights to cross the forest.

On the fourth day, a group of college students hitch hiking their way through the tea gardens found her; a thin frail hard headed woman six months into pregnancy fighting against all odds to live.  They admitted her to the city hospital where she gave birth to a girl three months premature. She was tiny; her eyes round and shiny. Her mother named her Beera, the brave one. She had braved her way into this world as a girl.



Beera grew up to be an educated lady, raised against all odds by her mother working odd jobs in the city. Later in her life when she opened an NGO to help women in distress, rescue women who were accused of being ‘witches’, she would always recall the hardships her mother had to face. She would recall how they blamed an innocent woman for the killings of the tribal people which was actually because of a communal clash between a militant outfit and their tribe.

Or maybe, Beera thought, her mother was actually a witch. Whose magic lay in the fact that she refused to give up, she refused to quit. Regret was sent back packing by Mhaya every time it knocked on their door.



Mhaya never returned to her village again, forgetting it was the easiest thing she did while raising Beera up. But every morning when she drank a cup of tea, all she could see was her mother returning from the tea gardens, smelling of freshly plucked tea leaves.

January 2015

The tress changed colour and sooner than I know, winter woke me up with her chilled finger tips, abruptly, and I sat up in bed and wondered whether to go back to sleep or to make some use of the extra time at 5 in the morning. Most of us are still trying to fight the feeling that the year is ending. We don’t want to say our goodbyes.
So lest my memory fades away, I have decided to write down the year, one month at a time.


  January, 2015
Home meant bon fires with my folks, my Grandma’s stories of the days gone by. That was the first week and I soon packed my bags and had to come back to this young city, back to my college.
College had become this celebration with food, laughter and friends.  Oh yeah, and books. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, and we as a species stand testimony to the importance of variety, our bodies tell us stories of how we can fall in love with anybody. We’re tall, we’re short, we’re fair, we’re sun-kissed, we’re rosy-cheeked, we’re young, old, average, and intelligent and God knows what else. We still love each other.


The winter sun continued playing hide and seek through the trees of Digholi pukhuri and everyday in college some hearts broke and some new friends made. The fragrance of youth drifted all around the college and the rattling roar of their energy sunk into the ground and made the trees grow faster. We bunked classes, hung out in the canteen, fell in love with all of us.


  I managed to go out, managed to fight the lonely monster for almost the entire month, managed to wake up and mechanically found myself in class, laughing at someone’s joke every other day. One of my friends started drifting apart and they knew I knew it. I was too smart to not notice.
  Anyway, I filled the void up with books, music and writing like I always do. They were always leaving, what did it matter anyway, I thought. That hurt, of course, but I found friendship can be the most unexpected thing that two of the most unexpected people can foster. And so when it disappeared I wasn’t too surprised. Understanding, you might call it.


And then we all dolled up with all the fucking enthusiasm our bones could hold and our blood could carry and showed ourselves off at Saraswati puja. The dark red hues of our lipsticks and the pale yellow of khichri got so mixed up with our yearnings of being noticed that we ate muck and never realised it.


Oh yeah, and I over spent. And regretted.