What I has been doing: it has all become too much, so it's time to write it in a list.

It's summer again, and today, I cut across the maath at India Gate from National Gallery of Modern Art, tramping down with my Roerichs and those sandals with small heels that still hurt sharply and with an insect bite that feels like someone's hammered a nail on your foot. It was lovely, notwithstanding foot hurting and emerging soreness of my inner thigh thanks to dubious condition of my leggings (don't ask): it was five-ish, the roddur had just stopped blasting through, and there wasn't a soul in sight. It was quite something:being in the heart of Delhi, and not have anyone around. I could probably have squatted and peed.
I was going to Bengali Market to meet my friend, R. I walked halfway, and then took an auto.
Places I went to today:
The Claridges, on Aurangzeb Road, which is very tree-lined and lovely
YWCA Kitchen, by Metro (felt rather nice after a long time), where I sat for two hours and methodically read through two issues of Eye, The Indian Express supplement and ate a rather nice platter of a lamb chop, a thick pork sausage (quite like a penis, if you ask) and a huge chicken patty, rather well-flavoured, and a milky cold coffee. Twenty-seven per cent added to the bill thanks to the legions of taxes with which you will be punished for eating out: it added about Rs 150 to the bill.
Thence, to NGMA, which was closing, so I walked straight, like a philistine, into the souvenir shop, and bought the Roerich prints I had been eyeing for so long. I will laminate and stick them up all around my room, so that I look at them and remember Ladakh. I wish I had time to look around at the photos. I didn't realise they would be so engaging. I just remember Amrita Shergill, Jamini Roy, Company paintings, Raja Ravi Verma and probably some Ramkinkar (such a lovely name) Baij from last time with O, when I slept on the yellow sofa.
Bengali Market turned out surprisingly nice, though Costa Coffee, with its industrial and tasteless peach iced tea and extravagant prices was intensely depressing. R came and ordered more gunk (she likes the gunk, and doesn't consider it to be gunk, obviously).
From there, we went to Pahargunj, which turned out rather nice, even though it had gotten to be desperately sultry by then, ar ami gorom e, amar tights er jalay ar pokar kamore hnaashphaash korchhilam. But, but, we bought shoes! Shoesses, soft ones, which  I never get. And she bought Kolapuri chappals, which she wanted. We walked down the main street to look at bags and clothes and earrings. We ended up The Metropolitan (where else) and she ate a rather tasty dish of chicken breast (always sounds obscene) and I had dubious caesar salad and ickily-sweet iced tea. We chatted for a long time, and then it was back home on a protracted journey where I couldn't wait to reach home and shed my tights.

It was a very full and enjoyable day, and I should really be asleep, but I am not.

This week has been harrowing because of the heat and The Office. I am considering hiring a rickety AC, because the cooler doesn't seem to be making much difference in 45 degrees centigrade. The Office has consumed my nights, even on days I have been very tired, like today. I have been watching John Krasinski's videos like an addlehead obsessive, though it has helped wear out the shine a bit.

In other news, dadu. A.
Are we really cool and special people that we fail to find someone good enough to live with? Are we independent and feisty and unable to compromise, or is it just sad that we haven't found kind, nice, fun people to share our lives with, and can't seem to be able to do with less.
It's annual sex time again, and I haven't found anybody. Hopefully it will be in better circumstances than last time.
I am enjoying living by myself. I was cooking a lot until this week's heat struck. 

This blog is where I have complained without restraint for the last six years. Here's some more.
I am in Hyderabad, have been for the last three days. The days have been a dazed blur. I must have met about 20 people, which is an 'only', and have come back meaning to fall asleep immediately, but keeping awake again till 2am. My job has become a wasteland. Why am I doing this professional harakiri? Why am I catering to the whims of my clueless boss? This is that juncture again. And I spoke to my ex, and result, it feels like I am back in that old place again. That desperate hurt that refuses to go, that bafflement at someone being able to do this with impunity. It's like I have to start it all over again, with a trip to McLeodgunj, ending in a long conversation in darkness, down sharp bends on a mountain road: conversations had again and again, with different people, examining the situation from varied angles, the need to talk, talk, talk it all away. At the end of which had come blessed relief, a scab that no longer hurt, and then there was Ladakh, and X and sex to wash it all away, and blossoming again into life, taking control and standing up, and being proud, so proud. And O and C and A. A being kind, and holding and listening, pulling me into her loving vortex and giving me relief I didn't even know I needed, C listening, listening, on those blistering afternoons when I stood on the balcony, and tried to find a method to the maze that I felt I had been pulled into, O repeating again and again and again, of love and strength and happiness, and hugging me, and bringing me along with her across Delhi: oh that lovely, scorching Delhi 2012 summer, winding through CR Park, Lajpat, old Delhi, kakima, Kutty and ma. And then I went away to Ladakh, and I went away again, and slowly things fell in place.
That was what it took to stand up again. You can't re-run that gamut. I haven't the wish, I don't want to repeat. I want to be able to shed him, shed all the mens who do this. This summer will be hard enough without. There can't be this added masala to the madness.

I was going to begin this with 'Dear Sir', since I write official emails all day. Life seems to be closing in, having caught me in its grasp. The flat requires too too much work, which I don't think I can manage while holding down the responsibilities this job entails. Is suicide an option? Just saying.
Aar parchhi na. An infantile parent, an undisciplined dog, the flat, the job, not enough money, the need for a lot more money, the fear of whether I can do this alone, the longing for someone to share this. What have I done? What am I doing? When will this ever finish? When will I ever be free? I really really really want to be free. I had hoped to leave my job and go away to Ladakh this year. But I can't. I have to stay in Delhi all of this year.
My leave, if I get two weeks' leave, will have to be spent in Kolkata, getting the flat, the myriad payments and investments in order. That travel will have to be timed with court appearances, so that we are in Delhi when we have to be in court. After the initial court work is over (or so the lawyer blithely said), I can take my family back to Kolkata and leave them there.
Yes, people die, people go mad. I still have sanity, I have food, a roof over my head, parent and dog are very well within the bounds of manageability. Kintu, kintu: one will admit this is a lot for one person. A person who does not enjoy responsibility, who does not get her kicks out of solving twenty problems at once, who would rather have mental peace than a fat paycheck.

Summer will pass with Ladakh turning all sunshiny and ethereal again, and I will be here. Maybe winter 2013 for the long trip.

Dear baba,

Seven years to that day. I hope you are happy where you are. We never do anything to remember that day, because till now, your absence was lived by us all the time, in varied ways. If I were alone, though, I would have done something. I would have gotten a nice photo of you framed: my favourite is the one of you laughing. We hardly have any photos of you. And I would have done something: lit a dhoop in the room, remembered you, ki jaani. Like I am remembering you now. A status message about Aminia brought back that afternoon, when I was in school, and ma wasn't with us, when we had gone there for food, a rare treat. We ordered the Aminia Special, which you said was their best dish, which you knew from your college days. But what arrived was a piece of meat in jhol, with a floating onion and tomato alongside, and you lamented how standards had gone bad. And I now think that your visits to Aminia must also have been rare treats, money being as scarce as it was then.
It is hard to construct a father as a person, dear father, when he is no more. And there are only memories to be revisited and reconstructed, examined in different ways at different times in your own life, as you feel more tolerant and greater longing for a man who is no longer there in flesh and blood, with his idiosyncracies, malices, anger, demons. Deaths can never be reconciled. Are the dead benign presences, or do they change into malicious gamechangers? One hopes for the former, one hopes strongly that one's parent remains a benign presence, or often, not even that. 
Life has taken such a turn, dear father, that one can no longer imagine what it would be like to have you around with me at 30. I would have been another person. Now, we concentrate on keeping ma alive, we grow to love her more even as we fight more than ever. We love our dog, or daughter, the star of our lives who brings two women together. This is my family, baba. 
I have thought of you when times were hard, when paths are difficult to tread. I pray for your love, I curse you for leaving me, I think of what you would have said if you had seen me thus. I am sure you would have held me close this time last year, kept the world at bay and condemned those who broke my heart. If you are close by, you must be appalled by the way I have been leading my life these many years, how close to the edge I tread. You would think of why I do this, and you would also know. And you would let me have my way, you would know that each one lives their life, baba. You know, I would accept death the way you accepted death, without thinking of protesting. Like you, I think I accept what life gives me. It feels warm to know we are tied in this, baba. 
Oh baba, the mystery of living. Tumi ki more giye bujhte perechho er mane ki? Shei orangutan tar chhobi dekhechho, je matha dheke agun theke bachte cheshta korechhilo: dekhte thik manusher moton. Ei koshter kothay kon mane achhe, baba? Tobu eta notun noy. As long as there has been life, there has been pain and brutality. Are we a particularly despicable species? Would it help if, like the Poor Priest, one were to spend one's life atoning for the sins of others?

