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.