The most beautiful thing

Faye Wong in Chunking Express

Winter is coming. It feels as ugly and portentous as the way they say it in Winterfell. The last few days have been a blur, a bit of work and coming back home late with the cold on my back, walking down a rather deserted road to Basat Chowki to take the shared auto home. A fair bit of walking, including the walk home from NH24. I can't understand what to do about the travel thing right now. Post-Nov, maybe it will be clearer. Among other reasons, it is such a relief when the salary comes in at the end of the month, it's like one worry set at rest: without even beginning to think of buying camera and where will the money to travel over a long stretch come from.

Cold is bad because it is mind-congealing; it's hard to hold more than one thought at a time, hard to think beyond getting to office, getting work done, how to keep from getting cold, whether to wear socks, whether to take hoodie or stole, how not to catch cold - getting fed up of trying not to catch cold and saying what-the-hell, bring on the Avil 50 and trip to la-la land. One thought at a time is a welcome thing when you are travelling; it keeps one from getting depressed, but here, in the city, if you can't multitask, you are asking for annihilation. (Professor Shonku invented a weapon called Annihilin). I can't think adventurously in winter; I am barely thinking enough to keep my life up and running: buy medicines, do groceries, remember to buy chocolate, 'should I have cake or sweets or both?' The balcony door is closed to keep out the cold and mosquitoes; আমার মনের জানলাও প্রায় বন্ধ। 

The Sharodiyas are here: Sananda and Desh for us, for now. I like what Tilottama Majumdar has written for both. Quite a nice break from the odious writing on 'women's issues' that would keep appearing in the Sharodiyas. বাণী বসু তো ওই করেই ভোগে গেল। And Sunil Ganguli is dead, purveyor of titillation and decadent possibilities, and sometimes, just lovely writing. Also Jaspal Bhatti. The world is changing, changing. My cousin has had himself a daughter, and I am loathe to call and congratulate them and be over the moon on the phone. It's embarrassing, among other things.
During Pujo, I went to listen to a Chandrabindu (Vikram had once spoken of a shoot he had to do with 'those Chandrabindu guys' :)) concert. Puro buk hu hu kara nostalgia. Took me a couple of days to get back on my feet, so to speak, and remember, and remember well, why Kolkata is not a place to live in anymore. But ki sexy, ki unmadona, such allure of youth, and remembrance of a city that is probably only in the mind anymore. This Pujo was my most wholesome in years. I had so wanted to do what everybody does, for such a long time: count down the pandals, offer onjoli, listen to 'function' in the evening, eat at the stalls, and to not leave behind a sad person who wanted but couldn't do it. We did all of that this time: on two days too, and got mighty pooped. I realised again, my limited appetite for this sort of thing. I can't do it dedicatedly and methodically through 5 days, after a point, you want to just go home and relax, and that I loathe onjoli. The utter pointlessness of it, I dunno. But the bhog was yum, even line e dariye bhog neowa. I haven't seen it in Kolkata ever, that anyone can come in and have bhog at any pandal. As was getting dressed and going out, and the Anandamela at CR Park, where I ate patishapta and bad pulipithey (really bad) and gokulpithey and aro ki ki shob. F cried the whole time, I think, the day we went out twice, and I got a call from our downstairs neighbour while we were at the C'bindu concert that she had been howling constantly and could we please come.
Her eye has been watering and closed this whole week, we are taking her to the vet tomorrow. Could be a fungal infection, Mrs Katiyal says.

All of this to hide that he is married or going to marry and I don't understand or know what to do with the hurt and the rage and the praner jala and I feel physically repulsed by R, yet wish I could wrap myself in someone's arms and say 'Fuck you, chutiye.' I wonder if I am stupid in my worldly unwiseness, if I should have married when I had the chance, yet what chance, if someone makes you feel stood apart and lonely, and disappoints you at every turn, you are also waiting and hoping, no, je ekdin amar bhaggeo shikey chhirbe? Jedin shob nodi mitbey shagorey, shob shomoshhar shomadhan hobe, shedin ami tomay biye kore nebo. But people are what they are, and if you can't live them down today, you never will tomorrow. Otoeb, gechhe, apod chukechhe.' 

It just brings you closer to the person you really are. I would probably never have married at 30 anyway. If ever.

Songs I've been listening to recemment:

Nancy Sinatra's Sugartown
Pink Martini - Sympathique
The Mamas and the Papas - California Dreaming

Ma r shathe jhagra hochhe phatiye. Edike F lunch undigested bomi kore diyechhe, ar tiktiki (1 nos) merechhe.

Incredibly old songs playing on the radio. It's 11.30 at night. Ma casually mentioned Shamshad Begum was one, while I was marvelling. The house is suddenly filled with music. There is an ease to living that wasn't there when I was growing up. Freed from the strictures of baba, we have both learned to breathe. Now, ma is cooking chilli fish.

I have my very own sari to wear this Pujo. Ma has the lemon yelloe tussar from Kerala and the south cotton purple and green sari.

I ate bad momos, and followed it up with thin crust chicken pizza (small) for dinner and guzzling RC Cola (lemon) to cool off. The grotesqueness of this gluttony appalls me, but tastewise, the pizza was yum! Scorpio Cafe is a wonderful institution. Only if you don't have their chicken club sandwich.

Winter is coming early this year. It's already cool, though I am determined to wear my sleeveless jama kapor one last time before putting them away. In Kolkata, it's still steaming, says C.

F shredded and ate a half-smoked cigarette yesterday and mysteriously developed a watering and droopy right eye. We are a little concerned, after all, dogs aren't supposed to eat cigarettes, though the eye's mostly back to normal.

I am reading Rimi di's City of Love. I rather like it than not, never mind what Adi of words uttered in haste said. I love his blog. He reads like he's high, compulsively, slightly unhealthily. What he reviews is completely different from what I read, though I read very little, but there is a certain pleasure in seeing this evidence of an act of pleasure performed so compulsively. Dunno why it seems this way. I've read other blogs where people read and review as copiously.

These are the tangible things in days that are otherwise floating away aimlessly. There is no point to them, no centre. I go through a dazed struggle to concentrate on something. This is good enough reason to leave, I believe. It's only a matter of time. Not sure how well it will reflect on my career. But 'ah, well' is what I have to say to that. What else is there to say. I could cut through all things important but unnecessary for my present purpose and there would still be a fair bit left to settle, which I shall probably leave as they are. I do so yearn to start travelling. I mean, just the terrific ichhe, not including the planning, on which a lot is yet to be done.
Primary train tickets to book, talk to more people, thrash around the idea of an outer end in the form of a return ticket (no need, I think), draw up a daywise itinerary (I realised today that I would have to by-heart it, imagine the tedium. But I can do such stuff, I've seen, so snigger snigger.), do some bookings or at least talk at the places I plan to stay in in Gujarat (it's going to be full-on tourist season), go out and buy that camera, talk to Sudeb da about a rucksack (wish I could just borrow one and save myself 3k. Or maybe get given one, like the sleeping bag.) I am wondering how I will cart around my giant laptop, and take some kind of a computer I certainly want to. Wondering whether I should buy an external hark disk (prices have come down, for one). Wish, again, that someone would give me a Netbook.
Stupid girl, stupid castles in the air. Oof.
I've decided that my sports shoes serve my needs just fine, the beginnings of a crack in the sole notwithstanding. If they tear irrepaireably, new ones will just have to be bought on the way.

Anyway, today I succeeded just a little in getting stuff done. Sent off several difficult-to-write mails. More of that left. Content work still pending, lots of it, but I've begun engaging with the content and enjoying it. There's a meeting tomorrow and I should have drawn up a P&L for it, but I haven't.

 Other tasks I am dreading: speaking to the lawyer (have no strategy for that yet), calculating, taking my share of the money and paying off the joint electricity bill for our and the flat below. It's not even the 20th, and I already keep wondering when next month's salary will be credited, and then immediately think of the rent that will be debited immediately afterward. My bank balance really took a snowdive after that first Ladakh trip. Official costs and kenakata included, I must have spent more than 50k.

I am wondering what they'll give us for Diwali. 

So, you would think my life is in a shambles. But then, it's my life. I can't denounce it. I have to look forward or else it'll all come tumbling down.

