Jealousy is a dangerous emotion. It makes you question yourself even if you know deep down inside that you are good at what you do. If you're not getting paid as much as someone who doesn't match up to your output, it makes you resent the work that you do, even though you can't stop. If someone is prettier, you waste your time bitching about her or him. If somebody just fits in right away, you spread nasty rumours about how she must have slept her way up. Jealousy is a dangerous thing and it makes you a bitter person.
But then, I think we all know that. We know it, but we feel the emotion anyway. Why is that? I have tried to be like a horse - I wear blinkers the way they do - just so I can't see what the rest are doing around me, and hence not feel jealous. But that's easier said than done. More often that not, I might not see it, but I am still thinking about it. I think about it on my trip home and then end up being so frustrated that I fight with my husband the moment I step into the house. And when that happens, I feel jealous of women who are unmarried. As I said, jealousy is a dangerous thing.
I remember an incident from about when I was just 14. My class was conducting a Miss 9th C contest (beauty contests were big back then), and my good friend was talking to all the boys in the class asking them which girl according to them was the most beautiful. Now I know it doesn't sound honest or modest, but most boys voted for me (I think, no, I know that it was because I was the most amiable girl - they didn't have to grovel around me). So when a boy told my good friend that he was voting for me, she asked him why? He said why not? And then she delivered the cincher, "Isn't she too short? And not to mention, that hairy upperlip?"
I was hurt. I was appalled. How could somebody, who I thought was a good friend, do this to me? But now, when I look back, I sort of understand. After all, her points were valid, so it was not as if she was lying. But jealousy made her forget the fact that I was a good friend, who had let her in on many secrets. Jealousy, you know, is a dangerous thing.
I stopped feeling jealous about someone else's pretty face a long time ago. I just realised that if I am not happy about the way I looked, nobody would be. So I dress up my ego in classy couture and always keep a smiling disposition, and I have come to realise that it works. As for the job thing, I have given in to my fate. I guess money will come when it has to. After watching a woman not buying a pav in the morning as it was too expensive, just about a rupee and 50 paise, I have come to know that I am almost a millionaire.
So I am sort of deciding not to feel jealous. What about you? Join me; it's a good place to be at. As I said, and I will repeat, jealousy is a dangerous thing.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Why women should not hold on
FOR KHAN Fahreen Sajid, a resident of the Behram Nagar slum in Mumbai’s Bandra East, the decision of who to marry is going to be the most practical one of her life. All she wants is a toilet — a step up from the slum’s community loo. “I need a house that has an attached bathroom,” she told her father, a zari maker, matter-of-factly.
In Haryana, this realisation dawned early. In 2005, the government started the initiative ‘No Toilet, No Bride’. Slogans of “If you don’t have a proper lavatory in your house, don’t even think about marrying my daughter” were plastered across villages. About 1.4 million lavatories have been built in the state since 2005 and 798 village panchayats have already received nearly Rs 11.29 crore as reward for having a toilet in each household.
When James Brown said, “It’s a man’s world”, he was probably thinking of the long queue outside a women’s loo. Out of Delhi’s 3,192 public urinals, only 132 were for women, according to a Delhi High Court inspection in 2007 and a Centre for Civil Society paper. In Mumbai, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation officer on special duty Anand Jagtap told TEHELKA that the government makes an equal number of toilets for men and women, with the aim of providing one toilet seat for every 50 people.
But Jagtap’s arithmetic is misleading. Even when the number of toilets are same, male ones have more units since they’re equipped with additional standing- style urinals. This is doubly debilitating when you consider that men and women use toilets differently, and, according to a 1988 Virginia Tech study, women need to spend twice as long in the loo as men.
The Indian man just zips down, faces the next wall and relieves himself. In doing so, he faces no shame or embarrassment — whereas women feel furtive even about using a public loo. Smrithi Rao, a 24-year-old Bengaluru stylist explains, “We are conditioned by birth to feel shame. And I don’t want men to look at me when I am using a loo.”
