The church mouse and the God

We took off, the two of us. Hugging my back was a battered, brown leather bag, inside which rested in a comfortable tumble, my toothbrush, notepad and pen. He came empty handed. He would borrow my toothbrush he said; the rest he had little use for. I dressed in my toughest jeans, an old shirt splattered with ink, and my worn-out trekking boots. He wore dungarees, paired with an immaculate white t-shirt, dark glasses and impractical padukas. The writer and her handsome, rebel muse.

We were going on a dangerous adventure. He had read about the divine light at the end of a certain tunnel that seemed to exist merely in the map he had tattooed on his forearm, all the way up his shoulder. As good sense goes, I was mad to trust him, but his animal charm was not something my fumbling soul could resist. I was but a lowly writer, in search of a muse to worship, and my unlikely God I had found.

We travelled on foot.

Every time I asked how far away we were, or indeed if this blessed light was to be found on our continent, he simply showed me his arm, and said, ‘From here to there is where we go.’ When I did get a little restless, I took my notepad out and started sketching. A sharp paragraph for his profile, a little limerick for his adorable nose, a sonata for his lips, a poem for his gorgeous hair. He held my hand, guiding me around puddles and pebbles, whilst I scribbled away an ode to him. He pointed out, at that juncture, a glimmering speck in the distance that was our hallowed light. We hurried on. But when night came, we settled beneath an apple tree, huddled beneath a single wrap of muslin that he conjured up through a needle stuck in his dungarees. Weakened by the presence of this peasant God, I felt my legs turn to colloid. And he told me stories that seeped through the little pores on my goose-bumping hand, and coiled their through my blood stream, to my brain, from where a bunch of little warriors threw spears at my beating heart. My heart bled a black ink, which stained my pages boldly. We woke up when an apple hit my head, and he was cross that the apple chose to fall on my plain head. He stalked off and I scurried along. We reached a river, on which he walked without creating a ripple. I almost drowned in that reptilian pool and he didn’t care. The shimmering speck grew bigger. It looked like a mystical orb now. And when he turned to look at me finally, the orb made a halo around his head. So awed was I by the vision, I was caught unawares when he hurled a heavy rock on my being. That night, under a wise Oak, I wrote a letter of bloody pain on my notepad, as a purple-blue song wrote itself upon my tender bruise. The muslin, he kept to himself.

He soon grew tired of me, I could see that. He held me close, even as he inflicted deep cuts on the tips of my fingers and drew my soul out, with some potent form of black magic. It was then that we saw people down the road. He threw me by the wayside and made merry with the bunch over a bonfire and bon-bons with naughty gifts. That night, the white sap from the rubber tree wove my despair upon the dark, starless skies. The morning after, we were only hours away from the light, and he walked ahead with his bunch. I hurried along as fast as I could, the church mouse scurrying to keep up with the God.

And then we were there. The light. A nasty smell tickled my nostrils, and stung my bruised being. I walked a little closer, and there I saw a radioactive heap of poisonous intent. When he turned to give me a smile, it was evil…as revealed by the waves of noxious energy. In the radioactive light, the map on his hand was nothing but a pattern depicting the mouth of hell. At the centre of the light was an isotopic pool of death.

I turned, I left. I walked, sore and serrated, till I reached the apple tree. That night, for the first time, I took the pen out of my weathered bag and wrote, of my own volition, ‘Goodbye.’

Dear Huge-Bosomed Female Reptile From Hell’s Smelly Belly

That gauzy veil you tra-la-la behind; it makes you look ugly. It brings out the enormity of your nose. It accentuates the pockmarks on your face. Makes the grey in your hair look like it was sewn from all the ageing maggots of the world. Most of all, it makes your insecurity stand out in high relief- even a starved Somalian kid’s ribs seem inconspicuous in comparison.

For the very fabric of that gauzy veil was steeped in a deep vat of pretense.

And then brushed with grimy dots of cheap glitter before you wore it upon your being, so excitedly.

You smile so widely for me- but all I can see is your big nose. You tilt your head in impossible angles and act coy- but all I can see is the disgusting disproportion of your nostrils. You wear all those tight clothes- yet, I can only see your face fading in the horizon, so pathetically behind your nose.

