GP-01

I let the wisp of smoke wash over me. It’s repugnant in smell but I don’t move an inch as it goes up my nostrils, into my lungs, stays there for a breath, and moves out again. I wait. Another hit. Repeat. Karan shuffles, moving from left-foot-over-right to right-over-left. He loves being comfortable while grabbing a smoke. I was scared by the vague comfort that we derived from smoking in a secluded balcony that nobody else was ‘allowed’ into; how easy it was for us to forget that any second someone could walk in on the pile of stubs that had gathered there over the years. The branches on the tree standing fifteen feet away from my balcony sway in the chilly Dehradun wind. It makes me think of the routineness of what we are doing here. I wonder if there ever was another like me. In the same balcony? Thinking the same things? Surely. Yes. There are seven billion people on the planet, a billion and a half in this country, and thousands who had been in this very balcony over the decades; there ought to be someone who wondered the same things I do now.  The lights in Mussoorie twinkled an eternity away. We often joked about how the closest galaxy to us was not Andromeda but Mussoorie. On paper an hour’s drive away, but separated from us in actuality by twelve-lightyear high walls, school rules and academic schedules, and the melancholic laziness of teenage existence. 

“Kya soch raha hai?”, Karan’s words cut through the wind and wisp. Such a difficult question to answer. What was I thinking about? What was I actually thinking about? Did he mean what I was ‘actively’ thinking about or what was in my head in that moment? Usually, I’d prepare an absurdly poetic question that I’d found on Instagram to dazzle the crowd. But today it was just Karan. He knew every inch of my brain like his own tiny backyard in Surat. Most of the backyard was compartmentalised. Mumma’s mints grew in one, Papa’s expectations in another. One corner housed the sunflowers that my friends plucked relentlessly everyday - there seemed to be a shortage of those everyday now, like the soil beneath was exhausted. In one tiny corner was a solitary bush of  black roses - the love that was reserved only for people who had the courage to travel to that part of the garden, beyond the grove of the thorns labeled ‘self-deprecation’ and ‘overthinking’. Usually Karan knew his way around; but today, it felt like he was intruding, demanding to be let in.

“I was counting my sunflowers”, I blurted out. He’s not going to get the garden analogy you dumbass.

“Haha”, I hear him chuckle from the corner of my eye. I can see the orange spark at the end of  his cigarette, burning away like a literal manifestation of time. Burning away like we had no cares in the world. Like a little boy’s childhood dream does on his first day at work. 

I shift away, trying to focus on the song in my head. My face felt like the static screen on a CRT television. Black and white. Buzzing. Chaotic. I thought about the wild outgrowth of buttercups in the smallest corner of my garden. The outgrowth that I watered and trimmed and uprooted daily because I was scared it would . I watered and trimmed and uprooted the grove because I was scared that if I left it to the soil of my brain, it would grow uncontrollably. The others, I left to the soil of my brain. Over Mumma’s mints, over my friends’ scarce sunflowers, even over my black roses. 

No.

Wait

What were you actually thinking about?

GO BACK

GO BACK

I wanted to write. Long messages. There was something inherently romantic about writing those. And not the bastardised version of ‘romance’ that children were idealising today. No. It was romantic in the most literal, purest sense of love. There was love woven into, “I wrote this for you when both of us should have been asleep but I wasn’t and you’re five lightyears away.” Into, “our physical distance is a kilometre and three hundred metres but in actuality we are distanced by metaphysical barriers, and so I sent this to you. I thought of you this way, at this moment”. Because when days passed and memories blurred, that love would stay, still. Always love, still. I thought about who I’d make the message to. 

So much to say. 

So many people to say it to.

Not enough courage to say it. To manifest such heaviness.

Another hit. The smoke floats like tainted cotton in front of my eyes. Like a ball of thoughts sent my way - waiting to be consumed. I felt a welling up of words. Fuck. No diary or laptop to be found in sight. I glanced over at Karan leaning back in the chair we’d stolen from the warden. He was almost done with his first. Even the cigarette wasn’t long enough to use as charcoal to leave on the grey brick walls today. Guess it’s me against my memory today.

 I thought about how friendship worked. How when you tell me you’re having a bad day everyday I shove obsolete words down your throat because I was sympathetic, everyday. I was so sympathetic everyday that when you woke me up and told me you fought with your parents and said life wasn’t going the way you wanted it to and you expected it to go another way, I took it personally. Like I should have stopped it. Like I could have stopped it. And not because I was able enough - I was not - but because you gave me that stature. Because at the end of every long message I wrote to you in the middle of my Math class you made it sound like it was actually working. I thought it was working because to me, there was nothing more intimate and thoughtful than being selfless enough to forgo personal achievement to ensure you felt alright - it was toxic, but it was also selfless.

