The denial of pain

She said she had moved on, but I doubted that she did,
She put up a brave smile and acted as if all was splendid.
But inside she was broken and wanted a tender shoulder,
In defence, she acted strong and somewhat colder.

She felt like wearing black, but against her heart wore red,
Wanted to listen to sad songs but played loud metal ones instead.
She was adamantly in denial of her own pain, her grief,
Acceptance and liberation: she rebuffed herself the basic relief.

And all so suddenly she was grateful to those who, for her, were there,
Hoping it would substitute for the missing love and unrequited care.
She hugged her friends recurrently and thanked them for random stuff,
And kept assuring herself that for her their love was sufficiently enough.

But in her heart, she still couldn’t repudiate the feelings for him,
It kept coming back to her and made her condition grim,
And as strongly as it would come, she would as obstinately ignore
But then it would make it worse and more miserable than before.

Irrepressible spurt emotions when difficult for her to conceal,
Helplessly she would have spasms of bad temper piecemeal,
Which would leave her well-wishers befuddled and confused,
For a little while ago she was thankful and all over them with gratitude.

All the while, she would be hoping for somebody to understand her mood-swings,
And ask her what is actually wrong and if at all they could fix things,
Only then would she be able to admit her vulnerability and weep,
And take off her chest the thoughts which for days hadn’t let her sleep.

Kaleidoscopic love!

For some love is like a wonderful kaleidoscope,
Filled with colours of ardor, delight and hope.
Together they make beautiful patterns,
Unique and different at each of its turns.

When you switch to a new motif
You know you can never get back the old.
But you move on curiously to the next as if,
It will be better than the design you currently hold.

But you never seem to find a difference,
For you have never attached yourself to any pattern for long,
You try finding the reason but nothing makes sense,
And you don’t realize what exactly could be wrong.

You restlessly try to figure out the best,
But get frustrated that you cant chose one from the rest,
Because now all the patterns seem more or less the same,
And throw it away, saying Kaleidoscopes are pretty lame!

Can I be jealous again?!?!

Just a silly little funny poem:


I have no doubt that he is mine,
But when she came and caught his eye,
I could no longer feel fine,
For she had the looks for which one could die!

I knew he wouldn’t be thinking about her,
But even then, it was obvious that she deserved more than a glance,
And the second time his eyes followed her after,
I just wanted to pull her hair tightly, if only I could’ve had a chance!

After stealing a glimpse, he turned back smiling,
Hoping that I hadn’t noticed,
And I immediately tried (and failed) hiding,
The frown that had come which couldn’t be missed!

For a brief moment he enjoyed the effect
Of being special enough to be jealous for,
Then with all the sweetness he could inject,
He tried changing my mood which had turned sour!

The extra attention he gave to compensate for his deviation,
Though unexpected was quite a refreshing delight
So I just let myself enjoy all the new-found attention,
For now, he wasn’t at all taking me out of his sight!

With contentment unable to contain,
I still had one thought lingering in my mind
That can I be jealous once again
For your way of assuring me back was one of a kind!

I dont need reasons to love them but you simply cant overlook the sweetness!

