new feelings

I am domesticating. This occurred to me just after a glass – newly washed ,wet with water — slipped and crashed at my feet. This was just after I had decided I must stop drinking out of juice cartons . It was uncool, uncouth and unsafe. Only recently had father emailed about someone dying after having drunk straight out of the carton — many a rat or a lizard has at some point at some Inland Container Depot made a carton its home was the general drift. 

So when the wet slippery glass left my fingers and took less than one tenth of a second to shatter into tiny shards, my first thought was: well, thats new. I have never dropped a glass before. Unlike previous instances of spilling milk, dropping heavier items like telephones, Internet modems, mobile phones and televisions, this time there was no one chastising or calling the pot, a black or kettle or anything – just an odd sort of a ringing silence – the glass many very well have rung the temple bell. 

Yes I love it, getting used to it, even if I am sometimes afraid I could get habituated to this — this silence, the golden hue of it and the ringing peals of it. I feel like a fearless woodpecker building my nest, cluttering it up with pillow cases, breaking glass, making beds, clearing up, paying the help and newspapers, killing cockroaches and even getting my own food, sometimes maybe cooking it. 

Who do you live with, wherever you live, people ask and I shrug and say, oh I don’t think i can do the whole PG thing any more ( but I’m doing the roosting thing, I think) or when young curly office colleague expresses wonder and awe at the death a cockroach, fat, flying and the first at my hands — just a week after pastagirl and I shrieked the house down ( it was my other friend who got blood on her hands for killing that cockroach) it dawns on me, this is domesticating – if that’s even a word. These are the moments when I can actually see time moving – not just a second hand and another after that but time moving like how a particle of matter moves in space. These are the moments when I feel life slipping or changing and thats when I hear someone singing– SO How Does It Feeeeaaal? To be on your own, no direction no, like a complete unknown. But the rolling stone, me, is domesticating, for lack of a better word.

on contradictions

 Traveling is not all that its talked up to be, especially on trips that require one to rough it out on an assignment. I always always have wanted a job with a travel profile, and I have one now. But I regret each time i have an outstation assignment – when I have to get up at unearthly hours to make a quick departure. At those 5am moments, I always promise myself I will immediately reevaluate everything I’m desperately wishing for. One cant be too careful about what one is wishing for and I did desperately wish for a traveling sort of a job.

Even two days on the road, alone, without a bath, indifferent food, lack of decent bathrooms or even a bus driver who insists that there is no stop for the next one hour with a ‘ladies bathroom’ is enough to make one intensely dislike outstation assignments – the truly, the only saving grace is the quality of the assignment (duh).

After a point, most places look pretty much the same. The same kind of trees, the same kind of winding roads, nearl the same sunset, something even the same kind of people, same dialogues.

Sometimes its the hope that something beyond that tollnaka will change that makes us go that extra mile, it is the adventure, yes. People say even that travel broadens one’s horizon – we never return wearing the same shoes we leave in. But who has measured this intangible thing. Its just a series of anecdotes leading to the formation of a theory, a quote. 

Its perhaps just the fatigue now that I want to scream when a trip is round the corner. It feels jaded. Again perhaps its only the people or the lack of them when I travel – then again its not so much the roads we take but who we take them with that broadens the mind. So, maybe traveling in leisure with some friends is all that its talked up to be but then from past experience even this is only until the time I feel cramped in space, style, and thought and yearn to go wild. Grow at my own pace.

 

On travel

Curly from work is only in third year – or would have been in third year if he deigned to attend classes in my city’s landmark college on landmark road (– guess which? )

But Curly decides no, he won’t go to study economics and the WTO but join a newspaper and write — which seems all right, and behooves a responsible kid but on the other hand, if one has a lifetime to work, must one start early?

After all it is only once in life that one is twenty, must one spend the year working in front of a broken keyboard on a broken chair in a dingy, poorly ventilated office. He has a lifetime to do that.

But then he says, I went to college for two years, did not attend class ( cos no one does, even the teachers), did what other kids do and wasted time splendidly. I’ve been there done that, tell me what else should I be doing if not working, he asks.

And I rack my brains hard enough. I worked too when in college, after lectures unlike Curly who’s younger to me by whole four years, I’m hardly the person to say, don’t work.

But if my college was like that, with assured attendance and an assured degree and no lectures then I might have traveled. Maybe saved enough money and gone to Europe, and the Central Americas. Maybe gone to the North east or the Valley or sailed in the Sunderbans, instead of hankering after all of that now, when even a month’s leave means having to pay for it.

SO I tell young Curly that is what you should do my boy. Travel. Forget college, you unlearn all of it in less than 2 months after one joins the workforce.

