Barbed Wire...
Dark clouds fester over the Kohima sky in the month of August… a family of giant, black mushrooms over the blue-green hills…
On one such heavy, mushroomy morning, Titu (with a goldfish pout and a brown dungaree) followed Mithu (with her Halo-shampooed hair and patchwork poncho) to the Ao residence… A slippery step at a time… a breathless step at a time… Past the morning due-laden shrubs, past the pig sty with oinking, baby pink pigs… past the Dey household where Jhorna mashi (a shawled mummy) was tending to her begonias…
They stopped in front of the Ao house…

Dear Reader,

If you are here by some misguided desire of being treated to a slice of an unknown life then I’m very sorry to say, the show is over… in these five years that I have blogged I have treated this place with varying degree of sincerity… when I started off (and when I was evidently younger) I treated this as a scared place where unspoken truths can come into the forefront, where resolutions can be achieved through a particularly clever turn of phrase… Soon enough, insincerity and self-consciousness crept in and I found myself writing keeping certain people in mind… I can’t say I’m ashamed of that but I wish I could change that fact about my blog…
Today, as I sit here dipping a rusk biscuit in my tea, I wonder why should I do this at all… I’m the sort who believes that there should be a proper distance kept between strangers, you and me…
How can I strip my soul bare in front those who have never even shared a rusk with me? How can I tell you about my little indiscretions in the metro? why should i tell u that I was jumping moments yesterday in a munakka-induced hazed? my little truths needn't be subjected to your scrutiny anymore....

So here it is, without any awkward drama and self-important delay,

Goodbye,
Me…

Fly on the wall

If I were asked to recount my school years, I will draw blanks… Of course I remember the school building (a white imposition over the serpentine lanes of Sealdah) … at least I think I do, but the problem that is they are all enmeshed in a hopeless little blob of a memory… so much so that I cant distinguish one from the other … the classrooms, classmates, teachers, tiffin breaks… the classroom must have been like any other … rows of window on the left, opening to the chaos of Sealdah’s Kolay market; in front, the weathered, white, blackboard, on which the teacher’s weary hand probably scribbled words they wanted to emphasise, their fingers covered in chalk dust… the teacher’s desk and chair on a foot-high platform… the walls must have been oilpainted in an antiseptic shade of green, devoid of any tenderness and comfort… there must have been a forgotten cupboard at a corner, full of books from previous years and coloured chalks which were never used (except for teachers’ day when the class captain would carefully calligraph a special message for the teachers)… my class must have been a microcosm of the world, populated with boys and girls waiting to grow up to be (hopefully) responsible, successful, future citizens … maybe they are important people now and I hear about them every now and then, maybe I don’t… the thing is, as much as I want to, I can’t distinguish any particular aspect of their personalities… Was Soumya‘s apparent calmness an act to hide his insecurities or was he really the Buddha, as everyone referred him to? Was Paromita, the pretty, shy girl with bangs, any different from other pretty girls with bangs in my class?

Oily, plastic wrapped tiffin boxes… scab-covered knees… teachers with vulgar, lipstick-smudged lips (I know I shouldn’t caricaturise them, but what to do?) … strains of a forgotten school song… early morning traffic on the Sealdah flyover… that’s all I remember of my schooldays… that’s all I want to forget…

my amethyst eyes
licks my livery soul
aaah you stood by my bedside yesterday night emmanuel
like peace comes to dying gods
Your dreams breathed on my nightmares
Like chocolatey city moonlight

Straight Talk

It’s the dead zone of an unnaturally hot afternoon. The crowd at the Coffee House has trickled to the die-hard regulars, and the hustle and bustle of College Street seems to be a distant dream thanks to the whir of the rickety old fans which drown all outside noise. The second floor of the seat of Bengali intelligentsia is however, astir with activity.
Pink banners, shouting AIDS and HIV are being tied next to a window, which seem to have attracted the attention of the local sparrows. They busy themselves pecking at the s rope that holds the banner straight. You worry about the fate of the rope but your eyes wander to the other corner of the room, where a young couple, oblivious to the activity around them, is sharing sweet nothings over a cup of tea and fish kabiraji.
Into all this walks a vision in black. Dripping sequins and faux pearls, Shyamolee (name changed on request) immediately grabs the attention of the boyfriend. The girlfriend fumes profanities to the cup, as Shyamolee settles herself in a table next to the couple.
The staring boyfriend doesn’t seem to affect Shyamolee, neither does the fuming girlfriend make any difference to her. She is used to such uncomfortable situations. “As a transsexual, one can’t help being subjected to stares. I realise that I affect these people, but I have learned not to make such a hue and cry about it,” she says before busying herself with her friends.
Shaymolee and her friends are at the Indian Coffee House to attend an adda on Sexuality rights and HIV, an endeavour which is quite unlike the usual Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) gatherings in the town. “The whole idea behind holding this adda in Coffee house was to reach out to people beyond our community. Issues such as sexuality rights is not limited to our community, these issues affect every human being,” says Anish Roy Chowdhury, a city-based LGBT activist.
Soon, other tables in the room are filled up with eager faces. A mike is installed in the middle of the room, a request for “the kind attention of the patrons” is made and the “adda session” starts. What follows is a potent discussion on sexuality and human rights. The microphone changes many hands as Article 377 of the Indian Penal code (which criminalises same sex behaviour) is trashed, pertinent points made and at times, irrelevant questions raised. After about an hour and a half, Roy Chowdhury is a happy man. “The evening is a success,” he declares.
In the middle of all these, however, the couple have made an unceremonious exit.

