Things I have been wanting to share.

• I started this blog just a week before stepping into law school and that was five long years ago. My college life is over, I'm officially a graduate. I'm officially a lawyer!
• I'm growing up too fast and I don't like it at all. Adulthood is scary, it is messed up and there is always too much to do. It's been more than a month since I turned 23 and it is as crazy as it was last year or the year before that. Honestly, I think in my head, I stopped growing up after 16.
• I got a job, like a real job in the real world and I am not yet accustomed to this feeling of having my own visiting cards that say that I'm an Associate. It is a lot to take in and I think I'm going to forget about it for a while.
• My brother visited us in June and gave my parents an out of this world surprise just by appearing one night. It was such a beautiful moment when I saw my mom scream and burst into tears as bhaiya walked in. Dad was in another city, so he refused to believe till we made a video call. And I.. well I managed the whole surprise by keeping the news with myself for two weeks, which was undoubtedly the toughest task. Somebody appreciate me please.
• A few days back, I received a mail which said that in some survey, Mirage has been selected among the Top 15 Personal Blogs in India, and that left me thrilled. To read somebody else's thoughts on my blog, on Mirage, it is a beautiful feeling. Of course, those thoughts have to be beautiful to make that feeling beautiful. eeeeep!
• And and, I'm going to bed now. I wanted to watch Game of Thrones today, but I couldn't because like I said, in grown-ups world, there is always too much to do and it is already midnight. And I have office tomorrow. Uh! Why can't I just refuse to grow up.
• Anyway, it feels great to share this with you.
• Thank you for reading.
• I love you.
• Here's a goodnight kiss.
• Go now.
• Shooo.

Transience.

A little more than three weeks and it is as difficult to make room for acceptance as it was the time I heard the news. 

It was 6 in the morning and ma was restlessly knocking on my door. With sleepy eyes and no sense of time or place, I got off my bed and opened it. What I heard next was so unbearably heavy that it shook me immensely from within. There was numbness, I remember. I was standing by the door, trying to absorb what I'd just heard while my mind was shaking.. to and fro, to and fro. I felt numbness in my throat, in my arms and in my legs. I felt it reach down through my chest, pausing every sense in me for a while.

It had happened. What we were told by the doctors had actually happened. Three weeks and one more life gone. The life of our family had gone.

I have been trying to find a better way to express how miserably tough it is to understand this ugly level of sadness that we are stuck at and to start learning to deal with life all over again. I have been trying and failing, again and again. Nothing is enough right now, nothing strikes the right cord or perhaps there is no right cord here and I'm just wasting time amidst this oblivion which is hauntingly familiar to me. 

Like I've been here before, sailing through it and hunting for days when I was a little girl, when I was far away from this world where people fade into memory with so much ease and when everyone, almost everyone I loved was just.. happy and alive!

________

"I am afraid of Life. Death is okay; it will strike only once." - Gulzar

After shamelessly spending the entire day in bed, I decide to get up and go outside for a while. My brother's room has been technically empty since last seven, eight months and it is his exceptionally comfortable chair that I've been misusing the most. I open the doors of the huge balcony and drag his chair outside. The weather is quite cool tonight, unlike my city's usual scorching weather in March. I drag the chair closer to one of the lower walls, sit on it, lean back with my feet placed up on the concrete. It feels rough and cold because of the evening rain, but I like it. Wind is a lot chilly than it was earlier during the day, a lot colder for my cotton shorts and t-shirt, but I like it too. Sometimes  a little inconvenience is what we need to keep ourselves alive. 

So I sit there, staring up wistfully at the plain black sky, emerging far beyond those scattered clouds. I watch them stroll past the moon which tonight looks disoriented, almost like my current state of mind. My neck is strained from looking up consistently, but I keep looking.. at the moon, at the pole star hanging beside it, at the frequent airplanes skimming across the night sky which appears very, very close to me. Like I would stretch my right hand up and easily brush the clouds away with the fingers. It is so convincing, my vision, my mind and this very moment which tells me that it is just within my reach and I, like a fool, cave in.

Life has been happening a lot lately. It is frustrating to watch how helpless this reality can make us, one blow after another while all that it leaves for us to do is wait. It strikes and we wait for the aftermath, wait for the formidable future, wait and witness how easily one more life would leave our beautiful small family, very soon.

