Rocketing to Rajouri

I am a very homely kind of person. I like keeping it near. And dear. 

Say, my eggs and bread are accessible in a shop I diagonally cross the park across my lane to get to (henna hair uncle ji even allows credit of macroeconomic proportions). A Mother Dairy (never liked that name) is next door to his shop. So in one jute bag which came free with Kayam Churan I can get my favourite breakfast, lunch and dinner all in one go. The vegetable carts come to my door step and announce their wares in various dialects I understand not but matters not. The beauty parlour is across the main road after walking down only two sets of yellowing buildings (and I always manage a discount there – say, not pay for threading when I have paid a month’s salary for the facial). Even my child’s school is three private-quarters away within my colony (so what if A-street does not get along with E-street. Education is education). And my favourite market (Rajouri, the name is Rajouri Market) is 15 minutes of battery-operated rickshaw ride away. Just 15 minutes! 

You see how my universe rests within a perimeter the diameter of which must be the smallest divisible number never happy to be multiplied and loving to remain single. 

So, when I was asked a big futuristic question as to where I would like to teleport to, I caught myself thinking. My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets but why do the names of the planets seem so strange? I can’t possibly say I want to visit ‘Very’, now can I? The Moon sounds good but will out-shine me. The farthest planets are too far, the nearest hotter than me. Another Galaxy, never, for I can't turn traitor to the memory of this chocolate from childhood. So, no!

I think, if I could cut down on travel time and reach a destination in micro mini seconds, I will pick my Rajouri Market. No hailing battery-bhaiya, no tuk-tukking sitting amidst bells and button-down Akshay Kumar posters and no haggling for that Rs. 2 discount. Just teleporting. (whatever that means!) 

I don’t know why you smile. Perhaps, you think me an idiot to want to go to this Punjabi-like-me market rather than, say, Jupiter to meet Sabu or Marlowe the Moon Man keeping the moon dust falling for Noddy. Let me tell you why. Let me show you three pictures from my last visit to Rajouri Market, Wild West Delhi, only this Sunday just gone, to show you how unique and interesting this place is. 

Picture 1:

Steve Jobs could not have designed this one. Neither could have this apple orchard been grown any better by the genius who did it. The many colours, the net (‘Behenji, pure lace! Not net.’), the overall over-saturated image of this on a human shape with bitten apples on every angle and I swear on butter chicken this could not have been spotted in any other market. Such highly evolved brain synapses which could connect unrelated colours and textures and well, even symbols, with such passion for mixing-matching. Today, I am a proud owner of Apples iSuit, limited edition. (apart from a few cock-tail gowns from an over-flowing place called ‘Bangkok Mart’. Such colours you thought never existed!) 

Now, to figure out which is salwar and which the kameez. 

Picture 2:

What you say is important but how you say it is equally important. We should communicate with love, and passion too, why not. A toy set, imported from across the highest peaks of the Himalayas and found in 'Luckee Toys hee Toys', reads thus. How sweet, sweet as pure cheeni. I held this in my hand and a rush of inexplicable kindness for my next door neighbour (country, I mean) rose up my belly and into my heart (and then down). How the media buries under reams of source-papers the real relationship that the peoples of one country feel for the other. Why rake up controversies over seas, when all they desire is to be fondled admiringly. My son cannot understand the words, but when he learns to read, one day, I am sure he will start wearing a cap and a tee to proclaim his love back for this country (just like those NYC-returned ABCDs). Now, isn't this love letter on a toy unique to my Rajouri? 

PS – It has been opened and the manual instructions followed properly. 

Picture 3:

(Please stop staring. This is purely for showing you the dress material) 

And the people in Rajouri, so big and so big in heart that accommodating other’s language into their own moulds and styles is never a problem. I am sure if this lady has been shopping in Rajouri she knows the symbols of all things Chinese. They are printed behind toys and clips and candy and phone covers and Godly idols and now, on behinds too! So, in the very act of picking this pretty yellow with a foreign language dezign the woman has travelled miles in the Market of World Peace and donned a symbol of such inexplicable unity in diversity that she can quite be used as Mother World. (If only I could see the face I would have doodled it).

