अफ़सोस

तजुर्बों में खुद को यूँ घोला तो था, खुद से अमूमन ये बोला तो था
खूब तन्हाई में खालीपन है, खला है, फिर भी बदतर है इश्क़, दूर रहना भला है

था भरोसा हमें हो गए हैं सयाने, नाजाने फिर दिल आज कैसे जगा है
है डरता बहुत फिर भी अपनी चलाता, अफ़सोसन मुझे इश्क़ होने लगा है 

खोज

किसी खोए हुए किस्से के खोए हुए बंज़ारे सा

खोया हुआ हूँ ख़्वाबीदा ख़यालों में इस तरह

जैसे सालों पुराना ऐब कोई खुदबख़ुद खो जाता है

बेमिजाज़ी

जब से तू मेरा ना रहा 

किसी से कोई गिला ना रहा 

नौकरी-पेशा, गाडी, घर-मकान 

हसरतों का ये सिलसिला न रहा 

न रहा शौक़ घर को आने का 

बाहर का भी काफिला न रहा 

Shadow

You always praised my memory, as I sat
bloated, and yearned for more of that.
I wish now that you had praised my heart,
and in yearning, I may have learned the art
of loving, not fueled and fooled by ego;
of being at home, wherever we go.
But what choice did you have in the matter?
I gave you no chance to praise the latter.
I worked for more of what I got
(I can not lie, I loved it a lot).
For years apart, it's clear as hell
that I had memorized you well.

[January 16, 2016 | Princeton]

Soulicitation

Call me some time. It will very likely be awkward, yes,

but just a little. Tell me what work is like, what you do,

and I'll respond with measured interest, no more no less,

crack appropriate jokes - some old ones, but mostly new.

Important things hogged all attention, and time has shot.

Yesterday, I loved your taste, and you loved Wodehouse

and Rumi, who have grown on me, and Eliot, who has not.

Recommend a book, maybe, or stuff on the web to browse?

So much of life is hard work, and planning for tomorrow,

and that may be how it ought to be, by jove, for all I care!

But of that precious ticking time, I'd really like to borrow

a tiny bit of listening to any words you'd like to spare.

[November 30, 2015 | New York City]

Postlude

Some truths can only be said in jest and some necessarily in verse;
and then there are some nutcases that must come out in a curse.
Which one of these I'll use today should be evident to you by now:
it's only fair that the mode I choose be one that really was hers.

There are those who always want back what to them is dear;
to champion them is not in me, despite how it might appear.
It's rather late, anyway, to want, but there's scope, still, to fear:
what if unlike so much else, love would not disappear?

[February 23, 2015 | Princeton]

Swimming in a Fish Bowl

This morning, Albert Wallace of the bent back but aristocratic nose woke up disheveled, shortly before a subdued autumn sunrise in a dimly-lit, painstakingly unadorned apartment, and after only a few moments of lying there in a trance, slipped his feet into his fading crimson rubber slippers, and promised himself he is so not gonna take shit from anyone no more. He straightened himself up and took brisk steps to the mirror, because of course the best way to avoid his fears was to confront them, and splashed freezing cold water into his face, furiously, fifteen times. 

“I’m gonna go out today, and I’m gonna talk to people!” he told his mirror image with an unsure enthusiasm, but with such loudness that one might as well imagine he was planning on conquering the Everest in his boxers. Once a popular creature with enviable looks, a reputation for expertise in all things from Probability to Literary Theory, and, even, a guilty taste for the rowdy humor of large groups, he had somehow found it difficult to get back on his feet after his former girlfriend, Anita, had suddenly left him for her long-time best-friend Patrick Boehner, who even Albert had grown a social fondness for, over time. But that was two years ago, and for what it’s worth, Patrick Boehner had by now married another fine woman, and Mr. and Mrs. Boehner are expecting a daughter next month, as some harmless facebook stalking has revealed.

For some months now he had felt no pleasure in most things people seemed to love, and often wondered how he, himself, had shown such keenness for the same activities in the years before. Every time he would discover himself tagged in a facebook photo by one of his acquaintances, the accompanying taglines that were usually on the lines of “Awesomeness”, “Amazing fun” or “Best day ever” left him nonplussed. If they hadn’t mentioned it I would never have known, he would muse. 

In the earlier days, he used to occasionally do stand-up at a local comedy club, and although he still appreciated the mechanics of humor and continued to be able to construct, methodically, laughter on other people's faces, he had found it increasingly difficult to elicit his own laughter, and felt uninspired, even, by the virtue in giving other people a good time. 

He had gradually become unmotivated to excel in his career as an Accountant, and the final straw came two months ago with his rather public firing, since which time, he hasn't applied for another job. It was the day after the firing that he first attended our yoga class. 

