Category: ramble

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I wish I could say this photo is the summary of my year — gazing upwards,  awash in light and happy — but the fact is that it is only a fleeting glimpse from December. December will shine like a lone glorious beacon through a year that was largely dreary. Maybe. (Maybe not.)

Often I have no doubt that this would’ve been a much more prolific and generally readable blog if the author had been less paranoid/indifferent about chronicling her life or expressing her thoughts to the world at large. More spontaneous. Maybe more innocent?

The thing is, with each passing year (with each passing month/week/day/hour/minute/second) I lose a little of my expressiveness. Get better at self-control. Suppress my strongest feelings with increasing dexterity. Refine the masochism till it’s a connoisseur’s delight — wins prizes and things. (Honestly, can I even write an uncomplicated sentence like ‘Hey, I won a prize!’ on a blog anymore?)

Hmm. Maybe too much thinking is the crisis. Tricksy topics like what do you truly believe and who do you love and how do you live with people who love you but refuse to want to love you and who do you expect to read this blog anyway. The next time I’ll write a book review.

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My room is suddenly filled with moths. They stumble in through the window at evening, drift about in the fan-air currents, hit and ricochet off walls and tubelights, descend upon typing fingertips gently dripping wing dust. I don’t much mind their invasion. (I’m quite amiable towards all sorts of insects except cockroaches and the ones that bite.) And moths are the most fascinating creatures. Not so extravagantly flashy as butterflies, but the patterns on their wings are equally intricate in muted shades. Because I’ve been confined at home for long stretches of late, I appreciate it that their erratic whirring keeps me company. My moths and I stay awake and whirring through the nights.

I now have a work email address! This is going to go into the list of firsts when I fill up that obligatory summing-up-the-year meme in another couple of months. I’m working with people I’ve wanted to work with from right when I became aware of their existence. Everytime I glance at my name and the company name connected by an @, it inevitably puts a smile on my face.

The nights have been growing longer and this makes me glad. When the entire locality has turned off its fans, I can hear faint strains of fajr namaaz from the Anwar Shah Road mosque in my room. In December I will even be able to listen to the local trains whistle as they pass through the station at Garia, some 8-9 kilometres of cityspace away from here. My little room stretches and stretches until the walls fall off into darkness; straddled on my minuscule bed I’m a boatman at infinite sea. There is so much to look forward to this winter! I have so much sunshine in my heart I can set awash an entire planet. Please don’t take my sunshine away, okay? Okay. =]

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Last evening, after getting lost in the labyrinths of Jodhpur Park (which we still miraculously manage after living in this city all our lives), R and I emerged on a street lined with shops where I spotted a small poster stuck in front of a hardware store — it was a battery ad I had copy-written at the office where I worked in summer. That hadn’t been the most fun campaign I worked on but finding it there, actually finalized and printed and put out in the world, filled me with that familiar feeling of speechless smug excitement that’s characteristic of the firstly published. Like remember the time your sappy little love poem got published in a corner of the fifth page of the newspaper supplement that no one reads? And even if they did happen to read it, the person next to you on the morning metro would still have no clue that you were Mondakini Mojumdar, India’s next Nobel-Laureate-in-Literature standing breathing nibbling at the corner of her ticket right there by their side; but that only goes on to make you feel a little more superior than the ignorant masses, a little closer to Superman as he bides time in his Clark Kent clothes. I thought all these things at once, so evidently I couldn’t spare the thought to take a picture.

This summer kept me happy. Work came by just when I was beginning to dread of a month of stupor and (inevitable) brooding, and the work was educative and fun. I loved the ambience of the office — my first office and very different from the kinds of offices I’ve grown up watching my parents work at. The day I joined, everyone was busy painting the papercups they drank coffee in. The day Google came up with a musical doodle, someone at office played it all afternoon. Other people played virtual pianos and music on Youtube, people made pen sketches and watercolour portraits, people flung bad puns and half-baked jokes across cubicles, went for cigarette breaks in the landing and walks in the rain, fed puppies downstairs and often stayed back all night to say hello to deadlines. I went to sea for three days with L, S and T and it was a welcome break, overwhelmingly peaceful and transcendental in parts. I immersed myself in it all and missed university life very little. Now that I am back I can sense the orbit of detachment that’s grown around me. I’m folding up like a spaceship ready to leave. I have dropped my ballast and secured the living quarters. Last summer when I was given a shot at leaving I was not yet through with university, but by summer next year I will be truly done.

