One Life: Me and My Life

Two of Us #14

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:41:03 GMT

Day 628

L Day 628, man.

N So we stuck through, did we?

L No, N. that doesn’t imply we stuck through. But it looks like — touch wood — we’re having fair weather.

N Well, happiness is what matters. When the sun shines, you kind of strangely forget about what it’s like when it doesn’t. And it’s not good when it doesn’t. So we don’t want that.

L Right. N?

N Yeah?

L We been out of touch.

N Why?

L Dunno, maybe because I didn’t need you, maybe never did? It’s easier saying those things now, you know.

N You mean you are happier?

L Strangely, N, I’m not sure. It’s like TV. Everything’s TV. Nothing matters too much.

N That’s bad, I guess.

L Yeah, but I ain’t feeling any urgency or any direct discomfort because of it. It’s just a sense that this shouldn’t be right that makes me worry about it. Not too much, though.

N It’s time you got another.

L You think so?

N I think so.

L N, you told me to not give up hope.

N L, we both know that doesn’t matter any more. We turned out fools. And we didn’t really have it in our hands.

L That’s why, N, I’m not feeling motivated to go into all this again, where you are always at risk of turning out stupid, and paying a lot in damages. It’s just that I invest so much… And besides,…

N Besides?

L Besides, I don’t feel an urgency like that. If a situation comes by, I’ll judge it and decide.

N But who’ll turn off the TV meanwhile?

L I guess college will.

N Man, college. That sounds so… so new.

L Yeah. Me. In college. Time slips by, man, irreversibly. Not all of that is good.

N You, the eternal moaner.

L I see reason.

N I see reason to not talk about it now.

L Right, me too. You know, it’s a hard job keeping up with all your friends.

N Count the good ones.

L Can’t. Not here. Bad idea, N.

N Some you will shed.

L Funny, isn’t it, how at one time I wouldn’t be convinced that I’d ever get over it?

N You’ll do the same thing if it happens again.

L Dragon-shit, man. Don’t you wish it.

N I think you’ll be careful.

L Will be, but I don’t know how effective that will be. You don’t get to know how you’ll turn out in a situation till you are in that situation.

N It’s a museum into yourself, isn’t it?

L Not quite as glamorous as all that.

N Hmm.

L How ’bout we put up the graphs?

N Who’ll know what they are?

L They don’t have to. It’s my blog, I do what I like.

N Okay.

L In alphabetical order.

N That’s the way they are, anyway.

L/N.

A12090605 / 140515.

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JEE Results

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:39:27 GMT

Our state engineering joint entrance results were announced today. It’s called West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE). But let me first tell you how much importance it has held for me.

I was pretty darned pissed off when in the first place it clashed with another test I wanted to take. Thankfully, on the penultimate day, questions were leaked and the joint was postponed. I sat for the other test.

We had a tour coming up after that, which most probably would engulf the possible revised date.

Finally, it didn’t. Most unfortunately, because I had decided to not take the test at all if it came to that. However, we would be returning only a couple of days before the revised date, and there would be no time to study.

We didn’t cancel the tour for that.

We returned, and I didn’t study a word in those two or three days. There were my friends who had studied really, really hard (and I mean really, really hard) for entire weeks before the first date and an entire month before the second, and I was lazing on a couch watching TV.

I sat for the test, a thousandth time less nervous than those around me, and those three hours were just spent realizing that I hadn’t forgotten everything.

The days coming up to today, the day of the declaration of results, were packed with anticipation and anxiety for my friends, and a lot of Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat for me.

Today, the results are out. I’ve ranked 468, while some of my friends are in the thousands.

Although it’s not wise to extrapolate each important incident in your life to deduce some general rule, yet, and especially because this wasn’t important to me, I am enticed to declare the rule that:

‘1 unit less of anxiety and nervousness during an examination equals about twenty units more of studying.’

I guess I’m off to somewhere to study Physics now (you thought I’d go for engineering? Pooh.), and in accordance to the rule above, I’m looking for many more books to read and games to download to my phone. Then surely, in some dazzling near future, I’ll be all over your newspapers and TV. You just wait till that.

