Prose before hos

I hope your joys never deplete. 

I really hope you're thrilled.

Psyched, even, for this part.

Cause I sure as hell, am not. 

I remember the year my grandmother passed away. I remember it in odd bits and pieces. I recall her demise in the music I bought two months after her she had breathed her last. It was a cassette that I heard the entire Summer on repeat, on her tape recorder, that was left behind in the room my sibling, my grandmom and I shared. That Summer was all about new beginnings. We had painted our house that year and it was as if, a part of me was covered in a coat of paint- beige with sorrow. I don't remember speaking a lot to anyone that year. Maybe, I am wrong. For all I know, I did speak a lot in comparison to others. However, in my head, I remember the year as trying to experience things all over again. Everything. However, without her. Everything was done in order to cover her absence from all our lives, especially mine.

I vividly remember my birthday. I was turning 14, and as the rituals go, we were not supposed to celebrate any occasion in the family for a year. This was going to be the first birthday without her being the first one to wish me. No handmade card sprayed with my favourite perfume of hers. No Tweety sticker on the card, and definitely, no new outfits and gifts. My birthday had become the annual writing retreat for her, there'd be Hindi poetry, some beautiful words and a card. All with a whole bunch of gifts, hidden from me. Without trying to be melodramatic, it was also the age and time when greeting cards were big. However much the things may have changed since, I don't remember anyone from my family going all out, as much as she did on all my birthdays.

It's so weird that I remember what I wore that day, exact outfit, the first birthday without her. It was a layered blue top with round neck, which had a tiny skull, made out of glitter. It was the nascent beginning to my Punk phase, which was to come in another six months. I was wearing this beaded chain, something Mischa Barton sported during those years.

A year before that, I got my first period, on my birthday. That's right, on the morning of my 13th birthday, I was 'gifted' by the universe. I ran to my grandmother with my stained bloomers, when it happened that morning. She dismissed me in utter disbelief that it could happen. The second time I went to her, she and my mother had another reason to celebrate the day. A year later, I recall, there was no cake.
My 14th birthday is a day that I'd never like to go back to, but somehow, always end up at that. I recall my aunt had come over and brought me a checkered pouch with some jewellery. I used that pouch until a couple of months ago when I gave it away. I could no longer stand to look at it without being reminded of the birthday where my aunt was called over so that I could have a 'happy' birthday despite the grieving. So much for trying to not celebrate and only grieve.

The only thing I carry with myself physically from that day is a pair of earrings, which my cousin had gifted me. It came inside the pouch and that was the only thing which wasn't sickening about the day. They pair is a set of Teddy Bears carved out on blue stone with a silver plasticky border. I didn't think of them until very recently when I stumbled upon them. This is around the time, I'd parted with the pouch I received that birthday. Surprisingly, I didn't abhor at the sight of that and been wearing it on days when I felt, I needed the courage to face the reality and the world. So far, it's been four times in the last six months or so.

That birthday seemed like the first turning point of my life. It was rudely reminded to me, in the absence of the paraphernalia which followed each year that nobody cares. People are transient, things are transitory. Nothing will last forever, and state of being will most definitely change. I don't think I've been 'happy' at any birthday, since the last one where my grandmother was around, mostly bed-ridden, but still around. I think it's an odd way to remember my grandmother, but I'm ever so excited and cheerful about my birthday because she used to be. It's just an odd sort of thing that stuck around. As much as I avoid thinking or talking about her, blocking her out of my life and mind with a layer of new stupidity I indulge in on a weekly basis, I become the same person I used to be, during the first 13 years of my life- unreasonably excited and cheerful about turning old.

I'm turning 25 in under a week. Everyone around me seems to think that I haven't grown up. Nobody knows that the girl inside me grew up the year her grandmother wasn't around for her birthday.

Relax by Ellen Bass

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat–
the one you never really liked–will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up–drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice–one white, one black–scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

So.


How do you return to a page to acknowledge and update you *forgot* about for over a month?


With this scene.



This golden piece is what my highlight of the month is. Aishwarya Rai's character believes she will be pregnant because Salman Khan's character is in love with her and it's a 'sin'.


Easily, the highlight of the month where I finished a MPhil thesis and managed to score a date.

More on all these, when my MacBook is charged and I don't have to figure out my sleeping arrangements. I feel like this year's all about displacement.

In other news, if you're reading this and wondering why you're here, please be useful and suggest me the best place for Chicken Lasagna/Lasagne in Delhi. I can't lose this challenge.

- Shah Rukh Khan, July 2016 to Huffington Post. 

I don't want to romanticize this and shit, but I can't fucking believe it's only under a month (let's make our agnostic prayers now) for me to wrap my thesis. I will be done with another university and well, be jobless. Without any real plan or thing to look forward. Not as much as a vacation, forget anything else.

I asked a friend/acquaintance from an old workplace for a job, as they'd advertised everywhere. They're looking for associates, and I believed I fit the bill. Not to forget, I really like that place and met some of the most stunning minds there, at my previous stint.

"Who do you have in mind?"

"I was thinking I should apply. I mean, I love to read and I've done a whole fucking thesis on social media so I know my game."

"I'd take you in a heartbeat bae, but I think you're overqualified for this job. You'd get bored in a month."

And, just like that, my very first rejection-courtesy-higher-education hit me. It made me cry for two whole nights and bore He Who Must Not Be Named on the phone with the same sentence on loop.

"No one's hiring me."

Of course, anyone who's not depressed won't sympathize with that statement. Sinner has been attending my near-breakdown phonecalls for over seven years now, so she's naturally subjected to this. And some more heart wrenching news, which came unexpectedly. HWMNBN heard me and for full two nights, without losing his temper. Said nothing exceptionally nice, but said the things which were right enough to make me stop crying.

After hours of brooding, crying and giving up on meals, I found myself feeling a shade of happy, only when those two came over. I call them rocks because there's nothing that those two can't make me do. Effortlessly, I laughed; after days. We talked- about everyone that mattered and did not, about the crap films we've done, about the men I liked when I was 14 and about Comic Con from 2012 (I tried looking up for a post but couldn't locate it. I sure as hell wrote about it when it happened), that boy who broke my heart recently (and how I didn't see it coming) and melon juice.

Here's the thing. I may not have a job, or the prospects of having a stable academic career, or even a film or a show to work on. I may not have a significant other to write dreamy Instagram posts for and I may have all my friends abroad and unavailable to talk to me, all at the same time just when I need them the most. However, what I will always have, are my rocks. These clowns would bring over Green Apple Yogurt with Gummy Bears and a huge pack of beef chips and tell me all sorts of things to make me laugh. Though, nothing counts as much as knowing that there's someone who still believes in you, and everything you stand for. That validation is all that one needs, on days when you feel nothing can go right.

Despite the distance or the time that has passed, I know there will be them. If they're not around, someone else will look over me, or have me in their mind when I'd be wondering if this is the lowest I've hit or what. There's very few of you out there and I would just like you to know, that I am incredibly lucky to have stumbled on you in my life. I have peaked, with career, with friends and most definitely with luck. I won't be hitting the same notes ever again but for the times when I did, there will always be evenings such as these when I can look back and feel better about having done it sometime in the past.