Has everyone gone quiet or is it just me? Are the pubs not teeming with people looking to take someone home for the night? Are they not getting drunk into a stupor that makes them a little more tolerant of who they will wake up next to? Is everyone going to bed with visions of the hills and waking up to it again? Has everyone stopped questioning and started accepting? What is, is what is. What will be, will be. If I’m rudderless today, I’ll let myself drift. Till a branch or a beak catches me mid-flight. Or I will wait for the breeze to stop fanning my flight and lower me gently on to a flower petal or the earth.

It is liberating to not ask, ‘what next’ or ‘why so.’ It is sobering to live in absence. Of joy and sadness, euphoria and grief. Of unexplained delirium and spiralling slides. I am not traveling inward nor looking outward. I am here in this moment, doing what I must do till it is morning again. The vision of the hills keep visiting. There is an orange sun and there is me at the precipice, just sitting there with a readiness to let go. 

What is it like to not feel? To be a spectator, possibly the only spectator, to the theatre of the times? Water is drying up in the wells, plastic is piling up. Kids are planting bombs between heady puffs of smoke. Kids, whose birthdays remind their mother of her rape. Innocent animals are slaughtered so you can order a meal you can’t finish.

People are out on the streets demanding rights to right the wrongs. Rights for the displaced, rights to free speech, rights to choose whom to love, rights to protest the denial of rights to protest, rights to wear what they want, rights to offend, their rights versus the rights of the others. The right versus the left. Whose right is more right?  

Every column inch taken up, every street corner busy. The song of protest, the dance of solidarity, the silence of rebellion, the walk of dissent. They speak up in verse, they speak up in prose. Speak up for the gays, the jews, the rationalists, the whistle-blowers.

Speak up.

They are loud. They coo out of my music, they headline my newspapers. They stare at me from movie posters and appeal to my conscience through my literature. They won’t let me be till my voice rises with theirs. But it won’t. Why won’t it? Do I not have a heart? Does it not bleed?

Truth is, it doesn’t. I worry about the rising pile of dishes in the sink. I fret over a leaking pipe and a malfunctioning motor. The yard is unkempt and the bike is covered in dust. If their trays aren’t refilled, the cats will go hungry and if the bills aren’t paid today, my house will go dark.

I don’t ­run long distances, I don’t meditate, I don’t bake cupcakes and I don’t click sepia-tinged pictures. If you looked me up on Twitter, you would find that I am not even a writer. But I am happy to be alive. I wake up and smile, knowing that the sun is out. I don’t care about forced conversions as much as I care to know if my cricketing God indeed clicked a selfie. I am not half as outraged by the RSS or the ISIS as I am by the Silk Board traffic that won’t let me get home. Because I need to get home and catch up on today's Facebook outrage. You see, I am the guy without a cause.

All those causes up on the store shelves and yet, I'm not picking any.

The park benches keep their secrets well. What does the lovelorn know of those who have grown old together? Everyone is a stranger to each other and I am a stranger to them all. If I rested my head on the stolid stone, would I hear whispers and laughter that found pores to slip into and never leave? Would it splash cool comfort on my soul like the conch shells from a sea-shore do?

What would I know about comfort? I have always only hummed tunes that weep. Draped in a summer evening breeze, I sing songs of melancholy like that’s all it means. I stare right through the sight of children racing with their pinwheels. ‘I am just a tune, these words aren’t mine,’ the breeze tries to reason but I am not listening. I turn my face up and blow out another plume of smoke and watch it waft back to my face. White, amorphous and toxic. What would I know of comfort in this refuge?

If I were a vandal, I would scribble the names of all those I have sought refuge in. What names, though? I have only ever been good with stories, the names always fade away. The texture of a voice, the violence of a stare, the shoe size in the mud, I remember them all. I can’t tell who they belong to and it does not matter. What I have kept belongs to me.

Through the smokescreen, I stare at the house at the far end. How much of the house does the attic take, I wonder. I imagine an old man who hoards. Every year he knocks the house down and rebuilds it so it would have a bigger attic to stow things in. The first to make way is the bedroom. He starts sleeping on the couch, not always alone. The ones he lets in leave something behind every time. Then one day the kitchen disappears. He learns to eat out of cans. As the years pass, his attic outgrows his house and he finds himself sleeping on the cold earth outside his well-locked door. He is weak but possessed by a passion to guard his hearth. He had decided years ago that not a thing in there would ever be thrown out. So he grows old outside, forced out by those he allowed in for shelter.

The children have gone home for the night. Come evening and they will be back here. But how could I be so certain? I am out of smokes, sleep better not be elusive. My cheeks turn cold and numb from pressing against the stone bench. Would the story of my mistaken certainties slip into one of its pores as I sleep?

­

When the phone rings, its sound slices right through the 3AM peace of my hotel room like the shrill cry of a newborn in a hospital ward. And I seem to be ready for it, as I always am these days, even in my increasingly fleeting bits of sleep. I don’t need to rub my eyes, I don’t need a moment to compose myself; I know it’s you. I know your jetlag is keeping you up again and I’m happy because it has made you dial my number, something I wished you had done hours ago before I went to bed.

