So. Back’s better, though I am losing no opportunity to complain. Well, basically I am saying that I love the way Bibek writes, here and here. So much prettier if we were a composed sum of our best qualities, instead of scatterbrained and waif-like. At least that’s the image I suggest to myself of myself. It was a good day today. Boyfriend got computer working again. Ram spoke to Vellore and found out what had to be done for duplicate death certificates, there’s a chance my savings account and our new fd will be done yet and I applied for the vellore DD at the bank today. I will send off the vellore application tomorrow and go with my mother to another bank to close an account and get some other work done.
On Saturday, we have an appointment with ma’s doc. My salwars are ready too and can be picked up from the tailor’s. I am quite excited about them.
On Monday, I went back to the municipality (site of fall and subsequent back hurt) with the last receipt and paid the outstanding taxes. No worry till April next year. That was another accomplishment. But on the way back, there were no buses. I can’t sit in an auto without back hurting. So I walked almost half the distance (a fairly long distance) in the unbearable humidity. I had eaten almost nothing and was feeling slightly ill and was getting late for office and a little worried about my back. Well, I got a bus eventually.
Now, it’s not so hot and so humid, so everything is more bearable. You can think with greater clarity, do more without feeling drained. I bought lots of interesting stuff today. Orange crush, tuna, rice noodles, macaroni and kaju and kishmish. Can’t wait to have macaroni and tuna for dinner, hneh hneh. Of course provided mother makes.
And Castle, hneh hneh.
And True Blood season 3 from next week. Hneh hneh hneh.

I fell down the stairs today. Slid down a few steps on my butt. I had gone to the municipality to pay long due taxes. Slid while getting out of the building. It hurts very much. I can neither sit, stand not lie down without feeling pain. It’s the tailbone I think.
It’s also very muggy, I have a cold and a sore throat. I don’t know what to do, so I am just riding it out till I feel ok enough to take decisions.
It was quite sunny when I set out and I was sweating very much. At the municipality, people were willing to help, which was a good thing, but they also have not maintained any record of payments. I hadn’t been able to find the latest bill, so took the bill before that. The man asked me to bring the last bill, he would update his records and take the money.
While coming out, I slipped and fell. Much vigorous hurting later, I went to the auto stand, sweated in the auto line, then, after getting an auto, sat and sat until the jam cleared. It got a little uncomfortable after a while, as my back was really hurting and I could shift positions only very gingerly. The cold aggravated the sweating.
Got back home. Hunted for an hour for the bill. The cold got a little worse, I think, since I was sifting a lot of dirt, so I took an anti-allergic. I did not find the bill and decided I felt too ill to search any more. My mother kept asking what I wanted to take for tiffin and asking me with great concern to not go to office. I did not want to miss office since I had taken a month’s leave in April and there are other considerations as well. But explaining that would not really have made a difference, I suppose. My mother kept asking what I wanted for tiffin until I agreed to what she was proposing. She would not take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer.
I ate, dressed, messaged my boss that I would be late because I fell down the stairs etc. All of this was interspersed with the same sms on my cellphone from my bank informing me of a bank transaction I had done today. I kept rushing to check the message because I wanted to see what my boss would say. I probably got the sms 14 times today.
He called later, expressing great concern and asking me not to come. I said I was fine and was on my way.
I walked slowly to the bus stop, taking 15 minutes, perhaps, instead of the 7/10. I got up on a bus that had just arrived instead of the waiting auto, thinking I’d save a buck and sit perhaps more comfortably. After I sat down, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I hurriedly got down and began walking back slowly to my stoppage. I was wondering whether to get the wallet and come back, something I’d hate to do even on an ordinary day. I told myself that it was important to do one’s job, that one went to office unless one were physically incapable.
I ask for others’ opinion when I know the right answer, but want someone else to say the thing I want to hear. I called my boyfriend and asked if I should go back. He said, do if you want to. I felt the old sad anger at the detached answer. I said ok and disconnected the line.
I went back, climbed the stairs and rang the bell. My dog howled when she realized it was me. My mother opened the door and after my dog had put her urine-dripped paw on my fresh white shirt in welcome, said, ‘be careful, she just peed her.’ She then asked, won’t you go to office?’ I said, please be quiet. She then said, open your earrings.
I went in and changed, came out and sat and watched TV. It was hot, I was sweating constantly, my throat was sore and I felt quite ill. There was nothing interesting, so after a while, I switched it off. My dog and I went into my room. I ate my tiffin on the bed, while she sniffed greedily. I didn’t give her any. She’d had lunch, she has meat everyday and it was teaching her a bad habit. It still felt bad, however. I offered her my sweet after I finished eating, but she wasn’t that interested. I could hardly sit and didn’t want to change position, get up and coax her.
I lay down for a bit, saw afternoon become evening, took a few phone calls.
I have since left the bed, watched some TV, had a cup of tea.
My mother asked me whether she should give tomato in the chicken she was cooking for me. I said, I don’t know. I then shouted that I had told her I had a cold, I was asking for tea which she refused to make and she still kept asking whether she should put tomato in the chicken. She would have to decide for herself. We shouted at each other for a while.

In the last few days, I have hurt myself more than I usually do. Day before, I singed my calf a little with the mosquito coil while I was sleeping on the floor. That was actually a new thing, and I was a little kicked. But I keep bumping into things, stabbing my toe, ramming my elbows into walls. Is something wrong with my coordination? While bathing in the afternoon today, I remembered my father falling down the stairs before he left for Vellore. This is a story I heard much later from the residents in his building when we went to where my father lived and worked, to settle his final payments. I always imagine the incident, instead of remembering the telling. He hurt his head or back, I think, because he was returning home from office, climbing up the stairs.
My mother had a very bad fall a few days ago in the kitchen. She let out an unearthly scream, a thin, long drawn out keening cry. Until I rushed in and saw her, I didn’t know whether it was her or the dog. When I heard it, I thought the worst might have finally happened, life as I knew it was over now. When I saw that she had slipped on pickle oil and then, when she started blaming me for hurrying her, I did not freak. I helped her up. Her foot swelled up and she had a nasty cut on one of her hands. It’s ok now.
But I feel very afraid when slightly older people start falling.

I felt very helpless a while ago. With everything going wrong in a way that was hard to ignore.

What in god's name is this?


If I suddenly stop trying to do everything I am trying to do, jump up and get married, will everyone be happy? Will my boyfriend be happy? (he won’t), will I be happy to have done what is expected of me and not feel so bitter about wasting my life? I mean, the marriage will be the visible thing, everything else will be subtext, non-existent unless I utter it.
Another flurry of marriages, 30 is closer than I ever thought and I am no nearer doing any of the things I had thought I would do. Living on a pause button. It’s scary how much things don’t move unless you do something about it. Scary how ok it is to snarl, claw out what you want because you want it, because you believe it your right, scary how much time I wasted thinking it to be impolite, scary that people I live with still think it so, think it better to wait hesitantly in the wings forever, doing your damnedest from there to be noticed.
Why is it that at 27, I am still waiting? I have been afraid for a long time that if I did what I wanted, I would not have something else I dearly wanted to keep. And I have done my time. If I still don’t have it, obviously the process is wrong.
But oh oh, to think of all the things with which I decorated my life: the dogs and the little kindnesses, laughter and smiles. It is habit to cling on to what you have, perhaps it is only others for whom everything is unfurled like a dainty planned process. Others just have to settle for Gulkand, believing it to be a tasty dish. When you know, in your heart of hearts, that sweetened roses with nuts and raisins cannot but be horrible, horrible.

