Extract

There are days when sorrow is like a physical ache. Under your skin, its is a soiled washcloth the surgeon left inside before sewing you up. In your bloodstream, it’s a murky grey fluid, an effluent without an outlet. Inside your ribcage, it is the deadweight of despair. Even neon seems dim, music grates. People are talking to you, but all want is for them to go. Their concerns are trite, banal, pointless, compared to the grief that you cannot share with anyone. There are such griefs and they are most terrible.

At this precise point of time, happiness may seem a myth, a chimera, a bedtime story for children, a poor urban legend. When were you happy last? Yesterday? The day before? Yes, you can remember those times, those moments, but you cant believe it was you. It was another person, yes. It was another world. Here, now, this moment, you can never be happy.

You make a list. You start small: mundane happiness’s, commonplace joys and random unplanned delights in a world where happiness was allowed. Lying about in a meadow in the winter sun. The caress of a river breeze on your face. Getting wet in the rain after seven years. Cuddling up with someone you love under the quilt.

But memories of happiness can hurt too. Can you ever go back to those moments and experience them again, now, with the knowledge of what comes after? Will the sky ever be as azure as it was on that winter day 10 years ago? The quilt may be the same, but you could be alone.

Happiness happens. But the patterns of its arrival are random, and its departures are staggeringly unexpected. It knows no reason and follows no apparent logic. Causality can be established, but you know that introspection and analysis often spoil it. It can be a warm light, it can be a cool blue. Anticipation can be it, so can afterglow. Bliss is doing nothing at all but it can also be working at a feverish pace. But most of all, right no, for you, happiness appears.

A sleeping child, a warm puppy, a mother’s lap. Two rainbows in the same sky and animals hiding in the clouds. The first snowfall, the last love of your lfe. Ducklings waddling down to the pond, the sighting of dolphins.

People find happiness all the time, You know that. P.G.Wodehouse and the Pickwick Papers. M.S.Subalakshmi singing Suprabhatam in the morning. Vintage Kishore Kumare on the car stereo at 100kmph on the highway. The Lion King from Hollywood and Munnabhai MBBS from Mumbai.

But why do you need to be happy? Why do you crave for it, if the only thing you know for sure about happiness is the inevitability of betrayal? Happiness won’t last, it will leave, without even the courtesy of a wave goodbye. Did not one of your professors once tell you that creativity is directly proportional to the amount of tragedy you hold in your heart? What sort of pictures could a Vincent Van Gogh with his soul at ease paint? What is the big deal about happiness? From your limited knowledge of the world’s major religions, you have a sense that most messiahs have spoken about the peace of mind, rather than happiness. You could be wrong, but that’s the notion you have.