The Bag

"Honey!"

"Yes, dear?"

"Have you seen my bag?"

"Your bag, dear?"

"You know, my rucksack - the one I carry all the toys in."

"Oh, that bag. It's outside on the washing line, dear."

"What's it doing there?"

"I washed it, dear. It was all grungy with soot. We can't have you going around with a bag like that."

"Yes, yes, but it's Winter. It'll take AGES to dry. It's probably frozen solid out there right now."

"Very likely, dear."

"But I need it tonight! How am I going to carry all the presents around with me without my bag?"

"Don't worry, dear. We have plenty of bags."

"No we don't. None that are big enough. I don't understand why you had to wash my bag just when I was going to need it."

"Now, now. Don't fuss, dear. Of course we have bags big enough. Why, you can take the laundry bag."

"The laundry bag? That ugly, shapeless red monstrosity?"

"Yes, dear. It's very spacious. I'm sure all the toys will fit."

"I can't take the laundry bag!"

"Why not, dear?"

"Because, I'll look stupid walking around with it."

"Come, come dear, I'm sure no one will notice."

"Of course they will! Me, with a stupid lump of a red bag instead of my usual state of the art rucksack. Of course they'll notice."

"But dear, I thought you were the one who said appearances didn't matter in your work."

"What? When did I say that?"

"When we were discussing that new diet plan."

"Oh, that. But look, this isn't about other people. It's about my personal work ethic. I'm a professional. I can't just show up for work with any old bag."

"But it's just this once dear. By next year your usual bag will be dry and you can go back to using that."

"No, no, it won't do. It won't do at all. Just think of the contrast. Me in by all black costume carrying a red bag. A RED bag. Surely even you can see how ridiculous that'll look."

"Yes, well, that reminds me. About your costume, dear. I've been thinking..."

[Okay, okay, I couldn't come up with any other Christmas stories]

Waiting Room

Four strangers in a silent waiting room, trying not to meet each other's eyes. Accidents will happen. The passing of trains has as much relevance to this place as the passing of time. Which is to say it only an excuse. Which is to say there are five dimensions: length, breadth, height, long ago and far away.

You use your chair as a ladder. climb up to where the window looks back at you, looks through you. The others watch you as though you were a clock.

The appointed hour is late. You go down to the station bar, order yourself a sonata. You come back shaken. No one else has stirred.

Conversation

Sometimes, at night, if he's not watching TV or listening to the radio, he can hear the woman in the next apartment on the phone. She has a distinctive voice, loud and high-pitched, and the walls are thin. He can't make out what she's saying, or whether it's in English, but he can hear the timbre of her voice, the lilt and flow of it, its occasional ascents that could be either urgency or excitement.

At times like these, he puts down the book he's reading, switches off the lights, and sits very still, listening to the muffled sound of his neighbor's conversation, this music of connection that only he can hear.

Choco late than never

A recent incident made me think about the various ways in which we as a society sanction cruel and inhuman treatment of various food groups every day of our lives. Just think about the way we puree tomatoes, for instance, or dice carrots, without any concern for their feelings or the effect that such torture could have on their families.

In particular, I'm concerned about a food group very near to my heart - chocolate. It's truly horrendous the kind of tortures you see chocolate being put to every day. Enter any half-decent cafe in New York and you'll see perfectly good, well-educated chocolate being set upon by raspberries and blueberries and other assorted tropical fruit, and being able to do nothing about it. Such treatment is worse than insulting - it's downright barbaric. And what about those patronising chefs who grate the chocolate into tiny pieces and sprinkle it lightly over some putridly fruity confection, as though chocolate had no identity of its own and could be usurped to anyone else's service. Or the restaurants back in India that will serve you Bournvita and claim it's Hot Chocolate. What about Bournvita itself? What about all these biscuits and cereal bars and toffees pretending to be chocolate and corrupting the taste buds of young and old alike? Whatever happened to the dignity of chocolate? How did we go from being a culture where chocolate was treated with the respect and gravity it deserved, to the point where it has become little more than a flavouring, a frail yes-man reduced to mere flattery of our ever more insolent taste-buds.

Some people will argue that its chocolate itself that has become more subservient, more cloying. Schooled in the insouciant tradition of Hershey's and Snickers, today's chocolate is a mealy-mouthed spineless thing, a grovelling excuse for a food-group that deserves the contempt it receives. Yet who is to blame for this deterioration in the moral fibre of chocolate? Is it not a socio-economic system that has systematically marginalised chocolate interests, forcing chocolates to prostitute themselves if they are to survive as active members of the foodstuff community? Is it not the lack of an appropriately nurturing environment, the ridiculous prejudice against chocolates enshrined in the canons of weight-watchers everywhere, the blatant preference shown by young people today for things like fruit and grain, which can never hope to match up to the sophistication, the quiet distinction of the true chocolate bar?

Where is the public debate on this issue? Where are the NGOs? Where are the lobbyists? How can so vital a component of our food-groups be disenfranchised and no one care? How indifferent have we become as citizens, as members of society?

All is not lost however. You still see them - whispering together in confectionaries, waiting patiently in duty-free shops at airports - bars of true chocolate, the kind that have not abandoned the proud traditions of their forefathers, but cling bravely to there identity as chocolates - international dissidents riding as the vanguard of a chocolate Revolution that is bound to come.

Let us join hands with these chocolates, let us show them our solidarity. Let us boycott those restaurants and cafes that would enslave chocolate in the name of bananas or mangos. Let us demand equal rights for chocolates everywhere, let us look into the plight of chocolates in China, in Iraq, let us cry out for greater representation for chocolates on city councils and in parliament. Let us make sure that each and every chocolate is assured its true and honest place in the pantheon of food.

