Sniffing Flowers by the Wayside

You haven't lived till you've had a Columbian-by-birth serenade you with "Jimmy Jimmy" and "I'm a Disco Dancer". Trust me on this.

And to think I thought I was open to cross-cultural influences. Hoist on my own petard doesn't even begin to cover it. Oh well.

Why Cyndi Lauper Had It Right

I got my first chocolates-and-flowers deal today. Delivered to the Law School desk because the person who sent it didn't know precisely where to reach me. And if there is anything more embarrassing than walking down the university hallway clutching a bouquet and a box of chocolates in one hand and Gibson's Introduction to Business Law in the other, then I have yet to experience it.

Be that as it may. I have been suitably oohed and aahed over by fellow flatmates and assorted of gender affiliations startlingly similar to mine. And I have discovered that I absolutely spiffingly wholeheartedly love being a woman. I like high heels and short skirts and girl talk and mushy movies and stuff toys and shopping and hot guys. And I love getting surprise gifts in the mail. Especially if it is flowers and chocolate. This last bit is a recent discovery.

So thank you God... this here is a job well done... let me know if you ever need references.

One of my aunts is unwell.

Most of us having gorged on Wodehouse and leading a fairly independent life somehow have learnt to pooh pooh the whole extended Indian family tradition, well...at least I have. I absolutely have no fascinations for it.

But a few days back Baba called up, and said Kuttipishi had been admitted to the hospital, and she's in a really really bad shape.

Aloka...Abha...my Kuttipishi.

She used to stay with us, us as in my nuclear family of my dad, mom, elder bro and myself, and of course she. I was her pet.

She was the one who taught me the alphabet, and the numbers, taught me to draw and paint, bought me books and played carrom with me.

I remember her teaching me the bengali numerals. she taught me to write the digits, from 1 till 9, and then showed me how the numbers proceeded thence....10,11,12...and then she asked me to carry on as far as I could. I was perplexed, and confused, and she was busy cooking. And suddenly I saw the pattern. I could visualize how the digits fell in place to create the numbers, and since then, while I haven't been a genius at mathematics, I can always visualize how the digits arranged themselves around a problem. I guess it doesn't make any sense...it isn't meant to.

She used to buy these beautiful books for us, me and my elder bro, russian tales translated into bengali. Funny thing, being a bengali; and I pride myself in my general knowledge on that language, I learnt bengali from those translated russian tales...ones in the books she bought. Petenka, Vasilisa, Ivan, Andrei, Baba Yaga, Anoushka...all fairy children brought to life.

And there were those dolls, exquisite, perfect dolls she made out of cloth and cotton. Beautiful damsels dancing in different Indian classical dance postures, Shakuntala, Krshna and Radha, a Japanese lady with her parasol and since I'd perpetually hover around to see what she was doing, she'd let me fill in cotton in the dismembered torso and the legs of the dolls, and she'd let me glue the glitters in their dresses; and once, she even let me glue the hair to one bald skull.

Then one fine day, she got married to a guy I had vowed to myself I'd never like. The 6 year old me never know how charming that guy would be...so charming, that the vow held good only for a month till after the wedding Kuttipishi and Kuttipishu came to visit. They always came down during our summer vacations, and he'd make me do a hundred problems from my mathematics textbook in exchange for stamps, or books.

Perfect moments don't last too long, or maybe we just get too busy to notice as they fly past.

Today I am in chennai, doing fairly well in life; and I don't even remember the last time I saw either him, or her. And then three days back Baba calls up to tell me Kuttipishi is not well.

I am here in Chennai, and she's in the ICU of some hospital in Kolkata, under ventilation, moving in and out of a coma like state, her lungs and her chest invaded by some bacteria the doctors are unable to identify...none of her organs responding to the medicines.

She'll get well, I tell myself, because I do not have the courage to she her across a glass pane, smelling of the hospital instead of cloves and cardamom as she usually did.

