I was looking at the stats of my blog today. Nobody reads my blog, like no one! I did change my address so that I could moan as much as I wanted without anyone finding out, but a big part of me does like being read, and being told I don't write too bad (!) My readership of two-and-a-half people dwindled to nothing when I decided I needed to hide, and that airing my feelings for public consumption was really not a good idea anymore, and that the whole business of honesty and putting myself out there to face the brickbats and the love, if any - well, all that was BS. I wouldn't change what I write to make it more consummable and not embarrassing to me, because I want to be able to write here about the same stuff, but some of it is rather naked, and I would rather not have people who I know but who aren't close friends, read it. I want lots of complete strangers to read it, though.
I watched a rather lovely movie yesterday. It was today really, cuz I watched it between 4 and 6 am. It's called Your Sister's Sister, and directed by a woman called Lynn Selton, and has a cast of 3 people: Rosemarie Dewitt, Emily Blunt, and my current crush, Mark Duplass. His surname will tell you that he must have at least some French in him, supported further by the fact that he is from New Orleans. He really is rather good looking and he plays a slimeball-ish midwife on The Mindy Project, my Thing to Watch of the moment. As they were saying in this long, lovely promo interview for the film, it has a lot of the actors as they are in reality, in the film.

Anyway, so, I was talking to this guy, a junior, gay, whom I've never met face à face; we've only spoken on chat and Facebook. With this guy, I can indulge all my curiosity (and fantasies) about homosexuality. He seems to live his life with an irresponsibility that I will never be able to muster. It would have been the dream once: fucking many, random people, who always seem to be available, with no emotions to worry about, with no social consequences. But after talking to him yesterday, such a life didn't seem so charming anymore. It seemed pointless, and then, scary. It must be so lonely to live your life with so few anchors. I was listening to this really charming and weird interview of Truman Capote with Robert Frost. (Who was asking him rather puerile questions, which would have passed off as charming and risque because it was 1969, and Capote was also very sportif about it. And I do think Americans enunciated their English better 40 years ago.) Listening to him answer Frost on whether he'd had more friendships or sexual liaisons, I wondered how lonely it must be, to die without a family and partner, or blood relations, when you are old and tired. My friend, this gay guy, he seems to be romping across continents with everyone he is attracted to, but then you imagine what would happen if this guy was sick, and needed people's help, but he's completely fucked himself out of the mainstream, and they wouldn't care if he lived or died.
I fear I was too open with him, and fear consequences, because Tinkerbell that he is, he has no responsibility to keep what I said to himself. He'll go "give somebody some goss" about this random senior who, do you know, said she was open to a homosexual experience, and that she thought everyone was potentially bisexual. Well, I don't suppose I said the last, though I believe so.

Footnote: Somebody on Facebook wrote about their first experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I'll tell you my one and only experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I used to work in Calcutta, then. On my day off, sad, depressed, because my kind, accommodating fuckwit of a boyfriend never spent enough time with me, and well, because it wasn't his day off, I buoyed myself up resiliently to go experience something I'd heard spoken about a lot. It was winter and I remember being cold, people looking at me strangely for being the only woman eating alone in that cubbyhole of a place in Shyambazar, and that the mutton was tough and very very very oily and the platter came with sweet tamarind pickle, which I think is completely pointless. By itself, going off to try kasha mangsho at Golbari's not such a terrible thing. I've gone to tonnes of places alone (and since realised that I am happier travelling and eating in company and that it need not be with my best friend or the person I am sleeping with). But the experience of Golbari is inflected with the frustration of working in Calcutta at a deadend job, when I wanted to a) go live in another city b) have a job I actually liked, and which I had a reason associated with the quality of the work, to keep. Most importantly, it was frustration for having tied my life with one who could not make me happy and did not care to try, for whom I was making all these compromises that took me further and further away from the person I wanted to be.
It has been a good thing, the break-up. Hugh Laurie's The Oranges, horrible movie though it was, had some moments which rang true. There is this point at the end of the film where Laurie's wife slaps his teenybopper girlfriend and then says, "Someday I'll thank you for this." That's how it's been for me. And though terrible things have followed, it is still a good thing that I am free of him.
Yesterday, I realised I didn't even feel that terrible hate towards him anymore. I think getting in touch with him, taking his help, and on occasion, talking with the old familiarity, has helped me move on from it. Yes, it feels like a bitch when he takes off for his trip to the Him-uh-laa-yas with his parents and wife, when I cried myself hoarse because I wanted to travel with him, but it doesn't occupy my thoughts beyond the occasional moment, and I can say I don't really care what he does.