1Life.

Tags: WBJEE, results.

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That orange plastic bag

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:08:39 GMT

That orange plastic bag, the one in which the last segment of my life was stored away, was transacted today.

I had to do it, because I’m going away to study in a few weeks, and I really can’t leave it behind. Besides, cursory glances at a few pages is all that I will ever be able to do with those diaries. I won’t like handling them any more than that. So what’s the use anyway? So I gave them back.

She looked exactly as I remembered her. She had the same teeth. I didn’t feel scared when I saw her, unlike at some other points of time. She was actually looking pretty good. She was wearing a… er… let’s see… a sky blue and orange top, grayish blue jeans, and similarly coloured sneakers. And kohl. She had a green side-bag. She looked pretty okay. And I think she had a white belt.

She looked a little uncomfortable for the few seconds we talked. She had her hand to her hip, fumbling with something, and… well, you can tell when someone is a little uncomfortable. I liked that, because I wasn’t uncomfortable. Yes, I was a little nervous before she came. We were meeting in the same damn place we had on our first date. Same damn standing spot. However, I wasn’t having any special feeling, really. The whole damn affair is actually very far away now. Very far away.

Our talk was very short, though. But I think, I just have this little inkling, that she was a little taken aback by something on me.

Anyways, I don’t wanna talk about it any more because it’s again starting to look like I’m thinking a lot about it, which is not the case.

Somehow this is right, this is good, this not having to be involved so much. I think I’ll try to be like this for longer, till something happens. But yeah, if nothing happens ever, I’d be pissed off.

Oh yes. The orange plastic bag wasn’t entirely delivered. A bit of it remains with me. Just the plastic bag, really. I did try to get rid of it too, but she wouldn’t take it and was about to throw it in a bin when I took it back.

1Life.

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Sometimes

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:43:51 GMT

Sometimes it’s really hard to believe

That I was born with an eagle’s wings

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like I can fly

When I stumble over trifle things

1Life.

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Blood, Gore and Me

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 06:35:46 GMT

This post will be about me, so if you aren’t really interested, you may skip it.

Now, whatever is the reason for taking the time and effort of writing a post and starting with a line like that?

Well, the reason is that I don’t like talking much about myself. This has germinated from a dislike of persons who like to talk about themselves, either openly or subtly (half an hour through the talk, you start realizing that this person is only talking about himself or herself).

The fact is, I may say that I don’t like talking about myself, but maybe I actually do. There are so many traits in a person’s character that are invisible to him but quite plainly visible to others. These things fall in the Blind quadrant. I’ll tell you about that later. Anyway, so I know that there’s a chance that I might subconsciously like to talk about myself. That’s why I put that apology in advance. In this post especially, because, yes, it’s a little about myself.

There’s something weird about me. A few months ago I started hunting for topics to write a story on peace about. I ended up with the Holocaust. During the related research, mostly on Wikipedia, I came across many grotesque facts. And pictures. And there was this strange realization I felt much later.

That maybe I liked some of it.

Never consciously, but I find myself drawn to the Holocaust, and everyday, on the newspaper, it’s the grotesque news articles that get my attention. There’s something in them that fascinates the inner consciousness.

But that’s not why I’m weird. You know why I’m weird?

I’m weird because I chose to post an entry on this, because I’m talking about it and admitting it.

Lots of people, I’m quite sure, have a similar deep (and sometimes more open) fascination towards blood, gore, rape and torture. You watch some of those reality shows on AXN, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Fear Factor has now become mostly an insect- and moulded cheese-eating championship. They eat dragonflies, maggots and stuff. I DON’T watch those parts. But when you see that there’s a handsome prize money that comes at the end, you know that this show doesn’t lack TRP and has quite a number of viewers. Then there are those shocking videos which are really strings of accidents. I hate those. Having experienced a dislocation in front of my eyes (it was my cousin), I’m not a great fan of them. But that a show could run for half an hour, or perhaps even one hour, airing just one clip after another of just such gross accidents is a plain indication that there are people willing to watch them.

