The Sabbatical

I had decided a month or so ago that I would quit my job. To an outsider, it may have seemed like a hasty decision, but the truth was that I’d had enough of this corporate lifestyle. Jet setting around to boring meetings where most people were concentrating harder on the cookies passing around and working out strategies to net the chocolate cream ones. Staying in one hotel which looked just like another, where the staff all wore white uniforms, and pretended not to notice when I was smoking. Trying to steal as much freebies as I could without getting to the point where they would open my bag and search for the goods. From the outside, it looks like the life anyone would want to have, but I was sure that I was missing something. When I was young, my father used to tell me, “Don’t miss the woods for the trees”, but it looked to me as if I could not even tell the difference between the two anymore. So I decided that the best way for me to work out things would be to quit my job and take it a little easy. I didn't know if it was a sabbatical. That would have implied that I was coming back. As of now, I didn’t have a plan either way. Maybe I was coming back. And maybe I wasn’t. It wasn’t the kind of time to make a decision on something as important as that. Or maybe something as trivial. So I just left it quietly at the back of my mind, filed away in one of those cabinets, not so far back that I couldn’t reach in and bring it out if I wanted to, but not too upfront either. No, I didn’t want it too far up front, poking out whenever it got the chance to. So I just served out my notice period, a month, according to my contract, and packed up all my personal stuff at work, and carted it home.

When I told my husband about this, he wasn’t surprised. “I am sure we can manage with my salary and our savings for a few months”, he said, as though he’d seen it coming for some time, “But what will you do, won’t you get bored just sitting at home?” “Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something”, I said, though the truth was that I really didn’t know. We had a cook at home, and I couldn’t cook and didn’t plan to learn, so I wasn’t going to be spending my time conjuring up exotic dishes. My husband ate very simply most of the time, anyways. We didn’t have kids at that time, so I didn’t have to pay attention to anyone, or pick them up from school or anything like that. Maybe I would just spend the entire day waiting for him to get home, and then listen to how his day had been. Maybe that’s what rich housewives did. But I didn’t see myself getting bored. I just pictured time as this finite thing, cut up into strips of twenty four hours, each of which I would count away easily, one after the other. At that time, I was still young enough to be unafraid of time, either how little or how much of it was left.

Renuka Kirte

Renuka Kirte was the ugliest girl in class. She was so ugly, in fact, that it wasn’t even safe to dislike her openly, all the girls felt. Except my sister. When my sister joined this school in class six, she was already a head taller than any of the other girls in the class. And she disliked Renuka Kirte as soon as she saw her. Her pinafore was more black than regulation blue, and her shirt creased like wrinkles on a monkey’s back. Her collars drooped down below the round neck of the pinafore, and thin strands of jet black hair escaped from her loosely tied pigtails. My sister, on the other hand, was always neatly dressed, and considered the most beautiful girl in the class. I was in class three, and even my friends could see that. What’s more, she was within the first five ranks in class, while Renuka was closer to the bottom, so there was really no reason to dislike her.

One day, my sister asked mother to arrange her birthday party. I was envious that her birthday fell in the school season. Mine came in around April, so I never got to wear new frocks to school or hand out ravalgaon toffees. She chose the girls she wanted invited to the party. I saw the list she made, with many crosses and scratches, and it looked something like this.

Yes
Anitha
Vidya
Puja (Deepa gang)
Radhika

No
Shalini (Didn’t call for her party)
Manjari
Sonal (Refuses to share homework)
Renuka (NO NO NO)


It had many more names like this, but you get the gist. My sister was always very methodical in everything she did, and this list was no exception. The only name that really stood out on it was Renuka’s, written on again and again, so that the pencil marks had almost pierced the page, and crossed out vigorously. Mother found the list where my sister had hidden it, under the open wooden shelf, where we kept all our books, tucked in where the laminate was peeling away. That was when the trouble began.

Mother insisted that we had to invite Renuka. She stayed in our building, two floors above our flat. Her mother would surely notice that a birthday party was on at our house, and feel offended, she explained. It didn’t make sense to my sister or me, but we had to give way; When mother got really angry, there was no saying what she might do. What if she cancelled the party, sister would never recover from the shame. Most of the girls had already been invited, and news had gone around that Mother would even be serving pepsi. Pepsi! Who had even tasted one before. We had all managed to sneak out one or two rupees to buy the pepsi-cola they sold in tubelike pouches at the canteen, but the pepsi that came in a bottle. We had only seen the big girls standing at the corner shop near our school, sharing these, sometimes even with boys.

