Frankly, Amy

I read about it first on the news feed of Yahoo! It was a short piece; I do not remember much—I must have been sad, but I remember I was in awe of the touch of death. So close at hand (too far), so near, so hungry, and I felt the need to cry. That year was the year of knowing death for me. And it all started with Amy.

“All I can ever be to you/Is a darkness that we know/And this regret I got accustomed to…” she begins and lets the tears flow without restraint. I would perk up with those first few words and then wait for the refrain. She was good company for that lonely summer. Things were changing so quickly, and I had lost my bearing. But I had her. When she would indulge me with that groan of a sound in Rehab, “I just…ooh…I just need a friend”, I felt understood. That was one of the very few places where I felt understood.

I was already hurting, and suicidal ideation was creeping up on me like vines on a derelict wall. I remember the black dots of my vision when I would feel faint. I remember when I started starving myself. I remember the purple wall behind and the frame of the bed where I gave up on saving myself every day and every night. I don’t remember much of her death or my immediate response to it, but I remember that it was just the beginning.

Losing Amy was like losing the last vestiges of my innocence. More death followed that year. Someone I had once called a friend (who had moved on to another city for her education), a relative taken by cancer. So grew my fascination with what the end would mean. When life seemed to be slipping out of me one drop at a time, I felt a kinship with death. I followed its voice in my dreams — its whispers provided a relief from the pain, its silence was always punctuated with another hurt. I ached for it, I thought I needed it to fulfil what I could not in life.

Through it all, I still clung to Amy. I found others in later years—those voices with the Siren call, with the touch of a crystal cleanness, with the darkness of suffocation and breaking away from it.

“And life is like a pipe/And I’m a tiny penny/Rolling up the walls inside…” I repeated and repeated after my first heartbreak, and all the times I felt deceived by myself. She was there, as I delved into the exuberance of a tomorrow and the hopelessness of today, during my metro journeys to college. “As far as my heart, I’d rather be restless/Second I stop, the sleep catches up and I’m breathless…” remained in my head through the emptiness, as I found myself trapped in the pattern of my breaking.

But she was also there when I found myself in the company of friends. “Since I’ve come home/Well, my body’s been a mess/And I miss your ginger hair/And the way you like to dress”: I would forget my discomfort with my voice and sing out loud with Chi Chi, finding the joy of Amy in what has often been a lonely journey.

Whenever I find it creeping on me—the death that still vies for my attention, that is always going to be there—I think of Amy, and I think of the life that is here in this moment now. Not always. I falter, I get lured away by the pleasure of a funereal fantasy. But my love for her has remained the same. So much has remained the same, and yet so much has changed as well.

When I hear her voice, I do not regret all of it. I do not regret any of my falls and hurts. I remember them fondly, I am learning to live with them.

If there is a ‘beyond’, I hope it is restful and kind. Thank you, Amy!

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© Anmol HA

Something for the 10 years of passing of Amy Winehouse

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of sleep

i stalked Shabana Azmi’s Instagram at 4:17 a.m. after coming across one of her posts. i got stuck to it and explored her life, as exhibited on the heavy screen of my cell phone. in a desperate plea for sleep, i look for such intervening factors on the social media that can lull me to close my eyes where i can lose the ra(n)ge of my incessant inner-voice. sometimes, it works and i hand over the reins of the internet and breathe deeply into a light snooze. at other times, i realise after long how bizarre it is and begin to make amends, in the form of shallow breathing to trick myself to sleep. when that does not work, i start worrying about the books that i am not reading, the ones i left in between, the ones i do not know of, the ones i could never write (or something along these lines) till i cross the borders (and uncross them) between levity and foolhardiness one too many times.

in order to feel better, i finished the chapter of one of the books that i was reading and watched the first half an hour of a film. then to bed and breaths and buildups. and back to prompt wakefulness.

at 6:37 a.m., i stand up and go for a floating walk. with the sun burning my industrious eyelids, i miss out on the hornet just ahead of me. after a moment’s delay, we both gawk at each other and turn in opposite directions. my sense of direction does not work well in such circumstances and i end up encountering this mischievous creature again. before the sting, the cry of a crow takes my full attention and i manage to escape.

the scrawny black thing has a worm in its mouth, hanging loose like a scarf around the neck (that can well be a noose). it is a morning angel, cawing and cackling and enjoying its breakfast. it ignores the row of six pigeons on the opposite wall, who are the sentinels of this open court.

there is no judgement in the coming. i think of the law and its acrimonious relationship with hope. i think of the absentee litigator before an absent god, i think of a big advocate with a stamp of contempt on his head. what is the law for but to disembowel the mind and tie the tongues into neat knots?

the law is sans justice. the sleep is sleeplessness. with that in mind, i start writing of this vacuum that can contain all of our lifetimes and those that have not even begun yet.

