“There is a power cut in the office”, a man in a grey shirt whines. “Do something!” He tells no one in particular. We continue working on our laptops, smug that the power cut didn’t impede our work process.
He wipes the sweat on his forehead with a rather ill looking handkerchief. He wants to print a 200 page document. He shuffles restlessly. “Relax” the receptionist tells him. That’s the only trigger he needs.
He is having a bad time at work. His reports are “shoddy” and his observations are far from sharp. The co workers think he sucks up more than required. They make fun of him during their smoke breaks. His sucking up doesn’t help anyone, the bosses dislike him. They treat him with as much as affection as they would treat a housefly. This has been a rather difficult week and he has already accidentally deleted a very important document earning not only the boss’ wrath but also threat of the pink slip.
His wife wants him to take her to a hill station. His brother won a DVD player in a lucky draw at work. The food in the canteen today had eggplant and he hates eggplant.
He tells his invisible audience, mopping the sweat on his neck, that if he fails to print this document the boss will definitely fire him.
The receptionist purses her gelusil-pink lips and says “Calm down sweetie.” The man blushes. Nobody calls him sweetie.
Then he shifts his weight from one foot to another and says that his job has definitely been snatched from his hands and now he’ll have to go work in his father’s sari business. He then takes a couple of minutes to consider the pros and cons of this potential situation.
He looks at us working away and sighs wistfully.
Then the power is restored and his five minute long rant comes to an end. The printer starts spewing paper after paper and then stops at page 52. Error, it tells him, a red light blinking.
The man looks close to tears. He goes back to muttering about the sari business and the smell of cotton saris in a warm room with no windows.
All he has to do is refill the paper tray, but nobody tells him that. The sari shop doesn’t require one to print anything anyway.

Garbled.

You have to be very careful what you hope for. 

You have to be even more careful to not hope for certain things. 

You sit down, and make a list of all the things that you have been secretly hoping for and haven't been admitting to yourself. Then you take that list and burn it. 

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If something sounds like it's absolutely horrible and you laugh it off because it's never going to happen to you, don't. The strange turns that your life can take have more potential than you give them credit for.

Realism leans towards pessimism because no one likes being caught off guard. It's easier to pretend that you are going to fail miserably and then you can rejoice silently when you scrape through.

Realism is when you use a lot of maybes, because come on now, in reality none of us have a clue.

And those of us who have a clue, run with the clues and then sulk in our soups because we feel short-changed.

The Kite Runner

Back in 2006, October rains were still a thing of wonder. So one such wonder filled October night, I sat and began to read, what would come to be one of my favourite books. 

The Kite Runner has many layers. On the surface, it is a story about Afghanistan and the vagaries of the human life back then. On a deeper level, however, it is a story about friendship and loyalty. Most importantly, it is a story about betrayal and redemption.

The book maps the life of Amir and the people around him like- his father Baba, whose attention Amir craves. Khalid Hosseini has done an exceptional job of sketching Baba’s character. It is a very strong character and there is a line in the book that sums Baba up perfectly. The line is - You can’t love some people without fearing them. Maybe even hating them a little. 

There is also, Hassan- the servant boy who is Amir’s friend and playmate. The description of his unwavering loyalty for Amir is an indispensable part of the story. He stands by Amir and stands up for him every time the situation demands it. He silently bears Amir’s anger and torment. He even makes his peace with the fact that Amir let him down when he needed Amir’s help the most.

These in my opinion, are the strongest characters in the book, apart from Amir himself. The other characters include Rahim Khan, the well meaning uncle- the only adult Amir finds a friend in. It is Rahim Khan who reads Amir’s stories and it is Rahim Khan who chides Baba when he claims Amir does none of the things Baba hopes he would. Rahim Khan tells him- Children aren’t colouring books. You don’t get to fill in them with your favourite colours. Lastly, there is Soraya the girl Amir falls for and eventually marries.

The entire story speaks of Amir’s personality, his behaviour, and his thoughts. At various points in the book I rooted for him, worried for me and cheered for him. I related to him a lot more than I thought I would at the outset. More than once in his life, Amir is morally tested. The first time he fails. Thereafter, the fact that he betrayed his friend haunts him for many years. The second time he is tested- he knows that this is his chance to be good again. The story ends, leaving the reader with a feeling of hope.

Set against the stark backdrop of Afghanistan, with Hosseini’s powerful description of Taliban, The Kite Runner, written in a first person narrative in Amir’s voice, peppered with Persian words is one of the best stories I have heard.

I was moved by this book in a quiet, silent sort of way. A lot of people were swept off their feet with this powerful tale because of its intelligent plot. I was taken more by the narrative. The Kite Runner exemplifies that descriptions and narratives are as important as the plot, if not more. Hosseini charmed me with his endearing attention to the tiny details- the winters in Afghanistan, the smell of cigar smoke in Baba’s room, the illustrations in Amir’s favourite book, Soraya’s henna painted hands- these things made the book what it was, for me. These things have a curious appeal. Even as a kid, in books I cherished the descriptions of the most banal things. Since then, I am usually unimpressed by the big guns. The smaller things, now, THOSE make me sit up.

I stayed up that rainy night and finished reading The Kite Runner. At the end of the night, when I finally slipped under my sheet and pulled the covers to my chin, I felt at peace. I felt content. Like you feel at the end of a long conversation with a close friend or when you slip your hand into your partners’ at the end of a very trying day. It is a feeling of ineffable comfort.  

