A gentle reminder

It’s easy to get lost in the maze. To get distracted among the many beautiful and wondrous things, to run far and wide, so far that you lose yourself in the chasm of the diversity, the vibrant colours and the rumours of great things outside, to the extent that you lose sight of who you are and what matters to you most. You’ve forgotten your friends, those who were there with you when you had nowhere else to turn, who would still help you up if you were to fall down. You’ve forgotten your mother, who gave you the world and the power of will to make a name for yourself, the only one who would take you back inside, even if the entire world were to kick you out on to the streets. You’ve forgotten your brother who looks up to you to show him the way, and your sister who needed you to be around, to take on the reigns if she ever dropped them. The distractions are overwhelming and you’ve lost sight of the breadcrumbs that you dropped, ironically so that you would find your way back. You’ve forgotten what love looks like. You’ve fallen in it too many times, and each time it is different and unfamiliar, that you can no longer tell how real anything is. I know what you are. What you are is scared. The lines of love are blurred and you don’t know where to stand anymore, or if there is anywhere left to stand at all. It’s easy to get lost. I know you are tired. Tired of looking and getting lost trying. Tired of promises of happily ever afters that you see on tv, tired of seeing someone else in the eyes of the one you adore and tired of seeing love walk away. So you get used to this. Falling in and out. It is easy to fall in love. But it is difficult to stay in love.

I know it is hard.  But baby, I want you to remember. I want you to remember what love looks like. Love will remind you of your mother, because she is the reason you have survived, to look at the world with eyes so big that you only see the good in people and not the ugliness of material things. He will remind you of your best friends, who have taught you that life is a struggle, and to live it you must fight, and fight you must with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. She will remind you of your grandmother, who is a fighter on her own, a one-woman army if you may, who would fight for her values and teach you how to make an amazing chatney at the same time. He will remind you of your love of people, of how you want to help them fight their battles. He will also remind you of sorrow, your ability to give and to feel other’s pain. She will remind you that you can endure, and that you are strong, even when the whole world will try to prove otherwise. He will remind you of love letters, written with heavy, heartfelt words that were blotted out by tears that fell on the page. She will remind you of trees, and sunny beaches, and hot chocolate fudge on rainy days, of animals and the way you rolled in the mud when you were small, and didn’t care that you got your cloths dirty. But Love…Love will not be perfect. She will not be as beautiful to look at as you thought she will be. He will have his flaws. She will snore at night. He will be annoying. She will not return your calls. He will not be as funny as you hoped he will be, and she will not be as cute as you remember her. He will have crooked teeth that ruin your romantic kiss. She will wear too much perfume. He might not speak the language of your grandmother, but will still make you shine and your grandmother will understand that he loves you the most. She will not be perfect, but she will hold you like you were. He will not be the greatest cook, but will always have something for you to eat when you are hungry.  She will not be the most experienced under the sheets, but she will sew you a quilt from her hands that will wrap you on your hardest days, and tell you that everything will be alright.

And most of all, love will stay. Love will stay because it is easy to move on, and to get distracted by she who is prettier, or he who is funnier. Love wants to do what is difficult. Love does not want you to change for him, but she will change you for the better. Love will bring out the best in you, when you think you don’t have it in you. Love will remind you that the world is nothing but pain and suffering, and sadness all ballad up into one blue dot. But Love will also remind you that there is goodness in the world, of people reaching out to connect even in the middle of chaos and pain, and it is still a blessing to wake up every morning. Love will stay. Even when you yourself expect Love to leave. Love will stay and watch you grow up. And love will grow up with you. 

Smoke and Mirrors - Picture by Florence Henri 

Moody

I can see forever from up here. I can see the rain kissing the giant window panes that surround me. I watch the sky change her mood from dark to pale even in the middle of the day, and towards the evening, perhaps when she is tired from switching between the two, she would burst out in shades of pink and orange that would later turn into darker shades of blue or purple that stay that way till finally, pitch black takes over and the lights in the city blink wide awake. It’s a steady process, so to say, an unwritten statement between the humans here and nature above. How the city lights take over when the sun retires. Especially during Christmas, out here in the city, it is truly a sight to live.

I look down, and see the hustle and bustle of the activity down below. People and vehicles rushing past, missing out on this view. It’s the season, and everyone is caught up with it.  But I am here in a room, locked away from all of that. From here, I can see the sea peaking over the buildings in the far corner, her shades more of a mossy green, sometimes turning gray and matching shades with the sky that’s not too sure of what colour she should look like. But let me tell you a secret. If you watch her close enough, you can almost see her moods change as you watch. But for that, you need to ‘want’ to see.