Turns out, you can go to the salt pans of Kutch alone, if you can spend some money for it. Full moon has to be figured out, though. But I am missing the sex occasionally, but also being somewhat revolted at the prospect of the person I want to have it with.
Read a lot on Gujarat this week, because I realised I have stayed totally vague about the details of the proposed trip after deciding broadly on the places. Got a few basic maps off the Net I can print out. Found out about a government guest house and a camp for Little Rann. Devjibhai Dhamecha remains a very real option. But they have to be called and spoken to. And I can't say definitively about the timings yet. The Rajasthan itinerary is starting to sound vague in comparison. Shekhawati seems a glorious idea, now that I've started reading up about it. I wish I could find a travel companion(s), but I am not sure whether I am definitively travelling alone or not. If I did, I would start looking around.
Meanwhile, I am bored out of my mind. Or I am telling myself that this feeling, this torpor of being stuck-in-a-moment-and-can't-get-out is boredom. The work is brain-congealing now that I am back in D, winter is starting to make its presence felt; you sweat and feel chilled at the same time. It is disgusting. Of course, the winter by itself is disgusting too. The zenith would be spending a few mind-barfingly tepid weeks in the winter no man's land of Calcutta. I dread the prospect. I hope not to sink into lyad again, and instead do my work and get the hell out. In Delhi, I suppose I will be so anxious to get out of the cold and loneliness, I won't be able to sink into lyad again. This feeling of dying every moment is so intense now that I have quit worrying about money. I will take what I get my hands on, and stop when panic sets in.
Next week is Pujo. I have decided to don my kasavu sari and fire-red MAC lipstick and check out CR Park with ma. Another day, we will go see the pujos in Mayur Vihar Phase I, and offer anjali. The works, mamah! I wish F could come along too. But how do I make life beyond the normal for her, except by maybe celebrating her birthday, which happened around this time, in the same spirit?
After that is over, hopefully, freedom. In between, I want to slip away to Jaipur for a weekend. Because I want to go somewhere, and also partly to see whether my plan would work, how I feel about things.
There's a rucksack to be bought in Calcutta, money and photos to recover; a camera to be bought in Delhi. Meanwhile, the money keeps flowing out of my hand.
Met a school friend twice over last week. I am, as she put it indelicately with unconscious candour, her 'new best friend', because she is chronically unable to stay alone and her husband has gone off to study and she isn't getting leave for an uncertain while. Ergo, she will hang out with whoever lives in her current part of the city. Earlier, it was other people, now. it's me. I admit that I mind. Despite pleasant hours spent and my reasons being similar, I do want the enjoyment to be genuine and mutual. Yesterday was a little less fun (I do loathe walking around malls and my knees start to hurt real soon) and I wonder when I'll meet her again.
I have been shouting wilfully at ma. I love hanging around F, and wonder how I will get along without her. But not for too long, fo sho'. I am not living here, in the cruel badlands of D, alone.

How do you live with so much hate? I hate three people right now, all men, for all of whom I have had varying degrees of affection. One broke my trust, another was cruel, the third callous. I am always loathe to let go of people until they have shown themselves conclusively to be pricks, bastards, unworthy. This takes repeated acts of bastardiness and unworthiness, until there is a final straw which convinces me that the time to close this book is past. I've closed the book for the first two, I am considering doing it for the last, because I don't want to suffer repeated disappointments.
Two things: 1. That one does this on principle at a certain point in an association, even though feelings ask otherwise. You can take more shit, but you choose not to, to preserve your dignity, self-respect.
2. That you can't live feeling this much hate, totting up the list of people you feel this strongly against, and then feeling that your heart is full, and there is no place for light, happy feelings. That you therefore, willingly choose to let go. Let go of people you have loved, some people you still care about. Remove them from your heart, for them to do as they will.
Is this the way of life, for human beings? That you strew people by the wayside as you go along? Is this the lesson I am supposed to learn, another of the mysteries unravelled, another thing my unworldly parents didn't tell me about, that I am to figure out theke shikhe? I will learn, sure, but I wish it were neater, that others, and I, played by the rules.
If you associate with someone, you don't just shut them out suddenly from your life. It's common courtesy.
Thank you - Welcome. How are you? - I am fine: that kind of thing.
You don't break people who have opened themselves to you.
You don't hurt people where they are exposed.

This whole leaving people, it's a wholly different way of life. It means spending time with people you don't particularly care for, a casual friendship with many people who you can therefore let go of without the need to look back, because they didn't give you anything worth remembering. It also means letting go of people who did give you something just as casually, those people who you want more of.
People who incite my curiosity are the ones I love getting to know the most, far more than the troublesome attractions, where there might be nothing in the head worth sharing, or where the interesting stuff might be obscured by sex or feelingy thoughts.
All of this leaves one rather lonesome. I don't like being lonesome. I like my company, but I also like to meet people. It means going on alone if someone doesn't fit the bill, not staying with a motherfucking bastard because you, in the longest rope that you have given a person for that one act of kindness, decide to swallow the terrible things s/he does and because s/he means company as opposed to lonesomely trudging on some track, or not getting to go someplace because there are some places you can't go alone. How will I go to the salt pans of Kutch, I wonder, let alone spend the whole night under a full moon? Desert trek is not happening. I can't go and watch a Rang de Basanti type freakshow in its place, can I?

The summer, as promised, has been lovely. I came back from L. Much fun was had, the meanness notwithstanding. I saw the Mulbek Maitreya Buddha. I was thinking in retrospect, though. R is not very nice either, is he? Why do I keep associating with people who I am not convinced about?
Amazement: at the typicalness of male behaviour. K has made perfectly random attempts to get in touch. You want something once it's out of your hands.
Mes projets pour l'hiver include:
desert trek, Jaisalmer, Khuri
the Rann, Dholaveera, Lothal, Pavagadh-Champaner (too much for one state, if you ask me. It's starting to sound like those crazy family vacations covering an entire state that people take)
Varanasi for noo year
MP, and a wedding
L

There is a possibility I will be heavily disillusioned after it all. You know, finding out that people are all the same, often irredeemable, and that travelling doesn't change you one whit.

Yesterday, I met a condescending prick who made me rush back to the shelter of family. I felt so grateful to have ma and F. People are mostly like this prick, niceness is a rarity.

I am (again) planning to buy a DSLR. But apart from everything else, I have to wait for next month's salary to replenish my coffers.

Nick Hornby is so neurotic.
Cadbury's Silk is yum. Finally, a local chocolate that you can eat. And, um, Gold Flake.

What else? Kolkata somewhere in between all this, though after yesterday's encounter, I feel loathe to let go of ma and F. They are my cocoon, my cushion, I am scared of what it would be to live here without one. I'll get them back after I am done with all my projets, of course.
One should leave as little as possible to chance, because chance is all round you, right, waiting to throw your plans awry. But a lot of what I am planning rests on chance. I have no foresight on how I will be after this. I am hoping for a very good time and not too many brickbats, at the very least.
And to smell of the road, to smell of the road.

Tso Mo was magical. You have no idea how much I am longing to be as happy and do exactly what we were doing of that afternoon and night, with the sharp smell of your Gold Flake hitting my nose like a pointy needle. That magic, one longs for, with some reckless desperation.

It's entirely there, nowhere near going away. I found a message 'Ei kagoj porchhi' and what we had came rushing back in a torrent, the enormity of what is lost. It is indeed as if a limb has been chopped off. You have never known how to live without it. How to be 27, say, and not be that way.
It is not like baba. Not like a parent. It is a six-feet tall flesh and blood, a chest of hair, a pair of glasses. And then I remind myself, again, that it was also unanswered affections, silences, being left standing in the middle of the road, being a coward, again and again... moral turpitude?
In total, maybe not such a bad bargain.
I saw an article: on singlehood being seen as an abnormality when more and more people are voluntarily choosing to be single. I think it's stupid. Right now, I really want someone to love, but the person has to be someone I want to be with. I won't settle for drain water because I am thirsty, hence I am single. It's not an ideological position, really. Who voluntarily eschews company they enjoy?