How is all this to be achieved you ask? Time is short and there is much to do, so I won't go into the details here - except to mention briefly my plan to set up an International Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to Chocolate. For those of you who wish to support our cause, however, there are many smaller ways in which you can already begin to make a difference. As the Christmas season approaches, chocolates everywhere will be lonelier than ever. Show them you care. Make them feel special. Take a chocolate home today.

Conversation

Sometimes, at night, if he's not watching TV or listening to the radio, he can hear the woman in the next apartment on the phone. She has a distinctive voice, loud and high-pitched, and the walls are thin. He can't make out what she's saying, or whether it's in English, but he can hear the timbre of her voice, the lilt and flow of it, its occasional ascents that could be either urgency or excitement.

At times like these, he puts down the book he's reading, switches off the lights, and sits very still, listening to the muffled sound of his neighbor's conversation, this music of connection that only he can hear.

Math

In the end, murder is the simplest equation.

Blood cancels blood. Suffering is constant. Death multiplies.

What remains is guilt.

It solves nothing.

The Importance of Being Ugly

Ah Monday. Time to argue.

It seems to me that underlying talk about stereotypes of female beauty there are really two distinct issues: a) the significance we attach to female beauty and b) the way in which that beauty is defined. Think of them as the weight a subject has on your overall grade and the way that you're marked on that subject. It's my opinion that the real problem, indeed from a gender perspective the only problem, is the former, not the latter.

The trouble is that we live in a world governed by the assumption (shared by men and women alike) that women are supposed to be beautiful. Years of systematic social conditioning, liberally aided by propaganda from clothing and cosmetic companies makes us attach undue importance to female beauty, making it a critical if not defining part of a woman's identity. And that is just silly.

The comparison with male beauty (or handsomeness, or good looks, or whatever) is instructive. It's not that standards for male attractiveness are any less stringent or outlandish. Take a look at your standard underwear model with his rock-hard abs and / or his pretty boy good looks (ooh! yum...errr...sorry, got distracted there for a minute) and you have a template of male beauty every bit as unachievable for the ordinary guy as any that applies to women. The crucial difference is that with men, society makes the eminently more sensible assumption that most men aren't going to come close to that standard. Oh, I'm sure there are men out there who care a great deal about their looks. But this vanity is not (or to a much lesser extent) socially imposed - nobody seriously cares that you're not good looking. Or rather, it's a small part of who you are - along with intelligence, professional success, personality, sense of humor, etc. - and not something to get too fussed about. Nobody, for instance, would call me handsome (except perhaps a short-sighted aunt or two), but I can't say that I've ever been anxious about this, or felt the need to invest time, money or effort into doing something about it. And based on my (admittedly unscientific) observation of people I'm friends with, I think that's an attitude generally shared - on average, female beauty is a much bigger deal (to men and women both) than male beauty.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not for a moment suggesting that the more sensible attitude to male beauty is in any way a reflection of the relative smartness (or not) of men; notice it's the attitude to male beauty, not the male attitude to beauty. You might just as well argue that the fact the male beauty is less critical is a tribute to the greater maturity of women when it comes to looking for a mate (though I don't seriously believe this). No, on the whole I think we're all products of an inherited set of social norms that unfairly emphasize the physical attractiveness of women. As Germaine Greer puts it:

"clothes are expected or altered to fit the man; women have somehow to try to fit the clothes. There are a few male fashion victims; all women are victims of fashion. Men will not buy cosmetics; in the United States women spend more than $ 10 billion a year on make-up and beauty aids" (The Whole Woman, Anchor Books 1999, pp 150)

All of this is patently ridiculous. And mouthing platitudes about how "all women are beautiful" or "every woman is beautiful in her own way", while expressing a pretty sentiment, does more to devalue beauty than to help women. Let's face it - most women are not beautiful. They are at best vaguely nice looking, frequently plain, occasionally ugly. Pretty much the same distribution, in fact, as you find with men. And the point is that this doesn't and shouldn't matter. Physical attractiveness shouldn't be the defining characteristic of any individual, it should be a valued but minor trait, like good driving skills, or the ability to juggle or remember phone numbers.

What we need to fight then, is not a particular definition of beauty but the conspiracy of beauty itself. And yes, this means ensuring that we weed out the role of beauty as a selection mechanism in the workplace; it means that we ask ourselves tough questions about media reports that place undue emphasis on a woman's looks or manner, that, for instance accuse Hillary Clinton of "having a grating voice and bad taste in clothes"; it means that we work to change masculine attitudes that evaluate women purely or primarily on the basis of their looks. It also means that women need to make a conscious effort to deny the feminine privileging of beauty, to keep themselves from being manipulated into an emphasis on their looks that is, frankly, unnecessary. It's easy to say "oh, but looks do matter" (just as it's easy for men to say "oh, but it's women themselves who are obsessed with looking beautiful") but real progress will only get made if we attack the perverse selection mechanism from both sides.

