cocky

I’m in excruciating pain. If life has ever bitten you in the ass just when you were walking on air, you’d know what I mean. This is agony.

I can see very clearly though, why it happened. I got stupid. I got cocky. I stopped thinking, my emotions and over-confidence got the better of me, and WHAM. I fell down a multi-storeyed building, unfortunately accidentally taking someone else with me as well.

Perhaps at some point the people affected may forgive me. Perhaps. But how long will I take to forgive myself?

So much for always being in control.

no second thoughts

“We are such funny roommates. This has to be the best morning after ever!!”

Of course, by then it was 10 pm, she was half asleep while we were discussing nefarious activities of the night before, and I was rolling on the bed cackling. I had to agree with her though, while I watched her run off to pick up the phone. It was her boy from the night before. Thankfully though, the one I encountered wasn't going to call me anytime soon...

--

15 hours earlier. . .

The sun was up. Fully. And I was exhausted. It still hadn’t really sunk in, what I had done. Even with the hand that curled around my stomach, playing with my belly-button.

“You have such a hot body.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, it’s usually covered.”

I raised an eyebrow but he couldn’t see it of course. I was too tired to argue. But my nerve-endings were waking up again. The boy had very long fingers. A good thing. I now know, I like men with long fingers.

“You know, I kinda like to finish what I started. And I don’t think you’re finished.”

Ten minutes later, I was pretty sure I had finished. I found myself laughing.

“I’m sorry... I know I tricked you.”

It was the easiest trick I ever played. Two hours earlier, when we had rolled into bed, he removed all my clothes but refused to have sex with me. “I’m tired of fucking women. I want to make love. I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”

“Uhm.. What, you want me to marry you?”

He laughed.

“I thought so. So shut up and do it.”

He laughed even more.

“You’re such a bossy bitch.”

I smiled in the darkness.

Strangely enough, we talked a while before I seduced him and got what I wanted. Twice. And I didn’t even do it consciously. The talking turned us on apparently. He was very gentle. And it was probably difficult to be gentle when you’re 6’2”, fucking someone’s brains out. He covered me with the bed-sheet when I felt cold, he wrapped one long arm around me and nuzzled my neck. He told me how fabulously hot and intelligent I was, and even laughed when I said I picked all the wrong guys. “You have nothing to worry about, sweetheart,” he said. And strangely enough, in that moment, I believed him. Though I had to tell him that I didn’t like being called ‘sweetheart’. He wasn’t surprised.

Tarika and I were talking about this later. “Good. You never believe your sister and me when we say how beautiful you are. I’m glad this guy told you, and that you believe him.” I didn't have the heart to remind her that I only doubted myself because the last two men I fell for hadn't touched me even with a bargepole.

It’s quite amazing what a little intimacy will do to your life. Your underwear feels sexier, your stomach feels flatter, you walk with more oomph... I always thought it was such a goddamn cliché. I mean why would gorgeous, amazing women need a man to validate them?

I think my questions have been answered.

I had expected him to be gone by the time I woke up. I heard his voice, though, after my phone rang. He had a very deep, sexy voice. He and Tarika were laughing and playing with my dog. Somehow, it wasn’t awkward at all. We went back to being friends in a heartbeat. He didn’t try to hug me goodbye and he understood what I meant when I sent him a monosyllabic text message many hours later.

“Thanks.”

He knew I wouldn’t want to analyse the previous night and turned the sms-talk into a request for books. Something I didn’t forget. Somewhere between warming up to each other and him seeing a side of me only one person had ever seen before, he told me about his ADD. How difficult it was living in a family of geeks when he was growing up. I remember thinking, “Even this one is messed up?”

But he wasn’t. He had a gargantuan family, slept around a lot, rescued drunk friends on bike escapades, tried to read one book every two months, ran one section of a business, all at the age of 26. A surprisingly normal guy. The type I never fell for. But the perfect guy to lose my ‘one night stand’ virginity to.

This was probably one of the few times in my life I didn’t have regrets.

“You’re welcome,” his reply said. “Thanks for being you.” Smileyface.

(anti) love

I am reading a book called Into The Wild now. And it is very inspiring. And impractical. I don’t see myself giving up everything, burning my money, and living among the trees. Yet, I somehow come across as [and enjoy coming across as] a nature lover, animal lover, whatnot. Slightly hypocritical no?

