I think I can never be happy. I don't probably like it so much. I am more at home with being depressed. What would make me happiest now? To be able to go back home, to not have to do the job I do. To relax, let go.
I don't think happiness is dependent on one getting what they set their minds on. As Dibbo said, or perhaps didn't, it's a state of being. It comes to me only in short flashes.
The year will end tomorrow. It's not been a bad year, really. I got the flat emptied, I came away, like I'd wanted for ages. But they didn't really happen the way I would have liked them to. It is, as it always is, about gritting your teeth and bearing the situation.
I was looking at photographs of people in JU. There was an album that had me in splits, absolutely. Another that made me remember what it was like to be in college. Another, that seemed to suggest the people in it were happy, even though they had left college.
It's neither here nor there.
Like today. Which wasn't bad as a day, but was hard to swallow if you thought of the circumstance it came in.
One tiny day, when you wanted to rest and venture out, finish chores and eat out. Play with dogs, who would dirty your clothes, which you would have to wash. To know that you were away from your dog, in a job you did not enjoy, in a city you did not like and not know if there was anything in this world that could ever make you completely happy.
Like, ever.

It is like, bloody cold in Dilli. i am sitting at home with a cold and when i breathe out, i can see the dhowa. my hands are too cold to type. ami chollam.

The sense of a man standing close, hinting at softness. You keen towards that body, wanting to reach out and be enveloped in the warmth. You yearn with half-remembered longing for what it feels to be with a man.

Maybe it is just the novelty. Maybe it isn't missing what is familiar.

But here, in faraway Delhi, I am allowed to long for someone's touch, anyone who is halfway kind: to be kissed and loved and to be allowed to rest.
That there is a time for rest, a time to stop fighting, to stop looking over your back, that with some people, you can relax.

For the new year, can I ask for calmer days, easier times, to be loved up?

Today is my off-day. I wait for it like I didn't in Calcutta. But a large chunk of every off day is ultimately spent in catching up with chores. I head out in the evening, to some market or the other and come back with a bag heaving with groceries. Not any bag, actually. It's Madhura's bag, the one she liked so much and the one which I'd said I'd courier to her but never did. I like it so much as well. And well, embarrassment, the usual stuff.
I like grocering, I like what the act involves: looking through the gleaming, fresh vegetables, asking the rates, looking for a bargain, picking up the new cheese, or ice-cream or sauce (I bought Plum sauce today. And it's not horrendous, I tasted.) what I don't want to give away to it is time and energy.
Here, doing something for myself more often than not means not doing something else I want to do or which needs to be taken care of. Buying a 3g data card recharge coupon today meant not going to Majnu ka tilla for momo,something I'd been mulling over through the week. Hurrying back for grocery meant no time to look for new cell phone. Wanting to relax after a bath in the evening meant no cooking, ordering in food, which still irks me right now.
The floors haven't been swabbed in weeks, I haven't yet gotten around to cleaning out the box bed and putting in stuff there. The bed sheet needs to be washed as well, likewise for the kitchen top.
Then there is home. There is trouble at home. That apart, I feel terrible about staying away from my dog. Sometimes I fear she is slipping away from me. I look at the photos of her, us and there's an ache inside. I feel guilty for not taking the white dog in. It seems he must have been a pet sometime, he keens towards people so. I love to hug him. There was one evening, when they had all come up to my flat. I'd given them biscuits. One had left, but the other two, including the white one, settled down outside, a black one on a landing below and the white one just outside the flat. I sat with him on the stairs with an arm around his neck. But I had to go in and cook, so I shut the door on him eventually. It's terrible to have to do that, terrible.
And Delhi. Well, I know it as a fact that I am living in Delhi, I am assured of the amenities the so-called capital provides, I speak to vendors and Delhi residents in office with an accent approximating theirs, I dislike, I tolerate, I often smile. But I don't think I inhabit the city. There is much to see here, I am sure, but it's so far beyond my periphery. It's a mental void, really. I'm grateful for the things there are. I like my flat and I like Jalebi Chowk, I like the sunshine on my balcony, I speak to the pigeons that sit on my neighbour's balcony and live in trepidation that the tenuous calm will be broken.
I've had no one up here, save C and a junior colleague and don't feel the need to. On this one day of the week, I want to be left alone. I'd only want to be with someone who'd leave me alone. That apart, the house is in a mess and there's too many things to do. Always.
I'm afraid I'm becoming like those Bengalis in Delhi whose mental space is so entirely filled by Calcutta that they speak of Shymambazar and flurry of real estate activity at Rajarhat as if they'd find those if they stepped outside their rooms, as if those were problems that affected them on an immediate basis. It does feel good that at least numerically there are so many Bengalis in Dilli. But that's it, really. I don't think we carry a common core that makes us happy to be together just because we are Bengali.
I bought fish the other day from Jalebi Chowk and the boys dressing the fish were Bengalis from Araria. But they spoke with such a strong accent there wasn't much you could identify with. Still, I was grateful. I suppose that does makes me sound like a crazy bag lady who scans the crowds for a Bengali face. I do, and often my guess is right, but that's about it. There's nothing more to look forward to on an individual level, save drawing a bit of warmth from an imagined commonality.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3067501.cms