Of course, none of this is new, and all of it is easier said than done. But I think it's a critical first step to recognize that it's not really about how we define beauty - whether it relates to skin color, or to a particular shape or body type. The simple fact is that beauty must, by definition be exclusionary. A world where everyone is beautiful is a world where no one is. We can certainly replace one stereotype with another (as an aside, would someone care to explain to me how a currently common definition of beauty can be an 'ancient' stereotype?) but all that achieves is some minor reclassification of who gets to be beautiful - it's a bit like (forgive me, I can't resist) rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But surely, you're going to say, judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is a form of discrimination? It is if we use beauty to judge people (especially women), if we make our assessments of their physical attractiveness a basis of providing access to opportunities or selecting for jobs. But if we were to get over our obsession with female beauty and relegate physical attractiveness to the position it deserves, then the whole question of fairness' relationship to beauty would become largely irrelevant. I personally have never understood the obsession with lighter skin, but there are certainly things I find attractive in a woman (though I'm obviously not going to be stupid enough to list them here) and, by extension, women who I think are beautiful. But I don't (or at least I think I don't) base my friendships or my relationships with women on how the women in question look, simply because in the big picture that hardly matters. And that, I'd argue, is where we want society to be headed. The more time we spend debating what makes a woman beautiful rather than why this matters, the longer we stay trapped in a reductive emphasis on beauty that serves little purpose except to bolster patriarchal power.

Table for one

The old man sits at the table across from me, his newspaper folded to a neat quarter page and laid flat on the table, so he can read while he eats. I can't make out from here what section he's reading, but he seems absorbed in it, never looking up to observe his surroundings, barely glancing at his food as he lifts it mechanically to his mouth, pausing only to turn the paper over, the fork placed back on the plate for an instant, then picked up again.

If he did look up for a moment, if he happened to look this way, would I acknowledge his gaze, perhaps smile at him? No. I wouldn't want to meet his eyes, wouldn't want him to think I had been staring. I would look down to my book, pretend to read, wondering all the time whether he'd gone back to his paper, whether it was safe to look up.

Yet I am grateful for his presence here, grateful that he too has come out on this cold Sunday afternoon to this shabby chinese restaurant to have lunch by himself. Grateful because his being here means I am less alone in being alone.

Blind man's bluff

Of all the apocryphal questions that women ask men - and this list includes such beauties as "Do you really love me?", "Do I look fat in this dress?"[1] and (after you've spent the night before getting madly drunk) "Do you remember what you said to me last night?" - the absolute worst has to be: "Notice anything different?".

Such an innocent sounding question that. So casual, so by-the-way. Like a gently tossed grenade. You smile. You say something like "Of course!" trying to drag out the words while speculation spins in your head like a roulette wheel. It's probably a new hair style, you think. But it could be new nailpolish. Or new glasses. Or just glasses (did she wear glasses before?). Or a new dress. Or new shoes. Or a new purse. Or a new outlook on life. Or maybe it's a trick question and there's nothing different. [2] Hell, it could be anything. She's still waiting for an answer, looking increasingly sceptical. You hazard a guess. Obviously, you get it wrong, thereby proving that your relationship / friendship is nothing but a hollow shell, that you neglect her, take her completely for granted, and don't appreciate her at all. I mean, how could anyone NOT see that she was using a new shade of mascara.

I don't get this. I mean, who in his right mind spends time memorising the colour, length and shape of hair of all the women of his acquaintance. What do I care if your hair is short, shoulder length, waist length, ankle length, third-vertebrae-counting-from-the-tip-of-the-coccyx length? Or whether it's straight, wavy, curly, or fluctuating sinusoidally? I don't even know what a split-end is (though I've always imagined it as a Hydra like creature - you know - Hercules the mighty Hairdresser's trying to give you your fortnightly trim, but every time he cuts a hair two new ones sprout up in its place), so there's no way I'm going to notice if you got them fixed.

You'd think women would be appreciative of the fact that one could see beyond the way they looked [3], that one didn't think of them as over-excited mannequins, that one actually cared about their opinions more than about their hair. Yet we continue to be haunted by this obsessive need to pay attention to appearances, to notice, to compliment [4].

Not that women are the only ones guilty of this kind of attention seeking, of course. Watching La Moustache the other day (it's a brilliant film, btw - like watching a French version of Murakami) made me think about the fallacy of assuming that just because someone loves us or is interested in us they must be paying close attention to every detail about us. The movie itself is more concerned with the question of whether the main protagonist actually had a moustache in the first place, of whether he's just hallucinating, but I kept thinking - so you shaved off your moustache and your partner didn't notice. So what? Is your facial hair really so important a part of who you are that her blindness to it makes you doubt her feelings for you?

Now if it was something truly important that the other person didn't notice - Like say, you were sitting in a coffee shop reading Dancing in Odessa and your boyfriend / girlfriend walked in and didn't ask you who this Kaminsky person was and what the poems were like - then you'd have a real reason to be upset. But all this pettifogging about hair and clothes and 'look' is so redundant. It always reminds me of those 'spot the difference' puzzles they used to print in the papers - you know the ones where you'd have two drawings of this guy standing on the deck of a ship and in one the island would have two trees and in the other it would have only one and there'd be some 22 other such differences and you were supposed to spot all of them. And all the while what I was really interested in was - why was this guy out there on the ship in the first place. Why was he staring wistfully towards this desert island with its one / two trees, with his cap / hat pulled down low over his eyes. Had he signed up with the Navy to get over his heartbreak? Was there someone on the ship looking for him and was he trying to avoid letting them get a good look at his face? Here was a man living through an intense and suspense-filled moment; who cared whether the funnel of the ship he was on had one stripe or two.

[1] A classic double-barelled question that - confuting the issue of whether she looks fat with the agency of the dress in achieving that effect.

[2] People who say women don't enjoy quizzing don't know what they're talking about. Women, in my experience, are natural quizmasters. They secretly hope you'll manage to figure out the right answer, but meanwhile, they love watching you squirm.

[3] In my younger, more naive days, I once made the mistake of telling someone I was dating how I wasn't interested in the way she looked. I wasn't with her because I thought she was good looking, I said, I was with her because I thought she was intelligent and interesting and funny and because we had so many shared interests. I spent the next fortnight having to apologise.

