‘We’ll never fight again, Motts. Promise me?’

‘Never Pashi. I promise you. And even if we do, because its me and you, we’ll come here, this spot, and hug it out’.

‘Fine, I love you babbby! Just one more question- What are you, Motts?’ And I smiled cheekily.

‘I’m your little bitch, Pashi!’ And our laughter echoed on..

We have friends, boyfriend/s, family, social friends, a best friend. But sometimes, very rarely, we may find in our lives, this one person, one type of friend, who transcends all these categories. And doing anything at all without this one person becomes unimaginable. 

‘Pashlinder, my pashi, where will I go ya without you! I’m right here- your designated everything! How can I defy anything you ever say to me Pashi. Your wish is my command!’

We laughed again.

And just like that, the suitcases were zipped up, the documents were filed, a last meal was done and I realized that this time tomorrow, my speed-dial will be trying to reach a ‘this number is temporarily out of service’. 

And just like that, I’ll make conscious efforts to drive far from the ridge, away from the Civil Lines metro station, and still will end up finding myself going back from time to time to a broken fence behind that old juice ki dukan. 

We went there today, one last time {hopefully not the last time forever}. Through that stupid narrow opening into the dark alley, lit one up in shared company, looked around and smiled, not meeting each other’s eyes on purpose, and this was a prelude to the first real goodbye hug. And as a tear reached our eyes, I looked up. And tonight, I saw, there was just one star in the sky. And I realized, for the first time, that this is really goodbye. 

In that moment, I knew that come tomorrow, my travels from the older part of Delhi will be unaccompanied. That my phone bill and phone battery will decrease and increase respectively. That my weekends will be a lot more sober. That my attitude needs a check now and my tantrums will need to chill the fuck out. That no undivided attention will be coming my way. That my work will probably be more efficient. That the ‘random’ from my routine will disappear and that I might become more serious, a term I don’t generally associate myself with. That I might not be interested in making any more plans. That I might scroll through my phonebook and wonder what went astray. That my crazy best friend might just have taken a part of me away. 

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A memory is a beautiful thing. When asked “If you’re 60 and living alone, what would your house look like?”, I’d say my house would be full of photographs. Photographs that a person needs to shuffle through, to know everything about my life. Photographs that show that I was once happy and I can fill myself up with nothing but that feeling and be content with my current days. Photographs of all my achievements and all my failures. 

Most importantly, photographs of all the people who have ever entered my life, affected the way I think, created the person I am. Or even just existed by virtue of once sharing a cab with me, sitting next to me in class 5 Geometry, taking my side in a high school brawl, sharing his microeconomics notes or like The Beatles said – promising to need me, promising to feed me, when I’m 64. 

But what if things go bad. What if the people you saw as your roommates/flatmates/bridesmaids/lifemates were all just your imagination? What if you expected too much out of a relationship? What if the friendship balance never really tipped your way? What if by some chance of fate, or a better chance of un-required, bigheaded ego, you alienate yourself from everyone who ever cared about you? We use words like forever, never and always without really understanding what they mean and what implications they might draw. What if a “I never want anything to do with you” actually means “I NEVER want anything to do with you”? What if all you’re living with, and for, are those photographs on the walls? What if the memory of being happy doesn’t fill you up and make your face glow, but is actually killing you inside and reminding you, everyday of being rejected, defeated and my scariest feeling of all – unwanted? 

Imagine a dream world. Imagine the incoherency and surreality of what dreams are like. In that very state, imagine an old, dusty photo album. It’s full of all your photographs, in sequence of when they happened. It starts with the day you were born, moving on to your first step, your first french fry, your first toothbrush, going towards your graduation, your engagement party, your first child and all of his or her firsts. It has all your ups and all your downs – the most jubilant day of your life and the day you wanted to kill yourself. It has all the people who matter – Or mattered as the case may be. But more than showing you how great your life was, it screams at you with images of every time you felt disappointed and cheated. It tells you that in the whirlwind of trying to find yourself, you got lost. It’s a blatant reminder of the fact that you never really lived. You merely existed. It ends at where you are right now – the exact place, the exact time, the exact surroundings and the very exact laptop in front of you. But this time you have an eraser in your hand with the power to permanently erase all the photographs you don’t want in your album. 

