The Bench

The air was sticky and still, ripe in the middle of summer. Thigh against thigh, shirt clinging to a wet back, electrified hair, damped moons peeking through underarms – yes, humidity had started to rear its ugly head.
As if to compensate for all the discomfort, the skyline was a vibrant orange with streaks of pink thrown in for good measure. Along the sidewalk, in front of an insignificant little garden lay a desolate bench, a seemingly ordinary looking one made of grey stone. Under the shade of a huge oak tree, it speckled with golden light.

On the bench sat a woman old enough to be called a grandmother. She came to sit on that very bench every day, unfailingly, knitting a pale pink garment, shaped dubiously like a sweater.
Her eyes twinkled with unbridled residual youth of yesteryears; a sharp contrast to her grey hair and shiny wrinkled skin. Life across that path was a blur, with people walking, rushing, moving, and knitting their own veil of busyness, the only constant was this old lady, floating in her own bubble, distant to the rest of the quick paced world.

One of such typical days, a young girl who must be in her twenties walked on that sidewalk. Her eyebrows were in a knot and her shoulders were hunched with tension. Nobody knew that the streetlights were blurry orbs to her. The moisture in the air had accumulated and condensed in her eyes instead. She kept on walking until she couldn’t anymore, eyelids didn’t come with windscreen vipers, you see.

She sat down next to the old lady, who didn’t look up from her knitting, which was good for the girl for she wasn’t currently in the mood for either small talk or sympathy. She sniffled and let the tears fall uncontrollably; her face in her hands. The cascading waterfalls slipped between the ridges of her hands, puddling her charcoal suit. Her sniffles slowly transformed into sobs. She knew this would happen, she never used to cry, always guarded, but when she did; it was as if an unstoppable faucet had been turned on.

The old lady stopped clicking her needles and finally looked up, confused. “What happened, child?” she said to the girl.

“I..um..he..I” she mumbled between moans.

“What is your name, dear?”

The girl finally looked up, her face a mess, like a fresh oil painting given in the hands of a toddler; her kohl smeared across her cheeks.

“I’m Suhani” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, it’s nothing. I’m fine.”

The lady put her knitting aside and said, “Have I greyed my hair in vain? You must tell me. There is no problem that can’t be solved.”

Some might call this kind of intervention into another’s life as intrusion but sometimes all you want in life is for someone to hear you out, to listen even if it is to just nod and pat your arm.

The girl looked into the lady’s eyes. They looked huge, magnified behind her cylindrical glasses. Her teeth were perfectly straight, being obviously dentures and her whole aura glowed with radiance mixed with some inherent sorrow associated with the past. There was something very comforting about her presence, as if you’d keep your head in her lap and all your worries will be forever hers.

She twisted her hands in apprehension and began, “Well, there is a boy. He loves me. And I love him. But we cannot be together.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s not that easy. He’s got a job posting abroad and I have my job here. So, I thought it’d be easier on us if we both broke up. I broke it off myself, he agreed too. He leaves tonight.”

“If you did it yourself, then what is the problem?”

“There is so much heartache. We live in a world of ephemerality. An age where profile pictures last longer than relationships. It is highly unrealistic of me to expect a love so old-fashioned, for it to go on forever. You know, what is the definition of love in today’s world? It’s called convenience.
Maybe. I’ve been born in the wrong world, the wrong time. I’d be better off in your age, Aunty. I can’t bear the pain.”

The old lady blinked twice at her sudden outburst and then she stroked her arm. “You didn’t have to break it off with him. You could have gone abroad too, gotten a job there and settled down.”

“Settle down? All these years together, marriage has never been the topic of discussion. Who has the time you know? And I know I won’t be able to last a relationship without being in the same city as him. It will fade. I’ll be suspicious and he irritated. Hence, I thought it’d be most convenient to stay apart. When you cage your heart, the more protected it will be right?”

“But how long will you cage your heart, as you put it? Do you think you’ll be able to live without him?”

The bluntness of the lady’s question made her shudder. She had known the answer all along.“I don’t know.”

“Beta, I don’t know why your generation has become so confused. You are given more freedom and you choose to listen to your brain. When I was your age, I used to work as a receptionist. A man used to take the same bus as me, every day. I’d catch him looking at me at the bus stop. One day, he finally got a seat next to me. The moment I saw him, I knew he was the one.

We used to sit together and talk every day. I still remember his lopsided smile. That time, there was no cell phone, no internet. All we had were those few precious hours.

 One fine day, he didn’t come to the bus stop. A whole week passed by, still there was no trace of him.”

“Then, what did you do?”

“I had no idea what to do. I talked to a few people and got his number. Imagine, in those days! I was quite the talk of the town, asking for a boy’s number. Eventually, I reached his house. Turned out his father was on his death bed and he had to leave town in a few days.”

“Then, what happened?” asked Suhani, wide-eyed, clutching at the lady’s hand.

“Well, I knew he was too shy to say it on his own. So I proposed to him and we were married off soon.”

“And all of this happened in a span of how many years?”

