Procrastination and Perfectionism – A Pernicious Circle

How to become a non-procrastinator in 5 not-so-easy steps?

I know I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time. In my defence, I have been very busy for the past year. I graduated college with a post grad diploma, completed a mandatory internship under a toxic supervisor, finished writing a novel, started my first job and have started querying the novel (and also amassed a respectable number of rejection slips).

So what drove me to write this now? Well, my schedule certainly hasn’t gotten any less grinding. But I guess you could say I had an epiphany. I found (or at least think I found) the answer to a question that has been bugging me for a while now. To fully understand this question and subsequently, its answer, you’d first need to know a bit of background information about my life.

I was a terrible student, particularly in school. In fact, I was so terrible as a student, being bad at academics kind of became my USP – almost a part of my identity. And this was a problem. A terrible, traumatising problem, really. I come from a middle class, Indian family. My family (and my society, really) places a high value on academic achievement. The school you go to, the grades you get, the things that are said about you at parent-teacher meets have very real consequences on the quality of your life, your standing amongst your peer group, the way people see you and perhaps most importantly, the way you see yourself.

It is important to point out, here, that I wanted to be a good student. Wanted it desperately, in fact. I would have given anything to be one. To get good grades and to be praised by my teachers. To make my parents proud. I cannot overemphasize the extent to which I wanted all of that. I wanted it so bad it was almost pathetic.

But for the entirety of my school life, I never achieved it. Hell, I never even came close to achieving it. It was nothing but a mixture of pure, dumb luck, and an aptitude for sounding more knowledgeable than I was (particularly in writing), that kept me from having to repeat a class. Which comes with its own baggage and associated stigmas, but that’s a rant for another time.

My problems with academics were not, however, a problem of aptitude. It wasn’t that I could not understand the course material, it was simply that I could never even bring myself to read it. Nobody understood why I didn’t do better at school – not my parents, not my teachers. Not even the one psychologist that I forced my parents to take me to, in a state of desperation. The thing is, I didn’t understand it either. Why could I not just read the chapter for which I had a test tomorrow? It was as much a mystery to me as it was to anybody else; a fact that to this day, I have not been able to explain to my parents.

Procrastination – the great adversary

Eventually, in high school, I learned about the concept of procrastination. I self-diagnosed as a chronic procrastinator and pretty much accepted that fate. It was a relief, really, to finally have a name, a label for all those years of confusion, despair and self-hatred. I accepted my propensity for self-destructive levels of procrastination and even (in some moments of defensiveness and general dysfunction) gloried in it. And life went on, as it has a tendency to do.

But then, something happened. By the time I had graduated college, my problems with procrastination had diminished significantly. By the time I got my post-grad diploma and stepped into the workforce, they had all but disappeared altogether. I was more productive than I had ever been before in my life.

And don’t get me wrong. I was happy, I was bloody ecstatic about this change. But I didn’t know what had brought it about, and that fact kept bugging me. Not knowing kept me feeling vulnerable. Because if I didn’t know what had caused it the first time and how I had managed to overcome it, what would I do if it ever happened again? Procrastination had made my teenage years a self-perpetuating cycle of misery, self-loathing, stress and fear. I most certainly did not want to repeat that phase again.

And then, it struck me. Just this evening, if I’m to be honest with you. I finally know what had caused the chronic procrastination, and what finally stopped it.

Perfectionism – the invisible villain

The culprit, believe it or not, was a strange kind of destructive perfectionism. I call it strange because I would not, in a million years, have pegged myself for a perfectionist. To me, the word perfectionism brings to mind an image of ambitious, Type A, high-achieving, high-flying, workaholics. I was not, and still am not, any of those things. On the contrary, I am a pretty laid back person whose idea of a fantastic evening is a cup of coffee and a good movie (or a great book). I could not be more Type B if I tried. So how could I be a perfectionist?

Turns out, I was. Well, it would be wrong to say that it was just perfectionism that was the problem. It is also true that I found schoolwork largely boring and I suppose the excessive external pressure that most students are put under also played a role. But I’ll tell you why I think perfectionism was the biggest culprit in causing and perpetuating my chronic procrastination.

So, say I have a test next week and the syllabus consists of seven chapters. I would create an exact schedule for the next seven days in order to prepare for this test. I would map out my exact study plan, decide on my schedule for reading, revision, practice and so forth. Then, I would begin.

