Monday, January 7, 2008

When I was seventeen...

When I was seventeen, I made it a point to not sleep in the outside room of our house. The room which was my bedroom was actually a drawing room and had the vacuity of being one. Out it stared into a large verandah which opened itself into the night sky and stars that blinked for intolerably long.
How I wish sleep came to me so the tiredness could drain and how I wish I could be awake while I slept so that I could keep on thinking, looking, watching and observing the night.

These were the days when I wanted to break open from my body. These were the days I wanted wings to fly. My legs would form crooked commas as I lay on the bed with my head tilted and my hair reaching for the floor. Some nights, I thought of the future. The forced, picture-perfect future.
It was always like this. Let’s say a place in Dubai – easily reachable and also closer to home, where I would have a house of my own with a tiled terrace which had a rusted ladder going all the way up to a black water tank. When it would rain I would dance on the terrace and this was my idea of freedom and worldly-wise-speaking, independence.

This is all I wanted then. Independence. Freedom.

Now it is the words that bring me to them. Now that seventeen is long past.

The tiled chips on the terrace, the wrought-iron ladder, the septic tank, the rain; they have converted themselves into shapes and forms of words.

Even the night is a word and the unblinking star a phrase, like memory of faraway friendship on the verge of being strung together and discovered naked.

Seventeen, unbecoming as it is, is another word.

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