Life is a Verb

 

The monsoon arrives as a terrestrial reset, a violent grace that refuses the permanence of any human claim. In the lowlands, the wasteland is not a static geography but a recurring event. Each year, the sky bruises to a deep, heavy indigo, and the rains descend to dismantle the shanties, dissolving the mud-packed floors and stripping the corrugated sheets until the earth reclaimed by the water is indistinguishable from the chaos of the flood.

And yet, as the silt settles and the humidity begins its long, slow simmer, the inhabitants return. There is no mourning the lost structure with the static grief of those who own stone. 

Once the land is dry, they begin the labor of becoming again. They haul, they tether, they patch. To look at these settlements and see "poverty" is to see a noun—cold, fixed, and pitiable. To look at them and see the rebuilding is to recognize the verb. The shanty is not a thing but a persistent act of defiance against the inevitable.

This is the great, shimmering truth we spend our lives attempting to ignore: nothing is ever finished. We treat our identities, our griefs, and our triumphs as monuments—granite slabs we can polish and protect. But the universe has no interest in monuments. It deals only in currents. To cling to a "self" as a finished product is to attempt to dam a river with a handful of sand. It is the wise who understand that the eye must be wiped clean every morning, that to truly see is to witness the world again and again for the first time. The moment we name a thing, we stop seeing it and start seeing our definition of it.

To see the flow is to understand that stability is a hallucination of the slow-moving. If we zoom out far enough, even the mountains are a slow, subsurface wave. If we zoom in, our very cells are a frenetic exchange of energy, a constant dying and birthing that maintains the illusion of a solid "me." When we stop resisting this motion—when we stop trying to freeze the frame—we move from being the observer of the storm to being the wind itself. There is an exquisite, ungraspable beauty in this lack of tether. It is the freedom of the unfinished.

Even the finality of the grave is a linguistic lie. Death is not the end of the sentence but a shift in syntax. Life continues its conjugation in the memory that stings the eyes of a survivor, in the sharp, sudden cadence of words left behind in a dusty notebook, or in the haunting stillness of a photograph where a gaze still reaches out to touch the living. We are exhaled into the air, an essence that lingers in the lungs of those who follow, a quiet ripple in the collective ambient pressure.

We are not the house but the building of it. We are not the wound but the healing of it. In this wasteland of shifting tides and seasonal wreckage, there is no arrival, only the exquisite, terrifying, and holy momentum of the journey. Life is not a state of being we inhabit rather an action we perform until the very last breath—and then, it is an action that the world performs in our absence.

AQI

 

The air in Dehradun was supposed to be a benediction, a crisp, pine-scented erasure of three decades spent inhaling the grey, particulate despair of Delhi. For years, she had carried a digital reliquary on her laptop—a folder titled My Future Self—which housed high-resolution images of terracotta pots, linen tunics, and the kind of serene, soft-focus morning light that only exists in the imagination of the chronically overworked.

She had moved to a small, sloping house on the periphery of the city, where the Himalayas loomed like silent, stony judges. She had acquired Soni, a ginger cat with a temperament as jagged as the skyline, and she had planted a garden. But as the first monsoon mist began to roll over the ridges, she realized the terrifying truth of ambient pressure: when the external noise stops, the internal frequency becomes deafening.

The Weight of the "Best Version"

She sat on her terrace, a cup of herbal tea cooling in her hands, watching a hawk circle the valley. By all metrics of her previous life, she had "arrived." The AQI monitor on her phone glowed a virtuous green, showing a number so low it felt like a miracle. Yet, her chest felt tighter than it ever had in the smog-choked corridors of her old office.

The folder—My Future Self—had become a haunting document. It was no longer a dream but a checklist.

06:00: Meditation (20 mins)

06:30: Gardening / Soil Aeration

08:00: Artisanal Breakfast (No refined sugars)

She had escaped the rat race of the corporation only to enter the neo-rat race of the spirit. She was optimizing her peace with the same frantic, jagged energy she had once used to optimize quarterly reports. She was trying to manufacture a soul out of mulch and silence, and the effort was polluting the quiet she had come here to find.

The mind, she discovered, has its own AQI—a "Ambient Quality of Interiority." And hers was hazardous.

Decades of "circling back," "touching base," and "leveraging synergies" had left a thick, oily residue on her thoughts. Even here, amidst the silver oaks, she found herself "performing" retirement. She would catch herself arranging Soni on the wicker chair just so, imagining the frame of a photograph that no one would see. She was still seeking a promotion, only now the boss was a phantom version of herself that demanded a perfect, enlightened performance.