And after this sage advice I removed myself to continue reading about Mugabe’s Zimbawe, where Cholera is raging and poor George Bush, who no one wants to talk to, not even his own party people. And I cannot help feeling that the world would have been less dangerous if these two had traveled in their youth.

 

On living

Dee once said not able to live alone was a sign of a ‘high maintenance’ person. That phrase stuck. We were discussing about high and low maintenance people and emotional neediness, clinginess, needing someone to be around when you return from work, in other words — not able to live alone meant  high maintenance emotionally, according to wicked Dee.

So I want to tell Dee, hey I’ve managed to live alone these last two months. It’s all right, even if it is crazy sometimes. But a room mate might be nice.

Learning to live with one-self is tougher than learning to live with some one else.

With oneself, one is left to deal with a whole lot of mess all alone, and not all of it is emotional. In the past two months, I’ve left the gas burner on twice  the first time for seven hours and I was not even home that time.

I thought I’d burnt down the house. We had gone to watch the closing ceremony of the CYG and each time the cell rang, I thought it was the office calling to report a fire in K.

One night I came home and went straight to the bathroom and a big flying evil cockroach leapt out at me. Many nights, I’d get nightmares about lions and tigers chasing me through the woods. Living alone means battling insects and animals on your own. IT means if some nut case broke down your front door in the middle of the night, you’d have to handle it yourself.

Then you’ve got to keep the house clean. You’ve got to pay all the bills on your own — and keep track of the bank account, and see how the money disappears regularly—the heart really bleeds.

It’s almost easier to sort out the emotional aspect. One becomes tougher, independent, you answer to no one else. You’re drunk on freedom. After a while, talking to the walls is even fun.

Its tough to live alone, but it can be done. But I’m arguing for living with company. It’s a chance at joy. It can be exasperating, but there has to be delirious, glorious joy sometimes. I’d recommend to get a friend to move in as  neighbour, but that might not be economically practical. More practical is to get a room mate. The trouble only is when the room mate ends up being unbearable. One’s own mess can be ignored for a while, but someone else’s mess is intolerable, they say.

The question for me is — is it better to be depressingly angry and exasperated with a roommate or inconsolably depressed and suicidal with oneself?

… an oscillator

 I feel i must write some thing now and then, just to keep this thing alive. i can act like there is no time, when it is really mismanagement of time. Earlier time was divided into semesters. At work, it is divided into weekly meetings, though only just. Even the most exciting jobs can get predictable. Excitement can also saturate beings. But i feel im living in phases, with a 90 degree time lag, sometimes maybe 270 degree. This work till that work / plan comes through. i am here till i go there. This, that, here, there are the troughs and the crests and if i make a good graph, they might make an uneven saw tooth formation. I might be an oscillator. It could be a sine wave formation, but a sine is too predictable and i definitely dont want that as an input. 

I can be tangential but this is still about time.

When i was smaller and more malleable, mum often said — study now child, you cannot see time move. Before you know you will be staring down at the question paper.
I have spent many afternoons staring down (or up) at the long hand of the clock, just to prove that i can see the time move, but most of the studying has been done in the ‘eleventh hour’ as father calls it.  I am hoping this eleventh hour will rise to the ocassion this august and september.

I have an exam, but besides that, pasta girl and i are on a secret mission. We have plans to accost a lot of random people, even the ones on the roads, into being our fnew best riends.  I have to basically find new best friends within a fortnight. Pastagirl will be away for more than a month between august and september, another good friend ‘72 mm’ (:D)  is leaving the clan to cross the seven seas in mid august. A dear friend akshoo has applied for a transfer out of pune. I am just running out of people i can still call on a saturday night at 11 pm and crib. I will admit that my immediate future looks rather bleak and unfriendly, so i have pressed into action – the eleventh hour plan. 

Which we put into action on saturday, walking down FC road when we spied an interesting looking house, which we thought  was perhaps a theatre group because of a pablo neruda quote outside. Pasta girl wanted to poke around. And when we rang the bell, the lady welcomed us in and it turned out to be the house of four hopefully interesting architects, who are sold on the wadi-type, minimalistic, mediterranian type style of architecture.

And as much as i realise that i might not be able to afford these guys when i build my home, nor can i call new architect friend at 11 pm on a saturday night, my movie plans for saturday evenings are at least taken care of, so said new architect friend – apparently they screen fancy european movies on weekends at the architect house, which has a pretty water body — by the by. And im thinking this is atleast better than a year ago when i would end up working for lack of other options.

