Hypochondria, and umm, well Flyovers!

So I was in bed the other day, and things started to get real bad. I had been feeling uneasy and uncomfortably warm for a while but I passed it off as lack of new music, good films, women and great TV. (Notice the lack of an adjective for women. And it wasn't even intentional.)

Then I felt myself sweating a bit. I mean who gets exhausted with just half a day of lying down? So I got really worried. Soon my chest felt tight on the left side.

I told myself it was absolutely nothing and adjusted another pillow (fourth) under my head before turning to CNN. News of the global economic mess and Rihanna getting assaulted should distract me from my own petty complaints, I thought.

That bastard Anderson Cooper looked younger than me!

So, the sweating worsened and my throat started to get dry. I stretched my arm out for some water. But it tasted fairly weird. What was happening to me? I had this pain in my wrist last week, and my knees have always hurt slightly. Surely it couldn’t be arthritis? My chest was now collapsing on itself. I could hardly breathe.

Even my feet were sweating now. Heart attack??? I cursed myself for archiving all those upsetting chain mails with symptoms of heart failure and stroke.

Just like a dry nose signals illness for Cookie, the absence of the colourless single strand of hair from the middle of my forehead spells doom for me. When its there, my life’s pretty brilliant. It was a flourishing one and a half inches long when I got my first job and tipped two inches when I was at the peak of my acting career and prowess. The last time it disappeared I got painful kidney stones!

It was about the size of a half-severed mosquito leg. SURELY I WAS GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!

Why didn’t I eat more fruits? Why didn’t I ask out more women? Why didn’t I exercise more? Why hadn’t I made my movies yet?? No one will even care…

I was still lying there; most of me was now covered in sweat, my head twisting madly, as if trying to release itself from my diseased body. (That would be cool, though! Detachable heads!)

Then my mother came in. She never knocks! No one ever takes me seriously at home!! Where’s the respect for privacy? They will regret it when I am gone!!!

“Why haven’t you switched on the fan? It’s 35 degrees!!!”

“Oh?”

The fan starts to turn around with the enthusiasm usually shown my kids on the first morning of the new academic year. Slowly all vitals returned to normal. Hehe. Silly me.

Ya, so the summer really made a sudden entry.

***

Fa Hein (399 BC). Megasthenes (350 BC). SlowtumblingLife (2007–09)

As you can see from the abovementioned calendar, great scholars of international repute and profound depth have often visited the bustling historic megapolis of Patna and chronicled its gala journey through time as one of the oldest and dirtiest continually inhabited places on the planet.

Btw historians have now firmly ascertained that Fa Hein was a common junkie who just got phenomenally lost looking for opium in China and tumbled across Nepal into Bihar. And I have evidence of his records being nothing but drug fueled fantasies.

Current view of the "80 Pillar Hall", Fa Hein documents spending 'vivid' afternoons here.

Saala.

Since Patna can’t compete with other cities of the world on obvious and mundane parameters like quality of life and women, the proud people of this city have created their own titles.

We have the largest colony in Asia. Kankerbagh. It’s a fact every kid knows in the city and something everybody is extremely proud of. There is East Patna, West Patna, South Patna and Kankerbagh. Ergo. Of course, nobody in the real world has ever heard of this colony.

Why isn’t it simply the largest colony in the world, you ask? Well, to keep a tradition alive it has to be vaguely plausible. Our kids won’t believe just anything, especially after wretched satellite TV.

We also have the Gol Ghar. Well it’s not a title really, but it fills our middle class chests with solemn and massive pride nonetheless. It is after all the only Gol Ghar in the world. It’s a massive pointless structure, originally intended to be a granary. Now it’s a picnic spot for the really jobless and a good way for the government to siphon off money by keeping it under “restoration” for the last eighteen years.

The Historical Gol Ghar.

Oh, my historical note is not about the above. It’s about a flyover actually.

ChiraiyaTadh Pul (Flight of a Bird, Bridge) – A Saga

Yeah, when you have just one flyover to name in your city you have the time to be poetic and use mythical refrences in Sanskrit.

So ChiraiyaTadh as it is fondly known connects Kankerbagh to the rest of the city and world. It had been around for ages, and when the new state government was sworn in a few years ago on the mantra of change and hope it vowed to renovate the quintessential architectural symbol of the city.

