say goodnight and go?

Skipping beats, flashing jeeps
I am struggling
Daydreaming, been sitting, the corner cafe
And I’m left in bits, recovered tectonic, trembling
You get me everytime

Why’d you have to be so cute
It’s impossible to ignore you
Must you make me laugh so much
It’s bad enough we get along so well
Say goodnight and go

—

Poppy music makes me happy. It makes me feel like I’m part of one big, beautiful, technicolour, happy world. Well, what can I say? I’m a sucker for cliches. I like believing that what I feel is what hundreds, thousands, millions of others have felt, are feeling and will feel because that makes me feel a tiny bit less lonely. Being without my laptop, without the internet and my constant connection to other people almost drove me crazy last week but made me realise how much I rely on this kind of ‘validation’ every single day.

I spent two weeks in this beautiful new city sitting in my room communicating with people halfway across the world. Which is utterly ridiculous, I know.

Perhaps it’s time I learnt to do things on my own.

—

I miss home so much that I dare not think about it. I miss my bed, my room, my quilt, the smell of my books, my mother, my father, my brother, the incessant noise of the tv, our dog, the noise of the street, the smell of exhaust, the unfathomably familiar sights of the trees, the mud, the sky, the sun, the heat, the cars, the people. I never realised how much I could miss those things that I took for granted everyday. I miss being able to climb one flight of stairs to drink tea with my beautiful grandmother or argue with my opinionated grandfather. I miss being able to fight over the tv with my father or brother. And the thought of all that I’m missing nearly makes me want to go home, and immerse myself in the familiar, enveloping picture of family, home, life.

But I don’t dare think about any of that, because it might, just might be too much.

you’ll come back when it’s over, no need to say goodbye

Funnily enough, I spent roughly three months crying over my imminent departure from Chennai when I was 15, about to relocate to Bombay. The change seemed so overwhelming and immense, despite the fact that I’d already come to regard the city as my second home and I was only going to live with family, that crying seemed to be the only way to express all the tumult going on in my head.

Over two years, Bombay seeped into me – a beautiful, intoxicating mixture that, try as I might, I cannot describe. Like I said to a friend when we made a trip there recently, something about the air of the city just makes me happy, the minute I land there. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Bombay really was my Kirrin Island, my holiday home from the age of 4 to 13/14. I saw the same things each time I went there – the museum, the Gateway, the aquarium, the bookstores, the art gallery and the sea – and though moving there did change a lot of things for me, Bombay has become my favourite city in the world.

If you’d asked me, at 15, whether I wanted to come back to Chennai after my 2 years in Bombay, I’d probably have said no. Chennai was never on the cards for me. I assumed I’d be just like my batchmates – applying to far-off, intimidating sounding universities and discussing the respective merits of airline carriers and UK unis vs US unis. Evidently, something up there had other plans, and I very reluctantly packed my bags and wept copiously over having to leave Bombay only to go back to insipid, somnolent Chennai.

Three years changed everything, though. I don’t think I would be the person I am today if I hadn’t come back – and I realize now that I might have ended up very differently if I’d rushed off to the UK immediately after Bombay. Oddly enough, the one place I always thought I would be a child in became the place that threw unanswerable questions at me, the one place that pushed and shoved me onwards, on the road to ‘growing up’.

I’ve found my best friends in Chennai. People without whose opinions I couldn’t live; people who’ve seen me at my worst and my dubious best; people with whom I share a strange, struggling bond. I’d never had a “gang” before I came to Chennai. I’ve always been a nomad, and I suppose I’ll always be one, but something kept us together and I’m infinitely thankful for my people.

I’ve made heinous mistakes here. I’ve fallen in and out of love like a Jack-in-the-box on a sugar high. Up and down, the rollercoaster ride never seemed to stop. Hollywood romance and Victorian wishfulness were my only ideas of love before; I know now, after multiple crashings and burnings perhaps, that love is awkward, funny, unexpected, capricious, and terribly, terribly difficult to feel or express.

Drama. Three years, of never-ending drama; each time, just when I thought things were settling down into a comfortable, cozy sort of routine, somnolent Chennai threw a new, harrowing, confusing, multiple-phone-call inducing nightmare at me. I’ve been ecstatic, confused, disgusted, hollow, sick, cynical, idealistic, deluded and thoroughly astonished. But, of course, I enjoyed every minute of it all, good and bad. Drama is necessary, drama keeps things real, people!

So that’s it then.

The bags are lying on my bed, clothes and shoes, bags and scarves, books, books, books on the floor, on the bed, on the shelves. I feel oddly unreal, putting things into these giant strolleys. I’m going. I’m going!

I’m going to miss home. Bombay may be my city of dreams, but Chennai’s always been just that – Home.

it’s been a while

What an entertaining week and a half.

I am now the proud owner of multiple pretty coats and jackets and woollen things, along with 4 new pairs of shoes (that brings the horde upto 10!) and a fluffy pink bathrobe.

