It is just after midnight and as a deep, meditative stillness begins to envelop my isolated space, a dull sense of foreboding starts to pick away at my heart: What if one day I wake up and the memories of yesterday are gone, like a tapestry that has lost its ancient thread, featuring a million colours, suddenly reduced to shimmering insubstantiality? It is a subject that nips at the back of the mind: a fear of memory loss. My memory feels like a golden cauldron of experience, a deep wooden chest filled with ear splitting laughter and river flooding tears, victories and failures, trauma and triumph. But, as middle age slowly starts to scythe away youthful froth and fuss, so, too, the once blessed pipeline into the scattered compartments that store memories has begun to feel like a burden.

I spent my childhood feeling proud about the fact that I could remember, about how my friends were astonished at how many lines from a beloved novel I could quote, or how I suddenly knew something significant that had happened to them in the past, or that I remembered the tiny details of their lives. It felt good to see people’s jaw drop with amazement at the memory palace inside my head, and the thought occurred to me that a sharp memory distinguished me from others. And yet, with passing years I realised that the sweetness of remembering is battered by knocks: the knocks of pain, disappointment, of heartbreak and bereavement, of the knowledge that the past can never be recovered. Every time you laugh with a memory going through your mind, there will be someone somewhere who is crying with newly broken wells.

What if I could forget it all? The thought has echoed through my head more than once, the call of forgetfulness, to be rid of the baggage of my broken past, to start fresh and leave yesterday at the door, chasing away the ghosts of the past so that when you enter a room it is not filled with the echo of the memories of those no longer here and an old friend’s face does not bring up the sadness of missing another who is no more, and when you smell that old perfume from the past it does not overwhelm you with sadness for having been hurt. There is a perverse appeal in the theory of forgetfulness: a way of being rid of the shackles of my nostalgia.

The thought makes me pause; I wonder if that is in fact where forgetfulness might lead: new combinations unfettered by the shadow of my history. In the moment, not burdened by the mistakes of my past, not fearful about the things that I have promised I am going to do but haven’t yet. But would I then not want to remember anything? Would I be willing to cause myself to lose all those glorious memories that make me what I am today, memories that are enmeshed in who I am, in my being?

So, I picture her: a woman with a bindi, with kohl stained eyes. Her blackened gaze is ever wistful. It hints of secrets and sounds of untold stories. In her eyes, I see the mirror of my soul, etched with shades of my happy and sadnesses. There is a grounding quality to her, as if being near her was like being told to breathe. As intangible as a healing balm, just breathing her in muted the chatter between my sad fancies. As far as I could tell, our being together left the rest of the world unnoticed as time stood still.

I can imagine her laughter, a song I once heard ringing in the noise of my favourite bar, across the clink of glasses and laughter of friends. Her kohl laden eyes, and those black grotesque gushes of mystery and warmth. They talk in some tongue that I do not quite understand, but from a distance I am enticed by them. And I can’t help but wonder if she could hold my drifting memory in place like a lighthouse on an inbound boat. I look up and stare, and I try to remember how her eyes twinkle when she describes her interests, or how they relax when she thinks about them. They are like past memories, fragments of lost erasure that could rise to the surface. We would talk about our lives, dig under mountain top perhaps, we plumbed the depths together, dreaming and fuming, confessing true to ourselves, she let me know who I was, that who I was, was worth knowing. Those like that are essence to survive in a sea of frenzy.

But there is something ambivalent about this vision. I fear that returning to the field full of memories of loss could incite in me the feeling of a stranger in an unfamiliar place: the unsettling suspicion that I have already stepped into that scene before. Would the presence of her counter images interrupt my composure? Would I sink into an ocean of deep time, becoming a prisoner to its painful and comforting memories, memories that have shaped me, but also penalised me, memories that echo my own resilience? Or, on the contrary, will they be the bridge back?

The point isn’t to forget but rather to sit with it all, to accept that my story is not single but multicoloured, and that just because something happened it doesn’t have to define who I am. Every memory: the happy ones and the horrific ones is a stroke of colour on my canvas. The smiles, the cuttings, the in-between moments: they’re all part of my identity.

Therefore, although I might remain fearful of losing my memory, I can face that fear with hope, cherish the past and stay open to the future. Something in me lights up when I walk into my favourite bar. It might be the woman with the bindi, with her understanding eyes, or it could be the contribution of friends who have stood with me. I know that new memories, new colours, are trying to join these threads.

Life is a fine dance, both a memory and a forgetting. The dance between actively remembering and forgetting allows us to live, to let go and enjoy our lives. We can allow the chains of memory to become our tender guides. A signpost pointing to the path already travelled.

Amid this clamour of feelings, a new idea strikes me. It suddenly seems all right to carry my memories along, to be tender with myself, to allow myself to be hurt, because I want to stay open to beauty. I can be hurt and keep my eyes wide open. My story becomes mine again, knitting connections not with the past, but across it.

And so, the fear of forgetting is ultimately a seed that blossoms. I am not able to destroy, but I can hold my memories with dignity, nicely intact, every instant, every encounter, one step at a time, because we never stay the same. Life unfolds before us, undulating with endless advice, with its challenges and its delights, but in the end, I know that whether I recall or not, I will always be a work in progress, always growing, always learning to dance.

It is as though she does not go away when the night ends, when the bar clears, and the collective chatter dies down to the last few quiet voices recounting the evening. Perhaps it is because she does not make herself seen or heard in a loud way. It is that she is quiet, and because of this quietness you watch her when you tell yourself not to. You do not find yourself looking at her only because she makes some kind of exhibition of herself, some way that draws all eyes toward her. But you find that something about her is ‘quiet-ish’, a magnetism that makes you watch her even when you tell yourself to stop. It is not a boldness or a demand for attention. It is not something like that, how she walks around the bar in silence, and you find yourself watching her for longer than you would like to admit.

