Today.

One class every Tuesday.

Teach kids all the systems. No matter if its less. Or more.

Teach them, so they don't grow up to make

the same mistakes we do.

Or if they ask me questions I don't know the answer to.

Not to flinch.

Write.

I am happy today.

The within type.

And I can now fly without feeling the need to look down on the ground below.

The Fly Away type.

I have shed that skin, that shed sad-sodden slime drops.

Fewer stuff remaining. In the To-Do list.

Open the windows in someones closed room.

Make someone realize a word 'want' is not a thing beyond her reach.

And tell another, 'I cannot' are words just not meant to fit his shoes.

Spread two corners of everyones mouth.

Meet two people. For the last time maybe.

And no cringes of selfishness when I realize I am praying,

but not for myself, for the truest-firstest time.

I have nothing left to ask for.

What thirst I parched for from the falling raindrops of a cloud.

A big river came and started to flow outside my home.

I got everything I needed; from him from Her.

I am free.

Free to fly.

The Fly Away type.

And I am happy today.

The within type.

Nothing...

Yesterday I promised someone I would write instead of crying. And I was with the hope that i would yet again produce voluminous amounts of text. Today I dont feel like crying at all. I just realized this. That I still don't have enough love in my veins. Not as much as I would like to. And I lay down my weapons against that thing called life. Right now, I would like to,

Go and fall over a cliff. And trust me I would be smiling till I smashed into the rocks.

Something I have never been able to do...

Run till my lungs burst and all the blood came out of it.

Hit my head and forget everything about me. And then go to a village and live a life doing chores from house to house like an ordinary peasant woman.

Leave this place. Just leave this place and start walking. And walk till my life bleeds out of my legs.

Actually fall into that water I have seen myself fall into countless times in my dreams.

The best, be that Mermaid I grew up with, even before I learnt to read the story.

Life can be that strange, that fucked up for some people.

Or people fuck their lives up. Maybe that is the truth.

And tears, No tears today. And I doubt if there will be any ever again after this.

I don't know if I am better today knowing it or worse.

I am numb. Because still, I have nothing to gain.

And I have nothing left to lose.

Just a vague emptiness, that I have no words to describe.

Like someone punched me in the face, and forced me to see my face in the mirror.

Like the moths I used to smash as a child because I was scared of them.

Ugly isn't it?

I have nothing left to say.

And when I dissolve into foam, one single drop would fall from my eyes. I wish I could dive in and go away from here.

I wish this is all a dream and I could be, I could be 24 again.

And if that is not possible, then what I learnt today, should change me to the extent that I don't have to do that "Exhale Sucharita. Fill yourself with happiness, you are going to save people's lives. Its a much bigger privilege than anybody gets to get in his/her life. Don't ruin this with your unhappiness within. Don't let that shadow fall on them", each time I walked to the Hospital.

To be honest, About right now, I want to go to Daycare center where I used to be on night duty for a bunch of Terminal patients on ventilator. At about 2 or 3 in the morning, in the biting cold, I used to be the only one person awake there. And I used to pace all night. Looking at each of those bloated faces till it was 6 in the morning. People I mostly never saw making it to life till the time I left.

I want to do that now. I wish they did not lock our hostels from outside. They possibly sense our feelings. Thats why they lock us in. People like me can be dangerous tonight.

On being read...

I have no idea why I am being told I write well. Few days back a junior around here i don't even know the name of approached me, checked if I was the name I know to be mine, and said I write a good blog. That means a lot many read my blog who do not choose to say anything. I dont know what to say. I am not sure if I want to be read. I don't think I would like people to come asking me...oh who is that person u referred to in that entry who loved to beat his students in their knuckles...or who is the she with a white saree and a vermillion mark. I dont want to answer these questions. It doesnt make a difference if people know or dont know. I never wanted that for me. I write when my heart wrenches. Which is quite often. Because I choose to come back to my life silently. And stubbornly stick to my privacy after my exhaustion with people in a hospital. I wonder if my extremely nice friends can actually hear that grumble when they knock on my door and I reluctantly allow them to come in. No I have never wanted to write well. I have always written because I have always been afraid to speak. (Disclaimer: Nothing about this blog is professional; because if I use the same statement in that regard, at least two people will lose consciousness. I won't name them of course. They try to put some sense into my head about controlling my outspokenness and blatant temper ) And when I do feel like this, if I am not in tears (which is most often; I am a very emotional, depression prone neurotic individual), then my hands move automatically and I start hitting the keypad.