But today was different. He looked palpably determined in his freshly ironed, crisp white shirt and linen trousers getting ready for the Interstellar show at AMC New Brunswick. Unusually chirpy all morning, he played his favorite music from The Beatles to The Doors at full volume while he vacuum cleaned the whole place. But it was really when he began humming along and grooving rhythmically to the high points of these happy songs that I really knew today’s different. Very uncharacteristically, he also nudged me to wear my dark azure top, telling me how it enhances my breasts in a “menacing way". I was, like, woah!

I’ve been living with him for the last two weeks, but contrary to what others in the class think, we are not sleeping together; the only reason I’m living here is that we were both scared of living alone. Scared of ourselves, perhaps. We keep each other sane. And useful.  

“Let’s get going now” I cried at 5 minutes to noon, “we will have people from the class, all waiting. We’re also grabbing lunch before, alright!” 
“Just a moment, honey. I am shaving.”
“C’mon now. It’s not a party! And what’s with ‘honey’? I am not your girlfriend, okay?” I said, and put on Breaking Bad on Netflix. I was in the middle of season 5, and it’s getting crazier every episode. It’s so addictive, oh my god. It wasn’t until the episode was over that I realized Albert is still inside. What a bride-to-be, this guy.

“Albert! Dude. I’m gonna go by myself.”

No voice responded.

-- 

The doctors just told me there is scope for revival, but added that it was “in everyone’s best interest to be prepared for all eventualities.”

I don’t know whether we were lovers or just close friends or just two random depressed people who, as a matter of mere convenience, were each other’s support group. Whatever we were we weren’t anymore.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 2 - Kruger Ganley, Then and Now

I’m feeling positive about an impending promotion. Last Friday, my boss asked me out to lunch. Well, to go together and pick up lunch from Sarvana Bhawan, to be precise, but that’s almost as good, definitely a signal. Then he got an important call so I had to go pick it up for us both. But why must I worry about a free lunch gone expensive, since what mattered was the signal, and that, as you’d agree, remains intact. I know that because he also complimented me yesterday on my work migrating the trading books to the new platform. “That was helpful”, he’d said. I’m actually a statistician working with market and macro data, so this was not, in the strict sense, a part of my responsibilities, falling clearly as you can tell in the domain of IT professionals, but it wasn’t terribly difficult and the whole exercise gained swiftness by orders of magnitude if I collaborated with the IT guys, so I figured why not. I can’t see how this isn’t exceeding expectations, unless the expectation is that I set up technology, do accounting, trade billions and serve chai and butter-toast to everyone while they play Oprah in the comments sections of Humans of New York.

So, yeah, it’s all looking good. Bonus and promotion announcements are still a month away, and my match dot com profile is already half-ready. In fact, what’s pending is just putting up my pictures, but, of course, that is the all important part. I do have a couple of nice pictures of mine from 2009 and 2010, and with just a little retouching, I should be all set. Uncle Baburam’s daughter Madhuri was very gracious about offering to “do amazing things with these pictures” at no cost, and although I’m quite tempted to take her up on the offer, I think I’ll hire a digital makeover expert from U2RHot for eight hundred bucks. What can I say, I’m not fooling around this time. And Madhuri should be focussing on her studies, Kindergarten is a crucial class.

You wouldn’t guess it from looking at me now, but my first six months at Kruger Ganley were a dream. I started at this job on the 23rd of June 2009, about two weeks after the graduation ceremony, and exactly four months from the day I’d started dating Swati. It was a phenomenal year, 2009. Everything about that year was perfect. If I left a problem in an exam because I’d have no clue how to solve it, I would later discover that the problem itself had being scrapped for some trivial linguistic ambiguity in the way it was written. This ball I hit out towards the hostel windows on the second floor, while playing cricket on the narrow alley next to the building this one time, went straight to the singular window without a pane, thus saving me the huge fine I was going red with dread about as the ball made its way up the projectile. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong in the crazy unbelievable way that I now regret why I never dabbled in gambling or sports betting while it lasted. If I were ninety years at the time and left for a morning walk in a fit of rebelliousness and trembled on a rock, cursing everyone I ever knew in my head in the microsecond I imagined I had left with me on this planet before I hit the ground, a hot, top-naked girl would have come running from the woods, stopped me from falling, and kissed me passionately for no discernible reason. God was that kind of kind. 

