Static.

I sometimes wonder if I'm just the radio static leading towards that point when you've tuned to the right frequency. Never the station itself.

The rituals of a day

I woke up at 2.30 pm. Immediately opened my laptop to check what I missed when I was sleeping. Turns out, I missed absolutely nothing.

This waking up in the noon has been happening for the last couple of days. You know how it goes, the unease builds up slowly, snowballing quietly, until you wake up one day, like I did today, completely ready to snap because you're tired of waking up and feeling like you've to catch up with the world. Absolutely disgusted and groggy with myself, I decide I'm not going to check my phone, Facebook or Gmail for the next two days. 48 hours, I tell myself.

I intend to stick through. The rest of the internet quagmire, however, is fair game.

I make a huge mug of green tea, making a note to buy some more tea, we're running out. But my birthday is coming, maybe someone is already sending me tea. I decide to wait it out. In a week I'll be 26.

I google the best episodes of Inspector Morse. Reading the synopses of each episode, I make a list of which to watch on YouTube first. That'll be an hour and a half taken care of. Then, I'll finish Tove Jansson's wonderful collection of short stories that I was 1/4th of the way through; before sitting down and seriously considering which book to read next. Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph, some short stories by Lydia Davis, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith and The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Garrard are the immediate contenders.

I told a friend I'll read Colum McCann's Transatlantic immediately, as he reads through Let the Great World Spin by the same author. It is a book I gifted him. We had decided it would be amazing to discover an author together. But I don't feel like going there right now. I feel like going nowhere.

I check to see if any new episodes of Jonathan Creek are out yet, and I learn that it was a season of 3 episodes. I also have the Korean drama I was in the middle of, to finish. I've downloaded some 20 books to my Kindle, all book I've been wanting to read for the longest time. Then there's the fluff I need to catch up on. Really bad reality television. It is as much a job as is a good series, I must tell you.

I brought with me to Bombay only the books I hadn't read (which was still a hefty lot) and a couple of immediately accessible favourites. I think that's why I'm struggling. All this is giving me a little anxiety. So much to be read, so much to be watched.

This false sense of a problem is basically due to the lack of a denouement. I'm amazed at what I choose to be affected by in this exact phase of life, as an unemployed woman.

But first, some toast with jam. And some more tea.

On turning 26.

I realise, with a sinking feeling, just as I'm beginning to make this new house a home, that I can't live with my family. There is just too much baggage. 

Every time I oversleep, it isn't taken as an incident within itself, it is part of a pattern, a link in a daisy chain leading to this person who is supposed to be me, this person who oversleeps. They come in the form of inside jokes or anecdotes, and you realise it is a thing. Somehow it will always be a thing. 

And I'm sure it goes both ways. I'm sure I do it to everyone else in the family, this inescapable labyrinth of people who have seen you and whom you have seen for the longest time. You tend to resent the knowledge they have on you. 

The pigeon-holing that family does, no one else quite gets to do it as expansively. 

My dad is excited about this new place. So everything is a rule. This is his way of grappling with the exponential jump we've made in class. There must be time to appreciate everything, a new-age "let's thank the lord". So we have to eat together on the table, we have to sit in the balcony in the evening and at least one of us must say "Ah, isn't this just great". We have to keep things minimal, throw all our clutter out, keep things neat. We have to find or create a place for everything -- things that lived and breathed with us without a place in Delhi.

But that's not even it, really. He's only doing things the way in which he knows. It's the rest. It's the not knowing how to interact with a 26 year old daughter, any more. I'm sure it's tough for them, because there is no jurisdiction. No "Go study", "Focus on discipline" or "Please behave yourself" any more. Interactions therefore, become a little confusing, a little strained.

I think all my life I've basically had to deal with one overwhelming necessity - to never, ever be dependent on anyone. It was as silly as teaching myself how to workout with any equipments or wax -- because if there came a day when I had to only depend on myself, I'd have these skill sets. So my whole life becomes an exercise in just detaching myself from things. Even in the throes of love, I'll always look for a reason to detach, to walk out, to turn my back (even though I don't); because there will come a day when I will be dependent on that person, and out of that will come devastation and sadness.

So I figure that I've been happier being outside my house than inside. The only reason I like being home is because I'm not imposing on anyone else. I'm not waiting on their kindness and generosity. Even this studying outside thing, will be on someone else's money and it will always weigh heavily on me. 

This independence thing is a disability, I think.

I need money. I need money for my own place, my own space. I need to get out soon. Just as intensely as I am settling down, I find myself wanting to get out.

the kindness of people

Coke sees me wake up at 12pm, and go right back to sleep on her mattress. She's right there when I wake up again at 4pm on the same day. She sees me sprawled over the bed, conscious of the fact that I might be feeling sad -- even though I will not acknowledge it.

I find a video of J, unexpectedly, and keep it on mute, on loop. I can't listen to the video, it's too personal, too private to watch like that. I keep watching it for a few good minutes, over and over.

She looks at me, with a face pack on her face slowly drying away like lagoons on a bad summer day, and says, "You need malibu and some sprite. I can't fix your heartache, but this is a good start."

When she's handing me the drink, hers in the other hand, she tells me with gentle conviction "I've made yours stronger".