You say black is back. But you still drape that smelly shroud of deceit upon your adipose-infected self, to cover up your darkness. Do you not think black is a desirous colour? Why do you have a wardrobe full of miniscule black dresses? If such is the shade of your heart and mind, why won’t you showcase it? Barbie and Ken look happy in pink- but don’t you see? Ken is gay and there have been no summer rains in Barbie’s dry, cold world. Pink is not the colour of the season. No one cucking fares.

The human soul is black. Every single soul. But even black has different shades. Who is to say black can’t be pure? Why do you assume it isn’t the exact shade of innocence? Have you proof that it doesn’t incite passion?

There is the black of the night. The black of being consumed. The black of pleasure in pain. The black of current, and that of currant. Of Sabbaths and Bettys. Birds and Velvet.

Your black is just as unique perhaps. Just perhaps. But you choose to camouflage it and bite from behind, catching people unawares. But don’t give yourself credit. You aren’t rabid, not that powerful, no. You don’t kill. You just bite, and people exclude you from the radius of their existence after that.

Dear, Cellulite Bottomed Girl. Instead, why don’t you occupy yourself with thoughts of velvety cakes and Jim Morrison in tight blue velvet? Of days in Oktober Munich and flowers drifting in the nippy October air? Of Mary Hopkins’ voice and the voice of your heart’s reason? And if you absolutely insist on being just like me, why don’t you just shuck the fut up and observe from a corner?

Why won’t you be real?

Or if ‘real’ is an alien concept in your ammonium-sulphate filled world, here’s a better idea. Get out of my face.

No love and looking forward to the cessation of your existence,

Me

28 years

To be able to live knowing that life was a short, sweet melody, and not a long-winded song. A snappy vignette of the best parts. No flim flam. Boo hooey.

Being able to indulge in shameless debauchery, knowing you didn’t have to preserve your body, for use beyond those splendid 28 years. 28 years spent in some sort of quarter-coma and bursts of prodigious lucidity, wafting about much like the fragrance of a lily-of-the-valley. Riding along on substance and liquid alone. Wearing otherworldly psychedelic sunglasses that tint the present day, a colourful shade of the past. Bearing only netherworldly intentions.

A rebel without a cause. Without disguise. Without guile. Just all the bile. After a heavy night with the effervescent golden gods. Waking up the next morning, to the sound of the gods hammering away at your medulla. You acquiesce them with hair of the dog. A peace offering. All you care about is going higher, hitting the zenith of madness. Hit the road Jack. Remember all tomorrow’s parties. Remember little else.

But what would I do if I could count my days to the last breath? Would I play pretend? Would I theorise and philosophise, the possibilities of life in a different era, while I dedicate the present to impious indulgence? Would I make my life an ode to megalomania? Or perhaps a tribute to wasting? And wasting away? Would I sell my soul to the Devil for a lifetime of evil pleasures at my beckoning?

In a life that would end before responsibilities began, in a life that would end before true love’s honeymoon came to an end… I’d surrender to life.

To risks. I’d live recklessly, fearing not the dreaded tomorrow. I’d take the plunge. I’d taste things the way they’re meant to be…without trepidation coating my taste buds. I’d love like there was no tomorrow, because there would be no tomorrow. Glad to meet you; it was my pleasure and all pleasure. Free-falling. Free of the thought of failing. Songs to be written, poetry to be experienced, verse to immerse in. With a peg to nurse and a pug to pet. All the sleep to catch up on. So much of it. Without the ink of bad memory drawing out a detailed pattern of insomnia. No more skeins of stress staining my sleep. The forty winks that only a man with no time deserves.

Days dedicated to getting intoxicated on the sublimation of self. Notebook by side. And warm candlelight. Thoughts that wax eloquent on sufficient lubrication pour forth onto papyrus. A legacy in a thousand letters, with nary a fetter. 

There’d be too little time. And yet, not a minute in surplus.

The End would come at the 28^th hour of the 28^th year. I would wait with my suitcase, stuffed with words and worth. Life would be snuffed out in an instant. I'd play my part dutifully with a few snuffs and puffs. A few hours of messy heaving. And then dry heaving, when little remains but the spirit…readying itself for flight. In the arms of an angel I'd go. 

