Sunday 25 September 2011

when it gets boring...


45 minutes, 30…20..15..13…10……is there something amiss with my Timex’s internal circuit? My unstable head starts doubting the reliability of the product. Past 45 minutes, I have been floating in the thin air. I first fly to Rajasthan, find myself by the road, enjoying a “bhutta”(corn along with the cob) shaded black at areas, an assault on it by the red hot coal ;the ‘nimbu’ rubbed over it along with just the adequate amount of salt. Ahh!!what a taste,I swallow the saliva that has made its home in my buccal cavity within as short a time as 3 minutes. A grumbling alarm from my tummy sounds like a happy kid who gets an ice cream after throwing a big tantrum. But my tummy is quite adjusted- kinda habituated to getting ignored..(it bears some analogy with my battered Nokia-5130, whose morning alarms continue after every 3 minutes of snoozing, until it gets tucked beneath the pillow and its vibrations  can no longer be sensed)..


Next moment, I find myself pitying the dog which heads in the direction of the door but soon changes its destination as it comes a little closer. I go back in time. Grandpa had a dog. It was brought by him when it was just a puppy and it grew up to become a beast and every time I used to visit his place, it used to scare the hell out of me. And needless to say, I was quite relieved to hear one day that it was dead(I sound quite rude, but excuse me for that. As a 10 year old, I was always frightened of its teeth).Now, I sigh on seeing the canine approaching the door. It might be infested with ticks, or lice or whatever. But suddenly it strikes-why a dog? And why am I seeing it at this place??





Fan is on..is it because of its rotating blades that I am getting goose bumps?..A musty odour follows and then the harsh melody of the big droplets reigns the atmosphere..voices are getting subdued. My clammy hands creep inside the hollow and are satisfied on feeling the contour of my umbrella. The drops diminish in diameter, and now what is persisting can be termed as a slight drizzle. I calculate-I am having a mild form of cold. Drenching in a slight down pour will not hamper much. If at all it does, it won’t be much. At the maximum, I may be down with a fever. Not very serious, chalta hai. I allow a smile invade into my drowsy face, thinking of other times I was out in the rain. Out I step in the rain and realize-there’s no better shower than this. Feet immersed in the tiny stream of free flowing surface water, umbrella nowhere to be seen, wetness on my face, I experience ecstasy!
       
Ecstasy,  doggy thoughts and ‘baarish’..a tour worth 45 minutes! “Present”, I respond to my roll call. All this time I have been sitting in the class and imagining things ! And in the 15 minutes preceding these heavenly 45 minutes, I was chatting with my friends regarding the so called “hot news” of our college. The professor was 15 minutes late!

Sunday 11 September 2011

A PAGE IN A DIARY..


Dear diary,

It’s been a long time since I wrote on you. Past few months made most of my life, or is ‘totally changed it’ a better phrase? You can decide upon it after I complete my entry today.
I will pour my heart out, no longer dark thoughts will inhabit the corners of my heart. I haven’t communicated with a person for so long. Even my doggy is no longer with me, at least he would wag his tail when I used to bare out my thoughts to him. His reaction would make me brim with wonder for the person who coined the adage- Dog is man’s best friend. And it hurt like hell when he got afflicted by some ghastly ailment, which was finally satiated and abandoned his frail, sparse-haired body along with his soul. For days I didn’t feel like eating a morsel. I felt completely lost without him.


