Stopping to check time. Checking to stop time.

I pick up an antique compass labelled “Marion Ross” on Colaba Causeway. The innards of the city have a lot of history on offer that you can own if you’re willing to shell out the Rs. 750 he’s asking you to. I won’t buy, not the old compass, commissioned to mark yet another boat-ride of old, white colonial men from the continent, nor the pocket watch which has a ferocious eagle on either side. It tells the right time madam, he says, battery operated. Take it, he says, I’ll give you a good price.

Desperate to make his first bargain for the day, the young relic seller sells me his story. These antiques came all the way from Jharkhand madam. They are very old, British-zamaana. Why from Jharkhand, I ask. The British ruled there too, he says incredulously. He wouldn't be doing this, my young friend, if he had found a job in the city. An interior designer graduate, he came from Jharkhand, looking in a place where there is so much lose. Why Mumbai, I ask, everything costs so much! That’s why madam, that’s why I came. Now won’t you buy something? Won’t you buy today? I must earn madam, I must earn till I find a job.

I didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't going to buy. But that his story had more currency than what he sold. He could peddle that story for so much more, he could create the legend of the interior design grad who runs a humble antiques shack. That he was so quintessentially India in that moment that it was both heartbreaking and beautiful.

I should’ve asked his name. But he had lost interest in me already. He was trying on a fake watch a fellow-seller had brought in his kitty. This is how my life is now, this is how it is, he said to no one in general. The world kept walking by.

Incredibly Fast and Positively Good

We were stuck in the taxi a long time. Behind other cars and buses, scooters and bikes carrying locals to their lives, who were able to carry on unlike us. I felt the time solidifying against my reclining form at the back of the taxi, that I wouldn’t be able to escape the failure of this moment.

To me it was disappointing that we’d spent so much time not “experiencing” things. I wanted to get off and push the car, or run to our destination without a break. Anything to escape this crushing race against time and an unexpected traffic jam.

As it happened, we didn’t make it before closing time. We missed seeing something we’d talked about, planned on and plotted to see. A few days for me, a few years for my friend Sanju. The volcano in Bandung in Indonesia. She’d heard all about it from her mother, who’d been there years before. I understood this need to share a moment with a parent. It’s why I always call my dad from a jazz concert. Both of us looked out of the window to the greying skies that had turned the colour of ash sooner than we expected it to. We were blind to space or time in this foreign land. We seemed to be moving in a linear fashion, yet it seemed like we’d been turning circles right where we stood, digging our heels into the mud. With one final look of resignation towards the mountain we had just begun to approach, we gave up, told the driver to turn around and decided to make our last bad decision of the trip.

I was upset for a long time that day. I was sad because there wouldn’t be a picture of us against the sunset atop a volcano. Of us climbing down to the belly of the earth, of claiming that one moment for posterity in a photograph. I wouldn’t have exclamations of joy and jealousy when friends looked at the picture, when for a minute, I would’ve beat them in this race to be more worldly.

Isn’t that why we travel? To know more, show more. Show how we left our imprints on different parts of the planet, claimed a bit of foreign land for ourselves and were also able to shed that bond like old skin, like a coat heavy with damp, to move on to new destinations, new ideas to be part of, new territories to capture. Stuck at the back of the unmoving taxi, I had already begun to realise how futile this was, this conquest for the sake of a never ending race. Why did it matter that I hadn’t clambered down to a volcano that day? Why did it matter that I’d spent most of my time in a vehicle negotiating in a language that I didn’t understand, over foreign money that didn’t feel real in my hands?  Like I was playing a part of a merchant trading experiences for cash? Why did it matter that on that one day, our trip had been a failure, our best efforts were thwarted, that it being spontaneous hadn’t paid off.

And then, when Sanju said we were in the southern hemisphere, that we’d flown over the arbitrary line that converts the earth into a complicated minefield of time zones, forests, ice caps, deserts and people, is when I realised why I’d been a foolish tourist in the back of a car, blaming the universe for standing in my way. We were flying back, sipping tepid coffee at the KL airport from our last few Malaysian ringets. “ Is this why the days were shorter?” I asked her, the foolish tourist. She smiled and nodded. I think she knew what I was referring to.

Travelling is about people, she said. Through people, I added in my mind. I had travelled through her. Quite literally, she’d let me come with her as a last minute addition to her itinerary.  More than that, I’d seen through her eyes, her vision of a perfect holiday. She’d been disappointed too, maybe even more than me, that we never got to the volcano. But for her, this trip was a lateral experience, like a file cabinet she could pick experiences out of. She could file away Bandung, only returning to it as a cautionary tale. An antidote for further trips. Maybe what she would open regularly was the day we stayed up for 24 hours, starting in a Buddhist temple and ending in a reedy club in Jakarta. The time she held her friend’s baby for the first time, or when she began to giggle, uncontrollably, at a reggae singer’s high-pitched laugh.

My dad has the travel bug. He passed it on to my mother, by telling her stories of the places he’d lived in and the food he’d eaten. Impossible stories of how monkey brains were scooped up in spoons and eaten with their bodies wriggling under the table. She’d laughed herself to tears, she told me, and then decided to marry him. Since then, they’ve taken my brother and me to fantastic places both within and outside India. They were conventional travellers to unconventional destinations. Instead of Paris or Rome, they took us to Jordan first. We saw the Bhimbeteka caves before me or any of my classmates could locate Madhya Pradesh on a map. I still remember the insides of a cavernous dark room in Chakori, where by candle light, my dad told us ghost stories of station masters whose hands would stretch like rubber. It was always the same story, about arriving in a strange place at a strange hour and meeting strange people. In some ways, it mirrored what he did on holidays with us. He planned to the very last detail, booked every minute of our time onto mundane tours meant for old, crinkly people and herded us like lost members of a flock, snapping and gesticulating wildly when we were late. We can’t waste time, he said. Time is money. We’ve already paid for these. His string of reasoning was inexhaustible.

As much as I awed by where he took me, I was annoyed at how he did it. He still does it to us, at malls, for movies, for functions and on holidays. So that day, on a taxi ride with no end in sight, I heard my father chiding me for being late, for the lack of planning, for not wringing joy from every moment.  Trying to deafen myself from it, I watched the sun slice the sky into dark and light halves, and shutters of shops go down as we sputtered up the narrow highway, still hopeful we would make it. I was unable to reconcile this, I urged the driver to press on. In my version of a holiday, there was no question of wasting borrowed time.

And that was my second revelation. Flying back, I realised how the airlines had tricked the time barrier itself. I’d never felt it so starkly because I’d never flown through three different time zones. We were almost making a mockery of the linearity of time, going ahead and forward in calculated strokes, so that somehow, we managed to arrive in Bangalore the same day we left Jakarta. We flew back in time. We controlled its flow. It was up to us to decide how we owned it. We owned it. We’d earned it. It was ours to waste, to hold and to lock up in memories that were a consequence of only our decisions. Suddenly, I wasn’t being held hostage by the idea of time slipping by me. Instead I stood directly above and parallel to its flow, like a river I could dip my toe in and out of.