Kaveri Nag, a retail manager in Delhi, says, “I’m scared I’m going to catch an infection, because most toilets are dirty.I carry toilet paper and cover the seats with lots of it.” She drives from Delhi to Jaipur every week, and is shocked that there is not even one toilet on the threehour long stretch: “Men can just get off and go. What do we do?”‘I only go to the loo before dark and if my calculations go wrong, I just hold it. We're supposed to be resilient,’ says Anwar Sheikh with a resigned smile
In the Kutch, women are forced to defecate in a hole in their rooms after childbirth as walking to a distant field demarcated for defecation is out of the question, reveals Ila Pathak, a prominent social activist who works for the Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group. Says Pathak, “Most women in rural areas don’t use sanitary napkins, so during the time they are menstruating they stay at home and follow the same routine. Travelling to places almost an hour away demarcated as a women’s loo can also cause unusual problems. If the woman of the house takes a long time coming back from these areas, family members suspect her of having an affair and beat them up!”
And in the Northeast, says Charishma, a PhD student in Shillong: “You can spot men all over the hills and in the main town parking themselves on the side of the roads. But when we go down to the main marketplace every Sunday, we keep in mind that we shouldn’t consume too much liquids, or else we might have to use the dirty loos. We have got used to holding it forever.”
FILMMAKER PAROMITA Vohra’s documentary Q2P asks the all-important question: Who are India’s super cities being built for if there are not even basic facilities for women? Paromita says with a dry smile, “A woman’s body is never seen biologically, only sexually, and so when a woman sees a man watching her as she goes to the loo, she knows he’ll be thinking of her naked body. The fact that women can’t pee where they want and when they want is a proof of their oppression — even in the so-called metros.”
India’s urban women — both rich and poor, by the way — face many problems around their toilet routines, but the dilemma of preserving their dignity is often in the forefront. Take the case of Rukhsana Anwar Sheikh, 35, who lives in a Mumbai slum, and has to cross over to a neighbouring slum every time she needs to visit a decent loo. “I only go to the loo before dark as I don’t want to leave my house after a decent hour. And if my calculations go wrong, I just hold it. Women are supposed to be resilient,” she cracks a weary yet resigned smile.
Some women, though, are ready to challenge society’s farcical attitude. Bharti, Guddi and Sunita — housemaids in Delhi’s Rohini neighbourhood — have decided to shed their inhibitions for the sake of their health. The owners of houses where they work don’t allow them to use the bathrooms, so they hit back by squatting on the main road whenever they feel the need to go, even if they are stared at. “We gave up sharam long time back. If we fall ill, what will happen to our children? It’s not a choice we can afford to make,” says the trio of Rajasthani banjara women.
Dr Anita Patil-Deshmukh, executive director of Pukar India, agrees that there are health risks to holding back. “They suffer from constipation and piles. Women who hold it in for long periods also suffer from recurrent UTI (urinary tract infection) and hence give birth to premature or small babies. It’s one of the silent killers for women all over India.” A study conducted by think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in 2010, on sanitation facilities at Mumbai’s 106 suburban railway stations, revealed that the ratio of women to men getting UTI was 6:1.
Journalist Brinda Majithia, 25, commutes 90 minutes from far-off Mumbai suburb Kandivali to Lower Parel every day and never uses the railway station toilets. “I have gone eight hours at a stretch without using a bathroom. The only way you can think of using a station loo is if you don’t touch anything.” At her office, too, there is water shortage. “Last month, we were actually forced to go to a nearby mall because our office made no provision for water shortage in the city,” she says. “Men didn’t suffer — they were still able to use the office urinals.”
It is well known that the right to education is hampered by lack of loos in schools. Half of India’s government-run schools don’t have separate toilets for males and females, forcing young women to use unisex facilities or nothing at all. Bina Lashkari of the NGO Doorstep Schools, which works with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation schools all over Mumbai, says, “Most girls give up coming to school once they hit puberty, as they are wary of using the dirty unisex toilet, especially when they are menstruating.” In Bengaluru, in a school which had no loo, girls would go in twos to the corner of the compound. One girl would shelter the girl peeing by standing in front of her with her skirt spread out! No wonder, a Ministry of Health and Family Welfare health survey from 2006 found that 22 percent of girls complete 10 or more years of schooling compared to 35 percent of boys.
British urban design planner Clara Greed once said that you can judge a nation by its toilets and assess the true position of women in society by looking at its toilet queues. In India, all we can do is hope, and wait with our legs crossed as tight as possible.
