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?

So let's all be equal. We'll not wear different clothes, we'll wear our hair at identical lengths, we'll take turns cooking and cleaning and take turns being on top while having sex and teach our children the perils of objectifying and sexualising and stereotyping. We'll even bring them up to be on par at all times, play with toys take up sports pick a career, everything will be equalised. The girls will be told they need not read a romance, the boys will be told pin-ups aren't cool, they'll go places where masculine and feminine as terms will come with so much baggage they won't even use them. It'll be an equal world and it will be beautiful and everyone will tell each other what a fine equal unprejudiced society they've created. Till then I'll wear my laciest bra and admit to liking stubble, how about that.

It's like standing at a cigarette shop with a guy and the shopkeeper's offering him Sexygum and staring pointedly at me, it's happened to me twice, it might happen to me more. Just an example. The deal is, though, why view it as a struggle. I've enjoyed being a girl, I can take all the ruts that being feminine brings with it. I learnt to cook because I like food and I iron because I dislike wrinkles, I don't give a fuck if people assume it's because I'm female. I wouldn't give a fuck if they assumed I should do these things because I'm female either, it's not like I'm going to. That doesn't make me a feminist, just stubborn. If people are morons they're morons, you're expected to deal with them as you would with morons, whether they're being sexist or inhuman or kicking puppies doesn't matter. If I can survive the world as an ideology-less person it'll be a miracle, I'm really scared that I'll have to go around doing the My Name is Khan thing in a different context pretty soon.

In other news, Moriarty and TAAQ.

To be back is to be back, one must understand that. To be back is to keep in mind that used plates go in the bottom sink always, to be back is to have a class test looming at you, to be back is to have to suffer things. I'm not being archaic, it's the only word that fits. To suffer things that look so trivial in other frames of mind, things that are trivial but must be arranged into a scheme of things we do from day to day and therefore go through from 07:01 to 23:58 or whatever one's timeframe is. Things that are not nice things like fish swimming in a jar suspended from the ceiling, or a shop hoarding that advertises STD ISD PCO and cashews, in that order precisely. Ok, so this isn't happening, this descriptive stuff. I'm no good at explaining any more so here's what I did, I slept all through last evening and read bits of old magazines all through this morning. Then I made a list. I like lists, they've run me into trouble frequently in terms of content and time spent mulling over them but this list took two minutes.

Liked:

- Red rocks for embankments
- Aformentioned fish in jar hanging from ceiling
- Sambit being mauled by hungry dogs
- Propinquity of sand, even though it got tiresome later
- Bhutbhutiyas or whatever they're called, also tractors with Bhojpuri music blaring from them.
- Crabs, small or big or hidden or dead but crabs, fundamentally.

Disliked:

- Red rocks for embankments being cruel on skin
- Going into the ocean with scratches from the red rocks
- Having a mouth full of saltwater and sand
- TV in hotel room.
- Being told that I snore. But it turns out I don't. Screw the world. I'm Liz Taylor and Liz Taylors don't snore.

I've new music and just heard about Fu-Manchu. Tomorrow I go xerox The Gipsy in the Parlour and I can officially stay in my room till Friday. Maybe the father will agree to going away this weekend out of jealousy or grumpiness, there was visible glaring when I showed him this trip's pictures so maybe Good Friday won't disappoint. Otherwise being back is mind-numbing, tedium to the point of wanting a fly around so you'd at least be pushed to swat it away.

Banksy

Grannies.

Greenriot Police

Flowerchucker.

Had a whole lot saved. Second round favourites, but not actually from graffiti.

Say One.

Compounds, the kind of open space behind a one-storey house, I learnt later you could call it a backyard. I hate all compounds. It was in the compound of my grandmother's house that I hid behind a plaintain tree as she ran out of the kitchen, fist clenched around red chillies and what I now know to be spluttering sesame, and once she found me she started at the head, circling it thrice. Pungent smelling fist rubbing right through to the scalp, then dragged down unwavering to my ear, then down my neck, I can feel a stray fingernail scrape it. From the nape it travels along collarbone to ball of shoulder then down my hand, sticking to the skin, never leaving, words being muttered all along in with purring sounds in between, and then it's down to the wrist, reached the fingertips, then taken off me and flung away. One jerk and a handful of spices lies at the bottom of the tree, mingling with rotten banana skin, being ignored by an army of plump black ants.

This happened a lot for mostly two reasons. My grandmother believed in the evil eye, and I kept getting sick for no reason. The sicker I got the more often she hunted me down, the better I got the more she let me alone, it used to be simple enough for me to understand so you'd expect the world to work in my favour sometimes, especially since I couldn't stand the smell of heated chillies or the feel of her skin against mine. Things rarely work out that way, a new vendor arrives outside school and he has things we haven't seen before, things he calls A-Class Jelly in long thing plastic tubes, and before you know it I'm letting my pants run yellow. But here is a lesson, the avoidance of an exorcism goes thus: steal keys at noon when everyone's asleep, increase TV volume, open back door to compound. Run past papaya trees, leap across ditch and speed it till Lajpat Rai colony, turn left to the market, walk four streets past, stop at milk booth, turn, stare, be reborn.

