I find it harder to like myself on some days than on others. I don’t want to forgive my body its tiring flaws. Recently I lost chunks of my head hair. I have something doctors call Alopecia Areata. In regular-people, it means that my immune system turned against its own hair follicles. It happens because of stress. I am tired of my body immaturely reacting to our problems. I don’t think marriage would work if my partner gambled away my hair, without my consent. I am angry. I wiled most of my yesterday away in anger. In retrospect though, yesterday felt like December.
In December, I was in Goa: over-working, over-walking, but under-sleeping and under-eating. We were putting together an art-learning festival, spread across Goa. It was only 794 times more stressful than it sounds. I ran, sometimes literally, all around procuring, managing, assembling, dismantling if-assembled-wrongly material, art pieces and people. I made sure I played music when I drove or walked alone. I listened to Prateek Kuhad who I had discovered recently. I have a distinct memory of walking by the ruins of a house while the tender sun shone over it and “we are all looking for someone to be at ease with” played in ear. In the mess we had made out of time and place over a black cotton cloth, I took a moment out to stand and enjoy this concert for one. Till today, “it’s not the pain that’s on my mind” reminds me – not of the sore feet, the below minimum balance bank account, the skipped meals – but of the uninvited sunny day. Yesterday was like that.
If I listened to the song that yesterday was, I will hear kaka planting a kiss on my head in the morning when I was asleep. That fleeting moment of sleepy consciousness and not the injections on my scalp, the cracking of my i-can-not-afford-this-phone’s screen, along with mumma’s love – dished out in form of sliced carrots and sprouts – will be the first stanza of my song. I will run through two more about the time papa and I stopped our cars at a chance meeting on the street to discuss the menu for dinner, the times R and I giggle at bad shows at night. For the last line, I will save the feeling I feel when I hear babyR singing by herself a song about chocolate houses.
