Living in a ghost house

Apparently, I have been staying in a ghost house. I did not know. My roommates did not know. The owner, the neighbours, or other loving people around either did not know or did not reveal that there was a possibility for us to meet a post-human if we were staying at this house.

All of these became significant only during the last week of our stay at this place. Thanks to corporate greed driven climate change that gifted us a troublesome heat filled summer, and thanks to unplanned house construction that gave us a lot of light and little of wind during the day time, we were living in a ho-hum incinerator. This heat led to a lot of problems among us like increase in night rides and lack of sleep, which further led to increase in consumption of junk food, resulting in an increased production of flatus, further increasing the pace of climate change, we decided that enough is enough, and started looking for a house with better ventilation and less heat.

It did not take us much time to find a house, like it and start dreaming it as our next rented abode. The landholder was a gentleman and the lady was also nice, and we decided that we would move out by the end of this month. This was in the beginning of March, when heat had started affecting our lives as much as the other heat affected us in our adolescence.

For the past 6 months we have been staying here as happy roommates. Ashi, BC, Diego and Me. Four people who have lived four different lives and experienced different people in different places had as diverse opinions as four people could have. There were conservatives among us, like BC, whose views were totally different from mine, and the other two people’s opinions were in between ours. This was a good setup as all discussions ended up in debates and all of us got to know that our own experiences and opinions aren’t the only opinions available.

Coming from a protected unwalled liberal zoological garden of a university, it was easy for me to discard the opinions in the other side as fringe and not worthy of noticing. Then after college, when I had to join the society as it is known, I had to meet much more people who made me doubt that I was the fringe one. As we found each other as roommates here, I got to understand that the opinions and political stances were as diverse as the number of people we get to meet. But this did not stop me from my college given habit of sidelining those extreme views.  But I realized soon that this was not the case as I was faced with my inability to answer pointed questions from the side. I started to listening to BC in order to grasp what goes into their mind, and inevitably failed.

What do I know about religion and spirituality? Nothing. I only have the atheistic rhetorics that I have been using all my college life. He had the religious rhetoric that he used all his life. He was not religious, I should point out. But the rhetorics seldom were dissimilar to those given by a staunch believer. He would look down upon my lack of spirituality and I would look down upon his interest in it.

I knew that he would gel well with the neighbours, with as strong belief in being conservative as he has. Even the neighbouring kids came to our house and sensed negativity in this house. I joked it was because of me being filled with negative non spirituality and they just laughed.   

In the 6 months that we were roommates, all of us had our happiness, sadness, non emotions, emotions, frustrations, interferences, let downs, celebrations and little nothings all of which we either enjoyed or survived. Dreams, nightmares, reality, and fantasy came into our conversation as we discussed our future plans and past coincidences as we lived through day by day.

We noticed strange coincidences and correlations like how when BC goes out, it inevitably rains, if it is in the monsoon season. When the water supply guy fails to come to our house, if and only if Ashi calls him and asks him, or scold him will he bring water to our doorstep. That Diego with his non local accent, could get anything from the neighbours, and would inevitably get beaten up in one stationary or another one day. I fail to keep my head straight when drunk was something that I found out when I was living here.

Life passed by fast and then summer came. We realized how difficult it was going to be in the first few days of summer. Ashi shifted to his own house due to lack of sleep. BC failed to sleep well and started taking short walks at night. When asleep, he started dreaming that people are attacking him, or killing him. To not have to face the heat, I dragged one of them for rides every single night. All these frustrations started affecting Diego too.

One day BC filled up around 10 buckets of water and watered the terrace in order for it to cool down and give us colder wind when we put on the fan. It did not work. Taking bath right before sleeping did not work too as we remained sleepless, but a bit fresher. Heads became heavier. Pockets became lighter. Dreams became nightmares. Debates became wild. None of us made sense to any of us anymore.

Then one day, when we were walking around, we saw a board which said a house was available on rent. It did not take us much time to decide that it was a good option. We called our landlady and told her that we would be moving by the end of March as the heat was unbearable. She laughed. We had thought that this would be an unexpected blow for her as she was not that well off. Her laughing made us a bit relieved and much less guilty.

We gave the new landlord two month’s rent as advance and made it official. Prospective renters came to the house, looked around and went back. It became a routine for about 2 weeks. Then suddenly it stopped. We wondered why, but did not bother much to think about the reasons. We were going to start living in the new house in less than a week. It was exciting.

One day, when I was going out, I met our neighbor uncle. I smiled, and he smiled back. And as my bike was moving, he asked, “ Can I ask you something?” I nodded politely. He asked, “ Why are you moving out?”

“Heat.” , I said.

“There is nothing else, right?”

Thinking that he would have felt bad about something he thought he had done, I said reassuringly, “No. Just the heat.”

“ You don’t hear or see someone walking around at night, do you?”

“No. Why?”

“What about nightmares?”

I said no to even that, and then asked why he was asking all these.

“The thing is,” he said, “someone I know asked me to ask you why you were moving all of a sudden. None of the renters here have stayed as long as you people have. All of them have said some story like this or the other.” I laughed, and said we had experienced nothing like that as I went.