Summer has been good to me.
In spite of endless cooler breakdowns, no-water days, work going nowhere. There have been friends, far too many outings and a shutting-out of all of that eating me in the months before.
Summer, as always, has been an exercise in freedom.
Right now, it is just like Kolkata: the heat and humidity is just about bearable. Not so bad that you can't keep still, not so comfortable that you can relax and settle down.
And Dilli as the city which helped me rally, thanks in no small measure to ma and friends, but also because of what the city is, who woulda thunk. Is it an exercise in finding or losing myself? A bit of both, I suppose. The endless trips back home in autos after 10 (how I have thrown money around) looking at the night city, no one to tell you what to do, the man on the street who sits down at that hour for a drag, men who go to sleep on the pavement, men finishing up after work. And a blank in my mind: once it was happy, this return home after a full day, now it is just an absence of feeling, not knowing what tomorrow might bring. I am not complaining, just wondering what comes after this.
What a leveller it is to have ma and F, the groundedness, the feeling of home. Who knows what I might have done without them.
Yesterday, at Nehru Place: scouting for that rarity, apparently: a 2GB SD card for my camera. And IndiaFab for clothes, and dirt cheap books, bought from a slightly creepy, educated old man, who makes you wonder if he wants to fuck young women like me. Thence to Shahpur Jat in Panchsheel Park, a part of the city I hadn't been to before. L seems so un-European in his manner. I found myself liking him, and M, who I still don't quite understand, but like very much.
P leaves on the 28th, I feel so bereft, I can't even explain it entirely to myself. Our closeness has not been emotional: it is more robust. But the three days spent in their company, I haven't been this happy in a long while. I haven't relished the company of friends with whom I feel so at ease for a very long time, doing things I like to do. Friends, who, I suppose, accept me for what I am, one who knows me since the time I began thinking for myself.
One by one, all of them, the summer visitors, will leave. The season will turn again. Who knows what will happen then. I dread the news of a certain marriage, still. I am lulled into thinking that a phone call is the most normal thing, after I see a couple that works together, and then I tell myself that I have been lulled.
When the season turns, my sister-in-law will have had a baby. She has asked me to come, and I will go. But I do wonder what happens to me, though I have been schooling myself in the lesson to accept my life, whether it comes with coupledom or singlehood.
Right now, I am being a waster. I have told myself that I am not responsible for everything, that I am allowed a break till I get back on my feet and figure out what I am going to do.
It has not been boring, however. I have gone around Delhi, travelled with ma and dog for the first time, and am readying for another trip, with people I have met through another friend. Winter, apart from anything else, will be for travelling to warmer climes (Madhya Pradesh perhaps) and for seeing what I haven't of the city: more detailed old Delhi exploration (now you just become miserable and wild-eyed with the heat), including Qutb and Nizamuddin. I would like to travel more with ma if I can figure out a good place to keep F.

These days, we keep the main door open, with the metal door closed, to let in cool air. Another summer freedom, and a memory from very young days, when we stayed at Nivedita Enclave. It's weird, but I don't remember thinking we were not normal in any way, then.

I am considering getting a new blog, because I like the idea of people reading what I write. But I don't know how my earlier readers, few as they were, would find their way to a new blog. This blog is no longer for the public eye, I think, because the memories are too numerous, and I want to start on a clean slate if I am writing stuff that people can see. The ways of thinking, of loving, as much as the things loved, longed for and seen are so tied up with one person that whatever I write in public in this blog, it seems, will forever hark back to those times, times spent with him.
How does one do this? How does one detach oneself from one's own growing up years, impossible to think of without reference to one person, years which are bittersweet, but which seem blighted because it now seems to have led up to a path gone awry. It's like a dish, that you really enjoyed cooking, but which turned out to be like ashes because of something gone wrong in the end: then does the process of preparing it bring any joy in retrospect?
I wonder how Dibbo dealt with Madhura's going away. They were his growing up years too, far more growing-up because in college. One feels blighted, blighted by a single act, and then things are always going to be different.
As A and I were saying, it is as much about grieving baba as grieving for the loss of one person. The grief not felt then, the grief gone so easily below ground, never disabling, never debilitating. I suppose you really remember a person when you most need them, and because I really needed him now, now more than ever since the time he passed on, really, that baba's going away seems to hurt so keenly sometimes.
And then there are people who have lived without experiencing these losses, girls who never break up over a break-up, girls who lose dads only after they have lived their lives in full. It's such a blasted waste. Why did you waste my life so? Did my years seem throwaway to you? Did you think I came so cheap just because I was always there? Because you had to push and push and push to drive me out of your life?

Summer is here again. This summer will be joyless. But no fear. Summer is my season, it never is too marked by sorrow for the next summer to not promise freedom again. Then, there are the rains. Joyless, washing away all sorrow rains. Squelching through filthy streets back home, disgusted by the dirt between your toes, every year, the waterlogging, that is monsoon in my city. I never detested it too much, but now seems a good time to start, another birag to have against home, to call it less of a home. How strange it is that none of you feel Calcutta is home anymore. I still so love it, helped in no small part from seeing the city through his eyes. But even without, what other city is there to call home? So, and therefore, Kolkata is home. I've only ever known one other city, this Delhi. And who could call Dilli home, bolo? Maybe if I lived here in the 80s, with memories of Khan Market as a DDA market and east Delhi as Jumna paar, and old Delhi as not the exotic part of town, but the place you went for wholesale groceries or somesuch.

It is hard to grieve here as ordinarily as I did with Ananya over chat the other day. That was a good chat. Here, one is constrained by the rules of language, the restrictions of symmetry.
I did so like this blog. And can no longer venture here in the open, because it is no longer my own space, but the space where I have been judged and condemned. You took away so much, so much. So much of me I have to change, so that I can learn to live without you.

Dear baba, this is for you. I remembered the time when you were in Vellore after the fall, and yes, I was remembering those days otherwise too. Dear baba, what I had wished for for so long (as I find) without realising how bhoyonkor it was, has finally come to pass. After you, he has left me too. Your leaving was not voluntary, but his is. Maybe it's not so bad, maybe terrible things would have happened had we stayed together. You know all about how much it hurts, baba, you have lived with it inside my head. But it was not very nice, was it? I was reading this post I wrote, and I can't imagine whether I was being stupid or whether I had gotten so used to him not hearing my plaints; I had asked to be set free, however sad and tragic it was. And it is prophetic, baba, karon exactly that has come to pass, and tragic is quite the word for it.
Amra dujonei nijer ojantey ki bhoyanok shob jinish cheye boshe achhie. We are on such different pages, it is amazing. O ekhon ja chaichhe, a marriage with a stranger in three months, sheta amar churanto illogical mone hoy. Kintu oneker khetrei sheta khatey, and there is happiness and laughter, as I was telling him. But that is again the triumph of hope over experience, and if that is what we are doing, why not he and me? Maybe because the unhappiness is a proven, and in this case, documented fact. I have been implicated by my own blog, baba! Tumi jodi thakte, amay aro onek practical hotey shekhatey. Shekhatey emon boka hote nei. Tahole amar lojjata hoto kebol tomar shamnei, amader bairer karur shamne noy, je nijer bhalobashar abhoron ekdin shoriye nitey parey, jar bhalobasha is a choice, not a given.
Amar shobshomoy i bhoy chhilo, je ami happiness pabo na. Ami ki shei pothei cholchhi, baba? Etodin er gora structure ta toh bhenge gelo. Abar notun template banabo, naki eki bhabe abar cheshta korbo? Tumi toh amay jano, tumi toh jano ami pretty noi, attractive noi, bhishon chalak ba smart o noi, ar particularly friendly ba adjusting o noi, thik Parks er moton, House e. Amar moton loker jonne ki arekta manush thake? Ami nije cheye na niley ki amay keu egiye debe? Amar chaitey apotti nei, kintu amar shotti i chinta hoy emon kauke abar pabo kina. Kauke toh charidike dekhina, ei Dilli shohore toh aroi na. Tumi keno chole gele, baba, shob shanti, asroy, bhorsha niye? Ajke ami abar rastay dariye, on my own. Mone hoy parbo, I have the will to try, which is so important, kintu eka je khub bhoy kore. Ar mone hoy, amar baggage niye ki keu amay grohon korbe? Ami bolbo, amar kukur chhara cholbe na, amar ma somewhere I can keep an eye on her na hole cholbe na. Ke debe eto? Chhele ra toh ekhono bossmen, tader ma der jonne wives leave their careers and families, but which guy makes changes to his life plan for something as little as a woman's mother? Kukurpremi jodi ba pelam, amay ki ar keu eto bhalobashbe je ma r kothao bhabbe? And not any old mom, but mine, with her complete disregard for anything that matters. Maybe I'll become like anasuadi (god forbid), or like Indrani. Ami eto chafe korlam as long as I had him, now that I don't, it seems terribly important to have him. Tumi hole amay contempt er chokhe dekhte, ar bolte ami ki shallow ar selfish. Ei jonnei tomar chole jaoa uchit hoyni. Before I even started my life, you abandoned me. How can I forgive you for that? Nobody but parents care selflessly and you left me, to deal with the world alone. Look at epshita, she still has them. She needs them, and she has them. But you, you left. You gave me such a lesson in growing up, but look at me, I am still psychologically a cripple. And I am responsible for two beings. Look, just look. She wouldn't have happened without his support. and now he tells me he was relieved when i got her, because she was a distraction, and because i really loved her. and that he can't live with her, because she is not like his daughter, she is just a dog. because he can't live with an animal. his this so called madness, everything remained the same, only i was excised from his life like a tumour. that was his madness, that was all. so summarily, baba. oboshho tumi holeo tai korte. tomra dujonei eto similar.
i hope i find someone kind again, baba. kinder than you, jodio, tao ki hoy? kinder than him, which seems unimaginable, chhelera eto bojjat. sharadindu o is quite a slave to received ideas, jodio kotoi ba judge korbe ekta lok ke tar milieu theke tule niye. tobe or moton strong, unmoved like a rock, and kind, bodhoy ar keu hobe na. i am ultimately on my own, aren't i, god? he will find happiness, is bound to. his positive aspects are so very nice, it's easy to fall in love with them. and there will be laughter and children, and i am afraid, i will forever be on the road, waiting.

