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.

Weird week, topped by fight with boyfriend. Maybe we are breaking up? That would completely mess me up. On the flip side, mosquitoes have appeared, I have lost one nos. t-shirt, one nos. nyakra, one undie in the storm, and a panjabi lies on the balcony of the girl below. I cooked mangsho, with ne'er a damn about how it tastes.
I loved Chungking Express, though not the first part. It seems to confirm the disquieting impression that Chinese men go into paroxysms at the slightest provocation, like happiness, arousal. But the girl, oh the girl, she was so beautiful, with her waif-like body and well, the story.
Someone in my class just got married. It has an unreal quality to it, hearing of this marriage, but it is so rigidly rooted in reality there is no way around it. Perhaps that's why he did it, so the act, the coming together of two people could in no way be denied.
But I still can't imagine doing it. Yes, the thought of it is a fond indulgence. And more than anything it fills me with sadness and worry. But it never seems to be a certainty.
Though I do want to come home. Always. And with him, I know it will never be a shutting of doors to hem me in, but then, he won't look if I walk out and never come back.
Is this how it will always be, only as good as this, and as solitary as this?

Last week, I went to Paharganj. It was lovely. The spaghetti bolognese was very nice. And the other day's sushi too.
I have cooked for a dog. I have night tomorrow. I have to iron clothes, I have lost half a bottle of shampoo to a shampoo disaster. I still haven't got leave, have to submit investment documents, get lots of fake medical bills from somewhere.

If my father could have seen me, cooking badhakopi at 3.45 in the morning, he would probably have said in disgust, erom uronchondipona keno? Sometimes, when I am washing dishes at the kitchen sink, I wonder if baba is standing behind me. And I half-believe that since I am thinking it, it must be so. And then I tell myself in despair, there is nothing beyond death. But I don't really believe that. Though it does not help, because I can't reach out beyond life.

The badhakopi refuses to get done, much like the gajorer halua. And I am not eating anything tonight, because it's too much of a hassle, plus all the cooking smells never make me feel like eating what I've just cooked. It would be lovely if I could have a mild, soft, delicious steak with potato mash. What a firingi I am talking like.

And apart from that, bad, bad day at work. Looking ahead to a day just as bad, hoping to be able to get chhuti approved, the very tiring day before yesterday, but shopping. And then a 10-hour sleep.

What would it be like to go home. I have wanted it so much that I am ragged with wanting. It is not even enjoyment, or delicious anticipation. I just want to get home and sink my head on my old, flattened pillow and go to sleep with my dog early one morning. And wake up late in the afternoon and eat lunch and fight with my mother.

One of the good things about life is there is always tomorrow. If time stopped whenever you were having a bad time, life would be very hard indeed.

I just thought of this. And I am too tired and my knees are aching and there's still bloody paneer to cook. Life sucks, I miss my dog. Buuuut, I had salmon sushi last week, veeeery nice. And nice dokra earrings at Utkalika, Orissa emporium and another dul on the street. Then cake from Wenger's. I rather like the emporiums than not, ki bolbo. But wait, Rajasthan, I will the come to you.
Puro O Champs Elysees
And I met a dog lady here. And Friendicos gari does come here. On the flip side, Delhi pet shops do not stock medicines. Tell me what else is stupid about Delhi again??
Also, I discovered all those shops selling jackets at CP that day. Kothay chhili ami jokhon sheet e kapchhilam? Oh well, late discovery. Also, I am wondering whether to bring my dog by train. Ooo First Class, amar baba o choreni, I bet.

And that brings me to baba. I think of him sometimes, like, baba ki bolbe. Ei onko ta kibhabe korte hobe baba janbe, ba, baba ke phone kore jigesh kori gaachh kata r economics ta ki. Never mind that my father and I never had a phone relationship. And definitely not a mobile phone one. My first cellphone was the one my father had bought before coming to Vellore. So ya, I miss him very much now. What I thought would not happen anymore is happening again: I keep reverting to a state of mind where I think he is around, when I am most stressed, I suppose.