Paper cut

Under the blue-and-white umbrella outside the store, is the gift wrapping station. The man who wraps gifts is called Hakim. He comes in every morning, puts away a plastic bag that holds his things and rolls up his sleeves. Then for 8 hours straight, until the stores shuts, he wraps all kinds of things in a variety of papers.
His area is a festival of pretty paper; some shiny, some chic. The children are fussy; apparently Bobby’s present has to be wrapped in a paper that says happy birthday. Hakim hardly speaks, his hands move through the air with the air of a magician. Scissors and ribbons come in on cue. Ribbons that curl; ribbons that look like flowers. On dull summer afternoons, sometimes the ribbons look like swans.
The pay isn’t great but they give him tea and lunch. A boy in dowdy clothes comes and pours piping sweet tea into a steel tumbler. Hakim doesn’t speak to the boy, just nods in acknowledgment.
The store is packed with women in the afternoons. They buy hairdryers and make up kits. They buy bright coloured school bags for their kids. They always stop by the gift wrapping station. Hakim is convinced that a lot of people get things wrapped only because it’s free. What is the point in getting things wrapped when you’re buying them for yourself? He wonders about this more often than not, while he swiftly covers up a curling iron in silver paper. Who is silly enough to be taken by surprise by things that they bought a few hours before, he thinks. Then he looks up at the women whining incessantly about the food at their parties and their delayed pedicures and he has his answer.
In the evenings, he picks up his plastic bag and rolls down his sleeves. He puts away the gifting paraphernalia and sweeps the area around the gifting station. Scraps of silver paper speckled with blue fly around like birds in fairy tales.
He walks home, smoking a cigarette. That is the only luxury he allows himself. Outside of the one where he takes in, hungrily, the smell of fresh wrapping paper every morning. That speck of happiness keeps him going; despite knowing well that the paper will end up in the dustbin of a rich kid by the end of the day.

Small voices from behind the wall.
Through the thin lemon yellow walls of a hotel room, I hear snatches of laughter; frothy words from a faraway place.
People you’ve never seen before and will probably never see. Strangers, separated by peeling walls.
Rubber soles on wooden flooring. The clinking of bangles, maybe an anklet. A woman; perhaps with long hair that used to be longer. I imagine her sitting on the bed – complaining about her aching feet. Maybe she uses night cream from the drug store; the one that smells of medicine but in a comforting way.
There is a dull humming sound; a man’s voice. Her husband possibly. In a world of things, where it’s easier to assume him to be a lover, I think I’d rather not. The story in my head then opens up too many options of clandestine affairs and extra marital worries.
Perhaps, he likes to hum softly with his head resting against the wall. Old songs with a faraway look in his eyes. He listens to his wife’s complaints. He looks back at their day here. The wife, the hotel room with blue curtains, the wedding they just attended.
Cupboards open and shut. She’s putting her wedding clothes away. A chocolate brown sari with work in gold. It smells festive. The thin gold bangles – her mother’s. She puts them away in boxes lined with velvet. She comments about the wedding, the pungent food and the dull people, their saris and their lives, gossip intertwined with concern.
The man says something. I cannot tell the tone; perhaps reproachful. He tells his wife to not be such a woman. I can hear her laugh. It’s an old running gag in their marriage; her need to gossip and his need to chide.
I imagine her sitting at the edge of the bed, smoothening imaginary creases on her nightgown. She rests her hand absentmindedly on her husband’s knee. Eventually, she gets into bed with him and drifts off to sleep.
The walls carry no sound; just me and my wandering imagination.
I imagine him sitting there looking at her. Not necessarily love; but definitely an enviable level of comfort. He can smell the oil in her head. Almond oil in a clunky bottle. All their years together and the small things that will never change.
The next day when I wake up, I know they’ve left.
Maybe I’ll run into them sometime. Another city, another wedding.

Oh an Arts major? Here, have some of my pity

There is a man I met today. He started a conversation with me about a book I was holding. The conversation went downhill in a matter of minutes.
He said, “You must be an engineer. Or BSc Chemistry or something.” He somehow concluded this from the copy of Midnight’s children in my hand. I said no, I majored Economics. He raised his eyebrows in a manner as though I told him I didn’t believe in education. He said, “Oh God. How are you holding up?” He wasn’t joking. He thought I must be struggling in life because I didn’t have a science degree to back me up.
There was a time when I used to think that this is the attitude of people from another generation. People who lived in a time when the Arts weren’t as developed; people who weren’t as exposed to opportunities as we are. Then one day, I realized that people my own age who I thought of as smart and well read also held this opinion. From what I gathered from a conversation with a rather intelligent person, it would be better to be a failing at a Science related job/degree/course then doing really well in and enjoying an Arts one.
I have lost track of the number of people who look down upon Arts subjects on principle. This same intelligent person told me that this is the thought process because the Social Sciences are easier and less demanding.
I have a lot of things to say about this. But I am going to keep mum and pretend that I didn’t meet the man who felt bad for me because I had to deal with being an Arts major.
A while ago, The Hindu had an interview with the noted historian Romila Thapar. It was about the controversial decision that the Academic Council of Delhi University took to drop A.K. Ramanujan's celebrated essay on the Ramayana from the B.A. History (Honours) course.
In this context, Thapar made an extremely pertinent point about the whole attitude towards the social sciences.
She said, “The interesting thing about this whole argument about interdisciplinarity is that the social sciences are always attacked. But the sciences are never attacked because people are scared of making a fool of themselves by saying that this is not something worthy of teaching. So nobody questions the sciences. But with the social sciences, the world and his wife are there to comment, in some cases, without any kind of background knowledge of the subject. There's a feeling that you don't need to be an expert; this is all common sense.”
I’ll just go sit in my corner now.

Bharat weds Tinku on a sparkly thermocol heart near Worli. I am in a cab that had been held up in honour of this happy occasion. They are standing there surrounded by women in florescent colours and men in scratchy looking kurtas.
Tinku is caked with make up; Bharat looks rather thrilled. In the middle of heavy evening traffic, he climbs on and navigates a white horse. The horse protests but gives in soon enough. Friends cheer loudly. Tinku's friends nudge her and giggle. The city loves marriages and the drama that it whips up but it loves getting home in time more. The coy look in her eyes and the grin on his face fail to soften the irate home-goer at the end of a long Tuesday. He has just about made peace with the festivals that block the city's streets every couple of months. He doesn't need to be a part of someone else's wedding.
Bharat the bridegroom gets off the horse and a younger cousin dressed in the brightest yellow that the human eye can handle, runs with a box of crackers. On cue, the band plays about Munni's defamation and everyone dances to an additional background score of honking cars and screaming drivers.
Someone from a cab a few feet ahead of mine gets off to have a serious conversation with one of the shiny relatives. The man shouts out what he has to say to be heard over the music and taps angrily at his watch.
The situation takes a confusing turn when the shiny relative procures a box of eerie looking orange laddoos dripping with ghee and offers one to the screaming man. He offers some to a few other drivers and passengers near by.
The passengers are still displeased but atleast they have refreshments.
Between the scarily decadent sweets and the screaming at traffic jams, we are headed for the dreaded cardiac arrest either way.