If you felt like an insect and wanted to crawl into a hole and not come out for a long time, you could, right? Will going away change this?

I returned today. And stayed back since the Duronto Express (yes, it is a joke) was two hours late. It was a good day to return, it was not sunny, there was a cool breeze in the middle of afternoon, it was cloudy etc.
But then, it is not joyful. It is like returning to the site of your defeats, to your biggest heartbreak, where your heart is breaking even now, where things have not changed for you at all. Where there is no challenge because you have lost several times over and are only returning to face the consequences of your defeat and to lose some more.

It's a Sunday afternoon in Delhi. I am sitting in my dusty house, typing this out in my emphatically non-qwerty keypad and waiting for the mistri who's to come an hour later. So, well, one finds oneself inhabiting moments that, even though one doesn't mind them, are very far beyond the realm of the expected. There's a nirvana-like quality in sweating out the mild heat of the apartment, hoping for an undisturbed hour, hoping to avoid catching a cold from the dust, staring at the faded fabric of old jeans. It would be pleasant to settle down, wouldn't it?, but there are so many things that must be taken care of into which it is difficult to factor in someone else: they might not want to be factored in.
Can i say that i find the challenge of making this house an inhabitable place mildly exciting & therefore want to take it on?
I don't like this locality. The houses smell of joint families & ghee, that it's far from what for lack of a better word one calls cosmopolitan. It's hard to figure how the Punjabi or Marwari or Jat thinks, one only knows to be wary.

So, i am sitting in an extremely dusty house that belongs to us, which i fought to get back. I have a cold, so it's not such a hot idea to sit in the dust. I got glass fitted to the empty window frames day before & boarded up a doorway. I'm sitting on the floor with my back against the peeling wall & feeling apprehensive at the possibility of trouble from the Society. It would be easier with one other person with me.
So, door got fitted. Still waiting for a mistri to give an estimate for some work on the balcony.

I didn't realise this was the extent I could ask for. I'm tired of asking, tired of stooping to beg. It's otherwise very amiable. Just that, after a certain point, there is an absence, a vacuum, where no word or appeal has an effect that is any different from that reserved for any other friend.

Does one ever take away lessons from experience? Are you ever wiser? Little indicates I am. It seems I am unfit to take on the affairs of the world, so inept I am. What am I doing? Why does it take so long to wise up to things? Why do I ignore my gut feelings so easily. And Rohini is so very far away. And Dilli is so hot. Lawyers are crooks. Police are always an uncertain quantity. Ananya's words often ring true, that you are always alone. Why should one have to repeatedly ask for, beg for help from one one counts as one's own? Why do so many words have to be expended, repeated ad infinitum, why the need for explanation at all? Isn't it evident? Unless my impressions are deemed untrustworthy, or that I have not given enough to command so much in return? What are faulty electric meters, office jokes, being needed in office on a Sunday? These are non-existent reasons. Am I wrong to expect another to look at my problem as I look at it? A was saying you can't, except of parents and I knew this to be true once, but I, well, I have had so much for such a long time that I expected nothing but entire commitment. I am tired of having to explain, of trying to speed things up because someone is in a hurry to return.
I spent six hours on two commutes to Rohini yesterday, I stood in the sun for say, an hour and a half at an office and by the end of it, had almost lost sense of my surroundings. I was ill from the heat, with a tummy upset and feeling like vomiting. We had left at 8am and returned at 3. I could hardly eat. I was journeying back to Rohini by 5 for an appointment that eventually didn't happen. This was the second time it hadn't. I returned at 10.45, having hardly eaten anything through the day, ate a little rice and waited for a phone call. By then I was running entirely on adrenalin and didn't know how to switch off, so I read a couple of stories from ma's sananda. It was quite relaxing. But then I again had to explain why I couldn't do it alone, that another head, another pair of hands would be very handy, would be like being given the moon and that it was not only about reassurance.
My back still aches a little from lugging around the knapsack, my feet doesn't hurt as much from yesterday's hail auto=buy ticket-hold ma's hand through escalator rides, stand in metro-change metro=more escalators- more hand holdiing, rickshaw ride. I am glad hot blasts of air didn't lash my face and make my eyes sting. Maybe someone else would be more resilient, more cussed, more determined, more go-getting, maybe the way I am does not work in Delhi, maybe my thinking that I will get this done come what may and how badly I am actually doing this does not tally. Who knows? I did lose baba at the end of a month, so I am probably not that good a fighter. I held F's picture on my phone close and cried today. At the helplessness, perhaps, at the struggle, out of fear, disappointment??. Am I bad because of that? I need a break, at least a day's, even though I can't afford it. Am I wrong that I can't keeep working, days on end, that the weather, the stress gets to me so soon?
I sound selfish, accusing. But well, I am still there, aren't I?

my heart is clenched. i dont know why i thought this would sort itself out at least a little today. my heart sank when i realised. it seems i've stayed away so long from all that i like. F was operated today. she was being trouble, so I had to put the choke chain on her. oh, she must have been so scared. she has probably been scared all the time since she always snaps at people there. what a badly-brought up dog, I must think. such a small dog, and who knows how she must feel being all alone.
it was so good to have ma today. i thought i'd cry from hopelessness on the way home. but she was around, to just have someone else who cares is so strengthening. at other times, when i have sat at home and will do for the rest of the week, it seems like i have been placed in an alien planet, where i have no roots, no purpose while everyone i know has a concrete day to day reason for being here. i feel like an exile, here to take away something that belongs to me in a place where i dont belong, where i have no right.
each day i sit doing nothing, seems like a waste of life blood: room rent, cost of food, travel: all for cooling my heels waiting for a time when something MIGHT happen.

Hey bhogoban, what now? Is this all there is to it? Then I shall just keel over and die.

Oh, just get me a man though. To do this with. I am weak with relief though it might mean just nothing. It's been this way so many times in the last 2 weeks.

F goes to stay with I tomorrow. One can never appreciate a dog enough. You get used to its fur and that you will find dog hairs on your person at the strangest times. That a kyabla face will look at you questioningly and that you will receive occasional tail-lashings.

But let's not gush. It is probably nothing and we will return to the heart-clenching, bone-wearying grind.

I am very very tensed about upcoming work. I couldn’t do it without the help of boyfriend and I realise again and again why people come together, marry, form communities, why those bonds are stronger than friendships. It means a commitment, a duty that goes beyond like or dislike. I am grateful for this. I feel scared, insecure, and spiky about having to take favours. I want to come back to my own space soon, where I do not feel obliged and guilty for being unable to repay the kindness/ help.

Reasons to be irked about today:
BSNL has mistakenly added last month’s bill to this one’s and barred outgoing calls. In the midst of never-enough-time, kal will have to run to Salt Lake to get that fixed. Online billing? No no sirree. In fact, offline o thik kore korbo na.
I was hoping for the closure of the first phase of duplicate marksheet story. No hope in sight. Duplicate marksheet wanter hasn’t written back clarifying what she wants, and I have left stuff with Dibbo. So sorry.
And then, no cook, no maid, ma at dadu’s, so go home clean dog, prepare other dogs’ food, wake up early when ma is back tomorrow routine. Feed own dog, who will throw all kinds of tantrums, stuff food down own gullet. TALK: v.important to figure out stuff.
Getting a form signed by someone. Speed posting it.
Making a v.important call from home. (Oh brilliant, no happen tom, because no phone, no STD. So figure out a niribili place in office to phone from.)
How I will do all of this by tomorrow, I have no idea. The BSNL thingy really really didn’t have to compound things.

