The pee collector!

     I am an ordinary person who has made many million mistakes…so far.  My earliest memory of a mistake was collecting my pee in a mug only to  pour  it out after wondering about the yellow tinge of it. Gross? Yeah…but what can I say, I was a curious child.

     I stole coins from my piggy bank. It was the love of ice cream that made me commit the “crime.”  I  would climb up sneakily to the loft, an “unreachable” place where my mom kept it. It was a small tin box  with  a slot on the lid (dad’s work, “Reuse” in the 80’s) When the thought of ice cream crept into my mind in the hot days of summer I climbed upon the door and would take as much as I needed.
 
No guilt!
   
     I was punished a lot in school  for not doing home work and for failing in almost all subjects. I wondered why the grown ups were so cruel.  What they perceived as “me” was not “me” to me. I was clueless of their ways, but I had me! 
    
     Later years , it all continued… my mistakes.  Still no guilt. 
    
     On one rainy night I found two baby bats on the steps to our terrace. I took them and fed them milk. There was no wikihow then. I took a wild guess and gave them drops of milk which they very happily licked. I was glad I found them. A little proud too as I rescued them while my sisters were scared to even look at them. After a few hours I left them in a flower pot on the terrace hoping their mom would pick them up from there. The bats that were flying by unusually close that night made me do it.  
     The next day when I went up I saw the babies dead. I had left them in the cold night. It was my mistake that they were dead. GUILT! 
     After killing the two baby bats, it was a two day old puppy that I stepped on in the dark. GUILT! 
    
     Then the three squirrel babies that recently died on my watch. GUILT! 

     Is it possible to love myself?  

     We change as we age. As we grow we become very hard on ourselves. The support we got from ourselves when we were kids become unavailable. We begin to see what the world sees of us. I was me but every mistake began to haunt me.  And how can one live without making any mistakes? 

Self love is vital to  happiness…to survival. 

Sometimes  I  need to be the girl I was when I stole the money for ice cream. I remembered how easy it was for me to forgive myself then. 
She taught me to love “me” unconditionally.

I am the only one who can free myself from guilt and that is the  most precious lesson growing up has taught me. 

Puppy Love

My landlady is a  very kind and thoughtful woman. One of the big reasons for me to choose this house to rent is her. The first day I went to check out the house I saw two mongrel puppies, Cherry and Amigo. Later she told me that she found them on the road and didn’t have the heart to leave them there. She took them with her and they were loved by her and the teenagers of the family. They grew up happily, they grew up fast.  

Country bred puppies with no training whatsoever, results in mayhem. The dogs were let out and they brought back trash that were dumped on the roadside.  Both the dogs got huge and one of them, cherry, was very unmanageable.  The house has enough open yard for the dogs to move free, so I asked them to keep the gate closed and avoid letting the dogs out on the street. I am a dog person, but I dint like it when cherry showed its love by jumping on to me. They stink as they stayed on the road most times. One day as I was parking my two wheeler when we got home , cherry pushed down my daughter and the backside of her leg was burnt by the silencer. The whole neighborhood heard her scream in pain.  

 Amigo was no trouble, it ate garbage and was quiet, and so that was let into their house while cherry was driven out.  Cherry was taken to a far off place and was dumped there.  Most dogs end up like this as the owners fall out of love with them.  But Cherry  came back after a month and a half. Stupid faithful dog!  when  Amigo died because of snake bite, they felt very bad that it was not Cherry.  Cherry became a lot quieter after its return.  It got pregnant and gave birth to a litter of beautiful puppies. This time they kept a male puppy and the rest were given for adoption, a smart decision.   

I talk with the mother or the daughter of the family as they are nice. The house owner is a very rude moron.  I told the girl that keeping the male puppy was not a good idea as there was Cherry.  But it was the dad’s decision she said.  It was nice to see cherry and the puppy playing with each other happily.  That changed soon. Baby’s diapers became the new thing to play with by the stray dogs of the neighborhood.  Some “super smart” humans kept throwing the used diapers on the road and the “stupid” dogs tore them and threw them all over the street.  There are like seven stray dogs in the area, including Cherry and the puppy. But the puppy was punished.  

An angered “smart” lady resident  hit the puppy with a cane. It didn’t end there. The house owner began to tie the puppy up. It cried and moaned but “it was for its own safety.” The diaper incident continued to take place though.  And the puppy stopped fighting and accepted the chain. It made me very sad to look at the puppy chained.  Every time it cried  because of rain or cold I rang up the lady, and the puppy was taken and chained upstairs where they live.  

Everyday I leave for work looking at the puppy that gave me a sad face.  The spirit of it was crushed already. It was the saddest puppy I ever saw. It peed,  pooped and ate at the same place. Another “smart” thing about humans is how they try to change nature. Many dogs are fed rice with little or no milk.  

We destroy nature in so many ways!     

