The Sunset Boy

I want to write about you, but I still have two more sunsets with you...On the third sunset from today, I will think about you, about us and write this blog

On my list this summer ;)

Mumbai & Murund Janjira near Mumbai
Matheran
Kashmir
Nepal
Bangalore
Hyderabad
Chennai
Calcutta( obviously!)
Delhi

Damned! two months to go...yahhooo ;)

Some Fragments

I only remember bits and fragments of my early childhood. We- me, Ria, Mom and Dad- we used to stay together, in an appartment. I remember being close to my dad, listening stories and all, going places with him. It’s a very vague memory though. I remember the one fight when my dad grabbed my mom by her neck and almost strangled her… and I was scared.I found a stick from somewhere and started beating my dad asking him to stop. I remember they fought a lot one day, and Dad shut himself inside his room. They seperated pretty soon- Mom left home with me and Ria. I was about 4.

Mom slowly developed an uncontrollable temper. After we moved out, I did not have any friends as such. And being the younger one, my mom had hardly much to say to me.
I grew alone, and was a very mediocre student.My mom never asked me about my studies. Nobody liked me somehow. I don’t know, most people still don’t.

As years passed, mom got more and more violent. She used to beat me like anything. I remember she did, and so many times I planned on running away. It was cruel. With shoes, with belts. She used profanity that I never understood back then, which I know now means motherfucker, fucker and so on. I cannot imagine why she used such words on a 7-8 year old kid, but she did. The memories are vague and distant now, the pain and lonliness of those years I still remember. Around eleven and twelve I escaped into my world of imagination. I met Nick, and he was my best friend as well as my boyfriend. He was there to save me everytime. He came to my rescue, like the prince in a Cinderella story- and he became almost a reason for me to live. To me he was real. I loved him, I believed him and he meant the world to me. My mother’s violence never stopped. In anger she would also say- Go and sleep with your father. I was too naïve to understand the implications back then. But I would be hurt.

Quite often I would wish I were dead.

I had other friends than Nick, which included Crystal, William and Derek. When I was eleven, my dad suffered a heart attack, and we went to see him. I had met him some few times during the period we were seperated. This time, my parents probably thought of reuniting, but it didn’t work.

We didn’t have any close relative either. Divorce or living seperated in Indian society was a big deal. I just ended up being different from the other kids. Every now and then I would seek a best friend to rely on, but it was very difficult to find one, hold on to anyone. I wasn’t good in anything. After I would return home from school, I had no one to talk to..other than my elder sister Ria sometimes. I was left out, and stayed by my own, till I discovered the joy of writing and imagining thing. And all the low feelings used to dissapear when I used to step into the world of imagination- where Nick and others would care for me so much. The pain was so much easier to handle now.

Still there had been times, I had tried to run away, thought of killing myself.But Nick would never let me, tell me he loved me. I owe him the six years and more of my life …till I met Arjyo.

Then and now I would understand Nick might be only a fantasy. My dad suffered a lung rapture when I was in 9th standard was was paralyzed with thrombosis for six months. It was then we moved back in. It was very strange…suddenly living with a man, whom you hardly know that much. But it was scary too-to see him suffer so much- the nights when he would wake up screaming from pain, and my mom did take good care of him. No matter even if she hated him, she did care enough to make him get well.
I had my first serious crush in 9th standard. A guy who looked exactly like Nick. My next two years revolved around the dreams of him, though nothing ever really happened between us. He played around with me a bit, but in my world of imagination he was very dear and close to me. I built long plan dreams with him- may be , may be he is the one to my rescue finally?

I suffered a heartbreak when I came to realize the guy was an asshole. Sometimes I look back, I wonder how silly I was! I can't imagine falling for him now. Good looks matter, but they form so little of the whole package I look for in a guy. In 11th class, I got my first proper boyfriend, Arjyo...who had been my best friend for a while. Though the relationship had more commitment than any other ones ( not counting with Jesse :that's special) I have had so far, it marked the start of my degrading grades in high school. Eventually I graduated school and got in a very ordinary engineering college, where Ria had gone as well. I had never wanted to study engineering. But mom insisted. All I wanted back then was Physics.