Plus, I am apprehensive about Dilli trip. It seems like a godforsaken place, much worse than Nagpur. Perhaps by the end of the trip I will have resolved to never live or work there.

NB: Para dog seems ok.
I hope SSS’s cat will be fine. Its name is Mieville, like Dora’s cat.

So, er, this is more an update than anything else. Just because I can.
I went to Indrani’s and this is what I wrote to Oli and the sexy sadistic spanker:
Dog is well, calm, even happy. And somehow, even clean, though obviously not given a bath. It was very relaxing to be there and indrani herself talks in a language that is familiar: she talks of dogs like they are people, she told me about my dog: what she's been doing, how she loves mangsho bhaat, but rather dislikes milk. And how she can eat and eat. She hasn't pulled at her bandages either, wagged her tail at Indrani and let me pet for a long time when I went into her kennel, looked curiously out of her kennel whenever she saw us come up to her. Her other dogs were also lovely: clean, fat and friendly.
Indrani has gotten young Mowgli adopted. Mowgli is a very spirited young pup that M and I saw when we went to her place. And another two will be gone too. Which is very nice. One should be able to think of some things with unrestrained happiness and right now, thinking of her and the dogs she keeps, makes me feel that way.
Among other things, I have feeling addle-headedly affectionate towards boyfriend again, without much reason, so I don’t know what to think about it. His g’ma died and he loved her very much, indeed and I was occupied with doggy stuff and feeling uncertain and blah blah things happened blah blah we spoke while I cried a little and no solution or way forward really came out except that well, I am not worried and disappointed and sad and since I can’t understand why I should feel this way, well, I can’t keep thinking about it anymore.
A cousin married. I visited their house yesterday after they had both come back from her parents’ house in the evening. My cousin looked so glad to have gotten married, it was nice. And we shall go to the boubhaat (ogod I am referring to rituals I don’t care for by name) tomorrow and I shall have to iron out my mountaineous salwaar kameez and wear it in this heat and turn on my public self and it’s work but hopefully will not be prolonged. And an uncle said, sheshe tui ekta leri kutta ke pushli. I am too outraged and well, what’s new, but is it so very hard to expect basic sensitivity, decency? You might not care for it, but you are talking to me and you can extend the same politeness, if nothing else, that I extend towards you even if I might think that what you do is bullshit. I am polite and I try to engage you in talk about what you do even if I think it’s all hocum. Is it so hard to want the same back? I dunno. Maybe I am perpetually in guilt on account of some fault of birth.
The purpose of my Dilli visit will not be sorted out easily. But I do so look forward to meeting friends. I am a little alarmed at the thought of how hot it will be, but ki ar kara.
Since I saw the sufferings of para dog, I look at my own in a new light: I had gotten used to her, but now it seems to strike again how precious her life is, how tenuous too, like everybody else’s. I pet her more often, hold her closer, smell her again and again. When I come down with food at night and my downstairs pup goes ballistic with joy (it goes ballistic at the slightest of reasons), leaping, rolling over and trying to lick all the other dogs, my heart fills with delight.
Crazy dog lady shall accompany to Harinavi for stuff she has to get done. :(

http://www.eloiseleyden.co.uk/slum-dogs

Thank you Dibbo for everything today. Mane, I am just a stupid oaf bumbling through everything. I am grateful you knew what to do, from getting the taxi, deciding on the fare, lining the seat with newspapers, petting the dog when she was on the operating table and not losing your cool once, petting her and holding her reassuringly in the taxi, paying off the driver. Also, for telling me that she needs to be walked before being made to get in. This too I didn't know at all.
Twenty four hours have seemed too little in the past three days and I am not sure what tomorrow will bring, but the pressure has eased up a bit now. And I am writing this.

Amar kalo chokchoke kukurta shob bomi kore phelechhe.

I sometimes think that having a dog in the house is better than having an infant. At least the dog isn't as articulate and pointedly demanding as a child. You are proved wrong when the dog:
sits by the door you have shut to stop it wreaking havoc in another room, subtly making the point je ei ghor e ekhon amar thakar katha na. tai doya kore dorjata khule amay uddhar koro.
You have obliged and gone back to your stuff. You find it has procured a biscuit from somewhere and is finishing it on the sofa. You give it another, which it refuses to eat, places it politely nearby and looks up, expecting to be fed. When you do hold out the biscuit for it to eat, it takes bloody annoying dainty, testing bites, each time, and when you coax baba bachha kore to eat up fast, it looks up condescendingly and walks away.

It has been a mosquito-filled day and I haven't bathed, but sweated and a copy has to be written and phone researched and dinner eaten and advice taken for important stuff to be done tomorrow and I'm feeling bad at not having ironed and disgusted because both the parar kukur hardly had the huge platefuls of bhaat given, so you will understand if I say karuke dhore kelate ichhe korchhe and I wish the other parar kukur would be back soon.

Well, uh, here’s the thing, and I am a selfish old fart for saying this. Well, that your “nearest” ones desert you when you uh, need em the most. And then, well, you manage and are the stronger for it. Don’t mistake this for a oh-my-world is good chest thumping or determined to see the silver lining and ignore the actual dark cloud. I am struggling to manage, there are so many things it’s hard to think coherently, but well, I am still standing, messing up, but still around to mess up and still there to take the blows that come out of messing up. It’s going to be a long week and I could do with some sorting out in the head. But if, after three years and a bit more, I have someone turning on his heels and marching out because I have let my resentment show for his not being there when I needed (he had genuine reasons), I am not going to call after him. It’s hard, but like every hard thing, you learn. I learned to cope when baba died. I would tell myself everyday as I found never-ending reams of papers and worldly things to take care of that I had little clue about: whatever happens, I will survive. It might be bad, it might not be the best, but it’s still me, I am still standing and I will survive. I daresay I will survive even when and if I have no one behind me propping me up.
So well, it’s selfish to expect someone to be your confidence, to be the one to unentangle the knots in your head, to calm you. When you are unsure what you offer in return. But well, this is how I probably will always be, as selfish as this. And uh, well, I will probably still be standing. If only because I don’t know yet what gets me down. Please God, give me time before that happens.

Cspca was supposed to send a vehicle to pick up two of the strays we feed and another that another lady feeds for sterilisation. They could catch only mine. They came three and a half hours late, by which time I was tired, hungry and was feeling very dirty. I felt sorry and scared to think how it would be taken care of, whether it might injure itself furthur (it has an injured leg: a swollen joint and is limping) if bunged in with a lot of other strays. It was cringing into itself as I put it into the vehicle.
I did not know it would cost as much. 1600 rs is not little money for me if spent for a single dog.
I don’t trust cspca one bit. They don’t care about the animals.
I feel very helpless and close to tears. I am filled with rage at the appalling quality of service. Even 1600rs will not ensure that my dog will be in safe hands. I would not be worried if she were with Indrani, for instance.
The red tape there seems like a big wall to me. It angers me all the more to think that they should be throwing their weight around at people who are paying to have animals treated, when it is the very reason for their existence. And they have so much space, such large premises. I am afraid.

God, will you think me crazy if I go to a Mughlai restaurant and wolf biryani down my throat? After a non-descript healthy lunch of ruti and aloo peyaajkoli with achaar and one lovely nolengurer mishti? I also want to eat, right now, beautiful creamy dessert (take me to Mama Mia!), or pork momo, lovely succulent pork momo drooping fat. I will be a successor to Anthony Bourdain yet.
That twit Anthony Bourdain, I was completely disgusted by yesterday's episode of whatever food show he is hosting now. Being so all high and mighty saying, why do food bloggers get acrimonious over food, why do they take pictures of a dish before eating it? After all, it's just food. Bah! You make your millions doing the same thing and howmuchever you gel your hair, oohaah over whatever food you are tasting in whichever country, you will (er, probably) never be a good cook. It gets very samey after a while, Anthony Bourdain does. And it seems to me that he gushes over everythign he eats because it's his job to gush. Let me go check out his blog.