I thought about how ‘good’ people perceived friendship. How a ‘good’ person was always there for their friends. Always above and beyond. How a ‘good’ person always said the nicest things and how people thought the ‘good’ person was the sweetest person on Earth. How a good person once stayed up the night and wrote an exam for you because your boyfriend broke up with you and he felt bad. How everyday he woke up and replied individually to every one of your messages but you still hated him because he never called. And how nobody really loved the ‘good’ person. Nobody asked him if he wanted to have dinner together. Nobody cared if he was actually listening to you when he called you teary eyed but you started with your own bullshit because he was hiding his tears and he once told you he liked it when you weren’t discussing his problems - he thought he meant it but, in all honesty, he was just being nice. Nobody asked him how he was doing because they assumed since he had time for their problems he was doing fine. And maybe how that was okay because that flows from a logical chain of thought like a river flowed from a mountain. I thought about how every night that ‘good’ person slept in bed feeling like a pillow - useful but unnecessary. You expected it to bring comfort to you and if it didn’t you folded and pushed and punched it until it suited you. ‘Good’ people romanticised their friendships and that’s where they faltered. 

I thought about how I was so sympathetic that it affected how selectively atheist I was. That if it pleased you that I called god the way you intended god to be called, I would do it. Just for you. That if it pleased you unconsciously that somewhere in a world’s corner I sent a prayer your way, I would do it. I thought about how selectively busy I was. Like if it accorded you even the tiniest hint of a smile that I shower an hour later and get late for my class just to speak to you, I would do it and never tell you it happened. What class?

I thought about how people deliberately went out of their way to show everyone around them that they were strong but when at night they called me, they broke down. People broke down about wanting to hurt themselves and wanting to run away and wanting to leave the parents they so unquenchably loved yesterday. People cried about law being hard and them wanting to go back home because this place didn’t smell like home and how my friend that they dated was an asshole who deserved the worst things in life. But nobody cared about the girl who broke up with me in six hours because she thought I wasn’t worth anything and so did you. Nobody cared about how every morning I woke up and saw my father on the couch and thought what a disappointment I was to him. Nobody cared because I didn’t tell them but I didn’t tell them because they were always so full of their own shit. 

I thought about the gullibility of human selfishness and selflessness. Everyday I offered up the space in my head to you with the belief that the universe had left it empty for you to fill it up with your sorrow, leave it behind and in return for my head you would give me a place in your heart and we would call it friendship or some sort of destined bond. But then you went out of your way to encroach on my brain. To consume the little space in my brain that I left for myself - not because you were desperate for that kind of affection but because I always told you it was not a problem. I acted as if all that sorrow didn’t have an effect on me, much like a mother pretends not to be pained when her daughter has her first period. And you still did not have space for me in your heart because your heart was already too heavy with all the people you were carrying around and I didn’t deserve a spot over them. Of course I didn’t. Who the fuck was I?

About how one day when you woke me up and told me about how you fought with your parents and you called the boy you shouldn’t have and how the one person on Bumble you did not expect to message you finally messaged you and how even though you didn’t care about love, without it some part of you felt incomplete. And when you told me all those things and I was five thousand two hundred and eighty six miles away and I had just woken up - I broke down. I broke down because I realised then that there was too much of you and others in my head and because there was too much of you and others in my head, I was not coherent anymore. I was in too many hearts with too much to do. I could not make you believe your parents loved you because my words had lost meaning to you and I could not make you stop calling the boy because who the hell was I to talk to you about love and the momentariness of feelings when I stood in front of you with an unbroken heart. I broke down and I pinky-promised you that I didn’t but you still saw that I did but we didn’t say anything to each other because we knew about each others’ white lies. And how I knew someday you would read this and how I was scared we wouldn’t be friends when it happened.

There were people in my head that demanded that I woke up every morning and answer all their questions. Why someone’s mother only taught them how to dress and not how to love. Why someone had the prettiest eyes and nose and mouth but nobody loved them the way they longed for. Why someone thought we used to be best friends and now I wouldn’t call anymore. Why we stopped being friends. Why I should write someone’s college essay because they couldn’t do it themselves and as their friend I should do it. They didn’t ask me obviously. Nobody did. It was like making one of those unsaid promises a poor mother made to her stubborn child about providing a meal she couldn’t afford.  And it revolted me to think that people were such savages. Such savages that they would feast on the good people; the good people who said they would give their all and actually meant it; the good people who never recounted a favour, but made the mistake of  remembering one. 

“Karan?”, I called out like a child does before he asks his mother another stupid question

“Hmm”, he said. It wasn’t nonchalant and I knew he was listening. He was the only person whose reactions in a conversation rarely told the true story.

“Do you really want to know what is in my head?”

“Of course babyyyy”, he reassured. For one brief moment, when he said that, I allowed myself to smile. That sentence was proof of the single, most important thing that boarding school had provided me - someone who was ready to lighten the weight of every problem. 

“Are you sure?” I countered. Almost as if willing him to take it back, to not accord my brain as much importance as he just had. 

Karan stopped smoking. I was in trouble. He was serious. “Sanshray, I genuinely want to know. I. Genuinely. Want. To. Know”

And so I told him. 