These moments of enlightenment are still nestled in my brain. They go off as light bulbs as I write this. Create a fuzzy frequency between the two, urging me to stay beyond the realm of everyday disappointments. It won’t last, this heady feeling, this emancipation from the need to be “switched on”, on being a slave to time, destiny and logic. But it has re positioned things inside me. Like pieces of a jigsaw, they now sit better together and I am able to move more swiftly through the day with the knowledge that I failed, but I moved on. That experience and memory and joy are, at the end of the day, under my control, and the world is still my oyster to pry open, only with different pliers each time.

Circles

We're walking on parallel sides of the road
In different directions, away from each other.

He turns suddenly
I can feel the little hairs at the nape of my neck bristle
as he changes the direction of the wind with him

He smiles at me and I can feel its warmth on my turned back.
It ends swiftly, this two-second love story.

I want both this and the infinite that will follow
but half-emotions is all we can hope for
in half-returned glances and half-empty glasses

And again one day
In the heat and dust of a busy city street
Maybe two others will meet the same fate
Maybe exactly where we stand today, or a few feet away

They will step into the molds we left behind
Of hearts flowing over.
And love being a silly metaphor for life

It will still be us, in a different time and space
Such is the inevitability and history of human fault.

Old Fears, New Spaces

It feels good to be a statistic. At least you feel like you’re part of the country—of the millions who were intimidated by some action that they never called for. While protesting or writing complex, jargon-y statements about women’s right to claim the streets, to walk unafraid of mental and physical attack and through the very act symbolise the legal freedom of being out ‘there’, I never once really understood the utter sham words can be.

And yet all I can do is write when a gentleman on a bike reaches out of his way to plant a sharp slap on my ass. No I didn’t ask for it. No it wasn’t the middle of the night (Even the prude eleven o’ clock Bangalorean curfew wouldn’t frown upon a 10 PM walk). No it wasn’t a dodgy, run-down part of town. It happened where I’m given to believe Bangalore’s elite live. No I wasn’t taking my chances with the night in a mini-skirt or hot pants. Just merely walking home from dinner in a “morally conducive” pair of jeans.

The appalling thing is that he actually stopped to check my reaction. Turned his head around to see what I would do. Too stunned to move, I couldn’t even swear at him. The slap had seemed disconcertingly familiar.

I’ve had my breasts peeked at, poked at, an unassuming hand graze across my ass. I’ve had boys in school wait under staircases and been stared at so hard it made it impossible to stay in one place for too long. I had never underestimated the violence of a gaze, but the sheer anger of being touched without consent is something much bigger than just anger. It’s an unlearning, a complete undermining of your person.

He had a yellow shirt on but that’s all I could tell. He was on a bike, his face half hidden by darkness and the other half by an ugly smirk. He was indistinguishable from the thousands of others who do this to thousands of other vulnerable women across the country. They often do much, much worse.

The ironic thing is that on the way back from work earlier, on a bus segregated by gender, I thought about the geography of misogyny and violence. And I realised there isn’t any. Once the son of a prominent cabinet minister had joked about how women only got raped in Delhi, in contrast to Gurgaon where they get murdered in addition to being raped. I thought the joke in very bad taste, but since we were being young and urban and self-consciously gender neutral in our friendships, I let it go.

I sat through a slew of insults against Delhi when I first moved to Bangalore. About how Delhi didn’t know how to treat its women, about how raping was a sadistic past-time there, about how ridiculous the Khap Panchayats were. As if Delhi was a monolithic kingdom that sacrificed women as part of a daily ritual. The truth is that people rape, abuse, harass, touch and pinch women in Delhi for the same reason that men in other parts of the country do: because they can get away with it. The helplessness of not being able to run after the bike, or it being too dark to check it’s make, were things not in my control. They’ll never be in my control when a hand reaches out from the back. From now on, in my mind, my geographies of violence will change. Familiar streets will grow vulnerable to the sheer audacity of men on bikes.

Statistics have history. So I learned when I called the most un-hysterical person I know: my mother. Tough as nails, my mother’s response to the rising incidents of assault and abuse in Delhi has never been to curtail my freedom. Typically, she heard me out calmly and offered a few ripe insults towards the biker to assuage my hurt. She then told me about how thirty years ago, as student in Miranda House, she had faced much of the same thing while walking to class. In her mind, the map of assault and insult consisted of a few streets in Delhi University where she and her friends were regularly leered at by groups of men dominating street corners. “Sometimes the days would be just as bad. There would be no one around in the scorching summer heat. No one to help,” she said. For my mother, I know that these geographies of violence shifted constantly as she moved between states and even to other countries. Bad men were bad men everywhere. Their belief in misogyny intact, it didn’t matter how or who fell to the system.

When someone calls me a feminist, they usually mean it as an insult. They say it to undermine my political and personal belief that every individual has the right to live equal to his/her peers. At work, in the middle of UN millennium goals poll, a colleague, quite coolly, passed over the need for gender equality. “What do you need more? Water, food, sanitation or women’s equality?” he said. In his vision for the future, if this happens to me again, I should come back home to my water and scrub off the feeling of guilt and utter helplessness. Because that’s women do—they wipe themselves off an existence.

FAR FROM FICTION

My grudging appreciation of Chetan Bhagat is much like my grudging appreciation for Shah Rukh Khan. Both unwittingly stumbled into stardom, and without much talent or backing, created empires that shifted the meanings of superlatives in our vocabulary. Both, in a sense, are a celebration of middle-class India’s love for mediocrity. Both are heroes of an average kind.

What they portray is a dream without the cruelty of irony or parody. Khan can still earnestly morph into a make-believe, computer generated action hero and fight the fight, talk the talk and charm the pants of his heroine. Bhagat can still write books, despite his clear paucity of expression, and postulate on what the youth of India want.  Both are marketing phenomena par excellence. Both pander to an audience only too willing to indulge their exploitation of the middle class bucket-list.

Those of us who look down on Bhagat’s style of writing often forget the kind of intuitive appeal his books have had on a generation bred solely on post-liberalisation TV programming and very little library time. The creation of his stories, it seems, is based on this very insight—it’s a seamless extension of the programmes they watch on TV, the news they consume, the women they wish they had and as always, the aspirations they need to mirror to be part of this seemingly buoyant economy.  (It has, however, been four years since he penned The Three Mistakes of My Life and India’s fortunes have dithered since.)

In the early 90s, when Switzerland was being re-imagined by Yash Chopra through his epic romances, it was Khan who shouldered the weight of middle-class aspiration. He was a one-way ticket to the Alps.  However Khan himself was beyond the aspiration and the struggle. As the poor little rich Raj, he was charmingly off limits. We revelled in the gaps he created, happy in our half-baked hopes of flying abroad one day and tasting real Swiss cheese.

Bhagat is a harbinger of a completely different generation. His heroes are call centre executives and MBA grads. It’s not so much about inherited wealth and privilege as it is about enterprise and self-worth (For the sake of this argument, let’s assume that all Bhagat’s books are potential scripts, which seems to be increasingly the case). His heroes are optimistic to a fault and smack of familiar stereotypes of the Indian middle-class. They would pick a business plan over a trip to the Alps.