To begin with they completely destroyed the earlier bridge. And for fifteen long months Kankerbagh, the largest colony in Asia, was ignominiously cut off from the rest of the world.

The gentle people of Patna after years of misrule have been robbed of much, but on the flipside they have developed colossal reserves of patience. However even those were tested when the new bridge upon inspection turned out to be exactly similar in all respects to the old one.

There was a violent upsurge; residents of Kankerbagh demanded something substantial for fifteen months of torture. The state government was in a fix, they had run out of ideas! To buy some time, they briefly cut off electricity supply to the colony and much of the city. Everyone forgot about the bridge.

And then the government came up with a great idea. They erected two massive pillars at the center of ChiraiyaTadh and converted it into a suspension bridge. Except the bridge wasn’t really suspended from cables, it was supported by a series of pillars. ChiraiyaTadh Pul was a suspension bridge in the same way that Eminem is black. Basically it wasn’t, but it tries to be.

Within months Kankerbagh and much of the capital city was up in arms. They realized they had been had. Once again there was no electricity.

And then the government came up with another brilliant idea. They decided to gift the people a second ChiraiyaTadh parallel to the first one, now traffic would be smooth and undisturbed on this arterial route of our historic city.

Of course, there was no room for this second lane, and much of the celebrated Kankerbagh had to be razed to make space, severely threatening its esteemed status amongst Asian colonies. But the state government was not one to be held back by such trivial concerns.

Construction on the second bridge was severely delayed, mostly due to boredom. When, suddenly, one cold winter evening large parts of the bridge collapsed. Much action followed, the opposition parties boycotted assembly sessions, the media carried the news on the front page and beat its chest and some residents of Kankerbagh went on indefinite hunger strike to protest the inferior quality of building material.

The residents were once again briefly distracted.

In the meantime, the government cooked up yet another infrastructural innovation. They awarded the city with a longer second lane. Yes dear reader, they decided to make up for the collapse by giving more ChiraiyaTadh to the city.

There was much city-wide merriment. We could soon have the longest flyover, and definitely the stupidest.

Since then the bridge has been extended once more. The reason? Well, construction stretched into the elections, and the election commission guidelines blocked any inauguration for fear of it being used as a publicity stunt.

So the ruling party did the obvious thing.

The final bridge will be inaugurated after the elections.

Like all visiting scholars, I felt it my duty to document the life of this extraordinary city. For you dear reader, and for future generations, I have a diagrammatic representation of the idiocy. It should make things simpler.

The Travails of the Second Wing of ChiraiyaTadh Pul.
(the third structure identifiable from the moon, after The Great Wall and AIG's Debt)


*
*
**
***
****
*****
******
*******
********
*********
*********
*********
********
******
***** <-- Point of Collapse
*****
******
****** <-- Intended end of flyover.
*******
********
********
*******
******
*****
**** <-- Elections hit us here
****
*****
******
******
*****
**** <-- World’s Sharpest Declining Flyover (Actual Reliable Data)
*
*
<-- City Ends Here

Pardon My 90s

Yo. So the Indian Youth (born between 3 yrs before 24th January, 1984 and 5 years after) is a totally cool set of people. I mean we really really ROCK! Our music, our literature, our social networking, hair, cinema, food, TV, clothes; dammit our very LIVES are enveloped in the awesome glow of heavenly coolness.

But things weren’t always like this. Let moi elaborate.

Have you ever wondered how 9 out of 10 Indians just “LOOUVE” Calvin & Hobbes? The remnant 1 out of 10 has graduated to more serious humour of the White Ninja or Slowtumbling level. And yet dear reader, one stops to wonder why, for a funny people (source: broad view and Bollywood), we are extremely low on the proverbial sense of humour?

Q: What did we grow up on?

चाचा चौधरी
Chacha Choudhary
Uncle Chowdharee
تشودرى

Whatay super hero; brought to us by cartoonist Pran, who clearly didn’t get the basic premise of super-heroism because he gave poor old Chacha absolutely no special powers and then armed him with a mighty wooden walking stick.

Of course Pran often reminded us that Chacha’s brain was sharper than a needle and quicker than a computer. (Pentium 486, 60 MHz in those days) So basically Chacha could perform complex double digit multiplication, faint immediately after from the stress and regain consciousness in less than fifteen minutes.

