healing

Give yourself more credit:
You’re healing while hustling, dreaming while doubting, growing while grieving, and building while battling.
Vex Kingp

First Love

She was what her friends called a naivete, a chatterbox who wore her heart on her sleeve. But when she fell in love with him, she withdrew into her shell and started choosing her words carefully. 

In her dark kohl-drawn eyes that looked up to his warm searching eyes, you could find desire and a strange reticence to be what she was before she knew him. She talks to her friends like earlier but smiles as she speaks, thinking of him. 

Those who knew her earlier finds her new behaviour strange for she was a chatterbox talking without restraint about what mattered to her. But she was not the same after she tasted love and she forgot herself in his first embrace. 

She spends her days dreaming about him and the secrets that togetherness brings and this is one sacred space that she does not want to share with anyone. Her friends tease her about her sudden transition but she smiles and changes the topic as if she does not want to talk about him and what he means to her. 

From that moment when their souls had mingled in a sweet ethereal melody beyond any words, she has become an earth woman celebrating her newly discovered feminine nature, a woman who is one with nature and its rhythms. 

She talks to her friends but not candidly like before and in the midst of her conversation with them, she falls silent as she dreams of him and the emotions that memories of togetherness brings. 

She dreams of the sweet nothings that he whispered in her eyes as she sat next to him and the love-light in his eyes that makes her bloom like the jasmine she wears on her hair. She keeps flitting to a secret world where being one with him- mind, body and spirit- is her only thought. 

Dedication

You wanted a book dedicated to you, my dear. I could write many a story of you and me, words and silence, music and love, rain and summer.

You are a sacred space that I have never left; a home that keeps me grounded to the world of dreams, though some are lost and some found again. For I’m like the proverbial woman who lost a valuable coin and has found it again after thorough searching.

You have a bowl full of colours that fetch you happiness every day; while I keep mine clean and empty for an impulsive act of alms from you. Someday, you might give me a little from the lot you have, just to keep me from starving.

You are my summer love, my love felt in the blood once upon a time in fairy land. I think I was living in the hundred acre woods with pooh, piglet and rabbit, that's how naive I was. 

You were like the rains during summer and you came with thunder and lightning and I remember the tiniest details we shared. May be we shared a bond where everything about the other person mattered a lot. 

You came with the rains and I became like an earth woman dancing to the rhythm of the raindrops on my tin roof. I remember how I would lie awake and listen to the pitter-patter of the rain outside and then go to sleep with nothing but your thoughts. 

The clouds still heave and burst into tears, every now and then and I still remember how I was like an earth blossoming after the rains. have never got a chance to tell you how much you mean to me for I want to hold your hand and tell you affectionately how you mean the world to me yet all I could do was to write some words scribbled on a page. Yet you are special by the way you bring back music to me; for I’d never forget that one day, when you made me understand that I had forgotten how to sing.

Every day, from dawn to dusk, your name is like a talisman that I keep safe from the world, till words form one by one and fill these blank pages. In an imaginary realm, I have walked with you across ages and from that moment became your soul mate and your only love. I would run your smile, every word you said and one little cryptic messages to each other and your funny way with words. 

May be this love stays with you for it was a perfect way to understand yourself and to grow in ways you never really understand. May this love was a constant solace that you ran to when beset with your world of worries and though near or apart stays with you as a special bond to look forward to, though we our bond does not have a name that the world understands. 

If I meet you in person, I want to tell you that you are my yellow and with all the words that I write, I love you more than anything else in the world and that I value your presence in my life. 

Morning

When you wake up early in the morning feeling quite content with life and you are happy that you have everything that you have always wanted in life, starting with the love of the one you desire.

You wake up feeling that all your desires are met as his limbs coil around yours early in the morning and when you wake up with your lips locked in his and mumbling good morning in his ears.

Your heart and soul are at peace and you look serene like a lotus in the pond, exactly where you are supposed to be. There is harmony in your soul because there is a brand new day to look forward to, full of new adventures.

More than usual, there is a need to do something
different ,out of ordinary on a morning like this. Though it's cloudy you decide to go on a walk outside after a long time, all because you feel high about the kind of joy you feel.

The roads are quiet and the city is silent. The signs of life are only few with a few bicycles in the road and people out for walking who like me has decided to celebrate this happy day with a morning walk.

On a day like this, much is done and much accomplished, when I woke with the sun and with your arms coiled around me. And, you feel excited to look forward to a brand new day full of exciting adventures and the memory of a perfect morning of love.

@

Making memories

I want to spend some time with you and I want to know everything about you. I want to spend all the best days across various seasons with you, wandering this world and learning more of you, what you are like and your likes and dislikes, creating some really good moments together. Someday, I want to look back and think that we were creating memories together.

