My window shivered as the last shred of cold wind slithered past the leaves of glass that was to keep the rain and gusts out. For a moment, life seemed like a Monet, dotted with colour but still so disparate and desperately in need of closure.

Every childhood is a basket of stories, bright and dark, some prancing in the sunshine of May, others lingering like dark clouds in October. We grow up with secrets, with guilt, with joy and jaunty memories. Yet how many of us choose in the end to turn to face the faceless ghouls of our past, the wrongs we have soiled our hands with, the curses we swore, the hatred we bore and all the desires we embraced as bitterness mingled and flirted with the forbidden fruit? Some of us carry to our last breath the heavy hearts of regret. We may have left wives who still love us behind as they nurse their broken hearts amidst wails of lonesome infants. We may have broken with our very hands the backs of our futures because of foolish errors that flushed our minds. We may have – at the drop of a hat – abandoned reason for madness, simply because we let emotions take the reins, because life seemed vacuous of meaning had we abandoned that magical moment to take revenge, to reach out for the core of our desires, to mutter that curse that sealed not the fate of those we hated, but that of our own.

I am not writing about regret. Neither am I to write about childhood. I want to think about life even as I can write only a quarter of my life story. I grew up with every ammunition to annihilate depression. I had loving parents and godparents and friends. I got almost everything I wanted, and that which I did not get, I probably didn’t mind not getting anyway. But somehow, perhaps in my desperate plea to flit away from the horrors of life that I have seen in my life and others’, I headed straight into its ugly embrace. I have been mired by too many tales of bitterness that those embittered were desperate to forget, and I have been told of too much sorrow and abandonment, as cry after cry tore through this broken land. K once told me that people who grew up knowing they were abandoned by the world tend to think especially hard about and look especially hard for these contortions of the human face. We grow up smelling the salt in the air, hearing the throttles and chokes and ultimately we learn to wash our hands not clean of this sorrow, but of the nature of this twisted world and go on waiting for the next good or bad thing to happen.

It’s true that I had every reason as a child to be happy. Yet I knew I wasn’t and probably would not for most of my life. I didn’t grow up depressed. Neither am I now or was I ever. But there was always this sinister complication in the labyrinth that is life that I was acutely aware of, that life isn’t always as simple, that there were sub-texts in every murmur and every cry. Yet amidst these layers of meaning, I knew that I needed to move on. I would keep my clutches tightly on these threads of meaning and slowly take my lifetime to weave my own tapestry. I knew it wouldn’t be a happy picture, but I knew too that I needed to learn to be happy.

And so it began, a life of bonhomie as I pointedly sought to put away carefully every broken eggshell that could no longer be put together again. But I noticed it. Every moment of joy for me was like a retiring clown, tired of jest and eager to slink back and head home. I desperately tried many times to hold it back, but it would almost without fail fade away and leave me in desperate solitude. Yet amidst the strong lights of the circus of life, I would notice and bathe in the shadows that wouldn’t go away. I was the jovial one, the one who was deep and introspective, but always eager to throw in a joke or two and eager to share a ‘sunshine smile’ I was told more than once that I had (and probably still do). But that was about as deep as anyone could fathom about me. The occasional good friend would peel another layer of the onion, but that was all. The core remained damp with tears, and while at first sight and touch felt hard, would sink and never inflate again if pressed. So that was life for me, not of duplicity – for I had never aspired to be what I am not – but of merry solitude.

If one were to theorise about one’s life and the principal patterns in the cosmology of one’s history, one could conjure a multitude of ideas. But I am a vapid mind, and I can only think that I have led so far a largely misunderstood life. At times, I wish someone would call me a social misfit, so that at least, I feel that someone is seeing me in the right light. But despite my silence at work unless prompted to speak, I have been told that I am eloquent, thoughtful and at times witty with my lampoons of UDPs (universally disliked persons).

So my life rumbled on like a square wheel of stone, heavy and capable only of painfully rocky rides but nevertheless mobile and granted the passenger a fluidity of the scenery and some excitement if the occasion allowed for it. But of late, I have been waiting. And learning to wait more graciously. Too many questions can be answered only by time, I am beginning to understand, and when time refuses to throw the answers out into the air, one can only wait. But waiting is becoming an art to a mule like me who has little room for patience in my life. There are different forms of waiting. The wait that one is ground under like one awaits the blood report after a night of bacchanalian debauchery, as one clasps one’s hands tightly in fear. There is the wait that one soaks in as one awaits to inhale the brilliance of a blood-red sunrise in Cyprus. There is the wait that one mingles in as one awaits the arrival of an important luminary, amidst the clinks of champagne glasses looking busy when they simply sing about nothing. But of late, I have been drowning in the wait of nothingness, the wait as one falls feet-first into a deep dark ocean like a blade into the pool, as the cold envelopes me and as I wait to know if I will sink to my death or get to rise above the torrents and waves and hear the gulls one day. It is that stage of liminality, of uncertainty as one transcends from one dimension to another, not knowing if the transition would be smooth or one fraught with treachery. It is like pregnancy without technology, when one has no clue if the flesh would be a stillborn in one’s womb, until that fateful day when the water breaks or when the infection sets in.

And so I have lived. I am still waiting, still breathing under the dark water, still cutting deep into the body of currents as I see the flickering lights above where the sun was growing dimmer and dimmer. I will – so I have been told – soon reach the seabed, with plenty of air still in my lungs. My legs will still have the spring to launch me right up to the gulls – so I have been told – but I choose to wait nevertheless.

It is still too early to tell.