What Ayesha Thought

Step 1 to a Dream

It’s magnificent, but it’s not me! It glows so much it makes my eyes twitch. It’s attractive, not as much as I’d expected, but yeah it’s nice. I still wish mom hadn’t sent me here. London is everything, but New Delhi. Everything, but where I wanted to be. It’s making me feel things I’ve never felt before, blurt words that are strictly supposed to be kept within the barriers of my mouth. For the first time in life, I’m scared. Scared of new places, new faces. But what’s really making me collywobbles is not having friends. I don’t know how to make friends anymore. The last time I made friends was in Kindergarten, and they’ve stuck around ever since. Being the ‘Social Butterfly’ that I was back home, I feel like someone’s chopped off my wings and left me in a golden cage to flutter. I’ve never had to go buddy-hunting with a torch in my hand before. My flat mates are sweet, but the more I stay with them the more I wish to scream in my mother tongue and curse in Punjabi. Because that’s what I am, a rowdy from Punjab, and I miss my rowdiness.

My mouth has begun to hurt being all gracious and polite. The ‘Pleases’ and ‘Thank You’s’ really don’t suit me. The funny thing is, this place has no real rules. People smoke freely, drink freely, and do whatever they want. It’s not one bit like back home where to smoke you’d have to find the one lonely corner in town where you’re likely to get raped. Ironically, I thought I’d like this about London. Sadly, I miss breaking rules. There’s no fun smoking when there isn’t a someone to steal a puff from. Good thing, I barely smoke any more. Drinks, yeah they happen every alternate day with my Flalmates, but what’s the fun in getting piss drunk when I can’t yell at and curse the entire world while standing on the table?

I feel like a jack in the box trapped inside this University. I can’t spring out of my box till I know there’d be someone to handle me and shove me back into my boundaries and so far there hasn’t been a single person worth talking to, leave alone confiding in.  I guess I should just quit ranting. Relax, probably get a smoke and head off to the Fresher’s Fayre. Even though I don’t get the point behind it, silly seniors who probably would hate to be friends with us freshees because they’re being paid by the hour to promote things they probably don’t use themselves! I wish mom knew all that glitters is not gold.

So here I am , plastering a paste of fake smile and enthusiasm on my face like foundation along with the clothes I’ve been instructed to wear by my mother. And there, I’m ready! Looking sweet and adorable as ever, jumping around like a pink mad bubble. From stall to stall. Grinning like an idiot, smiling at strangers, giving introductions to bloody nobodies, asking question I don’t want answers to. What will happen of me, in this fayre, at this Uni, in London?

The Remains of A Mistress...

Wailing and panting she ran towards the bathroom. The enormous bathroom where she’d once played hide and seek with her friends in. The cold marble floor felt numb under her burning feet. Slipping over the water that had leaked from the Jacuzzi she slipped and fell on the glass basin. The sharp broken corner cut her hand, but she didn’t notice.

Kohl smudged eyes, tears forming dirty paths on her face, her pink lipstick spread downwards on the left side of her face. She opened the tap to splash water on her mushy distorted face that was made up like a beautiful painting a while ago. The blood from her hand mixed with water formed distributaries all over her face. She looked at herself in the mirror over the basin. Horrified. Horrified and Angry.

Who was she? What was she? No she wasn’t… then who was she?

She walked back towards the room. Drops of diluted blood still shining on her face. Her white stall that was now a dirty shade of red and black. Was she the girl in the pictures hanging on the walls? Reflecting every shade of the spectrum in a smile? Wearing every color on the pallet, everything that looked stupid. Hugging friends, boys, girls, old ones, little ones. Every expression, so animated, so wild.

She ran a hand over the collage of pictures stuck randomly on the pin board, leaving  blood stains everywhere. Where had she lost this girl wearing jeans, jumpers and a pair of converse? A rucksack on one shoulder, a bottle of Budweiser in the hand, a grin stuck to her face. Standing with her brother on one side and her best friend on the other. She wondered where her best friend was now. She wondered how he was, if he missed her. Was he angry at her for just disappearing? Did he try looking for her? Would he recognize if he went and stood in front of him today?

More pictures, more memories, more questions and more tears. Her room was nothing but a big collage of photos. Photos of her, with friends from places all around, in places all around. Photos of her having fun, living what is meant to be lived. Laughing, making faces, blowing raspberries, playing pranks, gulping beer. And then she saw him, in the last set of her pictures, her memories.

He looked decent, smiled almost like an angel. Those dimples, the golden skin. The veins sticking out of his over bulging muscles…and those cat eyes. She felt herself muttering. Words of anger, words of hate, words of filth. He changed her, he ruined her, he killed her.