Balloons. He sells balloons.
His wife screams at him every morning. “Try and find another job, will you?” she screams. “The smell of your stupid balloons is making me sick.” He stays mum. Then she screams some more for good measure.
He makes his way through the dizzying crowd outside Dadar station. The women carrying baskets of flowers on their head chatter in rapid Marathi. They throw him disdainful looks, for no particular reason. He finds a spot where it isn’t too sunny and settles there. Nobody buys his balloons. A couple of children pass him by, squealing, running towards the ice cream man. The ice cream man has a sour disposition, but that doesn’t deter the kids. He scowls while scooping out bright pink icecream. They just grab the cones from his hand and skip away. He yells at them for giving less money. They stick their tongues out at him and run.
Then an old woman comes to buy a balloon. She wants a 5 foot balloon that says happy birthday on it. He shakes his head. He has only the regular variety. She walks away. He sighs and remembers the time when he would come with his father to watch him sell balloons. He remembers the number of children who would surround the cheerful man begging for the balloons. Blue ones and smiling ones. Happy balloons in the bright summer sky. Now, no one wants balloons; atleast not the ones he sells. Even his kid doesn't care for his balloons. He wants toys and ice cream and shoes that light up.
He looks down at his wallet as the evening comes by. Nothing. His balloons look deflated, mirroring his general spirit. He makes his way to the station, bracing himself for his wife's taunts and his kid's disappointment.
Then someone taps him on the shoulder. It's the icecream man. He pushes forth a small battered ice box. "Will you give me your balloons for some left over icecream?" He asks. He now looks more tired than sour.
"My wife threatened to throw me out if I bring in more strawberry smell into the house. She said it makes her head ache." He explains.
"But the balloons? Does your wife like them?"
"No, but my dog does. He chases them around the room and it makes him happy."
Then they walk away into the crowd, balloons bobbing and small mercies in ice boxes.
The next day, they look a little less harrowed.
The city moves past them as usual.

Ill at ease

Vacuum your curtains and wipe your window panes with soap and a newspaper.
Pick up your clothes and fold them; place them in neat even piles. Place them in the cupboard.
Repeat till all the clothes are inside the cupboard.
Change your bedcovers, dust your table.
Arrange your toiletries in increasing order of height.
Rearrange your books so that they follow some kind of a pattern. Alphabetically by name, or by name of author.
Vacuum the rest of the room. Dust the walls. Even behind the big clock.
Take it all in; go sit elsewhere because you can't think with all this neatness staring back at you.

What colour do you think in?

In a large box of crayons, I always used up the blue one first.

I would colour everything blue. Blue people with their strangely shaped heads. Blue dogs. Blue sunsets.

They asked me to look around and see if these things were actually blue. It didn’t matter. I liked my blue people. They spoke to each other, their round mouths moving ever so slightly. They played in the fields, the blue sunlight making them squint. They shook their webbed hands.

There were children in school who made fun of me. They showed me their colouring books. They had soft brown coloured people. Pink coloured candy floss. You are stupid, they told me.
The teacher once asked me to hand over the blue crayon. She said I had to learn to colour things with other crayons.

The blue people disappeared off my pages. They probably played elsewhere.

I started writing in art class then. About these people. I would write about how they were real people, with real thoughts. I created a parallel universe where these people had jobs and they ate cornflakes in ceramic bowls for breakfast. Their children went to schools and they had loving pets in their homes.

My teacher handed me the blue crayon one day. She gave me no reason for returning it.
I realized it then, that although I preferred blue over all the other colours; I didn’t really care about colouring stuff. I actually cared more about the people around whom I wove these stories. I had come to enjoy the imaginary lives I created.

I put the crayon back in the box and continued writing.

God-less.

A man on my floor at work came up to my desk yesterday and asked me for 500 rupees. He said it was because he was taking a trip to a temple in the South and would offer it to the God there. He also smiled and told me that he didn’t want me to miss out on blessings which where powerful enough to cure his neighbour of cancer. He assured me that he would bring me the Prasad from the temple. He probably picked up on the fact that I was both busy and not particularly jumping at the opportunity to be rid of a grave disease; he told me I could leave the money at his desk later.

This man had once, not a very long time ago, come and put rice in my hair while I was typing away furiously on my laptop. Now this situation irked me on many levels. Mainly, I really don’t care if the rice was holy, I don’t want you dumping it on my head without my permission. Also, I have curly hair. Even three days after this event, I would randomly find rice grains popping out.
I didn’t end up giving him any money and that earned me the wrath of more people than you’d think. I am really not a stingy person. But I will not pay up for something that I don’t believe in.

Yes, I am a non-believer in general, but this is a whole different problem. I specifically don’t buy into giving out money to temples and such because it isn’t really benefitting anyone outside of the temple priests. If there is a God, and we are assuming he is smart, I am pretty sure he wouldn’t dole out his blessings in proportion to the money people contribute.

A lot of people gave me dirty looks yesterday. Some told me that the money offered to God is a mark of respect and that I had angered the greater power. A co-worker narrated a story of another soulless person he knows (outside of me, of course) whose son got polio because he refused donation at some temple. I tried pointing out how they have polio drives all the time to avoid precisely this situation but no one listened to me. Since I am now the person who is risking all kinds of misfortune, my opinions aren’t worth too much.

In the middle of all this, none of these people remembered that last year while they all cited the inflation and rising household expenses as excuses, I was the only one who gave a thousand rupees, so some child somewhere would be able to have sixth grade textbooks. And I don’t even like children.

Very long day and hence the very short post. I'll make it up to myself by writing two posts tomorrow.
I bought my laptop today. Made my very long day worth it.

Last year, there was a bunch of street children who played outside Mahalaxmi station.

They would chase each other and have make believe weddings. They had a variety of toys that they had made themselves. Cardboard boxes, strings, plastic bags, torn kites all found their way into the games that used to take up their days. They'd disregard traffic and the weather. They'd snigger at irate police officers and screaming adults.

Then one day, I saw them all huddled together. They were all cackling about something. It was a mobile phone. I smiled to myself about how thrilled they were. I wondered how they got it. For the few days that followed, they would peer into the phone and laugh.