Please, please, can I quit? Please can I give in and embrace the pleasant aftertaste of melancholy? It does not hurt, only induces mild longing for what might have been. A pleasant hate for what was taken away. You can hate in peace, without hurting, having relinquished the imperative to be happy. That you wouldn't have to work so bloody hard to be happy, that you could just let go.
I came upon Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road yesterday. You know what I am saying, don't you? The book is easier than the film, it spells out the despair, the sense of doom, and when death comes, it spells out that too, I suppose. Help me, God. I want to give the boot to my present life and find something new. But I am so scared that I will find I am not special after all, that I have no wings, that I need to be rooted in one place for any amount of sanity, all while I'm dying in misery misery, all-consuming, sense-obliterating misery.

Thirty-four years in thirty-four weeks. God, what a fucking co-incidence. I will perhaps go back to journalisme. Je suis journaliste. Je travaille a ----. Je traverse tout le monde. Je n'ai pas des amis. Je ne mort pas. Oh God, please let me die. Quietly, painlessly, I am fed up of being torn apart, fed up, so fed up. Of the fear, the pain, the ground falling away beneath your feet, repeatedly, repeatedly, no music in your ears, the world like lead on your shoulders. And even then, the longing for one. I don't want to be optimistic, I don't want to relentlessly chase happiness. I want to sulk, I want to hate. And I want someone to pull me out of it, to force me to look at the sunlight even though I turn my face away. I want to be free to hate, to despair, while the world is still there for me with its possibilities. I don't want to court the world, I don't want to court people to bestow favours and kindness on me.

OB Tampons are the most pretentious things. There is only this sad loser of a brand available in Delhi, and they are rather expensive as tampons go. I miss my good ol' local brand, manufactured at Colootola Lane, very much indeed. But haven't been home in a while. In moments of fancy, I imagine asking someone to courier a stashload to me, but then, who to ask. Also, what if it gets wet?

I had sushi with folks last week. I hope to do it again tomorrow. I feel ambivalent about the weekend, glad  to have a couple of days to myself, but then the shit lurks just beneath the surface, and there's more time to make kashundi of it.

I watched Wake up Sid, all at one go, yesterday. Mane, really stupid and crazy on a workday. But it kind of holds you on, you can't let go. Konkona Sen Sharma is this unbelievably zen mohila who takes all sorts of shit with a smile, no rough edges, always holding it together. But despite Ranbir Kapoor's duh-ness, he does convey, and rather well, the immense openness that his character Sid is. Such openness, to embrace the world with all the shit it will give him, and still he would love it. It would be lovely to love such a person, to be young with him. The film has several cliches, but it also channels the wonder of Bombay. I mean, it is how I imagine it to be: a city where you could do anything. And she puts it so precisely when he asks her what she'd come to Bombay for: to be independent. It's why I came to Delhi, not to scale career heights, but so I could live a little: so that both the good and the bad would be mine: I would be responsible for it all, with no one to blame or to be  grateful to. Make your own money and spend it too, and not be answerable to anybody.

I am trying to get That Girl in Yellow Boots and Hugo. I considered Daniel Craig and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I don't think it's worth the trouble. I do like the Swedish version. And reading Maximum City. Non-fiction has this calming effect, it holds true even when shit's flying around the house. Especially so, I think.

You pretty boy. You pretty, pretty, pretty boy. I am swinging between vellahood and utter despair. O says being this way is normal. That neurosis is fine. But I would like to be more stable, more disciplined in my emotions. I am trying to ignore the matter as if it does not exist. I have done the other things I usually do in the day. And written and messaged her when I could not do it anymore. I just wrote a mail to her. I am horrified by what I think I have done. But I am holding my peace now. I read a blog of a former classmate. Some of it was so beautiful and calming, I remembered the calmness of Eliot's Rhapsodies. This was triggered off by an interview of Laurie where he talks about working with Fry. He was beautiful and I felt so helpless then, because I always related them. So beautiful, so beautiful, and I seem to have tarnished it all. I wondered what nervous breakdown was and stealthily looked it up at work today. And found that as definitions go, I am far from it. Which is good, yes. If I could not laugh and do other things, I don't know what I would do. Why have the years passed, God? Why am I 28? Time was I would write to you in my diary and do sums with baba somewhere in our house, gulping down the inexplicable pain of an unrequited crush. And you helped then. You do, even now. In far greater measure than I ever deserve. Have I made three old people very unhappy? Have I broken the hearts of two of them by my thoughtlessness? But you know it was not all that. You know I felt harrassed, I wanted to escape. I didn't want to say harsh things to their face.
Be kind, dear God, be kind, again and again and again.

The summer is upon us, again. F has grown quite fat, worryingly, and my mother hasn't a clue of what's going on in my head. Yesterday night, gasping in pain and fear, I told F that I couldn't believe what was happening. She stared up at me with round eyes, but stayed by me through most of the night. O says it's good they are here, because one tends to obsess. I guess that is true. I can't give vent to my ugly grief when she is around and I whisper to F in darkness at night and in the morning after I wake up. Eventually, very soon, it subsides, and I start the day. I won't let them go right away now. I can't do this alone. I will go mad. I will take them home when the upheaval has quietened, when a plane has been reached.

I swing wildly between such divergent feelings. I know that technically I am free, but it doesn't seem to bring joy though I know it's a good thing.

Chatwin's photo on the header is very reassuring. And ya, another sad year.

I hope what Angshu said once, so very long ago, remains true. That I can find that energy and optimism of 2007. But such a long time has passed, I am a very different person, is there that me anymore? People do change, don't they? And ultimately, people, men, are always disappointing. And time, time, it do catch up to tell you that dreams are finite, that it's timeover eventually. It's not an infinite time for yellow sunlight filled with hopes. And then there's own crippling character, along with its flaws, to deal with.

theoutsider

From an even longer time ago.

right. I've scouted blogosphere quite thoroughly (my purview of it, anyway), I have a deadline to meet by 10a.m. tommorow (an article I haven't thought anything about), amar pithe jhijhi dhore gachhe, so I am just in the mood for a post. Why is it that you get this critical urge to blog just when you should not be doing it?Dunno. Who cares. I spoke to this rather famous bangali shahittik today who turned out to be full of himself. Sigh, a chink in every armour, I guess. No one's perfect. Didn't get through to this other famous director, 'not easily accesible', my superior said. Which translates into "will play song from 'Guide' at you; will then switch off phone just when you've started getting your hopes high that u've tracked down the elusive guy after all. (And all that after you've chewed off your nails in apprehension thinking that you'll forget to ask ethng u meant to ask if he picked up the phn so why call him anyway)
Well, a day, a day. no probs. okey-dokey.
Got to read about 4 lines of chatwin's songlines today. wow, great. if that's how life's gonna be as a scribe, I can forget ever sitting down to read anything ever. All I'll be doing is researching stuff on google for absurdities to shore up my art.s with. I am afraid I'll even forget to miss JU.
Oh JU. I love you so much. Haven for misfits is so right. And it also gives you a kind of pleasure to see all the straitlaced ones who give you such hell in their kind of environments getting to see the other side of the coin. But it's sad really. Coz JU really takes everybody in and makes it a kind of home. All it asks for is a kind of basic honesty to yourself. I didn't give it all of mine. That's the only pity. And quietly, the biggest one. Coz it's just my size.
And another reason to crib. I haven't got anti-spam thng. on my comp. So keep getting these 'Crazy Girls' adverts. i am sick to death of seeing immense boobs. Really.
Have an interview where, a friend tells me, I'll be asked strange ques.s.