[4] Obviously, you shouldn't even think about offering honest criticism. Make an articulate case for why you don't like it (whatever it is) and you'll immediately be accused of having a negative attitude and being dismissive of everything she tries to do - all of which is linked, of course, to your own male insecurity which makes it impossible for you to celebrate a woman's achievement (said achievement, being, of course, her new earrings).

Yes, but where is the heart?

People ask him if he's going somewhere for the holidays and he says, "Yes, I'm going back to India, actually", adding "for three weeks" if he wants to keep the conversation going. He would like to say he's going home, but something about putting it that way, saying 'home', makes him squeamish. The word tastes wrong somehow, like too-sticky candy.

What is home anyway? How do we define it, locate it, pin-point it on a map? The OED says: A dwelling-place, house, abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests; one's own house; the dwelling in which one habitually lives, or which one regards as one's proper abode. Trust a dictionary to say everything without telling you anything. What if you don't live with your family, what if nothing in your life is fixed and you survive from one nine-month lease to another? What if you have no domestic interests? And what the hell is one's proper abode? Come to think of it, who even says abode anymore, except the people who translate B-grade Kung Fu movies?

Is home where the people most dear to you live? Then, yes, he is going home. Or is home the place where you live yourself, the place you are most comfortable in, the place that all the activities that matter to you are centred around? Then no, he is not going home, he is, in fact, leaving home and going back to a country that he will wear awkwardly at best, like a coat two sizes too small, his shoulders hunched into a shape that is no longer his. Or is home merely another name for a remembered childhood, the places you are nostalgic for, the city and the locality you grew up in, its markets and monuments and streets? If the quest for home is merely to follow the spoor of a wounded memory back through the undergrowth of time, then surely the search ends only in the womb. But no, even by that definition he is not going home, because in the time he has been away the world has changed - people have shifted, old buildings have been torn down and new ones put up in their place - home, like the river, is never the same.

"Home, where my thought’s escaping / Home, where my music’s playing / Home, where my love lies waiting / Silently for me". How many of those criteria does a place have to meet before you can call it home? What if each one of those places is a different place - is it possible to have multiple homes? And how is it possible to be both on vacation and at home at the same time? When did home become a tourist destination?

What was it Tennyson said? "all hath suffer'd change:/ For surely now our household hearths are cold, / Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:/ And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy". He wonders idly what a lotus tastes like.

Home is the place you belong in. The formula offers itself eagerly, shouting its message at him like an urchin with a newspaper. Belong in, belong to. For a moment he is tempted, then he shakes his head. No, that would just begin the cycle over again. One would have to ask: where do I belong? Who do I belong to? And the same doubts, the same questions would raise their heads. Besides, he does not want to 'belong', he wants only to own. He does not really desire to be loved or protected or advised - he sees these things at best as minor inconveniences and at worst as insults - he wants only to love, to protect, to advise. The inconsistency of this stand does not escape him, but it comes back, in his head, to the idea of virtue. If caring for others is a virtue, then surely by caring more for them then they care for us, by being more virtuous than them (is God a relativist, he wonders, does he grade on a bell curve?) we do them a disservice. These are weighty matters.

How do other people do it? How do other people say words like home and love and good and wrong and happiness so blithely, never pausing (it seems to him) to think exactly what it is they mean. Can it be true that the unexamined life is the only truly happy one, that life itself is the one gift horse you should never look in the mouth?

Where is home for him?

What if there isn't one? What if home is only an idea in his head, a fantasy, the colour of grass on the other side of the fence. What if home is truly a mythic place, like Neverland, or Narnia, or Oz. Yes, like Oz. What if Kansas no longer exists and at the end of all these sunlit roads there is no 'whiz of a wizard' but only a wrinkled and ineffectual old man? Does he really need a home? If homesickness is only a kind of gravity then surely there is some velocity at which it is possible to escape it, to leave it behind forever. Can he not find that velocity?

Ships need anchors. The phrase hangs dripping in the air above him. Do they really? What happens to a ship that simply stays in deep waters, is it possible to survive only on stars, on directions? Is it possible to make the ship your world, or to build the world on your ship? Why this fondness for maritime metaphors anyway? Does that itself not betray a certain restlessness? Ships need anchors, yes, but they need anchors that they can retract easily into their own bodies, that they can carry away with them when the leave. An anchor left behind is no use to a ship.

If the longing for home is a kind of gravity, he thinks, then perhaps we are its satellites, falling always towards it without getting any closer. The image pleases him, because it suggests both loss and loneliness of being apart and the ferocious maintenance of one's own identity - forces centripetal and centrifugal.

Very well then. Yes, he is going home. He is just not sure that he will get there.

Textual love

Poems on Love (complete with capital L). 160 characters (with spaces) maximum*. To be sent typed out in an SMS.

i)

A dropped heart.
Falling is flight, but in the end all things break.

Measure desire in breath and dreams in eyelids.
Every love seems unfinished in its own way.

ii)

Writing to you this way
I should be more precise.

But my fingers pick out
A language of missed connections,
And the text knows already
What it has to say to you.

iii)

This is what the heart contracts to,
A love that fits in the palm of my hand.

I try to put a brave face on it,
But my smile is a parenthesis
Closing on itself.

iv)

The signal is fading now.
Soon,
All hope will be out of range.

This is just to say
That I tried to reach you,
And couldn’t get through.

* I've taken the liberty of adding line breaks for the blog version, but without the line breaks (though with the rest of the punctuation) each one of these will fit into a 160 character text message.

Troika haikus

A short story - three haikus, each a complete sentence / a set of complete sentences:

1)

Dawn. The shadows fade.
Without his noticing it
The tide has come in.

