Kashmir, Bloody (n) Paradise!

Or as we call it Kasheer!

I have not seen heaven (given that there is any) and honestly have never understood your comparison with it. I’m sold on the idea that chances are you are better and your value is largely inconspicuous and understated among humans.

Either way, you are beautiful. I have traveled with (and to) you so much, that you almost feel like a person now. Over the years you and I have only gotten better, ferociously co-dependent of course, but better. You make me happy, you are awfully erratic, addictively gorgeous, sometimes distressed, and a lot demanding. You are like the ex I know is toxic, but what the hell? I mean, you know if you know!

Your quiet has the right amount of noise!

Anyway, the more I talk about this city, the more I want to go back and never leave. And one may feel it is because I feel like home there, No. It is exactly what I do not feel. If I wanted to feel at home I’d stay home. It is more like living in a Time Warp (or in hyperlapse). You can hear yourself breathe, your heart pounding, the sound of your steps on dry Chinar leaves, the wind steering through mountains, the rocks and pebbles in Jhelum, you can hear it all loud and clear.

There is a lot of white space in that city!

It hasn’t still surrendered to the 60:40 revenue model. If you are a reader living in India but serving people outside the homeland you know what I mean.

It may seem like it is the perfect city for romantics, but it is not, or maybe it is and I am just not a very romantic human (not complaining), more of a doer than a dreamer. For me, it is a perfect place to channel your thoughts. Align your chakras! Come down to a point zero in your head if you have been waking up bewildered lately. Works like magic. This also was Nia’s (my first born) first trip to native, the first flight ever, comparatively long travel, etc. It was overwhelming. This girl is astoundingly calm for her firsts, her calm often scares me.

Does she get excited or impressed by anything or is there a bit too much of me in her? Well, I’ll figure that out in time, until then I hope she keeps the bars high! Always!

My Little Wild Girl!

Stay wild, Stay free

Let no one tell what to be or not to be!  

Be made of fire, be enchanted

Let yourself be the magic that exists, never taken for granted!

Be a myth, a legend, maybe a story untold

Let no one tell you what you may or may not behold!

Be the star and the stargazer, be your own light

Let every ungodly mouth be another reason for all your might!

– Mum (Yashasvi K.)

Your Sunset Vs. My Sunrise!

If you’re deluded that it was love that kept you going, no it wasn’t!

Let me enlighten you!
Contrary to popular belief, I have always understood love as just another emotion, in-fact in my head rage is stronger than love. People push their limits harder in rage than in love, don’t trust me? Go back into your life and reiterate.

Love is given so much weightage because it carries many more essential, far-significant, and nerve-wracking chemical reactions in your head. And that’s that. It acts as an escape, a reason to vent, a permanent shoulder to cry on, self-consuming and nasty make outs, opening up without the fear of being judged, and a long list of other perks. So honestly, no love keeps you going, it’s the transactional benefits that keep you going.

A part of me was glad, I haven’t had a transactional, self-benefiting experience. However, I’ve had a loud and clear – Oh God, I want you! – kind of experience. And I wouldn’t trade that for something as small as love.

Personally, if I’m in a narrative, it would open with,

“If you still have a space permanently in my head, it’s not because there was love. It is because your actions enraged me and so did mine. Because I touched the dragon and made love with its spitting fire while it burned my nights and days for senseless hours, till our bodies turned into a fragrant carcass. I fought, screamed, and scratched the mental peace out of you, and so did you. I had found content metaphorically, literally, and rhetorically.”

So, honestly quit it, you can’t convince me and neither can I. Not on love is bigger than want for you and want is bigger than love for me. We do more things out of want than we do out of love. A raging desperate want, in my head is a purer emotion, far stronger than love.

You live through sunsets and I through sunrises. We are different, in ways hard to comprehend. So, for us to co-exist in one moment, together, even for a few seconds, it would take the sun, the moon, the stars, and the universe itself to align. Or maybe, just take a tans-Atlantic flight, the dawn and dusk co-exist beautifully (I say it with personal experience), and a for a few minutes you’ll know what I mean.

If you don’t make me angry, you don’t matter. Easy!

Sinful Black!

I cannot begin to tell you…
How much I knew
That he & I had allied souls,
Allied in terms of wrath and warmth.
The kind that would come around once,
Once in a gazillion years.
And it dazzled me,
The way we were synced,
Synced without trying.
It was implausible to see,
That every sunset spent together,
The universe would witness two souls,
Turning to the color – sinful black!

TOO FULL OF ME!

It’s a pity you aren’t here with me at this moment

Or you weren’t there in those,

That I am surer than you would be for yourself,

You would want to be in with me more than you want anything else,

In all my travel stories, or cafes I went by, or the roads I traveled, or the oceans I drowned in,

Across countries and borders, warzones and conflicted lanes, woods and skyscrapers,

Everything, anything, and nothing!

There is a part of me that has stopped trying,

Stopped forcing myself to believe it was just another passing wave,

Like a million others I have tamed!

