2012. Distances grow. Without meaning to. From innocence, from love, from sharing, from family. From concern, from grappling, from reality. From truth. From coherence. From understanding. Growing up is happening too fast. Suddenly, there is no time. I’ve lost myself in a tumult of the outside, forgetting myself in the hurricane. Gladly so. Suddenly, it is easy to ignore the mundane, be engrossed in the trivial. It is easy to feel like I’m doing something of credibility, of worth, something that will have an impact. Much harder to realise, in moments of self-truth, that this may not really be so. At the end of the day, my eyes hurt behind lids that are coloured grey and red every time I close them. Loud guffaws of the day echo in some cob-webby attic of the mind. There’s distance in perceiving time too. Days have begun to feel like an age. Exhaustion consumes me, I don’t have the energy to think things through. And yet, this is ordinariness. Others have lives twisting into hyperbole every second. And I run away from them, from myself because I have no solace to offer. Every morning, I wake up unwillingly, and the first thought that floats into mind is a tiny prayer for a sense of humour to a God I don’t particularly believe in. And he/she grants it to me. And I live on…
In the black, there are always, and only, shades of grey.
A vortex, it will slurp up the white, like a Hoover,
Burp and beam, from Jaapan to Jalandhar.
Replete with satisfaction, it will leave red.
In your face, on the road, on your sheets.
And then Society will come a-knocking.
And all they’ll be able to see anymore is the mud.
Horrors. No blairwitch, this. “She wouldn’t listen”
Is all they’ll have to say, passing it on.
So, here’s a telling point about where we are in our scale of liberation. Two reports in this morning’s paper, one about the US and the other about India. Both concerning rape…
The Justice Department said the crime of rape will be defined as “”penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim,” CNN reported. ”This long-awaited change to the definition of rape is a victory for women and men across the country whose suffering has gone unaccounted for over 80 years,” said Vice President Joe Biden in a statement released Thursday, USA Today reported.
According to the prosecution, Harijan was a neighbour of the victim, and both lived on Mankhurd-Ghatkopar Link Road. On January 10, 2006, he took the child to a deserted place near her house and sodomised her while her father was away…On January 1, 2008, a sessions court acquitted Harijan of charges of rape but held him guilty under Section 377 on charges of sodomy…Arguing against the quantum of sentence awarded to Harijan, his lawyer Arfan Sait said he was poor and “living alone, away from his native place and therefore probably he lost control over himself”.
Airtel’s (now slightly old) new ad campaign says har ek friend zaroori hota hai. Every friend is important. Or every friend holds some place in one’s life. Every friend is special, indispensable. It attempts to sell talk-time to a generation that lives in college canteens in groups on kulhads of chai; bunks classes to smoke pot in huddles or watch movies in single file rows; has survived on watching re-runs of ‘The One Where…’ episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and absorbed more life lessons from those than any classroom lecture. The day it was launched, the video went viral on Youtube and Facebook and every few seconds, somebody or the other would post a new status message getting all soppy and emotional about dosti and what all their friends meant to them, as if it had JUST then occurred to them the vital wisdom of this simple statement.
Look at the ad stills at bus stops – the lazy friend, the bookish friend, the kanjoos friend, the adventurous friend…and it goes on. But here are some they totally…forgot (is the word)… to include i guess:
The Study-Notes Friend : Come February-March and I suddenly find there’s an increase in the number of people willing to buy me coffee or wanting to talk with me or simply just beaming at me from across the room. Of course, the fact that I record notes like a dictaphone has nothing with this, it’s just the spring air, yaar.
The I’m-Never-Going-To-Pay-You-Back Friend : Soo, you lent her some money one beautiful morning, when she needed it and you still thought she wasn’t one of ‘those’. But turns out….abhi toh pocket money nai aayi yar, my boyfriend dumped me yar, i lost my phone, my wallet, FIVE HUNDDDRUD bucks yaaaarrr….yaaaaarrrr, *puppy face*, kal pakka haan!
The Bottomless Void Friend : Who basically measures the amount he/she loves you by the ounces you put into him/her (oh well, you might as well say IT!). Feed them, nurture them, water them (with beer and whatnot) and IT shall be yours lovingly forever (till your resources for such fruitful enterprise run out). Even Marley knows where his loyalties lie, bones or no bones, yaar.
The Vanity-Fair Friend : She will bring you all the gossip and shine her royal light on you, at the price of at least one compliment a day. Or she will do whatever it takes to get all the boys’ attention, all the spotlight so she can radiate the sun into oblivion. Or he will crack witticisms about everything and bring to you the most bizarre, alternative information engineered to blow your mind away and make him cool. And the moment you stop the flow of admiration, he/she will begin to see in you the essence of your office’s dusty furniture. Mein bhi toh sultry hun, yaar!
The Who DAT? Friend : You’re walking down a street and you come across a face you know very well, and you stop, turn and run back to say hi! But the person is so oblivious to a world outside of their own personal haywire orbit that they cannot place you. Orrrrr, they pretend not to place you because you’re just not cool enough to be on their list of acquaintances even! Of course, this comes after they’ve ignored your calls, messages, wall texts, tweets, postcards, inland letters, pink-scented love letters…once your medium of association has expired. Out of sight, out of mind is only fair, afterall i know soo many people, yaar!
