When Winters Weren’t Wicked — Vol. 1 of 3 [Letters to a Doosh]

23^rd February ’22 — Somewhere in the Mountains in Minus 2.7 degrees. My hair & buttocks are frozen. My heart & dreams, I hope, are still unfrozen like tipsy birds flying in the crispy-cloudy skies.

Hey, Doosh

This letter will have three parts.

Let’s begin with a story.

I will break your heart even before I start.

—This story has no happy ending—

Why? Because the story is true?

Yes, it’s true as oceans, but that’s not why there is no happy ending.

The thing is — In life, there are no happy endings, just happy in-betweens.

———

January 1997 — Year & a half before you were born. 8 months before you were placed in your mom’s oven.

I was in 10^th Grade — living in a Sikh-family-run boarding school —GRD Academy— in Dehradun. This was not your clichéd Bhangra-loving, Whiskey-chugging Sikh family. They were the founding fathers of world-famous Texla [not Tesla] TV [Google it - It’s as real as chicks with big dicks] & New Empire Cinema — Famed for running five-shows-a-day — exclusive Malayalam Porn Films with Fat Aunties as the big-breasted seductresses. Those were the best Sunday afternoons of my teenage life when I relished the worst naked movies in a single-screen theatre wearing my full school uniform :)

Anyway — one day, a bespectacled, boarding-school friend, whose name, for the life of me, I can’t recall anymore, told me, ‘I’m not coming back.’ 

He wasn’t going to come back to the boarding school after the board exams in March. He wasn’t a close friend, yet I felt super weird. I had never felt this specific sort of “super weird” ever.

This was the 1^st time ever I consciously realized I will be losing a human I had shared bedroom, classroom, washroom & dirty magazines with. Remember, it’s 1997 — there are no cellphones — there are no social networks. There are letters, of course, but we are boys — we don’t write letters. That’s too gay :)

Next day was a Sunday. After stuffing my face with two oversized aloo paranthas smothered in a psychedelic square of butter for breakfast, I sat sunbathing on the academic block’s building’s pavement — looking more fucked than a fifteen-&-a-half-year-old hooker in New York in 1973.

Our pot-bellied House Master, Mr. T.P. Goel, noticed me PMSing. He came & sat next to me. He asked, “Beta, what’s fucking your happiness?”

I told him.

Then he said something I’ve never forgotten — Why? Because life doesn’t let me.

‘We meet to depart.’

From March 1997 to March 2022, it’s been 25 bloody years. People have met me, made stories, made love, shared hopes & dreams and disappeared forever. They will continue to meet & leave till it’s time for me to leave Earth & become Eagle food.

This isn’t the story of certified cunts like me — this is the story of everyone’s life — lesbians, trees, yodas, koalas, butterflies, turtles, sea-monkeys, chihuahuas. Even the best ones leave — the ones you love to death leave. But, that shouldn’t ever make the time you share with them any less beautiful.

Everybody I’ve loved, I will love forever/till dementia. That’s my deal.

Even after 25 years of Baptism by Fire, it still hurts like childbirth everytime someone I give a damn about disappears.

I’ve made my peace with it. But, it still leaves me in pieces everytime.

P.S. What I’m about to end this letter with is something you already know, but I will write it anyway — in case it has slipped your heart.

“One day, you will also leave — either by choice or by death.”

So, till you’re here, I will cherish all of you.