When you see a
photo of yourself, you start wondering is that me? Is that really me? When that
particular shot was taken, that pinch of salt smile, that clenched eyebrows and
glow in the eyes, that alertness in your face right at the moment of the click,
all of it -- was it me? If it was me am I still me? Right now? Each picture
gives away a bit of your self. Not always the best part though. I feel a part
of me gets captured in the photo and can never come out. It surrounds itself in
the oblivion of a non-existent world, a
world in which I can never go back to. A world that encapsulates the tragedy
and merriment of a single moment only, sometimes a fraction of a moment.
And then, whoosh! It’s gone. Gone forever.
If our pictures
could make a collage of our life, what would it be for me, I wonder. Would it
be the negativity, utter and shameless violence, the non-committal atrocities,
or the soft and sweet melodies, the songs and the memories and the muffled tone
of my mom’s lullabies putting me to sleep? Or would it rather be composed with strong, resourceful, enterprising, never-laid-back kind-of-thick-skin pseudo “manly” demeanour many so called acquaintances of mine want to label
me with? I don’t know.
Passing thirty
years of my life on the face of this planet, I sometimes feel, my sheer
romanticism about dying within 25 was not a very bad idea indeed. By 25 I have
had seen everything. Birth, death, love, hatred, relationships, breakdown,
gossip, joy, achievement, jealousy, self destruction, success, passion,
craving, banality, meaninglessness, irresponsibility, cruelty, absolute
submission, power race, politics of sexuality --- wooooh! The list is far from
complete, yet I have seen and experienced them as a part of my very happening,
urban-privileged and predominantly feminine life.
I was happy in a
way, not the way you demonstrate it as a state of being rather in a situation
where I hopped on and off from happiness. There were ecstatic moments and I was
confident that should I need to choose someday, I would always choose ecstatic
happiness for a short period over living a mundane life and being average happy
like majority of the human population do. My adolescent fantasy about happiness
even pushed me to the state where I could give up my most valuable possession
for being ecstatic and to explode with happiness, and in an amazing bit of
serendipity, would be content finding that joy and would not worry at all about
the sorrow or the agony if there was any at all, to follow.
Thirty years
gone, I astonishingly see, I am still in that state, willing to give up
everything for a moment of happiness, for a splash of ecstasy, however, reality
has set in. Reality, to me is a nasty word, almost as nasty as the ill-smelling
hooligans whom I avoid consciously in train or open spaces with blurry racial
ignorance, or nasty as a saucepan I would never ever leave on my sink as it
would continue to pinch me like a bee-sting until I clean it and put it back to
the shelf. But my reality, apart from everyone else’s, has shown me how very
average my life is. How meaningless it is.
I was not heading for a sudden
epiphany into realizing how my perception of happiness has changed and how I
have settled for an average life.
I was rather pissed.
Knowing that you believe in something
and then finding life has something completely opposite in store for you is: pathetic.
I don’t like the life I am leading right now but worse is the fact that I have
transitioned into someone who stopped practicing or trying. Maybe the tacit
hope I possessed was wrong, but what the heck! Right or wrong has never been
the yardstick of being happy. And it never will be. All that matters is someone
has lost the enormous potential even without exploring it.
I am deeply
anguished to be that someone today.
Adultery by Paulo Coelho