From a long time ago.

I have now become greatly a part of the consumerist horde. I watched hours of television today, will go and buy clothes a few days later, having bought clothes a few days back.
I also watched Khela, like every self-respecting bangali worth his aantel soul. It was very good, by the way. It was a film about a film shoot, right, and for the first time, probably, I wished I could do something like that, be a part of a shoot, I mean, it was a glimpse into a world, like, and I liked it. The vivacity, fluidity, etc etc. I would be glad if I could work in some capacity on this director’s set. Just wishing, mane who knows, he might be a gorgon, for all I know.
And I also wanted to say that I like this song: Ha rehum, I think, from the film Aamir. They were showing it on television today. I dislike the hero’s voice, and I didn’t care to watch the film. It might be good, etc, but I am not obligated to watch it, am I? I did watch Hum Tum, parts of it, hee hee, and liked bits. Very overstressed, and Rani Mukherjee wears hideous make up ALL the time, and looks like a martyr, but there’s this Punjabi MC version of the Hum Tum song I always liked. Well, this is all about popular culture and I am getting a humongous dose of that for now. I also think Akshay Kumar is a good actor, by the way, and that Bhool Bhulaiya is a fine film in parts. Saw Road to Perdition too, which I didn’t like. I had forgotten it was by Sam Mendes, a pointless film it was. And I liked the kid Mike so much too. But then, oh whatever.


The real reason for writing here after such a long while:
I was watching a piece on Nat Geo about this area in ?? where the brown bear lives. It is a cousin of the short faced bear that went extinct when temperatures started cooling. These bears thrive on the shorteye salmon (the salmon is the life blood of the entire ecosystem of the area). These salmon (and we’ve heard this story before) travel upto 60,000 miles in their lifetime. They are born in the river in this area, and soon after, head out to sea. They travel up to?? And then swim back to return where they were born,to breed. They travel upstream, in the face of really fast currents, and they are so frenzied by then, they can’t even stop to eat. It is during this return journey that the bears lie in wait for them, snapping them up as the fish launch themselves against the current. By the time they arrive, they are completely sapped of energy. The silver green salmon turn a bright red. They lay their eggs, fertilized by the male fish, and then they die.
Nature generally has it figured right, don’t you think? I think of the Aborigines, who go walkabout, and well, Chatwin who spoke of the instinctive need for mobility which, under the urge to be settled, you ignore. The fish have it figured, don’t they? They are born, and as soon as they are able, they set out. They travel the world, and then they return, home. There is a sense of rootedness, it is so beautiful, so beautiful. I wish I were like the salmon, that thought were given over to instinct, always correct, always homing to where you wanted to be, without even knowing.
To turn red like the salmon, and to die…. I think I love the world so much…

I don't like my phone, that is the truth.


Chosen very carefully for its utility: 5 megapixel camera and high battery life, I think it's graphics are ugly, as is true of so many Samsung phones. I love the gift, but the looks are, eugh!
On another note: make-up! Don't buy! I!

Oli's (original post here: http://www.arcche.blogspot.com/2011/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-gb-x-none.html)

Prayer for travelling people

If it is evening when they set out,

collect them into the last light

and make it dawn for them.

If someone kissed them

goodbye, let them both remember.

Give them fewer waits at airports

or train stations or bus stops

or rickshaw-stands. Mostly,

give them breath to walk

far and wide and with

clouds catching their eyes.

Keep them warm.

Give them silence if they

are happy. Give them

conversation if they are

in themselves alone

and thinking not just of

passing from place to

place but of passing the

very world by.

Bring to them the

kindness of strangers.

Fill their eyes.

Let there be someone,

when they arrive, to

bring them home.

Is marriage bred out of tiredness? I saw Little Children today and it touched and built up to a crescendo in the end and I longed for a similar plenitude of drama in my life. And the music in the end was beautiful, quite. And I read the last part of the Eragon trilogy a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it, because it struck me so hard in the way pleasure, fun, enjoyment becomes more and more rarefied until it is completely banished from the psychological landscape of the book. Eragon, along with all the major characters in the book, except Roran, follow the path of duty, without any sense of doubt or beyond a longing for what they leave behind. It struck me as so very curious, in that it’s written by a guy who’s barely out of his 20s himself and he’s writing fantasy, right, which is, after all, wish fulfilment. And though I found it very disturbing when I read it, I recognise it as the same satisfaction one gets when I work when I want to do fun things, because it means not having the sick feeling one gets when the weekend is at an end and there’s tonnes of work to finish.

I am considering making this a private blog.

The plumber told me on the naked terrace yesterday, while I looked around for the first time at the crumbling concrete vista below, that marriage, money and something else only comes to those who are fated to have them. Going by how people marry here in the same way that bunnies mate (no idea if they do, really. The bunnies, i.e. The people definitely marry voraciously), you would think it would need a hand of fate to not marry. But it's something to think about. Very scary, the thought of spending the long, long years alone, or making them a blur that does not matter. What if, though? I thought while returning home today that it would be comfortable to be married. To sign a document and that would guarantee extra closeness and fewer questions asked. But that doesn't really happen. And I would be happy to marry, but not to stay in Calcutta for it. Right now, I'm getting the feeling that I am done with Delhi. I would like to go live in Bombay. But that would be another upheaval, perhaps a furthur moving away from the boy. Maybe the money won't be enough to support two people and a dog as comfortably as I can now. It would be so nice if he and I could go live in Bombay, but that I suppose is not to be. Nothing else but living till eternity in the city of my birth can be accomplished with ease.

Meanwhile, the real winter is happening, finally. Gah!

I am so not houseproud. My house, after I have lived in it for a little over a year, is still no more than utilitarian lodgings: digs is the word. Though I rather like it: the word and my digs. Until now. The walls of the kitchen and the two bathrooms and the passage and the other room have been damp for about a month now, but the kitchen ceiling has now started dripping. The house is a filthy mess, though my mother has been trolling through most of the shit, since I conveniently have quit the kitchen since she came. It's now gotten so messy that even I, who will stay put as long as her one patch of clean ground is undisturbed even while the shit overflows, am thinking that enough is enough. Not to mention the hell that will be when the monsoons come around. I am swinging between shelling out about 9k for another same-sized flat, that would not be on the top floor and would have a separate meter, or a larger flat that I would share were someone interested and suitable to come along, or settling for a smaller top floor room: lesser space to mope around. But the last option is impractical, I already know: I have too much stuff already and on muggy days, if I have to stay cooped up in one tiny room, or perpetually keep a door open, with all the risk that involves... think of, among other things, if a pack of monkeys like the one I saw fighting the other day, were to descend on the terrace and proceeded to create mayhem: I do not want to cower in fear or constantly feel anxious about them making an appearance.
Very likely a two-room set-up like the one I have now is what I will look for in earnest: more money gone, but well, if ma and f chose to come again, I wouldn't worry about space or feel constrained about inconveniencing someone else.

I discovered pooja's blog yesterday. she seems to be living such a bohemian life to my stolid one. I am so old. I am so old.

Also, I have no idea what makes a house look warm and welcoming. My aesthetic landscape is so sparse: I do not feel the need for photos or showpieces. I want them, but don't need them. Clean, bare walls, clean floors and whatever else you need to exist. A big kitchen, like the one I have now, where you can cook and surf the net; clean, slightly spacious loos, mirror, clean washbasins. But while others: both pooja and mamdmomma, whose blog I was reading before I thought of writing this one, would do so much with these raw materials, I am fine with these. There is the simmering discontent, about how bare my life is, but I don't really know what to do. I know I can't stand hurrays, I know I will not travel with random people nor invite them into my home, which leaves my mind and my house kind of bare. Ah well. Maybe there's hope yet.