I have taken to smoking, though only up to 3 a day. No reason save that I like it. 
And as I grow older, I hope I will better accept how dire this living this.

Bhalo theko, baba.

So, I must have written here that I am relationship-free now. I am here to say that after reading this blog that I do, I am glad once again that I am, because I too was going to settle for a lifetime of loneliness and far worse things besides. It would have been a shame to give up so much of my space and dreams to live with a piece of shit.

খুব কাশি হচ্ছে। ফ্লপি পাশে শুয়ে আছে। এমন সব সময় মনে হয় কাউকে যদি বলা যেত এই তিনটের সময়, "শোন, আমার কাশতে কাশতে গলায় জালা করছে, গায়ে একটু একটু ব্যথা করছে।" কিন্তু বাবাকে হারানো মানে এই privilege lose করা। আর কৌশিক কে না বলতে পারা হয়ত খারাপ না।
Well, I feel small and rather sorry for myself. If I were F, I would have curled up like her and stuck close to my human.

This was quite a weekend. If all weekends were like this life would be fine, bearable even. On Sunday, I went for the mother of daywalks, through Asola wildlife sanctuary. With Linus. L navigates by googlemaps, and he navigates. Me, I find out about the route, see if it works for me and go alone. I did not find much information on the Net and presumed that L didn't rely on googlemaps alone. So, net net, we were stamping through barely-there tracks, cutting through REALLY thorny branches, with innumerable scratches and thorns in our shoes. I expected - and found that L did too - it to be a 2/3-hour walk at most. I took 600 ml of water, accordingly and munchies. In the event, it turned out to be a daylong thing, with me wondering constantly whether we would be able to get out while there was light. I was thirsty and hadn't pottied, which together I find quite incapacitating. Anyway, it wasn't all that bad, because we walked almost constantly, our longest break must have been 15 minutes long, and though at moments I felt very tired, it didn't come to the point where I did not care, or thought I couldn't go anymore. Must have been close, though. L has done this often at home in Sweden, and he was fairly confident throughout that we would come out at the west. He knew which was west, for one. We found much to chatter on about, and he was a really nice companion, I have no idea how. I can't point out particular aspects of him which make it easy to get along with him, or things which I might have in common with him. Maybe he was just polite. Turned out, we had walked about 7 km, though it felt like 10. The objective was to reach one Bhardwaj Lake, marked on googlemaps, which we didn't - we skirted around it unknowingly - but we did pass one huge lake towards the beginning, before we entered Asola - probably the CITM lake 1- and saw 2 big, but very shallow, drying-up lakes and one biggish, full lake before we left. We started our walk from the opposite of a college on Pali Road, down a track that began with an open garbage dump. About 10 minutes' walking took us to the first CITM lake. Surajkund is close by, apparently. We met people who were coming back, some of whom were appreciative, some condescending, one who joyously called us lovebirds. But once past the first lake, we didn't encounter a soul, except a goat herder in the beginning, and construction workers at the end, near the place which is supposed to be a 'shelter' for monkeys who are picked up from across the city to be dumped here.
Our only companions were cows, and L said we could rely on them, but they might not be in a hurry to go west and get out, like us, right? We found them at 3 points on our way: once, when the path we were on abruptly ended where the land seemed to have sunk a couple of feet and there were cows on the other end. I politely declined the offer to go down on our bums and climb up the other end, though in retrospect, it was as easy as some of the harder stuff we did. The other point was where we were picking our way through rocks and thorny branches, and there was a cow who wanted to pass. We looked at each other for a bit. It waited and then went along, through the thorns as if they were light leaves. I now know cows are thick-skinned. The third was when we were walking through even denser bush and suddenly there were cows leaping alarmedly out of L's way. They were not reassured at all by what he had to say, viz., what's the matter, cow, etc.
The tracks, such as they were, were barely broad enough for a person to pass through, and you had to remove thorny branches out of the way. I acquired a stick - a thorny branch with no thorns at one end, where I held it - to get the branches out of my way, but L used his hands pretty much. By the end of the walk, his hands were completely scarred and very red. For a plump person, he is quite fit and agile. Parts of the way were rocky. We climbed up and down the rocks. There was a spot, towards the end of the way, a shady clearing (and we had almost no shade throughout, which made one very thirsty) with cool, black stones at one end. We just rested our bodies along it. The stones were heavenly. I couldn't have yearned for anything else at that moment. But that was about 10 minutes, and soon I was back to saying which animal I would like to be at that moment (at various points along the route, I had wanted to be a cow, a dog, a monkey and a bird, depending on the terrain and how hot and thirsty I felt). Around this part, there were the remains of an old wall. Perhaps this used to be the earlier border of the sanctuary?
We found several feathers along the way, or rather L did, and I picked them up. I would like to get them identified. We also saw a nilgai, an eagle which I couldn't identify, babblers, I think, and birds which I found later were Oriental Magpie Robins. We heard peacocks too.
L brought cinnamon buns which he had baked. I ate one of that, and my biscuits. No, they weren't cinnamon buns. Something else, but same mix of spices.
The last kilometre or so was on an earth road for vehicles. That's when we started feeling the aches and pains. We came out at Bhatti gaon. They have put up a continuous, huge, green plastic wall to demarcate the sanctuary from the village. It is quite a monstrosity, but people have made holes along the bottom of it. There are also gates. We met several pigs at this end, and man, were they scared when they saw us creeping along through the trees. One adult squealed and ran for its life #stupid peeg. The piglets with their dirty feet merely took us in with beady eyes. And then there was a black dog with a collar, who was very territorial. He wouldn't stop barking because we were there, although we were being quite fleet-footed. He meant business, alright. His mouth looked scary, shattered, like someone had bashed it in at some point.
I was quite glad to be out of this typical Jat village. We had dosas at Naivaidyam in Hauz Khas village and I rapidly called it a day, because I was feeling very odd by then, what with the no water, no sleep and no potty. I would like to go back again.
Long narratives make me fed up.

P.S. I liked Skyfall. It's quite grand, Judi Dench's extreme dodderiness and Ralph Fiennes's constant pottyface notwithstanding. I wonder what it is with Daniel Craig. He is quite charmless, has ears that stick out: he definitely fits the prototype of the East European goon far better. Yet one likes him. Maybe it's the suits, maybe the humane thing gets to people. Skyfall the droughty estate is beautiful.

The most beautiful thing

Faye Wong in Chunking Express

Winter is coming. It feels as ugly and portentous as the way they say it in Winterfell. The last few days have been a blur, a bit of work and coming back home late with the cold on my back, walking down a rather deserted road to Basat Chowki to take the shared auto home. A fair bit of walking, including the walk home from NH24. I can't understand what to do about the travel thing right now. Post-Nov, maybe it will be clearer. Among other reasons, it is such a relief when the salary comes in at the end of the month, it's like one worry set at rest: without even beginning to think of buying camera and where will the money to travel over a long stretch come from.

Cold is bad because it is mind-congealing; it's hard to hold more than one thought at a time, hard to think beyond getting to office, getting work done, how to keep from getting cold, whether to wear socks, whether to take hoodie or stole, how not to catch cold - getting fed up of trying not to catch cold and saying what-the-hell, bring on the Avil 50 and trip to la-la land. One thought at a time is a welcome thing when you are travelling; it keeps one from getting depressed, but here, in the city, if you can't multitask, you are asking for annihilation. (Professor Shonku invented a weapon called Annihilin). I can't think adventurously in winter; I am barely thinking enough to keep my life up and running: buy medicines, do groceries, remember to buy chocolate, 'should I have cake or sweets or both?' The balcony door is closed to keep out the cold and mosquitoes; আমার মনের জানলাও প্রায় বন্ধ। 

The Sharodiyas are here: Sananda and Desh for us, for now. I like what Tilottama Majumdar has written for both. Quite a nice break from the odious writing on 'women's issues' that would keep appearing in the Sharodiyas. বাণী বসু তো ওই করেই ভোগে গেল। And Sunil Ganguli is dead, purveyor of titillation and decadent possibilities, and sometimes, just lovely writing. Also Jaspal Bhatti. The world is changing, changing. My cousin has had himself a daughter, and I am loathe to call and congratulate them and be over the moon on the phone. It's embarrassing, among other things.
During Pujo, I went to listen to a Chandrabindu (Vikram had once spoken of a shoot he had to do with 'those Chandrabindu guys' :)) concert. Puro buk hu hu kara nostalgia. Took me a couple of days to get back on my feet, so to speak, and remember, and remember well, why Kolkata is not a place to live in anymore. But ki sexy, ki unmadona, such allure of youth, and remembrance of a city that is probably only in the mind anymore. This Pujo was my most wholesome in years. I had so wanted to do what everybody does, for such a long time: count down the pandals, offer onjoli, listen to 'function' in the evening, eat at the stalls, and to not leave behind a sad person who wanted but couldn't do it. We did all of that this time: on two days too, and got mighty pooped. I realised again, my limited appetite for this sort of thing. I can't do it dedicatedly and methodically through 5 days, after a point, you want to just go home and relax, and that I loathe onjoli. The utter pointlessness of it, I dunno. But the bhog was yum, even line e dariye bhog neowa. I haven't seen it in Kolkata ever, that anyone can come in and have bhog at any pandal. As was getting dressed and going out, and the Anandamela at CR Park, where I ate patishapta and bad pulipithey (really bad) and gokulpithey and aro ki ki shob. F cried the whole time, I think, the day we went out twice, and I got a call from our downstairs neighbour while we were at the C'bindu concert that she had been howling constantly and could we please come.
Her eye has been watering and closed this whole week, we are taking her to the vet tomorrow. Could be a fungal infection, Mrs Katiyal says.

