That One Sock

That one sock 

@ CaffeinatedJunk: An essentially mellowed down version of myself.
Most of my work at https://caffeinatedjunk.blog/ would gravitate towards health, feminism, consumerism, technology aversion, what's-left-of-capitalism, fictional references to morbid realities of life, a certain dysfunction that finds a home in otherwise preoccupied minds aching to create

Punctuated Scoop

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again - Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

These are lessons I swallowed up along the way and lessons in the making that I scribble on grocery lists, the back of an old economist, on a memory charter that grew dysfunctional in time and on walls yet to crack open

The first one is a weird statistic I have been musing over ever since I have had the luxury of time on my hands from not having to fix broken pieces of a vase that I once thought to be my raison d'etre

Little did I realize that these pieces were never meant to be fixed and their beauty lay in hopelessly lying around. 

My vase was a gorgeous cerulean blue in its prime and the beauty that seeped from its nearly perfect shape and form was astonishing. 

But the more I look the more I realize how perfect each broken piece of the same vase is and how each broken edge adds to a finish that seems nothing short of breathtaking and yet surprisingly and holistically complete

 

We are all vases – tall blue, short green, luminous, crimson, earthy, glass, Greek, porcelain, brittle, broken

Back to the weird statistic: the number of smart, single beautiful and genuinely interesting women I have known are hopelessly vulnerable to bouts of incredibly low self-esteem and are living with a horrifyingly flawed assumption of not being ‘good enough’ for themselves and the people around them. This statistic has been disturbingly gnawing at me and sometimes I wake up to be such a woman

I love how dangerously forgetful men can be in the matters of their heart and their own taking. The only time you know they are acting stupid is when they confuse ambition and foresight

And yet it could only take a man (a man who we all wish would exist more often) to culture and grow a feminist prerogative, because only then would it be appreciated and not taken for granted 

So here goes an honest confession made well before its time: I am sorry I cried foul. I am sorry I said it was all about sexism because it isn’t and it never was. I do not defend my gender anymore.  Selective sexism is here to stay. I think I appreciate the fact that we are all terribly flawed and the only way to deal with this massive unfairness is to know where each one of us is coming from.

What I do, however, defend in all honesty is courage in the face of defeat and a kind of rare courage that will never show, but will glisten on your forehead and trickle down the back of your ear. You know this is a defeat that will have a brighter tomorrow

So I decided to take a step back, to look at the world as you might not see it. There are traces of your own life missing color and you have to fill them up – that is your streak of madness, your streak of sanity waiting to be withheld, waiting to be snatched away and yet so desperately wanting to stay

And I was a child again, running back to where it started, prioritizing aspects of my life I have no control over, giggling until the alcohol wears off, filling in journals with details that define the infinite aspects of pointlessness, falling asleep at odd hours, dreaming big, clutching at my coffee mug like there is no tomorrow. This was healing I suppose

This time I pack my bags humming ‘the Voyager’ by Jenny Lewis

She asked to be ruined after all. Yes she did, she even begged for it

14:23 hours. Sunday.

‘’The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate & predictable that you have so few of them.’’

-          Ned Beauman

From here on each of my posts would be flagged by a quote that left me wide eyed and scrambling for a pen.

Also, you don’t need to write a book to use a quote. No pressure.

14:23 hours. Sunday.

I was am a wreck, I can’t possibly expect a half-baked blog post to come to my aid. Not even the half bottle of Vodka that my dimpled boy left over from the night before, not the ‘not eating’ and not the trying to sleep my life away. None of it sweetheart. None of it you whore.

All the while I was writing this post I must tell you I switched screens thrice to work on an email and never got around to completing it.

Thought: Obsessive compulsive cleaning doesn’t work out too well when you deprave yourself of caffeine.

Ever tried making a list of Murphy’s laws that apply to your life? I tried mine over the weekend and I realized this could just be ‘the book’ that I never ended up finishing.

My ‘Warhol’ course evidently added to the blur. The blur and the preoccupation that always was, and only until recently that which turned out to be the mainstay of my half-baked existence. It was a beautiful blur though.

Week one of the course was reading, reading and more reading followed by interviews where Warhol knew better than to make sense. The handouts included a section on ‘The Pinocchio theory’ (I could take these thoughts to bed, night after night)

Warhol says that each of us has an exchange value – a fetishistic aura that far exceeds its materialistic and utilitarian properties as objects.

The argument of ‘cult value’ v/s ‘exhibition value’ was a loss/loss.

At the end of it, we conclude that your ‘aura’ is different from your ‘product’ but both of them are for sale.

I tried to use the phone less, I knew I sounded a mess as well.

This is my third black coffee at the café. It would be incredibly embarrassing to down a fourth cup, but to hell with it.

My idea of vacation would be a sabbatical. On weekends, I study art by myself. There is nothing entirely wrong with me. I haven’t swallowed up the bitter pill, not as yet. Don’t intend to. They make you slow. (PS: This just happens to be the era of microblogging and four worded sentences are absolutely not retarded anymore)

All of this would have been incredibly funny if it didn’t come with a clause. A clause that claimed that my best attempts to organize myself were falling off the hook. That’s life and that’s art – colors, lines, textures and hues. Sometimes there is a pattern to it.

A conclusion: I did fine, I think. I didn’t wreck a marriage or cheat on the love of my life or kill somebody or vandalize property.

My life isn’t that bad, but hey, at least I am trying to be creative about it.

To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

I walk over to the counter to redeem myself. It is 3 a.m. I do not know what I am looking for. I am not just looking for it, I very well intend to pay for it, even though my hair is unkempt and my clothes speak of a madness that never was. 

