Delusions

I wrote this rather weird, macabre, juvenile poem in a very boring class today.

I trust you know, the world isn’t out to get you.
Your delusions overpower the reality of what’s true.

I’m telling you, your demons are in your head.
You don’t have to disbelieve everything I’ve said.

For the voice in your head, is really chemicals in your brain.
I know it’s all real to you, but really, it just isn’t the same.

Don’t hate your husband, he loves you more than anyone can.
He doesn’t want to kill you, nor does any other man.

I understand things are scary, and you don’t want to die.
But killing your own father, why would you do that, why?

Going off your medication, what put that in your head?
For if you’d listened to me, your father wouldn’t be dead.

Also I don’t get it, why’d you want to kill me too.
For we’ve been best friends, since we both turned two.

I empathise with you, I understand what you feel.
For so many people want to kill me too, but unlike you they’re real.

I understand I created you; you’re a figment of my dreams.
Your family and friends, and people you love, they belong in my realms.

Don’t be scared of the people you think will kill you, for you see,
the only way you’ll stop existing, is when someone finally kills ME!

Memories of Nagaland

When it comes to really old memories, I am never sure whether it is the memories themselves I remember, or a memory of me remembering the events of that memory. If that sounds complicated, let me explain. You may have this memory of something you did as a three year old. However your parents would have described it over and over to you, you may have seen photographs of that time, and you recollect that as an eight year old you absolutely remembered what it was like to be a three year old doing that particular thing. However, now, as an adult, that actual memory becomes hazier and hazier and what other people told you your recollection of having had that memory is most of what your memory of that particular event is. Memories of before I was 5 and a half years old are slowly fading or becoming memories where I know I was at a certain place and doing something but it’s as if its someone else’s memory . I don’t remember much of what I used to think about. Like everything that happened before we moved from Nagaland to Bikaner (it sounds great right!) , every memory of that is stored in a different part of my brain.

And it was the most significant change in my young life. We lived in villages, actually spent some months in a house made of mud, I changed schools every three months. Every post that my father went to, we followed him, to the aforementioned mud houses, to places where I walked down from a hill to go to school. Then in the holidays I’d go to Dehradun, Chandigarh, Delhi, places as different from rural Nagaland as they could be. I remember wanting to buy one of those portable video games you could play tetris on, and I wanted to know why it wasn’t available in the place I lived in. It was all very confusing for a young kid. We lived in a place called Ghaspani, named because it used be a place for horses to get ghas and pani (grass and water). I’ve lived in places called Medziphema, Peren, Newland, Diphu etc. I didn’t even know how they are properly spelt but the trusty internet was there to help! My most vivid memories are those of walking to school. In Peren I went down a hill to get to school and then went up the winding road on the hill to get back. In Diphu, it was a relatively flat walk where I used to eat Jamuns on the way. In Newland, the walk was all right but I remember the day a helicopter with some local dignitary landed and my parents were meeting him. During recess the whole class was looking wistfully at the helicopter while I ran all the way to my parents who were sitting in chairs with whoever it was had come and back. I also knew some of the language as a child. In retrospect, I never knew the extent of the insurgency at the time we were there. I knew my father was in the Assam Rifles and have hazy memories of hearing about some women being caught as an informer, but never knew about people dying all around us, both on our side and the rebels. These memories are real and at the same time stories heard later, bit by bit so I don’t know what I actually remember and how much I’ve created in my mind, it’s a hodgepodge really.

The village of Peren

One think I’m sure about remembering, and not something ever discussed and dissected with my parents was a visit to Kohima, where we went to a really interesting Naga Museum and the Kohima War Cemetery. The War Cemetery was beautiful and serene and it contains a memorial to all the Allied Soldiers(which includes Indians) who fought against the Japanese in World War II in the Battle of Kohima. It contains the famous epitaph,

When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.

A part of the Kohima War Cemetery

And yes, my earliest memory, I was a little less than three years old when my sister was born in Dimapur, Nagaland.

Visits to Churches, being told by distant relatives who live in Nagaland not to visit them as we came in an Assam Rifles gypsy, hearing that the convoy we were travelling in could be ambushed, stories of the strange food (to us), the awesome Army parties with the bands, the torrential rain and occasional earthquakes, and the incredible beauty of the places we lived in. My memories of that place are like a James Joyce style stream of consciousness flow in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There is no chronology in my head, it is just a striking assortment of images, sounds and smells coupled with explanations by people who experienced these places as adults. For some reason, I remember a lot of snails… and scrumptious pineapples. Nagaland was different, dangerous(though I didn’t know it then), exotic and beautiful. The place, and the constant moving surely affected me. I was a shy child for a long time, maybe coming from the way things were around me then. But I’m amazingly lucky to have those memories. It changed my parents too, who saw a completely different culture, experienced living in perpetual personal danger and realized the apathy the rest of the country has towards the northeast. I would love to go there again just to see if there’s anything I recognize from the mosaic of memories in my head!