“About ten months. When you know it in your heart, time and space mean nothing.”

“Wow! Aunty, I never knew you were such a diva!” Suhani was almost laughing now.

“We have been married for 45 years now. All I tell you is never regret anything you do in life, especially if you do something out of love.”

“Aunty, thank you so much for your time” she squeezed her hand, a smile flooding her face and coloring her cheeks red. “But I have to go now and find him.”

“Good luck, dear. May God always be there with you.”

*** 

It was early in the morning. The sky was a turquoise blue today. Birds chirped in the distance but alas they were overpowered by horns blaring out of shiny cars rushing past the street.

The old lady was sitting on the bench again, knitting an overtly long sleeve; the ball of wool rolling on the floor.

A man walking by the street picked it up and handed it to her, he sat down next to her and started to read his newspaper.

“I still remember when they put his picture on the newspaper in the obituary section. It was heartbreaking.” The old lady looked as if she was about to cry.

“I’m sorry, what?” the man was confused, not to mention unprepared to handle the sentiments of an old woman.

“My husband. He was in the army. Our love story is one of those typical Bollywood movies. He was Sikh and I, a Jain. Our love was doomed from the day we were born. But you know what did we do? We eloped! It was quite a scandal.
We had three lovely kids and we spent our life in Patiala. But life had other plans. He was killed in the Kargil War, after just ten years of wedded bliss. I’m sorry, dear. Look at me! Crying and spoiling your mood right in the morning.” She blew her nose silently in the extended knitted sleeve of the pink sweater.

The man, unaware of the appropriate social etiquette, handed her a tissue and quickly finished the rest of his paper and caught his taxi.

***

“Did you have your morning medicines? It’s way past your lunchtime.” A woman in white clutched the old lady’s hand and walked her to the building besides the garden. 

    

**********

Children of The Night

Blood on the snow

Dirt in my mouth

The unheard truths

The suppressed lies

A fresh wreath

A molding cradle

A needle through my skin

A stitch through my vein

A gunshot bleeds into the cerulean sky

A firework colors the murky abyss overhead

The sun frowns

The moon smiles

The cimmerian sisters unite.

The ashen brothers rub their hands with delight.

We are children of the night.

Thieves of the daylight fun.

We inhabit the dark corners your dilated pupils fear to see.

We refuse the day,

Bow down to the dusk.

We rise from the scabs of the earth

The more you pull us apart,

The longer we sustain.

The grit shines on our grim faces

A pair of piercing eyes in a tunnel

A blade of silver

A whip of crimson

It is us. This is we.

The children of the night.

So close your doors.

Shut your windows.

The monsters under your bed have fled.

To take over the world.

One night at a time.

Routine shall be destroyed.

Conformity demolished.

Clocks will be upturned.

For we are,

Yes we are,

Children of the night.

How to become a celebrity on-board.

No wailing babies.

No love-drunk honeymooners.

No hippies.

No loud sardarji families.

No first-timers jostling for the window seat, taking selfies faster than you could say ‘seatbelt’.

Moreover, I was occupying the spacious aisle seat, meaning I had one less Armrest Nazi to deal with.

Yes, for the first time in what seemed like years, I had a decent flight co-habitat.

My immediate co-passengers were all sane uncles and aunties, minding their own business.

I popped in my earphones and time flew past.

                                                           ***

I never knew when I fell asleep.

It must be the lab manual that I was trying to study that acted as the lullaby. (Not a nerd, I had a lab test the next day!)

The next thing I hear is high-pitched screaming.

And my scalp is scalding, as if on fire.

Now someone is screaming “FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!”

Is this a dream?

Oh wait. The screaming is coming from my own throat.

Hot boiling coffee has been poured over the posterior side of my head, trickling to my shoulders and to my back. 

The air hostess is gesticulating madly, shoving tissues in my face, with an insufficiently apologetic look on her pancaked and now panicked face.

I snap back to reality.

“Ice! Ice!” I scream.

All eyes in the flight trail me. I’m taken right to the front, to the washrooms, and now water is poured all over my head.

My 600/- haircut and styling has gone all down the drain. Curls which perked into curvy smiles are now a droopy floppy mess.

The pancaked stewardess and assailant to my peace starts to apply ice and is now blaming the passengers for moving around too much. Then she shows me her finger and says, “Mera bhi jal gaya” That comment gets me hot-headed, and I wanted to show her the finger.  

Then an air host with perfectly threaded eyebrows, like a Geisha's almost, reaches out for cream and the hostess starts to apply it on my shoulders.

                                           I swear to God I think I saw a trace of lipstick on him too.

"Oh! See!" Pancake Lady points out to Geisha Eyebrow Man and says, 

“You must have played Holi na, it’s all red.”

Me: “No, I just got burned. I do NOT play Holi.”

Pancake Lady:“No, no. It’s coming off.”

A moment of silence.
For Common Sense, who just died, buried himself six feet under and then started rolling madly in his grave.

Then the Eyebrow Man asks me if I was traveling alone.
I whimper a yes.