Still, it would be embarrassing when sister’s classmates found out that we lived in the same building as Renuka. Now, you may be reading this story, and thinking that perhaps we found out what was wrong with Renuka, and why she had more than her share of bad days. Not really. The birthday party came and went. It was a huge success. Mother made a walnut vanilla cake, no one had ever heard of such a thing before. Did she learn this in foreign, my sister’s friends asked. Renuka Kirte was also at the party, looking funnier than ever in the dunce cap my mother had given out. Most of the girls had pulled it off once my dad started taking photographs. But she kept hers on, and the other day, I discovered her in an old photo album, dunce cap perched on her head like a weird shaped bird. Her frock looked better though, as if it had been ironed with a hundred kilo iron, sticking out sharply at the sides. Some of my sisters’ friends were surprised to see her, but most of them behaved well, with a few parents around watching. One girl did say that she would invite only her own gang when her birthday party came around.

The next day, my sister and I played teacher, teacher. My sister was too old for this of course, but I begged her. She pulled up our old bed sheet and wrapped it around herself, a sari pallu over her shoulder. Then she took an old knitting needle that my grandmother had left behind. She called Renuka Kirte to the front of the class and beat her and beat her and beat her with this scale, while I watched. When she was done beating the air, I asked her what was the matter. She started crying loudly and pushed me away so hard that I hurt my head. The next day, Mother explained that sister was too old for such games now, and I should go play with my friends in the park instead, I was old enough.

Around the same time as QT 158

Ammani had another of her reader-participation exercises here.

My story - a counterpoint to hers - is here :

“Yes, I have it, Flamenco Flamenco”, the older one wanted to scream, like Archimedes out of the bathtub. But of course he couldn’t. That would spoil everything. After all catching a mouse is hardly the ultimate in cool. Any idiot can do it. But how many of them know to enjoy their kill, get the most out of it. Cain and Abel, yes, that’s what we’re like, he mused. Look at him, the duffer, screwing up his face, trying so hard to get this simple word. The focal men shifted, moving around the bird. He can’t even get that. 3 minutes and 56 seconds, let me give him another four before I go in for the kill. He doesn’t have a job, his car is a laugh on wheels, and I know no girl is ever going to marry him. But at least he wasn’t foolish enough to get infected and become HIV positive.

The older one shouted, “Flamenco, you idiot, flamenco. However long you live, you are never going to be half as smart as me!”

Networking Love

Do you like fairy tales? You do? Good, you’re like me then. When I was young, my father bought me a book, Grimm’s Fairy tales, not realizing that some of it was grim indeed. Still, it didn’t do me any harm, as far as I can see, and no one had yet invented political correctness, so I was allowed to enjoy them. When I was much older, I realized that fairy tales are not just tales, they are real. Are these the ramblings of a somewhat, how shall we put it delicately, unhinged person, you’re wondering now. No, really, fairy tales are real and exist in our lives, except that we don’t think of them that way. They are everywhere, even online! So then, if have folded up that disbelief and suspended it from a high enough place, read on.

Once upon a time, I met a young man, charm_ing,
Literary élan and limpid eyes, disarming
Manner with all kinds of nice things
To say and mean; Of course that brings
In a horde of romantic women a-swarming.

Naïve woman seeking romance? Falling for him so easily in this day and age, you say. Impossible. Oh orkut, myspace, ryze and others of your kind. Surely you’ll bear witness to the possibility of the soulmate appearing in the online avatar, intriguing persona and snatches of real life accoutrements to match.

He dazzled then, in vers libre, sonnet well rhyming
Or sometimes, a good critic he would be, chiming
In to point an error, gently;
Bent over the page intently –
I pictured him, a sexy Shakespeare, a true Ming.

Aha! Sex! Is that what all this is leading to, I hear you shout. Be patient though, gentle reader. (Much patience is required of he who reads poetry, or she, though the poets would never admit to that, but let us leave those old arguments about prose and poetry aside for now).

We stalked each other’s work, conjured up love, roaming
Freely on the body written, Passion foaming
Up through our sturdy keyboard wands
Messaging private but the bonds
Visible to all, from Worli to Wyoming.

So, it’s not just a you-and-me love story then. There are others, and oh, what glorious others, much in the manner of the sleeping beauty’s thirteen good fairies, clustered around the message board, nodding wisely, drinking their potions creative, seeing everything in gulps of quiet little hints.

On one fine day though (unlike the movie cloying)
The persona fled, its romance shed, left toying
For an owner, on the clueless
Board, but everyone was blameless;
Who never was named could not be called annoying.

This fairy tale ends rather abruptly, as prince charming rides off alone into the real world darkness. There is no sunset no happy no ever no after. Still, it is a fairy tale with all the ingredients of one. Love, magic and inexplicability. What more could I ask for?

