On this evening spent

When I came back home today the sunlight was just fading. As I turned the key and opened the door to our apartment I could see the faint light through the curtains that cover the French windows in our living room. I switched on a light as soon as I entered though, out of habit, immediately shutting out any trace of the remaining daylight. I put the keys on the foyer along with the cards and some loose change. I pulled out the cell phone from my bag and plugged it in for charging. The battery had long died. I walked across the hall, to open the doors of the three rooms one by one. First the bedroom. I peeked in out of habit but did not enter. Then the study where I switched on a solitary dim light. And then the guest room. Where we have been sleeping for a few weeks now because that is the only room where the air conditioning works and we have been too busy to get the others repaired.

I didn’t take the clothes off the clothes hanger today. I didn’t feel an urgent need to fold them and put them away immediately. I noticed that we were out of drinking water. But I was not irked by the fact that it should have been ordered yesterday. I picked up the phone and dialed the number for the convenience store. They didn’t pick up the first time. I calmly dialed again. I had already decided that I’ll take out the ice cubes from the freezer and let them melt so that I could pour the water into a bottle and use it. But they picked up. I placed my order and floated to the bedroom.

The house, our house, was empty. Normally I resented it. Bitterly. I would spoil my mood thinking how I had no one to come back to at the end of the day. I would always remind myself how lonely I was.

But strangely today I had looked forward to being alone. Not lonely but being on my own.

I took a long hot shower using a bath gel that I had bought months before but never used. I dried myself and stood in front of the bathroom mirror scrubbing my face. I applied a face pack after almost a year. I rinsed it away when it dried and applied cream that promised to keep my skin hydrated through the night. A cream, that S brought me last year when she visited from the States. And I took it out of the box today. I put on my nightclothes and toyed with the idea of giving myself a pedicure. Too much work, I thought. I lit an incense stick. The smell of sandalwood filling the whole house instantly.

For dinner I would mash boiled potatoes with my hand and mix it with some salt and mustard oil. There will be a boiled egg. I’ll sit on the floor of the living room eating the egg and potatoes with rice. I will add generous amounts of ghee to the rice and bite small bits off a green chilly while I devour my meal.

When I am in bed later tonight night, I’ll read for as long as I want. I might forget to switch off the light. I might also lie in the center of the bed and use all the four pillows for my comfort.

All this sounds rather strange to myself. Really. As I sit in the living room, typing this on my laptop and listening to the drone of the air conditioning, I realize how much I had missed being by myself. How much I had missed doing exactly what I felt like doing. Without rush, without thinking.

It is odd, one might think. But it is today after eight hours of work, three hours of commute, the prospect of eating rice with generous amounts of ghee, the scent of sandalwood and the new bath gel that I feel close to myself again.

Yes, I admit that it sounds unreal. But I seem to have muchly missed my time alone.

On companionship

Inspired by a true story

***

It is a quiet evening in the two room apartment. He is watching an old Amitabh Bachhan movie on TV while flipping to the sports channel in the break to check on the cricket score. He lets out a sigh. His team is losing. Again. He smiles and reaches out for his cell phone. “They are losing again. 86/4. Did you buy the shirts?”.

She is alone in an empty apartment in Delhi. Visiting her younger daughter for ten days. She is  busy taking out the Raajma rice from the fridge. She checks the chicken to see if its marinated properly. Her cell phone beeps in the living room. She walks briskly to the pick up her phone from beside the floor cushion. She checks the message and smiles to herself. “Gd I m not wtchng mtch. Bght 2 t shirts 4 Rishi n 1 pajama 4 u. Shud I buy bedsheet for Bhabi?”

“Yes. If you have time. Buy something for Divya.”

“I wnt 2 buy sarees 4 Nitya. She nvr gets 2 buy anythn.”

“Ok. Do you have money? Should I send you some?”

“I have 2th now. I wl take 2th more frm Divya.”

