It's 3-o clock in the summer afternoon and we are all sitting in the verandah, the ice cubes that Naani-ma (grand-mother) took out from the Rooh-Afza sherbet, are melting in the tray.
By her side, Ammi is knitting a woolen sweater for the first-born of my Maamu (Uncle)  . Her gold bangles make a sound with each turn of her hand. There is a tin-box of imported butter cookies in her lap, in which she stores an assortment of her spools of thread.
  The peace of the situation is so sedating, I lie flat on the charpoy and look at the sky. The clouds are moving slowly in a swirling pattern, a dance you can only pick if you look at them for a long enough time. Likewise, you can miss the beauty in people if you only look at them only with hurried glances. Having thought this, I turn to look at Naani-ma, intentionally for a longer time than I usually do. Her brown eyes are surrounded by deep wrinkles, but there's a glint in them. 'Haters will say it's glaucoma'. An inward joke, rises and dies within me. But there IS something remarkable about her face. Gravity turns the smiles of people upside down if they live long enough, but it has not been able to undermine her smile entirely. It's that feature that trickled down from her to my Aunt, and then to me in the next generation, making me look more like my Aunt's daughter than I ever looked like my mother's daughter. I feel so much love for Naani-ma in my heart. But as soon as the word 'love' enters the canvas of my mind,I feel perplexed by a quandary.

 Naani-ma loves my mother, but she also admonishes her often and expects her to do a lot of things she does not want to do for the sake of keeping appearances in front of people. It makes my mother different from how she usually is, lively and spirited. And the same Naani-ma who is the kindest possible person to all of us, can be very unkind to my Mumani (Uncle's wife).  It's confusing.  People display different shades of their character with different people in the same room. There is not one universal body of love that we can all go to and expect love and fairness from . Up until some years ago, I would have thought that Only God could offer that. But It is foolhardy to believe that anymore. Every other evening, Maulvi Sahab told us about the ways God likes to punish people for the crime of loving, or worshipping him in a different way than the one he approves. Love.... surely, it must be too much to expect that even the highest ideal that human beings could come up with, is so stringent about offering it. 

 

 'It's so frustrating when you cannot separate these threads from each other'' my mother's voice interrupts my thoughts  ' The more you try to yank them apart, the tighter they get''  In her hands are lying the two hopelessly intertwined spools of thread, red merging into blue going into red, an infinite appearing mess, a chaos.

 'That is why you should be careful where you put them when you put them' Naani shakes her head at my mother. 'If everything is neatly aligned from the start, you don't reach this point''.  She takes the spools of thread from my mother's hands and gives them to me.

' Now it's your job. You are the young one with better eyesight. Try to solve this mess for your mother'

  I feel that the prophet has spoken.

 I stare at the mess in my hands, the big junk that I have to figure out, the red that I have to separate from blue, a task akin to prising apart the intermingling patterns of love and pain in one's life, all of one's life.  Out in the verandah, there is a cupboard where Abbu stores the operating manual for every thing that exists in the house and sometimes, even the things that don't. That is the place where I run to, when I want to crack a problem in a systematic way. Sometimes reading a manual helps me crack a problem that does not even have anything to do with machines. 

   But there is no manual for disentangling stuff, because only the one with his fingers around the knot realizes the complexity of it. There are techniques which can help you, but they can only offer you a minimal guiding light. The judgement and the decision regarding when to pull, and if to pull is mine. The responsibility of knowing when to give up and cut the knot, instead of trying to resolve it, is mine too.  With my fingers around the heart of the knot, there is only this idea, that there is a way for this knot to not exist, which makes me take up the task in the first place. It's only this idea that makes me want to deal with it in the first place.

 Otherwise I see the hopelessly enmeshed pools of thread, forgotten inside the imported tin-boxes lying around, everywhere, in the house, and in people’s lives.

 

Do you understand what I mean?

Transition.

Hey.

I am catching you during a period of transition.