She would sit at the bar, her fingers nervously working their way into her hair, twirling it round her fingers or pulling a loose strand behind her ear. It was a little gesture, one she probably didn’t even feel herself, but that gesture is her. It could be in the smallest things, in the flicker of kohl rimmed eyes, the neat moons of her nostrils, the planes of her face, her head tilted slightly to the side, as if she was thinking of something, and you were hearing it reflected back to you across a void.

The first thing I noticed about her was her bindi. It was not flashy, but it was profoundly unmissable. How it sat so precisely in the centre of her forehead, how it seemed to pin everything there. It was not a piece of jewellery or a fashion statement or a nod to a mythical past. It was a part of her. The small red dot a tacit, inconclusive statement about some depth, something that held her together, that I might never fathom. And yet, every time I looked at her bindi, every time I blinked, and it came back into focus, I felt as though her entire universe was suddenly inscribed inside my own.

She was not one of those women who needed to be in the company of others, or of talk, she often sat in solitude and silence, for she was loath to intrude on others, even in a social setting. But that silence was not a lonely one; it was a silence of the stillness of one alone who is not lonely but content in her own companionship. And it was a wise stillness, a stillness with an inner awareness of its own identity, not needing to be expressed outwardly to prove its own worth. She did not talk much, at least not to me, but in her silence, there was a quiet assuredness.

I would watch her, although I doubt it looked like I was watching her. Not secretively or slyly. It was impossible not to, really. It was like she had this “thing” about her that you could sense; like you were in the presence of someone who saw things differently, who felt and thought in ways that most people could not. I think it was the tattoo on her arm that gave her away. It was a quill etched into her skin, a simple one. Something about a writer’s spirit, I think. Someone who lived in the world but could not help but leave a part of herself outside of it, observing, thinking about things, composing in her mind, using words not because they allowed her to communicate but because they allowed her to understand, to make sense of things that were too much and too confusing to do any other way.

She was a moving work of art. Not in the performative, garish way of someone who wants admiration, but in that everything she did, even small movements, was done with care and thought. Even how she picked up a glass, how her fingers would rest on the rim and move it absently as her mind drifted elsewhere, was the same way of being in the world: aware of it, but always reaching elsewhere.

It was her eyes that were most striking: huge, dramatic, lined with thick kohl that only seemed to heighten the melodrama of whatever was happening behind them. She needed to say very little to assure you that her mind was not boring. It had lived, it had felt, it had absorbed all the experience that the world has to offer, both good and bad. And yet it was soft, there was tenderness in them, a welcomingness that made you feel as if, if you took a moment to sit alongside her, she might tell you something.

It wasn’t just what she did; it was how she was in the world. Her stillness made the world around her feel louder, more frenetic. She wasn’t keeping up with the world; the world was keeping up with her. The restlessness under the surface, the electric vibrancy of her silence, is what made her endlessly intriguing. There was a sense of a storm building in the distance. She was silent; you knew there was so much more going on beneath the surface.

And that is why I go back, and I go back, and I go back, a thousand miles, in the middle of the night, when all is quiet, a thousand miles away from her, and I think of her, not so much in the way one would think of a romantic attachment, as in the way one would rather think of something left in the middle of a story, a thread that’s never completed, a conversation that’s never taken place, but still remains in my consciousness, waiting to be picked up at the right moment.

And I don’t know that I did. The fact is, I will maybe never know her, and perhaps that was the magic of her. She will always be a puzzle, quiet and unheard, and not here to be solved, but to be seen, to be viewed for the few seconds it might take before they pass, unseen and unrealised, and yet. Even now, a thousand miles away, I am thinking of her, and I am thinking of how some people come into your life not to stay, but to leave a lasting impression on you, quiet and forgettable: to go the way they came, reminding you that some people come into your life to teach you how to glimpse that which you never thought you would.

And I think of her still, not with a demanding romantic ardour, more with a tender quieter insistence. I think of her slumped at the bar, alone, in her own thoughts, her fingers tracing the rim of a glass, her gaze a million miles away, yet never entirely. I think of that bindi that held my attention in moments when I would have otherwise wandered, and I think of those eyes: they seemed always to have something to communicate and were seldom silent.

She remains with me, even now.

There she was in a back corner of my favourite bar, in a cloud of smoke and shadows, with everything outside happening at half speed. The woman with the bindi. She was beautiful, but that’s not quite the right word, because she was something else, something deeper, something like a photograph that had come to life. Every time I saw her, I was struck by her grace, by that timeless quality that would pull you in and hold you tight. She was not just a woman, she was the setting for a memory, the kernel of a story.

I can see her still, just as I saw her then: every detail as fresh in my memory as it was back in that place that time. She showed up a few minutes after me, but not early nor late; she didn’t rush, nor did she make an entrance. For a long time, she was nearly invisible, as if she hadn’t arrived at all, until she had. And then she did the thing she always did with her hair, pulling it back, hand to hand, to gather it up and twist it into a tight bun, a thing she did in an instant. And all around her, the air shifted, as if a scene-change had just been cued but before it happened you had to just hold still and wait for the next moment. As if it were something you wanted to hit slow motion on, as if you wanted to see that thing again and again.

Her tight-bound hair circled her face, highlighting the bindi: a small dot of crimson that sat above her brows like a declaration of strength. There was something about it that was enigmatic, something about it that begged to be explained as much as it was a statement of her own self-assurance. She didn’t need the world; she didn’t ask for it. But the bindi, the little red dot in a world of grey, did.

We faced each other together on many occasions, sometimes companionably quiet, other times punctuated by the ticks of speech; but even when she spoke, it was not her words that I held, no, it was her eyes: her dark, deep, storytelling eyes. There is a strange alchemy in the way in which some people can communicate everything they feel with no need for sound. She was one of those rare souls, one who could laugh and rage in the tiniest of blinks.