The day I got the job, I got myself five Park Avenue shirts, one for each weekday. I would show up at work early, and smiled at everyone as they came in, just as uncle Baburam had advised. People seemed to like me, I stayed late and got everything done faster, taking workload off other people on my team who had been here a little longer, and have since all bought yachts and mansions and left the firm. My boss was supportive and treated us often, but I have to say under a different boss I might have learned a wee bit more. Most of his mentoring revolved around giving me such illuminating pearls of wisdom as “It is what it is”, “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do”, and “That’s what it should do, you’re right, but the reality is it does whatever it is it does”. He could spend an awful lot of words explaining things which were explained just as well in zero. During meetings was always on display his unique ability to talk for an hour about nothing except what he’ll be talking about for the rest of the hour, until the hour was over, and we exchanged pleasantries and left. Was this the secret to multiple Brooks Brother suits while paying for your kids’ piano classes at the same time, I always used to wonder. I only stopped when he was fired a couple of years ago. The new boss, let's call him Aurangzeb, has proved to be very hard to impress. In the last two years, he has only taken me out for lunch once. That was two months ago, at Suburban Tadka. At the restaurant, when the waiter turned towards me after taking his order and I was putting on my greedy smile, about to blurt out the most expensive dish on the menu, he butted in and ordered something for me entirely on his own discretion. “Just what I’d wanted”, I remarked heartily. The waiter gave me a look I will not go ahead and describe, before turning back to him, clearly aware of his only customer that mattered, “So how spicy would you like it, high, medium, low? Medium, I suppose?”
“Yes, medium.” said Aurangzeb.
“Ok, sir”, said the waiter and began to leave, when he was stopped again.
“Wait, wait, wait. Actually, do very medium. Infact, very, very medium.”

That is not the sign of a man who doles out promotions easily.

Alpenliebe

For the fourteenth time in as many weeks, Vasudev Bakhshi was faced with the question of what to do during the two and a half day long weekend, when the office admin girl, Alisha Bhatia of the blunt nose and domed forehead, began giving out candies at every desk with a cheerful, if shrill, cry of "Happy Friday", stopping at every desk, and before he knew talk of what everybody was going to do on the weekend filled the colossal yellow-lit hall lined with fifty thousand desks, or so they seemed to Vasu, who, obese as he was, had been running the tip of his index finger along the periphery of the opening created between two ridiculously stretched buttons of his grey linen shirt, and wondering what it was that he used to do with his weekends during the summer four months ago when Sonia, his wife and a professor of Geography at the University of Bundelkhand, was home for the vacation and, to his surprise, he couldn't remember anything of import, neither any elated partying like when they were both collegiate and hungry for each other's touch all the fucking time, nor, thankfully, any crazy, viscious fights characteristic of the year before when she was still working in the city, although he did recall a certain Aarohi's phone number scribbled on the last page of one of her books, a number that he had committed to memory with a suspicious, foreboding fear, a fear that it wasn't Aarohi, but whoever Sonia took her increasingly numerous cigarette breaks out on the backyard to probably converse with, always in what he imagined a voice so low her own shadow couldn't overhear, but why o why o why couldn't she have talked about it, what is the worst that could have happened? Little Ridhi wouldn't be screaming in her bed every night, and I would at least have been able to eat this candy.

Sid Shoulda Said - Part 1 - The Short Term Goals of Sid Chat

We broke up three years ago, Swati and I, but I have to confess I have been thinking about her a lot lately. Being a man of indubitable character that I am, however, I won't call her. I strongly believe that it is very cheap to constantly call and text your ex-girlfriends, especially when, as in this case, they categorically cut your calls upon feeling the faintest shadow of your number upon their phone screens the fifteenth time they see it in a day.

My ex-girlfriend, the one who, some would say, I obsess excessively about, was the proverbial woman of substance, intelligent and driven, and I the typical man of substance abuse. She was also conventionally good-looking, had curls, big eyes, exquisitely shaped, soft lips, and a slim, affable personality. I knew other guys wanted her. I have no idea why she ever decided to date me with my flowing nose and fluffy arms, even though I admit my hair were the stuff of many a man's envy when shampooed. But that was rare, and besides, my teeth are a shade of color between yellow and green for which there is no name yet, as no other specimen of said color has ever been found in recorded history. She, on the other hand, brushed and flossed twice a day, and visited the dentist often. Her nose was pointed yet smooth, very much like a carefully sculpted nose made by a meritorious master's degree student of nose sculptures. In contrast, my own was made by an underpaid fast-food worker, who, when given this unexpected, unseemly task of making a nose, said what the fuck and made another samosa.

So I can only guess that she misconstrued my ugliness for my nerdiness, and gave in to her sapiosexual tendencies. I forget what the modern expression is, way out of my league, I suppose? But it wasn't the fact that she was physically attractive that drew me to her initially. It was that she was a girl, who would talk to me. That really was all. To really understand my obsession these hundreds of years later, you have to consider what had been happening with me in the years before.

I was precocious. As a toddler, I was already challenging the stereotype the whole world had been cooking up for ages about how all kids were cute. I do not remember a great deal of those days, but I do remember being constantly passed from one eager pair of arms to another reluctant one, before the latter would begin a frenetic search for the next victim. I am often told by my parents that I was the miracle kid who never peed his pants. Little do they know it was because I was so embarrassed already, I couldn't afford it. When I grew a little bit and reached the age when children start thinking they know shit, I realized that I was, after all, at least, a real funny dude. That was a big respite, I have to say. Every morning when I walked into the class, my classmates burst into instant laughter. I never quite understood, though, why they would hide my tiffin-box and leave chewing gum and pins on my chair and fail to tell me. To tell you a little secret, I never enjoyed that part as much as they thought.

