Kind of puts everything into perspective, doesn’t it?
Remember playing with doll houses? I do. I had one that was in shades of primarily pink pastel complete with tiny furniture and little shutters on the windows. My grandparents had bought it for me and my sister and for a brief time it was the ultimate joy of my life. We’d spend entire afternoons tinkering away, positioning our Barbies to sit atop the chairs or trudge down the stairs. We’d let them cook in the petite kitchen and change their outfits at regular intervals just because. It was like designing the perfect life, I wonder if subconsciously I was painting my hopes in those hours. Wasn’t the doll house a projection of my, albeit childish, dreams for life after all? I suppose that it was just the most ideal life my miniature self could fashion at the time.
I had the doll house until I was eight years old and maybe I would have outgrown it soon anyways, but moving countries separated me from the cardboard wonder-piece much too soon. I can still remember the feel of the plastic doors, the exact magenta of the flowers painted unto its side. Somehow when I think of “happy things”, the doll house resurfaces in memory. More than the house itself though, I think I miss all that was attached to it.
Tere bina zindagi se koi shikwa to nahin
Tere bina zindagi bhi lekin, zindago toh nahin
navk:
(This is for Heer, our picchi sister in New Zealand who requested that we write a collaborative piece together. So we chose to write on the first day we met.)
— — — — —
It is strange but two people can be at the exact same place, at the very same time and tell completely different…
But the tide always pulls me ashore each time…
I cannot seem to leave a song half-played. I simply have to let it finish until I can turn off my laptop/iPod for the night. Tell me its not just me…
Cover of Bheegi Bheegi raton mein
(For you Mush…And I can’t seem to turn down a request even though I know I’m going to butcher the song. *sigh*)
Thank god, she’s patient.
He must still be sleeping
I got lost
Well, as long as you made it
Oh, hi.
(awkward silences ensue)
Get in the car (and let’s drive off into the sunset)
This goes against everything I’ve been taught since Kindergarten
Just show me where to park
Okay, this way now (do not trip feet!)
She likes to open her own doors (I’ve noticed)
Wonder if I’m coming across as the ultimate nerd
I wonder if I should ask to help her with all those books (doesn’t-)
I’m talking far too much, I think the initial awkwardness is wearing off
I wonder if she’ll sing to me…
(This was the close-to-fail collaboration piece that navk and I attempted today. It’s mostly just a conversation but it was fun nonetheless. Hope you guys won’t unfollow us now lol)
You’re right, it was pretty awesome! We live in the same city so I guess that helped :)
I’m currently taking a course on the history of the Holocaust and as I do the readings it breaks my heart to think that people could actually inflict such atrocities on other human beings. Some of the material is so difficult to read that I have to put it down at regular intervals to force myself to breathe, so that I may finish reading the chapter on how Jewish people were massacred by the droves or children shot before the very eyes of their parents. The inhumanity is startling and I cannot even begin to imagine how some lived through it. Yet they did and of the most astonishing things about survivor stories is that many come from primary documents, i.e. diaries and journals written by Jewish prisoners themselves. To think that while they were overworked, underfed, subject to terribly unsanitary conditions, and at the mercy of ruthless treatment by Nazi soldiers, some found it in themselves to lift a pen to paper… it just takes my breath away. How, after everything had turned so bleak, did these people write of their trials? How did they put together paragraphs and sentences when life itself had become such a chaotic struggle? But they did write, daily even, documenting each ounce of their pain. As I read through some Holocaust diaries, I’m deeply humbled by the power of writing. Sitting here in 2012, comfortable in front of my laptop, I am struck by the force of the written word that has found its way to me from the sorrow filled pen of a Holocaust prisoner from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. Time and time again, this world becomes most terrible place, yet, the written word transcends that somehow. And for that much, I am grateful.
