Rangiye Diyo Jao-Colour my life

Every passing moment blurs out the bond I share with my past. Nights spent fighting battles end up bringing me closer to this fragrance of the unknown. This newness is slowly painting my world with colours of a rainbow and I no longer know what I feel. I am trying hard not to drown in this ocean of strangeness but in that, I am finally finding my true colours. The image of my past self is slowly fading away. I am running out of the thread that held me together. 

I build a home with her on pretence and fear, hiding it from the world. This love ignites the fire of my soul. But not all fires want you to run away. Some demand you to walk right into them while some fires walk themselves. The possibility of a tomorrow without her scares me. This love is hopeless, I tell my mind. And yet, I still come back home every night to kiss her fidelity and hear her silence. I love her in shameless and immoral ways, on sheets stained with shame and rage. But for her, a thousand times over and over and over. I let her fingers touch my body scared with stories of childhood while she kisses away my tears. 

The tears of yesterday bring me closer to her, to a home.

Time pauses its saunter while I gaze at her. Every time I look at her eyes, the life we could have had, all the memories that could have been ours come before me. Behind those black iris lie my forbidden colours. The more I delve, the closer I get to discover something new each time. I try to remember the map of her face; the scar on her lower lip or the mole above her right eyebrow. She is as vulnerable as me, but the actor in her knows how to hide better. Behind every sharp-witted insight is a story from the past, an experience that she has lived before me. She has had a life before me and she will have one after. There is no tomorrow before us but knowing this doesn’t help. So, I hold her closer like a bad habit, finding my freedom in those arms. She is a dream I have to wake up from but knowing it doesn’t help.

So, I hold on tighter, tighter and tighter…

Written by Annesha Mistry

Artwork via Holly Warburton

Ghore Baire—The Home and the World

With teary eyes and a suitcase full of hopes, I looked back one more time. My room filled with books I have collected over the years, the scribbles on the wall ma always wanted to get rid of, the familiar smell of this city were holding me back, urging me to stay back for some time. But it was time to leave. I had to, for the dream I have cherished and nurtured for years. The corner of my room that embraced me all this while, the friends I had made over the years, the streets that are deeply rooted in my memories are now just a part of my past. The life I was acquainted with isn’t the life I am living anymore.

At the station, with a heart filled with fear and second thoughts I hugged ma for the last time. As the Howrah to Delhi Rajdhani Express started pulling out, I could see tears rolling down her cheeks while baba turned away in an unsuccessful attempt to hold back his own and hide the pain of sending off his only daughter to a strange city. With the final glimpse of my city, I felt a strange void in my heart—loneliness combined with despair. The life I desired was a few hours away when the thought of the loss of a home, a familiar language and known faces hit me for the first time. I always wanted to run away from Kolkata in the hope of a better place, a better start, but wiping the slate clean seemed a lot scarier than I expected. The same streets that suffocated me and moments that made me want to leave now look comfortable from a distance. The fear of the unknown terrified me and I could no longer shrug off the feeling;

I was a stranger, again. 

But each city has its stories to tell or maybe cities are stories in themselves.

Today, as I write this on a chilly January evening, two months have already passed in between. In the shifting sands of time, old connections are slowly falling apart as I try to find the same old fragrance in people I meet. Some new faces have become familiar while old friendships are somewhere fading away in late night FaceTimes. This city excites me at times though there are days when I find myself crawling back to bed with my favourite Bangla song playing on my AirPods, an unsuccessful attempt to recreate home. But the time I have spent in Dilli made me question whether the definition of home can really be confined to the 2-storied house with its familiar corners where I have spent the past nineteen years of my life. Isn’t it in the rush I feel through my veins while exploring the unexplored corners of my heart? Somewhere between tracing back to the familiar lines and embracing comfort outside of what I have called home for years, life has started adding new colours to this new blank canvas. I have started to find the comforts of home in a person who lent me her shoulder to cry on when I was lost, offered to hold my hand when I struggled to cross the road, and listened to me while I shared the most mundane stories of my childhood. The fears that were embedded deep within my soul finally feel seen and heard now. The acceptance I craved for over the years has found me. This feeling of belongingness is what connects the home and the world.

I have found a home outside home. I have found a home in Dilli.

I am no longer a stranger. 

Written by Annesha Mistry

Edited by Shriya Ganguly

Artwork via Pinterest

A Small Flirtation with Death

I wasn’t yet a teenager when I came across a book where a girl, a little older than me, knew she was about to die. It was night, and I was pushing my bedtime by staying up and reading this book. By page 30 I had given up. It was as if 30 copies of the same book had been stacked up on my chest and I had to deal with them first to move to page 31. This was the precise moment I realised that death wasn’t an abstraction. It wasn’t a paid television actor or the kindly neighbour that politely visited the too old or the too sickly. It wasn’t even a problem I could deal with at some future point. Distanced from it by at least one person, a tragic thing but a stranger regardless, intimately known to those that I knew but not by me. Don’t take this to be a naive misadventure of a kid, at least it’s not entirely that. I think we all realise we are going to die at some young age. It’s the one primal discomfort that we must reconcile ourselves with at maximum seven. Since then it’s a pressure point at the back of your skull-remember your time too is limited. Fairly easy to ignore, it’s more of an advisory to work hard than an existential threat. But that night, for the first time, it wasn’t. That night a pre-teen shifted and stirred in a nice air conditioned room till I could feel my skin taut over my tensed muscles. Yet my mind stretched tauter till I could envision at the edges of my vision some type of nothingness, the emptiness of self, the point at which within my mind I ceased to exist. Then I tried to imagine a mind overtaken by this nothingness and I was paralysed. It was more horrifying than uncomfortable. It was like I was truly human for the first time and I understood all the terms and conditions that came with that deal and boy, aren’t we all getting scammed a little. That night I think I was content with not sleeping. Sleep too was adjacent to death and I had the important task of rendering it as a stranger again. Suffice to say, I never did finish that book.

Written by Divija Kaushic

Edited by Tara Kalra

Artwork via Pinterest