25 Random things about me…

1) I lie… beautiful, random lies which make complete sense in my mind…
2) I try and wear nice undies whenever I leave home because I worry I will be run over or something and when they perform post-mortem on me I will not look nice (which is also the reason why I brush my teeth right before I leave home)…
3) I recently had bhang for the first time and proved to be a text-book drunk…
4) Whenever I want to sound interesting, I quote from The Hours or from the Home at the end of the World…
5) At times, when I’m particularly pissed with my mother of sister I take random stuff of theirs and flush them down the toilet…
6) I’m not as bad a person as the above five confessions make me out to be…
7) I have never physically assaulted anyone in my 27 years of existence…
8) I have recently developed a passionate dislike for peanuts (which used to be my favourite nut till about a week ago)…
9) I share a very troubled relationship with food…we are like Jimmy and Alison in Look Back in Anger…
10) I envy everybody everything…
11) Though I claim otherwise, nothing really icks me out…
12) I’m notoriously bad with money… not only am I a spendthrift I physically treat them badly too… notes are a crumpled mess in my wallet…
13) Animals unsettle me which is why I’ve never had a pet…
14) If I were a reader I would have moved on by now…
15) I’m mortally scared of being called boring and fat…
16) I like people who like me… as in I can make myself fall for somebody who likes me…
17) Cinema is the presiding philosophy of my life…
18) I don’t read newspapers…
19) I pretend to read books in cafés because that’s how I want to be perceived as-an attractive young man reading a book in a café…
20) I’ve hardly any memories of my school and college days… in get-togethers I just nod and play along with other people’s stories…
21) I’ve promised that I will buy myself a guitar by the end of this year…
22) I discovered scrabble a month ago and was hooked for exactly a day…
23) I fantasise about food every few minutes…
24) I’m a selfish shopper…so much so that I even grudge my three year old nephew his shopping hour with me…
25) I miss home even when I’m there…

I wont tag anyone coz I don’t believe in tagging…

Abbas …


At my favourite Barista outlet, Abbas probably stands in front of the cappuccino machine, polishing its gleaming stainless-steel spouts and admiring the chrome finish of the Italian machine… Only the Italian can have such sense of lines and texture, only Italians have such sense of aesthetics, he is probably saying to himself…
For despite our presumptions about his background, Abbas is probably an erudite young man with a passion for Italian coffee machines. A passion so intense that he decided to take up a job in a coffee shop to be near one…
As I make myself comfortable in my corner chair and smile a smile of acknowledgement, he is probably saying to himself – “There is that guy again, I wonder what his story is…”
He is probably also considering the change in mid-afternoon coffee regulars… The old lady with the orange bag who always ordered a frappe and a lemon chicken sandwich, and slowly consumed it in her corner with the concentration of a surgeon at work, had disappeared…It’s almost as if she were a characters written out of a story… She had gone and taken her world with her… her small world of orange handbag and jingling change… The café now has a new regular, a beefy middle-aged man, who appeared out of blue one fine day, as if to replace the old lady…
Our little thoughtless gestures probably irks, disappoints or irritate him…
Maybe he flinches every time I pick up the copy of The Telegraph, because he is a Statesman loyal…
As we sat there and made casual conversations, there were probably countless moments when he could have interrupted and impressed us with acute observations… But as of now, Abbas busies himself with a cup of foaming coffee…

Nothing unusual nothing strange
Close to nothing at all
The same old scenario the same old rain
and there's no explosions here

So I dreamt the other day… my dreams, of late, tend to be tepid replay of everyday situations… me queuing up for a movie ticket, minutely observing the dandruff on the shoulders of the guy ahead of me and the likes… but this time, it was different…

Then something unusual something strange
comes from nothing at all
I saw a spaceship fly by your window
did you see it disappear?

