Inner Child

 It's easy to love.

Easy to believe.

Easy to leave.

Easy to hurt.

Easy to wallow.

What's not easy,

Is to remind yourself

To liberate

The inner child,

Shunned away from

Life.

A New World

The veil lifts up

As Life takes on the centre stage

A conflagrant chariot gallops through the starry canvas

Illuminating a golden universe.

Orion towers above- scattering stars

On every drop of dew.

Liberated mornings

Await in anticipation

To lose their souls

As the shimmery grains of yellow, red and blue

Glisten the feathers

Of our winged friends.

Dry leaves orchestrate

A sublime scenery

Across the desolate cityscapes.

Whirlwinds of cloud,

Slither through the sandscapes,

Coalescing into the waves.

A world, anew,

Yet so ancient and familiar,

The green and blue,

The orange and yellow,

The white and grey-

As clear as the skin of a new-born!

Threads of green sew through the landscape-

A new age is born.

Mirage of promises

Disintegrates;

While a new morning

Rises from its ashes.

(Lockdown 2020, India)

To LOVE, With Love

All these years, I carved myself to perfection. I chiseled and sharpened my soul to be deserving of you. Of your profound love. Profound in its multi-polarity, in its infinite multi-dimensions. Fervent in its divinity. Love that is esoteric and enigmatic.

My yester years provided me with the incubation that crafted me with pain and solitude. I endured it all in anticipation of your sacred chalice. My stars have counted every moment of this interlude. The wait is over finally. I can feel the music play in full throttle now. I kissed my alignment with your entity to be ONE.

Lend your ears to the universe that rejoices our unification. Smolders and stars sprinkle flames in union. The sun kisses his newly wed moon. Scattered showers of their warmth pour on us. The celestial orbits come close with magnified gravity.

God's children are in harmony at last.

Make the world a better place to live in

Have you ever loved anyone so much that it hurts?

Have you ever loved anyone so intensely that you can't contain yourself?

Have you ever been loved so deeply that you can't take it further?

Have you ever loved so fiercely that the greatest distortions seemed the silliest affairs?

Have you ever loved so vehemently that your blood froze at one sight of her moist eyes?

Have you ever loved anyone so passionately that you could see the sun rise and set in her eyes?

Have you ever been loved so profoundly that it put the rockiest seas to rest in your eyes?

Have you ever loved anyone so acutely that you could smell the chill of the Himalayas in her breath?

Have you ever loved so painfully that you could sense the seas uproar in your veins at her sight?

Have you ever been loved with such impassion that you touched HIS feet?

Have you ever loved so frenziedly that you could see the almighty?

Love,
My dear
Love.
It's all we have
It's all we can offer
It's all we can return
To restore
The creator
To restitute
The Creations.

-DEBARATI ROY

P.S. 'All we need is love' by John Lennon inspired me to pen down these lines.

This poem wasn't written with any craftsmanship in mind, nor did I write it to be critically analysed ( in most cases I expect critical analysis of my work, though).

I poured out these words just to share how exactly I have perceived and felt the greatest feeling possible. Yes, I have cried vigorously, not because I was upset but because I couldn't contain my love further.

In this smog-covered world, 'all we need is love' to remove the sooty clouds and make room for compassion, to be so loving that you could forgive your staunchest enemy; rekindle love in his/her heart since they need it the most.

I hereby, invite you all, to share your feelings/ experiences and above all--- unite through love.

In the Quest Of Love and Peace

You keep returning
Like an almost extinguished flame.
You lit me up.
Ablaze-
The black hole flickers in my womb,
Before erupting.


My lips part
Blow you in smoke.
The veins soothe
As their shadows rest in my eyes
To come back into life
There
Right there
Where
You reside
O Flame!

Prayers and cries
Blend
Consummate
Conjugate
To give you a thorny glow.

An incandescence par brilliance
Gallops through an unending tunnel:
Green springs to life
A poet is born.

Fumes germinate in your seeds,
Sprouting love
You pollinate my civilisation.

Your serenity ripples through an ocean of clouds
As the planets wait,
Around a ghastly bonfire,
With bated breath.

My love,
You breathe
Meaning into meaninglessness.
You make every chaos strike a balance
You bridge the seas with care
Guarding Moses' trails.

Every cell of this universe
Every wave of the ocean
Every bed of pearls and corals
Every successive phase of consciousness-
Lose their names and forms.
Arrivals and departures
Dissolve
In the untorn cord of the womb
As you realise your immortality
In harmony
In synthesis
In love.

Finally, I rest on my laurels

Scared of death all my life, for the first time I have geared up the courage to face it and accept it from the front. I have learned to believe that souls never die. They just shed their adult body to move on to another lifetime, which we call death.