The thing was, this entire master plan consisted of a number of sub-plans. When I would begin each chapter, when I would end it, when I would revise, etc. And if I failed to achieve any one of these goals, (which I inevitably did as I put so much pressure on myself), I would feel compelled to start all over again. Or to give up altogether. Or to start again the next day, when of course the same problem would repeat itself. This was my perfectionism sabotaging me, without me even realising it. I was completely and utterly unaware of this entire subconscious process, that I went through over and over again for several years.

My perfectionism told me that if I couldn’t follow a study plan perfectly, I couldn’t study at all. And because this perfection was so difficult to achieve, my brain kept delaying it as much as possible, pulling me away to do other things.

And when I did finally get around to studying, the same miserable cycle would repeat itself. I would try to study, to get it all exactly right, follow the plan to the letter. And then, inevitably, I would fail to achieve one of those goals and the entire thing would be sent into a tailspin and I would feel compelled to start over again or to abandon the process altogether. Which is what I did, and paid the price for it for almost the entirety of my academic life. And not just academically either, but socially and emotionally as well, which I would say had a much more lasting effect than any academic failures that I experienced during the period.

It amazes me how this could have happened so consistently, and for so many years, without me being aware of it in any way whatsoever. And because I wasn’t aware of it, I didn’t know how to deal with it or overcome it. You can’t, after all, fight an enemy that you don’t even know exists.

So what changed?

And now, we come to the reason why I am writing this in the first place. To tell you (my understanding of) how I finally overcame my procrastination problem. I would like to say that for the longest time, I was as unaware of my recovery as I had been of the disease itself. It was not until just a few months ago that I finally noticed the fact that, hey! I had completed my education, managed to get myself a cash award for academic excellence, finished writing a novel, landed a job and was doing reasonably well at said job.  I was being more productive than I had ever been before and it didn’t even feel like I was swimming against a tsunami. So, what the hell changed?

What changed is that on the long and tortuous road to adulthood, I came across, and almost unconsciously implemented, some amazing pearls of wisdom. Five of them, to be exact. I’ll try and explain them below, in no particular order.

1.       Give yourself the freedom to fail

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about them in any particular order, but this is indubitably the most important one. And so I am listing it first. If you remember nothing of this post, do remember this. Because failure is inevitable. It happens to everyone, no matter how safe you play it. You will fail. A person who has never failed is a person who has never aimed for anything but the most low-hanging fruits, and even that is not a fool-proof strategy.

So to fail or not to fail is not within our control. Failure, like the common cold, is something that happens to almost everybody at one point or another. The only thing we can control, then, is how we deal with failure.

In school, my perfectionism made me deal with failure by mentally punishing myself. By making me start the project over again or by avoiding it altogether. And that is what led to my chronic procrastination. The fact that I could not forgive myself for failing, and tried to subconsciously escape the pain of it by simply not trying in the first place. After all, you can’t fail at something you never did.

I guess as I got older, I learned to be kinder to myself. I accepted the fact that I would fail; not once, but over and over again. And that that was alright, so long as I kept trying. I learned to be proud of every rejection letter I received for my novel. Because hell, they were physical (or at least electronic) proof of the fact that I tried. And that brings me to my next point…

2.       Do your worst work

I read this on an online forum, though I have now forgotten what the forum was for. It’s true when you think about it, though, isn’t it? The worst book that you could possibly write is still better than the perfect book that never gets written. Doing your worst work is better than doing nothing in the hope of eventual perfection, which is what I basically did for the majority of my academic career. In the pursuit of that elusive master plan, I ended up spending a whole bunch of time doing absolutely nothing. Because not only could I not study, I couldn’t do anything else with that time either, as all the while I was feeling guilty for not studying. So I just spent hour after hour mired in guilt, hopelessness and an endless series of llama videos (which weren’t so bad).

Additionally, when you give yourself the mental permission to do your worst work, guess what happens? The pressure lifts. The stress vanishes. It becomes easier to get into the flow of whatever it is that you are doing. And the end result is rarely as bad as you thought it would be. And if it is? Well, it’s still infinitely better than nothing. Giving myself permission to do my worst work was probably the single best thing I did for my productivity in my entire life.

