टूटा तारा सा

मैंना ने सूहा साहा ले जाना
खोये के मीठी मीठी खेती में खेलन  होये
तोता  बोले पेड़ों पे, पेड़ से, पूड़ी से
सूहा साहा नींदन में बोखा ना हो
संघ साथी , हन सूनी थारे हो ना  हो

सूहा साहा अम्मा का
सूहा साहा अम्मा का

रैना ………
कारी कारी कोयलें  सी रैना
नींदी तोला, तोला  सी रैना
तारों का बिछोना …चैन से सोना
गोटा गोटा गुदरी में, घूमेगा, घामेगा

सूहा साहा मैना ने ले जाना

Sooha Saaha
Highway
Irshad Kamil

The song I have started with today is a lovely song from the movie Highway, which is basically a lullaby asking the child to go to sleep peacefully. The child here is "sooha saaha" which literally means "red rabbit".

I've been wanting to write. But I don't know what to write or how to put the zillion things in my head into words. Sometimes, I want to write about friendship. Sometimes I want to write about love. Sometimes, I want to write a story. Sometimes I want to write my story. My dashboard has a few drafts that are either a few coherent sentences or a bunch of gibberish. A few of them are full blown posts that I am scared of posting. For many many reasons. And a few of them are still works in progress. So then I decided today to just start a new post and go with the flow and not try and complete the incomplete ones.

Kabhi, when I sit and think about my friends, I think about my two friends from school and the one from college. And I realise other than my "parallel life" friend from school (on whom I have been trying to write a post), no one really knows what's happening in my life. I've been sharing the daily happenings of my life with someone for so long now, that without him, when I have no one to talk to about silly stupid things, I feel like I am all alone. That is true and not true at the same time.

Not true, because I have friends, some close, some movie buddies, some food buddies, some childhood friends, and I can just call them and they'll pick up my call and listen to what I have to say for sure. The point is, I don't want to call them. As stupid as that sounds.

Now, the feeling of being all alone, is also true in a way, because there are only a few people in this whole wide world, who 'get' you. You know what I mean. I mean, they know what you are feeling, saying and not saying when you send them a one liner email. The kinds that you want to call and not say anything to, and you know they'll not question your silence, but just be there on the other end. The kinds that don't interrupt you when you are sobbing and telling them how you feel, thinking you are making complete sense, but actually you're not. The kinds that don't give you shit lines like : Oh God, not that again, can you stop it/ can you forget him/ there is so much you have in life to be thankful about, etc. You get the drift.

My two best friends from school and college are too far away from me, literally and emotionally, to even begin to understand what is going in my life. I am not saying, I am being a perfect friend to them either. Life takes over, i understand that.  All I am saying is I won't be telling them my deepest secrets, or even if I tell them, I know they will unfortunately give me one of the lines from above. So well defeats the purpose and makes me feel worse, I'd be better off not telling them. This other parallel-life friend of mine and I weirdly go through the same stuff at the same time. And fortunately I have found him to understand me and thankfully I understand him.

I am slowly turning into a recluse, i think. There's so much happening inside me, that I don't want to go in front of people and have conversations with them, unless I am forced to (eg : work). I'd rather sit at home and 'do my own thing'. Now what that is, even I don't know.  But then I've always been like that. The fear i feel now is the inability to be my true self with 99% of the people around me. That scares me, as it should scare anyone i guess. Anyway, i comfort myself thinking it's a phase.

Anyway, the essence of the friends bit is how I have come so far away from everyone, and how sometimes I want it to be that way. And how sometimes, I want them to understand me. About how I fervently wish that I could talk to my best friends and expect them to understand. About how the emails I send them are answered, either with an email or a phone call, or even a message. But then, I don't know what I am upset with, who I am upset with. Do I have the right ?

So that's about friends, the other thing I keep wanting to write about is my upcoming travels.

I am going back to Hyderabad next week, and I am ecstatic about it. It's the only other city I identify with after Delhi. Mostly for having lived there for 5 years,the longest I have lived in a city other than Delhi. It's the city that made me what I am today. I have memories with so many people, in so many places in that city, I feel like rushing back and collecting my times there in a bag and hugging it tight and then opening the bag and see the memories flow out like butterflies that have been closed in a jar. But I  know when I step out of Rajiv Gandhi International Airport I will feel an immense sense of sadness for all that the city gave me and how I lost most of that. But I also know I am not going to let that feeling stop me and I am going to take in everything that the city has to offer again. Maybe it will give me a new lease like it did 6 years back. Maybe it won't. Either ways I can't wait to go back. I might even visit all the places I lived in.

Then I want to write about love.  I want to write about how i felt when i saw the person I had walked with for so many years, met me at a streetlight on day, and how he said hi and then walked ahead of me as the lights changed. As he was striding ahead, I stood rooted wondering how lives that seemed so entwined until yesterday are so separate today. I want to write about how i felt about it being all my fault. And I want to put in words the weird pinch that I felt inside of me when I saw his back facing me and how I missed crossing the street and had to wait for the lights to turn green again, and how I clenched my teeth to stop myself from crying at 9 am in the morning and looked up at the morning sun as I pushed that fat ball of tears through my closed throat.

Then I want to write about music and the millions of songs that I don't listen to because they are on a list. And how the radio insists on playing them and how I switch it off, only to slowly turn it on after 5 minutes in the hope that the old tune doesn't come back to haunt me. About how I went to P.S Cafe yesterday and had to get out of my body to push myself through the doors and not run back home afraid of facing what I will feel once inside those doors.

I want to write about how afraid love, marriage and life sometimes makes me. About how the uncertainty of everything makes me feel like I am on a ship in the middle of the ocean and there is nothing and no-one for miles and miles and miles. Someone said to me sometime back she'll never watch DDLJ ever again in the same way. And I was too scared of watching DDLJ, afraid that the movie will lose whatever meaning it had for me and in my life.  So when they finally showed it on TV and I stopped everything to sit and watch it from  beginning to end, I was glad there's one thing in life, I still feel the same for. And hopefully that won't change.

Now that I have this post out, I hope I can find words for my other thoughts. And hope that this feeling of having lost something, of having left behind something, will begin to disappear.

टूटा तारा सा
छोटा सा
तारा  सा
टूटा रे
पूछे वोह देखों तेरी ही बारे
क्यूँ ना सोए
क्यूँ तू रोये
क्यूँ तू खोए
यूँ परदेस में हो

क्यूँ तू रूठा
किस्से रूठा
क्या हैं छूटा
तेरा देस में

जो भी हैं
रूखा सूखा मन में
वोह बोलों तो
खोलों राहें
बातों कि बाहों में

तोता  बोले पेड़ों पे, पेड़ से, पूड़ी से
सूहा साहा नींदन में बोखा ना हो
संघ साथी , हन सूनी थारे हो ना  हो

सूहा साहा अम्मा का
सूहा साहा अम्मा का