Let's have a pact.

Let me say nice things to you and you say nice things to me and we'll find happiness.
Let us be dishonest but not fake.
Let's avert the question that makes us feel bad.
Shrug it away and not think of it anymore.

Let's forget our bad days and not even joke about it.
Let's end sarcasm together.
Be slightly stupid and ignorant when it comes to the ways of the world.
Let us not compete.

Let's all of us feel ugly and not speak of it.
Be the first generation in the history of humanity to forgo marriage vows.
Let's not reveal all our secrets.
Display our weaknesses.
Let's not talk to psychologists, doctors and beauty parlor ladies.
Let's shampoo everyday.

Let's sit outside on the empty road and sip some chai.
Let's forgive the sun for tanning us, only today.
Let me not say anything for a few minutes without it getting awkward.
Let's dream separately and smile secretly.
Let's not share the Ipod while travelling.

Let's not count our days and think of the future.
Nor of money.
Let's not stay hungry and give in to that chocolate pastry we were eying.
Let's eat with our fingers. Drop Dal on the table. Wipe it with our own hands.

Let's be unhygienic and stink of happiness all the time.
Forget the showers for a day or two.
Keep them mosquitoes in our room to live as they will.
Let's not electrocute them.

Allow me to blush when you compliment and mumble a tiny ThanksYa.
I'll allow you to remain silent after the exchange.
Let us not be sadists today and strive to make everyone feel better.
Let me be lame, girly and a bit of a pansy today and I'll let you be a weiner.

Let me laugh when nothing is funny.
Let yourself join me and together we'll laugh and happiness will follow us instead.

The happy part of your day has ended.

I can't decide whether sad people make me sadder or happy people.

Life is sad.
You may enjoy an entire week, at a stretch completely unaware of this fact but at the end of the week it brings you back to the same conclusion.
Life is sad.
Sadness may evaporate when you are having fun/cold coffee/sex/all at the same time/a combination of two but after all is said and done and had, life is sad, essentially.
Now you may not be convinced by what I say in this post because of the obvious lack of vocabulary or statistics and an excess of the Law of Repetition or happy people in the world but you must consider my claims.

Life is sad because everyone compromises and after a while they accept it.
Life is sad because people you don't want to let go of, leave and the rest act clingy.
Life is sad because I met a very old man today who had walked 70 kilometers from Electronic city to Churchstreet and he wanted to reach his village Thompur and I couldn't help in any way.
Life is sad because everything comes down to money.
Life is sad because everyone wants money, even hippies.
Life is sad because you can't beat it.
Life is sad because at first you wish to fit in and then when you do, you wish to do something different with your life and start all over again.
Life is sad because losers like us exist, who have nothing interesting in their lives and write blogs to sound less boring.
Life is sad because time heals everything but takes a lot of time.
Life is sad because maybe God and suchlike don't exist. Which means we exist on our own. Which means people with low self-confidence/ IQ/ practical knowledge/ -waist Jeans will fall before the rest.
Life is sad because people get attracted to each other and then attraction fades and both get hurt.
Life is sad because some lucky attractions never fade.
Life is sad because of the word 'some' and 'lucky' in the previous sentence.
Life is sad because people claim to feel the same emotions as in a Bruno Mars song and then act indifferent in real life.
Life is sad because people are afraid of getting to know people more intelligent/stronger/good looking than themselves.
Life is sad because they shy away from being awe-struck and settle for everything that is second best.
Life is sad because the second best option always wins. In economic terms, it is known as 'Opportunity Cost' and most of life's decisions depend on this OC.
Life is sad because sadness is contagious and I'm spreading it further.
Life is sad because at some level I want others to be sad so I can feel happier in comparison.
Life is sad because I am a sadist, just like God.
Life is sad because happy people exist and make you jealous of their happiness.
Life is sad because you are going to post "Happiness is a state of mind, Embrace it. Don't waste even a second on sadness." comments for this blogpost.
Life is sad because I wont give you an option to express your feelings.
Life is sad.

One day, you all will get the promotion you worked hard for. You will get a perfect wife who will look good in a Sari and cook 3 rotis for you. You will have hard-working, talented kids and life will be just so great.
And then the next day, something will go wrong and you will be sad again.

That day, you shall remember the time I tried to convince you about life being sad, essentially with my limited vocabulary and zero statistics.
Have a good day.
And then a bad one.

You should know.

Dear Roo,
You should know that I don't really hug/kiss anyone anymore and despite knowing you for a very short time, you  have been an exception to this rule.
Just saying.
I don't even know when it was that I grew so close to you, I just remember the one time I kissed you on the forehead during lunch and Unat asked me what was wrong with me.
We don't even have that much in common except for amount of tension we take during each course.
And then sometimes, when I am in the middle of my stressful thoughts, you pinch my nose.
Laugh at my wrinkles on the forehead.
Poke my forehead and start talking in Marathi.