He sits at his desk,
Staring at the suicide note
He could not finish.

It is too late now.
To miss the end is to have
To begin again.

2)

"She loves me, she loves
Me not" - gestures picked apart
Like summer petals.

The answer, when it
Comes, is not to his liking.
He storms off, crying.

Behind him, a new
Flower is pollinated,
A new life begins.

3)

It has been two weeks.
The bouquet he sent is dead.
There have been no more.

Yet every day
She cuts the stalks shorter, as
If they were still fresh.

Every day she
Lingers in a fragrance
No one else can smell.
p

Prospice

Fear Delhi? -- to see the fog outside my plane,
Feel airconditioning in my face,
When the announcements begin, and the captain explains
We are nearing the place.
The seat that won't incline, the cabin too warm,
The limited leg-room;
Here he comes, the Steward with his immigration forms,
We'll be there soon:
But the journey won't be done when the terminal's attained:
There'll be long hours in line,
Then a battle to fight ere our baggage be gained,
And that's if we're on time.
I was ever a frequent flier, so -- one flight more,
I can make it, I can last!
This movie is really crap, I'm tired, I'm bored
And time barely creeps past.
Come, let me taste the whole of this meal - I fear
It's at least two days old,
Bear the taste of it, wash it down with beer
Though it's greasy and cold.
For sudden the landing gear is released
And the plane descends
And the babies that scream, and the aunties with their 'Beta, please"
Shall dwindle, shall end,
I shall change, get rupees for my dollars,
And arrive at Arrivals,
I shall proclaim my destination, by a taxi-driver be collared,
And pray for survival.

P.S. In case you still haven't figured it out - I'm headed for Delhi, spending the Winter break there. Now I know what Persephone must have felt like.

Walking on eggshells

Do you ever get the feeling that walking home with eggs in your hand makes you more vulnerable? As though you were somehow implicated in the eggs' fragility?

Like yesterday. There I am with a half dozen super-special nature brown organic eggs [1] in a shopping bag and suddenly I'm imagining accidents everywhere - speeding cars at every crossing, a bus ploughing onto the pavement, my feet slipping on a patch of ice. It's as though I'm haunted by this vision of my body and the eggs both lying broken on the sidewalk, my blood mingling with the spilled yolk.

This is why I don't make omelettes.

Notes:

[1] I'm not, in general, big on the whole organic thing - but the only eggs available in a half dozen pack at my local grocery store are the la di da organic ones. And buying twelve eggs for one person (me) seems like bahut nainsaafi. Oh, for the good old days of walking down to the khokhawalla at the corner and saying "do ande dena". (though to be fair, even he used to give me pitying looks).

The Vacation

There he goes again, she thought, striding away ahead of her, leaving her behind. His familiar figure losing itself among the backs and faces of strangers in this unfamiliar city. Why did he always do this? Sure, he liked to walk fast, but would it kill him to walk beside her once in a while, adjust his pace to hers?

Watching him draw further and further away, she felt a perverse determination to linger. Why should she let herself be stampeded by him? No, she would take her time - staring into the shop windows, stopping to haggle with the roadside vendors - he would just have to wait for her to catch up. And serve him right too. The thought of him standing on the sidewalk, annoyed and impatient, sent a small frisson of mischief through her.

Just then, she noticed a pair of the most exquisite shoes in a shop display. She just had to go in and try them on. Instinctively she turned around to call to him, ask him to come back, then realised that he was already too far away for her voice to reach. For a moment she hesitated, then, with a shrug of her shoulders, walked into the shop. When he discovered that she wasn't behind him he'd come back.

Coming out of the shop fifteen minutes later, she realised that he hadn't shown up yet. She'd been so busy looking at shoes that she hadn't noticed. Where could he be? Was it possible that he still hadn't noticed that she wasn't following, that he was still striding along with that purposeful, intent look of his - getting further away from her with each step? Surely not. Maybe he had realised that she had fallen behind and had decided to stop somewhere on the side of road, at a cafe perhaps, and wait for her to catch up. Yes, that made sense. She walked along the sidewalk in the direction they had been headed but there was no sign of him anywhere. Could he have stopped in a shop as well, could she have passed him by without noticing? Unlikely. He hated shopping. Besides, surely he would have been keeping an eye out for her. Where could he have got to? If there was some specific place they had been heading for she would have gone there, but today was their first day in the city, and they had decided just to ramble through the streets at random. He could be anywhere.

Could it be that he'd got mad when he realised that she wasn't following and had gone off somewhere in a huff? The more she thought about it, the more that seemed like the only logical explanation. The gall of the man, to abandon her so! And in a strange city too! She could feel her temper rising. Well, to hell with him then. She didn't need him. She would go see the city by herself. Give both of them a chance to cool down. Yes, that's what she would do. It occured to her that this would be the right time to go see the museum that she'd been keen on and that he'd refused to go to. That way, things would actually work out for the best. She stepped off the kerb, hailed a taxi.

Leaving the museum at closing time she suddenly realised that she had completely forgotten the name of the hotel they were staying in. It was a small hotel, a bed and breakfast really, and it had this exotic local name that had clean slipped her mind. She'd never had a good memory for this kind of thing. It was the kind of detail she trusted him to remember. She took a cab to the locality she remembered it being in, and spent a couple of hours wandering around the back streets, looking for something that looked familiar, asking shopkeepers for directions to every inn, hotel and pension in the area, but she wasn't able to find the place. Finally, exhausted beyond all measure, she checked into another bed and breakfast, ate a hasty but delicious dinner up in her room, went to sleep.

