Home > Work > The Face At the Window
1 " Love, now that was dangerous. It plucks your heart out of your chest cavity and throws it into the skies where all you can do is watch it freefall towards the object of your love, and hope he or she would catch it. And very often your heart would land with a sordid, painful thud on the ground, or worse, a ditch, and lie there forlorn, neglected and pitiful until you found it, picked it up, glued the various parts back together and put it back into your chest where it would continue to beat on, stolidly, with only you knowing that there was a beat missing. A beat audible to no discerning ear, but your own, a slight sense of being out of tune with yourself, a heart that beat reluctantly, for the sake of keeping up appearances, in the forlorn hope that some day it would get back in rhythm, that some day it would have something to beat for. And then, over the years of missing a beat, you would grown irretrievably out of beat with yourself, and end up discordant. "
― Kiran Manral , The Face At the Window
2 " Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy. "
3 " There is a charm to letters and cards that emails and smses can’t ever replicate, you cannot inhale them, drawing the fragrance of the place they have been mailed from, the feel of paper in your hand bearing the weight of the words contained within. You cannot rub your fingers over the paper and visualise the sender, seated at a table, writing, perhaps with a smile on their lips or a frown splitting the brow. You can’t see the pressure of the pen on the reverse of the page and imagine the mood the person might have been in when he or she was writing it. Smiley face icons cannot hope to replace words thought out carefully in order to put a smile on the other person’s face, the pressure of the pen, the sharpness or the laxity of the handwriting telling stories about the frame of mind of the writer, the smudges on the sheets of paper telling their own stories, blotches where tears might have fallen, hastily scratched out words where another would have been more appropriate, stories that the writer of the letter might not have intended to communicate. I have letters wrapped up in a soft muslin cloth, letters that are unsigned, tied up with a ribbon which I had once used to hold my soft, brown hair in place, and which had been gently untied by the writer of those letters. Occasionally, I unwrap them and breathe them in, knowing that the molecules from the hand that wrote them might still be scattered on the surface of the paper, a hand that is long dead. "
4 " That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, ‘Mother, I’m cold.’ Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There was a sudden click, the red light of the heater lit up, the bed and blanket warmer began radiating life-giving heat again and I felt myself thaw out, emerge from the scary limbo which marks one’s descent into another dimension, and the shadow faded out from the rocking chair right in front of me into complete transparency and the icy presence in the bed faded away to nothingness. "
5 " If you leave assumptions lying around unchallenged and uncorrected, it isn’t long before they morph into facts. "
6 " The heart, it still beats stoically in my ribcage, but it knows its time is up. Strange how the repository of one’s existence is one’s heart, when all the heart does is pump the blood through the body. Not the soul that puts the life force into the body. The soul is intangible, it floats beyond oneself. It returns, pulled back by threads of loves, old and new, of the lives connected with one, of the belief that no, it isn’t time yet. The heart would beat on until the moment it decided it had done quite enough beating for a lifetime. A miracle organ, the heart, constantly beating through sickness, through health, through wakefulness, through sleep, through sorrow so terrible you think it would stop then and there, and through joy so intense you wish it would stop right then to freeze that moment forever. It beats on, regardless. And when it finally does stop, so does the body. Switched off, like a machine, the engine that powered it shuddering to a halt. The life force swirling away into the ethers, wherever it was that life forces went after the body had perished. Right now I am alive. The heart is beating, the soul is still restless, the feeling that there is more to come niggles. What more though, I don’t know. "
7 " The most difficult thing to do after a life well lived is to sit down and type it all out. To start with, your fingers are old and gnarled. You can see the skin crinkled up like paper, the knobby knuckles, the veins standing up blue and aggressive and you wonder, when did your hands change, when did they stop being young and firm and definite, when did the hesitancy creep in, when did the trembling begin. Your mind sieves through memories as thick as molasses and as bitterly sweet. The words trip on your tongue but hesitate to make their way onto the page because you debate endlessly in your head about which of them you should put down in print, terrified of the permanency of the written word. Memories are the kind of elusiveness that shift, change form, and remodel themselves by the second. It is a challenge to wrestle with them, to get them to agree to be analysed, to be put down in words and encapsulated into sentences, moulded into paragraphs. As long as they are shifting, morphing into different things as the moment suits them, they aren’t bound by one person’s recollection of how things were, of how they happened. These are my memories. And this was my life. And so I try to write this. I am already half way through what I am trying to put down. I have no idea who would want to read the story of my life. But I write it out, more for myself, than for anyone else who would care to read. "
8 " Religion stays with you long after you have lost faith, buried somewhere in your subconscious, waiting to rise and take over your need to turn over your cares to a higher power who could bring forward resolution. "
9 " There was an evil wind howling through the undulating hills that night, rattling the loose panes in the windows of the cottage, keeping me up all night. Unbidden, the Lord’s prayer came to my lips, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… I said it moving my lips silently, as I had all those years ago, on my cold hard bed in the convent back in Calcutta. Praying didn’t come easily to me anymore, I had to hack out the words from deep within myself, but it brought me solace. It warmed a part of the soul that I long thought had shrivelled up and died. I grew up with prayer, it was difficult not to when one was growing up in a convent, surrounded by threats of hell and brimstone and the overwhelming guilt that one was inherently evil being drilled into our brains by the nuns. They might have been well meaning in order to keep a bunch of unruly children in line, but ended up scarring us with a concept of a vindictive God one could never really love. "