My Life Science teacher (who told me the secret behind the name Lufthansa) once told us that some people are fascinated by the amount of unpleasant things that are associated with road accidents. The majority of the crowd that instantaneously gathers at such sites consists of these people. They have absolutely no inclination to help. They are there to watch the blood, the mangled wreck, and if they’re lucky, a squashed head or two to top it off. And when they get home, they tell people with relish and excitement just how gross it was, mentioning every little splatter of blood. You can sometimes almost hear the silent lip-smacking when they relate this. And the local newspaper that we have in our state, it’s called the Anandabazar Patrika, it thrives off these events. They love to paste a huge full-colour picture of the accident site on their front page, and describe every little blood stain in the article with it. Not only that. It takes pleasure in dealing with all sorts of perverse facts. There was this man Dhananjoy condemned to death by hanging for raping and killing a girl. On the day he was to be killed, the newspaper carried a huge front page graphic of a person in a prison cell silhouetted by light, and below was an account of the things he had done since waking up. It included, I vividly remember, a measure of how much he had pissed, in cc. And this newspaper sells like hot cakes. And well, recently, the Indian public has taken it upon themselves to teach erring drivers a lesson. They engage in the most brutal processes of actually killing them, and there’s always a TV camera or two right there, airing the cutting, the slashing, the uprooting and the burning (of limbs, skin, eyes and the entire person respectively), live for its viewers. We could question whether this is the responsibility that mass media should take up, but a greater question, more relevant to this topic, is whether everyone is prone to this affinity for violence, the public and the viewers alike? It appears so.

This post was supposed to be about me, although I don’t think it’ll remain much about me in the end. Anyway, let me tell you, I hate these shows. It’s true. In fact, this fascination in me is a lot less than in other people. Why then am I weird? Well, like I said, because I choose to talk about it.

I have this weird habit of sometimes wanting to publicize or confess a very bad thing in me, which nobody needs to know. Often it’s a trait that everyone has, but an acknowledgement makes it sound worse. Maybe sometimes it’s not such a common trait, and it’s not good for me to state it out loud, but I still go ahead and do it, sometimes actually exaggerating and outright lying to make myself look bad. I don’t know why I do this. It’s because of this reason that I lost my girlfriend. Anyway, she’s someone else’s girlfriend now, and honestly, I’ve ceased to care. I realize it’s a lot better off this way, and that internal panic in me related to the thought ‘I’ll have to leave this planet without having loved’ has abated to a certain extent. (Is it funny how my thoughts always seem to end with death?)

If you have started viewing me a little strangely after this, well, I’m not surprised. I told you I was weird. But there’s one thing you should know. After reading that Holocaust page on Wikipedia, I was shocked and dumbfounded by all that those bloody Nazi sewer-rats could do to a helpless population. I felt all the guilt that the Nazis should have felt perch upon my shoulders and weigh me down. I felt so, so guilty, as if I’d manufactured the Holocaust. And I wrote a story on it, called Liberation, and it was finally selected to be included in a book. To this day and for the rest of my life, I’ll hate the Nazis with a great, great force.

But that fascination towards violence and torture, I guess that was still working when I was reading that Wikipedia page.

This is what people refuse to understand. Like I said once, they have full colour vision, but they refuse to see things in anything but black and white. Dude, I’m not black or white. I’m grey. And it just so happens that while reading that particular page on the Holocaust, the force of white in my greyness, generated by sympathy towards humans and life in general, was a lot more than the force of black, generated by a primal love for blood and violence. I may be weird and have enough black in my greyness to make me like gross stuff to a tiny extent, but I can safely say that I have enough white in it to never imagine doing anything like that to a fellow human or animal, and to protest in my loudest tone if I see someone else trying to do it.

I can see already that while writing this post, I have, as usual, exaggerated my affinity for grotesque things. It’s really not as much as I’ve made it appear. Some of this exaggeration has been due to that weird tendency of mine I told you about, and some for the sake of the conversation. Phew, it’s tiring to continually analyse myself.

I guess that will be all for now. It’s getting late today. If you want, you can visit the Holocaust page here.

1Life.