The Le Joker Friend : Sinister, like, Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight, this one’s particularly tricky because they’ve got split personalities and many faces. She will be always by your side, you will witness her ups and downs, you will an intrinsic part of her life, glass-shattering, wrist-scratching, self-loathing moments included. But the moment you go home, she will tell the world how you torment her, sabotage her, prey on her, steal from her, mooch from her and basically treat her like she’s the doormat. Sympathy milegi toh boyfriend bhi toh milega, yaar!
Of course, this list goes on. We’d all find some or other ‘friend’ who’s done this or more to us, duped us into believing this is the real thing. OR we might squirm and, if we still have a heart left, admit that we too have not been ‘holier than thou’ and done something awful to some unsuspecting soul, maybe not so wittingly ourselves. So if the bums at Airtel wish us to believe that being nonchalant about it will make it alright, they must know heartbreak and friendships don’t mend easily. And if all they’re trying to do is tell the world to get a grip and be good to your ‘hommies’ too, well, it’s a noble enterprise, but i do think it is a rather lost message in this day and age of short attention spans, shorter memories and big humongous egos blooming at terribly young ages instead. Dosti ho toh aisi yar!
Jhumpa Lahiri’s narratives have always been about life, love and loss, in equal measures. All her books, The Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth, deal with one common overarching theme : adjustment. In the most recent of her books, Unaccustomed Earth, a compilation of short stories, she traces the lives of first or second generation migrant Bengalis in the USA. The stories deal with death, displacement, compromise and all that accompanies these themes in real life.
A woman and her father move on with life once the only thing that connects them, the wife and mother, has died of cancer. Another woman watches her mother fall in love with another man, sees her heart shattered, and tries to understand her values, the only thing that bind her mother to her father. The second half of the book is a novella of sorts, tracing the lives of a Bengali girl and boy, who grow up together, yet apart, through the trying circumstances of their separate lives. Falling in love eventually, only to lose it finally, the tragedy of their shared life is the reckless timing, even of nature.
All the stories reflect a despondency we are all familiar with, acquired through the harsh blows life doles out to us every now and then. But through the mild sense of the blues this book might envelop the you in, you sense the maturity of her characters and of their responses to everyday tragedies and the less commonplace dilemmas that accompany starting new lives in newer surroundings. The book is a good read for a languid winter afternoon, when you want to contemplate on the true meanings of everything that goes on around us.
…was digging into Banoffee Pie (which was an Israeli delight according to Pinku bhaiya, the sweetest simplest waiter at Sasi Restaurant who hailed from Mandi and prattled on cheerfully about life, love and loss and kept us satiated with conversation while we waited for our Shakshuka plates or Enchiladas to arrive) on a candle-lit check-cloth covered table under a star-studded clear sky, with the white Parvati raging endlessly to our left and the solid black mountains of Himachal all around.
Never had i thought that bananas could taste so delicious. Some Parle-G or chocolate biscuit crumble, honey, condensed milk, glazed bananas, almonds and walnuts, cream, butter, your expertise at layering and voila! you’ve got an eighth of an orgasm in each bite. Oh, and it is very much an English invention.
Of course, apart from partaking of such wonderful food, we did the usual frolic in the hills, dipping into cold water, emerging from shivering trances to take walks along green winding roads, talking, playing catch like children. Meeting fresh-off-the-Army-bus Israelis who loved India and chai and ‘gulab jabun’ and travelling. Scouring tiny shops for semi-silver cheap trinkets. Sitting on a lovely big balcony, wrapped up in sweaters and music and good company, sipping chai, breathing pine scent, feeling life re-coursing through one’s veins. Embalming bad patches, building reservoirs of energy to brace against more rough wind. Praying there wouldn’t be any.
Planning it would’ve been to ruin it. We went with the flow, wherever our mood and the buses took us. If vacations are about suspension of reality and taking a chance at living out a fantasy, this was IT.
Of course, by now, heartbreak was
a foregone conclusion. She knew, even in
those intense moments when she could almost
touch a wave of love welling up inside her,
that this too, like all else, wasn’t going to last.
Nor was the universe, only our perception
of time didn’t allow us to comprehend reality,
she thought, melancholy. She knew, the comfort
of that blissful blindness, when all her flaws are eclipsed
(because she knew how to charm them a silly pink),
was temporary. They would see her, inside out, baring
thorns on flesh and bones, they would see the big hole
where her heart should have been. She knew that they would
know, in a single moment of blinding clarity, that she was
merely mortal. Not Princess Leah, not Sasha Grey -
Not transcendent. She knew, they would be appalled,
When they saw her plain, reflected whole in an honest mirror.
They would puzzle at her fears and her dreams,
they would blink, stare, wonder – is she for real?
She sighed. She knew, she’d have to end this too.
Self-preservation, her mirror told her, meant
she must hold on to the pedestal. That, at least,
they won’t see her addiction to adulation. Only
her tears, salt and sugar, swords to etch
unforgivable wounds into unsuspecting souls.