Yes, maybe i wont have to pay for my sins jusst yet. p.s : i am so effing tired of this city. I so want to move, but being friendless and clueless in a new city is something i am not up to, at present. I need more time. I want to climb up to the menacing clock, unscrew the glassy cover and tell the long hand to stop moving, and if it doesnt listen to me, physically stop it from moving. Stop long hand stop, it is not yet time. I am still young and i want to be fine.

how i came to make friends with pasta

When pasta girl and I met many full moons ago for the first time, she was the only non-journalist friend i had in Pune. Then Ay came, then Ay left, then DD came, then DD left and then December came and then she left and a year down the line, she is still my only non-journalist friend in the city.

And this may make me sound like an anti-social, friendless person. Sometimes im all that, (and to be fair i know many journalists including my collegues who are great friends)

But while i know many other people in the city as acquaintances or sources, they would not pass the guest list test.

(the guest list test is my collegue’s invention and my axiom. If you are willing to add a name to your wedding guest  list, then it is likely that you would add them to your friend list. Collegue and i run all our sources through our guest list test. I was shocked, for instance, to learn that many of our common sources have already attended collegue’s wedding, which inversely probably explains why my collegue has so many friends and gets so many gifts – if you invite someone to your wedding, its likely that they will eventually like you and maybe even go dotty over you.)

so anyway, we met because of a common man friend. Pasta girl told me once that she was hoping i would be a man. And really, i would have hoped the same of her as well, but i knew our common man friend (who sometimes passes off as my cousin ) better – he doesnt know many men, his guest list for instance, when he gets engaged this month, would probably not feature any men. 

So anyway (again), i recognised pasta girl immediately as the other half side of me, if i came  to be compared with a shiny coin. And thats not only because we share a name. Like me  she is a whiner, a diner and an old fashioned piner. (We pine for people constantly, so much, we could grow a pine tree in our back yard and it would really drip — with pines). We dont know what we want, but like me, she ends up liking men who are not interested in us ( being fond of us does not count, we are fondable people) . Ay, on the other hand, just doesnt have to try. Ay picks up men on sundays who would pick her up from the bus station and drop her home on mondays. I mean, really, the only man I know who has done that, would do that for me is my father, and these days even he doesnt offer, says journalists should manage their bags on their own.  

So ya, shes pasta girl because she likes pasta; she likes pasta with feminist leanings, she likes pasta that is eaten by day and saves children by night, she likes pasta with violent violet salad helpings, with a dash of vinegar and yes pasta that is penne, i think both of us dislike spagetti, and yes pasta will be eaten when we go to sindudurg this year. No, we dont hanker after Italians.

Agra

It would be a good idea, I thought, to buy UG’s in Agra — Mumtaz special. A laugh it would be we decided if we found someone selling something similar to what Mumtaz Jahan wore for the Shah.

I didn’t have the time to go looking. Nor did our Agra Fort guide mention if the Mumtaz wore Ugs or if any of the Mughals liked wearing Ugs (we also did not broach – although he did say that the Mughals loved women and had loads of them, there were harems with over 3,000 women or that the Mughals did not like messing with doors, they preferred curtains, they liked hanging out with their wives in the balconies and doing nothing during summers.) 

And so the Taj variety of love is surf excel clean ( as if you didn’t know).  The owner of the place  where we lunched ( as did everyone else) referred to the Taj as a ”Pyar ki nishani’ – the sacrificial kind.  
 The only comic endearing moment during the Taj trip was when a warden ticked off a tourist for smuggling cigarettes in the soles of his shoes. (As the sheepish tourist with his love for cigarettes walked back to the locker, Aye asked the by now smug warden how did he figure out where to look. The warden said he just knew. )

as i have complained to most people, the Taj is a big letdown. The guides we followed – we didnt hire our own — at the Taj were insipid. A friend had asked me to hire a guide to learn about the architectural wonders of the Love Mahal. It didnt work.

Heading back from the love mahal was a nightmare. We were three girls, one visiting the Taj for the first time, one after 20 years, and one after four years, though that was not the reason why we hooked ourselves up with an auto driver for day long transportation. It was a  very bad idea. We got into a bus in the evening that took the longest time – from 6 pm to 3 am — to get to Delhi.(In Delhi, we got hauled by cops when we couldn’t find a single open gate into the society.)

 One soaring moment during the day was the lunch we had at the back alleys of Jama Masjid. The chicken I nibbled on from Aye’s plate was better than Delhi’s Karim’s. I had asked for dal-chawal  ( i was trying to be vegan), but they gave me a mild version of fried rice, with peas, boiled and fried in oil,with cashew, cloves and other spices.

