Learning

You and I have come so far after travelling the miles together and apart. If you look back, the growth has been amazing. For you will see that I have changed beyond recognition and am much devoid of my often boasted scholarship; instead what i have gained from life is a sour temper and vaguery in every field. While you , who never bothered to read any scrap of paper except the titillating have become a bookworm, who boasts of every little piece of knowledge you have gained. Still the contrast is amazing in that you still look forward to me like you used to do; while I live a dual life- the past and the present.

Reconciliation

You pretend to laugh at my jokes; but I see your face clearly though I may not always see it. Your voice betrays your hatred at what I have done and what I failed to do.You think that your hesitation is much better than my total change of plans. But looking deeply, you wil find that the spirit is same; too much thought that leads to much inaction and nowhere in life.

You think about finding answers in logic; while I depend on intuition and the flow of the moment. Who are you to blame me for crumbling before mighty forces? For I would never have crumbled, my dear, if you listened to what pained my heart when it mattered. Nobody did. All you did was to laugh a queer laughter at my craziness and sudden loss of intelligence.

Now, I find that you and me, the best of all allies have become strangers in a strange land and crave for love from kind strangers, though what lies behind us is a mighty past full of great dreams and common likes. For you, who never cared for the word "honour" shirk at my sight because I have thrown mud at your so-called honour that never mattered anyway.

Senile

He sits silent in his favourite armchair. No words, nothing ever comes out of him. One so famous for order and discipline, now sits crouched in a corner. His senses have discarded him.

Now and then, he poses a question about the time, place and welfare of his kids. Some pretend not to have heard him. But when a fond face steps before him, though it has grown much in age and in pain, his dispassionate face breaks into a smile and he asks: “When did you come?”

Once more an era steps before him when he danced to the whims of a fatherless little girl who watched television sitting in his lap, for whom he bought sweets that vanished in a few minutes and with whom he wandered in this new city.

All the stories that are told about his partial loss of memory, his absent-mindedness and lack of consciousness are proved wrong when I, who call him Bapu, may be the first grand-daughter who named a grandfather (with a name that he used to sign his letters) steps into his view.

Hurt

When I look at my friends who move around crowds with the ease of chameleons and get admiring glances from others, I understand that I have none of this charming nature about me. An ordinary face that provokes laughter, some weird actions that create contempt and a strange nature that does the wrongest things at the right time.

Not that it was always like that. A few days were there; when love was everything; when sky was the limit but who can blame one who was hurt by the beloved. For life has never become the same again; the hope has faded; trust in people has disappeared and all that is left is a little irony and a lot of skepticism and a lot more of silence.

Life

The songs have changed with the seasons. All songs now taste of that sweet sense of expectation- the wait for the rain cloud and its joy on caressing the earth.

This earth that was dry and parched has signs of new life sprouting everywhere. No longer, the days are spent eyeing the cheerful faces around a new wonder.

The wonder is here finally; in its time; not too fast nor too slow; right at the time when it can bring about new bursts of pelting affection from all around.

Celebration

When life started each morning was a blessing; each hour a time to celebrate. The sacred chants held a great mystery that could elevate the soul from its drabness. Now, every moment is a long drag, a step heavily drawn, from habit to habit, from place to place, without energy.

For with all its idealism, life was real from the first few years. Then you came along with your positive messages and need for miracles. Somehow, my touch with reality was lost in the same moment. No wonder, I prayed for wonders spending sleepless nights hands spread before the holy icon.

Nothing happened but a slow withdrawal into silence and a coldness that replaced the early joviality. At times, when the heart forgets its long lost desire, the one dream that mattered more than anything else on earth and rejoices in whatever has fallen into these little hands without asking.

Only on those moments, this life comes real and turns into pages of quite happiness quite unlike the loud but blessed ones who celebrate their happiness in the streets with splashes of colour and loud music. Here, only a smile shines quietly to fade again.

Reality

It was in the shadows of this morning that you appeared in a dream, once again. Reassurance, remembrance and reciprocation, you promised while I held your hand as easily and gently as I've always have, in my dreams.

For it was easy to be us in the dreams as opposed to the dreary reality that drew borders and boundaries in our minds every day. How else can you explain how a love of a lifetime faded in ten seconds of doubt and months of hesitation?

That sense of your face so close to mine or your mere presence in my life has ceased to be miracles; for they are as far and away as lost friends and childhood memories. But these light years have covered more distances in the long wait for an expression of love.

In the meantime, the world has crumbled, shook with quakes, burnt and thrashed yet has come alive with every baby step or baby smile. Still we walk together in dreams with the same spirit and hearts brimming with love as on our first walk in the rain.

Friend

It took no longer than a minute to see how you have changed from my dearest friend to the snob you are. Your every word reflects an arrogance that to the unobserved eye is like obedience; your mouth full of advice that you don't think twice before delivering.

How can I be so cruel as to judge you when I do not judge many who are lost and confused. Well, I can see through your pretenses because you can never pretend to be someone you are not, with a friend who has listened to your ramblings unedited.

Not just that, I hear though in silence, whatever that goes beyond that cunning eyes of yours. No wonder a friend one advised me to be wary of you and I never heeded. It is a shame that you speak highly of yourself before me who is the only one who is aware of your shortcomings.

But stranger is my heart who always defended you before everyone and fought hard to be friend in spite of all your big talk and our differences, trying now hard to put my hate to words, hard words so that nothing is erased from my mind.