All of this to hide that he is married or going to marry and I don't understand or know what to do with the hurt and the rage and the praner jala and I feel physically repulsed by R, yet wish I could wrap myself in someone's arms and say 'Fuck you, chutiye.' I wonder if I am stupid in my worldly unwiseness, if I should have married when I had the chance, yet what chance, if someone makes you feel stood apart and lonely, and disappoints you at every turn, you are also waiting and hoping, no, je ekdin amar bhaggeo shikey chhirbe? Jedin shob nodi mitbey shagorey, shob shomoshhar shomadhan hobe, shedin ami tomay biye kore nebo. But people are what they are, and if you can't live them down today, you never will tomorrow. Otoeb, gechhe, apod chukechhe.' 

It just brings you closer to the person you really are. I would probably never have married at 30 anyway. If ever.

Songs I've been listening to recemment:

Nancy Sinatra's Sugartown
Pink Martini - Sympathique
The Mamas and the Papas - California Dreaming

Ma r shathe jhagra hochhe phatiye. Edike F lunch undigested bomi kore diyechhe, ar tiktiki (1 nos) merechhe.

Incredibly old songs playing on the radio. It's 11.30 at night. Ma casually mentioned Shamshad Begum was one, while I was marvelling. The house is suddenly filled with music. There is an ease to living that wasn't there when I was growing up. Freed from the strictures of baba, we have both learned to breathe. Now, ma is cooking chilli fish.

I have my very own sari to wear this Pujo. Ma has the lemon yelloe tussar from Kerala and the south cotton purple and green sari.

I ate bad momos, and followed it up with thin crust chicken pizza (small) for dinner and guzzling RC Cola (lemon) to cool off. The grotesqueness of this gluttony appalls me, but tastewise, the pizza was yum! Scorpio Cafe is a wonderful institution. Only if you don't have their chicken club sandwich.

Winter is coming early this year. It's already cool, though I am determined to wear my sleeveless jama kapor one last time before putting them away. In Kolkata, it's still steaming, says C.

F shredded and ate a half-smoked cigarette yesterday and mysteriously developed a watering and droopy right eye. We are a little concerned, after all, dogs aren't supposed to eat cigarettes, though the eye's mostly back to normal.

I am reading Rimi di's City of Love. I rather like it than not, never mind what Adi of words uttered in haste said. I love his blog. He reads like he's high, compulsively, slightly unhealthily. What he reviews is completely different from what I read, though I read very little, but there is a certain pleasure in seeing this evidence of an act of pleasure performed so compulsively. Dunno why it seems this way. I've read other blogs where people read and review as copiously.

These are the tangible things in days that are otherwise floating away aimlessly. There is no point to them, no centre. I go through a dazed struggle to concentrate on something. This is good enough reason to leave, I believe. It's only a matter of time. Not sure how well it will reflect on my career. But 'ah, well' is what I have to say to that. What else is there to say. I could cut through all things important but unnecessary for my present purpose and there would still be a fair bit left to settle, which I shall probably leave as they are. I do so yearn to start travelling. I mean, just the terrific ichhe, not including the planning, on which a lot is yet to be done.
Primary train tickets to book, talk to more people, thrash around the idea of an outer end in the form of a return ticket (no need, I think), draw up a daywise itinerary (I realised today that I would have to by-heart it, imagine the tedium. But I can do such stuff, I've seen, so snigger snigger.), do some bookings or at least talk at the places I plan to stay in in Gujarat (it's going to be full-on tourist season), go out and buy that camera, talk to Sudeb da about a rucksack (wish I could just borrow one and save myself 3k. Or maybe get given one, like the sleeping bag.) I am wondering how I will cart around my giant laptop, and take some kind of a computer I certainly want to. Wondering whether I should buy an external hark disk (prices have come down, for one). Wish, again, that someone would give me a Netbook.
Stupid girl, stupid castles in the air. Oof.
I've decided that my sports shoes serve my needs just fine, the beginnings of a crack in the sole notwithstanding. If they tear irrepaireably, new ones will just have to be bought on the way.

Anyway, today I succeeded just a little in getting stuff done. Sent off several difficult-to-write mails. More of that left. Content work still pending, lots of it, but I've begun engaging with the content and enjoying it. There's a meeting tomorrow and I should have drawn up a P&L for it, but I haven't.

 Other tasks I am dreading: speaking to the lawyer (have no strategy for that yet), calculating, taking my share of the money and paying off the joint electricity bill for our and the flat below. It's not even the 20th, and I already keep wondering when next month's salary will be credited, and then immediately think of the rent that will be debited immediately afterward. My bank balance really took a snowdive after that first Ladakh trip. Official costs and kenakata included, I must have spent more than 50k.

I am wondering what they'll give us for Diwali. 

So, you would think my life is in a shambles. But then, it's my life. I can't denounce it. I have to look forward or else it'll all come tumbling down.

Turns out, you can go to the salt pans of Kutch alone, if you can spend some money for it. Full moon has to be figured out, though. But I am missing the sex occasionally, but also being somewhat revolted at the prospect of the person I want to have it with.
Read a lot on Gujarat this week, because I realised I have stayed totally vague about the details of the proposed trip after deciding broadly on the places. Got a few basic maps off the Net I can print out. Found out about a government guest house and a camp for Little Rann. Devjibhai Dhamecha remains a very real option. But they have to be called and spoken to. And I can't say definitively about the timings yet. The Rajasthan itinerary is starting to sound vague in comparison. Shekhawati seems a glorious idea, now that I've started reading up about it. I wish I could find a travel companion(s), but I am not sure whether I am definitively travelling alone or not. If I did, I would start looking around.
Meanwhile, I am bored out of my mind. Or I am telling myself that this feeling, this torpor of being stuck-in-a-moment-and-can't-get-out is boredom. The work is brain-congealing now that I am back in D, winter is starting to make its presence felt; you sweat and feel chilled at the same time. It is disgusting. Of course, the winter by itself is disgusting too. The zenith would be spending a few mind-barfingly tepid weeks in the winter no man's land of Calcutta. I dread the prospect. I hope not to sink into lyad again, and instead do my work and get the hell out. In Delhi, I suppose I will be so anxious to get out of the cold and loneliness, I won't be able to sink into lyad again. This feeling of dying every moment is so intense now that I have quit worrying about money. I will take what I get my hands on, and stop when panic sets in.
Next week is Pujo. I have decided to don my kasavu sari and fire-red MAC lipstick and check out CR Park with ma. Another day, we will go see the pujos in Mayur Vihar Phase I, and offer anjali. The works, mamah! I wish F could come along too. But how do I make life beyond the normal for her, except by maybe celebrating her birthday, which happened around this time, in the same spirit?
After that is over, hopefully, freedom. In between, I want to slip away to Jaipur for a weekend. Because I want to go somewhere, and also partly to see whether my plan would work, how I feel about things.
There's a rucksack to be bought in Calcutta, money and photos to recover; a camera to be bought in Delhi. Meanwhile, the money keeps flowing out of my hand.
Met a school friend twice over last week. I am, as she put it indelicately with unconscious candour, her 'new best friend', because she is chronically unable to stay alone and her husband has gone off to study and she isn't getting leave for an uncertain while. Ergo, she will hang out with whoever lives in her current part of the city. Earlier, it was other people, now. it's me. I admit that I mind. Despite pleasant hours spent and my reasons being similar, I do want the enjoyment to be genuine and mutual. Yesterday was a little less fun (I do loathe walking around malls and my knees start to hurt real soon) and I wonder when I'll meet her again.
I have been shouting wilfully at ma. I love hanging around F, and wonder how I will get along without her. But not for too long, fo sho'. I am not living here, in the cruel badlands of D, alone.