Somebody tell me about blogs that write about Calcutta in a way I want to read! Google search turned up such nonsense.

So I’ve been awake since 9 in the morning, which for me should be gobhir ratri since I went to sleep at 3.30am or thereabouts. But the cook comes at that time and I have to hang around while she works because my mother is staying over at my grandfather’s, whose all time help has gone to her desh indefinitely because her husband is dying, taking some rice and two potatoes in a putuli along the way, without informing my grandfather, at which he is furious, which my mother thought was very unjust of my g, since the help’s family does not give her food, but I told her that she should have informed him and taken it and then he wouldn’t have been so furious and would have happily agreed, because regardless of why you take something, if you do it without telling people, then it’s thievery. My mother is also unable to say how my 85-year-old g with faltering sight found 2 potatoes and a cup of rice missing.
These are things my mother narrates when she returns from dadur bari, by which time I am ballistic with sleep. I am invited by my mother to opine and of course we differ and then we fight and then she says I have strange ideas which have been put there by random person about whom she isn’t feeling kindly a ce-moment la, at which I become angry some more and list the bad things that have happened to me on account of her and then I go away feeling like shit.
So so today, nothing of the sort has happened, but only because we haven’t had a chance to really come face to face, because she was with the dog since after she returned, while I was talking to the cleanliness freak maid who insisted on cleaning the kitchen tiles even though she was getting late for my dadur bari, and she hadn’t gone yesterday evening, so my dadu was bound to be raging. I was watching fascinated as she cleaned off old grime to reveal sparkling surfaces. I like that very very much. It’s why I like to clean toilets, remove iron from bathroom tiles: there’s a lot of satisfaction in revealing the gleaming surface behind the dirt. I hate dust, though. Can’t seem to get my way around it. I just seem to sift it from place to place instead of getting rid of it. My boyfriend is very good with dust.
So today, I have a holiday, so I am going to go back and sleep some more and in the afternoon, go looking for clothes. If I can keep my head and get away soon, it will be pleasant and not turn into a traumatic, harrowing incident.

Also also, I really like the song Ibn-e-Batuta from the film Ishqiya, along with Dil toh bachha hai ji from the same film, which I have been listening to everyday and now. Toh I was singing it to my boyfriend with great gusto on the phone one night and he said, abar ta-ta kore gaan gaichho? I was deeply embarrassed, but would now like to clarify that the song really does have a ta-ta refrain: bagal mein joota, ta… ta and so on. So there.

The Whine
Uh, by writing about the following problem, I will take writing about personal stuff to a new level: new high, new low. So, well, my mum is 53 and has diabetes and another disorder. At rather a late time for our family, I have decided/ had decided about six months ago, that we will get ourselves medical insurance. Much testing (for ma) later, an agent has kindly told me that you can’t get insurance for people with diabetes etc unless you can show that reports are normal. The other policy there is will not cover the entire expenses of a hospital stay. So suddenly I am hyper worried about something that I was casual about earlier because I knew that whenever I submitted the forms and turned in the cheque, the job would be done, we’d be insured.
2nd, I am coveting bags: the kind women take, on one shoulder. Good leather, medium sized, something bound to be expensive and is utterly unnecessary. Ek shomoy hoyto ichhe hobe chhure phele di shoto hosto dure. Like I feel about the disgusting orna I bought to wear with a pretty salwar kameez to a wedding and for whose design I spent a couple of poring on the Internet.
I have a thing: I have decided that I will try everything that Nahoum’s makes one by one, trip by trip. So, I feel particular satisfaction when I wolf down a tasteless custard cream roll with gusto. It’s easy to imagine that it will be horrible. I saw the man at the shop lift it up from its place in the glass windows, it’s yellow vanilla bottom showing and knew. Imagine, jaast imagine: thick, floury, gyadgade yellow muck stuffed into patty. Among good things at Nahoum’s: chocolate éclair, though there is too much of it in one piece, beautiful chocolate brownies, nice pizza puff and cheese samosa thingy, garlic bread o bhalo, but daam o bhalo. And ginger biscuits too. Rest I haven’t tried/ are mucky things. Nahoum’s’ owner pays to get dogs near his shop sterilised. Which is a very nice thing.
Also pup affair: pup alive, which is very very kind of God to have let happen. But also, no home for it, except the garage, from which he keeps escaping onto the road. And he is really tiny. Pups make me warm and fuzzy inside. Sunayana had once written of wanting to softly swaddle a wee newborn, this is something like that. You want to cosset a tiny puppy and take it to sleep beside you. Only up to a limit, mind. Waking thrice in the night because of the puppy was some crazy shit.
My vet told me that cat hishoo smells something terrible. Much worse than dog hishoo, he clarified. Now when I go to Sraboni’s house, I take in the animal smells with new knowledge. I now know it’s all cat hishoo. It’s stronger than dog pee, but definitely not as bas as the vet had made it sound. Shala vet, for all his way with animals, he was subtly telling me that taking in all this puppy wuppy was crazy. Crazy is what they might make me feel after a time if I have to constantly monitor them, but if you can take care of them endlessly, that’s fine.
The following are the examples of bags I covet:





I would be happier carrying the green one, but the metallic thingy would be what I should carry, considering what I would like to look like.

hack has discovered the loo in New Market. Hoorah to hack. More news later. Detailed whining hobekhon.
Edited to add:
Also, hey bhogoban, make me pretty and pheminain. Must I go through life looking like an ugly duckling?

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.

I must be the kind of person who is rarely interested in the lives of others unless they are entangled with mine, preferably not very tenuously. I am not going to be bothered about how hard-worked someone is, I am tired of being sad. I want to have fun.
I feel more and more at ease about not answering mails from friends because I don’t want to, though I hate it when some people I want to respond to mine, don’t.
I am not very pretty, am I?
So this year will end tomorrow, another of many, no different from the last, mired in boredom, my mind as fetid as in the last. I will write something wonderful when things change.

Uh, the reunion. Bad pictures, so those won’t be appearing anywhere. Except for this one.
The feeling is slipping away, but there was so much I wanted to write about while they were happening.
It was a beautiful sunny day, glorious really, more charming because I am either asleep or in office or at home when this happens. The campus is very manicured and is perhaps a good thing. Yes, it is good to have clean grounds and green grass to lay down on, as I suppose is the giant entrance at Bengal Lamp, but well, it’s new, is all.
Somewhere towards the middle of Bibek’s band’s playing, I realised I was more relaxed than I had been the whole day, that I felt the way I did in college. Great comfort, knowing that there was no reason to question your presence here. Bibek’s harsh voice and Sujoy’s seamless singing, the mandolin played on. I speak like I know them, I don’t, except of stories I’ve heard from friends, but surely you can speak of what you loved with some familiarity? And then there was a time, when two ex-students, who had been in a relationship, hummed along to Mirna Guha’s song. And the rhythm of their heads shaking to the music was the same, though they didn’t look at each other much. I wondered then what we had started out with and what we had today was different, sometimes so far away.
And when you are that relaxed, you want a body to lay back against or somebody to laugh with, old, known jokes and uncontrolled laughter. I missed Oli. It was one of those moments, when things seem as if through a haze and you feel warmth for everyone who smiles for the same reason as you.
As I walked out of the Bengal Lamp gate, I could smell the openness I inhabited in my head once and that now it was different, and the choice had been mine and it wasn’t so bad: there is much warmth, but when you go back, you remember such longing, such desperate longing to live that way again.
And sudden kindness that I am quite certain I don’t deserve, Supriya di’s, Rimidi’s, and Dipta da. I felt so out of it for such a long time, I have, er, outsider issues.
I wish there were more people from my class. But there was Arati, Karishma, V, R, Dipta da, Ditto da. Sreetama was in the city, but dunno how, had NO idea the reunion was on. It would have been ever so nice to meet.
It makes you restless, it makes you want to leave your present and get out again. It makes you very restless, to not reach out for all that you want.