Then one day, I saw a policeman yelling at them. A crowd had gathered around one of the kids and there was a commotion. Turns out, the boys were taking pictures of passing women. Although the pictures were by themselves harmless, the act was unacceptable.

I didn't see the kids after that.

A few days ago I saw one of the boys at the station. I remembered him as one of the older kids from the group. He was being slapped repeatedly by a woman for feeling her up. He said, "bhai bola karneko"

It will be rather unfortunate if there is such little hope from the future generations. I threw him a dirty look and walked past. Turns out that's all I can do.

Popcorn. Caramel, usually.

The quintessential bad love story in Indian cinema should ideally have two or more people. In the situation that it doesn’t and we have only one person, it might get confusing; or it might be a psychological thriller where the protagonist has Schizophrenia; but we don’t want to explore that just yet.
For the sake of this piece: We have 3 people.
The girl is called something generic like Priya. She is then referred to as Pri or Cookie or some such nickname. She is a Philosophy major; she wears horn rimmed glasses and carries a thick book. We all know that those are the only characteristics of a Philosophy major. She flits in and out of college wearing summery clothing in the winters and with her face wrapped in woollen scarves in the summers. But because she studies Philosophy and is above everyone else, she isn’t bothered by inane things like the weather. She doesn’t have friends, only admirers: a bunch of other girls who look at her in awe. You can throw in a whole social activism angle too, but then she might really appear to be smart and we don’t want to digress.
The boy who falls for her has to be, what is loosely termed, stupid. He has to be muscular and self-centred. Efforts are made to display his lack of general knowledge and his general disregard to education. He has to have a rich father, a kitty party going mother and several servants, atleast one of whom is called Chotu. We can always throw in a lonely childhood (while the parents partied) to add some so-called character to our man so that the audience doesn’t begin to dislike him too much. He could be called any number of things because it doesn’t matter; but we’ll call him J. Yes, he is too cool for names with more than one letter.
He meets Priya at an airport, almost always. They could also meet at coffee shops, malls or movie theatres. They can never meet in nightclubs because she is a serious Philosophy major and doesn’t indulge in frivolous dancing in dark spaces. (Later of course, one could show her dancing in an inebriated fashion, to show the other side of her otherwise demure personality, but this is optional)
Against the background of a busy airport, she pretends to dislike him but is actually charmed by his pointless humour and carefree personality. He is moved by her concern for the world and society and her well rounded knowledge of things. (She knows who the President is and not too many people are as well read) They fall in love in a matter of a day, but she has a degree to pursue in another country and he is headed elsewhere to waste time. They decide to meet at a certain place on a certain day but find it beneath themselves to take down phone numbers or addresses. He never shows up, because on the same day that he is supposed to meet her, he finds his calling as a filmmaker and almost instantly makes a film, wins an award and has the power go straight to his head.
She is heartbroken, (insert nightclub scene here) does what she has to accept the facts and after failed attempts to find him (because without a phone number and address, one can’t track down one’s true love, after all) gives up on life for a while. Then she picks up the pieces of her shattered existence and starts doing volunteering work with the blind. Her interest in philosophy comes down to her sitting in her pink pajamas reading the same thick book.
She then meets our third character, let’s call him Ben (because we are in a different country now and we have to have a name that doesn’t sound too Indian) who is absolutely fabulous – he has 2 PhDs, a diploma in Thai cooking, another degree in music and can knock your socks off with how kind he is and how he helps out at old age homes.
Then of course, the night before she marries Ben, J comes to find her.
She says she is going to get married the next day yet has time to use the night before to show J around this new country. Then we have a series of apologies and lost love stories and general confusion. He says he has turned over a new leaf (this can be seen by the fact that he knows who the President is and now wears glasses too) and wants to marry her. She declines but still shares one last passionate kiss with him overlooking whichever famous river this country boasts of.
The next morning she goes away to marry Ben. After a while, J runs long distances in her general direction only to find her waiting for him, teary eyed. Ben is close at hand with a Zen look on his face. She hugs J and says that she isn’t marrying Ben anymore because she came clean about who she actually loves and Ben only wants her to be happy. (You may say "aww" at this point if you wish, but no pressure)
J and Priya get married in an airport because that’s where they first met.
PS: If you didn’t like this post, you may take this up with this friend of mine. She took me along to watch this masterpiece London Paris New York and I haven’t quite recovered.

Spaces

We lie on the open road, the sky overcast. 

Remember we used to talk about this, about how peaceful it will be; how surreal it will feel.

There isn’t anyone in sight. Not even a stray dog. No lone traveller with a backpack; just you and me, and the humbling feeling of looking up into infinity.

You wrote me a letter once. You spoke about the open road. You said you’d take my hand in yours. You said that would make you happier than anything else. You promised me stars on a dark night and the sound of the wind in the trees.

There isn’t so much to say and nothing to do. We make small talk; not the kind that is made to ease awkward situations, not the kind that is made to impress. But in fact, the comfortable variety, where our words potter around making smoky circles in the night air and we think aloud about nothing in particular.

There were many things we said we’d do. Cycling in the rain, steaming momos in the North Eastern cold, walking in an empty street in the wee hours of the morning. Are these things all of us say at some point because they create some kind of subtle magic? If we did have cycles and it did rain on a certain day, will we actually go cycling?

We fall asleep next to each other. The sky just hangs there. We are just two tiny specks and our thoughts and feelings affect or alter no one. In the cosmic scheme of things, we are nothing. You always said that. Perspective and reality all in one happy package.

On many a rainy day, I find myself sitting in your room, listening to music I am not sure I understand but don’t quite mind. There is this funny thing called contentment. As long as you get there, it doesn’t matter whether you cycle to it or walk lazily, jumping across puddles.

Prompt word: Prey

Some say it’s an urban legend. Some try to convince you it’s true. They tell you it happened to  a friend of a friend in a medical school in Delhi. One can never really be sure.

She had just started a course at one of India’s best medical schools in Delhi. Her parents had gotten teary eyed when she left. Their little girl would be alone in a big city. She cried a little as she left her parents behind. Sometimes if she was alone at home; the rattling windows scared her out of her wits. She couldn’t really imagine living alone.