Your nails are bare, without any trace of nail polish. Your face is wiped clean of all make up, even the kajal that always lingers around your eyes, so much so that your face now feels unfamiliar without it. Your cheeks have visibly thinned and your skin is tight across your jawbone. You look so beautiful in this barren simplicity. So untouched. So fresh. Your features so soft without accentuation of make up that one can easily imagine the child you had been.I cannot count the wrinkles under your eyes if I try. 

The lady is here to apply Mehndi on your hands. All of your cousins and friends are sitting in a circle around her assistant, but you are on the sofa, with your arms propped on the pillows, palms upwards. Giggles and chatter are drowning the sound of the Bollywood Music playing in the background. Somebody just tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, and gave you a small bite of the Gulaab Jaaman. You seem too polite to say no.

One of your relatives holds your face in her hands, her bangles jangling loudly. She is asking you how it feels.

You smile ever so slightly. ''I don't know. It's too much happening all at once''

I think it's a very honest response. Some moments can be so overwhelming that they bypass our ability to experience them in detail, giving us a strange sense of numbness. 

Yet, In this general state of feeling overwhelmed, there will be discrete moments which will hit you like electricity. Some hours down the line , your heart will beat to the beat of the drums. Your senses will be joyfully overtaken by the smell of roses. You will be adored, and cherished, at least today. 

And then there will be quiet.

Later in the night, when your sister cuts an apple for your father, he will remember the way you cut it, your sister will miss the you-shaped hole in the center of your shared bed, and your mother will hug your clothes that are still hanging on your bathroom door, and cry.

But you will not know that. 

There will be a time, some months down the line, if not some weeks, when you will not care about the chipping nail polish on your finger, you will not wear make up to bed in hope of waking up pretty, and you will start taking a bit of space for yourself. The small moments like this will indicate that you have completed your transition into a new life and have become comfortable with the old habits spilling into it. 

There will be more transitions, those days in life when it will feel like you are in middle of two destinations, and you will remember them as defining moments of your life. And even the life itself will end with a final transition. 

And today, I feel that we were passengers in a train, and I saw the preparations surrounding the moment when you got off at a station. Yes, my ride continued without you, but I am hoping that removed from my eyes and knowledge, you are living a life worth living, that the difference between peace and numbness, is evident to your heart because on account of its extreme familiarity with the former. 

All the best. 

It will be upto people to see the beauty in you. Sometimes people are too different, to have any appreciation for opposing qualities in each other. And sometimes it is just a matter of where they are in their journey , and how ready they are to embrace you or someone like you. A swan can dance before a blind man, but if he doesn't have the ability to see it, he wouldn't see how beautiful the dance is. 

If you are such a swan, would you then keep dancing?

 I think of this Urdu Proverb here : 'Jungle me more nacha kis ne dekha' which implies that if a peacock's dance is not witnessed, it's in vain. 

And I understand, my Swan, that you want to be seen, but even if you are not, you have to keep dancing, you have to keep being you.

Because someone acknowledging the beauty in you, may feel like validation of your existence and who you are. 

But you being you is an act of obligation, by you, for yourself. And that comes first.

On a given day, at all times, we are negotiating our worth with other people. We are doing that at work, in the market and importantly, unless we are incredibly lucky, we are negotiating it in our relationships. 

As a child, we imagine politeness and a quiet attitude to be good qualities, but at workplace, it can be seen as a sign of weakness. Similarly, in relationships, if you are very nice to someone and bend over backwards to make their life easy, they can take it as a sign of your low esteem, and may even begin to appreciate someone who has more assertive qualities than you. It’s super weird and scary, right?

 Compare this to how a child loves you. The child is trusting and open to receiving love as well as reciprocating it without calculating responses in his mind or treating it as some sort of a game. As a result, you may feel that the child’s love has the element of an all-encompassing safety and reliability that is usually missing in adult relationships.