The drug store owner hands me a strip of yellow pills – the size of insect eggs.

One year into a life I never thought I would be living and I was a joyless, sexless, clueless nobody.

The drug store owner looks at me with eyes that scream – Run over to the bookstore next door and buy the Book of Love.

Its 3 a.m. Bookstores close, memories snap, love grows sour and all you are left with is bad timing.

He runs his hands over the sharp edge of the strip – What do you know of failing?

Before anything else, you had to know this – She was easy, easy to fall in love with.

What do you know of not wanting to be here? Not wanting to be you?

As my lover, you should know, it is a terrible time to talk about the economy. We are a faltering civilization and you can’t use it as an excuse to bail out on what we had.

The other day I read about the soaring ‘lipstick index’ – We are wining. We are ironically undefeated. 

Cloudy, gloomy days, days that beg you to dive headfirst into a peaceful slumber. These days have me thinking of you

I think of you waiting at the airport. That’s how I always picture you – nervous, alone, waiting, wanting to go, indifferent to goodbyes.

There are so many bits of you that need due consideration, you never cease to amaze me.

‘I’d date me,’ you’d say or something equally ridiculous, as you washed the very last of the dishes pouring a part of you down the sink.

Sometimes you’d cook for yourself and lay out a table for two even though you knew no one was coming. Because an empty plate made you feel safe, because I knew you better than that, because you could eat your words and never have anything to say ever again.

Metaphors never happen, they are just there for you to pick up. Among those many things, I can’t even name the ones I miss the most –

A half open window, an unmade bed, an untouched cup of tea, garbage bags lying at the door, waiting to be thrown out, the smell of guilt.

When you can't subscribe, you bastardize.

“There is plenty of ground beneath rock bottom,” who said that? I did, when I was 17 and drunk on life and a slew of thoughts that got me floored at my worst hours.

I’m 25 now and the only inspiration to get me out of bed is really bad coffee at office and it took me 10 minutes to come up with that.

Is that what it is? The price of not being exceptional? The price of hanging in there? How about a nice big cup of stupid instead?

I’ve been through what you’d call a hazy few months: A whiff of controversy. Imagined scandal. Testosterone. Don’t get me started on feminism. Well earned arrogance at the end of the day. The price of being professional.

11 am: I skim through my laundry list of clients. This is how we operate, stock prices swell up, and data spills over. Coffee cups pile up. Breakfast bars are a thing.

Lunch is peaceful. Finally, there is some wind in my hair.

Sometimes I read up on oil and sustainability, look up Latin words, Reuters, China, Pfizer.

I make a mealy mess forking deals. Sometimes I clean up. Sometimes I am told that I am being played. Weird men you know, like to start their days with quotes.

Have I lost my mojo? Does the pleasure of drinking wine at 8 pm in the perfect glass outweigh events that led me to ask myself that question?

On Saturdays I drag my working class ass to the park, sometimes I scribble. Scraps of paper do it for me like fancy notebooks never could or would.

You have to realize that I am a straight shooter and that I won’t shut up.

I am such a dog waiting to grow wild,

I am holding my breath, watching the sun

I am dreaming of all the mistakes I’ve made

I am sick of his gold rimmed notebooks and his copybook charm

I am trying to stretch my imagination of this city.

I am trying to be gone, I am minding the gaps

I am trying to reach out, I am hanging on by a thread. 

Of Lullaby Springs and Damien Hirst ( Additional notes from the under deck - no convenience charge )

Natasha Choukkar – on why she is good at what she does and why she hasn’t been doing enough of it.

So these are "literary" notes from the under deck that have been scribbled on planes, buses, parks, outside grand museum stairs and motel note pads, sometimes fancier notepads and Pierre Cardin’s (with a cold metallic sheen) that don’t really subscribe to our generation.

And as I am writing this from a sublime and terribly gorgeous place in Whitefield's where the rain trickles down the window pane every ten minutes and skylights brighten up the room at dawn, I am thinking of all the things I swallowed up on my way here: 

These were the things I did take a very long time to learn about myself:

• I have vacation issues
• I deliberately like to torture myself by carrying the wrong books on my journey to help me get to write. Suicidal, ain't it?
• My life is not a Roy Lichenstein version of Sleeping Girl, it really isn’t. My life revolves more around every conceivable Jasper John’s you could ever find. Some people confuse it to be something like Degas and his drying women. Like seriously? Get a life.
• I can’t sleep on most nights – too much coffee and the fear of being rendered redundant gnawing at me.
• This is not a place to soul search
•  Having fun is hard work and you of all people should know that (Yes you, D)
•   I don’t have shiny hair either ( I’m talking to you D, don’t look away)

    Here’s what I have been doing when I haven’t been eating weird meat– reading up on Damien Hirst. Hirst is a man who sold his thoughts. Period. Love him or hate him for that. So you could blame Hirst for me throwing up stuff about me which shouldn't be surprisingly shocking if you've known me already and come this far.

    We live in a society with questionable moral ethics; need we blame our artists for their questionable artistic ethics?  I am trying after all to be almost as transparently fair as I can be. (D?)

Woman, are we ready to talk about your day yet?

I am glad I get to you, in bits and pieces though, I still get to you.

I recite my thoughts like a hymn waiting to unfold, itchy at the edges. My life somehow makes sense when sprawled across a post it.

I define my own tools and I define my failure and I notice.

Anger and creative hindsight – these are the tools with which I learn best. I guess I am not ashamed of being angry anymore, or bored or indifferent. I hung my shame out to dry and wither in the hot summer sun.

