letters to my ex

Calcutta calling Calcutta

Do we remember the day we were born?
We do or maybe we don't, that's okay. It doesn't make much of a consequence to trace the history. However, it's imperative to know the story, anyway.

So, the story goes with the doctor acquainting your mother with this knowledge at least ten months prior. She struts, uncertainty clamming her dry bones as her husband hitch-hikes her to the nearest station. He tells her that they're making a world together and that's the least bit he could afford to do, she nods.
She wants to retort, she wants to scream. She's leaving centuries of history behind her. 

Are they though? Are they making a world or abandoning whatever they had?

But that's not our concern at this juncture. We don't need to know if your mother had a life before you. That there was a time when she was a four-year-old holding on to her mother. She might have had the nicest of laughs and the brightest of smiles and to the annoyance of Gerard De Nerval, you would have been compelled to compare her to a rose because she could be as delicate and as prickly. Maybe, there could have been one, where she was eighteen and she let herself fall in love with a boy. The boy she loved could have loved her too, but they never said anything.

A life before she married your father, a life before she left all of herself behind.

She got married in her twenties, you don't know this.
You've never cared.

So, the doctors acquaint your mother with this knowledge ten months prior. She doesn't know what to do with this. She chuckles, she cries.
She forgoes this life, and therefore, you hold this speck in your palms.

You've never cared.

That's exactly how your birth story unfolds, true to its nature.

You dislike this story.

Correction: You don't dislike it but you need an after story.

Why? You realise that your rebirth is a story incomplete. You believe that we've all got it wrong, that the ones who die are actually the ones who are living and we're the deceased.
I won't question you.

In his last days, your nans is an out of focus figure itching to feel what it means to be present. He tells you of his father and his father's father. He tells you of the summer you both went on a city stint, hands clasped.
No, he's talking about the one where he took you to college street and swamped you with half a century old books.
It's not difficult for you to remember him because you've watched him.

You remember being 4 and watching him lay shiuli flowers on the ghats.

5 and he tells you about his days of football.  His toppling adulation spoke of the divine 60's era of PK-Chuni-Balaram.

6 and watching him tug the hem of his monkey cap while exclaiming to a neighbour, “Oh, bhishon thanda porey geche, dada!”.

7 and he teaches you all of his stellar moves from chess and carrom. After all, he can't let you flunk in front of Yash.

8 and you watch him prepare kajjali, grinding mercury and sulphur with a certain precision. This was his muse and one true lover. An ayurvedic practice which held true enough to erase all the fault lines that came along with life in little pockets. The thing which made him smile to himself and sing out loud in random moments; offkey but fervently euphoric.

9 and you observe the way he sleeps. He has this peculiar way of enveloping the blanket that only a section of his face is visible. You imitate him.

10 and you're sitting by him with your knees pulled over and wondering what to say when his wife died.

11 and you remember watching him hum to Anupam Roy's “Bawshonto Eshe Geche”. You recollect dancing to the soft instrumental notes of his gramma and giggling as you twirled in the halls of his apartment. He found beauty in songs and literature that reached out to him while blocking out messy and empty visuals and lyrics. You often questioned him why music was the only aspect he picked out of a song with poorly accompanied lyrics and sloppy delivery, he couldn't relay an answer in words. Music to him is art; no, was art.

14 and you hear him pray “aaj shalaa brishti hok!”, whenever KKR plays.

15, 16 and 17, you call him.
This isn't correlated; this has been punctuated.

18, but like I said,
your rebirth is a story incomplete and untitled.

yaar, ek cup cha(i) toh pila do.