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?