We underestimate how places feel about people.

We underestimate how places feel about people. We forget the angles we left our chairs turned to, when we left the office- those chairs carried on our conversations about the files due Monday and Mrs. Preisley's date with Jerry last Friday. Apparently she found a ring in her glass of wine and spilled the drink on poor Jerry's face, only to realize the waiter delivered it to the wrong table. The ring in the glass had developed a severe crush on the wine's taste and didn't quite appreciate the perpetual smell of cabbage on the fingers of where it finally sat encircled.

We really do underestimate how places feel about people. This world has an arrogant charm of its own; it makes us feel very...small. Showing us surreal escapades of people around us and foxily hiding away the transience of it all. The world feeds on one momentary pleasure a time with each trampled heart that seeks validation of atleast ten people around him. He doesn't even realize how many times those ten people use the word 'I' in a day and doesn't consider the quiet corners of his humble bedroom sheltering his crunched up balls of paper which reek of a forgotten dream saying "I will".
He forgets the first time he learned to eat noodles with chopsticks without spilling some on the white rug, he forgets when his mom walked into him masturbating in bed when he was 14- he forgets his room saw him in a black suit for his first funeral, he forgets his room saw him stark naked with a bowl of grapes right below his stomach watching television. He forgets how many times the reflection of his lean body flashed by or stayed on the mirror, catching his eyes look unamused, his hair disheveled or his lips chapped.
He remembers to hide in his room but he forgets he doesn't hide from it.

It's really not just him, we do underestimate how places feel about people.

He spends atleast 6 hours every night pushed against his white pillows, so intimate as if trying to hear truths about his souls and demons through its soft bumps and depressions. He abandons it each morning and doesn't consider the angst of the cushion when he climbs out of bed, not so much as gives a second glance back. The pillow lies dejected  and used like a stagnant walk of shame after an intoxicated Saint Peter's night.

He doesn't hear the girl next to him hum to the song blasting from the bus radio because he spends the entire journey trying to move both his ears without changing his facial expression. He found the song foolish and mainstream Bollywood and decided the chronicles of his ear and their movement was an idea worthy of exploration. Once he left his seat at his stop, his seat lay unmoved and cold devoid the warmth of a human rear; "Cold soul"; the seat remarked, the universe agreed. The girl next to it kept humming.

We underestimate how places feel about people. Swearing and elbowing through our days, cutting lines, falling asleep in metros, getting over hangovers by staying drunk; objects and spaces remain lifeless to us, coping with our incorrigible  narcissism of only taking humans seriously. The universe cracks up at that every time.

Shy sunbathed corridors, tucked away backyard gardens with pumpkins growing in them, the rays of light through glass windows in empty college lecture halls, confetti and shiny wrapping paper balled into garbage cans after a birthday party; we arrogantly forget to notice the details of our everydays because we can only hear ourselves breathe and rely on empty critiques of people we want to believe know us too well.

Imagining what spaces we exist in every single day of our lives would say about us? "Now there's a ridiculous thought", said every human ever.

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How've you pumpkins been? :)
Love,
Nil. 

Dear Blogger,

I think Blogger is the easiest way to really see what and who you've turned into from what you were. It's the easiest way of forgetting people you met here and meeting people you never knew.
I have been blogging for the last seven years. That's a big number for me because youth often underestimates the potentiality of big numbers. The concept of 'long run' is often not so long and sometimes arrogantly short sighted.

In the last seven years of blogging, I remember deleting just one post in 2009. Apart from that, whatever I wrote was as good as set on stone because irrespective of the horrible grammar and the strange SMS language that was a fad once, I had no regrets about the person I used to be. In fact, it used to be amusing and at some level comforting. I was a good kid, and I think I managed to grow into a decent-ish human being. But a few days back I did delete a whole lot of posts from the oldest of chests on this blog (2008). I reverted them back to drafts; not because I was embarrassed by what a ridiculously hyper, unabashedly emotional teenager I was. I deleted those posts because I couldn't relate to them anymore. Perhaps sudden minutes of retrospect dab figments of epiphanies in you. Perhaps it was like that one fine day you wake up and decide to quit your job because you forgot why you started working in the first place.
It just had to be done.

You see, back when I wrote them, Blogger was an entirely different world. My list of Followers and Followings were this intimate circle where we trusted absolute strangers with our potent feelings about everything. Back then it was 'milestones' like the first day of my higher secondary schooling, or the longest spell of crush on a boy. For others it was family, work, and much bigger milestones. Some of these people became the kinds of friends who till date keep in touch and genuinely matter. I remember being the baby of the blogger circle.
It was absolutely beautiful how a bunch of URLs could mean so much to people who perhaps lived in different cities/ countries and yet knew overwhelmingly enough about each other.