 Our life is much more than just living. We learn to be patient, to trust, to forgive, to love, to accept, to shed off jealousy, disbelief, resistance, lust and greed and finally cleanse our souls in the 'space between lives'...

 ...A knowledge as profound as it can be and more than that. 

 My anxieties, panic attacks and fear have finally started to cease. The new insight into life and lifetimes helped me stand my ground, though bruised nad battered at times, but triumphant always!

Today I can forgive all of them who have hurt, sometimes beyond my limits of endurance too. I can be patient when things go downhill. I can love unconditionally.

And most significantly, I am not disquieted by death anymore.

I knew it to be the biggest truth of life but found it hard-bitten to accept.

 But not anymore. I am not hard up any longer for courage and vigour. I know the key.

PATNA DIARY

A thick blanket of heavy cloud hangs, as if enveloping the entire runway. Stars like lights, inside and outside the aircraft. A stretch of yellow line on the flight strip separates the zones of airlines, as if different solar systems orbiting within their confines.

As the plane takes off and I get elevated to God’s kingdom, the earthly clouds, which the blades of the plane slice through, the stars and their abode, seem to have exchanged places with my city beneath. A cluster of lights.Of stars.

The journey that I am making now, made last week and will be making for the following few weeks, is not merely professional. For me, this terse absence from my city of joy, from the people I know, is a magic potion that aids me to take refuge in a faraway city among unfamiliar people. It is an elixir that heals my antsy mind. The bud within opens up into full bloom. This journey is not just an evasion from the city but a serendipitous encounter with my lost self, an opportunity to regurgitate.

It’s been long since I have heard my voice. My inner voice. The relentless cacophony around have long deafened, dumbed and blinded my senses.

When I am on the clouds, fetid vapours emit from a smoked up heart. They hang in front, clouding my eyes; their claws intertwining with those of the sooty clouds outside, till I have been completely enshrouded and ingurgitated and devoured.

Moments pass by. Moments, dragged beyond a clock’s ability, fleet away. I open my eyes. To a new world. Ahead. A sunnier world.

And lo! When the clock strikes seven on the dial, the sky bifurcates- the sun on my left, yellowing its share of the skyspace and the moon on my right, scattering its pearls around. A divine sight that no god-forsaken mortal could witness.

No solar system, no milky way could rear a groom more powerful than the sun and a bride more angelic than the moon. The knightly clouds stand as guards of honour as the groom kisses the bride. The sparks from the constellations echo through the universe, ricocheting in countless milky ways. The newlyweds consummate as the infinitesimal world snows under the trivialities of life.

But this lonely wanderer, stand the sole witness to a celestial conjugation, the thirst of my eyes quenched.

As I spread my vision across the unending expanse, I find the vapour missing, the sooty smoke absent and my vision clearer than never before.

My watch says one hour twenty five minutes since boarding, that is twenty five minutes since the starry wedding and here I am, on the runway of Patna airport.

A fuller, more content Debarati, signing off.

DEADLOCK

It was the final day of the term before I went on vacation. I had taught for just 3 weeks which means I had only 9 classes, in other words, 18 hours with the class, with minimal scope of personal interaction. She waited at one corner of the classroom till everyone else left for the day, with laconic parting words.

As usual she looked elegant and vibrant. Light red lips, nails painted with a subtle pink, an understated but sophisticated suit and a flashy white pair of slippers; her straightened hair neatly combed and eyes intense.

I smiled at her, “Yes, how can I help you?”

“I brought this for you”, and she handed me a bar of dark chocolate (my all-time favorite, but how on earth did she know about it?) and a card.

“Oh thank you so much! But my name is spelt incorrectly. It’s DebarAti, not DebarOti!”

With a withdrawn smile, she said, “My son had told me but I didn’t listen.”

“Really? I thought your son is young, I mean 3-4 years old”, she didn’t come across as a mother of a grown up boy!

“No, he is eighteen”, she said as a matter-of-factly.

“Oh my god! Are you serious? How old are you then?” I asked with staggered eyes.

“How old are you?”

“I am 26”, I never faced troubles revealing my age to people, unlike many of my contemporaries.

“I am ten years elder than you.”

“Okk.” I tried to calculate if that was an age old enough to mother an 18 year old boy. After my mathematical brain solved the equation, I reverted, “You became a mother at the age of 18 then?”

She smiled and said, “I got married when I was 17 and within a year I became a mother.”

I couldn’t hold on to my probing mind. “At such an early age? I mean… you know… Was it a love marriage?”

She shook her head.

“Was there any… any kind of… ?”

“Financial problem?” she cut me short.

