To You, From Your Rock'n'Roll Band

(Back-story: This was a strange and difficult letter to write. Shreya, wrote to me asking me to help Mridul feel special on her birthday. Two years ago, Mridul lost both her parents on this day and it's never been the same. That part of her life, however, is fiercely hers, the sadness, the grief, the articulation of it, what to do with it and where to put it. This letter is the opposite of that, it's from 8 of her childhood friends, who each sent me a different paragraph on "Mridi" and how much they love her, so Mridul can decide how to hold all this affection in her arms, what to do with it and how to decorate the walls of her room with it.
Happy birthday Mridul, I hope the year shines extra special, just for you.)


To You
Mridi, Mridu, MAD, Mridul

If the eight of us sang together, and blindfolded you, would you be able to pick our voices apart?
Yes, we know you'll pick Sneha out before we even get to the "To You" of the birthday song. That's because she's always hitting notes higher than the rest of us while Shreya is indulging in the opposite- cushioning the song with her velvety alto. But would you be able to pick all our different voices out? 
Or would you forget the game midway and join in because there was never a song that you didn't like to sing along to?

Happy birthday beautiful singer, the great love of our lives and the girl who is the glue holding this group together. You, with the curls you spent adolescence warring against. Those midnight waves of ringlets book-ending your cheeks; lush, Shakespearean curtains existing if only to frame the stage for that famous smile, all teeth and slow- waltzing eyes. Mridi, you've been singing since we've known you, but there's no verse you've sung with as much grace, finesse and polish as you have these last two years.

We've made all executive life decisions together, like how low our school uniform belts could could go, how many tries we could get at career Russian roulette (cardiologist-architect-singer-actor- doctor), how many pizza slices we could eat at a birthday party and how many times we could get a subject wrong till we got it right? (Hi Calculus!).
Watching our friend these last two years, this beautiful, awkward, fuzzy caterpillar (oh come on, we were all fuzzy and beautiful for it), be forced out of her cocoon too soon as a fresh butterfly with soft, still-fresh pollen on her wings, was inexplicably painful. 
You see, while we're never prepared to handle grief thrown our way, we're especially ill-equipped to watch people who own pieces of our heart struggle with it. We can't rush into their lives or inside their minds and offer them quick, easy fixes like which outfit to wear for a social or how to study for a test or how to sit down on a chair until your heart stops hurting.
We are never really given the memo that the truly grown up part of growing up is having to do it alone, in a sharp-edged recess inside your body with space designed only for one.

So, darling Mridi, here we are eight of us (Shreya, Dolly, Himani, Sneha, Saloni, Disha, Anchita, Apurva) singing our lungs out for you, hoping that our voices, our cheering and manic applause make their way to your secret recess- where you're doing your growing up, alone.

Speaking of alone Mridi, do you know that the best kind of families creep up on you? That sometimes they're taken away when you're not even looking and sometimes they're given to you when you're too distracted to notice. Like Saloni who came into your life when you were both 6 months old, Dolly in kindergarten and the rest of us (like a too crowded rock n roll band) formed in class 7. And there we were, sorta like The Beatles, singing through school about the matching scabs on our knees, the patch-works on our sometimes freshly bruised hearts, our notes, our birthdays, our journeys, our triumphs and the bun-cholla we ate at lunch or the ice-cream we ate after. Do you know what superpower this gave us? 
(No, not flying, please put that cape away Saloni.)
It tattooed us together for life.
There's a famous story on medicinal rats which talks about how a mother rat was put into a different room and separated from her baby (and hooked onto an EEG monitor). Each time the baby rat was pricked with a needle, the mother's brain wave (in another room far away), flickered to register for pain. While science is writing papers and drawing up theories for that, here's ours: some ties simply run harder and deeper than distance.

Who're today the visual merchandiser, the TV actor, the PhD aspirant (teacher), the air force cadet, the IPR Lawyer, the journalist, the MBA student, the MD student and Accenture HR manager, were all once grubby kids sharing dreams and ridiculous code names made up so they could talk about boys they had rabid crushes on (remember Dhinku?). And this means Mridi, that even though we're not in a classroom anymore, we still know exactly what you're going to say next, or what parts of a joke will make you roll your eyes or when in an awfully long story you and Sneha will lose interest. 