Then the other ‘he’ came into my life, as if the Omnipotent had sensed my loneliness and sent this new ‘him’ to break the worthless monotony of my life. I was on my way to the school. The new faces were beginning to appear familiar. In the bus, even though I didn’t know the names of most students, I recognized them well by face and could distinguish them well if they happen to be scattered among thousands of students of different schools. A few displayed a hesitating smile while I spread mine across my face, while some just looked away and a few others appeared as if I had never ever come in their field of vision. ‘New environment, new faces..you’ll need some time to adjust. Just relax’ I would reassure myself. That day the bus was unusually overcrowded. I had to stand for the whole 30 minutes ride, juggling with my bag and my pack of project files. Those days they used to stuff us with numerous projects and you just couldn’t ignore them-internal assessment, you know. By the time the bus reached the school campus, steering its way through the rich greenery of a tea garden, I was exhausted! But it was still 7 in the morning and I was pondering over ways to keep myself awake through the assembly and the classes that followed. In the rush while coming out from the bus, I nearly lost balance but managed to land safely on the ground. But much to my dismay, my packet of assignment files was missing. I waited for all the students to get down and hoped it wasn’t crushed under the hasty black shoes. I readied myself to board the bus once again. Dear diary, I was on the first step of the foot board, when ‘he’ appeared. ‘He’ forwarded the packet to me with a gentle ‘Is this yours? Must have slipped out of your hand. You see, the other bus that comes by Sundar street had some problem, so all students coming by that bus had no other option but to squeeze themselves into our bus and did you see how rowdy they are?’ No, I don’t term it as love at first sight nor will I say that a lightning struck me. But heavens, I like the way ‘he’ spoke. There was something in his voice which soothed me and my anxiety disappeared. A mere ‘thanks’ was all I could say. I won’t say it was a great job he had done by handing to me my own packet. But how many of us bother to pick up a fallen packet and hand it to the owner and add a few words of comfort to dispel the awkwardness of landing in a new school altogether? And he was soft spoken, not that temperamental man who bursts out high decibel waves to emphasize his position-this I could decipher from his dealing with his juniors. He was the prefect of the school and never had I heard him behave rudely. To say that he didn’t ever fall prey to rage would be an exaggeration. After all, we are all humans and any human with an intact nervous system and emotional aspects is sure to have emotional outbursts, be it in the form of love, anger, blah, blah..My classmate, Manish’s purse went missing one day. He rushed to ‘him’ almost in tears and both of them began a frantic search for the purse which contained a few thousand crisp notes. Somehow he came to know that another boy of our class, Siddhart  had stolen the purse. Manish’s mother was under hospitalization- she needed a kidney transplant but there wasn’t any suitable donor. So money was a big crisis for Manish. Repeated dialysis and medications had already manifested their importance on his family. ‘He’ caught him by his collar and literally dragged him to our HRT(Home Room Teacher). That was done in a fit of rage and after Siddhart had accepted his guilt and returns back the money, ‘he’ apologized for rendering his collar button less. And I was a silent observer to all this and I couldn’t restrain myself for loving him-his character. As for his appearance, he’s not that head turner ‘Tom Cruise’ for whom every girl falls head over heels. But he sure could make any sensible girl fall for him by his personality. Oh dear diary, I can go on and on, write about him for hours. He helped me to mix with the rest of my classmates. Days were flying past and I have locked those memories in the most secure place my heart. And one day, we expressed our love for each other. He found me beautiful and me him sensible, so we patched up. We were the happiest people on the earth.

Beauty, they say, is skin deep. Beauty is ephemeral. I didn’t believe these then. But now I do. The reason being I am no longer pretty. The deep cut on my right cheek from the car’s window glass is resolute to accompany me throughout the rest of my life. But by giving me its company, it made me bereft of the 3 most precious gems of my life. ‘He’ now has a new girl friend and turns ‘his’ back whenever he sees me in school. Perhaps I scared him, scared them all by my appearance. So, I made it easier for ‘him’, I left that school. There’s one more reason I can’t go to school now, but that’s secondary. Dear diary, why didn’t the glass pierce right through my eyes, that way I wouldn’t have had to see ‘him’ with her and those horrifying scenes. ‘He’s still happy, still polite with her...but the only difference being it’s not me but ‘her’ by ‘his’ side.

