Winter it is.. am still cold and dormant
Winter it is... am still cold and dormant
Jan 30, 2013
You might be wondering where I have been these days.
Last night, I went for a relaxing stroll across my street when I discovered a beautiful girl running as if she were being chased by a pack of street dogs. Already disturbed by the inhuman, violent, nerve-shattering Delhi incident, my adrenaline rushed forward before my brain could apply for permission. I ran to protect her.
When I reached her, I noticed an exterminating rage on her face.
Before I could say a word, she slammed me with her handbag.
“What are you doing, lady?” I shouted.
She seemed deaf to reason. She kept hitting me — hard, harder, and then harder than grammar allows. Every time I asked her what she was doing, she answered with another blow.
When I started bleeding, she suddenly became silent and sat down on the platform. Then, all at once, she began to cry.
“Why did you do this to me?” she asked.
I was the one bleeding red.
“You molested my forehead with your handbag and now you are asking me this question?”
“Hmm… are you hurt?” she asked, staring at the droplets of my B positive blood oozing from my head, sliding through my T-shirt, and recklessly spilling across the road.
Having B positive blood does not mean I am an ascetic practicing self-denial. I wanted to hit her back with her black heels. But I did not. I do not hurt women of any sort, because I have the greatest reverence for Goddess Durga Ma.
“No, lady,” I said. “It is just tomato sauce. I suddenly craved to dip my face in it.”
“Oh, come on, Karts. Give me a break from your mind-numbing, so-called jokes. If I have to name one person who can make me laugh even when he is badly hurt, it has to be you.”
This was the worst of the worst things that could happen to a man: being attacked by a random girl with a giant handbag and still patiently listening to her silent wit.
Wait a minute.
Did she just call me Karts?
“Hey, how do you know my name? I am not the Karthik you are looking for.”
“Hehehe,” she chuckled. “So who are you? The Karthik who never cares about his blog or the few followers who have been incessantly visiting his page for an update? Or the Karthik who recently got hit by his blog-lover for not giving her all the mental pleasure she wanted from the physical world?”
Honestly, I did not have an answer.
I knew she knew me well.
So, like a CIA agent preparing himself before opening a vault, I composed myself before asking the next question.
“I have quit blogging. Just leave me alone.”
She looked at me.
Not with anger this time. Not even with sadness.
She looked at me the way a ceiling fan looks at a man lying awake at 2:37 a.m. — spinning above him, knowing all his secrets, refusing to fall and end the drama.
“You quit blogging?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I have a life.”
She looked around the empty street, the sleeping tea shop, the barking dogs, and the weak Indian winter hanging in the air like an unpaid electricity bill.
“This is your life?”
“Part of it,” I said.
“And what about the other part?”
“What other part?”
“The part where you were honest.”
That hit harder than the handbag.
For a moment, both of us were silent. Even the dogs stopped barking, perhaps to respect the seriousness of the conversation, or perhaps because one of them had found a discarded parotta packet near the drainage.
She opened her handbag and took out something.
I thought it was going to be a knife.
It was worse.
It was a notebook.
A black notebook. Old. Corners bent. Pages swollen with rain, sweat, and the kind of dreams men abandon when they start wearing formal shirts.
She placed it on my lap.
I knew that notebook.
It was mine.
I had used it in college. I had written terrible poems in it, the kind where the moon was always lonely, the rain was always philosophical, and the girl never replied to the text message. I had written story ideas in it. Half-lines. Angry sentences. Jokes that had no home. Beginnings that never reached endings.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“You left it behind.”
“Where?”
“In yourself.”
I stared at her.
“Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t act like you don’t understand metaphors. You used to overuse them like free Wi-Fi.”
I opened the notebook.
The first page said:
One day I will write something that will make even silence feel jealous.
I closed it immediately.
Some sentences are like old lovers. You should never meet them after many years. They will either make you laugh at your stupidity or cry at your innocence.
“I was young,” I said.
“You were alive,” she said.
“I am alive now also.”
“No. Now you are functioning.”
Again, unnecessary violence. This time verbal.
I stood up, pressing the wound on my forehead with one hand and holding the notebook with the other.
“Listen, madam. I don’t know who you are. Maybe you are one of my readers. Maybe you are mentally unstable. Maybe you are both, which is a very dangerous combination. But I have moved on. People grow up. They stop writing nonsense on blogs. They get busy. They become practical.”
“Practical?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that what you call fear nowadays?”
I wanted to say something sharp. Something heroic. Something that would make her regret underestimating me.
But nothing came.
Only the truth came, shameless fellow that it is.
I had stopped writing not because I had nothing to say.
I had stopped because I had too much to say.
The world had become louder. Every opinion had become a sword. Every sentence had become evidence. Every feeling had to be defended in court. It was safer to be silent. Safer to disappear. Safer to let the blog gather dust like an old temple where the deity had gone on leave.