Having done that I now trust all the unfairness in the world to shake things up and stir up a storm.

If I see a beautiful bald woman and I can’t write about her – I call it a failure. I define my own failures.

I did see her today; she was the most beautiful woman I saw in a very long time. She was dressed all summery ready to swallow the sun if she had to, with piercing eyes that could take or leave all.  I realized it wasn’t her beauty that wrecked me; it was something that clamored back at me when she looked me in the eye. 

Where does she get that perverse yet astonishingly satishfying freedom from? - the one thing that I have been looking for all my life.

Happy fucking woman’s day – I mutter under my breath.

I don’t get what Woman’s Day is about – yes I am grumpy and no I didn’t dress up; yes I didn’t do my hair. Yes I got drunk, yes I’m in love, no I don’t do God anymore, or marriage – the institution repels me, suffocates me. I could do yoga, I could never give up meat, I am not a limited edition.

I sweat the details, for all practical purposes I adore the wrong kind of men, adulthood won me over when I was five.

I am not very excited about being a woman, probably because I am a feminist and I chose to run to the man I love to help me fix things I broke in the first place.

But I refuse to be a Stepford wife, I refuse to be told right and wrong because who let you decide all that stuff in the first place anyway.

Why be told you’ve come a long way? Isn’t that limiting ambition? Why be told you are lucky to be where you are?  Is that what we are going to do – keep telling ourselves how lucky we are? That we weren’t burnt or scarred or raped? Is that what we want to live off for the rest of our lives – luck? And what if we happen to be not so lucky one of these days?  Would we have run out of luck?

I get what tradition is all about – I however fail to understand what losing freedom is all about.

That kind of submission is worse than rectal smuggling.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – I notice. I notice the way you hold your coffee mug – I think it is truly fucked up. 

Yours Sincerely,

More bad grammar and lazy writing.

Why did everything have to be about running away?

Treadmills.  Coffee Mugs. Amazingly long showers. My day just began.

I always wake up thinking that once in life I’d have the serious courage to break free, but it is 11:15 now and courage only a metaphor, even better an excuse to get me out of bed.

This is my little world of no paper shredders, bad coffee and very little hope. I welcome it, nonetheless. Yes, paper shredders would’ve made a difference.

What’s worrying is that I had an opinion you know – an opinion on whats wrong with the world, Aaron Swartz, Global Warming, free content, tweeting, gang rapes and mass murders. A fucking opinion you know?

Well right now all I am left with is no paper shredders.

We are an army of angry little feminists – self wrought with damage and brilliance, drowning in a whirlpool of the wrong kind of men and it never felt so fucking right. But maybe, that is more or less a part of the plan – the grander plan that leads me to where I ought to be.

So then there is that conclusion that doesn’t entirely convince me: I am my own worst enemy.

Painted love.

When you ask a man, “How can you sleep at night?” He, in all probability does sleep at night. Nothing wakes him up – not the sound of thunder or the prick of guilt. I knew a man like that. I knew him over and over.

It’s easy, I ask you to name things that sell. You name them like children, little boys and girls waiting for the last bus home.

Sex, violins, drugs, paperback versions of the book that changed your life, corporate services, an engagement ring, dry martinis, apple cinnamon martinis, Bono, love toys, broken boys, ideas that changed the world, wigs, chemicals, facebook, crude oil, research reports, mutual funds, communism.

Paper jewellry, playstations, cardamom pie, a knife box, olive oil..

Us.

You tell yourself you would leave, when needed the most. You'd be gone on a train to nowhere at the crack of dawn before the faint patches of sunlight gather enough courage to lift up the sky.

But you're never gone really. You stand right there at the kitchen sink, looking outside a window when the faint patches of sunlight begin to show.  

21^St century romanticism –the fashion accessory we could all do without

My Shoes Don't Fit Anymore

24. That time of your life when you ask yourself : What's another bad joke? What's another lousy try? 
24. When you are much 'funner' when you are more 'drunker' 
24. When the only thing that could cheer you up in the morning is the coffee machine whining
24. A time when the best of us fell apart
24. When words like 'xenophobic' and 'questionable' and 'pussyfooted' and 'tumbleweed' and 'moral policing' start making sense
24. When ramming into a glass door would technically be the only thing that happened to you all day
24. When one of your bags is always packed. You never know
24. When you succumb to the realization that there are other ways to forget than banging your head against the wall
24. When the law of inverse goodness holds true (something is so bad that it is actually good)
24. When you have dinner with an asshole, because despite the fact that he is an asshole he has something important to say
24. Words. They don't impress you anymore
24. You now know why Alice had to keep running to stay in the same place
24. Affirm. "Just because I haven't, doesn't mean I'm not."
                 "Just because I'm not, doesn't mean I haven't."
24.The shoebox. That's where your secrets lie. Not smothered under your chest. 
24. When the smell of rain did it for you. Saved your day 
24. When you still want to grow up to be a cultural evangelist
24. When sketchy details is all you have
24. You really thought I'd come up with 24 of these? 
Boy I'm glad I grew up. 

Of crash carts and more..

2.00 pm  a hot scorching Wednesday afternoon

A visit to the Clinical Pharmacology unit: Twenty odd crash carts stacked in one corner of a spotlessly white room.

All the while I wonder, to what extent could, standing in a room where the floors, curtains, walls and sheets – all spot-fucking-less white mess around with your head.

I’ve been spending my days trying to understand and make sense. I also very sincerely try to keep myself from being appalling, vile and second rate.

