there was a cat and a bat and a hat. the hat and the cat were good friends, but the bat was just a bat. nobody liked the bat. there was also a witch. ofcourse it was a wicked one - the witch hoarded pencils and scented erasers and shiny ball-point pens. it was mean to small children too.but then again, i know for a fact that some small children deserve meanness and their knuckles rapped. but, this is not a story about small children.nor one about witches.
the cat and the hat were catty and hatty and orange and green. i mean the cat was orange and the hat was green, having a green cat would be very silly indeed. and to make things easy, when they were awake the cat would put the hat on. just like the paperboy puts on a plastic bag on his head some mornings. but when they tried sleeping, the trouble began.
the cat and the hat would find a nice shady corner in the garden and lie down for a nap. now, everyone knows that a nap makes you a nicer person and much more clever too.they'd snuggle together and shut their eyes and count till twenty-three. this was a small problem to begin with. they didn't know their numbers beyond twentythree. if they didn't fall asleep by then, then they'd have to count till twentythree again and this would make them very tired and cross. the cat would try sitting up and counting , but the hat hated it. see, the hat couldn't take a nap when somebody was sitting up straight with tail in the air, loudly counting seventeen, eighteen... and so on. and the cat was rather loud, it believed that talking really loudly helps things happen faster. the poor hat would keep quiet most days, but sometimes it would ask the cat to stop counting, but the cat would get confused, mix up his eleven with thirteen and scold the hat. then the hat would get cross.
and on days they managed to fall asleep by twenty-one, the bat would come and wake them up. the bat loved picking on the poor cat. it would come and sit on the cat's tail, or brush its wings across the cat's face and on some days it would even tug at the cat's moustache.the cat couldn't do anything. see, the bat was so much smaller that the cat couldn't hit it. and the cat was also scared of waking the hat up if he tried to tell the bat off. one day the bat even put a feather up the cat's nose. the cat tried to sneeze quietly. but then its sneezes made the cat feel like its brain would explode. so the cat started sneezing loudly and the hat woke up. the cat was very sorry, but the hat told him not to be silly. then the hat went to the bat and told him to leave the cat alone. the bat was a very naughty bat. it just stuck its tongue out at the hat. the hat got very angry.
the hat then went to the spider that lived in the alamanda tree. they wouldn't let the cat hear what they were talking about. the cat got a little sad, but just a little. then the hat came back and told the cat to go back to napping. the hat also promised to count this time, though honestly speaking the hat was quite horrible at counting and went straight to eleven from eight. the cat fell asleep and slept and slept and slept till it was time for the gardener to come and turn the sprinklers on. when the cat woke up it saw the bat was hanging from the alamanda tree, tied up with spider web. the hat was waiting for the cat. together they went up to the tree. the hat told the bat that they would ask the spider to let it go if it promised not to bother the cat again. the bat didn't want to say that, but it was getting dark and there was lemon tart for tea at home. so it promised not to bother the cat. the hat wanted the bat to say it was sorry too. but the cat was slightly scared ( it didn't like fighting with anyone except the hat, but that was alright). the cat was also a bit sorry for the bat. so the spider and the hat had to let the bat go.
but from then on, the bat never woke them up. and later on, when the summer evenings became longer, the spider also taught the cat and the hat to count. it had eight legs and made sixty-four corners with his web. so he was very good at counting. and they became quite good friends after that.

get me a king size four-poster, a winter day, a light down comforter and six pillows. that's all i want out of life.

preponing monday morning blues to sunday night doesn't help anyone any. one still has to get in an auto where the plastic sheets screen off the rain to let the co-passengers sweat profusely into one's left side, one still has to go to work, one still has to listen to the soccer post-mortem from the old bald guy who has a lingerie designer girlfriend despite being weird and mild, one still has to humour morons predicting mumbai-like monsoon disaster with every droplet of rain, one still has to balance umbrella, mobile, loose change and soggy cigarette with much acrobatic effort to get three seconds' worth respite.

we went lounge lizarding and enjoyed it immensely. but it brought home the realisation how old i am. sitting in a corner with friends listening to music (though of hideously pathetic quality - the attraction of the evening being jungle life, remember tarzaan?) is one thing. actually a very pleasant thing. the mojito was perfect, the old people were tucked away into a corner and the bartender was an awesome kid. the mjusic made us feel like we were back on those long ago summer afternoons with musical bandbox on the radio.

