Separate lives

Tossing and turning in bed, hearing time move on, second by long second, I often try to make lists, hoping that the effort of organising will exhaust me, bore me to a slow slumber. But sometimes, I pick the wrong topics: the places where I have had the best coffees, the movies that defined my idea of love, the clothes I used to have forever but one day disappeared, the number of times they relaid the road to the house I grew up in. These lists kick off an enjoyable reminiscing that drives sleep further away. The most stunningly failed list, however, has been one I've never completed: the list of lost books.

It frustrates me, the (lack of) memory of a book I was stupid, careless, or angry enough to lose. Where must my first, maroon hardbound copy of Heart of Darkness be? Swimming underneath the used book towers at Darya Ganj when I absently put it down to free a hand and fish out the G book in the Sue Grafton series?
(Oooh, what was a 'Gumshoe'!) Untraceable: the Margaret Atwood collection from Eloor library I read way past the due date, and then kept, justifying that they who charged obscenely from even students did not deserve it to be returned, given away by my spring cleaning father along with his Robin Cook paperbacks to his "friend's son". That might be where it went, unless it walked back to the Commercial Street library when my back was turned, infuriated at my disrespect and betrayal.

There is guilt too, guilt and reruns of scenes that are vivid and cruel like nightmares. Of my Alice Munro flying away, from Copenhagen to Dubai, sharing the seat pocket with the safety instructions, as I run like a fugitive on the slippery floors of the airport and beg the amused flight attendant to stop the flight. "I have to get my book back!" I screech. For most of that defeated walk back, I hate Copenhagen and transit stops with a certainty I rarely feel for anything.

Another time, a passenger may have found a more willing book in the seat pocket. A previously half-finished book, misplaced in a house move, searched for and purchased at the airport, read rapidly in the 2.5 hrs from Delhi to Bangalore and left behind accidentally on purpose. With a desired ridding starkly opposite to the seawind-coaxed calm and oneness with the world I experienced leaving the Yeats poetry collection in a Gokarna hotel room, the page folded at The Second Coming, a pencil arrow still drawn at the line "Things fall apart".

The greatest insomnia comes from the frustration of books unreturned. The $1 review copy of Curfewed Night that my husband bought at The Strand in New York, its fourth page saying 'A map of Kashmir will be added here' (or words to that effect) and its author picture a white frame with no portrait: the borrower of this, I cannot recall despite several baseless accusations flung around. The Disgrace that crushed hope and joy from my being for months on end, the fat brick of Suitable Boy that restored it. Snitched physically from my life, they resurface in nightly lists, conjured up with ghostly lives-- some with coffee stains and yellowing and lustful reading, some with dust and cold possession. Their lives remain attached to mine in my most sleepless moments. Perhaps they will leave me alone if I introduced them to my lost umbrellas.

Return back anthe

My city has changed so much. I'm forced to shorten the checklist, shrink my expectations, conjure up new defences. But some things are paved deep into Bangalore's twisted 40th-Cross-12th Main- 1A Cross-roads. Some barely noticeable things that make all the difference, like the red chutney in the masala dosa.

Rain and the odd embarrassment about carrying an umbrella, CO smell in hair, fanless cool breeze, probably illegal super fast broadband, the pleasure of even buying chillies, switching rapidly between 4 languages, the sweet anticipation of a large family spooning boondi onto bisibelebath in my house, neighbour blasting Michael Jackson and AR Rahman back to back, north Bangalore and south Bangalore competition, street dogs that might take over the world. The traffic jam gripe that is more annoying than the traffic jam.

As long as one of these exists every day, it's a home I can decide to live in.

Tick

Tock 

Tick

Tock

There must be a name for the fear of the clock.

The Quibbler

The anger of the righteous, I thought, would spin the world on its head, shake up the unmoved and blow a storm of wonderful change. 

Today, I realised, it comes with a nitpickiness of such painful proportions that change be damned, how would the crusaders fight the big fights, if the little ones occupy all their waking hours? If wrong is wrong, and there is no little and big wrong, then I severely misjudged righteous warfare. If it is simply target practise, he is wasting ammunition.

A man seeking change today lost an ardent supporter. Far from admiration, all I can summon is dismissive rage.

To unfair suprises

I’m always surprised when I find the salt jar on the kitchen rack empty. This doesn't happen often, but I never notice the bottom coming. I reach for it blindly. And when I swirl the spoon with scooping purpose in the airy emptiness of the jar, I feel let down. “Already?” I wonder like a fool. Yes, it can be replaced, but why must I, I ask unreasonably.

Cheap drinks and unhinged days, heavy silences and endless rants, shared for years with people whose T-shirts I recognize on a clothesline, the shape of whose faces and secret fantasies I know intuitively, whose military unwillingness to lend books I have broken through. I reached for these people blindly.

Days and moments fly by before I see the unfamiliarity. New faces, new quirks, tiring first impressions. A mechanical revision of personal stories in a bid for fresh intimacies. Sprinkled in between the large swathes of the old, well-worn camaraderie, bits of new was welcomed.

But now, in a sharp zoom out, I see myself standing, my knees a little wobbly, eyes wide in unreadiness, in a scene I did not see being set up. It is not ugly, no. It is in fact more alive than the easy inaction of familiarity. But I’m spooked by the precious little say I had in the onset of the strangers.