I am writing here after a long time. So much has happened. I think I look forward to Floppy at the end of every day. Whenever anything goes wrong, even more. You would think it’s a selfish way of looking at someone, in terms of their use for you. But as House would say, we do that with everyone. And it’s easier to think of that about people.
Things at home: I want to go away. My grandfather is going to have an operation to have a growth in his urinary bladder removed. They’ll biopsy it and find out if it’s malignant. Dadu is 83 years old. About. He can hardly walk now. His mind is lucid, though he does find it difficult to remember things, and he can’t read the newspaper. He is also very selfish. In a vocal way. Not like my father at all. Not like me either. My mother is like him.
Floppy is very naughty. She’s destroyed one sofa completely, holed the other, eaten bits of the corners of the big one. She’s also destroyed my pillow, torn two of my bedsheets. Chewed the corners of tables, broken a few plastic bowls, peed on my bed, bites and scratches us. She’s about five months old, I think. They say it’ll stop when she’s a little older. I look at her extremely grave face with the white muzzle and moustache and I cuddle her to death. She has unbelievably silky ears. I washed her forehead with shampoo today too, and it came out shiny too. I was thrilled.
A senior colleague of mine has said, if my husband and I lived together, our marriage would explode. And someone also said, she was a peripatetic prophet. She’s my classmate and married to a techie and living in America.
Because of the recession, people are all sitting tight on their jobs, even if they hate it. You are lucky to have a regular source of income. As my boss has taken a 5 month leave, I do both our work. They are 8 hour days on an average and a bit of work, but I don’t mind. For the time being. Work is perhaps always an anesthetic.
I love the songs of Gulal. My boyfriend says they are earthy. I love the full-throated singing. When Piyush Mishra sings Duniya in his perfect diction, with the Urdu words dripping from his lips, with casualness and great mastery, it seems to me, I feel intensely attracted to him. I remember his hooked face in the film and his belly straining against his vest. And then the round framed glasses
I went to the handicrafts fair today. I bought a jute owl. It has large wings and jute tassles hanging below. Met a very senior reporter there. He kept fingering me whenever he encountered me. When I returned home and thought about it, I could easily summon a dazzling smile and polite reply. But there, I was breathless.
I think I am big on gestures, but no good with actual responsibility. Right now, that doesn’t bother me too much.
Floppy is sleeping beside me on the bed. I sometimes say what my father used to when I was very small and we were in Delhi: tui meyeta chinir cheyeo mishti. The sweetness of this had been lost when I was growing up, when my father gave me a pretty bad time and the words only tasted bitter. But now he is not, and all the nice things seem better still, as real life incidents in the present don’t intervene.
Bad English is my birthright