So, this is what we want you to do the next time you feel you're living in and continuously dusting a gigantic house of your own grief. 
Pick up a pen, and paper and write in your awful handwriting, boldly

F.L.A.M.E.S

Then think of the first boy you met in your day and play the game with his name. Once you're done take your arms and fling them towards opposite sides of the room like you're mid-scene in a Bollywood movie and announce something ridiculous, even if there's no one in the room. Head over to your bookshelf and pick up that gigantic book with the faded pale yellow cover- Linda Goodman's Love Signs- only to discover what you know, that beautiful Saggitarius girls get along best with other fire signs (Leo, Saggi, Aries).
Then stand up and picture all of X1Arts facing you, walk up to the centre of the classroom and sing out loud your favourite song from 13 goes on 30, "Why Can't I". 
Wait for applause once your performance is done and then tell all the girls , like you did some of your own friends that a transgression made on their bodies is never their fault. Ever. And when there's pin drop silence, like there was that day when we had this conversation, take a deep breath and smile at the revelation which will come to you like the winter fog: slowly, densely and then all at once -- inside you live all of our memories, our stories, struggles and strengths. You can bury your face in them when the outside everyday becomes too fluorescent and harsh. We placed these inside each other for safe keeping and for when we were too far away to give a hug. Gather these memories and all the everyday's you've lived so far and use them as your compass, armour and blanket.

They mention often that grief comes in waves. It washes over you like the ocean, never fully and never really done. Which also reminds us to tell you, so does love, forgiveness and happiness. Let each clean you, wash you and soak you from head to toe, so you can start again, knowing that there's another sunrise on the horizon and mermaids, jellyfish, sea-horses and mysterious, magical creatures of the sea bed, underneath. 
Happy Birthday Mridul.


Your Family,
Shreya, Dolly, Himani, Anchita, Sneha, Disha, Apurva, Saloni

                             (The day Mridul and her friends all became Prefects. Pic shared by Shreya)

                                          (A collage of the 9 friends. Picture shared by Shreya)


(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )

To You~ 23 and a few minutes to go.

(Back-story: After an unplanned hiatus, it only seems right that I return to pending letters. To everyone whose letters are still undone, I'll make my way through and back to you. The below was a request sent to me by 23 year old Diksha, who on her birthday wanted to write a letter from her all knowing future self.

Anyone who knows me, knows how time-capsules are one of my favourite things, so here you go, Diksha, Happy Birthday- 24 is one of those golden years. Live it up.)

To You

23 and a few minutes to go Diksha,

Birthdays are tricky animals. 

At first, you want to roll around the floor with them just feeling that special sense of joy radiating out of your being, because it is the day you were made. The day you first said, "Hey world, how's it going?" and the first time you did something that changed everything else. They're the one day in the year which is the peak of a mountain-top, when you want to look both at what lies ahead and the distance you've covered. Some people get whiplash from all the looking, others just fall over.

But I know you'll be okay. You've now done this for 23 years and that should make you an expert at birthdays. 

What can steady you through the day, is our collective wisdom, which I'm about to dispense. Happy birthday you stone-cold fox.

1.  Breathe- This year promise yourself that you will not freak out, or obsess over the shadow of a pimple or what an extra 3kgs might do to a picture. Do not hyperventilate. The pimple will go. The kilos will move up and down as the years go by. Neither has anything to do with how beautiful you look, and you're going to survive it all. Even the wind chill. I promise you.

2.  Let time take time- As it will, whether you meddle with your overthinking or not. But things always work much better when left to their own device. Remember that you've survived, grown and evolved through every mini-crisis that threatened to stop life mid-dance. And this year when a crisis comes around, as the sneaky bastards tend to, acknowledge it and do what you must. 

It will leave and you'll be better for it (also see above: pimple)

3. 24 means you don't have to be 18 anymore: Or 17, or 16. Let algebra be a distant memory. The bullying and cruelty of school can stay there. You shook it off like a gazelle does water after its swim is done. Droplets flung far away and off your beautiful life and body, so you can trample shrubs, traipses through forests and live a beautiful gazelle year. Keep your neck tall and proud, they say it gives you a better outlook. Also, a success of your life will be made even if you struggle with math.