How do you live with so much hate? I hate three people right now, all men, for all of whom I have had varying degrees of affection. One broke my trust, another was cruel, the third callous. I am always loathe to let go of people until they have shown themselves conclusively to be pricks, bastards, unworthy. This takes repeated acts of bastardiness and unworthiness, until there is a final straw which convinces me that the time to close this book is past. I've closed the book for the first two, I am considering doing it for the last, because I don't want to suffer repeated disappointments.
Two things: 1. That one does this on principle at a certain point in an association, even though feelings ask otherwise. You can take more shit, but you choose not to, to preserve your dignity, self-respect.
2. That you can't live feeling this much hate, totting up the list of people you feel this strongly against, and then feeling that your heart is full, and there is no place for light, happy feelings. That you therefore, willingly choose to let go. Let go of people you have loved, some people you still care about. Remove them from your heart, for them to do as they will.
Is this the way of life, for human beings? That you strew people by the wayside as you go along? Is this the lesson I am supposed to learn, another of the mysteries unravelled, another thing my unworldly parents didn't tell me about, that I am to figure out theke shikhe? I will learn, sure, but I wish it were neater, that others, and I, played by the rules.
If you associate with someone, you don't just shut them out suddenly from your life. It's common courtesy.
Thank you - Welcome. How are you? - I am fine: that kind of thing.
You don't break people who have opened themselves to you.
You don't hurt people where they are exposed.

This whole leaving people, it's a wholly different way of life. It means spending time with people you don't particularly care for, a casual friendship with many people who you can therefore let go of without the need to look back, because they didn't give you anything worth remembering. It also means letting go of people who did give you something just as casually, those people who you want more of.
People who incite my curiosity are the ones I love getting to know the most, far more than the troublesome attractions, where there might be nothing in the head worth sharing, or where the interesting stuff might be obscured by sex or feelingy thoughts.
All of this leaves one rather lonesome. I don't like being lonesome. I like my company, but I also like to meet people. It means going on alone if someone doesn't fit the bill, not staying with a motherfucking bastard because you, in the longest rope that you have given a person for that one act of kindness, decide to swallow the terrible things s/he does and because s/he means company as opposed to lonesomely trudging on some track, or not getting to go someplace because there are some places you can't go alone. How will I go to the salt pans of Kutch, I wonder, let alone spend the whole night under a full moon? Desert trek is not happening. I can't go and watch a Rang de Basanti type freakshow in its place, can I?

The summer, as promised, has been lovely. I came back from L. Much fun was had, the meanness notwithstanding. I saw the Mulbek Maitreya Buddha. I was thinking in retrospect, though. R is not very nice either, is he? Why do I keep associating with people who I am not convinced about?
Amazement: at the typicalness of male behaviour. K has made perfectly random attempts to get in touch. You want something once it's out of your hands.
Mes projets pour l'hiver include:
desert trek, Jaisalmer, Khuri
the Rann, Dholaveera, Lothal, Pavagadh-Champaner (too much for one state, if you ask me. It's starting to sound like those crazy family vacations covering an entire state that people take)
Varanasi for noo year
MP, and a wedding
L

There is a possibility I will be heavily disillusioned after it all. You know, finding out that people are all the same, often irredeemable, and that travelling doesn't change you one whit.

Yesterday, I met a condescending prick who made me rush back to the shelter of family. I felt so grateful to have ma and F. People are mostly like this prick, niceness is a rarity.

I am (again) planning to buy a DSLR. But apart from everything else, I have to wait for next month's salary to replenish my coffers.

Nick Hornby is so neurotic.
Cadbury's Silk is yum. Finally, a local chocolate that you can eat. And, um, Gold Flake.

What else? Kolkata somewhere in between all this, though after yesterday's encounter, I feel loathe to let go of ma and F. They are my cocoon, my cushion, I am scared of what it would be to live here without one. I'll get them back after I am done with all my projets, of course.
One should leave as little as possible to chance, because chance is all round you, right, waiting to throw your plans awry. But a lot of what I am planning rests on chance. I have no foresight on how I will be after this. I am hoping for a very good time and not too many brickbats, at the very least.
And to smell of the road, to smell of the road.

Tso Mo was magical. You have no idea how much I am longing to be as happy and do exactly what we were doing of that afternoon and night, with the sharp smell of your Gold Flake hitting my nose like a pointy needle. That magic, one longs for, with some reckless desperation.

It's entirely there, nowhere near going away. I found a message 'Ei kagoj porchhi' and what we had came rushing back in a torrent, the enormity of what is lost. It is indeed as if a limb has been chopped off. You have never known how to live without it. How to be 27, say, and not be that way.
It is not like baba. Not like a parent. It is a six-feet tall flesh and blood, a chest of hair, a pair of glasses. And then I remind myself, again, that it was also unanswered affections, silences, being left standing in the middle of the road, being a coward, again and again... moral turpitude?
In total, maybe not such a bad bargain.
I saw an article: on singlehood being seen as an abnormality when more and more people are voluntarily choosing to be single. I think it's stupid. Right now, I really want someone to love, but the person has to be someone I want to be with. I won't settle for drain water because I am thirsty, hence I am single. It's not an ideological position, really. Who voluntarily eschews company they enjoy?

Summer has been good to me.
In spite of endless cooler breakdowns, no-water days, work going nowhere. There have been friends, far too many outings and a shutting-out of all of that eating me in the months before.
Summer, as always, has been an exercise in freedom.
Right now, it is just like Kolkata: the heat and humidity is just about bearable. Not so bad that you can't keep still, not so comfortable that you can relax and settle down.
And Dilli as the city which helped me rally, thanks in no small measure to ma and friends, but also because of what the city is, who woulda thunk. Is it an exercise in finding or losing myself? A bit of both, I suppose. The endless trips back home in autos after 10 (how I have thrown money around) looking at the night city, no one to tell you what to do, the man on the street who sits down at that hour for a drag, men who go to sleep on the pavement, men finishing up after work. And a blank in my mind: once it was happy, this return home after a full day, now it is just an absence of feeling, not knowing what tomorrow might bring. I am not complaining, just wondering what comes after this.
What a leveller it is to have ma and F, the groundedness, the feeling of home. Who knows what I might have done without them.
Yesterday, at Nehru Place: scouting for that rarity, apparently: a 2GB SD card for my camera. And IndiaFab for clothes, and dirt cheap books, bought from a slightly creepy, educated old man, who makes you wonder if he wants to fuck young women like me. Thence to Shahpur Jat in Panchsheel Park, a part of the city I hadn't been to before. L seems so un-European in his manner. I found myself liking him, and M, who I still don't quite understand, but like very much.
P leaves on the 28th, I feel so bereft, I can't even explain it entirely to myself. Our closeness has not been emotional: it is more robust. But the three days spent in their company, I haven't been this happy in a long while. I haven't relished the company of friends with whom I feel so at ease for a very long time, doing things I like to do. Friends, who, I suppose, accept me for what I am, one who knows me since the time I began thinking for myself.
One by one, all of them, the summer visitors, will leave. The season will turn again. Who knows what will happen then. I dread the news of a certain marriage, still. I am lulled into thinking that a phone call is the most normal thing, after I see a couple that works together, and then I tell myself that I have been lulled.
When the season turns, my sister-in-law will have had a baby. She has asked me to come, and I will go. But I do wonder what happens to me, though I have been schooling myself in the lesson to accept my life, whether it comes with coupledom or singlehood.
Right now, I am being a waster. I have told myself that I am not responsible for everything, that I am allowed a break till I get back on my feet and figure out what I am going to do.
It has not been boring, however. I have gone around Delhi, travelled with ma and dog for the first time, and am readying for another trip, with people I have met through another friend. Winter, apart from anything else, will be for travelling to warmer climes (Madhya Pradesh perhaps) and for seeing what I haven't of the city: more detailed old Delhi exploration (now you just become miserable and wild-eyed with the heat), including Qutb and Nizamuddin. I would like to travel more with ma if I can figure out a good place to keep F.

These days, we keep the main door open, with the metal door closed, to let in cool air. Another summer freedom, and a memory from very young days, when we stayed at Nivedita Enclave. It's weird, but I don't remember thinking we were not normal in any way, then.

I am considering getting a new blog, because I like the idea of people reading what I write. But I don't know how my earlier readers, few as they were, would find their way to a new blog. This blog is no longer for the public eye, I think, because the memories are too numerous, and I want to start on a clean slate if I am writing stuff that people can see. The ways of thinking, of loving, as much as the things loved, longed for and seen are so tied up with one person that whatever I write in public in this blog, it seems, will forever hark back to those times, times spent with him.
How does one do this? How does one detach oneself from one's own growing up years, impossible to think of without reference to one person, years which are bittersweet, but which seem blighted because it now seems to have led up to a path gone awry. It's like a dish, that you really enjoyed cooking, but which turned out to be like ashes because of something gone wrong in the end: then does the process of preparing it bring any joy in retrospect?
I wonder how Dibbo dealt with Madhura's going away. They were his growing up years too, far more growing-up because in college. One feels blighted, blighted by a single act, and then things are always going to be different.
As A and I were saying, it is as much about grieving baba as grieving for the loss of one person. The grief not felt then, the grief gone so easily below ground, never disabling, never debilitating. I suppose you really remember a person when you most need them, and because I really needed him now, now more than ever since the time he passed on, really, that baba's going away seems to hurt so keenly sometimes.
And then there are people who have lived without experiencing these losses, girls who never break up over a break-up, girls who lose dads only after they have lived their lives in full. It's such a blasted waste. Why did you waste my life so? Did my years seem throwaway to you? Did you think I came so cheap just because I was always there? Because you had to push and push and push to drive me out of your life?