One night stands out in my memory more than the others. The bar was more crowded than usual, the hum of voices and laughing filling in the few quiet pockets of air. I watched as she put her fingers in the air to signal for the bartender. The way her fingers danced; it was a ballet. She took a sip, the way she always did, holding it in her mouth for a second before gulping it down. Her eyes closed for just a moment. The way she looked, with her Scotch, her hair in a bun, her bindi glowing softly in the darker corners of the bar, has always stuck with me.

She would take a sip of her drink, straighten in her chair and study the room. Her eyes would roam, measuring and appraising. She would gaze into the vortex of life, taking it all in, but never really engaging with it. She had this ability to be present without being part of the commotion. It was as if she was somewhere else, and that somewhere else was off-limits to other people’s assessments and judgments. I would always wonder what was going on in her head. What was she thinking about as she sat there, quiet and still, sipping her Scotch like there was no rush?

She laughed rarely, and when she did it was soft, a kind of secret between us. Not the kind of laugh that you might hear in a large room, it was a quieter laugh, for the ears of those who listened more closely. I lived for those sounds, for the way her laughter filled a space between us, the world outside disappearing. For the way that, in that moment, it was just us, sharing something nobody else heard.

But it was the resilience that I loved most. There was something about her, underneath that poise, behind that quiet strength, that no one ever saw. It was as if the world had exploded around her and she stood there, unscathed, still sipping her Scotch, still going on with her quiet grace. She never let you see the effects of what had been done to her, but if you looked closely, if you looked past the poise, past the quiet strength, you would see it in her eyes. She had been heartbroken, she had lost people she loved, she had been through things that would have driven anyone else to the depths of hell and back, but here she was, still standing, still drinking, still going on with that quiet grace.

I wanted to ask questions about her past, to hear the stories I knew were there, but I never did. I did not have to. It turned out that it did not make a difference anyway. Her strength was not in her past. Her strength was in the moment, in the way she lived now, and never let the demons of yesterday haunt her too much. I think that was what most impressed me about her.

The bar, its worn seats and the low mumble of old music, was our temple, and every inch of it was holy, not because of what we said to each other, but because of what didn’t need to be said. I could sit there all night, watching her drink her Scotch; watching the flare of her bindi in the dim light, like a beacon to some silenced truth I could not grasp but always felt.

And while those nights are long past, they remain in my mind as a kind of half-dream. Without her, it is muted, quieter, emptier. And if I sit alone here now, sometimes with my own glass of Scotch, I shut my eyes and try to imagine her opposite, her hair pulled back, her bindi shimmering, her eyes unblinking, telling me stories I’ll never hear.

There is something romantic about those memories, something nostalgic and yearning for those nights that are gone. She was much more than a woman who wore a bindi and sat in a bar: she was a reminder of everything that is ephemeral, of everything that’s beautiful and fleeting, impossible to hold on to.

Even now, when I remember her, I feel that same quiet sense of awe. She is a puzzle, a work of art, a memory that will live with me forever. All I know is that, if I ever drink Scotch again, I will feel her here, and hear her laugh, and see her speaking with her eyes.

The bindi gone, yet she is still with me. In every inky black night that comes and goes. In that glass of Scotch, I drink before bed. In every single look that says it all. And she will be with me, always.

Somewhere in this silence, amid the whispering that moves leaves on the forest floor, she resides. She is a woman who dwells in the expansive depths; she is the river from which literary rivulets spring in the buckets of my mind. She’s my muse, the bearer of inspiration, a powerful yet subtle spectacle that would be present regardless, and is the very reason why I write.

She is resilient, I want to say, but that would also be a lie. Resilience implies a hard won success against the odds, perhaps even a trophy earned. But she is not merely resilient, she is a refuge. She keeps emotions locked in a secure tower and hides them behind a façade of strength that she wears with breezy elan, as though she has mastered the art of repression, as though she knew exactly what to do with her storm-tossed waves. She presents a calm, silent exterior to the world, an air of unflappable sophistication. But I have seen the cracks in the walls, the moments when she peeks out from behind the parapet, when she displays an emotionality, albeit briefly.

Her opinions are hard as the walls that have grown up around her, the severity of them more certain in her mouth than in the eye, true and false as black and white. As for me, I shall not try to cross her any more than I would try to cross a badger’s sett; if she chooses, she will stay on her side of the ditch and make herself a willow herb hell of her own. This is one of the things I admire about her, the bold stance of her refusal, the treacherous ground upon which she plants her flag. But this freedom proves dangerous, too, and is more vulnerable than it looks, since in her black and whiteness she often stands alone.

But there is more to her strength than her strength: something she rarely shows; an imposter syndrome that creeps in from time to time banging at the door of the mind and heart, whispering that she does not deserve all she has or is; that some day her friends and colleagues will dissolve her false persona and find her out. This imposter syndrome is a shadow: a dark sensation linked to this being an imposter that inhibits her easy flow, interrupting some of the mind-heart’s spontaneity, and driving the useful energies into channels not of their own choosing. Under imposter-sensation’s influence, poised, graceful movement becomes a lumbering ghost-dance. She might then feel that her strength is false strength, perhaps another shadow: ‘That’s not me. It must be some other person with all that strength.’ But this shadow actually conceals the spontaneous flow, turning the river into a stream that does not run natural.

There are moments when her mask slips, when her emotions show through the holes in her armour. Her facial expressions, which even she can rarely control, occasionally betray her. A flick of an eyebrow, a creasing of the forehead, a certain look are sometimes the only time we see that things are not ok. Her eyes tell the most, and they are not always her friend. They are the mirror to her soul. We look at them and read them, and know the truth of what she is not telling anyone. In these moments, when I look upon her, I see all of her. Her soul, her mind, her feelings, and I am reminded of why she inspires.

It is not her power so much as the contradictions she contains, she who is strong and weak, certain and uncertain, open and closed. These contradictions are what keep me writing, or maybe what allow me to keep writing. From it she has given me characters who have dualities of their own, in other words, more than one side, perhaps like the rest of us. She has given me characters who are light and dark, happy and sad, strong and weak. And from these dualities I have material to write from, threads from which I weave my tales.