But like now, I didn't have the courage to make my decision.

That pretty much made the first 18 years of my life. The next five years, I have been someone else.

The purposelessness of this stupid life

I am not really contemplating suicide. But I find myself thinking of death pretty often.The same feelings of my teen years are coming over again. Sometimes my whole existence do not seem to make much sense, and there's too much going on to carry around with me all the time. Everything I want, and even including death seems something that doesn't come easy.

I think I don't have the mere courage. It's easy to wish you were dead, but it's so hard to die. For the first time when I saw death more closely, I realized I was so scared.I was afraid like anything...as I looked behind and saw the deep gorge, I felt scared. A slip of my feet would land me somewhere there, dead. The entire trek I was scared of so many things, and I realize in fact I am afraid of death like everyone else. Or may I am more afraid of the pain associated?

I am almost 23, and still done nothing worthwhile in my life.I have stood apart from the crowd by doing a whole bunch of ridiculous thing, but I see myself taking the same well worn out path after a a couple of years and growing old as a nobody. I don't really have anyone to live for either; when with Akash, I thought I found a reason. I love Jesse, but then he has a family, he has kids that give him reason to live. I don't find much purpose to my life...I am not benefiting anyone,the world, the society in any way.Not even my parents with whom I hardly talk. I hardly fit in with people...in a while I need to run from them and be on my own. I can't even maintain friends too long.Added to all this I think I am partially mad too.This purposelessness drives me crazy.I think I need detachment, and yet that detachment makes me feel so useless,so redundant in this world. I am only a burden to many, who just out of their goodness tries to make me happy, do so much for me...but I have nothing to give in return. The debt of their goodness is too much for me to bear at times and though I know what is expected of me, I do nothing to show my gratitude.I get many things I don't deserve, and sometimes the guilt of it kills me. And what I feel I deserve so much, like everyone else, I find myself deprived there.I really have no purpose -at the most I present an example of bizarreness which is not something people should be inspired from.

The conclusion called death

I lay there, passive, staring at the ceiling fan which made an occasional rumbling noise in the quiet summer night. June’s death left me in a strange numbness for the next couple hours, which I was unable to comprehend. I felt like I am living in a state of eternal coma ever since I have arrived to this city, suffering a series of hallucinations and illusions. Nothing was real. Nothing is or will be, ever again.

I didn’t know whom to blame for her death. Was it Babu, who’s child she was supposedly bearing? Or Sindi, who’s so called detachment, had been the root to all that followed? Or was it June herself, who was too weak to move on? Who loved a man who couldn’t belong to anyone, and tried to be with a man to whom she belonged not out of love but out of pity?

My thoughts stayed jumbled in my head and tormented my soul, while my body lay in a still undisturbed state. When I was exhausted, I dozed off. My lights were still on.
I don’t know the time, when I was woken up by a call from David, a friend in Fermilab. I had asked him to call me about some official documents that should be coming to my mail stop in Fermilab. He apologized for being so late, and said, there had been a strange accident at Fermi. Someone had been killed. Some woman’s body had been found at the Wilson Hall cafeteria. Might be some high school girl who fell from the high floors, he added.

The third death in a span of less than twelve hours.

I sat up in the bed wide awake. My roommates were still away and would be returning early next morning. A strange emptiness and silence had swallowed my whole apartment. And it spoke of death.

May be there was no other escape. There was a big hollow in my heart, a feeling of purposelessness, and I realized lately there had been too much going on, to even stop and feel through the pain. I felt completely lost among the series of events ever since I stepped to Mumbai, and it seemed Akash among all of these has become a distant memory, that rendered a nagging pain somewhere. It is this illusion of love and belonging, lust and longing that leads to destruction. Destruction of one self, and destruction of those we want to possess.

Contrary to what I expected, I found I haven’t recovered in the morning even. I made my routined journey to the laboratory, yet the whole time the events of previous day tormented me. Somewhere I have been integrated with their lives, I thought and the loss seemed too real. I thought of the dead girl at Fermi, and I knew it wasn’t an accident. A strange restlessness engulfed me- it can’t be someone I know. Jane is in Moscow, and no one I know could be insane enough to do so…right? There are thousands of people in the lab.