I told him about every definitively described thought in my head that was completely unrelated to the halcyon we were living in school. How my brain was now a house, not a garden. It had enlarged itself to allow more people to walk in. It was full of people. Some were in the kitchen, diminishing the contents of my fridge. Others were sprawled across the floor of the hall, gazing mindlessly at the paintings on the wall. In one dimmed cupboard under the staircase was stashed Chris Martin who popped out singing “Proof” at uncannily poorly-chosen moments. Upstairs, there were people who’d locked themselves into rooms. There was a boy who smoked six cigarettes a day because he broke up with the love of his life and right across the hall the love of his life put on eyeliner and lipstick for everyone else despite having lost thirty five pounds in three weeks. So many people who had resigned themselves to the comforts of my springy beds and had forgotten what coming out and bumping into each other into the hallway would do for them. How in the master bedroom was my soulmate who had her heart broken so many times but instead of facing it head on she threw herself head on into right swipes again as a surfer throws himself into the ocean right after being thrown out by a huge wave. 

As more people walked into the house I moved pieces of furniture around, with a smile, making more space for more people and ruining the home I had built with love and kindness. But now I looked at my home and it didn’t feel mine. I didn’t know what to do. Chris Martin had stopped singing. There were no chairs or couches in my head. I had to stop people at the door because nobody who was already inside wanted to leave the rooms.

What was I to do then, with all the furniture I cluttered in the attic of my brain because you wouldn’t stop moving in? With every thought that I cared about? So I decided to tell Karan about every little thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. 

Like how I so desperately wanted to be the reason someone called me in the middle of the night and cried at the sight of how real my love was. How I kept my hair long and messy because everyday I would angle it so that the sunlight shone through it and I positioned my eyeballs almost inside my head to keep looking at it and it was beautiful. How I was so in love with someone that she made me cry but neither of us called it romance and how often I thought about how only good poets meant their poetry and the rest just imitated them. The thought that someday the dream I forced myself to dream everyday would pan out the next day exactly as it panned out in my head but it never did. How I stared happily out the window every night and imagined if we lived on Jupiter and thought about a loved one we couldn’t even be sure if we were looking at the same moon. We would have more beauty to write about but we’d be so alone in that shared space. I was glad earth had only one moon. It made me and her happy together, I didn’t have to think about whether we liked the same kind of moon - the same color, size, distance. How I thought about the person who drew the line about being ambitious and being unnecessarily hard on oneself and whether the world thought he was weak. What was I supposed to do with the unending question I asked people like beggars asked people for money on the streets - “Do you mean the poetry you write? Is all that sorrow and heartbreak real? Can you show me how to put mine down like you do yours?”

And as I talked, Karan listened on. Forgetting that the stick Marlboro that we had paid fifteen bucks extra for was slowly wasting away. Maybe, in that moment, I really mattered to him. But I couldn’t tell because no matter what you were telling Karan he never really showed what he was thinking about it. He waited for you to stop talking. For you to be passionate about the most random snippets of information. For you to gasp for breath in the middle like an old man does right before letting out the loudest cough on the planet. 

When I was finally done talking, we both paused in the night. Waiting for the wind to grow louder, for a distant watchman’s lathi to ring against metal. He looked at me as if compelling me to say more. I looked back thinking, “I have more, but for tonight this is enough”. Because tonight, the assurance that he had listened was enough; that he had taken in every single word and thought that left my throat and packed it all up in a bundle and locked it inside his brain. And that made my head feel lighter.

And that was it. We both turned back. He went back to right-over-left and tried to salvage what was left of his cigarette. I turned to stare at the AC vent that passed through the building. Looking at it from afar made it feel like a huge silver dragon that broke through the building in a billion places. The place felt like a ruin. At least the wind was good up here in our balcony-

“Sanshray”, Karan poked at me. I looked back at his hand that held a shiny black phone. Our eyes met, inexplicable urgency shot through us and I immediately snatched the phone and put it away in my pocket.

At a boarding school whose reputation had been built on orthodox practises and colonial-style upbringing, a phone was the last thing a student was supposed to have. Three months ago when Karan had sneaked this one in and shown it to me in a bathroom stall I’d been taken aback. He didn’t even have a girlfriend. Why bring the damn phone if you’re not even going to use it for something? And then he showed me a folder on the Notes app completely dedicated to me. He told me he sneaked in the phone to let me write down whatever I wanted - every poem, couplet and letter that I didn’t allow myself to write because it furthered the conflict in my head. It wasn’t becoming of an engineering student to indulge in literary pursuits - at least in India. 

“Likh de yeh sab”, he said to me on the balcony. In that moment, neither of us cared about what really mattered. Whether we would be caught with cigarettes in a secluded balcony that ironically everyone on campus could see. Or if a teacher would walk in on us using the illegal phone and we would have to scramble to save our asses. We didn’t care because in that moment Karan only cared about me writing my poetry and I only cared about Karan. 

And so I turned around, sneaked the phone out of my pocket and plopped myself on the floor in the corner that had “JAW” in cigarette ash spelt on it. 

So, I typed. And suddenly, the air from Karan’s cigarette wasn’t as repugnant, the unexpressed love between me and the girl I loved wasn’t so painful and it made sense why the school forced every single student to attend a graduation ceremony meant to felicitate only the senior class. It made me believe that the girl I knew with the strong front would make it through without hurting herself and the boy who wrote songs about his heartbreak would make music that enchanted millions and so it would be okay. It made sense. All of it. Made sense.