I'm using all my energy to not think about this but I don't know what is it that I want to think about instead, where should I lead my consciousness to. So I open the knot and let it lose. I let my tired, exhausted mind lose. I let my thoughts drift away with the clouds as I swivel in the chair feeling shivers run from my slender arms down through the spine. Time and again, I like to remind myself how much I cherish the solitude, how much I cherish the quietness, just me breathing with the night, and the wind and the disoriented moon and the star that never fails to shine.

_________

Timelessness

Picture Source

What if it's all untrue! What if it's a very bad joke which adamantly refuses to get over, a lie which cannot be comprehended and brought out in the open, a facade of emptiness, of hollow lives, dreams and laughter which can never be broken. What if his absence has not been lingering in our lives for a year now. A year!

I want to be insane for a while and forget that it has been a year since his battle came to an end and ours began. 

_______

Don't make me sad, don't make me cry
Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough
I don't know why..
     -Del Rey

My heart belongs to you, Dear Kashmir.

I'm overwhelmed, ecstatic, thrilled, euphoric, greatly content and I'm chilling on cloud nine..refusing to come back to the ground.
My five day long vacation to Kashmir with family was way more than fantastic. I visited some really picturesque places and also learnt a great deal about this wonderful city and its even more wonderful people.

Kashmir doesn't need any introduction. A lot has been said and written about its unprecedented and breathtaking beauty and I am seriously short of words to describe it in a different manner. The moment I laid my eyes on the magnificent snow clad Himalayas from the plane, I knew I was going to have the time of my life. The whole city was dressed in white layer of pristine snow. For a girl like me, who had been to a snowy place just once in all her life and that too around nine years back, that single moment was beyond all human expressions.

I literally skipped a beat!

The surprising fact is that Kashmir in March is never like this. It is that time of the year when snow starts to melt, sky gets clearer, flowers bloom, gardens turn green and everything wears the shroud of warm sunshine. But after so many years the city witnessed heavy snowfall this month, just three days before we landed there. So throughout our stay we got an excellent glimpse of winters of Kashmir.

At the airport, we were welcomed by a man named Ghulam Rasood. An extremely knowledgeable and humble person who became a great company in the guise of a driver. We had some wonderful conversations with him, snippets of which I'll share with you at the end of this post. The weather was cold and cloudy and it drizzled continuously for two-three days.

Our first night was in a house boat on Dal lake. Oh wait, I have to strike this wish off my wishlist....eeeeeeeeee!!!

This is the houseboat. Its name is Mumtaz Mahal. And it did feel like a royal mansion from inside.

We reached here around 4:30 in the evening so we had just 30 min to freshen up and get ready for the Shikara ride (A small narrow wooden boat is referred to as shikara there) which is usually an hour and a half long and we did not want to miss its charm in the daylight. 

That yellow thing is a shikara.

This is the Dal Lake. I had read about it in my social studies classes in school but I did not know that the lake is exceptionally majestic.

There is a floating market on the Dal Lake and to our surprise people carry food snacks to sell on their shikara which they use like cars. One such man served us delicious chicken kabab and super tasty tea. The shikara ride is extremely calming, a lot like some natural therapy.

The next day we shifted to Hotel Pinegrove located very near to the Dal Lake. Its a budget hotel with well maintained, spacious rooms and a friendly staff. The food here was exceptionally good. The first of the three attractions according to our itinerary was Pahalgam which we visited the second day. On our way to Pahalgam, my mother bought me a navy blue firan which is the local dress of Kashmir. It was soooo pretty that I immediately changed into it.

Pahalgam Valley

My brother trying to spoil my picture..which of course, he successfully did.
Oh by the way..that's a firan which I'm wearing.

In Pahalgam there's a famous Betaab valley named after the movie Betaab (duh!) but it was closed due to bad weather. Instead we did horse riding amidst a gorgeous path covered in snow. The horse on which I rode, his name was 'Aashiq Awaara'. xD
Pahalgam is also en route the annual Amarnath Yatra. Also, while returning from Pahalgam, we visited the ruins of Avantipur temple which was excavated years ago and was actually built circa 855 – 883 AD.

That's my cool dad leading us through the woods.
This is what I wanted to happen but it didn't. He's waiting for the ghode wale bhaiya. :P

The next day we visited Gulmarg, for which I was particularly very excited.. don't have a good reason though. Gulmarg is around 2hrs away from Srinagar.. the closest of all the three places. It has been tagged as the “heartland of winter sports in India” by CNN which is undoubtedly true.

