Free

I often wonder what it is like to be absolutely free, to be able to just go ahead with what your heart yearns to do. I wonder what it is like to not be held back by relationships, societal norms, responsibilities or gender. I seldom do things that I want to do, more often than not they are influenced by those around me thereby incorporating their interests. There are several times when I have cancelled that solitary dinner that I yearned to have with myself to accommodate some plan with my friends. I could have said no but there is something that stopped me; I guess it’s the fear of losing them out. We humans are herd animals. We cannot survive completely on our own and out of the fear of not being able to survive in future, I have forgone living in the present a lot of times. There are several times when I have said a ‘yes’ when each bit of me yearned to say a ‘no’ just to keep someone’s heart.

I remember the afternoon I wanted to wear my favorite bright pink dress but couldn’t because we were going to a not-so-civilized locality and according to my mother it showed my thighs a little too much for the men there to handle. I wonder how liberating it could be to just pick out anything I find beautiful in my wardrobe and drape myself in it, without considering how everyone around me would feel about it.

I remember the evening when I was six vodka shots down and started doing the notorious ‘Nagin’ dance when I was supposed to just groove in a lady like manner. My friend had to pull me off the dance floor because I was being such an embarrassment for everyone. I think I like my drunk self a lot. She is more liberated than my sober self can ever be. I am certain that in that moment when I was recklessly dancing with every ounce of energy, I was the happiest I have ever been while dancing. I wonder who I truly am sometimes. I envy that my drunk self’s sense of freedom. I envy the way she could dance to her heart’s content without a care in the world. I envy the way she could walk up to the guy she has a crush on and tell him that he’s incredibly attractive. I envy the way she could let go off her inhibitions and live in the moment completely, wholly. I wonder if I really am that drunk girl after being bound by the shackles of decorous behavior, societal norms, responsibilities and the burden of being lady-like. My drunk self was happy, happier than it has ever been when sober. This is probably why I share a very amicable bond with alcohol. Life would probably be a lot easier if we just had to care about leading a happy life, not a dignified one.

I remember the time when I just wanted to go ahead and tell that guy how amazing he is but didn’t because it would probably sound inappropriate and it might make me sound too desperate or simply because women are not supposed to make the first move. It’s a pity how I have to hold myself back to just tell someone that I really like them.

I remember losing it at work one day, taking a deep breath and asking myself what I am doing with my life. The answers that I got sounded feeble and they mumbled something about money. They did not sound satisfactory enough to me. I went on with my work anyway because I received a mail of my credit card statement and that something which they mumbled about money suddenly seemed very important. A monthly salary can be an addiction, an addiction more dangerous than drugs, I believe. You think you own it but it ends up owning you, making you its bonded laborer for life.

I wonder if absolute freedom exists and whether it comes at its own price. Is it possible to throw away the filters that the society comes with and still be happy? Freedom brings along with it solitude and how much ever liberating it might be, solace eventually gets filled with loneliness. If you’re against the society, you’re most likely standing alone. Will it be a happy world if it is lonely? I wonder if it is possible to love and not be bound by it. I wonder if it is possible to seek for your space and not be engulfed by it entirely. I wonder if a freer life would actually be happier or just end up being more chaotic. I wonder if the ‘I’ and ‘we’ can coexist and respect each other’s boundaries. I wonder how emancipating it would be to not have to fit into any mold, to not have to belong to a category. Would it not be amazing if I could be the workaholic girl, the reckless party girl, the tomboy who would tie her hair in a bun and wear a XL T-shirt and walk around whistling to her heart’s content and the lady who would dress up in elegant fashion and speak in decibels too low for anyone not giving their complete attention to understand? How wonderful it would be to preserve each part of me and not let any bit die! 

Love -To be or not to be!

This is not for you if you have just given away your heart to someone and are letting yourself soak in the beauty of love, convinced that this is the tiny fragment of your life that was missing and now you’re complete in the purest sense of the word. This is not for you if you’re among the lucky few who have found the perfect partner and want to spend the remainder of their life (and if there is a beyond, then even that) with them.  This is for the broken hearts, the one-sided lovers and those who have been to a major extent broken down by the magnanimity of love. People happily in love are discouraged to read any further. This Valentine’s Day, I am going to sit and talk about every possible reason why it’s terrible to be in love.