What changed? Did we forget our fascination for the West? Or did we imbibe it so seamlessly that we’re happy with our mashed-up version of consumerism? Maybe a bit of both.  In Kai Po Che, Bhagat’s latest offering in Bollywood format, a familiar underdog story is played out between three men driven by different motivations. This, Three Idiots and more urbane fares like Rock On and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are markers of another classic shift—from largely portraying the inner realms of family life to the very public nuances of friendship and camaraderie.  Friends, in a sense, become moral guidelines for right and wrong, often leading to the creation of a different set of standards to live up to. For instance, filial loyalties in Kai Po Che are trumped by what was promised to friends. There is rebellion against the idea of duty and support for breaking away from the fold. Associations with the family, like in the case of the right-wing Omi character only end in complete destruction and friendship is sacrificed for a pithy game of communal politics. The re-emergence of the multi-hero format is reminiscent of the late 80s/early 90s when it was unsuccessfully tried with films like Tridev. While Dil Chahta Hai marked a watershed moment for Hindi cinema in the new millennium, no one could quite replicate its success through the decade. Till of course it became apparent that that no new talent could singularily carry a film like the Khans of the 90s. Acting talent, at least partially, is crowd sourced from lesser platforms like reality TV and soaps, re-casting the middle class hero in 2012 in middle class roles. With the exception of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Khan’s directors made him do quite the opposite.

The sly brilliance of a Bhagat and the directors that adapt his stories is that they understand the value of populism. They derive full value from the term ‘popular culture’. Kai Po Che uses the Bhuj earthquake and the Godhra massacres as backdrops, referencing them only to the point that’s comfortable to the middle class imagination. The rather sanitised depiction of the riots is a familiar itch but something no one’s willing to scratch for fear of a scab. The film never lets it get under the skin of the characters and the socio-political history that abets the riot is reduced to an emotional outburst, where the character is only looking to avenge his parents’ death, nothing more.

Admittedly, mainstream cinema is not a platform for conflict resolution. The portrayal of the Muslim minority sans caricaturisation itself is a triumph for Hindi cinema. While their blatant victimisation and dependence on the secular albeit Hindu hero isn’t exactly palatable, it’s still less unequal an equation that Bollywood is used to showing.

Political niceties aside, what burns through and pointedly so, is the entrepreneurial spirit of Gujarat. It brings to mind the other middle-class hero who has risen to now contend for the top job in the country. Narendra Modi, or Bhagat’s Parikh, is also re-casting himself in the public arena of politics. Chief Minister three times in a row, Modi has successfully created a brand of Hindutva that works on the simple theory of economic development for the majority. Kai Po Che (or for that matter Three Mistakes of My Life) also never makes an attempt to alter this set equation. It’s logic that sits well with the middle class. It’s the children of the 90s, weaned on Shah Rukh Khan’s opulent cinema, who now understand Modi’s easy and rather flawed link between money and development. Bhagat as a chronicler of our times has captured our shift rather well, be as it may in SMS literature.

Taking Root

I had my first ‘being alone’ moment today as I grappled with a lid to a fussy jar of pasta sauce. I scrunched up my face and even did a little dance to no avail. I danced around my tiny one bedroom-kitchen-half a hall apartment hoping that by some stroke of luck, the cap would undo itself. Out of pity if nothing else.

After ten minutes of acute hunger and fitful dancing, I gave up.

Half-heartedly, I knocked on my landlord’s door. A kindly Coorgi gentleman, he would make his tch-tch face at the sauce bottle. He’s not a fan of packaged foods. He’s clearly not a fan of how I do things. If I ever miss a parent, I usually land up there for lunch.

But the universe seemed to conspire against my will to cook—no one answered the door. I trudged back, intensely annoyed that I’d have to skip dinner. I needed another pair of hands. Dare I say it—a pair of man hands. (And then I ducked to miss the well-aimed, vitriolic feminist spittle)

This is exactly the kind of predicament my mother says would be averted if I got married. “You’d have someone to travel with,” she says, tickling my travel bone, knowing where it tickles most. The opened bottle of reedy pasta sauce would only be a bonus.

But what beyond travel plans? Can he make good bhindi? Maybe Shaadi.com should think about a bhindi box. Or one for Spanish omelettes.

Living alone is a revelation. I’ve done so little of it, that it remains an enigma to me how people have done it their entire lives. Be content for who they are, in the absence of a mirror or another person to talk to.

Sometimes it seems the fridge is trying to have a conversation with me. When all else falls silent, it hums and creaks like an old, old man. Frozen on the inside.

The silence falls like wet blanket. It gets darker quicker under the canopy of trees that makes little squares of the sky. If I listen close then I can hear the crickets, the night guard, the baby in the balcony across the road, the water falling from the slanted roof onto the pebbles. Even a guiltless fart once in a while.

I look at the little signs I’ve collected over these two months—a cut knee from trying to rush out of an auto, a dented nail from cutting the bhindi too fine, a backache from picking up clothes from all parts of the tiny house. And the bills, always the bills.

The thing about living alone is that there’s so much time to reflect on who you are, or who you’re trying to be. Not just in a pseudo-intellectual, philosophical battle with your brain, but even on an everyday level. It’s made me re-think my dependence on people, family, friends, the need to prove to myself and the world that I’m a ‘social being’. For now, I’m happy donning the new city cloak and turning invisible, unpalatable, unreceptive. I like the feeling of being dissolved.

One Sunday

We lay limp like fruits on a dry summer day

Under the sheets our mangled bodies cresting with the pain of being together.

The heave and sigh, the pull and tug, of breathing too hard, or too little.

The love of my life whispering inaudibly in my ear.

I cannot hear him well, or at all

My body writhing with the pain of being here this moment, and being faithful

On five inches of bed we lay, unwrapped and unzipped

We’re all hair and sweat and clothes and life

There’s very little blood and passion

Sometimes there’s too much

I can’t decide which I like better

The dry, limp wilt of a brain slipped with heat

Or the crazy, heated exchange of low clouds before rain.

He rests his head on my chest, I on his open palm

We try and breathe together, inhale and exhale in copycat fashion.

It works sometimes, and at other times, we’re disgusted with closeness,

Under heavy sheets of disdain

We wait for rain, we think it’s a better future

When the clouds come, we sing in hope, in love, with tenderness

Yet the mangled body finds no passion, no peace.

We writhe, we touch, we wait for a

Dawn that comes without the promise of clouds or sun.

We lie naked, exposed to the cruel afterlife

After being together, we can’t go back

Innocence is not an option, and we ran past Deliverance,

Handing out free popsicles at the street corner.

Spaces

I lose Bombay to the endless weave of beady lights. A long road running through the heart of the city is lit like a gold necklace--I haven't spent enough time here to ascertain, from thousands of feet above, which one it is. I've always only been a visitor. 

I'm disappointed though that I don't glimpse the uneven neckline of Marine Drive as a heavy cloud cover has between me and the city I can never understand. From far above, the glittering weave of humanity looks wholesome, ever reassuring. Earlier in the day, stuck in a tormented, angry downpour, it seemed vicious and untenable.

I'm finally on a twice-cancelled flight to back home, to Delhi. I welcome the prospect of tress, of a wider road, my own pillow. I marvel at how much I hate and love home at the same time. It's getting to be a definitive conflict. Definitive of character, of an attempt to realise an ultimate personality. But like the city I love (and even those that I despise), it changes and stays constant.

We've already flown over Vadodra, Ahemdabad, Ajmer and are heading towards Jaipur, as the dutiful, chatty pilot informs us.  In between these different weaves of lights are smaller, sparsely lit editions. Citylings. Tier-Twos. Rest of India. Even more abundant are the swathes of black in between. The Rest of India. It's a scary thought.

