you can cry all you want but you won't ever get back what's gone...

It hasn’t been “home” since amma died four years ago... But now the old flat my grandmother bought, where i grew up, has been sold and is being packed up.. My aunts and mother arguing over who gets what furniture and keepsakes and measuring what furniture will fit where in our own separate homes..

Last night my grandmother’s children gathered in her house for the last time to sign all documents and hand over the house to the buyer.. Chacha chachi and the kids shift out within this week... And i skipped out of going there because i was too tired and not in the mood to change into clothes suitable to go outside in....

As the eldest, I’ve spent the most time in that house... Have spent years running from room to room.. Had a new bed made for me to fit in the corner of amma’s room when i got too big to sleep in the same bed as my grandparents, had the balcony covered to make a “Separate room” for me.. Which i never slept in ultimately but became my study room... So many times when i got tired of the silence that pervades the house we live in now.. I would go there to see amma and babaji and feel like i’m actually “home”... 

I can’t remember the last time i was there.. Isn’t that strange...? I used to find the smallest excuse to go there, even if to just grab a bite and get a hug from amma when i had to to go Karkardooma court and could take a half hour out to go home...

All the friends and extended ‘family’ i had as a child growing up in that society.. 

Saying I’m leaving home and taking my minnie mouse blackboard over to Taiji’s house so i could “stay” in her daughter’s room.. Jiji’s kids are now years older than i Was when i pulled that stunt... It has been more than 20 years since it happened... Taiji left us weeks after Amma did.. A double blow that took my “home” from me.. Leaving no one there whose lap i’ve cuddled into as a child and as an adult... I think i stopped visiting after the two died.. I consciously stopped going even when Mom and dad visited chacha chachi.. It didn’t feel like “my house” any longer.. It was theirs now.. The room where i grew up listening to stories from amma wasn’t amma’s room any longer.. It was my sister’s bedroom.. Amma’s saris and babaji’s whiskey bottles didn’t stay there any longer.. I didn’t have the right to go and curl up in that bed or rifle through those almirahs looking for new pens and hidden treasures... 

Running up and down the stairs to see how fast i could climb up to the 7th floor and back.. The ‘nani’ who had given that dare to me is long dead... I was maybe 10 or 11 when i did it... Run up to your house and come back with 5 rupees in less than 1 minute and you can get two chocolates instead of just one... I don’t think even she expected me to actually clilmb six floors, wheedle money out of babaji and be back in less than 60 seconds... Have distinct memories of jumping down five or six stairs with my hand on teh banister while running pell mell to beat the deadline.. I have no idea what I would do if i ever caught a kid doing that.. 

The park where i learnt as a 12 year old to hit headers on a football... Stupidly while having a plastic hairband on which felt like it would go through my skull when the football hit it.. The open green area where we played football and cricket has been a parking lot for nearly 10 years now... It stopped being a free space for children even before i left my teens... The roof where we played hide and seek.. And talked late into the evening.. Had dance practices and “dates”.. Where cousin once threatened to enact the “suiciiiide” scene from Sholay because the boys got into a horrible fight and the entire group of friends took sides...

Amma is long gone.. And now the house is gone too.. 

I’m sitting in my bed writing about my lost childhood.. Tears in my eyes.. They will shift out by the 25th... I’m leaving on holiday tomorrow morning.. There is still today for me to go there and reminisce and cry.. But i KNOW i wont go there today... Even though my heart feels heavy and my stomach eels hollow and every stupid thing i did growing up is running through my head and telling me to go see that house one last time.. I won’t go see the house.. My home is no longer there.. It’s being stripped and packed away and i don’t want to see that..

My parents came home at 2 am last night.. With cardboard boxes full of pretty dinner sets and a bone china tea set that has remained displayed on the top shelf of the side board in the dining room since Mom bought it when i was four.. Amma always used to say that she would take out that tea set and serve tea only when some “ladke walle” came to the house to see me... 24 years after that tea set came to my home.. It is now packed into a cardboard box to be stored away in a different glass cabinet.. Amma is long gone.. My family is split into three separate families that don't have a common "home" any longer....