I have discovered the blog of another colleague. Hyuk.
So much feeling. The universe would explode under the pressure of it, if it knew. This is just as affected as the blog I discovered, was.
Then, a few days ago, I was checking the visitor stats of a classmate’s blog, a blog that I viciously dislike for its pretentiousness and then I checked mine and snnrrkd. My classmate might have thousands of readers in l’Amerique et a l’Inde, but I have the solitary reader in Turkey that my classmate doesn’t have. Snurf.
Ami asholey kintu eto vicious noi.

Someone is saying repeatedly Ridiklus state of affairs ya Ridiklus state of affairs.
Accha, so, I am wondering if two-year-old condoms serve any purpose, because I shall throw them out if they don’t and not endanger myself in the distant future when there might be an opportunity to have sex. This is just a way of saying I have had sex, which should not really be something that one shall have to state at my age. Also, that it has been off my mind for a while now, no thanks to my own natural inclination for, whattosay, more constructive activities. If I were offered sex now, I wouldn’t jump up in delight, I’d be considering and say: oh, you do? Well, why not.
Secondly, a colleague’s cat died today after being sent to stay at an animal shelter/ ngo for seven days, of blood dysentery and apparently, worms. It reinforces what one knows, that there’s no place your pet is safe except at home, or with other animal owners.
A junior has said that dogs with ears standing erect are usually mischief-makers. This makes me consider my dog in a wholly new light.
There is a very bad peon person in my office who was asking for tickets to tomorrow’s match. He is very sly and sneaky. I bet if he could've got them, he would have tried to sell them for a lot of money, even though he was saying some bullshit like ‘khela r jonne amar mon bhore othe/ knepe knepe othe’ or somesuch.

Bhogoban, ami ar ar parchhi na, ami bari jabo. Amar matha byatha korchhe, ghum pachhe, amar kaaj karar kono ichhe nei. Ami para r kukur der katha bhabte chai na, oder obostha dekhte pari na, amar mon bhenge jaye. Ami K er kachhe jante chai na je o overworked, annoyed, or cricket match dekhte pabey na, or off day r din off pabey na, why it is a luxury to demand to go eat at Mainland China because it is Christmas and it's nice to celebrate, when he is having trouble getting through his days, so much work he has. I don't want to know, I want someone to laugh with, wear old clothes and walk with. I also want to go home and sleep. Without my mother complaining, without the dog doing things it shouldn't. I just want to put up my mosquito net, take my dog in, wrap my arms around her and sleep.
Look, my eyes are filling with tears at my desparation.

Edited to add:

Bend me

Break me

Anyway you need me

I am subbing a copy that makes me feel like this song from Garbage.

I wish I was a person who could sport ethnogrunge look. You know, long earrings, thick kajol, occasional bangle. Trouble is, it also requires you to wear very good quality clothing, accoutrement, which you then proceed to destroy and call grunge. Or let it just become out of fashion and call it grunge. Which makes grunge a look, which is such nyakamo, really.
I do not wish to sport that look. If you are all nihilistic and feel nothing about the world, you can’t possibly have all the patience to paint your white, back and red.
I used to love dressing in raggedy clothes and I wish grunge was actually that, where you could sport comfortable tatter and still appear attractive. I look nice with kajol, but comfort really matters more and I take public transport and I sweat bucketfulls, so no kajol in summer, or lipstick for the same reason. And bangles make my hand look like a jhee’s. And I won’t buy clothes that cost more than a certain amount, because after all, they are clothes and are meant to cover your body. And waifish choppol, forgyet it. I hate dry, dirty feet.
Ethnogrunge, my foot, nc.
This is also occasioned by Dakota Fanning’s look in Push, a film that could have been so much more but which I still liked very much. Sure, the film’s yellow pallette will all turn out to be Wong Kar Wai-like and boyfriend will tell me o-my-god-eta oita!. Kintu ki korbo, I think I really like all these mildly sci-fi like films and fantasy toh I definitely like very much. Well, so Dakota Fanning had this shock of unruly hair with pink highlights, which I would love to have, except that my hair is in a very bad way and is a sensitive issue and probably won’t survive pink highlighting.
Another thing is the academic I met towards last weekend for an interview. It was bad and therefore very disappointing, but she had seemed so beautiful, you know. That’s the reason why I had hauled myself to meet her in the morning, waking up at 9.30 for god’s sake. And would love to put up her photo, she still seems beautiful to me. So intangible, perhaps therefore beautiful. After speaking to her for a while, the smile didn’t seem so lighting up the place anymore. And the book is perhaps as many academic tomes are.
Lastly, William by Richmal Crompton. I wish I had bought the other one in that pile of nonsense books strewn about at our local bookfair and were selling for 20 bucks.

Can you believe, people in the adjoining cubicle are making obscene chook chook noises, which you otherwise hear on the street when people fancy you available. They are showing off who can do it best, oh such cool bhodrolok we are, we can do what is so bad without batting an eyelid and without besmirching our unblemished bhodrolokhood.

This is from The Sartorialist. The brilliant sunlight, the vibrant green, the floaty dress, even the green nails. It fills me with such impossibly deep longing, of walking down a road in a far away country, with the sun on my back, where I could wear this impractical dress and take a long walk, where no one would know me, so you could do all of this and not think how this could be fixed into your past and your future.

The closest actual feeling of this was in Darjeeling, where the weather got better each day and that day I took that long long walk to the Tibetan refugee centre, so far away from anything one knew.

Achha achha, this is all very disgusting. I was reading a classmate’s blog and it depresses the hell out of me. Mane, okok, all right, I agree being married is difficult, mane even though I am not married. Adjusting with another family, I don’t expect to be fun. There’s my colleague, who does almost a picture perfect turn at it. And I hate the idea of it, but but, that’s not one’s whole life? Eh? Eh eh?
Gah, ami bhabteo chai na. Bloody depressing. You want to spit it out and rinse your mouth very well.

Is my life good or is my life bad?

I gave two stories in the last two weeks and both were done while struggling maniacally to balance pages. I was a little glad of being able to pull both off.
And then there was today. Of course, remember dog, beautiful black, silky length of her, curling up beside you every night and looking up with soulful eyes, always. Which made me so content with the present that I didn’t feel the need to make vacation plans.
Yes, today. Harrowing, harrowing nightmare, of endless complaints, accusation, and I felt rage coursing through me like a living thing that could influence me in a way that seemed most tempting to give in to. I know, I now know what makes good people behave in ways that seem horrifying even to them, of ways of being that wasn’t a part of their images of themselves in the toughest of situations. ‘I am my father’s daughter’ is a phrase that resonates with me for all the non-praiseworthy reasons. I understand often these days what made him act the way he did all that time, what must life have been for him and what it must have taken for him to not drop it all and go away somewhere where there was not this.
And then again, perhaps we do not. Perhaps that is our culture. Perhaps we are quieter, in a very Buddha-like way, perhaps we accept that things will be a certain way and rework our worlds to accommodate it.