But come to think of it, the child is nothing but an adult human in his early stage. It seems that we start out knowing how to love, and how to receive love but the harsh lessons the world teaches us, takes away from us the luxury of really believing in any goodness anymore. If your trust has been broken repeatedly, if you have been abandoned unceremoniously, if you have seen sweet proclamations of undying love turn into dead-ends of indifference enough times, you are just not able to feel, or expect of people what you could when you were just a pure mind, untainted by such experiences of life. It’s all a confusion to you, and you can only accept the roses in one hand with fingers of your other hand crossed behind your back.

What feels like cynicism of people about relationships, is actually quite a rational take on the matter based on their experiences.

Maybe one day, tired, broken and betrayed, you can get up and look in the mirror and say: The cycle ends with me. I will not become in entirety, a picture of my grief. Maybe you will smile at the door man because he does such an under-appreciated job, and you will really empathize when your colleague is having a bad day, and choose it over the worry of doing the extra work. Slowly, but definitely, a web of inter-connections will develop, permeated by your love, your care, your attention, and people will feel less un-hinged around you. This is an act of you ‘becoming the change you want to see in the world’. Also, my favorite quote.

Tell me the song about falling out of love. About that first cup of coffee that you cherish for it's aroma itself and not because someone's company is making it special for you. Tell me about the first raindrops that dance on your skin and exorcise the demon of pain, about the first morning when you wake up and you do not have to wonder if you are in the right reality because you are comparing it to the past, about the first night you sleep without calculating your losses. 

 Tell me about that first painting you make that celebrates you being noone to anybody, the first cake you cut that you cannot wait to have the first slice of, that first walk in the park that doesn't feel like being lost in a maze. Tell me about the moment when the roses, daises and all the flowers that you cannot name, smile with you.

 Tell me the song about falling out of love, that carries the melody of peace and not of melancholy , of acceptance and not despair, of contentment and not a regretted surrender. 

 And if there's no such song, then make it.

  Many times, when you feel hurt by a person over and over, you begin to imagine that it will be so much better for you if you have no expectations. There is nothing else that seems to be in your control anyway. You may even assume the personage of a brooding and humbled being with no expectations for a couple of days, and you may even declare it to the person, but I don't think you really believe what you are doing yourself. In all of your actions, in your silence, in your apparent indifference, there is hidden a cry to be recognised. Even if you say that you have accepted your fate, there is a sweet pain in your heart which stays. Your gaze may linger on them a bit too long when they are not looking, and if they make retributions for their behavior, you will dissolve into a bag of hot tears and everything will be okay again. You will still prefer that the person makes up to you instead of really forfeiting all expectations from that person. This scenario is the happy ending you imagine for your situation, even if you say otherwise.

  If they never apologize or come around, you will keep strugfling. The path of your grief is so uniquely yours, that each person has to walk it for himself and figure it out. There can be books and guiding posts, but the map of the experience is yours to navigate. You will fight against the seemingly insurmountable odds of love and attachment.

    One day it will be different. One day you will really not expect anything from them.

The thing about truly not expecting anything is that, you don't even feel the soft pain in your heart, that underlying expectation that somebody will prove it to you beyond your assertions, that they care. It doesn't matter anymore. There is no happy ending in your mind because now this subject is as irrelevant to you, as the face of a stranger in a crowd. You don't feel that sense of victory about overcoming pain that you once imagined you would. It just doesn't matter to you anymore. You have been restored back in your shell. You have no expectations. Truly. Really. Completely.

Time.

There is a rush of life in the house.

Ammi is making breakfast, Abbu is getting ready for office. He is humming an old Rafi tune. One of the things noone will never know about him is that he actually sings quite well. His personality is too reserved to allow an artistic expression in front of anyone.

 Sisters are having a dispute over a shared sweater, brother is blasting "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne on his speakers, the milk man is ringing the door bell, somebody is rushing to the kitchen to collect the pot for the milk because he always leaves too early otherwise, there is so much going on, and I am existing on the periphery of the situation as usual. I go to Ammi and eat my breakfast silently. She always pays attention to the closest details. She has remembered that I like the yolk hard. Another special thing about Ammi is that while the moms of my friends don't listen to them if they don't want to go to school, Ammi lets me take a day off once in a while. I ask her if I could not go and she lets me. I am excited to spend the whole day in her shadow and in the quiet of the house.

