Saturday, April 25

I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
- Jerome K Jerome

After a lifetime of being anal about exams and marks, I seem to finally have lost that vice like grip on needing to do well. I can't study. I try, but I can't sit at it for hours the way I used to. It's very unsettling, it makes me feel like a different person. I have never been indifferent towards exams, I keep telling myself it's because I loathe the subject matter, that I think it's not worth studying, that my life is not going to have anything to do with bleeding cost accounting (yeah!) and this is not who I am. But, internet, it's an exam. Where I'll be judged and marked and told how much of my time I didn't waste and how effective or ineffective my ability to grasp these concepts is. The content doesn't matter. It shouldn't matter.
Nowadays I spend my day being comfortable. I sleep about 10 hours a day, which I'm working on reducing to 7. I miss my friends, some of my closest friends, who I can't seem to talk to the way I used to. Saying out loud that I don't like what we're becoming, I don't like this distance creeping up between us, I don't like how your email with only 4 words is so cold and indifferent, will it translate into an automatic pass back to us? But I'm comfortable with it. Nothing fazes me anymore. My house is constantly freezing because we've turned the coolers on, and Delhi outside is like a giant ball of fire. I go for walks in the morning at 6, to smoke cigarettes and be around for the best part of the day. Milkmen and newspaperwaalas and schoolkids and car cleaners and the doggies, and the funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that I only get early in the morning, that says are you going to let another day pass?
I'm being incoherent.
I read something brilliant on a blog recently. Out of sight = out of mind. Out of phonebook = out of memory.
I'm being incoherent again. I've realised that I have a blank face. This isn't meant to be self-deprecating, it's just something I've realised after looking at old photos. My features are vanishing. As I age, my face is becoming more nondescript. I could rob a bank or murder the president and no one would be able to find me because they couldn't describe my face (assuming I get away to begin with, which might not happen considering I'm acceleration challenged). It's a khaali face and I can get surgery or crayons or make-up and make it into whatever I want.
I'm going to go now internet, but I must also remind you not to let things go unsaid, loves go unloved and don't let things reach a point where you don't know what to say to your friend to make them realise it's still the same you even though he / she might be having serious trouble recognise you. That shit piles up under your skin and festers like tumours.

1 comment:

Shagun Khare said...

banu you're supposed to get the pulitzer, remember? dead serious. begin writing.