Uh, long talk break
Life doesn’t seem so bad now. Even though you have to demand that for your birthday you want a strawberry studded cake with dinner and boyfriend’s closest friends on the list of invitees, beaming for having been invited. Or at least I would like to meet them casually too. Though I don’t really mind for the most part. Being a giant extended family is eminently avoidable. Mane, I know what’s happening at their end and vice versa, I think.

So it’s ended for today, I think. What occasioned this lekha, ie. Will probably start again tomorrow.

I gave in two churidar kurta pieces to the tailor to be made. It’s a bad world out there, where churidar wearers are at the mercy of tailors. If you are very lucky, your tailor will get your design and fit approximately right. If you are not, you might lose the material (as it happened last time), you might get a completely different design (even though the tailor notes down the cuts and measurements on his part of the bill) or get clothes double/ half your style. I was outraged at this recently, till I found that this is de rigueur. And boyfriend agrees, and he comes from a, er, vintage tailoring family.

See, how all problems in life are solved not by taking steps to correct what’s not working, but by adopting a Zen-like calm, as Bridget Jones would say, to take everything in your stride. Crazy family, insidious tailors.

Edited to add: eeeeyuk, is this a smarmy post. Door how beyadob!

Of course this is not the copy I am reading from.
So, basically, after a whole lot of whine, Edmund White kicked ass in the last chapter. Also, laughter, towards the end of the book, when the light was breaking on my night. I didn’t associate White with funny, but there were these moments of robust disgust. Mane, in the last chapter, he lets go of that careful craftedness and it’s more a human being, a boy who is not this distilled consciousness. The last paragraph reminds you of a poem.
(this poem:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.)
So, well, a lot fills me with disgust and fear and sadness now. I thought of what it would be if I lost my mother and what would happen with Floppy and it made me sick with dread. What will happen to the dog about F’s age, who is going to have puppies? Another cycle of early deaths. What will happen to Flop when I go away? How can I give her away? She slept with her face jammed into the crook of my arm yesterday. Which animal but one who knows nothing other than to trust you does that? A tiger is dying of cancer in Lucknow zoo and they are thinking of putting him down. In Long Island, a woman would buy dogs, torture and kill them. A one year old pit bull was put down in Brooklyn because it was unfit to live among humans or animals, apparently. What does that mean? This after she recovered after she was thrown down a storey (or was it more?) by her owner and had a broken leg and broken something else. In her photograph, she had the most serene eyes ever, looking deeply.
I remember telling my cousin once, when I was in school, that I imagined what would be if I were in the same situation as a boy in a Hindi film I had seen, a boy of five or seven, who is left crying after his entire family is shot while they are going somewhere. And my cousin had wondered what a gruesome imagination I had. And then years later, I think I remembered what I had thought when my father died. And well, all the times I had wondered how I would feel if I lost him, he who I thought was the centre of the world and he was. Was that somehow responsible for bringing on his death? Can you wish people dead? How terrible it must be to wish people dead out of your indulgence to feeling. And am I doing it again? It is like a reckoning of your own love for those who are most precious to you, to imagine how you would react to their deaths. And do you reduce their life span by it? Like Donne had asked his lover not to sigh for him, for with every breath, she reduced his life a little?

This is Edmund White with his lover Hubert Sorin and their dog, Fred. I am reading Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and rediscovering why I was so taken in by him when I read him in PG II. It’s almost like poetry, and isn’t compulsively wordy like The Farewell Symphony. This one’s like delicately charting the rise and fall of a mental state, just as he says he wanted to do. And uh, so many thoughts. What we set out be, what we are. There definitely isn’t any place for wishy washiness. I’ll quote from him later, and buy his books. And he is becoming very pro-establishment. And I met Babu, did I say? The name written with a firm handwriting that echoes the stiff rhythm of his walk and the birdlike gestures. So many worlds feel alive in my head and sometimes I want to inhabit many at once. It’s like being high on Avil.

The only thing that gives a respite is Questionable Content, trivial details about the lives of people your age that let you smile. That must be why bloggers who write about everyday rojnamcha are so popular. They summarise what overwhelms you.
Although it's always on top of my mind, I always tried so that I would never tell myself or another (I have) that I don't know what to do with my life next. I have tried to keep at least vague goals on the horizon, a rough sequence of events. I admit now that I have absolutely no clue of what I want next, only vague dreams and very little idea of how to realise them or whether they are realisable at all. I am on the wrong side of 25, time is running past me, I am answerable about my plans to another.
I feel tied up like a bundle of knots and unable to answer questions. I have no clue of where things are going to come from next. I can't abide my present, I can't conceive a future.

Opinions that have changed since I was a teenager. A list Sunayana made.
I thought I’d write on what she wrote, but then realised that most of them didn’t really make that much of a difference to me. These do.

Abortions: One should be able to decide whether one wants to have a baby or be rid of it. I now believe this even more firmly than I did then. In school, the reason was simple, it’s my body, right? Who is anyone else to tell me whether I want or don’t want to keep a baby I make? Now, it seems much simpler. If you decide to bring another life into this world, one must be absolutely sure that one can guarantee it a reasonable degree of physical comfort and emotional security. If I have doubts about either of those, I would rather not have a child. A child can’t be a solution to my problems, it’s not really fair to think that it follows after having a baby that I will become more responsible and caring, ergo child will be fine, while solving my relationship/ loneliness problems by being there.

My parents: Ah, I do feel vastly differently now than then. Then, I was constantly angry, or hurt, or needing. Since baba died, though, it’s changed. Can I tell you how strong I feel when I accomplish each little thing that I once felt helpless about? I can’t say how it might have been if baba were still there. I would probably have been less tied to home, but I can’t even imagine what my mind would be like.
I crib furiously at all the responsibility, at how tied down I feel now. I did a terrible thing yesterday, exactly what I had hoped not to do, and exactly the opposite of the kind of responsibility I am talking about. But I sort of accept that I will not be footloose, that I have a family of sorts that comprises mother, I and dog. And did I say that I can talk with such assurance because I know that the guy I am seeing is my rock?
I love The Namesake very much, and someone wrote about the book that it was the story of Ashoke and Ashima, of a husband who showed his wife how to be free. But she wanted to be free, yea? The guy I am seeing, he is not a remarkable boyfriend, really. I think he would give the same kindness and understanding to all that were close to him. It is a tremendous openness that lets you go where you want, even away from him.
So, er, what I am saying is, I am still very angry at my one remaining parent, but will probably not make any plans without figuring her into it. And that I feel strong enough to live out the years without baba.

Clothes: I remember wanting them when I was little like a child wants toys, but even then, the wanting was in passing. One of the many reasons college was liberating was that no one gave a rat’s ass (with all due love to rats) what you wore. I was so used to complete indifference to what I wore that it took me quite a while into my job to figure that clothes did matter. They are functional things: they let you be seen, heard. I try (not very hard, still) to be dressed in clean, ironed, more or less well-fitted, not bizarre clothes. I like to buy them too. I found that out about two years ago.

Money: I feel as strongly about this when I was little as I do now. It matters a great deal. One must spend it prudently.