This was not a footnote at all, and this post is longer than all permissible limits. It's the kind the mad momma writes, those which make me want to hurl the laptop. But then, hardly anyone comes here, and it's sort of my diary, so...

Everyone seems to be having fun, partners to hang with, handsome ones to be attracted to. Only I am sitting in my corner, with mistiris and myriad workmen as my companions, and desperately ignoring a deadline. I stink from not bathing, I don't have cigarettes at home and I haven't slept in 24 hours. And I am listening to Hugh Laurie:

He really is quite lovely, isn't he?

I haven't had sex in such a long time, and last year seems so far away and not so celebratory in hindsight. I don't want to have sex on those terms again. But it would have been nice to have a summer affair while I was here (as if that ever happens), but it's already getting time to leave and I am not ready to leave. I wish I could stay on for many more months.
Does everyone not get enough sex? That is a question I have pondered often. But you can't really ask, can you? It's seems voyeuristic and obscene. I wonder, do all my classmates and acquaintances having babies by the armloads, enjoy the sex? Or is it just to babymake, and enjoyment, if it happens, is a bonus? I am totally divorced from the worldly-wise, so this is something I shall never find out.
I will, however, watch Nobody Walks, which might be an annoyingly pointless movie, as Olivia Thirlby's maudlin acting suggests in the trailer.

I am almost done with getting our flat painted and repairing the myriad things that seem to fall apart continuously. But there is still a lot of work left on my mother's health front. And the dogs, the dogs. Sold off a trunk-full of my father's college notebooks (meticulously compiled, much in demand when he was in college, apparently) and books. The pages were falling apart in some, some had been eaten away. Mita took away a maths book, hoping, I think, it would be useful to her 7-year-old son at some point. Each to their own motibhrom. Sold off my college notes and xeroxes as well, mostly MA stuff. There's still all the BA stuff to sort through. Sold some books in College St as well. After 7 years, it is the time to let go. Another series of losses to begin one's days on a clean slate. To be wiped clean again after more loss and some more years spent cauterising it.
I discovered again this time that if you keep at something without letting up, even with fits of apathy, it gets done. If I were another person, I would have accomplished much in these months, but even so, the sum total isn't too bad. The break didn't happen: but then, you take the direction laid out for you, and this was pretty much an invitation to tie up loose ends. I connected with my ex: I have used as much of his help as I have needed. These are things it's best not to attach emotion to. I shall never forgive, but my present needs take priority over everything else. Who knows if there ever will be a setting right of things. There is no cosmic balance. Some people, too many people, live on the edge because that is the path laid out for them. Maybe there will never be a marriage, maybe it will always be taking care of ma, maybe I'll meet someone many years hence: jar jemon jibon hoy, resist kore labh nei.

The rest, you know. Meeting friends after a long time, spending more time with A than I have in many, many years. As if we were in hiatus from living. I wish this had lasted longer. O's present never seems so unbearable that she would need a hiatus from it. 

I never thought I'd quote from True Blood:

Sookie: To be honest, Alcide, I am not sure I know anything anymore. It's starting to feel like there's no rhyme or reason left in this world.
Alcide: That's what death does, whips the ground right from under your feet, makes you wonder if it was ever there to begin with. But it was, it'll come back.

I used to think, in very juvenile vanity, that I never regret. Because you are the way you are, and if you went back and found yourself in the same situation again, you'd do the same.
No longer. If I had another chance, I would go back and do it differently. But I won't pray, I won't ask for miracles again. There never are, only people, and their effort bearing fruit against the odds.

It's over. I am broken, and done. I will do what life enjoins me to do, I will try my best to take care of ma, but that part of me that hoped for new beginnings, that was grateful to be given the chance to love, I want it to become inert for a long time. I don't want this to happen again. Oh yes, I hope, I want it so much, but I don't want to take a step forward. If, at some point, I am totally alone, I will look for another to love. But never before that.
Life is nasty, brutish and short, as Thomas Hobbes said. If I had nothing left to lose, I would say, ar keno? Ebar toh shesh korlei hoy. I am resigned, for whatever else life chooses to throw at me, and there will be more. There is no point rebelling, you live the best you can, and when it's over -- your life, i.e. -- it is.