In winters, this place is famous majorly for sledging and skiing. I and my brother did the latter. But the easy and fun part was just for a couple of minutes. Rest was pure torture as we had to struggle hard with those extremely heavy boots to go to the top, during which I shamelessly fell twice and laughed my ass off. I thought I had taken a five day break from workout but I was so wrong!

This is Gulmarg. Vast landscape covered in thick snow.
Honestly, this place is a little more than heaven to me.

That's me! In case you can't recognize.

Throughout our stay in Kashmir, the one thing which I desperately kept praying for was to witness snowfall as it was my childhood dream... like seriously! Many people said that it might snow in a couple of days as the weather was not showing any warm side so I diligently did my job..which was to pray to all the gods up there.

And it worked! Yes, it so worked! I witnessed the first ever snowfall in GULMARG! It couldn't have been better. Gulmarg is probably the most heavenly place to witness snowfall. I screamed, I jumped, I ran, I laughed! That moment when I saw white thermocol like thing on my coat, oh it was breathlessly amazing. Wait wait wait! I have to strike off this wish too from my wishlist... eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

That's me again. Teeheee!!!

The last destination was Sonmarg which is usually the favorite picnic spot for the local people there, as per Ghulam ji. The route to Sonmarg is the most picturesque of all the three places. It is nearly impossible to move your eyes away from the window. The snow clad mountains surrounding a valley of gorgeous little huts in the middle of which Indus river gracefully carves its way is like an unimaginable scenery, impeccable in every shade possible.

Indus river narrowed down due to heavy snow.

On the day of Sonmarg, we were just 20 kms behind when landslide blocked the way. The officials told us that the route would be closed for the day because of bad weather. With high disappointment, we thought it would be wise to wait for sometime till we are hundred percent sure that Sonmarg is not gonna happen. Along with many other tourists, we passed time by having tea and maggie in one of the local shops and wandered around a small village.

Because we were stranded for more than an hour, my parents and Ghulam ji kept insisting to return and visit some other place instead but I refused blatantly because I religiously believed that we would visit Sonmarg. And yes, we did! We were sitting in the car with no hope and all of a sudden, we saw other tourists running towards their own vehicles with smiling faces and yelling that the route is cleared.. Sigh! My heart did a somersault in ecstasy.

Sonmarg has a couple of tourist attractions in winter such as a bridge which was exploded by Pakistani soldiers during the Kargil war. It has been rebuilt, of course.. but the very thought that it faced grave bloodshed gave me chills down the spine. There are two more small points to visit which are famous for the scenic view which one could see at almost every nook and cranny of the Sonmarg valley. While my parents enjoyed maggie (again!), me and my brother played around with little kids of a nearby village who also helped me make a small petite snowman.

Unfazed landscape.. on Thajiwas glacier.

The last point was Thajiwas glacier. Here again, skiing and sledging are the two main activities. We did none. We just chilled and absorbed the beauty around, as much as we could.. like one deep breath of oxygen before diving away in the ocean of mundane life. At one point, I felt so dwarfed and irrelevant by the splendidly huge mountains around me, I almost had tears of awe. Nothing could be compared to the naturally profound Himalayan range!

I'm not done with Kashmir yet. It is so beautiful that I have to visit this place again. But according to Ghulam ji, Kashmir subtly indicates 'Cash More'. So I must earn real hard in order to organize a summer trip to Kashmir in future.

_______

Things I learnt about Kashmir from Ghulam ji:

- People here are really kind and hospitable. I saw harmony among them too. They are not cold to outsiders which I somehow had the impression. On my last day there, I was gifted a small Kangri as a souvenir by a localite.

- They do not like to vote. They are hardly interested in elections because no matter what, they would never get what they really desire for and that is freedom from the clutches of India, Pakistan and China.

- Almost 99 percent of people have their own permanent residence in Kashmir. In this regards, it is a very prosperous and self-sufficient state.

- The people of Kashmir in India have a wrong impression about people of Kashmir in Pakistan and vice versa. Both the respective localites believe that the other part is less developed and that the people living there are no better than tribals. However, it is wrong for both the sides. Both are almost equally developed.

- Though it is a very sensitive area because of the frequent militant attacks, the city is unusually calm and composed in its daily mannerisms. One can see excessive police force in various parts of the city  throughout the year and the localites seem unaffected, which I believe is a good thing.