Ignorance

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas. ~John Dewey

Well dressed, well-spoken and with a tone that might put to shame the ancient serpent that charmed Eve are the fashionable people around me who boast of anything and everything, from a tidbit of knowledge scrapped from the edges of a ten rupee quote book to the new brand faith that they propagate in the virtues of the previous generation.

They speak hours about nothing closed in rooms that reek of some artificial scent or the other that brings a bout of sneezing or a cold. The words are worse, praising ones who are absent while closing the eyes deliberately to the ones who slug hard to keep their work-worlds intact. A good word for a good deed is the last thing; but lapses, quicker to find than a daisy in a room full of laptops.

Led by charm, they live and die, lives of exasperation, when the strange lady with cat-like eyes and a lousy mouth comes with her beauty and eat their brains right away. Held transfixed in gazes across those closed rooms, all you need is a call from a friend to distract you for at least a while.

Friend

Many distrust a bond made across boundaries; for the same can turn into a ploy for infiltration. Though my self is not the high walls of Troy, when my security levels were low, you lured me into accepting your offer of friendship.

You asked me questions that I could not but refuse to answer while you wove lie upon lie to create an image of reality. When you had your fill, the life that I had in me was no more; the faith I had in others and myself had vanished and then you disappeared without a trace.

But by then, my life had degraded into empty words and need for somebody to survive. From independence, you brought me on to mass dependence on lies. An addiction, your lying words often lifted the gloom out of everyday though it ended as fast as it started.

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.

Goodness

How can silence create so much of love? You must have asked yourself so many times. Is there anything wrong in silence? For those who learn each other with time, love to sit silent and idle by each other. In their togetherness, there are no words nor there are promises. That's something you with your thousand questions will never understand.

But at times, I want to tell how much you mean to me, how the absences of day-to-day life spurs love in me and how I love even when you dream of freedom and of long-forgotten memories. You mean everything to me, even when you are silent, even when you are absent or even when you stop thinking of me.

Sometimes I feel the aura of your grace coming to mind as a picture of all that is good, great and nice- a big heart I have seen except when you are sad and your heart chokes with pain. But with all the goodness that you scatter around minute by minute, you know how to hide your self within those walls of goodness.

Obsessions

You brought with you a little sunshine, a little laughter and myriad ragas of liveliness. Infatuated with you, I could never stop humming songs or stop dreaming of you. You come in those fantasies as an ideal lover, giving and receiving with full knowledge of a lover's desires.

The reality is a cruel world, broken by everyday hassles, mad world that has several faces of happiness and sadness in the single throw of a coin. You don’t appear at all in that cruel world. You like to hide your face amidst the sharp smells of newly printed books and clean sheets.

This love left unsaid has become an obsession that never fades or lets the heart live in peace. May be in the next life, you and I will not have all the words in the world to say why we don’t want each other in reality and might crumble in tears before the mighty silences.

You and me

You have left behind your traces in my path. Wherever I go, I see people who had met you, words that you had read and poems you  had written. That’s too much for me, for I have always played along with you, as if I believed each and every word you had said. But here, when I look back, I feel that your love is nothing more than a big lie; for the great darkness has sure unveiled quite a number of shadows that existed and shown in clear light what every single moment of wavering cost. With each day, it was my nature than corroded and rusted, only to be discarded along with scrap. You have scattered your scents in the wide universe; and I now out of four walls of my alone self can resist loving your soul, who wandered with me throughout ages and all times. 

Part of Definitions 

Work

Your work earns you respect and keeps your body and soul together. It fills your empty mind with thoughts of perfection and keeps you focused enough to face the mad words that the world slings at you. But most of us have known the joys and pains of hibernation, when you rested at home and proved the reverse of the rule of motion that a body in motion stays in motion by obeying the rule of inertia. 

Then one day when your words gather rust, you set out in search of greener pastures to rest your mind; for with no work to fill the empty spaces, life turns dull and monotonous; days close and open their eyes. When in such dreary states, the mind naturally longs for some puzzle to solve, some people to teach and some words to write. That's where you find your destination within your reach; to help you glaze like newly burnished metal; you know only to be a light and to shine and sparkle. 

Read more Definitions

Writing

Words leaped out of neatly bound and well-written books a long time back and became miracles in dark nights. Some writer, whose heart dribbled with love for a beloved set these words on paper, wove them with silence, longing and infinite love. May be the life-spirit that runs in all, whispered these intuitive life-lessons, through you, through the rain or the bright blue sky. 

I never knew this magic until one day; you came at midnight and peeked  in my dreams, with your gracious smile. Awake from your dreams, I wanted to tell you, with words like focused arrows on what ate my heart when you were not here. All the sighs, the tears, the smiles on how you spoke, smiled, walked and talked were mulled over again and again in those quiet moments of aloneness. Like a child with a favourite toy, I try to form with words; different games that might give you back to me, at least in an imaginary realm.  

This heart wants not to please the mob; only to sing about what hurts the most. These songs of silence have no art; they speak of the loss in not having you beside me. They have neither rhyme nor rhythm but only a wild beat of words that are quaint to the ear, yet in their own way, fresh-faced.  

Words come, with its thousand limbs, entangled meanings and nuances, like a sudden burst of rain that creates ripples in still water, while the great green forest holds watch over with its mighty silent wombs of understanding, from that moment when you came in my midnight dreams.  

Though I know that you will never set your eyes on these; for we come from two different worlds of understanding, I set before them engraved in a lovely script.