I have ordered a whole thaan of this piece. Some to get stitched, some to gift and some to send over for translation to the Institute of All Things Imported. It might help in understanding the print behind most objects in the market much better! 

Tell me! Do you still think me an idiot to want to go to this market rather than, say, Jupiter to meet Sabu or Marlowe the Moon Man who keeps the magic moon dust falling in Toyland?

Okay! Don’t answer that! 

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Teleport - If you could travel to any location in the universe — where would you travel and why?]

Book Review – That Autumn in Awadh by Rachna Singh

I could begin this review of ‘That Autumn in Awadh’ with a love quote, perhaps. But Rachna Singh’s semi-autobiographical romance novel does not leave one dreamy-eyed feeling all mushy inside. It did not me. For me, this story is too real to make typical. This story acquires poignancy through the context it was set in, and the life-like realism of characterization.

Somewhere around the year 1996, Samar and Sara find themselves drawn to each other, working hard in the same office but battling harder to resist falling in love. Slowly, they succumb, knowing fully well that a Rajput versus Christian battle will rage soon as their families know. And as expected, it does. The story moves from romance in office to lock-ups and house arrests. From intimate moments stolen clandestinely to unshielded threats to life. The plot hinges between the two poles of young, vibrant, hopeful love on one hand and bitter, coercive communal divides on the other. While the turns in the plot keep you absorbed as does their romance, a feeling of foreboding around these star-crossed lovers refuses to leave your side till the very end. A dose of Rachna’s humour helps balance that out, especially in the workplace scenes.

Most relevant – the communal context

There is a timelessness, sadly, to the context the love story is set in. The context of xenophobic communities working over-time to keep themselves ‘unblemished’ by foreign winds. Doing everything in their power to prevent such social embarrassments as their own blood marrying outside the community brings.  

‘Nons’ coming for the church-sponsored functions are unacceptable. Sara’s father pronounces a prospective groom for his daughter ‘low caste convert’. She muses ‘The quintessential ‘all God’s children are equal’ did not quite pan out the same way outside the doors of the church’. At Samar’s place, in ‘bhajans that were cacophonous’ sit families ready to join hands against transgressors, holding court, pronouncing judgement and even ready to shed blood, for does not Samar’s uncle feel bold enough to pronounce ‘If he were my son, I would have shot him dead’? You know, as well as I do, how this forms a reality around us still.

Most real – characterization

You know how stories about love spoil us! They make us feel like heroes and heroines in our own love stories, even as they decorate theirs’ in solid shades of valour, loyalty and sacrifice. ‘That Autumn in Awadh’ celebrates these qualities in its protagonists, but without aggrandizing them. In other words, keeping them as human and as real as the readers reading it. Hence, every act of courage by Sara and Samar comes after multiple sessions of timid musing, and every step forward on the rebellious route with a thought spared for the conservative parents. Their misgivings and confidence, both, are beautifully expressed by Rachna. Perhaps, this being her own story in part, played a role in that. 

The minor characters are present only to propel Sara’s and Samar’s story forward, either assisting them in their escapades or adding a delightful note of laughter in a world beset with uncertain tomorrows. The foci always remain Sara and Samar. 

For most part of the first half, Sara and Samar are ‘two solemn heads (doing) some tough talking to two defiant hearts’. Playing I spy with putting a name to their relationship, this ‘something more’ than friendship, remains ‘unspoken, unnamed and unfathomable’.  Between HR meetings and MBA classes, their faux defenses shed gradually, and their relationship develops slowly till the ‘invisible envelope of love surrounding them’ reaches a can’t-live-without-each-other magnitude. 

I liked the individual characterization. I felt happy to see Sara surpass Samar, at multiple points in the story, if not in her conviction then certainly in breaking stereotypes, even though she too was often ‘in no shape to argue’ against meeting suitors her parents arranged for her, a point which her sister brings up later in the story. Samar, on the other hand, dithers more, and again and again, from the point where he declares that he will have to marry a girl his family chooses to still worry about Sara getting a ‘smooth entry into my family’ despite the high drama of cancelled weddings and body guards. Frankly, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders at this point, slightly tired of his continuous musings on family. 