She looked at her hands, stained with the red earth of Dehradun. She had thought that by changing her coordinates, she would automatically change her composition. But she had brought the smog with her—the soot of old anxieties, the nitrogen dioxide of resentment, the fine particulate matter of a life spent waiting for the "real" life to begin.

"The hardest thing to realize," she whispered to the cat, "is that you are the only one still keeping score."

The realization came not during a scheduled meditation, but during a moment of profound failure. A stray dog had dug up her prize hydrangeas, and Soni had knocked over a jar of expensive honey. In the old world, this would have been a "crisis" to be managed.

She stood in the middle of her ruined garden, the mountain air cool against her face, and she felt a sudden, sharp urge to delete the folder. She went inside, opened the laptop—that glowing brick of past obligations—and dragged My Future Self into the trash.

She didn't feel enlightened. She felt empty. And for the first time, the emptiness wasn't a void to be filled with "self-improvement." It was just space.

As the sun dipped behind the peaks, staining the sky a bruised purple, she didn't reach for her camera or her journal. She didn't check the air quality app. The soot was settling. The visibility was improving. She was no longer trying to be the "best version" of anything. She was just a woman on a terrace, breathing in a world that didn't care if she succeeded or failed.

Wellness Retreat

 

The clock at 2 AM is a thinning of the veil. In the lonely suburbs of the Doon Valley, the night settles with the weight of wet silt, a heavy, velvet shroud that demands a specific kind of listening. My terrace becomes an altar to the "shabby divine," a quiet ledge suspended between the sleeping valley floor and the indifferent gaze of the Mussoorie lights flickering like dying stars above.

This is my wellness retreat. There are no guided meditations here, no curated aromas of lemongrass or cedar. Instead, there is the raw, unwashed scent of the night: the damp earth of the Jakhan, the faint, metallic tang of the cooling stones, and the sharp, ghostly sweetness of a late-blooming Raat-ki-Rani.

At this hour, the meticulous-humanised world of the day—the emails, the posture of the writer, the social scripts—dissolves. What is left is the truth of the stillness. It is a quiet so profound it has a texture, a low-frequency hum that vibrates in the bone. You hear the things that noise usually murders: the sudden, dry rattle of a Lychee leaf skittering across the floorboards, the distant, rhythmic pulse of a water pump in a neighbor’s yard that sounds, in this solitude, like the heartbeat of a great, slumbering beast.

Looking out into the dark, the portal opens. The mundane transforms. The silhouettes of the Sal trees are sentinels guarding the entrance to unseen worlds. In the absence of image, the inner eye begins its work. The deep shadows I often write of are restorative rather than frightening. They offer a sanctuary where the heavy, dark currents of experience can flow without being judged or redirected.

To sit here is to witness the stripping away. When the flicker of the screen and the clamor of the ego fall away, you are confronted with the profound stillness of the Indian night. It is a rigorous wellness, a purging of the unnecessary. The soul doesn't need a spa but this 2 AM clarity, where the only thing moving is the grey dog’s quiet breath and the slow, certain rotation of the earth. Here, in the hollow of the Doon, the truth you were meant to see isn't found in the light, but in the patient, honest endurance of the dark.

Love downward

 

The sky sheds it no longer can hold,

today, is a rain of tiny violets,

shaking off the branch to die in common dirt.

They settle against the feet,

small, cooling stars turning into soil

that once hallucinated their color.

I watch them and feel the slow silt of years

thickening inside my chest—

a steady, internal autumn where light grows long

and the bone begins to lean.

 

Is this what the blood has been rehearsing?

This gradual turning towards the dark, damp quiet?

If love has a direction, it must be downward.

  

It is gravity that pulls the blossom to the root,

a radical kindness that allows petals to rot

so stems can shudder with a new green.

  

To die is to become feast.

To vanish for the next bloom’s arrival.

I look at my hands, stained with ink of thousand ghosts,

and ask the river—that silver, indifferent muscle carving the valley—

what remains of a man who has lived only in the breath of words?

 

If I am not the flower, let me be the mulch.

If I cannot be the song, let me be the silence

that makes the next singer possible.

To die beautifully is to go without grievance,

unclasping the world as the violet lets go of the air.

  

No jagged edges, no desperate holding,

just a final, shimmering gift of a body

offering itself back to the ground.

