She bruised herself at soccer,
her play doh castle crumbled,
she finished last in the game,
and always dropped the ball,
she missed homerun by a mile,
and was late for the park swing,
Her parents thought it embarrassing.
The four year old thought it fun.
It was her secret. No one knew, not even her boyfriend. And she wanted to keep it that way. Telling people would mean speaking out and she wasn’t sure how to do that.
She had been mute for 22 years. People had thought she’d never speak out. Her parents had given up hope, and so had her doctors.
But then one day, he waltzed into her uneventful life. She stood on the pavement looking at vehicles clamouring past with no intention of stopping. The pedestrian crossing was just a dab of paint in her wheel-inflicted neighbourhood.
Every time she took a step towards the crossing, a car would whiz by, knocking the wind out of her and messing up her hair. And she’d step back onto the comforting pavement, and wait for another rare gap when the street would be less occupied.
After what seemed like hours, a man popped out of nowhere and stood at her side. He tilted his head to peek at the endless stream of vehicles, and then took a couple of steps back.
Heaving a sigh, he turned to look at her. “Busy street, huh?” he raised his eyebrows. Though she hadn’t heard what he said, she read him. And smiled, with a vigourous nod. He said nothing more, and she returned her gaze to the traffic lights, wondering if someone had tampered with it.
The next thing she knew, someone had grabbed her arm and dragged her onto the street. In one swift moment, she crossed the street. When she realised it, she was on the other side of the street, her hair all over her eyes, and the man heaving next to her. Her heart thumped in its rib cage and she breathed deep to bring it down to normal.
“What the hell did you do, you a — ” She almost blurted out. The words exploded inside her head, but not a sound escaped her mouth. He was smiling at her, expecting to say something. When she didn’t, however, he realised shouldn’t linger any longer. Waving at her, he disappeared into the building nearby.
Looking his figure shrinking in the distance, she mused, “asshole.” And this time, the word came out loud enough for her to hear it. For the first time in 22 years, she had uttered a word.
It took me over a week to note that in writing, but I think June is the best month of the year. I know some bloggers do a month-to-month post about the month itself, but I’m not one of them. I just happen to like June better than any other month.
It’s no surprise why: just look out the window. It’s been an awful summer, and it’s so good to plunge into the smooth breeze after the scorching heat. June is the only month when people are happy to leave the house in the morning or ride a bike in the park after sun down. It’s the month in between the mangoes and the monsoons. It’s neither this nor that, but it’s got the best of both seasons.
It feels great to wake every morning without your t-shirt clinging to your perspiring back. Or to not want to sit inside the refrigerator all day. It’s liberating, in a whole new sense, to step out of the house without drenching yourself in an “ice-cool” talcum powder that never works as well as they do in commercials.
What’s better than June weather? It’s cool in the morning, it’s cool in the evening, and it’s cool at night. The sun comes up when he wants to and smiles all day long. And all of a sudden, is something goes amiss, it rains. With no warning at all, just like in life. And then we’re smiling again, and staying up a little late.
Even the sun resonates with us this month. So much so that the sun has his heads in the clouds, while we have ours in the iCloud. Ain’t it wonderful to walk all day with the clouds looking over us?
I like July too, but that’s another month altogether.
It’s June now, but I’d still like to think March was recent. Having said that, I’d give anything to revisit my recent visit to the western borders of India. I’ve written quite a lot of my travels, and spoken about it even more. To be honest, I brought back over a thousand photos, and I needed a way to flaunt them.
But it wasn’t just about the charming sights and endless stream of photos. There were so many new things I had to get used to, and I did. It wasn’t easy being thrown into a vehicle with five others and travelling uphill with my head swirling. But I got used to it. I had no choice, but I enjoyed it too.
And we travelled with kids. Small kids, infants, even. That was my tipping point. I wasn’t keen on having kids on the trip, because they have a tendency to ruin it for the rest of us. And sure enough, there were a few tears, a few tantrums, and plenty of throwing up incidents I’d rather erase from my memory. It’s not something I liked or would recommend, but I got used to it. I just had to accept the fact that we were a party of twenty four, including three senior citizens and five kids, braving a temperature as low as -6˚C.
I hated having to give up the window seats and making small conversation every time we stopped for tea. But when I look back at the whole trip, I have nothing but memories I cherish. I enjoyed every bit of it. It was hard at first, and I had my own inertia to overcome, but once I did, I saw how beautiful even mundane things like a steep U bend became. It brought me closer to the people I travelled with. I hadn’t expected to meet a sixty-five year old eager to jump into a freezing lake. It showed me a different side of the people I thought I knew. I hadn’t liked the idea of travelling with my colleagues’ parents, but I had judged too soon. Because by the time we returned, they had became as close to me as my own parents.
It was an adventure of a lifetime.
The Chaos Within 