I have next to no recollection of Chennai but plenty of my relatives. Which goes to say I'll probably have a nice time but be bored to tears. I shall look at people as a mute version of myself, nodding and laughing and helping out when needed and everyone will think I'm the poor silent sort who will trouble her parents later in life. I shall eat a large quantity of chips with meals and get used to rasam and be asked if I want Aarlicks at night. It's all good though. Some people I want to see because they figured so prominently for the first seven years of my life. The others, I don't know. I'd like to meet the family drunkard but he won't stop talking if he senses you might listen. It'll be like rehab but its ok, as long as I get to go somewhere I'll be awesome every moment. Maybe I'll be so awesome I'll go around asking for the recipe of chettinaad chicken again. Little extreme, but it should freak everyone out enough: the last time I did I was asked, in the most conspiratorial tone, if I ate mutta-dosai at home. Tamil for omelette, it struck me later.

Shakespeare

by Istvan Banyai

Artocarpus heterophyllus

I'm constantly amazed by my love for jackfruits, it's a mildly baffling kind of love. I can't stand the smell or eat a lot of it when it's ripe but it's like hormones, you eat too much and get pimples and a bad stomach. And since it's smelly and yellow and prickly nothing at all in history can be said in defence of this... smelly yellow prickly thing, except for the jackfruit halwa I grew up on and have missed unfailingly and intensely these past six years. And the jackfruit pickle my grandma used to make, and every raw jackfruit preparation within the limits of keralite cuisine, plus jackfruit fritters and kathal kofta and chakka varatiyathu and elayada with jackfruit jelly in it and masala curry and enchorer kalia (which is one of the reasons I like Bengali vegetarian food more than the meat) and, and, and, jackfruit and mango salad with limejuice and red chilli powder. The last one's the bomb.

And last night I dreamt about a jackfruit, but that's not really important.

Wow, twenty ands.

Words I like:

peril

hodgepodge

charlatan

pristine

springbok

propinquity

blister

puddle

lepidopterist

grape

ragtime

poplin

Someday I will disappear. I will turn into a dog and scamper out of this city, jump from terrace to terrace into the sunset, stumble upon a cave on some holiday and swim into it through phosphorescent water and never come out. I keep thinking of outrageous surroundings a lot these days, a lot of the world around me has lost its charm in a way that isn't as tragic as I'm making it out to be, but it's a little damaging anyway, knowing that it's essentially a matter of proportion. To have your world get smaller and smaller while knowing that the world around this world is an entire universe, I don't know, it's like a gnawing pain. This blog's going through a bad patch but it'll pick up, I don't want to abandon it and it's just a matter of one year. Lets see. This is the summer of my smiles, yes why not.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Aaj hum slow cheetah. Why must fountain pens disappear just after you've bought purple ink?

Such a limp listless bit of life that this is right now, why write really when all I'll be doing is whining about how it's too hot and there's nothing happening and so on. Everything has scope for nervousness and irritability. I can't get Mika off the playlist. I wouldn't wish this on anyone, really, so much annoying catchiness, but then he sounds like Freddie and I'm just cranky. You can't be cranky in college when surrounded by people you love, besides there's respite when you need it, but today there was a flattened goat's head on the road outside gate no. 4 and this sick Bubai-type kid kept annoying the fuck out of me on the autoride back home. Ma ma oma ma ma oma ami icekrim khete chai ma ma ma LITTLE BASTARD. Then I came back home and suddenly felt chatty and told the motherboard about my day, but turns out she's in one of her reading phases and thinks I sound exactly like Adrian Mole. I can see why that's funny but not now. So yeah, one is supposed to be above this but one is thirsty and jumpy and more than a little bored, I can't think of one superlative moment today. Maybe the bit where Sukantada called the first world war a "little skirmish" and then went into this really cool history-lesson mode, but that's about it.

My kingdom for a thunderstorm.

Sustenance as of now: Garia-Golpark has evolved. If I'm lucky I get neon green, usually it's sparkly blue and red.

If then we fall to
like bears
like beasts
is there a pact about
pretending not
to notice
how peculiar
our faces look
while we're chewing?

This is the story of Paresh and his watermelons. No one knows why Paresh is so meticulous about wrapping every melon he slices in half with thin filmy foil. People wonder about the manic look in his eye as he smooths down the edges with his little fingernail. He's happy to sell you as many as you want, he'll weigh them in perfectly with only the slightest suggestion of anticipation in his actions. But every watermelon around him is a ticking second, and Paresh waits in the centre of his rounded, green, striated universe with two blood-red circles covered in clingfilm on either side of him.

cxviii the fruitfly does not care. Reflected in the shiny orbs of its eyes are the gleams of light thrown off the transparent cover. Vigilance is not an issue, neither is hate, there will always be a moment when Paresh looks away. There will always be a blink of eye, a speck of dust, a bead of sweat. Whatever the distraction, it will be too small to evade and too quick to invite a premonition, cxviii will swoop down from the lightbulb and sit on a watermelon tonight.

