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.

lol.

labouro'love.

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.

No, no, nonono. ONE SHOULD GO SIT ON MOUNTAINS AND MEDITATE. Yes.

Strange, having other things screw with one's peace instead of oneself. One is usually above all this and bubblewrapped nicely to boot, but it's all ptt ptt ptt ptt now and one is sure it doesn't really matter, if one knew better one would smile smugly and go out drinking or beat up a pillow or suchlike. As things stand now one will probably end up with unfortunate piercings. Funniest thing though, piercing on right side of nose or left? One's capacity for entertainment would suggest both, that way it's all good at the box office. After all, one survived Raavan. That movie's an embarrassment, such an embarrassment, so others shouldn't really compare. Lets see.

Psapp.

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?

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.