Reasons why my parents are the cutest in the world:
• I have yet not encountered an old couple who fight for computer games. The let-me-play, stop-hinting-me-the-next-move, my-score-is-better fights and the reasons they find to make the other move away from the computer are just adorable! Of course they keep me on wait on the phone till they finish their game before they talk to me!
• I have never ever ever seen a more enthusiastic couple when it comes to dancing. Play the music and see them dance away to glory! During navratris I remember asking my mom to stop the dance and come back home and she would say, just one last dance! It is going to get over after that! They are truly the dancing queen and king!
• I haven’t heard any parent complaining to their daughter “amma tithinaa” (your mom scolded me) everyday even if she didn’t.
• Cant imagine any other lady closing retirement taking part in her office’s national level sports meet, going places likes Pune and Allahbad for it and actually winning prizes there. That too, for weird events like long jump and table tennis! Ma, you are just out-of-the-world! Never known of a 39-year old pregnant lady taking part in an athletic race and beating all the 20-year old youth in it.
• Oh! My very passionate mom with that incredible participation spirit. She would take part in all her “hindi-divas pratiyogita” and keep reciting hindi songs and poems all through the day, so much so that even we would know every word by heart. There has been no event she knew of and didn’t participate in. Tiredness and hectic office-work are never excuses.
• So supportive they are for everything you do. All you do is study well and they are in for every little wish of yours.
• Oh my ever-talkative parents. Sometimes, I just sit spell-bound with my mom, not able to believe how innocently and candidly she can talk and talk and talk. And when it comes to my dad, the same old jokes that he cracks every now and then and laughs equally hard each time!!!! And if there is nothing much left to talk, there is the obvious “amma tithina” statement or my dad’s repetitive jokes on which he laughs as hard everytime.
• Who-on-earth has a fetish for water, collecting socks, body-splash, Tupperware and random chutka-mutka things but for my mother? Typical Moanisha character! And my dad, he would so excitedly try even female sweat-shirts unwittingly and ask how it looks on him!
• Who would wail at the top of their voice muthai-tiru-something-something while happily riding on the roads, much to the bewildered amusement of other people, especially at traffic signals!
• The very proud but innocent boasting that comes from dad that my daughters have done this and my daughters have done that to every person he can catch hold of who can be forced to listen to it. For the very reason, his insistence on asking us to keep uploading our photos online, so that he has visual proofs to his bragging big talks. And not just that, suddenly receiving 200mails in your inbox notifying you that “Venkataraman Iyer” has tagged a photo of yours! (And yes, his two-second come-on-skype calls!) Not to forget, the very embarrassing add requests from my dad on facebook, orkut and the other thousand webpages he has registered into.
• What a brilliant memory my mom seems to have. She would remember the names and specific memories of every single person I would have mentioned to her. Oh! Priyal, the girl who draws well, Oh! Shardul, the one who came home to get your Scooby-doo tazos! Oh, this guy and that girl, she just knows everybody!!!! And very contrastingly, my dad seems to forget the very friend he would have met yesterday! (Sometimes, comes to my aid, he forgets the friends he is annoyed of!)
• The couple who would just attend every bhajan-function they would know of and then on the same day go out to celebrate Valentine’s Day at SICA! And yes! Also wish their daughter valentine’s day and ask her for her plans! (Not that they would want her to have any!)
• Getting a mail which ends saying “truck full of love, Iyers” might sound cute but I also have greeting cards for my birthdays where it is signed only saying, best wishes, IYER! Not much sentiment expressed, one cannot consider it a card lovingly from a father… Pendulum of swaying sentiments or awkwardness, I guess!

Well, my emotions are always on the expressive side and so this note! TOUCHWOOD

The Pseudo Identities of a Writer!

