Raining Friends

Monsoon seems to bring cherished memories for most. It also brings the prospect of prosperity for some others. It can also bring chaos.
For Delhi the idiom, when it rains, it pours, comes true in the literal sense. And it poured last week on a Saturday, and with it all movement, human and mechanical came to a standstill. The satellite towns near Delhi had a tougher time.
People whose jobs demand working on a weekend were finding it hard to get home from work. It hadnt stopped raining in the evening; there was still pitter patter on the road.
Of the four years that I have lived in Delhi, the rains havent stopped me from going anywhere. But I had to get to my gym, near my house otherwise I would miss my martial arts class, which I loved.
When me and colleague got out of our Noida office, the road outside was waterlogged, so much so that we couldnt walk through it. An office boy helped us find an auto for the Metro station. Being Noida he charged us double, only because it was raining. We paid; we had no choice, but to be extorted by the auto-rickshaw driver.
To get home I need to change trains at an intersection. That intersection looked like the crowd at Mecca, but circling around stairways and lifts. I fought my way to another platform and got into the over-crowded second one. I was relieved when my station arrived. But, I was in for a surprise, the train did not stop there, the station was drenched, the fault of a leaking shaft.
I got off at the next station. Half the people there were confused about where to go next. A girl walking next to me asked how she could get to a shopping centre. I told her I have to go there too, and we decided to share an auto.
As we got out, there was no auto in sight. We walked towards the main road, heading out from a by-lane. Then we saw why there was no traffic going towards the station; a huge tree had decided to take this day to come crashing down. There was more chaos. There was little space for pedestrians to walk, and none for vehicles to pass through.
As my new friend and made our way through the chaos, and were trying to hail an auto, passersby on a cycle passed a lewd comment and sped past, in day light. The day was just showing that it was Delhi.  Welcome to the rude, always angry city.
We asked an auto driver to take us to the shopping centre, and looking at his customers, the two abla naris, he quoted an exorbitant amount. I haggled with him for a good 5 minutes before he turned his vehicle around saying no, but in a last minute change of heart decided to drop us anyway.
On a normal day, even with some traffic, it should have taken us about 7-10 minutes on the journey. Alas, the drainage system, water-logged roads, delayed the journey to about half an hour. All I could see was people in a hurry.  Patience was scarce and anger was the pulse of the traffic.
The only solace I found was in making small talk with the girl.   

Can a woman afford to dream?

Even though we live in the 21^st century so to say, it seems women still have to make a constant effort in order to be treated as a human being with a heart, rather than a baby-making machine who also provide ‘household’ services.
Recently, I happened to hear about a family which lives in a town in central India and is surrounded by their close-knit community. Other religious and socio-economic communities co-exist, and have a similar way of thinking about family, the woman, the girl child and marriage.
The family I am referring to consists of five; the parents, two daughters and a son. The elder sister, who is now married and has two little children, had this to say to her younger sister, who is still in school, “Don’t study so hard, you are wasting our parents’ money. I will ask mother to get you married soon after 12^th grade.” (When she turns 18). It is the age when girls in India are allowed to get married, by law. For boys it is 21.
This comment or should I say a conclusion derived from circumstances she had to endure or has seen, stirred my insides.
The sisters have another sibling, a male about my age. He is still doing his MBA. Before he enrolled for the course he was trying to look for jobs but did not land one. When this continued to happen, his mother exclaimed in a sour-grapy attitude, “Boys are not getting jobs because of over-ambitious girls.”
I am itching to dissect each word and the situations they were said in, to begin an analysis. But I would now stick to just the two that seem most prominent.
The thought process that women should not have a job or their only job is at home is deep rooted and is not unfamiliar, at least in India. Apart from the men who want to suppress the voices of women, and make them dependent on them for every need, it is the older female members in a family or a unit that also manifest such ideas. The thought that educating a woman is wasting money, because all she will have to do is take care of her husband and children with her nurturing demeanor, is engraved in brains of the masses.
What if a girl wants to do all this and more, have a career, or a passion that she can pursue? What happens to the dreams of a teenager who wants to be a pilot and fly across continents? Where is the place for a woman, from an average Indian household, to become a poet? It seems as if some women are treated as if they have no intellectual capacity.
The boy’s mother thinks her son isn’t getting a job because there are girls, over-ambitious ones, who are on the prowl to steal all the jobs available to men. She doesn’t even spare a second to think that maybe her son didn’t try as hard or was not as well qualified as somebody else, or the interview didn’t go well.
Whatever the reason, she refused to see that there was anything wrong with her son and blamed it all on women, who dare to step out of the house and out of their rightful place to a forbidden domain in search of a job.
Whatever century one is part of, discrimination of the ‘weaker sex’ has always existed. Whether it is religion, politics or a socio-economic situation that is the cause of such and other variants of suppression; what is sad is that the greatest quality of a being a female, the ability to reproduce, has been turned against her to make her weaker, to shut her indoors like an animal and to deprive her of passions and dreams.

