Jay Mody

Who said life isn’t beautiful? Its as beautiful as a dying dream with the well conjured scenes and hopes left behind in its wake. Life is as tranquil as the flight of a feather detached from the body of that bird, once full of life. Life is somewhere between the spaces of that drunken night and the morning after. Life is between the spaces of that broken dream and a new start. Life is between the spaces of that girl’s heart who never loved you. Life is between the spaces of that jump out of the window and the landing thereafter. The beautiful silence. Life is a mirage of abandoned dreams and unfinished battles. Whoever said life was beautiful, must be out of his damn mind.

Winter for me is a season of lost innocence. Of days when words didn’t hold with them the weight of the world. Then, before I knew it, time stood still, sweet smoke blowing through my nostrils, the world receding lazily into oblivion and strange visions threatening to take over my mind. I was born again and the world seemed new. My darling girl was still at my side, her eyes – delirious, making love to the smoke and watching me with tenderness. Time had stopped reeling somewhere in between and we were just two souls sitting in a deserted field with dreams of utopia.

To this day I travel lonesome on a road I never took, but still running. Inebriation gripping my soul but thoughts of another lifetime, so distant even my mind plays tricks on that log of life. Trapped inside.

Empty rooms. Plush hotels. Loneliness. Carpets stained with memories and rushes of the thousands of lives that have lived here. The air heavy with the smoke of countless cigarettes that were lit here, only to count the passing minutes. The silent nights not as dark as the darkness that fills your soul. Every minute takes you further away from home, yet, threatening to bring the journey to an abrupt end. Stifling luxuries and trifles not needed. Books that take you far away into a world you desire, the one you can never have.

Tired walks down the deserted evening roads. Cigarette smoke makes love to the fog and the chilly winds make your face go numb. The road to take at the crossroads seems like the easiest choice you had ever made. Alien country, nothing to call your own, yet, this minute, it embraces you like the warmth of a mother’s arms while estranging you the next.

This evening the world seems as distant as the fading horizon on a lazy shimmering sea. I don’t think i know the people anymore. I don’t think i know my friends any more. There are no more songs to capture my imagination, no more vessels can take me to that horizon. Is this where it all ends? Or has it only begun? Questions such as these plague my weary mind and the train chugs on to the destination i can barely call home. The thought of those walls suffocates me and life seems like a prostitute waiting for a customer, ready to finish the job and move on to the next.

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More incoherent thoughts. I wonder if the beauty of a poetry lies in its incoherence. Words form a trapdoor in an inebriated mind and spill out in a beauty of disorder. The dark folds of this endless night engulf it in shrouds of mystery. These words will never be spoken again. Interpretation is just a facade for your own thoughts.

Okay, normally this is something that I absolutely ignore, but I was tagged by Aurora Sky and I’m taking it up this time. I have to give 7 weird/ random things about me. So then here goes:

1. My music taste – I only listen to anything that is classified under rock/metal and I listen to Ghazals. (Does anyone find that weird? A lot of my friends do.)

2. I am shit scared of ghosts and ghost movies. But if someone talks about a haunted place, I would be the first person to go and explore that place.

3. <Redacted on 25/10/2013>

4. I used to listen to sick pop music (backstreet boys, boyzone, etc.) till standard 11. After that my music taste changed overnight.

5. Once in school, I had scored higher marks than what was calculated on my paper. I never bothered to tell the teacher cause I didnt care. I got scolded very badly for not saying that I have got higher marks. (I was totally confused, honestly)

6. I had asked a girl out for the first time when I was 21, cause I had heard she had a crush on me. I was shivering while we ate in silence.

7. I want my death to come as a sky-dive without a parachute.

I dont think I know of 7 people who still continue to blog. I will pass the option of tagging 7 people.

The day wears on and that gentle hope for a new tomorrow feels like a malignant tumor that threatens your very existence. It hardens your soul and the tears run dry. The emotions that created life, were simply distorted, till they gave in with a final sigh. The word hope now feels like the most political and manipulated word i have ever heard. Hope was butchered back in those days and its been years since then. There are only events and ends that you live for, over which you have no control.

“You return home tired and your mind plays tricks on you. Once again you slip into thoughts that take you nowhere. Its like quicksand. You think and you fall deeper into thoughts. Thoughts that lead you to other thoughts and the train of thoughts goes on.

You are living in a void. A world that has been created for you. Everyday you carry out your routine like you are an integral part of a never ending algorithm. You feign respect for people you absolutely loathe. Its not out of manners that you do it. But you are scared. Scared of the consequences. You are scared of going against the “”convention””. You think that better sense should prevail. But who decides what is good? And hence the comparison of what is better is something that has been fed to you over and over again, since time immemorial.