Summer is here again. This summer will be joyless. But no fear. Summer is my season, it never is too marked by sorrow for the next summer to not promise freedom again. Then, there are the rains. Joyless, washing away all sorrow rains. Squelching through filthy streets back home, disgusted by the dirt between your toes, every year, the waterlogging, that is monsoon in my city. I never detested it too much, but now seems a good time to start, another birag to have against home, to call it less of a home. How strange it is that none of you feel Calcutta is home anymore. I still so love it, helped in no small part from seeing the city through his eyes. But even without, what other city is there to call home? So, and therefore, Kolkata is home. I've only ever known one other city, this Delhi. And who could call Dilli home, bolo? Maybe if I lived here in the 80s, with memories of Khan Market as a DDA market and east Delhi as Jumna paar, and old Delhi as not the exotic part of town, but the place you went for wholesale groceries or somesuch.

It is hard to grieve here as ordinarily as I did with Ananya over chat the other day. That was a good chat. Here, one is constrained by the rules of language, the restrictions of symmetry.
I did so like this blog. And can no longer venture here in the open, because it is no longer my own space, but the space where I have been judged and condemned. You took away so much, so much. So much of me I have to change, so that I can learn to live without you.

Dear baba, this is for you. I remembered the time when you were in Vellore after the fall, and yes, I was remembering those days otherwise too. Dear baba, what I had wished for for so long (as I find) without realising how bhoyonkor it was, has finally come to pass. After you, he has left me too. Your leaving was not voluntary, but his is. Maybe it's not so bad, maybe terrible things would have happened had we stayed together. You know all about how much it hurts, baba, you have lived with it inside my head. But it was not very nice, was it? I was reading this post I wrote, and I can't imagine whether I was being stupid or whether I had gotten so used to him not hearing my plaints; I had asked to be set free, however sad and tragic it was. And it is prophetic, baba, karon exactly that has come to pass, and tragic is quite the word for it.
Amra dujonei nijer ojantey ki bhoyanok shob jinish cheye boshe achhie. We are on such different pages, it is amazing. O ekhon ja chaichhe, a marriage with a stranger in three months, sheta amar churanto illogical mone hoy. Kintu oneker khetrei sheta khatey, and there is happiness and laughter, as I was telling him. But that is again the triumph of hope over experience, and if that is what we are doing, why not he and me? Maybe because the unhappiness is a proven, and in this case, documented fact. I have been implicated by my own blog, baba! Tumi jodi thakte, amay aro onek practical hotey shekhatey. Shekhatey emon boka hote nei. Tahole amar lojjata hoto kebol tomar shamnei, amader bairer karur shamne noy, je nijer bhalobashar abhoron ekdin shoriye nitey parey, jar bhalobasha is a choice, not a given.
Amar shobshomoy i bhoy chhilo, je ami happiness pabo na. Ami ki shei pothei cholchhi, baba? Etodin er gora structure ta toh bhenge gelo. Abar notun template banabo, naki eki bhabe abar cheshta korbo? Tumi toh amay jano, tumi toh jano ami pretty noi, attractive noi, bhishon chalak ba smart o noi, ar particularly friendly ba adjusting o noi, thik Parks er moton, House e. Amar moton loker jonne ki arekta manush thake? Ami nije cheye na niley ki amay keu egiye debe? Amar chaitey apotti nei, kintu amar shotti i chinta hoy emon kauke abar pabo kina. Kauke toh charidike dekhina, ei Dilli shohore toh aroi na. Tumi keno chole gele, baba, shob shanti, asroy, bhorsha niye? Ajke ami abar rastay dariye, on my own. Mone hoy parbo, I have the will to try, which is so important, kintu eka je khub bhoy kore. Ar mone hoy, amar baggage niye ki keu amay grohon korbe? Ami bolbo, amar kukur chhara cholbe na, amar ma somewhere I can keep an eye on her na hole cholbe na. Ke debe eto? Chhele ra toh ekhono bossmen, tader ma der jonne wives leave their careers and families, but which guy makes changes to his life plan for something as little as a woman's mother? Kukurpremi jodi ba pelam, amay ki ar keu eto bhalobashbe je ma r kothao bhabbe? And not any old mom, but mine, with her complete disregard for anything that matters. Maybe I'll become like anasuadi (god forbid), or like Indrani. Ami eto chafe korlam as long as I had him, now that I don't, it seems terribly important to have him. Tumi hole amay contempt er chokhe dekhte, ar bolte ami ki shallow ar selfish. Ei jonnei tomar chole jaoa uchit hoyni. Before I even started my life, you abandoned me. How can I forgive you for that? Nobody but parents care selflessly and you left me, to deal with the world alone. Look at epshita, she still has them. She needs them, and she has them. But you, you left. You gave me such a lesson in growing up, but look at me, I am still psychologically a cripple. And I am responsible for two beings. Look, just look. She wouldn't have happened without his support. and now he tells me he was relieved when i got her, because she was a distraction, and because i really loved her. and that he can't live with her, because she is not like his daughter, she is just a dog. because he can't live with an animal. his this so called madness, everything remained the same, only i was excised from his life like a tumour. that was his madness, that was all. so summarily, baba. oboshho tumi holeo tai korte. tomra dujonei eto similar.
i hope i find someone kind again, baba. kinder than you, jodio, tao ki hoy? kinder than him, which seems unimaginable, chhelera eto bojjat. sharadindu o is quite a slave to received ideas, jodio kotoi ba judge korbe ekta lok ke tar milieu theke tule niye. tobe or moton strong, unmoved like a rock, and kind, bodhoy ar keu hobe na. i am ultimately on my own, aren't i, god? he will find happiness, is bound to. his positive aspects are so very nice, it's easy to fall in love with them. and there will be laughter and children, and i am afraid, i will forever be on the road, waiting.

Please, please, can I quit? Please can I give in and embrace the pleasant aftertaste of melancholy? It does not hurt, only induces mild longing for what might have been. A pleasant hate for what was taken away. You can hate in peace, without hurting, having relinquished the imperative to be happy. That you wouldn't have to work so bloody hard to be happy, that you could just let go.
I came upon Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road yesterday. You know what I am saying, don't you? The book is easier than the film, it spells out the despair, the sense of doom, and when death comes, it spells out that too, I suppose. Help me, God. I want to give the boot to my present life and find something new. But I am so scared that I will find I am not special after all, that I have no wings, that I need to be rooted in one place for any amount of sanity, all while I'm dying in misery misery, all-consuming, sense-obliterating misery.

Thirty-four years in thirty-four weeks. God, what a fucking co-incidence. I will perhaps go back to journalisme. Je suis journaliste. Je travaille a ----. Je traverse tout le monde. Je n'ai pas des amis. Je ne mort pas. Oh God, please let me die. Quietly, painlessly, I am fed up of being torn apart, fed up, so fed up. Of the fear, the pain, the ground falling away beneath your feet, repeatedly, repeatedly, no music in your ears, the world like lead on your shoulders. And even then, the longing for one. I don't want to be optimistic, I don't want to relentlessly chase happiness. I want to sulk, I want to hate. And I want someone to pull me out of it, to force me to look at the sunlight even though I turn my face away. I want to be free to hate, to despair, while the world is still there for me with its possibilities. I don't want to court the world, I don't want to court people to bestow favours and kindness on me.

OB Tampons are the most pretentious things. There is only this sad loser of a brand available in Delhi, and they are rather expensive as tampons go. I miss my good ol' local brand, manufactured at Colootola Lane, very much indeed. But haven't been home in a while. In moments of fancy, I imagine asking someone to courier a stashload to me, but then, who to ask. Also, what if it gets wet?

I had sushi with folks last week. I hope to do it again tomorrow. I feel ambivalent about the weekend, glad  to have a couple of days to myself, but then the shit lurks just beneath the surface, and there's more time to make kashundi of it.

I watched Wake up Sid, all at one go, yesterday. Mane, really stupid and crazy on a workday. But it kind of holds you on, you can't let go. Konkona Sen Sharma is this unbelievably zen mohila who takes all sorts of shit with a smile, no rough edges, always holding it together. But despite Ranbir Kapoor's duh-ness, he does convey, and rather well, the immense openness that his character Sid is. Such openness, to embrace the world with all the shit it will give him, and still he would love it. It would be lovely to love such a person, to be young with him. The film has several cliches, but it also channels the wonder of Bombay. I mean, it is how I imagine it to be: a city where you could do anything. And she puts it so precisely when he asks her what she'd come to Bombay for: to be independent. It's why I came to Delhi, not to scale career heights, but so I could live a little: so that both the good and the bad would be mine: I would be responsible for it all, with no one to blame or to be  grateful to. Make your own money and spend it too, and not be answerable to anybody.