3.     Go one step at a time

Another thing that always triggered my procrastination, as I now realise, was envisioning the entirety of a large project. Completing an entire syllabus, writing a whole book, acing the finals. You get the picture. These huge goals seemed like mountains that were impossible to climb; a dark tunnel to which there was no end in sight. What was needed was a reframing of the problem, which I didn’t do because I wasn’t consciously aware of the problem at the time. The point is, writing a whole book only seems hard if you think of it as being a whole book. What if you thought of it as a whole lot of 500-word scenes?

You didn’t have to write all the scenes. You just had to write one. And then, when you were done with that, you just had to write one more. Anyone with a keyboard can type out 500 words. And remember, they don’t have to be 500 perfect words. They can be 500 of the worst words you have ever written, and that would be a victory too. Because you have given yourself the permission to do your worst work.

And you can miss writing your 500 words one day, and that would be perfectly fine. It doesn’t mean that you have to start over or give up on the project. You can write it the next day. Or the night after that. Because remember, you have given yourself the freedom to fail, and to keep going even after you have failed. So really, all that you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. Type the word after the last one. Read the page after the last one. And simply doing that makes you a winner.

4.       Take tiny bites

This point is, in a way, an extension of the last one. That is to say that even when I was taking one step at a time, setting myself big interim goals still tripped me up and triggered my procrastination. If I promised myself that I would write one whole scene in an evening, or read an entire chapter, then I felt a need to keep that promise. Now these goals weren’t too hard, and most of the time I would have no trouble completing them. But we’re all human, and sometimes, life happens. You get caught up on YouTube or find yourself incapable of hanging up on a distraught friend with too much alcohol in her system. And then you fail to reach that seemingly reasonable goal and boom! There goes the perfectionism fuelled procrastination monster again.

The way I got around this was to set goals that were so ridiculously easy, they would be impossible to miss. Read one page. Write a hundred words. So on and so forth. And when I was done with that goal, if I still had time, I would set myself another ridiculously easy goal. Read the next page. Write another hundred words. So even if one day I found myself with just 15 minutes of free time before bedtime, I still had enough time to achieve my goals and feel like I had taken one step forward, no matter how tiny. Taking really tiny bites, setting up laughably easy goals, are how you make a dent on an impossibly large problem.

5.       The next day is the first day of the rest of your life

I heard this one on a Ted Talk video. See? Those hours of browsing aimlessly through YouTube weren’t a complete waste after all! Well, I took the advice to its logical conclusion. The next minute is the first minute of the rest of your life.

One of my main problems with procrastination was that if I did one thing wrong, if I missed a single goal, that mistake or failure cast a long shadow over the rest of the project. So I would feel like since I have gotten this particular thing wrong, I will inevitably get the rest of it wrong too. This thought process put me under undue stress and again, made me want to avoid the whole thing all together. If I messed up once, I messed up the whole thing. I would feel like I’ll have to start the whole thing over again or just put the project on hiatus and try again the next day, or the next week. I simply could not grasp the concept of cutting your losses and moving on.

But what if every new minute was an opportunity for a new beginning? I didn’t have to put off rectifying my mistake for a whole new day. I had a whole new minute waiting for me at the end of sixty seconds. Everything that happened before the next minute is irrelevant, the problems of another time. The next minute is literally the first one to the rest of your life. Even if you have made an absolute mess of your life up until the last minute, that baggage does not have to carry over to the next minute. With every minute that passes, you can choose to start a whole new narrative for the rest of your life. The failures and successes of the past are irrelevant.

It is only the future that matters. To think of the next moment as the first one of the rest of your life is the best way I have found to cut my losses and shed the baggage of past mistakes, both recent and old. I mean sure, I made some mistakes in the past. But I don’t have to repeat them in this new phase of my life. If you train yourself to think like this, every moment can be a new beginning, a whole new era. And the perfectionism monster can’t tell you you’re a loser for past mistakes and failures.

Bonus:

This is not directly related to the procrastination problem, but it is another pearl of pithy wisdom that I heartily believe in, and that has had a transformative effect on how I view the world and live my life.

-          Don’t think for more than five minutes about something that won’t matter after five years.

Practice Practice Practice

Here’s the thing, though. All of these are easier said than done. Simply reading about the solution to a problem won’t help you get rid of it. That’s just the first step, though an important one. You have to train your mind to believe in all of these points, to implement them and to live by them even when it seems impossibly hard. And you won’t succeed the first time. The procrastination monster doesn’t give up that easy, and perfectionism sticketh closer than a brother.