Letter to dog:

It was sometime later in the year, last year that you came into the world. That was the Pujas too. I was busy with so many thoughts this time last year. I didn’t have any inkling that you were going to be born. I saw you for the first time when winter began to fall, as a wee thing, with your wee brother, both of you tugging at a sapling. The dog lady must have fallen in love with you, because the next time I saw you, you were already in the grill. And then I saw you. And you came to live with me.
Since then, you’ve torn both our sofas, don’t eat, you’re shedding hair like there’s no tomorrow. But I love to go to sleep with you on my bed, love to bury my nose in your fur and breathe in deep that unbathed dog smell. You are the best thing that happened to me in a very very long time.
A year has rolled by since then and it’s festive time again. You look out curiously when the beats of the dhaak sound, bark in fear and anger when the boys burst crackers. You leapt at me when I came out of the room wearing new clothes, rubbed your wet nose on them to get to know the smell. I wish I knew how to make a dog enjoy the Pujas, I wish I could take you to watch the Puja. But your birthday is around the corner, I swear we’ll have rollicking amounts of fun then. We’ll have mutton and sweets and ice-cream and I’ll get you new toys. Much love.

The pujas this year
It was like being a child who discovers the world for the first time. I saw so many Pujas and today, on Nabami, I wondered how I had not felt this deep deep enjoyment in all these years. I was passing by a puja in Dum Dum Park, and it was a homely one, really, no fancy pandals. I went up close and saw the faces of Durga and Lokkhi and Saraswati and the design on Ganesh’s shur, I saw the lines drawn in: the eyes, the lips, with such care lavished on each line, it seemed. You wonder about the reason for such love, it’s only a festival, no? and you know, that people do this, for things they love, there might not be much benefit to be had from it. Some unreasoned strands that make the cultural fabric of a people. How glad I am that we have festivals.
I saw a very small boy at Thanthania Kali bari. He stood behind the dhaakis who were playing, and quietly clapped to himself. He clapped and he clapped, amidst the tumult of people who passed to and fro, never minding them, who never minded him. And someone came and moved him a little to one side, out of the way of people, very kindly. And he went on clapping.
There was a couple, at that pujo near Gariahat, a daab seller and his wife. I saw them in a corner, hidden away behind the pandal passage. It was evening and they sat and spoke. The man was in his 40’s, perhaps, and the girl, in a sari, with her head covered in a ghomta very matter of factly, like your barir kaajer meye. But the girl was.. 13.. 14 perhaps and the moment they shared was so intimate and yet, she was a girl! Little more than infant! She spoke to him like an equal, like one would speak to a husband.. and yet, how can you live it down??? How can you live down her glaring youth? And that she was married to a man so much older. How can you ignore the tiredness in her face and that the youth that dripped off her was so at odds with her fatigue, her grown-up clothes and an aged husband?

Incredibly depressed.
from The Songlines, Chatwin quoting Baudelaire:

This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by the desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

from Anywhere Out of This World!

Another reaching out for distant possibilities ‘post’, if you will. I read an interview of Alexander Skarsgard, who plays vampire Eric Northman on True Blood. He is in his mid-30’s, Swedish and his father is Skellan Skarsgard (who has starfish growing out of his cheek in Pirates of the Caribbean 2, I think, and who plays the bullish math professor in Good Will Hunting. AND Goya in Goya’s Ghosts. It was very good.)
Alexander Skarsgard is a TV actor, mostly, and his home is Sweden. He talks about his work schedule, it is very gruelling and about staying with friends in LA and not wanting family right now. And well, how attractive that was. To be tall and work hard and alone. To be free of the compulsion to settle down, if ever. To do it tomorrow or when it came along. To not even have children, if it didn’t work for you. Even if children were beautiful and a nice thing to look forward to.
And I saw House, the first episode of the season finale of 5 where he begins to hallucinate. And there’s Cuddy, who is very much in love with him. And he is in his 40’s and she going to be, and they are still falling in love. She is. And he lives alone and he is, as David Shore says, incredibly self-aware and he has fears. He hangs on by a slim thread.
God, I shall not live by stereotype. I don’t think they make me happy. They are pretty, people with nice children and falling asleep sharing nitty gritties with a husband. But I don’t want em, not in that combination and not now. I am 26 and I am a little scared even to write this, at how big the words are. But I hope I live up to them.

Was Chatwin a bit of an Orientalist, I mean in believing that the East stood for mysticism, where he would find a life that would be different from the frenetic pace of the west? Did he feel trapped in the torpor of the war that swung around him and did he find sunshine in cultures that lived unaffected by the Europe’s turmoil? I was reading a random page of The Songlines and the well, compulsive quoting from texts (very lovely, mind you) felt like a mind working frenetically to find a way out, to make sense.
Reading from a random page was soothing, without the compulsion of having to follow a storyline, but then, probably he felt that way too, the need to cut loose?
What I long for greatly now is to find my way to a small town in the Deep South like Bon Temps. I might hate it, never mind, but it seems so attractive perhaps because it has no frame of reference to my current life. I hate to say perhaps. I know that is the reason. I hate to have to give an adult explanation for a longing that sounds juvenile, otherwise.
But, well, what Chatwin says, that wandering is not the sign of neurosis, dissatisfied sexuality, but natural? What can I say? When I think of places away from home, I don’t think of forging ties, of friends (if I am lucky, perhaps), I think of a quiet heart, one that does not rage against its present, that walks in silence, utterly soothed by the sights it sees, the people it meets, without feeling the need to touch them, to form life-long bonds with them.
Is that the flaneur? Perhaps not. I dunno, it’s ok if it ain’t.
Here’s a few from Chatwin:

“Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis, a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be suppressed.
Nazi propagandists claimed that gypsies and Jews – peoples with wandering in their genes – could find no place in a stable Reich.”

“A very brief life of Diogenes:
He lived in a tub. He ate raw octopus and lupins. He said ‘Kosmopolites eimi’. ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ He compared his wanderings through Greece to the migration of storks: north in summer, south to avoid the winter cold.”

“We Lapps have the same nature as the reindeer: in the springtime we long for the mountains; in winter we are drawn to the woods.
- Turi’s Book of Lapland

I was subbing a copy on a science show. It dealt with pressure, density and vacuum and brought forth these images from Class VII, the terror, the rough-paper of the physics book with its killingly bland diagrams that today seems curiously maya makhano because I remembered baba drawing those experiments again and again to explain those principles to me. And they seemed so tough, so tough and baba would say, how can you find it boring? It’s so interesting, it explains everything. And pressure was a terror, and I was always a very average student, but I remember I did well in the class test and I remember the teacher’s opaque recitation of the principle, smooth voice and smoother handwriting and red lipstick. She thought she was explaining and the smart ones in class probably got stuff too, despite the bad teaching. But it seemed so like a puppet talking. I know because I have spoken like that sometimes, with my mind completely somewhere else, and people haven’t understood even though I wasn’t saying a thing wrong.
But think how pressure diagrams can seem so loving in recollection, even the fear and the hate.
Is literature, writing, feeling an exercise in indulgence? I thought I would leave all that behind, but it has gripped me again. And I am without any spine to deal with it except to take refuge in silence. Also, it seems so infernally stupid that I have nothing to say. So I choke with rage and sputter.
(the pic is a refraction diagram. Eta slightly easier chhilo)