I’ve wanted to write about someone for some time now. But I didn’t know how to start, or how I would finish. Because it’s just a thought, and thoughts rarely have any beginning or ending. Its just there. Like her. She comes and goes. I don’t know much about her, but each day I meet her, I learn something new about her. A fact, or a thought about her, that I didn’t know previously. She would give one fact, each meeting, and from these ‘facts’ I would learn about her, how she works and how she thinks. She is probably –indirectly- the reason why I am in this room in the first place.  Yesterday, she said that each of us are here to learn.  And the longer we stay on this plane, born and reborn, we gather ‘learnings’. These ‘learners’ breed compassion, and understanding of each other and that takes eons to cultivate. Because there are lesser the ‘learned’ among us. They are young and they don’t know how to feel. They just are. Vessels carrying souls that don’t ‘feel’. No- actually they do. They do feel, but they feel only about themselves. Atleast, that is what she tells me. I think she could be right. But I want to add to her ‘thoughts’. I add that they, these older individuals not only feel and understand others, but also, -counteractively- are unattached to them. They do not ‘cling’ on to what they feel for. But try to heal them instead. They feel them, their pain and their suffering, and do their best to heal them. And then be off on their way to learn more. And at the end of their learning, they leave. They are allowed to leave because they do not cling on.  They don’t need more and more of what they pleasured, but understand that wanting more will only prolong their stay here. But I don’t know for sure. It’s just a thought. It doesn’t have a beginning, or even an end. Maybe one day I will know.

Imprints

It’s about stories. Random moments caught in the frame of time that tell a story. It could be a giant ruk tree that yawns above a passer-by or stone Buddha statues clad in a yellow robes meditating in a row or an old lady smiling at the dawn of sunlight. It could be something completely irrelevant and trivial to someone who is too busy to notice, but there is still a story in its core. People have so much to tell although they appear to be silent. Sometimes I wonder how a person can keep all those thoughts and emotions locked up inside them, and why they haven’t overflown out of them like an erupting volcano. I want my life to be about these people I share it with. The people I love who have influenced me and have added into my life. Not reduced from it. I want to talk about them. Them and their stories. The people who have crossed my path, about how they add to me and my thoughts. I want them to trust me enough to exchange their stories, and know that their secrets are safe with me. I want to talk about the person who gave birth to me and about the person who gave everything to me and watched me grow.  I want to talk about the strong women in my life, who have drowned in sorrow from trials that were forced on them and how they survived, and struggled out of them, chocking and gasping for life. I want to talk about friends. Friends who visit me when I least expect them to. And friends who make me laugh uncontrollably, for no particular reason and who know me so well that they can almost read my thoughts, even from the other side of the world. I want to talk about the men I fell in love with, how their dynamics keep on twisting and churning with mine as they switch from stranger to friend to lover to a mark on my skin that will never fade. I want to talk about how his hands are different from yours and how differently yours fit in mine.  I want to talk of how you make me laugh, and how you giggle and look away when you are shy. I want to share my energies with you, and I want you to share yours with me. I don’t want to be the person snap chatting and facebooking each day because I would rather spend my energy making talk, or even no talk at all because we’re so busy looking at the sky and trees in real time. I want to adopt a baby girl one day, and surround her with little baby animals for her to play with. I want to show her that the world hasn’t forgotten her. And that the world is still beautiful. I will give her what the beautiful women in my life have given me. Strength and hope. When I meet her, she will be old enough to know that the world is cruel, but young enough to have faith in it. And then I will teach her that although the world is a dark and treacherous place, it can still be beautiful when you reach out and make a difference in someone’s life. I will grow old with her and live to be the lady who doesn’t mind a messy house with lots of plants and wild animals in it with me. I want them to imprint positive energies in me, so that I can imprint it on someone else. Because in the end, all that matters is how softly you walked with someone’s soul and how you made them feel.