He could also count the no. of pages in a book by looking at the last one.

Obviously none of this came in handy against terrifying, blood curdling and world threatening nemesis of the calibre of roadside bullies and local thugs. Plus Chacha had his hands full, what with his fat and domineering wife, Bini Chachi. She wielded a far more menacing weapon – a stout (although once again, wooden) rolling pin!

To save dear Chacha from getting summarily thrashed both inside and outside of his home Pran gave us Sabu! A giant alien of infinite strength and stupidity, whose anger caused a volcano to explode in Jupiter and made little girls giggle on Earth. He dressed with significant spunk, in matching red underwear and gum boots. Understandably, Sabu was never married and deftly avoided the topic. But he showed none of the same restraint when it came to eating.


Sabu ate in a single meal, 110 Rotis, 12 Kgs of seasonal fruits, green leafy vegetables and sweets before washing it all down with 20 litres of milk.

Sabu’s diet was a constant source of domestic violence in the Choudhary household, with Bini thrashing Chacha for inviting the Jupiteranean and Sabu joining in later to channel his hunger fuelled alien angst.

Anyway, the Avant-Garde artwork and humour took comic books to a hitherto unknown depth. Also the stellar use of the Queen’s English caused the British to, for the first time in their history, officially lament colonization.

Consider the following example – FUNNY FOOTBALL

Urban Simpleton, Evidently Dense (USED): PATKU! HOW COME AT THIS AGE YOU VENTURED TO PLAY FOOTBALL!

PATKU: THIS FOOTBALL IS NOT FOR PLAYING BUT TO DERIVE FUN.

USED: WHAT KIND OF FUN?

PATKU: KICK IT WITH FULL FORCE!

USED: AS YOU PLEASE!

*KICK*

USED: EEEIII!!! MY FOOT!

PATKU: HO-HO! THIS FOOTBALL IS MADE OF SOLID ROCK!!

Of course, not all of our comics were about the middle class dealing with common problems. Some were much worse.

A badass debut really sets up a comic book hero for eternal glory; much like a raunchy sex tape sets up a celebrity career. So when Super Commando Dhruv was unveiled in “Pratishod ki Jwala” (Fires of Revenge) there was much anticipation.

A sex tape can generate publicity but a foray into serious cinema requires ample nudity (content). Similarly, an ominous title is fine, but to be taken seriously you have to look the part, have a brilliant vehicle, at least have a vehicle, really wicked villains to fight, a supremely hot woman to woo, a great story and reason for being against evil (other than God I mean), and finally, once again super powers.

In Sanskrit Dhruv means Axis, which profoundly stands for “one who maintains his position no matter what happens.” If Sanskrit was still in verbal circulation and hence currently evolving, Dhruv would now mean Asshole.

First off. He has no super powers. None. Zilch. He can’t even make water evaporate faster than it anyway would. To look even more stupid, he actually physically looks stupid. Then he has no vehicle, in fact there was an entire issue dedicated to his adventures haggling with cab drivers. If not having a serious rival was an early disaster in Dhruv’s career (his arch enemy is Bauna Vamaan, Dwarf God, who harasses the world with his cocky haircut) he made it worse by vowing never to kill anyone.

Natasha is actually kinda hot! No? Okay 90s hot?

Currently, Dhruv is going through a somewhat rough patch, readers have complained about the spectacular loss of depth, the overuse of mythical refrences, although the changes to his costume have been largely welcomed.

The plan is to resurrect the comic with full gusto, in English. Be scared you evil Angrezians, it’s our turn to colonize now. The tikka-curry was only the beginning.

*****

Well that’s the thing with stuff. You can’t believe what used to be cool once upon a time. I mean now, everyone swears by Calvin and you’d probably be killed and then laughed at for admitting you had anything to do with the above comics.

But then for some time, however brief, in the 90s, that’s what you did, probably unknowingly, probably without even liking it very much. Just like tight jeans, mushroom cuts, Aishwarya Rai, boy bands, goaties, hotmail, Ansal Plaza, No. 1 films etc.

Some of it I still miss. Goldspot and Phantom Cigarettes.

***

And in case you are wondering, 24/01/84 is moi birth-date. It's the standard and constant measure of Indian Youth.

The fineprint is a recipe for Goldspot/Apple punch!!