India's lost cult films

Are you one of those who were awake that night? Be warned that answering ‘yes’ will identify you as nearing 40 now, but back then in 1988, you were a bored, disaffected, possibly dope-smoking late adolescent who stayed up late to watch Doordarshan (DD) because there wasn’t anything else to see back then, and not much else to do late that night.

So you sat through all the crappy, presumably cut-price shows that DD filled its late night slot with: dour German detective serials, dull Russian costume dramas, bad British sitcoms, pathetic pop shows, and only very rarely something good, like when it showed Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Launderette.

That was a jolt, but it was nothing like the jolt that we got late that night in 1988 when a film with a really weird title was shown. Because In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones wasn’t set abroad, but in Delhi. And the kids in it weren’t foreigners, but students like us. And they didn’t speak American teen lingo, but the sort of Hindi laced slang we all used. And they dressed scruffy like us, and were almost definitely smoking dope and they had the same dim view of teachers that we did, and they were happy to cheat at exams. And while the lead actress — who also was the scriptwriter — was stunningly beautiful, she was in scrappy, sexy way quite unlike any other Indian actress we had ever seen. And it was funny, in a real, irreverent, smutty way that was miles from any Bollywood comedy.

It seems hard to imagine that many people saw it late that night, released without any publicity, and yet there are so many people whose eyes will light up if you mention Annie, Yamdhoot, Radha, Mankind, Kasozi’s worms, Lakes' crystal bowl and the fruit trees on the side of the railway line.

One night...

It would have to have been that night because DD never showed it again. According to Pradip Krishen, who directed the film, it almost didn’t get shown at all. “The film was commissioned by Bhaskar Ghosh who had promised to release it without changes. And he was actually watching it for the first time when he got a call from Rajiv Gandhi’s office telling him he was being sacked,” says Krishen.

Ghosh’s rather spineless successor had no desire to show such a pathbreakingly frank and funny film, but finally agreed to that one, late night, unheralded release. A few people did record it, and those videos became precious commodities, loaned grudgingly, watched to the point of disintegration and finally lost.

Since then the fate of Annie, as we’ll call it for short, has been much speculated on. One story is that DD has locked it away and refuses to release it from sheer perverseness or revenge for its irreverence. Another was that a producer had made away with the negatives. Or that the negatives have degraded. Over time the film’s mystique has developed, not always for the expected reasons.

I'm definitely not 40 and I've never doped. Watching the film made me remember what freedom tasted like. Once you've lived through the eighties, you'll always be a child of the 80s. Though technically, mine were the 90s. But it too was free of the glut of wealth and glitter.
Delhi seemed like a grey ole town in the film, and how I longed to live in it instead of the loud, boisterous city, a corner of which I now inhabit.
And I miss Doordarshan, miss the glut of choice, the dull, hot afternoons, often without electricity, the trance the heat would send you into.
Life was simpler, even if as sad. I really, really miss it.