“What is?” I asked

“You are getting free – FRICKIN FREE – passes to the Metallica concert and you are still not going”

“Urm, well…”

“Well what?”

“Nothing. Don’t feel like it.”

“Loser only”

This conversation might be heard to happen between a pal and me on a Sunday afternoon in Bengaluru during late October 2011.

Most of the populace was buzzing with excitement. There was the Grand Prix happening on the Indian soil for the first time ever. Unless you argue that India was taken over by Aryans who are from Europe and so in a philosophical sense, if “India” meant “Aryan Land” then a lot of Europe is also “India” in a way.  No, wait. That doesn’t make sense.

What was I saying? Yes. Most people were excited about the First Indian Grand Prix and/or First Indian Metallica Concert. It was one of the most eventful Sundays. Even us Bangaloreans, usually to be found relaxed owing to our coffee-on-bed favoring weather, were up and about on a rainy day.

I will not even talk about F1. It seems like a bunch of really fast and noisy cars trying to out-noise and out-fast each other. I am missing the whole point of this sport, of course. I am told this is the world’s most expensive sport. If clever birds like Dr. Vijay Mallya and folks who own Ferrari, Vodafone etc. are pouring their fortunes down this, there must be something about the noisy little cars. Anyway, I think it is pretty cute how the winning driver (they are called drivers, aren’t they? Or is it an offensive term?) attempts to drink Champagne from that over-sized cup. Awww.

As far as Metallica goes – my deepest relationship with them is when at the end of a jolly college party everyone would be smashed under the influence of Old Monk and sing off-key to Nothing Else Matters with heart-felt gestures. If we have done this once, we have done it a hundred times. That’s how much I know about Heavy Metal.

I don’t know much about that Beethoven chap either. But my nerves don’t start frightfully trembling when someone plays Beethoven’s music at high decibels. So I guess, to me at least, Beethoven > Metallica.

Along with these two ‘First Indian …’ – there was also another historical event that had captured the country’s imagination. An actor called Shah Rukh Khan had, for the last few months, surpassed Unilever in marketing and sold his movie Ra.One to the unsuspecting public more than my brother tries to sell House Music to me. This remarkable movie had released the previous week and was being watched by a large chunk of Indians. For some reason, most of the people I knew who watched the movie had uncharitable comments to make. Something to do logiclessness and scriptlessness. Most reviews were quite entertaining, I must say. All in all, the movie did generate a lot of entertainment.

One of my close friends is a Shah Rukh Khan Fan (yes.) and since I love her, I shall restrain from cracking the popular ‘Rahul Gandhi is visiting families of people who watched Ra.One’ joke on this public forum. I think that joke is found hilarious by so many people because it takes a jibe at BOTH SRK and Rahul Gandhi. Clever. While I am not equipped with enough mental apparatus to invent such brilliant one-liners, I am never tired of repeating them and sniggering to myself.

So, after taking a deep long consideration of the wide bouquet (is it bouquet?) of options – viz. watching F1 on TV, Metallica in Rain, Ra.One with SRK or Rath Yatra with Sri Advaniji – I decided my course of action.

I sat on my bed with a hot cup of Tea and my Kindle. Read a book through evening to late night. Drank a few cups of more tea. Visited a few aunts. What a glorious Sunday it was, I tell you. Or like the Delhi kids are calling it these days – Rocking.

I will reel with surprise if you are anybody other than my mother or me. My mother, clever as she is, will read almost any nonsense I will recommend her to read. Except for Douglas Adams, that is. She refused to go past a few pages. I suppose even affection for your first-born cannot take you far with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy if you are not deluded enough.

Anyway, the point is that I am back on my blog after a longish time. This blog, when I used to write it regularly, was read by an average of three persons a month since – let’s see – 2007ish. If you had carefully studied my previous writings (I seriously doubt anybody did), you will have noticed it was mostly a rant of a certain kind. I promise this Resurgence will be no better.