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Holidays absolutely scramble my brains. I think I’m one of those people who only function well on deadlines. All my creative output also springs from deadlines — bits of poetry, fiction, drawings just when I’m aware that I shouldn’t. Last evening I finally reached the end of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, two days after I should’ve finished reading it for the exam, but I try to believe exams are not the only reason to read books (unless they are unpleasant books, of course). I’m not sure if ‘like’ is the word I should associate with Murakami’s writing — Norwegian Wood had given me a strong and lasting depression, it’s one of the books I’m afraid to re-read — but maybe it won’t be incorrect to say I like his vision and his impact. I didn’t start reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland till the end of the first two exams but it took me in quick, its premise was interesting although I think the effect dissolves towards the end. You could tell how it was a pre-Norwegian Wood novel. Even After Dark (the only other Murakami I’ve read) is more precise and sure-footed about its pressure points, despite its much smaller scale.

I need to learn how to sharpen my kitchen knives because all of them are blunt. Just now I had to slice a lemon with the meat cleaver; the small vegetable knife would just not sink through the rind.

Of the things I’m looking forward to this year, these are at the top of the list:

  • River of Smoke, which I find a greatly unmemorable name compared to Sea of Poppies, but I can’t wait for the book. Even though I do agree with the point P made on her blog about the second book of trilogies usually being a drag. This was also the first book I pre-ordered in my life (which, of course, has more to do with the huge discount they’re offering at Flipkart).
  • The final Harry Potter movie.
  • Snuff.
  • The Tintin movie.

That is a vaguely chronological list although about these things, who can tell. That’s also only a list of upcoming things; there are existing things  that I want to catch up on like novels by Kundera and Umberto Eco and all the Woody Allen films I have not seen. I want someone to give me a collection of Pixar shorts. I want to sit at the rooftop at B&B with a chilled beer and watch a diffused gray sunset over this stupid city that does not let me go away. I am very excited about this book called Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings which arrived a couple of days ago (Flipkart again, thank god for Flipkart), but I will leave this for another post because I have such a lot to say about it. Also, just thought I’d mention that I do not at all feel impressed by the song called ‘Bhaag D. K. Bose’ that seems all the rage these days. Edgy lyrics alright but the tune just refuses to catch. I wonder if this will change.

I want to make pasta and chicken and a chocolate cake with walnuts in it but god, it’s so hot. The kitchen feels like a slice of hell all the time since the sun is up. I can’t bear to swallow my morning tea after 8 AM so on days I wake up late, there is no tea and I feel sluggish and can muster up enthusiasm for nothing except stay in bed and read. Or watch music videos on Youtube when the internet connection feels benevolent enough.

It’s a Sunday morning and my mother is wandering around the house talking incessantly on the phone. Chhoto Pishi, Mejo Jetthu, Chhoto Mami, so on and so forth. I’m listening to the constant chatter over the whirring of the washing machine and the splurts and hisses from the kitchen and vaguely wondering how she has so much to say, because I can find nothing to say to most of my relatives, even the ones closer to my age like Cousin A and Cousin L, who keep up this one-sided effort to stay in touch. Cousin R is getting divorced and I should maybe phone him but I always forget. I’m listening but I’m not really tuning in; later Ma will tell me snatches of these conversations and I will absentmindedly nod, repeating all the time in my head, whoa really. (Whoa really nothing. Just whoa, really.)

It took me about three hours to write this blog post because I keep getting distracted and going away. I have a few more things to say but at the moment I can’t compose them into coherent lines. There’s so much else to do. Which one is your main task and which one’s the distraction? You wonder, you forget, this flotsam-like nowhereness is your life. Perhaps.