Pixie Dust

When I looked up from my book and glanced out of the train, we weren’t underground anymore. The window pane had exploded in a shimmer of lights. The glass was covered in beads of water that the moody, impending storm had sent down. And the little drops were lit up in gold by headlights from the cars under the bridge. Tinker Bell’s pixie dust on a grey day.

This was about two months ago on my way to the O’Hare airport. I wrote the lines whilst staring out of enormous window panes during my stop-over at Heathrow. Then my brain froze. Well, to be precise the words stopped. My brain has been abuzz with thoughts for a blogpost for months, but there have been too many detours and reroutes. And let’s face it, excuses. So here we are, trying to stick to a lane of thought and not trying to explain why I don’t write anymore.

It isn’t clear to me whether reality has always had the ability to be unbearable, or whether this fact dawns on everyone at a certain age or if it’s the sole burden of fools who feel distress every time they open a newspaper or talk to someone in a crisis. In any scenario, I understand that most people survive it. The question is, how? Pixie dust.

My recent, most ground-breaking revelation has been in the field of fairy tales, not cell biology. I have discovered that they permeate everyone’s mind. And by everyone, I mean everyone. Even the most pragmatic or cynical, the young as much as the old. We’re all programmed to wait for the happily ever after. The dramatic fairy tale one where King Triton turns Ariel from a mermaid to a human, the Slumdog dances with his love at Victoria Terminus and Geet runs away from Monkeyman to kiss Aditya, whom she just realizes she is in love with. The program is so hard-wired that we don’t recognize a real happy ending when we see it in our path because it pales in comparison, and worse still, we don’t know what to do once we’ve crossed it. Because no fairy tale told us whether Beauty and the Beast had trouble having kids or how Raj and Simran spent Thursday nights arguing.

I’ve admitted before and I’ll admit again that I’m an utter, foolish romantic. I love my imaginary, often movie-inspired, world where your hair caresses your face in the most flattering way in the wind, where every frame in Spring makes the air look crisper, the sunlight more golden and where every pair of jeans you carelessly put on makes you look like a diva. The unappealing alternative is to accept that this life, it ain’t perfect and it ain’t for the faint-hearted. Wise, huh? In this imperfect world, we spend a large fraction of our time simply tolerating our partner and every day, learning to co-exist. We turn 80 without ever saying ‘I love you’. We struggle with our jobs, we make terrible mistakes, we question our abilities, feel awfully disappointed, we fight to fit in, we pray to be left alone and we wander aimlessly wondering what on earth we’re doing here and whether we’ve been wrong all along. It makes us far less airbrushed than Kate and Leopold, but not necessarily any less happy.

What might really make us unhappy is the choice between a Megalomaniac and a Cop-out for the future Prime Minister of India. Or the thought that our country has decided to seek blood for blood and our countrymen have replaced the value of life and humanity with murderous vengeance and have taken to celebrating the hanging of a man. What might cause us unbearable pain is to be forced to view our country through The New York Times and be asked why we want to return to India. Women are brutally raped, there is no justice, people die in stampedes, millions of people are trapped without electricity for days, the system is so very corrupt and all the good cricketers have retired from the team.

How indeed then, does one survive this precarious and fragile life where a crazy gunman could just walk into a school and murder your child? Pixie dust, I say. Our entire lives may not be fairy tales, but little moments can glitter and make your eyes shine. For instance, never underestimate the power of humour in your relationship with your, perhaps insufferable, partner. It might be fleeting, but your fairy tale castle will shimmer before you when you realize how happy you are. Don’t wait for the Nobel Prize but rejoice when a bunch of wiry undergrads tell you that “your discussion sessions were totally, like, awesome”. When the Fairy Godmother forgets to turn your body into an hour-glass figure, celebrate how your muscles ache with all that dancing you did. If no Prince comes by to kiss you awake from an enchanted slumber, just wake yourself up and be grateful for all those hours of sleep you never thought you had time for. And instead of waiting for the ephemeral golden sunshine of the Spring, smile when a small but perfect snowflake lands and melts on your nose.