Kangaroo Kafka (100% Fantastic)

It was an ordinary room. The table even more so. It was square, wooden with a fruit basket in the middle.

There were four chairs. ABCD, arranged anti-clockwise.

Kafka sat on B. The sun pierced in through a boring window exactly behind his chair, so that Kafka’s shadow sat on D. Kafkadow. Kafka was asleep. The fruits were centered within his shadow’s stomach.

There was a lot of smoke in the room. It came from the Kangaroo, standing between D and A. He wasn’t your usual Kangaroo; he wasn’t wearing your customary red boxing gloves. But he was smoking. Marlboro Lights.

Fantastic Fanboy was seated on C. Armed with a quiver full of maps. Much randomness was floating through him, you could easily tell from the angle of his glance.

He was just banging his head on a wall. He’d run and crash His head and fall. Then He’d do it again. He did it exactly behind A.

It was an ordinary room hosting an extraordinary contest for Supreme Oddness.

No one apart from the finalists could enter the room. To avoid normal-pollution. Things would commence automatically when the bell rang. DCBA. Each would have to prove his own peculiarity.

Supreme Oddness (What's after Trinity? For Four?)

***

TRRRING BZZZZZZZ RRRRNGGINGGG TRRR ZZ (We stole it from a hospital, it’s half broken.)

***

Kafkadow heaves a 90% sigh. Then he looks at Kafka who is 100-105% asleep.

“Asshole! Always snoring.” says Kafkadow with considerable spite.

Kafka’s shadow explains how he is an insomniac.

But even before Kafkadow can begin, behind A, He starts to laugh loudly, “You call that strange? HAHAHA!” And then He starts to bang His head on the wall, harder than ever.

“Anyway. It’s a bitch I tell you. I spend all night staring into the ceiling as I get dragged across the room.”

Kafka slumps down on his chair. Kafkadow dips below the table.

He continues, “The worst thing is I am not sleepy. I mean no sleep has got to fuck you somehow right? It’s been 19 days now!!”

Kafka stretches his arm out, and then extends a loud yawn before slowly pulling his legs apart. Eventually he falls.

Kafkadow now lies carelessly splattered on the floor, “During the day I am so exhausted, it feels the sun will make me crack and then the cracks will widen till I die." He is in tears.

Of course you can't see shadow's cry. Well maybe sometimes, at certain angles. Rare, though.

Then he calls out to one of them, any one, “Please shove a cigarette between his lips. I need that?! And can you put him back on the chair? This is a little embarrassing.”

Nobody moves.

***

“The thing is, I’m not sure if this would be less pathetic if they had commissioned me to do it.”

Fatntastic Fanboy explains how he is looking for someone, anyone, who hasn’t heard of The Beatles in England. That's what he does in life. For a living. There is no money though. But it's still for a living.

“My God! That’s odd?? Do you actually think you can win with that???” The others were all getting irritated with Him. He just wouldn’t stop laughing or crashing his head.

FF starts to sweat about 45% and says, “So I leave home every morning and cover every thing on my maps, bit by bit. I am almost 7% done already and it’s only been 3 years.”

“No I don’t speak to Children.”

“No Asians.”

“I don’t know. I will tell him who the Beatles were, sing Eleanor Rigby and then I’ll move on.”

Then he sings Eleanor Rigby. It's really horrible. Kafkadow wishes he was dead.

***

“The thing is that no one takes a suicidal Kangaroo seriously.”

The Kangaroo wants to die in a car accident. Apparently Kangaroos that died in car accidents, on purpose, were reborn as humans.

There is a giant crash followed by the shrillest loudest laughter. A single enormous guffaw cut into tinier sausage shaped giggles. Madness comes over Him.

The Kangaroo scowls, wishing he had the bloody gloves on.

Dreaming of one less nose in the room he says, “I want to be able to listen to Radiohead. Ok Computer, especially. Hmm, In Rainbows was fairly ordinary. Anyway.”

Pulling on his 63% cigarette, “Fucking humans will be 100% righteous about killing Kangaroos. They’ll crash their cars, but save me. Somehow. Dickheads.”

“Anna Karenina, I want to read that too. If you don't read or appreciate Music you are 50% Kangaroo anyway?!!”

"No??" says Fanboy, offended slightly. He has gone only as far as Karma Police would take him, and Anna K. was too long.