I am trying to get That Girl in Yellow Boots and Hugo. I considered Daniel Craig and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I don't think it's worth the trouble. I do like the Swedish version. And reading Maximum City. Non-fiction has this calming effect, it holds true even when shit's flying around the house. Especially so, I think.

You pretty boy. You pretty, pretty, pretty boy. I am swinging between vellahood and utter despair. O says being this way is normal. That neurosis is fine. But I would like to be more stable, more disciplined in my emotions. I am trying to ignore the matter as if it does not exist. I have done the other things I usually do in the day. And written and messaged her when I could not do it anymore. I just wrote a mail to her. I am horrified by what I think I have done. But I am holding my peace now. I read a blog of a former classmate. Some of it was so beautiful and calming, I remembered the calmness of Eliot's Rhapsodies. This was triggered off by an interview of Laurie where he talks about working with Fry. He was beautiful and I felt so helpless then, because I always related them. So beautiful, so beautiful, and I seem to have tarnished it all. I wondered what nervous breakdown was and stealthily looked it up at work today. And found that as definitions go, I am far from it. Which is good, yes. If I could not laugh and do other things, I don't know what I would do. Why have the years passed, God? Why am I 28? Time was I would write to you in my diary and do sums with baba somewhere in our house, gulping down the inexplicable pain of an unrequited crush. And you helped then. You do, even now. In far greater measure than I ever deserve. Have I made three old people very unhappy? Have I broken the hearts of two of them by my thoughtlessness? But you know it was not all that. You know I felt harrassed, I wanted to escape. I didn't want to say harsh things to their face.
Be kind, dear God, be kind, again and again and again.

The summer is upon us, again. F has grown quite fat, worryingly, and my mother hasn't a clue of what's going on in my head. Yesterday night, gasping in pain and fear, I told F that I couldn't believe what was happening. She stared up at me with round eyes, but stayed by me through most of the night. O says it's good they are here, because one tends to obsess. I guess that is true. I can't give vent to my ugly grief when she is around and I whisper to F in darkness at night and in the morning after I wake up. Eventually, very soon, it subsides, and I start the day. I won't let them go right away now. I can't do this alone. I will go mad. I will take them home when the upheaval has quietened, when a plane has been reached.

I swing wildly between such divergent feelings. I know that technically I am free, but it doesn't seem to bring joy though I know it's a good thing.

Chatwin's photo on the header is very reassuring. And ya, another sad year.

I hope what Angshu said once, so very long ago, remains true. That I can find that energy and optimism of 2007. But such a long time has passed, I am a very different person, is there that me anymore? People do change, don't they? And ultimately, people, men, are always disappointing. And time, time, it do catch up to tell you that dreams are finite, that it's timeover eventually. It's not an infinite time for yellow sunlight filled with hopes. And then there's own crippling character, along with its flaws, to deal with.

theoutsider

From an even longer time ago.

right. I've scouted blogosphere quite thoroughly (my purview of it, anyway), I have a deadline to meet by 10a.m. tommorow (an article I haven't thought anything about), amar pithe jhijhi dhore gachhe, so I am just in the mood for a post. Why is it that you get this critical urge to blog just when you should not be doing it?Dunno. Who cares. I spoke to this rather famous bangali shahittik today who turned out to be full of himself. Sigh, a chink in every armour, I guess. No one's perfect. Didn't get through to this other famous director, 'not easily accesible', my superior said. Which translates into "will play song from 'Guide' at you; will then switch off phone just when you've started getting your hopes high that u've tracked down the elusive guy after all. (And all that after you've chewed off your nails in apprehension thinking that you'll forget to ask ethng u meant to ask if he picked up the phn so why call him anyway)
Well, a day, a day. no probs. okey-dokey.
Got to read about 4 lines of chatwin's songlines today. wow, great. if that's how life's gonna be as a scribe, I can forget ever sitting down to read anything ever. All I'll be doing is researching stuff on google for absurdities to shore up my art.s with. I am afraid I'll even forget to miss JU.
Oh JU. I love you so much. Haven for misfits is so right. And it also gives you a kind of pleasure to see all the straitlaced ones who give you such hell in their kind of environments getting to see the other side of the coin. But it's sad really. Coz JU really takes everybody in and makes it a kind of home. All it asks for is a kind of basic honesty to yourself. I didn't give it all of mine. That's the only pity. And quietly, the biggest one. Coz it's just my size.
And another reason to crib. I haven't got anti-spam thng. on my comp. So keep getting these 'Crazy Girls' adverts. i am sick to death of seeing immense boobs. Really.
Have an interview where, a friend tells me, I'll be asked strange ques.s.

From a long time ago.

I have now become greatly a part of the consumerist horde. I watched hours of television today, will go and buy clothes a few days later, having bought clothes a few days back.
I also watched Khela, like every self-respecting bangali worth his aantel soul. It was very good, by the way. It was a film about a film shoot, right, and for the first time, probably, I wished I could do something like that, be a part of a shoot, I mean, it was a glimpse into a world, like, and I liked it. The vivacity, fluidity, etc etc. I would be glad if I could work in some capacity on this director’s set. Just wishing, mane who knows, he might be a gorgon, for all I know.
And I also wanted to say that I like this song: Ha rehum, I think, from the film Aamir. They were showing it on television today. I dislike the hero’s voice, and I didn’t care to watch the film. It might be good, etc, but I am not obligated to watch it, am I? I did watch Hum Tum, parts of it, hee hee, and liked bits. Very overstressed, and Rani Mukherjee wears hideous make up ALL the time, and looks like a martyr, but there’s this Punjabi MC version of the Hum Tum song I always liked. Well, this is all about popular culture and I am getting a humongous dose of that for now. I also think Akshay Kumar is a good actor, by the way, and that Bhool Bhulaiya is a fine film in parts. Saw Road to Perdition too, which I didn’t like. I had forgotten it was by Sam Mendes, a pointless film it was. And I liked the kid Mike so much too. But then, oh whatever.


The real reason for writing here after such a long while:
I was watching a piece on Nat Geo about this area in ?? where the brown bear lives. It is a cousin of the short faced bear that went extinct when temperatures started cooling. These bears thrive on the shorteye salmon (the salmon is the life blood of the entire ecosystem of the area). These salmon (and we’ve heard this story before) travel upto 60,000 miles in their lifetime. They are born in the river in this area, and soon after, head out to sea. They travel up to?? And then swim back to return where they were born,to breed. They travel upstream, in the face of really fast currents, and they are so frenzied by then, they can’t even stop to eat. It is during this return journey that the bears lie in wait for them, snapping them up as the fish launch themselves against the current. By the time they arrive, they are completely sapped of energy. The silver green salmon turn a bright red. They lay their eggs, fertilized by the male fish, and then they die.
Nature generally has it figured right, don’t you think? I think of the Aborigines, who go walkabout, and well, Chatwin who spoke of the instinctive need for mobility which, under the urge to be settled, you ignore. The fish have it figured, don’t they? They are born, and as soon as they are able, they set out. They travel the world, and then they return, home. There is a sense of rootedness, it is so beautiful, so beautiful. I wish I were like the salmon, that thought were given over to instinct, always correct, always homing to where you wanted to be, without even knowing.
To turn red like the salmon, and to die…. I think I love the world so much…

I don't like my phone, that is the truth.


Chosen very carefully for its utility: 5 megapixel camera and high battery life, I think it's graphics are ugly, as is true of so many Samsung phones. I love the gift, but the looks are, eugh!
On another note: make-up! Don't buy! I!

Oli's (original post here: http://www.arcche.blogspot.com/2011/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-gb-x-none.html)

Prayer for travelling people

If it is evening when they set out,

collect them into the last light

and make it dawn for them.

If someone kissed them

goodbye, let them both remember.

Give them fewer waits at airports

or train stations or bus stops

or rickshaw-stands. Mostly,

give them breath to walk

far and wide and with

clouds catching their eyes.

Keep them warm.

Give them silence if they

are happy. Give them

conversation if they are

in themselves alone

and thinking not just of

passing from place to

place but of passing the

very world by.

Bring to them the

kindness of strangers.

Fill their eyes.

Let there be someone,

when they arrive, to

bring them home.