4. Boys: Liking them gets better and liking them gets worse. But take warm comfort in the fact that everyone around you, even the self-assured 28 year olds, those in steady relationships and those blazingly single- neither of them have a clue of the future, of what's to come and whether they're equipped. Take heart in the fact that who you love, will always be just who you love, that will not be the saviour or wreckage of your life (unless you let it).

Oh, and trust me that the boy who today makes your heart feel like a knotted, wet, wrung out shirt, will soon not even cross your mind, until you hear an old song and smile. 

Old songs carry most of the weight of our memories. That's something you should know too.

5. The things you will do: Will make and unmake you in bits, kneading you into new shapes every year. Cocoons that you'll have to burst out of and places of rest where you must stop for a while. So choose them wisely. Always say yes to travel, but know that the most important journeys are often just the ones you take inside. Laugh like you want to, in a twisted grimace if you must, anything which sets you apart from that same non-smile called the pout which everyone from 14 to 41 year olds are doing today. Set yourself apart Dee, you'll understand in a few years why that is the biggest weapon in your arsenal.

6. On being sad:  I remember the last few years and our struggles with depression. I remember friends who didn't understand and those who thought you were self-indulgent. And I can tell you now, that the only one whose judgement and understanding of what you're going through counts is you. So read every book you can, smile every chance you get, dress up, buy minion cakes for your birthday, hoard colourful stationary, make blanket forts out of your 5 year old self's minnie mouse quilt, remind yourself of that winter in Canada and the first time you let a snowflake turn to water on your tongue. Your body is your refuge and your fortress. Holding more answers and wisdom than you know. Fold into your own body when things get too dark, it's where you've always stored the light. It is your surest cure.

7. On love: Oh, the things I could tell you and the things I know. 

Like how much of it you've already got, how much of it waits for you in the future. How kaleidoscopes of butterflies will synchronise somersaults in your stomach, how you'll carry the heat of the inner core of the earth in your round cheeks and how when you're in it you will swear you're moon-walking on a higher frequency (like dolphins), hearing sounds and seeing things your friends just don't. The trick (and I'm not allowed to reveal details from the future: it is the first secret to time travel) is to live out your life like a designed for success supernova would. Those who are always craning their necks trying to spot the alien attack are the ones who most often miss it.

(Side note: No one is out of your league. So those dreams of kissing Chris Evans may not be totally make-believe.

Aside to the aside: Disney songs are always right. Keep a few on shuffle in your iPod. No one has to know and they always do the trick.)

Happy birthday you eerily beautiful, strangely stubborn and deliciously brave girl. 

Your 24th year is a gorgeous, rainbow striped, unicorn shaped piñata. Take a stick and smack it at its core.

Love,

Your future self.

                                                  (One of my fav street art images by Martin Watson)

(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )

Words. Strange & Otherwise. Part- IV

Instagram killed the blogpost.

(These past months I've spent more time on @hyperbolemuch than this blog.)

I haven't written here for almost 6 months now, and while I'm now working on all the lovely pending To You, letters, this one was just quicker to put together. As with my earlier posts volumes one, two and three , here is a collection of my favourite sentences. 

Sentences which are almost human when stripped away from stories and left standing by themselves. A few are knock-kneed sure, but well-intentioned humans.  Some have been picked because the words are like fairy lights when strung together, others for the wisdom they're bursting with and all because I love them. 

Which means you shouldn't question any, 

Do I question your lovers?

I've also added a link to each sentence, so you can buy the book if you'd like. There's poetry here too, because I find it creeps into most prose. Especially when someone is really looking.

(This game was a lot of fun the last time around so here it is: If you have a life question, you should pick a number between 1-20, then the quote against that number is the answer to your question.

If not you've met a sentence I love: say hello, and smile). I'll let you read now.

*****

1. "The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”

~ Susan Sontag

2. “If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn't.”

~ Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

3. Come to the orchard in spring.

There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter 

~Rumi

4. "Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."
~ Kurt Vonnegut

5.“What I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.” 
~ Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

6. “For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.”
~Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

7. “The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”

  ~Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

8.“Paper is the strongest material in the world. Things under which a mountain will crumble, you can place on paper and it will hold: beauty at its most intense; love at its fiercest; the greatest grief; the greatest rage.” 
~ Nadeem Aslam

9. " Being with you and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time."
 ~Jorges Louis Borges 

10."I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn't realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it's the halves that halve you in half."
~ Like Crazy (This isn't a book but a movie I really, really love and can't recommend enough).