Now, I am exhausted. I had expected to see him on the day I was released from the hospital. I fractured my knee but it didn’t hurt. Still on my calipers, I watched my parents’ bodies transform into ashes. At that time my heart yearned for support. Yeah, my aunts, uncles, cousins were all there. But still I longed for his shoulder to cry on. Didn’t he comfort me at our very first meeting? But why couldn’t he when I longed for him the most? I waited but he didn’t come. ‘She’ had thrown a birthday party that day. It took me a lot of courage to collect my broken bones, face and most importantly, soul to buy this colored liquid. It cost me only 20 rupees, not a big deal! They used medications worth lakhs but couldn’t save my parents’ lives. This cheap liquid can cure me of all my pain but before that I have to do something. I got ‘his’ photo framed and relish the liquid while gazing at his face with my heart’s content. Dear diary, today’s special..25th November (the date on which he proposed to me last year)..
(purely a work of fictin);-)

INTROSPECTING


It was morning and also the time to rush. Bags still unpacked, clothes lying in a mess around the room-some scattered on the unmade bed, the others tucked off carelessly in the shelves. ‘Damn it! It’s already 7:30.I think I won’t be able to make it to my aunt’s home this time,’ muttering to herself, Santoshi made a frantic effort to keep in pace with the unstoppable hands of the alarm clock. Within the next 5 minutes, she was ready-a quick breakfast, dressed up for the journey and her curly short hair combed(though it would be hard to believe that she had indeed combed her hair, as it is always that tuft of keratinized stuff glued naturally to her skull and  she couldn’t do anything but wonder how it could  be so rough and thick, and to add to it all, it’s curly; making it no better than a creeper growing on another tree in the dark interiors of a rainforest magnifying its canopy) .But it didn’t bother her at all. Her thick framed specs, the one she had been using since she was in her 5th grade, and her short hair-both matched well with her personality making her a complete girl-not a meek one, who shrieks on seeing a cockroach or a chipkali, for that matter, but one who smashes the arthropod, holds it by its leg and coolly offers it a free ride to hell through the window. ‘It’s nothing dirty, the poor thing is made of chitin and chitin isn’t something that can make you vomit, is it?’ she would say every time her friends made faces on seeing her lift an insect carcass off the floor bare-handed. Absurd!!-Many would say and it is justified if it is said so.


In the bus stand, with her bag by her side, she began taking sips of mineral water to cool her body which was distraught with the unbearable rise in the Mecury level. Small boys in tattered clothes and legs as thin as branches of a tree moved around with bamboo fans persuading the people to buy them. So she was there on her own, awaiting her bus. The mineral water bottle which had cost her 4 rupees extra for the freezing, failed to serve its purpose. A man probably 40-45 years in age, she estimated from his appearance, came and stood near her. Cigarette smoke and the constant blabbering by a lady standing beside her, about her newly bought sari made her feel ill at ease. The thought that she was passive smoking made her restless. She turned to have a look at the man, who by then,was enjoying his 3rd nicotine delicacy of the day. He displayed a rare look of satisfaction and Santoshi hated him all the more for this. Of course she couldn’t gag the lady to provide some relief to her ear drums, so she vocalized a few sharp straight-forward words which made the smoker throw the cigarette and move away from that place, displaying not a change in his facial expression. ‘Hurraaay! The addict finally decided to take a few steps away’ she was delighted at her oratorical skill. But her momentary joy gave way to anger when she could sense that horrible smell once again and it was none other than the same person who had taken out another cigarette and lighted it. It appeared as if what oxygen is to us, cigarette smoke is to him.

A long wait of 30 minutes seems all the more never ending when you are all alone and bound to take interest in the surrounding which bores you out like hell. Having nothing worthwhile to do, Santoshi began to rotate her head (which until then had been focusing on the smoker) and narrowed her eyes on seeing a rare specimen. Rather an antique piece- piercings in the ear lobes, several metal studs on the eyebrows, a ring almost in every finger, a skull tattoo on an arm and a shining metallic cell phone, which was proudly flaunted. ‘Repulsive!’ He appeared like a person thrown into a box of junk in a garage and he came out of it loaded with all the ornate metallic designs on his body. The air of pride with which he enveloped himself, made him even more eligible of Santoshi’s contempt. ‘A silly handy man, and look at him!’ She had a big mouth and spoke the words loud enough for the ‘specimen’ to hear. Lo! The guy turned back to see who passed the derogatory remark but saw only a tomboy gazing intently at her cell. She had been in that place only for the last 15 minutes or so, but she had already begun disliking half of the people present there.