“I can’t!! Well I can't, because Ipods don’t fit Kangaroo ears.”

“And I can’t turn pages. No fingers. So no Tolstoy.”

Then he lights another Marlboro.

“Ok?? Fuckers??!”

***

It’s His turn finally. But He is busy crashing His head on the wall. Same spot. He is still covered in silly laughter.

“So what’s your story?” demands Fanboy.

Kangaroo puts Kafka in place and Kafkadow returns to his chair, he is staring at Him for a reply.

“Tell us or we throw you out of the window,” thunders the Kangaroo, sadly.

***

He continues to crash His head. Slowly the laughter fades. Then he walks to A and sits down.

He plucks out a banana from Kafkadow's stomach, tears it open and eats it up. Clumsily.

Kafkadow wants to say, "HEY!" in protest. But he doesn't. He watches the banana disappear with its shadow.

“Me? Well I wrote this! I wrote you! HAHAHA.”

He then points at the wall. The others turn to look, simultaneously. Just where he had been banging his skull it read, “Writer’s Block. 95%"

"Oh?"

***

TRRRING BZZZZZZZ RRRRNGGINGGG TRRR ZZ

Bloggy Love

I don't know how it is with other bloggers, but in my case nothing makes my day like a sudden spurt in traffic. And yet I do fairly little to actually take this blog to people. Or I do a lot with a few people, those I think I can bug and get away with, and nothing otherwise.

So you can understand, my total delight when I received this award by Adaelamoon over at Ruminations. Oh and she wrote some fine things about this place. Do visit her blog, it's only a month old but already there's much terrific stuff to be read.


And, now it's my turn to spread some Bloggy Love -

1. BLIMBLOP - Her first post was the very epitome of profound brevity. "Yada Yada Yada," she said. And then the women just wouldn't stop talking. She'd write two posts between lunch and dinner, and one just before she slept. And they were all brilliant. Her blog is mostly about lizards, Bombay, her office, and Rats. Its perfect. Do visit. Leave her a string of curses for not writing often enough lately, even though she is now the somewhat proud owner of a laptop. (She took six months to decide on buying one, six months to decide the model and then three months to go to the store.)

2. Balls On A Rampage - A Dystopian Take on Life - Uddhav will go down in history as the man who downloaded all of Cinema. Also, before I met him, people who followed their dreams were only characters in books. When you get to know him you will know what I mean and you will admire him for that. What I like most about his blog, is the honesty. It stares you in the face. I wish someday I could match him there.

3. The Delhicate Constitution - On some blog somewhere, he is listed under Too Kewl to Blog Anymore. Which is true, he is fairly busy these days. But go there, he has been blogging for years, and you can pick any random post to read and you'll love it. Plus he has a list of awesome Blogs which I use every other day.

4. No Longer the Elastic Retreat - A New Chapter - I just visited this a few weeks ago, but its a brilliant blog. Found it on my aimless meanderings across the internet. And now I go there fairly often, just trying to finish reading his previous posts.

5. Autobiography of An Ordinary Man - Another blog I chanced upon. You must read his posts, they are more hilarious than anything else I have read in a long time. And he writes really often.

6. Donscave - The Don - he once kept his stuff private, then I abused the shit out of him, now you can visit. It's really an incredible collection of posts, that takes you through his life. Now if only he'd write more often.

So that's that. Hope this will increase the quality of you life online.

Oh and consider yourself awarded the Superior Scribbler Award by your very own Slowtumblinglife. You are supposed to pass this on and all, but all's cool if you don't.

If this doesn't make you feel too awesome, let me just tell you that I spent Sunday doing brilliant things like having Malted Chocolate Fudge ice cream, then cutting my toenails, I saved them from last Sunday when I cut my fingernails (what planning), then I cut Cookie's toenails (all of them), and now I am waiting for Roadies to start. Oh I also had a routine Blood Test, just for kicks (almost).

It's an honour, just to know me? Aww.

Dev (Pee)D

So I was in Delhi the other day, and everything seemed, like, so cool. You know, like, so awesome, it hurt my eyes.

Why do they speak like that in Delhi?

But in most other ways it’s a brilliant place. Except I wish they’d stop being so annoyingly creative with their loo-signs. I went to this restaurant and they had the back half of an elephant's body stuck on the two doors, so that you saw elephant butts. And they were both the same shape, curve, size and had the same tail, so I did what was clear and intelligent, I bent a little to check if one of them had a dong swinging below the butt, but there was enormously nothing.

