:(

Internet, I'm sick. What's worse is that I *feel* sick. And bummed out :(

And now I have "this is the end, beautiful friend, the end" playing in my head :(

What do I do?

Hmm.

"It could be hard to see a womanizer like Ford as a closet case, but it occurs to me if no woman is the man he is looking for then he would never stay with her."

What's up?

Internet, hello.



It’s my last day at work before I buckle down and behave and hit the old books. I’m at that point where just the thought of being home sounds wildly exciting. I’m going to get to sleep and read and hang out with the kids and my brother and be zen and read all my newspapers from cover to cover and stay in my pyjamas for weeks on end. It’s a very heady time. I’m going to get oh so unbelievably bored and I’m going to be the sad girl who’s on google talk all the time, who no one wants to talk to, because it’s obvious she has nothing better to do. All those years of bad karma, of appearing offline and saying brb and gtg when I had nowhere to go and no intention of being right back will catch up with me and bite me in the ass.

However, I AM turning 24. For the record it’s still three strands of white hair. It was four earlier, but one broke accidentally. And resulted in a moment of blind panic where I foolishly thought a million new strands of white hair would replace that one overnight. Twenty – four, dudes. I’m not going to live to a hundred, so I’m already a quarter done! And if I keep crossing roads the way I do, maybe 80% done, but it’s all inshallah. The other event the people of Delhi are counting down the days to (besides my janamdin i.e.) is the Commonwealth Games. Finally motherfuckers! I think I’d like to go and actually see the games, after all this is where ALL of our tax money (and then some) has gone. This is the reason why we’re hoarding lots of surplus electricity and water and not feeding our poor or building schools. But we do have very nice roads and a lot of parts do look a LOT cleaner. One sincerely hopes the Commonwealth delegation doesn’t accidentally stray into Khanpur or the still emitting Mayapuri. Mild embarrassment will occur. But yeah, anyone with passes who wants very interesting and wildly good looking company, please step forward.

Did I tell you about my austerity plan? Well, it sucks and all I want to do is go buy those flimsy shirts that Mango sells for 1200 bucks a pop just for the heck of it. It’s worrying, because now I’m actually thinking of how I might be wearing out particular things that I like. And when that used to happen earlier, I’d just buy two or three of the exact same thing. But now I’m becoming some sort of crazy hoarder, who squints at all her friends and mutters to herself ‘I’m not marginally fading out this xyz thing I like so much for YOU.’ Turns out I might just value some of my shirts more than my friends. Thank you, austerity.

I don’t feel young anymore internet. I blame work. I really miss college and studying and notebooks and stationery. I miss young fun. Not remembering the name of the club you’re in, not being able to see or think straight, infinite dancing with strangers. Not that I’d want to actually spend any of my free time that way now. Incidentally, if you peruse the archive of this blog I think all posts in April sound similarly cranky. I want a hat for my birthday, internet. I think I want a hat.

Back to work.
xoxo

I was in Udaipur this weekend, internet, and I got to come back by train. I don't get to travel by trains very often, my universe as I came to realise is fairly sterile. Air conditioned offices and cars and hotels and more offices and airplanes and malls and boutiques and an endless cycle of the same. The Indian Railway Experience is completely overwhelming. Especially for a claustrophobic person. Twelve hours of people right around you, over you and below you and in front of you. Twelve hours where you can feel the imprint of the skin of every person who's ever traveled in that sweaty piece of metal. I swear I could have cried. We're a nation of no space. Personal, physical and emotional. Space is a luxury with a quantifiable premium. We buy bigger cars and bigger houses surrounded by bigger lawns and put gates around our neighbourhoods to wrap ourselves with as much space as we can. We live with the people in our lives scattered all over, in different cities and countries and hemispheres. We can never have enough space. We leave and go looking for ourselves in places where we can be by ourselves, just to be able to think straight.
Internet, I'm highly claustrophobic and I've found someone who sometimes makes all the space I can lay my hands on meaningless and useless. I now find myself alone in my space, wishing I could have him so close that we're breathing each other in.
Love feels almost like a most agreeable defeat. Your armies at the doors of my kingdom. Your soldiers climbing the ramparts of my fort. Your spies among my court, your poison in my wine, your knife at my throat.

So we were sitting at my favourite table at the roof-top restaurant at two in the afternoon. You can see the lake from there and at night this beautiful wind blows there that makes the whole experience of the ghats just completely serene. But we're sitting there at two in the afternoon, with the sun right overhead, in the middle of this strange Paharganj of the desert. While sitting in the baking heat we watched this woman in a white sari with red flowers water the plants on the roof of her house with a steel matka. And even though this was at a considerable distance, just the sight of the water flowing out was such a relief.
All civilisations were built around water. We too were sitting in this dirty little tourist spot, with its unwashed firang hordes, covered in grime and sweat, just to crowd around this dirty little lake. And the night before we were talking in bed about the Mariana trench. Did you know that the Mariana trench is so deep that if you inverted Mt. Everest and stuck it in the trench there would still be about 7000 feet of water above it? Did you know nobody's been down there, right at the bottom and nobody knows what monsters lie in its shadows? We spoke about it in the dark, scaring each other with just the thought of having that sheer quantum of water over you. Of just trying to wrap your head around the amount of water surrounding you, that dense unbelievable weight right above your head. About how if somehow you were there, you could swim and swim forever and never leave.