  When everybody leaves, I go to all the places which are usually occupied by someone and sit in them one by one. I am getting all the special treatment and I'm loving it. Fast forward to 20 years later. 

  Everybody has a new life now. Parents are here and the children inhabit another corner of the world. Their access to each other might be the envy of a 16th century sailor, but for the people who share bread, butter, blood and tears for decades, how can it ever remotely feel enough? 

 Everything else is mostly the same. The milk man comes to the door, someone collects the clothes from the washing machine and hangs them on the line. There is no distribution of chores about who will collect the clothes from the line and who will bring the dishes from the kitchen. There are no arguments. There is a silence which has replaced fights, but also laughter.

  I sit on the stairs of the verandah, and think about life. I can still feel the peace and the quiet that I used to feel on the special day off. But there is a hint of sadness imbued in this experience.  I think about how everyone has started their own sub culture with their own families now. New life buds out and makes its way, pushing the elderly to the fringes. It is happening and one day It will happen to you and me as well.

  I look at the wrinkled faces of the old people and see so much beauty in them. They have seen so much of this world more than us. They are there..your parents and mine. They exist with their stories to tell, they exist with their pain to express and their love to bestow. All of that is special, but it does not have a monetary value or tag on it that the world can recognize. It depends on us to recognise what we mean to each other.

  It is often said that the one who is left behind knows the true grief because he is surrounded by the markers of the other persons' presence. I can vouch for that  in the haunting silence of the house. 

 When your parents narrate their life experience as if they have already lived their life in the past and are now just existing,  it is not easy to bear. But only by facing this discomfort, can you fight it or find a way aroud it.

I fight against it all the time. I tell Ammi Abbu, i know you feel you have lived your life but what are you talking about,  we are yet to see the world.

  I have to take them on the Bosphorous cruise, where they can see Asia and Europe on two sides of the same ship. We will have the Turkish olives and tea. And Ammi will buy anything she puts her hands on in the Souq.

   

You see, when I give an old patient a medication in my clinic, I can see it in their disinterested demeanor that it is just a pill I am giving them and not the will to live. 

 That will always be given by the purpose, or the feeling that they have something left to live for. 

If you want to stand in the way of a loved one their decline. Plant a dream. Plant a vision. Plant a hope. That is the stuff of life.

When the verandah becomes a place where we will take an exciting flight together from, it doesn't look that sad anymore.

After-effects.

  When someone is mean to you, and says something nasty about you, on the surface it appears that they have done something that makes you feel bad. They can call you ugly, boring or anything under the Sun. Maybe you will feel devastated by it in the moment.

But it is never as simple. In time,  you will move on, your heart will find peace, you will find some closure,  and you will be a different person.  But the person who says you are ugly,  will always stay the person who said you were ugly. He will always stay the person whose judgement of another person was based on such a superficial metric, and someone who was so ugly inside that he was not averse to hurting others. He will have opportunities to redeem himself, but the burden will be on him.

 In any encounter you have with them ever, they will know it, you will know it, and it will always be up to you to forgive it.

   Tomorrow you may be in a different place, emancipated from them, free of all the hurt they could make you feel while they had the power, and it will feel so different for you. You will probably be unaffected by anything that was ever said to you.

 

But they will know. They will remember. It will be their burden to carry, not yours.

I think we always bear the consequences of what we are to people. 

Something about the kidneys.

   I have never known my father to be afraid of anything in life, except Dialysis. (Dialysis is a procedure in which a machine cleans your blood of toxins when your kidneys cannot make urine anymore.)

     If we were in a hospital, i would spot Abbu looking at the frail patients in wheelchairs from the corner of his eyes, and I could always interpret that look with the knowledge of the stubborn self-sufficiency he has always displayed in life. His wish was that he would rather pass away while  he was still healthy , than be dependent and frail for any period of time.As Diabetes took a toll on his kidneys, his fears regarding disability grew. In his fear of ever needing dialysis for his kidneys, i saw the reflection of my own fear of needles as a kid. We know that  the time period of agony a kid experiences in fear of the needle is much longer than the duration of the needle prick .Same was the case with Abbu. The concept of Dialysis kept him perplexed long before it ever became an option to treat.