but then we went club-hopping to notch up our cool quotient. and THAT was an eye-opener. crawling into a floor packed with thirty thousand seventeen year olds with ear splitting bollywood music and a non-waning affection for himesh is something i do NOT want in my life. The Southern Wonder and Cow salsaed some, half heartedly - but it still was a very pretty sight. Attempts to teach me the moves failed somewhat, though i slithered and twirled with some grace ( i thought) before tripping over my right foot. watched the last bit of the game perched besides PDA aficionados who were trying to trace patterns on each others tonsils.
anyway, feeling tired, disgusted, claustrophobic and paying for it just made no sense.

crawling back home at ungodly hours saw to it that my sunday was spent in a daze and there's only so many hours left to blue bloody monday. if there's any justice there should be a mandatory five day week in India , and a chip installed in my brain that shuts down my physical processes when i attempt to do whatever would have been a "cool" thing to have done ten years back. i have grown up and the realisation makes me smug, but what is left is for me is to catch up with myself.

childzilla I

staying up for soccer or anything else is all fine when you are not woken up at six in the bloody morning by an insistent four-year old with natural talent for pestilence. but if you are, then mindless violence seems to hold an enormous appeal. it magnifies by the second when the childzilla demands an orange icecandyand tea too.

i need to barf out my whole rant right now. wonder if it would sufficiently recreate the mid-week horror if i use a minimalistic style of writing. like saying this week began on a monday. strange people and ideas took up tuesday. then on wednesday, childzilla happened.

shrewd customer that she is, she fell back on her i-am-a-cute-little-baby-with-a-cuter-lisp till she got her presents. and then she morphed to her usual i'm-four-going-on-thirty-four self. she told her mother that she wanted a waxing, at which my absent-minded father responded by saying "i'll buy you candles", she also ticked off my brother for taking pictures when she was not looking cute enough and for getting her a skipping rope which she felt she is too young for, she smashed my play-dough lizard and told me i need to wear yellow dresses with flowers on them, stuck out her tongue at a visiting child next-door, picked up three more four-letter words from untraced sources, conned my mother AND father into giving her three ice-creams, and recounted innumerable tales of how she gets slashed with knives at school.the fluency with which that child lies left us all feeling dazed, though in our weaker moments we tried to convince the each other that she is imaginative. thankfully i left for work, which was another kettle of fish altogether. i thought wednesday couldn't turn any worser than it already was at one in the afternoon, but like in everything else i was wrong in this too.

anyway after i crawled back home, my work wardrobe was carefully scrutinised, every item in my tote strewn around ( and to give her credit packed back after intensely examined), i was subject to a half-hearted tantrum on the subject of jiggly-wigglies, and made to mockfight vampires till midnight, with proper karate-like moves and sound-effect. apparently three rounds of solid thrashing when the doting grand-parents were not looking hadn't been as effective as my sister would have wished it to be. she just confessed very unhappily that these days she can't summon up wits enough to win the much-advocated power-game with childzilla who leaves her two steps behind, at which my brother helpfully pointed out that she has never been very bright and was given the flick across the ear. both of them would like to believe they are poster children for efficacy of corporal punishment, and when i explained to them that looking at either of them now would leave people to conclude just the opposite, they fell back to bullying. BUT there is some sort of cosmic justice and France won, so that evens things out.

we are expecting childzillaII in january.

why should anyone take offence when asked how to distinguish between straight man hitting on someone and gay guy making friendly overtures? it is a very legitimate question and there should be clear stated rules on this. appearances are often deceptive.

tamam shud. the phrase with which khaiyam ended rubaiyat. a rough translation would mean the final dispensation of all debts. a fitting end, when you owe nothing. i live for a sunday evening when i can close my eyes and say tamam shud, no longer owing my time to the days , the weeks ahead.

i am exhausted from being nice, missing the most important game of the week, talking to gay-ish men with embroidered AND sequinned butterflies on their shirt and generally its-saturday-morning-i'll-have-to-go- to-work kind of exhausted as well.

the best part of last evening was listening to the Bloodsucking Leech. the Leech went to mauritius and was immensely impressed with arrival lounge, general beauty, scantily clad women with nice figures and his first limousine ride - till the chauffeur put on the music and with what nick hornby would say "a cavalier disregard for cliches" played aashiq banaya aapne.

the best part of this evening looks like the sibling's anticipated arrival hopefully with all the specified liquor. but that is still a solid fifteen hours away. and then i have to bring the said sibling home and see all hell break loose.

and this time god help the man who tries humming leaving on a jet plane in the arrival lounge. you do not do that. you do not do that in arrival lounges. more importantly, you do not do that at dumdum when 99% chance is u'll take a shuttle back to nager bajar or deshapriya park or beleghata or mominpur. a) its very irritating, b) the song takes a very long time to get out of the head, c) its traumatising to find the meshomoshai crooning in a whisper three inches from one's left ear. with all my residual niceness flushed out of my system last evening, i will do something very drastic indeed.