We only see what we believe. We judge books by their covers. We're covered in bright lights. The Rest of India is covered in dark, with a few highways leading into it. What are these places, my snobbish, city-bred mind wonders. What are these points between dark and light, between self-assuring knowledge and complete, bitter oblivion?

As we get closer, the lights get brighter. They blind us. They block out the black, the little enormous swathes of dark. 

Touchdown.

Of Keen Mind And Angry Heart

Only two words: No Judgement

The expletives aren't necessary. They never are but we like them to make a point. Hence.

What the fuck is a job anyway. Does this make me sound angry? I'm glad it does.

They tell me it's about mopping up the pieces others leave behind. They tell me its about doing the bare minimum. They tell me its about creating a vision for yourself and the company. They tell me its about thinking beyond means. They tell me its about living within my means. They tell me its about getting some means, some meaning, some shape to an endless fucking disappointment of a life.

What the fuck is a job anyway?

Who is a good worker? Is it someone who lets their boss tread all over them and stab them with their knives recently sharpened? Or is it someone who stands up to the daily roughshod attitude and creates a personality at work? Or is about being insignificant enough so there's never any room for trouble? They tell me it's about making your money, being friendly without being friends, about snatching someone's ground from below their feet while you're handing them coffee so that it's a double burn.

Who the fuck is doing their job anyway?

In country that's sinking faster than quicksand sinks itself, who IS doing their job? If they were doing their jobs would we be here? Would we need the media to point out what's wrong? Would media be a slave to money and would money make people's heads turn? Would we be running an endless race of whose going to lose the quickest? Would people watch that race? Do people watch that race?

They tell me its about winning. About being cunning and gentle at the same time. They tell me its about developing a thick skin, a cold heart without being jaded. They tell me I'm getting on their nerves because I ask to many questions, because I'm reluctant, because I'm lazy. Have I been invisible all this while? Or worse yet, have I been an impostor? Because I don't remember ever being lazy or reluctant or an impostor.

Where the fuck did I go wrong?

I refuse to feel sorry for myself. I refuse but it doesn't help. I'm trying in vain. Maybe its my first lesson in failing.

Being Born

This morning I woke up with a severe cramp in my hamstring. I rolled over, hoping it would disappear soon and let me rest a little while more. But I knew it wasn’t one of those things that would pass without me getting up and hopping around for a bit. So I did just that. After all that hopping, I was wide awake. Such a waste.

As you can probably tell, it’s not a new feeling. Every month for a week, over the course of one year, my life stopped. It literally stopped. The only things that moved were the hands of the clock (a metaphor since I use my phone or the computer screen to tell time). Anyone who has ever had a deadline anywhere in the world was better off than us. Or so we thought. We called it, quite ominously, Production Week. For the uninitiated non-newsy folk, it’s when an issue is put to bed. No, not all issues like wars or terrorism or money swindling through Swiss accounts, but a magazine, which obliquely references all the other issues I just mentioned. The first week I joined work, I joined on Production Monday (notice how I sanctify the week by capitalising the initials of every day). I waited from ten to one for my team to show up. I did think it odd for people to start their work days in the afternoon but I kept shut. It was, after all, my FIRST day at my FIRST job. Ever.

I sat leafing through the magazine that was going to soon put an end to my social life, but I didn’t know it then. People began to arrive slowly and a storm began to brew. No they weren’t mean or uppity. They were welcoming and fun and it felt like college, apart from the fact that everything now had real world consequences. Yet I couldn’t stop feeling uneasy. Like a storm was brewing. By the end of that week I knew what it was. It wasn’t one single moment of impact but a whole week’s worth of tireless, mind numbing work that finally curled into a ball at the base of your spine by Friday morning. It’s a feeling where you feel your mind closing in on itself and its walls collapsing. When you are utterly rubbish.

On the metro back home that morning, I felt like the storm had finally blown over and left an upturned tree in its wake. It felt like that tree was an unlikely metaphor for the rest of my life. Quite simply, I was upset that I’d joined in such a hurry. Upset that the first week itself wanted to make me run for cover. That I couldn’t undo what I’d just done. I thought of things like motivation, courage, stamina and where I could find them. The metro ride went by swiftly.

Month after month we followed this routine, drove ourselves insane over commas and full stops and indents and credits. And widows. Oh the widows. (Incase you’re wondering,
this isn’t a widow. Or maybe, well, not anymore. There.)

What’s changed in a year? Everything. Or maybe nothing at all. Maybe what I measure as change is the batting of an eyelid in my editor’s life. Her career has spanned an excess of 20 years. And judging by the number of fires she lights, fans and puts out everyday, make my change time frame a micro granule of a little bacterial life. For me however, in the current moment, a year’s worth of fires is quite enough. No, I make it sound like a rubble of a career so far. Maybe it’s not a career yet, but it’s not complete rubble either. I’ve been a coffee/tea girl, a lousy sub, an average writer with bursts of inspiration, a caption giver, a closet (then open) smoker, a conversation starter, the go-to person and finally, a colleague. I had a wonderful team. Five eccentric people who wouldn’t talk to each other in a party otherwise, thrown together to find common ground. At first I was very worried about fitting in. None of them were like anyone I’d known before. It didn’t help that talking was encouraged. We always talked, all the time, about everything.

If it wasn’t for Production Week, especially Thursday nights, it would’ve been five different people who went to five different parties. The India Today office has a massive roof where we’ve sprawled ourselves on the stone, seething with the night’s heat. It was such a feeling of camaraderie, of common suffering that we bonded over, it made the experience very particular, wholly applicable only to us. A part of me was always itching to go back to my desk and finish the task at hand, but a part of me wanted to stay under the stars and watch the sun come up. I wanted to see what happened if I didn’t deliver, if we just left the building, like they do in Hollywood films, when the super-able protagonist finds a ‘higher’ purpose in life. I’d rehearse it in my head, a motley crew of five against the sun glazed white pillars of Connaught Place, walking out with the first light of day.

But of course, like in all real lives, and in ours too, they all left one by one, making each exit a bigger blow than the last. Chairs emptied out and the ancient PCs stopped their whirring. All talk thinned down to monosyllabic sentences, and became strictly perfunctory in nature. I miss the fact that I can’t look over the fake-wood partition and find three beautiful and self-assured women bang on about how grossly inappropriate their boyfriends were being, or how the state of feminism in India was in shambles or even how silly it was to have these conversations in at three in the morning when we had a magazine to release. On a Production Thursday.

OLD FRIENDS, BOOKENDS.

A night is only as good as its stories. There’s a main story that unfolds, with little ones in its wake. It’s like throwing a pebble onto the surface of the past. It stirs but never settles. Just like a good song, a story is a heartbreak in reverse, it keeps peeling off layers you constructed with patience and some luck. But nothing is more beautiful than how an evening unravels, and we stand just a little further away from where we started.

We can’t look beyond each other. We’re oblivious to who’s watching. We have a story but no words to tell it with.  It lasts for a grand total of five minutes. In reality, it’s lasted much longer. In a parallel dimension to this one, it’s lasted forever.

At another table, He can’t look past her. He’s waiting for a sign, for her to tell her story. Bitter underneath, he asks her why she’s a mystery. She doesn’t hear, and tells him about obscurities and vague generalisations. His face creases with the effort of holding back. To others around, this is spinning to an inevitable end.