And as I enter into this phase of my life where I’ve gotten around to feeling largely irresponsible for myself, I can’t help but look around for crash carts.

You have friends and lovers, but do you have crash carts? I think we’d all better start looking..

I sometimes cannot talk to a person without a voice screaming ‘Would you be my crash cart?’ in my head.

On the other hand NOW is when I am ready to say I’ve finally moved in.

With a David Foster Wallace on my bed and a Radiohead on my wall and a flurry of post its finding their way on the doors and cupboards and bathroom walls- I am finally home.

The poster on my wall says:

Fond but not in love

Still kisses with saliva.

Is it just me or are we getting louder?

I think its just me then. I haven't been particularly television friendly for over two years now. I cannot be hushed into believing everything's the same.

I couldn't sit through Rahul Kanwal interviewing Mani Shankar (With Mani Shankar throwing his Let me speak, let me finish, I am asking you Mr Rahul Kanwal on national television to LET ME SPEAK much too often, you sort of tend to loose track of the discussion)
I couldn't sit through Arnab Goswami interviewing five people at a time either. It was impossible to make sense of it, it had to be considering one of the five people being interviewed was Renuka Choudhary. 
Of all the things I can bear (many among them being bad food, humming mosquitoes, rap music, pretentious social retards and mounting societal pressure) - the one thing I can't bear is Renuka Choudhary ranting on my television screen - it is redefining 'blown out of proportion.' 
And if Renuka Choudhary proclaims herself- a feminist then I would go back to being an inconspicuous bore. I would. 

I don't blame us for getting louder though, how long are we going to be buttoned up for? We have moved from a nation of dirty politics to desperate politics and it just keeps getting worse.
Now that worries me.  


Now I know what you'd tell me..you'd tell me that I have a choice..to flip a damn channel and save you the trouble of reading this post or probably you'd be nice enough to tell me to flip the damn channel to save myself the trouble of going through that drudgery. 
But somehow reading Kafka on days when you have nothing to do oddly dilutes your entire perspective on things. 


But 20 minutes of yelling and bawling was all it took for me to give up on my Kafkaesque approach towards life. 
So I just switched over to Bree (from desperate housewives) making the perfect watercress sandwiches, pushing aside a strand of lovely red hair from her botoxed forehead (I love you Bree, you know that) keeping up with her dangerously yet unfailingly perfect demeanor. 


I also think we should have more of Karan Thapar and his deadpan wit, gagging his guests to speechlessness. 

Crumbling Social Fabric

The unbecoming of a Hero

I’ll miss these dog day afternoons. If you walked into my room you wouldn’t call the bed a bed, the chair a chair, the table a table and the room a room. And while you stood in the centre of this mess wondering how wrong it could all get, I ‘d sneak out the door into the blazing heat.

This is as good as it gets. This post like every other dog day afternoon is pretty pointless.

It started with greatness, however it didn’t really end that way.

Greatness is outdated for now and so is righteousness. If you were to look around you the bigwigs, the heroes, the somebody's are all falling out of place. Greatness is- sprawled under a microscope, being dissected until disintegrated into utter meaninglessness not to mention stifled, having cracked under pressure. 

That is greatness for you, barely any takers.

And Righteousness? Antique literature we pride ourselves with. If you are looking for antique, you’d rather a bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc.

We are the wicked era of the underdogs, the nobody's, the dark horses, the down and under's..

Being famous, meanwhile is like being intoxicated. You are doomed to think that the guy who has it all has a dozen women up his sleeve while he sips on some dry martini. The guy who has it all was in his dorm room honey, while you were thinking otherwise building to break what there was and what just wasn’t enough..

I don’t think stilettos and pouty plum lips are answers to infamy.. I doubt politics in all its essentiality, is just another dirty word.

After all, I think there is a limited amount of damage we’ve been allowed to cause as citizens of this planet. It is our choosing and I only wish you the best by hoping that you wouldn’t wish someday that you should have chosen differently.

So there, politics is as much as a pre requisite to stay out of trouble as it is for getting into it. So if you have to get down and dirty you might as well like the whole getting down and dirty.

The other day I read an article in the Harvard Business Review that says ‘How not being nice is turning out to be more important that we thought’

It’s not the whole slipping away into augmented reality that bothers me, it’s the fancy imagination that comes with it.

Just like in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘What the Dog saw’ it’s not what the dog thought he saw, but what the dog saw. 

Are we leapfrogging from being ‘Homo hatists’ to ‘Homo Phobists’ to finally having settled for ‘Homo sadists’?

So yes, I might have to stay back to watch the weather grow from awful to wretched

And just as I was contemplating whether the consequences of not giving up were worse than the consequences of laughing it all off in my face, I decided nevertheless that all this angst could be organized counter productively.

Hence the writing spree, hence Will Self, hence the vitamin pills, hence insomnia, hence cough syrup, hence the cleaning spree, hence George fucking Orwell.

To start off, all this talk about sexual liberation gets me barking mad. Were we ever sexually liberated? And if we ever did manage to bring sex out of the bedroom why couldn’t we get around to bringing ‘being gay’ out of the closet.?

I’ve wanted to write about this, ever since I got back from a friend’s place about a month ago, when having woken up hung over (amidst people I don’t remember talking to the day before) I found myself in the middle of the most ridiculous conversation ever. Here are smart, well to do youngsters, armed with a rare ingenuity up their sleeve (IIM certified if I must add) who could not and would not respect the fact that they should just let people be sometimes.

