To My Soul Mates...

There are very few people who enter your life and are allowed by you to hold mirrors to your soul.

These are your soul mates, those to whom you can’t help but pass on the mirror.

In front of these people you lay quite bare, there isn’t a lie you can tell and not a twitch you can hide.

Most of the times you don’t even need to say anything. They just know.

Destiny knows when, where and how you need to meet them. And when they need to leave.

It also knows the exact time when you need to meet again, even if it is a phone call - The point when you have forgotten how you look, how you looked when you met them.

It brings them back to you.

They can never be your lovers or the friends you hang out with. They are the ones you go to when you need to break all the walls you have built around you, so that when you shed every mask in front of them and open up your heart, they just know what to say, what to remind you of and never tell you what you should do.

They just silently protect you with their divinity and you know nothing can ever be that wrong.

They are the ones you will love the most in some strange, divine, nonsensical, unconditional, heavenly way.

They are the ones with who no place will ever be far away.

If you have people in your life that hold this place, cherish them forever.

I have a few, and you know who you are.

Thank you for being my reflection, my soul mates and my this life to the next people. 

Renew, Regrow, Reboot.

There are moments in everyone’s life that define and pave the path to his or her own personal quests. Instances that change who you are or sometimes even bring out what you really are deep inside.

Eight years ago, on an idle Saturday I walked into The Crossword store in Bandra, Bombay and as if destiny was pulling me, for the first time in my life I entered the travel section.

It was shouting out to me with its 1500 pages – The Lonely Planet India. In a trance, I picked it up, closed my eyes and opened a chapter – Pondicherry.

I read with awe, it was the first travel guide I was reading despite having had family holidays twice a year growing up.

I remember distinctly, getting out of the store, calling my parents and telling them, I was going to Pondicherry, alone. I presume they must have thought I’m bonkers. I never gave them a chance to tell me that.

All the biggest decisions in my twenties were made on a whim and a call to my parents. Something that has changed in my thirties. I am much more guarded and analytical today. 

The trip to Pondicherry was no ‘Eat, pray, Love’. I didn’t find peace, my inner self or a soul mate but I became contemplative, self-assured and quiet. I loved being alone with myself; I enjoyed my own company for the first time in years. Most importantly, I discovered how traveling made me feel. Nothing has felt as joyous than travel ever since that trip. 

Since then, I have taken several trips alone to different parts of the world. I still pick a map, close my eyes and choose where I should go.

In a few days I embark on a solo trip to Holland and The Czech Republic.

That idle Saturday afternoon comes to my mind as I prep my camera and my travel bag. Each day, each trip since then has been a different kind of journey; I have evolved and changed in both negative and positive ways – as a traveler, as a person and as a woman to reach a point today where it all seems to begin again.

This time I pack my bags with things and also with a few years of toil, questions, arguments, answers, regrets, guild, resentments. I pack them all.

It’s time not just to visit another country and meet new people. It’s time to let go of some extra baggage, go back to the whim of that Saturday eight years ago. to meet the person who had that whim, once again.

It’s time to shed every thing that adorns my soul and begin again.

To renew, regrow and reboot.

Stardust

Change doesn’t happen in an instant.

It’s a process that has its own course.

If you step back in the middle of the process to look at the imprints of the journey, you see the beauty of evolvement.

You can map out the troughs, the peaks; the etchings made permanent with tears and silent vows with yourself that pushed you to reach this far.

Each process of change has an end that is the beginning of something new. Something that will remain fancy at least for a while until the waves of transformation twist the hands of destiny and change your life once again, for what will seem, forever.

I see an end now, I can see light so close that I can almost feel its glow around me and feel the warmth in my bones.

I look back to see the various layers I have shed on this path to transformation.

Bits and pieces of my skin entangled and engraved with guilt, pain, pity. 

I see myself far, far away. Is it really I? Or is it a version of I, I cease to remember?

As I adorn this new skin, all shiny and bright, I pass on some light to that woman standing far away.

Someday very soon when I will touch this glow, she will become one with the light and burst into a ball of energy leaving stardust into a time, when I was her. 

Life Sucks, And Then... You Run. Or Maybe Not.

OR NOT?!

 If someone put in front of you a mirror today that reflected everything you have presumably become to the world. What would you do?

Would you buckle up and sprint in the other direction or would you continue to stare until what you see standing in front of you would dissolve into nothingness leaving behind mere fragments of someone you used to know.

Running is easy, convenient and simple. But every once in a while you need to take a break, face this mirror, look ahead at the road and ask yourself, “How long can I run?”

You need to take a breath and look back at the road to what was left behind, what was missed and what is now long gone.

Then sometimes at a one of rare occasion looking at that mirror, catching your breath and tying those shoe laces to get set go, you need to look inside deep into the core and ask yourself before you sprint, “How far will I run?” 

Tick Tock, Tick Tock Goes The Biological Clock

Last evening an amiable taxi driver started chatting with me on my five-minute ride home. I got to know he had been in the country for 22 long years, managed to go back to his country once every two years and every time tried to have a child. In his pursuit of producing kids he had successfully managed a 9 year old son, 2 year old daughter and a 3 month old son. He told me about how he has seen Dubai grow from nothing to the fairytale land that it is today, his issues with money and having three kids education and health to pay for.

A minute away from home he decided it was time he got to know my life story. So the first thing he asked me, “How long have you been married? How many kids do you have?” (in one sentence) for a second I was taken aback. Did I look married in a short skirt, blouse and jacket, all about in my corporate avatar in place or could he not imagine a single, independent woman could exist? However, not wanting to scandalize him, I decided to play along.

I told him I had been married for one year, my husband worked here and I hadn’t thought about kids because it was too early and I had no money to bring kids up. Thankfully, as soon as I finished my spiel we stopped in front of my building.

He looked back and with the most stern, serious eyes I have seen in a long time and told me that my biological clock was ticking. Money was in the hands of God and so were kids, both would eventually come with each other however my age wouldn’t come back.

My jaw, now almost in my lap took some time to adjust itself in place as I got out of the taxi and walked home.

Very often when I have gone out for social gatherings especially the ones infected by married couples, I have been asked where my Husband is. The taxi driver said it crudely, everyone else just sugar coats it.

When we are fresh out of college, we are told to make a career and stand on our own feet. Men can come later. By twenty-five we are at the edge of a social defined time frame labeling us as  – ‘Ready to get married.’ 

Post that it’s like a domino effect. Everyone you know is getting married year after year. Around the time you are thirty, you have lots of dressy wedding clothes worn once that now take up useless space in your wardrobe.

By then most women have fit into the second slot– ‘The married.’

Ever since the epic taxi ride I’ve been thinking, in the 2 prime decades of her life, are there only 2 slots a woman can fit into?

What about the ones who are happy and comfortable being alone?

Why do they need to explain the reason for their anchor not firmly parked in the confines of a socially defined term?

Where in the middle of the two slots do these women fit?

And so I wonder, with the clock in fast forward motion and new lines around the crows feet fast approaching, have we become so jaded that a white lie about a relationship status is way better than going through the a long, weary conversation on why despite having everything a man has and perhaps being more succesful, life is still incomplete without a ring on the finger?