She'll get well, coz if she doesn't, I'll never be able to tell her that because of that old sepia afternoon when she taught me to see digits create numbers, I can still visualize matrices and trigonometric equations.

She'll get well, coz if she doesn't I'll never be able to read those russian fairy tales where everything fell in place, and the good lived happily ever after.

She must get well....coz if she doesn't no one will ever call me Gutu...and that just cannot be.

I am petty enough to hate people who are consistently better than I am at everything. And this is not just hate... this is single-minded flaming white hot hate fuelled by such cold anger that I begin to be thankful for the Indian Penal Code as a restraining factor on homicidal impulses.

I'm going through a strange phase...and i am somehow not happy about it.

So i am watching Batman movies :D

nothing more refreshing than michelle pfieffer playing catwoman, and that 'miaow' she says when she sees batman and penguin!

Batman forever, definitely the best of the lot; if only because it has catwoman and michelle pfieffer!!!

Miaow!!!

Insomnia

What I really like about my flat in Griffith is that one can hear people whistling to their flatmates to let them inside the building at 3.47 in the night. And that though my room is commodious in the extreme, yet all I have to do is sit up on the bed in order to draw back the curtains and peer out the window to see cars driving by at 5.17 in the morning.


I haven’t slept the whole night. And yet I feel more alive than I have for a long time. The last time I felt like this was when I was up the entire night reading Atlas Shrugged.

Fashionably contemptuous as I am of everything, occasionally a belief in magic sneaks up on me before I have had the time to retrieve my stock of chocolates. Pity.

Whimsy

"Rosemary - that's for remembrance"

You shall be missed dear friend. You leave a gap in our lives and in our hearts that no one can fill. And in this moment of deep grief, we can only hope that you find peace in your final resting place - away from the arclights trained on you - unsought, as if they too could not resist your erudite charm. Gone, my friend, but not forgotten.

This post is dedicated to "London and Back", which shall by virtue of this very post be consigned to realms far and beyond the main blog page of inst.

of cats and koala bears

One of my closest friends...one who i shall not name :P has fallen in love with something extremely short, dirty, hopelessly hairy, with long dirty nails. Apparently its called David, and she had the nerve to tell me that fat cats were vulgar to look at.

Have you ever heard of anything more abhorrent?

Spring Cleaning

No. I am not a control-freak. I just like having things in their little dockets. And I like to christen these dockets. Which was why I was tidying up my mail account – unclogging the inbox, creating folders called Nefertiri and Nefertiti for all the class notes ever mailed and seriously contemplating creating another called Bubba. When I came across a mail I had sent to me (I tend to do that a lot) in 1999.

And thus it was today, almost a decade later, that I sat reading through the largest profusion of morbidity that has ever come my way… and I have read Dickens, by the way. I was 13… and I wrote of dying people and handicapped children and jilted lovers. In poetry and prose. And watched Tom and Jerry in my spare time… which at 13, was half the bloody day. And laughed… I genuinely giggled each time Jerry hit Tom over the head with a saucepan.

Three autumns later, I looked all my attempts at rhyming “cupid” with “dup’d” in the eye and said up yours. And I stopped writing.

So thank your stars that I do not write of the Grim who “scurried nigh with stealthy steps” or of the little brook that “bled with the riches of mankind” anymore. Or of the “nowhere man”. I am conveniently shallow now and laugh indulgently at the priggish child I must have been.

A small part of me however, wants to hunt till the ends of the earth for the thin, red spiral-book with which I sat by the window just after it had rained and looked as far out into the distance as I could before writing of "the puppy that drowned" in rounded, cursive writing. The thin, red spiral-book without which I never went anywhere, not even to school – the Muse is the Muse, even in the middle of a boring Geography lesson on Rabi crops. The thin, red spiral-book which I pretended was a secret but was only too glad to show-off to anyone who asked. The thin, red spiral-book which I christened with a little gangajal snuck out of the puja cupboard, and whose name I have now forgotten.

And a small part of me wishes I believed in second chances.