The train to Bangalore was amazingly shiny and clean. If it wasn’t for the view of the villages and fields outside, I’d probably have forgotten that I was still in the country.

Last night was crazy. I haven’t been that drunk and not thrown up or passed out in a while. Ladies’ Night, yay!

This is most uninspiring post, but my confused mental state at the moment along with the vestiges of a hangover don’t allow for much entertaining or intellectual writing.

But seriously, as a sidenote, I must rail against the vagaries of Fate. Or Destiny or the Almighty or whatever capricious Force it is that governs our puny lives. Does it really amuse you to throw me into awkward situations and then watch me fumble my way through them? Also, while I’m railing, I might as well ask why everything that happens always has fine-print on a sheet of paper tucked away somewhere, just where I can’t get it until it’s too late. Can’t there just be Good things and Bad things and none of this confusing Grey Area nonsense?

Bah!

idle fancy.

There’s such a world of difference between reading, knowing and dreaming about a place and actually being there.

For years and years -I think since I was eight years old- I’ve been reading, knowing, thinking and dreaming about the United Kingdom. Well, to be specific, England. I never understood why I was so captivated by the most mundane things (potted meat and black pudding, from Enid Blyton, to name some) but it always seemed like a fantastical place, with boarding schools full of youthful camaraderie and bands of child-detectives who roamed about the country solving mysteries and eating a lot of strange food that sounded much more appetising than anything I had.

I experienced a dual childhood – parts of me read the Amar Chitra Katha series on Indian Mythology, the Mahabharat and the Ramayana, and absorbed these stories and their values; the other side of me read Enid Blyton, L.M Montgomery, E.Nesbit. Frances Hodgson Burnett and countless abridged volumes of Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Scott, Verne and H.G Wells. For real fantasy, I had Narnia and Tolkien and J.K Rowling – all quite undeniably British in their sensibilities.

And what I read told me that England was a land where things like honour, chivalry, intelligence, courage and friendship were valued. I discovered history; I preferred not to read about my own country’s formidable struggle for power because I thought our nationalist leaders were poor imitations of British leaders. I, quite honestly, was more engaged by the exploits of the various Governor-Generals and Viceroys of Imperial India than by those of Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak or Bose.

My grandmother, daughter of a man in the Indian Navy before Independance, was as torn between being an Anglophile and an Indian as I seemed to be. We went to England when I was fifteen; it was like a trip into a book. I was enchanted by everything I saw, I took photographs of everything from sheep grazing in a Yorkshire field to the perennially gray skies over London. I can’t describe what it felt like; to see, touch and breathe the trees, the grass, the flowers, the buildings, the air of a place that, in my mind, retained its mythic grandeur from ages past.

It was only as I grew older that I realised just how much of my identity derived from my own country’s history as a colony of Britain. And I feel torn, all the time, between my strange love for the history and culture of a country that today attracts pity rather than awe from the big players in global politics. England today seems petty, self-involved and weary: nothing at all like the big-hearted, domineering, self-assured power that it seemed to me. My own country’s problems press themselves upon my notice; I cannot stop being Indian, just as I cannot stop loving the idea of England.

My identity has always been dual; I can correct a native Englishman’s incorrect use of grammar but I cannot read or write my own native language. I can tell you stories from the history of that little island, right from its earliest inhabitants, to the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, but I cannot tell you stories from the much older history of my own country. And I feel a terrible guilt in admitting both of those things, because in this world, my nationality is an integral part of my identity, even if I don’t want it to be.

Right now, on the brink of actually living and studying in that land (albeit a little removed, in Scotland, about whose history and culture I know very little), I’m terrified that my fantasy world will be shattered and I’ll be forced to adopt the same stance of sympathetic pity towards England that people feel today, or worse, that I’ll discover that the colour of my skin and my nationality prevent me from ever seeing that true face of England that I’ve idealised throughout my twenty years of existence.

all that you can’t leave behind

Another Saturday night, and a better one than most.

The bluish haze of the bar, the alcohol drumming beats in our veins as we dance around each other’s public selves. We are so beautiful, so young, so in love and hate with the people that we think we are.

The beer is cold, the air throbbing with human excesses; drowning, drowning, drowning everything.

I’m losing my words again, and it’s not your fault.

We are young women, on the brink of something always but we don’t know what it is and it kills us. Every morning I wake up not knowing and it frightens me. It frightens me to think that we will all go away soon, that this will soon be a memory glossed over by the sepia tones of nostalgia.

This immediacy, this urgency of attachment provokes theatricality: we cry, we hug, we kiss and we forget all our faults.

The picture always belies the truth: we sit, the six of us in front of the camera. Tall, short, large, small, frowning, smiling, eyes shut, eyes too wide-open, a set smile or a bubbling laugh or a hesitant giggle.