And then I realized, why, Sara and Samar are only a product of their times! A century when the institution of family was important enough to rein in or rethink youthful impulsiveness. A time when it took time to decide the next step, if not to make up your mind. An era when women and men were working independent of their parents but not cut-away from them. When parental assent mattered in its own ways, and so best efforts were made by lovers to convert rebellion into acceptance, even if the parents stood rigid as rocks.

Most enjoyable – Rachna’s humour

Rachna is effortless with her humour, a self-enhancing type of humour consisting witty descriptions made matter-of-factly. Marry that with comments about quirky colleagues or quirkier communities and it becomes a delicious home-made cake – sans frills, or hyperbole. 

At work, Deboprotim Dutta, Head of HR (and funny pronunciations too) is a character who adds much laughter to the reading. A work place where ‘engineers had a way of answering questions correctly, without solving the problem’ but where ‘studious girls … were dressed in stodgy, sensible engineer-like attire, the primary function of which was to conceal any trace of feminine lure’. Where food is like ‘buckskin parantha’ and ‘bullet proof paneer’ and dancing parties see ‘balding senior managers trot up to the relevant missus while adjusting the trouser belt below the canopy of flesh and sweeping them in their arms. The image was macabre’.

A delightfully funny account of the Christian community is the cherry on the cake for me. At Easter lunch ‘the crowds … charged towards the makeshift lunch pandal with the fury of enraged crusaders. Roomali rotis flew like unmanned gliders only to land on plates like manna … the raita quivered on the wobbly wooden tables, maybe saying a silent prayer of thanks since it did not feature high on the list of hungry desires’ for there was chicken biryani in attendance. And getting ready for suitor-seeing meant ‘apply only Charmis cream and dab with Liril powder. Then, using a wet towel, wipe it off, to leave only a subtle trace’. Or where reasons for leaving Church before the holy communion could be ‘clubbed under un-ending sermon or biryani-kebab-cooking-delays’.

The one problem, for me

Rachna says she wrote this semi-autobiographical love story not as a narrator. She wrote it like a third person, observing the turns and twists Samar and Sara go through after stepping out of herself. How far she managed to remain an ‘observer’ to documenting this true love story only she knows. But I notice in the ‘Acknowledgements’, which is obviously her speaking, she adds a “disclaimer” saying (a) She has used actual names of ex-employers to lend authenticity to the narration, but then (b) Ribbing of Christian community was in jest, and neither did she want to offend the Rajputs because ‘it’s these quirky little things about all Indian communities that make us such a vibrant society’. 

While I cannot question her choice of subject to lend authenticity to her story and did enjoy the ribbing, I am disappointed to see the apologia which calls coercive and life-threatening ways of communities ‘quirky’ and adding vibrancy to society. Maybe, since she was writing this as a third person, she need not have kept it so tame? I would have wished a bolder portrayal of how regressive communities can get in suppressing love. While the events are there, since the judgement is missing (even from Sara's mouth), the horror of some situations seems to wane. 

The final word

‘That Autumn in Awadh’ is a for-the-young and by-the-young story of love across the shadow lines of caste and community. A marriage of fiction and fact to create an interesting read, and a story which will find echo in many hearts torn between love for an ‘outsider’ and allegiance to a family. From the dash of humour to the lovers’ dash in autorickshaws (I cannot get the image of pretty Sara and caring Samar challenging Fate sitting in an auto out of my head), the author keeps you engaged with her easy language and keeping the plot interesting till the very end. The book comes with the quietest of love poetry, but that is what kept it so real and so relevant, for me.

Title: That Autumn in Awadh

Author: Rachna Singh

Publisher: Alchemy

2013

[This review was commissioned by the author. The views are my own.]

Book Review – Pendulum by Sarang Kawade

‘Life is driven by a single principle – decadence, resembling a still pendulum,’ says Sarang Kawade’s introduction to his book ‘Pendulum’, a collection of 48 stories rendered as poems or short prose passages. 

Decadence – that moral and cultural decline characterized by hedonism, debauchery, corruption, intemperance, immorality and wantonness, is the context this book arises out of. The mood, like the ‘pendulum called life’, oscillates between smiles and sorrows, hope and despair, loneliness and company. The setting is the young, urban world of IT jobs and coffee shops, cellphones and busy hours, empty homes and unrequited love as well as fruit vendors and homelessness, prejudice and even sexual assault. Each story has its own narrator, a voice speaking either like an observer or one deeply involved in documenting, scene-to-scene, his/her surroundings. Which, when you read you realize, are yours and mine too. 

