Ours will be the age of not growing up.
Of being 36 and wondering whether to settle down.

On being asked whether he plans to have a child sometime, Randy Harrison said in a recent interview for his play, Harbour, that he doesn't really know, because living in New York is just too prohibitive. I like how young he is at 36, how he is still undecided how the rest of his life will be.

This is the age of Peter Pan. We will all be self-absorbed and looking for approval, crack silly jokes loudly and write our states of mind in parentheses on Facebook status updates, be horribly confessional to strangers and then recoil, aghast, when that person does not appreciate where we are coming from.  We will have funny haircuts, sport old jeans and faded clothes, live from moment to moment, not own a house. We will have eyebrow piercings at 31, look greedily at beautiful people, take up smoking and drinking in earnest on the other side of 30. We will have nasty break-ups that will leave us floundering, go to work groggy from having stayed up most of the night doing things we don't really remember or care about. We will be queer.

See, that is the wonderful thing. You don't have to grow up, give up your mannerisms, stop being affected. Except of course when life sticks a bamboo up your arse, which will be quite often. So you will do hospital bills and worry about money and fight with your mother, but you will also be very gay and chase the next high, and go from high to high, and wonder where it's all coming to, and whether it might not be better to be dead at 45.

Khora

As I go to office every day, I wonder what the world is coming to, and the world we are leaving behind for those who will come after us. These are big words. On the way from Gazipur to Noida, I pass a huge field of burning garbage that stretches off NH 24, alongside a residential area at the Sai Baba temple vicinity in Indirapuram. Families live right alongside this, children breathe this air. Cows stand around and sit in this unbelievable smoking field of garbage, and you wonder whether they aren’t dying a little faster because of it. I have passed this area five days a week for the past 2 years in shared autos, which lurch through semi-paved streets, seven people to each vehicle, four in the back seat where you struggle to hold your position if you are the last person to get in. Now, I traverse the same stretch in the luxury of a reserved auto, because Noida Sector --, where I work now, does not have a route where these vehicles ply, and I don’t want to change 4 modes of transport to get to office. It is quite expensive, but I have decided to allow myself this luxury, because I won’t get to office with my back hurting from walking long stretches with the laptop bag, my legs hurting from standing too long in a metro compartment where there isn’t space enough to draw breath.

This field of garbage in Indirapuram now has a road that cuts through it which leads to Khora, a lower middle class area, which is also a shortcut into Noida. The air here swirls with dust. The dust is gritty, hard like steel. As it laps my face, I wonder about the poisons I am breathing in, and look at the people who live here, the dogs that sit relaxedly, legs splayed out in the winter sun, amid the endless eddies of dust, and wonder what will happen to us all.
This road through Khora is new. Earlier it was an undulating, stony patch of road through which autowallahs would take their vehicles only when all other roads were jammed. There were small hills from where the ground would slope down sharply and you would wonder what kind of animal the driver was to take his gari through this monster of a stretch and what a miracle it was that the tyres survived. Now, this stretch has been smoothed out. Very soon, it will be paved. I wonder if this is the beginning of the gentrification of Khora.

I write from a rather privileged position, where I can afford to not live beside a smoking field of garbage. It is less privileged than those of many friends and colleagues, who travel in their own vehicles with windows rolled up. I am incredibly grateful when one of them kindly offers me a lift home, or part of the way. On a hot day, it means not walking in the sun while your skin feels like it's burning. It means not breathing in the smell of rotting garbage, or the smell of chickens cooped up in wire cages: the smell of old genjees that have never been washed. 

Madeleine Peyroux sings this cover of the Leonard Cohen song. Another Queer as Folk find.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above

Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn

Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

O the love.

WHEN MY BOY WALKS DOWN THE STREET - THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

Grand pianos crash together when my boy walks down the street
There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat 
Everyone sings hallelujah when my boy walks down the street 
Life just kind of dances through ya from your smile down to your feet
Amazing he's a whole new form of life
Blue eyes blazing and he's going to be my wife
The world does the hula-hula when my boy walks down the street 
Everyone thinks he's Petula so big and yet so petite 
Butterflies turn into people when my boy walks down the street 
Maybe he should be illegal he just makes life too complete... 
Amazing he's a whole new form of life
Blue eyes blazing and he's going to be my wife 
Oh, shadows of echoes of memories 
Oh, things that he brings that he found in the sea 
Oh, shadows of echoes of memories of songs 
Oh, how could he know that it won't be long...
Grand pianos crash together when my boy walks down the street 
There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat 
Everyone sings hallelujah when my boy walks down the street 
Life just kind of dances through ya from your smile down to your feet

So.
There was a time.
When life was simpler.
No, it never was.
When parents were meant to take care of you.
While you went and sowed your wild oats.
Now, the tables have turned.
And I find myself
Carrying the unbearable burden of my mother
Who has decided
To
Stop living
In all but drawing of breath.
I cannot do this.
I want to run away.
Forget myself.
Have lots of sex
(For fun)
And die
In welcome oblivion
That it has finally come to an end.

The present is unbearable.
The future unimaginable.
I only have longing, and hate,
And rage.
And boredom
That runs through every moment.
That is, however, a fair package.

When will this end?
When will this end?