Saturday, November 26, 2005

Treacle

PMS or post-menstrual syndrome? Well, it’s the other P for me - pre. Yeah, a week before you get the trickle of stickiness between your thighs or the matted touch to your vagina, you get the hints of an impending a well, well ‘spent’ days.

A battle on the premises of five minutes, a battle fought with renewed resistance every five minutes, I sleep on, a true controller of senses, sphincter and vagina muscles tucked in. I put the mute on busses rolling by; I merge shades of my sheet to blot out the sun; I put the stopper on the torrential tap thundering down plastic buckets down the corridor; I place a non-resonant glass in between me and my roomy who’s blow-drying her hair; I squiggle around and curl up like a foetus to win the biggest battle- the urge to pee and drain myself.

But like rodents, which make their way into the teeniest place inconspicuously and rampage you, my nose begins to itch. Somewhere I think we are predestined to do the things we do. Fate does play a role. Our genes have evolved to synthesize an accurate human being- my hand shoots up and scratches my nose. Very robotic I must say!

Now I’m plagued by conscience- yield to the warmness of the itch. No! Restrain! Restrain! Aah but Mephistopheles doth thwart me-*scratch scratch* the trapdoor opens and I slither into a runny nose.

Rudolph the red nose reindeer aint had no fun in a long while. Go figure!

The itch works its way into my heart and my head, disorienting me. Sneezes that garble my curses; the tingling sensation all over my face, which makes me erupt volcanic white foam with no effect on my teeth; the itch in my scalp leaves my fingers sebum-greased and faint hopes of no lice and no dandruff.

It seeps into my murky blues. To be precise I blend in with the gray of the drasted skies pinching me with drafts. I think it’s the cold but my legs go rigid and ache with every step. Visuals of nerves turning blue accost me and I stare blank into the white board with red veined eyes. Cold blasts nudge me. Ouch! My nipples perk. Yikes! Sleazy guys eyes will be frozen to one spot. The cold air seems to bloat my boobs. Every brush against them makes me wince. Purgatory- get teased and released. My day is damned!

Those are what you call symptoms. But there’s one more thing - the knife just aint plunged, it’s twisted. PMS makes you a sadistic, masochistic depressant.
Hah this U guys gotta read! V&J u innit!

Can’t get any worse can it? Nothing happening on the professional front…I got an internship after a 4-month wait and a 6-month extension relies on the unveiling of my genius. Crank crank…work dammit! Aah but My love life…my love life you said? I’m a noname lover. Not here not there…wallowing in a quart of uncertainity and ideal convenience spiked with question marks of what ‘am I now?’ as it's fermenting into something else altogether. Limbo ain't always a bad place. Actually, what the fuck, I pick holes in it only once a month...it's the kinda relationship tween a toothpick and a fleck of food hiding in those ridges...you know you can pick it all out. You take your time about it and it doesn't hurt when it's wedged in either...it happens all the time, you don't stop eating. Escalating expenditure has my parents asking me to account. It’s me for Christ sake! No, it’s not that the simplest of calculations elude me; it’s just that I’m a complication addict. I spend on petty things like calls. Calls to my friends mind you but I end up staying mum anyways. I’m an inexplicably clean person who can spring an instantaneous thought in anyone of ‘Is she on something?’

There has to be the goat, the scapegoat, something to point to, something to purge yourself off on, some unheard of planet sending psychedelic rays to my being and successfully twisting my gray cells into greater vices, or Feng shui or Vaastu; by the way Ma can I have a potted cactus on a ledge of styrofoam next to my headrest, 4 inches on all sides, at a right angle to my head and sloped at 45 degrees pointed at my footrest? But I choose my college C to barf on. My expensive mistake that shall go down in columns, or biography or most probably my autobiography when I make it big! Thanks to the potted plant! (‘Unaddled’ my brains with a bang!)