As Sarang moves from one story to the next, the narrative voice changes in tenor from angry and even caustic at times, to plain objective; from despairingly dejected to hopeful and often preachy – all this depending on how involved or distant he feels to a specific story. For someone who likes deconstructing books based on changing narrative voice, this will be fodder for study.  

What remains consistent and helps bring the 48 stories together under ‘Pendulum’ is the author’s thought-process and the technique he uses to translate it into words.

The Thoughts and thought-out Technique

Sarang is 22 and in the software industry. That is all I know. When I asked him for an author introduction, he said he will give none. The artist wanted the art to be received independently, sans any pre-conceived notions that come with social labels. 

That he is only 22 amazed me at various points of time while reading the book, for he has already managed to unravel lessons from his life which typically (perhaps mythically) take years of grey hair to realise. There is ripeness of thought, a looking within and turning to self, an honest acknowledgement of social wrongs, a beautiful acceptance of the importance of relationships over jobs, of love over money, care over success. While the poems and stories remain bold and honest, each comes wrapped in a kind of maturity of thought which makes you believe what you read. The secret wishes of his various narrators (the ‘Burqa Clad Butterfly’ penultimate wish is to ‘ride a bike and let my loose hair fly’) – so simple yet so impossible to achieve, leaves you with a melancholic taste in your mouth.   

The language Sarang uses to deliver his ideas befits the narrators of his stories – young and urban, or old and alone, and lost. Expect no lovely lyricism or similes drawn from bounteous nature. This book was written in dark alleys of fat wallets ridden with futility and frustration, or empty ones clinging on to flashes of hope. So, Sarang speaks to us through the speakers of his stories in a language that those people speak in real life, not just to make himself understood but also to bring in a believability to the stories. In poems where he himself seems to be the speaker, the language becomes more complex than otherwise, but we realize how he too belongs in exactly the world that he is trying to hold a mirror up to in ‘Pendulum’. He speaks standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the different and differing narrators of the 48 stories. 

Apart from the prose passages written such that you wonder if they too are poems of some sort, personification of emotions, analogies with colonies of ants or bubbles, creative titles which read like exam questions with marks in parenthesis, advert jingles, letters from daughters to fathers, coupled with jumbled syntax like ‘Endure I long walks’ are everywhere. As is use of slang words, which, for the first time, I did not cringe on encountering.  

Let me give you my favourites out of this collection.

In a poem satirizing the kind of societies we have built around ourselves, Sarang creates ‘your reasoning town called ‘Brainville’ (somewhat reminiscent of Yeats’s idea of an anti-Christ being born in ‘The Second Coming’) where:

‘Neurons work as conformists in the

industry to recycle dumped ingenuity

and create a swarm of material desires.

But Hope is the secret vigilante, willing

to even die protecting the Rebel square.

(where)

Traditions are enshrined in Stereotype Avenue

(but where)

Hope is not scared.

Hope will soon be blessed with a child

Residents of Rebel Square have a name for the

Child – Belief.’

‘Love Conquers Gadgets Too’ connects existential alienation to the symbolic individualistic ‘I’s’ ‘being used by phone, laptop, tablet’, creating an (i)-me-myself world. An interestingly titled and creatively written ‘I care you. So take love’ begins with a question Care (personified) is asking about Love – ‘I feel jealous of her charm. Why is Love so popular and I am not?’  Care and Love write letters to each other to understand each other, to get married in the end. An idyllic situation but equally ironical when seen reflective of a society working on different principles. 

A brutal poem ‘Rapes, Cuts, Blood and Solace’ is a woman’s account of her many rapes, as nonchalantly as if she was talking about buying vegetables. At 16 – ‘I was raped yet again by a single guy. (Thank God)’ and the ( ) hurt. Raw anger in ‘Oh Thy Anger’ where ‘Be happy, act foolish, disguise fury, sounds so stupid your self-help shit’ speaks an angry voice yearning to break free from social givens. While passages like 'Game of Domestic Violence' stun you into silence, some others like 'Candy Floss Smile', and the final one in the book called ‘I love you father’ (I wonder if this lovely piece is autobiographical) come written straight from the heart, leaving you feeling warm. 