Fuelled by everything on television and a movie I’m in love with (Angels in America), I saw a scene from the film- the scene where Mary Louise Parker’s character talks about souls rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and floating up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joining hands, clasping ankles, and forming a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbing them, and being repaired…
Amie come sit on my wall and read me the story of Of O
Tell it like you still believe that the end of the century brings a change for you and me
Nothing unusual nothing's changed
Just a little older that's all
But then that’s what life is all about isn’t it? It’s about painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and hoping for a better tomorrow…

You know when you've found it there's something I've learned'
cause you feel it when they take it away …
Maybe this is the threshold of revelation…

Mellow...


If you happen to be anywhere in Kolkata now, I would urge you to take a moment… before the gaudy festivities of Diwali take over, before we start welcoming a frayed, watered down winter (purely out of sentimental reasons), take a moment and breathe it all in … the delicious melancholy of “postpujaness”…
Look around, observe a city overwhelmed with a bittersweet hangover— the skeleton of pandals looming comically large over ever para more, the weary, dark-circled eyes of its denizens, the solemn dismantlers who guiltily go about their work of normalizing the façade of the city and the heaps of crumpled silver foils in street corners which bear mute testiomomy to the city's ravenous appetite…
I am ill-equipped in the philosophies of life, but I can tell you one thing, feeling mellow does you a lot of good…

Memories ...
It was supposed to be a quiet afternoon…ma and me will take the afternoon metro to New Market, where she will shop for "parsi lace" (whatever that means) to lace her saree with… enamoured by the quaintness of the endeavour I centred my entire weekend around the trip… after purchasing the parsee lace, we decided we will catch the evening show of Mama Mia…ma will soak in the memories of her ABBA youth, while I sought solace in the collective memories of the 1970s (how I romanticise the 70s)… dinner at Nizams, where ma will tuck into biriyani …I will gnaw at chunks of panir in eerily orange gravy…
Early Sunday morning, we bickered and fell apart as usual… the plan was cancelled… but I have vivid memories of it… an afternoon that never was….

The drip, drip of the long-haul…

Weekends are awful…a prelude to future… though I would lead myself and people around me to believe that there is dignity in loneliness, I do realise that there is nothing noble in being so chronically untouched that a mere whiff of a man standing next to you sends shivers of longing sraight down to your groin…to catch a flash of a young, lean man in the rear view mirror of an autorickshaw and wonder what his mouth tastes like… It’s not just lust, mind you, but a longing for human intimacy… to be held, to be wanted…
When I was younger I had such a vision of a content life… of warm libraries and bare, stark bedrooms… I also, in moments of weaknesses, would dream of finding someone… but one learns one’s limitations... Slowly and kindly it dawns upon you, that at the end you are all alone…

It’s you face am looking for...

If there is one lesson I have learnt in my 27 years of existence, it’s the notion that repressed passion does no one any good. It turns ghosts out of vibrant men…

The sweet and the lowdown

If I were ever to write a novel, this is how it would begin...

It was a Kohima of fond memories that I was born in. Before insurgency, before the gurgling brook that ran through it caught fire. We were four. Ma, Baba (was that what I called him), Mithu and me. We lived, fought and fell out in a rambling 3-bedroom cottage, with two cavernous, perpetually wet toilets. Our house was quaintly perched on a hillock, and there was no concrete road leading to it. Only a neat pile of stone steps that connected it to other hillocks and civilisation …

C R A S H
When I’m alone I keep the television (which is two rooms away) on at night …disembodied voices and signature tunes of shows waft in, lulling me into a very urban sense of security… it’s as if the grotesque soap opera of life is unfolding outside while I bury myself in the blueness of my room… it’s nice this way …
I don’t feel completely alienated from my reality, though it becomes difficult sometimes, to distinguish what has actually occurred from what should have happened…
At times, I spend hours trying to think about people hurtling across the hinterlands in trains at that very moment… it’s a kooky promise I made to myself in a sleep-bereft train journey between Vizag and Howrah almost a decade ago… I had promised that in the security of my home, when I am safely tucked in my bed, I will try and think about those who are
uncomfortably twisting and turning in blue-sheathed bunkers… how fragile yet potent is their existence in these steel boxes… their lives and realities, their loved ones back home and their temporary bonds with fellow passengers, equally palpable and dreamlike…