 I’ve wanted to write about this post every awkward moment that left me scrambling for words. I’ve wanted to write about this every time I’ve blasted myself for being buttoned up about it. Trust me I did.

Mischaracterized and misunderstood, the third gender, the sexual minority (to sound more politically correct if I may)

Slapped left, right and centre with miscellaneous biological and behavioral perspectives.

Why couldn’t we, for the love of God, just let them be?

For those of you who don’t know (I discovered a few who didn’t today)

Balbir Krishan, a gay artist was brutally assaulted at his own exhibition somewhere around in January. The theme of the exhibition was centered on homosexuality (no surprises there)

There are however three things that leave me ‘ogling’ with fury.

1.   The attack was directed at him because he was gay (I mean come on, haven’t we blown this issue out of proportion already? Haven’t we made them suffer enough by abnormalizing them?)

2. The attack was directed at his art, a form of expression. and Art is really not answerable to anybody (underline)

3. The attack was directed at an amputee, who had lost both his legs in an accident in 1996 (even a low lying lunatic wouldn’t justify something like that)

Enough said.

 I love my friends.. Trust me at times I wish I could do more than tell my friends how much I love them and how proud I am of them for being who they are and not what others want them to be. 

Some more Rushdie-ing around the bush

I think it’s the third time in a week that I’ve woken up to this feeling of being beaten up. Otherwise I’ve had fairly healthy anxiety levels throughout the week. Yes I thought I’d dissect myself on a week by week basis.

So a week of living on coffee and cheese puffs got the better out of me. And just as I began wondering where the hell my nutrition was at, I began wondering where in the world my head was at in the first place.

11.22pm

I curl up in my bed with Midnight’s Children. My third attempt at reading the same for over two years now. At this rate and at the rate of dramatization of recent events I thought it fair and something that had to be done. Rushdie is difficult in writing and in person, but that doesn’t really undermine his genius. Recent sensationalist attacks on the writer apart from elevating his popularity have fueled a much needed debate regarding freedom of speech and an artist’s unbecoming in a selective democracy.

The Satanic Verses is now a politico literary disaster with questionable traces of blasphemy (residue post the reaction) and hey 20 years is a long time to be blown out of proportion, isn’t it?

For once I don’t see him to be the literary snob that he was always cut out to be. For once amidst all that mess, I see a man violated of the one thing he thought he’d do best – write.

Having said that, I’d rather band aid myself with thought than have your ideology stapled to my head. 

The story.

 I remember the story well. Our story. I can hear the words even before you spread them at the tip of your icy lips. They throb and burn in my whimsical heart and I am forced to share an unwanted delight. But I trust your words, the shapes of them, the slight curves and folds. They stimulate the pores of my imagination and I am rendered hopeless to speech. I wish I could tell you what each wordless day felt like until you froze them in our midst. Then I watched each frozen drop melt away, out of sight, getting smaller and smaller. Tears you might say. Relief I'd say while I watch you walk away. Your back has captivated me ever since I met you. I stood still for mighty seconds whenever you left. I watched you leave. These moments they never return, they stand frozen in our midst and then they melt away.

I'll get back to the story. The story that lay splattered on the dinner table. Entangled within a fork and cut short by a knife. A story envied by the sumptuousness and luxuriousness of everything distastefully yours.

I was young, a girl of fifteen living along the edges of a crumpled paper. I wasn't aware of much except the cat in your house and the hair on your neck. Howdy do little miss muffet? You said as I stepped inside the walls of a delirium something as unfathomable as my heart and what you make of it. I was young that is all I know. You said that I'd grow up to be something and that I needed direction, support and plenty of ambition. You said all that like I'd find them everyday on the breakfast table along side my mashed eggs and potatoes. A hard earned breakfast I'd say after a night's violent ordeal. I couldn't sleep for the first week. Twisted and turned like a monster waiting to be fed. Nana couldn't really do much to comfort me except keep me warm which she would. Nana and her forty year old rugged hands was about all I loved back then. She was magical. She’d scrub and clean and spit and forget. The chequered tiles smelt of Nana sometimes. I rolled over these tiles at times when I was incredibly bored and stopped right two tiles before the stairs. The whirlwind never ended and it led straight to your room. A disaster I could never fathom.

Dig,dig,dig! Dig these wounds deeper and they won't hurt as much. Hold your hand against this sickening flame and you won't burn as much. Sometimes I'd sit up straighter when I'd catch you staring at me through the corner of your eye. I’d find myself questioning the details of what I am doing when I'd sense your watchful and perverted gaze. Most of the times I'd do it wrong and wrong I was all over again. Right from the start ever since I was 15 and I have been wronged ever since. Nana knows a lot about wrong and right and yet she doesn't judge me or my wrongdoings. This is what you get when you walk a town you know nothing about. And then you start from scratch. From loving each foreign step that you take to not noticing even the most hideous of the faces that pass you by.

Demons I have known as I grew, bled and matured into a woman. I dreamt of this place often even before I came here and never imagined spending most of my adulthood over here. Recurrent dreams of a weirdly built house, chequered tiles and a nauseating staircase. Your room and mine. Nana’s belongings scattered in a corner.

I am more than a molested girl who grew into a woman only to fall in love with her molester.

I have more than sin and lust and wavy hair.Now 25 years down the line I am not thinking about sin any more.They say the past has a way of hunting you down and you can't really escape it. Escapisms were those long, tiring nine to five jobs that i thought would dissolve me to the very last piece. But things don't work the way you want them to at times. All I can hear right now are the birds chirping outside my window-- they are a middle aged woman's miracle. To hear then, feel them and stay at peace.

