The sun is peeking through the mountains and you are skating down the road. The sky is pretty like it always has been; a blend of sunset blue, peach and wild yellow. The sultry summer air wafts through your hair and plays with your t-shirt. A poder passes by you. The whole fat neighbourhood glances at you from their balconies. A kid asks you to stop and pass the football on the road but that's the last thing to worry about. You skate forward like the carefree breeze.
And all of a sudden, you see your friend's face beside you, appearing out of nowhere.
There is silence. And then her smile breaks and splits her face in half as she overtakes you at the bend in the road. Before you could even think of any questions, laughter echoes in the air and disappears downhill. An unplanned, uncalled race. Involuntarily, you spread your arms, let this moment sink into your memory and speed to melt in the horizon before the sun does.-
You say that you wear heart on the sleeves
And I believe you
Because when you put your arm around me
It beats to brush away my blues.
-
I've started to feel in words.
It's beautifully painful
And It's painfully beautiful
I don't know which one is it.
Maybe it's both.
It's breaking my heart
But it's also building me.
Surely, I can sense that
And I have no idea
What to do with it.-
Falling short can be a painful thing. And even if I describe it using best possible adjectives and similes, pain can't be known till you experience it, I said this to a friend who is taller than me. It's not that uncommon, she said. I still get that feeling whenever I see people who are taller than me, she said, and I'm sure, the tallest one in the room envies the shortest. I remember telling the same to her some weeks back. There is nothing more beautiful than two short, broken souls consoling each other, telling each other that they are taller than they think.
-
When the clock hits midnight, I get up to brush my teeth. It has become a habit now. I rinse my mouth and look at the lady in the mirror. There is something mysterious about her that I cannot decipher. I try to touch the tip of my nose to mirror's surface and trace lines of the lady's face. I draw her round eyes and long chin and other details which humans cannot understand.
Maybe the bulbul who sits on the window of my kitchen can comprehend my reasons, for I've seen him doing the same, when the clock hits mid-day. He first knocks on the tinted glass, pecks at it and then attacks his reflection, flapping his wings aggressively till you see a drop of blood on his beak. I don't stop him. Maybe he's fighting himself. Like me at midnight.-
As I sit on the skull of my house, I hear the laughs of peddlers walking in the distance. Their cackle lances the silence of the sky, hits my eardrums and echoes around the fence of my dreams. It soon grows into a screech of the chalk scraping the blackboard, which is enough to send a shiver down your spine, begging for your attention.
And when I do turn around, peddlers swing themselves over the wall and disappear into quietness of the night.-
Tonight, I see hundreds of narkasuras walking on the streets closely followed by a huge crowd. 15-20 feet tall. All of them are shaking their gigantic bodies on beats of bollywood music with a crown placed on their head, bloodshot eyes, canine teeth, green face and polished six pack abs that any young man can only dream of. Some of them are dressed as terrorists, coronavirus and voldemort (really?). People are damn creative when it comes to such things. But I am pretty sure the one wearing the politician's attire is gonna win. He has too. Oh wait. I almost forgot. This is a narkasura contest.
Why do I care anyway? The team which have lost their blood and sweat for the last 15 days with paints, paper and thermocol just to build a devil out of nothing will receive a cash prize from some minister and will celebrate their victory drinking feni. Those who lose will have feni too, cursing the nepotism even in the narkasur contest.
Soon, narkasuras will be set on fire by the same crowd who created and worshiped them. You see, at least we are smart enough to understand that this time krishna won't jump down from heaven to kill countless narkasuras. We have to clean up our own mess.-
I'm lost. Let me be brutally honest with myself for one last time. I'm lost. Just like that neighbourhood cat whose yesterday, today and tomorrow is the same and will be the same; or that lost little calf on the road spreading out her ears listening to heartbeats of her dead mother; or that paper boat who doesn't know her dream, direction nor destination.
Dream. Swapna. Sonhos. I flip through the pages of the dictionary trying to fit in, forgetting that I'm a girl with many mother tongues but with no motherland. I'm the flower kept aside for it won't suit in garland.
If I accept that I'm lost in the game which seemed like a paradise before, will that make me a loser in the foul play of life?-