I want to know close, read each and every look, every smile, learn your language and also what you say without using words. I want to see and remember how your eyes light up in a smile and how my world lights up with your smile and how this world lights up making it a better place to live.

Your fingers touch me and I forget myself and the worries of this world. Your lips kiss mine teaching me the art of love every single day.

It is with this pleasant feeling of being loved that I want to go to sleep at night and it is with the certainty of your arms around me that I want to wake up in the morning. 

Making memories

I want to spend some time with you and I want to know everything about you. I want to spend all the best days across various seasons with you, wandering this world and learning more of you, what you are like and your likes and dislikes, creating some really good moments together. Someday, I want to look back and think that we were creating memories together.

I want to know close, read each and every look, every smile, learn your language and also what you say without using words. I want to see and remember how your eyes light up in a smile and how my world lights up with your smile and how this world lights up making it a better place to live.

Your fingers touch me and I forget myself and the worries of this world. Your lips kiss mine teaching me the art of love every single day.

It is with this pleasant feeling of being loved that I want to go to sleep at night and it is with the certainty of your arms around me that I want to wake up in the morning. 

The Story Teller

Life was an open book;
Everyone knew everything
About her life and times,
And she was a storyteller
Creating happy endings
In the worlds to come.

There were adventures
Waiting to be written down.
When the words came to her
She set them in a beautiful script
With happiness, prosperity and love,
For themes in everyday life.

She was blessed with abundance
With music, books and coffee,
And always had anything she wanted
From the deepest desire of her hearts
And the lovestory that she wrote

Always had a good ending. 

#definitions

Soul connection

There may be millions of people in this world and the population increases second by second daily. I do not want to know about these millions of people because my subject of study is you.

There may be many songs that I have heard that belong to various genres ranging from peppy, soulful or sad. But these days, I want to be the song you were humming all day long.

These days, I want all my dreams to begin and end with you, I want to become familiar each and every contour of yours and trace them with my fingers.

I want to look all day into your eyes and feel the desire surge in them. I want to make you my entire world and my favourite soul melody.

There may be many millions around but the only cure for my ache is you and I want it to be you to be you, the only one at the end of every journey home and every single daydream.

Like many before us, we were destined to meet each other and change our lives forever. You and I share a soul connection that creates a world for each other in an alternate universe.

She

She was what her friends called a naivete, a chatterbox who wore her heart on her sleeve. But when she fell in love with him,  she withdrew  into her shell and started choosing her words carefully.

In her dark kohl-drawn eyes that looked up to his warm searching eyes, you could find desire and a strange reticence to be what she was before she knew him. She talks to her friends like earlier but smiles as she speaks, thinking of him.

Those who knew her earlier finds her new behaviour strange for she was a chatterbox talking without restraint about what mattered to her. But she was not the same after she tasted love and she forgot herself in his first embrace.

She spends her days dreaming about him and the secrets that togetherness brings and this is one sacred space that she does not want to share with anyone. Her friends tease her about her sudden transition but she smiles and changes the topic as if she does not want to talk about him and what he means to her.

From that moment when their souls had mingled in a sweet ethereal melody beyond any words, she has become an earth woman celebrating her newly discovered feminine nature, a woman who is one with nature and its rhythms.

She talks to her friends but not candidly like before and in the midst of her conversation with them, she falls silent as she dreams of him and the emotions that memories of togetherness brings.

She dreams of the sweet nothings that he whispered in her eyes as she sat next to him and the love-light in his eyes that makes her bloom like the jasmine she wears on her hair. She keeps flitting to a secret world where being one with him- mind, body and spirit- is her only thought. 

The serious and the trivial

In the midst of this summer tedium, we meet once again in the same old park that we used to spend our young days. In those days, you and I would enjoy roaming around the verdant campus talking of everything under the sun. 

The sight of the tall trees made us curious about the names and we were curious about the carpet of pink blossoms as well. It was with the same thirst of knowledge that you discovered the name of the tree to be tabeubia. 

Then there were the pink and white magnolias whose smells could make us forget everything. You and me shared serious thoughts about the angst of life and trivial thoughts about books, movies, music and us. 

When we meet again, it is like a springtime of memories flash before our eyes and your words fill me with so much of happiness. The shade of these  ancient trees forget the rising summer hear and the weariness that comes with it. 

You and I speak of our common love for words- poetry that has stayed constant throughout the years. You and me chat about the serious and trivial in the old hangout near the tabeubia trees.

positive thought

When you wake up in the morning, you can think of the ways in which you can be creative with the day. Most of the time, people are worried about the past or the future and they are not fully open to the present.

Today is a new day and then only then you will be able to understand the meaning of the word present, which also means a gift. That means to be fully open to the world of possibilities and like the poet says to wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. 