Love makes you a slave of itself, corrupts the ability of the smartest of people to see through things logically and make wise decisions. You keep denying it all the while and tell yourself that you know how to balance it out right, but you know it all along that although you know how to balance it right, you cannot. Love, arrogantly and defiantly sits invisibly on the top of your priority list lying to you about its non-existence. Gradually, without you realizing, it starts engulfing your work, your decisions, your people and your free time - the  time you once spent having conversations with yourself, getting lost in the creativity of your thoughts is now spent talking to them and if you manage to get some time off that, you spend it musing about them.

Your choices, your beliefs, your ideologies, your opinions- all of them start getting majorly influenced by them. You start moulding yourself into a person they would want to love and without even knowing it, you start losing yourself, huge parts of yourself to them. You want to do anything and everything for that smile of theirs and before you realize it, they become the center of your world and one by one you start throwing people and things out of your life because nothing and nobody else seems to matter. You want to make up more and more space for them, you want your life to be more and more occupied by them and in the process you have knowingly or unknowingly pushed everything else into tiny insignificant corners. Before you know it, it has become about them and just about them.

You valued your self-esteem more than anything else until you fell for this person who was capable of changing it all for you. You realize one day that with everything else that you pushed away, you pushed away your self-esteem too. You start doing things you felt are too crazy to be done by anyone, you start caring for someone more than you ever thought you were capable of and you start experiencing emotions you never knew existed. The chill down your spine at the sound of their voice, the smile that refuses to leave your face long after they are gone, the happiness that simple conversations with them provide and the pangs of jealousy that burn parts of you-  you experience it all for the first time. Love makes you experience the extremes of emotions. Although, the happiness that it gives is incomparable to any other happiness that you have felt before, what you don’t realize is that the pain which the fights and the separation might cause you will also be more devastating than anything that you have ever felt before. But still, you fall prey to all these emotions and you want to keep feeling them for as long as you can. It’s addictive, and once you have got yourself into the habit of it, it’s very hard to get yourself out.

Then, there is this whole thing about owning people we love. Now, your partner may be the most broadminded person ever and how much ever he/she doesn't want to restrain you; mere mortals that we are, we fall prey to insecurities and jealousy and we want our partner to be ours before they can be anybody else’s and our obsession with it touches an extent where we want them to prove it to us sometimes. How much ever romantic it might seem initially to be told by your partner, “You’re mine baby”, it becomes stifling and suffocating when the hormones have taken a back seat and there isn't enough estrogen and testosterone being secreted to make you hyperventilate as your partner utters it. Whether you want to accept it or not, you lose a huge part of your independence and you actually become somebody else’s before you are yours. You've got yourself so deep into it all that there is no easy escape because you've reached this point where you cannot do without your partner and at the same time you cannot be comfortable with the fact that you are so much theirs.

However, gradually you get used to it and consciously or unconsciously you start liking all the good and bad aspects of love; you weigh them against each other and the fact that you have somebody you may call your own seems to outweigh all the negatives.  And, over an extended period of time when you learn to balance things right, when you learn to appreciate love, one by one bring back all the pieces of your life that you pushed aside in the pursuit of love and start leading a fairly stabilized happy life, exactly then my friend, they leave!

Then, you’re devastated like you have never been devastated before. You’re broken into a thousand pieces like you have never been broken before and realize that you had actually become somebody else’s and you’re incapable of independent existence anymore. There’s a void they leave behind, and you try, try every day to fill it back but you fail miserably every time. You try every day to convince yourself that you’re more than their presence in your life and your friends, family, work and all those parts of your life which you pushed away try to bring back your broken pieces together. And, after a long, long time which seems like forever you become alright and embrace life with all its beauty and ugliness once again but although you never say it out loud, that void remains unfilled forever.

All said and done about love, I ask myself if I would refrain from it. ‘Of course, I will’, my mind replies in an instant but my heart hesitates a little and with its eyes cast down and cheeks blushing a Valentine’s day red whispers, ‘It cannot be all that bad, can it?”  