_______

You know your days are going well when..

-Your brother voluntarily opts to prepare French toasts for you in the morning, almost every other day.

-And oh, those French toasts are deliciously tasty as well.

-On a bright sunny morning, you put sunglasses on your already handsome doggy and instead of wrestling to take them off, the doggy strikes a pose.

Yeah, he's cool.

-All your life you are tagged as skinny and underweight but with a lot of hard work (read a lot of eating) and improved diet plans, you gain around 5kgs in mere 5 months and shut everybody's goddamn mouth. Trust me, this thing made me THE happiest.

-Your workout sessions at home, start showing breathtaking results and you finally have more than just traces of calf muscles, biceps and triceps. Told you, I'm gonna be a strong lady soon.

-After consistently pestering, you succeed in convincing your parents to plan a trip to Kashmir. Yay!

No wait..what if I just jinxed it.

-You spend your Valentine's day with some of the most awesome people in your life in the most awesome weather at a place where you've wanted to go since many years.

Surajkund Crafts Mela 2014

-You have more than one reason to be happy. Period.

_______

A Happy Day

My dad woke me up today, asking whether I would like to have Gajar ka Halwa. (For non-Indian readers, it's a very famous sweet dish whose main ingredient is carrot which is Gajar in Hindi) This being my favorite dessert, I readily yelled "Yes" from my room. But the next moment I wondered, that my mother is not at home, our maid has taken a leave for a week.. then who is going to prepare this super tasty thing? I jumped out of my bed and ran to the kitchen. To my very surprise, my dad was preparing it.

Before moving further, it is necessary to share that I hardly see my dad in the kitchen preparing some high class dish. He is there usually to keep a check..you know, on stuff..just like that!

So I being an opportunist, diligently assisted him and learnt the procedure. Yes, I finally know how to cook 'Gajar ka Halwa'. The best part is - for the rest of my life I can flaunt that it was my super dad who taught me this.

______

As mentioned above, our maid is on a leave, so these days I've been learning and doing a lot many household things. (A legit replacement..eh?) But tonight for a change, all five of us, including my brother and Frodo prepared dinner. Fine, Frodo was just watching! But the rest of us did prepare the supper together. It was such a warm and happy feeling, you know. When the whole family is together and we chat and we laugh and my brother tries to pull my leg and we laugh some more and the dog keeps wagging his tail.

Sigh.. it was just perfect!

______

But the day did not end there..

Today is Lohri. As a custom, we celebrate a bonfire night. Me and my mother went outside to get some pieces of wood for the bonfire. No doubt, it was a tiring thing to do in the cold. But the sweet outcome made it all worth it. We celebrated the festival.. again just the five of us.

And all I could think of was that this moment, right here, when the smiling faces of my loved ones are glowing in the light of bonfire, it is very special and I'm going to remember it forever.

:)

Thus, a happy day.

_______

P.S: A couple of days back, I recited my poems in front of some very amazing poets from all over the world. Being an introvert, I had never thought I would do something like this but everyone was so friendly and motivating there, that I grabbed my mobile, opened my blog and just like that..recited three of my poems. It was an impromptu decision but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Felt like having achieved something..not big or small, but something.. Yay!

The Chapter of My Life - Twenty Thirteen.

As the curtains are being drawn and the year is nearing its end, I curl up in my blanket, play my favorite music and flip back the pages of this chapter of my life.

The story of getting published for the first time and watching my name on paper back gleaming silently among big reputed names. That pride which pervaded on my mother's face when I stood on the stage with many other talented poets. Ah! It was priceless.

The story of pestering my parents to allow me to live my passion to travel and experiencing some of the most breathtaking moments of my life. My first vacation with a bunch of friends!

The story of wearing a scarred face that wrested my confidence and crushed it to death and then gradually walking on the road of recovery and coming out as an even more beautiful person. I can look into the mirror and feel good about myself, again. And by all means, I have deserved it.

The story of watching a loved one turn into a wisp of memory lingering in our lives and learning that this reality is just as transient as you, me, our smiles and tears are. I learned that you don't have to be old to be strong and wise, you can be as young as nine and be stronger and wiser than all around you. The time when I watched my brother breathe his last breaths with unflinching calmness, I felt my heart pump nothing but sheer dread in my veins. I watched him lie there, fighting with fucking cancer while I curled up in agony within my fragmented sighs because I could do nothing. I was but a helpless soul flapping restlessly to find some solace, just a little scoop of solace to comprehend what was happening around.