But eventually over the years, everyone got busy. People moved. People moved on, too. A lot of the blogs I used to religiously follow are now not accessible anymore because they've either turned private or the last time they were updated was two or three years back.
I sure do miss those guys. They were good people and I hope they're all in good health.

I've had years like 2011 when I'd write so often that drafts over drafts piled on my dashboard, waiting to be published. I've had years like 2013 where I had so much to write that words failed me, and all I could manage was crawl up to 13 posts in a year. I've zoned out and zoned in, I've had painful spells of writers block and even worse spells of sheer laziness. But I kept coming back here. Because somehow I knew that somebody would be listening. And if it was a lucky day, somebody would be waiting.

 I have to admit, Blogger still surprises me. In waves of blue moons, once in a while I see old blogger friends leave a comment on a post when I least expect it. Even today, I bump into wonderful blogs of people I want to know better because their words make a lot of sense, they hit home. I'm thankful for such people sustaining the art and the need of writing. Some times I come so close to deleting this blog, but I think I've seen myself and others grow too much in this space to give it all away. Like I said, seven years is a big number for me.

So to all of you who are still writing, to all of you who stopped writing, and most importantly to all of you who never stopped reading- this is a sincere white flag for all of you, to let you know that our boat is still sailing and the ocean still looks just as beautiful. The air is thick with salt, but the words don't fail to come out in sneezes. :)

Cheers, Blogger. You've been a good listener.

All my loving,
Nil. 

Elijah.

Like a sudden raspy slap of the coldest swirl of air- her face haunted me, displacing each an every element of stability within me. My flesh grew pale, though the blood within never felt warmer. It was like a sudden rude grip by unnaturally long fingers around my neck, I do not understand how a face can be so hauntingly beautiful. It ruined me for life.
Her brows stayed home, though the lingering questions escaped the chilly calm on her face with just a tinge of a smile. I refuse to understand how her body, so white like a possessed corpse could seem so alive with the unabashed inactivity in her character- by just standing there with those piercing eyes, she was ruling my existence. If moments could bleed, this would be it. 

Her lank poker straight hair plastered the contours of her oval face like a wedding ring too tight for a finger. The streetlamp on top of her head made a halo of her frail figure that stood too strong, too tall to go unnoticed in the nocturnal camouflage of the snoring night. She was the literary equivalent of star dust, she said.  
Somewhere in the throbbing veins of her hand, I heard a universe call and somehow I believed it really did exist.

Ghosts, spirits, demons and angels seemed like myths of the past that crawled away, intimidated by this Mother of Zeus- if we were all to be thin air, she would be chariot swirling the sky.
So harshly real, emitting a flow-charted insanity of sort- I was left crippled, impotent- a wounded soldier whose words were slashed by hers even before I could conjure a thought. 

Nationalities, religions, myths and epics failed to define her aura that was like a walking aurora in the middle of a battlefield with bleeding men and parts of scattered limbs around dynamites. Her presence was so raw, that you lament over the inexplicable reality of her tenderness.

She churned my insides in a way that would set the democracy of my ideas on fire and would establish the anarchy of my emotions.   

And yet what I felt was the casually tossed idea of wanting to die because you were just that happy. And perhaps, right then I realized the original difference between happiness and elation.
I felt the pores of my flesh, the pores of my soul, the pores of my eyes widen up like open gashes of wounds and found healing in the nakedness of my armors- armors of my flesh, armors of my soul and the armors of my eyes.

I stood right there, once the moment had ended, and the sprinkles of its blood shone in the creases of my fingers. The bones of her haunt made a moment bleed, which is now. 

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Something I wrote for the Poetry Slams I've been doing the past few months. You guys are beautiful, to have stuck around :)
I'll be back soon, I just can't tell when.

-After a long time,
Nil.

Her Maddening Delight.

Anne said, the easiest way to fall back in love was the same reason she usually fell out of it. Her eroticism for a breath away, alone, aloof. Her territory, her sacred perch of yellow afternoons, the sound of her ankle rubbing the brown leather couch, or the rings left on the coffee table from the abruptly abandoned cuppas or glasses of whiskey and water.

Her mind was frustratingly similar to that of every book she read, of every spider she chased, of every thread she pulled off the seams of her white sweater. Her mind was everything around her, and so it shifted, as she kept arranging her living room over and over again. Put the lid on the pot back, shut the drapes and opened them again, pulled in the rug, re arranged the wine glasses, shut the drapes, and.. pulled out the rug, again. 
Her mind shifted. She was like the tip that dances round and around on a poly disk. Except her song had all kinds of lyrics, and was her own.