You’re awake now. The album is still in front of you and so is the eraser. The only problem is – this album, is your life. 

What would it feel like to cut complete chunks out of your memory? To remove all those photographs that make you regret the times they represent. To start over with people you have unknowingly or knowingly harmed. To build yourself from the beginning – drop all accents, views, knowledge, opinions, perceptions, notions and pretenses. To gently remove all traces of those days you regret the most. Is it normal to want to remove whole persons from your memory completely? To burn a hole in your photographs, to put an end to those recurring dreams, to never feel what you felt when they were around – to move on in the real sense of the term. What if you didn’t ever have to look back at your mistakes? What if you just didn’t allow history to repeat itself? What if you had the option of not learning from your past but erasing it altogether. What would that feel like?

Are you strong enough to start over? Would you rather not know at all, or know, remember and cry over? If you don’t remember your failures, are you still at risk of repeating them? Will you ever be okay with letting go of everything – all events, all moments, all memories? 

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Are you prepared to be Eternally Sunshined? 

Poem by: Alexander Pope 

Photo courtesy: http://www.between-us-bilinguals.com/memories.html

Title reference: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – The movie 

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When I was little, I had a weird habit of associating every moment with the place where it occurred. The people were hardly relevant compared to their surroundings. So while you might remember your first play in pre school, I remember the stage and the auditorium. You look back at your first field trip or first shopping experience without the overbearing presence of mommy dearest and I somehow only remember where they happened. People think fondly of their first dates, first kisses and first anniversaries. I hope to God that none of the people involved in the aforementioned activities with me read this but I hardly remember anything of their presence. But the fancy restaurants, movie theaters, empty classroom and shady street corners are very very clear.

As I grew up I realised that it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just a childhood thing and it isn’t something that goes away with time. A majority of us associate our fondest memories with the atmosphere and how we felt when we saw, heard, touched and smelt the things around us. We tend to take a mental picture of what that night looked like, store it somewhere at the back in a box, to be opened only when alone and in the mood for a sob. What some people also tend to do is associate smells with incidents. Or for that matter even songs. Or just a certain tune always playing in the background. For me, every phase of my life can be represented by a different set of singer/albums/song. Life is really what happens to us when we are busy shuffling from Backstreet Boys to The Beatles. 

If you think about it, a memory is only but a movie playing in our heads. Except, the only difference is – we’re in it. Who really needs albums full of people in their most ridiculous poses when you can go back on your own special memory lane whenever you want – all lit up with lights, reverberating with familiar tunes, fresh smells and the faint memory of what it felt like when you were there last.

All in all, while we think that our brain or our heart are the most relevant while creating memories or going back to them, it’s actually more of the rest of our sense organs. It’s the smallest things that tend to stick the longest. A song lyric, a wine bottle, a toothpick and a small cafe or in one of my cases – an empty vodka bottle, shady bollywood songs, pyjamas & pancakes at Times Square and an urgent need to pee. 

The Monsoons are incomplete without that distinct smell of wet mud. Holi seems bland without the taste of Gujjiya in my mouth. You haven’t experienced Delhi winters if you haven’t almost died because of the late night chilly winds. Christmas is nothing really except the thought of a big Christmas tree, everyone singing carols around it and the sight of every kind of cake and pudding possible. Long walks on the Brooklyn bridge don’t feel the same without the Sinatra ‘Moon River’ soundtrack playing in your head.

If I couldn’t see the candlelight, I wouldn’t have remembered what it feels like to be alone in a room with him. If I couldn’t hear his hopeless attempts at ’Nothings gonna change my love for you’, I wouldn’t have known that even with that God awful voice, I actually love it when he sings to me. If I couldn’t feel the spotlight on me, I would never have experienced that rush of being on stage. If I couldn’t sense the grief in my throat and the tears building up at the airport, I wouldn’t know what goodbyes feel like. If I didn’t associate all my memories with the place, the smell, the song and the butterfly feeling in my stomach, the faces would just fade away.

