Nine

The year, 2009 A.D., is drawing to a close now. The wind is heavy, the temperature between cool and cold, the nights push the days away at just the time most people leave for their homes after work, and, Victoria’s Secret has slashed its prices greatly for another clearance sale; everything is exactly as it was at the beginning of the year. So much of life is but a recurring pattern, the unimportant majority trying to deceive us into unawareness of the subliminal, important, lasting, changes that expertly shape our living.

We take stock of the year when it is desperately close to ceasing to exist. I read yesterday on Abhineet’s blog that we do that, because, that’s probably all we can do about it with so little time to spare. I smiled. Now when I sit back and think about the year that was, I have a nagging sense building up inside me. It tells me something really bizarre. Are you doing it because you want to think about this year, S*****t, or do you just want to update your blog once more?

I wasted some 145 days right in the beginning of the year for a single trivial pursuit. Never before had I devoted so much of uninterrupted attention to one single thing. Second thought, it was the farthest thing from Pursuit. Then it fizzled out, like a settling volcano, like an opened beer, like a media uproar, like an illness, like. It’s absurd that I am putting down one comparison after another, when anything I write would fit the bill. That’s what life is. Ecstasy, indifference, elation, indifference, thrill, indifference, curiosity, indifference, hopes, indifference, sadness, indifference, tumult, indifference, disaster, indifference. And repeat. And repeat. And. Were life a car, wouldn’t indifference be its neutral gear? Then why do we scorn at it.

So, college ended. Old friends gave way to new, equally dear ones. A layer added. A layer thinned. New habits. Not all good, but, it’s fine. I didn’t realise being done with college was such a big deal, until the enormity of the situation was brought home to me while impetuously scrolling through my phone’s contacts list, and discovering that a big majority of those numbers have been rendered obsolete, because most of them have moved to different parts of the country, and the world, and probably changed their phone numbers. There’ll be many who wouldn’t have, but I’ll no longer have a reason to call them. Like a certain ‘Yash compu’, the last contact saved on the list, who was the kind of hi-hello friend that almost every guy in the hostel was of every other guy, but whom I called very often asking him to throw his table tennis racquets, from the corridor outside his room, down at me, while I stood on the ground-floor nervously imagining what if I don’t cleanly catch the racquets.

I had a family in DCE. Sometimes, vainly, I thought of myself as the family’s young kid everyone’s fond of. Sometimes, of course, everyone feels they don’t belong. But why should we bother about all we feel, when we don’t even control what we feel. If I start bothering myself seriously with everything that I feel, I might even start thinking of myself as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Oh no, no humanitarian ambitions. I just have a thing for taller white women.