The story is still unfinished, Nana’s dead and I am dressed in black. You see your beautiful daughter off at college and I am scared for her. Her tremendous beauty fragile and tender. Untouched and naive, her hazel eyes boast of the happiness she is yet to attain in the years to come. They are anything but wrong about it.

As I brush the last strand of my hair I come across a souvenir of what I consider to be the very last of my relationships. A sophisticated Rolex wrist watch that stopped working at 23:55 on 23rd May a week before. It was then that he stormed out of my humble apartment (with a river view and haunted eternally by construction and repair work) saying he couldn't take any more of me.

That I crossed all limits of human paranoia. That I bred in a pool of anxiety and drowned in the same. That my liver inflated and deteriorated every time I took an antidepressant and it affected my love making capacity.

I don't feel like putting my pen down today because that would mean surrendering to an unfinished story and letting the ghosts of the past flourish in their vagueness. A life needed more than that. And all want superseded everything else really. And now that Nana is dead there isn't much holding me back either. Nana and all her efforts to keep me warm gone down the kitchen sink. The very place she'd scrub her sadness away and hand me the plate so that I could wipe it dry and save her the trouble of looking at the future. The future was selfishly mine after all.

Thatttttttttttttt mannnnnn!! Tabitha would roll her tongue and look away. Her cork screw like hair stuck to her like a terrible secret waiting to be told. I’ve always been jealous of her after all she was the best friend I never had. Together we were the broken sisters tied loosely together with a broken thread. A dirty little secret shared. She kept hers under yoga mats and I kept mine under coffee mugs. Neat.

Tabitha is now a yoga instructor who had embraced Buddhism two years ago. Erasing her past, cleansing her system...she's good at this. She doesn't meet me often especially in front of her new friends. They love her that way - with beads, rings and trashy whorish make up. A self declared genophobic claiming to have heard the voice of GOD. Tabitha and the wittiness that got her nowhere, the fakeness she clung onto I loved her all the same.
But you may have been right all along. She was an uninvited guest. The story belonged to us and Nana was there to clean up the mess.
I remember those lazy winter afternoons when Tabby and I would run off to the nearby shacks to have a smoke. She was more than sulky and bad tempered. She made tea for Nana when she was sick and she threatened to bludgeon you when she heard the voice of GOD. Misunderstood. So then she was gone and I stayed on with the lowly cat. It would be another five years before I would finally walk out.
Darn cat.
Somehow I found it hard to believe in something. Belief seemed like pneumonia..Something with dire consequences. That’s when I realized that there are more things to this world than pleasing a wretched 31 year old.
The afternoon breeze touches my skin. I yearn to go back to sleep but I won't.. I think I have stuff to do..............................

................back in bed and my body wouldn't budge. My toes curl and I bring my knees closer to my chest. A fetus not wanting to be born. Sometimes I think I have become her. It took my mother 12 years to realize that the man she loved didn't love her..not even close and by the time it struck her he was gone and so were the people who loved her back then. Love is cursed in the town we live. Nothing here changes, it just lives on.
The winds have changed. Its become cloudy all of a sudden and now its starting to pour. I let the rain in.
'its been years since they told her about it...i run for life....lalala' I love that song...STOP SINGING AND ANSWER THE GOD DAMN PHONE;
"hey Niña, Tabitha here...would you be free next week..I have to talk to you."

Self belief was harder to fathom. I watch the day wrapped in its melancholy and the sky roaring with thunder. A middle-aged woman's nightmare.
Rain pouring outside my window, thoughts raining in my head like confetti.
A week since Tabitha called. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy, keep myself guessing actually. Amusing myself and trying to look busy, whatever it is. Yes...I am apprehensive, anxious and madly curious. I’ve been smoking again ever since I tried to quit. Tabitha was the one who showed me 'how to smoke the right way' after all and when it finally hit me I mumbled 'wow you should write a book.’ And then we'd giggle until we knocked ourselves off the settee, bare feet and momentarily insane.
Sometimes I run into grocery stores and forget what I have to buy. Wander off into banks like a wide eyed idiot and acknowledge my perpetual stupidity when I realize that I've forgotten something important like my ATM card or my chequebook.The worst nightmare I've ever had dying in my sleep whilst forgetting to turn off the tap. So when they found me I was floating and so were the details of my life.
Define wrong she said one day and i found myself incapable of doing so. As incapable as a blank piece of paper. But I knew what to do with it just as I knew what to do with the blank piece of paper.

Walk away before the day ended you once said to me. I didn’t. I saw the sun set and the pearly clouds twirl around the crimson skies. Night came too soon and when I finally decided to walk away I was too bored and lonely to do so. I needed direction..I needed the antique gold rimmed compass, a gold plated 1970's watch, a neatly folded handkerchief and the rest of the contents of your drawer. I needed the smell of Park Avenue flooding my nasal cavity. I needed Nana's clover breath. I needed a clean slate. I needed stones to topple over and bruise a knee.
I needed band aid, antiseptic and a wound whose presence I never bothered to acknowledge.
I wasn't looking.

