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One hundred years…enough living perhaps

The past is dark. Dark is the color. But something dark has no color perhaps or is it the mixture of every color that has made it so dark, colorless- such that it doesn’t reflect any color. Can color – the crayons paint a painful picture? Well, the mixture of a lot of colors can make it ugly thing. Dark is vacant, hollow ultimately leading one to the moment of feelinglessness, beinglessness. How much is it important to feel something in its own true essence?

I feel like an old tree. That has survived for lets say hundred years. Have been through so much of sunshine, colorful leaves, ripen fruits and old branches. I love the birds that come and shelter within me. I look at them and smile. Their love makes me to turn my cold branches into green, blue, yellow, red and pink. I become band of seven colors with smelling flowers blooming over the thousand branches of mine. Everywhere there is bloom- Well, this is spring. Everything matches with every other thing.

Then, these birds fly away. Leaving their nest empty. Vacant part above me hurts me like anything. I weep in silence and the sky competes with me. It shows me more anger in the form of thunder, storm and rain. Makes me wet, makes me cold, tries to remove away the nest, fills the nest with water. Immediately after, Sun comes to punish me for the sin that I commit for loving the birds as I am not supposed to love any birds. Because love is an illusion, the Sun says. Almost burning me with the heat, sun dries me up, dries the leaves, flowers and the ripen fruits- they fall in the ground and die. Ripen fruits : They are the ripen dreams that fall and die when it is becomes most fit to be recognized.

Untouchable Tale : Rajaswala Days

Published in Kathmandu Post on Feb 28…

Photo Credit: Kathmandu Post.. ( I loved this art)

(Navigating the rituals and myths, sorrows and shame that menstruation has come to be associated with in our part of the world.)

The place was murky, sunlight pushing to make its way through the lone window—but it was not allowed here, and its failed attempts to brighten and cheer rendered the atmosphere even more murky. Below the dark chimney sat my bed, much too big for a 10-year-old. My fourth grade books, bag, school clothes, shoes and socks were scattered here and there, along with a steel plate, glass and bowl, on which I would be served my meals, like a jailed convict, I remember thinking. Also lying around were my dolls, and the little pieces of cloth I would cut out to make dresses for them; ‘talatuli’ we called them. Yes, I was at a talatuli-playing age, blessed with all the innocence that implies.

“You’re a woman now,” the maid says.

“How? Please tell me.”

“Being Nachhuni makes you a woman. And because this is your first time, you can’t touch your father or your brother.”

“I’m a woman now?”

“Yes.”

How horrible was that day? The flowing of blood from where you peed, and the realisation that that you have no control over that flow, can’t stop it, even when your body trembles and hurts.