Is marriage bred out of tiredness? I saw Little Children today and it touched and built up to a crescendo in the end and I longed for a similar plenitude of drama in my life. And the music in the end was beautiful, quite. And I read the last part of the Eragon trilogy a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it, because it struck me so hard in the way pleasure, fun, enjoyment becomes more and more rarefied until it is completely banished from the psychological landscape of the book. Eragon, along with all the major characters in the book, except Roran, follow the path of duty, without any sense of doubt or beyond a longing for what they leave behind. It struck me as so very curious, in that it’s written by a guy who’s barely out of his 20s himself and he’s writing fantasy, right, which is, after all, wish fulfilment. And though I found it very disturbing when I read it, I recognise it as the same satisfaction one gets when I work when I want to do fun things, because it means not having the sick feeling one gets when the weekend is at an end and there’s tonnes of work to finish.

I am considering making this a private blog.

The plumber told me on the naked terrace yesterday, while I looked around for the first time at the crumbling concrete vista below, that marriage, money and something else only comes to those who are fated to have them. Going by how people marry here in the same way that bunnies mate (no idea if they do, really. The bunnies, i.e. The people definitely marry voraciously), you would think it would need a hand of fate to not marry. But it's something to think about. Very scary, the thought of spending the long, long years alone, or making them a blur that does not matter. What if, though? I thought while returning home today that it would be comfortable to be married. To sign a document and that would guarantee extra closeness and fewer questions asked. But that doesn't really happen. And I would be happy to marry, but not to stay in Calcutta for it. Right now, I'm getting the feeling that I am done with Delhi. I would like to go live in Bombay. But that would be another upheaval, perhaps a furthur moving away from the boy. Maybe the money won't be enough to support two people and a dog as comfortably as I can now. It would be so nice if he and I could go live in Bombay, but that I suppose is not to be. Nothing else but living till eternity in the city of my birth can be accomplished with ease.

Meanwhile, the real winter is happening, finally. Gah!

I am so not houseproud. My house, after I have lived in it for a little over a year, is still no more than utilitarian lodgings: digs is the word. Though I rather like it: the word and my digs. Until now. The walls of the kitchen and the two bathrooms and the passage and the other room have been damp for about a month now, but the kitchen ceiling has now started dripping. The house is a filthy mess, though my mother has been trolling through most of the shit, since I conveniently have quit the kitchen since she came. It's now gotten so messy that even I, who will stay put as long as her one patch of clean ground is undisturbed even while the shit overflows, am thinking that enough is enough. Not to mention the hell that will be when the monsoons come around. I am swinging between shelling out about 9k for another same-sized flat, that would not be on the top floor and would have a separate meter, or a larger flat that I would share were someone interested and suitable to come along, or settling for a smaller top floor room: lesser space to mope around. But the last option is impractical, I already know: I have too much stuff already and on muggy days, if I have to stay cooped up in one tiny room, or perpetually keep a door open, with all the risk that involves... think of, among other things, if a pack of monkeys like the one I saw fighting the other day, were to descend on the terrace and proceeded to create mayhem: I do not want to cower in fear or constantly feel anxious about them making an appearance.
Very likely a two-room set-up like the one I have now is what I will look for in earnest: more money gone, but well, if ma and f chose to come again, I wouldn't worry about space or feel constrained about inconveniencing someone else.

I discovered pooja's blog yesterday. she seems to be living such a bohemian life to my stolid one. I am so old. I am so old.

Also, I have no idea what makes a house look warm and welcoming. My aesthetic landscape is so sparse: I do not feel the need for photos or showpieces. I want them, but don't need them. Clean, bare walls, clean floors and whatever else you need to exist. A big kitchen, like the one I have now, where you can cook and surf the net; clean, slightly spacious loos, mirror, clean washbasins. But while others: both pooja and mamdmomma, whose blog I was reading before I thought of writing this one, would do so much with these raw materials, I am fine with these. There is the simmering discontent, about how bare my life is, but I don't really know what to do. I know I can't stand hurrays, I know I will not travel with random people nor invite them into my home, which leaves my mind and my house kind of bare. Ah well. Maybe there's hope yet.

F is curled up under the lep by my leg. Ma is making dinner. It's as good as it gets.

I go to office on my elephant and have a pet camel. I need the elephant because, as you must know, I have to traverse a tropical jungle to reach work. On weekends, we go out for jaunts on my magic carpet, which I bought from the neighbourhood genie, who belongs to the local snake charmer. Every locality needs one because, you know, the snakes are numerous. And I have Curry for brekkers, lunch and dinner and I am very promiscuous. It's the heat, you know.

My grandparents were quite unusual people for their time, I think. I am not entirely sure, because they were young at a time when a lot of uncommon things were happening and in their milieu, it might have been a fairly usual thing to do.

They met at while studying at one of the premier medical colleges in Calcutta, a decade or so before independence, I suppose. They fell in love, and decided to marry in the face of some family opposition. My grandfather was a penniless idealist. His father had been a railway official in pre-independence Bangladesh, in, my mother says, Akhaura district in Kumilla. They called him kanababu because he was deaf, which deeply hurt my Dadu as a child, but they were poor and his father was a quiet man, I suppose, and so, there was nothing much he could do about it except bottle his rage. He had an elder sister he rather loved and a younger brother, both of whom died. And young Goura was left alone, with, I fancy, his ambitions and his love for his parents, cut by resentment, I suppose, for his authoritarian mother and a father who did not have the resources to provide what he wanted.

My grandfather is a natural storyteller. I always spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and his stories of his life, which he would never tire of narrating again and again, are a part of the fabric of my mind. I looked at them differently at different times as I grew up. Unquestioningly, when I was little; with indifference, coupled with resentment, as I discovered Dadu's flaws; and with tedium, when I was grown up: by then, I had heard them so many times that I didn't care anymore. Now, he is in Calcutta, growing older and older, often complaining like a weary Tiresias, asking to be gone. I hardly speak to him anymore. His problems are too many and there is not much I can do without taking charge. And I am a master shirker. I take on as little as I can. But I do love the man he was. His life was an enormous act of self-fashioning, the credit for which is no less for it being so common.

One of the many tales I grew up listening was about the Durga Puja bhog. Goura was a most enthusiastic participant in all village festivals. He wanted to be in the thick of things, he loved running errands and generally, being where the action was. During one Durga Puja, a dada asked him to distribute the pujor bhog among those in the pandal. Now, they (and we, by extension) belonged to the lower castes. And when he went to pick up the bhog er thala, the cantankerous mashima in charge screamed at him: 'Tui chhoto jaater, abar bhog dibi ki! Pala!' The youngster's face reddened with rage and embarrassment and though a kind person asked him to never mind the lady and to go ahead and distribute the bhog, he did not shake off the incident.

This story was often followed by another of his college days. As a poor medical student from a distant village, Dadu could only afford the most basic lodgings. He stayed in the college hostel. As a low caste boy, he said, Dadu was required to eat separately from the other boarders. The thakur would prepare his food separately and keep it aside in a corner, where he had to sit and eat.

That, and perhaps a certain amount of idealism was the reason he believed, still does, so strongly in Mahatma Gandhi. Maybe he, like so many others, at the time, found in Gandhi a kindness, a recognition of basic humanity that others didn't show.

I have a lot of rage for Dadu, a lot of anger for the way he lived his family life, the differential treatment he always did, and still has meted out to his daughters, for my Didu's sadness, for her disappointments. But he also did so much, lived with such courage and such fullness. And as time passes, and those I hold dear grow older and fade away, the heart fills with such emptiness and sorrow that nothing can fill.

I haven't known many men closely. The other two are my father and my boyfriend. Baba's trajectory was much the same, starting out with very little and ending with enough and more. I think part of the reason he died so early was because of a certain nihilism, of believing that nothing mattered beyond a point. He wouldn't fight tooth and nail for himself, maybe for one he loved, but not for him. Which I know Dadu would and did. My boyfriend, I think I chose him because I could recognized the mould. And disappointing and often intolerable as such people are often to live with, it is the only one I can, and probably, wanted to navigate. So, there's him. I find much to admire in him, the grittiness, the tenacity, the hard work, the fearlessness and being able to conceive a state where one has nothing.

I will write more about Dadu. But so many emotions well up when I talk of him, or of any of the other people who have been such ever-present characters in the family tableau that you forget to question their being. My paternal grandfather, who I know far far less of, was also quite a remarkable person. He completed his Masters in jail, he was a freedom fighter. He was not a family man and married at 42 (I think) and had six children. He was one of the founding members of the Socialist Party and a very bad businessman whose chemical factory was in a very bad state and his family was perpetually poor. My father and mejo kaku would have to give part of their monthly scholarship for family expenses. It is remarkable at first thought, but then not, that his family took his achievements for granted. They bore the brunt of his financial unsavviness.

My thakurda was much derided and neglected in his old age and the only person I have found taking any interest in him as a person is my chhoto kaku, a rather strange person himself. I will find out more about my thakurda too, from him.

So, I will write slowly. Maybe I won't, ever. Maybe they will recede to their fixed places again in the picture. But I would like to write. I think they will make fine stories.

