i was very tired at five today. i had a fever, it was a stressful day at work and my one only friend in the new office hadn't come in. at five, i had my first break for a smoke. i came downstairs, took my usual position behind the potted plants, and had that weary drag evading the steady glare from the sardarji auto-part shop owner across the street. it seems, he doesn't mind other women smoking. but i get the full blast of his disapproving glare. or maybe, he just plain doesn't like me.

anyway, tired, irritated and feeling decidedly run-down, i happened to look up from the busy street, shop fronts and chaos. i saw a banyan tree. not a particularly impressive one, but its leaves were shiny green. how i don't know. it hadn't rained any in the past few days. then i looked at it closely, there were little clusters of red fruits. also gleaming, to the extent fruits in a banyan tree can gleam. i remembered a story from a long ago childhood favourite. the usual ingredients of a wicked step-mother and a little goat-herd boy and some pathos were obviously present in it. but the star of the story was a banyan tree. it had befriended the boy. when the step mother couldn't kill the boy, she turned her wrath towards his friend. she made all its fruits bitter. but in the stories , the noble and the virtuous always win. the tree managed to save its friend and because it was so noble, its other friends- the birds refused to leave it. and that's why till this day, banyan trees are the first place where birds nest and people seek refuge.

i felt so much better afterwards.

usual rant

i did not have time to eat lunch, almost didn't salvage dinner from a remarkably hungry and self-centred family, my "i love you" lighter has stopped working, ALL thanks to the people who first laugh at it and THEN go on to play with it for forty minutes. my smoking habit is becoming hazardous for my knees, in the midst of this unbearable heat i'm running a bleeding temperature and feel like a beetle. i need new clothes, new shoes, new accessories , yes, yes i DO need a new apple notebook - never mind what i use it for, its none of your business, and i need to find a new gym. the first thing that hits me when i walk in is a stench. industrial strength BO in a closed air-conditioned environment simply does NOT work for me. thank you very much. and wipe off that expression from your face, it has nothing to do with my natural laziness and reluctance to do anything remotely requiring effort.

i'll buy malibu when i patent this

we found the elixir of happiness yesterday and in our worship of words and ourselves, proceeded to lose it pronto. what i vaguely remember is like this - you have to pick things you care about and shake off the rest. finding the appropriate things to be passionate about is the key to a lifetime of happiness. yes, we are not precluding unhappiness from this - whatever gives you intense happiness also has the potential to give you much unhappiness too. but then its always worth it, to go for it.
to define hapiness is ofcourse beyond me - but we agreed to agree that its not the mere absence of unhappiness.it is like one of those things taught in stat01, somethings can't be measured. there are just indicators for them.

just, what works for different people - not the same things , at all.

but rule of thumb - a good book, at least one good friend, some flowers, a smile for no explainable reason, a long look at the sky and feeling good about it, maybe liril soap and pink bathtowels, being able to sit quietly by yourself for a stretch of time and not minding, finding comfort in silence,finding comfort in conversation, a mindscape of your own, a dreamscape that should ideally change as you go through days, weeks or years, finding something you care about enough, willingness to let it go no matter how bad it hurts,dancing on your own with joy, love - requited/unrequited/vanquished/forgotten/forbidden/ past/present/future, cat naps, junk food, junk jewellery, cheap shiny bobbles like a "i love you" mini-lighter, smiling dogs, random kids walking up to kiss your knees, ability to appreciate glitter gel pens and glow in the dark toys and yes, maybe some degree of success ( ONLY by your own definition of it) - are usually things that work as reliable indicators. by no means is this list an orderly or a complete one. but it sure works.

ps - the "i love you" lighter is bright red and pink and costs only Rs7.

meaningless collage

i don't know why or how i ever came to be the person who never takes or keeps photographs, saves e-mails, keeps old cards or shops for mementoes. tonight, i wish i was more normal. keeping it all in the mind is tiring- it offers me a kind of kaeidoscopic view of events, which changes by the second and also, i'm scared of getting alzheimer's and forgetting everything worth remembering.
my recent-most break is the object of my obsession now. it was the first and the last break i had in a year and now all i can remember, after two weeks, is sort of a bricolage of mini-scenes.