I hear your voice on the other end as you tell me that you wrote a poem that you want me to read. So we hang up and I look it up on my phone. Almost instantly, I slip into that now permanent sense of imbalance. My heart palpitates, as it always seems to do these days. I am back to that moment when you told me that you spent the night in someone else’s bed. Your verse romanticizes the night you spent alternating between the high of the joint he rolled and the warmth of the stories he probably told you between kisses. I know nothing about that place but in my head, I have constructed that night a thousand times. Did you not think of me before you put your phone on silent mode and escaped into him? Or was it the thought of me that made you do that? Neither of those thoughts is more comforting than the other. A part of me protests that I don’t deserve to feel this way; that it wasn’t a fair return for a night that I had spent looking at your pictures and trying to reach you – trying desperately to make sure you were safe in that foreign land. Another part of me dismisses that notion, arguing that fairness held no currency because you had never promised me anything.

I think back to the words of a friend, “you think you are in control, you think you will manage it all by yourself, but you can’t. That’s just how depression works.” Maybe I should have kept my appointment with my counselor that night instead of telling myself that I would be okay without her. Half-remarkable phrases that I had laughed off in the past now start haunting me. “Karma will catch up with you,” one lover had said between sobs. “You don’t abandon the ones you love,” another one had reasoned. “Why did you just drift apart,” a third one had once asked. Until a few nights ago, those had been mere breakup conversations. And now, they seemed to carry the sharpness of a blade that had been sharpened for a long time in its wait for a battle.

I check the time and realize that I have been up for an hour now. ‘And you say you are jet-lagged,’ I proclaim loudly and chuckle.  There is no defence against the night if you can’t sleep. It finds you at your softest and keeps working you till you break. I wonder if I should have left my phone on silent mode like you did that night with your temporary lover. Then I baulk at that phrase – t e m p o r a r y   l o v e r – because it occurs to me that I am one too. For you like finding lovers in every place you go to. But I am a man of constants. I need threads to hold me from falling apart. And in this moment, far away from home, I only have two. So I reach for my laptop and light up a cigarette. On nights like these, things that could kill end up saving you. 

They may call it madness, an affliction of the mind, a condition that needs repair. In truth, that is just one of the many ways they admit that they are scared of the world you see. They know they will never know the completeness of absolute surrender. So listen to me, this madness within, let it slowly own you. Let it spread its roots into the very fiber of your existence, every thought you think. Let it pump blood, let it breathe air. Protect it and nurture it. Give it shade, give it sun, wash it in the truth of your 3 AM tears. For what is madness to them is just that last flicker of life that keeps you alive in ways they will never know.

Fall in love with this madness, for it will kill you otherwise.

What would you remember of this night when you don't remember me at all?

Of this night, I will remember how painful it is to say goodbye even when it is a promise to meet again tomorrow. I will remember how difficult it is to live these moments in the knowledge that very soon, I will have to trust memories to keep them alive. Do you trust memories? I don’t. They have a way of moulding slices of our lives into little bonsai shapes that protrude where it hurts. Like, they will relegate the bit where we ended up saying the same things at the same time, not once, but twice in an evening. They will play up the bits where my presence was a shadow on a lane that didn’t belong to us. They will tell me nothing about the joy in discovering that you click your fingers with your thumb and the forefinger. This night will revisit in flashes of your smiles from the past that had for long sought a way out.

Of this night, I will remember how I sat next to you and quietly looked out of the windows at all those brightly lit streets. How I let you into yet another piece of the world that I will never again be able to reclaim.

Of this night, I will remember a stranger who found the warmth of a home by the stairs of a doorway.  

Acceptance

You have lived half your life and never really understood it. You have read about it, pretended to understand it and made a neat little bunch of quotable quotes. Then one day, you learn about it anew and you realize that nothing you thought you knew about it has prepared you for it. It reveals itself in slow doses every hour, every day.

Acceptance is lying on your bed, sobbing and throwing up, and wiping your face with the bedsheet as the cat outside keeps knocking on the door.

Acceptance is calling a friend, pleading for help and then hanging up midway.

Acceptance is fighting with the washing machine, punching it on the sides and willing it to quieten because the sound causes your stomach to churn.

Acceptance is sitting out in the sun and breaking down. It is lying under the quilt and breaking down.

Acceptance is battling the see-saw of your moods; it’s delirium one moment, and fear the next moment. It’s control followed by a spiraling fall.

Acceptance is making light of everything because faking is easier than confronting.

Acceptance is adding up your life in episodes and wondering if it could have been any different.

Acceptance is asking the one you love the most to walk away because you don’t have the answers she seeks.

Acceptance is praying that she never finds herself like you when she has come this far.

Acceptance is letting the mask slip and coming undone with your grief.

Acceptance is living through it all and yet somehow willing yourself into living another day. 

Acceptance is fool's courage. It is setting out again, giving yourself another chance.