Cocaine

Something i wrote a long time ago.. it feels surreal now, a floating recollection of the dark times.. it seems another world,another life now..

Cocaine

Today i cut myself
to see how it feels
to concentrate on the pain
to block out all existence.

my mind turned into sahara
no thought, no memory came
it was the unfeeling emptiness
all and everything i could want

today i cut myself
saw the blood trickle
the pain took away all fears
and i felt free

i took in the sting
the cut healing the scars
the tears came then
and i let myself go

today i cut myself
the blade against the skin
the pain, there was just one
and then there was none.

il(sic)

I hate being sick. It’s very irritating. Hostelites shouldn’t be allowed to fall ill. It’s not like you are at home and every whim and fancy of yours is granted by caring parents. Nobody is bothered here. Get your own water, take meds on time without being reminded by anyone. You can’t even garner some sympathy from fellow inmates.It’s a pain.. u know where.Falling ill at home is a luxury. Something to eat every 2 hrs, hot drinks, parents scare away kids playing out in the yard, “bhaiya ko disturb hoga, bhaago yahaan se!”. Lie around all day watching tv. There are people to take u to the hospital, friends visiting, mum busy in the kitchen rustling up something appetising. Dadi massaging your head with oil.

Here u are, in no condition to walk, but u have to drag ur feet all the way to the hospi for check up, even remember follow up appointments. Go all the way down to the mess just to get hot water. Go out to buy medicine, purchase fruits, scavenge for food, figure out what is good for u and what not. Wash ur own sweat soaked blanket. NO, there must be a law against this. nobody should ever fall ill in a hostel.Ever.

The Umbrella-pig

Came across this piece of poetry by Roald Dahl. Reminds me about the life of an IITian. Hope you enjoy it. I sure did.

The Pig

In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn’t read.
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn’t puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.
What was the reason for his birth?
Why was he placed upon this earth?
His giant brain went round and round.
Alas, no answer could be found.
Till suddenly one wondrous night.
All in a flash he saw the light.
He jumped up like a ballet dancer
And yelled, “By gum, I’ve got the answer!”
“They want my bacon slice by slice
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops
“To put in all the butcher’s shops!
“They want my pork to make a roast
“And that’s the part’ll cost the most!
“They want my sausages in strings!
“They even want my chitterlings!
“The butcher’s shop! The carving knife!
“That is the reason for my life!”
Such thoughts as these are not designed
To give a pig great piece of mind.
Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A pail of pigswill in his hand,
And piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes the farmer to the floor…
Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let’s not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.
Slowly he scratched his brainy head
And with a little smile he said,
“I had a fairly powerful hunch
“That he might have me for his lunch.
“And so, because I feared the worst,
“I thought I’d better eat him first.”

19 things about me

I don’t know why anyone would want to read this but i’ve been tagged with this meme and it’s social protocol to write stuff about me. As Sheldon says, the whole world order would collapse if we did not maintain social convention. So here are 19 things about myself that people may or may not know. And why 19? Coz 18 is just not enough.
1. I’m a compulsive reader. I can’t get any work done if there is a book to be read
2. I tend to get into conversation with myself. I rather like my own company over a congregation of interesting people.
3. I love hyperbole. Exaggeration comes very easily to me.
4. I get angry much less often than i’d like to. I don’t know why.
5. I’ve never been clear about what i want to do in life. Things just happen to me and i tag along.
6. I find it difficult to strike up a conversation with strangers, but can’t stop yapping to people i know.
7. I love procrastinating. If something can be postponed, I will. If something can’t be, well, I’ll find a way to do that later as well.
8. I’ve always been the skinny type and absolutely love it when someone calls me fat.
9. I like children. I don’t want to marry but i’d love to be a parent someday.
10. I wish that i have a daughter, so that i can beat the crap out of her boyfriend someday.
11. I’ve never had a decent photograph of me. Sometimes i look in the mirror and wonder why.
12. I love play on words and allusions. I’m qite good at these. But i’d love to write original stuff.
13. I have a horror of settling down. Permanence and commitment of any sort scare the crap out of me.
14. I have this theory that any real relationship can never match up to what you had imagined it to be. So why bother.
15. I associate memories of a certain place by it’s smell. The fragrance in the air brings back a lot of stories.
16. I love the warthog. It’s so ugly that it’s just beautiful.
17. I hate anteaters. They are just crazy lookin’.
18. I love train travel as much as i hate taking the bus.
19. I’m usually attracted to older women.

Train to Aurangabad

I met her on the platform. There was a connecting train from manmad and I was waiting at the station, pretty much alone and minding my own business. I hear footsteps, i look up and there she is. Hair dishevelled, bag flying to a side, a look of apprehension on her angel-like face.  Now whenever I meet someone beautiful I picture her this way – She is running in slow motion, her face lit up by the light of numerous CFLs, her hair being blown in the wind of an industrial fan, her stride bewitching, leaves falling around her… damn, I need to get real.

She stares at the empty platform and it looks as if she is about to cry any minute now. After a while, I find my voice and muster up the courage to ask her if there was a problem.

