Right now, at this moment I am missing Kolkata so much that I feel like taking the next flight home. except that I can't. I can't even afford a decent looking rain proof choppol to wear to office; the ones I have are torn beyond repair. I am painfully hobble my way to work everyday. I am digressing. 

When I left I had no intentions of returning ever. Only a few weeks back I was actually contemplating going back. not because I have outgrown this city. Because I wanted to prepare for masters et al.

One taxi ride through my favorite part of Worli on a rainy afternoon and I realized it'd be a cold day in hell before I leave this city so soon. More on that, later.

But right now, at this moment, I want to go home. where no one will laugh at my gender-confused, south-Calcutta Bangla accented Hindi. 

Not that it matters much. The being-laughed-at bit. But still. I wanna go home and sleep. 

Meanwhile, good days ahead. 

That's my work table. It is generally not this messy. That yellow cup is my favorite. I love drinking my hot chocolate out of it everyday. One day I didn't find it in the pantry and actually bugged Banwariji to no end before he found another one from the messy confused assortment of pots, pans, plates, cups that is the pantry. It seems I have some form of OCD they haven't come up with a name for yet. I googled and none of the types mentioned fit. 
   

P.S; I really like to draw people's attention to unimportant details.

P.P.S; I’m going for Iftar celebration tomorrow.

"...there is a moment when you say to yourself, Oh, there you are. I've been looking for you forever...."

Kurt Hummel: We're young, so we got all the time in the world to get adventurous.
Blaine Anderson: Don't you think now is the time to be adventurous? While we're still young. 

P.S: It is not a See-I-told-you-this-blog-is-not-dead post. It is more like a I-will-die-gushing-now-I-love-Klaine-so-much post.

How does the world's BIGGEST jackass work for a person with zero tolerance for bullshit?

How?

Okay so my roommate talks in her sleep. And not just that, she speaks complete sentences that make perfect sense. She also frowns and has intense arguments with someone that involves a lot of shaking-hand-violently gestures. 

That is perfectly acceptable.

But last night right in the middle of one of her argument monologues she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at me with a deadpan face. Like that Sadako girl in the Japanese Ring. And when I asked her what happened she simply smiled a very knowing smile, rolled over and went back to mumbling in her sleep.

And of course in the morning when I asked her she had no recollection of it.

Weird? No. Creepy? Hell yes.

Now if only the mind hadn't zoomed into an imagination overdrive.

The one where you get to know....

 

....What happened since I disappeared:

i.             I got a job. I am also incredibly happy it’s with an organisation I have always wanted to be a part of two months into the course. People tried to convince me that it’d pay me peanuts and I should go back. My father even offered to support me for the next two years if I agree to do an MBA. I mulled over the proposition for some time and decided to stay back. I think I am too much in love with this city at the moment to leave it now. Did I hear someone calling me ‘stupid’ and ‘irrational’? Yes, my entire clan back home.

ii.            I went home twice only to realise that I was feeling like a tourist in my own city. Not a nice realisation.

iii.          I came close to murdering my religious nut of a landlord and his wife. At least thrice.

iv.           I’d like to believe that as the years add up I keep getting wiser and have realised that what I want and what I can have are two entirely different things. But only yesterday I made a shopping list for love and it turned out my idea of The One is a cross between Michael Scoffield and Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, or Gregory House and Richard Castle. What? You cannot have a rational argument with that part of my brain which makes these decisions.

v.            I think I have screwed up my karma and earned Yaamraj’s wrath; my days are numbered and I am on my way to meet my maker soon. I almost fell off a ridge in Lonavala. My day feels incomplete if I haven’t got electric shocks from the iron. I got literally thrown out from the ladies’ compartment in the train twice. I was two minutes away from getting run over right by a Bentley in front of college. (“Wow! You’d have died a Bentley-crushed death!” was the exact words spoken by S after that. Good to know I have people in my life who will not only spot the silver lining in every goddamn cloud but will also hold me by the neck and point it out to me.) My friend G’s boyfriend tried to kill me by drowning in Kashid, thereby leaving me auditorily impaired for two weeks and emotionally scarred for a lifetime. Pointless exaggeration aside, keep me in your prayers this year will you?

vi.           I shifted to the suburbs only to have my heart broken in the process of leaving South Bombay. I have decided when I am insanely rich/married to an insanely rich man/successfully pull off my first bank robbery and somehow get away with it (I am still working on the plan so kindly do not sneer), I will buy a house overlooking the sea that looks exactly like the David Sassoon Library or one of those gorgeous old Parsee buildings on Princess Street or in Cusrow Bagh and live there. Some time in the next forty years I see this dream coming true so I feel partly mollified.

vii.         I spent ten grand on books. My mother called me up to say that back home, my books are dying a silverfish eaten death and that she wants me to take them with me. I have no clue how to shift them all from one house to another. Plus there are three hideously large suitcases to shift too. I wish I hadn’t bought anything. I wish I hadn’t lived so close to Colaba. The part of the brain which always screams “I told you so” keeps getting increasingly and annoyingly louder every day.