She is the one of the greatest gifts of my life, and the things I have learned from her continue to shape me. She has taught me that strength doesn’t always look like strength. She has taught me that vulnerability can be brave. She has taught me that the most powerful stories are those where people finally stop pretending that their lives are as they seem. She has taught me that all the best writing comes from a place of doubt: from the questions you are afraid to find the answers to. She has opened my eyes to life.

I think about her when I am writing, the way she goes about her days, the way she moves her head when she speaks, the way her eyes tell a story before her mouth does, my muse I go there every time I write; my river. I thank her.

For in the end, it is not her strength that I admire so much but her letting it be seen, her wearing it like a second skin. She taught me that strength is not about being unbreakable; it is about being bendable, about being able to carry the world’s weight and keep going, and not have it crush your bones underneath. This, then, has become my impetus to write, to tell stories.

And, in that world of constant motion and commotion, where the ordinary tends to overwhelm the remarkable, here she was: a woman who seemed to emerge from the humdrum of everyday life, conjured from somewhere beyond the fray of the fog of living; not someone who had arrived with fanfare or pomp, but someone whose arrival had been like the insidious, nearly imperceptible tilt of the seasons; a tilt you notice only after you stop to look. And, it was this tilt that slyly shifted my world so radically, in such a subtle way, that even in my most farfetched imaginations I had never predicted it would.

It was not only her, but rather something in her, which had come to meet me, and which had gone on working its way into me, as though upon a string, struck and vibrating. I felt as though a chord had been touched in me, which had been struck the very first time I laid eyes on her. I felt drawn to her, not with that idle and detached curiosity with which one regards any stranger whom one meets, but with that desire to find what is rare and precious, with which one approaches a newly discovered treasure. There was something about her, some sort of power that was almost imperceptible, but which held me fixed, drew me to her, and yet restrained me at the same time.

The first thing I noticed was her voice. It wasn’t simply what she said, though what she said was always interesting and often arresting. No, it was the rhythm of it all, the way it sounded as if every word had been culled and polished and then released into the world with an equal amount of attention and acumen. There was something musical about her voice, a tempo that was both calming and stimulating, utterly lulling yet also bracing, like a carefully composed symphony you find yourself lulled into, only to emerge from it having been changed in ways not easily named. It was the kind of voice, that is, that you listen to not just for what she had to say, but for what she wasn’t saying: for what happened in the pauses, and the silence that followed them, silence that seemed full of meaning.

I watched with fondness as she spoke, absently tying her hair into a knot. There was something gentle in the way she did this, a grace to the whole action. It was as if her fingers were mimicking the way she went about life itself: smooth and easy, with a poise that could conceal the turbulence within. There was such a delicacy to the way the strands were wound, a small act that seemed to contain all of her, put on display for anyone who cared to look. She was understated yet considered; refined yet entangled in the realm of the material.

But it was her eyes that kept me hooked and dazzled, two deep pools reflecting the light and the dark of a complex inner life. Lit by the low light of the bar, they seemed to flicker with intensity: seductive and blustering. The type of eyes that made you feel seen; really, truly seen in that disarming and somewhat comforting way. The kind of eyes that seemed to look right through you, right into the middle of you, past your protective layers and into your very heart, whatever or whoever you might be. And in those eyes was something more: an undercurrent of concealed feeling, a vulnerability wrapped in layers of intelligence and poise.

I recall the way the wind blew her hair around her face when we went outdoors, its strands flying towards her as though magnetically drawn to her like a natural force. There was an element of poetry to the way the natural world appeared to respond to her presence, as though it recognised in her a fellow human imbued with the same inherent rhythms of the earth. Those quiet, intimate, almost sacred moments were the times I felt most in touch with her, as if it was the universe itself conspiring to create something special: something worth experiencing and something worth writing about.

And, each time I met her I felt enriched by the experience, as if, somehow, she had managed to have planted a seed or two in my fertile mind, for them to grow and bloom and flower, ideas that I never would have had on my own. She did not so much inspire me as bring something alive inside me, something long dormant, that needed a spark to be set alight.

She made me talk, and suddenly my mind was full of words, and I began to write them in so many words that I could hardly contain her in them. She was the paradox of womanhood: a cause of hope as she emptied my glass, and disappointment as beginning to refill it, she topped it once more. And yet, my glass was perpetually half-empty. She is a complex object, because I find her simple. In short, she is a paradox and an enigma to me, and it is thus that she serves as my muse. A woman who is everything at once and its opposite.

The world as it is: broken, disorderly, sometimes depressing would often prompt a response from her that was as searing as it was intuitive. She was opinionated: words that cut to the chase, that pointed with clarity at the heart of things, and rarely missed their mark. Yet even in her frustration, she could find hope, could see a way forward, even in the most apparently hopeless, stuck situations, as though she had some mysterious capacity to see beyond the obvious, to the possibilities present even in the apparent impossibilities all around. She had a gift for filling with hope, with light, the dark spaces that others left empty.

And, several times I found myself rendered dumb by her arguments: messages in which her logic was so ironclad that all I could do was nod in agreement and submit to the inevitability of her conclusions. There was always something else, something deeper than reason, something more primitive than rationality, that moved her. At the core, beyond all the layers of logical justification, remained an emotion, a passion that she fought hard to keep latent, alive only in the momentary flash of her eyes, or the tremulous quaver of her voice, at moments of verbal refuge, when she spoke of matters that really mattered, that she really cared about. This is what fascinated me, this tallying of forces, the dialectic between darkness and light, despair and hope.

In her, I found not only a muse, but a mirror, the ego ideal, the return of the repressed: the unresolved questions and tensions of my own psychic economy. She was a riddle I could never quite solve. And the point, perhaps, was that I could never quite solve her. Pursuing her, I pursued myself. When I tried to describe her, I found my own voice again: muffled for so long by the chatter, commerce, carping of everyday life.

