Ruchira's Ramblings

 On the last day of the year, we came down from the mountains at the end of our little winter vacation. As the car pulled into the 'Drop & Drive' lane, I felt the stirrings of a vague sense of anxiety. We were about four hours early for our train. The journey from Takdah to NJP station was motion with purpose, the train ride to Sealdah would also be movement towards certain destination. It was the waiting period in-between, with nowhere definite to go that was unsettling.  I'm not much of a standing still person, I tend to pace around instead. Which is ironic considering how I've lived my life through little units of waiting. Waiting for this or that exam to get over so I could have fun afterwards, waiting for some movie to release so I could go and watch it with friends, waiting for vacations,  waiting for birthdays (now increasingly accompanied by a foreboding sense of dread for the inevitable and inexplicable letdown), waiting (now as a teacher) for end-semester ...

    Image by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash.com   When I was fifteen, a friend lent me a book. I hadn’t asked her for it, I didn’t even know she had it, but she lent it to me anyway because she had asked me if I had read it and I told her no, but I wanted to. The book was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . To be honest, I didn’t really know how big a deal this book was in late 2002. I had only passingly seen it mentioned once in the weekly children’s page of the English newspaper I used to read as one of those children’s books dismissed and criticized by adults as not real literature. Some months later, there was a review of the film in the Bengali newspaper which said the magic didn’t work because the lead character couldn’t act. (Hey don’t throw stuff at me, okay? I mean, this isn’t even the worst thing they had said about these films in subsequent reviews. I remember when they reviewed the fifth film they actually made up their own plot for it).   ...

Imagine an empty room. Imagine a house. Or a world. Imagine an entire star-spangled universe with its make-believe show of beginnings and ends. A show that engulfs us, consumes us and drives us towards each other. Or away from. Even from ourselves. Now imagine us. Forget the noise. It's just you and I. All that I say won't matter in time. All that I say will echo across the stars forever, forming new words somewhere else, for someone else. But right now, in this moment, all that I say is for you. You know that. So listen. I love you. I've been looking for you. I hope we find each other, because what else is left when the sun is cold and we are all long gone? All we have is this moment, to be true and to live and to not burn ourselves out in this great cosmic pantomime that consumes us and drives us away from ourselves.  📸 John Fowler via unsplash.com I found a Tumblr screenshot on Instagram the other day. I don't recall the exact language but it said something to this ...

Day 17. Today I wrote a haiku for International Haiku Day, using the phrase 'gibbous moon'. This was the prompt from the Instagram page Kavyajananipoetry. The prompt from  napowrimo.net  was quite cool, it was just that I wanted to catch up with some of my reading lists, so I wrote only one poem. But I did think about the other prompt, you know, the prompt not taken, as it were, and it brought back memories. So what was it? Dogs, All the dogs you've known in your life. The prompt was  developed by the comic artist Lynda Barry, and it asks you to think about  dogs you have known, seen, or heard about , and then use them as a springboard into wherever they take you. Cool yeah? I have never had a dog. When I was young, I was terrified that the neighbourhood strays would bite me and then I would have to take 17 injections (I don't exactly remember if the number was 17, but it was a big number). As I recall, the dogs seemed to bark a lot and always seemed angry, but ...

Sorry, it has been a while. Things just pile up on one another, you know. But here’s the main news. The thing I’ve been waiting for since last December finally happened. Last month, on the 16 th , I got my TARDIS driving license. Which is to say, I successfully defended my PhD thesis. What? I’ve been waiting to make ‘Doctor’ themed jokes for a while now. But you know the strangest thing? Happy as I was (and still am) about the whole thing, the immediate aftermath of it felt a bit deflating. Like, what am I supposed to do with myself now? I mean, I have enough on my plate, don’t get me wrong- classes to teach, scripts to evaluate (how is about 80% of my life consumed by examinations and grading? I seem to remember these being a lot less frequent when I was a student myself!), data to collect and enter into endless excel sheets (did not sign up for this, smh) and then order and reorder, supervising student drama rehearsals, organizing intra-college poster contests and so on and so forth....

  I have a folder full of grading to do. Just the grading. Put a number against the white, no evaluation required. I am paid for my signature, not my opinion. I have four different excel sheets to fill up and I can’t bring myself to open my laptop. I keep wondering when you reach the breaking point. I keep wondering what tells the straw it’s the last one. What if the camel’s back gets so used to the pain it doesn’t realize when it finally breaks? Maybe it broke years ago and we just carry on out of habit like the coyote chasing the roadrunner across the air before it remembers to look down? So anyway, as an act of rebellion, I have been holding off listening to those voice messages and reading poetry instead. And there are words so simple, so casually written that shake you up. Like, how could they know? These strangers? And why couldn’t I write it? Or maybe we all wrote our poems and wove them into our collective dreams. And who knows,  maybe someone has read them too. And on...