At the bus stop near the Metro station nearest my house, people spit gutkha laden gobs of thuthu in great amounts. I wonder sometimes how big their mouths might be to hold that much of oi, whatever, at one go. So, everyday, I remember Ol's pishimoni telling me to never step on spit, to walk around it, never across, or over it. She said this on that day we got our Master's degree, in oi, orange robes and all that hoopla. Oli and I were there, and she took a photo of us on her mobile. I wonder where that photo is.

So well, I have a stocked fridge, except for tomatoes (roshun is 300 rs a kg, mygod, and deem, can you believe, 50 bucks a dozen) and I have hired a maid. So clean house and no clothes to wash. What else could I possibly ask for.

This is a protest post, but before I start: sheki, o ar phirbe na? How can you just bid goodbye to your life in Calcutta?

I'm fed up of this job, I haven't had sex in years, I am so unfamiliar with fun that it takes me by surprise. And for what? For what do I wind myself up so tight? From fear of losing what? Everything, everything. But what do I even have? And what would I be left with if I revolted? Dog, come back to me. In your love and mine for you, there is no distance, no restraint. All other relationships, activity are fraught.

Release me. To be myself, whatever ugliness that means, however tragic it is.

Road trippin' with my two favorite allies
Fully loaded we got snacks and supplies
It's time to leave this town
It's time to steal away
Let's go get lost
Anywhere in the USA

Let's go get lost
Let's go get lost

Blue you sit so pretty
West of the one
Sparkles light with yellow icing
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun

These smiling eyes are just a mirror for

So much as come before those battles lost and won
This life is shining more forever in the sun
Now let us check our heads
And let us check the surf
Staying high and dry's more trouble than it's worth
In the sun

These smiling eyes are just a mirror for

In Big Sur we take some time to linger on
We three hunky dory's got our snakefinger on
Now let us drink the stars
It's time to steal away
Let's go get lost
Right here in the USA

Let's go get lost
Let's go get lost

Blue you sit so pretty
West of the one
Sparkles light with yellow icing
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun

These smiling eyes are just a mirror for

It's very cold in Delhi these days. It's that kind of cold where I no longer register needs like hunger, the need to pee, the need to bathe (which was never very strong, anyway). I concentrate on trying to keep warm and on sleeping. No amount of time seems enough to asleep. I spend about an hour trying to fall asleep, to discover at some point that I had been gritting my teeth against the cold. Feet refuse to get warm. It's like it would be during the trek.
I wake up all warm and toasty and it seems like the biggest injustice to have to leave the bed and get ready for office. That's all I do in the morning, really. Make tea, warm lunch, potty, shovel food down my throat, get ready and run.
I have taken to eating with a spoon and out of the bowl I boil rice in. Hand feels frozen if you eat with it, plus one utensil less.
I bought a jacket from Sarojini market today. I'm wearing it now. I feel like Sajid in East in East. He would always wear a parka, and at the end of the film, he got circumcised.
I saw Persepolis over the last two days. I liked it more than I liked the book, which I also liked. It would probably find an echo with anyone who feels exiled and unable to return. La liberte a un prix, it ends with. Truer words never said, etc.
I was also watching Black Swan, the whole of which I couldn't watch, for faulty download reasons. Trying to see whether the whole film could be seen somehow, I watched one-third of the film thrice. I liked it each time. I loved the music. It's haunting and it mirrors Natalie Portman's character, Nina's thoughts. She acts very well, I think. Or maybe, all lonely women answer a chord these days.
I went to Khan Market today. No one told me that besides housing all kinds of brands, it was also a rather quaint place. And Big Chill, for all the blowsiness it suggests, is like that too. Of course, it's also expensive. I disliked Dilli Haat quite thoroughly and felt very at home at Sarojini market. But that was after I found the jacket, which I was looking a little desperately for. But then I went into this part of the market that sells vegetables and fruits. I like that section. a fruit seller there has made a little space beneath the brick surface he sells his wares from. It's a small space, exactly right for a dog to fit. There's a gunny bag and some straw there. The dog in question was a black one, sitting straight. He was very soft, ami aador korechhi. He also ran away with a tupi someone handed him and the small boys selling stuff there played a game of chase with him. He knew it was a game and he adroitly sidestepped the boys several times. :-)
I felt at home there. I wish I were living in south Delhi.
And company definitely makes venturing out easier.

