Nameless

Hi…(shyly).

Hey, long time! How are you? (Pretending to be nonchalant)

Not bad. As long as there’s alcohol. (Smiles). So, don’t see your husband…

Yeah, he had to stay home. Becoming a workaholic, that man. Even I could attend only ‘cos I had to fly into town for some meetings…but I’m not complaining, just glad they had a reunion! How’s the family?

Wonderful! Home never gets old! My sis is getting married, by the way.

Oh my god! Really? That’s lovely! When is the wedding? Arranged or love?

In May. Completely arranged. But she is happy. So, you tell me, how’s married life been?

Exciting! (Winks).

Well, chalo, let’s catch up later…(Slightly uncomfortable).

Sure. Nice to have seen ya…(Shifting feet as well).


The eyes conveyed something that spoken words didn’t. They said,

There’s so much to catch up on, have a drink with me?

Of course, I thought you’d never ask!

Tu nahi sudhrega bhai! Shaadi ko kitney saal ho gaye? Abhi flirting band nahi honi chahiye?

On my deathbed, dude. Only then…ha ha ha…

God, it’s been so so long! Sometimes I wish we had kept in touch.

Yeah, so did I. but neither of us worked at it. There was just so much anger and confusion.

Hmmm. True. Sometimes, I still wonder why.

Because it would never work. You knew and I knew. But we just had such a great time, no one wanted to face truth.

We did live in a fantasy, didn’t we?

Yup. We did have such a good time, remember Goa? But hey, life had to bring us back to reality. Life does have strange ways to get one back on track. Nahi?

You’re right. How come we never talked about this? We could have ended up being friends long ago.

Well, I tried (indignantly). You are the one who shut me out!

Hey, I was a broken man!

Blah! You pretended to be all wise and all, when you were just being a pain in the butt.

That’s so charming. You’ll never change.

Remember your idiotic jokes? Hey, the one with the uncle?

You remember that one?

I remember ONLY that one!

Well, you refused to speak to me as well.

Well, I was furious at you for being such a wiseass.

I was scared. I told you. I was just protecting myself.

Doesn't everyone?! You didn’t trust me. That was all. And I didn’t wanna bribe you.

Are you saying I lost you ‘cos I didn’t trust you?

Wah! What a line! A bit too late on the ‘lost you’ line, honey. This is the way it was meant to be, and you did know it before I did. ‘Cos of which, you were as hurtful as I was.

You are right, I treated you rather shitty as well. Call it even?

Absolutely.

I’m so glad we talked about this. We should have done this a long time ago.

Don’t tell me I didn’t try.

Don’t start again. Let’s please not jump at each other’s throats, and try and stay the way we were…? We were awesome as friends.

I wish we could, and I really want to, dude, but after the alco wears off, life will take us back to reality again.

She saw the knowing acknowledgement of that statement in his eyes, and two people walked away from each other. Because of an indescribable, but nameless connection. Not lovers, not friends, not a couple, nothing. Nothing but having once wanted to take care of each other. Look out for one another, cover each other’s backs. Collect assignments, save a seat at dinner. Bring back something from each trip to the city, teach a hypertense woman to relax. Life’s reality doesn’t deal with nameless connections.

Randomness, A Bit

Random observations over a really rainy weekend:

Men are way more vague than women. There are more interpretations to a man’s words than a woman’s. Mostly because they use so few.

If the phone plays music when it’s on hold, the office seems much larger than it is. It may be a three-strong firm, if they play music while transferring calls, it will seem like thirty.

There is no pleasure in home-made golgappas. It is the quintessential street food which must be filthy to be tasty.

Opinionated people think they are the smartest. As one opinionated friend of mine put it, ‘We are of the opinion that we are smart.’ If only someone could correct them.

The names of best friends get clubbed together in conversations, the way even couples’ names cannot be clubbed. Paris-Nicole, Munna-Circuit, Leena-Tanvi, Naina-Ruchika, Adi-Sarang. What I could never figure out is why one comes before the other. Is it the more famous one, or the more dominating one, or is it simply because it sounds nicer that way?

I feel the hungriest when I cook.

It’s a rare, rare situation to actually like your boss.

Rainy days are too gloomy.

I am bored.

Flutterby Effect (Butterfly Effect in Negative)

Dilbert had very correct views on management. It’s bullshit. A lot of common sense, packaged and branded into a bunch of theories and hypotheses and abbreviations. MBWA. Management by walking around. Are you saying managers were so dumb as to not realize that the most effective way to influence people is to be with them and make yourself available? What’s the use of Theory X and Theory Y? Type A or Type B? Country club management or Impoverished management! Excuse me while I die snickering.

