IceAndBlood

  “… So don’t forget any of it. Remember it all and overcome it. If you don’t overcome it, you’ll always be the kid whose soul never grows.” – The Boy who Fed on Nightmares by Moon-Yung   Have you ever felt that you have lost chunks of memories or pieces of your life? Gaps in a sequence that doesn’t add up? As if your system has simply deleted those memories, wiped them off your brain. You remember the feelings, the sting of pain or rage or breaking grief… but not what exactly happened. Flashes of colours, one or two words, sensations of heat or numbing cold, choking dust, taste of salty water… but nothing else. If you want to recall them, your mind does tricks. She weaves those pieces together, stitches the gaps with imagination, intuition and emotions and makes you feel contented with the stitched-up memories. Obviously, the contentment doesn’t last long. It happens to me often - with the memories I want to forget. My head does the wiping off for me. That should work, sh...

  There is something heartrending about the word ‘melancholy’. Heartrending and musical and pure and beautiful. Just like rain. I don’t connect rain with melancholy as most people do. I never find anything sad about rain. But heartrending, musical, pure and beautiful? Of course it’s all of that! Yet somehow, these two words ring with almost the same frequency, within me. I cannot think of one without thinking of the other. Both are as innate to me as the colour of my eyes or the texture of my hair. I don’t even have to think – they simply occur to me. As natural as it could be. Where I live – a small peninsula at the southern end of Asia – it’s been raining day and night… for weeks at a stretch. It might be insensitive of me to say this – considering the havoc this has wreaked elsewhere, but these days have been the happiest of the year, to me. All night, I could hear the rhythmic sounds of rain – falling, falling, falling, on my gorgeous city, my vagrant city, my lost city and...

  Recently, I went to Murshidabad with a few relatives, for a short trip. Relatives, as is in my case, would be the last people on earth whom I would like to accompany in a trip but then, sometimes, you have no other option than to compromise. Maybe one day isn’t enough to pass a judgment. Yet, I failed to find anything worthy of my wasted time and spree, over there. Historical places have never interested me and Murshidabad too had no reason to like me at all. So, I returned, broken, disgusted and enervated by the hardship of the journey.   On my way back, our bus halted near a petrol pump. I got down. It was a beautiful night. One of those nights that stun you. One of those nights that make you stop and listen to the sounds of silence. I wandered alone till I reached a small shop of chocolates, biscuits, spices, and other trivia. There were a couple of benches in front of the shop. About three to four people were sitting and lazing there. One of them grabbed a packet...