Her first week in hostel was difficult. They had paired her with a girl in the third year; ‘a senior’. When she moved into her room, the senior smirked. She meekly introduced herself. The senior laughed. The laughter was mirthless. That night, she found out why. They called it ragging. She had never heard of it. She didn’t really buy it when they said, “It’s a hostel tradition.” But she didn’t protest other. Her nervous demeanor left her helpless, more often than not.

It was harmless in the beginning. They asked her to sing a song, to dance. She obliged, her face flushed with embarrassment. It got worse. Soon they asked her to stand on the bed and strip. She refused; they insisted. She finally ran out of the room, crying. When she returned, the seniors were gone. She sat on her bed. Her room-mate returned shortly and apologized. Even to a naïve girl like her, the apology sounded fake. She didn’t respond. She fell asleep that night wishing she was home. A few days later she came home after class. As she sat on her bed, she felt something under the sheets. Must be a book, she thought and reached for it. She screamed until her voice went hoarse. It was a broken skull.

 In very tiny letters it said- ‘Property of AMJ College, Anatomy department.’

The seniors came in a minute too late. They had planned to burst in to see her shocked face. They miscalculated. When they entered she was nowhere to be seen. They were confused. Had she not come in at all? That wasn’t it. They had vaguely heard a scream. Then they heard her ragged breath. They followed the sound. She was sitting on the top of a steel cupboard. The cupboard wasn’t too high; they could see her face clearly. Her eyes had a blank expression. She was gnawing at the skull.

Her parents came a week later. They had come to take her back. Even after a week, her eyes still had the same blank expression. She was never the same again.

Fail

All my technology is failing me today.

My laptop screen is flickering so much that it looks like it is possessed. I have to type with one hand, while patting my laptop with the other hand, like you would to a queasy kid.

My home computer is making eerie sounds when turned on and progresses to whirring sounds soon enough. There my kind-hearted patting and sweet talking also doesn't work.

My brilliant phone in under repair because it's putting itself into flight mode when I am clearly not in a flight. The past few days without the it, have made me realize I can't so much take an auto ride without whipping out my phone to check the fare. I am horribly attached to my phone for everything - the news, reading, the internet!!
I know I have become one of those people but now I don't think I can go back. I don't think I want to.

I don't think I can write any longer because now my laptop screen freezes unless I move it back and forth like a harmonium.

So long.

I'll go communicate with my friends through smoke signals now. 

A long time ago when college festivals were a deal big enough to be bothered with, the Martyr Momos were born on a July evening. We needed a name for the blog event and we decided that it had to have something to do with food. I don't know about the Martyr part. We picked that out on a whim.

The Momos have been around for longer than the blog they made. I met Krati Tandon on a very rainy day in 2008. Don't tell me it's a cliche, It really was raining. You can ask her. We became friends almost instantly. If I hadn't met her, I am pretty sure I would a different person. I wouldn't write as much, I wouldn't have as many bangles and there would be long blank spaces in my day; spaces which now are devoted to talking to her on the phone about the many inane things that plague my life.

Then we did the blog event and had such a good time, that the blog name became a part of us.

 Krati Tandon is a super momo - with her tech advice and her whizzing around with her camera, her enthusiasm and her jewelery. She does sharp market research by day and writes hauntingly beautiful poetry by night. Her evenings are taken up by Momo meetings, buying wooden bookcases that are full of character, bike trips with her face wrapped up in scarves and educating the ill informed about best technology available in smart phones.

She is very 'sunshine on a Christmas morning interspersed with wise words and funny stories'. The best kind of festive sunshine, don't you think?

The big tree

The big tree is being cut down. A lot of children cry. They hug the trunk and their shrill voices cut through the heavy afternoon air. I look down from my first floor window and see one particularly enthusiastic child swinging on one of the branches. The people that the BMC has hired to bring down the tree are standing at a distance and chalking out their modus operandi. I can imagine the children’s distress, the tree is nothing but magnificent.

Moreover, the plan to bring down the tree isn’t well thought out, evidently. They can’t possibly have thought of cutting down such a huge tree on a Sunday afternoon with no protest from the residents. Sunday afternoons are a time when mothers stop bothering their children about food and homework and such; and the children rush out in the sun to play. I consider going down myself, if nothing else to reason with the officials, but from what it appears, a lot of like-minded people are doing that already.

Some concerned residents approach the BMC men and ask them something. From a distance, it looks like a very grave conversation. One of the officials makes hand gestures which indicate that the road has to be widened. The residents are unimpressed. One of them points to the tree and says something to the official. From his gestures, it looks like he is pointing out the tree’s grandeur to the BMC official. It is the official’s turn to look unimpressed. He has heard too much of this intellectual rubbish.

As the people flock around the man talking animatedly to him, I see that the enthusiastic child has fallen off the branch. It must have been a couple of feet of the ground, but that’s all it takes. The child starts howling. The child’s mother tries to pacify him. The other kids are confused and join in the crying. The adults try to calm the kids down – but the floodgates have opened. They bawl and shriek and the BMC officials have had enough. “ Chalo, hato!” one of them shouts and raps his stick on the pavement for effect. The children don’t budge; they surround the injured kid and keep making a racket.

“Chalo!!” The official shouts again and grabs one kid by the collar. He has tolerated more than he bargained for. The child screams as if pinched. The adults try to intervene but the official screams at them as well.

After 20 minutes of stern words and raps with the baton, the crowd begins to disperse. Just as the BMC official rounds up his men and gives them instructions, there is another intervention. In the middle of an unassuming October afternoon, it begins to rain. The official slaps his forehead in disbelief. It will be hard to work; the others chime in, as the rain gathers force. They walk towards their vehicle in frustration, cussing the children. Just before they drive off, they see the children have returned. They run around their beloved tree - the blues and yellows of their raincoats are in sharp contrast with the wet brown trunk. They laugh and play and give the BMC officials condescending looks.

The tree stands there, not sure what it has done to deserve such love from these 6 year olds

Little boxes.

My mind has little compartments. Little boxes that if could be, would be, labeled with bright post-it notes listing out their contents. A bright blue one for the good stuff - the memories and the people in them. An orange one for all the to-dos. A red one for the decisions you need to take and have been putting off. The mustard yellow that warns you about its contents, imploring you to find another box to open.

