Landed. At nine am today I was pretending to be a rock at Gingee. I thought I'd coax the father into climbing all the way up to the top of the fort so I could see what a splendid kingdom I'd have had if I'd been a tribal chieftain, didn't happen because we realised halfway through we were drenched in sweat and wouldn't reach Chennai in time for the Chettinaad lunch we'd planned to have after a week of hobnobbing with what we call the idli-dosa public. So we turned around, and there it was, a wide expanse of wild grass and manicured ASI lawns with ruined temples and granaries and arched gateways popping out through the rocks like startled gnomes. Telephone lines in the distance. But mainly rocks, so many boulders turning into pebbles near the horizon, consider the number of trolls they'd make, consider building a fort on sleeping trolls. Gingee was my favourite place of the lot after Thanjavur, when I go back again I will spend the day there till my legs creak and then turn into a rock. Or maybe I'll go eat some more mutton ghee roast in Madras. It's all a matter of leverage, I'll lean the way I feel. Yet another animal-versus-mineral instance.

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.