Picture by Chatrini Weeratunge

The kiss

When you kiss her, kiss her like you mean it. Not one of those hit and run pecks. But a real kiss. The one where you look at her eyes instead of her boobs. The one where it’s about you and her only. Not the one where you feel like tearing your way through her to be inside her. No, that’s for later. This is the one where you first turn her face towards you when she gets shy and she looks away to avoid your gaze. You breathe in the smell of her face and feel her stubborn strands of hair prick your cheeks. Hold her face in your hand, and make her look at you. Slide your hands behind her back and hold her from her waist, not her butt, and pull her towards you. That’s when you move in to feel her lips. You close your eyes and take your time. Savor her, like the time you drank a fresh, steaming cup of tea in the coldest weather on top of Adam's Peak. Explore her, as though it was the first time. The different textures and lines of her skin remind you of the creases of dry leaves in February and while you trace these lines, you notice her breathing is in sync with yours; shallow and fast. You can’t hear your own breathing over the sound of the ocean wind. You don't hear your own thoughts because you badly want to know what goes on in her head. Her hands run down your back, slowly tracing the ridges of your spine and you feel as though she is draining out your day’s stresses through her fingers. And then you kiss her like you want the idea of her to dance through you, and you feel paused in time. Kiss her like you’ve forgotten any other mouth that you’ve ever touched. Kiss her like you are starving. Kiss her soft. Kiss her silly. Kiss her until it hurts your heart. Move away. And then ask her what number comes after 1 and 2 and listen to her answer with your name.

Tuks and spirits

                                                              

Tuk drives are always entertaining, bumpy, dusty rides. But at times, they offer a little bit more than what you bargain for.

If you’re abroad and missing home, one of the first things that you will probably start to miss about your paradise island is the taste of a spicy, freshly made pol sambol with roast paan and parippu. Nothing beats that. Except for maybe kottu. Followed by the all-authentic tuk experience. 

The three seated box like transportation device is the sight-seeing genius of this century. Hop on it and trace your way through the winding roads of the city without hassle, especially if the driver is knowledgeable. It’s cheap, compact and fast so a handful of friends can easily scoot about in it. It also so happens that normal vehicle laws don’t apply to these things in the sense that tuks can take U turns on roads that can’t and in fact don’t allow vehicles to do so. This is done at the discretion of the driver and passengers but done nonetheless. The uncovered sides let the people inside get an eye full of the uncharted view of everything outside, while exposing them everything outside, including the elements of dust, rain and vehicle fog. 

During the night, the local tuk experience is equally entertaining but more to the dodgy side. There are not many people on the road, and the lights in the few cars that pass your tuk, cut straight through your vision as the cool night air whooshes past your ears.  It was a quarter month moon that night. The stars littered the sky like glitter dust, piercing each inch of the dense, black blanket with little specks of burning light. 

Theekshana travels at this time because his job is on shift basis. He doesn’t mind. In fact, he prefers it to traveling during the day. He avoids harsh sunlight, stuffy busses that play biscuit kudu music, clogged roads, dusty pavements and people running about like hamsters in their wheels. At times there would be no buses so he would hail one of the few darting tuk tuks. Few of which would actually stop to take a wiry passenger. There’s no fixed point where he would hail one, so sometimes he’d have to actually go looking for one. On that night too, he wondered off into the thick darkness starring up at the sky occasionally, and ogling the few odd characters that were his fellow commuters at this time. Save for the rare 24/7 saiver kade , every other shop is fast asleep by this time.  He kept on walking for a while, noticing how peaceful the eerie quiet was when he spotted a tuk in a quiet corner of the road. 

It was resting next to a closed shop by the road, almost hidden because its lights and engines were off, unless someone was specifically combing the area looking for a one, this tuk was dead to the night. Theekshana happened to be that one person who was specifically looking for one. He saw a feeble light seeping in from a half opened door a few yards away from the sleeping tuk, and assumed – no - hoped that whoever the driver was, was inside and would be willing to hitch him a ride. He had already braced himself for the high rates that were sure to be pelted at him because he knew that the prices in the night doubled to that in the morning. He thought he would hang around until whoever was inside the dim lighted room came out so he can ask if they would take him. His own impatient shuffling about annoyed him to the extent that he thought it would be okay to sit inside the tuk and wait for the voices inside the dimmed room to stop. And wondered which was ruder, to go knock on their door at the dead of the night and ask if the tuk was for hire, or go sit in it and wait for them to come out. 

He mentally opted for the second one and found himself at the back of the tuk tuk waiting for something to happen. And something did happen, quite unexpectedly too. As soon as he was getting comfortable in his seat, Theekshana felt as though he was being strangled. He felt clammy hands wrap themselves around his neck and the further he struggled to unlatch himself from whatever thing he was, it tightened its grip around him more and started to choke him. Tears fogged his vision as he flayed his arms and battled against the invisible clutches that held on to him so forcefully. His cries were muffled by his own thrashing around and as suddenly as the mayhem started, it stopped.

Theekshana scrambled out of the tiny interior and ran for it, without giving much thought to finding out who or what that had tried to assault him. 

Epilogue 

Theekshana had later visited the vicinity to get to the bottom of things. Apparently, someone had murdered the owner of the three wheeler to get it. Since then the vehicle is known to have been haunted. Whoever gets inside is attacked by an unseen entity. They had tried to sell it but no one would ride it, let alone buy it and eventually they allowed whoever to take it for no payment but still no one would go near it. A monk who had been called in to bless the vehicle had been able to communicate with the spirit and that was how the murder was revealed.


