Yesterday I happened to be reading Switch Bitch on a bus that was stuck somewhere in Santoshpur at ten in the night, while a dozen bhashaan parties danced their way by. Having shiny pink hands pass you by just outside the window is unnerving, so is the fact that there are forty grinning faces in every truck with the idols, so forty expressions flash by under the streetlights, one after the other. Somewhere down the line I put the book down because I felt all Victorian and didn't want to be the girl reading dirty stories in a bus while goddesses rode by. And it was much too noisy. But then someone flung a handful of flowers into the bus so I picked one up. It was small and white and smelled good, and I put it in between two pages and forgot all about it.

Today I picked up the book again and there it was, the flower, wedged into the best passage in the entire book, only smelling slightly funny. And it made me smile, because it smelled funny, and then I read the passage. If you've read Bitch you probably know why. I don't believe in coincidences, but there is always a pattern to unrelated events if you stretch it long enough.

Contrary to all expectations, I shall pull this blog through for an entire year. And I shall write almost everyday. So there. Make ninety-nine red balloons go by.