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State of Denial

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:44:28 GMT

N & I went to this movie the other day. It was a Hindi movie. We’d heard it was different. It was, I won’t deny that. There was this girl in love with this guy, and then the guy ditched him. The girl couldn’t get over it. Then there came along a second guy, who had been friends with this girl for a long time, and he slowly convinced her out of it. These two were very friendly and platonic throughout. But at the end the first guy finally changed his mind and decided to marry the girl. In the climax, the girl changed her mind and married the second guy instead.

When the show was over and we came out, it was raining. It was about five in the evening and there was that dying evening light all around, dimmed a bit more because of the overcast skies.

We walked to a secluded portion of the parking lot. The ground was very slippery. We propped ourselves against a wall where there was some shade overhead and watched the rain. It came in scattered gusts, some of it sprinkling on our face. A few cars were getting drenched.

I suddenly said, ‘Do you think it’s good to live in a state of denial?’

I looked at him. He was squinting at the rain. Without turning, he said, ‘what do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ I looked down at the drenched, shiny ground. ‘I mean you. That you are part of my state of denial. I am worried about this state of denial. Is it right to be like this?’

I looked up at him. There was a clash of thunder and the rain seemed to have strengthened.

He looked at me and said, ‘why are you asking me that? If it helps you, it’s right. What other definition does right and wrong have? Although,’ he looked away, ‘it doesn’t seem to be much of a help, recently.’

I didn’t say anything to that. Hoping to avoid the topic, I asked, ‘what did you think of the movie?’

‘Things don’t happen like that in real life,’ he said, looking out across the parking lot to a clump of trees that were beginning to glisten from all the washing.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But these are the movies that fetch money. That are different, yet, somehow, not true. Maybe things like that do happen. Of course they happen. But how often? Wouldn’t it make sense to make a movie out of what occurs most of the time? And why do people come and watch them? Can’t they see that this is exactly what has not happened in their lives, and don’t usually happen? Why then?’

He now turned to me and said, ‘if you were given the money to make a movie, would you make one about how this guy wakes up in the morning, then brushes, deposits his waste, has breakfast, then goes to wherever he goes to do something utterly not interesting, comes back, has some more food and then goes to bed? Would you make a movie out of that and still expect to make a profit?’

‘Well, of course not, if I were out to make a profit. So what you’re saying is that these stories work merely because they are commercially successful?’

‘Yes.’ He said, with that glint in his eyes that means he is not telling me something, and wants me to ask a particular question.

I looked stupidly at him for a few seconds, then I think I guessed what he wanted me to ask.

‘Why are they successful?’

He smiled and turned away. Yes, that’s what he wanted me to ask.

‘Because everyone wants to believe these untruths, L. Everyone wants to live in a state of denial every now and then. Everyone. That’s why it works. Every damn person on earth has their own state of denial.’ He turned to me. ‘Stop worrying about yours.’

I looked at him for a few seconds, and there was only the rush of the wind and the patter of the rain.

L/N.

A12090605 / 140515.

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Two of Us #13

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:59:23 GMT

1Life Hey.

Neo I thought you’d killed me.

1Life Don’t be too sure I haven’t.

Neo Anyway, what’s the buzz?

1Life Let’s talk about something else.

Neo You’re losing, aren’t you?

1Life What do you expect?

Neo I expected you to win.

1Life You didn’t actually, did you? Anyway, something else.

Neo It’s funny watching you flee.

1Life You know, those old stories I used to believe in, they’re long past.

Neo Well, then you have lost a lot of yourself too, I’d have to say, ‘coz a lot of yourself was those old stories.

1Life Maybe, someday, I’ll have reason to believe in them again.

Neo You’re leaving this hope in whose hands?

1Life I dunno. I guess you’re right. I’m just trying to flee.

Neo Divulged yet?

1Life Nope. Can’t, I guess. Sounds great to the inner ear when I sometimes think about it, but it’s going to be awkward once it happens. I mean, you need to draw the line somewhere. You leak too much of yourself, and you are bound to start feeling awkward about it soon.

Neo But where is this going? You have any idea how long this has been?

1Life Pretty long, yeah. If I sat down with the stats, I guess I’d be pretty much pissed off.