And I will never forgive myself, for all their deaths. Don't pretend, don't forget. Elide, perhaps, to survive, but don't let down your guard. Never create that bond again, never have a child, there will be no one to hold you when that one goes, and it will hurt more than a dog, that I can guarantee.

Have a will, create a trust for ma, so that she survives if something happens to you.

I am here to write about Jim Halpert. I meant to the last time, before I got diverted. It bothers me that I like him so much, because he is very similar to my ex. The same mild-natured, fun-loving, etc.
Thirty is so old to have that kind of crush like one did in school, when it just hurt and you didn't know why, and you knew no way of reducing the pain. Of course I can do other things, but one wants to moon, to think of this imaginary character, and wish for, I don't know what: definitely not the same kind of person again, but I dunno, the sweetness, good-lookingness, the fun? I can't imagine wanting to be with a person like him, he doesn't really excite one, yet I suppose, it's a fallout of being drawn to the same prototype. As A said, you look for improvements, but the skeleton remains the same.
I was feeling terrible because he was so similar to my ex, and it felt like a terrible betrayal that such people are ostensibly nice and easy to get along with, that nothing would make it obvious that they have the capacity to hurt you so. Yet, Jim does, doesn't he, in the way he barges in like a bull in a chinashop to declare his affections for Pam, and expects her to reciprocate. There is, of course, a 'normal' way to look at it, but I keep thinking that he was essentially callous.
Then, haha, there is also the crush on Krasinski, who seems of unnaturally buoyant mood and good humour: from his Twitter account, it would seem that nothing can get him down as he walks the straight and hard working path to success. You should watch his performance on Late Night show with Jimmy Fallon to understand what I mean. :D
Meanwhile, I wish I could get over this crush soon. It's destroying my routine.
I am going to AP tomorrow.

What I has been doing: it has all become too much, so it's time to write it in a list.

It's summer again, and today, I cut across the maath at India Gate from National Gallery of Modern Art, tramping down with my Roerichs and those sandals with small heels that still hurt sharply and with an insect bite that feels like someone's hammered a nail on your foot. It was lovely, notwithstanding foot hurting and emerging soreness of my inner thigh thanks to dubious condition of my leggings (don't ask): it was five-ish, the roddur had just stopped blasting through, and there wasn't a soul in sight. It was quite something:being in the heart of Delhi, and not have anyone around. I could probably have squatted and peed.
I was going to Bengali Market to meet my friend, R. I walked halfway, and then took an auto.
Places I went to today:
The Claridges, on Aurangzeb Road, which is very tree-lined and lovely
YWCA Kitchen, by Metro (felt rather nice after a long time), where I sat for two hours and methodically read through two issues of Eye, The Indian Express supplement and ate a rather nice platter of a lamb chop, a thick pork sausage (quite like a penis, if you ask) and a huge chicken patty, rather well-flavoured, and a milky cold coffee. Twenty-seven per cent added to the bill thanks to the legions of taxes with which you will be punished for eating out: it added about Rs 150 to the bill.
Thence, to NGMA, which was closing, so I walked straight, like a philistine, into the souvenir shop, and bought the Roerich prints I had been eyeing for so long. I will laminate and stick them up all around my room, so that I look at them and remember Ladakh. I wish I had time to look around at the photos. I didn't realise they would be so engaging. I just remember Amrita Shergill, Jamini Roy, Company paintings, Raja Ravi Verma and probably some Ramkinkar (such a lovely name) Baij from last time with O, when I slept on the yellow sofa.
Bengali Market turned out surprisingly nice, though Costa Coffee, with its industrial and tasteless peach iced tea and extravagant prices was intensely depressing. R came and ordered more gunk (she likes the gunk, and doesn't consider it to be gunk, obviously).
From there, we went to Pahargunj, which turned out rather nice, even though it had gotten to be desperately sultry by then, ar ami gorom e, amar tights er jalay ar pokar kamore hnaashphaash korchhilam. But, but, we bought shoes! Shoesses, soft ones, which  I never get. And she bought Kolapuri chappals, which she wanted. We walked down the main street to look at bags and clothes and earrings. We ended up The Metropolitan (where else) and she ate a rather tasty dish of chicken breast (always sounds obscene) and I had dubious caesar salad and ickily-sweet iced tea. We chatted for a long time, and then it was back home on a protracted journey where I couldn't wait to reach home and shed my tights.