I have similar views on chaos theory. The very name is an oxymoron. A theory for chaos? Are you kidding me? This is actually all stemming from a largely crappy movie that I watched last night…Butterfly Effect. The theory basically propounds that the flutter of the wings of a tiny butterfly can cause a tornado across the world. Basically saying that the initial action, a tiny flutter, could cause a chain of reactions to begin, which ultimately leads to a tornado somewhere in the world. Ok, I am saying ‘basically’ a lot. I will stop.

So, to put it in normal human terms, a little action of yours could set into motion a series of reactions that could lead to something really tremendous. Which is what the movie was all about. It was this jumbled melee of scenes, trying very hard to tell a story. But it did get me thinking. About how utterly dumb it is to theorize v. v. common sense. It’s like theorizing how my writing this post, will lead to something huge happening. Biggie. I know actions may have varied outcomes. Everyone knows! Control is redundant. I could write this post, and some scientist could kill himself by reading it, or kill me, because his life’s work involved chaos theory. Or, I write this post, and lots more, and with all the practice become a published writer (Yes it is a cherished dream). Or, I write it but I forget to post, so it just stays put. Or I write, I post, and then…well buddy, who the hell knows? And this, devotees, is the whole point. In my world, you can’t theorize chaos. Or common sense. Or life. The butterfly wings fluttering is supposed to have caused the tornado. Does that also mean that if the butterfly didn’t flutter its wings, the tornado wouldn’t happen?

No Place Like Home

So armed with something old (the old boyfriend), something new (a new resident permit), something borrowed (some curling mousse from a friend), and something blue (ummm…ok nothing, but shopping will remedy that), the task of decorating a new home awaits me. It’s a spanking new apartment, with color-coordinated furnishings and state-of-the-art fittings, in fact some which an average middle-class Indian may take some time to figure out, because an average middle-class Indian home doesn’t support such applications. It’s pretty, airy, and HUGE. But after a month of living there, it’s still not ours. I want to make it perfect, but I don’t know how.

When does an apartment become a home? How does the space get personalized? Do you put useless scented candles in every shower and ridiculous knick-knacks that husband’s boss gifted you at your housewarming party? Photos of your wedding on the nightstand, as if to remind yourself that you DID get hitched! Flowers on the dining table, but the fake ones, because you are not housewifey enough yet to be bothered to change old flowers every three days. Framed paintings of palm trees in muted hues so that they go with the beige-and-coffee décor. Or get an entire paint job into vibrant purple and chocolate and orange, kyunki har ghar kuchh kehta hai.

How can it become home if one hardly spends any time in it? For me, it’s still ok to have a gaping hole filled up with gray cement when the air-conditioning was put up. Or a full-length dresser mirror, which was defaced by a little cousin with glitter-happy fingers, who hoisted herself up on it and drew stars all along the borders. A glass shelf cracked cleanly down the middle, on top of the sink in the guest bathroom, because some idiot (me) put a candle right below it when there was no electricity. Homemade potpourri on tops of cabinets, not pretty like the store-packed ones, but way more effective. Windchimes that are placed along the outside corridor, and hit you on the head everytime you walk past.

Oh, there’s my answer. The little imperfections of a lived-in space, which really make it a perfect home.

Girlfriend in the Gulf

I’ve been thinking. Today’s the day I’ll reactivate my blog. Today. Ok, today it is. And in the confusion of getting married and moving and setting up a new home AND learning to cook AND getting a new job, it didn’t happen. But yes, today is the day.

This blog, my blog, my window to a rather inspiring, crazy world, has been such a good friend. It kept me alive and warm, through many a rough patch. But I ignored it when I needed a friend most of all. A strange country, weird names, crazy outfits and crazier languages, accents and even crazier women – it took some time to absorb it all. I needed a girlfriend. I so missed them. I needed to talk and bitch and laugh and share. I needed my blog.

Today this crazy woman came waltzing into the office. And looked at me. Her eyes twinkled. And finally after months of pining for those crazy women from college, who used to be just like me, who didn’t throw you strange looks if you smoked or corrected their grammar, who pretended to be snooty but looked for bargain labels and picked up three hundred bottles of shimmery nailpolish because it was Buy-One-Get-One-Free, who always complained about the way their hair looked and spent about one-fourth of their day turning it into something it wasn’t, who thought Cosmo was trendy and read it in a group, but really preferred reading material that was much tamer, and what’s more, knew about it the whole time that they were reading the Cosmo, who had a healthy inquisitiveness about the gay community (and didn’t raise an eyebrow in this situation, that I’m talking of the gay community while talking of girlfriends – they would just know the two topics weren’t related!), I knew I had found my first girlfriend in the Gulf.

I dedicate my comeback post to all my girlfriends. A crazy crazy bunch.