When I was reborn I had a bottled thandai in my hand and a discarded nine-piece puzzle at my feet, and the biggest compound I'd ever seen spread out in front of me like a stage scene. No fences no gates no postbox, just a compound.

No more loud humming. I'm being erratic even for myself, it's true, what can I say? How long can you pull through waking up and looking for amusement? I'm like that kid in the Gashlycrumb Tinies who died of ennui. Shit, I'm going to die of ennui. Even eating Maggi with bhujia doesn't help. I wasn't born to be contrary and I wasn't meant to choose random ice cream flavours but one can't always eat chocolate. Right now King Lear's depressing the hell out of me, no one will believe that it's my favourite Shakespearean tragedy but it is. Of all kinds of madness it's this form I'm most scared of, the kind where I only have my stupidity to blame. Oh wait, ha ha, opinions. A favourite right now may not even be an option five minutes later, what can I do? I'm not going to die of ennui or contrariness, just vacillation. Say you'll love me whether I'm being erratic or bored or contrary and I'll laugh and shut you out, how's that for a plan of action? Fifty pages to go. I wish the Fool would shut up.

Time to write a story again?

Was going through Rolling Stone India's inaugural issue and there's this interview with Ringo Starr where he's asked what the worst track he had to record was, and he says Maxwell's Silver Hammer, and then he's asked about what albums he's listened to, yada yada, he says he couldn't play Johnny Cash's last album because he sounded so frail, then the interviewer says, That record can get you down.

Then Ringo says, Yeah. If I was ever down, though, I'd put on Leonard Cohen. Then you know you aren't that down.

I laughed so much. Whaddya know, Ringo, Summer Finn's not the only one who loves you.

Ga is all chipchip. It's ten in the morning.
Two baths a day again.
Everywhere there are globules of sweat
trickling down around eyebrows hanging off
noses forming little fluid armies on upper lips everywhere.
So bloody annoying, not to mention unfair
it's not even April yet.
And sweat patches everywhere, people get up at Worldview and there
are dark grey bum prints, and faces get grimy
and the dogs lie around panting and make it
feel EVEN hotter and thonga remnants with rotting
salad lie everywhere and the place smells like
a stewpot of sweat and fur and onions.
SOUP.
Ok I'll stop.

Rubbed a cucumber all over the bathroom mirror yesterday
to test the theory, it's still smelling disgusting like some
creature oozed body fluids all over the place. No
that's not what I mean but I can't think of a
better image.
Ate out for both lunch and dinner. I want to die.
Everything is vomit-inducing
after you've eaten and stepped out of the AC into the world.
Additionally,
wotis mobile number wotis your style number karni hain private baatein
de de koi private number.
Hello.
Ittise lovely weather. fnnngfnnngfnnnfgngng.

Raju has the kind of eyes I've always wanted, he has the smiling urchin's face I've always wanted, he has the kind of dusty skin I've always wanted. He takes us past Rishikulya to the beach and points out little specks in the distance and flaps his hands, then helps me collect rainbow-coloured shells that now lie in a plastic bag on my table, they might be mother-of-pearl but I don't want to find out they aren't.

Raju has a husky voice and a red shawl and says things I don't understand, it sounds like a mixture of Telugu and Oriya but it could be something else altogether. I say things he doesn't seem to understand either, we get by with what I've now learnt are International Gestures. IGs for what is that? And no, not there. And wait, wait, there's something in my shoe. He says he's in class three, he understands the word school, also cyclone. Because he's brought us through the cashew trees and mangroves and lots of sand right to the water I'm inclined to want to bring him along into the boat we hire to take us out to sea. But he disappears, and when we come back he's scrabbling around on the sand waiting for us, bringing out two more shells and a dead crab from his pockets.

He wants a toffee but he wants my camera more. He looks at it like it's a weapon at first and then he likes the attention, by the end of it he's making faces but don't be fooled, Raju's a gentleman. He drags us to see a freshly-caught swordfish and leads us back to his village, kicking stray objects in the sand out of his way, pausing now and then to pick up a dried fish or dig his nose or point at a solitary torn chappal lying around, and then he disappears again. Just like that. We pull out in the van and I'm still looking, only he isn't there.

When the reels are developed he looks quite different. The amber of his eyes and the shininess of his hair don't come through. But there's something quieter and more subliminal going on here, I look closer and there it is, Raju's a star.