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Three years the boy has spent in this alien town of big cars blaring the latest gangsta rap. In the city of pretty girls who cannot speak English. In a mini-country sized city which falls in the range of surface to surface missiles of not one, but three other countries, two of which have half a mind to make use of that factor. This city seemed to hold all of the stuff that this boy was critical of, everything he swatted aside with a derisive snort {other than the pretty girls of course}. Still, three years he’s survived. And he hates to admit it, but he’s actually enjoying himself.

On a ridiculously hot summer night the boy set foot for the one and the half-th time {the first visit to Delhi couldn’t have counted as one}, shocked immediately at the audacity of a geographical location to adamantly stay at 40 degrees at 12 am. Since he hailed from Bangalore {the paradise where it’s perpetually spring}, it made him even more uncomfortable. He sweated out half his already-depleted body weight on the ride to the hotel, and he hated the god damned place. The next morning entailed standing in line for hours on an even hotter day {if that was possible} to get admission into one of the most prestigious colleges in India. It did not make him feel any better about the blessed heat though. Or the copious amounts of Hindi being spoken all around him. But this decision to run away from home and do “arts” was completely on him. So he decided to fight it out.

As time went by, he got used to the heat, but he still needed to get used to the people. Being brought up in Bangalore meant he did not really think too much about keeping up appearances. He was startled at the college fashion scene. It was like a going to the zoo. For the first time that he saw one of his friends get dressed for a party, he could not comprehend the fact that a male homo sapien can spend an hour trying to look presentable. At the party, in his borrowed shirt and torn jeans, he felt really out of place. Like a hobo in a Gucci store.  All these people milling around him, dressed like they’re going to the Oscars, blowing “muahs” at each other disconcerted him to say the least. So, he just concentrated on the alcohol. Oh, that was one redeeming factor about Delhi, the rich kids gave you nice booze. He still hated the place though, and the people in it.

But then, by virtue of being a {barely} “social animal”, he made a few friends. Friends who called him “English Boy”, but friends nonetheless. He discovered that if you looked beyond the branded clothing, and chose to ignore almost all your cultural convictions being violated in conversation, these people were actually pretty normal, but in his opinion, trying too hard. Fact of the matter remained that they were nice. The boy slowly began suspending his staunch views on stuff that were ingrained in him by his heavy metal brethren, and for starters, he actually began to enjoy techno-electro music {it’s called dhikchik auto music in his hometown}. What’s important here is that he gave David Guetta a shot, a listen, and then chose to like it. What was important, and what he realised was giving Delhi, in all its nauseous pretence, a shot.

With that plan of action in mind, the boy roamed Delhi for a good two years. He found a few things he liked, and many things he did not. He put his chappal-shorts philosophy on hold and bought his first pair of trousers, and first few pieces of non-blackgraywhitebeige clothing. He found places to fall in love with, like the congested gullies of Old Delhi, or the BRT at 2 am in the morning. He found people to fall in love with. He even almost fell victim to this Blackberry trend, but the Bangalore in his blood eventually got the better of him {it was a close one}. In Delhi, he lost some of his passions and found some others that made him happy. In many ways, he realised, the fast pace of this town made kids do a lot more at a very young age, that they are more driven, and that in turn motivated him to shrug off the lethargy characteristic of Bangalore and do something. The city gave him his brush with philosophy, an interest he may never have discovered had he not met these “arty types”. The city also gave him his first glimpse of the heart stopping beauty of winter, of the visions of the India Gate slowly emerging from behind the icy veil of dense fog on a January morning. He learnt to love chai {not tea, in his mind they are two completely different beverages} and stop hating paneer {oh, the epidemic}. He learnt to embrace the history and the beauty of the city. To him, strangely, if Delhi were to be personified she’d be a beautiful mujra dancer from a yesteryears Bollywood film. If Bangalore was his love, then Delhi became his muse.