But here’s the thing. That’s ok. Because you have the universe’s permission to fail, and even the worst attempt at recovery is better than none. You can simply implement one of these remedies at a time; you don’t have to do them all at once. And you can break them up into smaller chunks if that helps you process the entire thing better. And if you ever slip up and go back to your old, procrastinating ways? Well, you can wipe the slate clean and start over again the very next minute. Because, after all, what better way to kick off the first minute of the rest of your life?

Want my advice? Practice practice practice. If you do it enough times, it will become second nature. Believe me, it really does get easier with time. And practice.

P.S. This blog post, in all probability, is not perfect. But if it turns out to be even marginally useful to even a single person that reads it, then in my opinion it’s a great, roaring success.

See? That’s the power of setting teeny goals. You improve your chances of reaching them!

The Poetry Post #3

Pretend

Pretend you’re not here, pretend it’s not me,
Pretend the knife in your back doesn’t bear my fingerprints;
Pretend the red in my hands doesn’t flow from your broken heart,
Pretend we can go back to those forgotten days, that innocent past.

Pretend we’re back to the night you smiled at me,
With every yearning breath I relive that memory;
Your last smile, our last kiss,
Just this once, pretend you can forgive.

I may not apologise,
On that fateful night, I forfeit the right;
It’s a crime I am destined to repeat,
No rest for the wicked, no salvation for my misdeeds.

Pretend I had changed my mind,
Pretend I had returned your smile;
Pretend the kiss was real, didn’t end with a knife through your heart,
Pretend you can sleep tonight, safe in my arms.



Dollhouse

Dazzling lights in rainbow hues,
Music soft, steps right on cue.
Bodies swaying – gentle brushes, halting touches;
A lingering glance, movements in a trance...

Melodies sweet, soft lights enhance,
Painted lips and powdered charm.

Sparkling fabrics adorn anorexic frames,
Vibrant smiles and anonyms;
Alluring words and curtsies disguise,

Shifting glances, lifeless eyes.

Crimson fountains flowing full;
Into blissful oblivion, all senses pull.

Painted dolls in rooms of glass,
Keyed to smile, simper, laugh;
Kaleidoscope beams the shadows chase–
Bodies move in euphoric haze.

But when with dawn, darkness descends,
Nocturnal angels, into the shadows fade.

The Quake: A Short Story

Preeti sighed as the ground lurched violently under her feet once again. The man was a veritable nuisance.

“Oh no not those,” she repeated with slight irritation in her voice. “The white ones. They’re crunchier. I told you didn’t I?”

“Are you suicidal?” the man growled, frustrated. “This building will collapse any second now and you’ll die, taking me with you!” he spat.

Preeti sighed again. “You do realise that we are surrounded by multi-storied apartments on both sides of the road, right?” she asked with forced patience. “It’s not like getting out of this building is gonna save your ass any if things decide to start toppling over. What’s indoors or out to a corpse? I’d as soon die in a hotel lobby eating white chocolate as running about aimlessly on overcrowded streets.”

For a moment, the hapless shopkeeper stared at Preeti, open-mouthed, as if she were insane; and if Preeti was entirely honest with herself, she wasn’t all that sure that she wasn’t. Then, with a heavenward gesture of surrender, the stocky, balding man threw a fistful of beautifully wrapped confectionaries in her direction before jumping haphazardly over the counter and making a beeline for the main gates as fast as his rather stubby legs would carry him.

“Stay close to the pillars,” Preeti advised over her shoulder, already sucking on one of the mouth-watering delicacies, as she jumped lightly over the counter that the shopkeeper had just deserted, throwing herself into his cushy chair, surrounded by candy. “And try not to die in the stampede,” she added as an afterthought as another hoard of disoriented and scrambling bodies fought to get through the now congested gates. Honestly, they kept coming, like a swarm of really annoying locusts. She sighed, and bit delicately into the core of a ferrero rocher, all thoughts of annoying tourists fleeing her mind as the delectable flavours of molten chocolate flooded her senses. “Mmm...” she moaned almost obscenely, although thankfully the sound was drowned out by the sounds of cutlery crashing to the floor as another violent tremor shook the earth. Preeti barely just managed to keep her own chair steady.

“The Hell!” Preeti cursed as surprise caused her to lose her grip on the other half of the confectionary, which dropped to the floor and rolled into an obscure corner. “Damn it!” she grit out, reaching for another one and unwrapping it carefully. Oh well, she mused philosophically, as more people ran about in the lawn, screaming hysterically. She was in a candy-shop, after all. It wasn’t as though she were ever going to run out of candy.