Note : Mahendra Rathod's Love in the Caferati bushes acted as a kind of stimulus to this piece. However it was intended as a sort of commentary on relationships that develop online; It is not directed at any individuals per se.

Acrostic

We had this recent writing exercise on the message board at Caferati, based on a recent occurrence in the literary world -where an author was tricked into using a fake letter in a biography he wrote - More interesting, the letter was an acrostic , not too complimentary to the author himself.

Peter Griffin at Caferati, kindly pointed us to this interesting link which explains what all the fuss was about.

As self-respecting writers, ofcourse, it was proposed that we all try our hands at it... So here is my contribution...

In every way that they could think of, people felt that that Raghav was the perfect man for Monika. Not all the time, ofcourse, but occasionally, Monika would think about this. Driving home everyday, on the Gurgaon-Mehrauli highway, with the FM blaring in the background, she had enough time to think, analyse, dissect, then add on a fresh layer of thought and churn it some more. Each human being is so different, she would think, each individual steeped in the juice of himself, a concoction wearing thin in places, yet unique. Could any one person then ever be perfect for another, and what did it mean anyways, to be ‘for’ someone else. I am not talking about things like tastes and habits here, she would explain to her friends, but deep down, isn’t my first concern in this world myself, my own happiness.

Shut up, yaar, they would say, stop thinking so much, you want to become a philosopher or what. Indeed, most of her life, Monika had been chided by her family for this too much thing she had, reading too much, thinking too much, just doing too much of nothing worthwhile. Only the fact that she had finally landed a job at a prestigious advertising firm and then fallen in love with Raghav, had finally redeemed her. No one knew better than her though, that there was still opportunity to fall, there was always a chance, to fall back on indecision.

That time of my life

At that time, I would finish lunch and have a nap until four. It seemed to me then, that I had never had such restful sleep before. It was the sort of sleep where, if someone had come in and looked at me while I was sleeping, they could have assumed that I was dead. Don’t ask me how I knew this, I mean, its not like I could look at myself sleeping, but I just knew. All my life, I had slept with a kind of sleep that only left me wanting to sleep more. If I slept for two hours in the afternoon, I would complain of how I needed three. If I got three the next weekend, I would want four. It never seemed enough. But now, I would sleep exactly for two and a half hours, and wake up at four, without even an alarm waking me up.

From four to six, I would listen to some music, playing my favorite CDs over and over again. I would listen to Isaac Stern playing the Mozart violin concertos or Richter and the Borodin quartet on the Trout Quintet. My tastes in music were simple. I had been introduced to western classical music as a child, but my knowledge was limited to the most well known of pieces. I didn’t know how to listen, or what a coda was or how allegro was different from andante. I just picked up pieces at random, borrowing them from friends and acquaintances. What I liked, I stuck to. At this time, I hadn’t yet ventured into Sibelius or Bartok. Even Beethoven seemed incredibly complex at the time, beyond comprehension at any time of my life. Perhaps the pastoral symphony, but nothing more adventurous than that. Especially not at this point in time, when I was trying so hard to keep everything simple. Yes, it was a simple time of life.

Slum View

Plants arranged
On faded steps
Cover the open drain.

Traffic, inch by slow inch.
Legs scrape your door
Almost. Noses flinch.

The vanities of the poor
Then, no less than those
Of the rich. Only more

Functional. A screen
To see your home
As in a dream.

Mallorka - The finale

When she had first met Kevin, it was on one of these subterfugical acts of rebellion disguised as a hard night of group studying at a friends house. Instead it was to be the young persons guide to whisky and other assorted pleasures, being launched at her friend appy’s house while her parents were away to visit a deathridden aunt. Appy, Spunky, Oozie, Melly…Mallorca’s friends from her all girls college had odd nicknames with no resemblance to their given good names or their homegrown pet names like dabboo, chutki, sonu used by family. The girls gave each other names far away from the familiar territory charted by the mundane vowels and consonants of their regular names. Mallorca had no such nick. When classmates questioned her on her unusual name, she refused to tell them the embarassingly bollywood-style story of her parents’ short-lived honeymoon at palma, preferring instead to lie that the name was special to her dad for unknown mysterious reasons. The name slowly became a sort of hallowed ground which could not be desecrated and so there were no nicknames, related or otherwise. Kevin was his real name too, not an assumed americanized halo, although he was an abcd who had recently moved back to calcutta reluctantly. He was one of the three guys who had been invited to the session and he was infact the ultra cool bartender for the occasion doling out RC and water like some fancy new cocktail invented by an up and coming pub. The girls took their first sips haltingly not wishing to admit that they were nervous, that the concotion burnt their tongues and seemed to dissolve the lining of the oesophagus as it made its way to squeamish stomachs untouched by the ravages of any alcohol. A second peg joined the first to its uneasy destination, while tongues and bodies loosened under the real and imagined effects of the whisky. By midnight, the octet had split it into hazy fluid groups that merged and moved and merged as events were dissected, wounds laid open, hearts bared, peeves aired and the beginninings of convergences mapped put. Mallorka found it the most irrational and natural thing that had ever happened to her, that by the time they approached the early hours of the next day, Kevin had become a fixture at her side.