It was a very tough two minutes of my life, my bladder issues were making me woozy, once again I felt old, and I failed to make an educated guess regarding the complex sexual references laid out by tiny identical elephant asses.

Then one of the doors pulled inwards, and a stunning Japanese woman stepped out. In the light that came in from the loo, I swear it could have been from her face, I saw that the elephant butt on her door was pink.

Of course I had no time to flirt with her. Damn you, weak bladder!!!! She was really hot, and was wearing very little. With a heavy heart but also with great hurry I pushed open the door with the grey elephant butt and stepped in.

What next? Doors that creak H-I-S/H-E-R in Morse Code when you swing them?

HIS-HER in Morse

That would be, like, trippy bro. So fuckin’ cool, you know. That’s like my thing, trippin’.

***

When life begins, it’s truly awesome. Then little by little things start to turn into shit, the realities, facts and truths come together to screw up things with the gusto of Chengiz Khan and the precision of Chinese torturers.

Do you know that an average person kisses for only two weeks of his life?

Do you know that it is two times less than the quality time we spend in elevators? That it is only two times more than the average time spent doing exciting things like looking for socks and using toothpicks?

Do you know that there was a two week phase in my life when I was kissing?

On the brighter side, being more or less an average person, I have, statistically, an exciting future ahead of me!! Also, statistically speaking, if the ratio between that and tooth-picking is a constant then I’ll easily have a few decades of smooching.

Oh, in case you are wondering where I met with this sad bit of information, let me tell you the source is irrefutable. It was printed on a bottle of Snapple. (Made from the best stuff on Earth.)

Btw, the good folks over at Snapple also tells us –

1. Fish Cough.
2. The average woman consumes six pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.
3. The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called tittle.

***

“Don’t give me that psychological bullshit.”

You guess right, I just watched Dev D. Mr. Anurag Kashyap, understand, such a sentence really stands out like a sore thumb in a Hindi movie.

“Who are you Florence Firangitale?”

Don’t get me wrong, I liked your movie! A lot, but not as much as I liked Omkara. Of course my love for Omkara doesn’t even come close to my love for Kalki. (Thank you for introducing her, and now lay off!!!!)

Mr. Kashyap, I know you are a dangerous and abusive man, please understand any obscene and insolent comment on this blog will be fucking erased in no time. So kindly refrain, I get a lot of family traffic you see. You are of course allowed to sing praises about my writing and leave a blinking link on PassionforCinema.

Anyway the movie is brilliant in large parts, but the brilliance is never allowed to overwhelm because there is a lot of unnecessary stuff, too many shots of Delhi traffic, that too in different shades and texture, too many sunrises all with varying no. of birds, I think three or four montages, and numerous versions of that camera trick from Requeim. (Ya the tying camera to body wala trick.) Also –

1. The scene with the old woman in the bus.
2. Hilaiye.
3. And a few more.

You are making a movie, not writing a post. Trim the not-so-brilliant bits. Let go. Not every little bit has to be crammed in. (Umm, I never face that problem though, while writing; it’s ALL awesome, in case you were wondering.)

At the end of it, it’s difficult to recollect the movie, even though I have now seen it twice, feels like you planned and thought of it in individual bits rather than as a whole movie.

(Don’t worry though; very soon you can take tips from my movie. Very soon.)

Abhay, good show, very similar to OLLO though, in some scenes I almost caught the OLLO crew in the background having tea. Did you actually shoot scenes simultaneously from different sides?

Okay, I am just being mean. It’s Holi Hai, and the apartment kids came in and left with Cookie, then they returned and took my parents. Then the maid. Then I waited in torn white clothes but there was silence, they didn’t even ask for me. Runts.

:(

Amit Trivedi, your music will be on my ipod Top 25 for a long long time. Thank god there is someone to save us from Rehman. Err, all you Slumdog Fanatics/South Indians/Patriots feel free to leave abusive comments. Nothing beats Emosanal Attyachar.

Kalki, please get in touch. I cook the most amazing Mutton Curry, floss regularly, have a single one inch long strand of colourless hair in the middle of my forehead, which you can play with but not break, because it brings me good luck, plus unlike AK am thin and tall.