I wish I had the balls to do something like Chris McCandless. bluepapercranes and I were discussing this yesterday, and [literally and figuratively] we really don’t have the balls. She took a jump into a field that she loves - teaching kids for almost no money - which does not involve hours bent over a computer, her eyes tearing up, head throbbing, back withering. Now she wanders around barefoot in classrooms, giggling, hiding her tattoo from the kids, singing songs and teaching them grammar.

Love is a bit strange. It involves so much courage. Something I don’t think I have anymore. I had it once, not-so-long ago... but now I’m bitter and cynical almost to the very core of my being. I’m not saying I don’t love. Fortunately or unfortunately, I do. And very passionately at that. But I just don’t have the courage to believe in such love anymore.

I love writing. But I won’t give up my paid job at what is now a sad excuse for a weekend newspaper, and I won’t just plunge into it. And I’m not taking any chances with my life. I don’t think I have the balls.

Robert Lee Brewer said to write either a love poem or an anti love poem yesterday. I’m not in the mood for whiney poetry anymore [see below; also bluepapercranes may just kill me], but Brewer’s prompts do tend to bring out some writing from me. I just don’t know which side I am on this post - love, or anti love. I guess both. I believe in it, but it hurts too much to take chances anymore. [please don’t ask me if I’m talking about a boy!] I’m just going to go with the flow, and see what happens :)

speed demon

Car horns blared and wheels screeched. If I had stopped I may have even smelt something that always put me off – rubber burning, or rather the smell of tyres when they aren’t built for speed. Mine were, fortunately.

Traffic was a bitch. It always was. And I wasn’t the chief minister or leader of the state’s opposition, or even some inane IAS officer or High Court judge. I was nobody. A common man, albeit married to the most brilliant woman in the world, with a mundane and monotonous job, and a lousy hatchback of a car.

Chennai roads were not built for speeding hatchbacks, even if they had Japanese tyres – potholes, people crossing on a whim, cows, bullock carts, stray dogs that think they’re Superman’s best friend and try to fly across in peak hour traffic, not to forget the millions of two-wheelers and auto rickshaws.

The roads definitely weren’t built for people dying either. Why the goddamn hospital had to be a billion miles away, I wouldn’t know. And the goddamn paramedics had even refused to let me in the ambulance so I had to jump into my trusty hatchback and follow. Sans the screaming siren and all. So people thought I was a freak and mostly didn’t allow me to pass.

The aforementioned brilliant wife was standing by the road, waiting for me to pick her up, when she crossed (the signal was red). Some bastard knocked her down. Right in front of my eyes. A massive 4WD with the ruling political party’s flag flapping away at the front, very proudly, knocked down my 26-year-old photographer wife, gorgeous and intelligent and carrying a shitload of equipment. If she wasn’t, she would have just caught a goddamn auto.

I cursed myself for not leaving office sooner to pick her up and cut through one more red light, screaming at the two-wheeler who tried to overtake me from my left. Moron.

I felt like I was having a panic attack when I saw the next red light. The ambulance managed to get ahead by as much as about 50 feet and I had to get to it. Stat. Of course, traffic wasn’t allowing me to. I turned off the nasal girl on the radio and put on some Pearl Jam and stepped on the accelerator. That was after I took a puff of my asthma medicine. Of course, I didn’t actually have asthma. I just smoked too much and kept it with me in case of emergencies. Like this.

I got to my wife after a couple of minutes. I knocked down a girl on a bicycle in the process, but it was her fault. Women are gorgeous and smart, but they can’t drive to save their lives and they should bloody accept the fact.

It had been 27 minutes already. Twenty seven long minutes since that white monster of a car had knocked her down. And I had no idea what shape she was in. I saw the hospital on the horizon and somehow, I didn’t feel any relief. I think I knew she was already gone. Maybe she was never mine to begin with. I always wondered what she saw in a poor sod like me.

**********

The boys had been glued to their gaming console since early evening, but hunger made them look up around dinner time.

“Where the hell is Samir, dude? I’m hungry. Is he getting pepperoni or chicken bbq?”

“No idea. Both will do. I may even eat mushrooms now, I’m so fucking hungry.”

“He’ll be here soon. He was stuck at office.”

The first guy looks up. “Office? Shit, that’s in fricking another state, dude. He’ll take another hour at least.”

Boy number two groans, but the third interrupts. “Chill, man. The psycho will be here soon.”

“How do you know?? Have you ever driven on that route at 7pm?”

