Stories that demand to be told | #17
Why do I feel so defeated when I should feel liberated? I look young but I feel so old. I tried so hard to make everything work. Please write to me...
This is the 17th edition of Stories that demand to be told, a curated spread of the most evocative, resonant, real stories. Welcome to Ochre Sky Stories, a home for writers from the Ochre Sky Workshops, facilitated by
and .1. A thousand kilometres from Gaya, I learned to love the taste of its baskarel by
Papa’s reaction was almost childlike; I hadn’t seen him so happy in a long time. He got to work immediately—washing, chopping, and soaking the baskarel. He didn’t even wait for three days for the stems to soften. I woke up the next morning to the whirring of the mixer grinder. We don’t have a sil-batta here in our small apartment, so he made do. He was ardently prepping to make pakoras.
I took a chunky bite from the first batch of pakoras that emerged from the sizzling mustard oil. I liked them—crispy, salty, spicy, and with a grainy but comfortingly earthy texture that I think I had only imagined all along to be bad.
2. Why I want to be a slow friend by Vibha Krishnamurthy
One night, we sat in companionable silence as she wrote while I read a book. The comfort of a real friendship settled on us and blessed us in.
I'm thinking of reclaiming the pace of my friendships from school days. I want to be a slow friend. That means to share more than the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee to spare for a friend. I want to rediscover each of my friends the way I reread favourite old books — I read them the first time for the plot and then again for the beauty of the prose.
3. Viridescent Grief by Ronita Chattopadhyay
We had wondered – do the waters really look that green (because of the underwater plant life)? Nothing had suggested that I would also see you. I am not really surprised though. I have been seeing you in rivers and seas and ponds and mountain streams and swimming pools for so long now. This time, your face is much softer, a little blurred. My friends are arguing passionately about the colour of the river water.
4. Food is nostalgia after all by
Longing for home is an eternal human craving. However, when home is in a land separated by a national border, truncated by a line drawn by the colonial masters, guarded by men in arms and barbed wire, when visiting is nearly impossible, memories take on special significance.
Both sides of my family, like millions of others, were forced to leave home, land, trees, crops, livestock, river, ponds, the sunrise and sunset, the soft eastern breeze, the family Gods, and migrate to a new place. Not quite as refugees, but as dispossessed — certainly. The loss ran so deep that I, two generations away, can describe the family home as though I have seen it. I haven’t.
5. Flying under the Radar by
Nobody has arranged an effigy of Shah Rukh or Mr. Bachchan to burn as the end credits roll. As far as I know, in the two weeks since the re-release, there have been no calls for boycott or PILs to shut down Yash Raj Films.
It is surprising that in a country plagued by a joblessness crisis, nobody has made it their job to get the film banned. Maybe what has confused people is the 20-year lag. Just like Veer and Zaara did not know what to do with each other when they were reunited after twenty years (following a three or four day romance), the saviours of the nation too may be unsure of how to squish this piece of propoganda.
6. Apna ya...(Yours or) by
Is it really blood, then? Or can I hope that my daughter will have the abundance of many life springs of apnapan. That she will know how being seen, heard and witnessed is possibly one of the best ways to experience it. That she doesn’t have to make herself smaller or fit herself into someone else’s idea of who she should be. I hope she will know that true belonging lies in a place that feels safe.
I know my daughter will have questions. I know that she will ask one day, why don’t I look like you. I hope that she will see mirrored back to her a place of belonging.
7. Pia and Gopal by
Gopal became a wanderer. He left the hospital and started walking along the straight grey strip of Jessore Road – the highway connecting Kolkata and Dhaka.
He stopped by villages in search of the tender feel of his mother's hands rubbing warm mustard oil on his scalp. He lay in orchards to catch the chortle of his father in the passing breeze. He lived in bus stops, hoping for his brother to alight from a bus, haggard from his search for his runaway sibling.
When Gopal crossed the threshold, the Bangladesh police deported him back to his country of loss.
8. Change by
I woke up with sore eyes. In each wing, there were six rooms in a circle, and a small corridor that connected to the bathrooms and toilets, and the main corridor. I picked up my toothbrush and toothpaste and headed to the washroom. Every toilet had shit floating in it, and every sink had the frothy toothpaste spit. The water-pump could not function, due to the power cut, so the toilets and washrooms were out of water. One of my acquaintances though, found a wing on the opposite end of ours which was semi-functioning. I got the bucket and mug from my room and went there. By the end of the shower, I was baptized.
9. The thing about children... by
The thing about children is that despite everything, you try against despair, against fear, against gravity, against life itself and hold them up. You try to prevent the unpreventable, withholding this bitter fruit from their eager clasp- that breathing itself means pain.
The thing about children is that they make you somewhat manic, with hunger for a life better than the one you were born in. They make you want to live, especially when you want to die every second of every day.
10. Letting Go: The Rage Behind Forgiveness by
Forgiveness, I’ve come to realize, isn’t always the noble path it’s made out to be. Sometimes, it’s a cop-out, a way to avoid confronting the very real pain we’re feeling. It’s easier to say “I forgive you” than to dive into the messy, uncomfortable process of acknowledging our hurt, our anger, and the injustice we’ve endured. But in skipping that process, we deny ourselves the right to fully experience our emotions.
There’s something empowering about rage, about allowing myself to feel the full force of my anger without immediately seeking to dissipate it. Anger can be a catalyst for change; it can drive us to set boundaries, to demand respect, to insist on better treatment.
11. Make a promise to never abandon yourself again by
“I trust you for some reason,” she wrote.
I am going to hold your hand and place your finger on the crux of the problem, I replied to her. Not only has your husband betrayed you, but in your attempts to please him and try to gain acceptance for so many years, you have abandoned your own self too. You feel exhausted because no one stood up for you. You neglected your own self in the hope of being able to save something that might have been stillborn.
12. Zabaan by
ped ko darakht kehne ki himmat nahi hai
ped ko tree kehne ka mann bhi nahi hai
mere liye ped Hindi ka vriksh toh nahi,
haan Marathi ka jhaad ho sakta hai shayad
ped kitni zabaano mein rehta hai mere zehen mein
har zabaan bhi ek ped hi toh hai mere zehen mein.
URDU se DOSTI, a beginner's workshop facilitated by Vimal Chitra
Urdu is a language of love, history, and poetry. Discover the jaadu of Urdu with poet, screenwriter and spoken word artist, Vimal Chitra in our 2 day workshop, Urdu Se Dosti
Discover the transformative power of personal writing with Natasha Badhwar
and Raju Tai at Ochre Sky Stories Memoir Workshop.
Just reading the excerpts felt like I was dipping my big toe into one cool, deep pool after another!