No matter how she is, no matter how she copes with this world going haywire, she still lives on in my mind, sparking my imagination, and inspiring my muse that gives songs their cadence, and breath to words; and so long as she is allowed to live on, even if I may likely never know who she is, I know I won’t mind, for she is now a part of me.

Ultimately, she is not a muse but a spirit of place, a natural force, a reminder that beauty is paradox, hope resides in the margins, and the richest stories are the ones that can’t be told. She is the source of every syllable humming in my head, the wellspring I draw from with every sentence, every line. And without her, I would have no words at all.

In her, I have found someone who is not only an inspiration but also a travelling companion on the road to the self, a troubadour who leads me deeper into the labyrinth of my own mind, whose shadows hold the deepest truths. She is a light in the dark, a reminder that a path provides perspective even in the most complicated and contradictory of situations that tumult remains a source of generative potential, that life never really ends, and that as long as she remains my tale, I will always find a way to keep on telling it.

আমি আকাশে পাতিয়া কান
শুনেছি  শুনেছি তোমারি গান

আমি আকাশে পাতিয়া কান
শুনেছি  শুনেছি তোমারি গান..

It felt like a city full of people going about their lives, where each thought or idea was a car traversing the city at its own pace, zigzagging through the streets, racing to keep up with the others. Keeping track of what I was supposed to learn or do lost all of its senses, because I could not ever create a single stable mental space where I could focus, relax and get things done. I was therefore very easily misunderstood, as my parents thought I did not want to do my lessons, creating an imaginary world of my own. They thought I was pretending not to be present, when all I wanted was to be able to think clearly and have some sense in my head. In fact, thinking was often a painful process, resembling slogging through a pitch black bog up to one’s knees in mud. I soon stopped trying. And, this handicap remained hidden from me, as well as from others, throughout my first decades of life, only to become blindingly obvious in my adult years.

I was the kid in school who could not keep his butt in his seat and whose eyes were perpetually wooped out the window. Teachers and parents assumed I did not care. I was being defiant. Verbal assaults such as ‘Pay attention’; ‘Stop daydreaming and stop making excuses’ followed me around like a cloud. The truth was, I wished I could pay attention. My mind was a radio with many stations, all blasting at once. It was nearly impossible to focus.

At home, the effort to keep everything connected to the task at hand was thankless. I felt like I was failing less because I did not care and more because nothing I did seemed to stop my attention from ricocheting.
This experience of a constant battle extended far beyond the classroom: it spilled over into the rest of my life. I would experience conversations like I did in the classes: propelling myself headlong from one topic to the next in a sort of mental sprint, without even meaning to. While playing sport, I would often miss the key due to wandering attention.

Socially, it was difficult to keep up with established friendships. For my friends and peers, my attention span was and still is an enigma. I am that friend who begins a story only to detour halfway through before starting another. I am often assumed rude or oblivious. That’s my brain multitasking in real time.

In my adulthood, with more responsibilities, I was pushed to experience these difficulties more profoundly. Avoidance procrastination became an uninvited guest without my knowledge: tasks become more and more daunting as I put them off. I was not lacking willingness to do something but I became scared to do it because I knew I could only do it in a certain way. Often I could not, so that fear left me paralysed and resulted in late submission with a big pile of guilt.

Getting help was a turning point. I, underwent a series of evaluations and consultations with several mental health professionals before being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The diagnosis was eye opening and liberating. For the first time in my life, I had an answer about those patterns, and a reason why they had been there all along. I came to realise that the way my brain works is different, and with that realisation I was able to learn how to cope with my symptoms.

My ADHD diagnosis was a bit like trying on the right glasses for the first time after wearing blurry contacts for many years: it clarified things; many aspects of my difficulties suddenly made more sense. I learned that the very act of procrastinating was itself a consequence of my ADHD, not necessarily a reflection of my character, and that this was liberating. After I found my diagnosis, I was more forgiving of myself and kinder toward my perceived shortcomings.

But post diagnosis, I also saw the ways that my ADHD affected my self-belief and self-image: the thoughtless hurt of others who did not understand how my brain worked, the humiliation of not being compatible with expectations, this absolute tsunami of misapprehension that caused me to internalise the words that said: ‘You aren’t the same as us, you are somehow broken, your brain is not right.’ ADHD knowledge began to counteract the self-doubt, rewiring my self-belief to be grounded in acceptance rather than shame.

The most important was avoidance procrastination. Avoidance procrastination is different from laziness. It is the ability to recognise that it is going to take you such a long time to do a task that you feel overwhelmed. You simply choose not to do the task. That is the nature of avoidance procrastination, particularly common in people with ADHD. My issues with avoidance were severe because I thought differently. My flow of thoughts is rapid. I had difficulties imposing a priority to my thought processes, and in constructing and managing a timeframe. Things that seemed mundane to others could feel as if they belong to a different universe when I viewed them through the lens of my racing thoughts and fears of vulnerability and exposure as imperfect.

This would soon become a coping mechanism: I was avoiding the anxiety of inertia and the stress of persistence. Soon, I started to see this avoidance as less of a failure of willpower and more as a necessary response to the specific kinds of obstacles that ADHD imposed. I came to see my procrastination as symptom rather than flaw.

ADHD has been a constant challenge and a triumph because ADHD itself cannot be cured or resolved. It is part of who I am. It has been a long, winding road toward accepting that I must learn to manage my symptoms rather than attempting to solve the problem. But the journey has been worth it; it has allowed me to continue living and working in the world with a mind that never stops.

In hindsight, I now know that this was not due to being lazy or lack of interest in the material but a different way of processing. If there is one thing that I would tell my younger self, it is that being different is not something to be ashamed of, but rather something to be celebrated. I hope that by sharing my experience, others can relate to what I experienced and realise that they aren’t alone. With the right support and the right understanding, one can thrive with ADHD.