Flashes of conversation from that first encounter still filtered through to her through the intervening haze of five years worth of happenings since then.
“ I can fool anyone you know. I am very good at lying.”
“Shall I tell you what you are thinking right now ?, he asked her. He was wearing a short sleeved checked white and lemon yellow shirt and the dim lights arranged clumsily to give the room some panache reflected a lurid spotlight onto the yellow.
She was thinking of herself as she lay sprawled on the mattress beside him. It was not a comfortable position and her stomach felt pushed and prodded by the lumpy dump of a mattress. It was not comfortable but she knew that she was looking beautiful and that he knew it. She could feel it in her veins, with the alcohol coursing through them gently now, and she knew that she had never felt so beautiful before. Her eyes felt uncannily perceptive as though they had suddenly been endowed with a superlative, even supernatural effulgence that caused everything around the ordinary room to be transformed into a beautiful operatic setting. Drama was being played out in this transformed room and she was at the heart of it. But he did not tell her what she was thinking.

Instead he simply lifted her limp hand that clutched the edge of the mattress and kissed it gently. It was a kiss many times older than his young years. The tenderness it conveyed brought along with it a fleeting commingling of souls, when for a delicious instant, all sense of self fell away and submerged itself in the preciousness of the moment. Eleanor Rigby played in the distance, Paul McCartney uncomfortably loud, and close to the truth.
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

They moved away from each other self consciously and rejoined the rest of the group as though they had never been apart, but it was understood that they would see each other again. This was four years ago, and now Kevin had vanished, the end of his line having morphed into the Setland drilling company. Was it a simple case of wired being crossed or was there something more playing out behind the scenes? Some deep cosmic game in which events were being orchestrated in super-control-mode by an unknown somebody. Mallorka managed to cast off this fatalistic streak as she realised that the taxi was hurtling down straight towards Ulta Danga instead of taking the detour to Salt Lake. “ Sector 1, Char Number Tanki”, she yelled out to the driver above the noise of the FM. “Kya bole”, the driver turned around slowly to ask, his left hand cranking down the radio. The amethyst ring on his hand glittered in the light of a passing street lamp and struck her with its sudden and complete familiarity on the hand of a strange taxi driver. Kevin! Complete with all the details down to the smallest ones. The small squarish set of his shoulders visible above the front seat of the amby, the superfine hair of his moustache weighed down by a faint perspiration, the faint amoeba like birthmark at the base of his neck. A mark that she had kissed so many times but failed to recognize through the drive absorbed in the claustrophobic space of her own mind. Mallorka clambered over into the front passenger seat falling into it like an odd lumpy object. “Kevin, where are we going?”

Kevin grinned, his slow unhurried smile reaching his eyes. “I am rescuing you”, he replied simply. His eyes were beautiful to watch, with their dark brown pupils, intent, looking ahead seriously, while his smile brightened his cheery light brown irises. “But what are we running from?”, she protested, “I don’t want to be rescued.” Kevin drove on silently. Mallorka looked out of the window watching the dark road running beside them. The road was falling away swiftly now, its sides hurtling towards the windows and sliding away as quickly as it had risen towards them. Her thoughts came on, one after the other, slipping into place, taking each other’s place, nudging and jostling each other, so thick and fast that there was hardly any time to arrange them neatly. I am being rescued by a Prince Charming, and we are riding away into the sunset, just like in the stories. The sunset is dark. I don’t want to go. No, that’s what I think I should be feeling. But I do want to go. Do I? I feel like Abhimanyu, fighting a lonely battle with an army closing in on me. I should die a valiant death. But I don’t want to die. I don’t want to face any of the choices waiting for me. She knew that the decisions awaiting her at home would be unbearable. Even if she chose to stay alone, loyalties would have to be proven to one parent or both. I am sitting on the edge of a see-saw that goes higher and higher, she thought, and there is no counter weight to pull me down again. One of these days, I will make one wrong move and fly up into the empty sky with all the dead weight of a cannon ball. My calm good sense, my reasonableness, my sensible ways, my amicable manner, none of it is going to save me. I cant save myself. But maybe, I should give someone else a chance to. She opened the window fully and took a deep breath while they drove on companionably until break of dawn.