There you go. In that little world inside your head where you build and shatter day in and day out boundaries, opinions, musings, explanations, hauntings, yearnings, elaborate agonies and trifling ecstacies (or vice versa) – in that little world where you make yourself up and others up and constantly announce how you want yourself portrayed hoping the rest of the world pays heed – in that little world, you’re probably also twitching your toes under veils you think no one would dare to strip off you because you have declared among other things that they are forbidden territory. Do you know why you are twitching your toes? Does it bother you that you don’t? Or are you just happy to have a secret?

Until later then, when the click of the knuckle bones calls to be explored.

We all have a set of people we love but mostly live with a rather distorted idea of what we love about them. We don’t love people because they are sugar and spice and everything nice. Nope, their goodness is not it. We love them for their intrigue. We love them for their drama and despair. We love them for their choices and mistakes. We love people for their revelations. We love them because we know them to be vulnerable, and it is up to us, at least in part, to keep them unbroken.

We may love people for their kindness though. Kindness is not run of the mill – it is a shady virtue (before you start to feel smug, I don’t mean the “feeding hungry puppies” category).

If you disagree with this theory, then good for you. If you don’t – you are doomed for life. Thank you, Amsterdam! Curtains, please.

There’s so much that goes on in our heads that we think is unique to ourselves. Yet, lot of things eventually come together, and let us know how common such thoughts actually are. The thoughts that run through your mind when you’re reading a line, when you’re listening to a song, when you’re watching the sea, or the sky, or an aeroplane, or a bus, or a labourer, or a field are always shared by almost all people who’re doing, or have done what you are doing. Unsettling.

Each individual probably has an inbuilt way of analyzing certain things, possibly some among the things I’ve mentioned above too. We’re all so frightfully same, though we’ve all maybe grown differently. It’s so horrible, or maybe not, I don’t even know what to think. Either I’m right, or I’m unbearably boring.

I don’t know why it feels so weird at times, and you end up writing not so much what you actually want to, as something that hasn’t even bothered you much. So strange to not know yourself what you’re going to type next. How you see word after word appearing on your screen, and yet there’s not even a trace of what you wanted to say in whatever you’ve written. Or maybe, there’s nothing to say, after all. Sometimes you feel something is terribly wrong, as if there’s something that’s always been missing. But you can never quite point out what it is. Again, maybe it’s nothing. I don’t know. But right now, I feel rotten. So confused.

“No matter what our struggles and triumphs, and however we might bear them; all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper”

On a side note, you know how some people say destiny has a way of working itself into your life? I don’t know how true that is. I don’t even know if other people are right when they say you’ve got to work towards your own destiny. And now I really wish I had something nice to say so that I could end this post with the words “All I know is…”  , but I don’t.

On a side-r note, an interesting tweet I recently came across: “Good morning tweveryone!”   Clever, isn’t it?

Sad analogies aside, a happy day for most people here consists of successfully managing to climb into and out of crowded local trains at the right stops. I have often thought of Bombay as a city interrupted in the middle of a revolution. As if the people in it were fighting for a much greater cause before the pause, and are now forced to give vent to agitations through trivial daily chores simply because they cannot recall what their original cause was.

But most of all,  Bombay, always absurd and often charming, is to me a concoction of copious amounts of coffee, television, noisy neighbours and sweat. Where storylines in hindi soaps miraculously seem to make more sense than real life. And where the highest point of the day is that one hour of water supply, with a frenzy to find as many empty utensils as possible that can hold water enough to last for two whole days. A place where everybody owes everybody else money, and fake affidavits are more omnipresent than ten rupee notes.

For better or for worse, a Bombay sojourn has never failed to increase my blog count till date. It is a city that liberates you as much as it entraps, where you know you must keep moving on inspite of everything you do  seeming too little, too late. It is hard to not fall in love with Bombay.

I spent ages flipping through old class notes, identifying the places my handwriting had gone awry because of eyes that wouldn’t stay open. And checking out all the dog-eared pages in old novels and wondering why I had marked them. I found so many hairpins and safety pins sticking out from here and there – all borrowed during Manthan and Alcher.  A fortune of one rupee coins! And old envelopes that had once carried stuff from home.