There are these brilliant people out there who are all zen about the people who hurt them. These people are all "You wrong-ed me but I am the bigger person and I forgive you because you don't know any better." These people have all my respect. But I am not like that. I don't plan to be, even. If you did something to me that affected me in a fashion that found its way into the box with the mustard yellow post-it, please make yourself scarce. I don't think of you very often, I almost never feel bad about you now, but I have not forgiven you.

The people who hurt you find a way to change a little part about you. Maybe you're a little more insecure,  maybe you judge yourself too harshly now, maybe you have an eating disorder. You don't admit it, you say your bigger than all that, but you know it's true. Especially on days when you're down in the dumps and your writing is a mess and you are stuffing your face with unhealthy food. Then you secretly strive to believe in yourself and you do your best to not be insecure. You hold on fiercely to what you have now because it makes you happy in a way that you wouldn't have imagined a few years ago.

The people who live inside the tiny box with the blue post it find a way to make me happy everyday. They wave at me as I pass them by inside my head and outside they call me and say things that make me laugh. If I shut my eyes and imagine them laughing, clear ringing laughter, it makes me feel very calm. The blue people are a part of me, they are a part of who I am. They are all over my writing, my phone, my speed-dials and if I see them after a long period of time I squeal loudly and give them rib cracking hugs. ( Or squeal silently and give them small hugs, as per their preference.)

Some of these boxes gather dust a lot, some play a tune when opened.

Rubble

Sometimes, she sleeps under heavy sheets of guilt. Sometimes, she is full of regret. Sometimes, she talks to the emptiness in her room. The foetal position offers no reprieve for her pain. No quick fix for her cramped up thoughts. 

Her arms hurt and her legs feel stubbier everyday. She walks through her day knowing someone will make fun of her. Someone will tell her that there is no place for her in this seemingly perfect world.

She lives in an awkward bubble where her thoughts chase each other at a blinding speed. Her bubble is black and murky and her feelings are wrapped up in old newspapers. There is almost always an unbearable stench of feet. 

She is everything that she shouldn’t be.  She is everything that the world creates when it is high and angry. Sometimes she is running through long streets of people chasing her and sometimes she is cowering behind the deafening sound of fear. 

She is plain and striped down. No colour will ever be her colour, no man will ever hold the small of her back tenderly. Her planner is empty and her food sits on the plate or makes a reappearance in the bathroom before she sleeps.

She is everything we look down upon. She is everything we pity. 

In the beige workplace, she shows herself into a corner and ducks behind stacks of peeling paper files. She is a drying wall flower. Day after day, her work gets done but nobody knows who is doing it. She is everyone you walk past at office cafeteria and everyone you ignore in the elevator. 

She walks on egg shells all the time, hoping to never get noticed. She cries silently and laughs inside her head. 

She is both, what we mock on good days and become on bad ones.

 

Every night, once it was dark outside and the lights came on, she'd wait for her father to come home. Sometimes, she'd wait at the window, sometimes she'd try and distract herself by playing a game.The minute he rang the doorbell, she'd squeal, race across the house and open the door.
Her father had once admitted to himself that there was no feeling more precious that that of tiny arms around your neck to welcome you home.
She called him Bob. He used to be a Baba but one day when he got home from work, she announced that she had a new friend - Bob. He smiled, waiting to hear of her new friend. She then climbed into his lap and said - You're Bob! and giggled. He called her his Little Bug. When he kissed her forehead at night, he always said "Little Bug in a Rug" and that always made her laugh.
On rainy evenings, Bob and his Little Bug would go to have soup at the diner around the corner. The owner was a family friend and he let her have as many croutons in her tomato soup as she pleased. They spoke about their days and their friends. Her friends who wore sunshine-yellow socks and made Mother's Day cards, his friends who worked long hours and didn't have anyone at home waiting for them.
 Sometimes, she didn't tell him certain stories in her day because she knew he'd feel bad. She didn't tell him how all her friends made fun of her socks that didn't match. She never mentioned the time when her friends shut her inside a cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. Nobody likes being the weird kid in the corner but she knew that she always had Bob. He would never think she was weird.
He told her she could become whatever she wanted. So she became a writer. Spiral notebooks filled with her writing. Confusing poetry. Dark tales of love lost. He worried for her.
On her 20th birthday, she announced she wanted to study writing further.  She sat on an airplane soon enough and took off to America. Before she left, she had thrown her arms around him. There was still no feeling more precious.
She wrote him long, winding letters and short stubby emails. She left him abrupt messages online that made his day. "Dear Bob. It's cold here." "Dear Bob. The teacher looks a lot like our old maid." " Dear Bob. I thought of you when it rained here this morning"
She told him she didn't want to get married, when he asked. He had nothing to say. All he said was "I will support whatever decision you take." They never spoke about it after that.
On his 60th birthday, he got a brown package. He knew she'd send something special. One year she had sent him a harmonica. One year, a vintage chess board. This time it was a book.
He held it close to his heart when he saw the cover. It had her name on it. The small girl who climbed into his lap wrote this book. He didn't worry for her anymore.
On the first page, in bold print it said " For my Bob who always listened to all my stories."
He shut his eyes and thought of her. He thought of her telling him the stories at the soup diner. Stories she had saved up all day to tell him. He opened his eyes and looked at the book in his hand
His Little Bug had made it.