***

So I reached the airport, ready to leave Delhi. I am early and I look in my bag for a book. Instead I find a small bottle of complimentary Grey Goose. Saali Khushi!!! So I do the clear and intelligent thing for the second time on my trip. I buy a bottle of mineral water, saunter into the loo, pee (pour) half of it out into the pot, of course I make (usual) zipping unzipping sounds, then I empty Grey Goose into water bottle. Then I place empty bottle in toilet loo and cover with crumpled toilet paper. Then I flush (fake) and leave. Then I sit before the cops and drink all the ‘water.’ Then I am smiling at everyone as I pop some Cool Mint. Security check is awesome, I don’t feel a thing, then I stand like Vitruvian Man. Then I start to listen to Jazz, Portishead, Pink Floyd, Goldspot, Franz Ferdinand, Yann Tiersen and Emosanal Attyachar, one after the other. Also I read Murakami, 100% Perfect Girl was the name of the brilliant story.

Haha Hehe

If you can avoid the slightest flinch, bit by bit, you are liberated.

***

To begin with there is nothing but thick darkness. A faint siren calls out from somewhere within its yawning emptiness. I am driving a taxi. Because I am also standing at the corners reading blank newspaper after blank newspaper I observe it’s a pale yellow taxi with swollen stripes that glow, for borders. It is no longer dark, but black and white, with hints of grainy brown. Inside, I am strangely delighted because my hands aren’t tied to the seat. So I let them dance on the wheel. Utter freedom. It’s a swinging car now. People are getting in, couples mostly, and they all want to go exactly where I want to take them even as the siren only gets louder. I am cycling uphill. She has a pretty face. I see her from the front of the class, and then I walk past an endless row of books, reading each of them as I do. She loves the car. The glowing gets more pronounced, the yellow is no longer pale. We bounce away; the trunk is full of unread books. They keep falling out. But I don’t feel sad; they are exactly the ones I have read. I can tell, because somehow I am collecting all the books as they fall behind the car. Who was in the car? Oh. The sound of the siren starts to get unbearable. The darkness starts to return; only this time it’s a thin brittle shroud. At first even the students are green, but then only the board is. I fill it up with brilliance. There is a standing ovation. I ditch the cycle and start to walk uphill. It’s a frenzied walk, because the siren seems to be chasing me. And I have to get there before it gets too dark. Hours pass away in a few seconds, and I am still walking. Only, faster. We are both holding hands as we approach the summit; the taxi follows her silently and slowly, with respect. She is smiling and swinging my arm. The cars are carrying an endless supply of unread news and literature. Then suddenly I recall the frightening siren, and it returns to curdle my blood. It starts to chase all of them away, even her. Even the students, who were eating ice-cream and following me on their desks, start to go back. The ice creams are giant and melting quickly. The cones have glowing borders. The siren is doing that. To everything. I look at them leave. Even the car leaves, taking away all that there was to read. I turn around to resume walking. But the blaring only grows louder; cracks start to appear in the shroud. It begins to tremble violently. Eventually it gets unbearable.

And I wake up.

But not before all of this happens once more, in a flash. I remember the car, and holding her hand and the books. And her smile, sort of.

Then I am fully awake. The morning siren is dead but it’s left behind an angry buzz in my ears.

I know I am not free. But I haven’t moved my arms and legs. You are tied up only if you try to move. If you can stay absolutely still then after a while you can feel free.

***

“Did you see him? Just before he woke up?”

“Yes! He was having a dream!”

“What do mad men dream of? Can you imagine?”

“Madness! What else? Thank God he is tied up all the time, the last time he wasn't he attacked Sister Nathan and then publicly masturbated in the mess!”

“You are right, must be full of sickness, his dreams. I mean even old Sister Nathan must dream some colourful dreams of her own, so one can only imagine.”

“I know. Haha”

“Hehe.”

Rewind

He was by far the most interesting person at the party. In fact, when she thought of it, he was the most fascinating person she had met in a long time. About everyone she ever came across was boisterous, attention-seeking or simply drab.

Between a lot of laughing and alcohol they had a brilliant conversation. Amongst other things, they established that the party was overflowing with boring people, the year’s Oscar nominations were astonishingly off beam, and that any job would eventually be horrible and meaningless.