Just like an interjection, the past walks in from the right, sweeps us of our feet. I feel inconsequential in light of these new developments. I feel oddly story-less. The others (the new ones too) nod at each other in guised disdain. Theirs wasn’t happy story, some would say. Maybe it’s still being told.

It’s a badly scripted play, for there are awkward gaps in the conversation that even alcohol can’t fill. We take to other intoxicants, but it only makes us worse. Woozy and alarmed, I stand in between the now deeply segregated groups, trying to tell one story from the other. They’ve made shields of their smiles, and I can’t tell despair from joy anymore.

Inside a couple try talking over the music. They’re not the right pair, though she must admit she thought about it once. But he’s part of another story now.  But she’s adamant. If you can’t create your own story, then it’s best to begin writing for other people. The opportunity is thrilling, has a muse-like effect. In her mind, there’s a faint recollection of the last time she tried this. How easy, she thinks to herself, how careless. To conspire for happiness, even if it’s twice removed.

Under the white awning, an ingrate, 20-something couple unwind their life’s desires onto us. It makes us think of stories from when we didn’t have to pretend to be grown up. Maybe I wasn’t quite so tall, think the women. Maybe I wasn’t quite so lame, pray the men.  We watch, amused and maybe a little envious.

The stories come to an abrupt halt when we find ourselves sitting in a line. There aren’t any cross conversations anymore as we sit frozen in our intolerance for each other. Slowly, a white rage rises within me as I see the story-teller walk away with a wink. He was holding it all together, all the stories were strung through him, like the ends of amateur paper-cup phones.

Suddenly, all I could hear was the blankness of an evening run dry, apart from Jim Morrison on loop. We lost a few stories on the way. Maybe they were making new ones, to tell new people on newer nights. Our stories had grown cold with the early morning air, but the birds brought the promise of a different dawn. We drove back into the city where we’ve all lost our hearts, or will do one day. We drove back into the familiar, into the stories we’d left behind. Sprawled on cane, he looked at me, his face creased with pain and smoke. I felt my heart fold.

It wasn’t even an epic setting for our stories. It wasn’t hot and ripe like summer fruit. It wasn’t blisteringly cold like chapped lips. There was no rain, no thunder, no chance for our stories to fester. There wasn’t nearly enough alcohol. They looked like puppets with cut strings, unable to bring it together, to a crescendo. We didn’t rise and fall, there was no beginning or end to the story. Just a mellow re-telling of the human failure to connect.  It’s ironic that a night of so many tales was passed mostly in silence and ill-timed glances.

I look over to my right and I find the oldest story of them all. Of a slap and a love song. That one’s never going to get old.

The Glutton

For you I've always made an exception. I don't even know why. It has nothing to do in the least with how much I wanted to get in your pants. Well that's done with. 

I miss you. I don't even know why. Maybe we're alike. Maybe we're not at all. I can't tell which one it is but it sure as hell is a powerful draw. 

If we are friends, we're a funny sort. I'm overwhelmed by you. I don't even know why. It's taken a million conversations to make one. And the lack of any is making me fidgety. 

I don't even know why.

At the best of times, you're a schmuck. I can see right through you but I pretend not to. I still write my heart out to you at two in the morning, just so that you can smile at this. And hate me for calling you a schmuck.

This is the love letter I never wrote. I do love you. More than you can believe. Hell, more than I'm willing to settle for. I don't even know why.

When you looked at me through the screen, when I took off my clothes for you, I did it for the tiny window that shows up on the side of the monitor. And I couldn't believe my eyes, or what my hands were doing. 

Didn't you see it then, you bastard? I didn't either. That's probably why I'm writing this to you at two in the morning. After five miserable years of knowing of your existence, I'm finally admitting how much I hated myself when I first met you.

Emotional Fool

Shopping for jeans is like getting a mini-heart attack. You pant and sweat and heave and almost collapse from the effort. Your arms begin to spasm as you try desperately to pull them to your waist, without going into a seizure. Your companion(mom/boyfriend/thinner friend) taps politely at the door, hoping that this would be it, that they won't have to dart across the shop to find the dreaded bigger size. And all this time you arch your back, pull your stomach in as rolls of fat hang over the tight button. Then you begin to sweat.

Soaked in perspiration, you emerge out of the trial room, hoping that none of the shop attendants noticed how long you took, and how little you left with. You imagine their pity, their disgust at having wasted so much time. You imagine they're whispering as you walk past entire racks labeled deceptively to attract 'larger' women. You look over longingly at the men's section, where life seems easier. There's no worry about curves, or the lack of them. The girls in skinny jeans stare down at you as you walk with your hands parallel to your thighs, to hide the bulge that shows despite the extra long sweatshirt. The sweat now pricks your neck with the cool of the night. Blinded by tears, you bump into a few happy shoppers who found their sizes. For everything. 

Your blood curdles at them, and you want to punch their shiny faces. Draw blood, seek revenge for years of being called 'fat'. You roll the ugly word around your tongue, taste the venom in it. It's ruined your life. It's ruined every chance at happiness. When someone calls you beautiful, you know they're complimenting your brains. When someone calls you hot, you recoil because you think it's indecent for them to play on your insecurity. If your city was a war zone, then the thin are your enemy. And everyone in between is an interloper who might've crossed over battle lines to get emotional ammo against you. And you're always ready for an attack. 

You're not genetically blessed, you tell yourself. Your thighs are not your fault, you tell yourself. Those jeans aren't meant for real women, only actresses who get paid to look good. It's not in your job profile, you console yourself. And then a gorgeous woman zips by shattering all your illusions and you hit rock bottom again. Fat is guilt, it's a lovely scoring point for the consistently self-obsessed. Fat is a handicap of epic proportions-- it inhibits your mind. Fat is a fuck buddy because you give in eventually. It's the only thing we can control in all certainty, and yet fail to do. Fat is an ugly scar. 

Fat is the buts and the only ifs in your life. Fat is the opposite of action. Fat is fear. It's your demeaning stepmother who hates you. It's the kitchen knife you've contemplated using on your wrists. Fat is not an incident. It's the rest of your life.

Strange Love

It’s a great conversation when it begins
Hands slide into each other, deeper into pockets between conspiratorial mists of time
It’s a Delhi of deep love.
Achingly, they kiss away the night, hoping for a beautiful sunrise.
It comes mottled with fog, unblinkingly severe,
Lost, the hands refrain from touch,
when they do it’s in a clammy embrace.
The skin parts without love, and treachery unfolds.
It’s a Delhi winter of deep despair.

It's Always The Last One That Does It

The hands of the wall clock are a smudge as I try to wipe away last night's remnants from my eyes. The vodka's pounding through my head, and everytime I move, the blood between my ears swooshes uncomfortably. I lie back, praying for water, and a purpose for my feet to make contact with the cold granite. It'll be a couple of hours, at least two, before I'll be of any use to the world again. And then annoyingly, and quite predictably, I can't go back to sleep.

