Wasteland

I hunger
Meet captured
videos in galleries
And some time later
The whores
And gigolos
in supermarket aisles
I suck on
Stale cups
chewed pens and
lost causes
Spit out
tricks that clique
Grind my teeth
and box the air
Gibber about
Mad men.

Unleash the
hysterical woman.

Dead books and dead songs
Their warnings ghosted.
We named our beloved
To enunciate and separate.
To hear it
Escape our hate-lined lips,
As the knife slid home.
Now we write dead books
And sing dead songs
To remind our children
Where they are going.

They’ve already won. Without lifting a finger. So here I am. Unaware, complicit slave. My chains are subtle, hardwired into my DNA…generations of good, solid middle class upbringing. What do you do when the last bastion of mindless bureaucratic evil, of fear, of polite envy, of righteous hypocrisy also smells of your childhood? When it reminds you of summer holidays and car trips with families like us, of playing in the shade of identical ‘company’ flats, of attending birthday parties with ice-cold dahi vada, of dancing to Do re me on the gramophone, of finally being allowed to watch the parent censored bits from Sound of Music on the home VCR, our gadget of aspiration. What do you do when you are charmed by the cocoon of naivete and innocence and are disgusted when the maggots of repression and respectability emerge. Of being thankful for being loved and being taught to be honest and good and kind but cringe at how the goodness is extended freely to only "people like us". When the sense of entitlement ringing in the voices of your kith and kin makes you want to tear out a part of yourself---the part that expects similar things and articulates it in perfect English.
So I dream of being skinned. I dream of my skin breaking, flesh tearing apart voluntarily. Splitting, the tear spreading down my face, down the nose, the lips, the chin…the muscles unravelling, the sinews breaking, parting cleanly. Till the white below shows. The expressionless skull. Tearing further still, down between my breasts, tearing apart the fat, the intricate weave of blood, the pounding heart, the cunt. Till all that is left is clean bone with no markers left, of gender, of identity, of whom I’ve loved and who have loved me, stripped of all that is expected of me and of what I expect…all gone, wrapped as they were in the flesh that wrapped me. I sit, bone clean, on the edge of my bed and feel unsoiled, the bloody mess at my feet. Now if only I could walk away.

This is the extent to which we have deadened ourselves... we find reality TV amusing. We like dignity on sale. We like to feel superior to people who are brainwashed to act their worst when really we fall for the same trick ourselves each day. Only it is called laissez faire - allow to do. Allowed to shop at supermarkets, allowed to be stuck in traffic jams, allowed to consume overpriced, over-processed filth. Allowed to have miserable, small existences. For that you get the prize money. Money to go consume some more. And because our existences are so narrow, so lacking in real experiences, we want the hyper-real world of soaps, movies and serials. Where births, deaths, love, sex, marriage, infidelity, blood, struggles, fights and betrayals play out in a blur. All our collective experiences played out in fast forward in a blinding succession of images crammed into 30 minutes or less. Our lives drained away to create that extra clear, high definition, unreality.

It is always about that. We've been told repeatedly in many languages, in many tongues, in a million different persuasive arguments to back down. The poor are brave because they have no choice. The rich are brave because they can afford to lose. The middle class has just enough to make it scary to lose it all and little enough to squash any grand moves. The cities are the perfect reflection of this grey deal of compromise. Masses of men and women living from day to day, embracing all the numbing agents they can afford because they know something is wrong and they don't know how to fix it.
It is possible to fix it though if you decide to be fully conscious of your every act. But here's the catch. How do you switch off the darn auto-pilot?

There should be an age, where all the blocks that build the self should settle. The constant taking apart and rebuilding should stop. Because it is tiring. Each reinvention shows you exactly how hollow the concept of identity itself is. The flimsiest of armour constructed to distract ourselves from the knowledge of our own expendability. Better to chip away till there is nothing left to protect. anarchy turned inwards

I can't be handshaky-shaky clever, mysteriously suicidal, dramatically depressed or supremely cynical and worldly wise - all the reigning female prototypes living in metros. I can't seem to fit into any of those moulds. What I excel in is conflict diffusion and inducing feelings of euphoria and it seems to come naturally.