Tears welling up in her eyes, she says choking, ”I missed the 5 pm train to Aurangabad. This was the last train and I need to get home today. Otherwise mum will kill me.”

I tell her the 5 pm is an hour late and I’m supposed to be travelling by the same train. Her face lights up, clouds of despair are parted and the world is a happy place to live in now. It looks as if she is about to hug the bearer of this great news. Now my face lights up! But son of a bitch.. she takes the exact moment to realize that she is crying buckets in front of a total stranger she is about to hug.. yeah, yeah maybe she is about to do no such thing, but it’s my story so back off!

After the initial euphoria, she settles down a bit. I leave her to her devices and go back to my reading like a dignified gentleman. I try to look into my novel but now it’s all Chinese. With all the strength of determination I can muster, I try not to look at her while she fidgets with her bag.

She then comes and sits next to me and my insides turn to jelly. My heart is banging against my chest cavity, eager to break free. Surely she must be hearing the sound of it. But it doesn’t show. I am aware of my hands and legs, not sure what to do with them. I search for an opening line, play the entire course of dialogue in my head, accounting for every response right from, “let’s make love, right here, right now” to “Aren’t you the stalker I got the restraining order against last month?”.

In the end, I manage to make some guttural noise which sounds a bit like, “So, off to Aurangabad, huh?”  Stupid, stupid! After all this time, you speak and all you manage is a rhetorical question about her possible destination. Genius, Einstein!

And then, she smiles. They say your life flashes by when you are on the verge of dying. I’m sure this smile would be a major slide in my life’s presentation. The corners of her mouth turn up to display a set of perfect little pearls a dentist would gladly give his right hand for. The smile isn’t perfect, it’s a bit crooked with the right corner at a bit higher elevation than the left. It’s one of those cute little imperfections that make a face distinct, create it’s own identity, hold your attention and don’t let go. Her eyes light up and her nose gives a kind of a cute little twitch.

It was a smile that can move mountains, alter the course of civilisations, for which kings would gladly forego their crown and I would give away my entire Batman comic collection. (Yeah, I get it. I am an idiot, a loser. But I was there and you weren’t, so who is the biatch now, huh?)

Oh, crap! Her lips are moving! All this time she has been talking while I have been drifting. Come on, focus! Announcement for the train arrival and I am spared the ignominy of a response. The crowd on the platform is sizeable (I hadn’t noticed) and she is lost in the melee. I frantically search for her but I know it’s an exercise in futility. There are 14 bogeys and probability has always been a bitch to me.

Resigned, I enter the third compartment and set forth finding a seat. I hear a whistle overhead and there she is. She has even saved me a seat up. She whistles…hmm,  a girl after my own heart,. I can see it all clearly. Her standing next to me, our wedding day.  Our first kid, a baby girl. She has got her looks, thank god for that. We lead a happy life. My girl’s first date.  The boy brings her back 10 minutes after the agreed time and I knock the stuffing out of him. Her graduation, her marriage. We retire as a couple walking into the sunset. I am jerked out of my reverie by her voice beckoning me. The next five hours are bliss. We talk all the way. She is a graduate student in Nasik. Zoology, she says. Not my cup of tea. I’m an IITian I tell her. Meaning she should be impressed, that I’m not the regular run-of-the-mill guy, that she has a future with me, that she is the mother of my children.

We get off at Aurangabad. I walk her to the exit where she hails a cab. It’s time for goodbye but she hesitates for a minute, lingers a bit more than necessary. A thousand thoughts cross my mind. Should I ask for her phone number, her address? Should I ask her out? Should I propose to her? I do no such thing. I wish her all the luck in the world and watch her leave. She has an amused look on her face as she looks at me smiling at her. Confused? She probably is. But the reason I haven’t asked for any contact with her later is because the reality of the relationship that I could have had cannot compare to the imaginary one I have pictured in my mind. She is a sweet memory which I will cherish forever, never tainted, never overwritten by a bad memory of her since this is all I know of her.

I know, this is really stupid. I mean, who thinks like that. It’s probably a big mistake. I know it is. Maybe we would have had a “lived happily ever after”  but probability as you know has generally been a bitch to me. I make my own destiny. If you think I am a moron, then so be it.

Ah, my sweet little princess, my … Oh wait! I don’t even know her name. Never bothered asking her. Neither did she ask me what mine was. I guess we both felt we knew each other.

The Lecture

“So to find out the longitudinal stress over the cross section…”

The prof looks funny. He says something I can’t quite comprehend. This prof is a cartoonist’s delight. Pronounced features, funny caricature face, distinguished paunch. Cartoonists are funny people. At least they are supposed to be. Kinda like my uncle. Uncles are strange, but aunts are stranger. They always say you’ve grown a head taller than the last time she saw you even if she met you last week. And they have this irritating habit of conjuring up some embarrassing incident of ypur childhood which you can’t even deny because you were just a blob of snot-filled, potty untrained toddler with no sense of self respect. Kids, i hate kids. They are so lame. People say childhood is the most awesome time of life but I don’t agree. As a child, you are helpless. Pushed around, ordered by parents, elders and neighbours alike. With adulthood comes power, position and respect…

“Hey you,yes you in the white shirt! Tell me, what were we talking about in class…”

“Sir I.., sir I …”

“Get out of my class. The standard of JEE is getting lower every year. Even such buffoons get through.  In my time…

spotless mind…spotless mind?

