I don't know why this blog still exists, I have nothing to write about. Or to put it more honestly, I can no longer write about the things I want to write about here because I cannot write about them the way I do here. That makes no sense. I should go watch a movie and think about this later.

So salty and so upfront you flare your nostrils and unbutton as many buttons as it takes to realise that more often than not, saltiness comes of being a mountain shaved down to hillside shaped into a rock, essentially mineral in any case.

How to unknot neck? Surprised at how face hasn't turned pasty white yet, but how can I reconcile myself to the fact that I am unbelievably bad at this? Had to Google the Qutb Minar to be able to draw it, I have seen it and stowed it away and remember it fine in my head but my hand does not know where to put in the ridges or which way a balcony curves. I am unfailingly good at agonising over small things to get away from life in general, but how to unknot neck? Someday I will be consumed by a violent desire to just drop things and rest, to settle like jelly, to congeal, to curdle, to just stay put, but till then I will tie myself into knots inside. Cut me open scalp to sole and inside will be this one huge tangled thing, almost Celtic in its ability to baffle, frayed ends quivering at the slightest hint of touch.

Playing Ghost Story by Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale on loop, I never liked it before but it's clearly where I am today. Woke up with head hanging off bed and a billowing curtain tickling forehead. Waking up groggy and late on a morning like this (cloudy! stormy! romantic!) is usually tantamount to steadfast gloom for the rest of the day, but had to stretch and run around the house flailing my hands and swivelling my head this way and that in an attempt to feel like everything was ticking right. Result affirmative but doesn't matter anymore, just two more days. Overall though, it's bleeding nuts. All of it. To borrow a line, I've spent the past week underwhelmed to the maximum.

World I love you, don't make me calculate.

Three reasons to paint a cat. Crouching, from above, a furry meditating chicken with a cat's head attached. Sitting upright, a compact eagle silhouette with a cat's head attached. Up front, a a breathing bottle with a cat's head attached. From anywhere, a moulded vase with a cat's head attached. Three reasons to get a cat. Look above. If I wanted to know certain things and was dying because I couldn't remember, like what Anthony Gonsalves says when he comes out of the egg, having a cat around would help distract me. Billi Elliott my future cat. Or Billi Jean. Or Billi Bunter.

Billi Arjan Singh?

New post today! I will write about this thing, not ideas about the thing but the thing itself, everyone knows the deal. I will paint my nails purple and pretend I'm playing an instrument so that I can see my fingers curled. As the night progresses I will worry about not getting enough sleep and continue reading the internet as opposed to the book lying on my bed, I'm in one of my poetry moods. I will create a resume by two thirty if it kills me and send it off. I will wander through (through? It's five by six by my reckoning) the kitchen and look for biscuits. I will tie up the curtains and resist the temptation to paint my bedside lamp sunflower yellow. Now that I have nothing but the summer to look forward to, not ideas about the summer but the summer itself, I will write a new post everyday. Mostly because it'll turn out that there's very little I can not write about through a summer in the city, italicise in. In that respect I suppose a summer is like a prison term, or an Art of Living course maybe. If all else fails there are the gulmohars, but I just remembered, summer in the city means cleavage cleavage cleavage. First song this morning.

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.

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.

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.

Padmasambhava. I've been following without knowing for so long it isn't funny. First Nako and then Gurudongmar, I want to go back and I want to go to Rewalsar and wherever else it is but mainly I want to go to a lake. I want to be back like I was at Nako, climbing up dusty hillside till I reached a tree and under the tree I found a skull, dog or fox, can't be sure. And under the tree I sat and held the skull in my palm and thought about the noxious-looking potatoes with stalks sprouting out of them that the villagers had sold us. Carbide the proprietor at the half-constructed guest house was convinced they were poisonous. We were convinced he was whining was because he wouldn't get paid fully for dinner. Mr Carbide had a face I can't remember, the name stays because he was cocksure and explosive and snuck up on us when we didn't expect it. Wasn't my idea, the name.

Also under the tree I remember that moment of indecision, whether to take off jacket or not in the face of mild sunshine getting cloying and warm. Mostly that morning stood for nothing, everyone isn't Padmasambhava. No epiphanies. Just a feeling of invincibility, but in an offhand way, I can't explain. Setting loose pebbles rolling downhill to the lake and then worrying about landslides. Feeling the weight of the skull make my palm all sweaty and worrying about being morbid.

All the times I've travelled with adults I've been to places I want to revisit now because they aren't cities. Being dropped down at 14000 feet versus planning the getting-there bit. Getting permission to walk around alone versus getting permits to cross a checkpost. Maybe I want to go back so I can obsess over myself in ways I don't do here. How long before they miss me? When will they call out? The mountainside's witness to the fact that you may end up a skull among boulders but the mountains will remain, and what if no one misses you, that sort of thing. Not epiphanies but neuroses.

Eight years later all that remain are trigger-words. Padmasambhava. Skull. Potatoes. Aquamarine lake, headache. Ditto for Gurudongmar, only Colder and More Blue and Fluttering Flags and Sikh Shrine. There's always a chance I haven't forgotten how they look, but I won't know till I see them again, landscapes in old photographs always look alien. If I waste this June, P, I'll never forgive myself. But then I miss out on the other lakes I could sit by, that's what it all boils down to in the end, really.

Hello, prolix post, beg pardon.

My mother owned a salwar-kameez set that had designs I copied onto paper long before I saw the Taj Mahal and knew of pietra dura. She wore it to most of my childhood excursions, zoos and parks and playgrounds, and there are photographs of me covered in sand and staring at her clothes. I look idiotic mostly.

My grandmother still carries a diary with my scribbles on it, I scribbled over everything. I had a lotus phase because the lotus was the easiest flower to draw, but even then things were mirrored and always have been, two flowers on either side, leaves and tendrils bent at precise angles. Everything looking like it was meant to fall into place without apparent reason. But there are signs, I saw them when I looked into the diary and the photographs this time. Age six and the frustration already shows. Age twenty and no matter how hard I look the other way it's always there, everywhere, all over, yin and yang, dum and dee, sita and gita, a pair and a symmetry to everything till I decide I might as well be the blemish, haminasto haminasto haminasto.

This could be a self-pity post or an I Am Special post, but really it's a Fuck Perfection post. Pun intended.