What Makes a Good Writer? (Podcast)

When the Mug of Life Brims Over

I am going to call the protagonist of this story ‘Bubbly’.

She looked like a Gen Z kid. Full of mirth and zest, she traipsed around the restaurant where live music played old Hindi songs, from soulful Kishore and Rafi to Shammi Kapoor ditties that had many of us grooving. Her thick curly hair was tied up in a half ponytail and it fountained down her shoulders and slender neck. Her distressed jeans seemed like a symbol of the carefree persona she revealed through her easy demeanour, loud laughter and chatter with guests around her table. For a while, I took her to be part of a bigger family that were seated adjacent to her table. But she was not. She was there with a man, presumably the love of her life.

The evening slowly morphed into a state of sedate calmness with all the peppy numbers drowning out, and the slow melodies wafting in from the live orchestra. Bubbly, by now, had had one too many and was laughing louder than the prescribed decibels. With each pint, she seemed to levitate and float like an ‘apoopanthaadi’ (Milkweed), with her hair flailing in the air and her singing joyfully out-of-sync with the singer on stage. If angels were drunk, they might look like this.

‘She is drunk to the hilt,’ said our friend with a grin. She indeed was.

In her woozy state, she went to the table next to hers, hugged the guests there as if they were her closest relatives, chatted with them in a brew-washed voice and took an old man seemingly in his early eighties for a dance. She twirled holding his hand, swayed with him, even as his wife sat and watched. In the dim light, it wasn’t clear if she was amused, but the rest of the family thoroughly were. They cheered them on as Bubbly brought back youthful spring to his feet, and she gave him a hug before leading him back to his seat.

‘Let’s go. We have a flight to catch,’ I heard the man who was with her say over the music. But Bubbly would have none of it. She was on a song (and dance) as she moved to another table, held a toddler and took a few baby dance steps with her and her mother.

The man went after her as she continued to remain lost in the lightness of her being, exhorting her to leave.

‘We have an early morning flight to catch, baby, come let’s go,’ he said, with the utmost tenderness only a man besotted with love is capable of saying. He was close to pleading, but Bubbly couldn’t care less. She didn’t want to leave. It seemed as if she wanted to spend the rest of her life wallowing in the sobered night air inside the restaurant.

People who are tippled beyond recognition make curious spectacles; some even become a nuisance, but to me Bubbly represented a free spirit claiming her space in the world. She did what came to her naturally.

‘We are going to miss the flight for sure,’ the man said, turning around to us, knowing full well that the few eyes that remained in the restaurant at that late hour were fully on his woman. I wondered if he was helpless or frustrated, but he was evidently a patient human being. Given a choice, he might have let her gallivant till the wee hours, but the morning flight prompted him to wrench her out her ecstatic bearing.

The morning flight, in the end, became the nemesis of her boundless joy.

Irked by his constant urging, at some point she lost it. The bubbles burst, the fizz flowed over as tears, and she began to give out a typical tantrum cry. The man looked on helplessly as she stomped out of the restaurant bawling, ‘you are a bad man, you are a bad man’.

As we settled our bill and walked out, we saw her slumped on the floor in the corridor. The man was trying to get her to her feet, but she sat cemented firmly, thrashing her arms at him.

‘Is she OK?’ I asked the man and leaned over to take Bubbly’s hand in mine. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I had an impulsive urge to reach out to her and give her a word of solace.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked, to which she said, ‘No, I am not. And he is a very bad boy. He made me cry and now he wants to drag me away from here. He is a bad boy’.

‘Yes, he is,’ I said to placate her, at the same time nodding at the man to mean, ‘it’s OK’.

‘No, he is not. He is not a bad boy. He is my husband. I love him very much. But he made me cry. I hate him,’ she said and I smiled at the dichotomy.

I was still on my knees, uttering, ‘it’s OK, it’s OK’ for want of better words to say.

The man bent to help her get up, and before I could realise it, she had got up, freed herself from his grip and uttered obscenities at him.

Bubbly’s husband looked scandalized. ‘I am so sorry about her language. Please forgive her. In fact, she just lost her mother, and she is traumatized. She hasn’t been able to come to terms with it. I am so sorry,’ he said.

My shoulders drooped at those words as I looked at Bubbly struggling to cope with a pain that was tearing her asunder inside even as she fluttered like a butterfly in the restaurant. The grief ripped the seams at a point, and she took the liberty to purge all that she had cleverly hidden till then.

It was probably the drink that gave her the freedom to rinse the veneer of happiness. Or was it just the weight of her sorrow she could no longer bear that made her freak out and risk her reputation?

I wished I had whatever it was that allowed her to bare her heart without having to feign normalcy and gave her tears a license to flow unhindered when they needed them to. I wish we all had the courage to whoop it out when the heart is aching sore, to give our secret sorrows a voice when they are muffled by norms of decency, and just not lie to the world that all is well, when it is actually not.