  So before moving to USA, i took him to a nephrologist to make sure his kidneys were in as good a condition as they can be in. The kidney doctor told Abbu, that in his lifetime he is not likely to need dialysis ever. Abbu was very  happy to learn that. On his way back home, he was smiling more than he usually smiles about things.  But i was lost in deep thought. 

I knew that a clinician making such a statement is either naïve, which the said doctor was not, or there is something else that lurks under the superficial understanding of his statement. And i found it out soon enough.  At a certain age, and with certain risk factors that my father has, the probability of a patient dying from cardiovascular causes is higher than that of their kidneys worsening to an extent that they would need dialysis.  The doctor said 'you are not going to need dialysis in your life' and i understood ' You are more likely to die from a heart problem before your kidneys are bad enough to need dialysis'

   Ah, different interpretation of a same fact can give you such widely varying degrees of comfort. And how easily we fall in the loops of interpretations and get falsely reassured by incomplete data.

Even the best of the thinkers among us do not think statistically, even if we may believe that we think rationally.

   Having said that, i am not detached from the emotional implications of what i heard. I send a wish to the cosmos that my Abbu lives a long and healthy life throughout the entire span of my existence. ❤️ 

Medicine.

During third year of medical school, as a part of our pharmacology practicals, we had an 'apothecary class'.  Each student was given access to some chemicals, a pestle and a mortar, some brown wrapping paper, ribbons and a simple squeezable plastic bottle. Our task was to make the ointment for scabies, a disease caused by a parasite which makes you itch all over, and is very contagious.

  We prepared the medicine and installed it in bottle, cleaning the rim of the bottle with a spatula.  Next, we wrapped the bottles up in a brown paper and then we were taught to tie the ribbon in a figure of 8 for some technicality that had to do with ease of opening the wrapping. We then  labeled the bottle with its ingredients as well as with the name of the imaginary patient to whom it was being dispensed.  Although far from being an ideal or efficient way of dispensing medicines, there was some satisfaction in having every step of the process under your control.  It  gave me a feeling of how medicine used to be practiced in olden days.

The practice of modern medicine is very different. Now, in order to treat a patient, what you do is rack your brains and choose the most suitable agent, on a computer, and the medicine after going through multiple checks of quality control and pharmacist review, is collected by the patient.  Delegation of responsibilities to chosen people instead of one person, and multiple number of quality checks are in the best interest of the patient. The only drawback is that the task of treating patients has lost a personal touch for both the physician and the patient. A good internal medicine doctor of today is an efficient thinking machine.

 In clinical practice, I observe that it is the work of the nurses, which is directly satisfactory in that they are the ones who deliver the medicine to the patient and are involved in more intimate care of the patient. For myself, anticipating how the patient will be comfortable and attending to their small needs, as well as giving them the medicines, is an invaluable experience ever if I can contribute to  it. There's something to it that seems to restore medicine from the domain of a 'profession' to the realm of a sacred service.

Lahore.

 There's something in the evenings of that city. The dusk is really 'dusky'. Romantic. Alluring. Poetic. It is a definitive spot between night and day and not just a hasty period of overlap between the two domains. Don't ask me what it means. Stand in the middle of the street in the narrow corridors of old Lahore as the evening prayers come to an end and the dark blue sky spreads over the horizon, and you may feel what I am saying. But It is not just the experience of the ones whose feet are more familiar with the perils of unequal grounds. You can feel this in your stilettos on the top floor of a popular restaurant while craning your neck to see the sun setting down between the houses. You will feel this if you are not in a rush. ( In life you will feel many things only if you are not in a rush)  You can feel this as the car next to you blasts Punjabi songs when you stop at the traffic signal next to Neher on your way back from office. The people of the city mark the evening with a definite shift in their behaviors. The mood of the city turns over. At evening, Lahore becomes a city of shadows and whispers. Add winter to it and it becomes a setting conducive for an epic romance.