She could have managed alone, like she eventually did. But still, one does expect a sign of care from the person who claims to love her. She had no issues walking back alone through a secluded lane at an odd hour but it mattered to her whether that person would show concern for her safety, for it would have meant he considered her to be his as much as she wanted to be his. She was hardly bothered about her safety, nothing wrong could have possibly happened but it was HIS indifference to it which pricked her as it in a way signified a small defeat: she had failed to get him express concern for her well-being. However hard she may have tried convincing him that she can walk back herself, deep inside her heart she wanted him to care enough to not let her go, to accompany her till the end, if not bragging as a strong protector but maybe just to get more time to spend with her. She was unsuccessful in creating a want in him to be with her. She obviously wouldn’t have voiced it out, for it was something one shouldn’t be told about. Yes! She was just in one of her emotional high and the rush of emotions weren’t helping her be objective. It might appear inconsequential a thing if she would think back about it, but for the moment it made a huge difference what he would say. Finally walking back alone, she did feel a little childish expecting a trifling little thing from him and getting disappointed about such a trivial thing, but disappointment was disappointment.
She rushed back home and banged the door behind her. Hurried up to her bed, held her pillow close to her to hide the rolling tears from her eyes, before anybody else sees it. Only that soft delicate roll of cotton knew of her tears, the world has never seen her in her low. She managed to let out a small tear, feeling ridiculously juvenile all the while. She thought of it for a while as at that moment, she was able to sense the feeling she had towards it. A pragmatic that she is, more than just letting the feeling sink it, she started analyzing it, scrutinizing the feeling as to what was it that was making her feel so disheartened. The insignificance of the whole incident made her smile at herself but by then she had experienced too much of the emotion to let go of it. She wanted to make the emotion hers: to possess it in some way.
Her way of owning an emotion was writing about it, making a story of it. She immediately grabbed a pen and a paper (for she liked the conventional style of writing) and passionately started to write. Just as she was about to give a name to the character, she stopped; strangely so, for she had never halted in her flow when she decided to write. This time, she didn’t feel like giving a name to her character. She wanted this story to be in first person, not impersonated by a fictional being. Each emotion that she had strongly felt was always narrated to the world in the camouflage of a different world, a different person and never being her. Sometimes it was rather tedious giving superfluous details to make sure nobody knew the parable was in fact her own story. She loved sharing her experiences but felt awkward admitting them as hers and hated being questioned by people the reason she wrote it and what is it that she is feeling now. Because by the time she starts writing about it, she is already over the feeling, having probed over it for some time. Like mentioned earlier, she deeply believed in objectivity and took sentiments also rather hard-headedly. She was comfortable in her creative let-out by making it sound fictional. On one hand, because she had strongly lived through the feeling the story could be related to by many but then she would be spared of confessing it as her experience. She would usually be speechless when people glorified her writing, pondering how she could have possibly written about something so well, having not gone through it. She would just smile at them, thankful for them liking it and unsuspicious of it being real. But this time, she was tired of making it sound like an imagination, tired of living another incident of her life as an imaginary character. She wanted to face the questions thrown at her, answer them and get over it. After all, everybody experiences what she has/had. Like the funny imprudent expectation she had a little while ago, she was sure everybody had had it at least once however bleakly faint it would have been. What was so awkwardly embarrassing about having emotions? This time the story was going to be different, it would be truly hers, just the way she had lived it. She gave herself a self-assuring smile and began writing. A little later, she was seen dozing off beside the paper. A little closer look at the paper would have told you a story of a character, Samreen. She, the writer had again cowered to give her story away; she kept her identity to herself yet shared it with the whole world. She just could not put all her other stories at stake of revelation by admitting one to be a part of her life. She, again had lived the life of one of her many characters, this time of Samreen’s; ironically helpless because of her own fictioanal characters or more precisely by her own emotions.

The Imperfect Beauty

She considered herself to be ugly. She cribbed saying she had the most unattractive mix of the most unprepossessing features. To her, her hair was unmanageable, she had hideously small (‘chinki’) eyes which were disproportionate to her bloated up face with never-going dark circles and for the unpleasantly bony figure that she had, she detested the chubby cheeks she had (I mean, how could have God so menacingly dislocated the placement of the adipose flabs) And to add to all of that, her lips weren’t even pink and she didn’t posses the perfect set of teeth which she could flash in every photo. I was taken aback at her description of herself. I was seeing her in new light for I had never noticed any of the “imperfections” she just claimed to have. But even then, noticing her I couldn’t help but notice that she was pretty. Talking of features, how could she have forgotten the cute dimples she got whenever she smiled? And to mention her eyes, I agree they were small but very cutely so. There is no way you could call such a pair of gleaming eyes plain. They had the sparkle that could just bewitch many with just a glance. And the thick set of eyelashes made the eyes look prettier still. Such wonderfully long eyelashes she had that they actually got reflected in her own jet-black eye-balls when you looked deeper in there. And for the dark-circles, Oh! I always thought that she used to brush her eyes up everyday with a wonderful shade of eye-colour! Her high-cheek bones were in no way chubby and even if they were, it gave her such a lovely heart-shaped face-cut which so beautifully defined how she is as it was a manifestation of her heart glowing right there at you. Yes her lips weren’t pink but thankfully so. The deep crimson shade she naturally had didn’t require a coat of lip-gloss everyday. My heart used to skip a beat when her lips looked so succulently pretty even when she was least aware of it. She would be happily eating some oily junk-food at some roadside chat-point and even the rancid oil would appear as the best lip-gloss one could have. And the smile, such a bright innocent smile she possessed, it was just too difficult to fathom that she would think an imperfect set of teeth will make even slightest of difference to that. And then I loved how her curls would occasionally fall on her face which she complained to be unmanageable. And not just the face, the puny bony figure she wasn’t in favour of gave her the prettiest jewellery to accessorize herself with: her eye-catching collar bone! To me, she was pretty and that was how I had known her. Listening to her grumbling criticism, I couldn’t help but notice that YES! Right in front of me, there was the biggest of the flaws which even she, an observant scrutinizing critic of pulchritude had failed to notice: Her MINDSET. That was the biggest (and actually the only) wrong I could see. And this flaw made everything else look so negligibly pretty. This flaw had taken her breath-taking smile away without which the dimples ceased to appear, the magnificent sparkle from her eyes and actually made her what she never wanted herself to be. Yes, it was only her image of herself as ugly which made her helplessly so!