In Haryana, this realisation dawned early. In 2005, the government started the initiative ‘No Toilet, No Bride’. Slogans of “If you don’t have a proper lavatory in your house, don’t even think about marrying my daughter” were plastered across villages. About 1.4 million lavatories have been built in the state since 2005 and 798 village panchayats have already received nearly Rs 11.29 crore as reward for having a toilet in each household.
When James Brown said, “It’s a man’s world”, he was probably thinking of the long queue outside a women’s loo. Out of Delhi’s 3,192 public urinals, only 132 were for women, according to a Delhi High Court inspection in 2007 and a Centre for Civil Society paper. In Mumbai, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation officer on special duty Anand Jagtap told TEHELKA that the government makes an equal number of toilets for men and women, with the aim of providing one toilet seat for every 50 people.
But Jagtap’s arithmetic is misleading. Even when the number of toilets are same, male ones have more units since they’re equipped with additional standing- style urinals. This is doubly debilitating when you consider that men and women use toilets differently, and, according to a 1988 Virginia Tech study, women need to spend twice as long in the loo as men.
The Indian man just zips down, faces the next wall and relieves himself. In doing so, he faces no shame or embarrassment — whereas women feel furtive even about using a public loo. Smrithi Rao, a 24-year-old Bengaluru stylist explains, “We are conditioned by birth to feel shame. And I don’t want men to look at me when I am using a loo.”
Kaveri Nag, a retail manager in Delhi, says, “I’m scared I’m going to catch an infection, because most toilets are dirty.I carry toilet paper and cover the seats with lots of it.” She drives from Delhi to Jaipur every week, and is shocked that there is not even one toilet on the threehour long stretch: “Men can just get off and go. What do we do?”‘I only go to the loo before dark and if my calculations go wrong, I just hold it. We're supposed to be resilient,’ says Anwar Sheikh with a resigned smile
In the Kutch, women are forced to defecate in a hole in their rooms after childbirth as walking to a distant field demarcated for defecation is out of the question, reveals Ila Pathak, a prominent social activist who works for the Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group. Says Pathak, “Most women in rural areas don’t use sanitary napkins, so during the time they are menstruating they stay at home and follow the same routine. Travelling to places almost an hour away demarcated as a women’s loo can also cause unusual problems. If the woman of the house takes a long time coming back from these areas, family members suspect her of having an affair and beat them up!”
And in the Northeast, says Charishma, a PhD student in Shillong: “You can spot men all over the hills and in the main town parking themselves on the side of the roads. But when we go down to the main marketplace every Sunday, we keep in mind that we shouldn’t consume too much liquids, or else we might have to use the dirty loos. We have got used to holding it forever.”
FILMMAKER PAROMITA Vohra’s documentary Q2P asks the all-important question: Who are India’s super cities being built for if there are not even basic facilities for women? Paromita says with a dry smile, “A woman’s body is never seen biologically, only sexually, and so when a woman sees a man watching her as she goes to the loo, she knows he’ll be thinking of her naked body. The fact that women can’t pee where they want and when they want is a proof of their oppression — even in the so-called metros.”
India’s urban women — both rich and poor, by the way — face many problems around their toilet routines, but the dilemma of preserving their dignity is often in the forefront. Take the case of Rukhsana Anwar Sheikh, 35, who lives in a Mumbai slum, and has to cross over to a neighbouring slum every time she needs to visit a decent loo. “I only go to the loo before dark as I don’t want to leave my house after a decent hour. And if my calculations go wrong, I just hold it. Women are supposed to be resilient,” she cracks a weary yet resigned smile.
Some women, though, are ready to challenge society’s farcical attitude. Bharti, Guddi and Sunita — housemaids in Delhi’s Rohini neighbourhood — have decided to shed their inhibitions for the sake of their health. The owners of houses where they work don’t allow them to use the bathrooms, so they hit back by squatting on the main road whenever they feel the need to go, even if they are stared at. “We gave up sharam long time back. If we fall ill, what will happen to our children? It’s not a choice we can afford to make,” says the trio of Rajasthani banjara women.