There is an unrelenting guilt: a constant, violent criticism of self that chases me like a hare and nibbles me to death like a snake. And, it is entirely self-created, the guilt of day to day, trivial episodes, blown out of proportion, that back burner and pile up into a crushing load of regret. It is the guilt of not getting back to a text or missed calls. It is the crushing swirl of what I should have said, or the way I said it, that overshadows the present and infects it with the irrelevant, the long dead, the not yet come.

A particularly torturous memory is of waking up to seeing that someone had texted ‘hi’ just six hours before she died. If I had answered her, if I had asked what was wrong, if I would have checked to see how she was. Too many ifs, just too many. This is the hell of derealisation. The feeling that my thoughts are slipping, like sand, through my fingers. I think of someone far away calling for me, and long to respond and see them safe but I am cautious not to move too quickly in case it is not real. I am conscious of ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys’. These are possible worlds that I cannot turn into fact. I must live with the regret of not having been there. This is the hell of dereliction. The reminders that things could have been different, that the future was never secured.

Incessant analysis is part of who I am. I have always overthought things, and although it has certainly become more of a supporting characteristic as I have aged, it is little more than a persisting flu that has hung around for years. I am not referring to a full on psychological ‘problem’ but the tendency my brain has for dissecting a conversation, or an interaction, in an attempt to recreate it, apply hindsight, and generally be critical of either me, them, or, frankly, anyone involved. I will replay words I uttered; the tone I used and how that inflection might come across; the way I might have appeared, to then invariably beat myself up for having likely made an absolute prat out of myself. Did I say the right thing? Was it the right reaction? Did I give the wrong impression? Careful examination of the past does little more than prevent one from enjoying the present and, what is worse, set up future interactions in the same self-consciously trepidatious and poised to implode manner. The fear of saying the wrong thing, or how someone might interpret something said by the ‘wrong’ person, seems to have become a self-perpetuating disorder.

The pressure from it all: be it the boss, mother, office security, even the guy who drops me home daily: perpetually adds to the sense of guilt I feel for not living up, or the constant need to live up to those possibilities and prevent the negative consequences of me failing. My fear of being a disappointment to someone, at some level, is central to every encounter or engagement, at every moment of the day. It is hard to picture it any other way, whether at work or in my personal life. It is hard to see myself as a person capable of failing. It is as if the very thought of letting people down goes beyond the possibility of humiliation, reaching the depth of depression. To be completely honest, I always end up playing to whatever fulfils the expectations of people from the world I move in: colleagues, manager, family, parents: however valid or not the expectations may be. And all this, at the expense of numerous sacrifices to make myself available to meet the demands of those around me.

This everyday habit of re-reading every conversation and text message, replaying words spoken earlier in the day, scrutinising every iota of communication with others is the tip of a never ending  cycle of self recrimination. It is never enough to simply dwell in this feeling alone: it is a vicious cycle, which feeds itself back into itself becoming the sole source of its own nourishment.

The self-recriminating individual exists in a constant state of anxiety from anxious discussion about the actions they perpetrated and their motives behind them. This anxiety does not just cause me to mentally suffer, but it adversely affects the quality of my life. Because of this, it has been difficult to maintain close relationships with people, which is hard to admit because I am one of those individuals who are socially bonded and friendly. I can walk miles for a meet-up with anyone; it is the simple things like wondering whether this step might accidentally trap me in a stairwell of anxiety that I will invariably fall prey to. It is like walking on eggshells, ever conscious of the possibility of my impending collapse into the pit of my inescapable guilt.

But, breaking out of this walled-in prison is not easy. This is my brain: who am I to question it? I am learning to consciously catch myself every time my mind starts overanalysing something, castigating me for what would normally be seen as a ‘normal’ error. I am going easy on myself, knowing that no one is perfect; that I do not have to have the answer to everything all the time; and that it is a very good thing that I am not everywhere at once. I am ‘being the worse me’. I am trying to let myself be human.

It is going to be a long road, towards encouraging myself to be compassionate and accepting, and stopping seeing the guilt and dregs of my imperfections as a burden rather than the evidence of the humanity I am born with. It means unlearning the study of my faults and the practice of feeling displeased with myself, to be able to be free in the present with a clear slate. I am not expecting myself to reach this state overnight, but I am looking forward to the day when the great guilt, the clenched and pointless fists of anxiety, will be allowed to float off from me in wisps like I am letting go of the barge at the end of a terrible festival.

Nestled in the midst of Guwahati, Rukminigaon was once a neighbourhood alive with the soul of a cosmopolitan town coupled with the prosperity of community life. The years, 2015 to 2019 were the happiest years of my life, for I lived there. Rukminigaon, for me was ‘Heaven’ : the best of the city of Guwahati wrapped in a jiffy, the hearty food, fun loving crowd and a concoction of culture to make even the most stressful day bearable.

Everything one could ask of one’s locality was neatly bundled into this. There was a certain sexiness about the way Rukminigaon functioned. There were coffee shops where you could go to get one of those rich, heavy brews, there were restaurants where you could indulge in a meal every bit as decadent, and then there was my favourite, my salvation, my desert island, Urban Mantra, just a stroll away. Urban Mantra was no ordinary pub. It was the place where I could go to forget I had to work, to slow down time, to watch the realities and responsibilities demanded of me by my life and career shatter themselves against some hard and unforgiving surface and dissolve into the clink of glasses and the hum of conversation, the whine of music that dominated the darkness of night.