Far away from here.

coma of the non-medical kind

The promise of a sterile tomorrow that holds no promise

The frustrating certainty of trusted certainty

Squishy brain mass squelched by Prozac doses of ennui

Seeking lobotomical relief

A heart devoid of soul and a soul devoid of spirit

Days of a monotonous hell that hath no fury

Reserved for a madwoman’s scorn

A hell of vacuous vaccum

Dusty morning walks to purgatory, seeking salvation

Slacking off in purgatory

The senses sung to sleep by the collective lullaby of potent moronic babble

Finding hara-kiri-like kinship in listlessness

Shuffling about in sparkling new shoes with rusted needles that poke

The feet that don’t want to walk, that want to bathe in dehydrating turpentine

Loud voices and acrid smells float about with an iron baton of doom

Waiting to swipe out of the slightest smidge of life essence

Karma has left the building

Caffeinated grey cells feed the imagination

Fed unto nasty obesity

Tears add salt to the wound

They dry up before you can feel them with your disgustingly unsullied finger

Doused out by clouds of poisonous sedation

Dreams die before birth, before conception, before lovemaking

Goals kicked out silently expanding French windows

Desire, a maggot-wrapped package

Emotion…

The lack thereof

Of spinning and living

When I went to office on my first day of work, I thanked my stars for the salsa red of my workstation, the wide-screened magnanimity of my computer monitor, the endless opportunities, the golden smiles and my lovely blue chair that would spin at will. When I wrote my first ever article, it was with avaricious ambition that I played away on my keyboard, like a novice taking her first piano lesson, faltering and blithering, but finding a giggly joy even in raw dissonance. When I drove my own sweet car for the first time, I had the cheek to actually chuckle and swear back in Tamil at all the people who asked me ‘ootla-sollitiya’? Oh and when I first fell in love, it was with the wide-eyed naiveté of a new-born lamb that I entered a land of roses, where Elton John and Paul Anka songs played on loop. I baahed and booed and cantered about happily, my tinkly laugh announcing to the world that I was a lamb in love. Baaah!

Today, the red of my workspace could be a royal blue for all I care, the smiles could be a stale silver. The articles that I write lack inspiration and the sound of my typing reminds me of an old lady from the 80s attending to her government job, striking the keys of her type-writer slower than the rotating speed of the squeaky ceiling fan. The last time I drove my car, I merely bared my fangs at the kena-dog cyclist who dared cross my path. And when I fell out of love, it was with all the tinkling joie de vivre of a zombie that I trudged out.

Of my friends, I have always been the most immature, most prone to spawning ‘heated’ cold wars with best friends, most likely to take a leap without making sure there was a safety net waiting below, much given to laughing like a pig-hyena hybrid at inappropriate times, like when being scolded by a professor for sleeping in class. During my college excursion to Wayanad, along with four classmates, I teetered up a slippery rock path, to the part of the waterfall where many people quite simply slip and die. I refused to be one of the thirty other girls who were busy taking pictures of themselves, prettily dipping their toes in the cool waters. But then, life changes you, doesn’t it? You join work, assume an air of pseudo importance and stick your nose up in the air, convinced that you’re the best thing that happened since the creation of cheese. You kill the toddler in you and go all grown-up on yourself and the world. You enter a relationship as a baby, and while in it, morph into a scary aunty, haggling constantly in a migraine-inducing voice. After this comes a point where you stop caring, build a wall around yourself and get super-fat on a dose of ‘Don’t give a damn’. It is approximately at this juncture that life begins to sing to you in Steven Tyler’s voice ‘Yeah your so jaded, and I'm the one that jaded you’. And sadly, all you can think of as a counter is, ‘it’s ‘you’re’ not ‘your’’.