  Think of the the large forbidden grounds of Punjab University covered in fog, and the lure it must present to two lovers toiling in its campus. It seems possible to be lost there. Fog has this tempting character of promised oblivion.They can be conveniently lost if they are daring, until they are discovered by the Jamia. That is Lahore for you, love and sanctions co exist side by side. But love wins, ever so often.

 You know the way I think about places now is that..even though they are non living, they have the upper hand over their short term inhabitants. People come and people go, political and social climates keep shifting. Poetry is read and art is made. At different times Lahore was, and will continue to be claimed by different people but the characters always vanish and the place stays.

Lahore stays. Magnificent, magical, mysterious; keeping its inhabitants entrapped in an unforgiving nostalgia during their limited span of existence.

There's an idea of bridging medicines, in which you have to keep the patient on first medicine until the second medicine takes effect. These days I feel people are always bridging in relationships. When they are unhappy in one relationship, they start to explore other options on the side, and when their attachment needs get met with the new person, they declare that they no longer want anything to do with the first person. Obviously, it sucks for the person who gets evicted from the relationship and on the surface it appears to be a good deal for the person who moves on with the next one. He doesn't have to deal with the heart break and difficult feelings that surround the end of a relationship.

 But is anything about human nature and happiness ever as simple as it appears? 

  In life, without exception, if you don't conclude your feelings properly with one person before you are with another, you are not likely to have the peace of having a singular mind.

  Perhaps in some cases, it might occur that the new person is everything you ever wanted, and they keep you sufficiently happy to never look back, but even in that case, you owe it to the other person to conclude things with them properly instead of letting them burn in the agony of you being with someone else while they are still in your life. 

  Reading back, it feels that my post has a tinge of moral policing and a disclaimer is warranted. I do not judge people in a way that i classify them as bad people even if they perpetuate this bridging.I understand that human relationships are far more complex than they seem through the lens of a moral perspective, and that we are all imperfect.

  It's just that, there are also consequences to taking the easy way out and on account of them being not clearly visible, they are more insidious, and they are likely to stay unresolved for you. On the other hand, grief demands your attention to it immediately.

  It may be so that many years down the line, you see the jilted lover to be in a calmer and wiser state of mind than the one who walked away.

I keep knocking at the door, but she doesn't open it. Auntie joins me, and both of us start banging on the door. We hear a timid voice emerge from the frightening silence behind the door, ''i am coming''.  We are both furious at her when she opens the door. "What were you even doing in there?" Auntie asks her.  ''Nothing''.  She tells us.  Auntie yanks her arm forward which was hidden behind her back. There is a pack of biscuits in it. She looks at us with tears in her eyes , as if reproaching us for this breach of privacy. Both of us heave a sigh of relief.  I know Auntie was afraid that she may be talking to a boy secretly, that is what anyone her age would be doing, but she was not hiding because of that. She was hiding because she wanted to enjoy a pack of biscuits without reproach.  

 I don't know what is this fog that enveloped us that we breathed a sigh of relief at the moment in which we should have sat her down and reassured her that she didn't have to hide from us, or from anyone. It happened before our eyes at all times, she refusing food or she gorging on it, she yo-yoing between cycles of being thin and overweight. But we told ourselves that  it is just a part of being a teenager. It is now that I understand that not only did we overlook her suffering, we also reinforced her behaviors inadvertently, by ignoring, complimenting or reprimanding her based on her size and how well the clothes looked on her body.

  Through the years, I saw her look at the food in the weddings and visibly retreat from it , I saw her subsist herself only on one slice of bread a day when she came to visit us, i saw her suck her cheeks in repeatedly while working, I found her pausing at her reflection in every mirror,  I saw her checking her wrist width in the finger span of her thumb and index finger, and all of those habits became normal to us. In fact, as  she got thin over the course of time, her obsession with the scale and her measurements became something to aspire to, for the younger girls. We saw the end result and we liked it.  We talked about her self control around food and her ability to withdraw from it for long periods of time, with a touch of admiration.  

