It seems like it's time. Then again, making your goodbyes public means you must take them seriously. You can't write a suicide note and survive to tell the tale without feeling at least the tiniest bit embarrassed with yourself.
How interesting unfamiliarity is. I came back here and something in my eyes went 'really?'; this blog theme is possibly one of my favourites. It began to seem a shame to leave, without having written anything worth the possibilities this colour-combination and font texture invite in a person. Perhaps I will override my farewell and come gatecrashing back. I think this is entirely likely; having invested two paragraphs already to one thought, there is a definitive possibility that I will change my mind swiftly. (Never must one think one does not know oneself. There only remains the prickly question of honesty.)
For someone with an abysmal memory, to have and keep a journal is a way of keeping off the sand dunes of time for as long as possible. When you are putting things down, a part of the reason why you labour so much after adjectives and descriptions is desperation. This desperation is borne of all the moments of disappointments you and others have felt, of having let something go. Is forgetting something a choice? Perhaps repression is. But why would you forget this, and not that? Is there a mechanism at play, of which somehow, slyly, you are aware? Does your ego not suffer when you forget important things, or do you admire how it somehow endears you to your loved ones? Oh, you're a crafty thing, you are. There is nobody more cunning than the one who manufactures innocence.
Where have I digressed to? This is the problem with writing at night while listening to music which sounds so familiar that you feel like you're strumming every wailing chord yourself. A girl I know once told me how she had stopped talking on the phone at nights, because she'd wake up next morning and be a tad mortified at the languorous rubbish she'd been spinning last night. I've felt that sometimes. So much sharing makes you lose yourself a little. Then you run around on a wobbling heart, trying to gather your dark secrets again, trying to feel that old sense of slight contentment, that there are things you want to share sometimes, but something has made you suspend that feeling, till another secret, another little bit of you comes along. Or you blog about it all at night. Oh, what an irony pickle!
So let's not blame myself. Perhaps it's this house. We're shifting soon and going to a house on the seventh floor, on a building made by vanishing a jungle. It's a conflict, truly it is. I knew this jungle, what it looked like, what it felt like. It was our myth come true, it was our gory battlefield, it was our daylight horror tale. To this day, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the day is my favourite nightmare. It is a breathless, hand-on-my-heart frightening a prospect for me. And now when I walk towards school, my mind nodding in agreement to the sprawling landscape of nostalgia, my heart crushes at the sight of this building. My forest has disappeared, and in its place is a thing as alien as a dinosaur. Perhaps it is one.
I need to stop growing so old, if truth be told, because things change, and our conversations with the past need to undwell on how similar or dissimilar the present appears to be. For this very reason I keep counselling myself to not give up on Bombay. Have I given up on Bombay? All I can see is an invasive, unmindful, graceless kind of change-brain, knocking things up and plonking down strange creatures in their place, creatures which seem proud of themselves, but are, in fact, painfully awkward in their ambitiousness and fresh paint. They look down at the few old trees which have been left alone, and something seems very odd.
There are creatures, however, who do seem to have a kind of bloom in them. A run-down little two-room opposite IDC has been recreated as a creche for children of construction workers. It has friendly, although incomplete, cartoons all over its outer walls, and despite the nauseating off-white paint scheme, it seems quite inviting and at peace with where it stands. If double-decker buses and the pavement book-sellers leave, if L'Amour book-shop at Hiranandani is replaced with an Arabic bistro, if Taste of Kerala goes away, if Anmol near J B Nagar loses its grand entrance to a steel gate... Seawoods station has already been turned into a monster, and some of us have been reading with trepidation at what is about to happen at Panvel because of the new airport. It's difficult not to despair, I can almost hear myself singing mournfully, 'Back in the days when taxis were black-and-yellow...'. And on the other hand, I tell myself that attachments stunt your capacity to remember things with love.
Our loves seem recycled, sometimes new, but our fears, they seem to be the same old ones.