Reaching the lab, I quickly finished some work my advisor asked, before dropping some lines to Jane about the news. She has been busy off late with her exams and her trip to hometown, but we still manage to talk quite a bit. She came online in the afternoon, I felt a bit better to find someone alive amidst the world of dead I was living in. She was a bit taken at the news. I left my office, and came back, and found her message which was mail from her advisor George. The girl was Maria, with whom Jane shared the office.

I am scared, she said. I wondered how she would feel to go back and be in the same office. I hoped she would be okay.But even before that she had one more exam to go through.

And yet I wasn’t. They were all young. Like me, Crystal or Jane. Did they ever know about their untimely consequence ? I wonder....and do I? I have accepted it.

At sunset, I sat on a rock at the sea face. The only place I loved in my campus that felt too much mine. I watched the waves crash on the rocks and break over and over again, with an irrepressible desire to conquer, but ending in failure. They were like those waves of emotions in me struggling to win over the agony and pain and render me some peace and happiness. But they too fail everytime.

Dear love...

Can I ask you something?
Yes?
How many men did you have sex with? He asked as he held me naked beneath him,and at a moment when I was thinking that his love was everything I ever wanted in life.

I didn’t want to lie. So, the other option was not to answer.

Poor Indian men. They still judge the purity or your feelings based on times you have indifferently given to lust and longing in your past. And yet they fail to see the love for which the girl gives up everything and is standing at your doorstep wanting to belong to you.Do they understand love? Or even the concept of love is limited by the stringent orthodoxy that leads them to live a life of unforgivable hypocrisy?

Love, my dear love, everytime you leave me, I am in a mess. In last three years has there been a day I haven’t thought of you? May be sometimes with hate, sometimes with love and sometimes with anger. But you were in my mind. I have loved a ghost of you, which was to me the way I wanted, and may be even now, I am opening up my soul to someone who didn’t exist in the first place. And so my love, in this world that’s so real I am no longer surprised that you ain’t here with me. Because the real you was never there.

I have never truly belonged to anyone. Yet many tried to possess me. I never belonged to my parents, who remained strangers to me all my life, never to my lovers, and never to myself. Never to my country, my people or my creed. And then I found someone, who could probably possess me and liberate me at the same time. My love, that was the first time I asked a man to own me.

My darling, my sweet love, there is a venom in my blood, and it won’t go away. I ate the forbidden fruit, and called upon my own destruction. I lie in my bed, and try to extract from my scrambled thoughts, those moments of true love and intense pleasure which have got lost in this vast ocean of hatred. And slowly, there is a vision. I see you. Your eyes looking at mine, telling we are destined. Yes, love, we were destined even though if it was only to fall apart.

Of Guilt, Pain and Love....

“You told me there are things that you wanted to tell me”
“Some other time, not now”
“You say that everytime”
“I know, but I love it here. I love it here with you, and I don’t want to feel the pain. I just want you to like me”
"I already like you very much. And for nothing I would judge you. Trust in me"

I liked his simplistic attitude. I knew he meant what he said, and the simple English translations of his German feelings somehow made the equations between us much easier to deal with. We didn’t have a lot in common, apparently.Our taste of music was very different, our perception and philosophies of life, our ambitions- there was no similarity at all! But yet we liked each other a lot. We cared for each other in some tangible and intangible ways.And above all those complex feelings, we were good friends. And that was pretty much it.

I cuddled up in his arms, as we lay behind the bushes and the tall grasses at the shore of the lake.The full moon shone brightly, and I could still see the twinkle in his blue eyes. We were wrapped in the white sheets, but I still wore his red sweat shirt. It was the mid August, and there was a bit of chill in the air and since I was too sensitive to cold, the jacket saved me. He said I looked cute in that. I think I did, but I liked it more, because it was his.

I liked watching the ripples of the water as the moonbeam fell on them. He held me close to him. I could feel his hands running over my arms, and my waist, and yet a little hesitant to do anything more. I looked at him. Shit,I wish I could tell him he looked so beautiful. I kissed his unshaven cheeks, and held his face. He looked at me.“Are you sure?” he asked.