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d…

saw eternal sunshine of the spotless mind today…touched a chord somewhere.I do wish sometimes i had the means to selectively erase my memory; get the pain and suffering out of the way. Or do I?  We tend to intensify and accentuate the pain endured in a relationship. When I think about her, the first thing that comes to mind is the excrutiating times i had to go through. But beneath all the grime , the moments which i cherish are lost in memory. The small moments stolen from the world. precious precisely because they were hard to come by. Do I want to lose a part of my life, even though it makes me want to cry my heart out?… I think not. It’s my life after all, it has made me what i am, for better or for worse.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind?…the spots are what makes us who we are…daag achche hain…

move on

Ah,home sweet home. Paradise on earth, the stuff dreams are made of , the epitome of civilization as we know it… and so on. Or is it? Maybe it is. But as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Coming back to my town gives me a sense of being a little …how do i put it..seasoned. The little things , infrastructural changes, fresh faces in the marketplace tell me you don’t belong here anymore . Mine is a small town , the “everybody knows everybody” sort.In our days , we used to own the city , zooming around on bikes, breeze riffling through our hair and not a care for the world. Each day beckoned with a new vigour. School was a blast, the bus ride to school even more so. Evenings promised many exploratory kilometres to put on the pedometer.And ah…girls were to be found in abundance(heartburn) . So what if most of we did was look, smile and look away, it felt good to have a choice nevertheless. That’s all you ask for in a capitalist consumer oriented economy; variety of choice. And i tell you, window shopping was  fun, not the stunted, man ko samjhaane waala fun, real fun.Alcohol was a rare novelty, and cigarettes were considered actually injurious to health.

Alas, how the times have changed. Our place on the roads and food outlets has been taken up by the stupid minions who ran around in knickers racing their bicycles up and down the road. Maybe i’m being paranoid  but…i can sense a snigger in the  voice. you are history sir…better take the lifetime achievement award and bow out quietly into the night. The new edition of sought- after girls has arrived, bachche bade ho gaye hain. new stories , affairs have started doing rounds. our (love) stories and conquests(over the school administration) are still whispered in the dark alleys(back benches) of classrooms but with a lot of glorious inaccuracies that creep in when history takes the form of myth. My batchies have all flocked their nests. I don’t know the beauties walking the streets by their first names (or phone numbers). My old school (class 10) juniors know me just by reputation and hence treat me with a certain detached reverence. They think setting off a bomb in front of the principal’s office is their very own , patented novel achievement , a feat unparalleled by any. And i don’t want to destroy their newfound glory of being rebels by disclosing the painful fact that an even greater feat of setting off a bomb inside the principal’s office had been accompilshed at the time when they were learning making a tie.
Am i finding it difficult to move on ? Accept the fact that i am no longer what i used to be here? maybe. But then , all this is a part of severing the umbilical cord. Our seniors must have felt the same disdain for us. And i have moved on to the ocean from the pond which has it’s advantages. Most of all , when i see these young idiots awash with the newfound freedom, i smile with the advantage of perspective.They will have to pass on the baton as well. This too shall pass.

Strumming away…

I play the guitar……ok ok u got me , i try to………ok fine i just pluck the strings and hope some kind of music emanates out of it. I have always liked listening to music, can spend hours doing so. But aside from the side drum in the school band and incoherent rantings of a harmonica, i have no claim to being a musician. You may not believe me,but i used to sing.  Long long ago in a kingdom not so far away, the people listened in rapt attention to a voice, soothing to the ear and touching their bare soul. The voice belonged to a boy of 12 who enthralled one and all by his melodies and the audience shouted encore. Okay , okay it is a bit exaggerated , but a writer is accorded some literary liberty. I wasn’t all that great but i was okay… used to get picked up for all the group songs, and existence was bliss.

                                    And then….puberty struck. For the uninitiated it is a growth phase in which some hormonal changes occur, one being the expansion of larynx (the sound box).Within the year my voice cracked. So much so that i couldn’t recognise my own voice when i spoke.And nobody bothered about the deep baritone i now spoke in. and i restricted my singing just to the occasions when police retained my services to break hardened criminals.

                                    Jokes apart, i really like my guitar. I always fantasised about playing one as a kid,still do. so got my first guitar at 19. A bit late i know but what the hell…i’ve got all the time in the world. I just sit around , gazing into the sound hole, playing the same sequence of chords again and again. Whenever a tricky maneuver comes up, i keep at it, chipping away , like a lockpicker , until the prize is mine. I know i am not talented or prodigal,but we get by, me and my guitar. the day would come , when the stairway to heaven would open and my fingers would turn comfortably numb….

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