I wish the boy were here. I miss him on, well, certain days.
There's a flurry of marriages all around. Again. I wish I were settled too, sometime. In every which way. I wish F were with me. I wish my dog were with me. I wish she were with me.
A colleague said while we were coming back a few days ago: 'I had many dreams once, but I want now is to be back home.' He is from another city. He doesn't like delhi either. he's lived here for three years. how can he live with such longing for three years? i blabbered a little. i said, i think at home, i'll be the least unhappy. he agreed. who knows if he was telling me the truth.

I think I can never be happy. I don't probably like it so much. I am more at home with being depressed. What would make me happiest now? To be able to go back home, to not have to do the job I do. To relax, let go.
I don't think happiness is dependent on one getting what they set their minds on. As Dibbo said, or perhaps didn't, it's a state of being. It comes to me only in short flashes.
The year will end tomorrow. It's not been a bad year, really. I got the flat emptied, I came away, like I'd wanted for ages. But they didn't really happen the way I would have liked them to. It is, as it always is, about gritting your teeth and bearing the situation.
I was looking at photographs of people in JU. There was an album that had me in splits, absolutely. Another that made me remember what it was like to be in college. Another, that seemed to suggest the people in it were happy, even though they had left college.
It's neither here nor there.
Like today. Which wasn't bad as a day, but was hard to swallow if you thought of the circumstance it came in.
One tiny day, when you wanted to rest and venture out, finish chores and eat out. Play with dogs, who would dirty your clothes, which you would have to wash. To know that you were away from your dog, in a job you did not enjoy, in a city you did not like and not know if there was anything in this world that could ever make you completely happy.
Like, ever.

It is like, bloody cold in Dilli. i am sitting at home with a cold and when i breathe out, i can see the dhowa. my hands are too cold to type. ami chollam.

The sense of a man standing close, hinting at softness. You keen towards that body, wanting to reach out and be enveloped in the warmth. You yearn with half-remembered longing for what it feels to be with a man.

Maybe it is just the novelty. Maybe it isn't missing what is familiar.

But here, in faraway Delhi, I am allowed to long for someone's touch, anyone who is halfway kind: to be kissed and loved and to be allowed to rest.
That there is a time for rest, a time to stop fighting, to stop looking over your back, that with some people, you can relax.

For the new year, can I ask for calmer days, easier times, to be loved up?

