Thick gullets of fog gurgling down at my palm as i stand at the entrance of my paternal house. Me smoking invisible cigarettes, and feigning ignorance as soon as the father is anywhere in the vicinity. School socks scaling the length of my legs till right below the knobby knees. The grey school skirt perched just above them. Knees like eyes of the legs, except eyes that bend and coil. Cool breeze combing the placated skin behind the knees. The skin forgotten in summers, comes to pertinent importance during sub-liminal temperatures.
The left knee with a long inkdrop-looking scar. The right knee, scarless, boring. Bend on your knees and raise your hands—the school teacher tells me. The knees become grubby paws of a grudging puppy. The muck from the school floor sticking to my knobby knees as if that's their only mode of salvation. I feel cold. My stockings loose their sheen around the hole shaped knee areas a wee bit.
The next class, or period as we used to call it then, is English, or Mathematics. My homework is done. Who cares about History and Geography! I sit on my chair, waiting for the teacher to skim through my notebook. "Ntbk" I write to myself as a shortform and giggle small-ly at my lonesome smartness. The teacher—Chatterji sir—has corrected the mid-term papers. I feel like I should have scored somewhere in the early 20s. He hands over my transcript. Its 27. I have no one to share the joy with. I scribble some small sugary words of mirth to myself on the last page of my rough copy. "Ruff" I label it on the name slip of the cover.
I am 27 now. I have no mathematics score to be jubilant about. I have no new quirks to celebrate. I was ample amount of time or atleast the illusion of it. My vocabulary has no space for ruff and ntbk. There is a distance that I have covered, in time and life, yet with every new night my dreams, that I lovingly like to call nightmares, take me closer to the times long past.
There were Cello and Montex pens earlier. Now there are pens that colleagues pass on, and those that I have accumulated over the years. The ruffs of life are still rough around the edges, as are also my writings. My many Decembers in Kanpur and plenty Novembers in Lucknow and then Delhi and then Chennai and Pune and Coimbatore and then winding back to Delhi have been calloused by loneliness.
Earlier there were people around yet still the loneliness, then the people threaded away. One by one. Parsed away from the centrifugal lonesomeness of life. There were more ruffs—illness, people drifting apart, defenses,issues, angers, dilemmas, and impulsive decisions—a lot of them. Yet what mattered were the Decembers. Decembers that marked the beginning of coldness, of solidification of loneliness, of disembarkments and lack of disillusions.
Come winters all the lonely hearts I'm sure, like me, understood the real reality of loneliness. The coveted quilts came with added benefits—you'll be by yourself with a legit excuse of disallowing human interaction on account of the temperature dips. Late nights become compulsory hideouts from the rest of the peoples.
You chewed fried garlic and binged on baigan ka bharta. The calloused garlic skin quaking inside your mouth and you chew till the roof of your mouth burns. Your ears turn red. You can feel a pang of heat circle inside your cheeks. The eyes, they burn. You look up, your mother is making rotis, her back to your burning face. Your tongue starts bleeding. The mouth tastes of blood—the blood that you taste when your editor yells at you while you try to dry swallow an anti-anxiety pill in the small south-Indian town far away from anyone you ever knew. Your editor shouts for your couldn't pronounce something correctly. You smile, bow down and agree with a mouthful of blood and lungfuls of anxiety.
The Decembers were bleating—blue, black, red—followed seldom by gentle marham while the genteel splaying the scorchy-looking winter sun. The terrace became home. Downstairs was the house of fears and scares. Over 15 Decembers pass, the downstairs residents are darker and colder. Decembers are periods of quietness, patience in the face of birthdays approaching and debilitating circumstances. Staying tight and composed, to woo composure and solace.
A place beyond belief—Decembers may come and go, but darkness of the Decembers past is here to stay.