I feel very very depressed. When will this ever end? When will I have, among other things, nice delicious sex?
But that’s not the worry exakly. What is, is how depressing everything. I am 26, not on the road to what I want to do. I want to quit and sit at home and then find something else to do, apply to begin with. If that doesn’t work, something else. I am tired of being cautious, of distrusting my instincts, of second-guessing myself constantly. We are all given what we deserve.
I got myself a beautiful blue book shelf, it’s huge, tall and wide.
I have a black, soft dog who looks at me demandingly, with complete conviction that I am the one she will go to for whatever it is she might be wanting. She yelled in rage when I came back home last night, at having been shut out for so long (two hours). She sleeps curled up on her paws at the foot of my bed and lies lazily on her stomach beside me, her fat tail erect after I have just woken up and am deciding to get out of bed.
I watched a serial about vampires and people yesterday. Six episodes back to back. The concept is awfully kinky, but the acting is quite awful, it’s so sad. They think they can pull it off by piling on the sex appeal and shut out every other aesthetic sense? But there’s also this town, Bon Temps, which is almost a village, really, and there’s this tremendous atmosphere: the black woman who is a complete drunk and a devout Jesus groupie, mane oi bhishon classic Bible belt stuff, like, who goes to an Obeah (that what they call traditional healers/ mystics???) to get the demon (the alcoholism) out of her. This Obeah drowns a caged possum, into whom the demon has passed into, in a tub of water. There are layabouts, like Jack Stackhouse, mama’s boys, over the hill, heavily-made-up, thrice-divorced waitresses. And then, ah then, there’s the vampire bar Fantasia and fang bangers, who like to hang out with vampires and being bitten by them. And True Blood, artificial bottled blood for vampires trying to go mainstream into society. There are vampire rights groups and staid vampires who watch TV and invite prostitutes for a shag in exchange for blood, a potent aphrodisiac and rich, spoilt hippie girls who are addicted to it.
Then there is the broad broad accent that’s wonderful. I really love it.
The title song is the kinkiest. I had initially thought it was real footage put together, but found they’d actually gone and shot it. Tar moddhe, there’s a shot of wall graphiti saying ‘God hates fangs’ and a newspaper headline saying ‘Angelina Jolie adopts vampire baby’. Both of these two were told me by the boy, which effectively lured me into wanting to watch the series. And then I armtwisted him into downloading the season for me as a birthday present. Sweet love, hahahahaha. So, he doesn’t like it, because it’s not interesting enough, which I see. It won’t hook you, or exhaust you like House, by engaging your head, emotions, curiosity at the same time, giving rise to a thousand possibilities. But oh, ah, I am sold on all of what I wrote before.
All of it so so kinky and only if there was a thaash bunot, it could be so much more. Eesh, aha re. Mane, the sexy vampire Bill Crompton looks like a complete addlehead, off his rocker, when he smiles dnaat ber kore. Karon, haashle toh dnaat berobei, so you can’t really help it. That’s unfortunate. And Anna Paquin’s always had very curious expressions, mismatched with what she’s saying. Now you know it’s just that she can’t act. Also so unfortunate. I want to think that southern 25-year-old women who can listen to other people’s thoughts are like that, mane, not earthy, sweaty, in-you-face like us. Perhaps they do have this kind of fogginess.

It’s a pitTy, really. I wish Alan Ball had directed it too.

I want to leave, dear whoever you are that is sunshine and all things hopeful, help me go away. I want to breathe, not feel mouldy dampness clinging to every breath I take, not struggle to talk, to think, because all that you do makes you want to bolt, revolts your senses.

1. Bare jeans suck. Unequivocally. Their bad fit is unparalleled. I have seen no worse in my short jeans experience.
2. I had horrible momos the like of which I haven’t had in a while. Probably a close parallel would be momo in a hari of shinni, as a friend of Madhura and Dibbo saw in a dream.
3. I was sitting outside a shop beside Chungwa today, shortly after the ore baba, live music session had ended. Singers and their patrons spilled out. I sat for a very long time, nursing my tea and a Gopalji cake, bland and very soothing. No one noticed me. The singers, besequinned in shiny clothes, synthetic sarees, loudly flirted with their customers over tea and muri aloor chop. It felt good that no one considered me a presence. I have wanted that for a long time. To melt in a crowd.
There was a man among them. In his 50s, thin, balding, cheap slippers, ironed shirt and trousers who wore a watch on his right hand. He had a thin leather bag on his shoulder. He was distributing 100 rupee notes to the singers. He tried to touch the women. I am wondering, does he spend a great deal of the money he earns on this? Perhaps it’s a small pleasure in an otherwise nondescript life. I suppose one would dislike him, his lechery, his habit of giving out money. But it’s not what I feel. It feels ok.
And can I write about the clothes they wore? I can’t get over it. Or can’t have enough of it. The horribly uncomfortable-looking synthetic sarees worn in the think of summer, with choomki of the sort you used in your craftwork at school, the bangles, the lipstick. Have you liked things on others that were completely alien to you? Their laughter, toothy smiles, the chatter….. eh, the moment has passed.

4. I like solid colours, not fading ones. I almost bought a black three quarter trouser in cord that I didn’t like. I had set my sights on the sale for so long that I couldn’t bear to leave without a bargain, and the jeans, as we now know, were all from Bare, which is and always will be an unequivocally horrible brand for jeans.

Travel does not bring me exuberant happiness, I don’t find myself smiling when I am alone on a road away from home. It is perhaps a bit like Forrest Gump, who only knew that he had to run, not the why. I went on the trips I did because I wanted to go away from where I was desperately. In Darjeeling, I did not think. I think one can accept that one will not be exuberantly happy to travel, but that one will need to go away again and again, to be on the move. Perhaps it is peace for an unquiet mind in this. And reconfirming faith in oneself, in one’s ability to stand up for one’s happiness, to push one’s limits a bit for it.
I wish it is always like this. I wish to travel more and more, for longer periods each time.
When you return home, you think you are such a different person, you will certainly handle the world differently. But everything remains the same, agonizingly. You don’t find more strength to deal with your hell, you want to go away from it even more desperately.
About Darjeeling, there isn’t much to write, great food, very crowded.. I was very quiet, I hardly spoke and the slight cold makes talking something from an even rarer realm. The quiet is a very even state of the mind. I want to go away again and again.

I had an ordinary day today. The pleasure of days ordinary is that you savour simple things, things absolutely without incident. Also, like today, when I was cleaning our drawing room basin while sweltering in the heat, you feel the pleasure of it in the recollection of it more than while actually doing it.

It’s back to Calcutta summers again. You can’t walk five steps, or turn in bed without sweating a little for it. And today I watched night change into day. I’ll remember it by my first sight of the day: the loose petals of radhachura swaying in the rare cool breeze. I had watched Ugly Betty and then began watching an Indian film on world movies about a boy who becomes an elephant catcher in the forest, and nice though it was, I changed channels and found Mrs Parker and The Vicious Circle. Which I liked very much. The rhymes spoken with that tight nasal droning voice, the preciseness of the poetry, and her need for her dog. At one point, she tells her editor: “Woodrow Wilson died.” And he says, “Yes, about a year ago.” And she says something I don’t remember, but WW was her dog. And even while thinking of the dull pain of losing your dog, you think that she named her dog after the President. And the dogs change, and you think of her need for an animal, even though she can’t care for herself much. And I thought of Floppy. Her huge round soulful eyes, that stay that way even when I am late in feeding her, does she complain? Or is she too sad, resigned, or doesn’t know any better than me?

After seeing the morning, I looked up Dorothy Parker on the Net, to songs from Travis’ The Rubber Band. And I love the songs, but my head was throbbing, and I thought my eyes would melt out of my socket with the strain of it, I wasn’t wearing my specs. And DP’s rhymes in writing felt plain, a little tiresome, I wanted each song to be over so I could concentrate on the poem. And then I’d had enough. I switched off everything and went to sleep. And Floppy came in from the verandah and slept at my feet.

Ends

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.