I’m gonna convince mom to let me drink tea in those china cups tonight... And maybe cry a little more...

When will the Doomsday strike?

A few years ago, i got addicted to this TV show called Supernatural. The first two seasons scared me enough to start not looking at the window and the shadows at night and gave me nightmares for weeks.. its about two brothers who basically fight demons, angels, Gods and all manner of other creatures and beings to survive and "save humanity"...

Season 5 of the show was all about the buildup to the biblical Apocalypse- complete with the four horsemen of the apocalypse- War, famine, Pestilence and Death.. personified and rampaging around on earth...

since this morning, after reading the newspapers, I can't stop thinking about two of the episodes from season 5-- the one where the Winchesters fight against the horseman War, and the one where Dean goes back in time and confronts Lucifer himself...

War, who tells the boys some ugly truths about life and humanity, makes a very simple yet profound statement- "there is already evil in humans, all they need is a little push.."
The entire season is about the degeneration of the world because of the impending doom.. the War episode is full of people attacking and killing each other for no reason at all.. an entire town at war with itself..., Pestilence has the rise of incurable mutated diseases that can cut swathes through an entire city's population at a go.. Famine has so much greed that people will eat each other just to get at what they want... while Death has terrifying natural disasters that can erase everything in their path..

and all through this.. God is gone and doesn't care about the survival of humanity.. or as Lucifer puts it.. the "world" isn't just the humans. The earth was there before the humans were made and will continue to be when humans are wiped off its face..

the bluntness of these episodes is something that echoes eerily in the world around me these days..


the madness around this world has predictions in every religion.. Hinduism and Buddhism say that we are now living through the 'Kalyug'-- where humans will lose their humanity and society its structure slowly, till the Pralaya comes and ends us all...

Doomsday predictions seem almost welcome when the alternative is waking up to news reports like these..


http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/next-door-to-delhi-mob-kills-50-year-old-injures-son-over-rumours-they-ate-beef/

http://theweek.com/speedreads/580344/study-children-disproportionally-killed-by-syria-bombs-airstrikes

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/sringara-3-year-old-succumbs-to-bullet-injuries/

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/water-wives-of-maharashtra/1/480898.html

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/5-km-from-vvip-zone-i-am-afraid-i-will-also-be-killed-over-water/

the staircase

maybe i got too high a dosage of Disney as a kid.. or something..

because the idea of having a bedroom with a spiral staircase that opens out onto a terrace which is essentially the highest accessible point of a tower makes me feel ludicrously excited... 

One of the biggest perks of parents having a government job is that they get government accommodation.. and the house dad has been offered now is a monstrosity built 80 years ago which is need of a few serious repairs.. but it has a bedroom/spare room whatchamacallit room on the first floor that is accessed through the terrace, that also has an internal staircase which takes you to yet another higher floor, with a small sheltered terrace that makes you feel like you're on top of the world looking regally down at all the gorgeous verdant green of the lawns... with the bright blue sky open above... its like something out of a dream.. and i know for a fact that there is no way in hell i will ever be able to find a room like that anywhere in Delhi and even if such a room exists and may be available for rent, they would charge the sun and moon for it because it is BY FAR the most beautiful thing i have ever seen.. even though its currently covered in cobwebs and maybe termites.. and i have to get a safety check done on that spiral staircase because that place hasn't bee lived in for years and years..

but i can just picture the pretty lights i'll wind around the banisters and the bookshelves and photographs that will go on the walls and the cushions I will put to create a reading nook right where the landing of the staircase opens onto the terrace...

if we actually move into that gorgeous house and the said gorgeous house doesn't fall down around our head.. it is an OOOOLD house after all... 