I wish that day was a haze to me. I so wish!

This life, it is a big, scary labyrinth. We are but puppets crawling around in spirals which ultimately ends up in the same destination. I was literally surprised to see that people who call themselves my close friends, lurked behind the facade of a busy life or some other make believe crap when I badly needed a shoulder to cry on, when I wanted to kill my daunting fears and give an outlet to my feelings, layer by layer. I never confronted them. Never felt the need to do so!

-Charles Bukowski

It's really funny how the aftermath of one big accident can strip off so many beguiling lies which you've been living for long. But then again, isn't it better that those beguiling lies finally stand naked and one can leave them all behind and start afresh? Well, yes, it sure is.

With nth number of ups and downs, this chapter of my life comes to an end. Hope for a less bumpy new year for myself and for you dear reader. I never say this but you are way better than many of these people around because you listen to my woes and musings with utmost patience and stay by my side always.

Thank you for being real to me.

A very happy new year.

Love
Mirage
_____

Lansdowne

It's been a while since I last updated anything apart from poetry. There are many things which I had on my mind. One of them was about my short visit to Lansdowne, this year in end September.

Lansdowne is a small, cantonment hill station located in Uttarakhand. The fact that it is a cantonment area makes this place even more clean, fresh and peaceful, unlike other hill stations. It is covered with unending alpine forests and picturesque view of majestic mountains.

As mentioned above, I visited this place in late September and the weather was nearly perfect. We (which refers to me and my cousins) chose our personal car as the mode of travelling. Started in the early hours, we managed to touch the town around 2 in the afternoon with the help of reliable GPS and kind people all over India.

en route... just a few kms before the destination.
And that's my brother's hand.

The hotel where we stayed was 'Fairydale', situated near the main market. Like many other residences of military colonels, it is a huge bungalow converted to a hotel which kept the homely ambiance intact. The food was good, the staff was courteous, oh, and they had an adorable Labrador who, unlike Frodo, spent his time meditating nonchalantly and basking in the sunlight instead of drooling over everyone's lunch table. Clearly, he was on another level.

What I loved the most about Fairydale were its rooms. We had one master bed on ground floor and the other one went upstairs and ended in an extremely cozy haven like compound. I remember how I was left with the widest smile that day, the moment I climbed upstairs and snuggled deep inside the thick blanket.
After all, this is what one craves for, after a looong hectic travelling.

And so the holiday began.

You see her? The girl in  pink track pants? Yes, that's my little cousin Mishti.

cozy cocoon.

Poser!

The mornings we witnessed were wrapped in dense fog and absolute silence. Perhaps this is the reason why Lansdowne to me is a perfect harborage of quietude.

Earlier I had thought that taking our car wouldn't be a good idea because of the exhaustion it would cause. But honestly, it was the best decision. We had independence and privacy in a new city where one is usually dependent on the cab or bus driver. I thoroughly enjoyed our long walks in dense morning fog, through the alpine forests and then chilling for a while in the middle of nowhere while we knew we had no reason to rush. It was fun. Not the usual kind, but I did enjoy those happy moments.

This moment, right there, it was scary and calm at the same time.

A very famous church and utterly gorgeous too.

Let me share a little secret. I had never ever been to a church before. No wait. I did, once, in Goa. But the problem was that it wasn't structured in a traditional manner. It was hemispherical in design while I always wanted to visit the one where there is a narrow aisle and two paralleled seating arrangement on both the sides, the usual movies wala church. So my silly desire was finally fulfilled in Lansdowne.

Eeeeep.

After the church visit, we went up to the highest point, referred to as Tip-in-Top. It was drizzling and we were cold so we could't stay out in the open for long. But we did enjoy tea, pakoras and played carom.

Tip-in-Top point.

Aren't we adorable?!!!

Tea and pakora time. And yes, it was elaichi wali chaai. ^.^

By the way, most of these pictures are clicked by Mishti.

Not me!

Don't judge by his concentration. I won the queen. Wuhooo!

By the time it was evening, we retired to our beds and started the best part of the journey..a never ending game...Monopoly!!! To say that it was the charm of our trip, is and would always be an understatement. Period.