I must have been 6-7 years old and we were visiting some relatives in Calcutta. They had a big house on the outskirts of the city. After the first few days, when the novelty of the big house had passed, we decided to go to the city. My enthusiastic uncle said that it was time we did some touristy things. He said we must go explore the city. Go take pictures at Howrah bridge and at Victoria Memorial and eat puchkas later.
We piled into the back of his old Fiat and set off on our little journey. There were way too many people to fit in and I had to perch onto my mom’s lap. The ride was very interesting. My uncle kept pointing out buildings that had been built in the British era; their structures subtle yet sturdy. My mother and aunt made a couple of stops to look at saris. I remember that there was a cow there that had very pretty eyes. It’s funny how tiny details always stay with you.
As we began to approach our destination, the excitement grew. Everyone started talking in loud voices. My uncle had to juggle driving and making animated gestures to spice up his anecdotes. In the middle of all this we didn’t see an oncoming car. My uncle hit the brakes at the last minute. The car made a loud screech. Thankfully, the two cars didn’t collide. The other driver shouted at my uncle in rapid Bengali. My uncle apologized and turned to see if we were all okay. We weren’t. At least I wasn’t. Since I was sitting on my mother’s lap, I had hit the front seat with the sudden jerk. My lower lip had a slight cut. But when you are 6, a slight cut is like having a fracture. I started crying and my entire family attempted to pacify me. My uncle apologized a hundred times and made promises of pastries and sweets. My mother told everyone, in a strangely high pitched tone, what a brave girl I was. “Isn’t she brave?” My mother asked the others. I continued crying. To make matters worse, my cousin pointed at my lip and said, “Look Ma, balloon!” what he was trying to say was that my lip was beginning to swell. That scared me more and my howls became too loud for my family to handle. Finally, resorting to being stern, my uncle asked me to stop crying if I wanted to see Victoria Memorial with everyone else. That did the trick, but only just. I switched over to whimpering.
The swelling however had begun to worry my folks. My uncle started driving towards an ice cream man to see if he had some ice. My sister, in an attempt to cheer me up, began to tell me a story to make me a laugh. It was a story about a king who had to stop a battle to go to the bathroom. I remember laughing a lot. The ice cream man didn’t have ice. He also cheerfully informed us of some massive power cut. He told us that finding ice now would be difficult. Then he saw my lip and my tear streaked face. He smiled and pinched my cheeks and said he had a solution. He handed me a cold pack of Frooti. It was semi-frozen. He told me that I could hold it to my lip for a while and then drink it.
Those were strangely simpler times. We saw the Howrah bridge and ate the puchkas, amidst all the other things. But my favourite part of the Calcutta trip was the semi frozen Frooti.

I am my own Confusion.

This isn't your life you're leading. It's a dizzying blur of a million things. Your father's ideas, your mother's hope. The fleeting hug your brother gave you before he left. The way your best friend painted your toe nails a scarlet red when you probably would have preferred a tamer colour. This isn't your life.

There are books on Chemistry piled on your bookshelf. Yet, in the dark of the night, you scribble poetry on old notepads. You like your peace, you like your loneliness. Yet, every weekend, you find yourself making your way through noisy teenagers, making small talk about life in the hazy backroom of a bar. You work for a corporate, you wear your stiff white shirts and carry leather handbags. You make cookie-cutter presentations to impress the people on the other side of the table. Yet, ever so often you close your eyes and imagine yourself wandering through the muddy roads of a small town, thinking thoughts in your head that you're obliged to tell no one.

You live in a crowded city, you fit in like you should. You don't have time to stop and gaze at the world. You have some place to be. You read on your phone because it's just convenient. Your handbag has unpaid bills and make-up.

You fall asleep with escape swimming in your eyes. Your mind is full of half baked plans to pack your life up in a backpack and leave. You dream of oakwood book shelves and freshly made buttermilk cookies.

Then one day, you find yourself enjoying your work. You go to the bathroom and shriek. You write more everyday. You jog more everyday.

You stand outside your office holding your papers, smoke snaking out of your thin lips.
 
It isn't your life. It isn't.

But you don't hate it as much.

Also, your poetry is getting a lot better. 

Dissonance

There are few things that scare me a lot. The night before the results of a big exam. Maths. Earning the wrath of certain people. If I have to call these people or mail them, I think of all sorts of things. I wonder if they are busy. I wonder if they might see my name flashing on their phones and get angry. I wonder how they might react to my call. I factor all this in and then go ahead and call them. Sometimes, I just quietly turn off my phone and put it away; and congratulate myself mentally on having averted a potentially ugly situation.
The people I know sometimes become the people I used to know. I forget what my name sounds like when they say it. I forget the sound of their laughter. I forget how they pronounce certain words. Then many years later when I hear someone else say a particular word in a fashion that they did; I think of them and wonder where they might be.
There are nights when you sit and run over everything you’ve done. All the things you missed out. The times you turned down offers to go to a beach for a weekend getaway. I am everything I do. And everyone I meet. If that actually does work the way I think it does, does that mean, the things I didn’t do at least slightly alter who I am. If I had gone to beach last week and I had consumed alcohol from a coconut shell, would that have in some minuscule capacity made a difference to who I am.
I miss my phone ringing in the night. I miss taking long cab rides as the sun sets. I miss myself in colourful socks and in worn out jeans. I miss everything that I had and I might have. I miss my sister being in the same room as me, on long boring Sundays.
It is a Saturday evening and everyone at work has left. I am writing this and drinking coffee from a paper cup. I wonder if there ever comes a time in any of our lives when we are perfectly happy with everything. If it does, does it last a while? If it doesn’t, is it because we expect too much? And if we did drop our expectations, is there really a point in such a compromised happiness.
I wish I could just fix everything there was to fix, or atleast make peace with the fact that sometimes you can’t fix things.
"I know someday you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky
But why, why can’t it be mine."

Prompt word: Vermillion

The bangles in the box have been unused for a while. They sit there in all their glitter and glory. They miss the time gone by. The time when she loved them dearly, gazed at them, admired them. The times when she would come from the bath, her waist length hair covering her bare back like a curtain. She would sit in front of the mirror, the soft orange lights in the room making her looking a hundred times prettier. She would dot her glowing forehead with just a hint of red. She would dust the parting in her hair with vermillion. The tips of her fingers were always a faint red, a testimony to this everyday ritual.
The bangles were kept in a wooden box. The insides of the box smelled of polish and good times. Now they had not much to do but to sit there demurely; as the events of the past haunted them as much as they haunted her.
The call came in late one night. She sat on the bed and cried for hours. She’d had taken one look at the wooden box and thrown it to the floor. She was angry. Why did fate pick her? She was meant to grow old with her husband. She was meant to have him hold her slim waist; have him whisper how pretty she was. She sat in front of the mirror – her glowing cheeks were now a flaming red. She tore at her hairline, in an attempt to wipe of the vermillion. She rubbed it off, her hair now an angry mess. The vermillion had served its time. Now, it didn’t make her look pretty. It didn’t make her feel secure. It was just a rude reminder of her loss. She rubbed at her forehead until the fleshy part of her palm grew red. The orange light gave it the red an eerie edge.
The bangles were picked up by a concerned friend and put back in the wooden box. The box was kept away out of sight; lest they bring back memories of the tragic time
A few days back she opened the wooden box. She had a look of pain and longing. The pale blue bangles had been her favourite. She touched them tenderly, like they would break with her mere touch. Then suddenly she shut the lid with a force that caused a couple of bangles to crack. They never did complain though. They had heard her cry into the nights. Her pain was deeper than their longing to adorn her hands again. They continued to sit in there, in the dark. They understood. They understood that they reminded her of that night.