 Aye has coined a sobriquet for Agra – ‘city of thieves’. Agra ke log chor hote hain,  is what we told everyone who was within ear shot as they forced us to sight-see through Mathura and Vrindavan in the dark, both filled with mercenary priests. 
People say, one is predisposed to like the Mahal, even before one steps in. Some other people said before we left that that it is a symbol of one man’s ego. If one feels compelled to try out the Taj Mahal, then it is useful to remember that the Love Mahal is like a temple at the time of an ‘Aarti’. Or do the night trip – which is about Rs 500 for 20 minutes.  

I feel sage enough to add that it is best to talk less in Agra. Do not strike deals with the auto drivers to take you around. Stay away from guides. Stay away from crowds. It would be a good idea to carry as less  money as possible. Aye said the city is renouned for pickpocketeers. Do not buy anything, you will most definitely get fleeced.  The city is really not worth it. One ends up with an unsavoury taste, it erodes most things positive in you. Aye and I felt like our years of education and so many years of working and dealing with hardboiled eggs was wasted on us.

Spitian Notes – I

On our drive down to Kee monastry in Spiti valley, an animal loving friend got off the jeep to hug one of the two donkeys. For the donkeys this was probably strange even for Spiti standards.

In the next two days, Pooh Jha ( as she will be called here ) would hop out of the jeep to fondle another donkey, some sheep, a few blue, brown and yellow mountain goats and one domesticated and saddled horse. And although she expressed a desire a number of times to sink her head into the hairy mane of a yak, we never found one close enough for her to hug.

This was perhaps good for the yak as Pooh managed to spook the majority of the animals we spotted whom she tried to hug, despite proclaiming deep love and affection for all of them.

It began with the donkey pair that was quietly grazing on the road side, the day we went to Tabo and Pin. Pooh moved one step towards them only for them to shuffle sideways, away from her, without interrupting their afternoon meal, pretending to ignore the world, which perhaps allowed a distant thought to lull into her head that a hug may be possible after all.

She stretched her hand to pet one of them and they wriggled their rear and put a couple of more steps between us. She lunged one last time to hug and they broke into a trot and scampered away in tandem, their bums and tails synchronized and swishing. Oddly though, the donkeys never brayed.

She never named this couple citing treason on their part as the chief reason, but her next donkey love, Pooh called Ghanshyam.

This one was grazing away unsuspecting of what was about to descend on him. But Ghanshyam was quick on the uptake. The instant he sniffed non-four legged presence around him, he put in as much distance in between as was possible on donkey legs after an interrupted meal and days of non-bathing.

For a while, Pooh and I ran with Ghanshyam, calling out to him to wait and be hugged and then pose. But Ghanshyam ran unmoved.

I do not have pics of Ghanshyam. Of the first pair I have a forlorn Pooh looking at two donkeys running in the distance.

These were our later days in Spiti valley. And this was much before my camera phone broke. There was one horse — I forget his name — who Pooh managed to hug, of whom I have a video clip. Otherwise sheeps ran away, goats ignored, even a little kid didn’t take being pichkooed too well, but that is another story for another day.

On the third or the fourth day, journeying in Nako, we found a water beetle, who Pooh adopted and called Augustus Kramis – the third. Augustus ran away when he was scrubbed, force fed and force-sent to learn Sanskrit to be a Brahmin. An adopted housefly called Raghupathy in Kaza fled home when Pooh offered to get him married – or so I think, I forget the real reason. Of these I never managed photographs.

Yaks we never found in Spiti. They said they were abundant in Leh. But I have a postcard of a bunch of yaks on a farm in Spiti. Two of them, Pooh has named Ganpathy and Kundalika V. Young Ganapathy is peacefully grazing unaware that Kundalika is eyeing him. Kundalika is good at math and Ganpathy is good with knitting, or so Pooh said – I think. I might frame the postcard as an ode to the hug that never happened.

Last night was fun. Ranj and Ranj ( peh. cheap thrills. sriranj and ranj, actually) went to watch Mallika Sarabhai dance and Pandit Jasraj sing. from 8.30 pm to 1.30 am. Free of cost. beat that.

Besides the fact that we were starving ( having ignored food after lunch) and let down by the indoor auditorium ( we were expecting open  air and nice chills, we had even taken shawls) — it was heavenly.

I have never seen mallika perform before. I would have loved to hear her speak. Pandit Jasraj and Sanjeev Abhyankar would have cost us a fortune elsewhere in other circumstances. Shamefully, I fell asleep last night in the middle of the concert. It was a long day, but the music was soothing and tipped me over to relax mode. I was dreaming music nevertheless.

Aah, and i should probably mention how we got the passes, but guilt itches. some other time, perhaps.