Then her eyes fell on a beast barking to its content. Santoshi had already put on her ear phones of her i-pod. The tasteless noise had already freaked her out. The dog followed its mistress, wagging its tail. The lady was probably in her late twenties, a delicate darling, as Santoshi could decipher from her looks. With her nails carefully manicured, hip length hair straightened and high heels adorning her slender feet, she probably made everyone looking at her wonder that she was a clear misfit in that environment. ‘She would look more comfortable in an ac beauty parlour, with a number of beauticians working to make a Goddess out of her’ Santoshi’s brain was again set thinking. ‘What’s the need to show off her doggy? What’s the need to carry it along with her even to a place like this? Miss Show-off!’
‘What happened to the bus today? It’s 8:30 and no sign of it as yet,’ she muttered to herself trying to rest her strained legs by sitting gently on the bag. She couldn’t stand any longer. She had been standing for at least 1 hour by then, and to add to it all, it was getting warmer and her sweating mechanisms were unusually more active that day. And a slight headache could crop up any moment. She sat snugly on the trolley-bag letting out a sigh of relief and tore open a packet of chips. One thing good about travelling alone is that you have plenty of packets of chips and chocolates to accompany you throughout the whole journey, so that any time you feel lonely or bored, you can enjoy munching these down rendering many packets empty within a record-breaking short time


‘Are you waiting for the bus ‘Pushpak’2998? Santoshi looked up from her packet to see a sweet faced middle-aged woman, staring at her intently. ‘Ya, it should have arrived by now, dunno why it’s taking so long today. You’re going by the same bus?’ ‘Ya’ she replied with a brisk smile ‘the same bus.’  Santoshi developed  an instant likeness for the woman. Probably it was because of her smile which had some similarity to one of her favorite aunts. The way her lips stretched along a curve on the left half of her face acted like an attention grabber for Santoshi. So you see, good appearance has its own advantage, and if there is a sweet smile to add to it, these 2 things  together can work wonders!! Let 2 people of the fairer sex alone, and they can go on talking for hours (provided they go along well with each other). The conversation commenced. It started from their asking each other’s name, information related to where they both live, their purpose of the journey to their common dislike for the smoker, who was still busy making rings of smoke. They also shared another aspect of their character-their habit of mocking at people. Her name was Kiran. At times, their nonchalant conversation would be interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter, the very sound of which was enough to turn the heads of a few drowsy babies resting on their mother’s shoulders.


The bottle was emptied into the mouth, which seemed to soak up any liquid poured on it and dried up instantly like a blotting paper. Santoshi excused herself from her new friend and went to a nearby stall to buy another bottle of aqua. She was still gulping down the water when the green background of Pushpak appeared a few feet away. The stall-wallah was busy attending to some other customers and took some time to return back the change to her. The handy man of the bus, with a bunch of crisp notes in his hands went from one person to the other asking something. Pulling her bag across the road she went near him and asked him to lift her bag inside the bus. The bus had already started and all the passengers had settled down by then. ‘But, all the seats are occupied. What’s your name, miss?’ ‘I have booked a ticket in this bus yesterday. How come there’s no seat for me. I told them I would pay the money today. Didn’t they get what I said?' she blared out.The driver shouted from inside and the passengers were getting restless. After all, Pushpak was late by  a good 1hour and 25 minutes. The handy man boarded the bus leaving her drowning in a cloud of white smoke. ‘What the hell! What am I to do now?’ she uttered, almost in tears, totally helpless. She thought of calling her aunt but the very next moment, slid back the cell into her pocket. ‘It will make her all the more worried,’ she thought. The friendly lady was nowhere to be seen.


With a pain in her throat and moist eyes, she could visualize how she would have looked at that moment. She had the apprehension that probably everyone was staring at her. Her creative mind failed to hit upon a solution. With mixed sentiments of anger and worry (the latter predominating), she opened the 500mL bottle and rendered it empty in a few gulps. A slight touch of hand aroused her senses and turned to see Miss Show-off, her dog in her arms. ‘What happened? Where are you headed to?’ Santoshi narrated her ordeal unhesitatingly. ‘In that case, you can accompany me in my car. I missed my bus, so am going by my own vehicle. Kamnagar lies on the way to my place. I can drop you and you stop worrying so much’ Miss Show-off uttered, caressing strands of hair while doing so. Having no other option other than trusting in the sugar-coated words, Santoshi nodded despondently.  Soon, she was travelling along with a complete stranger (and of course, her dog and driver-that add up to 3 strangers in total). Miss Show-off showered her hospitality on her by offering her home-made food (Santoshi came to know that she was very health conscious) and a bottle of lemonade.


They bid good bye after Santoshi extended her thanks to Miss Show-off. It was already dark and Miss-Show-off insisted on leaving her right in front of her aunt’s home. But Santoshi hated to trouble her further. So they left her near the ‘gali’. Much to her dismay, there was neither a single auto to be seen nor a single soul. Just then, a bus came to a halt and a man got down. From his silhouette in the dark, one could make out that he was not a youth. She headed towards him to ask him if she could get any vehicle at that time. ‘Poor chance. Where do you need to go?’ ‘My uncle, Mr Kumar, lives further down this road. But he isn’t home today to pick me up and aunt’s all alone,’ she sighed. ‘Ahha! So Kumar’s your uncle? A very close friend of mine. I am heading to his neighbor’s place. You can accompany me.’ As he spoke Santoshi could sense the obnoxious smell. He lit his torch and much to her surprise, he was the ‘smoker’ she saw in the bus stop!! A little walk and she reached her destination.

The next day she called up the travel agency to enquire why they hadn’t reserved her seat. But they said that some Kiran had called up the previous morning saying that Santoshi cancelled her trip and she would like to take her seat. Kiran….the sweet smiling Kiran!!

Thursday 8 September 2011

Resizing..



“And I have lost exactly 6 kilos in a month”, came the voice from the other side of the cell. “Believe me, just go for it once…I assure you, within a couple of days, you can slip into your sister’s slim jeans and after that there’s no looking back.”  The voice was filled with a luring promise-something many girls think to be true, ’Iceberg pure’. Mitthi could only fantasize how good she would look in that sky blue jeans her sister bought the other day, only she has to resize her current trunk diameter from the alarming  36 to a decent 28 inch. Every time she goes out with her sister for shopping for clothes, her heart longs for buying those dresses that adorn the dummies. But this yearning of hers led her to a great loss once. It happened when she selected a pretty top with delicate ornate beaded designs all over it, saying her sister will try it in the trial room and see whether it suited her or not. While her sister was busy trying out other dresses herself in the nearest trial room, Mitthi went into another one and some how forced her head and arms through the top. It was mid-August. The trial room was literally suffocating for her and the blades of the small fan hanging from one of the walls could slice anything that came their way. And in this ‘chamber of concentration camp-lookalike’ .Mitthi was badly perspiring, the sweat running down her temples and like a mini stream flowing down her neck and into the poor top…(had the designer of the top been there to witness its agony, he would have sued this fat lady for being so rude in dealing with the near-masterpiece).Now with her head fitted neatly into the neck-hollow of the top, the arms stuck bizarrely halfway and the rest part of the top refusing to proceed downwards; Mitthi realized..she was in a dilemma. The price tag hanging by the the neck caught her attention. Until then, she loved the top so much that she didn’t even bother to take a glance of the price tag. Then as she twisted around her arm to get hold of the tag, she heard a ‘shriek’. She was certain it came from the small battered fan up on the wall which failed to cool down her drowning body. But then,the arm that was so long stranded halfway, began to slide amazingly smoothly through the top. The price tag displayed a four digit with a 4 in the thousand’s place. Another shriek and Mitthi could really garner her wits to understand that she was transfixed in a trench by then. With only 2 thousand rupees note asphyxiated in her pocket, she shouldn’t have committed the mistake of touching this top even.


The sound which she anticipated to be of the old fan, was actually produced when the neat stitch on the sides of the top could no longer tolerate the torture. Mitthi immediately opened the top, thanks to the poor thing which was definitely in shreds. That day, she was target to which darts of ridicule were being hurled. Sitting back in the dark room, she could not hold back the fountain of tears welling up in her eyes. She began cursing everything under the sun. She ate much lesser than her sister did, but she still weighed approximately three times her sister. She resisted the temptation of the junk food and even stayed away from the deep-fried samosas that her mom used to prepare occasionally. Resisting the ladoos was toughest for her, but despite that, she abstained from it. She cursed her genetic make-up as she thought that she had it in her genes to be fat…an alarming 86kg, with love handles emerging from her anterior abdominal wall muscles. Oh!how hard she had tried to lose those extra pounds…she uses up her pocket money in paying for the gym she had joined for the last 1 year..yet the fat globules kept on multiplying….maybe faster than any bacteria in a favorable culture. She wept…for hours…interspersed with acts of wetting the hanky and blowing her nose, which by now had developed a pink hue. Nostalgia began engulfing her. She was a thin child until 6th grade, quite emaciated. It was after the summer vacations during her 7th grade that she escalated the weight scale at a tremendous rate. By the end of that session, she became an object of mockery in her class. Senior boys, her batch mates and even her neighbors used to call her by the epithet ‘Moti’. She used to laugh away the comment then…it didn’t in the least disturb her initially. But when her friends refused to include her in their team for outdoor games, she could feel a stinging pain deep inside her heart. She would run fast, she tried to assure them. She tried to run as fast as her feet could in a relay race, but her heart began thumping wildly…a feeling of breathlessness crept in…and she lay flat…on the green grass itself….while the other athletes were already on  the end line of the race. Then her team mates neared her, blamed her for their team’s failure and none of them cared to help lift her up from the ground . Several minutes later, she was up on her feet again, thanks to her sister who came running from the other side of the field. People long for childhood days, rejoice every moment of it…but Mitthi dreaded even to bring alive her childhood memories. She often wondered how her size was increasingly becoming a source of sarcasm for her…more so after she had joined the college. Ultra-slim girls with heavy eye and face make-up made her blue with jealousy. But the feeling of despair was the one that predominated. So crazy she was about her aim to shed the extra kilos that she rarely gave second thoughts before following any suggestion that poured out relentlessly from her friends who have succeeded in maintaining skeleton-like figure…

So, now indulging in her crave to look slimmer, she ordered for the pills about which her friends had just told her. After coming from the morning walk, her plump milk white clear face appearing fresher and her skin shining under the influence of the early rays; panting and puffing, she sat down to relax. Her long soft tresses needed an oil massage. Finally after breakfast (which of course, was devoid of butter and ghee), she took a pill and experienced a rare satisfaction. A week passed. It was a Monday and for the first time, a compliment was showered on her. “Your face is flawless, how do you keep it away from all those dark spots and pimples propping up every now and then?”a severely malnourished-appearing classmate with visible mascara applied in multiple layers asked her. First a shy smile, then an inner jumping of spirits and then ravaging her blank mind for a logical answer-this was the sequence of activities that occurred in her being. What should she say? Until then, she never used to pay any attention to her skin…the only thing that used to bother her day in and day out was her weight. And now she herself was in a state of question mark, let alone giving any advice to her friend, who was now playfully rubbing her fingers against her chubby cheeks. “Gosh! Is it? You find it flawless?”-was all she could utter…but nobody ever said that she was slimming down.


“What do you expect? You take the pills for just a few days and wake up one fine morning with all your fats vanished! Have to be patient, dear. I have another 30 of them. Get them from me and this time, you can pay a thousand less as I got a few dozens of them free from the company”. Her friend replied when Mitthi called her up after exactly a month. Still hopeful about the pills showing its effect on her, she thought of buying another sets of those.  The next day, she saw red spots appearing all over her face. At a few places, they turned painful. A number of fallen hair lay lusterless on her pillow-cover. So shocked she was with her sudden change that she stood numb. Episodes of nausea followed and her headache was literally killing her. 2 times visit to the doctor’s clinic and a variety of liquid and solid medicines were prescribed. Mitthi’s mom was aghast at her daughter’s condition. She couldn’t eat well for days together .After a week, Mitthi recovered a little. When she was able to eat, her mom prepared all the dishes that she liked. And much to her surprise, she couldn’t resist herself  from savoring  all the  delicacies her mom took so much pain to prepare for her. The items were prepared in ghee, no doubt….but Mitthi felt like heaven when she tasted each morsel with rare delight. The dark circles around the eyes were still there and even the spots on her face were so stubborn that they refused to go. How she longed for her original skin…how she hoped of getting out of bed. The two weeks of illness has made her weak.