No.

Not really, it isn’t ‘love’ either, I don’t do love.

It was something else, something I’m yet to name,

But when I do think of a fitting word for it,

I’ll write.

I’ll write around, and about it.

I am less consumed by the absence of you and more by what I was when I was with you,

It overwhelms me.

I don’t have the time to stomp my feet through the vacancy, there is none.

I’m too full of the moves I made at every swirl of those fingers around my curves and lines,

Too full of my aggravated blood that pumped through each inch of me at the sudden push and pulls.

Too full of the music I heard and the books I read, through the days and nights of burning one day at a time.

I’m too full of me, seamlessly screwed,

But then, aren’t we all.

Baatein Karo!

Oh, how I wish I could explain it to you in your language (Wherever you are and whatever language you speak) what every word of this song means.

It is beautiful. It talks about communication in this maddening and wildly internet driven gen. But, if it helps, the music is catchy! Keeps me sane!

Baitho kabhi saath mere bhi, do – Baatein karo!

Chhahe bhale baad mein tod do, Vaade Karo!!

Manali, We Meet Again!

Your picture from what I last remember is framed like a canvas, oils, maybe even a plain white frame with hues of bottle greens!

Surprise me this time, with something I seek from you! It feels like ages, since I met myself the last time, I look forward to finding myself in you. 

In the white sheets of the shivering nights,

maybe in the age-old rum and coke,

Maybe in the night of a crescent moon of mental sins and the thick smoke!

Or in the day dreams of my unfinished businesses, I hope I find myself in you. Manali, when I see you next, blanket me and my adrenaline rushes, my maddening spikes to have it all and nothing, at the same time.

Oh, how I have missed your snow blankets, how I have wanted to get lost in you, and so shall I.

I’ll leave the capital hopeful, and I anticipate you have waited for me like I have!

So long, Manali!

The Last Breath!

I can hear you, love, from the contour of that dusk

Do your pretty mental laces still arrest you in the social typecast,

Or have you now tricked your mind into believing, what you must?

Do your mountains still rise in the tragic gloomy nights?

Or your flowers now do not seek that honey-soaked might.

Has your Harley now stopped seeking its Joker?

Or does that wisdom tooth ever tell you, get up and fight!

Oh, tell me the wind still blows in the same direction,

That the lighthouse hasn’t frozen to death!

Let it once again swift pass those shores,

Catch the soul that hasn’t succumbed to its last breath!

The Winter Sun, Jaipur!

Have you ever left a city, turned around, and in your head looked at it and said, I’ll come back?

I have, old habits die hard, they say. And believe you me, the number of places I have looked back at and promised to see again, I have. While I was still growing up cotton balled, steering through the snowball effect of being the only and the youngest girl child in my family, there was love (a hell lot of it) and the superpower of never getting ‘no’ as an answer (Sad, I know!). Whatever!

This was my erstwhile adventure of stories, tales, superstitions, and of course casual mental braiding into the mold of a perfect woman by my mother. So now that you have a reference point, my mom is the predominant reason for most of my beliefs (Even if I do not agree with them, I kind of always end up experiencing them, I do not even know how. Moms, I tell you).

So, my mother used to tell me every time we traveled, do not turn around or you will have to come back, and I would exasperate and say -what are you saying, I am turning around! Is this a superstition I love or what (Very animatedly, I am speaking this out loud while typing, you would believe me if you knew me personally)?

Jaipur! I have strange but soft memories of this place. My reasons to travel have changed but not the love for this dusky, very raw city that tries to add pink to practically everything. I mean what is it! But it’s nice. It was a wedding, for the first time I witnessed a multicultural union of two very different backgrounds, and the fact how beautifully hypocritical and sweet can we be at the same time to people we don’t know but love to judge.

I would want to see it on 70mm maybe with a black coffee and a walnut muffin (I’m not a coke and popcorn person, oh how I hate it). From one fort to another, from one place to another, from Bar Palladio to basic flatbread meals -I don’t know if there is anything I wouldn’t want to see again. I loved the winter sun of this city (and in general ,too), who wouldn’t.

I have witnessed sunsets of several cities, from mountains, palaces, ruins, camps, and the most luxurious hotels around the world, not one has matched what I have experienced here, to date (I’m yet to travel to a lot of places, can’t promise for the future). The sun in this city sets in its hue of quintessential orange and pinks, as stunning as the bride’s face. It is prepossessing!

So, when I left this time, did I turn around? Now that’s a story for another time!

The Summer, 2020!

Lying on the white burning surface of the virtual skin,
There she was scanning the mental unorthodox memories of her mind.
For her enlightenment on self love came
On a sunny summer morning of 2020!
But, it came with a clause of a struggles,
Struggles to accept her,
Like the changing seasons of
indifference and warmth,
To scoop her out of a negotiated hell,
The one she later decided to rein in,
And she did, Oh & How!