I remember the Skype conversation we had after I chopped off all the hair, when I refused to talk and chatted instead, you told me how your respect for a person comes only from their work and the person they are, not the other distractions.
Hair or no hair, that was a good conversation.

You remind me of how simple life really is and how I over-think everything.
That makes you a very special person, not just to me but to others who know you.

Happy Birthday Roo. I hope you like me as much as I like you.

P.S: Sorry we couldn't do much for you birthday. So I painted you this card :D It is you and your 'crow hair' with a few crows sitting on it.

Untitled (Never date a writer)

She will correct all your spellings, take screenshots of your typos and then post them on your Facebook wall for the rest of the world to see. Even though, secretly you'll thank her for the all the likes that made your day.

She will use a metaphor in every second sentence of her's and after a point, it just wont be funny anymore.

Sometimes you will take her out for some coffee and then crib about your day, when all the while she will dream about the first chapter of her novel.

Because coffee does that to her.

And you will realize how maybe you were never a priority when she says "Huh? Sorry, what? I didn't catch that."

She will let go of your hand while walking down a crowded lane when she spots a handmade diary. She will bargain and then ruin her entire day because she just wouldn't have enough money to buy it.

Her mood swings will kill you and some days she wont text you at all.

She'll sound too poetic, most of the time.

She will describe the gangrene in her foot in it's goriest description possible but she will never tell you her darkest secret.

She will never reveal in you.

You might find her two-faced, even.

She will sell her soul to all the publishing houses in the country, trusting them with her writings but will shy away from letting you read that note she wrote about her father,hidden inside her closet.

She will never ask you for a gift and yet, expect you to buy her something special for her 20th birthday.

She will, of course leave hints on her blog.

She may write rant posts about how you annoy her, once in a while.

Your ego may take a hit on reading the comments posted on your annoying behavior by complete strangers.

You'll wonder where the line is.

She will roll her eyes and then nod when you tell her how you found her latest article brilliant. She'll never take

your compliments too seriously.  

You'll feel stupid.

She'll have friends who will make you feel stupider.

Some days when the routine life would start to bore her, she will start inventing new Aunts and enemies in her life to obsess over and then kill them off randomly,once it starts becoming a burden.

That would be the day you will realize she was always partly a sociopath.

Sometimes you will find yourself in awkard situations that never happened. You will be sipping lightly at your champagne as she describes a 'very funny incident' about you and her dog, that never really happened.

You will laugh at her imagination and ability to lie.

Some days you will wonder if she does it with everyone. Including you.

On rainy afternoons, you might decide to be sweet to her and make her some tea. She will take it and drink it in silence, without mentioning a word. Not even a murmured thank you.

Instead she will thank the skies for the rain.

You will wonder what goes on inside her brain, when you catch her smiling without any reason.

You will wonder if the reason may have be you.

Then again, you will never know and curiosity will kill your insides.

She'll get very passionate. About social issues like child labour and Eqypt. You will hold her as she cries on hearing the news of infants being slaughtered on TV and sigh about how she didn't cry the day you went broke. You will have to live with her impracticality.

She will recite her favourite verses from Macbeth, putting up a fake British accent, while stroking your beard and you will blame yourself for falling asleep midway through. 

She will never really tell you how much she likes you, unless prodded and you might find it easier to talk to her over long, sappy text messages. You will be careful with your spellings and the number of smiley faces you put after the 'Goodnight'. 

One day she will tell you how no one gets her and you will try to fake a smile.

But secretly you will rethink the whole thing.

Then one day you will leave her to her words and her punctuations. 

You will think for a moment about what to write on that post-it that you leave behind and finally decide on leaving it empty.

This time the silence will be from your side.

Years later, you will spot her in a coffee shop, typing away furiously.

You may gather enough words to say Hello and she will tell you how well she is doing.

Her earrings will clink as she will start to laugh but you, you will notice the emptiness in her eye sockets.

You will realize then; You knew all her secrets.

Never date a writer.

Just leave her to her words and her commas.

(http://www.redbubble.com/people/xstephens/writing/821940-never-date-a-writer)

Assam to Bombay to Bangalore.

Around nine years ago, when the country was still recovering from the Monkey Man incident and their beloved Shah Rukh was starting to bare all in front of cameras, I was on my way from the Far East of the country to the very West End. 

It was nine years ago that I had been on the first flight of my life, from the humble, almost rural childhood in Assam to the glossy billboard-studded city of Bombay and I remember it like it was just yesterday.

When you pick up a child who has grown up stealing bougainvilleas from the crazy lady next door and place her in a crowded Frankie shop with just enough space to breathe down someone's neck, the laws of nature conspire to give you the same result every single time- That of the child undergoing a silent shock of awe and fear.

That child was me and that time was mine.

