Ruchira's Ramblings

I have lost all the words and have no idea where to find them back again. They say, these modern critics, that the author died long ago, and every word that you think are his/her were gleaned from a matrix of time, canon and culture. And if all the words that were authored were never their own to begin with, was the author ever born? Or is the author an illusion, an idea or a ghost that we create in order to project the insanities we are too lazy and afraid of owning up to? Look at me, pretending to understand literary theories when all I need is something to write about. And I look around, at the things people say and do around me, hoping to discern the invisible pattern that might shape itself into an idea, and an idea into a story that is my own, my original, and if I am lucky perhaps someone I love, or someone I've never met will tell me how my words, the words I chose seem to speak their thoughts. But the words seem elusive. Perhaps my brain has developed some strange defe

Childhood vanished like the bad man in a kid's film, leaving behind dissolving snapshots of the long bus-trip to the grandparents' home through a long empty road they called the Bypass. Then home changed, roads changed, people grew up, grew old, died. I remember once going back to visit with my dad- that first tiny apartment where my earliest memories are. A big yellow front door and limewashed walls with blue pathes of damp making maps of countries yet undiscovered, a calling bell tune surely dreamt up by a tone-deaf person somewhere and the ceiling fans from a company called 'Ranjan' that I pronounced 'Ran-Jan'. I thought all of that was mine. That all of it was forever. And then one day a truck arrived and we folded our world in straw-lined packing boxes and home became a goodbye in a flurry of moments that slipped out of incomprehending hands. When I went back a few years later everything looked different, though they were there as they had always been- t

The Quest of Saint George’ by Frank O. Salisbury The Quest of Saint George’ by Frank O. Salisbury) #1 There’s a kind of relaxation that comes with the experience of travelling, of being transported somewhere without any direct effort on your part- this sense of a flow, of a movement towards somewhere. As the destination draws closer, an anxiety creeps in, because you know that soon, too soon, the bus or the train or the car or the plane or the boat will stop, and you will have to step out of the safe cocoon of passive inaction and be responsible for your own direction again. It’s like the breaking of a spell, or a reverie. But step back and think of the before- the past actions that led you to this journey, and may be finding a new route will become that much easier. Or may be not. Who knows! The ice melts, the oceans part, the forests shift and the maps change all the time. You are on the ride of life anyway, and there is only one destination, eventually. But maybe you can