“Well… err.. yes!” I felt guilty of hinting at something which might have coerced into some un-trodden territory.

“No, not really”, she smiled.

“Then?” I was inquisitive.

“ Even though I got married at 17, my maturity was of a 12 year old girl. I was very happy the day I got married; all decked out like a fairy.  I danced all day in front of the mirror. After the reception, when it was time for all of my family members to leave, I joined them to head home, thinking that the party was over and ‘twas time to get back home, when my mom clarified that my house has changed address and I was supposed to stay with those new set of people from then.”  She went on, “My husband was 24 years elder than me.”

My brows shot up, trying to fathom what reason could there have been to get an adolescent girl married to someone as old as her uncle! “Didn’t you ask your culpable parents the reason for this unjust treatment?”

“I did. I still do and they never have an answer. I didn’t know anything about the matrimonial responsibilities. But I tried hard to harmonize with the confines of matrimony. My in-laws never wanted my husband to get married for he was a mint of money. They never wanted a share of his property to go in the hands of his wife and child. That would dwindle with the proportion of wealth transferred to the other members of the family.

“My husband and I never got on well with each other principally because of the gap of a generation in our ages. Our tastes and preferences didn’t match, obviously. On our anniversaries, when I wanted to have a candle-light dinner with him, he would rather invite friends and family over for a party. I hated the noise and the crowd. But I attuned myself.

“One day, within a year of marriage, I realized that I have conceived. I was 18 then. My son is 18 now, exactly 18 years younger than me. My only best friend.”

She went on. And I still didn’t know that her narrative so far was just a drop in the bucket.

“I have an elder sister and a younger brother. 14 years after marriage, my sister first conceived. She had twins, a boy and a girl. It was a great moment for the entire family.” She paused and then continued. “Three years ago, my husband, my sister, my brother-in-law and their twins were driving down to a place and on the way the car met with a terrible accident. Right on spot, four of my family members passed away- my sister, her daughter, the driver and my husband.”

My jaws fell open. I blurted out, “Didn’t you say, you help your husband in his business on the first day of class in the introductory session?”

With a smile on her face, she said, “I said I take care of my husband’s business. My brother helps me too. He is more of a father to me, now that he has lost one of his sisters. He keeps phoning me every now and then checking if I am alright. He has become over-possessive of me these days. ” She said the last sentence more to herself than to me.

I tried remembering her introductory speech.

Her words brought me back from my wonderland.

 “I always detested the life of a widow, the treatment dished out to the unfortunate women and the hardships they encountered for the rest of their lives in the name of family and society. ‘You must not wear red garments now’, ‘You should turn into a vegetarian’, ‘Concentrate on spirituality, devote yourself to God’, the list of advice was endless after my husband’s demise.”

‘A storm is as strong in its aftermath as in its raging’- I had read it somewhere. I saw the truth of the author’s words that day in my student’s eyes.  Blistering eyes going red as her mind transported down the memory lane.

I stared at this young lady in a red salwar suit, with a dazzling pair of slippers, glossy lips, glistening-but-moist eyes and a languid smile. She had kept her chin up.

I wondered how this lady instead of steeping down into her troubles, geared up her courage and oiled the hinges of her troubled life in an attempt to make a mark. She had plunged into the depths of pulchritudinous life and revived her education. She was doing her graduation in English, her favorite subject and wanted to do Master’s from an international university of repute. She had picked up the threads of her life from where she had left them. She hadn’t lost her bottle yet. She still hadn't encountered Zen-like disconnections from the realities of life. Mere survival wasn’t enough for her any longer. My mind inclined with respect and admiration for her.

“I always believed that everything happens for a reason but I could never justify my bizarre marriage or my husband’s sudden demise. Until this evening, I couldn’t even reason out why I started learning English language. But now I know, I had to meet you, Debarati. “

I gave a faded smile, not because I was unhappy at her declaration, but because I was pondering on her every word and gauged what made her open the book of her life to a stranger. I was only a teacher who had never before spent any private time with her. What made her rely on me so much to unmask her life in few minutes? I didn’t ask her anything and the question kept hanging in my mind without any answer.

Hours after our discussion had ended, her words went on spinning in my mind.

A month later, she called me up on my birthday. Wished me and invited me to join her on a trip to Goa. Because of some professional engagements, I turned down the lucrative offer with a gloom. She was travelling with her son, her closest pal, who had promised to get her married to an eligible person who would fill up the void in his mother’s life with all the love on earth, who would not let the soil crumble again.

I wished her a happy journey and sojourn. She deserved to be happy and embrace life with both arms.

Before she rung up the phone, she promised to bring me back an exotic drink as a souvenir and compensate for my loss.