I have returned because Reticence and I have reached a certain end. A fork in our path, if you will. A drifting off, of sorts. Growing apart, as it were. You get the idea.

Since I last wrote, much water has flown under the bridge. So much water, if you made beer of it, there would still be quite a lot of it left after Oktoberfest.

I think I have put on, er, a different pair of glasses to view the world since then. Pinker than before and hopefully with less parallax error.

This was an entirely unnecessary post, I understand.

I work in a scenario with constant movement of people. People keep leaving and new ones keep joining.

So today a dear friend (also happens to be a colleague) leaves my organization for (I believe) a better place. This is the first thing I remembered as soon as I woke up in the morning today. It is only now that I realize I am going to miss him around here. That there will be no more crazy “I am Optimus Prime” dialouges in office.

He’s not one of those silent, deep type of people. Not the sort of bloke who would author heavy leather-bound books.  More the sort who would effortlessly be the center-of-attention of a big group. He’s the sort who would crack a joke no matter how grim the context is. He’s the sort who went through a great personal tragedy recently and smiled widely the next time we met (before I could tell him I was sorry with my Sober Face).   

 For the past few months, I have been quite immersed in my own affairs (New friends, old heart-breaks, new family members, an engagement, you get the drift). So immersed that I haven’t talked to him much and haven’t been there for him in his tough times. There is immense guilt weighing down upon me all the time.

We have shared a complicated friendship; the kind that can be mended fully only by time.

I hope when I see him (hypothetically) many years later (both of us with kids with leaky noses and drooling mouths), it will all be clear and we will both feel unpolluted happiness.

But as of today, the truth remains that he leaves. We will part ways. I feel a sense of loss that surprises me. I have a heart after all. Who knew?

Dear A, you will always be one of the Primes.

Part 1 and Part 2

My low regard of time (therefore chronology) is matched equally by time’s (therefore chronology’s) low regard for me. While I perform badly in meticulous recording of things in the right order, things themselves seem to be bent on happening , that there isn’t too much chance for me to actually record them in the right order. Spins one’s head, this stuff does.

We had last left this story on things waiting to happen around the corner.

 So, the process was on. Mother was running me through eligible poor men. I was running past the e. p. men. The last two weeks of October had been quite hectic – I was either in the eastern part of the country or working late. The bright side of this was that mother took pity on me and let me off the hunt for two weeks. The flop side was that, on 1st of November, I had two weeks of work log. On a Sunday (yes, a Sunday again), I pulled together as much moral fiber as I could – there’s not much of it – and sat down before the computer. I went through the whole lot; my mother’s list and the list of people who had gotten in touch with us.

The range was big – there were tattooed dudes (“luking for a cool and fun lovin girl”) to uncles with remarkably concave hair-lines (“she should be a good wife to me and a good daughter to my parents”) to guys whom you couldn’t really place anywhere (“she should be a blend of traditional and modern”).

Well, the process of looking for a life partner was not at all how people had made it to be. Some of my friends had told me it was a painful thing to go through and some others had made it sound hilarious. It was neither; if I had to give it a phrase, I would call it ‘mildly interesting to mildly tiring’. Amidst being mildly interested, I glanced through a certain profile my mother was trying to draw my attention to. It contained a picture of a very serious looking bloke. Staring right into the camera. Serious looking people have an unfair competitive advantage – they look deep and contemplative even if they are actually morons. I am not saying this particular one was a moron, I am just remarking about serious-looking persons in general.

Anyway, so this serious-looking bloke had an interesting profile. His requirement in a prospective spouse was ‘zest for life’, apparently. That caught my interest. Seemed like a description I could live up to, you know. You can call me hare-brained, but you can not call me dull. I am the sort who climbs trees. I am the sort who honks a rudimentary tune when the driving gets boring. I brim with zest for life. I don’t know if tree-climbing and tune-honking was what he had in mind, but I was hooked anyway.

So I wrote to him. Then he wrote to me. Then I wrote back to him. Then he wrote back to me. Then I wrote to him … you get the trend. Right.

