Category: I Am

Swim

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It is time to take back myself. It is time that I let go of false notions of what love should be able to do and what it should not be allowed to do. It is time that I paid more attention to things that are in my control. I may not be able to prevent the hurt, but I can make something come of it.

As I said a few hours back, in an argument to make others understand what only I was able to, that feeling something intensely and holding onto pain doesn’t make me a lesser person. It makes me understand myself a bit better. It makes me realise that though I receive nothing essentially uplifting from the pain, the fact that I am still able to feel it is a great feat by itself for itself.

It just means that I am still human and that I can still feel the grief that should have left with the increasing of intelligence and learning. i had long since given up on hope. Fool me. The fact that I can still feel pain would indicate that I can still hope, and I do hope. What else can cause this grief that gnaws at my innards?

It is the breaking of hope that resurrects the self. It makes me realise that all is not lost, my capacity to hope lingers on. I may be a poor student here but my spirit is not dead yet and while it survives it clings to the sweet bliss that hope affords. I look forward with anticipation of a brighter state of mind, an expectation that I will be understood and love can indeed last.

So here is to not truly wanting to understand that the world is lost. That humanity still chooses love over wanting to tear each other down. That video games can be about clothes and not killing and being competitive. That movies can have happy endings, and reflect life. That one can have no father and still be a great father. That one can be abandoned by love and still choose to love.

It is time though to look to myself. To gain perspective while hope has a flux and takes a back seat. To respect reality while romantic thought feels right only in novels and epic poetry. This is after all an ebb and flow, and since I find myself in deep waters, it is time to put my limbs into action and begin to swim toward land.

One likes because, one loves despite

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I love romantic movies. Romance comedies. Movies that are centred around the concept of love. I love to see the intricacies of human relationships and how they twist and turn and how they unravel. I love seeing the hero and the heroine or the hero and the hero or the heroine and heroine go through their character journeys, highs and lows, histories and future dreams and interweave them into a surreal diaspora of abstractions.

But love isn’t just an abstraction here. In the realm of Julia and Sandra, Richard and Hugh the story lines pack love and its scope in laughter and tears, with laughter, always laughter, predominating and climaxing. It’s like a wonderful love making. You see the camera swoop from angles and it makes the panorama so pretty. I move from George’s room to Audrey’s face and the song shall forever remain in my heart as its very favourite. It knows with a sated assurance that the cat will be found and the lovers will be reunited under the pouring rain. It makes you believe through those few hours that love will prevail and how love can make you and keep you happy. For a few hours.

Then there are those other movies, where love charges with a brutality that is so forceful it is almost destructive. Almost. You see Kate letting go of Leo as he sinks into the Atlantic, or you see Heath pine away for Jake or Oliver crying for Jenny and your heart shrivels so hard you are afraid it will harden and break. But the movies lift you. They take what you thought was the utter veracity of love and makes you believe if that damn poet was right all along. Wasn’t it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

You come back to seeing this sentimentality and wonder why so much of literature cannot be more of Austen and Bronte. Why Naturalism and Realism drive the nails further into wounds that life shall anyways inflict. Maupassant and Dreiser, Ibsen and Thoreau had their share of an uproar but give me Emma Thompson who makes you cry with her version of Austen. I ache when I see the twist, and I weep when I see the denouement.

Every story told has a grey shade. The times now seem to want to move deeper into the dark. They want to overturn Cinderella and create Into the Woods, they want to disrupt the pastoral idealism of Anne and make her modern. But I would much rather have Cinderella walk down the stairs wearing blue organdy and walk away with her glass slipper and her prince. Happily ever after should remain so – even if it is just for the sake of our imagination. It makes the world better. It certainly makes me feel better!

The colours of romance are always welcome, and writing on love is a sure success. Let tired hearts who have seen too much of reality come into this world, where dreams do come true, and love doesn’t always end up painful and battered. It is such a forceful emotion that I have to end with what I just heard in the movie I saw tonight. Liking someone is always dependent on the adverb clause of reason, but loving someone, ah loving someone, is always dependent on the adverb clause of contrast.

Monsoon

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

The rain is welcome. The summer is over. Heat has been defeated. I leave home with the kids and stepping out of the air-conditioned house I realise it is raining. Come back home and in a few minutes, the rain dies down, and I take an umbrella (to hold off the drops falling from the line of tamarind trees down the rain, and an occasional shit fall from the herons roosting high in the thin leaves) and ask the kids to follow me down the lane.

There is lightning far up in the clouds and the thunder calls back a second later. Xena is scared and looks around wide eyed. But she follows me as does Zach with his ambling gait. A minute later I see a scared stray, black with a splash of white on his chest, run past. He is not from the area and has obviously been scared away from his by the thunder. I call out to Xena who means to chase him, and he takes off down the street. I scold the girl, and then look up to find him but he has sprinted away.

Halfway back, the rain starts. I thank my brains for they asked me to pick up the umbrella and I trot back to the compound. Xena thinks it’s a game of catch and cook and gallops ahead with Zach on her heels. Of course, Zach is running from the rain, too, just like I do. I come back home, just as the rain begins to form a deluge. The day has been muggy and my partner predicted rain fall by night. Sure enough, here it is.

The whole night sky is filled intermittently with light and the resounding rolls of thunder as the gods fight up in the night sky. Rain falls. I hear the territorial dogs attack and I cringe. The pretty black one (I assume) yelps. I run to the window as does Zach. He owns the territory – in his head, at least. But I cannot spot the black fellow from our window. Lightning doesn’t help. Rain falls in sheets.

The city looks up to the sky, like a thirsty man opening his mouth to a cascading ripple of water. I will not think of the problems today. I will merely look outside the window as I type this, see the cracked edges of a lightning sliver slice the sky, see the black silhouettes of the trees filter the rain onto the lamp bright street and relax.

Morning is here and so are the monsoons.