Thankfully, life, apart from performing tacky covers on Aerosmith, also gives you wake up calls, reminding you to kindly get your limbs to move it, move it; your bottoms to, shake it, shake it. Because, really, what’s life if you can’t dance like crazy cartoons or do a funky Hakuna Matata a la Timon and Pumbaa. What’s the point of getting used to things? What’s the point of not caring? What’s the point of being a zombie, just because you won’t get hurt? What’s the point of being impassive when you can rave and rant? What’s the point of saying ‘whatever’, when you can yell ‘what the hell are you thinking you dung-brained raccoon-face?!’ What’s the point of mumbling about your job when you’re the one sitting there- no one’s dying for you to stay, you know. What is the point of giving up on life when you can give it one tight slap and demand that it ‘say sorry’?

Life is all about getting hurt, pulling your hair out, bugging all your friends and making them laugh the next minute, typing nonsense and then saying ‘now that is called nonsense verse my children’, pulling your window down and shouting ‘daiiii **** **** ***’ at the next biker who acts smart with you. It is about growing angry with your partner but never bored, about doing crazy things because they make you happy, about crying for days on end when love is lost but then looking to the future with hope and a renewed partner-preference list.

Life is about being the lovely willow which bends to the wild tempest and escapes better than the strict oak which resists it. Life is about spinning in that pretty blue chair for five minutes every single day!

Love, victually

It is with much shame that I admit, my comrades, the dishonourable truth. The appalling reality.

I share a more meaningful relationship with food than I do with you.

So why is it that a deep dish of pesto pasta or a banana leaf of choice Iyengar delicacies or a smidgen of perfectly-textured mousse, or a bowl of creamy Thai curry, or a stack of bebinca…sigh….so, where I am getting is, why do all of these aforementioned items seem more enticing to me than a long, meaningful, cosy conversation with my friends and loved ones? I thought about it hard the other day, when this heart-breaking home truth exploded in my head in the first place, like a heady overdose of wasabi. It was one of those Anusha-in-murderous-mood kind of days, when everything was getting on my nerves. Friends offered their impatient sympathies through instant chat and I made plans to meet several of them later in the day. In the evening, however, as I was getting ready to head out, I changed my mind. I texted my friends asking them to please forgive me for ditching at the last minute, but something had come up. What had come up was my dear appetite. So what I did was, head out to the nearest restaurant and order a plate of mashed potatoes. I then devoured a main course of gnocchi. It was lovely. Not doughy like many stupid restaurants tend to make it these days. Next stop- the friendly neighbourhood coffee shop, where dark passion awaited me in the form of a tall-glassed mélange of chocolate ice cream, chocolate brownie, chocolate sauce and chocolate rolls. Half an hour later, Anusha went home and slept like a baby-on-Cerelac. The next day, everything was well with the world again. Since then, I’ve been taking mental notes…Food versus Home Sapiens. Here are some thoughts:

Food makes me cry, brings out the emotions in me:
Those who know me as a mere acquaintance, think I am granite- cold, heartless, emotionless. Those who know me better, however, will tell you I am The Tempest in human form. I rave, I rant, I growl, I grunt, I bite (telepathically), I jump… but I don’t cry, not that easily anyway. But I kid you not, the last time I was fortunate enough to come upon the perfect Thai curry, tears escaped involuntarily and unchecked, until I realized the curry wasn’t even that hot. I was crying tears of unhindered joy.
“Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right - instantly.” ~ Thomas Chandler Haliburton)
Food makes me ‘right’.


Food doesn’t have crazy expectations and is not possessive:
It won’t mind if you don’t account for where you were last evening at 6.17 pm. It won’t give two hoots if you have a life-sized zit on your life-sized nose. It doesn’t even expect you to brush your teeth before you kiss it. And sure as hell, a jam tart isn’t going to demand an explanation when you decide to switch to burfi, one fine day. All food does, is dole out spaghetti-like spools of never-ending, comforting love.
“Expectations in your life just lead to giant disappointments.” Michael Landon
Pass me the giant bowl of popcorn, please. Mr Disappointment, be on your way now.

Food and I share a love-love relationship:
I love food and food loves me. It is that simple. Food shows its love for me by being yielding, fulfilling and filling, and I show my deep affection for it by polishing of every last morsel. Who cares about kama sutra, when you can have khana sutra?
“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.” Stendhal

I hope my next meal is just as good as the last one.