#1 a very harried afternoon, trying to get a print-out of my ticket, with C calling every half an hour to impress on me the importance of checking-in around fourteen hours early; me dutifully doing a trasferrence act on the SW, who to give him credit, bore it all with magnificent grace.
#2 being hyperactive with excitement at my first flight in India, so what if its air deccan.
#3 checking in - the SW's backpack is taken out, a bashful lady with a half smile moves over and a grinning guy takes over. the bag is unzipped to reveal a hoard of fresh clean undies. we start laughing extremely loudly, the SW quips - janaab fauladi hai. the guy blushes, looks at the Cow and me and says, "madam, yeh andar ki baat hai"
#4 excitement continues with trolley racing
#5 excitement subsides with realisation that the flight is delayed by a couple of hours.
#6 SW and Cow go white because the flight takes off during a mini thunderstorm and glare at me when i laugh at them
#7 inedible food, zero service, falling asleep on the way back from the loo and being taken as lost in a plane causing some panic to the Cow and the SW.
#8 reaching mumbai, soooo glad to find the airport loo.
#9 being taken to a dhaba where Mr S solemnly told us amitabh bachchan and shatrughan sinha ate in the 70's.
#10 interminable journey into the night in a car that had an ac set to arctic temperatures and a single CD containing all the songs by a loathesome creature called Himesh reshamiya.
#11 blinking and then opening my eyes to find the car going off the road, R reaching out steering the wheels with manic expression on her face.
# 12 three hundred quests to find a place to pee in.
#13 getting there
#14 getting into the sea. this is more complicated than it sounds. i love the sea, but i'm scared of it. i need people to hold my hands and tell me at the crucial moment to jump. then i get fully hit by the wave and grin like a maniac. it was no problem. i have good friends. except , one morning, just when a bggy hit, M let go of hand. his shorts fell off. almost. thought it was hilarious.
#15 thinking that i have a warped sense of humor. MY pants almost fell off, turned to find Mr S clutching at the back pocket of my denims for dear life.nothing funny about that. really, i need to grow up.
#16 R and me going in to check out a nightclub, leaving the rest of them on the street and then totally forgetting them to dance like devils, and then acting very contrite the rest of the night.
#17 three breakfasts on the beach
#18 pictionary on a hot afternoon with a bottle of bailey's and the most heinous criminalistic tendencies in people who would stop at nothing to win a game
#19 M's snoring, the Cow's special powers that are tied to her specs
#20 a beautiful dinner, courtesy M
#21 watching R relax
#22 piano massage
#23 throwing a tantrumling because i was feeling sick, everyone else throwing a tantrumling because of the presence of a perfectly inoccuous and otherwise nice family member of the S's. being human takes too much toll on us.
#24 the beach in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and at night
#25 being hit in the stomach realising that even a kid like SW gets it that unloving a person is the hardest act.
#26 weird lazy afternoon conversation with each of us trying to figure out our lives
#27 SW's delight at being in the same bed with 3 women
#28 US Club, Tajmahal Hotel and Little Idlis
#29 SW's remarkable self-restraint and insistence that we do NOT change our tickets
#30 the first view of bombay skyline and THEN being hit with the mother of all traffic snarls.
#31 reaching the airport about 10 minutes before takeoff to find plane has been delayed.not deccan though.
#32 the sense of rejuvenation that only friends can bring about, which hasn't left me ever since

make your list

mycotoxin, quit being a lazy bum and update your blog. everyday, i open the page with great anticipation and then close the window cursing. this is not good for my BP.
gullu and sister, please do not be silent spectators. if you leave occasional comments, i will not eat you alive. actually, i'll be abjectly grateful. mailed in comments are delightful, but don't quite offer the same thrills.
the rest of you, ditto. actually ditto AND do start writing. you don't really have to share a blog if you don't feel like it, its just great fun writing. do it for your own sake.
now down to what i actually started out to blog about, but quite bypassed in order to get my tirade right - let's not joke about getting things in perspective. it is one of those done to death pop-psychology strategies, but it is actually worth doing a stock-taking. by all means, stand back and think. if you have stuff that afford you even a minute's joy, take notice of it. once you start, its a great thing. list them for yourself, list them for me. i'd love to hear what are the things you hold sacred in your life. what are the things you thank your stars for.
if you're good, i'll tell you about the office klepto.

counting blessings

it seems like the right time to count my blessings. exactly one year back, i felt like i will not be able to go on.yes, the darkness renders the light meaningful. but sometimes, you just feel a little less able to cope with things. a year later, today i can't wait to find out what life has in store for me around the next corner.