I don't remember my first two years in the city. Maybe they have been lost in that haze when I was still getting used to the winding lanes and the sheer number of people that stood around me at any given point in time. They have dissipated into that corner in my memory, just like the Parsi colonies in the city, hidden away by the haze of the Oak trees.

The years that came after, though have remained so intact.

That smell.

That of Sea mixing with that of Raspberry Dollies and the cologne of the elite South Bombay men.

The smell of the Suburbs with their Biryaani joints and the huge Granite Market. Somewhere the distant wind carries the Carbonate to enter the fragrance of the meat to create the most revered Biryaani in Bombay.

The smell of hot fried snacks on a hot summer day and the pungent odour radiated out of a brick wall that has been just urinated on, mixing with the faint drowsy breeze of the Supari and plastic tyres being burnt on the footpath speak Bombay.

Even in the vaguest of memories, that strange smell does not seem to leave my mind.

There is a part of me that doesn't wish to be revived so as to still continue to be in love with the city.

Those days of back-breaking travelling on the local trains and then having to bear the sweating ladies clambering on top of you, while you get to keep half a butt on a seat, regretting having taken a seat at all.

Those days that the entire city faces together.

The floods, the bombs, the bullets, the rapes, the riots, the Bandhs, the Marathons, the protests, the campaigns, the politics.

When even the bus driver and you connect somehow, without even saying it. Both scared stiff of the threat looming ahead and throats tingling with the fleeting adventure.

In these ten years, I have learnt no Marathi and I still haven't figured out the way out of Lokhandwala Complex.

I haven't yet tried the Misal Pav and the Khus-Khus Gola.

I haven't brought myself to love the Bombay weather. Yet.

Places like Colaba Causeway and Vashi still remain unexplored.

And yet, I get angry when people compare Bombay to any other city and I get jealous when friends talk about their shopping trips to Hill Road.

I feel a certain pain when a bomb is dropped on the city, as though a part of my own family has been attacked despite being quite insensitive about the issue of terrorism.

I find a comfort in those anonymous rainy days with the mud entering my converse and baking against the sole of my foot.

I may have shifted my fancies to another city named Bangalore, due to it's better food, music and ofcourse, freedom and yet each time I feel a lacking, I run back to the faint, familiar sounds and smells of Bombay, remembering both;

The child who stole bougainvilleas from her neighbor and the one sat the cheap Frankie joint with just enough room to breath.

Jesus. Jesus wanted that hair.

I cut it all off two days back.
And now they look like :

Hairy coconut.
Ostrich's hairy egg.
Bengali Child widow.
Sadhvi.
Eunuch, from some angles.
Lalu Prasad Yadav's hair.
My ex-principal's hair-do.
One of the beggar children from Slumdog Millionaire.
10 year old boy with boobs.
Black Russian carpet.
Chuhiya, from Deepa Mehta's Water.
Lesbian Activist.
A certain boy whose name, Saundarya (a friend) cannot remember and I don't know of.


But I can bear looking like all these things at any time of the day with acquaintances staring from the corner of their eye while passing by me in the corridor.
Because Jesus.
Jesus wanted that hair.
God knows he did.

She used to work in a diner.

During the day she looked fresh and smiled as she served the bacon.
Her tiny palms took ages to wash the dishes and the spoons and the glasses.
And yet, the water that flowed from  between her fingers made her stay for longer.
Every two hours she would throw open her apron and fall flat on the bar. She would look into her glass of tonic and fix her hair into a neater ponytail.
No one told her then, her hair was perfect with not a strand out of place.
As the visitors of the evening started to come by, she would regain herself again.
She cleaned the tables with two large swipes.
She washed the dishes and the spoons and the glasses.
Sometimes the men, especially the foreign, would ask her to join them in the dance.
She would throw open her apron and kick out her heels.

She danced barefeet; with her eyes closed.
No one had ever seen a woman so fine, dance so terribly out of rhythm. Yet they stood to watch a waitress dance.

As the night poured in, all the local drunkards would be carried out across the street and left there, to find their way home.
She would sweep the gin off the wooden floor and wash the dishes and the spoons and the glasses.
As the lights dimmed out, she would sit with the last glass of tonic, sipping lightly.
She would watch the drunkards singing loudly across the street, through the glass door.
She would sway to their deep voices and the world would blur as she danced.

She used to work in a diner.
Never seen a woman finer.
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor.
She grew up in a small town;
Never put her roots down.
Daddy always kept movin' so she did too.

Somewhere on a desert highway,
She rides a Harley-Davidson.
Her long blonde hair flying in the wind.
She's been running half her life;
The chrome and steel she rides.
Colliding with the very air she breathes,
The air she breathes.

You know it ain't easy.
You got to hold on.
She was an unknown legend in her time.






Fiction after a long time. Lyrics by Neil Young from his song 'Unknown Legend' from the album 'Harvest Moon.'