Which leaves the watermelons themselves. If it's tragic to be human, consider being a fruit.

Now call me Kafka.

B4 da 23rd, there is da 11th. Plear dilonda ax. The others are losers. Don't reply to them. Have fun. Come back fast. Aiyxo soldier. PUPPIES.

I want to be a fly sitting on a piece of jam toast, I'd taste it with my feet and rub my hands in contemplation and feel this pure insect happiness. Then I'd leave a sticky pink trail behind me, patterned and barely perceptible because of the black of the kitchen slab, then lift off, avoid the fan and fly out through the exhaust pipe. I want to know what the inside of an exhaust pipe looks like. I want to be the ultimate infinitesimal, only not something characterless, not a particle or a germ. A fly would be fine. I want to be a fly.

Two hundredth post. Wouldn't have thought it, huh.

Defining moment of today: gross garlic-flavoured finger rubbed all over my face. The last time I was like this was during Spectrum, an unknown hand patting and kneading and prodding every inch of my face, urgh. I still feel school around me but it's from so far away I feel like I'm Jimmy Valentine. Not a reformation though, more like a morphing. I'd have wished I was a different person then if I'd had anything to regret, lekin hum hardened criminal ki tarah kathor dil wale ban chuke hain. Kroor. Nirdayi. Yes. Today I wish I knew people better but I also wish I knew better about people, hota hai hota hai. Hum kamre mein apne aap ko band karke kaan phatane wali volume level mein gaana lagakar naachenge. Jhatka matka. Phir Fatima Bhutto ki tarah tragic tragic looks dekar bilkul marmsparshak koi cheez likhenge.

Lekin kal. Mind blank go to sleep type ho raha hai yaa.

Today, I

- Discovered a crusty spot on my monitor and got ticked off.
- Changed my bedcovers and pillowsheet after two weeks.
- Let Expectations play on loop six times because it suddenly came up and seemed apt.
- decided to keep people out of my room for an indefinite period of time.
- discovered an old jigsaw puzzle.
- whined about not having an AC .
- made horrendous chai.
- reread Letters From Zedelghem before the test.
- thought about Simon Webb while writing my Oroonoko answer
- despaired about not having a dog.
- watched Last Chance Harvey after holding out for the longest time.
- tried to translate the Carla Bruni song from (500) and failed miserably.
- boycotted purple cabbage gunk for dinner after boycotting it for breakfast earlier in the day
- swallowed a wad of chewing gum.
- had a twenty-ten moment.

Pin-Ups

Bermuda Triangle

Zebra Lady 2

Kitty

Sea of Satin

Isabella

By Olivia de Berardinis.

I like the fact that they're not Hollywoodish and smiling and perfect-haired. Last one's a favourite for obvious reasons.

Change your heart, it will astound you. This change of heart has long been overdue but it has come and been undergone and yeah, it's spot on. We all have this capacity, right, like a lot of white noise between certain frequencies that you just can't tune into. Like so many band-aids waiting for scratches to happen. Something like that. You reach the right one after swerving left and right, to and fro, back and forth, again and again and thrice more, the space occupied is so small it seems a bit of an embarrassment that it should matter so much but then the needle hits and bam! Information. Bite-sized but useful, the astounding kind. Tomorrow my heart will still be the same, mind, only tilted a little to the left. Otherwise, well, I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me, something like that. I'm a loserbaby all right but I'm a good loserbaby.

आई रिपीट: डिफीट औकवर्डनेस विथ मेक्सीमम रिडीक्युलौसिटी।

I am grateful today for my shuffle playing Mr. Blue Sky first and then moving onto Fly Me To The Moon. I am grateful for happy music and the things it does to you when you're sitting on the floor of your room staring out at the sun steal over the roadstrip, it's out properly now so the curtains have been pulled. I don't get to read much nowadays, I've been hanging onto English Passengers for so long it isn't funny, even though it's not a slow book and I'm not a slow reader. And so many new acquisitions, Wodehouse on Wodehouse, Fu-Manchu, Jonathan Strange, I want to sit down and read but I get tired very fast, there's more music around me nowadays. I sing more now, bleating into my pillowcase at night and screaming myself hoarse in the shower and lets not talk about the guitar coming out but there it is, I'm grateful today for the kind of nice morning that gets you sappy and singing at seven a.m. I love this city because it's yellow at heart. Maybe I'll run around screaming YOU MAKE MY HEART SING today. I don't know. I like not knowing almost as much as I like finding out :)

Apreel Fool Banaya?