#Scurf168: Nudity of Body, Mind & Soul
My first memoir published in 2014 on its 10-year anniversary for a (now) defunct website called Helpost
A note to foreground this piece: On a cold January morning in 2014 when I was a miserable lawyer dipping in and out of the Delhi High Court six days a week, I wrote this as a dispatch to my best friend. I was ailing mentally and bruised with the legal dramas forever unfolding all around me. At the time, all I wanted to do was to curl into a corner and be caressed and nurtured and nourished by the love that only a bestie can give. I sent this gingerly over to her via email and she immediately asked me to see if I can get it published in some place. I scoured through my facebook friend list of the time and found that Aastha Manchanda ran this homegrown website for intimate writing and observations called Helpost. After I shared this piece with Aastha, she responded in the positive. Between writing this and sharing this with Aastha, a good nine-month period elapsed. That gestation period was perhaps me trying to find some confidence in myself. This nine-month period was also when I quit law for good and moved to Chennai to pursue journalism (something that was still as far removed from the real “meat” of writing as it could be). Today I felt like reproducing these very words for my newsletter as a way to hold them close. Over the last decade a lot of times I have found myself looking for this essay, but the research would yield no results. This essay here is a placeholder for the memory of a 10-year-ago me, a writing self forever in conversation with the world outside, the confidence a friend can show and what magic it can spin. Hope you enjoy reading this essay on what’s essentially friendship and this reading list I curated for
friendship essays.Being naked is not a physical state, it’s not perceptible to the human eye, nor is it apparent on the periphery of the human body.
Being naked is a plain, unbuttered, comforted and holy state of the human senses. It’s there where I can feel your words like the wind against my face, where I can sit and listen to you endlessly and we can hold our gaze together at the dusk sky, where I can listen to the rustle of the leaves, where I can feel the brush of your soft hair against my skin.
Being naked, for any frail mind, would mean the removal of bodily cover and exposure to the world. But to me, being bare bodied, being naked lies in the fact that I can open myself to another human being without the fear of being judged. It means that I can just let it be. I can let our conversations flow, however disordered, unlinked or sensitive, without being interrupted, questioned or judged.
I can say that for me, being naked means when I can peel off layer by layer, my emotions, when I remove my dead skin, when the pain can be waxed off only by talking till the wee hours of the morning and then, maybe falling asleep in your lap unwound, unruffled, having an emotionally relieving and fulfilling orgasm.
When there’s so much happening on the inside and the world just sees that I’m tanned, I want that person to see the reason behind the tanned skin, the jarred emotions, the unending cravings, the minuscule things that hurt, the shallow conversations that betray; that’s when I can be true to you and to me, bare myself before you.
It is liberating to go bare, sans all fears of hiding my scars, exposing to you, all that I’ve gone through and the feeling of not having to bottle an emotion, just melting in the other’s mind like cotton candy.
Being smothered, just by the silence of words and the speech of eyes, that is when I feel naked before you, the plain feel of you being able to get in my skin, losing my guards when with you, the fact that you’re always able to taste and swallow, as easily as each of my thoughts and each one of my experiences, you being able to bring comfort to me in times of hullabaloo, that alone can quieten the storms within.
The unsettling questions might still linger, but the fact that you can understand my being is what can help me sail through the turmoil, for it is only because of you that I might be alive, and I might feel new things every now and then and grow within me; an ease to live with myself. Calling you a friend would be a digression, a far cry from reality. Ergo, I call you my biography, I name you as a part of me, I call you- me, for you are as much a part of me as I am a part of this universe.
