Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Not a compulsive confessor

So is this my diary? No it aint. And am I a compulsive confessor? Nope. So I cant write about a lot of things here. So I cant write those things which might get me eye balls. Or for that matter a book deal. I started writing because my journal seemed too crowded with my poems. I started writing because I wanted some people to read my thoughts. But they dont, and well, what else is there to do but just to ramble on. *sigh* Hoping that someday... someday...

Are there days like this, when there is an equal amount of joy and sadness in you? When you know that you are just a dreams breadth away from your perfect future. The ingredients are all there, but you just messed up the timings so bad, that its better not to cook at all? You just need to hold out your hand and ask... but you know that asking will cost a lot from a lot of people. So you dont. You just smile at the game fate has played on you.

But Ive been lucky in so many ways. Ive had so much love. Im a bitch and still people love me. Its amazing when I think of it sometimes. I keep fearing everyone will leave and go one fine day when they realise how unbearably selfish and snobbish I am. But more and more, I see friends coming back to me. Depending on me. And surprise of surprises, saying nice things about me... even behind my back!!!

Yes Ive been lucky. Im lucky to be alive. 8 years back, a different seat in a bus would have smashed me to smithereens. The bus crashed... my family and I were on the last row. Thing is, I was not at the back at first. I was just beside the driver. My dad called me from there to sit with them. When it was over, and we were standing on the road, bleeding, dazed... we realised that the seat was not there at all. It had been crushed to a pulp. There was a man sitting there after I had left the seat. Was.

I survived though. Sans a few teeth, and a crushed lower lip, which had to be surgically set right again. But I had use of my limbs and brain. I could not eat for months and my facial reconstruction took almost a year to get back to almost normal, but I have only a scar and the dentures to show for it. It was harrowing seeing my family suffer. My dad, bleeding profusely from surface wounds, yet, calmly, coolly getting our luggage down, arranging for alternative transport to the nearest hospital. My sister, with a gaping wound just below her eye. "Can you see, can you see" my mother kept asking her. And my mother, who wasnt hurt physically, but who had to see all three of her closest people in that state. My mother, who suggested we go to KMC and not to Suratkhal hospital, as we would get better treatment there. She may well have saved my face that day.

At the time when I was visiting my plastic surgeon every monday, he used to be based in the burns yard of KMC (Kasturba Medical College Hospital, I was studying in TAPMI,Manipal). The sights I encountered there made me forget my plight. In fact mine seemed no plight at all.

Here is something I wrote in the hospital itself.

I know what pain is

For I have seen them suffer-

Little girls, their tiny hands bound in white.

Boys half my size, in stretchers, covered to the neck.

Ive heard them scream

Ive heard them wail

Ive heard their cries.

I know what pain is

Not because I have felt it,

But because I have seen them suffer.

(October 2000)

to be continued...

4 comments:

  1. its lovely and so straight from the heart...have feeling artificially high and pseudo flippant...your piece made me come down to earth and real world....:)

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  2. hey payal...remember me...i am the sound of silence from shelfari...didn't have your email id so had to write here...remember you suggested me something...i am still waiting :)

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  3. Hi ,

    I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be very good.. u write well.. Why don't you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blog ‘Smelling oranges on winter afternoons’ took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;

    BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!

    This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows.. :)

    You can also win an exciting t-shirt by winning the contest which is going on in rambhai.com…. hurry up the contest is from 10 – 24 august…

    Cheers,

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  4. Nice. :) See, your wishes are coming true, I've read through quite a few of your thoughts.

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