Argument between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader
Why do you bother me? Go to Hell!
I am your destiny. Can't you tell?
You're not my father. Eat my shorts!
Come to the dark side. Feel the force!
– Stephen Fry, The ode less travelled

Epistle
How curious your last letter was! Well-intentioned, concise, containing all the elements that appear to make up what passes among certain reference groups as a communicative effect, yet tinged throughout by what Jean-Paul Sartre is so fond of referring to as "nothingness."
– Woody Allen, Getting Even

Out of Sync. Feeling like Joseph's coat. The bastard soul. Out of Sync. Falling in the abyss of the generation gap, with nary a foothold on either bank. Flat, smack down, legs akimbo, groin touching the floor. Out of Sync. The awkward space between a handshake and a hug. Noses banging on your first kiss. Out of Sync. Turning up in jeans on the red carpet. The quadruple boobs syndrome. The name tattoo of your ex. Out of Sync. The scratched DVD, the burnt popcorn, the flat beer, the lumpy couch. Out of Sync. The black wedding dress. Clowns at a funeral. The thirteenth faerie. Doom spelled by skewed geometry. Out of Sync

You will need:
The last ray from the dying sun,
caught in a cup carved from a young rowan tree,
heated by fireflies for a night when the moon is full,
mixed with the first dew of the morning.
Drink it to see the roads that lead to Faerie.

Success is a bar of chocolate. Especially if it is 3 in the morning and you've had no dinner and the obstinate vending machine downstairs doesn't have any change and will only take crisp ten rupee notes. "Crisp" ten rupee notes are like unicorns, since for all practical purposes they serve as glorified hand wipes, exchanged from one sweaty palm to the next, in quick succession. Quite unlike their privileged 500 rupee cousins, coughed out of ATM machines with irritating frequency. Do ten rupee notes ever get to see the inside of an ATM machine? Nooooo. They are the bandhua mazdoor of the currency world. And shiny little vending machines don't like that sort of riff raff flapping around in their innards. Problem was not solved by me banging my head repeatedly on the machine's glass front. Solution was provided by the concerned office guard who emptied out his wallet of coins, which I then proceeded to jam in, with intense pleasure, down its stupid machine hole mouth. Vending machines are Satan's toys. But the power of one rupee coins compelled it and I walked away with a deliciously crumbly, half melted bar of Cadbury Crackle. aaah, sweet success.

I hate celebrities. I hate how they can't string two intelligent sentences together. I hate the fact that they can make me wait despite their Neanderthal pustule genus. i hate it that 7 pages will be devoted to their measly outpourings when there is so much else to write on. but most of all I HATE the faceless stream of humanity, the kind who laps it all up, sitting on their pots every morning. THAT is what I work for - people's toilet read. If everyone, for one blessed day stopped expecting escapism packaged as news, it would be sweet salvation. But it isn't going to happen, is it? At least not tomorrow. So let me trot along then and finish my tete-e-tete with Sush over sushi. I have already had the pleasure of almost getting to talk to adults with names like Guddu, Chee-chee, Boo-boo or Bebo and the rest of their ilk. Smita Smitten, Showbiz Kitten dies on Tuesday with this blighted cover story.

"Life's calling, where are you?" Sometimes ad lines make me laugh at their sheer absurdity. It is like asking a hamster on a wheel in a cage, where he is going.
I love that ad actually. Wouldn't it be wonderful if life did call like that. You standing at a window looking stunned at the mardi gras parade unfolding on your street.
But no, it calls in other ways. Nothing flashy – that is not its style. No, it is almost hynoptic when it throws choice morsels in odd places where you don't look for it. When you find them, you are happy. Makes you feel smart, since you picked up on something others disregarded. It is your little diamond in the rough that you polish. Sometimes you are really, really lucky and it is just that. But hell, stop being surprised if it turns yellow and citric on you.
So where am I? Right where you left me.
*Begins humming hindi song on cue* "Tujhse naraaz nahi zindagi, hairan hoon main, hairan hoon."

I know I have pontificated on this before. But I can't help it. Bombay might leave you crawling like a worm on the ground but at least you are an enlightened worm. Delhi, you can zoom about in a car and yet you will always be the ghetto moghul of your own little world. In Delhi, you find a little posse of people whose necks you don't feel like wringing and clasp to your bosom and crack the same jokes again and again and again with them. The same getting drunk on floor, wishing that you could numb out everything. Bombay will make you react, even if you don't want to. You will sit and talk to people who come from absolutely, diametrically different backgrounds and it is like opening doors to completely different worlds, feeling like Alice in wonderland. Glad you were invited to share completely different world perspectives. Really understand, instead of the superficial classifying them as "that kind". I have been completely safe, cotton balled away in the security of my family. I will always be a little less cynical, a little less world weary because of that. In Delhi, with similarly cotton-balled people, you think every wordless depression is the end of the world. In Bombay, there are people, who slap you and say wake up! It is an unknown world out there, get moving. Instead of spewing the same pseudo-intellectual crap, get up and go, explore, find out. Indifference is not a viable option anymore, because you have to care. The city is so harsh that you seek out people. Battling on your own is not an option. You need people, like water. You drink them in, searching your own way through their experiences, see yourself through their eyes and discover a little more each day. You don't feel your way around, ensconced in a bubble of your own making. You can't maintain it. Someone will come along, pop it and leave you to feel everything, raw and unfiltered. The “observation cap on your head, passing soundless judgments in your head” routine doesn’t work. You are in there getting dirty with the rest of them. And it feels good.