“You shouldn’t be sitting here all alone, you know,” a voice informed her conversationally from somewhere near the staircase leading up to the rooms. Preeti did not bother turning around. “It seems like a strong one. You could get hurt.”

“Yes, because running around like intoxicated puppies is doing them a fat lot of good,” Preeti retorted testily, jerking her chin towards the guests visible right outside the glass window, most of whom were still flailing about rather haphazardly. When the voice said nothing, she sighed. She’d been having a long day, sure; some idiot kid had puked on the pristine hotel sheets. And the ground trying to tear itself apart and driving the silly people nuts wasn’t helping any. But none of that was his fault, and there was no point in taking it out on the poor guy.

“Whaddya want, Jijo?” she asked finally, swallowing the residual chocolate in her mouth with a soft murmur of satisfaction.

“The walls are gonna cave in soon, you know,” her brother said with an exasperated shake of his head, hands tucked firmly into the pockets of his pleated uniform trousers, like they always used to be. “So if you’re not gonna make yourself useful, you might as well clamber under the counter and stay put, until this thing blows over.” Even as he said it, long, thin cracks appeared across the ceiling as the ground gave another heaving jerk, almost throwing Preeti off her precarious perch on the chair.

“I’m not a rat,” she spat irritably. “Rats hide under furniture.”

Her brother raised a brow, his expression neutral even as his eyes shone with barely concealed amusement.

“Then go up there,” he said, gesturing up the stairs with a dismissive flick of his fingers before stepping aside lightly to avoid a falling chunk of concrete. “Somebody’s stuck on the third floor. A kid, I think. You saw him this morning. He was sick. He still is, by the looks of it.”

“The pukey kid? Seriously?” Preeti sighed miserably, stuffing another toffee into her mouth before looking upwards dejectedly. “Of all the awesomely heroic things I could be doing right now, you want me to get drenched in puke?” she grumbled around a mouthful of melting white chocolate, even as she got to her feet, stuffing fistfuls of sweets into her pockets.

Jijo chuckled softly, the sound almost lost in the din of crashing concrete coming from somewhere upstairs. “Well, somebody’s gotta save their asses, haven’t they?” he grinned, leaning casually against the banister.

“You tried,” Preeti muttered, an irrational bout of irritation surging up her veins, even as she tried desperately to keep her eyes fixed on the chocolate she was unwrapping, to not look up at the mangled and bloodied form of her handsome brother. “Fat lot of good it did you.”

“Ah but that’s that point,” Jijo replied, voice warm and full of his usual mischief. When she finally looked up, his form was faded, almost translucent, but still distinctly him, the annoying older brother she’s known all her life. It hadn’t turned into the broken, mangled, bloodied thing that was usually all that was left at the end of these visions. “I miss you, little sis,” he smiled, before vanishing like a wisp of smoke in foggy mountain air.

Preeti sighed, popping one last candy bar into her mouth even as she ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Oh well, there were worse ways to go than with a tummy full of chocolate, she supposed.

The Poetry Post #2

The Bright Young Things

Livewire, raging fire,
Sparks flying everywhere;
Come burn in the flames of caustic desire,
Tell a truth, risk a dare.

We’re the Princes of the universe,
Born to rule, born to pave the way;
For the millions that come after,
In our hands shall the sceptre sway.

We’re the future of the race,
Burning brighter than rocket flame;
Racing to the top, masters of the game,
The pinnacle of the food-chain.

We play the music of purgatory,
Dance to the tunes of hellfire;
Fighting tooth and nail to win an unwinnable game,
Come burn to the music of common ire.

We’re the Princes of the universe,
Born to rule, born to save the day;
Drowning in kaleidoscope visions of love and hate,
Our eyes all futures await.

We’re the predators and the prey,
The darkness before first light;
We haunt the dreams of Kings and slaves
Of dark and luminous minds.

We’re the Princes of the universe,
Born to die in glorious wars;
Born of the flicker of a candle that
Obscured the solar mark.



The Beauty of Strange Lives

Strange passions, emotion
Felt through unfeeling eyes,
A vision in dereliction, devastation
A panorama of virtue and vice.
In the throes of catastrophe shines
The beauty of strange lives.