my transition phase ended with the recent trip i had. it was one of those breaks you take with friends, laugh incessantly, feel totally at home and do not even entertain the idea of having a meaningful conversation. it was just clean, mindless fun. i came back with the realisation that probably the only space where you should seek to be totally at home is with your friends. the rest - being at home in a job, being at home in a city, playing the 'right' part - is not really essential for survival. you should have those things ideally, but you won't stop being the person you are, if those don't work out.

i came back with a sense of calm and a contentment that i had lost , quite some time back. and then more stuff happened to lift me up to levels of euphoric existence. what more am i waiting for? this seems like the right time to do a stock taking.

- i'm very thankful that a year back, i had courage enough to ask for what i wanted. and throughout the year that proceeded, though i came close enough to giving up, i did not. though at times it took major faking of guts i did not have. but then again i'm a divine being, aren't i?
- i'm very thankful that i have friends to stand by me and hold my hands when i hurt myself. sometimes, they even go against their sense of self-preservation to try and stop me. i'm thankful that they don't give up on me.
- i'm very thankful that i learnt to let go
- i'm very thankful that i was taught to value the right things in life
- i'm very thankful that ocassionally i have it in me to make people i love a little bit more happy.
- i'm very thankful that i get what i want from life. yes, sometimes it is scary. but the other occasions more than make up for it.
- i'm very thankful that i have more than one person in my life who is happy or sad on my behalf.

* i'm also very thankful about my new slippers, the black top, orange rosebush and several other things. but its kind of flaky to mention those on this list.

i found the answer to one of the most profound questions that has bothered mankind. there is NO life after vacation. if one does exist, then its not worth living.more on this later. now i have to go to work. why? i don't know.

academia calling

S went to do an ethnographic study. those babies need a lot of interviewing and everything else. so he went over to call in on one of the people he really needed to talk to and was told "wo to chali gayin hai". being the patient bengali academic, he asked "shaam tak ayegi kya?" he was given the once over and was told "aj to unhka kreeyakaram hai". scene being bihar, the conversation that followed was not pretty.
he also spent a hundred and fifty rupees and a considerable number of cigarette packets in bribes each day, just to access material in public archives and libraries, got almost beaten up by constables of the bihar state police for taking pictures, shunned as a horrible hindu for objecting to the presence of twenty dogs in a reading room and to top it all he walked into a beer bar and ordered (successfully) buttered toast.
i'm feeling very ambivalent about going back to grad school.

i have misplaced/ lost/ let someone steal my passport, credit card, spare keys to my office in PA that i won't need anymore, my tax returns, my I-20 and my social security card. i think there is something very wrong with me. on some level, i know this is a big disaster, well mostly because upon hearing this, my friend stared at me in silence for 45 seconds before pronouncing "fuck" with seventeen syllables in it.

yet, i can't be bothered to get worked up about it. the worst it had done to me is provoke a deeply philosophical ( my kind of deep, which is like barely skimming the surface of the shallow end, holding the instructor's hand and clutching for life a life-jacket) question. if somebody steals my identity, can i go out and get a new one? i spent quite some time deciding on one and i am still not certain.

mostly i'd like one of those shiny, cool, sophisticated girl-woman kind of thing, with lots of inner balance, and a peaceful and tranquil core, propensity to like pastel shades and crystals and things of the sort. but i'd want the additional powers to shoot a mean one through the hoop and dance like pixies and eyeball a bartender over how a drink should be mixed. i'd also like my new identity to have gun or a biggish flick-knife and the ability to whip it out to totally crush deserving candidates into submission, without having to worry about the law and other tedious things like rights, wrongs dah dah da.

i can't help feeling a bit pleased about an identity theft.

them

he thought coconut oil was the only thing that could be done to his hair. she thought elvis presley was the last word when it came to styling. and of course elvis WAS the mark of god on earth, with that voice, that charm, and everything else.

he could speak for an eternity on the inricacies of indian classical music, and the closest brush he had with music of her choice, was when he heard janice joplin (much, much later in both their lives) and said she sounds like gangubai hangal.

she thinks elvis could still be alive somehwere, he could not sleep and spent the night walking on the streets the evening amir khan sahib died. she waited up for him.

