Anandi'
Female,
43,
India

Middle age suddenly happened to me. It was almost as if I woke up to it one fateful morning. My features suddenly took a severity that often I used to admire in my mother’s weathered face…
I was not as much alarmed by the occurrence as surprised. For years ago, after toiling through house work, when I would sit down to a fanciful ritual of applying an assortment of lotions on my face ( 10 revolutions clockwise, 10 anticlockwise, always massage in the upwards direction), I would wish away my wrinkles with an incredulous humour that only youth can afford… I was never serious about the implications of old age, ignoring my gynecologist’s strict instruction of watching my diet and taking calcium pills…dismissing it as something that happened to other people…

And now, here it is …staring at my face... eyeball to eyeball… and I can only laugh…

Thats how I deal with everything, my husband feels… I laugh at things…a dry, nervous laugh, which seems more like a query than an assertion…
Sex for instance…a queasy obligation more than anything else to me …when Ashok comes to me hungry and aching with desire, I submit to his lust with an almost comical resolution…pondering at his expanding midriff and ungainly technique… stopping myself from breaking into peals of laughter as he adjusts himself over me …ending it with a dry, nervous laugh….

Souresh
Male
21
Kolkata, India

I am not a morning person. Even though I push myself out of the bed quite early, the world that stirs itself to vitality around me seems like another person’s reality. I’m a passive observer. Tea, biscuits and the morning paper are consumed flimsily, without the grandiose of a ritual. As if I were an indifferent guest in a hotel. Considering my lodging, never committing to it.
She always deems it fit to barge into my room every morning. My mother. I could have been jerking off. Or be in the buff. But she never seems to think about these things. Though I never really was walked into. Maybe she knows me too well. Maybe its the other way around. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
Privacy in our house is frowned at disapprovingly. Doors are never shut. Curtains never drawn.The unspoken rules of conduct were probably laid by my mother ages ago. Maybe before I was even born. My father, an unremarkable man with a remarkable jawline probably succumbed without so much as a whimper. He probably thought it was easier that way. To let someone take the reins of his life. Prone to occasional bouts of helpless anxiety, my father lives his life “on the surface”, complains my mother, as she greedily snatches the unfinished work away from him. He always seems only too relieved to surrender. I wonder if they ever have sex…

Since my obstinate decision to move back to Kolkata last year I have often asked myself if it was a wise decision …. After all moving back in with mum is not the ideal thing to do when you are 25(heck I were in the States I would be considered demented or gay for taking such an action , come to think of it that wouldn’t be too far from the truth ) … my journey from the quaint Secunderabad station to the chaotic melee of humanity that is Howrah was in many ways symbolic of the confusion driven turn my life was taking…
After negotiating my way through an army of coolies, as I drove away in a taxi (the rusty non-electronic meter of which gave me anxiety attacks) the sight of the grotesque but familiar Howrah Bridge was like a confident hand on hesitant shoulders…

A year and a lifetime later I am still plagued with such questions… was letting go of the offer to move to Delhi a bad career move….wouldn’t I be happier being a lifestyle magazine reporter in Pune? Isn’t Hyderabad the place where i will get to be unapologetically me, what with the city teeming with friends who love me and understand me for what I am … Doesn’t Mumbai promise me everything that I could ever dream of ? Does my sister’s persistent proposal of moving to the gold laden city of Dubai make some sense, after all it has everything that modernity has to offer…
Maybe ….but life isn’t ever about answering questions is it??My being, I have realized is in many ways attached to this city…pragmatically speaking, that would have been the case had I been brought up in any other city… but the romantic in me likes to believe it’s a tumultuous love affair which has weathered many a storm (my 2 year stand with Hyderabad included)… Often, when I look out of bus windows and take in the sights, or walk the hallowed lanes of BBD Bagh ( there was a point of time when me and my sister used to presume that the “BBD BAG” emblazoned on the sides of the ubiquitous red Kolkata minibuses was actually an advertisement of a brand of bags) lined with spectacular buildings , bearing mute testimony to the changing fortunes of the city, I feel blessed … blessed to be a part of a community which has nurtured a way of life for centuries now… no matter how inconsequential and in the fringes I am...

P.S. thank u Kama for the snap

In the early nineties, when we moved to Kolkata from what now seems like almost virginal terrains of Kohima, life offered of a labyrinth of experiences…. Everything was new and dazzling… city life was sampled by us in small installments during brief summer interludes… everything used to fascinate us….the tiled bathroom in our grandma’s as opposed to the cemented one in Kohima …the overhead shower as opposed to the tin drum which was the receptacle for regulated water supply… The paper Kwality tubs of vanilla ice cream which we used to lick to the last drop with an equally fascinating wooden spatula like thing... the spatula like thing in turn would be chewed to a pulp to extract the last drop of vanilla essence….years later when I were to see Durga Puja pandals adorned with those very spatula like things stuck on the walls to make various decorative patterns (the ubiquitous Indian paisley included) my first instinct would be to chew them up …

Me and my sister were a capitalist lot…identifying experiences with brand names… hot sultry afternoons were associated with frantic glugs of gold spot ( the zing thing )… comfort was a bite of Cadburys milk chocolate ( Cadburys , interestingly was so ingrained in the Bengali/Indian psyche that it became synonymous with chocolate …so one had to ask for Cadburys when one wanted a bar of chocolate….chocolate was a generic term for all kind of lozenges … things that took a long time to seep in)…
The clammy Kolkata weather ensured that my bar of golden foiled “Cadbury” (poor Amul catering to a thankless market even after it’s innovate marketing campaign displaying cute amul looking couples on the wrappers) was always melty and messy leaving a trail of sticky brown spots of my summery shirts and shorts…evenings meant darkened rooms enveloped in the blue shadows of the Weston colour television…the drawing rooms were animated with coming of age tales in Star Plus… beaming the American way of life to our collective psyche …oh how I identified with Kevin Arnold and his teenage angst though I couldn’t follow half of what he said in that cute American twang…

Sigh ….how I digress… where were we? Oh yes the dazzling city lights…Gah have completely lost thread now ….funny how I start saying something and inadvertently end up saying something else…

Laladom…

Singledom is fun methinks…not that I have ever been in any other state of being, but increasingly for the past few years the bitterness and an incredible sense of longing that I felt after seeing my friends cozying up to each other or doing couply things (you know taking sips of each other’s coffee, casually sprawling on each other, completing each others sentences, placing each others orders in cafes, or just being with each other, happy and satiated) has waned… maybe its the city which is turning strangely moody nowadays, overcast, fast paced and incredibly unreasonable. So caught up am I in the city’s mood swings that i hardly have the time to negotiate with trivialities …maybe its my job which in a very feeble way challenges my intellect…

Gah …who am I kidding…Being single is a habit now and am not complaining…

Gawd …have been feeling listless and bored lately…it probably has got something to do with the clammy Kolkata heat which leaves you feeling drained out and for some odd reason fat… maybe its the shirt sticking to your body syndrome (you know wet with sweat shirt clings to your body and highlights the hitherto unnoticed lovehandles )… but then my friends will point out that everything makes me feel fat…maybe they are right ....
But I wonder what will life be like without my weight to obsess about … I am done being the blithe one who doesn’t care about what goes in and how it comes out …now every morsel that goes in has to be accounted for …


Gah… lesson no 99999….never force myself to blog just for the sake of blogging …