I've been saving this up for the middle of the night and now it's raining, so the world's still on my side. Presently I will get up and transport myself to more than five years back, sitting on slightly frayed but still-majestic carpet at an optimum position that gives me access to wide window, doorway and back of armchair. The parents are buying flower bulbs and jewellery and touristy things off boats, I'm looking at a book I picked off a shelf. It's a fantastic shelf to sit by because of the books left behind there, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, MM Kaye, an old MAD magazine, pages full of Spanish and Urdu, this houseboat room is very nearly responsible for keeping me from the rest of Srinagar. Everyone seems to have signed their book before placing it on a shelf, and there's this one book I pick up, Growing Pains by Emily Carr, because it has a flyleaf filled with awkward cramped writing, all caps, talking about who she was. Her beauty and humility will live on. Sentences like that. So I start reading, and it's the last day we have in Srinagar so of course it's a stupid idea, we go out and later I eat something bad and get sick and vomit out of a window into the lake and sleep it off and before I know it I'm looking at the book ten minutes before we leave, wondering whether I should whack it. To this day I'm sorry I didn't.

Trying to communicate how it haunted me will be pointless, I only got through a few chapters and I forgot all about it these past two years but some of the rawness of the writing must have remained, like the paintings in the book maybe. I'm not forgetting those. End of story, Flipkart to the rescue - saw it, ordered it, and it arrived yesterday but like I said, I've been saving it up. I'm scared to annoyance that I'll pick it up and find out it was just an ordinary book but more than anything else I'm scared it won't be the same book now that I'm not sixteen anymore.

Birthday presents making up for last year seem to be coming in by themselves, or maybe it's just a good time to be living. Shangri-la today, stop time switch fine.

So I heard about this today, last night after the Argentina-Nigeria match a bunch of Nigerian students (apparently from JU) who live around my area ran into our complex and had to take shelter in the community hall because they were being chased down by a mob of angry Argentina supporters. Banter then altercation then comment-passing then wrath, the usual story. The police were called and after a while agreed to escort the students back to their residences. I know a man who once told me he'd vowed never to watch a match at Eden Gardens again after he saw the Indian cricket team being booed by the entire stadium all because Ganguly wasn't playing, we've all heard the Greg Chappell-Rahul Dravid issue done to death by now, two years of Bonguly does that. He also said it wouldn't have happened anywhere else, I don't know about that. I don't watch much sports and I might not deserve to have an opinion about it at all, but it's something that's settled in through years of trying to take to it: so beautiful, so self-righteous, so incredibly unsporting, that's how it's always been around here. This isn't a judgment I'm passing. I've heard it from more quarters than I care to name. Merely as an observation, it's slightly sickening but I've never seen people more clueless about where they're really coming from.

Holmes Is Not Amused.

The HC Returns

when up on this branch

life goes from lorduhtheringss

to lorduhthefliess.

If and when she realises her lipstick's almost gone she will run to the bathroom to reapply. Black plastic container, a shade called Fuchsia Freeze or Bronze Shimmer or Crimson Caress. Step two, grab a tissue, fold then blot then crumple then throw.

If you're a toilet cleaner who can forge signatures, that's an easy fortune. Not to mention DNA.

Had a perfect Pinch Me kind of day. Like in the song. On an evening such as this, it's hard to tell if I exist. Like that. Because it rained the sky went mellow and everything looked like it had a vintage filter added onto high contrast, it's tragic this is the only analogy I can come up with but it will have to do. Made one think, all the strange hazy yellowness. Mostly of words, because after all the vintageness the evening gave way to something best defined by darkling; I was reminded of watching an electric tower from my old terrace, on evenings like this I'd be up there dragging bricks around on the floor making rusty floor plans and maps and things. Then I went home and overdosed on nostalgia. There was crackly old music on, then my shuffle played Guilty and there was more crackling and this overwhelming feeling of being weighed down by things, a heavy head and all the oldness of having lived during times that had things like film cameras and water coolers and cassettes. I miss cassettes, I miss winding and unwinding them. Then I decided to clean a little and came upon this book I looked at a lot as a kid, this photography catalogue for some competition themed "What Is Knowledge?", and as sanctimonious as the title sounds, it has some of my favourite photographs ever, grainy nineties images of people with shiny skin and sun spots on landscapes and slight shakiness towards the edges, I miss the shakiness too.

At dinnertime my mum was watching Dil Toh Pagal Hai on some channel, it reminded me of the time I was freezing my ass off at Kedarnath, '97 or '98, and was asked to wipe some spilt tea on the bed with a newspaper, but I refused to because it had a picture from the movie in it. Not only did I refuse, I jumped up and down saying "AAMAR SHAH RUKH AAMAR SHAH RUKH". It's profusely embarrassing now that I've rewatched bits of the movie but not so much, all things go.

Yeah, so all sorts of funny things are happening all around, but a good kind of funny, a steady comforting kind of funny. Like in the song, I could leave but I'll just stay. Aami ekta joyant. I'll topple over and chuckle myself silly any second.

=D

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.

I love my friends absolutely and unequivocally in spite of how much I annoy them or vice versa and it is because of them that many life lessons have come my way, always keeping an impending haircut top secret priority for instance, but of all these friends who have come my way in the form of life lessons and elicited a wow-how-weird as most life lessons are sooner or later bound to do, Sujaan Bhombol Myshkin Mukherjee is by far the weirdest. Just a thought. I shall write something worthwhile once I find something worthwhile to write about but right now it is imperative that the world know this, the fellow's an A-class nutjob.