Dr Anita Patil-Deshmukh, executive director of Pukar India, agrees that there are health risks to holding back. “They suffer from constipation and piles. Women who hold it in for long periods also suffer from recurrent UTI (urinary tract infection) and hence give birth to premature or small babies. It’s one of the silent killers for women all over India.” A study conducted by think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in 2010, on sanitation facilities at Mumbai’s 106 suburban railway stations, revealed that the ratio of women to men getting UTI was 6:1.
Journalist Brinda Majithia, 25, commutes 90 minutes from far-off Mumbai suburb Kandivali to Lower Parel every day and never uses the railway station toilets. “I have gone eight hours at a stretch without using a bathroom. The only way you can think of using a station loo is if you don’t touch anything.” At her office, too, there is water shortage. “Last month, we were actually forced to go to a nearby mall because our office made no provision for water shortage in the city,” she says. “Men didn’t suffer — they were still able to use the office urinals.”
It is well known that the right to education is hampered by lack of loos in schools. Half of India’s government-run schools don’t have separate toilets for males and females, forcing young women to use unisex facilities or nothing at all. Bina Lashkari of the NGO Doorstep Schools, which works with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation schools all over Mumbai, says, “Most girls give up coming to school once they hit puberty, as they are wary of using the dirty unisex toilet, especially when they are menstruating.” In Bengaluru, in a school which had no loo, girls would go in twos to the corner of the compound. One girl would shelter the girl peeing by standing in front of her with her skirt spread out! No wonder, a Ministry of Health and Family Welfare health survey from 2006 found that 22 percent of girls complete 10 or more years of schooling compared to 35 percent of boys.
British urban design planner Clara Greed once said that you can judge a nation by its toilets and assess the true position of women in society by looking at its toilet queues. In India, all we can do is hope, and wait with our legs crossed as tight as possible.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Giving up - a ditty
I'm giving up
Did I ever begin?
Maybe
But you never did
So I'm giving up
Human aspiration says
Did you try hard enough?
maybe not
So I'm giving up
Expecting for walls to talk back
They never will
So I'm giving up
hanging my clothes out in the rain to dry
that's absurd
So I'm giving up
dreaming that dream
coz its just a dream
so the world may say
Carry that torch love
but didn't I just say
I'm giving up
You and Me - just a ditty
You
I
Us
Being bitchy
Being jealous
Banging Phones
Banging heads
Being in love
to being sensible
Lending an ear
to closing down
Being distant, sometimes
Being there, always
Being You
Being me
Being us
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Don't know how this story will end
I had never seen her looking so beautiful or so sad ever before. In fact, she wasn’t beautiful, really — cute, yes, but she had told me never to call her that. She said that if I had to call her anything it would have to be beautiful, and since she wasn’t, I never did. I think it hurt her, but I didn’t want to lie to her. How did it matter anyway, when there was something about her that made me leave work early almost every day, take my Maruti (which I cleaned thoroughly everyday because otherwise she wouldn’t sit in it), give her a call to say I was outside her office, waiting with sandwiches and coffee. As she would come out as soon as I called (she never made me wait) she would look at me with a smile that never ceased to make me feel that I should tell I was madly in love with her right away. But I never did that, and that had made me lose her once, but hadn’t made me say it still, so I guessed I didn’t feel it strongly enough. And maybe because I never said it, she went away for a long time, married to a man who loved her more than me, or maybe a man who just said it without being cocky about it. But now she was back, and we had fallen into our old routine right away — lunches at our favourite Idli joint, coffee afterwards, and a game of chess, and then kissing feverishly later. But this time, she was different, and though she kissed me with passion when she did, she often gazed out of the window afterwards, avoiding talk or eye contact. And she never ever asked me to have the “talk”, never asked me where we stood, which was my luck I suppose, but it worried me that she never asked. I guess it had to do with the fact that the man who told her he loved her had died last year. And with him, died her expectations. And so now she was with me, without really being with me. I suppose I was talking like a woman right now, but I wanted her to say something to me, something that would make me feel she was into this.
“I am not going around kissing people and feeling them up in a smelly old car, if that’s what you want me to say. There is no one else I am doing this with,” she told me one day, when I had been all whiney and asked her if she even realized that she was with me. “No, I don’t want you to say that,” I said feebly.
