A Bowl of Elusive

This is the second part of the “Eric & Angela” series. Click here for Part 1 . A million thoughts ran through his head when Eric drove six odd kilometers to meet Angela. She had mentioned that the café they were meeting at was pretty close to where she lived, she preferred to walk. That is why she had chosen it for their first meeting. He had seen her pictures and he had heard her voice and they had talked to their heart's content but the two had not met yet. This was the fateful day, Eric thought to himself. The voice in his head often became a pompous news anchor and started narrating his own life to him when Eric got nervous.  “Eric being the neurotic son-of-a-bitch that he is, doesn’t want to be late for the first date. As Angela has reminded him thrice now, it isn’t a date. However, he is excited and has butterflies in his stomach, more than he had ever had before. In his excitement, Eric is trying to imagine what Angela looks like when he should be concentrating on the ro

Have you ever wondered what is the point to all this? I am talking about life. Why do we live? What do we live for? Someone who had met me a decade ago would be surprised at my asking these questions. I believed in indulgent excesses and living for the decadent pleasures of life. By that, I mean food mostly. I had a small family, including my grandparents and uncle and I never gave death a thought. Then in the last decade, I lost all of them. I made some serious mistakes in life, hurt people in the process and here I am, at thirty years old, alone, regretful and as per the latest reports, diabetic. So, I am asking myself, what am I living for? All these years, I had something to look forward to, but now it is all gone. I have these feelings that I feel like sharing with people, but when I call them, words fail me. You see I am unable to express the extent of the loneliness I feel or the all-consuming pointlessness of life in general. Lately, I have been doing a little bit of cost-benef

I remember all of us sitting in the dining hall at our place in Sambalpur. I wasn’t more than five years old at the time. My grandfather was seated in his usual wooden recliner, with my grandmother by his side in a matching chair, while my father sat at the dining table peeling mangoes for everyone to eat. I was on the floor fiddling with some toy of some kind while my father was entertaining his parents with anecdotes from his time in the armed forces. After a while, the conversation shifted to me and how I was such a big responsibility, especially since my father was raising me alone. My father looked at me with pride and announced that I’d become “a doctor or an engineer” when I grow up.  My father’s plan was to be hands-on with my upbringing and to a large extent he was. But it was short-lived, as just five years later, he died of kidney failure and I came under my grandparents’ care. They were good people and their style of parenting involved giving me a wider berth to grow creati

Just when you think you know yourself, just when you feel like you’ve seen and felt it all, that nothing could surprise you, something comes up and it changes the whole dynamic. Describing Eric as a cynic would be the understatement of the century. He was a caustic, bitter, and sarcastic thirty-year-old going about his life like a clumsy fool, tripping on the various hurdles that life’s journey threw at him. In his three decades on this planet, Eric had seen various facets of the drama that life offered – death, grief, love, heartbreak; you name it, he had seen it. Eric was someone who had very rigid notions about the world, which he believed to be absolute truths because they were based on his real-life experiences. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, some things just change the game. Angela wasn’t a stranger. Eric had known her for over a year, having connected with her through a dating site. She was someone who’d fascinated our protagonist right from the beginning

More than twenty years ago, there was a woman who would put me through a lot of torture, systematic and premeditated torture. It was physical and emotional abuse. When that era got over, my folks, especially my grandmother told me that the woman had taken everybody’s curse and would never live happily. Frankly, the whole idea seemed a little cuckoo to me. Therefore, I did not bear a grudge and moved on. Today the only reminder of that woman I have is a psychosomatic pain in my neck whenever any person in authority yells at me. (Long story – She had stepped on my neck once while beating me up.)  Anyway I grew up with a couple of septuagenarians after that who rarely ever tried to guide my behavior. Thus, I developed a sense of right and wrong all by myself, and every now and then take liberties with the same. That means that I am not always a very good person.  However, as I said, my idea of good and bad is uniquely my own and I do not always regret the things I do. I do things that “fe

I started sobbing uncontrollably. I am usually pretty detached from things and don’t let them affect me but something had happened and I was in pain. The emotional kind. As warm drops of tears rolled down my cheeks, I wondered what this feeling meant. You see there had been moments like this before and I hadn’t so much as frowned, but this time around, something really hurt. I had hurt someone’s feelings and I was miserable. Then I took out my phone and opened the front camera and looked at my ugly crying face. And I didn’t feel pity at myself. I felt disdain. That is the relationship I share with myself. More than two decades ago, I had a really traumatic experience. I was abused. Which impacted my life in a big way. But childhood trauma is neither interesting nor uncommon. How I dealt with it, though, was peculiar and set the pace of a lot of things to come. I convinced myself that I was actually enjoying the trauma. I even convinced myself that I was in control, that I wanted it. An

When I started this blog page, I was 24 years old, freshly disillusioned of my dream of becoming a teenage writing prodigy. Now, I am 30 and I still don't have a published book to my name. A couple of years back, I came across this book at a bookstore written by a 12 year old boy, a science fiction novel. Everyday I look at actors, content creators, stand up comedians younger than me, create a name for themselves, be heard and seen, and appreciated. And here, I keep refreshing my blog page to be welcomed by 45 to 50 odd views on the articles I write. I keep trying to convince myself that it's not about the readership or the views or the comments. I keep telling myself that it's about keeping the writer in me alive. But seeking validation is but natural, isn't it? I recently deactivated my social media profiles - Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. There's no specific reason for doing that, it's not like I was spending a lot of time on these platforms. B