The Story of a Mad Woman

People said I’m mad when I told them that I could hear voices in my head. I guess many people could. But I could also hear what others thought and could do what they wanted or did not want at all. This could be called a miracle but it’s not. It’s a modern curse when many days are laid waste just because voices whisper in your head and sneer at you.

One day, they tell you, “You are the queen”. The next day, they explode your head with pain. This has made me silent and quiet and afraid of others. I told my folks that I could hear voices. They took me to a doctor who prescribed a long list of medicines and sedated me. When I woke up, their faces had changed into that of hatred for creating so much trouble for their reputation and wealth.

On some days, invisible hands search my body. I wish I could tell someone who knew the same. Someone who could hear voices in their heads or feel the strangeness of being touched by something you cannot see. Until then, I’m only a mad woman who feels attacked by strange invisible hands that move up and down her body or cause disturbances in life.

Some days, these voices made me believe that you, whom I had lost had come back to retrieve you. Instead my life ended that day. For if it was you, you were not an angel as I thought you were but a demon who set in motion the destruction of a person who loved you the most. Whoever you are, I’m trapped in a world of your invisible beams until death.

Palgrave's Golden Treasury

In my college days, I was a regular bookworm who could finish a book in the shortest time possible (a few hours, a night of continuous reading or reading in the college bus). My treasure house was the college library, where the dust-filled corners, I will hunt some good book or the other.

A book that I found there and later bought a personal copy is The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language by F.T. Palgrave. It has a collection of English poems from the Elizabethan Age till the Modern Age.

Palgrave published his first version in 1861 with the aim of propagating the best that is known and thought in the world?. The present edition was edited and more poems added by the Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis.

My favourite from this collection was the poem, The True Beauty By Thomas Carew:

HE that loves a rosy cheek
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires:?
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.

This book is a rare find to those who cherish good poetry. I was so much in love with this book that I must have read it out aloud to many friends (poor things) who were willing to lend a ear.

Difficulty

Some words as harmful; sharing mouthful of advice on how an uttered word is like a sent arrow: whatever you do cannot take it back. But about those who never utter any word and keep hidden inside all the angst of life. What use is such a silence except for earning a name in each friend's list of tramped people?

Even more strange is those who use words to boost an ego that swells up with pride at victories and they use words to kill other's joys as easily as swatting a fly. But how on earth can you live up ideals in a world of contradictions when the meek and the gentle never utter anything about their selves and the proud boast about anything and everything.

No word is wasted; one who seeks the wisdom of a few words finds them useful. For many count their words with time while others exhaust themselves with talk that breeds nothing but contempt and hatred. While you and me seek words to understand the world of our difficulties and find solace in finding faces whose smiles fade and crack with sorrow.

Search

My search for you began someday when I was ten, when I realized that I was incomplete in this world without you. Your face has changed over these years but you have remained a source of hope always. From that first few lines that I wrote, this other self of mine has peeped in countless words that I have scribbled on lost pages. I never knew that the best words that I wrote were the ones I have lost. But still, from memory that remembers quite a lot of images and turns of phrases and scents and experiences, I retrace this verbal journey from nothing to everything and from everything to nothing again.

Most people clearly remember the day they started writing. For me, words came on a day, here in this city on an idle day, when I was standing on the terrace talking to myself watching the distant church tower and the clear blue sky. I thought of a few lines, then the lines kind of repeated itself and I tried to make it as parallel as possible. That's when I understood that this chanting aloud is of no use: I need to write it down. Finally I went downstairs and wrote my first lines though not in English:

You dream of a heaven as a garden,
With roses that stand fresh and fragrant
That are circled by hungry bees.

Distance

After many days, I hear the quiver in your voice as you recognise my voice. You did not expect me to call you say as a way of explanation. Do you know many days have gone since I last talked to you? Years. Months. Days. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. All messed up and long only because I thought talking with you is a pain because of our lost friendship. Why did you call me, you ask expecting a long answer. Just like that is never enough for you for as always you pretend that you can read my mind.

Sitting opposite a friend, the other day, I realised how much you and your friendship meant to me even with all its flaws. You could never be what I wanted you to be nor could I ever attain that perfection you wanted to see in me. Still, there's a joy in the old meaningless conversations that I share with no other. The same laughter and the same tears that gather in two friends who have known each other for long!

The days of longing and desperation are over. The sea of forgetfulness that swept over the land has swallowed with it the countless moments of anger and frustration. With both of us, broken and still happy, we can stay away at respectful distance without harming each other's feelings. For the mutual knowledge and understanding that we share surpass other bonds just because it was bound by trials and tribulations. On days I try to write, your words come as a reason for laughter and tears.

Laurence Sterne on Writing

There are two sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, . . . The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse to this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the eloquence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty.

Ray Bradbury on Creativity

Creativity is a continual surprise.