30 days into Summer

I get an erection when I think of free time these days. Yet somehow all that glorious free time is spent watching Season 2 of Gilmore Girls. I am not complaining though. I noticed a guitar in Luke’s apartment in the episode where Jess comes to Stars Hollow for the first time. I might be growing fonder of Emily than Lorelai – this is when I slow down, shut my laptop and contemplate life.

Summer is here – there’s blood and pus in my nose, boils the size of balloons on my face, grease and leaves in my hair, an egg that I am sure will neither fertilize nor crumble in my uterus, leading me to believe that much like me-that damned egg will live and die alone. In my uterus.

So PCOS 10: VJ Loser. It’s alright actually. I don’t even realise I have a malfunctioning uterus until a drop of the theertha is eventually squeezed out, once in three months.

Mintu and I went to Fenny’s last Sunday. Madam wanted to watch the match so she got there 30 minutes early and sat annoyingly close to the projector. I yanked her away to a nice little table with tall stools under some tree. I am yet to figure out how people grow so many trees on the third floor. Next to us was what they called a Lucky Ficus. Here’s something about sitting under trees –no matter how calm I am from the inside to be sitting right under nature’s bosom and all, I am permanently worried that there are snakes in nature’s bosoms. I kept looking up to see if there were any snakes hanging above my head and hissing. I didn’t tell Mintu because she would start crying and screaming and make us switch tables.

Mintu starts shaking if you so much as say ‘snakes’. Even the word, she says is snake-like.

In other news, I am no longer practicing tolerance and non-violence when people start screaming their guts out while watching cricket. At Social the other day, the waiters whistled with actual whistles everytime the blue men caught a six. My ears bled. I wanted to make something of theirs bleed. The drinks were nice though. The LIIT was an actual tower, a drink called trip on the drip actually came with a drip bag, and there were appetizers called crab balls to you.

Later that night when I went home, the match was still on and the peeps were mental. I was too happy and tipsy to complain so I joined in. But mother, B, M and V started throwing things at me because I was cheering for Bangladesh. When the match came to an exciting near end, my mother kept bouncing up and down, my brother was half sitting half praying, B and M were kicking me because I had spotted a man dressed as a tiger whom I decided to call Bengal Tiger for the rest of the night. Bengal Tiger beat his chest at various points and wept when India won. He had both his hands on his head and cried like a baby. Everytime he appeared, I yelped. Soon, they all joined and laughed the match off whenever they saw Bengal Tiger. He looked so sad – I think he died.

I am reading Tipping the Velvet and feeling bad for myself because after this and Night Watch, I won’t have any more Sarah or Waters to read. She reminds me of London, and the coach we saw London in. I can’t think about London without sighing and also feeling a little guilty. It’s close to a year now and I am nowhere near to finishing that Europe piece.

B is engaged! The wedding’s in August and I promised to wear a saree if she came with us for a vacation. B will celebrate her bachelorette or the Konkani version of it, on a cruise. I am making my list  for the vacations– hopefully I will find the courage to let go off Gilmore Girls and get a life.

 

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May and Might

I am afraid I must write this quickly before another Sunday dissolves into another long month that I cannot catch up with. This has been the busiest beginning of year. I didn’t notice BIFFES, META, BQFF nor any of the weekends that came after. I don’t remember the last time I sat in Parisian and read a book, don’t remember the last time I went to BCL, don’t remember the last time I took myself out for lunch (this is Swiggy’s fault)

Too much has changed and a lot more is going to change. I am not comfortable assessing if these changes are going to be good or bad. What I am sure of is that I am looking forward to another version of myself.

I thought I would quit going to Biffes this year because of Orion Mall. Turns out I can resist moping about endlessly if there is promise of 3 hours of stuffing my face with caramel popcorn and watching A abuse Titus. I can’t complain even though half my salary was dumped in cab fare and food because I caught some stunning movies.

Volcano, Corn Island, The Brand New Testament, Passion of Augustine, Gabo, Dheepan, Endless, and 3000 Nights are some movies I am struggling to remember so I can write about them.

Meta happened and happened well. Despite my dipping energy and random people’s capacity for malice, we were able to pull it off. I was on two panels this time and I must say I liked both of them very much. Part of reclaiming my space at Meta happened after one such panel. As I have come to discover, spaces can have more meanings than people. And Meta has become a space for me that has quite aptly gone beyond people.

It is easy to say this now but the ten days took quite their toll on me and I began to get perspective only towards the end.

And before I could sigh away the many lasts there were at the last day of META, BQFF arrived. Googly on white rum, I rode to Vasanth Nagar to catch Lawrence, anyways at Alliance. It felt familiar and nice to lay on the white mattress and watch movies in a half-sleeping half-crouching posture. It reminded me of normalcy and home. It reminded me of last year and how after averting a fiasco, I went to Goethe to watch Mommy’s Coming — all of us lying next to each other, shoes carefully hidden under somebody else’s, half my head resting on my bag, the other half on S’s shin. S and M giggling and slapping their own stomachs when daughter and mommy did the nasty. S’s disgust at the size of penises and A’s everlasting confusion about life in general.

It’s a Sunday. I am sleep-deprived and severely dehydrated as I write this but looking around the quiet and empty department calms me in a way that nothing has in a long time. Not even Old Monk. I need a new routine. I haven’t done Yoga in three months, haven’t done anything on my list in a year. Grr.

In other news, we said bye-bye to Faulkner and jumped to Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond and R.K. Narayan this week. I don’t know why. It made sense to read short stories after the torture that Faulkner put us through. I am waiting for vacations this year. This is strange because I don’t usually think about them until they arrive but all I can think of now — after three months of 2016 –is that long stretch of laziness with little dots of travel here and there – come soonly, May.

I need to get back to reading and writing in a more sustained way. This month has been cray-cray.