I wish you bliss!

I remember days when my colleagues/well-wishers would pester me to get married. The sessions would start as a joke, escalate to levels which could be easily sample cases of sexual harassment by co-workers, and would invariably end in one of them wise ladies saying, ‘Jokes apart. I want to see you happy. Don’t get married if you don’t want to but be in a relationship with a wonderful guy.’ The hysteria would die and others would sober up and nod in chorus. The conversations would keep me thinking long afterwards. Somethings that were spoken about, I would share with my mother; doubts I would clear up with one of best friends—P; and the parts that I understood but was too embarrassed to share with anyone I would try to forget. Even though I laughed with everyone during the late afternoon sessions when all of us would be taking a break, to the horror of our male colleagues, these talks left me feeling a little lonely and thinking that I was missing something vital. There would be days when I would be busy in some social engagement or the other and would not have enough time to brood over what was said. Those were good days. However, days when time was a plenty, I would start by laughing to myself remembering something that was said. Invariably I would then move on to being depressed thinking that maybe such bliss was not my cup of tea.

There were many, who, through my twenties told me I was old enough to be married. Others warned, ‘If you pass the marriageable age, all the good guys will be off the market.’ I responded with nervous laughter sometimes. On other occasions I would cheekily quip, ‘Achi cheez banne mein time lagta hai. The boy is getting ready to match up to my expectations.’ I believed in the statement only 5% of the time. I hated everyone who told me to lower my expectations and to not be too choosy. Some would think that telling me that my mother was a cancer patient and might not be around long enough to see me tie the knot was the best way to convince me to cross the threshold. As if that thought did not haunt me every minute of every day.

Now, I live with a man. The world and I call him my husband. He takes care of me. Loves me to the point of cherishing me. I understand the bliss that my colleagues and friends so oft spoke about. Having pop-corn while watching a movie in our house, tucked in the cushions of the sofa, suddenly I get transported in time and I think about what L had said or V had remarked. A smile spreads across my face as I realize all that they wished for me has come true. And how!

I wish the same bliss for my unmarried/single friends. I wish that they find someone they can bully into buying a chocolate for them at the end of the day. Someone they can ask to cook for them on a lazy Saturday. I wish they find someone who makes them laugh and whose eyes well up when he sees them cry. I wish them bliss.

But I want them to wait for the guy who makes the world go round for them. I don’t want anyone to lower their standards or expectations. Finding love in your thirties is better. You can share all the mischief and misfortune of your twenties with your partner. They weren’t there so the bag of stories remains sufficiently full to entertain each other on long, never-ending drives. Since you missed each other during the troubling twenties, you end up valuing each other much more. Doing silly things doesn’t seem too silly if it makes the other smile. I want my closest friends to experience all this and more.

I might sound full of mush. Some might be squiggling their noses at what I have written. Some might agree to what I say and others might define love and marriage based on their experiences. To each his/her own. But for my closest friends I wish bliss. The kind of bliss where you fight bitterly with a person and then rest your head on their shoulder while your tears soak their favourite t-shirt.

Dance

The rhythm was easy, enticing, and if possible, also sensual. The music caressed her arms just inches below from where he held her. They moved gracefully. As if they had been practicing for years; as if the moment had been painstakingly choreographed. They stopped for a fraction of a second and looked into each other’s eyes. They gazed into each other’s eyes as if trying their best to see what the future held. They returned to the motion as gracefully as they had stopped. Like they had never stopped. He looked down. The gaze broke. And the music stopped.   

Prefect Man

He looked at me trying hard to comprehend what was going on in my mind. I was looking outside at the slow-moving traffic, couples holding hands, parents talking to their children and a dog wagging its tail at the passing cars. Taking a sip of the hot coffee he cleared his throat to grab my attention. It was almost a Herculean effort for me to shift my gaze towards him. I braced myself for the lecture. He smiled and said, ‘You know what your problem is? Your definition of a perfect man is a poet on a motorcycle.’

The day I met Oprah!

Friday was like any other ordinary day in office. I had entered office shaking my head to the songs playing in my head. Before 10 o'clock Lopa had dislodged a glass tumbler from its right place spilling water all over Anuradha’s desk. Vinata had told us all about her new sweater and had agreed to all the compliments showered on her conveniently forgetting to thank the compliment givers.