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© Anmol Arora

Image source (Sleeping Effort, 1953, Jackson Pollock, © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

of heat and pain

the pain comes in waves, rising with every twist and movement, closing like a sunflower in that one particular posture and head tilt that makes it recede to an invisible centre (all else silent). in that particular pose, a burst of senseless laughter escapes me, of relief, of sweet, sweet relief. it has only been a couple of days and i am sick of its tentacles piercing and needling my muscles into tight knots. the right quadrant of my upper back is a plain, a parallel dimension for unintended consequences of seemingly inconsequential actions.

a hot water bottle rests against the hurt. the nightlight makes the red rubber look like blood. its scaled surface feels like old skin. letting the heat transfer and latch onto my pain, i feel light. the waves pass me by, hungry for new flesh and brittle warmth. lying in this manner, i drift off to visions. it may be the result of a muscle relaxant i took in one go that i feel the vibrations of a half-dream on my left shoulder and forearm, and numbness spreads throughout like apricot jam on a burnt toast.

with this unkindly sleep, i stay in a drug-addled awareness. all is as should be. all is on its way to becoming a memory.

embracing the pain, i read of an empress and bulimia, bridges made of watermelon sugar, and the kill list of a forgotten virus. the night becomes predawn becomes the first glimmer of light becomes a hot day. the water turned cold hours ago, the anti-inflammatory chemicals have absolved themselves. i move around and struggle with the weight of my small being in the vastness of this bed, all in the hope to find a way through the pain.

not to avoid it. to be it.

the pain as a reminder as a prophecy as a hypnotic dream as a sunburnt image as a rain besieged sea as a burnt-up pyre as an acceptance.

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© Anmol Arora

Image source (Frida Kahlo, Arbol de la Esperanza (Tree of Hope), 1946 (Photo: Nathan Keay, ©2014 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, D.F. Artists Rights Society (ARS), Private Collection Chicago))

of ants, words, and passages

my room is infested with ants. their dark, mellow bodies struggle against surfaces, solid or not, to find a passage to somewhere. some of them climb on me, walk up to my calves, to my thighs, before i realise they are there with stinging pain and shed them away. some die in the process, the rest wriggle free of this temporary shortcoming and find their way again.

they are like my words, that are often incompetent and even inchoate because i see life as a long series of misguided and misunderstood syllables. they are like wor(l)ds that speak from the downfall and seek approval to be present.

last year that i spent in a far off city, i would often jump a wall, go out in search of a cup of chai and smoke, with words bursting like tiny crackers in my mind that got transferred to all those who sought (something) on the streets. and sometimes, i would want to be that tall woman in a magenta saree to have that purposeful gait, that man who seemed like a fleeting answer to all my shattered believes, or that dead butterfly.

(i encountered some ten of them this time last year, followed by dead dogs and dead birds till the end of the year, which i took as a marker of my own death but it hasn’t worked out too well)

i have a lot to say but words seem futile and rudimentary for something wordless, even soundless. like the moon seemingly in the wrong direction on that beach evening (i cannot begin to forget it) or those crabs carrying my weight in the dark as i ventured alone with only moonlight as my guide to a bridge i knew was there, but not reaching anywhere. when i had opened the maps application on my phone, it showed that i was in the middle of the sea, the unstable ground left far away. but i was not drowning. so, i retraced my steps, lonely as wind, frazzled like an ant.

now i am in my home, spent more than three months here already, which is at least twice the total time i spent here (before this) in the last seven years. words are simple here. they come and go, climb up and down, rise high and low, sometimes without consequence, sometimes requiring me to kill them because of the pain that they cause — a moment’s pain but measured in the depths of a lifetime.

and i carry that alone through the day to the next, through the month to the next. waiting. believing that the words would set it right, that i will learn to walk out and get somewhere again.

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© Anmol Arora

This blog completed nine years a couple of weeks back. Marking the anniversary pretty late but here’s something.

Image source (The Ants by Salvador Dali)

This Highway

mumbling words

as the bus bumps

along the distresses

of this highway of notions,

of emotions, I have kept

ingrained within the coal tar

over which I drive the roller

of my communication, of things,

I tell you from the blanket

of night, breathing stories

not of stars, but of their images

that glint in the mud pond of life.

A little too urgent now and then,

I may have you see

the ills of my voice, but

what can I do, when

my truths are hollowed out,

distresses formed along this road,

where you don’t know, but

I let you know everything

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Image source