Her last lover; James, was a simple man. Above average intelligence, didn't look to sour and fell short of the need for affection. So he was your average Joe, every third man you walk by in the city. Anne and James took long walks by 5th avenue, they made love almost every night before the night was midnight old, and they went for brunch every Friday to Rose Cafe. It was quite a pleasant companionship if you must only read my narration, but James felt lesser and lesser the man of Anne's heart and more and more the man of her habit. 
The long walks along 5th avenue felt like aimless wandering; amusement lying in the sky, the trees, the birds, the buildings; save among each other, save the pointless fingers entangled almost as if to let their fingers practice bending, curving.. The love they made was a tiring physical act, and yet the steam blew away oh so long long back, perhaps last new year's eve. And brunches at Rose Cafe being the corner of the cafe, table for two, where the menus weren't consulted and salad on number 4 and the steak on number 9 were ordered, or actually nodded to the waiter. 

One fine February afternoon whilst walking barefoot at the park, James told Anne,  "..but my dear Annabelle, do my words even reach you? You seem to enjoy silence much more, than my wonder about your day", to which Anne frowned, after a deep thought that lasted as long as dry sugar on top of hot coffee she said; "Your words are going over my head.. And I'm not even going to look up, to catch those thoughts, my love."

And with that, she turned around and walked along. Leaving James and his words hanging in air, and her brown oxfords on the grass. 


That wasn't only poor James's story, but also of Keith, Gilderoy, Kevin and Simon. All these eligible bachelors wore their hearts on their sleeves and stuck a rose in between their teeth, all for beautiful Anne. But she wasn't too swept by those careless and careful charms. Her feet only pushed the ground beneath harder as she walked around the city, buying cups of fresh strawberries and cones of vanilla, and spending lovely solitary evenings at the city library all by her pleased self, every Sunday.  It was like she was her own maid of honor. 

And during one of those days in the week itself, could be a Monday or a Thursday; Anne would find a Harry, or a Billand and would high tea over Schubert and Bach. They would muse over Donatello's shadow relief sculpture and and Titian's vivid landscape. There would be easy indulgence, which would almost feel too convenient to be romantic.. but they'd meet over brunch or tea another Tuesday, anyway.  Two out of three times, the Tuesday would go lovely. Maybe even proceed to one of their living rooms. But one out of three times, the Tuesday would proceed to one of their bedrooms, and that right there, would be the glitch in the day, following weeks, and ending within a few months. 

Fleeting. She was a fleeting, hungry soul who looked ravishing in her eventual indifference to most people and her sudden (almost abrupt) endearment to objects and people. Ideally, such a girl must be one with a cat, but her petite sniffs and sneezes would drive away any fur around the cornucopia of her mind and home. 

But finally, there came Ruth. Anne met her at the porch of the house opposite hers. Picking up the delicious looking clear bottles of milk, while Anne couldn't decide which one of the two had a better figure.
Did her heart just skip a beat? Uh Oh.

Oh, their days together were ravenous. Walking with a skip in their beat and dancing skirts hovering high around their skirts, the two women slid their arms around the curves of each other's waists, thoroughly enjoying the boldness of each curve and drinking in kisses in the middle of daylight. Devastatingly in love, they celebrated the terrains of the other's body like it was an unfamiliar site and touch; outlining the pouts of their crimson lips, and tangled curls receding into hurried buns. 
It was delightful, absurd and absolutely horrifying. And for the first time in her life, Anne did not want to rid herself of another depression on the pillow by her side, every morning. 

In such perfection, there was no sense of humbleness. Anne and Ruth were atrocious and misbehaved women madly in love, and they vowed to never stop. No longer did Anne worry about the mundane; for her, every day was a red card of unruly behavior on apparent moral grounds of most people, which kept her entertained and affirmed and reaffirmed that she was alive, and very much.. at home. 

And with that feeling so omnipresent in her heart, Ruth left. 
Just like that. As abruptly as her heart skipped a beat one day; just as abruptly as the first hint of pressured transparent cursive on a paper that follow the blue, that disappeared with the ink getting over. 

Anne didn't try to look for her. Because she found a note on her side of the bed which read; 


"..we were all once young and wild in love, taking leaps of faith which eventually turned out to be a reckless desperation to feel real, and finally ended with revenge in the name of separation."

Ruth was James's sister. 

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(because I was pissed off with section 377. Come at me, bruh.)
There you go, fiction roll, unrolled. (:
Much love,
Nil.