There was a pool of blood on the floor now. Footsteps covered in blood, on white serene marble. She looked down at her blood. Kept staring at it with disgusted eyes. Her blood. Her own blood, that she’s deceived. Family! Bonds! Relations! Everything that she’d shooed away from her.

She started to shiver, shake like she was being shaken by someone. And then it happened, she let it out. A scream. It took her years to do this. Just scream it out. The pain, the fury, the helplessness. All let out!

She now knew what she was. A body without soul. The remains of a mistress…

Amy Isn't Dead!

I could hear the clock clicking as I tried to organize my chaotic cabin in the office.  I hadn’t stepped out of it since two days. There were bright chances of me missing the last train home, but I couldn’t care less. My lonesome apartment still smelled so new and empty, the blank walls stared at me with sad eyes, and I could hear the silence in every corner of the house. Therefore, I took my time to finish off the work on my dusty demanding desk as the raindrops tap-danced on my windowpane.

It was after midnight, when I finally finished fiddling with my desire of not going back home and headed out of the building where my office was.   I knew home was far away, and walking alone would take longer than eternity.  Being a brand new widower, I was still mourning her depressing death. Working helped me keep her tormenting thoughts away, but her memories came rushing back to me the minute I would be all by myself.  I’d left the city in which we’d first met, fallen in love and created our own little world. Nevertheless, her thoughts were still as fresh to me as the smell of rain. Her demise depressed me dreadfully. Thinking about her killed me a million times a day, and yet, I deliberately thought of her.  Doing so, did something strange, but special to me.

“Three months! Three months are more than enough to forget a person, Ryan.” I finally heard her talking to me.  I was getting lost in the world of illusion. A wonderful world where she talked to me, fought with me, scolded me, made me laugh (sometimes cry). The world where she wasn’t dead, where I wasn’t dead. Our world- Amy and Ryan’s world.

“ I don’t want to forget you, I’m happy living this way.” I said in hushes, hoping no one heard me speak to myself.

“Living? You call this a life. When was the last time you went out with your friends? Or called any of your relatives up? Or watched the game? Or trimmed your beard for that matter.”  She yelled at the top of her lungs. My sloppiness always inflamed her temper. She could’ve killed me, had she been alive.

“Ryan, my love, what’s gone is gone. I’m just hazy history now. You can’t stop living just because your wife died?” She said leaning towards me.  I knew she was delusional, but her image still smelled of my Amy.

“You know just how much I hate the word ‘dead’. The dead don’t frown like you, or smile the way you smile. They don’t come back to the ones alive, every night. The dead definitely don’t talk, Amy. And you talk to me, all the bloody time.”  I held her by her slender shoulders, a part of me knowing I was resting my hands in the air.  “I don’t care if the world can’t see you, I know you’re there.  I feel you around me, in me, all the time.” I held her hands. Her fingers as light as snow, as soft as silk.

“You’re losing it, my friend. You’re going crazy. You’re trying to find life in the dead. No matter what you do, and how hard you try you cannot deny the fact that I’m no more. I’m dead, Ryan. DEAD! I’m a lie that you keep telling yourself, to make life easier. But that’s not how things work, I’m not coming back, live with it and stop drowning yourself in misery.”  She hyperventilated.

“I’m not miserable.” I murmured. 

“I’m not real, Ryan.  I might exist in your head, and your heart, but I don’t in your world. The sooner you accept it, the better it is. I’ll be there for you like I’ve always been but you need to stop hallucinating. You cannot live by a myth. You have to move on.  You can’t drown yourself in work and disconnect yourself with the rest of the world.  Go out, live life like it’s meant to be lived. Meet your friends, meet new people, and make new friends. Be the Ryan that you are. “She looked tired of repeating herself.

She hadn’t said anything that I hadn’t heard before. ‘Meet new people’, was all I’d heard my near and dear ones say ever since she’d passed away.  But coming from Amy, it sounded like I’d finally been given the permission to move on. For the first time in three months, I felt it might be the last time I’d see her.

“I need to go now.” She said as the clouds above me roared in anger.  “I don’t think I’ll be coming back soon. But I’ll always be by your side, I promise.” She came closer to me and smoothly slid into my arms. Ironically, Her skin was as cold as that of a dead body.

“Don’t go.” Was all I managed to whisper.

“I have to. I love you, Ryan. I always will.” I closed my eyes as I held the wind in my arms.

“I love you. Amy.”