Blood and tears, grasping at straws,
Bullets, dynamites, the fireworks;
Fire-forged friends, cheap drinks, a broken cross–
Blazing trails in their wake leave the Young Turks.
Of darkest nights are born the brightest stars,
Famines birth messiahs; heroes, wars.

Strange lives in strange lands,
Live to die, and in death, reverberate–
In the neon lights of foreign screens
Images excite, enhance, desecrate.
The world watches, and cries and contemplates,
As blood mixes with stale water, and the headlines scream: violence escalates.

The beauty of strange lives,
That in burning, do not singe;
But warm at a distance; strange resistance,
To foreign aid, condescension, advice.
Statues and memorials raised, commemorate,
Strange names that, in passing, thrive.

The Last Letter: A Short Story

Dearest Mother and Father,

Blood ran down the corner of her lips, down the deep gash at the side of her abdomen where his boot had connected with her flesh. She was gasping for breath, her vision swam. She would have cried, would have screamed, but for the fact that doing so sent a splintering pain through her bruised ribs.

I love you, and I always will.

They had been married exactly three years ago, to the day. Lakshmi still remembered the first time she had seen him, shyly looking up at her prospective groom from under her lashes in the drawing room of her parents’ rather rundown flat in Bankura. He had been exquisitely dressed in a cream-coloured sherwani with silver buttons. If asked, she would have sworn right then that she was head over heels in love with Jaivardhan.

Of course, no one asked.

No matter where I am, however far away.

Her father owned a tiny watch-repair shop that hadn’t turned much of a profit for a few years now. She had two younger sisters, but no brother; nobody to supplement the family’s meagre income. Her parents hadn’t been able to educate her beyond high school. While reasonably good-looking, Lakshmi was no remarkable beauty, and she knew it. That a young man from a family as prosperous as Jaivardhan’s would be willing to marry her was almost a miracle. His family had even offered to invest in her father’s shop. There had never been any question of turning down the offer.

I’m hurting all over, nothing feels good anymore.

The honeymoon had been spectacular. Lakshmi had never seen anything half so beautiful or splendid as the view of the vast sea from their room in the resort. The bed was as soft as the clouds, the sheets warm and luxurious. When he’d touched her for the first time, it was as if a world of new possibilities had opened up before her eyes, as if her world had been forever and irrevocably changed.

If only she’d known then, how right she was.

It’s as if my whole world has been swallowed up by a darkness I can’t escape.

The final night of their stay at the resort in Puri, she had seen Jaivardhan drink for the first time.  She came from a conservative home, and had never actually seen liquor before outside of television ads. She did not like to see her handsome, wonderful husband swirling the dark liquid in his hand, his eyes red-rimmed and lips parted in careless laughter, at something one of the ladies from the party lodging with them had said. But she was just a small-town girl, she told herself. What did she know? Perhaps this was what all city people did.

I want to end this, once and for all.

That night he had been rough with her, for the first time since their wedding. Had held her down forcefully, wouldn’t let up even when she had told him, gasping, that she couldn’t breathe under his greater weight. She had had to wear a full-sleeved blouse on the journey back home, for the bruises still showed on her wrists, dark and angry.

Want to be happy again, free of this all-encompassing darkness.

He had apologised profusely, had bought her beautiful silver bangles for their one-month anniversary. He had dressed up in a striking lilac shirt with gold cufflinks, had taken her hand and gently slipped the pretty bangles up her wrists.  They had had dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants Lakshmi had ever laid eyes on. Those were some of the happiest memories of her life. By the end of the evening, they had run across Jaivardhan’s old school friend and his wife at the restaurant. His friend invited them both for a drink. Jaivardhan drank, just a little bit.

It is not your fault Mummy; or yours Dad. Please believe me.

That was the first night he had drawn blood. She had spent the entire ride back home begging him not to drink anymore. He had said nothing, had barely managed to keep control of the vehicle. It was a miracle they hadn’t been stopped by the traffic police. When finally they had reached home, he had waited for her to enter the flat, had stepped in after her, and locked the door. Then he had taken off his belt...

You have raised me to the best of your ability; have given me all the love in the world.

He always apologised, bought her pretty gifts afterwards. But she was running out of full sleeved blouses. The bruises and gashes hardly had time to heal anymore, before new ones appeared to take their place. She had cried herself hoarse, but there was no one to listen. If she told her parents, the funds for the shop would stop. They would be ruined; her sisters’ education would have to be stopped. And she could not, would not abandon them to a fate such as her own. She could not live with herself if they ever lay bleeding on the floor because of her selfishness.