I was informed about the day she was returning. So I waited for her call, waited to listen to her stories and adventure.

Few days passed by before she called. I was leaving my office premises and took my phone out to check if there was any text pending to be read or any call missed. There was. 2 missed calls. Instantaneously I called her back.

“Hello”, came a deadpan voice.

“I have been thinking about you for a while. Where have you been? When did you return? Did you have fun?” I said in one breath, hardly giving her a scope to answer.

When I paused to breathe, she said, “I was dying to talk to you. I tried your number a couple of times with no effect.”

“I was giving classes. I just saw your missed calls and phoned you right away. I was thinking about you for the last few days yearning to listen to your tales of adventure. So how is everything?”

After a terse pause, the castrated voice of my student uttered, “Mom passed away today morning.”

Impatience plagued me like never before. 

The fog continued to hang over and I failed to lift it from my shoulders.  

Surreptitious Memories

Memories are eccentric and clandestine. They are languid and phlegmatic, slapdash at times, never following any rule or chronology.  They nictitate in our brains, peep into our hearts and stir them, even before we realize we are drowned in the ocean of our memories. They play hide and seek with us, intermittently. When we try to delve deep into them, they tend to move away far beyond our jurisdiction, dampening our spirits, and then, all of a sudden, come forth for a quick consolation.

We never even know when they have us knocked down. But then when we try and trail them, they seem to scoff at us and run away...far beyond our vision, finding shelter, perhaps in the womb of some star or in the centre of some milky way, or else, escape through a black hole into some primordial universe...

RANDOM #1

Some white flowers were painted on the black bed sheet which was drawn up to his neck. His head was slightly tilted towards the right, resting peacefully on the pillow; his hands folded as if in a prayer and rested on his chest. Was he talking to one or few of the 33 crores of gods and goddesses and pleading for mercy? May be, may be not.
Wait.... did I just say 'mercy'?
Hell yes, I guess I did.  What makes me so sure that he waits for mercy?
What if he doesn't feel guilty at all?
The probability is more in the latter. That's the way it has always been.

A faint streak of yellow light sneaked into his room from the washroom and his face glowed. A rug was neatly folded and placed near his feet; he didn't need them; just a bed sheet was enough. The sound of the fan faded in the deafening silence. I waited. Waited to watch him breathe, waited to ensure he's alive. It wasn't easy to make out in the dark if his lungs were working. I switched on the light. And waited at the door. Again.

I checked the time. 3.30am.
I fixed my eyes on his face. Once more. He looked innocent, like a 5 year old. Vulnerable. Passive. It deserved mercy. I felt the long-drawn frown on my forehead relaxing.
I switched off the light. As I was about to leave, he woke up, his head hanging, blood dripping from his mouth. He turned towards me. That gory smile sent shivers through my spine.
The innocence was gone. The person in front of me was no more a vulnerable 5 year old kid. I was face to face with a monster, a psychopath, a cannibal. I rushed out of the room with a jolt. My room whirled around; the roof and the floor hurried towards each other in an age-old conspiracy to grind me to death. I felt claustrophobic. I needed air, some fresh air. I ran to the balcony. After a good 10-15 minutes, I realized I was still shaking. Everything was foggy around. My eyelids screamed for some rest. I came back to my room, closed my door and lied down. This creature certainly deserved no mercy.

Some bullets fired, corpses heaped up in a pool of blood. I felt wobbly.
I tried to scream for help.
My eyes frantically searched for some recluse... No sign of life around. I ran down the streets, knocking at every door, shouting, yelling, screaming... When suddenly I felt the ground shake.. Trees tumbled and houses collapsed.. I tried to run for shelter but my feet were stuck in intertwining mesh of uprooted trees.

I jerked up from sleep. Checked the time in my cell phone: 4.05am.
I searched for the bottle of water. It was close to my bed when I went off to sleep, but it seemed distant now.   After gulping down the entire contents of the bottle, I got up from my bed and went to the wash basin, carefully avoiding peeping into his room. I splashed some water on my face, neck, ears and the palms of my hand. Gathering enough courage, I started walking back. When I reached the door of his room, I stopped, paused a little and entered. The innocent boy was happy in his slumber. His face tilted to his right, resting on the pillow, hands folded neatly on his chest, praying... praying... praying..

He has been my only deity.. His every action, word and gesture had just one meaning:love life. I vaguely remember all his  words, since I was hardly ten when I lost him.
All I have is a feeling that envelopes me, a blanket of love that has never left me alone, a strong hand that has lifted me up every time i fell, a pat on my back whenever I accomplished something..
This is all I have of him today and there's nothing more that I can ask for...
This blog is for you, grandpa! May your soul rest in peace....