PS- One more thing that came into my mind. The "smiley" faced emoticons. If you think of it even they are a combination of ugly featues. ROUND face with a sick pale shade of the colour of poop! And yet they are the cutest thing you use to express yourself with! AND why? because their smile makes so much of a difference making them soooo pleasant! In the end, they are the cooolest andthe happiest thing!

Hmm.... love?!?!

I have tried countless times to express myself
Though still never found it reciprocated
I tried breaking open from my inhibited shell
And yet love has always kept me isolated.

Love has made itself seem like a fantasy
Something that doesn’t happen in real
Something that I am yet to see,
Believe in and feel deep inside me.

I am clueless how I can make someone fall in love with me
Or fall in love with someone who showers me with love,
For till now, love has never “just” happened unknowingly,
And yet knowing that it is how it is supposed to be.

I make myself believe that I am in love with someone,
And whole-heartedly that is what I try to do,
Until one day, I am forced to see my belief undone
For I hardly matter to him and I want him to love me too.

Sometimes, by the time I let my feelings out,
I realise that he waited for long and now I am late,
Sometimes, just to make sure that doesn’t happen,
I let it out fast and am considered desperate.

And then how am I not supposed to be excessively careful,
In making sure that he is truly the one for me.
Not analyse but feel the love that is so magically wonderful
When such wonders never materialise into reality?

Oh! This feeling!

Oh! I wish I wasn’t hopelessly in love with you,
For I don’t even know if you love me too,
All I can manage now is to let you know
That you mean a lot to me, even if I don’t let it show.

I can’t make you fall in love with me,
But neither can I just let it be,
I just keep hoping that you feel the same,
Or at least grow a liking for me suddenly.

I don’t know how to take it further on the way,
Tell you directly or wait for you to say,
I don’t really mind waiting, if you don’t want to hurry,
You can take all the time you want without any worry.

I will keep all this to myself if you want it so,
But please don’t ask me to forget you and let it go,
Because it is not that I haven’t tried giving up the hope,
But for what I do, I just can’t help but let the feeling grow.

I don’t know where exactly am I going wrong,
For you haven’t realized that I have been liking you all along,
Is it that it’s not worth trying for,
Or is there somebody else who likes you more?

If the options are keeping you confused,
And it’s really hard for you to choose,
You feel that there is somebody better you can find,
Let go off me, I am just ordinary, I won’t mind.

But if at all, there comes a day when you feel blue,
I will give you all the comfort you need to pull you through,
When you need support, I will hold your hand,
And when you need time for yourself I will understand.

Oh! I wish I wasn’t hopelessly in love with you,
For I don’t even know if you love me too.
And these uncertainties keep me puzzled,
I really am left answerless to what I am holding on to.