And for that I will be forever grateful.

She finally dragged herself off the floor. Gasping for breath, tears blurring her vision, she made her way slowly towards the writing table, blood dripping in her wake. Wiping her blood and tearstained fingers on her housecoat, she pulled out a clean sheet of paper from the pile on the desk. Taking a deep breath to calm the incessant shaking of her hands, she finally touched pen to paper.

No one is responsible for my death.

Folding the letter carefully into an envelope and sealing it, Lakshmi slowly got off the table. Reaching into an alcove under the little shrine beside the huge, glittering bar in the drawing room, she recovered a small, sharp knife she had bought at one of Bankura’s fairs before her marriage, as a curiosity. She ran her fingers gently along its sharp edge, drawing a small pinprick of blood.

With lots of love,

She walked slowly, quietly into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. Her husband slept peacefully, spread-eagled on the huge bed, his head lolling off the pillow. Blissfully unaware of his wife’s agony.

Jaivardhan.

She raised the knife to the soft flesh of his exposed wrist.

The Poetry Post #1

The Magazine Girl

There’s this girl in the magazine,
Smiling up through the glossy sheen
Of florid pages in the illustrious publication,
Barely into adulthood, touching the heights of acclamation.

Perfect hair, each strand in place,
Vibrant eyes, through prismatic lenses gaze
Out into a world of lights and stars,
Of dazzling flashes and airbrushed scars.

Designer labels adorn the hourglass frame,
Stiletto heels tread with careless grace,
All eyes transfix – with envy or desire,
In all hearts ignites an unquenchable fire.

Pretty as a picture, devilish perfection;
Inspiring love and hatred, with equal elation...
But in hesitant dreams of a different world,
She’d trade for a private love, all public adoration.


The Best Life

Every morning I wake up
To see colours all around me;
The sight of smiles on beloved faces,
And the scents of baked goods, surround me.

I don’t know how
Life gets better than this;
In another life I used to dream
Of this safe and sound feeling.

Feet torn with broken glass,
The stench of gunpowder all around me;
Pining for a little patch of grass,
The taste of despair surrounds me.

I don’t know how
Life gets better than this;
In another life I used to dream
Of this safe and sound feeling.

As I walk down the street,
Happy faces greet me;
The children race down to school,
And the postman rushes to meet me.

I don’t know how
Life gets better than this;
In another life I used to dream
Of this safe and sound feeling.

A child was crying for its mother,
Who lay bleeding on the floor;
I watched a while till a bullet flew past,
And the little one cried no more.

I don’t know how
Life gets better than this;
In another life I used to dream
Of this safe and sound feeling.

At night when darkness falls,
After supper with the folks;
I crawl into the covers and chase the nightmares away,
With my darling’s gentle strokes.

I don’t know how
Life gets better than this;
In another life I used to dream
Of this safe and sound feeling.

Smiles: A Short Story

She was surrounded the moment she stepped into the class.

“Hey! Good to see you again!”

“Where’d you been?”

“Missed you, yaar!”

“We had like SO MUCH fun at the party!”

Piya smiled brightly at her classmates, answering questions and allaying concern by turns, tilting her head to one side in a display of mild, friendly curiosity.

Someone had died. No, no one very close. Some great uncle she had barely known. There had been a funeral. Funerals had to be attended, of course. It was only proper, especially when someone in the family passed away. Not died. People didn’t die; especially not when they were part of the family. That would be a horribly rude thing to do. They merely passed away.

Piya put down her school bag on the desk beside Swati, her usual partner, who launched immediately into a detailed account of her last date with her newly acquired boyfriend, a senior and a member of the school band. Piya smiled excitedly at all the exciting parts, clasped her hands to her bosom and giggled shyly at the romantic bits, blushed where blushing was expected and sympathised where sympathy was required.

By lunch time her jaws were aching. Not that this caused her smile to falter, of course. Nor could you have detected any sign of distress on her face as she threw her head back to laugh heartily at a rather crassly sexual joke one of the more popular boys had cracked, to the shocked laughter of the entire class.