Most stories and poems have U-turns at the end, not a twist to shock or awe, but one to affirm a drop of hope where none seemed to exist a few lines before. Myriad moments of warmth exchanged and good deeds done delivered in such simple language, but never enough to make you forget the deprivation they are set in. 

An oscillating pendulum, but one which likes to remain steeped in sorrow! 

And then, the disappointments

1. While I have admired and enjoyed the thoughts behind the 48 stories and the oscillating sensitivity-brutality with which they have been expressed through the various narrators, not all poems or passages manage to maintain the power of expression consistently. ‘Stay Connected, Stay Insane’, ‘Ram Habib Daler Joseph’ and ‘I’m Sorry’ broke the effect either because the themes were repeated or they bordered on the typical. 

2. There is a self-contradiction in Sarang’s use of a ‘decadence’ (in a negative way) as the penultimate theme for his work. The very hedonism, intemperance and debauchery that characterizes decadence carries the idea of subversion too. Exactly the kind of subversion that Sarang actually celebrates/professes – artistic freedom, anti-establishment, quitting education, gay love, secularism, anti-rituals and prejudice, psychos with a heart, constructive anger. Decadence is not the word the author should have lamented about on the cover. Stagnation, materialism, alienation maybe. This being the only reason why I was wary of comparing some of his poems with Ginsberg’s ‘Beat Poetry’ like 'Howl' for instance – there is similar anger towards wrong, being sung to a rebellious beat, but not achieving the same level of clarity of purpose.

3. I would have liked a list of contents. Would have given some organization to the book. I am quite a Capricorn woman if you know what I mean!

‘Pendulum’ remains Sarang Kawade’s attempt to speak through men and women surviving different spheres and stages of life. The poetry is devoid of any ostentatious trappings and the short prose is simple and straight-forward, because he is letting his characters speak directly to you. Asking you to listen, understand and look around and within too. There is judgement in Sarang’s voice, against facets of society he doesn’t agree with and support for those suffering its idiosyncrasies. There is also a wish in Sarang’s heart, of personal freedom from all that binds artistic thought. This book, through its honesty and execution, succeeds in achieving this. 

I conclude with a few lines of a poem I have been re-reading ever since, ‘If I’m Weird, then who’s Normal?’ 

They call me weird, a social outlaw to be precise,

I take my stand; they’re the prisoners, the majority.

They say doubt wraps me, obscure is my speech,

I see clarity of thoughts erupting, bursting within me.

Their fundamental reaction is to concur, they usually comply,

I question back, I can’t walk around holding people’s beliefs.

They bully the fragile ones, beat them up to laud their insecurity,

I was beaten too but never defeated, they’re cowards, not me.

Title: Pendulum

Author: Sarang Kawade

Publisher: Partridge – A Penguin Random House Company

2014

[The review was commissioned by the author. The thoughts are my own.]

Pout-detector Selfie-taker

Pout – verb - push one's lips or one's bottom lip forward as an expression of petulant annoyance or in order to make oneself look sexually attractive.

Pouty - adjective, I made.

My parents never understood my pouty behaviour since I was three. I think they got me all wrong. All along!

In class five I would pout at the head-taller guy from next door who got us home-made pickle instead of my favourite candy and they got the pout all wrong. I would go to the club and pout at one uncle’s drummer son, class seven, playing a lifeless tune and they misunderstood my pouty lips. Again and again, and countless number of tender-aged times. Finally, packed me off to a convent, where the hems of skirts met the elastic of socks and skin was a bad four letter word, after ‘pout’ that is. Oh, I didn’t stop pouting! In an all girls’ nunnery convent there are more reasons for a 15 year old to pout than God will ever know or Heavens get to see. 

What a bad childhood.

But all that seems to be from a Stone Age past. Today, much like the Blue Stocking Movement of yore, the lips have found their own revolution. Say, the Red Lipstick Movement. It has spread like jelly set wrong, or not set at all. The camera in the phone holds the mirror up to your soul lens up to your mole, and all you have to do is click. Save Share that DIY Selfie face for viral eternity, often making such luscious expressions even the camera battery gets wet dreams. So, just like the British suspected trouble the moment two men collected to pee and discuss politics on the road-side, so you can expect a pouty selfie soon as three giggly girly lips come together, posing in front of a phone camera I mean. But all this you know already, if you too, like me, live on FB (activation-deactivation-‘where is he?'-grand comeback included!)