Just finished the packet of Gems that was a part of the Diwali gift pack of Cadbury goodies ma got me. Bakigulo agei kheye niyechhie. :-)
I went to Daryaganj today, at the Sunday book market. And I hate you, pretentious Delhiwalla, but I did find the Hardayal Municipal Library which is a place where people come to read newspapers (place subscribes to 25 papers in various languages) and the coin seller too, I dare say. But it was horribly crowded and the kebab platter at Moti Mahal was not half as good as it is notched up to be. But I did buy a butter knife with an embossed Air India logo and a penknife which I quite like. How is it that Delhi still doesn't warm my heart? But it doesn't.
There was a wonderful collection of books today, not the piddling shit I could sift out the last time. One guy was selling a huge collection of Penguin Classics, but too canony and stuff that I don't really read, tai ki korbo, kinte parlam na. And the place is really close to my place, did you know? I took an auto from Laxminagar, it cost me 50 bucks, but the guy had the meter on, which came to only 40 bucks! I spent such a lot of time scouting for a bus to the place, kintu the only bus that passes through my locality goes directly to the book bazar too! Amazing discoveries and wonders never cease. Needless to say, I returned on a bus. And people travelled on public transport more habitually in old Delhi than I have seen people do here anywhere else. It seemed like Calcutta in that way, and very heartening. It has nothing to do with wealth. It makes sense, non? And why should you have to resort to your own conveyance in a bustling metro? Public transport is one of the most basic services.
My haul:
Alexander McCall Smith: The Kalahari Typing School for Men (40 bucks). It seems quite lovely. Ma likes it too. She asked me, 'eta ki Negro der boi?' She also asked me if Kalahari was in Africa and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince her it was in New Zealand. She didn't believe me, sadly.
Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (and this very same I had been high falutin about buying at the Penguin discount sale. Got it for 80 bucks and I was cribbing about the high price)
Rimi di's City of Love (50 Rs). A little ashamed for not buying original.
Christopher Paolini: Brisingr (30 Rs). I had read the first two parts from Oli. We all did, I think. That was a couple of years ago, at least. I was waiting for the third part to materialise through a hand of fate. That means not buying the book, but 30 bucks is hand of fate, alright.
Nicholas Flamel: The Alchemyst. Hoping it'll be alright.
Ellis Peters: Monk's Hood. Ditto
William Hart: Culture and Civilization of Bengal (25 Rs). Hardback, with pictures, published by Mahadev Prakashan of Shahdara. I am glad about this one.
Tolkien's The Silmarilion (30 Rs). This, after the guy who sits at the junction of the left and right side of the market and who seems to know about books/ takes advantage of his prime position/ is pricey offered it to me generously for 120 bucks.

I read on the Net that the municipality occasionally conducts drives to get rid of the Sunday market. A classmate today was surprised to hear about my jaunt because apparently such a drive happened recently. I was surprised that he was ok with that. I hope the market is never driven away. Books are peace, a refuge, always, and everyone should have access to them, at whatever level of the financial ladder they are at. Also, those like me, who want to buy great books cheaply, principles be damned.
Also, books are familiar territory. But that lunch sucked, awfully. As did the overly fawning waiters and the horrible loo. Though I suppose I should be glad to have found a serviceable loo in old Delhi at all.
At the market, there was also:
Lots of P. D. James, which the boy says is good.
Salman Rushdies
Spattering of Dickens. And Villette, of all things.
No Ahmed Ali, though.
No Game of Thrones neither. Maybe it hasn't reached these nether regions.

It's Bakri (probably Bakr) Eid tomorrow. But no chhutti in office. Really.


Did I say what I bought from the Penguin sale? For me and others. Mostly for others. Here:
Dalu's books: The White Mughals and City of Djinn's (that was just the 50% discount)
Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Complete Ruskin Bond (how boring)
Khushwant Singh's Delhi: A Novel. Yuk. Mom reading.
I wanted Chatwin's What Am I Doing Here and boy wanted Finnegans Wake. But you know how they never have the good stuff.

The Delhiwalla is a most pretentious piece of writing. I will have Daily Mail any day. Among other things, it is the same time of the year. Last year, around this time, I was starting things from scratch in this godforsaken piss of a city, working away at setting up house, quite unafraid, really, like chipping away at a massive block of stone, only to see what lies beneath, not worried about the enormity of the task.
Here's a photo from that day, taken on my phone. I was completely alone, then. But it did not seem that what emptiness there was could be filled with random people.

If sex is just sensation, there should be more pleasure in denying it, non? Or maybe I am more straitlaced than I think.
My eyes are popping out with endless work and far more from Castle marathon watching. I am desultory, sulky and depressed. It's Pujo and nobody is really whooping about it in my part of the city. And my potential mother-in-law asked why I didn't do a registry biye the next time I came, and onushthaan could happen later! Oof babare! I said no, I mean, what the! And she was even saying that they wanted grandkids. I feel like gurgling with laughter at the outrage of it. But well, no. They are kind people. Very kind. Much better than a lot of people their age. But I can't meet this demand.
I want to be er, free. I realise it involves just so much loneliness, but I still want to be free. No marriages to make to keep other people happy, no endless khushal mangals to inquire of relatives who do not excite your interest. To live anonymously. I can't see what I am going to do. He is doing so well for himself it makes no sense to even ask him to come and live here. And I don't want to live here forever and when I am ready to go elsewhere, he will probably just be settling in. He gets unsettled if he has to move. I do too, I am even now, but I still want to move.
If I were Beckett, I would have been resolute and told him a long time ago that we don't want the same things from life and let's go our ways. But I have hung on like a limpet and now it's five years and I will be obligated, even want, to marry after two years.
I still hope to have everything. And I am not a kickass person like Oli even. Nowhere near. Yet I hope to have everything.
Miserable Pujo, youalls.
On another note, much love and warmth. I miss Pujo, I miss the pandals, the hubbub, the laughter and the fatigue.

Very tired, so just facts:
Well, the woman who wanted to have the baby is having the baby. And her husband who had said he did not love her anymore (something as heartbreaking and earth shattering as that) and that he couldn't bear to stay with her, is buying her a gift and planning to buy a camera to record the baby's arrival. The typical Indian family, what joy! You will break and be finished, but you will not leave. You will spawn progeny and forever be happy and believe this is your reality, a good reality. Call upon God and believe in him. It is right out of Heart of Darkness. Its unbelievable, unending night. And we are supposedly modern, better than the generation before, with more autonomy. It seems that I am sinking, that there is no way out. Who knows if I will commit such blasphemies myself.

Ma's blood sugar is down.
My boyfriend got me the bag.
I bought two perfumes online today. One for ma.
Pujo ashchhe.
Bhishon gorom.
Ghum peyechhe. Painfully slow download speeds yesterday and day before. I watched both of Satyajit's Felu das. Ate hideous hideous chicken roll.
And strange miracles abound. Like auto appearing almost immediately after I prayed for one in tutiphata morning sun. Happened yesterday too. Jam clearing, bus stopping when it never does. Small things that well, restore faith.

This is not nostalgia

People have left Calcutta in droves. I flew the nest very late at 27. I had been frustrated and had wanted to get out for a very long time. It seemed then that staying in Calcutta was an exercise in futility, waiting for the proverbial cookie to crumble, which, of course, it never did.

But there are so many reasons why one loves home, and none of them are things that make the city absolute as a font of contentment and joy. I was humming Mohiner Ghoraguli r Shaat Tola Bari today and it came back again, as it has for the past few days. Hot summer days, the hint of spring, Jadavpur, such love that it is a physical longing to have those days in my grasp again, friends, the sun on your face in the basketball field on the engineering side, the jheel there, climbing up that windmill like thing, sitting at the foot of a tree, Oli climbing the tree, French classes, BCL, desperate tiredness, bus rides which now seem so pointless, Debasis sir, the world opening up. From the age of 18 to 22, I dare say it was the perfect place to be. Rimi di, Amlan da, Supriya di, so very kind, Queer Studies, a classmate seeking to confirm from the Sappho people very, self-consciously knowledgeably, if the first sexual experience for a homosexual was a defining moment :-)

Babu, all bird-like, even the first year of Telegraph, when so many new things seemed to be opening up, and Floppy plucked out from a heartful of sorrow that were those years.

What will it take to have that love back, the longing for University is such a yearning sometimes, for something that is perhaps not there anymore, because I am not 18.

I miss Calcutta, I wish I could go back to it with an empty page, instead of as a refuge when I am broken, beaten up by Delhi. I wish Calcutta were not such a dump professionally, that I also could take its opportunities for granted like so many in Delhi do.

Ma has 400 pp sugar. Scared.

What would it be like to never be held or made love to. I am desperately lonely and I can't imagine me a scenario where I wasn't. I am scared.

A mosquito bit me on my boob! I'm sure this is all premeditated, or maybe it just found it first, because of the bump.