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)
