The reason I am writing today is quite unclear to me. I don’t have an agenda or a simple topic today. I do not have any inspiration as well, I seem to have run out of ideas. While I do appreciate your candour and support, my dearest reader, there is a chance you are reading this space on the promise of a sassy and fun-filled recount of a time I met another Karen, or perhaps even a bickering Becky. But I am, in the simplest of terms, sad today.
I have a life that gives me enough to be sad about, but I can’t put my finger on the reason what particularly is the reason for my sadness today. I woke up on the good side of the bed. I watched the new Teen Wolf movie, and despite its known lack of serious and thought-provoking content, it delivered me to a satisfactory enough orgasmic bliss by the end. So, you could possibly understand my confusion about this sudden burst of melancholia that has sprung out of nowhere.
As I chew on these three nine months old almonds in my mouth, I start on a quest. A quest of uncovering the roots of my desolation. The first thing that comes to mind is the room. This room that I am sitting in. This table. The table that my mother bought me three months before she died. This laptop, I got this on the day I registered for a creative writing course at the British Council, in 2019, if I remember correctly. My mom bought that too. She took up the money from her self-help group, or as the ladies in this country say, committee se uthae the.
I am sensing a pattern here. My mom. I think I miss my mom. The noon I spent on the roof of this house today was quite contributing to my mood. I sat up there trying to read this book that I have selected to write my dissertation on, though all I could do, while I read a nationalist’s account of a woman he loved and how he could save her, was write with these big white-cement residue that had over time transformed into chalk. I was writing in Hindi, which took me by surprise, not because it was a miracle that I still remembered the letters, but because of the words I had chosen. The words weren’t Hindi, they were Urdu. QAATIL, I wrote. KHOONI, followed next.
I won’t go into the details to decode those words. It probably had something to do with my mother and her husband not having the most peaceful marriage and the ways in which he, over the years, slowly and steadily snuffed the light from her eyes. The normal teenage years, I am sure you all can relate to. Though I do have some concerns about the things that followed.
As soon as I wrote the words down in big, bold, and clear lexicons of Hindi and English, a devastating fear flashed before my eyes. He had a voice. My fear was male. Darr, he was called. He asked, ‘are you crazy what if he sees it and decides to throw a bigger kadhai at your face? How will you explain that bruise, haan?’
I did not reply. I complied. I do that these days. In my last two years of living with alcoholics and drug-addicted egomaniac men, I have acquired a pearl of great wisdom- it is easier to comply most of the time. I think it is so much easier to temporarily silence the voice inside me that says no this is wrong I hate this I am not your slave than to let the voice of natural subservience spring out of sheer helplessness. I don’t want this phase of my life to be my life. The natural subservience will never be the root of my behaviour. I will let that inner strength out sometime. I know I will get out. I will have an actual life. Do you want to know what that life looks like?
Well, like all the good old fairy tales, there is a house. There is also a white picket fence. It could very well be a terrace balcony on the twentieth floor of an apartment either on Fifth or Park avenue, we can settle on Madison too. We’ll see. So, there’s the house. There is a table on that terrace, or the yard, whatever I end up on. There is a swing. There is a porch. There is grass. There is the flickering light of a bulb I forgot to change. There is the moon. There is a clear blue, and black in the night sky. There is tea. There is the twenty-year sobriety chip with the same words on my two-year chip god grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference right next to my ninth book that came out recently and has already been selected in the Oprah Book club. Yes, Oprah is still around and kicking like the badass queen she is now.
What I don’t see is a man. Or a woman. I don’t see any children. I don’t see any household noise. Hell, I don’t even see a cat. That is not my dream. My dream when my mom was alive, used to be of a husband who looked like harry styles, sang like him, flirted like him, and yet chose to be mine based on the fact that he loved me and on the brilliant miraculous grace of god that I loved him back. There were children. The house was full of noise and chaos. The flickering light bulb was long gone, in its place was half chewed teddy bear which meant that after ten years of marriage and five migraine-giving yet somewhat decent children, there was yet another toddler in the house.
Perhaps my current person does not want the chaos and the joy of the older dream. But I am also scared of the isolated solitude of the current dream. I am wistful. I am sad. And most of all, I think I am still grieving. They don’t tell you the magnificent scope of grief when you lose the person you lose. I bought this book titled, It’s okay to not be okay, an account of this psychologist woman when she lost her husband. He drowned right in front of her, as she was stuck in her own situation. I thought, well, here is this person. She lost someone. Tragically so too, I mean if she could get out of it and then go on to write about it, maybe reading about her experience might help me too. I know what you are thinking. You are like dude, her and your loss are different, like bruh wtf? But gworrrl, I was so fucking out of mind and in so much pain that I thought, at that time, this was the best thing ever. I so desperately wanted someone to come and pick me up, and tell me everything was gonna be alright. I wanted a saviour. Little did I know that saviour would eventually be me, and I don’t think I am doing a good job. I started the book with all kinds of hopes and aspirations, like yeah this is gonna be good I am gonna be like totally not sad after this. Needless to say, that did not happen. I did not finish the book. Her experience and observations were spot on, but I simply was not in the headspace to read about anything. Maybe I will give it another go one of these days. I am technically older and hopefully wiser.
But right now, I am going to wash my face off. I am going to go drink a glass of water, maybe two. And then I am gonna send this out. I hope this sudden stream of consciousness doesn’t scare you off, my dearest reader. Maybe I will be happy with the next blog post. Till then, I hope you the best of health and some deeply satisfying orgasms. Au revoir!
I am Harshi 