But enough about me. I have to do something about this obsession with Swati if I am to have any hope of getting promoted. I have been slaving away for 4 years as a Junior Analyst at this bank, and each passing year that I find out I did not make Senior Analyst, the guilt of being a total failure gnaws at my chest hair. Before uncle Baburam, who was then a Senior VP also at Kruger Ganley, set me up for this job interview with an effusive recommendation, I had been looking for a year already. For a long time before that I had struggled with the question of what to do with my life. Everything I tried always felt either too easy or too difficult. Nothing was just the right level of challenging, except probably getting naked, but I've got to admit I could never have monetized that. Anyhow, as soon as I started working here, I knew it was for me. Plus I was over the roof that I had money to spend on my dates with Swati. Here I go again! No more talking of Swati, that bloodsucking bitch.

I have to get promoted this year. I promised myself I will only send out matrimonial ads when I can mention I’m a Senior Analyst. My brother thinks I’m a moron for wanting to mention Senior Analyst, which, he says, is an oxymoron of a title. Yes, he says things like that ever since he interned at this literary magazine, Intellectuelle, that sells exactly as many copies as it has employees, because there are only as many people in the world as pretentious. “What are you trying to tell girls, that you are the senior-most junior-most person in the bank?” he goes. What does he know about online matrimonial MO with his average build and his face that is not remotely annoying, and who the hell awarded him the pedestal to consider himself qualified to pontificate his literary hogwash over me. Besides, isn’t Junior Analyst a pleonasm, smartass?

By the way, I’m Chaturvedi, Siddharth Chaturvedi. Get used to the name, you will be hearing a lot of me. If there is one thing about me everybody strongly agrees with, it's that once I start coming, I keep coming.

A story from the pre-mobile-phone era

Mrs. Sarita Jaiswal waited for her son at the schoolbus' designated stop but the bus did not come. She sat anyhow under a warm Gulmohur tree. Every five minutes or so a bus passed, and at the sight of each of them she would stand up, anticipating her son, and then go back under the tree. She called Mr. Anand Jaiswal, her husband and a generally thoughtful person. He was not on his desk, being engaged in a generally useless meeting, and could not take her call, so Mrs. Jaiswal called Mr. Subhash Khatreja, her cousin and a generally business-savvy marble trader. His shop was close by, and in fifteen minutes he arrived at the bus stop, fetched his cousin sister and just as they sat in his car to go to the kid's school, the kid, Vasu Jaiswal, a class fifth student at Delhi's Frank Anthony school and a generally mischievous kid, jumped down from the tree to tell them he had been here all this while. But the car had left just before he could yell at it, and he was left standing there with nowhere to go. He knew that the house would be locked so he did not bother going home but left instead for the closest video game parlour. At Frank Anthony, his mother and uncle were worried on finding that Vasu had been dropped at the bus-stop, and rushed back home in a frenzy expecting him to be sitting tired and hungry at the doorstep. But when they reached he was still playing video-games at the parlour, so they contemplated calling the police. An hour passed, and they had almost dialed hundred, when Vasu came leaping and bounding after having won all his games, his shirt untucked, and necktie tied to his forehead like a headband. Mr. Khatreja approached him aggressively, intending to give him a verbal dressing down, but before he could, Mrs. Jaiswal ran forward to Vasu and hugged him tight and long, and kissed him numerously. Mrs. Jaiswal, after all, was his mother, and a generally cool woman. Mr. Jaiswal could not be reached, when he was called again, this time out of a need for storytelling. 

Moral of the story: The useless meetings are generally the longest ones.

Nonlinear jump diffusion

In wintry dims of after-rains

like filigree my fingers shiver

as does my mind, 

jumping back and forth in time,

one moment I remember

lying in my balcony in 1999

reading with teenage fascination

about Mohenjodaro at 2 in the night

and thinking "wow, how cool"

living vicariously in BC 2000,

as I now live in AD 1999,

and sometimes, farther back in time,

my dad, who lost to me in 100m sprints

to make me feel victorious and vain,

until he met with an accident,

in September, 1994.

After which I won no more.

And then I sit and wonder what

it must have been to have continued

watching "Johnny Gaddaar" that day in '09.

After all, it had been a wish of mine.

Artist ?

He started something unworthy and his conscience did revolt
He continued for fun, telling himself, “To confess I’ll write a ‘post’.

I’ll put some strange character in, one with a ludicrous name,
His descriptions very unlike mine, of a very different fame.

He’ll do the sin for me there, and invite furious curses;
While I’ll still digest applause, he will for me take the blame”

How that’ll free him of his guilt, the blogger never stopped to think
How it qualifies as a ‘confession’ has a rationale rather lame.

It is surely more unworthy, sinful, than what it’s meant to cover
The ruthless abuse of the non-living, of a character mute, helpless, tame.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. – Albert Camus

Teacher ?