Neo It would do you a lot of good, too.

1Life I’m hoping to see that good without having to face that unpleasantness.

Neo Flee psychology again.

1Life Hey, I was thinking of taking a photograph of the two of us.

Neo We’ll see about that. What about this?

1Life I can’t be sure. Let’s see. I’ll try.

Neo That’s what you say all the time.

1Life Yeah, but I won’t use that argument again, of our principles being clouded by common beliefs and all. I realized I didn’t like myself much either. You could call that an extension of common beliefs, but I also saw that the perspective you settle into is pretty much distorted. It’s not true. There’s a lot more to things than this view will allow. Maybe that’s where the common belief is valid.

Neo So there is black?

1Life I’ve thought about it. Yes, it seems to be so. That makes me a hypocrite.

Neo Actually, you wrote that as a repercussion, didn’t you? I guess you were looking to justify something. Flee psychology again.

1Life What if I think it’s a limited, distorted perspective because the common belief treats it that way?

Neo Even if it be so, you’d do better to follow it.

1Life Why?

Neo You haven’t proved yourself internally strong enough to establish your own system. Why don’t you conquer it first and then deny it?

1Life It doesn’t hold, N, it really doesn’t. The same logic would want me to ban happiness.

Neo Let’s say, then, that we are doing it for your happiness’ sake, and not for any other stronger logical belief. It’s undeniable, isn’t it, that that’s one thing it robs you of.

1Life I’m not sure I can do this, N.

Neo Let’s do something else, then. Instead of trying to head towards null, let’s head towards a low. A specific, well-defined low.

1Life Let’s see. See you around, then.

1Life/Neo.

A12090605 / 140515.

Resurrected

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:28:57 GMT

It’s funny how, from time to time, you can snip off a huge chunk of your life that’s been trailing behind you towards the past end for some time, and let it drift away, so you can be a little more weightless while walking forward. Like an iceberg breaking off from time to time. You can watch the pieces that have floated away, but never actually get them back. Not funny. It’s not funny at all. It’s actually a little sad, I think.

I, for example, have packed my latest detached piece of life partly inside an orange and white packet in my cupboard and partly inside a folder in my computer. Something makes me open the cupboard and stare at the packet sometimes, switching momentarily to being a second person, looking at myself and wondering what I’m thinking about, whether I’m thinking the things that people in these situations are supposed to thing. What do they think? Are there socially approved lines along which such people are supposed to think? Something made me open the folder today. A lot of chat logs. It was surprising that I’d been able to bury so much amount of my past. Saw a few photos. Fear.

It’s funny how you once endow such things with destiny and providence and other stuff like the ones Paulo Coelho always shouts about. And then you see it’s no longer so.

I guess when you are trapped in a circular, spiraling maze like this all the time, the only way out is to sometimes think it’s funny.

The conservation of mass and energy is a cruel hint of the circular, pointless nature of everything. Why don’t the scientists get it? Why are they so dumb?

Look, hey, let me tell you something. I’m a weird being. I don’t miss my past as much as I ought to, and I worry about that. And I’m always guilty that I’ve let myself forget my childhood, my old friends.

For the little time we’re here, I guess we all try to embrace life as hard as we can. It’s because we don’t know where we were before we first opened our eyes, or where we will be after we last close them. That’s not a good enough excuse to suppose that the things in those two intervals were (a) same and (b) similarly unpleasant and frightening.

Look at an amoeba. The thing’s got nothing called fear. Fear is a learned response due to the constraints of being a human. So it’s logical to suppose that when you die and aren’t a human any more, you won’t have any need of your instincts, including fear. Hence, it’s not reasonable to be afraid of what lies beyond.

Talk about a hypocrite.

1Life.

Given Up - Linkin Park

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:29:30 GMT

Wake in a sweat again

Another day's been laid to waste

In my disgrace

Stuck in my head again

Feels like I'll never leave this place

There's no escape

I'm my own worst enemy

I've given up

I'm sick of feeling

Is there nothing you can say

Take this all away

I'm suffocating

Tell me what the fuck is wrong with me

I don't know what to take

Thought I was focused but I'm scared

I'm not prepared

I hyperventilate

Looking for help somehow somewhere

And no one cares

God

Put me out of my misery

Put me out of my

Put me out of my fucking misery

1Life.