I turn over, and so does the bile, rising in my throat, threatening to let lose if I tried anything quick or sudden. I rest one hand on my stomach and the other searches for my phone, my only contact with any kind of "reality" at this point. I blink through the mess in my eyes to check the time. For a Sunday, its too early to wake up, and too late already to make anything out of the day. I hope someone's missed me enough in the course of the night to text, or drop me a friendly missed call. I'm greeted with the plasticky blankness of the Nokia screen. My eyes are almost shut again when the phone buzzes in my hand and my fingers let it slip, jolted out of their inertia by the unnecessarily loud ring tone. In my mind are flashes of a heated exchange with an ex-boyfriend, whose face would be knotty with disgust every time my phone rang on a date. Being partial to the type of dressing that doesn't have pockets, my phone would press on with its ugly voice while I rummaged through my bag to locate it. I swear, it probably was one of the reasons why we didn't work out. He probably didn't want to go out with a telephone exchange.

But right now, in my semi-drunk, semi-conscious state, I blinked hard in the hope that someone close had thought of me, was wondering how my Saturday was, if I had a fun time.

It was Airtel. Telling me how every one of my friends is actually Mother Teresa in disguise, and will bail me out of any crisis situation I was inevitably going to fall into. And which is why I needed to add some ominous-sounding package called '5 Friends' or 'Friends Forever' ( you get the drift). I thanked Airtel for its timely ironic comment on my life and rolled over to sleep it off. The blood swooshed and the bile rose again, and I hoped that the vodka hadn't added to the rolls of flesh that I could gather around my stomach and then jiggle together in one clumsy motion, up and down. For five months now, I've watched my curves disappear with my resolve, and now as I nudge and poke the soft center of my stomach, I can picture myself walking at a furious pace, down Aldwych to get to class in time.

It was a quiet, quick walk that I can chart in my sleep. I can picture the faces I saw everyday, the Pakistani odds-and-ends seller, who stood in the same place everyday, next to his make-shift shed on Tottenham Court Road. I would marvel at the range of things he sold, wondering why someone would need a fake Rolex, a Union Jack and a suitcase at the same time. But then again, people do have lives more glamourous than mine. He had, like many fellow 'desis', begun to acknowledge my swift walk-by his shed with a smile he probably reserved for people from the homeland.

Then there was the poor sucker who stood outside the steps of a convenio, next to a fancy steak-house that girls wore dresses and stark red lipstick to go to. Amidst the steaming cups of morning coffee and the smell of McDonalds breakfasts, he would try and sell Lebara sim-cards to fellow suckers from the sub-continent. I was never drawn in, never feeling the need to stay in constant touch with home when I'd hardly been away. I suppose the plasticky blankness of this Sunday morning is a trickle down from years of not bothering to call back. Or text. I bet it's the desi sucker's warped punishment for the royal ignore I gave him on most mornings.

I can feel the signature, vodka-induced headache, forming a knot on one side. It threatens to ruin my Sunday (or whatever's left of it) with the promise of bile and gore. I lie in wait for it to pass. The swooshing has become more intense, and I can almost imagine wading through a pool of my own blood, but finding the current too strong to handle. Should've taken a boat. Should've kept off the vodka. From the far corner of the blanket, I stare at my masticated toe, a mass of bright pink tissue and thin, semi-transparent nail cover. Two weekends ago, my big toenail had come off in the oddest fashion, and turned putrid yellow for the week to come, clinging to my flesh from one tiny corner. Someone had painted it a garish, bridal red as a joke. Thanks to that fit of idiocy, my nail is speckled with the horrid colour, making it look as if mutant body might spring its head out any moment and threaten to take over the world. Or atleast my life.

But what I did discover was that every toe has a story. My heavy head is trying to recall the events from two weeks ago but gives up. I can hardly remember what happened last night. It reminds me of another time when I woke up, drenched in cold sweat, breathing heavily as the air tried to push past the bile and into my lungs. I was gasping and it felt like I wouldn't survive the swathes around me, including my cinch belt, which I hadn't taken off before making contact with the bed, and which was now cutting off the blood circulation to my chest. I remember walking to the bathroom my roommate and I shared with the other residents on the floor, a mangled mess, trying to drag a limp body to hurl into the toilet seat before I did it anywhere else.

Red wine had turned into blood, and it was running down the sides of my face. I imagined my head explode with the wine, I imagined putting a gun to it, to end the misery. With my head ensconced in the porcelain, I dreamt of breathing in the crisp air of London, and taste the water in it. I began to run in my mind, I began to row in the sea of my own blood and wine. The swooshing became harder as I hurled my self into the porcelain. I imagined my head to be a large goblet with the wine dancing in it, reaching the brim but never spilling over. I must have spent hours crawled near the toilet seat, waiting for the swooshing to end. I rowed for a long, long time between delirium and consciousness.

We walked around Notting Hill for hours that day when I finally regained consciousness. I looked over at my roommate sheepishly, begging her forgiveness for the mess from last night/early morning. She was busy eating dry breakfast cereal from a box while watching Ms.Marple solve yet another the-butler-must've-done-it-but-that's-too-obvious-to-show-this-early-in-the-episode murder mysteries. It was the fist time in London that we had cable television, and like the many who must've been transfixed the first time they witnessed the spectacle of colour television in 1983 India, so were we. Our Sundays did heavy damage to our IQs. British television didn't offer much in terms of intellectual stimulation. After all, half their news broadcast was an elaborate ritual called the weather report. But we got by, switching between foggy murders in the villages and dry British wit on "Have I Got News For You".

When I returned in December, our room was gone. I'd gone back to graduate a course that I'll never probably make use of, and found the city choking on snow, shivering, praying for a miracle. I stood outside Piccadilly station for an hour, miserable at having come all this way for a piece of paper and an excuse to wear the black dress I'd bought on sale. It was the boldest I'd ever felt and also my breaking point. I decided then that I could never live anywhere else, and never again out of a suitcase. Later, as we sat curled up on a generous friend's giant couch, sipping cheap wine from the supermarket, my ex-roommate and I watched the yard dissolve into a blanket of white. Insufficiently drunk, we pretended instead. It was the only way we could've survived the weather. And each other.

Whoever crafted the term ' mind's eye' was way ahead of his (okay, her) time. I repeat it several times with closed eyes, holding the words under my tongue, releasing each syllable gently, afraid that when it makes contact with the air outside, my vision will disappear. I can see it whole now, almost like an old cartoon strip-- me in a car parked outside my house, my ex glaring down at my incessant phone. Me unfurling into a Tesco plastic bag in the tube going home, with worried-looking Korean students petting my sweaty forehead. Me touching a familiar face, as he held my broken toe in his hands, distracting me with jokes I only half-understood in a boozy haze.


My own short story till now, drenched in wine.

Golden Days

Two lonely girls in front of the TV.

One wrinkled hand upon the other. Crossed in disapproval.

A young one clicking incessantly at the lurid screen.

Silence. Then noise.

They talk of sex and dirt. She listens, winces.

Crackles uncomfortably between the sheets.

The old hand stays where it is.

The young one clicks frantically at the lurid screen, pressing all the wrong

buttons in turn.

She looks over slyly, to see if she’s watching.

What happened to wholesome television? They both wonder.

Both lie back, their double chins doubling over to form years of fat they’ve accumulated.

Sigh in resignation at the lack of excitement. At the prospect of another Saturday night casualty.

The two lonely hands. One wrinkled and exhausted. The other smooth but hesitant.

On two sides of life, alone on a lonely night.

Step One

5 Things that are true about me right now:

- I don't love what I do. I tolerate it at the most. I'm also the most impulsive person I've met when it comes to making life's decisions, so I'd rather that they're made for me ( yes, die feminism, die).