Today is my off-day. I wait for it like I didn't in Calcutta. But a large chunk of every off day is ultimately spent in catching up with chores. I head out in the evening, to some market or the other and come back with a bag heaving with groceries. Not any bag, actually. It's Madhura's bag, the one she liked so much and the one which I'd said I'd courier to her but never did. I like it so much as well. And well, embarrassment, the usual stuff.
I like grocering, I like what the act involves: looking through the gleaming, fresh vegetables, asking the rates, looking for a bargain, picking up the new cheese, or ice-cream or sauce (I bought Plum sauce today. And it's not horrendous, I tasted.) what I don't want to give away to it is time and energy.
Here, doing something for myself more often than not means not doing something else I want to do or which needs to be taken care of. Buying a 3g data card recharge coupon today meant not going to Majnu ka tilla for momo,something I'd been mulling over through the week. Hurrying back for grocery meant no time to look for new cell phone. Wanting to relax after a bath in the evening meant no cooking, ordering in food, which still irks me right now.
The floors haven't been swabbed in weeks, I haven't yet gotten around to cleaning out the box bed and putting in stuff there. The bed sheet needs to be washed as well, likewise for the kitchen top.
Then there is home. There is trouble at home. That apart, I feel terrible about staying away from my dog. Sometimes I fear she is slipping away from me. I look at the photos of her, us and there's an ache inside. I feel guilty for not taking the white dog in. It seems he must have been a pet sometime, he keens towards people so. I love to hug him. There was one evening, when they had all come up to my flat. I'd given them biscuits. One had left, but the other two, including the white one, settled down outside, a black one on a landing below and the white one just outside the flat. I sat with him on the stairs with an arm around his neck. But I had to go in and cook, so I shut the door on him eventually. It's terrible to have to do that, terrible.
And Delhi. Well, I know it as a fact that I am living in Delhi, I am assured of the amenities the so-called capital provides, I speak to vendors and Delhi residents in office with an accent approximating theirs, I dislike, I tolerate, I often smile. But I don't think I inhabit the city. There is much to see here, I am sure, but it's so far beyond my periphery. It's a mental void, really. I'm grateful for the things there are. I like my flat and I like Jalebi Chowk, I like the sunshine on my balcony, I speak to the pigeons that sit on my neighbour's balcony and live in trepidation that the tenuous calm will be broken.
I've had no one up here, save C and a junior colleague and don't feel the need to. On this one day of the week, I want to be left alone. I'd only want to be with someone who'd leave me alone. That apart, the house is in a mess and there's too many things to do. Always.
I'm afraid I'm becoming like those Bengalis in Delhi whose mental space is so entirely filled by Calcutta that they speak of Shymambazar and flurry of real estate activity at Rajarhat as if they'd find those if they stepped outside their rooms, as if those were problems that affected them on an immediate basis. It does feel good that at least numerically there are so many Bengalis in Dilli. But that's it, really. I don't think we carry a common core that makes us happy to be together just because we are Bengali.
I bought fish the other day from Jalebi Chowk and the boys dressing the fish were Bengalis from Araria. But they spoke with such a strong accent there wasn't much you could identify with. Still, I was grateful. I suppose that does makes me sound like a crazy bag lady who scans the crowds for a Bengali face. I do, and often my guess is right, but that's about it. There's nothing more to look forward to on an individual level, save drawing a bit of warmth from an imagined commonality.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3067501.cms

India's lost cult films

Are you one of those who were awake that night? Be warned that answering ‘yes’ will identify you as nearing 40 now, but back then in 1988, you were a bored, disaffected, possibly dope-smoking late adolescent who stayed up late to watch Doordarshan (DD) because there wasn’t anything else to see back then, and not much else to do late that night.

So you sat through all the crappy, presumably cut-price shows that DD filled its late night slot with: dour German detective serials, dull Russian costume dramas, bad British sitcoms, pathetic pop shows, and only very rarely something good, like when it showed Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Launderette.

That was a jolt, but it was nothing like the jolt that we got late that night in 1988 when a film with a really weird title was shown. Because In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones wasn’t set abroad, but in Delhi. And the kids in it weren’t foreigners, but students like us. And they didn’t speak American teen lingo, but the sort of Hindi laced slang we all used. And they dressed scruffy like us, and were almost definitely smoking dope and they had the same dim view of teachers that we did, and they were happy to cheat at exams. And while the lead actress — who also was the scriptwriter — was stunningly beautiful, she was in scrappy, sexy way quite unlike any other Indian actress we had ever seen. And it was funny, in a real, irreverent, smutty way that was miles from any Bollywood comedy.

It seems hard to imagine that many people saw it late that night, released without any publicity, and yet there are so many people whose eyes will light up if you mention Annie, Yamdhoot, Radha, Mankind, Kasozi’s worms, Lakes' crystal bowl and the fruit trees on the side of the railway line.