Yesterday I was surprised to see the puppy not chained. But it was at the place where it was tied down. I thought to myself that may be it was “institutionalized” Morgon Freeman’s theory in The Shawshank Redemption.  This morning I heard it moaning and found it lying in its own pee.  It was dying. I spent some time with it telling it that it was okay to die. I could not control my tears as the lifeless puppy reminded me how  happy it was once playing with its mom! I rang up the landlady and told her that it’s better if one of the kids be with the dying  puppy. No one came down. The puppy died, and the “father” of the family came down, dug a hole in the front yard and buried the puppy.  The mean cruel things we do to others!  

Are humans capable of  love? Do we know what love is?  

This is the same pattern I find when we fall in love. we are attracted to someone, fall in love…happy times, that ends soon.  we want the person to change in some way. we try to change the person forcefully or subtly. Bottom line we think the person whom we were attracted to  once doesn’t seem attractive enough!  Why does love fade away?  

It breaks my heart every time I hear a dog cry. They are chained and caged. I wish such dogs to spread some deadly diseases to the IDIOTS who torture them.    

Married / Screwed?

Name?

“Skyla”

Mrs. Skyla?

“No Miss Skyla!”

Miss?….age?

“31”

But miss?

“Yes”

     Such tiny conversation I had with the lady behind the reception at a scan center. She was polite, making an appointment for me with a smile on her face. She must be my age or younger. Married for sure, saw her bright yellow ‘thali’. I went there to take a mammogram and what gave her the shock was me telling her that I was a miss not a mrs! This title thing is getting on my nerve these days! Why is marriage given so much importance? Let me rephrase…why is marriage before thirty- ish so important?

     Speaking of my own life, I got a divorce not just because I married the wrong guy, but because I married him for wrong reasons too. Like many women I had to ‘control’ my emotions and the biological urges of my body. Marriage here is the only way to have sex (well in majority of cases). It is quite natural and normal for an adult to long for a companion who is hoped to satisfy you emotionally and sexually.  But to find such a person is a herculean task, given the innumerable restrictions for a woman.

     I was crazily in love with my ex, but he married me as he  lost hope of getting a ‘proper’ marriage from his family. Men are not our enemy and not all men are bad. I would not have gotten married if live-in relationships are not a taboo here. Most of us get married because that is the next thing to do after one finishes education and gets a job. Marriage, both arranged and non-arranged, is a big gamble. There are pros and cons in both the types, but the main reason for it to take place is – everyone does it and so does everyone.

​Yes, live-in relationships spoil our “culture” – one woman for one man – but come on whom are we kidding? ‘To get married’ should be a seriously- taken- individual decision.  No one should get married because of their parents or because of the pressure from the society or because one wants to be loved.

     And if you do get married for one such reason then yeah you are screwed!

Life as I know it

     I am a romantic. I grew up watching English movies and fell in love with the language. It sounded beautiful and simple to me. My summer holidays were spent watching movies all night or reading novels. The rage of the Angels was my first novel. I remember the first time I went to the Central Library in my hometown, Madurai. The place made me very happy.

     I hate crowded places and the English Fiction was the most secluded, unvisited section of the library. As I walked silently amidst the tall racks of books I was the only one who could hear my heart  screaming with joy. I wish I could remember the titles of the books I read in that period. My memory sucks! But I remember this one book that moved me deeply and shook me to the core – Anne Frank’s Diary! I saw myself in her. Having the habit of keeping a journal and growing up with sisters as rivals made me think so.

     The first pain I could remember was caused by my sisters, I was not included in their circle. I remember playing in the streets or in the house all alone all the time.

The second pain was caused by the society. I was termed as the dark girl. I remember looking in mirror and seeing what the others see.

     The third pain was by my body filled with hyper hormones. I was so longing to be loved  and to be touched. I remember drinking cough syrup to put me to sleep, as the “thoughts” kept me up.

The fourth and the most painful – My marriage. I have heard nasty things that would make one want to throw up! I was strangulated, slapped, kneed on my breast, dragged by pulling my hair, arm twisted to the extent that I thought it wasgonna come off my shoulder….

And now back to square one…

So I thought!

     But you know what all those pain were not caused by others! I am so not going to be a coward to blame others for my sad life. I ‘m going to keep my head up high and change the story of my life into a happy one. Let them try to screw it up, in any which way but I am not going to give “a tiny rat’s ass” about it at all. This is me.  

     I have been so arrogant to think that I was living a horrible life, a life of feeling so lonely from a very young age, a life of seeking for love in the wrong places, a life of verbal and physical abuse as an everyday occurrence.

     I am out of the pain I was in and now it seems like I am ready to count the blessings. When Holocaust did not change the person Anne Frank was, what I went through is nothing.  My battle is no more with the others.  Every step I take now is towards keeping myself happy, without hurting others.