“Then what do you want Gautam? Isn’t this what all men want? I don’t even mind it if you meet other women, just don’t tell me you tell them they are beautiful,” she had smiled, and I had taken her hand in mine and walked with her all over Lodhi Gardens, looking at the ancient structures sometimes, and sometimes at her uncombed hair, already showing traces of white. She didn’t look at anything, she just walked staring right ahead, her lips curled in half a smile, and once in a while she squeezed her hand around mine. We then sat under a tree, watching the love struck couples indulge in carnal sin all around us, behind bushes and on uncomfortable rot-iron benches. But we sat with a foot of space between us, when she suddenly said, ‘Do you love me?’
I must have stared at her a tad too much, because she then said, “why is that such a surprise…If you say yes, I won’t ask you to make an honest woman out of me. I just wanted to know if you capable of loving someone like me?”
Instead of answering her, I asked angrily, “capable of? What do you mean by that?
She started laughing, “you look funny when you angry. All I meant is that you have known me for so long now. You have seen me when I was dressed in a dowdy school skirt, with hair on my upper lip…and you have seen me naked, with my wobbly bits at your fingertips, you have seen me like a girl falling all over a man, and a girl who just doesn’t care anymore. After knowing me so intimately, can you love me?"
I didn’t know what to say. Was this is the time to tell her that somehow inexplicably, she had become the one woman I realized I hadn’t got, and that made her special. I had held her in my arms, yes, but I hadn’t got her. I had let that chance slip away long ago, and she now thought of me as incapable of loving her. I didn’t answer and but couldn’t stop looking at her.
And that’s when I saw her looking really sad, and for the first time, really beautiful. Maybe she needed to be sad to look beautiful. “You look beautiful today,”
“You mean that?”
“Yes, there is a sadness in your eyes that is making you look so incomparable.”
She stopped smiling and said, “Gautam, I think if you keep me unhappy for ever, I might just be as beautiful as Aphrodite herself.”
“But I want you to be happy,” I said lamely.
“Happy or beautiful? You choose.”
As we walked back to the car, our hands still touching, with an unspoken knowing look that said we were going to make love in my apartment later, I knew what I wanted her to be for now — I liked her when she was beautiful.
And beautiful she was, that night as I played with her hair, and she nibbled on my ears. She stood in the kitchen, making cheese omelets the morning after, and singing along with the her favourite, “I feel like a natural woman,” wiggling hips with the beat.
“So what’s the plan today?” I asked with an easy nonchalance, just so she didn’t think that whatever she did, I wanted to be included too. But I did, I wanted to spend another day with her. I wanted to see if I could answer her question, I wanted to test my feelings for her.
“Why do you ask? I checked your phone and saw that an old flame was in town. Aren’t you meeting her today?”
“You checked my phone?"
“Yes, what’s up with that? We are friends right?”
She suddenly looked mean to me, like a green monster covered in goo and with a tongue forking out — a monster who was pretending to be my friend and infringing on my life.
I got up and walked towards my room, “Yes I will be spening the day with the ‘ex flame’, and wewill be coming back here tonight, so be gone by then.” I screamed as I shut the front door.
I was really angry, and I was going too make her pay. I was going to go out, have a great time, and then ….i didn’t know what else, but I was going to make her pay.
The ex flame looked better than ever, but by the time the second beer was dwindling down my throat, she seemed less interesting. She laughed at the right times, cracked a few ood jokes herself, licked her lips seducatively and even offered to pay, but somehow it wasnt clicking. As we made out clumsily in the back of her big car, I found my thoughts going back to the laughing face that had told me that it had snooped through my phone.
One the games were over, I was graciously dropped home and somehow I managed to not invite the lady up, even though I knew my home was empty and the night was just young. The house seemed realy quiet, and I removed my shirt and got into bed without switching on the lights. Under the sheets, there was another body, she was still here.
“You back?”Yes”
“Good, now snuggle up and sleep. I had a long day,” she said as she kissed me lightly
She was here, when I had told her to leave, it was getting out of hand, but for tonight, it was fine.