Rukminigaon magically transformed an average day into an extraordinary one. The crowd was spirited and youthful; consistently making the locality extraordinary. The zest in their lives always added a breath of freshness to the whole neighbourhood. Rukminigaon streets had this characteristic frequency with its unique busy and bustling personality, a feeling that could calm down any sort of restlessness within you. If one had a busy day at work throughout the year, often, the best way to unwind was to take an evening walk down the Manasha Mandir Path, a lively alley lined with trees. A light drizzle on this path and you would not make your way to your doorstep before soaking your clothes. The drips on your neck felt like a dropping kiss, and the light cool breeze humming through your sopping hair took away eagerly the day’s tiredness.
One rainy evening, me and someone special then, took a walk down the same street. Not much rain, but more of a drizzle, soft and comforting. We walked in silence or at least I did. Rain drops echoed smothering the pavement, a tap, tap move. We talked but no noise was made. It was cool and cordial. The street and the drizzle and the company. Oh! what a heaven of a night it was. The evening suddenly absorbed in novel romance, the world bestowing on us.

But, as in all good things, time changes many things. Looking at Rukminigaon today, you see a locality fighting to get over the brim with the rain, a locality crippled by poor infrastructure. It is one of the worst affected localities in the city when it comes to monsoon floods and the monsoon streets become rivers. I used to boast to my friends in different parts of the city that my locality does not flood and with pride say how Rukminigaon, braved the elements and never flooded.

But today, when people have to walk in the waist-deep rainwater, push themselves through what once was heaven, it is tragic. Those streets which once served us as the routes of ecstasy have now become the reminders of the vulnerability of this neighbourhood. Manasha Mandir Path, where I had taken that long-winding walk, is today hardly able to hold on to the rain. Poor drainage along with the inadequacies of civic infrastructure, adversely affects the street. Now, it is unthinkable to take a leisurely walk in the entire length of the street.
Rukminigaon was never the same again. A once lively neighbourhood turned into a flood-prone locality, where memories of what used to be the best time of one’s life overshadow the present struggle.

I hope that one day the drains and infrastructure will improve enough, that life will return to these streets in numbers. Then I will get out for a walk, with the breeze on my face, the city in my ears. Then I will walk down to Urban Mantra, and perhaps relive what was lost to me in Rukminigaon. The laughter, the shouting, the anger, the humour.
For now, it is a reminder of what Rukminigaon was: a haven in Guwahati, a place that contributed to some of the most beautiful years of my life. The place may have changed with the rains, but so has the character of Rukminigaon: the liveliness of the place that made it the charming little locality it once was. I do believe that with time, the locality will overcome its challenges and emerge livelier than ever, reclaiming the glory that it once had, when we all knew and loved it equally. Until then, I will hold on to my own memories of the place, hoping that one day, my little bit of paradise reclaims its glory, not just as a thought, but as a reality.

I have never been good at cutting ties. In the complex web of human relationships, I have gotten caught in things; knots and shreds where friendships ended and relationships soured. The world says let go, rebirth, forget; but I have hung in there, holding on far longer than the other person after their hand loosened. I have dealt in these ways because the persistent act of shaping memories into stories and feelings into art can be cleansing. Often, this penchant for remembering shines a light on what was. But these lean moments when we hang in there to see what might happen can also curl into alleys of recollection, where nostalgia bolsters the self, serving as both a bandage and prison.

I knew from an early age that I could not let go: departed friends, damaged relationships, connections clouded or curdled, remained etched upon me, as if I retained certain warmths if I could but catch them, certain spirits if I held close, invalidating the losses as they sharpened instead of fading, the suffering unyielding.

Nostalgia is a seductive con man and a deceitful friend, I realise because there is no salvageable living memory that is not eroded and autopsied when it is summoned again. And again, I am drawn to those darkening alleys that beckon towards a simpler and greener day. There is safety and succour in repetition. But the roads of the past are always dark and dingy, and lonesome. And the overgrown vegetation is only reassuring for as long as the echo of laughter chokes the space between chapters and vibrates where old conversations lingered before.

It is not like I am holding a grudge ; in fact, I rarely do. But there is a certain merit to harbouring a quiet hatred for those who have done you wrong. It is a flame that burns steadily like a bonfire one can sit next to and enjoy the odd glow that comes from it on the coldest of nights. it is a flame that isn’t burning me up from the inside out or boiling me in impotent fury. It is just there, like a low-grade fever, but it is steady. It is reliable. It is a reminder that while I might be fickle, I still do not forget easily, and I definitely do not forgive easily. It turns out that forgiveness is one of those bona fide virtues of, say, God or the big superhuman archetypal figures who are all-knowing and benevolent and invested in my personal wellbeing, scoring points with me for a lifetime of hatred. I am not God, nor do I aspire to be the person blessed with the grace and talent to forgive and forget. I am very much a human whose great flaw is getting beaten down to the point of being broken when wronged, and so it turns out that bathetic stubbornness is the very best I have going for me because I am a work in progress and therefore even the smallest standing requires that even I acknowledge and salute virtue when it presents itself, when grace and goodwill knock before entering.

Oblivion is a piece of cake. With the passage of time, faces lose their clarity, names disappear under lips, and the circumstances surrounding what was might take on a fuzzy quality. But to forgive? To forget the grudge, to give up the right of retaliation? For me that seems a taboo, a dishonouring of my suffering. It would feel like invalidating the pain I felt, and I am not ready to do that. I have what remains of myself: good and bad, and that is my good and my bad.
The good memories I hold on to. They are my gems: precious and irreplaceable. The laughter shared with friends; the touch of a lover; the little joys of life in the company of others: these are the pleasures I feel proud of. They remind me that, among the sufferings, there was pleasure too; that, when all is said and done, life can also be suave and kind, despite the cruelty.

Yet the good memories, they are quite different. They are scars, telltale signs of where I have been, what I have gone through that quietly transform me, turning me into a hunter, a man intent on dispensing justice, making them pay for the day he wronged me. Not vengeance in the sense of bloodshed or cyclical hatred, but closure, justice. This one is me when I am alone, with my bad memories, the scarps and clefts that nobody knows about.