Food has a universal language:

Yummy, mmm, ahh, ooooh la la... you don't need to know Spanish to tell a boat of tacos that you love it.

"Smiles are the language of love." David Hare
Oh that olan, oh that pulisheri.... :-)
Finally...

When all is down and the world is plotting against you...:

... Turn to a plate of thayir sadam and maanga oorga for comfort, instant relief and a quantum of solace. It is unlikely to tell you 'Sorry darling, am stuck in a meeting. We'll talk after three and a half hours.'

- FYI, here's a note to The Eagles: Love doesn’t keep you alive. I tried it once and after merely six hours, I suffered from symptoms of dehydration and started having severe hallucinations that involved being locked in a bottomless pit of despair. Try the food life sometime, guys.

Dear God

Dear God,


I am not an atheist as people think I am. I am not even an agnostic. I am a believer. In fact, just because I don’t go to a church or a temple, it doesn’t make me less of a believer than X, who FYI is asleep through Sunday sermon, or Y who goes to the temple only to surreptitiously feast his eyes on the hip-swaying, faux coy girls who seem to come just to sashay prettily around the deities like the whole thing were indeed a roundabout fashion show. Ok so I don’t pray at home either- I don’t pray anywhere. There’s just something warped about the concept of prayer taught to me that makes it so immensely unpalatable. ‘Ask and thou shall receive’, I was told. This is prayer, I was told. Which is not fair because starving Somalians have fairer needs than I do and their supplications must reach you before mine do, by all means. I lost all faith, over the years, in the image of you that was almost force-drilled into my head. Later, I tried to find the real you several times. I tried to find you in a church and I slept as most Catholics do in church. I went temple-hopping and was no nearer to communicating with you, but I did form a list of favourite temples- ranked based on the quality of prasadam they served. When this failed, I got interested in Jaggi Vasudev and tried to immerse myself in his teachings and change my way of approaching prayer. It got me no nearer to prayer. In fact, it erased prayer from my life- which was really an achievement because the zero-hearted nonsensical verses I was spouting at night, out of habit, seemed like an insult unto you. Osho went right over my head and I couldn’t jump high enough to gather sense. Oh and the new stuff about how one can have conversations with God as if he were a friend… I tried it, it felt rather strange. Also, my mother thought I was hiding someone in my room. So that was that. Officially anchorless and empty, at this point I felt I could well be the brand ambassador for No Man’s Land, if such a land did exist. I came to a conclusion that you would take care of my needs anyway, whether or not I touched base with you. It’s like my relationship with two of my closest friends- I do not have to talk to them every day for me to confidently believe they will be there for me anyway, even if I was a kidney-peddling fraudster or a croaking copulating bull frog. I accepted that you would give me my daily bread whether or not I asked for it and forgive me, whether or not I was repentant.

The Let Us Make Anusha Religious drives stopped ages ago. But still, my insistent cousin tells me now and then ‘Prayer is not just about asking and receiving. It is also a means to give thanks.’ Well, when I dig into a bowl of creamy mashed potato, with nary a lump or bump, my body says thanks in entirety. My five senses strike up a harmony, my gastric juices gush and gurgle, and every organ tinkles…'thanks!’ they effuse in unison. Now, in comparison, kneeling and saying ‘thanks for the mashed potato God’ seems so supremely lame. Similarly, when something I really want happens, I don’t fold my hands (as is wont by many an elder in the family) and say ‘Praise the lord. You are the most supreme. You are the master of the universe.’ See, I’m sure you already know you’re the master of the universe- so I don’t want to reiterate that. Instead, I go ahead and indulge in hardcore happiness. My happiness is my prayer of thanksgiving to you.

All said, I do have some requests. I mean, I know Somalia still needs you, and Afghanistan too, but if you don’t mind terribly, and you’re up for some lightweight duty, you know what to do. Also, if we are destined to meet in a more direct sense sometime, please don’t be put off by my seeming nonchalance. It’s fake. Maybe then I can have a proper conversation with you, without doubts creeping into my mind, as to whether perhaps I ought to check myself into a mental health facility.

And oh, just for the record, thanks for everything. Really.

Much love,
Anusha