Torrents won't finish downloading The Camel's Back, it's been forever and ever and I need to trawl through text and answer emails and right now I don't want to listen to anything else but this. Aah noying. And I'm reminded of how a week back there was batshit and hot stone everywhere at this temple where every beat of a drum bought bats flying out of the stone ceilings they were so high above, and how I kept wondering how much more rice paste I'd put into my system. And how we needed to pee on that long ride and had to stop in the middle of nowhere, and I got paranoid and ran into this cornfield, and then this man in a hut nearby, which had one rope cot and one loincloth-clad man for its contents, this selfsame man he came up and looked solemn and offered us water. We said no and he walked solemnly to another patch and came back with two cucumbers and pointed out fields of sesame and chilli, and then asked us to eat lunch with him. Such a rickety solemn man with such a rickety solemn smile.

We declined but ate the cucumbers on the way to what I was later told was an ashram, where I tasted the most unbelievable payasam, but that doesn't compare to the little kids running around in little veshtis with chotis on their heads. And just when I think things are getting beyond surreal I'm sitting in for their evening classes and they're in this tiny dingy room, screwing up their eyes, clenching their hands, and reciting shlokas in voices that make the room ring. Bizarre, bizarre day. Some of them look like rockstars while they're at it, they're that intense and crazy-eyed, and then they get up and grin and run off and there's more prasad. And the guy who was teaching them, that's who my mother grew up next door to, him and his entire family of pundits-in-the-making who've decided Calcutta's not that amenable to doing punditry and shunted themselves back to Tiruvannamalai. True story. Whole parts of this trip were sprung on me in ways that make me very glad no one was around to photograph me. Every frame akin to a o.O

Right. So I could get out of this virus-ridden travesty of a computer and go live a life, but that means finishing Oroonoko so I'll loiter some more, maybe the torrent will be done, maybe I'll go to bed happy, maybe I'll die before my Tragedy exam, haha, but hello, now my internet connection's given out so I'll have to publish this tomorrow.