One day I'll melt away. I'll be the girl with tired eyes; I will be the girl with sad eyes. I'll be the one who wasted her life holed up in this glass and steel mansion of nothingness and meaninglessness. I'll be like a million others who have swallowed their real selves and pursued shadows. Sometimes, I think. Sometimes I can't remember how to think. Sometimes, sometimes, I wish I was young once more...

46 days have dwindled to three. Yet, these are the three longest days of my life. My life? Do I honestly have a life anymore? Is having a life all about hammering away on the keyboard for fourteen hours a day till your fingers ache and back aches and your head feels fit to split like a watermelon? Gah. Must. Not. Crib.
Must. Be. Strong.
Must. Overcome.

On Calvin and Hobbes.

I have not grown up with Calvin and Hobbes. As a child I always made it a point to read Blondie, Garfield and skip Calvin. It did not appeal to my sense of colour, and I couldn't understand much of it anyway. Years later, in college, I got started. I was hooked. I am glad that I discovered Calvin and Hobbes a little late. It is better this way. Even now I never read too many at a go. Why spoil surprises? It's a magical world after all.

I recently came across Watterson's speech, 'SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED'. Go, read?

'Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?'

Our little blue car

Ma told me yesterday that Baba has finally decided to sell the car. A man from the garage arrived to take it away. I could not say goodbye to our old, blue, second-hand Maruti 800. I don't have a single photo of it either. It arrived one fine day, ten years ago. Baba had bought it without telling us, from a colleague. The car was in fantastic condition. Dada installed a fine stereo system. We went to Millennium Park to celebrate. Bought jaljeera ice-cream, something Walls had introduced that summer. Some days later, we went to Aquatica, Dada had by then learnt to drive a car. It was a thrilling/scary ride. We rode to Krishnanagar in that car, to Kalyani. I remember reading Harry Potter and listening to Kishore on those long trips. I remember heading towards my tuition classes, scribbling down answers for homework submissions, racing against time. The soft velvety seats. The towel thrown over the driver's seat, the cute soft doll that hung from the rear-view mirror, the eagle whose wings wobbled. Stepping out of the car at Howrah, and stepping into Rajdhani on 25th June, 2011.

Aar konodin reverse'e gelei 'Jingle Bells' shona hobe na. :(

Dillibilli

Delhi, leaving aside its architectural marvels, the sweeping roads and countless markets, is a place that is deliberately hurtful. MSWord helpfully extends a list of synonyms: upsetting, unkind, cruel, spiteful, cutting, wounding, insensitive… The only saving grace is that I have my friends around. I have a fantastic room-mate in D who’ll prod me into eating when I sulk, who’ll light up the house with diyas, who’ll return to Delhi every time with a bagful of cookies and cakes. Yet, sometimes I see worry creasing her brows, and I think about how we named her Giggleburi, and how slowly, but surely, she smiles lesser and lesser these days. There is A with his all encompassing love, his non-stop stream of witty gibberish and poems that go both forward and backward. Yet there are spurts of sulky silences. When both of us know that nothing we say can make us feel any better. We just have to grin and bear it.

There’s S and there is G with their unselfish, take it as it comes way of life. They have restored a bit of sanity to both me and D, sheltering us, quite literally when we landed here. Otherwise, I am pretty sure, my sissy sensitive self would have cried buckets every night before going off to sleep mulling over upon how the maid and the guard and the mother dairy man and the jhaaroo-wala and the countless rickshaw-walas and the plumber and the electrician and even the man selling EGGS misbehave. Rudeness is their religion. Screaming, their normal conversational tone. Cheating, and lying? Why, these are honest ways to earn their living. I know that Calcutta is not the perfect place on earth, and I know that in Calcutta one would still meet scumbags, but this place is oozing with them. Growing up is not pleasant if all it teaches you to do is to grow fangs and sink them deep into one and all before they get a chance to strike at you. That’s how you live here: you kick and scream murder before the other person does that to you. You also learn the art of glib, oily smiles. At least my workplace is wonderful. Deadlines can drive you crazy, but there are so many known faces all around. And the book you have worked so hard for, now printed and bound and nestling in your palms, feels like heaven. Forgive the wonky grammar and the countless punctuation marks. It is a deliberate departure from what I do for a living. (livelihood, income, wage, source of revenue, alive, breathing, existing, live)

Write, stupid keyboard, write. Type, aching fingers, type. Think, lolling head, think.

NOT.

46 days. 4 and 6.

Dammit, where is the fast-forward button?

I was lost when I met you

I was lost

when I met you on the road

to Larissa

the straight road between the cedars

You thought

I was a man of the roads

and you loved me for being such a man

I was not such a man

I was lost

when I met you on the road

to Larissa

-L.C.

It's mostly alright except when the bus takes a sudden turn and I think, this is like Salt Lake, and maybe, just maybe, it will take me to my own doorstep in about fifteen more minutes.

I miss home.

This is growing wild.

This is growing wild:

lightning swallows whole

the sky

the sky

is a waterfall

on streets

on streets

that can’t drink

and I think

this is growing wild.

On a painting.

A sketchbook

cradles you-

a creature,

in corporeal blue

of mystery, misery.

Colour has its own

idiom of loss, pain-

(brown, bleak grey)

of love, imagined

(pink, red)

of love, real

(bruised purple)

of silence, white

of absence, black.

Look in confidence

and find

grainy comfort

(moss, agate, ochre).

My voice

(invisible)

my heart, a rainbow.