F is curled up under the lep by my leg. Ma is making dinner. It's as good as it gets.

I go to office on my elephant and have a pet camel. I need the elephant because, as you must know, I have to traverse a tropical jungle to reach work. On weekends, we go out for jaunts on my magic carpet, which I bought from the neighbourhood genie, who belongs to the local snake charmer. Every locality needs one because, you know, the snakes are numerous. And I have Curry for brekkers, lunch and dinner and I am very promiscuous. It's the heat, you know.

My grandparents were quite unusual people for their time, I think. I am not entirely sure, because they were young at a time when a lot of uncommon things were happening and in their milieu, it might have been a fairly usual thing to do.

They met at while studying at one of the premier medical colleges in Calcutta, a decade or so before independence, I suppose. They fell in love, and decided to marry in the face of some family opposition. My grandfather was a penniless idealist. His father had been a railway official in pre-independence Bangladesh, in, my mother says, Akhaura district in Kumilla. They called him kanababu because he was deaf, which deeply hurt my Dadu as a child, but they were poor and his father was a quiet man, I suppose, and so, there was nothing much he could do about it except bottle his rage. He had an elder sister he rather loved and a younger brother, both of whom died. And young Goura was left alone, with, I fancy, his ambitions and his love for his parents, cut by resentment, I suppose, for his authoritarian mother and a father who did not have the resources to provide what he wanted.

My grandfather is a natural storyteller. I always spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and his stories of his life, which he would never tire of narrating again and again, are a part of the fabric of my mind. I looked at them differently at different times as I grew up. Unquestioningly, when I was little; with indifference, coupled with resentment, as I discovered Dadu's flaws; and with tedium, when I was grown up: by then, I had heard them so many times that I didn't care anymore. Now, he is in Calcutta, growing older and older, often complaining like a weary Tiresias, asking to be gone. I hardly speak to him anymore. His problems are too many and there is not much I can do without taking charge. And I am a master shirker. I take on as little as I can. But I do love the man he was. His life was an enormous act of self-fashioning, the credit for which is no less for it being so common.

One of the many tales I grew up listening was about the Durga Puja bhog. Goura was a most enthusiastic participant in all village festivals. He wanted to be in the thick of things, he loved running errands and generally, being where the action was. During one Durga Puja, a dada asked him to distribute the pujor bhog among those in the pandal. Now, they (and we, by extension) belonged to the lower castes. And when he went to pick up the bhog er thala, the cantankerous mashima in charge screamed at him: 'Tui chhoto jaater, abar bhog dibi ki! Pala!' The youngster's face reddened with rage and embarrassment and though a kind person asked him to never mind the lady and to go ahead and distribute the bhog, he did not shake off the incident.

This story was often followed by another of his college days. As a poor medical student from a distant village, Dadu could only afford the most basic lodgings. He stayed in the college hostel. As a low caste boy, he said, Dadu was required to eat separately from the other boarders. The thakur would prepare his food separately and keep it aside in a corner, where he had to sit and eat.

That, and perhaps a certain amount of idealism was the reason he believed, still does, so strongly in Mahatma Gandhi. Maybe he, like so many others, at the time, found in Gandhi a kindness, a recognition of basic humanity that others didn't show.

I have a lot of rage for Dadu, a lot of anger for the way he lived his family life, the differential treatment he always did, and still has meted out to his daughters, for my Didu's sadness, for her disappointments. But he also did so much, lived with such courage and such fullness. And as time passes, and those I hold dear grow older and fade away, the heart fills with such emptiness and sorrow that nothing can fill.

I haven't known many men closely. The other two are my father and my boyfriend. Baba's trajectory was much the same, starting out with very little and ending with enough and more. I think part of the reason he died so early was because of a certain nihilism, of believing that nothing mattered beyond a point. He wouldn't fight tooth and nail for himself, maybe for one he loved, but not for him. Which I know Dadu would and did. My boyfriend, I think I chose him because I could recognized the mould. And disappointing and often intolerable as such people are often to live with, it is the only one I can, and probably, wanted to navigate. So, there's him. I find much to admire in him, the grittiness, the tenacity, the hard work, the fearlessness and being able to conceive a state where one has nothing.

I will write more about Dadu. But so many emotions well up when I talk of him, or of any of the other people who have been such ever-present characters in the family tableau that you forget to question their being. My paternal grandfather, who I know far far less of, was also quite a remarkable person. He completed his Masters in jail, he was a freedom fighter. He was not a family man and married at 42 (I think) and had six children. He was one of the founding members of the Socialist Party and a very bad businessman whose chemical factory was in a very bad state and his family was perpetually poor. My father and mejo kaku would have to give part of their monthly scholarship for family expenses. It is remarkable at first thought, but then not, that his family took his achievements for granted. They bore the brunt of his financial unsavviness.

My thakurda was much derided and neglected in his old age and the only person I have found taking any interest in him as a person is my chhoto kaku, a rather strange person himself. I will find out more about my thakurda too, from him.

So, I will write slowly. Maybe I won't, ever. Maybe they will recede to their fixed places again in the picture. But I would like to write. I think they will make fine stories.

Just finished the packet of Gems that was a part of the Diwali gift pack of Cadbury goodies ma got me. Bakigulo agei kheye niyechhie. :-)
I went to Daryaganj today, at the Sunday book market. And I hate you, pretentious Delhiwalla, but I did find the Hardayal Municipal Library which is a place where people come to read newspapers (place subscribes to 25 papers in various languages) and the coin seller too, I dare say. But it was horribly crowded and the kebab platter at Moti Mahal was not half as good as it is notched up to be. But I did buy a butter knife with an embossed Air India logo and a penknife which I quite like. How is it that Delhi still doesn't warm my heart? But it doesn't.
There was a wonderful collection of books today, not the piddling shit I could sift out the last time. One guy was selling a huge collection of Penguin Classics, but too canony and stuff that I don't really read, tai ki korbo, kinte parlam na. And the place is really close to my place, did you know? I took an auto from Laxminagar, it cost me 50 bucks, but the guy had the meter on, which came to only 40 bucks! I spent such a lot of time scouting for a bus to the place, kintu the only bus that passes through my locality goes directly to the book bazar too! Amazing discoveries and wonders never cease. Needless to say, I returned on a bus. And people travelled on public transport more habitually in old Delhi than I have seen people do here anywhere else. It seemed like Calcutta in that way, and very heartening. It has nothing to do with wealth. It makes sense, non? And why should you have to resort to your own conveyance in a bustling metro? Public transport is one of the most basic services.
My haul:
Alexander McCall Smith: The Kalahari Typing School for Men (40 bucks). It seems quite lovely. Ma likes it too. She asked me, 'eta ki Negro der boi?' She also asked me if Kalahari was in Africa and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince her it was in New Zealand. She didn't believe me, sadly.
Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (and this very same I had been high falutin about buying at the Penguin discount sale. Got it for 80 bucks and I was cribbing about the high price)
Rimi di's City of Love (50 Rs). A little ashamed for not buying original.
Christopher Paolini: Brisingr (30 Rs). I had read the first two parts from Oli. We all did, I think. That was a couple of years ago, at least. I was waiting for the third part to materialise through a hand of fate. That means not buying the book, but 30 bucks is hand of fate, alright.
Nicholas Flamel: The Alchemyst. Hoping it'll be alright.
Ellis Peters: Monk's Hood. Ditto
William Hart: Culture and Civilization of Bengal (25 Rs). Hardback, with pictures, published by Mahadev Prakashan of Shahdara. I am glad about this one.
Tolkien's The Silmarilion (30 Rs). This, after the guy who sits at the junction of the left and right side of the market and who seems to know about books/ takes advantage of his prime position/ is pricey offered it to me generously for 120 bucks.

I read on the Net that the municipality occasionally conducts drives to get rid of the Sunday market. A classmate today was surprised to hear about my jaunt because apparently such a drive happened recently. I was surprised that he was ok with that. I hope the market is never driven away. Books are peace, a refuge, always, and everyone should have access to them, at whatever level of the financial ladder they are at. Also, those like me, who want to buy great books cheaply, principles be damned.
Also, books are familiar territory. But that lunch sucked, awfully. As did the overly fawning waiters and the horrible loo. Though I suppose I should be glad to have found a serviceable loo in old Delhi at all.
At the market, there was also:
Lots of P. D. James, which the boy says is good.
Salman Rushdies
Spattering of Dickens. And Villette, of all things.
No Ahmed Ali, though.
No Game of Thrones neither. Maybe it hasn't reached these nether regions.