My woe of Rs. 1,40,000 + Rs. 5,000 x 18 months + Rs 300 x 18 months has dunked me with a couple of surprising things, all intangible like all education is supposed to be, things I’m happy about, stuff I’m happy I’ve discovered. Here’s the jumbled blessing of fate and circumstance:

  • A good friend to my shrinking-by-definitions friends circle – J. Sharp, cherubic devil, tipsy over the slightest signs of delightful things, terribly cute, and yeah all those things that go into a good friend, always around…always.
  • One kickass partner when it comes to brainstorming – V my Pandi. My unassuming genious! The moron who doesn’t know what she’s about but can unearth brands and strategies and trigger you off simultaneously. She ain’t diplomatic she’s so fucking giving! Space and spaced out...god I love her!
  • Branding concepts and strategies. Yep, the apriori put in words
  • A winning ad pitch
  • Brilliant strategies for NEPAD, an organisation V and I grew to love passionately. I still believe we could’ve won (‘cept that we forgot G8 was behind it?) And that brings me to my next point…
  • Indians are freaking geniouses! We’re supertechy compared to the rest of the world ‘cept for those inscrutable Indians all over ze world
  • That I am a supertechy
  • That I can live with new people, that I wouldn’t exactly ever be the hermit crab
  • That I can go without food for a week
  • There are so many things I can do without, like coffee every evening, breakfast, toothpaste
  • Space and choices and never afflicted with the Hamlet syndrome
  • The hallucinating effect of running money
  • People who aren’t all tamilians or malayalis
  • 1gb of songs
  • A pair of Platypus like flat chappals. It is intangible…comfort is!

Rs. 2,35,400 plus miscellaneous expenses and all the above…tis been worthwhile in its own weird ass way methinks.

Pop de mumble!

You feel like your walking on silvery cold fish bellies. Everything is wet. Nothing dries. Your nose sprouts a leak. And that’s when you know the monsoon is in for good. Well, Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. A burst through the gray, a week yellow pallor spots your yard and out you go to bask in it, turning every inch of your face and body as though under a blocked sprinkler choking water out in spurts. Just as the imagined meager warmth filters through you epidermis, plop! You go colour blind again…the gray belly delivers ferocious lil gray monsters.

The monsoon’s were fun you know. When pollution was yet to be a concern, before we found out about acid rain, before the roads were raised and all the piddles of men and dogs swirled around in some catalystic formula of liquid manure and stagnated around the bushes in the garden; before our moms got wind of all the dengue, malaria, cholera and family and kept us indoors and stunted our immune powers for good. We’re old before our times and we ain’t going at it gracefully ;-) Really, with absolutely nothing to do when you’re marooned on an island (thank god for raised foundations!) and perpetual power cuts and swatting yourself silly and turning yourself into a polka dotted canvas of dead squashed mosquitoes, you just gotta look around. Well, it certainly is the greenhouse effect! Literally…man you’ve seen so many shades of green before; all the emerald glistening with dew, rustling in the breeze, sprinkling you with fresh oxygenated water? The traffic’s on a low. Not a murmur of a thanni potta exhaust trying to sputter to life. You learn to breathe in deep. So you begin to listen. You feel a lil Elizabethan with the mufflers around your neck like a cruffed up high collar. And in keeping with it, life is shortened with every sigh. That really can’t be helped cause you do begin to listen to all the beauty you clogged your ears and eyes to with a diagnosis of ‘cold’; to your own breathing, to the buzz of insects, the croaks of frogs whom we thought long gone, the slick trails of snails, the sky in the water, the bristling wet crow, the huge cute bandicoot sheltering in your verandah shrugging its patchy coat, the moist-laden silence.

That’s the upside. There’s beauty in everything. And of course asymmetry is the rule of being beautiful. Your nose is a sprinkler, your throat sounds like a cross between Doby and Hagrid, you want to shove your back scrubber down your throat and get that itch, you hate stepping into the bathroom cause it’s perpetually damp, you wish you can go without a bath or a brush but risk end up smelling like a mouldy piece of cloth, you slip and slide with your rubber chappals after every cockroach that wants to snuggle into your room, and the Hit you sozzle them with never outgrows its pungency, your mom keeps ordering you to blow your nose (very embarrassing), you can’t be without the fan but you freeze even at three, fever’s on the way, power cuts leave you with no option but to sleep, you fall in love with your bed but every time you get up you got a blasted headache cause you’ve overdone it, ice cream is elusive and just kashayam at regular intervals, weirdly you come to like it.

Yup, it’s a world of black and white. We all need highlights…contrasts. Just shut up and look around. And when you think you’re tired of waiting, when you think you’ve had your share of monsoon beauty, go look at yourself in the mirror in the half-light. You want to be out there! Watching it all.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…
 
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