What If ...

I do not want to renew my domain. Magic-moments.in. A URL I had long associated with my blog, but it’s an unnecessary expense I feel now that I am not regularly writing. It is not that important to me anymore. What’s more important now is to have a writing routine, practice typing words done daily, with a goal of a wordcount, and hone them on stipulated days, polished enough to publish as an essay or blog. It’s not content churning but a healthy habit of articulating well through my existing vocabulary while also learning new ones. New ways of seeing. Making and cultivating my own voice. Be it clauses after clauses, never-ending, or simple crisp details, several full stops in a single line.

As my reading has grown over the years to be more diverse, my writing has not. It has rather degraded back to the rudimentary level of decades past, I feel. Books I choose to read these days have depth, make me reflect, take the pen and scribble in my journal, or type on Substack or here. Apart from occasional murder mystery and rom com, certain books lately have stayed with me, made me feel seen in ways I didn’t expect. The Anthropologist. Real Life. Butter. It took me months to finish reading Butter, and just a week for The Anthropologist, but both I have underlined my favorite lines that I keep going back to.  Currently, I am reading The Details, by Ia Genberg, which seems similar, prodding me to revisit my past, remember things I thought I had long forgotten, and do so with lots of kindness, tenderness, for the people in the past around me, and the younger me. I am drawn these days to books that have not much of a plot, ‘nothing really happens’, quiet books that hold a lot.

What if I had gotten into the English and Foreign Language Institute in Hyderabad or in Lucknow. My trajectory of life would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have been earning as much yet, as I am now, thanks to Engineering degree and a corporate job in artificial intelligence. But maybe I would have been more at peace, more satisfied, more into literature and poetry. Perhaps I would already have something penned and published of my own. How I long for words to last long after I am gone. As much as I dread teaching, I might have taken a job at a magazine spending my days writing articles and essays and email interviews with authors, with occasional video interviews when I briefly outgrow my mortification of video medium. Or not. I would have penned Children’s books, done okay with meagre income, and a simpler life in countryside, smaller township. Like may be Dehradun/Rishikesh, where I would call myself a local over the years spent, and frown on tourists.

Let me indulge in my version of What if today. Inspired from the recent Substack newsletter from BrewingHygge by Japleen. What if I had done a PhD post my M.Tech, may be in Dehradun itself. I long to go back and stay in the town, have friends there, a routine of a Student/ Researcher/ Scientist. Live the winters there and go visit Mussoorie for Winter Carnival with friends. Revisit Buddha Temple. Have the best Thukpa there. Revisit the Wildlife Institute. The Forest Research Institute, its majestic trees. I would have frequented the Gurudwara on the weekends, or the Paltan Bazaar, had softie and soya chaap. But then I wouldn’t be in Bengaluru, a city I have grown used to, like and dislike in unequal proportions. Like – obviously higher.

What if I hadn’t got the internship with Reliance, rather had been to Franch in a student exchange program, like my friend Anjali. Had I been able to live so far from home, perhaps alone and lonesome in my painful shyness, or no, I would have made friends, let me imagine so, from countries far and made them write me letters send postcards and beautiful stamps. I would have learnt a new language, done a certification or two in it. Read books in that language. Visited its tourist friendly places, and cycled through the beautiful roads with pretty view of the skyline or the sea and the horizon. Clicked thousands of pics to last me a year of Instagram carousels or reels. But then I wouldn’t have met my now husband. Or life would have found a way to make us meet. I like to believe that in some parallel universe there are versions of me that are living these lives.