One night...

It would have to have been that night because DD never showed it again. According to Pradip Krishen, who directed the film, it almost didn’t get shown at all. “The film was commissioned by Bhaskar Ghosh who had promised to release it without changes. And he was actually watching it for the first time when he got a call from Rajiv Gandhi’s office telling him he was being sacked,” says Krishen.

Ghosh’s rather spineless successor had no desire to show such a pathbreakingly frank and funny film, but finally agreed to that one, late night, unheralded release. A few people did record it, and those videos became precious commodities, loaned grudgingly, watched to the point of disintegration and finally lost.

Since then the fate of Annie, as we’ll call it for short, has been much speculated on. One story is that DD has locked it away and refuses to release it from sheer perverseness or revenge for its irreverence. Another was that a producer had made away with the negatives. Or that the negatives have degraded. Over time the film’s mystique has developed, not always for the expected reasons.

I'm definitely not 40 and I've never doped. Watching the film made me remember what freedom tasted like. Once you've lived through the eighties, you'll always be a child of the 80s. Though technically, mine were the 90s. But it too was free of the glut of wealth and glitter.
Delhi seemed like a grey ole town in the film, and how I longed to live in it instead of the loud, boisterous city, a corner of which I now inhabit.
And I miss Doordarshan, miss the glut of choice, the dull, hot afternoons, often without electricity, the trance the heat would send you into.
Life was simpler, even if as sad. I really, really miss it.

It's getting to be 4 in the morning and what a hard day I had today. A bad day, more like. I was unslept, so was not alert at all, was slow, made horrendous mistakes, didn't have the right things to say and got into the boss's car along with a colleague and only later realised that I wasn't sure if he'd asked me. Not to mention that I didn't want this to become a regular habit. A news desk has so many different kinds of people, most often so hard to negotiate, and when you have a bad day, well, the weight of people seems to pile up.
At these times, I wonder if it wouldn't be nice if I were to find my boy when I returned and could go to sleep in the comfort of his arms. The black dog saw me when I returned at 1.40 today and he came straight up the stairs with me. I began feeling human again and then, sort of caught myself, because I couldn't allow myself to relax and put today behind me, because if I allowed this to be just another day, I would trip up again.
You wonder sometimes if you could escape the weight of dealing with people, personalities, if another office wouldn't be without these clashes, but then you realise that the only reason this seems to be so is because the new space is a void for you. And that there is no escape, except to recede. And it's too soon to do that here.

I am back.
at 6am, in delhi,
armed with 2gb worth of data transfer limit on a 3g sim,
on Linux.
with Britannia cheese for dinner that C so lovingly bought me as a going away gift.

to all i have missed in two months' absence from the net: priyanka, oli, ananya, madhura, dibbo.
my very loving, dear boy, who makes my head not feel like an alien space. you give me roots, reference, seemingly do not mind my horrendous rudeness, go see my dog and reassure me with pictures, tell me how my mother is, your parents, including your lovingly-barmy father, make me feel warm and loved, even though i've called them only once.
in the last two months, you have reassured me again and again and again. when i was afraid, when i was lonely and when i was depressed. you keep me connected to home. because of you, i know home is not lost to me, that i can reach out to them whenever i wish to.
you asked me to go and said that you would take care of my mother, when they would not give her medical insurance.
i am glad that you let me be, and reach out to me, even in my boringness, even when i feel unfriendly to everybody. i can tell you about my chores that give me peace. i know i will tell you about them again even though you listen with half a ear.
there are often such bad days, but i still feel glad i came out to do this. i am finally living my life, mundane as it is. even if it involves nothing but office and eating and doing never-ending chores at home. i am glad i could do this, in spite of being in a relationship. maybe your patience will wear thin sometime. but as of now, i revel in the freedom of living exactly as i please and of having a companion to reach out to.