A woman approached me telling me she wants to speak in our book club on her experience of being a single mother after being twice divorced. I said yes unhesitatingly but yesterday when I mentioned this to someone else, they said lets-skip-her-with-some-excuse as they hate a public display of emotion. Being in a place where people are expressing emotion makes some people very uncomfortable. Of course by emotion he meant sorrow, someone baring their soul in public because everyone else is always laughing or getting angry at something or the other. But maybe seeing someone talk about their struggles before they have emerged victorious out of them is considered a sign of weakness, a sort of an excuse – WHY aren’t you happy already? WHY have you not figured out something for your life already? The unsaid fact remains that someone who has divorced twice is assumed to be at fault especially if she’s a woman. ‘She-must-not-be-adjusting’ ‘Something-must-be-wrong-with-her-nature-otherwise-shes-so-beautiful’ which again implicitly assumes that ugly women have to be doubly interesting and doubly good natured and triply adjusting to survive in marriages with ugly paunched balding men. Fuck the innocuous comment made me want to hit him but I did the better thing, I did my dominating thing, ignored him and slotted her in anyway. It will be nice to see his face when she’s just being honest, having not lived up to his abla-nari billing.

But I digress.

But maybe that’s why people grow inwards. They shun display of any sign of weakness or vulnerability.

Or even joy.

You see smiles with eyes not smiling all the time. I call that the airhostess smile.

And sometimes you see people letting their guard down momentarily in a phrase or a glance or a gesture. Most times they convert their unhappiness in anger because display of anger is acceptable. The circles get smaller – anger is ok between loved ones. Sorrow is ok among loved ones as long as there’s a cause. Happiness is ok in public and joy among friends.

Yesterday the whole day my heart was jumping and dancing. A couple of times I did the fist pump – Yes!! As if I had dismissed kohli in a world cup match. For some unfathomable reason I was me, stripped of all labels even when alone. And I liked the me that I was, carefree, content, unabashedly enthusiastic about the day, carelessly self confident, assured.

Yet. Outwardly neither my eyes smiled nor my lips. Of course a couple of time I burst out laughing and that was exactly what it was. Bursting out. Of something uncontained in the vessel that is me. Of course it was an overreaction, of course the cause was trivial, but how did the cause matter? Of course joy is a strange furry animal that comes easily to you when it isn’t about you, sort of when you are absent from the chain of cause and effect.

It offered me a possibility of being. There are very few days now when anxiety about something or the other doesn’t touch me. The source is irrelevant, it could simply be anxiety about being late. But it’s always there like the darkened lip I hate or the scars on my face I try and not see. Tiny anxieties like handshakes against living a fulfilling life, a cohesive life neatly circumscribing my successes and failures, my nonchalant numerous achievements and my overhyped failures and frailties into a whole at least half as big as it’s parts.

Yesterday I was alive. Yesterday i was me.

I looked into a borrowed mirror and found myself smiling and waving at me.

No one knew. No one noticed. But I waved back with gusto.