"Hey are you feeling any better?" I find Tabitha's neatly manicured hands caressing my cheek. I felt terrible then I feel terrible now. It took me twenty years down the memory lane, darkness and the dead of the night to realize that feeling. I shudder.
'You were lucky, had I not called I would have never known...'
Having to tell people that I fell from the stairs was embarrassing enough add to all this fact that Tabitha was my official caretaker now. I added my own pickled details to the facts that were, like presence of water on the stairs causing me to slip or my dangerously shaky 4 inch heels. I never wore four inch heels and Tabitha knew that too. However there weren't many people to explain these things to, just a few colleagues whom I was barely in touch with.
A week later they sent me home with a cast..right leg left hand..bang bang.I settled in quicker than I thought. Now that I was pretty much at home all day, each insignificant task surprisingly occupied the whole of me and anyway I was grateful enough to keep busy all day.
Bathing was painful and took almost an hour but I somehow enjoyed it. The pain struck me harder than a knife at first but gradually I discovered that pain is a matter of getting used to- be it physical, emotional or mental sorts. I also took to some serious reading..all of Jane Austen, all of Rushdie, all of Naipaul, all of Doris Lesing.
Sometimes all it takes to wake up is to fall down and fall down hard I suppose.I wish I'd learnt that earlier in life. But then there was no scope of falling I was six feet under already yearning to see the light of the day and probably gathering enough courage to step out of the ruins. Courage and what this world makes of it sometimes bemuses me.


Absolute despair and myself, walking along, hand in hand swaying together...wayward fools on an unlikely path strewn together with guilt. A guilt that would stay for as long as I remember the blood in my veins. Gone was the time for all the wiftiness and insignificant ecstacies of life.Could I contain myself any longer? Join an aerobics class, drink fresh orange juice, pay the bills and pretend everything's fine? I don't think so, even that took tremendous effort. Facing myself each day, acknowledging the epicenter of the storm. I would have rather been drunk, naive, ignorant and unaffected than have witnessed all these foolish years, having stood in the shoes of a fool myself.
Courage and what this world makes of it amuses me. Trust and what this world makes of it makes me laugh. If only we'd think about more things to say! I see him slither away into the glory of a mad river. I say nothing. I watch him flow. The heliotrope skies oversee my sadness they add to it a tinge of his crimson craziness. Between us stands virtue and cloud-- a stairway to heaven. Its dark now and the insects have fearlessly started emerging out of their holes. They laugh at the eccentric writer, a mere clown and watch the skies beyond along with him, their antenna's tingling in the direction of the wind.

Years after sabotaging my dream I met him at a coffee shop. All those years of misery now gathered at his obtuse protruding belly. He drooped a bit having to carry the weight of an invisible burden. He wore hideous hexagonal gold plated rings.. a sacrament of sorts. An outward cleansing system only surface sterilizing the deeper complexities of sin-various sins actually that added up to a greater one. What never really left him was that rustic appeal that somehow added up to and at the same time subtracted a bit from his personality eventually neutralizing it. Everything else including charm genuinely faded away. His hair looked different now..An unpleasant light reddish brown russet colored. He stood at the take away counter humbly awaiting his turn.I wish I could go confront him right away. But with what? With loving him ten years ago? He disgusted me now. I felt sorry for him despite the cast on my left leg and my crumbling personality and the first few signs of wrinkles under my eye lids.."HE" was what I felt sorry for. So what were we doing here again? Two miserable people in the god forsaken coffee shop. What was I really angry at anyway? Him being miserable or him being happy? OR him having a family to go back home to? OR me falling apart?
Too much to take. I retreat to the grocery shop next doors, grab a couple of not needed things
and make a quick run for my life.

Did I need Tabby? Sure I did. I needed her more than her fake eyelashes needed her. And though things might not seem to work that way at the end of the day we do make peace with the people we hate knowing that they are the only ones you could perhaps count on. And Tabby, dear Tabby was a chronic believer wasn’t she? So I wrote to her- About how the past haunted me every bloody second of my weary life. About how we needed to get away, reconcile and make peace with ourselves..Learn to perhaps love ourselves before we tire ourselves out. The answer was very simple – nature could be kind and resourceful to us at this juncture in our lives.

She sat scanning the contents of my letter with a dubious expression on her face-The one that offered no explanations whatsoever. She might have felt a surge of sympathy shoot up through her skin or she might have felt otherwise.

The next thing I knew I was packing away the details of my life furiously and enthusiastically into a big red suitcase – the one whose glossy metal sheen bore my initials on it which could seen at a distance of almost six feet, the one that my ex gifted me after I lost two consecutive others but that wasn’t important what was important was that it was along with this suitcase that I was boarding the bus to nature’s heavenly abode somewhere far away from here.

That was all there was in the end- nothing but the nakedness of the fact and fiction that I put myself through. It survived through my darkest, bleakest hours and now it stood with me facing the aftermath of its imposition. I walked more than humanly possible that day, treading twisted wild grass, tricky prickly stones that assure you stability when you step on them but as soon as you do you are in if;">“She’s not his daughter”

“I thought you knew,” she said as she walked out of the bathroom leaving me to drown in that hell hole all by myself.

"You're just sad that I stepped out in the sun before you had a chance to see the light of the day."
"No I'm just sad that to went astray."
"Well you've had your chances..We all did, do."

I thought I heard a sigh but it was just the morning breeze, breezing her way through our detached conversations. I could not understand the intensity of the situation. It was pretty intense though. I then focused my attention on the cup I held in my hand. The cup was oddly shaped, bulging at the bottom and narrower towards the rim.Whore I thought. Yes I did have my chances. I never stepped out of his shadow and in the meantime Tabby stepped out of mine. I looked at her..truly amazed by what I saw.
Who was this spiteful woman who never wore her hair down and carried a bronze coated laughing Buddha in her purse?
We were odd balls weren't we?
Thrown together at a pack of furious professional players only to land up in ditches, underneath bushes and alongside wet marshy land after being hit hard.