Weird

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:33:29 GMT

A slightly weird thing happened yesterday. There’s a place I go for my Math tuitions, to a Formula 1 race-car who happens to look like a human being. His lessons whiz by above your head, or, if you are good, slightly lower. Nevertheless, you’ll never know what hit you when he’s done.

It was evening. I reached at around half-past five, an hour early like I usually do, for a very uninteresting reason, and as I sat outside on a bench on the lawn inside the complex, solving some problems, I noticed a few little kids, nine to eleven years of age, playing around. There were three girls who’d climbed a low wall and were waving sticks as long as themselves at the boughs of a tree in the hope of procuring a fuzzy yellow flower. They had discovered that the sticks were short, had asked an aged person to pick the flower for them, who couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, and wouldn’t go so far as to reveal whether he really could or not.

If you’ve figured out the last sentence, let’s continue. The girls put on a very businesslike manner and set off searching for some ropes to tie two sticks together. Good, good, I smiled to myself. I always loved these little projects I kept on doing all the time when I was younger. A brilliant idea, a spur of enthusiasm, then all lost in the stream of something else I found more engaging.

There were two boys about the same age as the girls, who had got themselves sticks too, and presumably they were beating them against the trunk of the tree, for I heard one of the girls tell them in a very bossy way that it hurts the tree and so if he could please stop it. I support her, of course, but at that moment her reprimand sounded really amusing to me.

One of the boys was thinner than the other, and the fatter one had huge round glasses. The thinner boy started mocking the girl in a very funny way. It was really funny, blimey.

Then their activities subsided a little and I resumed my work.

Some time later I found the fatter boy standing by the side of the bench on which I was perched. I looked up. He was looking down at what I was doing. His face was smooth, his glasses surrounding his eyes from all sides, like a pair of goggles. There was a slight blue tinge to them. I asked him where he lived. He didn’t reply. I asked him if he lived here. No reply. I asked him which flat he lived in. He pointed vaguely at a direction over my shoulder. I remembered that the first and most necessary question is usually to ask the most unnecessary question of all, the name, and I asked him that. He said Shushant, not in a Bengali accent. He didn’t seem particularly focused at me, and was gazing at the copies on the bench. I asked him which school he studied in. he said Kendriya Vidyalaya, in a definite non-Bengali accent. I asked him if it was a good school. A nod. I asked him if he had friends. He shook his head. Taken aback, I asked again, ‘You don’t have any friends in school?’ He shook his head again. Then very suddenly, he gave a jump, said ‘Goodbye’ simultaneously, and walked away.

I said ‘Ta ta.’

That was weird, wasn’t it?

1Life.

Two of Us #12

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:01:00 GMT

1Life Hey N.

Neo Whoa, I thought you’d died.

1Life No. On the contrary, I almost killed you.

Neo What?

1Life If I stay out of touch with you for long, N, what happens to you?

Neo I disappear.

1Life So, that’s that. I wasn’t dead. I almost killed you. But yeah, you could say that it almost killed me too. Sort of induced an anaesthesia.

Neo It’s not because of talking to me. You still have it, and will have it after this conversation.

1Life Then what’s it due to?

Neo I don’t know. Let’s say you aren’t allowed to do a lot of things you’d like to do, you don’t have a satisfying friendship, she left you, and you are steadily losing confidence in your abilities.

1Life What would I like to do if I were allowed?

Neo You don’t know that clearly any more, because obedience is no longer due to external causes, it has seeped in: it has become part of your internal mentality, L. When external forces are absent, you create fake reasons to excuse your tendency to stay bound by the rules.

1Life Yes. Is that a bad thing?

Up to you. You’re the one who thought it was a bad thing, to let oneself be governed so much by imported ideas.

1Life What is self, beyond a collection of imported ideas?

Neo A self is such an enriched and evolved collection of imported ideas that after it is formed, it can decide which of its constituent ideas were wrong.

