this sunday i was afraid.
sunday evening i went for a jazz performance - a bunch of people - friends, friend's friends - the kind you get. all posh and cocktail-sipping "in: crowd.
the music was very good as long as they didn't try fusion. close your eyes and you could feel the breath of a hot dark summer night, with faint stars in the distance, a little leafy-smelling fire somewhere and the primal energy of the night just outside your reach. it was good jazz. and then of course it became sort of nightmarish with attempted fusion of rabindrasangeet with jazz and it took me a while to figure out that it was real and i wasn't drunk beyond redemption. it felt like being trapped in a badly made bengali art film.
that was the beginning. the group seemed to have nothing to say against the fusion, in fact considerable time was spent lauding the effort and then thankfully (at the moment) we went for dinner.
we had a round table given to us and just the way long dinners go, the people became more relaxed and started being themsleves. which wasn't altogether a good idea.
there was obese man puffed up with self-importance who thinks only people with the "right pedigree" can be successful and the riffraff can't be tolerated nor worked with; semi-normal girl on his right who thinks the sun shines out of said man and sets best in new mexico; to her right was the spoilt rich entity with the loudest voice and manners who had disrupted the performance every five minutes, who has serious issues with life, self-perception, family and other people and has no qualms sharing them with the world and its brother; across her was her cousin - old, bald, uninteresting but could be a nice man for all i know but had horrible shoes and great degree of social awkwardness; on his right was R - distressingly nomal in all moments. on my left sat the potential communal rioter and elitist friend of mine and on my right decent Oxbridge guy who practices law.
the token normal presence from people-i-don't-know-world, the guy had impeccable manners, a good conversation to him, a sense of humour, generally the mature, understated sort of a person who still manages to have a presence.
all good, except for one thing - his habit of taking his car out at night and running over stray dogs. in serious, logical, well-thought out manner.
i have never been this scared. or so i thought till the Cow asked on her way home if she should call the guy over for dinner next week and when R started spluttering, she said casually "it's ok i guess. so many people kill chicken and lambs and eat them. this is ok."