That Cat

I hate cats. I've always hated them. No, not always. I loved this one particular cat once. White and brown fur. She was beautiful. Not just beautiful, she was enchanting! Hazel green eyes, stunning yet frightening and claws so sharp that it could rip you off. She would come every day to our little cottage house in Nainital. I would give her milk and chapattis regularly. I know it is not the best food for a cat; but staunch vegetarian that my grandmother was, we did not have much choice. She did not seem to mind the vegetarian diet anyway. The bowl would be licked clean by her, not the tiniest bit of chapatti or smallest drop of milk sticking around anywhere.

She used to come over in the afternoons sometimes, sometimes in the evening. How I’d wait for her every day! I’d look forward to petting her, getting her a bowl of milk and chapatti, hearing her meow as she would walk around the house defiantly and making her sit on my lap (sometimes forcibly, because she disliked bondage even if it came out of love) as I caress my hands on her rich brown and white fur. Before I knew it, I was in love with her! The agile walks, the magnificently fearless jumps she would make and traverse several meters with just one giant leap of hers and those eyes, although I admit they could scare me immensely but I had never come across anything more stunningly beautiful! I would wait longingly, every day for her to come; sometimes I went as far as going to the neighborhood to check on her when she would not turn up until late evening.

I saw her hunt a rat once, a harmless little thing wriggling about playfully near the drains.  She approached it cunningly, not making the slightest noise as it cautiously walked towards it and when she was close enough to grab it, she thumped it with her claws which made it squeak out in pain. As the little thing was trying with all its might to free itself from her grab, she hit it for the second time and when it ceased to breathe, she tore it with her canines and chewed it away with the utmost ferocity. I saw evil in her eyes that day! A soft heart, I had. I was an animal lover too. However, that day for some reason I could feel no remorse for the rat. I almost reveled at the cat’s victory, took pleasure in the satisfaction that she got out of hunting the rat. Love, I tell you, is a tricky thing! It can make beasts out of us humans.

My admiration for the cat grew with every passing day. She continued coming over to play with me each evening. One day after feeding her, I was trying to pull her into my lap to pet her. She wriggled out of my hands one time, I tried harder and pulled her more lovingly towards me for the second time. She turned her head wildly towards me, clawed me sharply on the hands, gave me the fiercest look ever and jumped away. She went far off my cottage in leaps and bounds and was out of sight in a few seconds. I was left in devastating shock! How could she do this to me! I was just trying to hold her for a while to caress her lovingly. How could she claw me and give me that devilish look; I thought it was meant for the enemies, but she met me with the same look. How could she!

‘I would not play with her, I will just give her food and then she can go back from wherever she came’, I thought. It was 5 o’clock. She was supposed to come by now. Maybe, she would come a little late. 6 PM, 7PM , 8PM ,9PM… hours passed by, the cat never came. I was hopeful that she would come the next day. The next day passed by, and the next, and the next. The cat never returned. I went looking for her in the neighborhood where she used to hunt about, but no luck. I gave up the search in a few days, but every time I sighted a cat, I would get reminded of her.

One fine evening, I was playing Hide and Seek at my friends place where I was hiding at the backdoor and there, I saw her! She was there! I was not mistaken. The same brown and white fur, thinning slightly at the skull and how could I forget her eyes!  She was out there for a hunt, I presumed. She was approaching the kitchen door with the same cautiousness I witnessed long back when I saw her hunt for the first time. I was right. She grabbed the rat with its sharp canines and ate it off mercilessly. After having finished her meal, she walked back and then, our eyes met. I could sense an air of recognition. She walked towards me and stroked my legs amiably with her head. A moment later she jumped athletically on a tree and was gone! My friend told me later that the cat recently started coming to her place every day and she feeds it milk and biscuits. ‘Such a beauty, isn't it?’ she remarked!

I felt a sharp pang of betrayal for some reason. I sensed at that moment that she did not hate me, but she did not love me either. She was not bonded by emotions. She belonged to no one. She was wild, free and independent. She was probably capable of love too, but not attached. She was incapable of getting attached to people, things or places. I guess that is why I started hating them, because I got too attached to that cat, only to get to know later that I was replaceable, easily replaceable. It was not hatred, I guess. Probably envy, I envied their free spirit. I envied their independence, the way they are completely on their own, the way they can never truly belong to anyone, the way they refuse to be owned and bonded, even in love. I guess somewhere in a tiny corner of my heart I long to be like them-free, independent and wild!