Waking the next morning she tried to think of ways to get back in touch with him. How to find out the name of their hotel? She went down to the reception and borrowed a listing of hotels in the city, but none of the names struck a bell. She decided to call their travel agent back home and find out what hotel they were booked in (she'd make up some explanation), then realised that it was Saturday and they would be closed for the weekend. She called her own house and checked the answering machine remotely, thinking he may have left her a message knowing she would check, but there was nothing. Maybe he was still sleeping. It would be just like him to have used the opportunity of her absence to get wildly drunk. She called back and left her own message on the machine, spelling out the name and address of the hotel she was staying in, so he could get in touch.

Having exhausted all immediate avenues of reestablishing contact, she lounged about in her room, waiting for the shops to open, then went down and bought herself some new clothes and basic cosmetics. Then, having eaten a filling brunch, she set out to explore the city on her own once more. After all, they were only here for a week - there was no sense wasting a perfectly beautiful day moping around in her room. It would all get sorted out by nightfall. Meanwhile there was so much to see.

When she got back to her hotel that night, tired but happy, the first thing she did was to ask if there were any messages for her. There were none. She felt surprised. Why had he not tried to get in touch with her? Could something have happened to him? For the first time since they had been separated she wondered if his disappearance could have been involuntary. What if he'd had an accident? What if he'd been mugged or killed? She sat in the hotel common area reading through the English dailies. No mention of any American being involved in a mishap. Still, if he hadn't got in touch by Monday she would call the embassy. Meanwhile, she called home and checked for messages again. Only her own message, and one from his mother. No word from him. Maybe it hadn't occured to him that they could communicate this way. Yes, that must be it. She still felt a little uneasy, but a half-bottle of chardonnay combined with the memory of the hectic day she'd had soon allayed her fears. Her last thought before she drifted off to sleep that night was: at least I'm enjoying myself.

The next day the cycle repeated itself. Again, there were no messages for her, again she went out and wandered through the city, taking in the sights, again she was a little dismayed at dinnertime but managed to drown her worry in good food and alcohol. The important thing, she kept telling herself, was to have fun - this was the only vacation she was going to get this year, and sooner or later this mysterious separation of theirs would get sorted out.

By Monday, the days had settled into a comfortable pattern. She spent her days wandering through the bazaars and visiting the medieval ruins, then at night she had dinner by herself. She considered calling the travel agency again, but the whole thing was too embarassing. She decided against calling the embassy as well. After all, nothing had really happened - it was just a silly little miscommunication - hardly the kind of thing you wanted to get the embassy involved in. They would think her neurotic. Better to let the thing sort itself out in its own time.

On Tuesday, she decided to go out for dinner, selecting an intimate little cafe not too far from her hotel, sitting at a table by herself, taking a book along to read by the candlelight. This soon became part of her pattern, though she chose a different restaurant each night. A couple of times men approached her, noticing that she was alone. She felt vaguely flattered by this, but turned them down politely - she was enjoying the experience of dining out by herself too much - it was something she'd never done before in her life. Certainly in the eleven years they'd been married she'd never been to a restaurant on her own. It was thrilling to be able to pick exactly the dishes she wanted, without having to worry about getting something that he might like to share, thrilling to be the one tasting the wine to see if it was good, thrilling to be the one handing out the credit card at the end. These evenings out alone left her so flushed with joy that when she got back to the hotel she even forgot to ask if there were any messages for her.

Now and then, usually over breakfast in the mornings, it occured to her to wonder what he was doing in the meantime. Was he having as good a vacation as she was? She imagined him going frantic trying to find her in the city, imagined him running to the embassy, to the police, and felt a pang of guilt. But then she thought, no, if he was really looking he would have found me by now. More than likely he's happy to be rid of me and is it living it up - probably there's a lot of alcohol, maybe there are even other women. She felt hurt and bewildered by his betrayal, by his callousness in not having contacted her yet. Still, she must be fair. Maybe he had been looking and hadn't been able to find her. After all, she hadn't been able to get in touch with him either. And she had tried. She wondered what he thought she was doing.

At any rate, now that the ten days they were here for were almost over, the answer was simple. She knew the date and time of their flight back home. All she had to do was show up at the airport, her backpack of new possessions with her, and they could return to New Jersey together. How much they would have to say to each other on the flight! What a story they would have to tell their friends back home. The very thought of that airport meeting made her smile. It would be like Casablanca, only in reverse. They would never have Paris.

But when the day arrived, he wasn't there. She sat in front of the airline counter for three hours, waiting for him to show up, but there was no sign of him, and when she finally asked the woman at the counter there was no booking in their name either. Had she remembered the wrong day? She could have sworn it was today - after all they both had to be back at work by Monday. Could it be that he'd gone home early, frantic with worry at her disappearance? But why cancel her reservation? And if he was home already, he would have got the message she'd left him. Surely he would have called.

The woman at the counter was looking at her impatiently. She realised she was holding up the line. She thought about going back to her hotel and trying to call him at home, perhaps coming back to the airport tomorrow to see if she'd got the wrong date. But she was here now, ready to fly out. She asked the woman at the counter if there were still seats available on the flight. There were.

