KhepiAri

(This blog post is written for the Blogathon competition hosted by Women's Web in collaboration with the Maya App, copy the link-> http://www.womensweb.in/2016/10/periodpride-blogathon/ or click on the hashtag #PeriodPride ) In whispers and giggles it had entered our ears 'a girl had bled', a bleeding girl is lonely, but a herd of bleeding girls is celebration. A girls first blush is celebrated in Assam as Tuloni Biya, she is kept inside the house for three days, on the fourth evening she is decked up as bride and a great feast is organised, it’s a coming of  age ceremony, a celebration of blooming into a woman, a tradition both praised and frowned upon. Growing up in Assam had made me attend many Tuloni Biyas, though my own close friends failed to invite me in their own celebrations [traitors]. Being a Bengali I never got my own feast, Bongs are on the hushier side of washing the bloody undies in public. This ritual is celebrated by the whole community; i...

First time I saw a mannequin is a memory lost in the Ocean. My major encounter with one happened when I was around seven. I was visiting my paternal home during summer vacation, on one particular horrible summer day my family had decided to go shopping. That was where I met a doll that was my size and wearing a metallic brown skirt, I fell in love with that skirt at first sight. Poor doll was also wearing a bottle green sleeveless tee, the greedy me desired that too. Shopkeepers found me exact copy-paste of the brown skirt, but when it came to the tee, they didn’t have another in stock. They bought me white full sleeved white shirt with red flowers, a yellow collared shirt, a pink frilly blouse, but I wanted that bottle green tee. Meanwhile my sister, mom and dad had selected their clothes; I was still stuck on the green tee. My love for green has been dominant trait since childhood; those were first strikes of my green-insanity. I made the shopkeepers bent to my demand, ra...

A month or two back I stumbled upon a word called Hiraeth- homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past. I always believe there are perfect words, which have a complete meaning and tragic beauty. Hiraeth is one of those perfect words. Once you hear them, you fall in love with them. Hiraeth is a word you feel after reading a Kundera novel. It is a expression you pin when you walk the valleys of Kashmir. That world built on words has no existence in reality, that land you walked on was never yours to step on. It’s a spell you are bound to, but the spell has no source. Few days back I finally finished Anjum Hasan’s debut novel, Lunatic in my Head. Here are characters who will always remain outsider to their home because of their language, race and religion. The Shillong; Anjum Hasan presents is the land which could never be the characters'. They are in constant ...

To my imaginary reader buddies, let’s close our eyes and imagine our lives; it has its downs and ups, falls and rises, sadness and happiness, anger and love etcetera etcetera. It’s normal, ordinary and has a history. We were born and like the saying goes we don’t get to choose our name or family, hence we stick to them for life. Keep your eyes closed though. When my elder sister bought her egotistical six months old Persian Cat, the poor proud brat had no name. He had assumed “oye” and “Oi” to be his epithet. Finally when I named him Goldie, the happiness he had was shining on the tips of his whiskers. After that he has been supplied with multiple nicknames which somehow are always similar to mine, but he loves all his names. If tomorrow I were to stop calling him Goldie and call him Sunflower, he would be perplexed for few days, maybe weeks. My housemate and I, we have adopted a stray cat and named her Petush. For first few days she was far from responding to her n...

Two days back, I picked up a paperback with a boy’s photograph as its cover. Never am I the children fan, but the boy’s face especially his eyes were apt for the cover as the title of the book is blueeyedboy. Its story of a forty-two-year-old man who writes murder fiction on a site called badguysrock.com, and he is also a murderer. Here lies Joanne Harris’s masterful use of narratives, multiple plot twists and the singularity in the goal of blueeyedboy’s mind, to kill his mother, rather his Ma. The book is an oedipal tale, here are three boys who love their Ma, but hate her equally. None of the boys’ escape her omnipresent sixth sense, each boy branded a colour black, brown and blue for sorting out laundry, they all resonate to their respective colour. ‘Blue’ being the special one, with his eyes blue and the youngest, he is most colonized by his ma. Hence at forty-two, he still lives with her. Throughout the story, the themes of incest run parallel, blueeyed...

Every once in a while, Google Facts keeps retweeting, “If friendship lasts longer than seven years, then it will last a lifetime.” Huffington Post even published a scribble called The Seven Year Expatriation Date on Friendships  years ago. It’s a fascinating and scary thought, no I won’t honour the tweet with the term fact. Though its backed by herd of psychologist, to me it’s an idea which can be stretched and contracted according to each individual. Again I keep reading about phony lives we project on our virtual world. Some of us have thousand friends to list, apparently none to talk. We pretend to care on screen but don’t bother to even check in reality. We are connected but not close. And articles after articles I read how much people are worried that true essence of friendship is getting lost. Apparently friendship of Millennials are dying pre-mature death compared to friendships from Gen X! These are overused arguments that I am bored of reading and listenin...

Every time I hear the word roots, my mind doesn’t flash the image of brown, muddy tentacle filled organism, but drags me back to my history class eight years back. My class teacher had asked us about the Slavic nations, we all were clueless. She had practically called us a batch of dumb-set high strung on ignorance. She had called our lack of respect for national history, regional past and personal chronicles tragic, and prophesied that this tragic trait would leave us handicap. Then she added the example of an arrogant little newborn leaf which was so proud of its luscious green colour that it detached itself from the brown tree. It died the very next moment. To her we were all going to face the same fate. Among the fallen human leaves of my generation, I am a proud member too. Few days back I was told, I need to stop writing in English and start writing in my mother tongue. No good writing happens in one’s second tongue. In its own place and context, it’s a very sound a...