losing

 

I have a little plastic bat and ball. My father has set the toy truck upright. If the ball goes behind me you get four runs, he tells me. If it goes past me without touching the ground you get 6. If it hits anything on the shelves you are out. If it hits the garbage truck you are out. If the bat hits the garbage truck you are out. Once you touch the ball with your bat you can run. If I hit the garbage truck with the ball while you run you are out. The game seems rigged to get me out. I get to ‘bat’ first, he says. I try to get in position like Jayasurya on the TV. My father does not like my stance. He does not know how to put me right because I’m batting left-handed. He makes me switch hands and shows me how to prepare myself for the ball. India loses to Bangladesh. I lose to Uppa. India loses to Sri Lanka. I lose to Uppa. I keep losing to Uppa. He gives me an extra wicket but I lose again. He promises to bowl slowly. I keep losing. Cricket isn’t all that  Uppa has bought me a board with white and black squares that he says if for playing chess. He teaches me that each piece has a place and a role. He lets me start with white as we start playing. I lose the first game, the second, the third, and the fourth. Months and years pass, but every time we play chess, there is only one outcome. He knows everything. Chess is for nerds.

My mother holds a few pages in her hand; she’s cleaning the cupboard. They’ve been torn off a journal from 2000. March 12 10:40pm, it says, Mishal is born. May 6 – Mishal’s first smile. I cannot keep browsing the pages, I’m not sure I want to. Those pages have a recorded a relationship between me and her indescribably different from the one we share now. I try to remember games we have played. Did we play any? I am sure she would have let me win at least once. There might have been some ludo or snakes and ladders here and there. If there are any, they don’t stand out, nothing significant comes to mind. I’m pausing to think about the implications of why even the parent I played with is so gendered. I’m sitting down to watch a movie. She hears the TV play. She comes upstairs, upset I did not tell her about the movie. You’re leaving me, and you don’t even want me to watch this with you. It works, I play it from the start again.

I am watching again the next night; this time, I do ask if she wants to join. Of course she wants to join. I know why I did not ask last night, but it does not need to come up. She’s right, I will probably get to keep leaving anyway.  

 

To Delhi and to Love

 

How do we measure familiarity? By how many days you have known each other? Maybe how much time has been spent in each other’s company? The nature of said company? Little details can have incredible impact on familiarity: liking the same book, finding the same things funny, having irrational hatred for the same condiment. Like everything in my life that defies explanation, I attack this question with all kinds of rationalisations. Some people, however, feel familiar from the moment you meet them, reminding you of the prescient words of a great poet of our age: before you came into my life I missed you so bad.

One of the crueller jokes I think fate plays on me is burdening me with a life and disposition given to constant movement. Most of the people I love live on my phone, and the list just grows all the time. One constant in this random journey of receiving affection from many quarters is how abruptly and painfully I lose the ability to see these people. Sometimes fate is kind enough to give a few months, even a year. Other times, the rug pull comes after just days. One of my favourite most romantic lines I have ever seen is from the movie Casablanca. I will admit to always tearing up watching Humphrey Bogart say “We’ll always have Paris” to an Ingrid Bergman’s character, both fully aware they will never see each other again. I have had to say that many times in my life: fraternally, filially, and fortunately (?) on occasion, even romantically. What I did not expect, however, is to have say we would always have Delhi. I arrived in a state of emergency, against my will, with the intention of wrapping things up as quickly as possible. I leave this city now, four and a half months later, having contained perhaps just as many lifetimes in that duration. I cannot say I have changed my mind about the several awful things I have to say about that city. However, I have lived and felt what it is like to know that among the millions of residents in the national capital are people I love and cherish and know I am loved and cherished by in equal measure.

With little over an hour left for my flight to start boarding, I waited outside Delhi Airport for a man whose phone was unreachable. I stood there knowing I would always regret not having stayed for the goodbye if he got there and did not find me. We got our euphoric two-minute goodbye, he gave me his necklace that he had not taken off in three years. He said he had forgot to bring his wallet in his hurry. I did not know what to do faced with such love. I promised him I would wear that necklace; it is the most meaningful piece of jewellery I have ever received. I don’t understand why it makes me feel sad to feel loved. I teared up inside the airport, and they were not happy tears.

Other familiarities are tougher to talk about. There are words to skirt around. Concepts to be communicated using a language not all are meant to understand. Of the things I take from Delhi is the knowledge that I cannot play NYT Connections, use orange zest in cooking, or even say dammit without a little pang. It is the certainty that some movies, some songs, some drinks, and even some colours, will always remind me of people I might never again have access to. No one bothered to defend Delhi on the same terms that I shit talked it; they all said something to the effect of assuring I would grow to like it anyway and that I would leave it but with a heavy heart. I do not think I grew to like it. I did, however, leave it with a heart much heavier than I imagined would be the case. That I found myself trying to cheer up by telling myself this departure was something I had wished for, and a precursor to a positive step in my life, would be incomprehensible to the man who landed in Delhi in November desperate to get his sister out of jail.

I like to think of life as a collection of people I have met along the way; it is only thing that comes close to giving it a semblance of meaning. I feel burdened by the realisation that it will never be a collection of people I feel like I have loved enough. I can try to convince myself these are all accidents, and not evidence of a tendency to cut and run.  For the past few months of my life, and especially the last few weeks, I hope it is enough to promise I will put a little too much salt in my food and walk out of an underwhelming theatre after 10 minutes every now and then.