After some of the mail exchanging happened, I crossed the mental block against talking to unknown people on phone.I called him up. I talked. He talked back. We talked to each other – for four hours (give or take). Yes, four hours on the first call. I know that’s crazy. But I always get reassured by crazy – just as I get scared of anything sane.

We soon had to meet, of course. So there were lunches and teas.

Meanwhile, my mother was anxious again. Because I was seeing him. It fails me how mother manages to be anxious about both things – about me not seeing someone AND about me seeing someone.

‘Why are you worried, Amma? You wanted me to meet a good guy. I am meeting a good guy.’ (everyday )

‘But are you going to marry him?’

‘I don’t know that yet! Why should I tell that right away?’

‘Because what do I tell the others? So many people have gotten in touch’

‘Um, tell them I am seeing someone?’

‘I am not going to tell that to anyone until you confirm to me that you are going to marry this boy’.

***

Very soon, I confirmed.

After years of indecisive fickle-mindedness, I made the life-time of a confirmation in less than 2 weeks.

Hundreds of probabailities collapsed into one.

I don’t know when it was confirmed inside my head – may be when we sat in fine-dines and judged their loos, may be when he taught me how to use a chop-stick, may be when we copied movies (and shows) from each other’s computers, may be when we mulled over what tea to order ( Assam or Darjeeling), may be when we spent hours among musty second-hand  books in Blossom book store.

He wears glasses and gets a dimple when he smiles – what more can I say – I am hooked.

For good.

Just like that.

 For every moment well-lived, a hundred moments are let go. Every friend cherished has to be paid with many of those who are lost in time and space.

When you look at that person (silhouetted against the window, sunlight streaming in) and have a million things to say do yell hug cry laugh, you can’t shouldn’t do it. That is the cost of sensible living.

Because it’s December. The mall next door has so many ice-men and Christmas trees ladden (really, ladden) with snow. Surrounded by chocolates and sweets. Yummy!  The glass doors in my office have snow flakes sitting on them. Wow!

Except that the snowflakes in office are made of styrofoam. The snow trail on the Christmas tree in the mall is cotton. The Santa Claus’ name is Rangappa.  We are in India. As hot as Calcutta, by Jove.

There is no snow here. No raindeers, only street mongrels (who are very friendly, btw.). No funny fat man to climb down chimneys and distribute gifts. No chimneys, damn it. No marshmallows.

Only anglophilism. One long grand angrez chee-chee ponch.

With your refusal to be a part of my life, you irrefutably became a part of it. It would have probably not mattered if you hadn’t refused. Because you said ‘No’ and I hadn’t felt that way for a long while, my grief came alive.

My grief took a shape, with legs. It became a real person and walked beside me everywhere. It followed me to places where grieving wasn’t allowed. To happy weddings. To beach parties. To cute nieces’ birthdays. Everywhere The Grief was with me. A part of me felt a sense of loss – no matter how happy all my other parts were.

And I wandered in the galaxy – intoxicated with disillusion. I started seeking out your presence, even with no real gratification attached to it.

One of those days, the Bangalore skies were grey and trees were swaying in wind. We sat on the 9^th floor stairs and had two hot cups of lemon tea. We were talking about this and that. I suddenly giggled, I am like that you know, I remember old jokes and giggle aloud.

You asked me – “what happened why you giggling?”

I said – “I remembered an old xkcd strip joke.”

“What?”

“What is a Snapple?”

“It’s an apple juice drink thing?”

“No, it’s apple infused with Tin. Hehe”

“<Blank look>”

“Tin – Sn?”

Comprehension dawns on your face. You go on, now this is key to the story here, to say –

“People who create jokes like this should be beaten up. Thank God I don’t read xkcd.”

It is then, that exact moment, the spell broke. I was out of it, just like that.

A web-comic decided it for me. Also that whole thing about hurting me.

It was that simple.

