Shelving the Heart

I feel guilty being alive when you’re not.
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My Dirty Little Secret

You use warm water to scrub the beach off me. Cook me delicious home meals. Hold my hand when we cross roads. Stare at me when I’m sleeping. Pull me on your lap – hold me, cuddle me, rock me. My life, past and inbox are open to you because you love me as I am. You slap my hand when I scratch my scalp. Read to me aloud from books.

You are the mother I didn’t have! :)
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A Week in Film School

Monday

Enter the canteen to see Shabana of the beauteous liquid eyes and a very pink Tom Alter sitting at a rickety table sipping chai. Try to act as non-chalant as everyone else is.

Tuesday

Rushing to make it to Editing Practicals on time. The Editing HOD hates you ever since he saw a bored you and gang passing a pretend chillum during his class. However you are destined to be late again as a six minute take of a rape scene is being shot just outside your hostel.

Wednesday

Enter the canteen early hoping to spend a precious half hour with the Murakami that Uber has lent you and are promptly put on dog control; which means feeding Johnny tiger biscuits so he does not jump into the set being shot in the canteen.

Thursday

See that a lovely pitch has been laid out in the football field with players in complete gear. Stop to watch the match till someone yells ‘Cut’ and you realize it’s a set.

Friday

Enter the canteen to be accosted by a senior who desperately needs you to play a Charlie’s Angel for his action continuity sequence. You get to kick butt and are immortalized on celluloid. The shoot, however, goes on longer than expected and you miss your Editing Practical. The HOD now refuses to acknowledge that you exist.

Saturday

Amble into the mess to get a cup of coffee and find that it has been turned into a cathedral complete with a real padre, pews, and twenty plus worshippers for G’s DV project.

Sunday

The one day we have off (except when there are workshops or special screenings, which is 60% of the time). Roomie wakes me up frantically at 6 am to ask if I have a light-coloured sari, she is in charge of production for a shoot and forgot. Sari?? Who me?? Geez.
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They were the lucky ones

They were the lucky ones,
who worked a bit and loved a bit
who took loving as a task
or just loved their work.
I was rather busy too in my own way
I loved a little, worked a little.
The work disrupted my loving
and love often came in the way of work.
Finally I was fed up
and left both unfinished.

My Guests

The door opens
on my sadness;
there they come, my guests.
There she is, the evening
to lay a carpet of despair.
There goes the night
to speak of pain to the stars.
Here comes the morning
with its shining scalpel
to open the wound of memory.
Then there is afternoon
holding whips of flame in its sleeve.
All these are my guests
who come to see me day and night.
But when they come,
and when they go,
I do not know.
My thoughts are always
drifting homeward,
holding doubts and suspicions,
asking many questions.

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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Bought myself a plant with yellow flowers. Let’s see if I can keep it alive.