This is the perfect death:

as love downward.

 

Lal-Da

 

The wind in the Doon valley arrives as an inheritance, a heavy, ancestral breathing that settles into the cracks of the hillside. Lal-da lived within this breath. To the village, he was "disturbed," a word they used like a blunt tool to categorize the silence he carried. But to Lal-da, the silence was a presence, as thick and textured as the grey mist that clung to the Sal trees at dawn.

Each morning, he descended from his cabin—a small, crumbling geometry of wood and stone—to the construction sites where the earth was being torn open for new foundations. He worked with a rhythmic, devastating efficiency. He moved with the mountain's own patience, carrying bags of cement as if they were sleeping children, his lean frame absorbing the weight until his skin was coated in a fine, silver-grey shroud of dust. He did not speak to the other laborers.

When the sun began its bruised descent behind the jagged spine of the Mussoorie hills, the contractor would approach him. The man, smelling of cheap tobacco and restless registers, would ask, "What is your rate today, Lal-da? What do I owe you?"

Lal-da would stop. He would turn his face, etched with the map of a thousand suns, and stare. It was a blankness that unsettled the contractor—a gaze that seemed to look through the man, through the currency, through the very notion of debt. It was the stare of a deep, still pool reflecting a sky the contractor had forgotten how to see.

"Food," Lal-da would eventually say, the word barely a ripple.

The contractor, relieved to settle the account so cheaply, would hand over a bundle: thick, charred rotis and a tin of watery dal, perhaps an onion or a single, defiant green chili. Lal-da would take the bundle with a slow, reverent grace. He bundled the contents into a faded cotton cloth, his fingers moving with a meticulous tenderness, and began the long climb back.

The village had been without electricity for seven days. The poles stood like spare  remains along the winding road, their wires humming with nothing but the wind. As Lal-da reached his cabin, the world was already dissolving into the indigo of a Himalayan night. There was no click of a switch, no artificial amber to push back the shadows.

He entered his room, the air inside smelling of dry pine and old rain. He sat on the floor, his back against the rough-hewn wall, and unwrapped his meal in the absolute dark.

He ate by touch.

The texture of the grain against his thumb, the warmth of the dal, the sharp, sudden sting of the onion—it was a sensory ritual. Outside, the mountain wind began its nightly threnody, shrieking through the gorges and whistling through the gaps in his door. To anyone else, the sound was a warning of isolation, a reminder of the vast, uncaring scale of the peaks. To Lal-da, it was a conversation. He chewed slowly, his jaw moving in time with the gusts, as if he were consuming the night itself.

He was a man who had stripped away the "shabby divine" of societal expectation until only the divine remained. He knew the coordinates of his own soul in the dark.

Once, a neighbor, carrying a kerosene lantern that cast flickering, nervous shadows, had stopped by the open door.

"Lal-da?" the neighbor had called out, squinting into the blackness of the cabin. "Are you alright in there? Living like this... it isn’t right. How are you faring?"

Lal-da had looked up, his eyes catching the tiniest fracture of the lantern’s light, glowing for a second like a forest animal’s. He didn't complain about the darkness or the cold or the ache in his lower back from the cement bags. He didn't mention the hunger that gnawed at his stomach before the contractor paid him.

"I am very good, thanks," he said.

The voice was humanized, stripped of the jagged edges of performative suffering. It was the voice of a man who had found a clearing in the thicket of human consciousness and decided to stay there.

The neighbor retreated, shaking his head, the lantern-light retreating with him until the cabin was once again claimed by the velvet grip of the night.

Lal-da finished his meal and wiped his hands on his trousers. He had the floor, which was an extension of the mountain itself. He lay down, the hard-packed earth meeting his spine with an uncompromising honesty. He pulled a thin, threadbare blanket over his chest, but his eyes remained open for a long time, watching the way the shadows danced—the dark has its own movements if you look long enough.

As sleep took him, the wind reached a crescendo, a wild, soaring note that shook the corrugated tin roof. A smile spread across his face—a slow, luminous unfolding that seemed to originate from a place far deeper than his own history. It was a smile of profound stillness, the smile of a man who knew that when the world goes dark, the stars have no choice but to show themselves.

The Impressionist

 

The silence of the house was a heavy, unfamiliar garment. For forty years, the air had been textured by the percussion of his wife’s bangles, the argumentative hum of the refrigerator, and the domestic directives that formed the soundtrack of his life. Now, with her gone to her mother’s for the weekend, the old man, Mr. Baruah, found himself standing in the center of the living room, a castaway on a quiet island.