Gaining 6 people on my followership column is a little daunting. Like I have to produce something good for the ones who read me. Yet I have no such ideas in my head to write. I write about my life, and the life I see around me. None about the feel good factor. None about the poke your head and come up with something that is like a cliffhanger; a instant hook-up. I write things that might just look interesting to someone else because its another persons private tragedy or comedy. Humans have that innate voyeuristic tendency. They always want to know what is going on in another persons life.

Like someone who asked me something recently to which I fell into that numb stasis. And produced this piece. 1> Do u believe in Love? 2> Do you believe in Destiny and 3> Do u believe that whatever happens, happens for the good?

I have written for years now. How and in which circumstances, doesn't matter. And to whom, and when, not much of a bother. I have written to people who have mattered the most to me to kids who never thought grown up people would appreciate their drawing. Recently I went through a chapter in Psychiatry about the defense mechanisms people use. And after going through it again and again, I knew I use two of them. Suppression, and humor. My aim is to go to the Sublimation. Its the noblest of all defense mechanisms (as has been pointedly given in the book...lie its forcing people to see inside them and reevaluate...). I cannot paint, for then I would have painted of sunshine streaking through clouds. I cannot travel, because I seldom get out of my campus more than once a week. I used to sing. But I used the money saved in buying a guitar for something else. A few months later, wretched with emotion, I stopped singing, and I have not sung ever since. I have slowly given up, over the time, my appetite for consuming large number of books. I remember I finished nearly 300 novels ( not M & B mind it...I would consider that subscribership to be below my dignity..). But Revolutionary Road hangs there. Somewhere in the 20 or 30 odd pages I read...for over a year now. And I have let up on that. I cannot live that life anymore. Its too painful as it is. I want to go numb after my exhaustion. Because reliving upto a passion that once got me into the best and worst moments of my life is an adventure I choose not to undertake anymore.

But I cannot leave this. I cannot leave writing. No matter how much I try to. And I have tried to quit; to stop writing letters, to stop writing about my personal life on a public forum. But I cannot do it. Not that I am advertising. No matter what I write, I know the one person perhaps I would want to read it is no more there. And it doesn't matter if a hundred other people read my blog ( I am not being disrespectful. I sincerely take on the blessings of all those people who have bolstered my faith in this. Especially my Professor, the most unimaginable person to read my column...hick hick...makes me blush each time I think about what he must be thinking to read young rantings like mine ) Without your faith and trust, I would be nowhere. But its difficult to describe. Like the Pin Wheel Jasmine. A flower without a scent . And the same way I cannot forget. The same way I cannot stop worshipping. The same way I choose to stay silent about that one question that snuffs the laughter out of my eyes and kills it everytime I see the same childs face in every child I see smiling. And I cannot move on. In fact I choose not to. In reality I manage to get my hands on every child within passing distance of me. And trust me, children are the only people who will look straight into your eyes without flinching. Most of the time, I break the gaze.

Believing that whatever happened happened for the good will prove that ascribing ones faith in another person or thing is not a permanent thought. Just because it got broken, or was not fulfilled. Or the idea that it can be done over and over again and it can be killed over and over again. Like 'gathering and dusting off lovers' that someone had written. I cannot believe in this. Even though I have lost enough times trying to prove it to myself to the extent I have quit playing games with my heart or faith. Yet I cannot do it. Not to someone else. I cannot do it to myself. Because that would mean whatever I say, or do, are statements that bear strength only in transience. My feelings and my life is not a short episode of a Sitcom. I move from day to day through the things that have happened to me all these 28 years. And I am a sum total of all of them. Even if some of them have been painful ones, they have defined me. Even if I know I can never have that faith anymore, I choose to believe Faith exists.