Original print on Ceylon Today on 4th of October 2014

Out there

When there is so much negativity, wrong intentions everywhere, so much hatred, ill thoughts and bad energies, I just want to go some place where there are no people. Just trees, water and animals. No man-made sounds like TVs or car horns or even any human language. Neither English nor Sinhala. No buildings or phones or canned food or even cloths. Not even the faint rustle of a page turning in a book. A place void of anything that reminds me of humans or even the fact that I am human with enough cognitive skills to understand that there is something wrong. Something terribly wrong with the way the earth is turning on its axis, the way our energies are attacking each other, harassing and colliding on to each other, the way our minds are out of control; destroying everything in our path.

Perhaps a place on top of a mountain where I am unattached to everything that goes wrong in the world. Unattached from even the world itself where there are children killing children and fathers killing daughters. A place where there is just nothingness but trees and water. Unending and free.

Recovery

The steady beep-beep of the heart machine next to her bed is soothing. It's the sound of life coursing through her veins, predictable and reassuring that things would soon go back to normal. Last night, the little lines that zigzagged through its screen had almost stopped. She'd have a minor scar where they had to fix her up but she'll soon be up on her feet, the doctor had said.

The lights in the private hospital above her head were dimmed and flickered a few times before she woke up. Her vision was fuzzy and disoriented and her head felt as though it had received a good pounding. She glanced around to absorb her bearings.

The small white room, her bed, a curtain that was open around her and a small table to her right with a few items were some of the things she could see through her groggy peripherals. There wasn't anyone around but she remembers the faint echo of Lal's voice telling her that he was stepping out to grab some food. Her head continued to throb in tune with her pulse as an overwhelming sense of thirst washed over her. Her mouth felt like a dry sponge and her tongue clawed for some water. She eyed the flask that rested on the bed side table next to her and wondered whether she could reach out for it without dislodging any of the tubes that were stuck on to her arm. After a few strenuous efforts of twisting to the right and shifting to the left, the flask still seemed a thousand miles away. The urges to drink water and the overwhelming weight on her head that longed to rest back on the pillow were in tandem.


Just as all attempts of reaching out to the water seemed to fail her, a small figure appeared by the door. The figure belonged to a small, fair girl, aged maybe 12 or 13. She peered from the entrance and smiled at her, one of those shy but friendly smiles that serves as a polite gesture among strangers. Her floral dress came right up to her knees while the two plaits she wore on both sides swung when she gestured an inquisitive nod at her. Rashmi managed to produce a weak smile and motioned towards the plastic cup on her bed side table. The girl timidly made her way to her side, removed the piece of cardboard that covered the cup and handed it over to the patient who gulped it down. Rashmi smiled at her, a meek and grateful 'thank you' and slumped back into bed, closed her eyes and tried to sink back into the damp maze that was now the inside of her mind.


A nurse, who had been making her rounds, asked if she wanted any water as that's what patients want right after an operation since it leaves them quite thirsty. Rashmi mumbled that she already got some water thanks to the little girl, probably a visitor who had come to see another patient, just a few minutes ago.
The nurse nodded and checked if everything was alright and left the room. She met Rashmi's husband on her way out and explained to him what happened. The girl who had visited Rashmi is an apparition that is rarely seen in the hospital premises. Of course, the nurse didn't want to alarm Rashmi by telling her, but had told her husband about it.


The little girl in the floral frock and hair plaited in two, never speaks to anyone but gently smiles and was once even seen seated next to a patient's bed. She does not make her presence felt when there is more than one person in the room and since this was a private hospital, most of the rooms are usually occupied by one patient. This had been the first time that she had helped a patient with something. She is usually seen roaming in the halls, or around patients' beds. With her fair skin tone and hair that is more brown than black, she is assumed to be of Burgher origins and since this was the hill country, locals like to think she is someone from the olden days when the hill capital was riddled with foreigners.


Author's note - What I found strange about this apparition was that it was actually able to move the cup when it in fact, does not have a physical body. But apparently they can. The source I spoke to (who I will keep unnamed) did some research on the matter and he discovered that it is actually possible for energies to manipulate physical objects depending on its level of capability. Some entities have positive energies while others have negative energies. And it is possible for them to use it. However, this fact isn't 'scientifically proven inside a lab so I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure. But let your imagination run wild with the idea, no-the possibility of energies influencing physical bodies.

Original published in Ceylon Today September 14th