Reaching the house, she could see immediately that no one was home. The lights were all turned off, the windows closed, the blinds drawn. In the gathering dusk, the house looked strangely ghostlike. She paid the taxi, then entered the house, setting her backpack on the stairs as she wandered into the living room. She checked the machine, hoping to hear his voice, but was disappointed. Desultorily, she flipped through the post, then went over to the bar and fixed herself a drink. Tired with the long flight, she sank into an armchair, kicked off her shoes, sipped her vodka slowly, thinking about the week gone by, their sudden separation. It seemed so strange to think that it had all started because she'd ducked into a shop behind his back to look at some shoes. The whole thing was bizarre. They'd had fights before, of course, but this was different - there was no acrimony here, only a sense of something disconnected. She wondered where he was now, but the thought passed through her mind idly, tinkling about in her head like a shaken ice cube, then melting away. Sitting there, in the almost dark house, she thought about the vacation she'd had without him - the choices she'd made, how alive she'd felt. Draining her drink to the last drop, she got up, went over to the kitchen sink, rinsed the glass clean. For a moment she stared at the red light of the answering machine, winking at her. Then, moving as briskly as she could, she went and picked up her backpack, slung it over her shoulder, walked out of the door.

Stupidity

Have you ever had the experience where you hear someone talking around you and have this urge to step over and slap them out of their stupidity?

Like the other day at an exhibition there was this twenty-something who was loudly proclaiming that she didn't see what the big deal was and she could have painted this herself and how this whole thing was mostly hype. Or the young woman sitting behind me at the concert on Saturday who went on about how she loved the third LOTR movie because it had such great action and that Aragorn guy looked so cute, but she thought the first movie was sssoooo boring [1] - apparently they just walked and talked and walked and talked - and overall would pick Harry Potter over Tolkien any day. People like that deserve to be roasted over a slow fire, preferably in their own moisturising creams.

That's why I'm so amused when people talk about the population problem. To me, the solution is obvious - just get rid of all the cretins who don't deserve to live anyway, and there'll be plenty of natural resources to go around between the few million people left.

Also, have you ever come across one of those stupid posters / mementos that say things like "It takes 456 muscles to frown, it takes only 6 muscles to smile", as though efficiency of muscle use were the only reason to be sad or happy. It always makes me want to ask - how many muscles does it take to be a moron?

Right. Now to get through the rest of the week.

[1] In the interests of disclosure I should say that the first LOTR movie was the only one I could really stand. Okay, so they left Tom Bombadil out and Liv Tyler got her stupid star turn, but at least they didn't actively corrupt the meaning / logic of the book; after what they did to the Ents in the second movie I never found the heart to forgive them.

Stupidity

Have you ever had the experience where you hear someone talking around you and have this urge to step over and slap them out of their stupidity?

Like the other day at the Met's Van Gogh exhibition there was this twenty-something who was loudly proclaiming that she didn't see what the big deal was and she could have painted this herself and how this whole Van Gogh thing was mostly hype. Or the young woman sitting behind me at the Dianne Reeves concert on Saturday who went on about how she loved the third LOTR movie because it had such great action and that Aragorn guy looked so cute, but she thought the first movie was sssoooo boring [1] - apparently they just walked and talked and walked and talked - and overall would pick Harry Potter over Tolkien any day. People like that deserve to be roasted over a slow fire, preferably in their own moisturising creams.

That's why I'm so amused when people talk about the population problem. To me, the solution is obvious - just get rid of all the cretins who don't deserve to live anyway, and there'll be plenty of natural resources to go around between the few million people left (though, of course, most of them will still want to live in New York, so it won't help Manhattan rents much).

Also, have you ever come across one of those stupid posters / mementos that say things like "It takes 456 muscles to frown, it takes only 6 muscles to smile", as though efficiency of muscle use were the only reason to be sad or happy. It always makes me want to ask - how many muscles does it take to be a moron?

Right. Now to get through the rest of the week.

[1] In the interests of disclosure I should say that the first LOTR movie was the only one I could really stand. Okay, so they left Tom Bombadil out and Liv Tyler got her stupid star turn, but at least they didn't actively corrupt the meaning / logic of the book; after what they did to the Ents in the second movie I never found the heart to forgive them.

On being a victim

Sometimes it takes more courage to be the victim. To admit that we were hurt or betrayed or deceived. To admit that we were wronged.

What frightens us about these situations is the knowledge of our own vulnerability. What if we cried out and no one listened? What if the person who wronged us couldn't care less? What if we were the ones who ended up being abandoned, ended up alone? Better to put a brave face on the whole thing, to preempt being let down by others by letting down ourselves.

Sometimes we say "It's okay, I understand", not because we truly understand but because we are too frightened to reveal how bewildered we are. Pretending to understand denies the other person power over us, makes us look less helpless, more in control. Sooner or later, we come to believe it ourselves.

Believing it ourselves requires having an explanation though. Which is why we now have to take the questions we were too afraid to ask and find answers to them on our own. This sounds harder than it is. Driven by our need to find reasons for everything, we move easily from the plausible to the certain, selectively finding 'evidence' for whatever theory happens to appeal to us. This sort of rationalisation not only gives us a basis for the understanding we have already laid claim to, it is also a wonderful way of occupying our time - numbing us to the emotional reality of the hurt and helping us experience a sense of self-efficacy based on our 'superior' powers of observation and thought. And if the explanations we come up with happen to be the ones most flattering to us, so much the better.

This, incidentally, is where faith comes from. God is an attempt to justify the unfair.

And should evidence contrary to our theories arise, we deal with it by positing a special relationship between us and the person who has wronged us. "Nobody else understands him / her the way I do" we tell ourselves. This not only lets us ignore what everyone else is saying, it also creates a special bond between us and the person who mistreats us - a bond that compensates for the relationship we thought we had. This is the love of the oppressed for the oppressor - every slave knows his or her master's needs better than anyone else. And believing in this unique connection allows us to look down on other people, to return scorn for their sympathy, disdain for their support. It is the armour in which we fight against the hands reaching out to help us.

People who have a real connection understand how little they really know about each other, how different they are and how poorly they understand those differences. It is what keeps them interested in each other. People like that don't need to rationalise.