The wind made the trees around us rock wildly. The stars in the sky seemed to have gone back to sleep under the blanket of black clouds. She stood still in my arms for a while and then within a split second, she was gone. The rain shook me to life; I opened my eyes to find myself standing on the long lonely road. Except, it wasn’t all that lonely any more, I knew she was next to me. She’d promised, she’ll always be.

I Don't Know What to Write!

I don’t know what to write. I’ve never been this blank before today, but I know something has to be written and so I’m going to try and find the reason behind the psychedelic frame of my mind.

My sense of humor has become a very sorry state of affairs.  I’m no longer ‘Miss Effervescence’. The old me comes back in flashes every now and then. I try clutching her wrists and no matter how badly I wish to grab it and retain her, they slip away like water from my hand. 

Why does every new beginning come from an end? Why do we have to give up on something to gain something else? Why can’t we just get the best of all worlds? Why do all good things come with an expiry date? Why do I have no answer to any of these ‘Whys’?

I feel like I’ve reached the autumn of my adolescence, dull and depressing.  I need a kick start, I need a direction. I forgot to set long-term goals for myself in an attempt to make my life seem glittery and logical in yesterday and today, but what about tomorrow? I need new things to do, new missions to accomplish, new mountains to climb, and maybe a new pair of binoculars to find these mountains.

Every night that I rest myself in my bed, I close my eyes to meet someone special in my dreams.  Someone I haven’t seen in reality in a long long time, someone I’ve missed a lot lately. She walks up to me each night and whispers the same words into my ears. She tells me I’ve been living in an illusion since a long time now, she says I need to wake up. She shakes me up to break my slumber and so I wake up into another morning of my life. Just to find myself lying on the same bed of illusion that I’d slept on, unchanged and untouched. That girl I meet every night is a reflection of the old me, I miss her. I want her back.

The search is on, I might locate the lost beam in me in days to come but the transition period is so slow. It bores me to death. Life under transformation is like being trapped under the body of a robot. So when this robot sits down to write something, she doesn’t know what to write.

I don’t know what I’ve written, it honestly makes no sense to me. Maybe, I should write when I finally know what to write. 

Are You Talking to Me?

Emotions make lives. Emotions break lives too. Emotions shape thoughts and thoughts form words. But what if these words get so mingled with emotion that they lose sync with what falls on ones ears?

Sometimes people speak so much, they forget to listen. And sometimes even a person who seems to be listening, might actually not be interpreting.

The most amazing conversations are the ones where no ones listening... Here's one such story...

A man of twenty-eight from Miami and a woman of thirty-five from London waiting in the V.I.P. Lounge at J.F.K International Airport for a flight to London. The woman is groggily flipping through a business magazine that she’s holding upside down, the man is adjusting the strings of his guitar and trying to play a tune over and over again.

WOMAN (hinting towards the man)- As if the delay wasn’t enough, now I’d have to spend time waiting with a noisy skater-boy with a lose stringed guitar!

MAN (speaking under his breath)- Oh! A corporate freak? Interestingly repulsive robots they are! Nonetheless, let’s kill some time.

The man walks up to the woman and sits right next to her. The woman gives him a faint half-hearted smile and gets back to reading the magazine.

MAN- Hey there, that’s one interesting way of reading. Where did you learn to read upside down?

Gives him a sharp look, turns her book right and continues tossing the pages. The man starts playing the guitar again and starts humming along.

WOMAN (angry) - Romantic songs, amazing! Just what I wanted. What would this pile of love take to shut up?

MAN (lost in thought, smiling like a love sick puppy and talking to himself out loud)- I can’t believe I’m humming this song, what’s gotten into me?

WOMAN (suddenly) – Eh, are you talking to me?

MAN- Errrr, sorry, did you say something?

WOMAN- No, not really!

Man holds his guitar tightly and continues smiling. Woman keeps the magazine on the table and holds her head in her hands.

MAN(ecstatic)- I think its love.

WOMAN-  I love him so much, how could I do this to him?

MAN- Should I tell her?

WOMAN (nervous)- Would he divorce me if I tell him the truth about my infidelity?

MAN- No, no I shouldn’t. What if she shuns me away?

WOMAN (fidgeting with her wedding ring)- There’s nothing else that can be done, what has to happen will happen, he deserves to know.

 MAN- But what if she loves me too? Is she the one for me?

WOMAN- I always knew he was the one for me, I can’t believe I got carried away. How could I sleep with my boss?

MAN- If she rejects me would she fire me? She is after-all the boss. Oh god! I’m such a wimp, I should tell her, she has no reason to turn me down.