11." I want to read poems filled with terror and music that changes laws and lives."

~ Leonard Cohen.

12. "The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."
~Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

13. “The night you gave me my birthday party… you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.”

~ Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

14.“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.”

~ Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (one of my favourite books)

15. “I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.”
~ Patti Smith, M Train

16. "You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances."
~ Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin

17. “He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.” 
~ Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

18. " Aey Junoon-e-Ishq Bata Zara
Mujhe Kyun Tamasha Bana Diya"


~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz (I apologise for not translating this, but there's no way I can without butchering it. For those interested in reading more- try Google translate for an indicative meaning).

19. "I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you everything that was left of me."~ Charles Bukowski

20. “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.”
~ Joan Didion, in her essay Goodbye To All That

To You, O Captain My Captain

(Backstory: This is the 100th post on this blog and I couldn’t think of a more special letter to write. 
Shweta wrote in to me, “My friend who I love very much, lost her husband when he was just 39 last year. It’s her son Arnav’s 13th birthday tomorrow. Can we write her a letter and make her feel ridiculously loved, ensure she’s laughing and feeling safe tomorrow?”

And how could I not try?)




To You
Diya,



If I could take the recycled paper on which this letter is written and wrap it around your hurting heart to make it stop? I would.
But can I offer you a lame inside joke instead?
Because I’d line up every comedian known to mankind to make sure you’re laughing in the way only you can- like warm, tropical rain you want to just stand under and get soaked in.



Sumitabh and you were the love story the rest of us spent summers longing for. 

I’ve heard my sister and her entire batch whisper about the way he’d make you smile. Constantly.

How he pursued you for months in school before you relented and how for 13 years you could not take a single decision without running it past him. 

How your favourite chai hangout was a small ally getaway few could find. 
He was the quiet in your hurricane. 
The velvety sitting place inside your constant confusion. 
Your Captain, as you always called him. 
Your best friend who’d take vacations with your son, where both of them would spend most of their time calling mum to tease and make her jealous. 

The one person who’d memorised the very important precise level of chocolaty-ness you needed from a cake. 

The boy you loved in school, who insisted you marry him before you run off to New York for a job and who you carry around in every careless hand gesture you make when you talk, even today.
But the true greatness of your love together and the absolute peak of its beauty is that gorgeous 13 year old whose birthday it is today.
Arnav is already frighteningly tall like his beautiful mother. I’m guessing a shorter body could not have housed the gigantic generous spirit he inherited from his father. 

Which logically leads me to say that both your great love story and that amazing boy, enter puberty today. 

From hereon, there will be acne. 
There will be the feeling of every feeling like it was invented only for you and put down your throat. 
There will be adventures. 
There will be nights spent staring at the ceiling knowing you're changing with every breath and turning into someone you've never even met. 
There will be an ending to every day knowing that the world being changed by you just existing in it. 

Hold on to all of those feelings, DK.
The world is yours and I’m around to make sure you take a huge bite of it.



Here are a few things I promise you:



To go on holiday with you to Turkey and Greece, 
because all the whirling dervishes in all of the world, had no twist in their movement that could match that infectiously happy curve of your smile.



To be the madness in your life. 
Because taking it seriously and softly will get us to the same place as dancing and moon-walking through it will.



To always be there for Arnav’s birthday.
So I can watch your love and that beautiful boy go from puberty to adulthood. Only the very lucky get to sit on the sidewalk, pop a beer and simply soak in the unmistakable glow of watching love grow.


To never fail to yell at you when you ditch me for plans. 
I’m not above calling your mother to cross check your excuse next time.



To chase rain and drive through it, like only we do. 
Always wondering if our car can outrun the raindrops falling just ahead. 


To sing Alanis Morisette songs out loud to you. 
For when life tries to be bigger than we are and you need reminding that you're the girl from Hand In My Pocket.



To make sure you’re up to date with my sparkling literary inventions like “scrotchers”- men who scratch their crotch.




To fill your heart with all kinds of love. 
It will not even be a smidge of what Sumitabh has given you, but I promise that it will flood spaces in your body and heart, that you didn’t even know you had.



Happy Arnav’s Birthday. It's a beautiful day today.



All my love,
Shweta

                               (The really lovely Diya with the birthday boy Arnav from several years ago. 
                               Picture shared by: Shweta).



(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )