Category: Articles

Circles

Published on by Harpreet Chhachhia

I got into this thinking mood – well, when I have never been in a thinking mood – but let’s just say I got into one that made me want to write this down. I met a friend after ages. We had a falling apart and then he returned and I talked to him again and whenever he wishes to meet me, we do. I am not one to call people and ask them to meet me… unless I really feel lonely or I want to celebrate with them an occasion. So he came over and we got to chatting about our lives.

He talked about how my world view has altered and it has, I’ll be the first one to admit it, but I don’t think I have changed except for the fact that I have understood things better. I may still want the same things but I know now they either come with a price or a compromise. I have learnt that people are flawed and it is their flaws which make them who they are. Flaws can be relative too. I may have a flaw which others may think of as a virtue. Now I am not calling myself virtuous, in fact, if there was one thing that I believe is all subjective is virtue.

Now that being said, I had a heart to heart about a lot of things and I realized in our conversation that I have no patience for unilateral thought. I want to associate myself with people who have minds and who are willing to look at the world from another point of view. I have always been proud of the fact that I can do this. The moment someone is talking to me about a particular situation or person, I tend to look at the other perspective. I am the classic Devil’s advocate.

This tends to either irritate or broaden the mind I am conversing with. If the other person cannot seem to gauge what I am trying to convey, I pull back. I don’t malinger with my point of view because I have realized that I cannot have a conversation. It will be a monologue. Once that has been gauged, I am afraid I lose hope. In that moment in time, I withdraw and I make my own judgements (which I am aware of, but I am human, too) and I make a mental note to either avoid the person, or the topic of conversation – if the person cannot be avoided.

Fight or flee, they taught me in college. Well, I tend to do both. But with people I fight with, they need to be doubly aware that I do not fight with all and sundry. Fleeing is way better option with people I know don’t really matter in the larger scheme of things. Flight has helped me many a time, in fact, I envy Superman for this reason more than any other. I fight or rather, lay down my point of view, only when I know it is necessary for the person I am giving it to, understand, because I would like that person to be a part of my life and by that demarcation, have an understanding of me. I would have said an appreciation of me, but that would be pushing the buck.

Over time I have also come to realise – and which this conversation I had tonight with my long-lost friend – is that I used to want to be appreciated. I wanted people to like me. I used to go out of my way to be more than who I was – and with all modesty, I can say that that is quite a lot. People came and people left with alarming population. My home became a thouroughfare for almost a decade.

Through the age of 24 to the age of 34 – give a take maybe a year or two here and there – I met with thousands of people. After my mom went through cancer treatments, and after I lost my daughter, Zoe, I came to the healthy realization that all who come into my life were not meant to stay. They came into my life, played their part and then they left. There were a few, a number that I can say still accounts for a large one to most recluses around the world, who chose to stay in my life because of who I am and what I brought to their lives and minds.

I was just saying how I used to think that the world was my oyster. Through school and early college, I was landlocked. The bell was tolling for me, because I was insecure, self-conscious, horribly shy and crucially aware of my homosexuality. I wore all these things on my sleeve and I was tossed about – literally – even by my own father. But I came into my own, in my final years of college and yet, I couldn’t perceive that the world came to me because I was still accepting it on its own terms.

I believed what it told me. I read books and chose to live how the characters lived. I watched Julia Roberts in movies, and thought that somewhere there will be a millionaire who would climb up a fire escape for me, too. Of course, there was no millionaire, or anyone who made love to me on a piano, but I did have relationships with lovely men. The realization that I didn’t have to find Richard Gere, but become Julia, came much later in life. Even later, came the dawning that Harpreet could be Harpreet and still get someone to climb a fire escape for him – and for that matter, even if no one climbed up the damned stairs, Harpreet could climb down himself and get into that limo.

There are these concentric circles of our lives. The innermost circle has the ones I can turn to when I need love and help. There is a circle beyond that, and another, with people thriving in them, closest friends, closer friends, close friends, friends, acquaintances – all coming and going. People choose to move inward or they can choose to move outward. I don’t barricade this, I have let things remain fluid. It needs to have a life of its own. But I do know the innermost circle is unfailing in its boundary.

Where the lost things go

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Mary Poppins was a wonderful movie. It took me to a place where the lost things go. It reminded me of why I was called Peter Pan by a friend so many years ago.

In the middle of life, I grew up somewhere, some time, and I lost perspective of the things that mattered.

Friends and siblings have grown up. The conundrum is that I look for independence and maturity in people I choose to build bonds with. I look down upon the ones who don’t think, who hope extensively. But I’ve also realized, especially when faced with people who are alien to emotion and responses based on the heart, I do not think that they will be happy in life.

I set a lot of score in things that have no real tangible source of happiness. A good wad of cash gets good things that are wanted, tangible, things that can be touched and – perhaps even loved. But these things, along with the cash, do not really matter, in the end. We are human beings – unfortunately – and we need love and we need the succour provided by the Other.

Death becomes final, if there is no love. Memory makes the person immortal. Experience and history are what carries you into the future, into existence forever. The poets and the writers and the painters tried to capture this into art and transcribe it into the tangible. I have known people who have moved away from sensibility and into sense, but I have also seen them despondent and eventually, I have seen them float into the sphere of feeling, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately and sometimes, fighting tooth and nail.

I have seen how sense takes flight and sensibility takes over, with a vengeance. It is almost as if she wants to wreck love with a violence. She seeks to punish, and she feels it is right as is her wont. But I have dealt with emotion my entire life. I grow weary of her. Sense has come to me while sensibility has been told to wait in the corner. I haven’t discarded her. I just wanted to talk a bit with her sister. It is as Mary Poppins says, it is the time between the dark and light. And sensibility hides quietly.

Some people I loved died, and some, tragically, have grown up. Yes. These elite have no need now of sensibility. They haven’t just taken a break from her… or so they like to think. They wish to do without her. They wish to draw boundaries. They wish for rules. Lines. Space. Independence. Finding themselves. But they do not realise that sense isn’t the only thing that will lead them to peace and fruition.

I know that when my child died in the middle of my home, she left for good. The floor she lay on is just a floor. The home she breathed her last is just a house. Sense asks me to know that death is final. Dreams are dreams and fears are unfounded. But somewhere from the dark within, sensibility whispers, gone but not forgotten. Trust, she says. Love, she reminds. And I turn to the dark, searching for the place where the lost things go. And I trust and I love and find her in me – sitting right next to Peter.

Abandon

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I was reading up on abandonment issues. When I got to the research part of it, I was faced with a lot of terms such as personality disorders at worst and helplessness at best. The crux, as it always is, goes back to parenting, the social situation at home. I think the first abandonment happened when I had to leave Bandra. I still remember sitting in the truck and moving away from Ganga Vihar, and my grandmother, who I loved incredibly, weeping at the balcony.

I never expected company from my mother, who raised us without a word of help from her alcoholic husband. So I depended on my nanny, who moved with us to the new home. It was just her, my sister and me. But she had dreams of going abroad, and so she left us within the year, after she had helped in raising me for thirteen years.

The time was a tough one. I was coming into terms with my homosexuality, the transition into adolescence, a new home, a new school. I was the victim of severe bullying. Boys would follow me into the bathroom and ask for sexual favours, outside in the playground, I was singled out. I am sure it didn’t lead to any feeling of abandonment, but in my head, I remembered thinking that I was being punished because I had left my grandmother who had loved me so.

My father didn’t help matters. He was an alcoholic ever since I could remember. He never held a job ever since I could remember. So he would be home when I would return from school. He knew I was gay and he detested the thought of it. How did I know this? He would lie on a divan in the hall, and begin beating the wall with his fist. He would amble about the house and he would pick fights with me needlessly, which would end up getting physical.

So the move began most of this issue in my head. But as I grew, I achieved more confidence. I loved reading and I would consume everything I would get my hands on. I loved movies and they became my escape as well. My focus shifted to animals, because they wouldn’t leave me. My favourite movie became The Black Stallion, where the bond between the horse and the boy was unassailable.

The first boy I fell in love with pursued me. He wanted to be in a relationship with me. He was a student of music and was here for studies from abroad. I knew getting into a relationship with him would end badly. I told him so and also mentioned that I wouldn’t want to get hurt by it. But as it so happened, he was the first guy who held me and made love to me and there was no going back after that.

He moved in with me and we loved each other for the better part of eleven months. I remember sleeping and waking up with a start dreaming that he had left and I was left alone. The feeling of loss was so severe that I used to wake up in tears. The inevitable happened and he left for his home, and to this day, I can still remember him walking away in the airport and I was left standing behind a glass partition.

The depression and the anxiety that followed for a year later was something that has prevailed in my mind. I lost thirteen kilos over the course of that year. The rest of the abandonment was a gradual process. Broken promises and a measured weaning off of communication lead to another abandonment, where closure was something that wasn’t given to me but which I had to find by myself over the years that ensued.

During that time, my best friend married. She was busy setting up her own new life and left for abroad as well. I have never felt abandoned by her, probably because I was assured of her love and fondness for me. It was an upheaval though, because we lost touch for the better part of three years, but it was one I could deal with.

The point of this sojourn through the past is to understand myself a bit better right now. I just took a couple of tests and this is what they had to say:

Your romantic attachment style: Intense and Preoccupied
You have described yourself as preoccupied in your attachments. This suggests that you have more intense interpersonal relations than many people do, that in your romantic relations you sometimes feel really quite close, and at other times you feel almost estranged and cut-off. You probably have a hard time asserting yourself in a way that makes you feel you are really in control of your emotions. You may find that you often feel let down and as if you are giving much more than you get in your romances.

It’s possible that your partners feel as if you don’t really know who they are, even though you feel you are very intimate with them. You probably have a higher level of emotional arousal than most other people, both positive and negative, and this gets expressed in your romantic relationships. You may find it hard to be without a lover, and yet find that when you have a lover, the intensity puts a strain on the relationship.

Being preoccupied in romance is a matter of degree. A good lover thinks of the beloved often and holds the beloved in her or his thoughts. Mindfulness is a virtue and being mindful of one’s lover is highly regarded and a tremendous asset in close relationships. But there’s a difference between mindfulness and preoccupation. If you feel that perhaps you have been too preoccupied in love, it may be time for you to consider professional help. Being overly preoccupied in love is a condition that can often be successfully addressed in psychotherapy.

Remember that attachment styles exist in degrees, and in this test, the degree to which a style is true for you will make a difference in your interpretation. Everyone has to have some style or another, and the features of any one style only become maladaptive when they exist in the extreme.

There is also the result in which I scored a 100 out of 100 for abandonment. Apparently, I have what is termed as the ‘abandonment wound’. I don’t really think these are all that conclusive. I don’t really trust in most things anymore. It’s almost like planning your day according to astrological patterns. There may be some truth in the stars, but one can lead one’s life according to their predictions. Science is still so new and still so scary, almost like a volcano that keeps spouting new lava – viewed from afar but felt in the atmosphere.

I have no real idea of what is going on in my head. All I can do is be self-aware and these write ups are my way of dealing with what is happening inward. There are times when I hear a song and I progress inward. Hoping to understand myself more and realise what makes me who I am. And hoping that once I do understand myself the adapting into something else doesn’t happen soon. I wish to get to know Harpreet and what makes him tick. I believe he is someone, who is worth knowing, after all. Someone worth taking the time to understand and love.