“You know that strange psycho-ass trick he has of following ambulances and pretending he’s the son or whatever of the person inside? He’s probably doing that. He texted earlier saying he’d be here in 20. So shut up and wait.”

maybe baby

Maybe next time...
I'll ask a question when I think it,
instead of weighing the pros and cons and deciding
everything is better left unsaid.
After all it is never safe to let people
into my head, my thoughts, my feelings.
What if they get scared, or they see... me.

Maybe some day,
I'll actually say something when it strikes me.
Maybe I'll be more open about why I was hurt,
why I am the way I am,
why I don't agree with you and think you're full of s*&^,
maybe I'll ask 'how do I know if I'm "in love" with xyz',
instead of letting her talk about inane things
when my head is in a cloud
and I'm only pretending to listen.
Something I'm very good at.. pretending.

Maybe next time I won't have to pretend..
just maybe

BG

Blonde hair, highlighted by endless hours under the outback sun,
muscled arms (that's all I could see),
tattoos aplenty.

We called him BG,
he looked like a hippie.

We saw him first in the dark,
before the sun rose on our little tour.
We were not on his bus.

Glad for no distractions from nature,
We got the chatty, funny guide,
not the hot one with a body from an ancient Greek statue.
The one who couldn't cook
but had us in splits for three days.

But a year later,
we still talk about BG.
Not the funny guy.

what if..

What if my family were all ordinary people..
Would I be ordinary, pleased by ordinariness and hence a happier person?
Would they not have been afflicted with air crashes, strange fatal diseases and suffering?

What if I let go of my mother when I was younger..
Would I have met someone in a strange city and been ‘normal’, i.e., had a couple of relationships by now?
Would I have stayed away from the people who loved me, made me love them, and then hurt me?
Would I have been smarter?

What if I had never been let down..
Would I be less suspicious, less cynical?

What if we were always happy people..
Would there be no hunger, poverty, over-population because of our selfishness?

What if we were not alone..
Would the other inhabitants of our spaces be our friends or foes?

What if I had not missed that flight to Sydney..
Would I have met my mentor or potential life partner in the check-in line?
What would I have done with the 300 dollars I would not have spent on another air ticket?

What if he hadn’t gotten on that flight..
Would he have picked other life partners for his children?
Would my sister and I even be here today?
Would we have curly hair, and me, a face like his which reminds my mother of him everyday?

What if I could forgive people, go easier on them..
Would that make me at peace with myself?
Would that lead them to hurt others or me again?

What if our lives were all written out..
Do our choices matter and do we make them?
Do we even matter at all or is it all for someone else’s supercalifragilistic plan?

What if none of us were really here, and we’re all imagining that our pain or happiness or ambition is the most important thing in the world?

--
prompted by: deep

a day before monday

10.55 am – Time to wake up befuddled, in a sweat. No, my pillow is not alive. My alarm is not ringing. And for a change I am wide awake, ironically on a Sunday morning. I feel useless, a waste of my mother’s beautiful genes, if I remain in bed any longer. My mind drifts.. Wishful thinking. I sigh.

11.10 am – I find the dog, rather, he finds me. We rejoice in finding each other. My roommate makes me coffee. Bittersweet because she won’t be here for very much longer.

11.20 am – Time to weep over the newspaper. Again befuddling because I can’t tell the difference between truth and lies.

11.45 am – Television. Inane serials, delving into other people’s lives because we are so bored of our own.

1.00 pm – Email, Facebook, blog updates, some more news. The drunk friends are contemplating their hangovers and the happenings of the previous night very intently.

1.20 pm – iPod. Some sad love songs. The day begins to unravel.

2.00 pm – Lunch with self and then washing some dishes. The phone rings. My soapy hands ignore it.

3.00 pm – I return the call, listen to some more depressing (but very good) music and head to shower.

4.00 pm – New shades. Summer is here after all. I head for a much-needed workout of my body and distraction for my brain.

6.00 pm – Friends. I’ve forgotten I was ever sad. I make inane remarks and re-discover an annoying Hindi film song, I eat, drop the friends home and head back.

8.20 pm – The dog is asleep but says hi. The roommate is out and my parents are away. My heart feels like everything happy has been sucked out of it.

9.00 pm – After staring into the darkness, someone I am supposed to interview cancels. I break down. I hate work.

9.30 pm – A light-hearted chat with my oldest friend.

10.00 pm – More television.

10.40 pm – I sit down to write. Has all of this really, *really* been over a bloody boy??! When is it going to stop? I pray it is PMS. The boy is not worth it if he is that blind. And nobody can make him see. Bloody befuddling boy.

pandora

Chaos.
Complete pandemonium.
He opened Pandora’s box.
Let loose a monster
Who was once an apsara
Radiating light.