वक्त इतना भी मेहरबान मुर्शिद तो नहीं है
करूं मैं एहतियात रोज़ ऐसी जिद तो नहीं है

नादां न वो बच्चा जो कहे वालिद हद-आलिम
हर सांच उभारी जाए, ज़रूरी तो नहीं है

हर ख़ता की तसल्ली कि भूल भी इक सबक है
हर सबक का यूँ सीखना वाजिब तो नहीं है

वस्ल को चला है जो राज़-ऐ-गुलशन की ले तलब
वो है तो कोई फलसफी ; समझदार नहीं है

The Girl at the Shopping Mall

Today at the shopping mall a girl had in her hand a rose.

That girl wore fabindia, was fair, and had a pointed nose.
I looked at her afar for long, only to eventually rue,
That you were not her, that she was not you.

Indeterminate

Last year X had his quarter life crisis
This year he is struggling with the midlife.
And you're wrong, genius, that he'd die at four
Because I'm already twenty five.

Words

I had been mulling over it for months. Five, six. I didn’t tell anyone. It was not something you could tell someone and still hope not to be evaluated. But I was consumed by the question like mint in ester. I wondered about it on my way to work every night. In the mornings, I couldn’t sleep because I wanted the answer right then, that very day, every day, for months. I was thinking about it when I dragged myself into the airport, for a new city now, and my parents waved me prolonged goodbyes from outside the glass wall. I was thinking about it also when I walked for the first time into my new place of work, the newly acquired free office stationery making things easier for a while. I was thinking about it when I knocked at the real estate agent’s door and a woman with manly sideburns, the receptionist as a matter of fact, welcomed me in. When I first visited home two and a half months later, there was a lovely little camera waiting for me. I was thinking about it as I stared into its lenses while it stared at others: why don’t I write more often? Why don’t I write?

When recently I met an old friend I was making mental notes of his adultnesses*. I liked him for them. I liked him by and large but I was on the lookout for giveaways at all moments all the same: those exaggerated truths, that baby lie, that question he’d ask me acting as if he didn’t know the answer.

The last I'd seen of him before this was when we were both nine: we weren’t as clever then, not by a long shot, but we weren’t as stupid either. I wasn’t. As a kid, I wasn’t writing a short story in my head when I should have been up with real, in-the-present-moment frolic.

(*except his round inchoate male breasts that came as not sucha pleasant surprise; I remembered him as a marathon runner in the making.)

Long story short: I was writing a short story when I met a long lost friend. But when I actually sat down to write, I couldn’t put pen to paper. Not only that. Whenever I would really get down to the business of writing – at this point you can imagine me in front of a blank word document on the screen, my fingers hanging just above the keyboard in paralysis, my eyes intent on the pixels laughing in my face – I suddenly wouldn’t want to.

While I tried to sleep today an answer the texture of an arrow seeped into my aching eyes. It was discomforting, and unlike what I had imagined, the coming of it didn’t make sleeping any easier. I like framing sentences, it told me, and I like adding one sentence to another. I like thinking up the odd witty remark, I like capturing the shy detail, I like imagining things in my head, I like hypotheses. It said I love how strings of words are jot together to resemble baritone musical notes, it said also that I like writing words and sentences and paragraphs that among themselves form mathematical patterns.

What it also told me, sadly, is that I have nothing to say to the world.
I have no desire to tell anyone what I think about what. Not directly, not through stories.

I didn’t want to believe all this, but it also told me, as if shoving evidence between my breaths, to go see people’s status messages on facebook. Not what’s in them, but just the fact that they were written. That these people, among them people who can’t put together a coherent phrase on being offered salvation as reward, that these people often had something to say to everyone. They wanted their voices to be heard, their thoughts to be known. While I didn’t, I really didn’t.

I know it’s not a happy or even an intelligent story, but what the heck, it is the story for today. I can't let the writer's block last forever just like that.


THE END
_________________________________________________





PS. Dear Curious Minds, mint in ester doesn't lead to anything or mean anything.
Except possibly that shallow frills excite smart minds.

Raingod

“Have you lost it?”

The person on the other end of the phone replied something. I don’t know what. But this distraught looking man standing next to me on the bus stand, with a large brown overcoat meant for someone larger than him and a large black umbrella meant for me, kept shouting the four words repeatedly on the phone, sometimes cupping his hand around his mouth, mostly not. If he released spit when he shouted, you could not know it: such was the rain.

The important part here is that I did not have an umbrella. It was raining furiously; the raindrops nearly hurt you as they made contact. The bus stand was not actually a bus stand, but a place where people waited anyhow and therefore buses stopped to fetch them. Meaning there was no shade, and I was feeling sort of cold in the rain, especially when a thick trail trickled down the back of my ear through my neck into my shirt. That shivered me, and for a brief moment I would shake like Shakria’s bum.