“Traveling alone!?!” they say in unison and horror, making me feel like an abandoned child.
“How old are you?” he says.
“Twenty”, I say, already aware of the response.
If their jaws dropped more, we would have already landed and alighted from this doomed flight.


After resolving their mock concern, my back and head feeling like a volcano, I start walking back. All sympathetic eyes bore into me.
I sit down awkwardly with the ice on my head. The uncle on my right smiles at me and
says, “Beta, abhi toh aap akele ho. Agar koi bada hota toh itna hata-pai hoti ki jahaaz yahi utaarna padta”, pointing downwards. 

As any good girl would do, I nod in agreement. 

“Par, beta. E-mail complaint zaroor karna. Air hostess ka naam dekh lo aur complain karo”, gesturing typing movements with his fingers.

Then he asks me what I do in Goa. I tell him I study there.
He says, “School?”
Two heads of another Uncle and Aunty peer out from his side to look at me.
“No, College. BITS Goa.”
“College!?” All three say in chorus. 

(Seriously. Do people have these dialogues practiced? It’s like a well-rehearsed musical I’m sick of hearing.)

“Third Year”, I add with a flourish, for dramatic effect.

The agitation among aunties and uncles spreads like wildfire. 

Soon they’re coming from far and beyond, unleashing their dormant welled up mamta, for this abandoned kid who is clearly lying about her age and is traveling alone to the Sin State of India. And who also says ‘Fuck' out loud.
Excellent impression.

Soon an announcement is made, “We’re looking for a doctor on board, an emergency at hand.”

The first one to turn up is a dentist, who is dismissed before I could ask for free cleaning.
The second lady, says I’ll be fine and it’s a first degree burn which should go soon. (Boo you Lady. My scalp still has speed-breaker blisters)

Then, the Aunty sitting next to the Uncle to my left across the aisle switches seats with her husband. Just to pacify me. She tells me how I’m like her daughter and helps me in putting ice on my head. 

That’s one thing about India, the Aunties. Why I capitalize Aunties is because it's a different species altogether. 

So loving and kind, affection oozing out at the slightest triggers, their emotional vents are always turbulent in nature.

Then she tells me how it could have been worse. Had the coffee fell on my face.
(I've never understood this logic, reasoning yourself with ‘Could have been worse’ logic. Why reach stage ‘bad’ in the first place?)

Then it turned out she lived in the same area as I did back in Delhi. In no time, she’s holding my hand and we’re talking like old friends.
As the plane touches the tarmac, I instantly reach for my phone to rant to my mother about the eventful twist that my life had taken, the Uncle says, “Mummy ko mat call karo. Kaho ki plane mein hi ek Ma milgayi.”
I smile politely and dial anyway.

Now Geisha Eyebrow Man comes and takes away my hand-baggage to the front. I stand there awkwardly, waving each passenger goodbye accompanied with a pursed “I’m fine.”

Now I follow this official looking man with a walkie-talkie in his hand and a porter who is carrying my luggage.
As I pass by the conveyor belt, an enthusiastic kid tugs at his father’s pants and points at me and goes, “Papa! Papa! Yeh to wohi Didi hai na!”

I halfway reach for a pen to sign an autograph but sadly he doesn't ask for one.

I also take the Spicejet Complaint E-mail ID and have now sent a gazillion mails with only one telephonic response, wherein they just said sorry and the customary “We’ll look into the matter”. 

To which I boldly threatened to file a complaint in the consumer court for their negligence and utter disrespect for not even offering freebies.
I mean they could have done a post-Holi Balam Pichkari number to cheer me up! Considering how the whole Spicejet crew loves dancing mid-air!
Objectively speaking they should just reimburse the flight money.

Instead all I have are free concave blisters scattered like constellations on my scalp. I’m just wondering if they could act as external memory storage devices, if they last that is, before the upcoming test.

Here's me signing off, to future paranoid and sleepless-unblinking plane journeys with me stuck against the window seat holding onto dear life. 

Never an aisle again! And never Spicejet either!

I am labeling this post as 'hot coffee poured by Spicejet air hostess' just so I get my due justice. Join me in my struggle for my Right To Safety encroachment and share this post. 
*wipes tears Aamir Khan-Satyamev Jayate style*

Seriously. If someone gave me 1 Crore per post, I'd  definitely cry better.

That elusive thing called Time.

Sometimes I wish there was an enormous hourglass hanging in the space around me, trickling down each granule of time passing away in my life, ebbing into oblivion, dooming my existence. Paranoia would drive me to waste less time, do more productive work, cross off more items on my to-do list. I also wish, that time seeping to the bottom would be sifted, leaving behind only sparkly sand, luminescing of wondrous times, with the shingles and stones of failures and sorrows vanished into thin air.

Oh, but then, who would smell the roses? Who would glee at the intricacy of a spider’s web? Who would be ecstatic about getting it right, finally, after days and months of hard work? Who would remember the exact way you smiled? And who would reminisce the lovely exchange of meaningless words?

Stop.
Slow down.
Stare.
Smile.