It's Bakri (probably Bakr) Eid tomorrow. But no chhutti in office. Really.


Did I say what I bought from the Penguin sale? For me and others. Mostly for others. Here:
Dalu's books: The White Mughals and City of Djinn's (that was just the 50% discount)
Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Complete Ruskin Bond (how boring)
Khushwant Singh's Delhi: A Novel. Yuk. Mom reading.
I wanted Chatwin's What Am I Doing Here and boy wanted Finnegans Wake. But you know how they never have the good stuff.

The Delhiwalla is a most pretentious piece of writing. I will have Daily Mail any day. Among other things, it is the same time of the year. Last year, around this time, I was starting things from scratch in this godforsaken piss of a city, working away at setting up house, quite unafraid, really, like chipping away at a massive block of stone, only to see what lies beneath, not worried about the enormity of the task.
Here's a photo from that day, taken on my phone. I was completely alone, then. But it did not seem that what emptiness there was could be filled with random people.

If sex is just sensation, there should be more pleasure in denying it, non? Or maybe I am more straitlaced than I think.
My eyes are popping out with endless work and far more from Castle marathon watching. I am desultory, sulky and depressed. It's Pujo and nobody is really whooping about it in my part of the city. And my potential mother-in-law asked why I didn't do a registry biye the next time I came, and onushthaan could happen later! Oof babare! I said no, I mean, what the! And she was even saying that they wanted grandkids. I feel like gurgling with laughter at the outrage of it. But well, no. They are kind people. Very kind. Much better than a lot of people their age. But I can't meet this demand.
I want to be er, free. I realise it involves just so much loneliness, but I still want to be free. No marriages to make to keep other people happy, no endless khushal mangals to inquire of relatives who do not excite your interest. To live anonymously. I can't see what I am going to do. He is doing so well for himself it makes no sense to even ask him to come and live here. And I don't want to live here forever and when I am ready to go elsewhere, he will probably just be settling in. He gets unsettled if he has to move. I do too, I am even now, but I still want to move.
If I were Beckett, I would have been resolute and told him a long time ago that we don't want the same things from life and let's go our ways. But I have hung on like a limpet and now it's five years and I will be obligated, even want, to marry after two years.
I still hope to have everything. And I am not a kickass person like Oli even. Nowhere near. Yet I hope to have everything.
Miserable Pujo, youalls.
On another note, much love and warmth. I miss Pujo, I miss the pandals, the hubbub, the laughter and the fatigue.

Very tired, so just facts:
Well, the woman who wanted to have the baby is having the baby. And her husband who had said he did not love her anymore (something as heartbreaking and earth shattering as that) and that he couldn't bear to stay with her, is buying her a gift and planning to buy a camera to record the baby's arrival. The typical Indian family, what joy! You will break and be finished, but you will not leave. You will spawn progeny and forever be happy and believe this is your reality, a good reality. Call upon God and believe in him. It is right out of Heart of Darkness. Its unbelievable, unending night. And we are supposedly modern, better than the generation before, with more autonomy. It seems that I am sinking, that there is no way out. Who knows if I will commit such blasphemies myself.

Ma's blood sugar is down.
My boyfriend got me the bag.
I bought two perfumes online today. One for ma.
Pujo ashchhe.
Bhishon gorom.
Ghum peyechhe. Painfully slow download speeds yesterday and day before. I watched both of Satyajit's Felu das. Ate hideous hideous chicken roll.
And strange miracles abound. Like auto appearing almost immediately after I prayed for one in tutiphata morning sun. Happened yesterday too. Jam clearing, bus stopping when it never does. Small things that well, restore faith.

This is not nostalgia

People have left Calcutta in droves. I flew the nest very late at 27. I had been frustrated and had wanted to get out for a very long time. It seemed then that staying in Calcutta was an exercise in futility, waiting for the proverbial cookie to crumble, which, of course, it never did.

But there are so many reasons why one loves home, and none of them are things that make the city absolute as a font of contentment and joy. I was humming Mohiner Ghoraguli r Shaat Tola Bari today and it came back again, as it has for the past few days. Hot summer days, the hint of spring, Jadavpur, such love that it is a physical longing to have those days in my grasp again, friends, the sun on your face in the basketball field on the engineering side, the jheel there, climbing up that windmill like thing, sitting at the foot of a tree, Oli climbing the tree, French classes, BCL, desperate tiredness, bus rides which now seem so pointless, Debasis sir, the world opening up. From the age of 18 to 22, I dare say it was the perfect place to be. Rimi di, Amlan da, Supriya di, so very kind, Queer Studies, a classmate seeking to confirm from the Sappho people very, self-consciously knowledgeably, if the first sexual experience for a homosexual was a defining moment :-)

Babu, all bird-like, even the first year of Telegraph, when so many new things seemed to be opening up, and Floppy plucked out from a heartful of sorrow that were those years.

What will it take to have that love back, the longing for University is such a yearning sometimes, for something that is perhaps not there anymore, because I am not 18.

I miss Calcutta, I wish I could go back to it with an empty page, instead of as a refuge when I am broken, beaten up by Delhi. I wish Calcutta were not such a dump professionally, that I also could take its opportunities for granted like so many in Delhi do.

Ma has 400 pp sugar. Scared.

What would it be like to never be held or made love to. I am desperately lonely and I can't imagine me a scenario where I wasn't. I am scared.

A mosquito bit me on my boob! I'm sure this is all premeditated, or maybe it just found it first, because of the bump.

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

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

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

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

Sacred Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ma keeps wanting to go back home. O ma go, ki korbo. Ma, summer ta at least paar koriye diye jao.

A sad year and a smelly dog

There is a certain symmetry to begin the blog with a photo of Bruce Chatwin and to end it with one by him. I am happy with how the blog looks now, none of the hard, definite colours there were earlier. But the vagueness, like how I want to be, and the greyness, which is what the weather makes of the environs and what the state of my mind is.
The smelly dog is F, she hasn't had a bath in a month and smells very dog-like. Kukur kukur gondho, as we say around here.
The year is indubitably sad, but is made happier and bearable by the presence of my mother and dog.
We got the AC installed today, took less time than I thought, more money than I'd hoped and messy as I expected.
Sitting at home, I am wondering whether the year MUST be so sad, whether working elsewhere was such a big thing. After all, this is Delhi, that is why one comes here: because there are options, if nothing else, in numbers that can never match your home town.
God, I do hate this city so.

But then, searching for Chatwin and Edmund White for the blog made me remember stuff I liked, of happier times, of knowing Chatwin for the first time at the BCL library, such a refuge in summers, so many hot, hot afternoons whiled away reading nothings, always things not meant for coursework. Of Oli passing on Chatwin's notebook, or was it that book of photographs off-handedly and I think I did teach myself to like a new thing, and now the picture of that door and that abandoned trailor somewhere in Latin America, or was it the Midwest, from What Am I Doing Here, brings back such warm memories, of myself. And the title, it has always echoed my state of being at so many different points in my life.
The only difference is, this torture is self-inflicted.

Apparently, celebrities are passing off manic depression as bi-polar disorder. Am I manic depressive?
And to think, I was supposed to check out all the birdwatching sites in Delhi. So many things I had meant to do here, and none is happening.

There are moments in my house in Delhi when I get a sense of home: as I walk through the small passage between the living room and the other room in the darkness, and know ma and my dog are asleep nearby.

Living on the top floor has a freedom I have never known. When I lie down on the floor and look out through the windows and see only sky, the glittering moon at night, and the pigeons flocking through at daybreak, I know no one can see me. And I feel free, almost invulnerable. I feel free in Delhi, then.

Watching House gives me strength that I wish would last. He, the people in it, shore me up to face life even when it gets so tough you think the strength is being wrung out of your muscles. I see them survive each day that is as tough as that and it gives me strength. Sadly, I don't see House before I leave for office, so by that time, all the strength has seeped away and I am left with dread at the prospect of another day of being wrung dry.
But the serial has such heart, it speaks so close to what really happens and how incredibly people find the resources to go on.

My boyfriend and I speak of marriage these days. He seems accepting of it, I have more or less accepted it. We are happy.