To be alone was a novelty that quickly curdled into a vacuum. He felt the sudden, frantic need to fill the void with something other than the ticking of the wall clock. He wanted to make this absence count—to prove that he was not merely a satellite orbiting her sun, but a star with his own light.

On an impulse that felt like a mild fever, he walked to the local stationery shop and purchased a wooden box of acrylics and a pad of thick, ivory-white sheets. He carried them home like stolen goods.

On the terrace, the Dehradun light was shifting, casting long, violet shadows over the water tanks. A small bird—perhaps a swallow, or a common sparrow made exotic by the twilight—perched on the parapet. Mr. Baruah snapped a photograph on his phone with a trembling hand.

He sat at the dining table, the pristine sheets mocking him. In his youth, he had been told he had a "knack" for drawing. He remembered the charcoal sketches of his college days, the fluid lines of anatomy and architecture. But as he pressed the pencil to the paper, he realized that age had not just made him rusty; it had thickened his perception.

His fingers, stiffened by the slow encrustation of decades, refused to obey the memory of grace. The bird he sketched was a clumsy thing—an anatomical failure with heavy wings and a beak that looked more like a shard of wood than a living instrument.

"Patience," he whispered to the empty room. "It’s a process."

He began to apply the paint, trying to match the delicate browns and greys of the photograph. It was a struggle against the mundane. Every stroke felt like a lie. The more he tried to capture the "real" bird, the more it looked like a diagram in a dusty textbook. He was chasing a ghost with a heavy net.

The frustration peaked as the sun dipped behind the ridge. In a sudden, jerky movement to reach for a rag, his elbow caught the open bottle of Crimson Lake.

Time seemed to slow as the thick, visceral liquid erupted across the ivory sheet. It drowned the bird’s head in a pool of wet, shocking red.

Mr. Baruah froze. His first instinct was a crushing, middle-class embarrassment. He looked around as if his wife might be standing in the doorway, ready to scold him for the mess on the table. He felt like a child caught breaking a vase.

But then, he looked at the stain.

The red was bleeding into the wet grey of the wings. It created a jagged, electric fringe where the two colors met. The "accuracy" of the sketch was gone, destroyed by a gravity he hadn't invited.

He picked up a wide brush. Instead of wiping it away, he pushed the red. He dragged it through the bird’s body, blurring the boundaries between the creature and the air. He added a smear of yellow, a streak of unblended white.

The bird began to vanish. In its place emerged a vibration—a frantic, abstract pulse of movement. It wasn't a bird anymore but the feeling of flight. It was an impression of the wind, a scream of color against the sterile quiet of the house.

That night, the painting sat propped against a vase of plastic flowers. Mr. Baruah lay in bed, his heart racing with the heat of a secret.

He imagined a new life. He saw himself in a small studio, perhaps in the hills of Landour, surrounded by canvases that bled and shrieked with color. He would be "The Impressionist of the Doon." He would no longer be the man who remembered to pay the electricity bill or the man who knew where the spare keys were kept. He would be a conduit for the sublime.

In the dark, his hands felt light. He fell asleep dreaming of a world where red was the only language that mattered.

The morning broke with the shrill, familiar chirp of the doorbell.

His wife was back, smelling of travel and her mother’s pickling spices. She moved through the house like a gale, opening curtains and banishing the artistic shadows he had cultivated.

"The house is so quiet," she remarked, dumping her bag on the sofa. She glanced at the table, where the wooden box of paints lay open like an exposed ribcage. "What is all this? Did you make a mess?"

Before he could explain the revolution that had occurred in his soul—before he could show her the red bird that wasn't a bird—she handed him a nylon mesh bag.

"Don't just stand there with that dazed look, Baruah-ji. There isn't a single tomato in the fridge. Go to the market before the sun gets too high. And get some ginger too; the quality was terrible last week."

Mr. Baruah looked at the bag. He looked at the painting on the table, which now, in the harsh, pragmatic light of morning, looked merely like a botched accident.

"The ginger," he repeated, his voice flat.

"And the tomatoes," she called out from the kitchen, already checking the level of the lentils.

The Impressionist died a quiet death between the hallway and the front door. Mr. Baruah took the bag, adjusted his spectacles, and stepped out into the heat of the Dehradun street. The red bird remained on the table, a solitary, abstract smudge in a world that demanded only the price of ginger.

