The Writer In Me Will Not Rest…

I write from my bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment in New Delhi. A chaotic space that is illuminated by a white bulb. My laptop rests on a multipurpose study table that has been with me since time immemorial. Bottles of half-used perfumes, serums, lipsticks, make-up sponges sleep in their plastic boxes. Next to them, lie an array of stationery items, ranging from pigment liners to post-its. However, my favourite shelf is overhead, lined with books, books, a scented candle, a polaroid of my 9-year old sister looking at an infant me with a sisterly smile while my mother’s protective arm looms in the frame. Today, as I made my way home from a pit stop at a café that I frequent after work, I made a decision to write, write something, anything. On most days, I come home, eat dinner with my parents, wash the dishes, warm a cup of tea and scroll endlessly, while I wait for my sister to call, and then wait for sleep to take over her duties. Today, however, was different. A conversation at work made me look inwards. I am a very curious person by nature. Curiosity sometimes treads very haplessly into the domain of intrusion through a liminal bridge of questions that I ask. It depends on who is at the receiving end of it. Today, it was a man who I meet every day. A man who I’ve come to know over a span of ten long months. A man whose silence makes me double over with words with which I perhaps want to understand, make sense of and get to know him better. Now, my questions aren’t the easiest to answer: How are you feeling?….shrug. A wise crack is usually met with his characteristic booming laugh, provided how funnily it lands and pointed questions are usually answered in ambiguous monosyllables. The man is an odd mix of silences and words that hit you when you least expect it. My visits to his place are strewn with gifts: questions that I hoard to bombard him with on our next meeting. Today, I questioned him on why he chose commitment the way he did. Well, his answers ranged to accommodative to a slight change in his candor. A sudden shift in his tone. A sudden sharpness. I terminated the conversation because I was miffed with being equated with “anyone and everyone”. I guess that is my inadequacy. I am an inherently jealous person. It could have to do with being the least favored while growing up as the youngest in a family of four. Helicopter-parenting, squint, bulbous “grandma” glasses do not enable confidence, to say the least. Years of solo dates, reading and most importantly, introspection have led me to clamber out of my ludicrous self-image. A mirror that would burn in flames of self-hatred every time I looked into it. Imagine how hard it is for such a person to feel like they are loved. That one can be loved without having to earn it. It has taken meditation in self-awareness, towards self-awareness of many years to finally like myself. To finally hold the hand of the ten year old Tina who loved her sister, just being with her in the same room as she read an illustrated book or coloured with wax crayons. Little Tina did not need conversation. Little Tina was enraptured by the trees, birds and even houseflies and their iridescent wings as they sat on her palm rubbing their legs with one another against their semi-detachable head. She could watch them to an end, until her sister jokingly shooed them away or they swarmed towards food kept on the dining table. Little Tina was always in her own head, which was an amphitheater-cum-radio-cum-storybook. I sometimes wonder, what would my life be if I were a bit ‘normal’ and not slightly twisted in the head? Would I still ask as many questions? The writer in me needn't always need a pen or a paper. She thrives in pages after pages that she writes in her head. Her subjects are mostly people. Today it was this man. Words uttered by people, their loud silences, syntax between what is often not said, a half smile, muttered half-nothings are enough for me to spiral with a mental-pen whose ink never dries. On days like these, when I finally decide to open my old and faithful laptop to write: I know the mental-writer in me is overwhelmed because she has run out of pages. Till the time she erases innocuous chapters from the mental notebook, I must write here. I have always wondered why do people do what they do? Why do they take a decision that they take? Why do they cast aside a road that they could have tread on? My logical self often asks me: Why are you so concerned with people at large and those in whose mental double-story building you would never even be considered a tenant in particular? The empath, the helicopter-parented, the ten year old Tina has only one thing to say: I would like to be a warm space for all. I would like to be a constant, even if invisible source of solace that they turn to when they have a bad day. How would I know if they are having a bad day if I don't ask pertinent questions? If I don't ask what lights them up and what fizzles them out? What makes them smile and what makes them tear up? I am especially drawn to those who reside in temples of silences. Each silence that swells up pregnant, expectant and recalcitrant. The silences that are opposite of comfortable silences. These silences jeer at me to ask questions: stupid, deep, candid, difficult and random. Those who talk for hours to an end already have an audience who listens to them, zones out and again listens to them. Who listens to those who swim in oceans of silences? I long to hear their voice, their actual voice and not the perfunctory one. It makes me want to have series of difficult conversations even at the cost of being banished. Especially with the silent people I have grown to love, singularly them. Today, the man was writing with a shadow of a pencil. Our ongoing joke is that it would last him another two years. Today, while he was taking notes, I took the pencil from him and pocketed it. Through his half-amused-half-stubborn complaints, I sharpened and brought him a new pencil, which he was was using throughout a day. It brought me most happiness, joy and peace than anything has in a while. Well, not really. What made me burst with joy was when he uploaded a new episode on his YouTube channel. It was a mini eBook that he was working on. I remember asking him, categorically pleading with him to do something for himself, outside of the realm of professional duties and domestic obligations. Anything that is of his own personhood. Again, the logical-evil human in me would ask: How do you care? Why do you care? Why does it matter? The ten year old Tina, the empath, the storyteller and the silent (not-so-much) lover in me argues, their happiness is infectious, It brings me joy, insurmountable amounts of it to see someone who lights up my each day do something that lights them up. They could hurt me with their words, crude remarks, manic mood changes, yet it would seem miniscule in comparison to them flourishing, thriving, content, happy. I am and would always be content loving them. For my love is not contingent on receiving love. It never has and never will. And I will continue to write about it, about those I love, about what I love in the coffee-stained-frayed notebook of my mind or this laptop. The writer in me will never rest. She will keep on writing. She will never stop asking questions. Untill the day she dies. Lack of questions would signal death, of a relationship, of love, of empathy. And what happens when empathy dies? One is left with a husk of a heart and is a shell of a human being. A funeral pyre is better than that death-like existence, I suppose. We live our lives in tightly packed boxes with family, work, marriage occupying a lion’s share of our routine. In it, we often rush through our days like a one reads a badly written novel, on autopilot. We don’t care, or don’t have the bandwidth to think of a flower, a human being or a thing that piques our interest outside of it. Every human being is born curious. Otherwise why would gravity be discovered? Why would Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why would a child shut the door of a refrigerator half-way just to see when the light goes off? Why would Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigate the world? Well, you may be the devil’s advocate with a devil-may-care-attitude and postulate that those were “bigger” questions. Who weighs them on a scale of importance and relevance, I implore! How is empathy any less than scientific temper? Isn’t the same brain driving them both? With this I stop for now. The laptop is warm. The heart is content. The sting of today’s rebuttal has somewhat been soothed by the narrative of typed self-awareness. The writer might as well rest for a couple of hours. Well, not really, she has her nightly shift in the Sweet Dreams Publishing, where she intermittently paints, writes and weaves cloudy dreamscapes.