For some it does. You have to trust me.

People who know me for what I am, have seen the aggression with which I work, my friends who have seen the depression that I once fell into (God knows I think I can never shake out that old hag tugging at my happiness each time I try it ) will tell you, I go by with a few things pending. ( Not including the paper my Professor wants me to complete..I think I should be doing it in another one and a half years..). I shall write about things that I feel like. And I know not all of it will sound good. In fact I know most of it will speak of the filth and the anger and the hurt that sometimes weaves up dark wet nets on my attempts to look at the sunshine. But I shall choose to write about them. Each time it comes to me, rather than fall back on my pillow and drench it ( You devise a method to date tear stains...and mine will be the longest surviving pillow....the prize shall be a detergent that would promise to wash the stink but keep the stain)

But I wont write with a promise to put more people in pain through the pain that I or some other people I know have undergone. People generally tch tch at things like this. Believe me nothing is more stupid than this. Or more classless. I don't want to make you more miserable than you already are. I wont have that much time to explain, and I rarely edit my posts so most of the time things will be dropped here and there. I know I shall never have much time to explain or beauitfy. But if you can, try to look for the hope I dont speak of when I write about despair. Just look inside the pools of tears and you shall find a girls innocence, a mothers dream, a sons fears, a daughters laughter...all undiminished, shining against the grey truths we give names like life, situations, and destiny. And you shall find love. Lots and lots of love. Of the capacity of people for love. Do not read me if you want to see life as a punishment. Dont read me if you think you need a vent for your anger and see that happening here. Which of course is true to the point that I write about things or people who were possibly wronged or misunderstood at some point in their lives. But beyond that, its also about truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth. Because I dont know about love but I can say that truth stands the test of time.

Because no matter what I tell, no matter what I or anyone else mentioned here goes through, lives, or passes on, truth shall remain.

And also that I will...

Always believe in love.

Always fight Destiny.

And always make things happen to me rather than decide that whatever happens might have happened for the good.

(Dear friend, did you get your answer? I promised you I would reply to you in my blog. And I did it. I am very serious about my promises...I keep every single one of them...)

KISSES OVER THE PHONE

It had started from there;

begged, in the presence of a friend

and you blushed and denied until;

you slammed the phone down.

And when you confessed to your friend

the situation,

She chose not to believe !!!

It went to a place when you were scared

and wanted to lock yourselves

in a room until you shook him

and you could say; bring it out on me.

take it out; don't let it consume you

the way it does.

But for him there was a better option.

Few days back again,

I got that telephonic kiss

again from someone who stays

up in the mountains, comes down to touch me

when my eyes open and

against all darkness of a house

devoid of light, I see

the moon by the window, full faced at me.

And from her I got it and got it again,

until stiff lipped, pool eyed,

I asked her to turn her head

and check her ears,

And planted a solid one against the dial.

What she did not realize,

was that her giggles caused

ripples on my pool of dreams

that I once saw with my eyes

that still choose to be blind

to the truth that ultimately awaits us.

In Comparison

How strange is this land, in comparison, where no more than twenty people can rise together for an occasion. Today is Dussehra, the festival of triumph of good over evil, of truth over falsehood, and it is a dead city. Cuttack, in comparison, would be held in chaos now. Pandals, murtis, Melodies, would be littered all over the city. From the Muslim dominated Buxi Bazar, through the beautiful Manglabag and the Silver Chandni Chowk effigy, into the Taladanda Canal Puja committes slum dwellers Durga effigy, its hard not to spot a place which has been left of some attempt at happiness.

I miss you Cuttack. The lack of religion here is as pathetic as the excess of it there. Given a choice, I would prefer the latter. It was always easier to unload ones sadness there. That is not possible here. You have to consume it within you.