It has become very hot over the past few days. I will rent an AC. Someone is supposed to come over about it today.

The meat almost went bad and my dog vomited the other day. My mother says it is because of the heat. She also needs a bath, and her rabies shot.
Did I say, I was bitten by a dog right after I returned from home? I met the dog last week and went up to it. But it totally changed demeanour after it sniffed my hand. It began growling and showing its teeth and started to chase after me. I shouted and hit out with my big bag and got away, but I think it meant to have a go at me and it really shook me up.
I felt really scared then, and I felt angry that it should be this way with me, and I wished I could harm it, that it would die. I don't know why it hates me so. Also don't know why dogs here are so very violent with outsiders, considering they are well-fed etc. They aren't this way in Calcutta. I don't think I will be able to take my dog out while I am in Delhi. I dare not think of what might happen.
There is a lot of work for today, my off day. There's fish and milk to be bought, gas to be filled, my kurta brought back from the tailor's. And we also planned to go to a mall and eat out. And I haven't even begun to sleep.

Well, it's kinda long time-no see. Ma and dog are here, have I said. As are lots of mosquitoes. I am afraid it's a situation developing here with the mosquitoes. There are nights we barely sleep thanks to their numbers and coils and repellents seem to make no difference whatsoever.
Apart from that, of course, it is what I do to earn my daily bread. And earn it, I do, by God. I feel the price I pay, the toll it takes and how money is needed to keep the daily bread coming. I sense it when I go to the market twice a week, when I buy chicken for my dog every three days, and I feel it when my mother throws away vegetables that have gone bad after lying too long in the fridge.
But I can't keep doing this. I can't, please. It's too much. Earning a living can't be this bad a thing? And there is no time for anything, and I am always so exhausted, mentally and physically.
I look at people in their houses and I tell myself this is home and hearth for them, this is it, there is nothing beyond. And I feel a little surprised, since Delhi is so intrinsically a place for transit, for me. I can't imagine what it would be if this were it for me. Home is still Calcutta in such an immediate way, maybe more so because I am having such a hard time here and it's hard to want to return to something that holds no pleasant memories.

tmi

I had sex after a very long time. It was so much better than I remembered it. On the downside, no condom, so like, a wee bit worried.
the best part of days so far, ma and F are here. I am so happy, so relieved, to go to bed beside them every night, to find them when I come back home, to see them when I come back from office, to wake up with them. It seems I was getting by like a zombie so far.
And being this way is like, everything I had not meant to be. I mean, how chhaposha I am, to not be able to exist without home, city, boyfriend. In my delirium of relief, I often think I would be happy to give up everything, come home to Calcutta, marry my boyfriend and live with him. Maybe like everything else, this is me coming to what everyone else feels, like, from infancy.

I am home. I am having a bad turn at work. A rather bad one. I feel human after a very long time. And it feels stupid to stay away from here. I have no idea what I will do with my career, but what my present job demands to succeed, I don't think I am up for. I don't want to leave, I want to be able to crack this and then quit, to show myself that I could do this.
And I feel happy here. I like the weather, I like how laid-back it is, I like spotting things on the road that I can keep looking at, that don't make you want to turn your eyes away and shut your ears.
I don't know if this is the influence of my boyfriend, or the nature of the job, or whether I am getting old. I hate change, now as always. But I never expected to be stuck at a dead end in my profession twice in such a short time, I never thought I could not do something, or maybe I am just not putting myself out there because I don't care enough, and that I never did care to excel.
I have often thought of quitting work altogether, something that I would have thought blasphemous earlier. Work was identity, I was always made to understand, subliminally. It let you live, without it, you would be swatted away off this earth.
But work, as I have experienced it of late, holds no allure for me at all. I keep thinking there must be other aspects of my profession that are not as unsavoury, that are easier. Or maybe something is wrong with me, I am not smart enough to crack it. I may sub decently, but I can't come up with ideas at the drop of a hat.

Perhaps all cities are the same, in their alienation, in their devil-may-care way. Maybe no city is innately kinder than the other, but becomes that because of what we find in it. I was watching Dhobi Ghat, and there is no closure, only a sense of loss and the knowledge that something is gained. You are immeasurably sad but have learnt to live with it.

I don't know why K found it so good. I don't think it is very good, especially not once the spell is broken. And probably Aamir Khan is the weakest link. It's hard to like a character if you have to imagine him, if the actor playing it can't convince you to believe in what you see on screen. But he is so House-like in his isolation and self-sufficience. I wish I could live out my life in an open apartment and not need friends either.

Actually, on furthur thought, I find more to fault in the movie. Oi, that the real story goes untold: the suave young man 'exposed' as the rat catcher, his moment of shame. Shai's moment of shame when her friends are buying drugs from Munna's friends, Munna who is also a prostitute on the side, Aamir falling in love with a character once removed from his existence, something mirrored in all the other characters. How they come to terms, even accept the unreachability of their feelings, when Shai admits the moment between her and Munna.

A rich artist living in the heart of the old city, this is felt so fleetingly. In a friends with benefits relationship with Vatsala.

And the city. God, I think I will not take photos of poor people on principle. I will take photos of filthy rich, bogus people and make them fantastic. What is this obsession with poverty? What is poor is real? If you believe that as a given fact, how fatuous is that? "I've done the dhobis, the cobblers, the perfumers, now I will do the rat catchers."

I resist this categorisation, of 'professions of the poor' as much as the idea that if I can walk through the filth and grime one day, or several days, I will know what the "real" city is about. Isn't that a more lived experience, rather than a catalogue to be ticked off?

My schedule in Delhi: home, office, back home, Internet, watching films, sleeping late, cooking, are things you would have done in any city. But I live these days fairly intensely and the city affects them all. It affects my mood, and it's about the sense of inhabiting a city, non, rather than what you see. I could spend a year doing nothing but this and feel that I inhabited the city intensely. And I have done the cataloguing. It doesn't leave you any richer. You have to give time to the city to filter in, years and years, of walking the streets. You remember the taste of the Dilli phuchka, you observe the clothes people wear, turn away in disgust from the fancy cars, shut your ears to the cacophony of people discussing mundanities in a korkosh accent, your own interactions, utterly unspectacular, with the neighbourhood vegetable seller, the autowallah, with the swindling shopowner and know you have inhabited the city. There are no places to tick off, no things to do for that. The places you visit out of curiosity, for pleasure. Anything sieved from those journeys is incidental.

I love living alone. For the most part. Sometimes, at very brief times, I think I could do this forever and not mind it. When I did, I would just quit and go wherever I wanted.

But running low on cash now. Want more cash, and want to go home. Desperately. Please God, engineer something so I can both go to Hyd and go be with mom and F and K.

I am very sad. I had a talk with my boyfriend. It seems this distance will always be there if we are to be together. I wish I was not always held at arm's length. I wish somewhere, the boundaries would be breached.
I wish I could cry a great deal. And that this crying would bring forth a solution: you know, since I expended this much of myself, I demand something back from the cosmos.
And well, it does come down to my being asked to move back. How rich is that!
I am sad, and very very disappointed.

I am not a big fan of the Internet. I don't think it's amazing, I use it as a tool, it's easy, it works, that kind of thing. And it's also really useful, but when was that fun.
The past two days have been very solitary and I have depended on the Internet almost entirely for any sense of the world outside. Usually I talk to my boyfriend everyday, that kind of fills up my mental space.
But here's the thing: I was so totally alone (which I have been before) but it's like, y'know, the contentment lasted for way long than before. Usually, I am trying to bear up with it, and eventually it all goes pouf! and I sink into depression and fall lower and lower till I am close to losing my mind, when I pull myself up and do the next thing that my schedule demands, which always evens things out.
But today, apart from this general feeling of having kept something slightly important at bay, I was very happy. And feeling resentful at the hour I spent talking to someone on the phone yesterday night and about having to meet an old school friend tomorrow morning before going to office.
It's like I feel apathetic to any company that is not perfectly suited to my taste. I can't imagine wanting to be with anyone with whom I have to 'interact', do things with. I just want to be left alone.
It's also a little worrying. Everyone I know here socialises compulsively. I was told yesterday that if I did not get married in the next two years, I will apparently become that way too.
It's as if that is the key to survival. But well, it never was that way, was it? Having people is fun, friends egg you on to do things that left to your own devices, you delay, even fun things, because lazyness is a more delicious option.