- I crave for things beyond my reach, like happiness and love together. It isn't really possible. Because I don't let myself be happy. If I ever so much as sniff it, I put it out completely before it takes over my life.

- I'm a good friend. At least I think I'm one. I'm also a good kisser, which has nothing to do with me being freindly. Totally separate things.

- I like random conversations, but not pretentious ones. I'm not intimidated by intelligence, I'm put off by an  overt display of it. I can't "play" dumb. Either I know or I don't. Though I must shamefully admit to having acted above my intelligence.

- I have, of late, developed a freakishly high-pitched laugh that catches me unawares. Have no idea how that happened. I hate being loud.

Okay one more...

- The blogger me is a better person.

Heartburn

There's always an image of the past that gathers itself in the mind and projects it through the eyes. An excessively long train whistle, an old movie, a dress. Or in Maya's case, a very old song. She had been sitting across from him for a whole hour, deftly hiding any signs of discomfort in little silent coughs and small smiles. She was trying desperately to forget, what her mind was conjouring for her, pushing through a haze of red wine and newly accquired confidence. The songs, one after the other, reminded her of four years ago, even three, when she had been next to him, her hand on his thigh and his on her waist. It was hard to forget and painful to remember how close they had been, and how spatially far apart they were now. For he was married, and lived in London. She was single and lived alone, quite alone, in Delhi.

Oh that song, he said, you remember that Maya, back from when we were in a band? Ofcourse, she said. What she actually wanted to say was far different, and much too indecent for a decent place, or decent company. She was the lead singer, he said gesturing towards Maya, as if everyone at the table didn't already know who Maya was. She was good, far far better than all the riff-raff going around then, far better. His voice lingered over the 'far' making it sound like an overt signal rather than a compliment. It sent a shiver down her spine and she looked away as she felt her cheeks flush. She needed another glass of red wine. Ofcourse, darling, said her date, drawing her close until she almost choked under his overpowering cologne. When she regained her composure, she caught Sandhya, the twenty-five year old London bride describe her wedding in upper crust Victorian tongue.

It was beautiful, just gorgeous, she said. Oh so gorgeous, Maya micmicked inside her brain, just gorgeous. And yet she couldn't help being jealous, insanely jealous of what Sandhya had, her perfect designer wedding, her perfect Indian groom, her perfect married, lovely, gorgeous life. She on the other hand was plain. No designer wear for her as her paltry schoolteacher salary couldn't afford any. She didn't live in huge mansions or shop in Paris, or have rich parents who could afford for her to do these things. She had a modest income, too modest, and far too ordinary a life to keep someone like Jai engrossed. Infact, she was surprised that it had lasted as long as it did, and was as glamourless and grey as it was. And here was Jai now, full of Hugo Boss and Gabbana, like a ramp model who'd walked his way from Paris to this non-descript Delhi pub. It is shabbier than I remember it to be Maya, he commented flippantly, as if things were supposed to have stood still for him. It has been four years, Jai. Four long years since you've been away, getting married and growing rich. She added the last part in her own mind, and went over it a dozen times, like the music they had once played together. And plus, Maya continued, you've also been spoilt for choice, what with living in London and Paris. And its the best, isn't it, asked Sandhya, slowly sliding her fingers along the nape of Jai's neck. Maya felt like she was going to burst a blood vessel.

Maya, the independent. No date Maya. No tears Maya. No whining Maya. Maya the strong, beautiful old girl. Atleast that's how she'd want her business card to read. But they don't give teachers cards now, do they? You just have to believe them. Maya would wake up sometimes, in the middle of the night, and preen into the bathroom mirror, under a flickering old tubelight, preen and preen till she could find traces of her old self under dark circles and greying flaky skin. She would smile coyly, laugh, make little facial gestures to imaginary friends, to Jai, to an enthralled, absent audience. As if behind the mirror lay her actual life and her current life was a specular inversion of what she was actually supposed to be doing. If everything was performance, a play, a pretence, then why not call it that? This 'lunch', this double date was life on the wrong side of the mirror. Maya's real world lay there, behind the glass, where she could smile without being seen and laugh without being heard. For real people never wanted to hear real laughter. So Maya tried her best to titter affectedly through the afternoon, glazed with good red wine, for Jai was a rich man now.

As was Sameer, or Sammy, as he insisted everyone call him. No one really called him anything else, for he looked like a Sammy, an overgrown, loud, spoilt lout. Why is Maya with him, Jai wondered out loud to Sandhya several times. The money or the sex, Jai couldn't decide which. It never struck him that Maya was capable of loving this man. Or that he could ever love Maya. He tried to ask her once, through an elaborate rise and fall of eyebrows, what she could possibly have seen in Sammy. Maya ignored the silent query and inched closer to him, for it was evident that Jai was trying to run him down, rub her nose in her failure to procure for herself a decent man, like Jai had salvaged a future with the gorgeous Sandhya. Fuck off, she said threateningly, through her own eyebrow monologue, and leave him alone. But later she would remember the look Jai gave her, practise it in front of her mirror friends and cry herself to sleep. Her performance would turn tragic. Her life would turn even more insignificant.

Love isn't ever easy, and even if something is going right, it always finds a way to become torturous, till it doesn't resemble love at all. But the feeling of love lies dormant in vacant hearts and re-ignites itself at the slightest touch, whisper or look. On that winter afternoon in a Delhi pub, a complication was going raise its lovely head and soothe the frayed nerves of a four year old headache.

Maya walked across the wooden floor of the pub to the bathroom. She felt she was sinking, sinking into the velvet of the red, stained seats. The red wine was swirling in her head and had unleashed a vortex of old aches. She had to get away, even if it was for a few minutes, and breathe heavily and decisively. The blanched lighting of the bathroom helped her recover and push away the memory of Jai sliding his palm under her thigh during a movie interval. He had drawn her close when the lights had been dimmed again and kissed her for what seemed like eternity. It's funny how memories are made of the most striking moments, never of ordinary,mundane life that make up most of our existence. Its almost as if, now looking back, Maya's life was only a string of these scattered, jarring, racy memory bits. She splashed her face with water furiously and wiped it clean of all tear stains.Outside, a few feet away from the bead-curtain partition, Jai was waiting for her.

He pushed her against the door of the bathroom and slid his hand up her back, just like in the movie hall, four years ago. He pressed her words down with his lips and stifled her meek protests with his hand. I missed you, I missed you so much Maya, he said, now crying softly into her badly permed hair. Maya felt like she was sinking, all over again. Why now, she cried angrily, why when you're a NRI bridegroom? She wanted to scream into her mirror, her loyal, faithful reflective friend, without the complication of a human body in between. Jai was messing up, again. Don't stand between Maya and mirror Maya. Not here, not here Maya. Can we go to your house? You still live there, right? We'll, I will, we can, yes, we should, was all Jai could say, a warbled mixture of commands and requests that Maya answered, shaking with nervous laughter. So they left, left the gorgeous spouse and swanky Sammy behind, and made their escape from this horrible, horrible mismatch of pairs.