It was a very full and enjoyable day, and I should really be asleep, but I am not.

This week has been harrowing because of the heat and The Office. I am considering hiring a rickety AC, because the cooler doesn't seem to be making much difference in 45 degrees centigrade. The Office has consumed my nights, even on days I have been very tired, like today. I have been watching John Krasinski's videos like an addlehead obsessive, though it has helped wear out the shine a bit.

In other news, dadu. A.
Are we really cool and special people that we fail to find someone good enough to live with? Are we independent and feisty and unable to compromise, or is it just sad that we haven't found kind, nice, fun people to share our lives with, and can't seem to be able to do with less.
It's annual sex time again, and I haven't found anybody. Hopefully it will be in better circumstances than last time.
I am enjoying living by myself. I was cooking a lot until this week's heat struck. 

This blog is where I have complained without restraint for the last six years. Here's some more.
I am in Hyderabad, have been for the last three days. The days have been a dazed blur. I must have met about 20 people, which is an 'only', and have come back meaning to fall asleep immediately, but keeping awake again till 2am. My job has become a wasteland. Why am I doing this professional harakiri? Why am I catering to the whims of my clueless boss? This is that juncture again. And I spoke to my ex, and result, it feels like I am back in that old place again. That desperate hurt that refuses to go, that bafflement at someone being able to do this with impunity. It's like I have to start it all over again, with a trip to McLeodgunj, ending in a long conversation in darkness, down sharp bends on a mountain road: conversations had again and again, with different people, examining the situation from varied angles, the need to talk, talk, talk it all away. At the end of which had come blessed relief, a scab that no longer hurt, and then there was Ladakh, and X and sex to wash it all away, and blossoming again into life, taking control and standing up, and being proud, so proud. And O and C and A. A being kind, and holding and listening, pulling me into her loving vortex and giving me relief I didn't even know I needed, C listening, listening, on those blistering afternoons when I stood on the balcony, and tried to find a method to the maze that I felt I had been pulled into, O repeating again and again and again, of love and strength and happiness, and hugging me, and bringing me along with her across Delhi: oh that lovely, scorching Delhi 2012 summer, winding through CR Park, Lajpat, old Delhi, kakima, Kutty and ma. And then I went away to Ladakh, and I went away again, and slowly things fell in place.
That was what it took to stand up again. You can't re-run that gamut. I haven't the wish, I don't want to repeat. I want to be able to shed him, shed all the mens who do this. This summer will be hard enough without. There can't be this added masala to the madness.

I was going to begin this with 'Dear Sir', since I write official emails all day. Life seems to be closing in, having caught me in its grasp. The flat requires too too much work, which I don't think I can manage while holding down the responsibilities this job entails. Is suicide an option? Just saying.
Aar parchhi na. An infantile parent, an undisciplined dog, the flat, the job, not enough money, the need for a lot more money, the fear of whether I can do this alone, the longing for someone to share this. What have I done? What am I doing? When will this ever finish? When will I ever be free? I really really really want to be free. I had hoped to leave my job and go away to Ladakh this year. But I can't. I have to stay in Delhi all of this year.
My leave, if I get two weeks' leave, will have to be spent in Kolkata, getting the flat, the myriad payments and investments in order. That travel will have to be timed with court appearances, so that we are in Delhi when we have to be in court. After the initial court work is over (or so the lawyer blithely said), I can take my family back to Kolkata and leave them there.
Yes, people die, people go mad. I still have sanity, I have food, a roof over my head, parent and dog are very well within the bounds of manageability. Kintu, kintu: one will admit this is a lot for one person. A person who does not enjoy responsibility, who does not get her kicks out of solving twenty problems at once, who would rather have mental peace than a fat paycheck.

Summer will pass with Ladakh turning all sunshiny and ethereal again, and I will be here. Maybe winter 2013 for the long trip.