Lets talk technologi technologee technology, not really my forte but I do know the green wire stands for peace on Earth and black one to remind me I’m a live wire even with my black dress on. Hear on! 

Young India is not just collared and wired and earning fat bucks (and voting and posting pictures!). The youth of today is always in the fifth gear. The B/W picture of Contentment (man sitting on an arm chair in his verandah in a baniyan, scratching arm pits and hearing flies flutter) no longer pleases them. They compete till kingdom comes, hard! Cutting throats for not just plum postings, corner offices and cushy cars but even to declare to the world’s winds in Alia Bhatt’s voice that ‘I love my baby lips muah muah’ and that I am always ‘Lakme selfie ready!’ Posters for ready reference below.

Therefore, due to such competition the selfie situation is quite tensed, and all cameras and phone batteries are feeling the heat, listening to ‘lens lens in my phone, who’s the pouty-est on the globe’ and God forbid if the answer is as unsatisfactory as the pseudo-elevation of a push-up whose straps have lost elasticity. God forbid, but then, it always is. 

In such days where pouts are vying to occupy selfie space, necks sprained into kamasutric positions to make nose hair hide itself, eyes going smoky and doe-like and windows to a thirsty soul, we need our two hands free to come to our self-service. (Oh not that way, no! You get me wrong!) No longer should we need to finger the camera button. So, I speak to software developers to create what we can call Pout-Detector Hands-free Long-lasting Selfie-Taker (dictionaries can revise their meanings of ‘selfie’!) Much like a smile-detector, but who is smiling? So, the moment the lips start moving towards your own image in the phone camera, the phone takes a picture. It is the highest form of self-love, the aspiration to kiss your own image (and God won't mind for man was created in His image) and look good doing it too. This deserves the biggest brains ever born to work on it. 

And when this software is invented and installed, what larks! 

Here is my phone resting between my floss and my tooth-brush, and there it detects my pout and clicks me in multiple poses – hands in just washed hair, hands in hair combed front, hands in hair combed back, hands cupping the cheeks, the chin, the … you get the point! Or when you are cooking pao bhaji, trying to get yourself in the frame with mashed potatoes drowning peas all bubbling in the pan, you place the phone on the steel utensil rack, pouting with a buttery intensity. It will love your bebbe lips, and hands – holding ladle, holding the two handles of the kadhai, closing eyes and smelling aroma. Clickety click it will go, detecting the pout on its own. 

But then, what about Equality, our favourite idea? 

I demand equal representation of all kinds of pouts in the pout-detector software. Equal representation. (Remember my childhood I just shared above?) Pouts happen automatically too and so many are asexual in nature. Like when watching TV without specs you may pout. Or when constipated (try!). Or when Arnab Goswami is being his real age, or even AAP? Then the pout we make when we go ‘tch tch’, or the exhaling one when in pain while getting a tattoo. How about the one which delivers lungular smoke up into the clear skies and even the one which we make to remove hair strands from our chin with plucker? The phone should be able to detect and preserve all kinds of pouts - sexy as well as asexy. No sexy-ist bias please.

Okay, I am suddenly all alive with my own brainchild.

I am sending this article to Rajiv “butter skin” Makhni of the cleft chin gadget guru fame. He will understand what I mean. Only yesterday I read this piece by him, recommending best phones for selfie taking. In him I will find a nodding head when he reads this. Perhaps, he will call divert me to the right people who will, like me, see that the next big thing needs to be Pout-Detector Hands-free Long-lasting Selfie-Taker (in whichever order their lips please!)

Muah!  

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - The next big thing - What will the next must-have technological innovation be? Jetpacks? Hoverboards? Wind-powered calculators?]

