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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amar kalo chokchoke kukurta shob bomi kore phelechhe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

Two things:

I was in Bowbazar and then walking on Ganesh Chandra Avenue today. I saw so many dogs, and even two litters. A piece of chot had been placed under where they were lying. Another dog lounged right beside where people were eating and they didn’t mind. The dogs were, for the most part, healthy. How and why why why is it that people on the streets find it easier to care for dogs than people in prosperous localities? Why do I constantly have to be on the alert to feed dogs etc quietly, because an animal person is not looked upon kindly in the neighbourhood? Sraboni, the lady from whom I brought my dog, is a nervous wreck, almost, these days. A Marwari family in her building is ganging up people against her for feeding dogs. Their rallying point is a male dog who has bitten other dogs and even chases people sometimes. He has a temper. They mockingly call Sraboni Maneka Gandhi and say that the dog is here and acts this way towards humans because S feeds him.
I know how it is. I returned home from home at 3am from office on three days. I feed three dogs usually after I return from office. One of the residents in my complex very conveniently put the two facts together and was asking around why I feed dogs at 3am in the night, endangering the security of the complex as it necessitates the opening of the main gate. I usually feed them between 10.40 and 11pm, when I return home on most days.
I am tired. A puppy I found has gone missing. It was staying nights with me and I was leaving it on the street, near an istiriwala in the mornings, because nobody was willing to take it in. I miss it shutor moton tail and fat belly and tumbly walk and bhota muzzle. It kept me awake at nights and required me to sleep by 12 and awake at 7. Please please be alive.

There was a drive of some sort happening on GC Avenue: a man with walky talkie was instructing some people in breaking the unoons and taking away the gas unoons of people selling food on the street. GC Avenue is office para and there are shacks lining the footpaths on both sides of the road. They serve cheap, fairly good quality food and are the lifeline for office goers in the area. I don’t know why their unoon s were being taken away, perhaps because they were not supposed to be cooking there, but things is, how can you do that? They probably pay money to whoever to be allowed to ply their trade there, and you are crippling them smartly, saying you are enforcing the law? I saw them as I walked, a little faster than I would have because I was also going to get lunch some way ahead from one such seller and didn’t want them to have broken this guy’s stuff as well. They just looked on with staring eyes, without reacting, as their stuff was taken away and went back to gathering them together. A little ahead, people hurriedly put them away, to stop them being taken away, I guess. I am sure this is not a particularly smart thing to write and there are nexuses within nexuses, but let me indulge myself, for once. This is not the way to do it, that much I know.

And something else, that I can’t remember now. My heart is clenched with apprehension.

Edited to add:
The other thing I wanted to say: uh, am I the only one who does not care to get pregnant and spawn children at the stage I am in my life, meaning, with job, potential marriage person and on wrong side of 25? It’s slightly sickening. And its not that I don’t want kids, I am just not seeing a reason to have them anytime soon. I don’t care for the sight of young, pleasant looking women carrying kids.

This photo for lack of anything better.
So, so, will I be hated if I say I didn’t mind the Sex and the City movie? One likes the laughter, the luxury of having all your friends in the same city and the even greater luxury of having the time to meet for endless breakfasts and dinners at the hippest restaurants, pubs ityadi. Of not being married at 40. One likes to see a woman who does not want to settle down and is happier alone, at 50 too. One likes to see a woman who is the bigger earner and is a lawyer but is apparently at peace with marrying a bar tender and says ‘I changed who I was for you’. And one sees Carrie Bradshaw, who does all he big talk, but is in a sado-masochistic relationship that has brought more sadness than smiles. And she is even getting married to the man. It makes one think, even dream. Even at the sight of one’s worst fears being acted out. One also likes how airbrushed it all is and wonders if New York really is this magical place that lets this all happen. One also likes the bear-like Chris Noth as Big, beside the pint-sized Carrie Bradshaw. One likes being enveloped completely by a much larger-proportioned man.
One does not like the old horsy Sarah Jessica Parker.

This was a much-loved film at the beginning of college. I remember arguing with my first boyfriend that Winona Ryder was wearing something to make her skin fairer because it looked painted and he telling me that I should take it from him that Caucasian women could be as pale as her. Or was it the other way round?
I was reading the plot of the film now, because I had forgotten it, really. The review says it captures appealingly the lives of people in their twenties: of Lelaina, who wants to be a ‘videographer’ and Troy Dyer, a slacker who loses one dead end job after another and is a nihilist grunge musician by night.
Well, this: I am in my twenties, very scared that it is almost at an end and I have done nothing but slacken. Yet, yet, the film seemed magical when I watched it, full of promise. And well, the old story: what we had dreamed and what we are living today and 20 years later, this will seem shiny: eating porota and kosha mangsho alone at Golbari, followed by a heavenly nolen gurer mishti and roshomalai at a shop nearby. It wasn’t the happiest moment, but compared with those that happened immediately before, it was free.
Because because, I can’t live down that life, love, was supposed to be magical, however much I might take solace from the mundane.

I am coughing from nail polish fumes.

I don’t know why I remember baba so strongly now, meaning since yesterday. Is it because I am stressed with the new pup, stressed by the uncertainty of keeping it alive, like the uncertainty of baba living then? Or is it the anger and resentment about boyfriend? Or is it the drawn-out death of Jyoti Basu being played out by so many people: you see the markers and remember? (Forcing a city’s people to live the death of someone who brought so much misery on them?)

I’ll say again what I was remembering: baba after the fall, the hemorrhage, when one of his pupils was off-centre, inward, while the other was in the centre, when I saw him like that the first time after he recovered consciousness after the fall, his moaning when they took him to the scanning machine: I was allowed to enter the room wearing a special coat thing to calm him, stop him moving, the many walks to and fro on the bridge thing connecting two departments, walking in giant sneakers without socks and blue pajamas: food tasted like food, meant for nourishment, to keep one going. And then, how, slowly, he died. Like a long long fall in slow motion where he would fall into my arms: it seems one way of looking at it now. I let him fall, that day, when he fell, it was on me.

How I told Amlan da how scared I was I’d forget it and he said he knew: how incredible it was: his understanding: how incredible that another human being should understand and give credence to something you are afraid is an indulgence.

And the memories do fade, they seem to float away sometimes, and you look, almost not caring.

Yesterday night, I said, I thought, I told God, after he had kept the pup alive and found it a kind person who’d taken it in: that it was wrong that baba had gone when he was 56. Basu is 95. Baba had a lot more to do, to see, to give. This is so a very bare fact, so not an indulgence: there are more to some people, there isn’t as much for others, perhaps. I am not singing a paean to a parent. It was a smart, agile and confident mind that was taken away, that went away, and I daresay, a heart that would have learnt a lot about affection in the years to come if he had lived. It is not fair. And yes, the same God kept that pup alive, quite defying all possibility: a very very little animal that can’t even walk properly, so small that it wouldn’t be seen by drivers of vehicles, it walked a very long distance to the istiriwala who turned out to be a kind person and didn’t think that he didn’t want to take on a responsibility, when I had left it on the footpath in God’s name and left.

So yes, I miss baba: how much I don’t know myself. It’s one of those things you don’t realize because you are still living it.