He was standing to my right. While telling you about how in this rain you couldn’t know if he unconsciously spat as he screamed, I forgot to tell you that you also couldn’t tell if someone's eyes had tears flowing down them freely if they stood unumbrellaed in the rain.

At least he didn’t seem to come to know.

But that could also be because he was so caught up in his own mess. You can never be sure.

You can never be sure about him, my husband.

Wheels

Yesterday morning, I whistled and Papa said don't. But I've just learned it, how to whistle. Raghu whistles all the time and his father laughs and sings and whistles along. Papa says it's bad. I ask him how and he just repeats that it's bad and looks at me with a look that says it's really really really bad, so I believe him. But I believe him only for the next fifteen minutes, after which I'm again all 'why is it bad why' in my head. It's such a pain. Yesterday when Raghu was whistling I told him it's bad, and he just laughed loud. He said if it were bad his dad would surely have told him. Right, right, I thought, and we both whistled to the tune of 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. We're so good at it, both of us. He is a little better, Raghavendra. We've named him Whistlendra in the class. It's so much fun. I think it is. Sudeep and Upasana too. But I am going to make sure I don't whistle when I walk to the bus-stop in the mornings with Papa. Ever since I've learned it it's just become impossible to stop. I'm whistling in the bus, in the recess, in the playground, in the music period, and to tell you a little secret, even in the SST period, but there less loudly than usual, because she'd get really hyper and call my dad school and then he'll be really mad. Ok, he won't be mad, but still. Ever since I'd fallen off the rickshaw and cut a huge bad wound and caught an infection so they had to cut the thing off, or amputate as Dr.Salve says, my dad has never scolded me for anything. He behaves as if it were his fault. I don't even feel in any way incapable or in pain now, for a long time. As for being caught whistling by SST ma'am, and being complained about to dad, and him being called to school, and informed about how I'm not behaving: I wouldn't mind it even if he were to get mad, but that he'll also maybe be embarrassed, and I don't want that at all. It's really not such a big deal to stop, I think. I will.

Yesterday was a sad day. Sad and beautiful, my dad wrote in his diary. My dad doesn't know that I know he writes a diary, so obviously he doesn't know that I know where his diary is. So obviously he doesn't know that I read it. Sometimes I think that he'll get mad when he comes to know, but then I think he won't be mad at me no matter what. But then I think he will be, in this case. And then again I think he won't be, and it goes on like this. So for a lot of days I kept going crazy tossing between both possibilities all the time, but of late I've realized that there's no point to all this fretting and that I should go on reading them because I love to. And so far, in a way, I don't with confirmation know whether it's even a bad thing to do. Only after I get caught and my dad discusses matters with me, and specifically tells me that it’s a bad thing can I really know for sure and certain if it's even a bad thing in the first place to be reading his diaries, right?

“An amazing and sad and beautiful, beautiful day. Miss you a lot today.” he has written, to be precise. And he didn’t write anything more yesterday, which is rather unlike him, for all his daily diary entries seem to be longer than my English textbook’s stories, so much so that almost every day I find myself leaving them midway even though I’ve never found any of them boring me. But I think that I’ll never find reading anyone’s diary boring, whoever the person, however written, whatever described.

Omg I’m still on the subject of diaries. So yesterday was quite a day, if you know what I mean. Raghu and I were, what else, whistling. And joking and shouting. In the bus on our way back. This is when I’d told him it’s bad, whistling, and he had laughed and .. all that I told you earlier about. My brother was sitting on the window seat, and then I in the middle, and then Raghu next to the aisle. He kept looking out of the window, my brother. His name is Vartmaan and he’s really not like me, like he’s not always hollering and whistling and laughing to other people’s annoyance, like Raghu and I do. But today the way he kept looking out of the window -- with no regard or attention to our awesome frolic inches away from him -- he seemed a man who knew something no one else does. Morpheus. Not really, but sort of. “His silence was unsettling even by his own silent, unsettling standards” my English teacher would say, that sucker for alliteration.

I don’t quite understand him, Vartmaan. His life consists of, I think, acting subservient to hot girls and therefore often getting snubbed by them, while taking the ones who’re not hot for granted and saying them things he wouldn't to hot girls, basically being himself, and then getting snubbed by them too. And then being sad about the whole messy scheme of things and unable, I guess, to mingle with us kiddies. He doesn’t find our jokes funny, which confirms to me that he really must be a grown-up. Or adolescent. What’s the difference anyway. He says it’s a different world altogether in the senior school but that he can’t explain to me how. I know for a fact that our subject, Science, gets divided into three components physics, chemistry and biology, each of them bigger than our whole Science subject. And that SST will be divided into History, Geography and Civics, of which History alone is said to be bigger than all our present class 5 subjects combined. Said to be so not just by him but all his friends too. Even Dad seems not to disagree about it. But I doubt that that’s what he’s referring to when he calls it a different world.