viii.        We had a red carpet awards night in college and I was made the Head of Logistics. The work basically entailed going without food for fourteen hours at a stretch, trying to make vendors and workers understand your bad South Calcutta Bong-accented Hindi, spending two sleepless nights back-to-back, screaming matches with your teammates, wearing harem pants and Hong Kong t-shirt (my ‘Chhotu’ t-shirt. You know, the kind servants named ‘Chhotu’ of the house or chai shops wear. I can easily pass for Chhotu. Put a gamchha on my shoulder and I see an alternate career opportunity right in front of my nose) during the event when everyone else is looking extremely pretty/dapper (depending on the gender) in their dresses and suits, running frantically and manning the backstage, doing last-minute damage control etc etc. The event was a huge success (this, an understatement); we got excellent media coverage too and our professor personally took the three of us, Chadha, Reetika and me out and bought us beer and kebabs. My first meal of that day, yes you got it right. J  

ix.           I travelled. Not as extensively as I’d have liked (‘I am still living off parents’ and ‘college is pretty anal about 75% attendance and all that’ being some of the reasons). But I went to Coorg in October followed by Lonavala and Kashid. I went to Kanheri on a beautiful rainy day and got dragged to the same place exactly two days later by Chadha. We trekked to the top, soaked to the bone; the orgasmic view of the Powai Lake and the surrounding greenery was worth the cramp in Chadha’s cuff muscles and my bleeding toe. Really. 

Way to Kanheri.

Chadha. 

We tried to be all brilliant and stuff with the camera. 

My 'Jack Torrance' moment in Coorg

x.               

Pretty Kushalnagar

Random lake beside Harangi Dam, after a heavy shower

that disturbing moment when after taking the photo you realise
subject is...err...relieving himself

Random

x.i.             It’s been a tough year. But one I was looking forward to since December 2010. Assignment shit hit the ceiling so many times we felt like running away. The professors kept saying that this is nothing and that it will be worse when we start working; if it was meant to motivate us to get our asses moving, it clearly did not help. August to October was a blur of presentations, agency visits, last-minute submissions, sleepless nights, endless fights, people falling sick (from common cold to massive strokes, we’ve seen it all.), breakups, shouting matches, fallouts and whatnot. But this city is also officially my first home outside home...you know ‘home’ as I’ve known it till now. It feels like home too. There’s something for everyone. It gives you a lot of personal space. Much has been said about its incredibly fast pace. People back home arch eyebrows and mutter something about “Bombay girl...short short dresses...o toh bokhe gechhe” under their breath. The city is made out to be an indifferent heartless monster in movies but my experiences have been very different. The people I have met, my two roommates (more on them, later), some of the professors, random people on the road, in the train, in old Parsee cafes with whom I have struck up conversations- the unforgettable motley experiences made it very difficult for me to leave the city for Delhi or go back to Kolkata. It is a heady mix of everything; It is home.

I am glad it happened.   

Maratha Mandir. One rainy afternoon. 

P.S: The gorgeous Coorg photos have been taken by friend, momma and fabulous artwork creator Suryaa Bhattacharya. 

The One Where I Come Home.( And throw up in the station loo etc etc. )

One month in Mumbai and if you still haven’t figured out the train routes and how to read that big electronic board with incomprehensible codes that is supposed to make your life much easier but only gives you a headache (from all that frowning as you try to understand what the hell it is trying to say), you are in BIG trouble. Especially during peak office hours and people are running like mad from the ticket counter to their respective platforms. You dare walk up to anyone and ask for directions and they are sure to give you that look that makes you feel like the cat that still hasn’t learnt to use the toilet.

Before I took my first train ride in Mumbai I had heard a lot of hair-raising horror stories about Mumbai trains-how you get groped, pushed, kicked in your ‘private lady parts’ (my landlord’s mother is a very sweet old lady who lowered her voice and looked appropriately embarrassed while saying out those three words), have your hair yanked off etc etc. My uncle once had to get down at Mahim but the moment he kept his one foot on the station he was unceremoniously pushed right back into the train.

Nothing much really happened though. Yes my body and the lungs, in the process got constricted to the point where I was preparing myself to meet my maker (not exaggerating), my feet got badly stamped and yes I got poked in the back by a particularly nasty looking umbrella and while getting off at Bandra, someone scratched me in the neck and left a mark that everybody in college thought was a hickey, I survived. 

The view from the locals when it is raining is breathtaking. I know I complain about the rain all the time but the moment you reach Charni Road or Marine Lines and catch a glimpse of the sea underneath the overcast sky you feel a little light in the head. (More if you have a bad hangover at 8 in the morning like yours truly). The cold wind lashes against your face (btw warning in advance: that doesn’t feel so good when you’re two seconds away from throwing up all over the seat or passing out in an empty compartment. Just so you know.) and you feel as if you have always been here; you never left. You just can’t.

I never thought I’d say this but one month in the city and Mumbai suddenly feels like home. 

"Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan....zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan..."

Mumbai.

Much has been said about the dehumanizing quality of this city.

Maybe it’s a way of life here.

Like some kind of a basic survival instinct.

When you know that you can be just 60 seconds away from mortality the moment you step out of the house yet you can’t do anything about it, because that’s the way it is here, you kind of understand why the city demands that you hide your fear and helplessness behind a garb of the now-famous ‘Spirit of Mumbai’.

‘Resilience’ and ‘moving forward’ seem to have become the other names of ‘Denial’ in this city today.

When it rains at 10 in the night and you are stuck in the insane traffic and all you hear around you is panic, chaos, ambulance sirens and screams rending the air and your mind has blanked out and insides have gone numb, your friend turns around, smiles and says ‘Welcome to Mumbai’.

Deal with it. Or bugger off.

Mumbai, 2011.

You are scary, incomprehensible. I may have begun to slowly understand you but I am not sure just how much of that so-called ‘spirit’ of yours I can imbibe.

Mumbai, 2011.

We did not deserve to live like this. We just didn’t.