The next few days were spent in a strange reverie — she was next to me, and I was her man. We shopped for fruits, made salads, laughed at people in the malls, ate greasy Punjabi food every night, and then hugged each other with a fervour that I hadn’t felt with anyone ever before. It almost felt like a relationship. I listened to the Snow Patrols singing a weird version of Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, but it struck a chord, her love was having me look crazy in love, and I couldn’t let it be like that. The balance of power had to be managed. At least for now, it seemed in control. I had a date today with another woman, and she had just nodded when I told her — no tantrums, no sulks — she had even laid out the table and spread new sheets on the bed. She had removed her kajal from my batroom cabinet, and her underwear from the clothing line outside. She did have a home somewhere in delhi, but I had never been there. But she was there tonight, and I strangely felt at ease. IT was my home after so long. I wined and dined my date, and the let her entertain me.
And just as I was falling asleep, my head in her hair, my phone beeped, “I miss you” her message read, don’t you miss me.” I slept without answering.
She came over around noon the next day with a bunch of daisies and dressed in a dress I hadn’t seen before. “I have realized something. I love you,” she said as if it was an epiphany that had just dawned on her. “and I am going to make you love me, I know I can, enough of this sleeping around pretending things are a okay, pretending I am just a friend I Love you and I know you are capable of loving me. Let’s move on, Help me move on Gautam. Only you can,” she was smiling, she looked happy, and hopeful, and it was sad at all, and she wasn’t beautiful at all.
And though all the days I spent with her whizzed past my eyes in that moment, I knew this was te right thing to do, “I am sorry,”I found myself saying. “You are great, you get me, you know what I need, you know I love the middle of the bed— not the right, not the left, but the middle, and whenever I see you squeezing yourself into a ball on one corner, so that I can be comfortable, I know I should love you. You know that I am incapable of sometimes looking for things that are right in front of my eyes, and you make sure you help me see them — be it a gesture, or my pj’s that I can never find. And every night when you hand me my plate full of all that I like seeing for dinner, I know I should love you. And I would have loved you, only that I can’t now, now that you have asked me to. Why did you have to go and spoil it all? Why do you even need to be in a relationship again? Isn’t one dead husband enough? You’re free now. Enjoy it.”
Her face lost the colour, and she was Aphrodite herself — beautiful beyond imagination. She walked upto me, and for a minute, I was sure I was going to get a shiner. But no, trust her to do what I never expect her to. She slowly kissed my nose, and then my lips, and whispered, “remember the feeling, because you will never feel it again.”
“I am not going around kissing people and feeling them up in a smelly old car, if that’s what you want me to say. There is no one else I am doing this with,” she told me one day, when I had been all whiney and asked her if she even realized that she was with me. “No, I don’t want you to say that,” I said feebly.
“Then what do you want Gautam? Isn’t this what all men want? I don’t even mind it if you meet other women, just don’t tell me you tell them they are beautiful,” she had smiled, and I had taken her hand in mine and walked with her all over Lodhi Gardens, looking at the ancient structures sometimes, and sometimes at her uncombed hair, already showing traces of white. She didn’t look at anything, she just walked staring right ahead, her lips curled in half a smile, and once in a while she squeezed her hand around mine. We then sat under a tree, watching the love struck couples indulge in carnal sin all around us, behind bushes and on uncomfortable rot-iron benches. But we sat with a foot of space between us, when she suddenly said, ‘Do you love me?’
I must have stared at her a tad too much, because she then said, “why is that such a surprise…If you say yes, I won’t ask you to make an honest woman out of me. I just wanted to know if you capable of loving someone like me?”
Instead of answering her, I asked angrily, “capable of? What do you mean by that?
She started laughing, “you look funny when you angry. All I meant is that you have known me for so long now. You have seen me when I was dressed in a dowdy school skirt, with hair on my upper lip…and you have seen me naked, with my wobbly bits at your fingertips, you have seen me like a girl falling all over a man, and a girl who just doesn’t care anymore. After knowing me so intimately, can you love me?"
I didn’t know what to say. Was this is the time to tell her that somehow inexplicably, she had become the one woman I realized I hadn’t got, and that made her special. I had held her in my arms, yes, but I hadn’t got her. I had let that chance slip away long ago, and she now thought of me as incapable of loving her. I didn’t answer and but couldn’t stop looking at her.
And that’s when I saw her looking really sad, and for the first time, really beautiful. Maybe she needed to be sad to look beautiful. “You look beautiful today,”
“You mean that?”
“Yes, there is a sadness in your eyes that is making you look so incomparable.”