You are living your life like a robot. Your actions and your thoughts have been molded by an excellent potter. You do what your master – the potter – tells you to do. And who is your master? It is not a single entity. He is rather an entity that has been created by people over the years. By men who have had power. By men who wanted to impose upon the world what they thought was right. By men who wanted to gain control over people’s actions and their minds. Serfdom never ended. People were made to believe that it had ended. You are the serf working for your “”master””.

You are given an occasional freedom to keep you happy. To keep you from rebelling. Somewhere along the way you lose sight of what you always wanted to do. You get trained along the pre-defined lines. Defined by “”those”” men. Your “”master”” decides your fate and you accept it. You are like grains of sand, passing through the hourglass waiting, patiently, for it to turn and guide you back.

You say there is no point complaining about things when you are not willing to do anything about them. You want to do something to break these chains, but you are burdened by responsibilities. But then, who creates these responsibilities? Aren’t they simply chains created by love? You have created this world for yourself, you want to give back to people what you have taken from them. It’s only your pride and nothing more, that compels you to think this way. Life is a sum-total of all the good and the bad things that you have done. But who decides whats good or bad? You believe that you decide the difference between good and bad, but then is it not social conditioning that alters your perspective? Maybe all these thoughts are just a product of your conditioned mind. Maybe you are trained to protest once in a while to maintain the servile sanity. The world needs to balance itself. Through all these thoughts maybe you are only acting as a counter-weight.

Once again you remember that you are just the grain of sand, destined to pass through the hourglass. You will only think, but not act. You will only breathe but not live. You shall sing but not “”the song””. And in your lifetime the only regrets will be simple things such as these. When you are lying on your death-bed, your “”master”” will leave you stranded, wondering, about how you devoted your life to “”him””, about how you could have done what you were born for.

And every night your head is muddled with thoughts such as these. Your sleep, muffled by silent screams. Your appettite, destroyed by the hunger for a new dawn. And then it all goes dark… like it always does.

“”Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Note: The subject line is a quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky from the novel “”The Idiot”””

The worst thing that could happen to anyone would be to settle down in your life with a job that pays your monthly bills and keeps you comfortable. Day after day passes by and you stop feeling guilty about not living your life the way you wanted to. The simple joys of academic life. That one rollicking night you spent with your girlfriend when both of you got drunk.

The thing is, simply put, you become a phony once you settle down into your job. The sub-conscious dies down. The so-called responsibilities over-burden your shoulders with the truth of life. Those long cherished moments with your friends are forgotten. The night you spent on the roof of your hostel staring into the dark winter night, stars looking down upon you dreamily, cold beer by your side and most importantly, your friends to give you company. These are the pages that get lost in the book of life, like a moth in a candle-flame.

What occupies your mind, now, is how you’ll make more money. More money than you could ever imagine. More money than you could ever use. What pressurizes you are the mortgage payments. The credit card bills to be settled next month. Those long walks down the road on a lonely winter night are long forgotten. Crumpling dried leaves on the way to the football field. Those wild nights when booze used to flow like an unstoppable river. Those road trips through the beautiful country-side, cruising along on your bikes.

One fine day you realize that you end up falling in love with things more than people. You wear a mask so tight that you forget about the life you once owned. That’s the day when you find yourself alone in the walk of life. The day you want to kill yourself. The day which, you hope, should have been the first of your life. The day you blow the dust off from that old Pink Floyd CD, which’d got lost among the things you used to own and love.

Life starts today. Again.

She was like a mystery to me. I was never able to unravel what lay beneath those pages of foreboding. She seemed to be intangible whenever I wanted to touch her, talk to her. Then she would come down like rain on a cold winter night, beautiful yet surprising. She never seemed to amaze me with her sheer timing. Its just like giving that last extra tug to someone falling off a cliff – to pull him up. And yet I long for her, every day, every month, waiting, breathing hard at the impending doom, only never to meet it. The hours in her company seemed to compete with my shadow, never leaving me, still distant. Untouchable.

Her life changed, completely, the day we became God’s pawns in the game of chess. Mine continued on its course. Two pawns seperated by the checkers of life. Patience is a virtue, and so one of them was taught. Hope is a virtue quipped the other. Yet I knew, I would see her again. So what if we were being played on in this game. So what if each one of us had to guard our own sqaure. Some said, life goes on. In an existential sense of the word, yeah, it does go on. But yet, I shall never live again.

And I still lurk in her shadow, breeding on her virute of hope, patiently.