“Don’t take from Divya. I will send money to Divya’s office by courier.”

“Ok. Finish th mutn today. Dnt kp it in th fridge nemore.”

“When will your train reach on Sunday?”

“930am. Wl u cm? Drvr wil b thr?”

“No. I’ll take auto and come.”

Two days later.

A small envelope is delivered to Divya’s office. Divya absent mindedly tears the envelope open while glancing through a long and important email. She restlessly looks at the small piece of paper inside the envelope. The paper is folded and is stapled from three sides. She rips open the paper and finds three thousand rupee notes and one five hundred note inside. The note said:

“Divya, Please hand this over to your mother. The 500 is for her phone recharge.”

Divya smiles to herself.

Divya’s parents never hold hands in front of her. They never cook a meal together. Her mother steps out of the house only with her father to buy mostly what her father approves of. Her father never steps into the kitchen and makes a cup of tea. Her mother stayed and took care of her in laws throughout their lives. Her father meets his in laws only twice a year.

Yet, Divya knows that they always watch cricket matches together. Her father never forgets to bring the ‘mogra’ for her mother on his way back from work. Her mother, in spite of having her own job, always asks her father for money for her daily needs. Her father always relents, giving her some extra, never questioning her on her expenses or her income. Her mother reminds him about the medicines they take in the mornings for their blood pressure. Her father keeps a track of her regular medical checkups. Divya has never seen her parents exchanging any ‘I love You’s. No roses. There has never been a diamond ring. Never a song for each other.

But after thirty five years her mother smiles every time she hears his voice. Her father always messages cricket scores to her if they are not watching the match together.

***

For a little while in her busy day, Divya is reminded of a Graham Greene novel where it said “At the end the only love which lasts is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire as deep as the simple desire for companionship”. She smiles as she folds the piece of paper and tucks it away in the envelope neatly with the money and wonders if it’s true.

What made my Monday super…

… was this picture of my niece …

…wearing the ghaagra choli that I had sent her for her Easter party

Tra-la! Life is all smiles all of a sudden.

On changing times

Sometimes I think I was much happier in my one room apartment in New York. I use to cry there too, you know. Very bitterly. With no one around me. But then R would come back home every night. And we would go out for walks, for coffee. Explore our neighborhood. Sometimes I would meet him in Manhattan. We would brave the crowd and walk to the theater to catch a movie. We used to take the train ride back to our apartment on those nights. We used sit side by side, hold hands and talk about the movie.

Sometimes now I tell myself I have a better life here. I have a big apartment, two maids, one driver, a big car and a good job. I don’t have to kill my back sweeping and mopping anymore and spend endless hours washing dishes. There is no waiting for the train. My career has finally taken off.

But something is amiss. We don’t walk around here. There is no neighborhood to explore. We don’t share household chores. We don’t get to see each other every night. There are no train rides, no walking in the rain and snow.

There is no time. He has his work and I have mine. On Sundays we match our calendars to find a window of few days to spend time with each other. Often we fail. We blame it on each other. He feels guilty, I cry for reasons I cannot explain. He thinks, I write.

And then we give up. Give up on being upset and offering explanations. We quietly retire to our own worlds while assuring the other one that we are still around.

We still love each other. We still want to be with each other. We would give anything to make it work. But the madness has gone. Somehow we have tamed ourselves, taught ourselves to walk and not run, go with the wind and not against it. Somehow, unconsciously, we have let ourselves be trapped in time, money, career and all things perceived to be essential in the pursuit of happyness.

And today, suddenly I am scared. I am scared that I’ll have to stop being insane. I am scared that he will stop being funny. I am scared that we are suddenly growing up and forcing ourselves to think ahead.

Are we ready yet?

I do not know.

On a Sunday well spent

I initially thought I’ll write about my week and what good things happened so I could get rid of my work stress. But then I realized no good thing happened during the week and I definitely don’t want to write about work. So. I will rewind myself to last Sunday. When much fun was had by four very good friends.