Sightings

It’s a stunningly bright day…the kind of day which can only signal impending doom …I am walking down Park street, inhaling a fragrant westerly breeze (or isit a whiff of Flurys)… and I’m telling myself —I'm in my early late twenties, my academic career is over and I still live with mom— such are the thoughts flooding my not-so-tiny head when I notice the new McDonald's that was blown up just a few months ago (or was it a year ago).. my God I deserve a break today, I sigh, all I ever get is the unhappy meal…
and that’s when he walks out of the plastic sheathed rubble that is McDonald’s now, like a phoenix rising from ashes… this guy, who is me… I mean who looks like me, so much like me that I'm breathless…
he looks at me for a startled moment and looks away… this guys, who is me…is he my other half? does he have what I don't? did he get the luck? the love? were we destined to meet or was I unwittingly trying to fight destiny by following him down the narrow Mirza Ghalib street? were we really separated forcibly or did he just run off with the good stuff? or did I? will this person embarrass me? will we indulge in awkward, silent sex? Is that how we put ourselves back together again?
Such were the thoughts flooding my not-so-tiny head when I lost the sight of the guy, who is me…

Differences …
So ma decided to renovate our "old" bathroom, you know the ubiquitous bong old bathroom—a cavernous, damp, water stained mess where we do all our laundry (maashi kapor gulo purono bathroom e dhuye nao) and which we surreptitiously guide our guests away from (no, no not that way, the bathroom is this way)… well she decided that it deserves a new lease of life…
bye, bye pink, chipped wash basin and hello gaudy glass basin and glazy blue tiles…
I try not to interfere with ma’s dealings and be judgmental about them, but what do you do when you bathroom looks like the setting of a lurid Sanjay Neela Bhansali dream…
My ma is so …baroque… and I’m so… not baroque… I remember the time ma insisted on hanging this elaborate painting of a waterfall which when plugged to a socket made "soothing waterfall sounds" *shudders* in my room and I relented simply because I wanted to avoid a showdown (we don’t believe in talking things out in the Biswas household)… it just hangs there and I avoid looking at it…the "soothing waterfall sound" however, proves to be a great distraction for my high-strung four-year-old nephew…
I hate the blue, glass basin… I hate washing myself on/in (?) it … I hate the way my foamy spit dribbles down its sides when I am brushing my teeth, it’s like spitting on your dining table…
Sigh…

Eyes...

Let me share this... of recent, i have become a collecter of what i call the "but you could have been so much more" looks... you know , the kind of look people give you when you say or do things which are not in keeping with their perception of you ?the kind of look which leads to a change of attitude? I've been plagued with those...
no matter what i say or how i say it, the shadow looms... today, after losing a battle against invincible forces that subject me to such looks i have decided that i will become a connoisseur of the "but you could have been so much more " looks... i will accept them, and grade them according to the level of intensity...
After all, all forward motion counts...

Life…
As years pass by, my doubts are confirmed… life is designed to be like a Cameron Crowe movie… a bittersweet balance that's funny, melancholic and romantic :-)

Family

They settle down in the next table… the family of three… the mother clearly the decision maker… a stately, middle-aged woman in a black salwar kurta (or was it a sari)… the husband seems defeated- both by age and life (they arent the same thing) … he bends towards his wife, displaying his dandruff-infested shoulders…black is not a colour to wear when you are fighting a losing battle against scaly skin…
The pubescent son is the object of my attention, for obvious reasons :P…he is plain really … hollow-cheeked and lean, like most pubescent boys are… he betrays a strange impatience towards his mother…he almost flinches when she reaches out in her purse to give him some money… shifting his weight from on red canvas shoe to the other…What a strange family, I tell myself… and how disconcerting it is to see them in a coffee shop at this time of the day …
Sitting there, witnessing an awkward family moment, I realise that I'm alone, not in the way this family would recognize… yet, at this moment, I yearn for the familiarity of this dysfunctional family...

Soulmate

Clearly, we are meant to be together… like Jonathan and Clare in A Home at the End of the World…half in love and half seriously contemplating a life together…
Both pilot and captive of the impossible sequence of events that keeps us away…But there she is, inert in a dusty corner of Hyderabad (a city which seems to be hell bent on discarding its glorious past and become a place where grotesque granite and concrete structures are considered to be man's highest form of artistic expression) surrounded by orange t-shirts, empty nutella bottles and walls of chick lits, and here I am, a hapless victim of vanity, pretending to read important books in empty Barista Cafés …