How interesting unfamiliarity is. I came back here and something in my eyes went 'really?'; this blog theme is possibly one of my favourites. It began to seem a shame to leave, without having written anything worth the possibilities this colour-combination and font texture invite in a person. Perhaps I will override my farewell and come gatecrashing back. I think this is entirely likely; having invested two paragraphs already to one thought, there is a definitive possibility that I will change my mind swiftly. (Never must one think one does not know oneself. There only remains the prickly question of honesty.)
For someone with an abysmal memory, to have and keep a journal is a way of keeping off the sand dunes of time for as long as possible. When you are putting things down, a part of the reason why you labour so much after adjectives and descriptions is desperation. This desperation is borne of all the moments of disappointments you and others have felt, of having let something go. Is forgetting something a choice? Perhaps repression is. But why would you forget this, and not that? Is there a mechanism at play, of which somehow, slyly, you are aware? Does your ego not suffer when you forget important things, or do you admire how it somehow endears you to your loved ones? Oh, you're a crafty thing, you are. There is nobody more cunning than the one who manufactures innocence.
Where have I digressed to? This is the problem with writing at night while listening to music which sounds so familiar that you feel like you're strumming every wailing chord yourself. A girl I know once told me how she had stopped talking on the phone at nights, because she'd wake up next morning and be a tad mortified at the languorous rubbish she'd been spinning last night. I've felt that sometimes. So much sharing makes you lose yourself a little. Then you run around on a wobbling heart, trying to gather your dark secrets again, trying to feel that old sense of slight contentment, that there are things you want to share sometimes, but something has made you suspend that feeling, till another secret, another little bit of you comes along. Or you blog about it all at night. Oh, what an irony pickle!
So let's not blame myself. Perhaps it's this house. We're shifting soon and going to a house on the seventh floor, on a building made by vanishing a jungle. It's a conflict, truly it is. I knew this jungle, what it looked like, what it felt like. It was our myth come true, it was our gory battlefield, it was our daylight horror tale. To this day, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the day is my favourite nightmare. It is a breathless, hand-on-my-heart frightening a prospect for me. And now when I walk towards school, my mind nodding in agreement to the sprawling landscape of nostalgia, my heart crushes at the sight of this building. My forest has disappeared, and in its place is a thing as alien as a dinosaur. Perhaps it is one.
I need to stop growing so old, if truth be told, because things change, and our conversations with the past need to undwell on how similar or dissimilar the present appears to be. For this very reason I keep counselling myself to not give up on Bombay. Have I given up on Bombay? All I can see is an invasive, unmindful, graceless kind of change-brain, knocking things up and plonking down strange creatures in their place, creatures which seem proud of themselves, but are, in fact, painfully awkward in their ambitiousness and fresh paint. They look down at the few old trees which have been left alone, and something seems very odd.
There are creatures, however, who do seem to have a kind of bloom in them. A run-down little two-room opposite IDC has been recreated as a creche for children of construction workers. It has friendly, although incomplete, cartoons all over its outer walls, and despite the nauseating off-white paint scheme, it seems quite inviting and at peace with where it stands. If double-decker buses and the pavement book-sellers leave, if L'Amour book-shop at Hiranandani is replaced with an Arabic bistro, if Taste of Kerala goes away, if Anmol near J B Nagar loses its grand entrance to a steel gate... Seawoods station has already been turned into a monster, and some of us have been reading with trepidation at what is about to happen at Panvel because of the new airport. It's difficult not to despair, I can almost hear myself singing mournfully, 'Back in the days when taxis were black-and-yellow...'. And on the other hand, I tell myself that attachments stunt your capacity to remember things with love.
Our loves seem recycled, sometimes new, but our fears, they seem to be the same old ones.
Please don't stop. You beautiful creature.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way about all this nonsensical building and cutting down of trees, etc. It's frightening. Really really frightening.
I read this cartoon today in which one girl asks the other while they're looking down at these factories, belching smoke and pollution into the atmosphere:
"what do you think our most powerful renewable resource is?"
"Denial."
It is scary, isn't it? I recently had to go to an SEZ meant for Wipro in Shozhinganallur, just on the outskirts of Madras. It had been built entirely on top of mangrove land. There were patches of water which had been left undisturbed as a sign of ecological CSR. Such strong, unrelenting illusions.
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