I told Diego all these as I returned. He shared the laugh. But then I started thinking, why didn’t they tell us if they had already known it. It also made sense why the children could sense the negativity. When you hear something, it was easy to spot it, especially when they are children. Then I told that we should tell BC and it would be a fun to watch. We decided to see whether he would spot some negativity, or that he would see nightmares, or if he would see someone at night walking around.

I was not present when Diego told BC about what the neighbor guy had said. I asked what his reply was. “Check if him, or someone close to him, are renting this house in the future. I believe he is creating this story in order to avoid prospective renters.”

I hope I will be able to leave the ghost of my judging present in this ghost house.

One writes about writing

So that writing three pages a day one was thinking about is not happening. How many days has one been doing this, people might wonder. This is the first day. And for a first day, this is a bad one, and one knows that one doesn’t have to tell anybody this. But one sees something positive there too. Tomorrow is not going to be a bad first day. At best, it can be a bad second day and one cannot think about any bad second days which are worse than bad first days. And that might not make as much sense as when written as it had when it was not a clear idea in one’s head. One knows that it is a bad sentence construction but they chooses to ignore it. But chuck it. It doesn’t matter. What one has to do is write. Write mechanically. Write for oneself. Write for people who have asked one to write whenever one doesn’t. Not quite a lot, one knows. But there are those ego boosters in one’s life. One thinks they are enough as of now.

One decides to write about a conversation they had with their mother. One puts it down on paper.

“Just today, when I was thinking about doing something like this, my mother called me up and said to me, “ Write something in between your work. It does not need to be that great or anything. Just write something often. Don’t lose writing.” And I agreed. She is a sensible woman. She knows really well that great writings won’t come from the thoughts brooding inside my head for a long long time. And I was glad that she understood that. And I was glad that she made me accept this idea of writing something often. And then it made me realize that I should make it a little bit more mechanical.  People might be wondering why something so “magical”, “beautiful”, and “divine” should be made mechanical. Those tags that come along with writing are precisely the reason why I have to make my writing mechanical. I am not a writer, I have understood. I cannot go behind magic, beauty or divinity, and create something out of apparent nothings like how a spider casts a web, how journalists manufacture controversies, or how a vermillion pasted stone of today becomes a temple with 500 years of history tomorrow. I am nothing when compared to these marvels of the world as we know it.
And I know it. They are living beings who enjoy constructing magic, beauty, and divinity through their words, and word order manipulations. These tags boost them. What it does to me is quite the opposite. It pressurizes me. It makes me want to write something better than what I am already writing. And when what I am already writing is something I detest reading, it makes it so much easier to not write than do.
That is why I stopped writing.”

Writing is a tedious process. More often than not, one only sees how they could have improved their writing when they see their own writing. When what one writes is on a topic that they wouldn’t want to read, even if it was written by the greatest ever writer ever lived (Sidin Vadukut), that becomes a problem.  One wouldn’t feel like writing. One would lose confidence. One would just sit and jabber about how good one’s writing was before thinking happened. And one wouldn’t  try changing the approach.

Until something shakes one up and forces gently to write. And then one tries to write and realizes that nothing inspires them anymore. Finding inspiration from mundane things becomes futile. One starts to decide that writing is no more a possible interest for them. Then the gentle force asks one to try again and this time, or the next time, or the time after that one tries so as not to make the gentle force feel bad. And one writes about writing.

Writing is not one’s primary interest or anything. As a topic, it must have been covered by most of the people who write. When people lack inspiration, they write about writing, one has heard, which is why one didn’t want to write about the topic. One doesn’t want themselves to be known as one that has no inspiration left in them. One does not want to realize that rather. So one puts of writing about writing, in order for them to not churn out idiotic sentence sequences which has writing about writing in them. One thinks about what else to write than about writing. One decides to write about putting off of the writing and decides against that thinking about how the sentence was formed in their head.

That is when one decides to chuck waiting for the imagination elixir that helps them write about life, breath, and other addictions. When one takes a conscious decision to write mechanically, one’s cynical part smirks, and the other part smiles back to them, and ask them to wait.

The cynic waits and sees writing happening and remembers  how when Sheldon Cooper told Leonard that he made some tea, and the things that followed. That Leonard said he did not want tea, that Cooper replied that he made tea only for himself and that Leonard asked why Cooper would tell that to him and Coopers reply that it was a conversation starter and as they were conversing, it was a good one at that. The cynic laughs at all these thoughts and in the mean time writing continues.

One doesn’t know if what is being written should make any sense to a reader X, who is nonexistent at the time of writing. Even though one projects a few faces reading what is being written, as the faces do not seem interested in the way it is written, one decides to chuck the sense part.

One just wants three pages to be written. Times New Roman, size 12, 1.5 line spacing, the usual that one is familiar of. One does not want to edit what they have written as they know that it is going to be increasingly tiring job as writing has not happened to one in a long time.

What one is writing now is enema to the constipated brain that gives it brain farts instead of thoughts. One just hopes that this would end such struggles, if not in the short run, surely in the long run.

One hopes to keep on writing more and even though the writings are going to be forced and mechanical, they hope that they do not continue writing about writing, which would be the worst thing one can think of during this exercise. One also hopes that one realizes how stupid it is to write in third person when first person makes much more sense. One’s one other hope is that one would realize someday that using third person instead of first person is as narcissistic as the normal sane usage.

One bids bye.