Minding my ABCs.... (1)

Prep School, somewhere in a remote corner of Orissa, an Integral School developed on the tenets of The Mother and Shri Aurobindo. Event: The Independence Day Oratory Competition. year 1986-87. I went knobbly kneed and spoke nothing on the dias...I am told I could recite chapters from books after just 2 readings. Maybe the initial synaptic connections were being set. But my first stage presentation and even if I had memorized the stuff in only one or two readings I got nothing on my lips the moment I set foot on the dias. Everyone gave me a respectful lapse until they finally got bored and finally asked me to step down. Another girl got a prize.

There was some man my mother had given a job in the school as a physical instructor who also teamed up as my bearer for the 20 odd kilometers I used to go by bus everyday. Sort of a benefactress for both the school's director and this man, who were her patients. I used to torture him into giving me a soft drink every day we used to walk back from school. I hated him but I loved his father, who was a village priest. He had a long aquiline nose and had a Sandalwood paste done in a way till the mark came upto his nostrils. I found him very good looking and kind. I thought my tutor was a monster since he was mean not to ever give me any cold drinks. What I did not know was that they barely had money to cook food in their family, and my mother had put him in a job because of his father's insistence when she went to the temple. So everytime he did give me a Gold Spot, my mother would force a note in his pocket.

He and his father were both very nice men and his family adored me. Everytime I went to their house in the village I got an omelette. I hated the Omelette. I wanted to eat smoked potatoes and water rice like them with Saag from their garden but never got that. They always gave me the parboiled rice and omelette. I loved his mother because she used to take me to the big and cold mud thatched room in their house which smelled of fresh straw and showed my how rice was beaten on a dhinki. And taught me to play see-saw on their bullock cart.

I was the previleged one in at least 5 villages...as the daughter of two dashing doctors from Cuttack. And so it couldn't be that I did not win a prize. I beat up C, the physical instructor, who also doubled up as my private tutor. My mother inquired what I wanted and bought it and secretly gave it to me through C Sir. I was told the school had retrospectively decided to award me because that was the first time I spoke, even if I did not come first. I had a school bag which I hated. I wanted a shiny steel box, like all others used to carry. It was heavy. So 'C Sir' used to carry it for me. It had a Bonnisan baby joker pasted on the top. Bonnisan for Happy Healthy Babies.

Somewhere through that winter and the rest, my mother bought me 2 illustrated fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. My world was awash with the idea of the being a mermaid dying for her love, sharing a chocolate house with Hansel and Grethel, wearing a frock that looked like a lotus, a black rose, having a house in a kite, understanding animal languages, visiting Russia to meet Ivan Ivanovich, live in a caravan and so on. I used to sleep between my parents and the first thing they did was to ask me tables. They wanted me to learn upto 30. I was not even 6 that time. I hated that time when I woke up and used to pretend to sleep over. But I loved it when father picked me up from the tables to talk to me about Popes and kings and India's Independence struggle. They stopped the tables recitation after I reached 25.

With the fairy tales I used to read strange books my mother bought me to read. I was being trained to go to Stewart School in Cuttack. My mother used to work in the hospital and then come back and teach me. I devoured the Science book and the New Horizons book for English. She got me another years book in advance that I was supposed to do in my spare time. I did that in no time.

I used to play Doctor Doctor with my cousin in the sprawling drawing room in our quarters. We were always short of paper we used for our games. I despised the white notepads that MRs gave my parents. My attention was in turn on the sheaths of blue kept in a black leather bag in my father's shelf. One day I picked a few sheets a little scared some one would know. We played with it, and I threw it out the window. It went unnoticed. Next day I became a little bit daring and we brought out another bunch and had a field day cutting it into prescriptions, bus tickets, coupons, currency and so on. Within a week a ream worth of typed paper was lying in a heap outside the window. A few days from then some summons came for my father to attend. He was and till date remains an extremely organized man. I was in the room when he came to the shelf. He opened the bag and found a pen without a cap. ( We were using the bag as the money bag conductors carry ). He never told me a word.