So, now, three years later, his friends at home laugh at him when he says he liked a Salman Khan movie. They ridicule him for playing dance tunes at parties {its a party for chrissakes, not a Lamb of God concert}. Amidst frequent utterances of “Ey, you’ve become one full Delhi boy da.”, he just smiles. He loves staying at home and not having to pay 300 bucks for a pint of beer, but to his surprise he misses Delhi after two and a half months of summer holidays. He knows that as long he has a goatee on his chin and a collection of unmarked black t-shirts in his closet, he will remain Bangalore. But, it doesn’t hurt him to say “yaar” in place of “da” anymore. 

Photo Courtesy: Pratheek Vinod Kumar

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Growing up in a place like Delhi, you learn not to get too accustomed to things around you. Things in this city take only a few moments to completely turn over and become something else. Delhi surprises me every day. So do its people. I could know someone for years and yet not know them at all. Then one day I can bump into a stranger and call them my best friend

A while ago, I decided to meet a friend for a quick lunch and a movie at his place. He decided for us to watch Brokeback Mountain – a brilliantly made movie that depicts the complex romantic and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983.

A scintillating 2 hours later as I got up to leave, my friend seemed to be looking for some sort of reaction on my face. It was as if he was expecting me to say something or act a certain way after watching the movie but I guess I disappointed him.

He came out to me the next day. “I have to tell you something. I am Gay.” To say I took it badly would be an understatement.

For the next few days I locked myself in my room due to sheer lack of words or thoughts or any form of brain activity and started looking for articles and write ups on the gay movement in India. Scores and scores of newspaper clippings, magazine sections and blog posts later, my frenzy had only but increased multi-fold.

I knew what being gay meant. I knew about gay rights and the gay movement. I knew about gay pride parades and I had read up, debated, researched, attended committee sessions and written papers on the plight of the LGBT community in the world today. But none of them had prepared me for this event in my life. I had always thought of ‘the gays’ {as we often refer to them} as a separate community, far from the everyday happenings of my life. I could not have been more wrong.

Think about it, there are thousands of gay people in Delhi or in any city for that matter. Some are fortunate enough to be able to come out comfortably, some are halfway into coming out and have a great support system to back them up, some are living dual lives – pretending to be someone they are not while some are still sitting firmly inside the closet too scared or even in denial or a little bit of both to accept who they really are. But apart from facts, figures and emotional stories, there is absolutely no literature on how to cope with the situation I was in. None of my fancy debate talk had taught me what I should be saying to a person who had just come out to me and expected nothing but for me to understand.

What could I have said? It’s going to be easy? Living in a country like India, it probably isn’t.

I understand? I didn’t. Not even a little bit.

I’m here for you? I wasn’t. At least not then – something I will regret for the rest of my life.

Some time and a slight sense of maturity later, everything is great with my friend. He’s confident, has been in love, has had his heart broken, is now almost infatuated by another man in an annoying ‘I cant get over his six pack abs and I’ll tell anyone who listens’ kind of way, and is happier than I have ever seen him.

Meanwhile, I had the privilege of meeting and getting to know another fabulous set of people – Jerry Johnson and Deepak Kashyap. Jerry, a marketing executive, lives with his partner Deepak, in Mumbai’s Santacruz Suburb. They got engaged over the New Year and hosted their engagement party last night.
“Its about wanting to go to work and sharing your lunch and saying ‘yes my boyfriend made that for me’ with as much pride as straight couples do. It’s about saying in a conversation, ‘yes my boyfriend and I went for that movie last night’” they explained in a recent newspaper article. I enjoyed a fabulous Marathi meal with them in Pune and they are easily one of the best looking couples I know – gay or straight.

Obviously, it hasn’t been easy.. “If you are visible, you are vocal. If you are vocal, society confronts you. If they confront you, interaction begins. Eventually acceptance will come.” says a charming Deepak.

So by the end of it – I still don’t completely understand. I don’t think I ever will. But I’d like to dedicate this blog post to Jerry and Deepak. I wish you a lifetime of happiness together. And to my dear friend who taught me one of the most important lessons of my life – if you’re not the most fabulous version of yourself you ever can be and proudly so, you’re a nobody. I also wish you and the many Mr. Six packs to come a lifetime of happiness. Or something like that.