I have officially lost it. The one thing that made me tick – lost, burnt and buried. We had the funeral at 4.30 today in the HT office. I got booed and hissed at for my writing. I am now going into seclusion. THIS is the reason you should never be too happy. The angst keeps you sharp.

Unravelling is an interesting word. It could mean a breakdown. It could mean you are finally seeing things in a perspective that doesn’t fit the worldview. So whatever constructs you’ve built up start crumbling. No one knows exactly why it happens. It could be a free-floating moment that you suddenly encounter that is so truthful, so powerful that you are forced to look at your life. Look hard and see all the war paint you’ve slapped on to hide the chinks. It is called an epiphany. It is a large arrow in neon lights telling you where to go. Things get a little easy then. Because you become a risk-taking child of the universe and all that crap, overriding the panic and Be Safe sensors. The middle-class fears of homelessness, joblessness…fear, period, of anything outside the construct are abandoned and before you know it, you’ve transformed your life before the familiar concerns lock on again. And even then, you don’t pay as much attention to them because you’ve walked off the cliff, tasted flight and don’t care a fig about the ground anymore. It is a little more difficult when you don’t have an epiphany. Then it is just a nagging but vague feeling that something is wrong. And you have no idea how to stop self-destructing. Unravelling. When conversations, scenes, your friends blur and nothing is in focus anymore. All you want to do is tire yourself out so much that you just collapse on bed and let sleep anaesthetize you. And in the morning you just want to lie on the tiles and stare at the individual grains in the floor’s mosaic. You don’t know what’s wrong and you don’t know how to fix it.

There was me crawling across wet, squelchy, quicksand mud, screaming "I Will Not Let The Forces Of Nature Defeat Me" as lightning ripped the sky open and the several million angels simultaneously peed. Natasha watched from safer ground, keeling over with laughter.
That was the state of Bombay roads yesterday. And all I did was cross one lane to go to ITC Grand Central. The mud sucked in the rubber slippers I was wearing and I had to then leap across corrugated iron sheets that lay over live electrical wires. End result? I walked in to a five-star establishment barefeet but alive, laughing like a maniac. To their credit, they didn't stare...much.

Of Saved Google Chats

3:30 PM me: de-hairing process complete....
arch of eyebrow perfect...
genghis khan moustachio demolished
bearded circus lady appearance eliminated
3:31 PM DK: went to parlour kya?
me: yeth and fed the little kitty outside
DK: i dont belive u, u fuzzy peach
me: underarms also...so light, so unhairy!!
DK: fuzzy peach
me: peachy fuzz
3:38 PM me: BAAAAA Chi MAIYA BABA CHIC CHIBWA BWA
3:41 PM BBBBBBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
DK: Boss was at my terminal
3:42 PM me: ooops

***
"I---n---t-i-m------a----c---i e-----s-----o-f."....it was like listening to a slowly unwinding tape. His lips forming awkwardly over the words, just as they did over hers. Why was he talking? Who talked like that anymore? Why was she sitting and listening to him talk? Why did his head just not explode even though she was directing her laser gaze at the point where his Neanderthal brows met. Right. No superpowers. Damn. Meanwhile he was still talking. "Water?," she offered, anything to make him stop. He smiled broadly, before slowly tipping the glass to his mouth. *Slug brain* thought the girl. It was only a coincidence of course that the H2O globule he was about to swallow had passed through such an invertebrate.

****

Writing a book involves a certain amount of navel gazing. That is where it "organically grows"out from you see. I have a very ordinary navel. It is an innie navel, not half as exciting as an outie navel. An outie navel reaches out in a little tendril, an antennae that prods the air reflectively and catches a whole swirl of ideas. Ideas that then spring about inside your tummy, giving you tiny butterfly niggles, till you retch out over sheets and sheets of A4 pages. The Innie navel is hideously self obssessed, with a propensity to avoid the big picture. It collapses over and in itself, going deeper and deeper down into a territory that it has explored since childhood. And the pickings there are slim. So ultimately innie navel gazing writers are destined for two things. Collapsing and falling so deep into themselves that they emerge hideously scarred and come out with a 'Confessions of a.....' book that other hopelessly self involved people (a majority) read. The other destiny is the collapse and fall into and then right through yourself, discovering the universality of the outie navel in a painfully personal way. And the stories you tell then are as old as the universe itself, camouflaged in the here and now. So here's my wish. To fall right through, without a safety net and remain sane enough to bring back the stories.