Dear baba,

Seven years to that day. I hope you are happy where you are. We never do anything to remember that day, because till now, your absence was lived by us all the time, in varied ways. If I were alone, though, I would have done something. I would have gotten a nice photo of you framed: my favourite is the one of you laughing. We hardly have any photos of you. And I would have done something: lit a dhoop in the room, remembered you, ki jaani. Like I am remembering you now. A status message about Aminia brought back that afternoon, when I was in school, and ma wasn't with us, when we had gone there for food, a rare treat. We ordered the Aminia Special, which you said was their best dish, which you knew from your college days. But what arrived was a piece of meat in jhol, with a floating onion and tomato alongside, and you lamented how standards had gone bad. And I now think that your visits to Aminia must also have been rare treats, money being as scarce as it was then.
It is hard to construct a father as a person, dear father, when he is no more. And there are only memories to be revisited and reconstructed, examined in different ways at different times in your own life, as you feel more tolerant and greater longing for a man who is no longer there in flesh and blood, with his idiosyncracies, malices, anger, demons. Deaths can never be reconciled. Are the dead benign presences, or do they change into malicious gamechangers? One hopes for the former, one hopes strongly that one's parent remains a benign presence, or often, not even that. 
Life has taken such a turn, dear father, that one can no longer imagine what it would be like to have you around with me at 30. I would have been another person. Now, we concentrate on keeping ma alive, we grow to love her more even as we fight more than ever. We love our dog, or daughter, the star of our lives who brings two women together. This is my family, baba. 
I have thought of you when times were hard, when paths are difficult to tread. I pray for your love, I curse you for leaving me, I think of what you would have said if you had seen me thus. I am sure you would have held me close this time last year, kept the world at bay and condemned those who broke my heart. If you are close by, you must be appalled by the way I have been leading my life these many years, how close to the edge I tread. You would think of why I do this, and you would also know. And you would let me have my way, you would know that each one lives their life, baba. You know, I would accept death the way you accepted death, without thinking of protesting. Like you, I think I accept what life gives me. It feels warm to know we are tied in this, baba. 
Oh baba, the mystery of living. Tumi ki more giye bujhte perechho er mane ki? Shei orangutan tar chhobi dekhechho, je matha dheke agun theke bachte cheshta korechhilo: dekhte thik manusher moton. Ei koshter kothay kon mane achhe, baba? Tobu eta notun noy. As long as there has been life, there has been pain and brutality. Are we a particularly despicable species? Would it help if, like the Poor Priest, one were to spend one's life atoning for the sins of others?

I have taken to smoking, though only up to 3 a day. No reason save that I like it. 
And as I grow older, I hope I will better accept how dire this living this.

Bhalo theko, baba.

So, I must have written here that I am relationship-free now. I am here to say that after reading this blog that I do, I am glad once again that I am, because I too was going to settle for a lifetime of loneliness and far worse things besides. It would have been a shame to give up so much of my space and dreams to live with a piece of shit.

খুব কাশি হচ্ছে। ফ্লপি পাশে শুয়ে আছে। এমন সব সময় মনে হয় কাউকে যদি বলা যেত এই তিনটের সময়, "শোন, আমার কাশতে কাশতে গলায় জালা করছে, গায়ে একটু একটু ব্যথা করছে।" কিন্তু বাবাকে হারানো মানে এই privilege lose করা। আর কৌশিক কে না বলতে পারা হয়ত খারাপ না।
Well, I feel small and rather sorry for myself. If I were F, I would have curled up like her and stuck close to my human.

