JUST. like that. 

Classmates.

You are lip gloss Seventeen party bag boyfriends barely aware of anything beyond Abhijeet Sawant's new video.

You are fun for five minutes, and frustrating for more than that.

You are my friend coz I don't know what else to call you without offending you. Acquaintance is too long a word.

You don't know who Lenin was. That's okay.
You don't even want to know who Lenin was, coz you won't be given more marks for that, will you. That. Is why I can't respect you.

On the last day of school, we will exchange email addresses, but you will never write to me and I will never write to you.

You mean nothing to me, I mean nothing to you, and we shall live happily ever after.

Both.

Coffee Day, Park Street.

Deepbeat music pounds on the smooth walls and the young moneyed sink into soft couches. Conversation touches upon John Mayer and J.U, and coffees topped by cream and chocolate sprinkles lie idle on the lightwood tables, neglected like the glossy cell phones that gleam and blink from time to time.

Then you step out the glass door and a little girl in a frock with the zipper torn out and hair browned by malnutrition tugs at your shirt. She holds out a dirty little hand for a spare one rupee coin, and you who just paid sixty rupees for a sandwich you ate half of, walk away.

Almost Every You.

There isn't much you wanted, really, just bundles of money, and respect from the fuckwits who got together and began calling themselves society.

It wasn't your fault - they taught you all your values. That most of them are non-values is something you never stopped to think about, coz, of course, they never taught you how to think. Why think anew when you’ve already been moulded into pre-frozen thoughts?

They sucked your soul dry, and filled it instead with needless greed and ambitions that you adopted only coz they said you were too young to make important decisions about things like your life. You don't know anything, the world is a bad place, and dreams are best ripped apart and tossed into the bin like fast food wrappers.

Love will never get you money, so you never did love anything. And if you did, it was wrapped up in the shroud of your childhood and buried. Art and travel will never bring you bagfuls of money, and do you not want bagfuls of money? Do you not want a big house stuffed with IKEA and gleaming cars and more cell phones than you can hold in both hands? You do.

All your little life, they made you. They hooked up your brain to their own diseased ones and let your spirit die coz of what use is a spirit anyway? All you need is an MBA degree, and connections.

You listened to them and learned. You learned to learn for the money learning leads to, and you learned to love the trash tossed out by people thirsting for money as much as you do.

Now you’re a wasted blessing longing for the happiness they promised you. But happiness comes to the living, and you’re long dead. You never knew when they killed you, coz they snatched your life away before you realized it was yours.

But it’s okay, it’s all okay. All that really matters is displaying the fake happiness of your half life to all the world’s slime, and earning the respect of fuckwits who don’t know what respect means.

Power Cut.

In a dash of surprise and disappointment, the comforting clarity of lights is gone. The whirr of the fan overhead swoons to a slow silence.

I leave my desk and feel along the wall for the niche where I know the emergency light is. On the darkened wall, my hand unknowingly creeps into a soft glowing frame. The light drips along the wall onto the floor in front, a footstep away. In the patch of mute silver, the shadows of the grilles are on me, and the rest of me is moonlight. I stay for a moment.

Where is the moon?

The verandah. I walk to the verandah where the faint fingers of a breeze touch me. The moon is in a part of the sky I can see. The dark sky softens around it, and the darkness retreats to gather around the feeble stars. I stand in silence and the silver light from a faraway being.

The moon has a grey smear. I wonder who else is looking at the moon at this very moment. I wonder what they are thinking. Maybe they are praying for money, or imagining what love is like, or waiting for the power to return so they can watch TV. Yuva, Star Plus, 9 PM.

Moonlight crawls through the clouds to crouch in homes where nobody notices it, unless there is a power cut.

I watch the moon and the clouds, moving painstakingly from my right to my left. If Ma was here right now, she'd say it in terms of north and south. But I'm not sure which is which.

I am alone at home and Faraway is here with me for a while.

Then the TV beeps on and the fan whooshes awake and the lights glow steadily brighter, and I can't find the moonlight anymore.

Today.

Icecream, a sandwich and a friend ( sadly inedible ) on the way home.

"The sun is right in front of me, aaaargh!!"
"It doesn't matter if the sun is in front or behind you."
"Whaa..? The sun won't be in our eyes if we walk the ulta way!"
"What a faltu conversation."

My hands are sticky with drops of vanilla icecream, so I lick my fingers and feel good. My bag is heavy, but I don't mind that sort of thing. My bag looks like something that a kid in class 3 would carry, coz her parents bought it for her and she had no say in it and none of them knew much about being cool anyway. I know a lot about being cool, I just don't practise any of it.

Reminds me of another friend, with whom I'm going to build another world someday. There, we'll ban combs and be uncool. Banning combs is a priority. We don't want to spend half our lives combing our hair.

The road is quiet, and our heels click click on the rough road. A man comes up from behind us and hands my friend a drawing of a monkey saying some smartass slogan, which fell from the book she's holding. She stares at the drawing ( she's very proud of it ), then at me, and laughs.

We walk.

"Hey, where are we ?"
"I don't know."
"Oh oh, I know."
"Yah, I know too."

For a moment I am lost in my neighbourhood. Delightful, like very few things ever are.

I buy a sandwich from Bake Club. The guy ( who's supposed to be ) behind the counter enters just as I say, "Hey there's noone in the shop...". I also spot some repulsively pink strawberry pastry. The expressionless guy heats my sandwich and hands it to me with a bent toothpick stuck in it.

Rain falls in almost intangible drops on my sandwich. My friend is thrilled.

"Four o'clock showers! We studied, na, in class 10!"

I look at my watch to see if it is really four o'clock. It's forty minutes past. She laughs again.

Then the road forks and she has to turn right and I have to turn left.

Ciao.

Seems strangely symbolic to me.

Wait.

Wait for your birthday. Wait for the bus. Wait for Ma to come home and make you an omelette coz you're an inept good for nothing idiot. Wait for the song to get over so you can close MediaPlayer and go to sleep. Wait for an answer. Wait for the evening to come so you can go out and play. Or go to tuitions. Choose whichever applies. Wait for your favourite part of the movie you watch every time they show it on ZMZ. ( And that's many, many times. ) Wait for the monsoons. Wait for the day when you'll say "I love you" and mean it. Do wait. Wait to surprise him with your letter. Wait for the lunch break. Wait for the computer to boot. Hell, wait to be born. Wait to die, coz you know, one day you will. Wait for things to work themselves out. Give up, sometimes. Wait for your sister to leave the bathroom. Wait for your friend to tell you what's wrong even though she said "nothing" when you first asked.

And if you're me, wait for the day when you'll finally have scraped together enough money to fly to Tallinn via Mumbai.

Been There.

Conversation


Play

Santiniketan, March 2005.

Nothing

I am doing nothing.

Nothing is filled with a swarm of somethings, but the somethings are small and they fly around in my head so quickly I can hardly distinguish one from the other. So they merge into a giant nothing that I dismiss and watch TV instead.

The other day the newspaper carried a picture of a little girl in Mali collecting water from a puddle in the muddy ground.

That was a sample something from my head.

Think. Turn off the TV.