Ruchira's Ramblings

Photo by Engina Kyurt via Pexels.com  There’s a certain type of sadness you fear in those you love. A sadness you can’t name, can’t put your finger on, can’t even properly describe. It comes out in flickers of petty, domestic discontent. The tele-soaps have all got it wrong. All those grand conspiracies, lofty heartbreaks come with an end-goal. Unhappy homes are made of smaller stuff- things misplaced, little forgettings, rotten fruits in the refrigerator, an unclicked switch, a harmless question. Even a shared anecdote. For a while, I have been watching. Counting. What breaks the ceasefire? What disrupts the peace? It is, as the saying goes, always the little things.  Truth is, nobody cares about the little things. The little things only reveal an absence. Most of human history isn’t about momentous matters, and thereby lies the discontent. There are no great goals for most of us, so we find our goals in others. A leader, a hero, a loved one. We are told to be a c...

You know how kids think sometimes that movies are real? When I was a kid, I didn't think so. I even knew actors' names (learned from my mother) and understood that they played different roles in different stories. But I didn't know how movies were made, and thought that they ran in real time. And so I thought, I thought... that perhaps the life I knew- with parents, friends and school and vacations was a movie that somebody else was watching the same way we watched those black and white classics on the family television set on Sunday afternoons, and that someday the movie would end and I would discover that I wasn't who I thought I was, but somebody else. And how strange and exciting would it be to discover that it was all make-believe, that I was someone else, from somewhere else.  Sometimes I think that I'm still waiting to discover who I really am. I recall no dream but broken images of imagined conversations melting away into a void of disquiet- ...