Love's Fool- A Guest Post by Rithika Iyer

The following post is written by a very dear friend of mine, Rithika aka Ree aka Batgirl. We studied in the same school for five years but we met much later. Over time she has become someone whom I am extremely close to. This poem was written in December and she very kindly allowed me to publish it on my blog. Please give Rithika a warm welcome people!

The Bilge Master

Love’s Fool

-         Ree

Is this what plants feel when spring leaves

come out? A siren call,

promising you’ll be thick as thieves.

They say Love makes fools of us all.

It came inlike a sneaky mole -

funny that it’s calleda fall,

because ittookmedown a rabbit hole.

They say Love makes fools of us all.

I didn’t know I was easily bruised.

Now out from under Love’s thrall,

slowly I feel my strength infused.

They say Love makes fools of us all.

Happy one day, heartbroken another,

I learnt to build up my walls,

And how to be my own tether.

Love made me a Fool after all.

Think of You

Lying awake unable to sleep

My thoughts in a tattered heap

About my feet

As I try to think

Of you

Your smile still mesmerizes me

Your laughter echoes in my head

And as I think an image of you

Forms in front of me

I can smell your perfume

May I miss you, and the little things you used to do?

May I remember you with fondness and not angst?

Will you remember the few things we shared

Back in that cold December?

And as I lie awake, the thoughts gather themselves up

And form an oasis in the desert of my mind

A cool place with trees that give shade

And sweet water to satiate

My thirst for you

And as I think of you

A smile comes to my face

Despite the fact that it's late

I lie here wide awake

And I think of you

And think of you

The Bilge Master

To Chuni- In Loving Memory

There are many bonds a human being makes. His parents are the primary one. Hs friend circle is a secondary but an important one. And then, there is the bond between a man and his dog.

A man has always regarded a dog to be his best friend. That is the case. I had a dog for eight years and he brought me up. He was humble, generous in his affection, he never barked and he was a thorough gentleman. His name was Chuni which means ruby in Bengali.

 Chuni came into our lives in 2005. He was a few months old and immediately my mother bundled him into her arms and said to him that she was his mother. I looked at him with wonder because I had spent the past year nagging my parents to get me a dog, and now that that dream had come true I was speechless with happiness.

Over the years Chuni grew and made the house a home. He would always be there to greet us when we came back from outside. He loved to eat and he loved us. He would lie curled up on my father's side of the bed and when my father came to sleep, Chuni would position himself against my father's back and sleep.

I miss him. I miss everything about him.

I miss the way his ears pricked up when he heard the word "dinner". I miss taking him walking while listening to his favorite song (Octopus' Garden by The Beatles). I miss his wagging tail and forever smiling mouth. I miss stroking his coat, mixing his dinner and cleaning up when he made a mess.

Chuni died of renal failure on this day, five years ago at 3:30pm. It was painful. We tried everything we could and then found out his sister who was with my cousins died the same way. It was genetics.

Chuni was an experience I cannot put into words adequately. His tremendous capacity to love and be loved, his forever forgiving nature no matter how heinous the crime against him, his passion for food, his always being there and his ability to sense when one of us was feeling low. These are all attributes that made the experience rich.

I apologize for having run out of words to describe him, but a quote from a song by Alter Bridge titled In Loving Memory should suffice to wrap this up

"And I know you're a part of me
And it's your song that sets me free
I sing it while I feel, I can't hold on
I sing tonight 'cause it comforts me"

The Bilge Master

All My Secrets

"Bury all your secrets in my skin

Come away with innocence

And leave me with my sins"

Slipknot, Snuff

Everyone has secrets. Some people have more, some less. I am the man with the most secrets. This is because people tell me their secrets. They trust me with them, like they trust banks with their gold. And I keep their secrets safely tucked away in the recesses of my mind, sometimes forgetting their face but remembering their secret.