With the first coffee cups of the day in our hands, I started telling Sangeeta in painful details about how Oprah and SRK were amongst my favourite people in the world and how they had taught me different but equally important life lessons. I did not say it to her then and might not appreciate her to her face as long as we are friends but Sangeeta is a patient girl. She listened to me go on and on. I hope all this praise and me calling her patient is true and she was not in fact revising one of her favourite books in her head while nodding politely at me.

Just as I was about to begin a new and long story about how I’m super intelligent because I’ve been gifted with enough sense to know that I should be learning from legends like Oprah, Kasturi came to my desk and announced that there was a meeting which I had to attend. Flabbergasted at being denied the joy of enriching Sangeeta’s life with my tales some more I just about managed to hide my anger. Reminding myself that work comes first I picked up my blue pen, phone and letter pad and walked like a hero to the small conference room.

I was sure that everyone, well there were 5 people in the meeting room, was up to something as the meeting seemed without an agenda and all I did for the next 3 hours was look at my watch and shout at everyone in the room. When I came out of the room my friends gushed and told me I had missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Oprah had come to office and had brought rajma chawal with her for everyone. As is my wont, my eyes welled up and tears started flowing in a bid to match the volume of water in the Indian Ocean. However, someone shouted at me and asked me to stop as Ranjan sir was just entering our department. The way my tear ducts stopped working abruptly was so mechanical that it was comical.

Heartbroken at not meeting Oprah and missing out on rajma chawal I sulked all day while everyone around me spoke about how nice she was. I sat in my corner and cursed the man who took me for the meeting. Time had decided to follow in the footsteps of a snail and all I wanted to do was go home and howl sad songs into the pillow. I picked up my laptop bag which suddenly weighed heavier than usual and started climbing down the stairs. If things weren’t already bad, just as I stretched my arm to open my car door, a man pulled me into a big car and we were out of the office campus before I could say, ‘SRK’.

Not one to surrender easily, I struggled a bit but was soon distracted by the awesome interiors of the car. The man who had pulled me in smiled at me and I blushed. It was my latest TV crush—Darren Criss who plays the role of Blaine Anderson in Glee. He told me that he was just escorting me to the place where I was to spend the rest of the evening and would not be able to spend time with me even though he wanted to. I sighed and before I could protest the car stopped and I was being pulled out by Gail (Oprah’s best friend). She hugged me and told me that since I was unable to meet Oprah at office I was to be one of the audience members for her talk show.

I was taken to a beautiful green room and dressed in a beautiful black dress. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt a twinge of sadness. This pretty and fated to sit in the audience, life was just unfair. There was an announcement and I was ushered to the studio. The sight of the cream sofa and Oprah looking stunning in red distracted me enough to miss a big picture of me, yes the narcissistic me, on the screen behind her. I saw her coming towards me and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow! She is amazing. She greets everyone in the audience individually.’ Just as this thought tried to make a home in the corners of my brain, Oprah held my hand and said in her inimitable style, ‘Priyanka Khot, welcome to the best hour of your life and stop crying!’ Never in my wildest dream had I imagined that I would disobey Oprah but there I was crying in a fashion that would give even Smriti ‘Tulsi’ Irani of the Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi fame a run for her money.

After drinking several glasses of water and being hugged my Oprah for several minutes I regained composure and sat down on the sofa where Tom Cruise had once jumped. We spoke about books. She asked me for a book recommendation and in my trademark style I decided to tell her peripheral details as well. I told her that my friend Sangeeta had recommended a book called, The Palace of Illusions to me and I absolutely loved the book and think Oprah should read it too. At this point there was a collective sigh of exasperation from the audience. It was their way of telling me that I had crossed the line by recommending a book to the reading queen—Oprah.

Oprah and I both ignored the audience. She in fact said, ‘Speaking of Sangeeta...’ and pointed to the screen where a slideshow of my photographs (mostly self-portraits) had been running till now. Viola! Sangeeta appeared on the screen with her big beautiful smile intact. She said, ‘Dekha! Huhuhuhahaaaa! Kar diya na surprise. She then turned her attention to Oprah and decided to tell everyone how SRK was my other favourite person and I believed that I had learned a lot from both Oprah and SRK. Sangeeta conveyed her bewilderment perfectly, saying, ‘But you know what, although Priyanka truly believes that a hug from both or either one of you will solve all her troubles, for some reason she never wants to meet SRK.’