but GOD the staircase makes me feel like a little kid watching a princess movie... maybe i'll wear a pretty gown and walk down that staircase randomly one day... just to be able to say that i did it... 

my dad, who has been trying all my life to stamp the fairy princess ideas out of my head, has however pointed out that the pretty room doesn't have a window big enough to put a cooler or AC in, and being as clumsy as i am, a spiral staircase isn't exactly the safest thing for me to be mucking about with... to him i say.. bah humbug.. 

standing still while the world moves means the ground slips out from beneath your feet

it is the strangest feeling when you feel truly happy and at the same time feel like there's a piece of your heart thats cracking into itty bitty little chunks...
My favorite couple got "roka'd" tonight.. a small ceremony, not inviting anyone.. RS called and sent me pictures about an hour ago.. and i got SOO excited i jumped around all over my room... and then called SN to tell her she looked so gorgeous i wanted to put a kaala tika on her...
at the same time i feel emptied out inside.. everyone is sorting out their lives, settling down, figuring out where they stand and who with..and I have no clue... i;m driftng most days.. just floating the the river of time, letting things pass by..

i finished school in 2005.. its 2015 now.. what do I have to show for the 10 years??????

so this is strange..

I spent 6 hours straight today talking to a boy my entire family is super excited about as a "perfect" arranged match.. the first real "topical" topic of conversation he brought up was incidentally this blog.. and the fact that he managed to read the last 10 years worth of posts and is rather weirded out by how much of my personal life i've put up in the public domain..
more importantly, how it will be weird if anyone else in  the family reads the rants iv'e put up about the Ab and my relationship drama over the years...
AND he asked whether i would continue to put up this much about my life after marriage and whether any potential drama in our lives would get in teh public domain..
and after i got done feeling completely outraged at teh sheer cheek of the guy for asking me how to live MY life, i started thinking.. and reading from 2005 onwards.. how much of me ive poured into these pages over the years.. how much about me, my thought process and my history can someone find out just by taking a couple of hours out to read this thing...

i've never hidden who i am.. but using this as practically a personal diary when my work contacts, hell family can read this, specially when the things i've written about are not really anybody's business but mine...
i dont know..
i will never delete what ive written here.. this blog contains my best writing, my thoughts, my LIFE... so there is o way i'm hiding it away...

but how much do I let some random stranger see my life? judge me and make assumpions about me..??
if this guy could make the statements he did,.. who is to say what any random stangers may do with the data thats there about my life...

ENS-1, Annie -0

I've been living in the world of books for a long long time... taking my cues and inspirations from the characters i read.. wishing my life could get magically sorted with the stroke of  a pen... but whose life do we really know about anyway??

at the end Marianne does give in to the pressures of her sister and "everyone else" around... does that mean she settles or does she actually be happy..?
Elinor finds her love, as do Elizabeth and Jane... its the not quite the heroine sisters who you are left wondering about... does Lydia ever be happy or is she forced to live the rest of her life regretting the bad decisions she made at 15? is it enough that Brandon fancies himself in love?


I have always wanted the fireworks.. the impossible love that makes you feel giddy like you're soaring into the sky and nothing else matters.. I always said that i stayed because it was the only place where i felt like home.. like that is where i was meant to be...


Marianne had the good fortune to have been 18 years old.. I am much older and was regretfully not born in the 1800s.. I am supposedly an intelligent grown up..

so do I let go of the rainbows and butterflies and agree to the compromise of "maybes" and cynical realities where the teenage fantasy of love does not exist and what you really want is someone who cares about you and you understand and share values with and have the society's blessings to be with....?

I haven't bought a new M&B in a while... i gave up on the "no matter what we will sort it out and live happily ever after" tripe years ago... so why does it raise a wall of revulsion in me when everyone around me wants me to come to my senses and do the sensible thing??
in any case, there is no way in hell of finding a spark if you never let yourself go anywhere near fuel...