she had been a heartbreaker, with her own share of heartaches. he didn't believe in love, not even when he was knocked out cold by it and couldn't recover from it in this lifetime. he still claims that there is no such thing as love, with a cocky grin. she just smiles at him and lifts her eyebrows.

she was silk, he was khadi ( he later had some khadi bell bottoms made to strike a compromise, which needless to say, didn't score quite as much as he expected).

she used to laugh at him, he used to laugh with her. they still laugh a lot. they share a passion for finding humour in the strangest situation.

he had one steel trunk in his newly rented apartment. she cut up her best sari to make a table cloth for it, so they won't have to eat on the floor, till they saved money enough to buy a proper dining-table. they didn't quite manage to save it, because they were perpetually broke buying books and flowers and book-cases and flower-vases. a disgusted friend took a hundred bucks from him and had a table with its own set of four weird chairs delivered to the flat.


she will not let the remote go and would sit through an unwatchable malayali movie, just so he doesn't get to watch tv. he will go the extent of tampering with the cords, so she doesn't get to hog the computers. all he does is play solitaires, all she does is watch news on tv. they also get extremely competitive with each other when it comes to exercise, morning walk, low-cal diet and page three trivia. and long-distance telephone calls.


he hates almost every shirt she has ever bought for him, she loved every sari he remembered to get. before every anniversary he is handed a list of things he should buy. she believes that exchanging gifts is silly, its all give and take - he gives, she takes. but she loves surprising him with gifts, her anticipation of his delight is a delight in itself.

he thinks she is the world's best cook ( she is NOT and they have a page in the telephone book devoted to the take-aways) and she thinks he is the best dish-washer she could ever get ( he is NOT, any maid or a small haier dishwasher could work miracles).

his body fails him, in small ways and large, each passing day, yet he finds himself picking up flowers for her after a ten-hour work day. her spirit just won't take a beating after all that she's been through, simply because he is with her, and there is nothing that quite counts as much.

they are old and tired and see friends and family dying. they see and sometimes welcome a growing seclusion. yet they seldom feel lonely. they have a cup of tea to sigh over, politics to fight over, scraggy tired old plants in a scrap garden that still spring flowers to wonder over, and each other to feel happy over.

they sometimes get very bemused and wonder how anyone could ever settle for anything less. i get very confused watching them and wonder, how can i ever make myself settle for anything less. but i have to, don't i?

the easter lilies came up. and i don't have to go to work till 11. and it is friday. i love my life.

i spent my evening very pleasantly. the first half of it, i took a walk in our neighbourhood park. suddenly it has become a very pretty park indeed. some atrribute it to an honest gardener who does not steal the money and run away with the maid from house no. 83 ( unlike the last three who ran away with different maids from the same house, and one even took Mrs Bose's brass letterbox). others attribute it to the fact that the secretary of the block committee finally got a closer look at the unmentionables (or entirely mentionables) of our friendly neighbourhood equal opportunities flasher, during one of his evening walks, and decided to make things better.

i topped it off with a chat with our little istriwallah dilip, who has set up his shop and home off the corner from the park. dilip is a charming host. at the age of 13, his social skills far outpace men a decade or two older than him. while i waited for him to finish up the batch that didi had despatched, he set me up on a little charpoy and put radio mirchi on for me. before he set the station, he asked me if i would prefer to listen to any particular one. i was floored.

later on in the evening, i had to go to the clinic. i really like going there. i mean not for check-ups, those bring all sorts of guilt to the forefront, i go there to meet some of the doctors and am made to wait an eternity. it is probably one of the only places where i get to have an undisturbed hour or maybe two hours of pure me-time, during normal people hours. it was absolutely blissful. particularly so after i told a kid in tones only audible to him that i will hang him by his eyelashes and keep him dangled for a week. i am not a horrible person, this child was begging for it. i wish more people believed in disciplining their kids , instead of simpering and then looking completely embarassed and pretending not to know their own child. anyway, things became immensely pleasant after that.

i smelt the rain last night. slowly my senses were filled with the smell of wet earth, that smell that makes you think of animals and the colour green and heat and raw life. that heady fragrance was the only thing i could feel, as if all my other senses had been temporarily suspended. then i woke up to a hot and clear night and it wasn't there anymore. i could see the stars.
i smelt the fresh linen, old books, two jasmine buds and dried ink smell of a leaky ball point pen. i looked at the stars some more and fell asleep again.