Feeling Good

I’m calm, relaxed and sitting in the library. Listening to beautiful music. I can hear birdsong even over my headphones. I love the fact that our campus is so green. Sitting on the top floor of the library on the side which faces the road, I can see people walking by, some I know well, some I recognise and some I’ll never know. As I write I deliberate whether I should put an oxford comma or not. For the uninitiated grammar nazi, it is the comma before the ‘and’ at the end of the sentence. As it gets darker, the library tube lights start coming on and apart from changing the mood, hurt the eyes which have been used to the relaxing late evening natural light. I can see the colour of the sunset which is a nice yellowish-orange glow that I can only see through the large square vents on the other side of the library. I’ve done nothing of consequence today, which is not uncommon for me, but I don’t feel the nagging disquiet and burning eyes that I feel after the mandatory ten hours on the computer. For I’ve been reading, on good old paper, not a backlit computer screen which is giving me a headache every night I sleep. The sunset’s colour is getting better and better and the flocks of birds flying in the sky look like small moving black dots in what is now orangeish-red sky. But no one I see is looking that way. They’re in their rooms or here in the library focused on what they think is important, an upcoming paper to write, or the news of something that happened halfway around the world, on a news website. When W.H Davies in 1916 wrote “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.” he could never have imagined how much more relevant it would be 95 years later.
The sky’s now almost red with dashes of dark blue. And the tube light over my head is put on by some well meaning guy and instantly my eyes recoil to the sudden brightness. Now the people in the cars in the road that I can see have their headlights on. What would I do without technology? It is indispensible and I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to live without a laptop or some other distraction which can overwhelm the senses. But sometimes I wonder if there is something that we have lost because of it. The sky is all dark blue now. In a world lit by fire, most people would be getting ready to sleep now since there is not much that they could do. But, for us, people of the 21st century, having wonderful, extraordinary machines that our ancestors could never contemplate or imagine, the night has just begun.

Ruskin Bond, the Hills and me

Yesterday, after a long time, I bought two books from Blossom’s. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, a dark, funny, satirical thriller set in Zia’s Pakistan, and two books in one by Ruskin Bond, On the Road to Mussoorie and On the Road to the Ganga, both of them non-fiction about travel, life in the hills and people he has met throughout his life. More about Hanif’s book later, but Bond’s writing to me, sitting in class today inspired some intense nostalgia about the hills, Dehradun and reminded me that despite wanting to live in a big city, I remain at heart a lover of nature. Ruskin Bond is someone whose writing I’ve read a lot of ever since I was a kid. I don’t really remember where I read my first Bond book, but I remember going to the Dehradun army library as an eight or nine year old with my grandfather who had procured a card from an army officer since the long summer vacations were getting boring for me and picking out three books by him. I read stories about Bond’s grandfather in Dehradun, his eccentricity about animals, his garden and the different kinds of trees in it sitting in my grandfather’s carefully tended garden in Dehradun. I read stories about Rusty’s eccentric Uncle Ken, his running away from boarding school with a friend. I was slowly but surely hooked, I read a wide variety even then, but Bond’s writing seemed so close to home, the places he was writing about, Mussoorie the lights of which I could see from my grandparent’s house at night were places I had been to, unlike Enid Blyton whose adventures happened in faraway England, a place where children solved mysteries in villages which were very different from any villages I’d ever seen and people ate exotic delicacies like potted meat and scones. As I moved on from the Rusty stories, his stories of the bazaars of Dehradun and Mussoorie, the villages of that region (cue The Blue Umbrella) and his awesome ghost stories all captivated me.