The next day was lazy. We started off late. It was just too hard to leave that beguilingly warm bed, okay! And also because there isn't much to visit in Lansdowne. Apart from a couple of churches and tip-in-top point, there is a picnic spot, highlights of which are boating in an artificial lake and a small children's park. Lansdowne is ideal for those who want a weekend getaway from Delhi or some nearby area. You don't need more than two to three days to devour the beauty of this place.

A family of definitely more than 10 people hopped onto this poor bridge 'together', while we were crossing it. Gosh!

  

And the entire trip, in a nutshell.

________

P.S: Did I ever mention how dearly I wish to be a travel blogger? And that I've had dreams of travelling to far off lands and breath-taking places, with a small pretty diary in hand and a camera hanging around my neck? Like literally.

It's normal, right?

From a Friend's Heart

I can never imagine to pen down strong emotions with so much ease and write something as emotive, stirring and compassionate as the following message. Not even a bit close! 
It's an exceptionally beautiful message written by one of the closest friends of my brother who passed away twenty days back after a long and valiant battle with Pancreatic Cancer.
I wish I had enough good expressions to express how I felt after reading it. I wish my brother was alive to appreciate his friend's thoughts. I wish his daughters could know how great their father was. I wish life was less cruel. I wish things were a lot easier. I wish!

Just a small attempt to keep him alive with me here, on this blog.
____________

It’s hard to write an obituary when the subject is arguably your closest friend. Obituaries were farthest from our minds when we met in Goa in March last year. Non-stop laughter was interrupted only when we went down memory lane. Water skiing in the Arabian sea, drawing on hookahs, munching on authentic Italian pastas at the beautiful Arpora Saturday market made it a holiday of a lifetime. And like always there was one guy who was the life of the party. Maddy was full of life and savouring every second of it. All of us will always owe a debt of gratitude to Anupam whose initiative and insistence led to this reunion being held when it was. A month later and it would never have happened and we wouldn’t have had the last opportunity to witness Maddy as we knew him.

Maddy came up with the suggestion that the next reunion be held later in the year. The conservative sorts amongst us were talking in terms of at least a two year gap between reunions to retain the novelty factor. Maddy would have none of it and in the ‘naa meri naa teri’ sprit we agreed to meet in 2013. In hindsight he could perhaps sense that he didn’t have a lot of time left. His body and his mind must have been giving him warning signals because a month later he was diagnosed with third stage pancreatic cancer. 

What followed was a year of intense suffering and pain, but Maddy never lost his dignity. His main partner-in-suffering was his beloved wife Sucharita whose courage in times of adversity can only be admired. Whenever I went to see Maddy, she would greet me with a smile, offer me a cup of tea and never mope or complain. Neither would Maddy. Such dignity in suffering humbles me. Maddy leaves behind Sucharita, two beautiful daughters Anubhuti and Ananya, his parents and his brother Sushant and so many of us who were blessed to be his friends. However Maddy wouldn’t have wanted me to dwell only on the sadness. In fact he was a guy who didn't have too many negative bones in his body. So let me just talk about what he meant to me.

I first met him in Indore in 1994 when we were a bunch of excited twenty somethings hoping to make something of our lives. I was in awe of him. He came from Delhi and I came from a small town in Bengal. He had a funny hairstyle, had attended interviews at all the 4 IIMs (thankfully not cleared them, otherwise we never would have met), spoke with a Punjabi twang and cracked jokes at the drop of a hat. Somehow fate conspired to make us roommates at the fancy sounding Ratlam Kothi. Within a month we pretty much knew everything there was to know about each other. I continued to be in awe of him. Not only was he brighter than me, he was computer literate, read management and self help books and could draw beautifully. I was rubbish at all of this. He would beat the commerce graduates and engineers in the finance and accounts related subjects. And to think of it, he had graduated in zoology! I borrowed all his jokes and retold them as mine. He ruined my language by adding cuss words to my vocabulary which refuse to go even after 20 years. We may have had the odd argument but I can’t remember either of us sulking for too long. He was a little spoilt like all boys are when they have stayed too long at home, but he quickly learned how to (pretend to)wash a pair of jeans. He never quite learned how to make cucumber sandwiches when all of us had run out of money to pay for the mess food towards the end of our stay in Indore. And he could never wake up on time for breakfast. I have to take credit along with our flatmate KK for having kept him and the equally lazy Debu, well fed for the better part of our second year in Indore. Yes breakfast was served on the bed for these gentlemen! It wasn’t all about fun and games though. Maddy could give you the soundest advice when you asked for it. The counselling that Maddy and Debu gave me in a fly infested dhaba over sugary tea changed my life for the better. After Indore Maddy went to Baroda to work in Sun Pharma. I don’t think his heart was in it. He missed his family and his hometown and a combination of circumstances made him return to Delhi where his heart always was. He worked in a few companies and ended up in an IT company which was always his real passion. It was there that he met Sucharita and they teamed up in life as well as in work because Maddy was on his way to becoming an entrepreneur. He always wanted to be his own master and being an entrepreneur suited him just fine. All through these years, we would meet once or twice a year and he would excitedly tell me about his morning sessions of football, about his new found interest in the stock markets and of course about his family. Always gung-ho and generally pleased with life. Even when the business environment was tough during the financial crisis, he would never wallow in self pity. Solid, dependable Maddy.