I said, I don’t know what that means. But somewhere in me I feel a lot of pain that I want to run away from yet I have no clue which road to take. I probably claim to have a bf I want to return back to and I also have a lover, and yet I am so insecure. I want to run from those feelings . But then is lust the answer to the guilt and the pain? I didn't know. Nor did he. I lived in the transitoriness of those intimate moments and for a brief while escaped into another world with him, where no one knew me, where no one judged me.But the mornings after those acts I realized, nothing has changed, and I was only trying to run from myself. The person in my place the night before was but a mere stranger, and she and I were just too different but trapped in the same body.

I knew goodbye was inevitable. It bothered me then and now, and yet it didn't. I liked the abstractness of the relation or the bond and yet the detachment in it. The last night I spent with him, while I was in his arms, I realized, that the once broken barriers of my life can never be mended.I looked at him, he had the strange innocence of a child, his hate, love, wanting was so simple. He had never been able to venture into the complex thoughtwebs of my head, and everytime he tried, he was pushed back. He was shy even. But I told him, this time, I love him. I don't know if that was possible, but for that moment, I think I meant it literally. When he left, and was traveling the East Coast before returning to Germany, he called me everyday and said he missed me. And he feels he is in love with me. I missed him a lot, and yet love was something I never really understood.

The Wrong Trade

Dated : 5th April, 2010

June,

I am sorry for the way things turned out for us. I will never find a
woman like you, and my dishonesty in not being frank to you has caused
you intolerable pain. When I had left Calcutta I was in love with you
and I had thought in a year or two I would find a place in this world.
I would put my talents to test and I would make a career and then I
can ask for your hand. But that never happened. I never started in my
career and after a year into recession I came to know that if any
trainee engineer would be fired then my name is in top of that list.

In this kind of a situation had I been the old Akash you had come to
know and love I would have stood up and fought back. But this new me
started finding fault in everybody, accusing others, bitching about my
own friends to buy a place in this company. I lost my self esteem, and
started selling out my people down the river, first I started with my
friends and then with my close friends. I have become a deplorable
human being who knows no low to stoop down to. My backbone is now a
jelly. I even started making random friends to see if i cn start anew
with a new career.

Among all this mess I saw that you still love me, and you are ready to
come to Bombay to stay with me. I thought maybe this is a good sign
and maybe I am getting the last straw to resurrect myself. But then I
realized I am no longer good for you. I tried to make things difficult
for you so that you finally give up your plans to come to Bombay.
Because as long as you are away you would not have to rest your eye on
the mess Akash is right now. I had always believed that love for
others stem from the love for own-self. Since the source had died up
the river has also been dead long since.

Still when you came the old emotions in me welled up and I could not
tell dare to tell you the truth because you seemed like the Manna the
Beduine waits for. In the meanwhile I pulled up another sham for my
parents, called them up showed them the new car. So they got an idea
that I am doing well and hence would be less worried about me. So I am
fooling my parents and you. In the deepest nooks of my heart I always
a place which is sacred for you, there is limitless affection for you
as well as devotion. That is why i tried so hard to keep you
integrated to my life. The bed I sleep on has the bedsheet chosen by
you, the breakfast is generally the one you had shown me to prepare. I
was doing all that so that I can carry you with me in the corner in my
heart which i still believe is pure. I would lose you because I cannot
allow you in my ship which is taking in water too fast. But I know
that when I will close my eyes my eyes will close to the fond the
memories of having you by my side, working on my laptop, dressing for
me in front of my almirah. I have kept a few of your stuff well hidden
in my room so that you would not be able to find them. I want to keep
them as your fond memory.

I know words and action cannot be enough to palliate your pain, but it
is best that I release you from my miasmic world. A tumor like me has
to be chopped off before it causes your death.

Thank you for trying so much to bring me back to life, but I have been
long dead, June. You deserve a lot more than a scoundrel like me.

Loved you a lot shona,

Goodbye,

Akash

I know this letter meant nothing. May be Akash loved someone once-a girl..Varada. Only who's thoughts can free him of his guilt, I take it. Happens to everyone, I guess, but it didn't mean he should have fooled me.Lied to me. And insulted me. The wounds will take time to heal, the love will perish to ashes, but I wish it didn't turn out this way. To me, he was probably the first one, who meant so much to me-but I lived a dream, it was never really me.