  Last time I saw her was at a wedding. We were in the kitchen and there was the aroma of gulaab jaamuns everywhere. Around us, people were talking about the songs they wanted to dance to, and she was sitting on a Kitchen counter with her legs above the ground. We started talking, I offered her the gulab-jaaman dipped in a bowl of sweet syrup, but she refused to take it point blank. I looked at her, again with a sense of admiration. ''You know, you used to hide behind closed doors and eat your biscuits. At that time, Auntie and I literally thought that you were talking to a boyfriend. Look at how far along you have come''.  As soon as I said this, her expression changed as if she had snapped out of a reverie. '' I have come far along ? '' She smiled at me. ''You think this is far along that i cannot enjoy a single gulab jaamun without feeling bad?" The sentiment in her voice struck me. "It's not that I won't eat it or I haven't had any dietary breach like that in the past week or even yesterday night'', she laughed '' It's just that i ll eat it when everyone is sleeping, and when i'm half asleep myself so that i am not conscious enough to put up a fight against my will. And you know what will happen next? I will wake up bloated, i will eat nothing for the rest of the day, but in the evening, I will eat because I will have suffered so much by that time, and i may end up eating too much and this cycle will repeat again. Yes, some self control. Yes, i have come a long way like you said''.  She smiled sadly, then seeing the shocked expression on my face, she took my hand in hers, and said it in a voice as gentle as her touch. '' It is not wrong for you to remark that I have come far along. I am not that chubby teenager anymore. And in that way it is true. ''. She said it, just as the tiny swarvoski crystal on her delicate neck gave a sparkle , attracting my attention to her prominent collarbones, as if to prove a point.

'' But inside, It's not a good feeling, you know, when you can't enjoy food. When your relationship with food, is this toxic, impossible thing, that always makes you feel bad after. When you have to experience it like a forbidden luxury day and night" She looked away with tears in her eyes. " I still hide to eat, you know. And I hide not just from everyone, but myself too. '' 

 In my hands, the gulabjaaman sat like a stale offering at the bottom of the bowl.

It was all fresh in my memory and theirs. We were meeting for the first time. They looked at me expectantly, as if, how I felt had to determine the course of our conversation.

"I don't care" I said. 

And my heart felt like it needed as much convincing as the people I was saying it to. 

Some days later, we were all hanging out. I decided to test the waters. "I don't care'" i whispered. Something kicked and squirmed and protested inside me with the intensity of a misunderstood and angry child.

I retreated. 

For days I did not say the ominous words.

But then one day I saw them worried.

"I don't care" I told them reassuringly to their face.

And I heard my voice coming from the hollow of a life-size wound up doll.

Still? I wondered. 

But I did one thing I had to do. I lived through it. 

One bright day, we were having cocktails under the winter Sun. The whole day had 'happiness' written all over it. The setup was perfect, even symbolic of the freedom I wished I could feel.

"I don't care" I said with a laugh. Hope skimmed the edges of the sentence.

But not all of me laughed with me.

I didn't say it anymore.

Today, on a day as ordinary as any, I was going up in the elevator with a cup of coffee in my hands. I spilled some. 

But I didn't care. And I said that much aloud.

And I realised I didn't care about a lot more.

I said the words aloud again, just to be sure.

"I don't care" my reflection in the elevator mouthed with me.

I checked back with my heart, there was no disagreement this time.

It was all of me there.

And I smile at how in the journey of life, you cannot make yourself go from the point of caring, to the point of not caring by your will alone. And how anti-climactic it can eventually be, when one day you discover that your heart has really healed from the blow it received. It doesn't even announce the coveted transition, even to you.

 It does not boast, it does not yell back in reaction, it does not paint its recovery into flamboyant picture of a victory. 

It just doesn't feel the same way anymore. 

To no one's benefit or harm, not even your own, it feels.

The story of how my heart shatters today.