When we finally get around to forgiving the other person it is because we wish to establish our own dominance over them. Forgiveness is a claim - it not only suggests that we have enough emotional distance from the situation to be able to forgive, it also implies that the person we are forgiving cares about us enough to value our forgiveness.

Sometimes we choose to be the bigger person simply because we need to feel bigger.

Sometimes dignity is just another cop-out.

And sometimes the opposite of all this is true and the other person really is sorry and we really do understand and really could forgive, only then we go read Kierkegaard or Greer and we think maybe we should be asserting ourselves more and we refuse to trust our instincts and end up alone and unhappy.

Only thing is, you end up alone and unhappy anyway. At least this way you have the satisfaction of knowing you fought back.

P.S. Don't ask. Let's just say it's been that kind of day.

Other fish in the sea

"There are other fish in the sea" my friends tell me, the day after you and I finally break up.

Yes, they actually say that. In so many words.

My friends are big on cliches these days. They seem to think that shopworn homilies are the best way to mend a broken heart.

The really scary part is that it works.

Lying awake in bed tonight, wondering where things went wrong between us, I start to think about fish. And the sea.

I think about the time we went down to Alibagh for the weekend. How you dragged me out to see the fort. How we walked back with the tide coming in around us, the water over our knees and rising. How frightened I was that we would drown. How much you laughed. Afterwards, your trousers clinging wet to your calves.

This is not helping.

Maybe if I tried counting fish jumping out of the sea it would put me to sleep. No, seriously. It's worth a shot.

Trying to conjure up the image, I realise I've never actually seen fish in the sea. Not once. Every time I go to the seashore there are the usual sights - children and lovers, seashells, a few colourful stones, the sand. And I've seen other, less ordinary things - a wooden idol floating in the electric blue waters off Vishakhapatnam, the driftwood of giant logs along the Pacific coast, seaturtles clawing their way out of the ocean in Orissa, ships stranded permanently in the shallows, the spout and tail of a whale. But no fish. Never fish.

I know that there are fish in the sea, of course, and that people do go out to catch them. Barechested fishermen ploughing their frail canoes into the teeth of the waves, sleepy catamarans, Hemingway and his old man. But these are more myths than people, distant, almost romantic figures, far removed from my life. I think I can safely say that nobody I know has ever gone out to the open sea to catch fish.

Fish, for us, comes from the market. If you live in India, you go to the smelly little bazaar where sharp-tongued old women haggle and barter their assembled wares. If you live in the US you make your lonely way down to the supermarket where rows upon rows of fish are laid out in neon-lighted sterile shelves, carefully maintained at the precise temperature that will make them look their most attractive. I personally never buy a whole fish anyway (I can't deal with the bones). I buy cans: cylinders of tightly packed flesh that you scoop out with a knife - tuna, sardines, mackerel, herring - all the usual suspects.

I suppose even these fish must come from somewhere. Someone must be catching them, delivering them to our doors dead and packaged. But perhaps it isn't lonely fisherfolk battling the elements, perhaps it isn't the delicate art of bait and lure. Perhaps it's greasy trawlers harvesting the waves with their nets. Fishing as mass-production and the death of dolphins.

I guess it matters whether you see the point of fishing as the satisfaction of hunger or the indulgence of a deeper craving for adventure. I'm just not sure we can always tell the difference.
(All this talk about fish is making me hungry. I think I'll fix myself a sandwich.)

The other problem with all these fish that come out of the sea, it seems to me (poking around in my refrigerator for mayonnaise), is that they're all alike. Well, at least the vast majority of them are. Think about it. How many of us can actually tell one tuna from another? And to how many of us does the difference matter? Is that what they mean when they say there are other fish in the sea? Not that you'll get other chances, but that every person can be replaced with another just like him or her? That the minute you catch hold of another fish to take the place of your old one, you'll never know the difference? And if that's all there is, this endless repetition, this grey sameness, then why let go of the first fish at all? What can you hope to gain? What do you hope to escape from?

But no, wait, there are other fish out there. It's not all tuna and salmon. There are the more colourful fish, the ones you see in documentaries about coral reefs, or in public aquariums. Living streaks of underwater paint, banded and speckled and gleaming. The kind of fish you have to go scuba diving on a clear day to see.

Except you don't catch fish like that, do you? They're decorative fish. You gaze at them in wonder as they pass you by and you want to protect their beauty, want to keep them from harm. You don't eat them.

Okay, so some people catch them and keep them in fishbowls inside their house, but they're either cruel or just plain fooling themselves.

Besides, some of those fish are poisonous.

So even if there are other fish in the sea, does it really matter to me, sitting here at my kitchen table, eating a tuna sandwich and feeling my bare feet grow cold on the marble floor, me with no boat or net to call my own, me with no means of reaching all these ocean dwelling fish except through the grudging agency of others and then without the chance to see them as they naturally are?

I wonder if I should take a vacation somewhere, maybe go down to a beach resort, maybe go diving, look for some fish.

What's the point? I can't even swim.

Possibly Untrue

It is impossible to believe in impossibility.

What we call impossible is only what we believe to be always untrue. Just as when we speak of infinity we mean a number too big to count.

Upper class twitter of the year

So I finally decided to try out this twitter thing.

Not that i have any intentions of influencing a conversation or get influenced by following the role model(s) to whom it gives easy access like never before.

I just figured that its the most efficient way to use my cell phone. It seems interesting to see extreme views ( tweets) unbiased by political correctness where one just speaks just to speak - a new found freedom of expression.

Obviously, It would take me a while to figure out 1) how this whole thing works and 2) what I plan to do with it. till then happy being a fence twitter...