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 ...

  I’ve been looking for things to say.   I have been afraid of staring at blank pages. What if someday I have nothing to say anymore? What if nothing I say interests anyone anymore? What if no one hears me? What if they hear me and laugh at my naiveté? So what am I going to write about? Like most of my recent posts, this too has been weeks and months in the making. I’ve been running away from saying the things I want to say. What if I say too much? Share too much? What if they laugh and roll their eyes, muttering about my presumptions? What if no one says a damn thing and I fall through the rabbit-hole of silence once again? On some days, I listen to one song on loop, willing it to weave a story in my head that transports me from my present. On other days, I run through my playlists, discarding old favourites like a moody teenager picking at food, too distracted to allow for the distraction of music and rhythm. Somebody perhaps I’ll sit down and write songs again, feel the...

Car smells make me sick. I don’t know if it’s the upholstery or the closed space or the stale air- something about cars with windows pulled shut remind me of the discomfort of movement, the uncertainty of the road, the sense of displacement from home. That’s a little bit ironic, because I love cars and cabs (who doesn’t?) and sometimes on a car trip I’ve wished for the road to continue so the solitude of vacant thought would linger, and the comfort of moving scenery provide distraction from the spaceless, static finality of destination. My favourite kind of road is the one that runs through lines of dense, leafy trees to infinity on a cloudy spring day with a light wind carrying just the hint of a drizzle. There seems to be less and less of those nowadays. I think car smells are the strongest on Monday mornings. Or maybe the body is just extra sensitive after the weekend. I read somewhere that general depression levels in a population increases on Monday mornings. Makes...