He kept striking the seat ahead with his middle finger in a way we strike the striker while playing carom. And kept humming a low pitched English song. And intermittently writing something on his mobile phone. Which seems to be his most favourite pastime ever since Dad got him a mobile phone early this year. He didn’t look sad, but every time I noticed him in a small breath stolen between our raucous laughter and antics, he seemed to notice me looking at him and immediately looked back away out into the roads, as if consciously trying to keep me at bay. Don’t entertain me, I’m not entertaining you. Something like that. I couldn’t have guessed what awaited us, and I have a faint feeling now that he could.

When we got home we saw something that literally blew our heads away. Honda Activa!! Hotter than all the girls Bhai loses sleep over. I can’t tell you how awesome it looked. You’d be thinking ‘just like all other new Honda Activas, you jackass’, but no, it was prettier. The bike was there on the porch, a tilak under its headlight. Tenant’s maybe. And then we walked in and Dad was there to open the door, leave taken from his office. Now something’s the matter, I started to think. But he just opened the door and went straight back in nonchalantly after a brief “hey wash your hands kids, and remember to hang your uniforms properly in the almirah”, a novel in his hands, two of his fingers inserted into a particular page near the beginning as he held it. Now there I saw a cake on the table. It might not surprise my school mates as much to see a cake at home but at our place a cake means someone’s birthday at home. But it was no one’s. And just as we get close to the cake, glitter and ribbons all fall over our heads from a bag on the ceiling fan I hadn’t yet noticed, through a lever-and-pinion mechanism he’d got installed, maybe that morning itself, for such special-effects, and which he was operating from his hiding place inside the kitchen next to his room. Then he appeared in a flash and jumped happily while saying “Vartmaan’s Activa’s finally here!!” cheerily and loudly, especially the word ‘here’. He doesn’t usually act this youthful enthusiastic way, our Dad. I felt full of feelings that I couldn’t name.

Though now I think I could have, and should have, used the opportunity to whistle in front of him and he wouldn’t have minded.

This had been on the cards for a long time, I think. Ever since Rajat had got one last summer, my brother had been after my dad to get him one too, a Honda Activa. Rajat’s this guy in our tuition centre who has a big belly, and whose arms can’t help hanging away from him at an angle when he walks, because there’s so much fat on his chest-sides. He’s boastful of his Parker Pens, his swiss knife, his Activa of course, about that he smokes Marlboro, about his Dad’s three cars, about that he travels in Aeroplanes. I’m sure not even air-hostesses smile at him. He’s already ballooned to the point of bursting, but he still wouldn’t stop it, Rajat the boaster. But my brother doesn’t understand. He just had to get the bike, he wouldn’t have it any other way. My dad said he’d just got him the mobile phone, but no, he wouldn’t have it any other way. They say wisdom comes with age. What a myth. He’s more than five years older than I.

Then my dad came up with this bright idea up all parents’ sleeves. He promised my brother that he’d get him what he wanted if he scored eighty percent marks in his class Eleventh, first term exams. To tell you the truth, I’d felt vaguely wronged when I got to know of this arrangement, having got A+’s and A’s all my school life, and not having been offered great rewards at mediocre successes like these. And as much as my brother wanted the bike, I’m not very sure that the lure of it pushed him any harder towards getting higher, better marks. He seemed much the same to me and soon I got over my earlier vague sense of being wronged when I realized it was unlikely he’d get that far. But sometimes I did think how out of the world it would be if he did somehow get 85 or something and earned the Activa. I both wanted and didn’t want him to get it.

Wanting more than not wanting, that is.

Three days ago, results for the first term were declared in our school. Let’s not dwell over my results, I’d just tell you in short that they were capital A Amazing, my marks. My brother though fared not as well as I’d have liked him to, or as Dad would have liked him to, or as he’d have liked himself to. He’d got sixty eight. I was a bit sad about that. Like for a day and a half. That’s as long as I normally can be sad about a single thing. How my brother felt, and my Dad – I’m sorry but I really don’t know. They must not have been thrilled about it either, but as a ten year old writer that’s as much insight I can give you about others’ feelings. I really don’t know how they felt inside, though what I can tell you is that, I felt pretty terrible about not being able to feel, or even guess, how they’d be feeling about it. Perhaps it’s not a big deal after all, but sadly enough I was not sure about that either.

So basically the point I’m trying to drive home here is that it was a big surprise – the Activa that Dad had anyway got for him. Bhai, who of late had been pretty economical with his smiles, couldn’t control his beaming, all teeth and jaw smile. You could see excitement all over his face, eyes so joyed with disbelief that you’d think Shin Chan won the Nobel prize for Physics. Dad was … again, I’m so sorry readers, I cannot explain. I see a tree full of fruits, I love the tree, its fruits and its shade, I always want it to be there, I’d be really sad without the tree, but how the tree feels at any point I’m far too ignorant about. Did that make any sense?