She has.

                                                                           ***
Three of my friends get in touch with me immediately. Ask me if I'm doing okay, if my heart is okay. The first is the friend I've known for longest, and also the closest. The second is someone more recent. The third I met a week ago.

Relativity.

                                                                         ***
A week ago I was leaving for Pune, from Bombay. My father asks me when I'll be back.

"However long it takes for her to come back happy," my mom interjects.

My heart brims with those words every day.

new note

Sitting in a cafe that opens onto the road in Aundh. I've met JD unexpectedly for the fifth time since we said our final goodbyes. There's the smell of coffee. I'm having hot chocolate. I'm wearing his t-shirt. "Goooood time to quit factory rolled cigarettes," he says. We talk about food values, family, anthropology, our love for languages. The huge table umbrella lifts off and flies into the air, nearly spearing through a car window. The two of us exclaim loudly at the same time, "That was beaaaaaaautiful!".  The difference in the final goodbye now, being that we are not afraid any more. We stopped looking for catches. The catch itself never goes away (whether recognised by the two parties or not), but it does stop mattering once you stop desperately looking for it.

Drafts

"Most days are spent. That's no way of living a life. But that's how it is," P writes to me.

                                                                 ***

"Kaatne ke liye kat-jati hain. But for a month there, I was alive.

It's in the act of someone touching you and bringing you to life do you realise that you've been dead all this while," I tell her.

I think it's these tiny touches that keep us alive in a journey that is headed only in one sure direction.

You say to yourself at the first sign of the day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day, today's not a good day.

It takes this path - incantation, mantra, charm, hex.

                                                                           ***

To be the extraordinary glitch in someone's matrix.

And then to realise that that is also a part of the matrix.

There is no glitch, there is no spoon.

                                                                            ***

"No text from you for a while means your love life is back on track," he texts me with that steady hand. The words split like a pea pod at the centre, enveloping my night.

                                                                            ***

At some point in time, you'll have to bring something to the table. Otherwise it is donation. 

Momentum

I suppose there comes a point in life, where you're sure of just what you're capable of doing for people.

And then there's that point at which you need to ask, and what are you doing for me?

For J

You pack your bags. I pack mine. We take a bus or a train to somewhere. Anywhere. As long as it is the perfect length. Not too short, we need a night's sleep on each other's shoulder, arms intertwined in part desperation, part solace. Not too long, because we're fidgety and life always finds way to come in. 

We take the bus/train to our destination, and back from it. Then you leave forever, but at least we'll have had this. A window behind which we could sit and watch our love thrive, a window through which the world moved along with us, tipping its hat for once, that we were doing this. 

At what point does it evolve from being an escape, to being the path through which you go out and meet the rest of the world?

The escape itself is always the path, the arrow of metaphysics points strictly in one direction. 

A pattern emerges, in whatever little time we have spent thus. In the fitful, waking hours of the night; or the restless quiet moments of the day, before everything else rushes in. We find each other when there is nothing left to give to the rest of the world. We find each other at the end of the day's journey, weary but steady. 

We are raw. We marinate in words and kisses until, by osmosis, we are prepped for the world's taking again. To live and die like that. 

Falling through the cracks

What is this life even, we ask ourselves.

There is no ceremony of parting. Nothing to mark the milestone of surviving 12 years in a city that I didn't like too much. As my parents struggle, back at home, packing up 12 years of living and aspiring, here we are, two able-bodied children, both suddenly jobless, breathing like one organic ecosystem in the lazy heat of a Hyderabad summer, with our grandmother.

The last week at work (somewhere in June) was where I managed to calibrate myself with everything outside of me. I finally felt at peace. I'd look at these people I was working with, bemused at how little all of this meant to me, now that I knew I was leaving. That limbo of having put in your notice period and serving out a month, a gesture of goodwill on both sides. But by the time the last day comes, you're already a ghost. You've been exorcised.

I left Delhi suddenly. I left it with a truckload of letter coming in from the most unexpected places. Dependable, solid people, they told me, were hard to come by. 10 days in Pune, living like a nomad, and another week in Hyderabad, still suchlike.

Somewhere in the middle of waking up dehydrated due to alcohol and figuring out what the day looked like, the hours turned into nights, and the nights into days and the days into a dream. I sat there, in the midst of pitchers of beer, the one time I did not drink in the week because he wasn't there and things just didn't make sense.

We missed our train, but I felt like I finally got into the right cracks, the right openings. I fell through the cracks, even though I'd spend the last couple of years refurnishing everything and repairing everything. Between the dreamless sleep in his arms at 4 am and the panic in my throat as I left his disappearing visage in an auto, I fell in love.

                                                                              ***
"I think we should definitely meet", someone else texted me in between, from another world I have long forgotten.

No, we won't.

                                                                             ***

I could always tell at the first instance who would be the one to leave, when things came down to it. I love you, I'd say, but it was only the first half of the sentiment. I love you, and you'll leave me. I love you, but I'll leave you.

Because ultimately, two illusions broke. One, that this would not be done to me and two, I could not do this to anyone.

                                                                         ***

I'm turning 26 in a month. I feel so happy I want to die. Bursting at the seams, completely winded. I love you, I told him.

I love you, come back.