I am considering getting a new blog, because I like the idea of people reading what I write. But I don't know how my earlier readers, few as they were, would find their way to a new blog. This blog is no longer for the public eye, I think, because the memories are too numerous, and I want to start on a clean slate if I am writing stuff that people can see. The ways of thinking, of loving, as much as the things loved, longed for and seen are so tied up with one person that whatever I write in public in this blog, it seems, will forever hark back to those times, times spent with him.
How does one do this? How does one detach oneself from one's own growing up years, impossible to think of without reference to one person, years which are bittersweet, but which seem blighted because it now seems to have led up to a path gone awry. It's like a dish, that you really enjoyed cooking, but which turned out to be like ashes because of something gone wrong in the end: then does the process of preparing it bring any joy in retrospect?
I wonder how Dibbo dealt with Madhura's going away. They were his growing up years too, far more growing-up because in college. One feels blighted, blighted by a single act, and then things are always going to be different.
As A and I were saying, it is as much about grieving baba as grieving for the loss of one person. The grief not felt then, the grief gone so easily below ground, never disabling, never debilitating. I suppose you really remember a person when you most need them, and because I really needed him now, now more than ever since the time he passed on, really, that baba's going away seems to hurt so keenly sometimes.
And then there are people who have lived without experiencing these losses, girls who never break up over a break-up, girls who lose dads only after they have lived their lives in full. It's such a blasted waste. Why did you waste my life so? Did my years seem throwaway to you? Did you think I came so cheap just because I was always there? Because you had to push and push and push to drive me out of your life?
Summer is here again. This summer will be joyless. But no fear. Summer is my season, it never is too marked by sorrow for the next summer to not promise freedom again. Then, there are the rains. Joyless, washing away all sorrow rains. Squelching through filthy streets back home, disgusted by the dirt between your toes, every year, the waterlogging, that is monsoon in my city. I never detested it too much, but now seems a good time to start, another birag to have against home, to call it less of a home. How strange it is that none of you feel Calcutta is home anymore. I still so love it, helped in no small part from seeing the city through his eyes. But even without, what other city is there to call home? So, and therefore, Kolkata is home. I've only ever known one other city, this Delhi. And who could call Dilli home, bolo? Maybe if I lived here in the 80s, with memories of Khan Market as a DDA market and east Delhi as Jumna paar, and old Delhi as not the exotic part of town, but the place you went for wholesale groceries or somesuch.
It is hard to grieve here as ordinarily as I did with Ananya over chat the other day. That was a good chat. Here, one is constrained by the rules of language, the restrictions of symmetry.
I did so like this blog. And can no longer venture here in the open, because it is no longer my own space, but the space where I have been judged and condemned. You took away so much, so much. So much of me I have to change, so that I can learn to live without you.
How does one do this? How does one detach oneself from one's own growing up years, impossible to think of without reference to one person, years which are bittersweet, but which seem blighted because it now seems to have led up to a path gone awry. It's like a dish, that you really enjoyed cooking, but which turned out to be like ashes because of something gone wrong in the end: then does the process of preparing it bring any joy in retrospect?
I wonder how Dibbo dealt with Madhura's going away. They were his growing up years too, far more growing-up because in college. One feels blighted, blighted by a single act, and then things are always going to be different.
As A and I were saying, it is as much about grieving baba as grieving for the loss of one person. The grief not felt then, the grief gone so easily below ground, never disabling, never debilitating. I suppose you really remember a person when you most need them, and because I really needed him now, now more than ever since the time he passed on, really, that baba's going away seems to hurt so keenly sometimes.
And then there are people who have lived without experiencing these losses, girls who never break up over a break-up, girls who lose dads only after they have lived their lives in full. It's such a blasted waste. Why did you waste my life so? Did my years seem throwaway to you? Did you think I came so cheap just because I was always there? Because you had to push and push and push to drive me out of your life?
Summer is here again. This summer will be joyless. But no fear. Summer is my season, it never is too marked by sorrow for the next summer to not promise freedom again. Then, there are the rains. Joyless, washing away all sorrow rains. Squelching through filthy streets back home, disgusted by the dirt between your toes, every year, the waterlogging, that is monsoon in my city. I never detested it too much, but now seems a good time to start, another birag to have against home, to call it less of a home. How strange it is that none of you feel Calcutta is home anymore. I still so love it, helped in no small part from seeing the city through his eyes. But even without, what other city is there to call home? So, and therefore, Kolkata is home. I've only ever known one other city, this Delhi. And who could call Dilli home, bolo? Maybe if I lived here in the 80s, with memories of Khan Market as a DDA market and east Delhi as Jumna paar, and old Delhi as not the exotic part of town, but the place you went for wholesale groceries or somesuch.
It is hard to grieve here as ordinarily as I did with Ananya over chat the other day. That was a good chat. Here, one is constrained by the rules of language, the restrictions of symmetry.
I did so like this blog. And can no longer venture here in the open, because it is no longer my own space, but the space where I have been judged and condemned. You took away so much, so much. So much of me I have to change, so that I can learn to live without you.