Circle of Life

She had no idea what she was doing on the yellow bench, staring at the patterns the union of rust and old paint made on it. She had been married in the biggest house around this park, but she had never been here. Office and work and parties and shopping and spa and movies and office and work. That busy thing we call Life. To think that for 10 years she parked her Honda Accord right behind the stone wall this rickety bench rested upon. And on which she rested today. Alone. With some papers by her side. With her hand holding them down on the bench. What was she doing here? Shouldn’t I be in office? Damn, it’s 3:00 pm and Linux Tech comes calling in 30 minutes for handing over Eastern Region’s project to me and ... and this is what I have been waiting for, working for all my …

The wheels of the pram screeched on the jogger’s path every time it turned around the oval’s bends. They did now too, just at the yellow bench. The baby giggled, the dribble running down the chin doubled, as did the loud delight at the turns. The mother did not seem to notice. She pushed the pram along, looking straight at a point only she could see. A face devoid of expressions, but thoughts sprinting into each other at full speed. Somewhere else. Certainly not here, where the two pig-tails on the pram were dancing with glee. The baby let her mother be, as if she understood. But who can ... can anyone understand, help? This ... guilt, this feeling of nothingness. Just burps and nappies and sleepless nights. This worry I am too tired to admit as real ... bone fatigued. These chapters I had not signed up for my entire …  

She straightened up on her bench at the noise, where wheels met pavement to turn a different direction. The grinning jingling monkey hanging on the pram pulled her out from the abyss of her thoughts. Her Linux meeting was tucked in a drawer. She noticed then, the pram, the baby, the mother. And then she stared with an expression her face had never before seen. The papers felt the pressure ease, but only slightly. What a darling baby! Oh look at that hair those curls the twinkle in her eyes. How happy she is. How old must she be? A few months, maybe a year? I love how she claps her hands when the pram turns ... as if she is flying. They are called bundles of joy ... Oh! What a lucky mother … and her nails dug into the bench. Green with jealousy. Now yellow with old paint. She looked away at a barren tree. The papers still struggling to breathe under all that weight.

She swerved the pram with one hand and adjusted her dupatta. Took a long breath. Her mother used to say it helps whenever you feel cornered by customs or people even. Breathe, and keep that scream from coming. Keep it in. Will I ever wear my ghunghroos and dance ... Oh! I must be mad. God’s gift of a child in my pram and such ungrateful thoughts. Evil ... Her swollen feet seemed to agree with the noises in her head. Sent a shot of pain rocketing up into her thoughts, where it remained. Pulsating. Where it would remain for every waking hour of her being it seemed. What would I do to just feel free! Lie down on this grass with not a lullaby to breathe or story to tell. No night becoming day becoming night. Just dance ... hear applause. No responsibility, none depending on me. Like ... like that woman on the bench. Sitting free without a care in the world enjoying the sun the calm. If only in her place I could be … and it sprung within her. Jealousy. She averted her gaze skywards at the lonely cloud drifting aimlessly. The hand clutched the pram tighter. It picked up speed.

And then the wind blew. As if it was eavesdropping. Peeping inside their minds. Colluding with an unseen pattern, the wind blew strong, then stronger.

The baby’s joy knew no bounds. It soared like a polythene on a string, as did her joyful shouts all around. In the meantime, one woman’s dupatta with stains of milk and baby oil protested and was set free, even as the hands tried holding on to it. The other’s papers blew away with the wind, no longer wanting to be clutched, leaving the yellow bench behind. There was confusion in the air. Hair and papers and clothes and pig tails all going wild. Together. The wind kept blowing as if it had a purpose to. And then it slowed down, just a bit. The baby’s mother helped collect the papers spread across the lawn. The woman on the bench unravelled the soiled dupatta from her legs. They walked up to each other to hand over what was not their own. And then to sense what was theirs, together.

The tears. 

They had both been crying. One because she had a child and the other because she perhaps never could. That’s what the papers said, those medical reports. She had just found out and had driven home. Straight. To this bench where she had never been before. 

The wind was gone. Left a quiet behind, intentionally. Also left behind a lawn peppered with leaves. Mostly dry and wilting but some fresh and green too. Like hope, no not jealousy! Or say, like finding a friend to share a yellow bench with, no matter how rickety the bench or how unknown the friend.

To share a circle of life, and understand the patterns drawn within it too. 

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Green-eyed – Tell us about the last time you were really, truly jealous of someone. Did you act on it? Did it hurt your relationship?]