Just as Sangeeta finished pronouncing the last syllable of her monologue, I saw the audience going into a state of frenzy from the corner of my eye. Then the title track of Kal Ho Na Ho started playing and I began to cry once again. Oprah took me by my shoulders and turned me around while I refused to lift my head up. I tried to drown my sobs into my palms. That was the best moment of my life. While he was hugging me and telling me to look at him, Oprah was shouting to the audience, ‘Here is the man who has a bigger fan following than Tom Cruise. Here is the man who can dance with women without any music. Here is SRKKKKKKKKKKKK!”

A big smile on my face, tears flowing as freely as the water of Niagara Falls, thanking Sangeeta in my heart for letting my secret out, I was hugging SRK and Oprah.

Just then, my mom decided to wake me up. HOW RUDE!

Hands and Smiles

His palms were huge. Broad at the base, they had tapered long fingers with neatly trimmed nails. The lines on his palm were few, dark, and deep. The strong forearms spoke of a man who had spent a lifetime engaging in physical labour. They exuded strength but at the same time it was easy to tell that the man could hold a baby without harming it. The hands could soothe a crying teenager after her first heart break. The fingers, just by a mere touch, could make a woman blush and want the moment to never end. They could give comfort to an old friend and lend support to a complete stranger. The hands had a character of their own. They spoke of the man and where he had been and who he had become.

Right now his hands were merely holding a book. The long fingers were taking their time flipping through each page. Anyone who saw the man would say that he took the job of flipping each page seriously and also enjoyed the sensation of the paper touching his fingertips. He grazed his hand from left to right at the top of the page he had finished reading. He then carefully picked the top right corner of the page with his thumb and the index finger. In a fluid movement, his hold travelled to the bottom of the page and he turned the page.

The gaps between his fingers were deep just like the deep valleys of the Greater Himalayas, where the young rivers flow at great speed. I had been looking at him for a long time now. Oblivious to the fact that the other travellers could see me staring at him, I took the liberty of staring at him for a few more seconds.

Then suddenly embarrassed by what I was doing and in an attempt to seem a bit less weird I blurted out loud, “Are you reading about the great mountains of the Himalayas?”

He made a quick attempt to hide a scowl, which had emerged on its own account as if he was rudely woken from a dream filled sleep. Trying to figure out where he was, and as if waking up after a night long sleep, he mumbled. Just as he finished saying, “Yes. Reading,” a puzzled look on his face revealed that he realised just at that moment that the pretty lady’s question had more to it than he had answered.

It was his turn to be embarrassed. He looked down at his book just to break the gaze that had held him longer than what was the custom in these situations. He lifted his gaze again to find that the lady was no longer interested in him and was intently looking outside the window as the lush green hills passed by. He looked at her hands. She had thin, shapely arms, delicate, soft palms and beautiful fingers. Her nails were coloured in a light shade of pink, which he imagined matched the colour of her cheeks, when she blushed. She wore only a thin gold band on the index finger of her right hand. There was no engagement ring or a wedding band to be seen. This detail made him smile. The smile lingered for a bit longer than necessary.

She held a light blue coloured handkerchief between her fingers. She was tapping a tune with her fingers. He noticed that her grip on the piece of cloth tightened every time the bus hit a rough patch. He wanted to know how her hands would feel in his, when they went to a park to photograph flowers together in the spring. He wondered if they would go red under the strong summer sun, or would the tips turn blue in the extreme winter. At that exact moment, their gaze met once again. Without losing a moment, he said, “I am reading about the Valley of Flowers in the Himalayas.”

She smiled. A beautiful smile and he knew just then that he had found what he was looking for.

P.S: To overcome a writer's block, I attempted this writing exercise. Please see and try it. It is fun. Click here.

Pinnacle

Everything I did in my life
Was just to reach here today, in front of you
To see my reflection in your eyes
To inhale the scent of you
To be in your embrace
I ate, slept, breathed thus far.

A stranger to me you never were
Though a mystery always
My tears knew you well
As my smiles did too
You are as real as my imagination
And as untrue as the fantasies I had created

I toiled through monotony
Cried rivers unknown
Existed through life
Just to see your eyes vanish
When those rosy cheeks try to touch
That forehead of yours.

The journey was my Everest
You my pinnacle.