She stopped smiling and said, “Gautam, I think if you keep me unhappy for ever, I might just be as beautiful as Aphrodite herself.”
“But I want you to be happy,” I said lamely.
“Happy or beautiful? You choose.”
As we walked back to the car, our hands still touching, with an unspoken knowing look that said we were going to make love in my apartment later, I knew what I wanted her to be for now — I liked her when she was beautiful.
And beautiful she was, that night as I played with her hair, and she nibbled on my ears. She stood in the kitchen, making cheese omelets the morning after, and singing along with the her favourite, “I feel like a natural woman,” wiggling hips with the beat.
“So what’s the plan today?” I asked with an easy nonchalance, just so she didn’t think that whatever she did, I wanted to be included too. But I did, I wanted to spend another day with her. I wanted to see if I could answer her question, I wanted to test my feelings for her.
“Why do you ask? I checked your phone and saw that an old flame was in town. Aren’t you meeting her today?”
“You checked my phone?"
“Yes, what’s up with that? We are friends right?”
She suddenly looked mean to me, like a green monster covered in goo and with a tongue forking out — a monster who was pretending to be my friend and infringing on my life.
I got up and walked towards my room, “Yes I will be spening the day with the ‘ex flame’, and wewill be coming back here tonight, so be gone by then.” I screamed as I shut the front door.
I was really angry, and I was going too make her pay. I was going to go out, have a great time, and then ….i didn’t know what else, but I was going to make her pay.
The ex flame looked better than ever, but by the time the second beer was dwindling down my throat, she seemed less interesting. She laughed at the right times, cracked a few ood jokes herself, licked her lips seducatively and even offered to pay, but somehow it wasnt clicking. As we made out clumsily in the back of her big car, I found my thoughts going back to the laughing face that had told me that it had snooped through my phone.
One the games were over, I was graciously dropped home and somehow I managed to not invite the lady up, even though I knew my home was empty and the night was just young. The house seemed realy quiet, and I removed my shirt and got into bed without switching on the lights. Under the sheets, there was another body, she was still here.
“You back?”Yes”
“Good, now snuggle up and sleep. I had a long day,” she said as she kissed me lightly
She was here, when I had told her to leave, it was getting out of hand, but for tonight, it was fine.
The next few days were spent in a strange reverie — she was next to me, and I was her man. We shopped for fruits, made salads, laughed at people in the malls, ate greasy Punjabi food every night, and then hugged each other with a fervour that I hadn’t felt with anyone ever before. It almost felt like a relationship. I listened to the Snow Patrols singing a weird version of Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, but it struck a chord, her love was having me look crazy in love, and I couldn’t let it be like that. The balance of power had to be managed. At least for now, it seemed in control. I had a date today with another woman, and she had just nodded when I told her — no tantrums, no sulks — she had even laid out the table and spread new sheets on the bed. She had removed her kajal from my batroom cabinet, and her underwear from the clothing line outside. She did have a home somewhere in delhi, but I had never been there. But she was there tonight, and I strangely felt at ease. IT was my home after so long. I wined and dined my date, and the let her entertain me.
And just as I was falling asleep, my head in her hair, my phone beeped, “I miss you” her message read, don’t you miss me.” I slept without answering.
She came over around noon the next day with a bunch of daisies and dressed in a dress I hadn’t seen before. “I have realized something. I love you,” she said as if it was an epiphany that had just dawned on her. “and I am going to make you love me, I know I can, enough of this sleeping around pretending things are a okay, pretending I am just a friend I Love you and I know you are capable of loving me. Let’s move on, Help me move on Gautam. Only you can,” she was smiling, she looked happy, and hopeful, and it was sad at all, and she wasn’t beautiful at all.
And though all the days I spent with her whizzed past my eyes in that moment, I knew this was te right thing to do, “I am sorry,”I found myself saying. “You are great, you get me, you know what I need, you know I love the middle of the bed— not the right, not the left, but the middle, and whenever I see you squeezing yourself into a ball on one corner, so that I can be comfortable, I know I should love you. You know that I am incapable of sometimes looking for things that are right in front of my eyes, and you make sure you help me see them — be it a gesture, or my pj’s that I can never find. And every night when you hand me my plate full of all that I like seeing for dinner, I know I should love you. And I would have loved you, only that I can’t now, now that you have asked me to. Why did you have to go and spoil it all? Why do you even need to be in a relationship again? Isn’t one dead husband enough? You’re free now. Enjoy it.”