  There is a little girl at the subway, in pink ponytails. She is wearing a backpack and is probably 5-6 years old. She clutches at the jacket of the woman next to her. The woman turns around and smacks her on the arm. "You are so disrespectful" . She snaps at the little girl.

I observe the silent figure of the little girl. Her tiny frame is the most adorable thing in the entire subway station. She looks at the elder woman, visibly scared and shocked. She doesn't cry. She doesn't answer back. She just stands and stares. It is not in the insolent fashion of a regular teenager. It is the timid way a prey looks at the predator when it figures that running will be useless. And then, the angels stand in silence and all the rainbows in the world disappear as a little hand emerges from pocket of a little red coat, takes off the spectacles perched on a little nose, and rubs two eyes on a little face, one after the other.

I wish I could hug her. I wish I could tell her that she didn't deserve to be snapped at. But I know with a sense of certainty by now, that whatever hot and cold treatment , or rebuke wrapped in love she receives now, she will begin to consider it love. Even if it makes her feel hurt, hollow or sad. She will never know there is another way to be, or another way to be loved. And I know that whatever one person 'deserves', no matter how good they are, is in the end at the mercy of other people. And life is not fair.

 However many tears that little girl had in her eyes, i had more. And my heart feels split in two.

 No one can do the arduous task of addressing your insecurities. The love you dream about and gawk at in the movies and the novels, the love you mysteriously suspect the other people to have, cannot bear the burden of this enormous expectation. 

Of all the things I have found to be true over time, this one is absolutely spot on. In order to love anyone properly, you must first love yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup. If you try to, you will hurt yourself, and them.

Enough people are put in guilt about cheating , but not enough people are in guilt about inflicting emotional abuse and hostile behavior on their partners for a lifetime. When that shit comes up, people would regard it as a personal matter of two people. When it happens around them in living rooms and out on the roads  and in the family gatherings, they look away.  When they see someone being visibly snubbed by another person and their entire personality changing because of undue pressure by a partner, they act like its a fair game. But when it comes to cheating, the entire country will jump on the bandwagon to name and shame a person. The way society treats relationships, accepting ugliness in some ways and rejecting it in others , is just horribly skewed.

Your mother was not like other mothers. She wasn't there enough, wasn't too good of a cook.

 Or all your mother did all her life was slaved away in the kitchen , but she didn't give you sustainable eating habits for life.

Your parents let you grow like a wildflower, making you learn your our lessons in the harsh climate of the world.

Or they protected you so much and for so long that you never took a flight.Consequently you remained a vulnerable adult child for life. 

  The kind of parenting you had will define what you become in life until you choose to put your foot down, if you ever do. Because being that will always be the path of least resistance for you.

 It is hard to face adversity but unfavourable situations come with relative clarity regarding  what you should do. 

It is harder to stand in the face of Love , to know it as a truth in your bones, and to walk along a path of potential regrets to find where YOUR heart is, YOUR  truth is.

 How many times have you made that call to your friend when your pain feels irredeemable. You know it will be distraction at best. But then the friend pick you up. In the familiar smell of his car, in how he lets the silence be, orders food for both you without asking you, makes casual talk before your vocal sadness gives him a cue to dive in, taps the table in front while averting his gaze if he knows you find it hard to be openly emotional in front of him, nods his head or completes your sentences; in the flow of his motions you find a sense of calmness. Here is something in your world which is happening just as it used to , and it is comforting.

Less has been said about such people in our lives, in whose absence it doesn't hurt to breathe, whose presence is registered more strongly than their absence, who are acknowledged as passing thoughts nut not bitterly missed.

Yet these are the people who become the gentle wind when our ships lose anchor, the people without whom we would be tossed around by merciless waves of our torrentous passions.

 Sometimes, people , after they make you feel unloved by their rejection or indifference, also curiously expect you to bounce back from the lows with dignity. They are keenly watchful of how you took the blows they delivered. 

Between the last embrace to the next time their feelings may assume a pattern of certainty, it is the love that you have for yourself which is put to test, and which enables you to do anything t all. It is this love which is the safety ingredient that lets any other love simmer at a heat which would not hurt you.