"He calls her Elisa. A musical prodigy- a genius in the making.Sitar, piano lessons,the flute..You name it.
She stands 5 feet 9 inches tall and defines ambition as the essence of her life."

Did I want to know? And to think that I even felt something like concern for her.

"Tabby did you ever want to win an Oscar when you were 12?"

Tabby threw her head back and laughed out loud flashing glimpses of her extra large teeth at me.
"Watch it ... she ain't staying under the shadows for long.."

A week after I came back from our trip, I almost got my life back together. I was freelancing for a lifestyle magazine and working as a part time translator. I started talking to people at book club meets and stepped out of the house more often than just to buy groceries and toiletries. I painted my bedroom blue and brought in new furniture. I took up cycling and swimming. I was more than happy to strike out atleast half of my to do list on a daily basis. I looked presentable and wore makeup.
But there was something missing. Even after an entire day of running around and accomplishing things at a pace I'd never really imagined I could..there was a void - something I couldn't seem to understand...

6.42 pm: I rush home just in time for the second season of desperate housewives. I am cooking vegetable stew tonight and I'll have the left overs for breakfast tomorrow morning. I also have two cans of Budweiser to keep me company before and after dinner. I strip naked and rush in for a quick shower.. there is nothing like an untroubled force of cold water washing down the sweat and itch of the day.
I step out of the shower- wrapped in a towel and happy. I then glance at the mirror..Essentially at myself. The droplets of water splattered across the mirror make me look contorted..I make no effort whatsoever to wipe them off and straighten myself out. My senses unwittingly inhale everything that surrounds me at that precise moment. Gone is my pink tiled haven. I look around at the hair strewn all over the place..my hair, some of them clog the sink. My toothbrush hangs out of its stand, the upper bristles deviating from the rest. I proceed to think about my uncooked stew and the Budweiser in the fridge, I hear Teri Hatcher blabbering away insignificant stuff at the moment. And then- I break down..tears and an uncontrolled shiver making me feel temporarily epileptic. Somehow I know in these depths of darkness a conclusion awaits its turn and in those final moments..i see him burn.

Our story did not demand a perfect ending. It ended the way it began- in bed on an unlucky night.
I remember lying awake that night..the room smelling of cinnamon and mint. Moonlight slid through a slit in between one of the curtains. It fell on your back.

"Let her breathe.." those whispers they float like silk on my soft skin-- it looks just like it used to when it was untouched. I could feel Nana's roughed out palms rummaging through them searching for traces of innocence only to find none.

Eliza's picture hangs over the bed, she is smiling and he stands beside her with that dangerous grin on his face. The contemptuous grin that created and destroyed lives. There is someone else in the picture too but I don't know who she is. She has a mole beside her lower lip and she looks pale..Like he has sucked the life out of her leaving her hollow and miserable. Why am I not surprised? They all have their arms around each other. Together they portray a family that never existed, only in our dreams beneath a terrible cloud of confessions and secrets- it plunders the substance of hope. He is snoring now, each snore grows progressively louder. I know this by now if not anything else.

Morning summarized the details of last night's encounter. He must have left at dawn, it is 6.42 now..weird. I collect my belongings and drive back home. The morning breeze on my face..nothing like it...exhilarating.
I reach just in time to start off my day.

The great social burnout.

As a child I was blessed with an ingenious capability to play by myself for hours at an end and then I grew up. Being with myself wasn't cool anymore.

Self sufficiency was dead as we knew it and playing by the rules of self sufficiency was either being labeled as 'from zombieland' or being the only zombie in 'a candy coated dandy land'

So I'm thinking did we ever happen to come by a 'wake up and smell the coffee land?' I think I am still in transit. 

I'm told it is the quality of people you meet that can make you or break you. But really I don't blame anybody for being perpetually broken.

We all are just skip hopping among a world of virtual friends, physical friends, lovers and random strangers. Having said that I have to be bothered, because the skip hopping would soon turn to wandering around aimlessly which would further disintegrate into a step to and fro and then stop. Just like that.

So is social-ness a muscle that would in time wear itself out?

Only time would tell. 

The year of Cynicism

If 2011 was ruffled with protests and classic mess ups, 2012 promises to elevate the gloom to another level altogether.

2012 promises to be a cynic in the making.

Cynicism, very rightly the Greek (ironic isn't it for Greece to take center stage at the onset of a very cynical  2012? ) school of thought is now far from what it was originally cut out to be. What initially meant selfless and unconventional has dwindled down to a mere mockery of sorts, a distrustful and contemptuous virtue of sorts.

How could we miss the possible tell tale signs of a now rapidly evolving cynical generation?

Falling markets and a failing economy supplement your morning coffee. Everyday promises to be a walk around town, a town sprawled with scandal and sleazy politics. We do not wish to be hopeful fools anymore. We'd rather stop believing, we'd rather stay a finger-breadth away from the TRUTH, because the TRUTH as we know it isn't the truth anymore. We'd rather believe in the power of a toothpaste than a brand that promises a deluge of freshness and the power to charge your life. Out with advertising, lets talk subvertising, lets talk culture jamming, lets talk meme hacking.

Brown is the new black and fat is the new thin.

On a more personal note friends keep tab, lovers keep score.

After all, we've graduated from an era of 'No thank you, but I'm glad you asked' to 'Would it even hurt you to ask?'

Cynicism, at the end of the day, is a bloated reality of sorts. Don't we all agree?

For now lets bite the dust with some Lasagne al forno and a dirty martini.

I know I happen to be 15 days behind schedule, nonetheless...Happy New Year folks!