Love is supposed to heal, she thought,
Not unleash my demons.
Her bubbles of venom spewed forth,
Dispelled love thoughts lay smashed on the floor.

She looked back at them.
Returned to grind them deeper into the ground.
Nothing is as empowering as revenge,
Icy cold revenge, she found.

psycho 27

I’m tired. And sad. Things which I try never to be. Tired means what I’m doing in the first place is not good enough for me. Sad could be because I’m not doing what I want to do, or that I don’t know what I want.

Or it could be more personal, I thought, and took a deep drag on my cigarette. What did I really want? Or was it a who?

Some years ago I had decided not to get too involved with men. I had bad taste in them. Maybe because of daddy issues, or the endless men I had seen in life who let my friends, family and me down. Who knows? Either way, I was always attracted to the messed up ones. Which made life quite difficult. Unfortunately in countries like mine, casual sex was frowned upon. Especially for women. So not only was I deprived of a boy, I was also deprived of sex. I’d like to think that I wasn’t pining for an actual fuzzy, warm relationship, that I wanted just the sex. But though the rest of the world could fall for that act, I knew the truth.

There was only one thing that could cure me of my daddy issues. Or it could make me worse: emotional, suicidal, crazy. “Love”. I hated that word. It was overused, overrated, misinterpreted, pointless, confusing, and a whole lot of other things. But apparently part of me wanted it. The fuzziness of it all. I shuddered.

I had always thought love was biological. Based on sexual urges, unconscious attractions to men whose babies we unknowingly (or in psycho cases knowingly) wanted to bear. And men, well it was simpler with them because there were no emotions there. They were just built to spread their seed. So this whole love business was pretty much a sham, and based on chemistry, science, cells.

Except I was 27 and apparently my cells had started giving in to the psychosis that takes over when you get older and realize what you want is security. A big guy to prove you wrong about men, who will take you out, be suitably overprotective, charm your family, buy you a cat, try and cook you dinner but actually burn it… I cursed loudly and lit another cigarette.

The beach was dangerous at night, especially for women who were alone. But I had made friends with the dogs there. I made sure I carried a weapon, my cell phone, and that I took the car with the bright red POLICE sticker on it. (Fake of course).

I took off my shoes and walked towards the water. It was further away than I thought so I plonked on the sand, halfway across. I saw an actual cop’s car pass. The cop got down and shouted at some guys loitering around their parked BMW. I rolled my eyes. The richer they were, the more arrogant the lowlifes got.

“Nouveau riche,” I muttered.

I lay down with my arms behind my head and looked at the stars, lost deep in thought. I thought about the douchebag I had recently fallen for. Well, he wasn’t all that bad. He was rich and confused, but otherwise quite a gentleman. Most other men would have asked me out on a date, bombarded me with text messages, asked to hear me sing (I had voice training as a teenager but didn’t want to be a lousy pop star) and thrown themselves at my feet if they knew I liked them.

This one was like the type I usually fell for. Messed up. But he probably wasn’t as messed up as he thought. Just weak and confused. Sometimes I felt like kissing him, at other times I felt like beating him to a pulp. I probably could, too. Part of me didn’t even know what he was really like. Whether he was weak or whether I just wanted to see the weak side of him so I could get over him. Not that it helped.

I had tried everything. Travel, singing, taking a break from work, drinking, socializing, but none of it worked. For some godforsaken reason, I wanted the confused, rich boy.

I sighed. I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was drizzling so I hesitated before pulling it out. It was my mother. I got up, brushed off the sand and prepared to head home before she called again.

That was when I saw him. He was standing in front of my car, staring at the number plate. I blinked. It couldn’t have been him.

He turned and saw me. But he didn’t move. His hands were in his pockets, he continued frowning at me as I made my way towards my car.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are YOU doing here?”

“I live here. You know that.”

“On the beach?”

“No, nearby.”

I showed no reaction. I did know he lived nearby. I ignored his reply and went to my car, opened the door and turned around to say goodbye.

I screamed when I turned. He was standing two inches from my nose. And he kissed me.

It was a kiss I had imagined many times. I was so busy handling the million thoughts in my head that I forgot to really feel the kiss. When he drew back, I stared at him for ages. Neither of us said anything. Then I asked him to pinch me. He did.

And then I bloody woke up on the beach, soaking wet because it had started raining.