On having read 'The fault in our stars.'

I sensed choking in her voice when she called up. She wanted to have tea. I hadn’t learned if tea was a part of her fascination for things British. Whenever I heard the British accent or heard someone even mention it, in my head, her tiny-voiced squeaky war cry outburst would play like an automated response to the stimulus. I agreed to have tea straight away, because there was no point asking her what the matter was; she had repeated her question twice without giving as much as a breathing space for me to respond, and that spoke out aloud for the state her mind was in.

It was an unusually cold February evening. Her hands gripped my unwashed t-shirt for balance and warmth – no, not my waist, only my t-shirt. The ginger in the steaming hot tea burnt the throat soothingly. She was on her way of being zoned out.

Tears kept swelling in her eyes, and when they got threateningly close to drawing a path down her cheeks, her brows crossed, an effort that froze her entire face, as if gathering strength from it. Her fingers sprung to rush into a clenched fist and stopped midway to relax slowly, as though they were a part of a choreographed performance with her eyes that filled and emptied in a rhythmic pattern. Her gaze was fixed somewhere over the bare, unpainted walls of the terrace on the multi-storied building that someone was raising on the other side of the road for almost half a year now.

Just like her gaze, I was stuck. Writing was not hard for me. There was a point of time when it felt natural and easy. And with time, I had lost my familiarity with it. Surely, there should be some way to go about it and be done with it. How would she have done it? What would she notice in the glances she stole? She would have noticed how my shorts were rolled, stuck between touching my knee and desperately trying to slip past it with each movement of my leg. She would have noticed how my eyes engorged and my brows arched when I put my entire concentration into tearing open a mouth-freshener with my teeth. She would have noticed the crooked 9’s on the envelope I held and probably made a mental note that they looked like tadpoles.

Tadpoles! There. I hadn’t lost it all, after all, and she was unknowingly helping me find it in my head.

She turned slowly to face me, tears brimming, brows still crossed as though she was judging my silence and my observational skills, boring right into my shifty self. After exactly a second and a half, I shuffled and dug into my pockets, mentally noting that she would never understand why I always had to look at my notification-less phone so often when she kept throwing looks like that at me.

‘What is it about?’ I asked her.

She lifted the book she was clutching in her left hand and brought it to the eye-level, holding it with all her might, lest it slip away from her grasp, and probably the universe as well.

‘That girl died,’ I said, not entirely realizing that I had shaped it as a question in my head, but had ended up making a statement.

She remained silent, still using all her concentration to abstain from crying in front of me. From the times I knew her, her cold skin could certainly do with some warmth. She continued looking straight into me. Taking a deep breath, she gave me the book and then showed me a couple of bookmarks held together by a tear strip. She folded it along that line.

‘If this is the whole of my heart or something like that,’ she said, and pointed to one side, ‘this is the bigger piece, and I want you to have it.’

‘What?’

‘Okay?’

I took it and examined it to see ‘Okay?’ printed on it in an artistic little cloud. She held the other piece in her hand. It said ‘Okay.’

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That February was unusually cold. I wondered if he understood the depth of what I had just said, what I had just done. And like every other time, what mattered was not if he did, but that I did. I stretched my hands open, diffidently.

‘Shah Rukh Khan?’ he asked.

‘Shah Rukh Khan?’

‘I thought you were doing the Shah Rukh Khan pose,’ he said.

I grimaced.

He chuckled softly and pulled me into his chest, letting me bury my face on the comfortable spot along the side of his neck. And through him radiated the central heating system that my body had the luxury of being spoiled by.

‘Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. (…) There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbound set. I want more number than I am likely to get. (…) But, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.'

On deactivating a facebook profile

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So off late, I have been coming across this general tendency of people to label deactivating a facebook account as a ‘publicity stunt’ or a ‘girl thing.’ I beg to differ and this is my take on what could/might/will happen when you deactivate your facebook account.

You are going to be wonderfully surprised when you get to know who notices the absence of your profile first. As queries begin to flow, surprises will increase as you realize how many people had really bothered giving your profile a look at every day to notice that it is gone one fine day – they could be people who are genuinely interested in your life or what you think about certain aspects/things in life, or they could be expert stalkers. There is something quite personal in the way people text or call you up to inquire if you are fine. And there’s something very endearing in the way some make it a point to meet you in person and give you a hug before assuring you that it will all be okay and in all probability, they wouldn’t even be prying to know what exactly did happen.

You will think twice before automatically hitting the new tab short cut and typing ‘f...’ Logging in just for a peep would also mean reactivating the account and you’d remember you didn’t leave the place for no reason. You may migrate to twitter, gtalk, google+, but   everything and anything would make you feel like you have a much more personal conversation with the other person than just ‘liking’ pictures, stuff shared or posting on ‘walls.’  Facebook will flash the DPs of 5 people and say ‘These people are going to miss you’ as a final desperate attempt at playing with your emotions and making you stay and these 5 faces will somehow linger  in your mind for a long time to come.

You will be amazed by how less depressed and more at ease you feel by not knowing what goes in the lives of people around you. You will go back to visit your long-forgotten blog, web page or probably even end up renewing your gym or music classes to fit in to the huge amount of time you suddenly seem to have out of nowhere. You read more. You think more. The temptation to peek will take time dying down, especially when you know the password(s) of the facebook account(s) of your friend(s), but eventually, you will get around it.

You will probably go back to your phone and check out old text messages where someone had asked you to read or see something. You will finish checking out every webpage you had bookmarked. You might develop a whole new interest. Going for a walk and observing what people do apart from logging in to facebook every 10^th minute will genuinely interest you. Instead of sneaking a look at the profile at the traffic signal, you’ll relax and let a song play on on your mobile. It will be quite entertaining to see how some friends really try to persuade you or blackmail you into joining the network again irrespective of whether they put it directly or subtly. They’ll mail you, call you, take you out and sometimes annoy the hell out of you. But at more than one occasion, these instances are going to fill your heart and make you realize how very dear even the profile that seemed so empty to you had meant to these people.

And more importantly, you might also get to know how one or more people whose presence on the cyber world mattered a lot to you had never once realized that you were off the network in the first place. They might tell you that they had barely logged in, they only barely glanced at their news feed, they certainly didn’t look at messages or wall posts, but when the duration we are talking about exceeds a week and still you end up hearing the above said, you simply need to know where you stand in their lives.

I am not saying that facebook is the beginning and the end of life, but for people like me, it has indeed become an integral part of our connectivity. When time asks for it, when we need to maintain some long-distance contacts or stay to fit in to a new environment, sites like this are a true life-saver. Of course I do not support the idea of deactivating the account at the drop of a hat, every alternative day. I don’t really have much respect for people who keep running away from their profiles and think that that would help them run away from reality as well and hence is the end of the problem. But it might be true that at least temporarily, that might be the beginning of you seeing/seeking a solution. And yes, this is a personal opinion.

If you haven’t done it before, take a break – a week, month, several months or maybe even a year. Get back if you want to or give yourself more time to explore away elsewhere. Either way, chances are that you will be gently amazed looking at, soaking in and living in the events that follow and you will see the world around and the people on it in an altogether different perspective. On the other hand, if you are never going to be up for it, at least understand this: if a friend has gone ahead and done it, either be there to give a hug and a chocolate or politely stay away. It might be your turn tomorrow to feel blue and you’re not going to enjoy being poked fun at, trust me.

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