I seek the need for detachment from most things. I wish I could just weep. I close my eyes, and my whole 22 years pass by me, like series of events that changed me in every step. I wish so many things didn't happen, but they did. I realize we all are in a eternal, endless chase...you, I will always want someone, who doesn't probably need us. I look back, think of men who came and went...and wonder how many times I really have been in love. Yes with Arjyo, but that was an unsure feeling. Jesse. And one last time I guess was with Akash.

As I sit idle once again in my lab and glance at the coverpage of this book, "Foreigner", I feel somewhere I can correlate myself to it.I feel this detachment, this crisis, and a note of irony that runs along this twenty years' story. I close my eyes, and think of the blue eyed boy I cuddled up and made love to by the lake, under the starry sky and tried to run away to some other world. But the escape was so transitory. I remember telling my story to a stranger over five glasses of alcohol, confessing my guilt, wishing someone would forgive me.But my sins stayed. And I remember holding on to Akash and asking him not to leave me. Looking for my last shelter I had gone to him.To be liberated of all the pain, guilt, and scars, and be like everyone else.But he left.I dealt the wrong trade.Then and now I close my eyes, wishing it's a nightmare, and there would be sun again, amidst the perpetual cloudy sky over my head. And he would come back, and this time mean those words of love. But I know that's unreal, movie-ish. For those few moments of happiness, I have suffered a irreplaceable loss.

To love, is to invite others to break your heart. Can I love again? I don't know. Did I ever love? May be, once or twice.But may be love is not the answer I am looking for, I was just following the wrong clue. Cause, for years now I have searched the shores of the world and I haven't found that precious shell. So, may be I need to look for something else.

Pregnancy , Alcohol and Creepy Happenings

It’s 4th of May, and I have completed a full one month of my break-up. The weirdest one, I ever had, I must admit to that.My roomies are off to IIT-kgp for the INO collaboration meeting. The last place, I think I want to go for now- so I stayed back with some stupid reason. Not to mention, it’s nice and peaceful to stay by myself. I had been late in waking up even today and as usually, like yesterday missed the bus to lab. I dragged myself out of the apartment in the noon, and walked to the station under the blazing sun, to find out trains are closed. Trains are lifeline for Mumbai, and even if they are closed for an hour- the city is paralyzed. I took a cab and came back home.

I looked at my tummy for the tenth time in the mirror. It wouldn’t show now if something is wrong. My cycle should have started on 28th, but it’s 4th. This has happened before, I have assured myself for the last few days, but I have a creepy feeling. The last time, on 3rd April Akash and I made love without a condom.The day we broke up. From the age of seventeen I have had this fear atleast a dozen times, and I had been alright. I told myself, I would be fine. It was my eighth day, it should have been okay. I should buy the stupid test, but I hate the anxiety while doing it. If I am pregnant now, if I do it ten days after I still would be pregnant.

But if my periods start before that, I don’t have to go through the torture.

It is funny and I guess a bit of irony too the guy with whom I wanted to have babies, now the mere thought of bearing his baby is like a nightmare. Logically the moments we had, were apparently sweet. And yet unlike 2008, my response to the whole thing now is something I myself am unable to comprehend. I realize I can’t seem to look back at anything with fondness. I suffer bad dreams a lot nowadays. I see myself walking in busy streets of Mumbai, and being chased by a stranger who wants to kill me. I wake up in the darkness,sweating and it feels someone is there in the kitchen and would come and stab me. Worse I have dreams about Akash raping me. Our lovemaking technically have been sweet and yet in my dreams, I see him as someone evil, laughing at me…telling something like, I told you so, calling me slut, saying I am hot and sexy and then forcing himself to me. And I struggle to get out. These bad dreams repeat. Almost every night. Worse I am scared in the crowd now, espcially when I come along the road from station. There is an illogical fear that they can all harm me. And again I hate walking in the empty corridors of the lab. Am I becoming paranoid? Is it just my lonliness in this big city? I don’t know, I am trying to deal with my irrational fears.


