Two things:

I was in Bowbazar and then walking on Ganesh Chandra Avenue today. I saw so many dogs, and even two litters. A piece of chot had been placed under where they were lying. Another dog lounged right beside where people were eating and they didn’t mind. The dogs were, for the most part, healthy. How and why why why is it that people on the streets find it easier to care for dogs than people in prosperous localities? Why do I constantly have to be on the alert to feed dogs etc quietly, because an animal person is not looked upon kindly in the neighbourhood? Sraboni, the lady from whom I brought my dog, is a nervous wreck, almost, these days. A Marwari family in her building is ganging up people against her for feeding dogs. Their rallying point is a male dog who has bitten other dogs and even chases people sometimes. He has a temper. They mockingly call Sraboni Maneka Gandhi and say that the dog is here and acts this way towards humans because S feeds him.
I know how it is. I returned home from home at 3am from office on three days. I feed three dogs usually after I return from office. One of the residents in my complex very conveniently put the two facts together and was asking around why I feed dogs at 3am in the night, endangering the security of the complex as it necessitates the opening of the main gate. I usually feed them between 10.40 and 11pm, when I return home on most days.
I am tired. A puppy I found has gone missing. It was staying nights with me and I was leaving it on the street, near an istiriwala in the mornings, because nobody was willing to take it in. I miss it shutor moton tail and fat belly and tumbly walk and bhota muzzle. It kept me awake at nights and required me to sleep by 12 and awake at 7. Please please be alive.

There was a drive of some sort happening on GC Avenue: a man with walky talkie was instructing some people in breaking the unoons and taking away the gas unoons of people selling food on the street. GC Avenue is office para and there are shacks lining the footpaths on both sides of the road. They serve cheap, fairly good quality food and are the lifeline for office goers in the area. I don’t know why their unoon s were being taken away, perhaps because they were not supposed to be cooking there, but things is, how can you do that? They probably pay money to whoever to be allowed to ply their trade there, and you are crippling them smartly, saying you are enforcing the law? I saw them as I walked, a little faster than I would have because I was also going to get lunch some way ahead from one such seller and didn’t want them to have broken this guy’s stuff as well. They just looked on with staring eyes, without reacting, as their stuff was taken away and went back to gathering them together. A little ahead, people hurriedly put them away, to stop them being taken away, I guess. I am sure this is not a particularly smart thing to write and there are nexuses within nexuses, but let me indulge myself, for once. This is not the way to do it, that much I know.

And something else, that I can’t remember now. My heart is clenched with apprehension.

Edited to add:
The other thing I wanted to say: uh, am I the only one who does not care to get pregnant and spawn children at the stage I am in my life, meaning, with job, potential marriage person and on wrong side of 25? It’s slightly sickening. And its not that I don’t want kids, I am just not seeing a reason to have them anytime soon. I don’t care for the sight of young, pleasant looking women carrying kids.

This photo for lack of anything better.
So, so, will I be hated if I say I didn’t mind the Sex and the City movie? One likes the laughter, the luxury of having all your friends in the same city and the even greater luxury of having the time to meet for endless breakfasts and dinners at the hippest restaurants, pubs ityadi. Of not being married at 40. One likes to see a woman who does not want to settle down and is happier alone, at 50 too. One likes to see a woman who is the bigger earner and is a lawyer but is apparently at peace with marrying a bar tender and says ‘I changed who I was for you’. And one sees Carrie Bradshaw, who does all he big talk, but is in a sado-masochistic relationship that has brought more sadness than smiles. And she is even getting married to the man. It makes one think, even dream. Even at the sight of one’s worst fears being acted out. One also likes how airbrushed it all is and wonders if New York really is this magical place that lets this all happen. One also likes the bear-like Chris Noth as Big, beside the pint-sized Carrie Bradshaw. One likes being enveloped completely by a much larger-proportioned man.
One does not like the old horsy Sarah Jessica Parker.

This was a much-loved film at the beginning of college. I remember arguing with my first boyfriend that Winona Ryder was wearing something to make her skin fairer because it looked painted and he telling me that I should take it from him that Caucasian women could be as pale as her. Or was it the other way round?
I was reading the plot of the film now, because I had forgotten it, really. The review says it captures appealingly the lives of people in their twenties: of Lelaina, who wants to be a ‘videographer’ and Troy Dyer, a slacker who loses one dead end job after another and is a nihilist grunge musician by night.
Well, this: I am in my twenties, very scared that it is almost at an end and I have done nothing but slacken. Yet, yet, the film seemed magical when I watched it, full of promise. And well, the old story: what we had dreamed and what we are living today and 20 years later, this will seem shiny: eating porota and kosha mangsho alone at Golbari, followed by a heavenly nolen gurer mishti and roshomalai at a shop nearby. It wasn’t the happiest moment, but compared with those that happened immediately before, it was free.
Because because, I can’t live down that life, love, was supposed to be magical, however much I might take solace from the mundane.

I am coughing from nail polish fumes.

I don’t know why I remember baba so strongly now, meaning since yesterday. Is it because I am stressed with the new pup, stressed by the uncertainty of keeping it alive, like the uncertainty of baba living then? Or is it the anger and resentment about boyfriend? Or is it the drawn-out death of Jyoti Basu being played out by so many people: you see the markers and remember? (Forcing a city’s people to live the death of someone who brought so much misery on them?)

I’ll say again what I was remembering: baba after the fall, the hemorrhage, when one of his pupils was off-centre, inward, while the other was in the centre, when I saw him like that the first time after he recovered consciousness after the fall, his moaning when they took him to the scanning machine: I was allowed to enter the room wearing a special coat thing to calm him, stop him moving, the many walks to and fro on the bridge thing connecting two departments, walking in giant sneakers without socks and blue pajamas: food tasted like food, meant for nourishment, to keep one going. And then, how, slowly, he died. Like a long long fall in slow motion where he would fall into my arms: it seems one way of looking at it now. I let him fall, that day, when he fell, it was on me.

How I told Amlan da how scared I was I’d forget it and he said he knew: how incredible it was: his understanding: how incredible that another human being should understand and give credence to something you are afraid is an indulgence.

And the memories do fade, they seem to float away sometimes, and you look, almost not caring.

Yesterday night, I said, I thought, I told God, after he had kept the pup alive and found it a kind person who’d taken it in: that it was wrong that baba had gone when he was 56. Basu is 95. Baba had a lot more to do, to see, to give. This is so a very bare fact, so not an indulgence: there are more to some people, there isn’t as much for others, perhaps. I am not singing a paean to a parent. It was a smart, agile and confident mind that was taken away, that went away, and I daresay, a heart that would have learnt a lot about affection in the years to come if he had lived. It is not fair. And yes, the same God kept that pup alive, quite defying all possibility: a very very little animal that can’t even walk properly, so small that it wouldn’t be seen by drivers of vehicles, it walked a very long distance to the istiriwala who turned out to be a kind person and didn’t think that he didn’t want to take on a responsibility, when I had left it on the footpath in God’s name and left.

So yes, I miss baba: how much I don’t know myself. It’s one of those things you don’t realize because you are still living it.