1Life Not everyone has a self like that.

Neo I’m talking about you, L.

1Life I don’t have a self like that.

Neo You question a lot of things that others would let pass.

1Life I don’t question a further lot of things I could question, because they constitute the basal parts of my self. To be able to have a stable self that is capable of holding its own while questioning, I must not go so far as to question the self itself.

Neo Your writing has improved.

1Life I know. That gave me a pang. That rusty old nail of pain in my head. I can’t believe she’s just gone now. From being such a close person once to being nothing at all except wisps of old memory locked here and there, closed spaces from which the last bits could not evaporate, slowly diffusing away into nothingness… Does she feel any of this?

Neo I don’t know. She had a huge ego.

1Life Maybe from that side I look like I have a huge ego, not taking her back.

Neo Stop it, L! She wasn’t coming back! She has got a mind like steel, and she wasn’t coming back to you. You’re the forever loser, moaning and blaming yourself for every single person who walks out on you —

1Life How many walked out on me, N? you make it sound as if a lot did.

Neo Two did. That’s not the point. Tell me, who are you trying to hide from? What wrong have you done? What are you trying to defend? What are you trying to prove? Why do you always take that look-please-look-please-consider-I-didn’t-do-anything-wrong stance? What guilt are you still trying to raise yourself from?

1Life Yeah, I know all that you said is true. But there’s this blunt pain in there, somewhere, so blunt that it’s no longer perceptible as a solitary pain, spread out so much that it engulfs my whole waking life now, diluted so much that I no longer realize that part of that dank air inside my skull is due to her.

Neo Were you here today to talk about this?

1Life No.

Neo The Challenge?

1Life I’ve failed. There’s no use talking about it. I’m clocking less than a week recently.

Neo Why don’t you let someone in on it?

1Life Who? I don’t have that sort of friend. I’ll never get time to build a friendship like that. No one’s interested. I’m a boring sort of sessile guy with nothing much ever happening in his life. Not an exciting sort of person… who’ll want to get their hands dirty with my story?

Neo Are you here to moan?

1Life You know, there’s a strange sensation I have very often — of wanting to do something very physically active, I don’t know why.

Neo How long will it drag on like this, L? You’ve got to do something about it. You can’t become a mental case.

1Life It feels so stupid to go and say, ‘Will you be my friend? I’ve got some dirty truth to tell.’

Neo Doesn’t it feel much worse to carry the dirty truths around with yourself?

1Life I’m scared of telling anyone. I’m too ashamed. It would be so much easier to tell someone ‘I once used to have this problem, but I fought out of it. Will you be my friend?’

Neo Life isn’t like that, L.

1Life Why not? Why couldn’t I do it?

Neo There’s no use musing over that now. You always do that post-M.

I see, I feel, I ask no more

My vision won’t stretch beyond the humble shore

I’ve waited, I’ve seen, it’s just a waste of time

Time that’d just be a waste anyway

I grope for months in my lonely dark alley

Turning in circles, the last bright opening left an aeon back.

Is this the age?

Is this the time to be down like this and let the world sweep over a half-feeling head?

Give me a hand, give me a sign, a whiff, a flare of red in this dark death-trap

Give me anything out of this routine submission I’ve closed into

You aren’t in front of me

Yes, you can touch me if you want, but that won’t get you any closer

I’m on an island in this huge ocean you can’t see or cross

I hate it and I do it even more each day, spreading the waters farther out

Once bitten and shy till eternity.

Change this, come take my hand

Yank me out of this stupor

Give me sunshine and trust again

Trust in me and trust in you

I don’t know who I’m screaming at.

This is a brief time, I’ve said a hundred times over

I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die like this.

Come take my hand, I’m not that bad

I can still turn around and be who I think I really am.

1Life/Neo.

A12090605 / 140515.

Back.