For last two days Crystal is not talking to me. But she talks to Jesse at night when I am asleep. Lot of creepy things are happening. However she wrote me a letter today.
So, I got a bottle of vodka at home mixed it with coke, and drank on Sunday night. I needed some sleep. As I drank, I told myself all this is my imagination.I walked into the dark kitchen, there was nobody. There was no one in any other rooms, bath, toilet. Nobody is going to kill me. I am just fine.

But thing with Akash wasn’t my imagination. What if I get pregnant with his kid? I want to kill it. But I don’t want to bear it even. I called him. And all my hatred came out in a burst. He has used me, raped me with my permission…which was liked fooled me into believing him, made me strip for him in the webcam while he has been a cheat, a bastard.I had been hating my body when I think of it. The thought of being pregnant from his baby is like being pregnant from a guy who raped you. His reply was the cold insensitive one, “I told you I am a bad guy. You didn’t listen”. Fuck, what the hell am I calling him for? I dozed off.

Morning I found him calling. Damned, I felt foolish at my stupidity. No way, I don’t want to talk to that guy. Later in the evening still pissed off by my act the night before, I texted him that I can deal with it. It was ofcourse my fault. This world is full of people who will take advantage of you. I had been foolish, so if I AM PREGNANT, I WOULD DEAL WITH IT.

Since I had inhibitions of walking to the drug store and asking for the test, Jane insisted she can buy and send it to me. She is my other closest friend now than Jesse. Sometimes I know that I had been able to deal through all of these because I had her always to talk with. We had so much situtaions and feelings in common, that I never felt that lonely.

I would get the test this Friday.

I am having another strange problem. I am spending money without thinking. Okay, that was me always, but I am not using it in the way I want. I was hungry today and I had apparently ordered 4 midium sized pizzas to be delivered. When they came, I had no clue why I ordered four medium pizzas, 10 inches each. I am alone, why did I order? But I have spent thousand rupees on those pizzas and I have no clue why. I have to store them in the fridge- I ate pizzas all day. Right now I feel a bit ill from them.

But this is happenning often off late. I can’t seem to keep track of my money. I am often purchasing things and later not understanding why I did it. I wasn’t like this. In fact I always told Akash to be careful about money. But it is not the same.I am spending on things and I am being forgetful. I remember buying two pretty tops from Bandra that day, but I don’t remember buying three white shirts. I find them in my cuppboard today and I just don’t seem to recollect.

There is no ghost. It’s just me, and I am being forgetful. I think things will be alright, they will all fall in place, and life will move on. My time at Mumbai has become a bit of nightmare and I hope once I go back to USA, life will be happy again.This has never happened to me before. And I think I am too stressed.I tried to finish my short story “Eight Years”…but I am confused about the ending. Just because my love story had a sad ending, why would it have a sad ending too? I don’t know. We will see.

Real lives are never like movies. Sometimes I wish things were okay, and all this was my imagination. That Akash was true, and I was really the special one to him, like he said always.Everything seemed so perfect. I have loved him very much. I have also imagined a happy life with him.But well, this is the truth.

Though I know he was probably scared of commitment and marriage, to be honest even I don’t imagine it too much. But if it’s true that I die at 30, I wanted that we be together before that. I wanted an assurance.Akash doesn’t know so much about Crystal. Nor the fact that she and I are together now. Sometimes she wants to talk to him, though she doesn’t want me to. But, Jesse said, it would a mess if she does. I think so too. But sometimes she does things without telling me really and that’s when I get a bit messed up. I don’t know what has come of me off late :/. Creepy stuffs.

However, I feel a strong detachment from everything. From Akash, from friends, relationships, and work even. All the memories of him seem so distant, so cold and sometimes I can't seem to recollect. Is my hatred so intense? I don't know, I force myself to think of him, but I feel nothing.And the weird things happening keep me worried. I feel like I want no one, no one around. I did go out with a IIM-A guy, but supposedly to a friendly outing. When he calls me everyday, I realize I don't want it. I talk to my parents once a week and sometimes not even so. Everything is fading away in my rear view mirror, and I am driving too fast. Didn't Crystal lose Mike, when she was off my age?

But then Mike loved her, and he died. May be, Akash also loved me, and that Akash is dead?