The moon

When the sun plunged into the sea

The stars smiled 

The night became a theatre

my window the stage 

I drew breath, ready to perform

I began to share with the night's creatures

I moved as fast and as vivid

as the summer fire

envolping the jungle 

each branch, twig and leaf 

burned, weeped 

like the rain

like the peircing arrow

he tore my soul

crashing into, embracing 

each thread of my heart

quieter, calmer

I surrender

I give in to the moon

and its white path

Scared of the cops

The police force was constituted apparently to protect civilians and maintain law and order. But of course media has brought to light several times their inability to do so. Some have even gone ahead and committed crimes themselves.
Police of different states and cities have also been accused of coinciding with governments to disrupt law and order, and allowing atrocities to take place. Basically allowing people to kill each other, under the banner of communal riots and letting rapes happen, shielding those who committed them — any minister's son — and sometimes even helping to commit the crime.
It is difficult to count how many times police have raped women in their police stations, allowed rapes to happen in front of them or just turned a blind eye to other crimes allowing them to go unreported.
More than feeling safe, when seeing a man in uniform, the feeling is to avoid him as much as possible.
I have never felt more violated than this one day when a cop seemed to have followed me from the market to my colony.
I live in a decent locality with a community centre just a stone's throw away. So walking to it at 10 in the night didn't seem unsafe. I bought a few things from a shop there and was walking back when a cop on his bike stopped next to me and asked me if the car parked further up was mine. I said no and he rode his bike but suspiciously very slow.
He entered the gate of the colony I live in, which is the first one after the market, supposedly patrolling on the main road of the locality. He confronted a man walking when he saw me enter through the gate, probably to buy some time. When he saw me pass he trailed his motorbike slowly behind me looking to see where I would go.
I hadn't feared more for my safety than at that point, more in need of security than then. I didn't want him to know where I lived, I was scared.
So I took a detour from where I hoped he couldn't look. I held back, waited to hear his bike move forward and then quickly opened the gate to my apartment and walked in.
It took me a while to get my heartbeat to a normal rhythm. All the horrific tales of policemen and other men in uniform, raping women catching them off guard or by using their 'authority' to commit the crime, came to mind.
Only few questions prevailed.
When can anyone in India trust policeman? When can I or any woman regardless of her socioeconomic background, at any point of day or night, ask for a cop's help, without fearing for her own safety, without being questioned about her integrity?

Words Stay Longer

At my desk on a newsy tuesday
I look out for a glimpse of quiet
the rays of the sun give way
a surprise rain patters
dampens the window pane
raises my spirit

Still typing away
I want to step out
I imagine people, on the roads
some shielding themselves
some welcoming
the piercing cold drops

But I can only stare
at the window
It is now hazy
Droplets devour it in a lovers' embrace

I can feel them on me
I sit and dream
recreate memory
words hidden in the sound
of the slashing rain

Scenes travel fast
some stay
But the words stay longer
like the smell
of freshly quenched soil,
like the calm chaos
after the storm
like the brown leaves
broken, scattered about


words stay longer...
like the rain
one now with the soil
immersed deep
stay plunged
into the heart's matter

Dream

Dream
a land a space
where bizzare is routine
routine is offensive
you either have extraordinary powers
or are being chased by a monster

It is closet of red fears
and purple affection

A place of black seas
milky mountains
chocolate rivers
pancake roads
of moonlight glow and twilight calm
morning chaos and afternoon bliss
evening red sun, and the night white moon

A land of overflowing desires
and of memories changed

Distorted relationships

Calm

I have always loved the sea. It's only natural that i do, I have lived beside it for 20 years.

I also remember the time I was a liitle girl and scared by the huge waves, scared they would swallow me. I would run as far away as I could from them. As the years passed the sea was still mighty, but my perception of it changed.
I learned to love it for the very characteristics that scared me.
 There is a certain hidden calm in the waves thrashing on the rocks. They ebb, rising again to corrode the sand, to slowly continue its work on the rock creating moist life, shaping it. The waves rising washing away details.

Mother nature has given us another phenomenon the majestic mountains. I saw them only when I turned 23. When I looked at snow near my feet and then the snow on the peaks it brought shivers down my spine.
It was at an altitude I cannot even fathom, covered in snow, white as a sheet. The afternoon sun glistened on it, reflecting on the snow, shining in my eyes. But then it sparks warmth within me a cooler calmness.

Night descends quicker in the mountains, I realised. In a pitch dark atmosphere, only the sound of a stream below was heard. Otherwise, it was miles of quiet.

When the moon rises the sea is voluminous, consuming. Loud and high the waves beckon. There is chaos.

The sea with its friction breathes into me conflict. The mind and heart quarreling, then reaching stillness.

The majestic mountain, panic it brings. Pitch black silence and the sweet flowing stream sooth me.