Photo courtesy: http://tiphereth.tumblr.com/post/1395741104

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I’m not crazy about chocolates. Or flowers. I don’t like people shopping for me. I don’t approve of other people’s taste in shoes or bags. I hate everything pink and or heart shaped. 
But I like love. Or at least what I think is love. After spending hours and hours over Nicholas Sparks novels, listening to hard disks full of every love song possible and spending more than half our lives obsessing over things from ‘why hasn’t he called me back?’ ‘where is this relationship going?’ to ‘how should I pop the question?’ one would think we know at least a bare minimum about this four letter word. But we don’t. Not even a little bit. Those who claim to are just kidding themselves. Nonbelievers have turned into hopeless romantics and gone to all extents to love and to be loved. We have gone to almost all extents possible to love and to feel loved in return.

Endless whining over ex boyfriends, current girlfriends, best friend turned lovers, lovers turned enemies and the countless realisations, comprehensions and life decisions made after a bad break up all vanish into nothingness by one cheesy line, a song on a guitar or in some cases, nice hair, pretty eyes and a near perfect butt. 

After years of trying to master the human psyche and what goes wrong or right during love times, I have come up with a Love Theory. It’s pretty simple and straightforward if you think about it. But that’s the thing with love – it makes you think about every situation or person in a complicated, messed up way. We’re all simple, clear, logical human beings. Till we fall in love.

The Loves

While creating a list of people for your birthday party, who are the first ten people you think of? All these people constitute the first part of the love theory – Love itself. All these relationships are completely platonic and have touched your lives in multiple ways. These are your go to people. The top ten of your priority list. You love them with all your heart. 

The In Loves  

The next group is your non platonic relationships. The people you have dated or are dating. Whether or not they are a part of your life anymore. These are the people you have been ‘in love’ with. The want to spend all day and all night with you, pretend to like your taste in music, boast about you to my friends, ‘you are the most beautiful woman in most rooms’, let you pick the restaurant/dessert/t shirt colour/perfume/car kind of love.

The Ultimate Loves

Now the third and final kind are the ones we’re constantly searching for. The people we end up with. The all consuming, cannot live without, Every breath you take, Rose and Jack, Chuck and Blair, Rahul and Anjali love. Except not just that. Your Ultimate Love is the one person you breathe for. This in an ideal situation should be your spouse. Or your lover. But you may find this person in a best friend. Who knows you better than you know yourself. Or if your marriage isn’t all that you thought it would be, your Ultimate loves are your children. Or your parents. Or siblings. Or a group of childhood Dil Chahta hai type friends who have seen you grow up. Basically the one person or the group of people who make you realize that unless it is mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of time. Your soul mates.  

I have multiple loves. The people I grew up with, the people I go to, people I fall back on and people I have learnt life from. People who will push me to go further and also catch me when I fall, people who have made me the person that I am today. I’ve been in love with some of them though unfortunately they are not a part of my life right now. Some were summer loves, some Christmas fantasies, some were very strong ultimate love candidates, some I thought I’d be in love with for life. But all who still mean the world to me. Who have taught me that sometimes it’s okay to want to give your everything for that one special person. It’s okay to want to be a better version of yourself for someone else. It’s okay to depend on other people. It’s okay to expect because when you stop expecting, the unexpected ceases to exist. It’s okay to believe in forever.

This is probably very immature and juvenile, but when it comes to love, what isn’t? I think I have a faint idea of who my ultimate love is. It’s not a knight in shining armour. Or a shady boy in aluminum foil. It might change as I grow up. But for now, it’s the person who has survived through all my knights and shady boys and still stuck around. My constant, my best friend.

Now this write up has obviously been written after ODing on An Affair to Remember, PS I love you, The Notebook and my one source for all things cheese – Kuch Kuch Hota Hai marathon. Assessing other peoples’ love lives and a little bit of my own – this is basically all I know about love. Oh and one last thing – Whether it is for your loves, your ‘in loves’ or your ultimate loves – There are too many mediocre things in life, love should not be one of them.

Quotes courtesy: Greys Anatomy 

Photo courtesy: Anuja Agrawal  

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