Bubbly’s undue effervescence wasn’t artificial. She had breached all boundaries of restraint then. Neither were her spasmodic sobs fake. They were expressions of a festering wound, or perhaps a disguised call for help that she wanted the world to hear.

I have been through moments of intense distress when I wanted shriek so loud that the world would stop in its tracks. We all have borne it at different points in life. But we have muzzled our emotions in the name of pride and propriety. We have drenched our pillows with many a secret tear; we have felt the weight of unspoken woes pressed against our chest. But unlike Bubbly, we masked them all. Unlike her, we did not laugh hard enough; we did not cry loud enough. We wore greasepaints on our face. We play-acted our lives.

We have all been serene oceans with buried storms, and silent skies with muffled thunders. All for the sake of a judging world.

Masqueraders all. The world and we.

Faraway Love

Saira didn’t want to get married to Mustafa, but she did. At the tender age of 17.

Saira didn’t want her Gulf husband to leave her and go only 10 days after their nuptials. But he did.

All she had to cling to when he departed was the smell of his Brut on her pillow, smeared with her soft sobs. All he took with him was the fragrance from a bride’s jasmine decked hair.

Mustafa didn’t see Saira for two long years after that. Saira couldn’t speak about her incipient love for him till he returned.

Two years. By then, a lot had happened in their lives.

There was no whatsapp back then; no video call; no means to convey love and longing except with tears. Sighs were the only medium of expression. And the silhouette of their lives was filled with sadness.

When I wrote about Mustafa and Saira in my debut novel, 𝙎𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙢𝙨, 𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙍𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙨, nearly 20 years ago, this was the case with Indian migrant labourers who left their newly-wed wives back home and came to the Gulf.

It still is. Nothing much has changed in the realm of the heart, except that technology has given a semblance of proximity to their parting.

But does that mitigate the pain of having to live away for years together?

Yesterday, Mahesh (name changed), the docile, young man who helps us keep our home clean, came with a box of Gulab Jamun,

‘𝘔𝘦𝘳𝘢 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘢𝘥𝘪 𝘬𝘢 𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘪,' he said.

'𝘉𝘢𝘥𝘩𝘢𝘪 𝘩𝘰,' I twittered with delight.

I was surprised that a year had already passed since his marriage. It was around the same time last year that he had joined us, and I remember the pictures he showed us soon after he returned. They looked like stars on a marquee.

Mahesh’s wife is very pretty. Almost juvenile-looking and demure, like Saira.

He left her behind 10 days after their marriage. Like Mustafa. I wondered how the narrative had remained almost unchanged in 20 years.

‘When will you go home next?’ I asked as I took the sweet from him, regretting the question soon after. I wondered if I had touched a raw nerve, silently admonishing me for the mindless query.

‘After one year,’ he said.

Mahesh, by nature, is a soft-spoken person. It is hard to feel any emotion in his voice even in routine conversations. But it requires no major wisdom to sense the sadness in his reply. You don’t need special sensors to feel the pain the couple must have felt on a day like this. You don’t need a stethoscope to hear the throb in a lover’s lonely heart. Its noiseless din can drown the sound of heavy traffic on the Sheikh Zayed road outside.

Mahesh and his wife can attest their love in words any number of times over a video call. They can replicate passion in myriad ways over text messages. But nothing can substitute being with each other in the flesh and blood. Nothing can replace the raw sense of love that the occasion demanded.

Love cannot be expended in the proxy. It needs the real presence of the object of love. Anything other than that is mere fantasy.

I wonder how Mahesh’s young wife must have spent the day back home; how she will pass the next one year; how she will keep the memories of love’s most intimate moments alive; how love itself will transform in the long interim; what shades it will add and what hues it will shed.

Saira hadn’t even known Mustafa well in the 10 days that he was with her. How much of Mahesh and his wife would have known each other in their 10 days?

As Mahesh took our blessings after we gave him a small amount as a present, I felt a dull ache in my heart for the couple.

‘Hope you go home 𝘫𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘪,’ I said, knowing the 𝘫𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘪 was still a good 360 days away. It won’t be easy to bide their time away. Neither for Mahesh, nor for his love-sick wife.

One of the many injustices in life is the one that keeps loving hearts apart. Separation is one of life’s cruelest woes. And the hope of reunion is all that keeps life moving from one hopscotch square to the next. Although, there is little solace in the sentiment of standalone hope. At best, hope is only a placebo.

Tonight, I will write a poem for Mahesh and his young wife. I will live their pangs of separation. I will mourn their deprivations. I will sing a song of faraway love.

It’s in a poet/writer’s destiny to tell people’s stories as if the stories were their own.

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(If you would like to read Sandstorms, Summer Rains, head straight to

https://www.amazon.in/Sandstorms-Summer-Rains-Asha-Kumar-ebook/dp/B09WLM33XC/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1685979711&refinements=p_27%3AAsha+Iyer+Kumar&s=books&sr=1-3)