authoring dreams.

My life so far has been friendless. Na, don't get me wrong. I have friends, but to think if anyone who has been patient enough to deal with my silence, is a cruel memory.
Often, I have asked myself why I could not find myself one soul who would stay with me, through the days when I am alone and not occupied with work or general miseries of life, and enjoy the differences between us as much as we bring ourselves to love the similarities.
I have blamed many essentially impulsive idiosyncracies in my being. I have felt guilty about carrying a fast-changing mood on my nostrils. I have regretted being happy one moment, rebellious the next. I have even tried to change/moderate/adapt myself according to situations that befall me. Nothing worked.
I realised I am going to stay and survive - just like this. With a beautifully calm house to my comfort and shelves carrying books that I hope to finish some day. There is a fundamental need in me, and I have often felt it more convincingly than before: the need to read and write.
In a hometown of blatant patriarchy and irreverent politics, I missed good public liabraries. Most I went to were overcrowded with students from university hostels, hoping to utilise the newspaper shelves since they were not buying any, or they had to deal with libraries with one of the staunchly tightfisted norms for lending books. My sole hope - the British Council library - was shut down too in my third year as a member as it didn't register enough readers.
Those were the days of abject hopelessness, in an age when hopes are built.
I had a motorbike, with a metallic red frame and a roaring start. I would travel kilometres on it, bookstore-hopping in search of a better book, a better bargain. I spent all my pocket money on books, and when I needed more, I had to convince my mother that I had indeed read the previous one. The fast-piling books on my shelf would often prompt father into a quick check into my collection. Pa and I had a secret deal : If he would pass on his magazines first to me and not to my younger siblings, he too would get to read my Hardy and Lawrence.
During the years between my school and college, I read countless number of books - varying according to my reach and limited knowledge. The number of poetry diaries also grew - from one (First one was started when I was eight) to three. In my four years of journalism, I am yet to fill up my fourth, but this is not what I want to talk about today.
I want to ask myself if I should secretly celebrate or, on a bad day, perhaps lament the death of my dream of sustaining friends or should I keep persisting? Which is a better deal: Relish my solitude and celebrate my freedom to be free of meeting appointments, keeping dinners, making promises, or keep going out of my way to please those I value but get no return value, or mourn my happy solitude?
If I go back to discussing what I like best, I would happily say: a room to myself with things I like, like books, a good movie on my DVD, a blank diary and a nice flowing pen. I am all set for happiness. I began with small paragraphs in school. It continued, like a puppy romance, intense but short. Then, the paragraphs grew and became stories - from my mother's village with the castle and elephant in the fields and dacoits on my nana's roof!
My favourite professor did the critique; I was amply encouraged. There was a sense of relief, and not jubilation if I am to be honest. I considered myself such a faff till that time - vain daughter of a poet-mother who would find herself scandalised at my love poems. For me, those were expressions of what I saw in the world - love, betrayal, news reports on dowry killings, the Iraq war, and on a sensitive note, letters to God on Dabwali fire and a note on Pa, and Ma.
Most of the bulk was love poetry. My experiments with its facets disturbed my mother, who kept postponing a critique until I gave up.
The three diaries were later reviewed by my younger sister when she grew up and started writing herself. Once, overwhelmed by a poem, she came teary-eyed: ``Please publish these.''
I could never find a publisher. Well, I haven't tried for one so far.
I do not know if I would ever find one if I get down to trying. But do I really care if they don't get published? May be, I do. But the thought that I am slowly preparing some sort of a literature pool, however base that might be, for my children (if at all I ever have one!) to read gives me unfathomable joy. When I discovered and eventually read letters written by my mother to my father when they lived away from each other, I broke down. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours. I marvelled how such degree of dedication from a woman to a man was possible.
Ma had written those letters at a time when Pa was still struggling to make it to the Judiciary while Ma was already teaching at a Science College in Uttar Pradesh. They lived three-day-long train journeys apart; Pa travelled when Ma sent him money. One of her letters had then told Pa: ``I dream of a beautiful life with you with our children and your love. I dream of a life when I would seek from you every small thing I need, right from a saree to a star. And, when my dreams come true, I would quit all my dreams to live your dreams, for our happiness.''
She did. She came to live with my father when he joined as judge in the district courts and gave up writing and singing with minimal regrets.
I took it upon me to compensate for that - in a way a child revives all dead dreams.
I write with the hope that she would read them someday.
I also write for hope. For also telling myself what I am - a loner with longings for quieter company in this cacophonous, nagging world that makes me so conscious about what i do purely out of my inborn reclusive tendencies -- float alone.