Last Sunday R and I decided that we have grown up and that we must think of our future and we must invest in right places. I thought, as a way of investment, we should buy a RV, live in Europe and travel the world. R acknowledged that it was a very good idea but suggested that maybe we should look at some flats. And so we went. large acres of land, partly dug up, green in places and cows grazing merrily. There, they said, will be luxurious apartments in just three years. Glass all around, imported marble, vitrified tiles. A four bedroom duplex too, if you want. After knowing the price, I almost fell off the duplex balcony but R caught me just in time. So we drove around prospective township, scratched our heads and voiced our thoughts aloud. The RV increasingly looked like a better idea.

So, after an attempt to make such important decisions in life, we went to watch Alice in Wonderland with C and S. we missed the first two minutes of course because C had to finish his smokes, and R had to buy iced tea and so I also had to get iced coffee and C felt like having some cappuccino to fight his sleep. But, even without the first two minutes, the movie was just what I had expected it to be. Down the rabbit hole went Alice, she grew tall and shrunk in size. She ate the cake and drank the potion and got stuffed into the tea pot by the Mad Hatter. Johnny Depp is God of course. He is the only one who could have played Mad Hatter in this whole world. The orange eyebrows seemed perfectly natural on him. Then there was the red queen who screamed “Off with his head” and the white queen with her vow of non violence. And the caterpillar, and the Cheshire cat. Sigh! Alice has not lost her “muchness” at all. Neither has the Wonderland. They all seem “much more muchier” now. And I was reminded as to how important it is to believe in as many as “six impossible things before breakfast” to get through one single day! A must watch it is, Alice in Wonderland. Such a delight, always.

Well, so, after we were done with the movie and reeling under the effect of all that fantasy has to offer, we hopped over to Smokehouse Deli. Now Smokehouse Deli is one of my favorite places with sandwiches and burgers and soups and dessert to die for. I mean, they have food to die for. Plus they have a sit out and a giant TV where they screen the IPL matches. Perfect setting for four friends to drown themselves in pitchers of Sangria, talk about everything from human rights to politics, cricket and marriage. S and I, of course, spent a considerable amount of time talking about the “men” kind. Interesting ideas were bounced off like when R said how true independence will arrive when more power is vested with the women and C said Alexander had come to India by sea and landed in Kerala (!!!) and followed it up by saying History was one of his strong areas in school (!!!!!!). S spoke a lot about Dravidians and Aryans (must have been lecturing C about Indian history) and initiated the discussion on female infanticide in Rajasthan, where, she said, female infants are drowned in a “holy” pot of milk so that they go back to God right after their birth! I had a lot to say that evening and I went on relentlessly about gender, gender sensitization, loopholes in implementation of laws, use and misuse of laws and the very warped perception of domestic violence in society.

And no. All this talk never tired us out. We went on for over four hours. Drinking those pitchers of Sangria and talking. When we finally got up to leave, we had to rub our eyes to keep ourselves from going off to sleep while driving! Not a good thing and not advisable at all.

It was a Sunday well spent, though. It was a Sunday worth writing about. And a Sunday that kept all of us going for the rest of the week as well!

PS- You know, I am awfully proud of my friends. They are all mad and weird but they are them. They make me laugh and always laugh at me. I make their day if I fall off a chair in front of them. They actually laugh about that for the rest of the year, yet they are the first ones to pull me up and offer me an ice pack. They are always the first ones to run around a look for ice packs. They made my first anniversary spectacular. They make my house feel like a home. It is only because of them that I am still in this city. I feel blessed to have them in my life. They complete me, they keep me the way I am. Thanks guys. You are such fab people.

(For R, Shruti, Namrata, Chetan, Arjya, Avinash, Shubhagata, Sohini. Also for Maman and Rinky. The last two are very far away from me now but always close to my heart.)