She stood up.
The streetlight flickered above her. For one second, she looked like an ordinary girl with mascara ruined by crying.
For another second, she looked like something older.
A goddess? A ghost? A frustrated subscriber?
I could not tell.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
She smiled.
“Write.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You attacked me for a blog update?”
“Don’t reduce art to content, Karts.”
“Don’t reduce assault to motivation, lady.”
“Fine,” she said. “I apologize for the handbag. But not for the intention.”
“Very convenient.”
She tore a page from the notebook and gave it to me.
“Write now.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“On the road?”
“Yes.”
“With blood coming from my head?”
“Excellent ink substitute.”
“You are insane.”
“You are late.”
There are moments in life when a man must choose between dignity and destiny. Naturally, I chose neither. I sat down on the platform beside her, held the paper against the notebook, and began to write.
At first, my hand trembled. Not because of the injury. Because of the memory.
The first sentence came slowly.
Then the second.
Then the third came running like it had been waiting in traffic for many months.
The street began to change.
The closed tea shop opened one eye. The electric wires above us hummed like old relatives gossiping during a wedding. A crow, which had no business being awake at that hour, landed on a pole and judged my handwriting. The dogs formed a small committee at a safe distance.
The girl watched me write.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“A story.”
“About what?”
“About a man who goes for a walk and gets beaten by his abandoned talent.”
She laughed.
Not politely. Not beautifully. She laughed like someone had unlocked a rusted gate inside her chest.
And just like that, the night became less cruel.
I wrote about the girl running.
I wrote about the handbag.
I wrote about the B positive blood, which had done nothing wrong except belong to me.
I wrote about my reverence for Goddess Durga Ma and my secret desire to weaponize black heels.
I wrote about the followers who kept visiting a dead page, like villagers leaving lamps at a shrine even after the priest had vanished.
And finally, I wrote about her.
When I looked up, she was crying again.
“Why now?” I asked. “Did I make a spelling mistake?”
She shook her head.
“You remembered me.”
“Who are you?”
She touched the notebook.
“I am the part of you that waited.”
A cold breeze passed through the street.
Suddenly, I understood.
She was not a random girl.
She was my blog.
My abandoned page.
My unwritten sentences.
My small crowd of readers.
My old arrogance.
My younger courage.
My shame.
My hunger.
She was every unfinished paragraph that had grown legs, bought a handbag, and come searching for revenge.
“I thought you died,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “I was only dormant.”
That was the most winter thing I had ever heard.
I laughed so hard my wound started hurting again.
She stood up and took the page from my hand.
“This is good,” she said.
“Really?”
“No. But it is alive.”
I nodded. That was enough.
She started walking away.
“Wait,” I said. “Will I see you again?”
She turned back.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you write before I have to come back with a bigger handbag.”
Then she disappeared into the street, not dramatically like in cinema, but practically — by turning left near the medical shop.
I sat there for a few more minutes, bleeding, smiling, and holding the notebook like a rescued child.
The next morning, when I woke up, there was no wound on my forehead.
No blood on my T-shirt.
No black notebook beside my bed.
For a second, I thought it had been a dream.
Then I opened my laptop.
My blog page was already open.
The cursor was blinking.
And on the screen, one line had been typed:
Winter it is... am still cold and dormant.
I smiled.
Maybe that was true.
Maybe I had gone cold.
Maybe something inside me had curled itself into a corner and refused to bloom.
But winter is not death. It is only a season with bad public relations.
At that exact moment, I felt something strange. Not inspiration. Not nostalgia. Something heavier. Something almost impossible to explain.
It felt as if I had been sent from the future.
Not to change the world.
Not to save humanity.
Not to warn myself about love, marks, money, or missed buses.
But to give life to the stories that were left half-finished.
The person who had written those drafts was no longer entirely me. He had my name, my handwriting, my foolish jokes, my dramatic blood group references, and my unnecessary affection for metaphors. But he was gone. Or maybe he had become seed. Or maybe he had simply walked ahead into time and left behind these unfinished little creatures, still breathing in the dark.
I was not returning as the same person.
I was returning as evidence.
Evidence that the cold had not killed me.
Evidence that dormancy was not defeat.
Evidence that a half-written story is not a dead story. It is only waiting for the right version of you to arrive.
So I began to write again — not to prove that I was alive, not to entertain the world, not even to escape loneliness, but to clear all the half-written drafts sitting there like unsent letters, unfinished prayers, and unpaid emotional debts.
Ezhudhaadha pakkangal.
The unwritten pages.
The pages that had waited in silence.
The pages that belonged to a younger me, an older me, and some strange future me who had finally come back to complete them.
I began to write because the person who started those stories was no longer me.
And still, somehow, he was mine.
I began to write to give his ghosts a body.
I began to write to see the way of the world.
And perhaps, through that, to see my way back into it.