But those two weeks were perhaps the most beautiful ones for her. During those 2 weeks, never even once she thought of the fact that she was overweight. She didn’t refuse to eat the ghee laden khichdri(which she otherwise would never have eaten).She was not tensed that she missed her morning and evening walks and her visits to the gym.


She realized that in order to make herself look better in front of others, she w as so long sacrificing her own happiness, her own desires. Her weight was never a problem for her in the sense that it never hampered her working abilities or deteriorated her health. It was a problem when she cared about what others thought of it.
The doctor couldn’t lay his finger on the exact cause of Mitthi’s illness which appeared so suddenly. (How could he? Mitthi never mentioned about the slimming pills that she was taking until then)
After a month, Mitthi was once again hale and hearty. With her face blooming and cheerful(thanks to her mom’s special care regarding her food), she disposed off  the slimming pills in a nearby drain, hoping it will do the society a lot of good by killing all sorts of parasites thriving  in the filthy water.


“No, I no longer want more pills. I have lost 6 kilos in the past 2 weeks. Thanks to you,” Mitthi uttered over the phone. “That’s a miracle! wow! You  should continue with the pills. Don’t you wanna lose another 6 kilos?”came an exasperated voice from the other side.”Yes, have to admit that it’s a miracle, you know. Your slimming pills helped me to cut off 6 kilos of crazy stuffs from my stubborn mind. And now I feel much lighter, even lighter than your 45kg frame. Bye!”

You killed me first!!


When my frail cottony fragile blood-hued body,
Emerged into the outside world,
And I let out my first cry,
That high pitch characteristic of a girl
And ur silhouette approached me
Cast a hateful glance at me
And a distasteful one at the lady half-dead, sleeping
And u turned ur back at both of us
Not even cared to touch my seeking tiny hands,
You killed me..


When I insisted on playing with my brother,
Those childish games of ‘teacher-teacher’,’husband-wife’ or
dressing my lent out battered doll with shreds of cloth..
And u pulled me by my fuzzy plaited hair,
Dragged me across the graveled floor
my cries unheard, my open wounds un-attended,
my innocence uncared for..
The curve of my lips, extinct
And placed me among the dirty platters n a pail
You killed me..
Are we only meant to work??



When he went to the nearby school,
and came back home to get that big hug
That kiss on the cheek, that pat on the back
His stories to which everyone lent an ear
The way you all giggled when he stupidly narrated a silly joke
And shooed me away when I uttered a word
When I kept his uniform ready for the next day,
Washed his tiffin sparkling-clean
Covered all his new books, polished his dust ridden black leather shoes
And when I stealthily open his book and blankly stare at the pictures
All I got is a ‘five-digits’ impression
You killed me..


When I was ‘bartered’ off to that old insane
Who drove out the element of life from every cell of my body
Exercised his manly powers on me
Converted me into an even worse sculptured puppet
And juggled me as if I were a circus ball
Made me forget that I have a voice-box
Perished my soul
Made me curse the only one deity
I had been worshiping for so long
You killed me..


But, I never even once, protested
No, I did once
That was when u rendered me voiceless
You moulded me into whichever shape u desired
I,like sand structures,too loose to stand against
The mighty tides of ur ruthless perpetrations
Broke down every time u smashed against me
I could have been stronger,
Could have started a feud
This could have transcended into a crusade
Of unfathomable magnitude
If only all the suppressed souls like me would have
Melted together and exploded as a volcanic serpent
And charred them to ashes
Only stench and red vapors to bid them good night
But I was too meek,
I broke my heart a little too soon
And that was  when
I killed myself..