This was quite a weekend. If all weekends were like this life would be fine, bearable even. On Sunday, I went for the mother of daywalks, through Asola wildlife sanctuary. With Linus. L navigates by googlemaps, and he navigates. Me, I find out about the route, see if it works for me and go alone. I did not find much information on the Net and presumed that L didn't rely on googlemaps alone. So, net net, we were stamping through barely-there tracks, cutting through REALLY thorny branches, with innumerable scratches and thorns in our shoes. I expected - and found that L did too - it to be a 2/3-hour walk at most. I took 600 ml of water, accordingly and munchies. In the event, it turned out to be a daylong thing, with me wondering constantly whether we would be able to get out while there was light. I was thirsty and hadn't pottied, which together I find quite incapacitating. Anyway, it wasn't all that bad, because we walked almost constantly, our longest break must have been 15 minutes long, and though at moments I felt very tired, it didn't come to the point where I did not care, or thought I couldn't go anymore. Must have been close, though. L has done this often at home in Sweden, and he was fairly confident throughout that we would come out at the west. He knew which was west, for one. We found much to chatter on about, and he was a really nice companion, I have no idea how. I can't point out particular aspects of him which make it easy to get along with him, or things which I might have in common with him. Maybe he was just polite. Turned out, we had walked about 7 km, though it felt like 10. The objective was to reach one Bhardwaj Lake, marked on googlemaps, which we didn't - we skirted around it unknowingly - but we did pass one huge lake towards the beginning, before we entered Asola - probably the CITM lake 1- and saw 2 big, but very shallow, drying-up lakes and one biggish, full lake before we left. We started our walk from the opposite of a college on Pali Road, down a track that began with an open garbage dump. About 10 minutes' walking took us to the first CITM lake. Surajkund is close by, apparently. We met people who were coming back, some of whom were appreciative, some condescending, one who joyously called us lovebirds. But once past the first lake, we didn't encounter a soul, except a goat herder in the beginning, and construction workers at the end, near the place which is supposed to be a 'shelter' for monkeys who are picked up from across the city to be dumped here.
Our only companions were cows, and L said we could rely on them, but they might not be in a hurry to go west and get out, like us, right? We found them at 3 points on our way: once, when the path we were on abruptly ended where the land seemed to have sunk a couple of feet and there were cows on the other end. I politely declined the offer to go down on our bums and climb up the other end, though in retrospect, it was as easy as some of the harder stuff we did. The other point was where we were picking our way through rocks and thorny branches, and there was a cow who wanted to pass. We looked at each other for a bit. It waited and then went along, through the thorns as if they were light leaves. I now know cows are thick-skinned. The third was when we were walking through even denser bush and suddenly there were cows leaping alarmedly out of L's way. They were not reassured at all by what he had to say, viz., what's the matter, cow, etc.
The tracks, such as they were, were barely broad enough for a person to pass through, and you had to remove thorny branches out of the way. I acquired a stick - a thorny branch with no thorns at one end, where I held it - to get the branches out of my way, but L used his hands pretty much. By the end of the walk, his hands were completely scarred and very red. For a plump person, he is quite fit and agile. Parts of the way were rocky. We climbed up and down the rocks. There was a spot, towards the end of the way, a shady clearing (and we had almost no shade throughout, which made one very thirsty) with cool, black stones at one end. We just rested our bodies along it. The stones were heavenly. I couldn't have yearned for anything else at that moment. But that was about 10 minutes, and soon I was back to saying which animal I would like to be at that moment (at various points along the route, I had wanted to be a cow, a dog, a monkey and a bird, depending on the terrain and how hot and thirsty I felt). Around this part, there were the remains of an old wall. Perhaps this used to be the earlier border of the sanctuary?
We found several feathers along the way, or rather L did, and I picked them up. I would like to get them identified. We also saw a nilgai, an eagle which I couldn't identify, babblers, I think, and birds which I found later were Oriental Magpie Robins. We heard peacocks too.
L brought cinnamon buns which he had baked. I ate one of that, and my biscuits. No, they weren't cinnamon buns. Something else, but same mix of spices.
The last kilometre or so was on an earth road for vehicles. That's when we started feeling the aches and pains. We came out at Bhatti gaon. They have put up a continuous, huge, green plastic wall to demarcate the sanctuary from the village. It is quite a monstrosity, but people have made holes along the bottom of it. There are also gates. We met several pigs at this end, and man, were they scared when they saw us creeping along through the trees. One adult squealed and ran for its life #stupid peeg. The piglets with their dirty feet merely took us in with beady eyes. And then there was a black dog with a collar, who was very territorial. He wouldn't stop barking because we were there, although we were being quite fleet-footed. He meant business, alright. His mouth looked scary, shattered, like someone had bashed it in at some point.
I was quite glad to be out of this typical Jat village. We had dosas at Naivaidyam in Hauz Khas village and I rapidly called it a day, because I was feeling very odd by then, what with the no water, no sleep and no potty. I would like to go back again.
Long narratives make me fed up.

P.S. I liked Skyfall. It's quite grand, Judi Dench's extreme dodderiness and Ralph Fiennes's constant pottyface notwithstanding. I wonder what it is with Daniel Craig. He is quite charmless, has ears that stick out: he definitely fits the prototype of the East European goon far better. Yet one likes him. Maybe it's the suits, maybe the humane thing gets to people. Skyfall the droughty estate is beautiful.

The most beautiful thing

Faye Wong in Chunking Express

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

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

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

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

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

Songs I've been listening to recemment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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