"What is a whole life? If you die when you're still a child, is your life whole or half or zero?"
I sit in my comfortable, abundant heaven devouring the contents of the book and bowls realizing the glaring extremities of the two. The worlds are so so small of the people who live so largely. And yet the lack of the large realization of the large lives we live, lounging in largeness, seems largely enlarging.
This one's a fairly simple and quick read, which is 1.5 weeks for a slumpy reader like me. It reminds me of the outside and the lives we made before the pandemic hit us. Of metro stations, sweet potato with chat masala, gloomy days, my imagination of slums because I have never been to one, parachute coconut oil, my house help, Delhi riots of December 2019, an old thought on Delhi and how open windows are for fresh noises and not fresh air, crunched noses when passing a 'nala' and my dooming privilege.
This one's a fairly simple and quick read, which is 1.5 weeks for a slumpy reader like me. It reminds me of the outside and the lives we made before the pandemic hit us. Of metro stations, sweet potato with chat masala, gloomy days, my imagination of slums because I have never been to one, parachute coconut oil, my house help, Delhi riots of December 2019, an old thought on Delhi and how open windows are for fresh noises and not fresh air, crunched noses when passing a 'nala' and my dooming privilege.
All-in-all this book is an ingenious insight into the everyday vulnerabilities of the people who are compelled to spend their lives like Jai and the people of his basti. The utter veracity of the book and my disbelief for it despite knowing otherwise; maybe that's why I position my bum snugly on the bed and lie down as I read the book with furrows only so deep. Well at least, only half of me remains a mystery. The other half is but a weakling.
'Where all their future's painted with a fog'- a line from a poem I was reminded of- Elementary School Classroom in a Slum by Stephen Spender. The lines from this 12th class poem fit as snugly as my bum on the indented spot on 'my bed' where I sit to fabricate a fable or two.
For me, Imagine Dragons sing 'pain, you make me a disbeliever', because really it is possible for us to take the easy way out and just not believe in the harsh realities. It is just a story. I tell myself. It is just a story.
I wonder with narratives like these
if 'guilt-free' is a word made for ghosts and djinns,
because being a human itself,
on quite a few days, feels like a sin.
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