Her face lost the colour, and she was Aphrodite herself — beautiful beyond imagination. She walked upto me, and for a minute, I was sure I was going to get a shiner. But no, trust her to do what I never expect her to. She slowly kissed my nose, and then my lips, and whispered, “remember the feeling, because you will never feel it again.”
Why i want to believe
I, like Fox Moulder in that show we loved so much, X Files, have always wanted to believe. I believe that there is something beyond that helps or or screws us. Even an Octopus Paul makes me believe that things like coincidence exist. Since i got my blackberry, i often google everything and anything, so as i watched Titanic after ages on Sunday, i started reading about it on Wikipedia. What really struck me was that there was a stewardess who survived Titanic, who, hold your breath, had also survived the RMS Olympic sinking and went on to survive the sinking of HMHS Britannic in 1916. And then there was that news report after the plane from Rio To France crashed last year. A couple who had survived as they missed the plane, took the next flight next day, and were taking a car back home, where their car crashed and they both died on the spot. Was it because someone up there realised two people were missing during roll call? I believe in all of it - that Atlantis exists, that aliens abduct people from Bermuda Triangle, that Jesus lived in India, that Jesus's predecessors still live on somewhere, that Krishna may walk amongst us, that an island like the one in Lost could be a reality, that there is a parallel world that can be entered through at Stonehenge. I believe in all of it. Do you?
Monday, July 12, 2010
My love affair with mythology
Till i complete my bisexual research, i thought i would do a small post about my mythology fetish. I loved listening to the stories my parents told me as we went on family road trips when we were younger. Have you heard the one about a place in the Himalayas where Sita still stays with a abunch of fairies? Mountain legend has it that whoever goes there and spots Sita, loses their eyesight or their mind forever. Another story that really got me excited was the one that said Sita actually never went to Lanka. She stayed at this kutia near Pune all the time, and the Sita that went with Ravan was one made of magic. Mythology makes me crave for more and as i have read more and more, i have realised that our texts, especially the Mahabharat and the Ramayana, aim to teach us the real truths of life. My interest peaked after i read Devdutt Pattnaik's Pregnant King, which tells the tale of a childless king, who accidently drinks the potion meant for his queens and hence delivers a baby boy, who grows up to be a great king. Why it fascinated me was that through mythology, the author discussed an important modern theme - of gender differences and how one must treat the "one who lies in between", who is neither a man nor a woman, neither straight, nor gay. When i spoke to the author later for an interview, he said, "We need to srcatch the urface to really understand mythology and learn from it." Another book that really captured me was The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Devakurni, which was the Mahabharat retold through the eyes of Draupadi, who could be credited for changing the course of history. And this is where i discovered the real hero of Mahabharat - Karna. I realised that i respected Karna the most as he lived for others. He supported Duryodhan because he had supported him even when his brothers did not, he was a real man not scared to take a stand. Did you also know that he loved Draupadi? True or not, it's a romantic notion I adore. My tryst with mythology is far from over because i still need to understand how Ram could give up everything for his kingdom, how the dharma follower Yudhuister could lose his wife gambling, and why Duryodhan is a hated man (because i actually see him as the wronged one). Do let me know what you think of mythology. Trust me, it's a conversation worth having.
Cheers
Aastha
Cheers
Aastha
Friday, July 9, 2010
Coming up
My first blog post is on an issue i have always been curious about: how does someone tread the fine line between being straight and gay. Is being bisexual a choice or a way of life? let's see what you all think...hasta la vista
Why I need to converse without borders
When you live in a world where people decide what you say, how you say it and where you say it, sometimes it's necessary to have a platform to express your own views without hesitating. This blog will serve as a medium for me to talk about issues that I think matter in today's world. And obviously, what you think matters. Let's talk to each other about the nation, films, books, sex, education, marriages, relationships, body issues, flings, love, lust, family, dogs, the planet and everything in between. And let there be no hesitation, because in this space, there is no one who is going to say "your opinion does not matter"
cheers
Aastha
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