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:38:02 GMT

I wasn’t dead. I was taking an unplanned break. I couldn’t find anything to write, or maybe I was too lazy, or maybe I was actually too busy and couldn’t find time. <point to self: (saying) “the busiest find time for everything.” e.g. ‘Rik is so busy that he finds time for an astonishing number of things that can actually make you feel that he has nothing else to do.’>

I have no idea where I was all this time, what I was doing, where all my time was actually going. It’s a blur, my life, a slow, lazy, viscous blur, like lazy streaks of traffic lights in a low exposure shot of a city street. I never know what hits me. When I find time to think, I realize nothing hit me worth bragging about. Then I turn off my thought-room and let myself go again, amazingly passive with the flow of this slow current that takes me to a number of places each week, brings me round and round to see the same faces, talk the same talk, immerse in the same atmospheres time after time. Monday school, no talk, fabricate my loneliness, evening fifteen minutes of nothing, then the dragging physics class where there isn’t a single damn good girl. Tuesday oh no, maths class, I’m lagging behind in maths. School uneventful, fabricate my loneliness, reach early to maths, then three excruciating hours of understanding nothing on the board, nodding to everything, and copying everything down. Home. Wednesday uneventful, fabricate my loneliness, don’t talk much, Bibs’ car, wind on the flyover, Statistics class of understanding nothing, home. Thursday no class except uneventful school, don’t talk much, make no friends, turn boring till everyone turns away to something more engaging, then muse. Home. Friday school, Bengali class, a little nice talk while returning home, then forget everything. Saturday Chemistry early in the morning. I never study chemistry. Then FIITJEE of a net total of 8.5 hours. Sunday the same thing. Then Monday again. Paste those lines here again. And again. And again.

Nothing happens. Nothing. I don’t want fireworks or a terrorist attack in school or a meeting with the other face of the moon and her new sun, despite all I imagine in my lazy hours.

I don’t know what I want, what to wish for. It’s too much work. Make this go faster, end it quicker. Let’s go somewhere else where I can start from scratch and build a different flavour of failure. And it’s a scientific truth that life is precious. Look how I’m wasting all the time.

The other day I went to this stationery shop to buy something. There was a man and a woman buying a pen. The woman had a dark pen in her hand, making writing gestures in air. I think it was to see how the pen looks when it writes something. The shopkeeper was full of praise for the pen. You know, yes, yes, it will write very well, smooth flow, will last long, nice company, take it, nice pen type glorification.

The man with the woman (not the shopkeeper) suddenly pointed out in the middle of his speech that something in the pen had come off. The shopkeeper seemed to be slapped in the face by his nice company, frowned and tried to fix it, but of course the couple were satisfied with their feat and wouldn’t take it.

I asked for a white exercise copy. He gave me something costly. I said something cheaper.

The couple (I don’t know if they were a couple. Here it implies two.) spotted a binocular packed in a small square paper box. I guessed they were on the lookout for a gift. When they were shown the binocular, one of them asked if it was toyish or realish. Of course the shopkeeper replied they were realish. The woman started looking around with the binos. The shopkeeper intervened and told her that it could also do something else. Hold it backwards and look into it. The woman did so. Of course she saw things reduced. She was elated. Man, the binos could do so much. Steal of a deal.

I dropped the different minute parts of the pen I wanted to refill and crouched down, trying to reunite them.

One last thing. The woman said if she could have the bino in any other colour. They were silver. She said that the receptor of the gift had grey things stuffed in his/her room. (His, of course. Which conventional girl would want a pair of binoculars?) The man replied that the company, Sony Handycam, manufactured only grey units.

Sony Handycam manufactures silver plastic binoculars sold in small square paper boxes in stationery shops. Binoculars that cost around 100 and can, despite their infinitesimal price, show you reduced images if you look into it the other way.

I relocated my things and made to leave. The shopkeeper said that now that I knew the shop, I should come again.

Try me.

It has rained today. Hard. As dawn grew to morning, the light died. Then a lot of rain.

And now I’m listening to Keane. All my hormones are charging. I can start crying anytime soon. Everything that can bring me tears is playing in my head. A lot of things can make me feel sad. I’ve become that way. But they don’t play separately in my head, defining their separate causes and characters. They form a mixed, dank air in my head, like hybridizing orbitals (don’t worry if you don’t know what it is. It’s irrelevant.).

See you soon again. I don’t wanna write any more.

1Life.