A lament about lost love: K R Meera's novella Meera Sadhu

Love is like milk, with the passage of time,it sours, splits and becomes poison.

The novel portrays the tragic life of Tulsi torn between duty and love and she chooses to run away with Madhavan instead of marrying her classmate Vinayan. She finds that though she loves Vinayan, she gets carried off her feet by the kind of love that Madhavan gives her.

She runs away with Madhavan on the eve of her wedding though she knows from his own mouth that she is his 27th girlfriend. Soon, she recognises that she does not have a role in his life and the story is a lament about lost love.

Through lyrical passages that describe the desire that Madhavan arouses in Tulsi, the author captures the beauty of love buy equally descriptive are her details about his treachery in love, the countless women that he has relations with. This wounds her and she grieves how she sacrificed her career and her life for the sake of the man she chose to be with in life.

The novel details the transformation of Tulsi from a loving wife to Meera Sadhu grieving her life and serving others in the ghats of Varanasi. The frequent shifts in time cleverly portray her memories about her marital life including the good times and the bad times.

Learning Curve

You read and study about the world and the things that you have an interest in. You never cease in your pursuit of knowledge and you do not rest for even a minute.

Whatever task you lay your hands on, you want to learn it and do it in a better manner and that is an your understanding of learning and becoming an expert in your daily tasks or bettering your work or learning how to cook your meals or learning how to please your lover.

Sometimes, you might learn a subject just out of pure interest without having any particular aim in learning it except for the pure fun of understanding what it is about.

People might ask you: What is the use of learning this now? Will this serve any practical purpose? But you tell that learning your area of interest is necessary for the purpose of developing your understanding of it and whatever you need to know, you need to know it urgent.

You have your idiosyncrasies and your quaint tastes in reading but you for sure that your knowledge will come of use someday sometime may be in another world that might be made complete by your deep understanding.

Your life gets meaningful by the very task of simplifying all tedious work through an overall understanding of how to make it simpler, better and easier.

My roots strangely

Sometimes, you learn how to feel this sense of belonging to an unreal world and I belong only to you, my love. 

I have never felt this sense of belonging to this place that I left as a child where my brother and I stood in the cemetery every year praying for his dead soul. 

I do not belong to my father's family since its all dead and gone, with a few bones scattered in a churchyard long and far away though you get occasional visits, calls and messages from people who look just like you. 

I  do not belong to the place where I grew up in my mother's native place beside the River Green, where it was always fun to be playing in water yet there were rightful inheritors who belonged just because they grew up there. Then there were homecoming that were full of affection from your grandparents or their visits to our city that were memorable. 

Now, I belong by marriage to a family which calls me my own though the blood that runs through my veins is hardly theirs and sometimes I get the feeling that I am home, finally free from this sense of not belonging. 

Do I belong to my co-workers who call me my formal name and I am a familiar stranger who does not have many stories to tell but nods and smiles and passes them by. Yet, there are times when you connect with someone and you feel that you have always belonged there and you sense this bond that goes beyond words. 

Then, in an imaginary realm, my love, you are the one who star in my all my dreams, the one whose thoughts occupy this arid life and I long for your presence just like one longs for rain in summer. 

You know me inside out like the palm of your hand or like the page of a well-thumbed book and what makes me a woman when I am with you. You know my

feminine spirit and tenderness and not my occasional clownishness in trying to belong to some name, some family, some tribe, where I do not belong.

It is to you that I belong, your complement that fulfills and completes you,  in the melting down of the barriers between you and me, and the all engulfing tenderness that follows our lovemaking. 

That is the space where I see myself as feeling belonged and as having a pet name that you call me an

Mogra

Do you remember the first Onam from your days of togetherness when your bed was bedecked with the intoxicating scent of jasmine flowers and you whispered sweet nothings in my ear. 

What do you want, you had asked me and I said I wanted you. You looked at with surprise and had laughed when you muttered, " you already have me and I will satisfy your desire whenever you want me". 

The jasmine plant had bloomed out of season and I had plucked the jasmines from the yard. It was the first time that they had bloomed and I kept them in a bowl of water throughout the day. 

Do you remember how you and I used to talk to each other about everything under the sun and how we spent our days of togetherness learning more and more about each other. 

Then I remind you every year on this special day how you and I will share our lives across ages and across time because I chose you to be my sun in all the worlds known. 

Like a creeper entwined on the tall mango tree, I wish we will stay together till a thousand moons. 

Celebrations

You could never celebrate this life fully for you were always weighed down by your worries. You could never let your soul soar to the skies for sadness cast its shadow like skeletons hung amidst sumptuous feasts to remind you that this too will pass. 

Every year, your birthday was a celebration of the mixed life that you had, full of joys and sorrows though you had to learn how to treat it with equanimity: for one learnt this bitter stoic attitude quite early in life. There was no better teacher than my grandmother who sang the way of the cross in her sweet mellow voice during Lent. 