Piya smiled a lot. At everything. Everyone. Her smiles didn’t discriminate. She had learned from experience that it was the best response to almost anything. No one could fault you for a smile. Plus, you didn’t need to worry about misunderstandings. Words could be misinterpreted, remembered, dissected, then reproduced to mean something entirely different. Not so with smiles. A smile could mean anything you wanted it to mean, and no one could really blame you for smiling wrong, could they?

There were different kinds of smiles, of course. The warm, open one for greeting friends; the slightly shier but equally friendly one for acquaintances and newcomers. The small, sympathetic one when comforting someone after a breakup, or when their parents had fought like Nisha’s frequently did. The excited, happy one for when close friends hooked up and the expectant, encouraging one for inviting confidences of such super-secret hook-ups, news of which inevitably spread faster than wildfire anyway.

But people liked to feel special, to feel like their lives and stories generated interest, happiness, anticipation and apprehension. They only listened to other people’s so they could tell their own, after all. Piya knew this, and she had no problem catering to that desire. It wasn’t even all that tedious. She liked stories, and some of her classmates were even really good at telling theirs’ – spicing them up with all kinds of dramatic twists and turns, fairytale romances and heart-rending angst, mystery and adventure all wrapped up in a single afternoon’s trip to the movies with a certain cute boy they had met on Facebook. Nodding and smiling appropriately at all the right places was a small price to pay for such engaging entertainment.

As you have probably noticed by now, Piya smiled a lot. Near constantly, though with some fine distinctions between one smile and the other, distinguishable to a keen observer. That didn’t matter, however, as she was surrounded by teenagers; who, by virtue of being teenagers, didn’t much care to spend their time observing and interpreting other people’s expressions. Unless there had been letters, of course! If there had been letters, and blushes and stammered confessions, then you may well be observed through lowered lashes and secret glances in between classes or during recess; but in that scenario the observation was focused on something else entirely. And that was a complication of a different kind.

She hadn’t always smiled so much. In the beginning, she rarely had. I mean, why would you smile anyway? If something was funny you’d laugh, and not many things were that funny anyway. A funny memory or a snatch of a conversation accidentally overheard might make you smirk, or in extreme cases, maybe even giggle. The point of smiling always eluded her, though. The only times she had genuinely wanted to smile was when Sis climbed toddling onto her lap. Sis was warm and soft and fuzzy and it made Piya happy to see her, to hold her and rock her. It wasn’t funny like a joke, or exciting like an adventure story. Just happy. Just enough to make her want to smile.

But Piya only had one Sis, and she only toddled so much. And she soon realised it wasn’t enough to smile only at those times, only when she wanted to. If she didn’t smile at guests, Mother would scold her for being rude. If she didn’t smile at school, Ma’am would get worried and call Mother and then Mother would scold her for being rude again. And then the other kids would call her a freak and a grumpy cat and random strangers would look sympathetically at her anxious parents and recommend doctors and give her sweets to make her smile. Well, the sweets weren’t so bad, truth be told, but Piya eventually decided that even toffee wasn’t worth the hassle that not-smiling seemed to cause for everyone involved.

After all, smiling wasn’t about being happy. Not really. People said it was, but they didn’t really mean it. Smiles were equipments. Like...like forks and knives! Only you didn’t use them to eat with. You used them for people, to handle them like you handled Maggi with a fork, wrapping it round and round the fork so you could pop it into your mouth. Not that you’d want to pop people into your mouth, of course. But that was a different kind of handling, though quite as simple when you knew how. If you knew how to use your smiles like you used your fork, people weren’t hard at all.

Smiles were for making silent people talk, nervous people comfortable, sad people less sad than they had been before the smile. They were for making Nisha stop crying when her parents fought, for making Swati tell her stories about her new boyfriend and for making the new girl stop fidgeting in the last bench. They were for hanging out with friends and talking to boys and charming the teacher into granting them half a free period. Like a spoonful of food, they required a very careful balance, of course. But once you’d managed it, you could do pretty much anything you wanted with it.

Piya smiled expectantly as she strolled out of the school towards the bus stop, listening to Rashmi tell her story about the seniors she had caught snogging in the attic that afternoon (what she had been doing in the attic during school hours was, of course, anyone’s guess). It was an interesting story, if slightly repetitive around the snogging part, and she felt herself relax in the cool, crispy air of late January. Her smile dimmed slightly as her muscles relaxed, but that was okay. Rashmi was too engrossed in her story to notice anyway. And, after all, it was an interesting story.