It is a journey you take by not clinging and clutching at your memories or letting them go altogether; and discovering that your past is a part of and not a substitute for yourself, for you are a sum of your memories and, if they are all good, you would be a saint; and if they are all bad, a sinner. I am shattered fragments of stammering friendships, some that ended for reasons that come back to shame me; some that ended for reasons that brought relief. Relationships that ended without fondness or a wish to keep talking, connections that taught me my own indispensability. Betrayals that, when I summoned the courage to confront the betrayers, either made them apologise warmly for the hurt I had experienced or brought down upon myself both full-throated abuses and non-responses.

But, I am not stuck in history. I know I need to grow and to make new memories and new connections. It is a juggling act, past and present, needs from before and needs now, letting go of: not the memories, but of my grip on the memories. Learning to live in the now is easier, maybe, than it sounds. The past keeps echoing, but the echoes are becoming fainter.

In the end, mine is a story of acceptance. Acceptance of the fact that I am flawed, that I have been wronged, and that I have wronged others. That I have cherished memories, and horrific memories too. That forgiveness is a choice, not a command, and that if anger makes me better, then it is good medicine. Acceptance of the fact that I am human, and in my humanity I find my power.
It is hard to walk away, to keep going after all this. But I can take the first step, and the next, find joy in the afternoon and evening, and learn to live with the morning I would leave behind. To hold on and let go. And, perhaps, I will find the peace I seek not in oblivion, but in remembering the whole of it: the good, the bad, and more.

And, as I write this, I feel the familiar pangs of nostalgia mixed with unease. Life has taken me somewhere that I did not imagine it would, and looking back over my experience, I feel a keen sense that I have strayed significantly from my course. Life growing up was filled to the brim with books, art, and quizzing. I dreamed of living a kind of story that would fulfil that promise; that would allow other people to say: ‘Look at him, it is clearly such an obvious fit!’ As time has gone on, however, my dreams of a perfectly tailored fit have given way to the general ill-fitting grind of adulthood.

And there he was, entirely removed from me: as if I looked in a mirror and saw a fleeting vision from another time and ether. Immersed in stories, art: the arts; as I was as a child, caught up in a dream of what kind of person I would turn out to be, I was convinced that there was a vowel on the horizon. I would be an avid quizzer, I thought. I would become a quiz champion, like one day I would become a champion in life in general. I would read and draw and study and teach and quiz. And win and appreciate life. And, when I watched quizzes on television, shows such as Mastermind India and the Quiz Crucible, I would fanatically absorb everything that was on the screen. The participants were magnificent. I dreamt of what it would be like to stand on the stage, face down at the buzzer, my head dense with answers.

Then, I saw a way to combine these things, perhaps earning my living as a story-teller who could talk my way into a room and then conjure some wonderful or exotic tale to charm my audience. The thought of a regular career was remote and chilling; I wanted to live all the way out on my individual limb, to spin one of those vines around me. Literature and art, the quiz: these things represented not diversions, but possibilities, alternative ways of living; ways to direct my energy, my imagination, my will.

But now I sit at a desk all day, scrolling through spreadsheets and checking off tasks on a to-do list that I did not create but am nonetheless responsible for. The life of someone who focuses on numbers, data, and business processes, does not involve waking up at 5am to work on creative writing, nor does it involve working on starting a collective garden somewhere. The responsibility has certainly shaped who I am. It is not that I do not like my job, I most certainly do. I find the way that I need to shape my mental faculties in order to solve problems and reach job related goals to be satisfying, and there are goals that I would not have reached if I hadn’t gone into it, but it still feels a long way from my childhood dreams.

I took the safer, lesser path, the one that provided an economic livelihood and everything this life affords by way of comfortable material indulgences and, yes, some occasional splurges. I stay in a nice apartment, I can afford good meals and the occasional treat. But I had sold out, and the bizarre, eccentric, and creatively off-grid life I wanted had to recede into the shadows, become a fantasy. I still do not regret a thing. I look in the mirror and see a guy who is disappointed: the wide-eyed 15 year old in many ways; denying the expressive, creating and experiencing and interrogative impulse through the choke hold of a domestically productive economic existence.

It is an uncomfortable mixture of material comfort and the lingering sense that something that needed to be done was left undone. The enthusiasm for books, for the arts, for quizzing: these things are not gone. They are just buried, and it feels to me like someone has thrown something heavy on top of them and stomped on them and walked away. I sometimes try to acknowledge the part of me that still knows those days existed by re-reading favourite books, listening to the music of my youth or combing through YouTube videos to watch Mastermind India or the Quiz Crucible reruns. A flare of joy as I recognise that person in the room, still alive and curious and attending to the world.
Even so, despite all of this, there is still a quiet sense of longing, an unshakeable feeling that I have resolved myself to a form of life that does not quite match my deepest aspirations. This goes beyond the choices of my career, and connects to a larger arc of life. The possibilities for exploration and creative expression that felt urgent in my younger years have given way to routine and obligation. The alternative path I imagined taking: travel, creative work, academic and intellectual pursuits; remains a dream unfulfilled.

Ultimately however, maybe this is not a reflection about disappointment, but about the messy truths of life: growing, changing, taking a path you never thought you would. Life does not ever go quite the way you planned, and the path to where you end up is rarely as straight as you imagined. I might never have become the person I once thought I might become, yet there might still be time to rediscover those passions, to find a way to integrate responsibility with creativity. Perhaps the journey isn’t complete, and there is yet time to honour the hopes of that 15 year old.

These small connections reassure me that there is still a little of the person I once wanted to be in this second act of my life. Eventually, I will find myself on a stage, engaging in theatrical hand movements that mimic the shape of a Q. But rather than a high stakes quiz, it will be a final farewell. At least I hope it will be a good one.
Thus, here’s to the tale: both the one we have trodden, and the one we have yet to; knowing that although we are not always exactly where we would imagine ourselves to be, the old adage is true: it is all in the journey, and who knows, maybe the best pages are still to come.