For it was never an easy life; always a loss between the cup and the lip and when the ancient scale of weights is checked against feathers by the god of the underworld, he will not let you inside for its soaked with your tears for losses that you have suffered. Your heavy heart will never let you through. 

The City of Love

Take me to Paris, she said, for it is the city of love and light and when you add three letters to Paris, it becomes Paradise, a haven of complete freedom for lovers. Let us explore the city of love together and travel its nooks and corners treasuring each moment of our days of togetherness, enjoying the enchanting pleasure it offers the senses.

Why do we need to go to Paris, he said because you are my Paris and have always been my Paradise and you will always remain my haven. You are and always have been my dream and my Paradise is where you are. When you are around my world lights up with your smiles, my heart pounds a louder music on seeing you and my heart, my body and my soul just loves being around you. It is you that I want whether I am at home or in Paris or anywhere in the world and nothing in the world equals my happiness when I am with you!

Our Day of Love

When the morning light drained through the windows she opened her eyes. Slowly she became conscious of everything around her. Last night, she had fallen asleep crying. Now her heart was empty but soon thoughts of reasoning and doubt would cloud it again. It was a day she had dreaded all this time. Throughout all the happy days the shadow of this inevitable day was on her happiness, on their happiness.

Back from bath, she thought, this one day I can look like an unhappy broken-hearted girl and make him unhappy.  So she chose her brightest smile and her brightest clothes and put them on with care. He would be waiting for her at the usual place, with a smile. How will I hide my heart from him, her mind asked her. She walked to the usual place with a bowed down heart and a bright face.

From the first glance itself of her walking in that resplendent dress, he read through her veneer of cheerfulness easily. How to calm her, he thought. His heart wanted to protect her from everything, make her his, so that she would never have to face her troubles again. Yet he didn’t move at all and looked at her with the utmost attention.
As if to read his thoughts, she looked straight into his eyes, reading deep into his soul with her deep sad eyes. In that one single glance, much was said. Without even uttering a word, he understood that the end had begun and smiled like he expected it all along like a stoic warrior sentenced to death. She didn’t move but went on looking at him with the same calmness.
He moved his hand to touch her cheek. She twined his hand in hers and placed it against her cheek. Slowly a tear fell on his hand. Then more came while she sobbed aloud.

Now he couldn’t bear all this distance. He leaned close to her and kissed her forehead. She smiled through her tears and rested her head against his chest. Hugging each other, they sat for long in silence.

When her tears ceased, she looked at him with a strange calmness and smiled. This smile was from heart where a strange silence took possession of her. When tears had purged the dross out of her mind and the emptiness in the heart was gone, what she felt was hope. Nothing could cast a shadow on their bliss again. As long as they lived, as long as death took one of them away, there was hope for them. An overwhelming love for him flowed in her heart. She took his hand and asked him to hug her tight and not to let her go to a universe of loss. Her eyes filled with tears for an instant. He held her tight and promised her that his love will always be for her. 

Eternal Love

I think love at my age and yours means trying to understand each other's worlds through the medium of words, smiles and touch till you comprehend me and I comprehend you. It might not be possible to fully sense what the other says or does not say but words mean a lot in our relationship. 

That doesn't mean that there are disagreements between us or misunderstandings for we are from two different worlds of understanding and upbringing. I think we often make an attempt to understand what each other's words and silences mean. 

Though you are a caveman who withdraws into your moodiness and a nature woman who has her cycles of crests and troughs, we try to find meaning in our togetherness. It has always been my dream to wander the world with you- go places, find beauty in nature and in simple things and live life to the fullest. What I have always wanted is to wake up early and watch the streaks of dawn across the sky and then snuggle you to wakefulness.  

I have found love once again with you, recovered from the strife of this mighty world and restored the beauty lost in time and I might like to wear daily the colours of holi that you splashed on my face or may be celebrate love with a spot of sindhoor that you smear on my forehead or cherish a kiss that you planted on my cheek. 

And, you and I welcome each day with gratitude for another day of togetherness, hoping in our heart of hearts that we will stay together till the end of time enjoying our mutually shared life of togetherness, where we learn our lifelessons everyday. 

#eternallove

Recompense

For every word of harshness that you hear,
There is equally a word of love somewhere.
For the darkest hours of the wakeful night,
At the end of which is a beautiful dawn.

For the loss of innocence of childhood,
There is the growing maturity of years.
For the loss of a life near river green,
There is lot more sunshine to equal.

For the trenches that this life fell into
There are the new scales that it climbs.
For the years lost in search of dreams,
There are these words on a virtual page.

Which brings in daily, strange comfort,
For every friend lost, that of strangers.