Lying on a single mattress hours later, in Maya's two room apartment, surrounded by a mess of Fabindia kurtas and test copies they thought of four years ago, when things weren't this complicated, when loving was without condition. Jai confessed to cowardice, if not adultery. He told Maya that his internship with a London law firm had helped him glimpse at a life he would never achieve with his ordinary Delhi existence and an ordinary school teacher-girlfriend. Maya swallowed bitterly, but sank deeper into bed, and love, with him. I loathe her Maya, he said. She's foolish, far too young and lives in the constant illusion that I love her, he added. I'll never love her the way I loved you, the way I still love you. Maya watched Jai's heart shaped mouth word perfect words and leant over to kiss him, waiting to see what he did in return. He kissed her back, but with one eye on the clock behind Maya, his mouth turning dry. With a short, low whistle he jumped up, put his pants on and walked over casually to the sink built in the wall, washing her off him. Flashes of the past danced around the dimly lit room again, as Maya watched them whirl in a circular slide-show. Of her and him walking out of her apartment, smelling like each other, hand in hand, happy like children. Now he twitched nervously at the shabby apartment, turning only to advise Maya on her plumbing woes. Why doesn't he just leave, she thought angrily, knowing full well that she'd regret it terribly if he did. He crept back into bed with her, holding her close, him fully clothed and she wearing nothing but the bedsheet. Jai always has me, thought Maya, naked, embarrased, timid, vulnerbale. Inferior. He was kissing her again, very slowly, asking her if she would meet him everytime he flew into Delhi without Sandhya, for his 'business' trips. His hand sank deeper when he asked her to move into the company flat in Vasant Kunj and told her she didn't need to work anymore, not if she didn't want to.

It was years before Jai and Maya met again. As expected it was in Delhi and in a lowly-lit pub with plush red velvet seats. But quite unexpectedly, Jai looked away at once, got up from his half finished Corona and walked out of the pub, with a woman who wasn't Sandhya. Maya laughed out loud at his receeding figure in winter sunlight. It was still there, the mark she's made on his face, when she'd broken his nose with a ironing board the afternoon he'd almost had her again, when the line between love and lust had first and finally been drawn.

We and Them

We read late into the night one day
and discovered all that we needed to know, to get by.
We walked out the next sultry Indian morning, under the unforgiving sun,
to put to test all that we had dug out from within the withered pages
of moth eaten books.
We spoke in several tongues, in every tongue
and every ear heard us, or pretended to.
We were joyous, free finally, of the burden of all the world's lies
written in beautiful words, written in the ink-blood of history.
When they asked us to reveal our identities, when they tried to
discover the truth of our words,
we shot them, slit their smiles from ear to ear and broke their bones.
We killed them.
They were scared, the others,
of the power of pure knowledge, of truth.
Or atleast our version of it.
For truth is but a shimmering illusion, afloat on the waters
of an ancient sacred river.
As for our words, our knowledge,
we put it all, all of it in a book.
And we called it ' The Law'.
In the land of the Free and Enlightened,
words are hard, bloody blows of death.
Our words, never theirs.

Death Ties

The past curled up like a yellow, wrinkled autumn leaf and fell in my dry, lonely lap. The sun shone behind broken bar clouds and reminded me of a future yet to come. I sat erect in the middle of time on a green park bench where we had lived and laughed together. But by now you had left, gone far beyond my reach. I had dreamt of a time without you, of a cliff beyond which you walked on clear, into thin mountain air. I was rooted on rock and broken stone, the silt between my toes. I had felt the solidity of earth, even in the dream, I felt as though my feet were grounded, while yours were free of land and life. You were lucky, you had escaped, but left me behind to deal with the mess your absence spawned. The endless hours of despair, the endless trips to your apartment to see if you had returned to live again. To see if death had been just a festival of life, to see if normalcy returned of grevious drinking.
The leaves were begining to fall again, it had been four years since that night, when we drew a line of death between you and me. We were on either side now, you more alive than me. In the beginning I couldn't remember your face even though we had lived all our life together. But now I remembered every detail, every line that drew your face out. I wished I looked like you, so that the mirror would show you to me, instead of my own dreaded reflection. I wished for a time that wasn't so devoid of you. I saw you sometimes, sitting, or walking around the orchard of blooming wishes, plucking the loveliest flower. How I hated you for leaving, for walking on in thin air, for being so magical and so dead. I still saw that mark on the side of your white forehead, that one mark that you died of, like a bullet wound that went through and through and didn't spill precious blood. I was amazed when I saw you dead, how clean and calm you looked, as though sleep had usurped you and
you were smiling at the idea. I looked at the patterns that the leaves made on your body, swaying in the January wind and watched little tufts of your hair catch the fading light of the west. That is where you went as I watched your footprints disappear in the mud. I don't think you knew I was watching. I watched everything, I carried your head in my lap on my way to save your life. You slept on peacefully, unaware of your life slipping away into the darkness outside the car window. I felt like you were stealing my heart away, clawing at it in your desperation to escape. I wanted to stop you, to tell you that it hurt to watch your own heart bleed. You carried on anyway. The smooth stone of the hospital had no comfort to offer, neither did our parents. They would never know you the way I did, dead, slipping between life and death, sleeping on while I slowly lost my mind. In a while I knew better than anyone that you were dead. I didn't feel the warmth of a human head on my lap. I could feel your head hours later, on my now vacant lap, I felt the warmth again and I watched you die again. Do you know, that I had another dream when you left, of you leaning against the hostel room balcony, smoking against a wild, wild storm. All I saw was your silhouette and the smoke from your pursed lips. I reached out to take the cigarette from you and you walked away, turned the corner. When I got to that corner, I found nothing beyond it, just a lousy yellow wall. And yet you had carried on before all of us, just the way you died. I would stay awake all night, afraid of that dream, if it should happen to return and soak me in the fear of losing you over and over again. Now loss is an old friend whom I call upon for comfort for loss is the only way I can still hold on to you.
Your rooms were washed clean of your signs. Unlike other things we lose, that we think about repeatedly, everyone tried to forget you too quickly and only remembered you more fiercely. I came away because I wanted to mourn your death alone, in empty corners and long walks. When trees began to regain their colours, I walked to your flat to grieve amongst things you had lived in. I lay for hours in your unmade bed, thinking about you, about how cold, foggy January nights were never happy occasions for us again. How your death had been a festival of grief, how hundreds had poured in to help us mourn. Mourn a loss that they possibly could not understand. No one had held your dying frame, or felt the last of your life ebb away through the tiny,bloodless hole. Suddenly I wanted your life and live it through for you. Your life would be lived out better, happier than mine.You should have lived instead of me, I should've been the one to have been killed by tiny bloodless holes. I did think of following you, over a cliff and beyond walls but I always held back thinking what if you really did not want me there, there where you were, beyond life and loss. I could still see you looking over my shoulder when I read the last letter you wrote me, about your new bank job and Krishna, the girl you were going to marry. You had our father's eyes and our mother's beautiful face, you were perfect. There were never any marks of that inherited lineage on me. You took away the last familiar face, the face I recognised as my own. When one day, your old friend called to ask for you, I was made to say again, how you couldn't come to the phone, you were so inaccessible, so dead. They never knew how that bloodless hole had taken your life away. They thought you had a full life, a long healthy fifty year old life, filled with the essentials of wife and family and job and relations. It was strange to think how you may have had that life, and how I may have remembered you differently. You would've been defined by a presence, instead of the perpetual absence. But maybe alive, I would never have been able to absorb you the way I did when you died. Maybe, we would've been ordinary members of a family, joined by the compulsion of blood ties.
There is no compulsion any more, just love. And memory.