The Ballad of Jack and Rose

I am quite shattered, paranoid, worried. My boyfriend told me today that he thinks the way Floppy is being brought up bothers him. For instance, that I take her with me to bed. He says he is a light sleeper (he is) and he'd never be able to sleep with her in the bed, and what'd happen when there's a kid. Now, Floppy doesn't jump around in bed once we've lain down to sleep. She stays quietly beside me in the morning until I awaken even if she's woken up herself. My boyfriend doesn't know that. But I think he doesn't want to share a bed with her anyway. I didn't know this. And I am very shocked and worried about how strongly he feels about it, how determined he is about it. I feel like I appear to be someone I know, a woman who wants to have a child even though her marriage is falling apart, because she won't be able to conceive later because of gynaecological problems: a crazy, manic woman. A colleague had recently told me he thought me crazy for attaching so much importance to animals, for thinking more of them than human beings.
I thought my boyfriend understood, I thought he knew. I am too tired to fight over this, over anything after so many years. I wish, well, I wish sometimes, now, that if this is how we are going to be - he said, with great concern, that our relationship might even end over this after we marry - I wish I could go my way, that I would not have to share my life with him.
Floppy is the dearest thing to me, one of the very dearest. She gives me love in a way few do, and I don't want to put any distance between us. I don't think I am crazy and I thought he felt the same way. But he doesn't, and I feel too old to fight.

I watched The Ballad of Jack and Rose today, and it's stayed with me through the day. And I wish, I so wish - to be loved like that, that state of innocence, and that things could always be that way. I know it can't, I don't think I even want to go through the physical living out of it, it was bad enough how dependent I was on baba and how claustrophobic it was. But this world - where you never find one whose soul is like yours and who understands you and there are no compromises to be made - I wish I didn't have to deal with it, I wish I could turn away and live like Indrani, with all my animals and their unquestioned love. And die with them.

And no, I don't want to have a kid. And I don't want to guard the marital home in one city for the rest of my life after I marry. I can't stay in one place, I am sorry. Hard as it is to stay alone, I can't live by another's rules in their house. I don't want to, I can't, I am sorry, I am sorry.

Sacred Games

I am a little in love with Sartaj Singh, much as I was a little in love with a designer in my office, and perhaps will be awhile. It's easy to fall in love with him: he is tall, and an inspector who has a heart. He even makes me like Surds.

Reading Sacred Games is a labour of love. I read through the 945-page book with care, slowly to savour in the details, wishinh I could write on the things I remark, especially the Eng Lit stuff that I have been trained to notice. That makes it such a doubly-pleasurable exercise.

The reviewer Jabberwock calls it Dickensian in the way the author balances such a huge tapestry of plot lines and also the way the city is also a character in the story. I agree.

And I love the book for much more. To sustain the reading of a book this vast needs a certain discipline, constancy, care. It is only the second novel I am reading after The Feast of The Goat, and that was a year ago. It's hard, if you feel high-strung, unhappy, despairing to sustain a read. It needs overcoming the overwhelming sadness, because reading is like adding more to yourself, and if it's a good book, it makes you happy. Which is at odds with the rest of the unhappy you.

I don't really like Ganesh Gaitonde. He is an unreliable narrator of his story because his perception is at odds with the facts narrated by other people disinterested in his fate. But it gets to you after a while, his constant self-inflation and what he things is his understanding of the universe.

I bought the book from Daryaganj. And I found just yesterday that it was missing 32 crucial pages. I was despairing a little, but Dibbo found me a soft copy. I am very happy, because it won't disrupt the thread of continuity, because I can continue this exercise in bringing together the fragments of my mind. O i sound like Ganesh Gaitonde, I know.

After this, I read City of Djinns. I have to procure it from somewhere, I hope it will be good.

Among other things, I saw the precious Koel Purie Rinchet outside the office building yesterday. She is a midget, and she looked like this sulky, surly, small thing, shorter than I thought he was. Gamine, but in a not nice way. And she is starting to look old too.