WOMAN- I haven’t left a reason for him to not leave me, but I can’t be a wimp. I need to tell him.

MAN- I have to tell her, I just hope she loves me too.

WOMAN- I’ll have to tell him, I just hope he forgives me.

There is an announcement and the flight gets ready for boarding. Both of them look at each other, pass awkward smiles and walk towards security.

It's Time...

My heart feels high on RedBull tonight. It’s been swinging left to right all evening. Restless, like a murderer waiting to hear the siren of the police cars approaching his hideout. Knowing something terrible was inevitably going to occur towards to end of this waiting time. I breathe in and I hold my breath, eyes closed, mind alert. Completely aware of this moment, this too shall pass. I breathe out wafts of warm air, sighing deeper every time. Another second gone, one more step away from you.
I don’t wish for the time to stop, my thoughts are tied by my own realism. I can’t wish to lie in your arms here, forever, that’s not what life is about. Ironically, I don’t even have the privilege to wish for something as real as having you next to me all the time. My last name, your ethnicity, our nations, stand like great walls barring every wish, every hope, every dream that I could’ve had, that I deserved to have.
The room is dim, the lights are off, we lie down snuggled on your rickety bed that makes scary noises every time one of us moves. This bed, where we first hugged, where we first kissed. This bed that has the stinkiest, dullest, wrinkliest grey bed sheet that hasn’t been changed since I first stepped into this room. This room, that gave me fits of claustrophobia, but what I called home. The dust particles that should pay you a rent to stay here. The dust that now feels so familiar, it emits a homely smell.
The sun that eavesdropped into our lives through those windows, the rain that fell on the mud outside to leave a marshy intoxicating smell hovering over the room, over you, over me, over us. The faint smell of Jasmine from the bush outside wrapped inside the warm familiar fragrance of your Kenneth Cole perfume,  in cold January nights. The breeze that entered your room just to push me closer to you, right into your cuddle where I beamed, all smug and smitten.
The exhibition on your table, of books, of perfumes, of food and what not. Products of survival that supported two lives in the space for one.
 Tea, lots and lots of tea, something you can’t live without. Food, enough to feed a million hungry mouths, but never enough for us hungry sloths. Coke, Oh those million cans that you collect to use as ash trays. Wires, of laptops and lamps and hair dryers and cell phones and devices that have funny names. Wires, enough to make a robot. Lying shamelessly, entangled with each other, just like us.
You look at me, with your drunken eyes. Eyes that are saying something you won’t. Eyes that have sadness peeping out, of restricted hopes, barred desires. I interpret a language we never created, never learnt. I know what those eyes say, I know because I feel the same way. I get up, detach myself from your embrace. I don’t want to cry. You don’t want me to go. We both want time to stop, and then we both snap out of it and back into realism.
You bend forward and reach the a packet of little cylinders of life. You light a fag with a lighter you stole from one of your friends and let out a huff of smoke.Eyes shut tight. Another drag, you seem to be calming down . Inhale, the bigger the drag the more the fine lines around your tightly locked eyes dissappear. Puff, puff, puff! The smoke, it glides in and then slides out. First, a bit from your mouth, then from your nose and the rest is thrown out in the shape of rings. Rings, I wear to make me feel yours. Rings that disapear like you will someday.
The magic stick is consumed, all that remains is ashes. You use the can of coke to dispose the bud, then look at me and smile half-heartedly.
You crack a joke. I smirk, then look at you laughing. Those veins bursting out of your neck, that tear dried up right under your left eye. It makes me sad, no, it makes me sadder. But I won't cry. I'm strong, no, I shall pretend to be strong for you.
You yawn. It's contagious. Soon theres another one, and then one more and then you slip me in your arms, my head is on your chest. I can hear you breath, you can feel me yawning. We're both drugged with sleep, but this night is a prized possession. I don't want it to pass, you don't want me to pass. We're talking, about yesterday, and the day before and the one before that. I'm lost in thought, you're lost too, we cross the permeable line between thoughts and dreams.
The phone is blaring, its the darned alarm. The sun showns its vindictive laughter. The sadist knows just how badly we detest it at the moment. It's a day I usually wait for all around the year, it's my birthday. but neither have I waited for this day, nor am I delighted. You look at me, helpless, bewildered. We'd never expected this to be this hard. It's time for us to leave, this room and perhaps, it's owner. I'm shivering, but its May. You want me to sit, but I'm restless. Why did I not prepare myself, wasn't this something obvious?
I'm oscillating left to right. One corner to another. Knowing that won't help. Knowing nothing would help. Knowing, it's time...