We became even closer during his fight with cancer as I tried hard to keep his spirits up and to try and soak up some of his pain, his fears and his suffering. For me it was the desperation to hold on to him because I could not imagine a world without his infectious enthusiasm, his laughter and his zest for life. Life will go on and the pain will eventually subside. But there will always be that little void in my life and in the lives of all those he touched, which can never be filled.

Maddy, farewell my friend. You will be badly missed.

*****

P.S: Maddy was his nickname for Madhur.

One of his favorite songs.

Actually, mine too!

You are More Than an Inspiration, Brother.

I visited him yesterday. He is very weak, fragile and unconscious. His eyes are yellow because of Jaundice and are open since many days. He can't close them as the brain has almost stopped functioning. The doctors have discharged him from the hospital because they say that they have no idea how long he would be in this coma-like state and that there is nothing more they can do. No treatment, nothing!

The one thing which is good, is that he is no more in excruciating pain.

Earlier, I was told that I shouldn't see him in this condition as it would be too much to handle and this glum picture of his would be stuck in my memory forever. But they were wrong! It gave me so much satisfaction just to watch him there, lying in calmness and peace. Yes, he looked extremely delicate and frail but I did not fear even a bit. Why would I? He is my brother after all. So what, if at 40, his body is as weak as that of an old man's. It narrates a tale of his brave and valiant battle with the world's most dangerous form of cancer. It narrates a tale of his determination with which he tried his best to quell the bitch. Nobody could ever portray the kind of mettle spirit he did, during the past one year. 

He is a lot more than an inspiration! To me, to the family and to his friends.

All through the months, even in immense pain, he always cradled a positive outlook. Having learnt the art of meditation, he detached himself from trivial, flimsy and all other kind of worries of the world.

Day before yesterday, my mother told me that out of many, the last thing which he taught her was not to love his body but his soul, his teachings and his way of life. For he will always be there in the heart.

Death has nothing to do with going away.

The sun sets

The moon sets

But they are not gone.

~ Rumi

For both his daughters, he has left something so beautiful which I cannot put into fine words. He has written a diary filled with so many precious teachings for life. It is hard for me to express how moved I was when yesterday, I sat down in a room all alone, and read those pages. They gave me goosebumps! All I wanted to do was just read them over and over again and cry to them forever. I can only imagine how relieving those tears would be. Even now, while I'm making an attempt to tell you how soothing it was, I can't fight back this urge to read it once more. For that is the one thing which would be the most priceless asset: An exquisite father-daughter thing!

Here is a picture which I clicked sneakily.

We don't know how much time is left now. We don't know when we would get the impending news. Hope has faded into sheer nothingness. And yes! We all are preparing ourselves for the worst. Even his wife, the strongest of all, who always greets us with a big smile, has become the pillar of the family. She is a brave woman and doesn't stand a tinge of pity from anyone. Last evening, she told us how dearly my brother wished to have a little get-together with family and friends but his deteriorating condition disallowed him.

Sigh!

Anyway, as the day ended, I made a promise to myself to learn the art of meditation. I have already added it to my wish list and shall soon work towards fulfilling the same. As he, in the diary, wrote to his daughters that whenever life gets tough, just meditate and face it and it will be good again.

Love you beyond everything, brother!

On a lighter note, last evening, I received a lot of appreciation for my recently published poems. Of course, I, without a fail, kept flying higher and higher.

Wait, haven't I told you that I got published again? Yes!!! And this time it is an online magazine Tamarind Rice. Go search me and read my poems.