Four by Four

 

The shadow of the four-letter word is a long one, cast by the flickering candles of a thousand Victorian parlors and the stern, pursed lips of a century’s worth of schoolmasters. It is a phrase that arrives with a built-in recoil, a linguistic flinch. To speak of "four-letter words" is to invoke the blunt, the base, and the broken—the vocabulary of the gutter, the sharp exhale of the frustrated, the jagged glass of the tavern brawl. We have been conditioned to see these four-character clusters as the weeds in the garden of discourse, things to be uprooted, bleached, and replaced with the ornamental topiary of Latinate synonyms.

Yet, if we hold the phrase "four-letter words" to the light and turn it gently, the prism shifts. The shadow does not disappear, but it begins to describe a different shape. What if these words are not the pollutants of language, but its bedrock? What if they are not merely the markers of impropriety, but the smallest, most pressurized vessels of the human condition?

Consider the symmetry of the architecture. The tongue does not discriminate between the sacred and the profane when the count is four. Love sits on the same shelf as the crudest anatomical slur; fear occupies the same rhythmic space as the most visceral curse. We have spent an eternity separating the acceptable from the forbidden, categorizing our outbursts into neat piles of "grace" and "filth," yet the body experiences both with an identical, shivering intensity. The pulse does not check a dictionary before it quickens.

There is a strange, muscular economy to the four-letter word. It is a linguistic bullet, stripped of the aerodynamic fluff of suffixes and the self-importance of multi-syllabic pretense. To speak in fours is to speak in a state of emergency or a state of ecstasy.

Pain is a four-letter word. It is a blunt strike, a singular thud against the consciousness.

Glee is its high-frequency twin, a spark that vanishes as quickly as it ignites.

Pure and Rave, Tang and Loss.

These are not words that describe life from a safe, academic distance. They do not meander through the scenic routes of "unfortunate circumstances" or "momentary exhilaration." They strike at the center. They are the vocabulary of the bone and the gut. When we are reduced to our most honest selves—when the ego is stripped bare by a sudden blow or an unexpected kiss—we do not reach for the ornate. We reach for the four.

The tragedy of our linguistic policing is that by stigmatizing the "four-letter word," we have inadvertently cast a shroud over the tools required for an unfiltered life. We have been taught to fear the sharp edges of the tongue, forgetting that the same edge used to wound is the one required to carve out the truth. A curse is often just a prayer that has lost its patience; a confession is often just a wound finding its voice. Both arrive in that same, compact shape.

In the quiet observation of our own internal weather, we find that the "taboo" and the "tender" are made of the same vibrating material. There is a hidden symmetry in how we navigate our days through these monosyllabic anchors. We wake in dark, we seek the dawn. We feel the urge, we endure the halt.

Society insists on a hierarchy of utility, telling us that "nice" words are for the parlor and "bad" words are for the alley. But the mind is a lawless place. In the heat of a rave or the cold hollow of a void, the distinction between a profanity and a poem dissolves. 

They are both attempts to bridge the gap between the unspeakable interior and the audible world. They are fragments of a more honest, prehistoric vocabulary that existed before we learned to use language as a mask.

To embrace the four-letter word is to stop treating language like a costume and start treating it like a skin. It is to recognize that our "crude" outbursts are often our most authentic echoes.

By widening the definition, we reclaim the four-letter word as a tool of recognition rather than classification. We stop looking for the smudge on the page and start looking at the weight of the ink. If we allow ourselves to see hope as clearly as we see its cruder cousins, we realize that the brevity of the word is not a sign of its simplicity, but of its density. It is the diamond formed under the immense pressure of being human.

Ultimately, "Four by Four" is an invitation to inhabit the small spaces of our speech. It is a call to stop apologizing for the jaggedness of our expressions and to find the grace in the blunt. We are composed of these fragments—tiny, four-sided mirrors that reflect a different version of the truth depending on how the light hits them.

The world is loud, complex, and increasingly draped in the soft, suffocating fabric of euphemism. In such a landscape, the four-letter word—in all its forms—acts as a necessary puncture. It lets the air in. Whether it is the ache of a long-held secret or the fire of a new conviction, these words remind us that we are still here, still feeling, and still capable of speaking the truth in its most elemental form.

We do not need more syllables to be more human. We only need the courage to use the ones we have, unfiltered and unafraid.