I am Joe's complete lack of surprise

There was a fire drill at work. They started announcing over the PA system that there is an emergency in the building and to evacuate it immediately. The announcer said this in the calmest voice with no sense of urgency. To be honest, I didn’t hear her the first time over the sound of Angry Birds crash landing on three I-pads around me. The second time we heard it, the people around me picked up their coffee mugs and walked towards the emergency exit, looking back several times at the TV screen to check the stock prices. One lady took her Japanese paper fan. She claimed she just simply couldn’t walk down 18 floors in this heat.
In the emergency stairwell, a man in an orange jacket shouted “Hurry up! Clear floors! There’s an emergency.” A grand total of zero people believed him. One man in sunglasses (in preparation for the sun outside) asked “What kind of emergency?” under his breath. One of my friends spotted me and skipped a few stairs to start a conversation. He offered me mango yoghurt. “It’s an emergency.” I said. “I know, that’s why I got food.”
We had to assemble floor wise in the parking lot. The heat was unbearable. I wish I had sunglasses and Japanese fans of my own. We made a quick calculation and realized that it will take painfully long for all these people to go back in 4 elevators. We decided to go have chai after they allowed our dispersal.
You may not believe this, but I heard of a divorce, 2 summer camps and a root canal surgery on the course of my walk from the parking lot to the gate. Nobody cared about the drill. The safety team cheered on having evacuated people from the building in record time. I wondered if this was record time despite picnicking with yoghurt while fanning oneself, only a small portion of us will make it out alive in case of a real fire.
The guard told us we weren’t allowed to exit the building, so we dropped our chai plans and trudged up the stairs. Another friend of mine ran past us taking the stairs two at a time. “The emergency is over. Stop pretending” I shouted after him. “There’s cake on my floor. I won’t get any, if I don’t hurry.” He screamed.
They should get him to make the emergency announcements next time.

Summers

How many things from your childhood and youth will you remember when you’re 70? Will you remember how you ate cookies when you were specifically asked not to? Will you remember how you got mad at your siblings because they made fun of your handwriting? Will you remember what your first kiss felt like? Will you remember the bad stuff too? The people who failed you and the people you failed?
There is a part of my childhood that I will never forget. We’ll call that segment – Summers.
My parents didn’t really trip over themselves with the ‘let’s-enroll-our-children-in-a-million-summer activities’ and I don’t think I could have been more grateful. While some of my other friends who weren’t as lucky went to learn to stitch, swim and sing all in a day, I would run around the whole place with playful abandon. Exams would end in the first week of April and what followed was 2 months of nothing to worry about. The funny part is when I look back now, I wonder whether there really was anything to worry about back then.
The days in the summers played out in pretty much the same way. I would wake up late, drink tea (that tasted as close to milk as was possible) and then I would put on my shorts and my rubber slippers and go down to a friend’s place. Sometimes we would watch cartoons; sometimes we would run out and get an early start to the day. We played lots and lots of cricket. Building cricket with building rules and a rubber ball. If there was a secret place where all the lost cricket balls could be found, I can assure you that there will be a small hill of cricket balls with our names on it. I have had the good fortune of playing this game with my friends who not only liked playing it but also were surprisingly well read about it for their age. In hindsight, if that part of my life was taken away, I’d enjoy cricket a lot lesser.
By the time lunch came around and it got too hot to be outside, we’d drag ourselves home long enough to have lunch. Soon after, we’d be back to play cards in the stairwell or monopoly in someone’s home. The family members of children my age must have cursed our energy back then, because there were days when I think we played, shouted, fought and spoke non-stop for the whole day.
Evenings were always the same mix of cricket and climbing on walls to hide in a game of hide and seek. A friend of mine who lived on the ground floor had his kitchen window exactly where we played. We would huddle there, out of breath, and knock the window pane until his always-smiling grandmother handed us steel tumblers full of cold water. The feeling of cold water on a parched throat isn’t one I’ll be forgetting for a while to come.
In that brilliant time between dinner and bedtime, I’d read hungrily, taking in as much Enid Blyton or Hardy Boys or whatever else I could before my eyes shut out of sheer exhaustion. I would fight with my mother if she forgot to bring back new books from the library.
When we went back to school in June, in our sparkling new raincoats, our faces a few shades darker thanks to the playing in the sun, it was a strange feeling. A mix of excitement of a new school year and the inexplicable sadness that summer had ended.
There is this song I like a lot by Joni Mitchell. It’s called Urge for going. The lines that get me every time are “I had me a man in summer time/ He had summer coloured skin” That’s where I get the blog name, because that is just such a lovely description of colour. It has multiple layers in meaning. Every time I hear it, I feel a different feeling.
But, had I heard it as a kid, when I probably didn’t know better, my mind would go back to June 15 th , when we took with us our summer coloured skin to school, year after year. Where each time, we were a summer older, a summer wiser and had under our belt one extra summer worth of memories.
When I am 70, I’ll probably remember this feeling. The feeling when you run out of the summer, as the inky skies pour down on you, and you go to school with a bag full of freshly covered books and there is the excitement and the comfort that your whole life is ahead of you.

Humble tumble

The lovely Krati Tandon and I recently watched the movie Julie and Julia on a Saturday night sleepover. The food stuff is brilliant and Streep is a genius. But more importantly, this blog is partially a result of that. If I can write a post everyday for the next 365 days, I'll have 365 posts and lots of satisfaction.
I usually try and write fiction, but I am definitely not so great a writer that I can promise 365 fiction pieces. Hence, this blog is a blog for just about anything. Food and books and movies and people and the city, and hopefully a bunch of fiction.
This is a humble attempt at a seemingly trying project, but don't we all do one small thing we like everyday until we can do it full-time?
I must mention this as a part of this post: I have and will always will be grateful to all the people in my life who have more faith in my writing skills than I have.
Okay then, see you on the other side.