I think I was 12 years old and in Allahabad when I heard that Bond was visiting a bookshop here and signing books. I, my sister and a friend went to see him and I took along my copy of Rusty Runs Away, the one where he ran away from a drab boarding school to get to Jamnagar where his Uncle who was on a merchant ship was stationed for a few days and then hopefully travel the world. When I reached the bookshop, I gave that book to my sister and the friend, and then decided to buy a new Ruskin Bond book. They got my book signed and I bought myself the cheapest available book, called Strange Men, Strange Places which was just fifty rupees and stood in line. When I finally met him, I told him, my grandparents live in Dehradun too. He said, “Then when you come to Dehradun, come to Mussoorie and visit me.” I loved meeting him, and he looked like the kindly old man I imagined. The next day, however, there was a picture on the second page of Times of India, the Lucknow edition of my sister and my friend getting their book signed by Ruskin Bond and I was very jealous of them. I had taken the effort of buying the book and there they were, with photos with him! Then, when I read the book I bought, I was surprised by what it was about. This wasn’t Bond writing for children, but it was this awesome non-fiction book about European adventurers in eighteenth and nineteenth century India and I read about how many of them married Indians and went totally native. Later, when I was reading the Last Mughal, I knew I had read about some of these white nawabs somewhere else and it was that book!

As I grew up, I read a lot more edgy writing, read a lot of fantasy and generally stopped reading Ruskin Bond. Then I found some of his stories which weren’t really for children, and boy they were brilliant as well. Time stops at Shamli is an example. It is this surreal story about a ghost town, lost love and odd people living in the past. Then, something very weird happened. I was reading the aforementioned Rusty Runs Away after a long time, and I was at the point where Rusty and his friend were talking to a chaiwallah after they had sneaked out of school in the morning. The chaiwallah told them, “Every time somebody runs away from school, I give them tea when they are leaving and then on the way back when they are caught at Dehradun station.” The runaways then decided to go to Raiwala station which is further off but there were less chances of being caught. I think I read till about this point before sleeping. The next day, I found out my father was transferred to Raiwala, of all places! We didn’t move there, but I did go to Raiwala and my dad’s office was right opposite the railway station. It was still exactly the way Bond described it, a small, deserted one platform station with one tea stall.

I love the sea, which is something I saw for the first time after college, and have happy memories associated with it. But it is the hills which have imprinted themselves into my psyche and are part of me. From the Shivalik hills which we travel through every time whenever we have to take a bus from Sahranpur to Dehradun, to Mussoorie in the Garwhal hills, to Nainital, Ranikhet, Pithoragarh and Almora in picturesque Kumaon, to even the hills in Nagaland which I remember travelling in to get to Kohima as a five year old. The memories of these hills will always attract me. The only regret I have is of not going to Kashmir despite my father’s two years in Srinagar when the rest of the family did. I suppose I have the time to recreate my ultimate fantasy now, strenuously trekking in the hills and then curling up in my tent with a torch and a Ruskin Bond book!

Another Rant?

This was written in class the day before I finally submitted my projects. Reflects my mood at that time.

The weirdest daydreams are helping me pass the time. This is not me in a happy daydream which involves me in situations which are ideal and where life is awesome. They help me escape my current existence which is hell. A time where I sleep all day and then waste time playing games or on the internet and get 50 to 100 words done of a 3000 word project done every night. Then I get up for breakfast, waking up as if from a dream which is what the past 10 hours have been. I am daydreaming( in the night) as I play FIFA, read a lot of stuff on sports news websites, band profiles, country profiles, city profiles, album profiles, movie profiles on Wikipedia, videos on YouTube, movies stored on the laptop, ebooks etc. While I am doing this, there is a small dim recess of my mind which knows I am in even more trouble if I keep going, then I look at the clock, only 11:00 pm, before I know it it’s 3:30, 5:00 and dawn starts breaking and this is when I get the work done (those 50 to 100 words).

Then that shameful walk to breakfast, that horrible sinking feeling. Depending on when I’ve slept, either I feel the need to sleep immediately or I don’t. Then comes the biggest problem, to go or not to go to class. When I make that decision not to go to class, I know that I am not going to do anything at all, but I’m so fucking angry with myself I will then want to continue reading or watching the nonsense I am until I’m too sleepy to think before I fall asleep. If I go to class, I act super depressed for the first hour but eventually get over it and I think about better things and talk to people and feel better. I hate and love the computer. It is the reason I feel like I live in hell right now but it is an amazing thing, and the desire I have to know more and more random stuff is well-satisfied. It feels even more incredible especially when I have projects or exams. When I don’t have the load over my head, then it’s the desire to meet people, go out, have fun which somehow overpowers this.

I am addicted and I need help but sometimes doing this feels so involuntary that I wonder if I need help of the pill-popping and talking to a shrink kind. But I know I need to find it within myself to do something about this. This is getting insane and giving me a lot of unhappiness. And there is nothing at all in the world which gives me any indication that things will change at all. I hope I become slightly better , and this vicious cycle gets over a little earlier when it is time to write a law school project again.