I read through my old to-do lists, and was pretty amazed at how a lot of the things in there are still pending. Call it  a supreme degree of inefficiency, or simply agree with my just improvised theory(excuse) that the things we usually get all hyper about end up not mattering so much in the long run.

If only I had found the keys to my lab drawer as well, I wouldn’t have been broke right now. <Yeah. Goo fines us for petty things such as these. Dear juniors, take note.>

In the morning when I was just about to begin, I was wishing I had a magic wand that would finish my packing neat and clean upon a single flick. As it turns out, now I don’t.

Note to self: Re-read this post when you are starting out on the almirah. 

There are some instances in life – epiphanies, if you will – when you realize just how much you have changed, and how, and why, or why not. At such moments, when you find that there are other people too who have grown and changed and learned in ways even slightly similar to yourself, it is somewhat comforting to know that you are perhaps not as wrong in your estimations about life as you were afraid you’d be. This is probably what old friendships are all about.

My point is this – no matter how much we may think otherwise, we are never really in control. The best we can do is try and hope. And let time take us places. I guess that is all I had wanted to say in this post.

When the embers had died, he found that he had fallen asleep too, and was dreaming about thirty three years ago, when there had been a flood and the cats from the opposite bank had been washed onto his shore. Most were dead cats, but some still lived. The cats were friendly, and he remembered how the tips of their tails would ruffle his nostrils every morning, and he would sneeze. The neighbour’s wife would be jerked out of her slumber by his sneeze, and then the entire village would be jerked out of its slumber by her noisy attempts to bathe the cats. There were many cats to be bathed, and each cat had to be bathed in its own special way.

The cats with frizzy fur did not want to be soaped too hard, and the ones with rough noses preferred lavender scented shampoos. When the clock struck eleven, they were all lined up and fanned until they were dry again. This happened every thursday, which was also the day the tobacco ships left the harbour for the distant land of Mozambique. The sailors had heard that the rainy season there was merciless. So they did not argue when they saw their wives stuffing heavy yellow raincoats in their bags. One of the wives also stuffed in a stick of incense because she had seen life on the sea before and knew that it was dirty. Her husband was allergic to evil odours. Anyway, the dirty life on the sea wasn’t the only cause of the odours.

Sailors in Mozambique also had to deal with the widows on the street corners who tried to sell them magical mice which were actually the ones that had been caught by their cats and had proven immune to dying. The mice did nothing all day and caused plague to everyone within 200 miles. Plus they smelled very bad.

Too much had passed between then and now, but he still remembered the night of the celebration. The flying helmet flew all over town for a week before the celebration. The celebration marked the end of its flight, and it would rest on the head of the most bewildered person in the gathering. The person would then have to attend orientation lessons all year long, until the night of the flying helmet arrived again.

The road to the orientation classes was lined with coniferous trees. The crackle of the crushed pine cones as one stepped on them was reassuring. The classes were held on the sixteenth rung of a ladder placed against the oak tree, and the twenty eighth rung was home to a set of spinsters who made a living out of selling honey taken from honeycombs. Bad dreams were a part of their lives, and they avoided all people who could spell a word having more than two syllables. They lived a quiet life and died a quiet death.

This was thirty three years ago, and so much had changed, but when he woke up, he found that the fork in the road still looked the same.

“It’s been very long since I posted here. I said in a previous piece that I hoped things would change soon. Maybe things have, in some ways.

This is a happy post. I am having a good time living. And I would like to remember this  ten years from now, when it might not be so true. Also, some other stuff that I would like to keep with me -

1. It is a nice thing to stay up late, and have people around who are staying up late too.

2. I am thankful for/to my laptop and my phone and my lens case and my water bottle and my family.

3. It is easier to bear being neglected than to bear being judged.

4. I have a mood ring now!

5. I like my BTP guide. He has given me funny things to talk about. At first he thought I was confused in general, and then he thought I was an unregistered, invalid student. And then I greeted him one day without realizing I had a  cold-coffee-moustache. So, now he’s kind enough to ignore certain things I might happen to say that don’t make sense.

6. When my sister and I were young and the boy who lived on top of our house was moving to another place, his mom told our mom that her previously well-mannered son had been spoiled by the two of us. It is weird when I think of that now, and wonder how embarrassed my mother must have been.”

I should study now. Midsems from tomorrow and I really don’t want to have to stay back here. Cheers.