In a room curdled with a mix of heavy smoke, flippant strangers and soft music he had told her he wanted to leave everything and follow his heart. He wanted to paint. And in that moment he swept her off her feet. Just like that.

Three months later they married each other.

It was a lovely painting, giant, intangible and yet subtly figurative, the kind she liked. She was laughing, her head was thrown back and her hands were behind her on the wooden table she sat on. He was standing close to her, making a point with his drink.

That evening had been tinted in a drunken orange glow that the smoke confused and conversations ignored. It was many years ago, but standing before the painting she recognised the first time they came across, all of it, in the grain and the scattered brushstrokes.

They separated only a few years into their wedding, the hurriedness with which they got together probably made it inevitable, she thought. He was after all, simply some guy who made her laugh at a party she crashed.

To family and friends they were the perfect couple, others sought to be more like them. He was an aspiring artist, she was incredibly pretty and they threw the liveliest parties. No one ever had a bad word to say about them, and for most the two were the final confidants. Somehow the way they lived their lives, their opinions, the clothes they wore, the furniture they used, the films and books they approved of, the restaurants they suggested were the right ones, they were exclusive to them, they were exactly what everyone else aspired to develop a taste for.

And yet every day their wedding crumbled a little more.

She had recognised and rejected an ordinary course for her life, one whose sole motivation was to get married and raise children. Like him she wanted to leave everything, but she didn’t know what she would be leaving it for. It was what made him attractive; he knew what would make him happy.

She lived her dreams through his paintings; her life was decorated in their colours. Everything seemed possible; in his presence she felt comfortable to seek out and realise her own vision.

He liked to paint and he wanted to be an artist. But he loved more than anything the definition this gave to his existence, that of an artist in the making. It distinguished him from everybody else, it made for brilliant conversation, and it had given him a beautiful wife. So much so, that he forgot that being an artist required a lot of effort.

As time passed, little became of his extravagant dreams leaving him hugely frustrated. Was he just running away from ordinary and tedious jobs? Was his passion for painting a mere façade? A juvenile means of dodging life’s responsibilities?

She tired of running the house soon after. She realised that their lives were as commonplace as any of the boring people at that party. Many of those people never realised their ordinariness. Other did, but then they came to terms with it and moved on, instead of trying to escape the obvious reality. Bit by bit she found herself caught in the exact life she had run away from when she married him.

Over a period of time this led to bitter fights, nasty allegations and eventually robbed them of their love for each other.

“No, I don’t love you! You are just someone who made me laugh once, at a party I almost didn’t go to.”

“You are the kind of woman that would suck my dick if I sold a painting tomorrow.”

It was his first exhibition, and if the papers were to be believed, it was a roaring success. He had left her a message inviting her, telling her how much he would love for her to visit the gallery.

The painting of them, Rewind, was the centrepiece of his exhibit. Was it as obvious a suggestion as it seemed? She felt stupid for feeling that way. But at the same time she began to justify his behaviour before they separated. Standing before the painting looking at him, she found herself admitting his guts in choosing art over anything else he could have done. And now, eventually, he was successful.

Nobody else would believe her, but back then she knew that someday he would succeed. Not because he was truly passionate about art, but because he genuinely loved what being an artist could do to his life, the honour, the fame, and the money. Eventually he’d paint his way to all of that.

But almost immediately she reminded herself that when they separated, she didn’t believe this would happen anytime soon.

She walked around the gallery; drink in her hand, music in her head thinking the kind of things that are impossible to share with anyone. Not because they are criminal, but because you don’t really mean them, at least not entirely, they are just playful amusing thoughts. He’d invite her to dinner after the exhibition, she’d agree. She kept telling herself that it would only be a conversation, but a part of her was making her smile with anticipation. They had been young, too impatient to handle a marriage. They have now known each other much longer. He was still by a huge margin the most intriguing person she knew.

Walking around she came back to stand before Rewind.

***

“Thank you so much for coming. Hope you liked it?”

“They are all flawless, loved all of them, especially this.”

“Oh yes! It’s me and April, my fiancé. I must introduce you to her; she has always wanted to meet you. We are getting married next month. This is for her, the first time we met; it was at Karen’s party. You remember Karen?”

“No. No I don’t. But congratulations, what great news. Goodluck.”

“Thanks, now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Yes please, go ahead.”