I have many sides to my persona, and all of them are facades. Very few people know what my real face is like. I fake it. I fake it all. I fake the smile, I fake the walk, I fake the talk. But when it comes to walking the talk, i.e. keeping something hidden, I am your man.

However, the hardest secrets to keep are my own. Sometimes I feel I can't face the demons in my head and so I keep them buried, denying myself closure from the past. This makes my secrets big. And I hate going down into the recesses of my mind, which is cluttered with information on people and find my own secret to dig out. When I do dig it out, the sight is not pleasant and neither is the smell. Fetid and rotting, it rises from the graveyard and comes to attack me. I try to defend myself by conversing with people and getting still more secrets, hoping that the red in my ledger will get lost amidst the swirling mass.

But it doesn't. The question marks are still there. The unanswered questions, the confusion. It's all there. My sin. The sin I have been running from and keeping secret. It's time for that to end. I have got blank pages to fill with writing that comes from within.

I'm tired of keeping secrets. I would rather set down the burden and move on to greener pastures . One day, someone will inherit my secrets and the ones from others as well. On that day, I shall be free..

The Bilge Master

Why Luna Lovegood Belongs in Ravenclaw

Harry Potter was a sensation in my teenage years. I remember how I used to read reports on the news about queues forming outside bookshops the day before the next book came out. Then they made the books into movies and the people of the world queued outside movie theaters desperate to beat the "House Full" signs by even one second, if possible.

Yes Pottermania was well in swing when I was 14 years old. And why shouldn't it have been? It was a riveting tale of a boy wizard who had lost his parents and was going to a school where they taught you magic! Magic! That alone was enough to keep me hooked, because having read many books where the key element of the plot was magic,  this one therefore attracted me. It was well written, had original characters and plot themes and the USP for me was that it was a world in which I could lose myself. Hogwarts was my home. There were dragons and talking paintings, spells that could turn you into a toad or help you disguise your nose, shapeshifting, salamanders and carnivorous books and so much more in the Potter universe.

Among the characters of which there are plenty- such as Hermione Granger, the intelligent and studious spell caster whose razorblade of a brain and never say die attitude makes her a lasting experience. We must also mention Cedric Diggory, who died for his friend Harry. You see Hogwarts was an ecosystem where it was never just  about Harry and Voldemort and was always about the universe Rowling managed to create.

However in this universe of half giants and basilisks there is one character who for me stood out sharper than even Harry. Her name was Luna Lovegood aka Loony Lovegood and she appeared in the fifth book- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and instantly became my favorite character in the book.

How did she do this? She did it by being totally, fantastically awesome!

Luna was a girl who lived in her own dream world, as far away from reality as  possible, while being thoroughly  grounded in reality all the time. She was intelligent, witty and had a sense of humor that rivaled that of Fred Weasley and that was no mean feat! She was also very underplayed- appearing for a few scenes in the book and making her presence felt in each of them. It was like an elephant in the room when Luna appeared, with her Quibbler held upside down and her weird grin.

But my dear reader, this character was also capable of shooting Pluto with a Blasting curse in The Ministry of Magic and making it incapacitate a Death Eater, so I would urge you not to mess with her.

Luna is the embodiment of The Beatles' song "The Fool on the Hill".

"He never listens to them

He knows that they're the fools

They don't like him

The fool on the hill"

This checks a lot of boxes where Luna is concerned. She is a Ravenclaw out and out, and although many people are of the opinion that Miss Granger should have been one, I disagree. Luna is a much better fit in Ravenclaw, because she is so underplayed. Her subtle hints to Harry at times make a lot of difference to him. While she may believe some strange things, she also stands up against evil and defends what to her is more precious than gold- friendship with Harry and the rest of the DA. We see that when Harry visits Xenophilius Lovegood and sees her room for the first time.

To conclude, Ravenclaw's motto was "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure", and Loony Lovegood is the embodiment of that. She is street smart, very intelligent and in all aspects of her there is wisdom.

Hats off to JK Rowling for having created Luna Lovegood!

The Bilge Master