Not long there after I once jumped inside the operation theater in the Primary Health Center both my parents were posted at. It was an open air, open access, brightly lit room with windows that had no panes, and my father used to remove fibroids, lipomas, drain abscesses, squelch hernias and so on, with some spectators from outside who kept standing outside the window panes and looked on at the proceedings. One day I entered the OT to ask permission for something. On the outside was my mother, with a baby hanging upside down in her left hand, and a woman with red between her legs and a bucket below. I ran inside when she asked me to go out. I saw dad stiffen. But no one spoke a word. I strained at what he was operating through the drapes. I stood there a long time before I got bored and walked out. It was a circumcision. I knew that day that my mother was a gynaecologist. She was giving birth to a baby !!!

In 1989, I walked as a 9 year old into a section full of 90 odd students. I was readmitted into Standard 2 Section B because the "English Medium" ICSE schools would not admit me in Standard 3. I thought I had failed, so I was doing it again. I was not in Stewart School, because my mother was told kids did drugs there in that school. And that scare was enough for my parents to decide to put me in good old SCB. I was in my favorite yellow Salwar and in my aluminium box which was heavy with hard bound notebooks. I was pink with shame. Someone called me back and the teacher asked me to go back and I began to go towards her. ' Go Back...' she said a bit louder. I blushed. A guy I later knew to be Santosh called me from behind in Oriya to come back. I went and sat next to him. We were friends. A few minutes later it was decided that I should ask Amrita, the smartest girl in the class for her friendship. But it would depend on whether she wanted to be my friend or not. I eagerly waited for the Recess.

The bell rang and I was taken by 3 or 4 kids to a girl who was incredibly round cheeks and eyes that ended in a oiled sort of way between her lashes. She had incredibly beautiful eyes and wore her hair parted on the side with a white band pushing the front hair back. In one moment I felt ashamed of the Yellow Salwar, the Aluminium box I was carrying. They were all bought at my own insistence when I was back in the Integral School. In one moment, I wanted to be like her, with her shirt having a round collar, and blue tunic. " See I don't have a problem in making you my friend. But I need to know what my best friend has to say about it". I waited for her Best Friend to come. An extremely fair girl, with a nose I noticed immediately, and kajol in her brown eyes, came banging desks on either side of her with her palms. " Can I be your and Amrita's friend? "

She took one look at me from top to bottom. I was very nervous. 'She is not a good girl', she said and walked back, palms banging desks either side of her. "I am sorry", Amrita said matter of factly. " I really had no problems being your friend but since my Best Friend says you are not a good girl, I will go by what she says". She walked away. Santosh consoled me. " Don't worry, I will be your friend." We shook hands or what I don't remember. I hated myself for being bad. I wondered why my parents had to give birth to a bad girl. I cried that day while returning from school.

That white girl was known was "White Ghost" amongst us. I used to run away every time I saw her. Because every time she neared me she cast a shrewd look that convinced me I had something deeply worng with me. Santosh had some time convincing me I wasn't bad. We shared our tiffins. But I did not like Santosh for all his help. He just did not want to read and had a terrible handwriting. I wanrted to befriend Amrita an her Best Friend. She was a very vicious girl it was said. She was a 'dada', a goon. And her name was Subhashree Panda.

I am obsessed with neat looking files and treatment charts that have less than 2 cancelled orders. But I am wondering if that part of the Obsessive Compulsive disorder I have to keep things clean, then why I don't carry it to my room. My room is a heap of mess, do not know if it is for the stuff that I kept lugging from Delhi, a total of contents of three rooms all shoved into one small dreary room I have here, with its books and papers, all flying about, and now 2 computers to add. For this reason I choose to suffer the summer heat and not add a refrigerator and cooler to it. Tonight I am going to clean it, in terms of shoving out the papers and literature I have been bringing home. Then I will get that 20 kilos of books from Delhi I am planning to finish. God be with me.