Then Dad and he made each other eat the cake. And made me eat the cake, and rubbed cream on my cheeks, you know, the usual cake fun. No pictures were clicked, maybe because we were so completely absorbed in the present we couldn’t get out of it enough at that time to anticipate how dearly we’d reflect on it when it becomes the past. Now you’re thinking this sentence is not from a ten year old writing. This is. I’ve copied it from somewhere. Briefly, they left to get ice-cream, my brother and Dad, on the new bike. Meanwhile I rang Raghu up and shared the good news. Bragged, for once.

In the evening, Bhai left for his tuition classes on the bike. He would meet Rajat there, on his older, maybe less advanced model. I wished I could see for myself how it would all turn out, the scene, but I’d quit going to the tuition classes a couple of months after I’d joined when I’d met with my accident. I never started going back again as Dad and I both agreed I didn’t really need the formality. I waited at home to listen to the anecdote when Bhai comes back.

At the time he was expected to be back, Dad was waiting for him outside the house, sitting on his scooter. I fancied them having a race, brother and father, from my windowside study table on which I draw pictures of these old people whom news channels are always after. The ministers and statesmen and all. Yesterday, as Dad sat on the scooter outside, the wind giving his shirt many turbulent wrinkles, I was drawing him. Probably the need for recording the day had emerged by now. My sketch was interrupted when he suddenly stood up, smiling wide, waving his hand. In 20 seconds Bhai was in my view too, the two of them talking, same height, similar features, Dad’s smile much bigger though than my brother’s.

Dad saw that the bike was much soiled. Like an enthusiastic kid who has just got a new bike as a prize for his efforts, Dad cleaned the stains off the Activa with a duster, and asked him, my brother, to sit besides him for a ride. I quickly ran out to the porch to see dad flying it into the green horizon. A little dangerously even, like an adolescent maverick.

It was the happiest of all the days I remembered. I was doing my homework when they came back. We had dinner, and chatted, all three of us, about moviestars and cricketers and the programs I love to watch on TV. Then we went to sleep in our rooms, only no sleep met our eyes. My brother and I sleep in one room. As I pretended to sleep, I could hear sobs from the adjacent bed, my brother’s. What?!

My brother was sobbing uncontrollably. I asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t answer. I said I’d call Dad, which he was sure I wouldn’t, and said nothing in reply. He just sobbed, and sobbed. Tell me what’s going on, I demanded. “You’re a very good boy, Guddu.” he said. “That I am”, I said matter-of-factly, “but why are you all sappy”. No answer, again, but he did calm down in a while and went to sleep soon after. I don’t quite know what our relationship as brothers was, or how we were as compared to how other brothers are. Anyway, whatever we were we are not anymore.

In the morning today I saw Rajat escaping the school walls to go to Priya, the multiplex he’s always bunking and going to with his gang. Apparently, his dad has got him a car now, a beautiful, white car, into which he promptly dived and scooted around at mad, bad speed. A Honda Jazz. Till two days back, they made me want to whistle.

The Opening Paragraph to a long experimental Short Story I wrote when I was unemployed¹

They were tired all of them and their shoulders all hung like the hangers we hang our clothes on. The stale smell of fallen beer pervaded the room. I am not talking about a certain, particular day. I am talking about everyday, right after noons, which in their world played the part of mornings. Let me continue. There were two actual ashtrays and a textbook doubling up as one, but there were no cigarettes anymore in the room to be smoked, only dead butts. Everyday at 1 PM, let me repeat. The glass window amplified greatly in hotness the hot sunrays beaming into the room and forming a distorted rhombic yellow on the floor into which they by turns all of them inserted their inward-sinking heads. They gleaned some kind of pleasure from the frankly harsh and intolerable heat seeping into them, their eyes, their malfunctioning noses. They fashioned themselves one with nature when they did such things, like imagining themselves a battered rock out of a volcanic eruption now resting in an undiscovered desert. Their throats swelled from cigarettes and alcohol disturbed their bowels and they thought they were somehow now one with nature, whatever being one with nature means. Probably they empathized with the similarly sad state nature is in now, but I'm not so sure about that. Anyway they were not all nature and sun and moon and trance. Some CDs lay strewn towards the laptop which in turn had been flapped open a little too much, at 130 degrees or something, as though they would climb up the wall and sit next to lizards to watch what they thought was a great movie. They were always watching what they thought were great movies. They were all for the most part living in a movie themselves, one which they thought great too. Great in a non-commercial, classic, cult, arcane, acclaimed, misunderstood sense, let me specify. That they were messed up and far from ideal and that the people they disliked² disliked them gave them the willies they truly adored. That while Orson in the next room got ready and bathed in perfume and tucked his shirt in and sung a sweet soft tune and winked at them as he passed their room while walking into a day full of painless although meaningless gestures and nothings gave them a feeling of spiritual superiority that as hard as I may try I cannot explain to you since to truly understand that part you've got to be one of them, like I am.







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¹Now I mostly only write emails followed by Regards Name Designation.
²which happened not to exclude a lot of people.