So where did we leave off this story? Right. Mother decides to ‘look’ for a guy to get me married to – in spite of my incoherent mutterings.
Being of entrepreneurial spirit, mother started to explore both conventional and unconventional channels.

She decided to dig out a copy of my horoscope from a black bag in which all our old documents are kept. This digging out process in itself was quite entertaining. I got to see a pic of myself in an identity card from 4th grade. I used to wear a Polka dotted frock and two pony tails on my head. I also seem to have won the lemon-and-spoon race in 2nd grade. Very gratifying it was.

Eventually, a yellowed-folded paper emerged. This paper, drawn upon during the time of my birth, apparently outlined what the stars and planets were doing when I was in the process of making my appearance before the earthlings. This horoscope was an important instrument in finding a life partner.

Next, I was made to dress up ‘like a girl’ – which involved wearing a Chudidhar, taming my hair and coloring my lips. In my girl attire, some photographs were taken. Portfolio, they called it. Two standing (one with teeth, one without), two sitting (one with teeth, one without) up close and two sitting (one with teeth, one without) a little afar.

‘What a lame thing this is, ya.’ I remember telling A as we both collected the – ahem – portfolio from the highly profitable studio.

The hard copies of a selected picture out of this lot – sitting, afar, no teeth – were given to some high network relatives along with a photocopy of the horoscope.

One Sunday afternoon I was cornered by both the parents. It IS remarkable how many significant things in my life have happened on Sunday afternoons. I was taken in front of our desktop. A matrimony website was open. Noooooooo I screamed. The barrel of a gun was placed on my forehead and I was made to (in description) fill in my Interests, Hobbies, About Myself and What I Look for in A Partner.Okay fine, the screaming and the gun part didn’t happen. But I was cornered and made to type (in description).

Now this led to a series of events.
Mother ended up being online all day.
Brother lost out many of his desktop hours.
Father found many more young men to express his opinion on.
I had a new homework to do.

Every day after I came home from work, mother used to have a list of profiles for me to look at. These profiles ranged from mildly interesting to soporific. So I flipped through many and shook my head. Day after day.

For around 2 of these, a conversation was even initiated over mail. After a maximum of 4 mails, the sensible boy and I both lost interest in each other.

Since I didn’t have any faith in this process to start with, I didn’t lost any.

Other things were waiting to happen – just around the corner.

However, I thought I might as well use it in my blog once.

1. My brother, The Vampire, thought that the movie Vicky Christina Barcelona had something to do with soccer.

2. A rather senior person in my organisation called me a ‘level headed girl’ the other day.

The former doesn’t know the world beyond his teenager universe and the later hasn’t heard my mad scientist laugh (buahahaha)

Having said that keynote; let me now come down to stating business. Last month, I discovered the joy of drinking a good cup of tea. I also discovered, along with it, a certain person. Lets call him Bob. Or Mickey. Or simply V. We have together discovered that it isn’t easy to find delicious veg steamed dumplings in Bangalore.

 However, since we both are bitten by the famous Optimism Bug, we have dedicated quite some time experimenting Tea. While for me it is a discovery and experience to inhale the fumes of Peach flavored green tea or the Jasmine wafts, for him its old business. In spite of which, he doesn’t been-there-done-that and indulges me in my girlish enthusiasm. He probably tells himself that girls will be girls and you can’t do much about it.

[I know I know. Some of you might be unable to comprehend my bias towards something that hasn't been fermented or distilled. My current attraction seems to be one that defies the laws of physics (and neurobiology).]

So we have been haunting a certain tea shop regularly now. We go, sit, pick our tea for the day and talk. We have sat and silently stared out of the window sometimes and we have chattered like a pair of squirrels someothertimes. As the Orange infused tea flows into our noses mouths heads hearts, memories are formed even as I see them happen.

Owing to having both our noses up in air, we excel at judging all the other people in our surrounding (and some distantly placed). I think quite a lot of hours have been spent on condescendingly looking down upon rest of the world in general.

Have you tried to look down upon the world? You should. It pairs excellently with tea.