Deuce Tickalow.

Mr. Ray, the Daddyness says,'When beauty-with-brains walks past you in a busy mall, you think it's Dennis Rodman's dog'.

There was always ridiculously-painful-sense-of-humour, leveraged-comic-timing, crackerjack-punchlines and now, this. Takes Daddydom to weird levels, where even the dopamine goes crazy. Gah. Papa knows besht. *hiccup*

A little orthogonal Christmas cheer.

Wrinkle wrinkle, little star.

Don't you just love it when your grandfather's neighbour chooses to let his hookah do the talking? The plate of baked sardines set on his lap, the colour draining from his pink cheeks as he deliberately regales you with a long drag and cracks his knuckles in your face. Windswept oily hair, that is as well-groomed as the whiskers of my librarian's dog. These Bengali octagenarians would have you believe otherwise.

Six months. Those rabid howls sill ring in my ears when I walk an unlit street. That feminine, primal scream still keeps me awake most nights. Why did I have to see it? And why did I react the way I did? Depravity. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Pushing bread.

The milk in my teacup squirms as the tea-leaves try to grope their way into its creamy smoothiness. Sometimes, I think the statistical chances of a person ruining these chai-soaked, breezy December mornings is close to zilch. I mean, who knew that the istri-wallah would suddenly take it upon himself to ask for Christmas-baksheesh when he is as Christian as my potted bougainvilleas?

Zaalim.

Why I raise hell when I can't settle with a person's history will always be cause for concern to me. I sidestep around the games people play, and then I realize I have been playing them all along. Heaven help you if one day I decide to go rogue and lambast all of you with my ego.

Powder bean.

Truth be told, coffee is sex in a cup.

These li(v)es. Balderdash in Bombay - Part 2.

The cigarette dangles from my mouth like nobody's business. We are sitting on a quiet curb near Colaba Causeway. Mohsinbhai is dishing out faloodas laced with saffron. Michellia is tugging at her shirtfront absent-mindedly with one hand, and waving the other at Mohsinbhai to get us another cream-crumpet. Out of the corner of my eye, I observe the slow undulations of her breasts, as she motions to Mohsinbhai to refill her glass. I look away hastily, fearing reproval. To our left, a 'secondhand-book-seller' is plying his trade without his usual chirpiness (that is an occupational hazard here). As she digs into her backpack to retrieve her Nikon,I look around for a suitable place to stub out the cigarette. There is a tinkle of glasses and cutlery, as I reach for change in the pockets of my jeans, and Mohsinbhai's face is gleaming as pockets the change, stowing the spoons away in his rusty steel container. 'Phir se aana, Ayanbhai. Memsahab ko bhi faloode pasand hain na'. 'Zaroor', I reply with a smile. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn my head to see Michellia click a rather uncalled-for picture of me. I try to protest but she grabs my hand and tells me she wants to walk. I comply.
I had expected the city to change. While I was in Manipal, Aunt Valerie told me that the city is changing, for the worse. I hated her when she said that. Because there's so much that would go away were this city to change. No more sleepy afternoons in Matunga. No more catching up with classmates in Koolar & Co. No more of the peddlers ingratiating themselves to me. Sarah, my ex-supervisor, once told me that every time she came back to Bombay after a long time, she expected a little more modernisation, a little more variations of globalizing tendencies, a little more molestation by international exposure. When I was younger, my mother befriended a Keralite housewife who had lived all her life in Sion. She said something like,'Aiyyo! Woh jo tightrope-walker hota hain na mele main, waisa hi lagta hain. Hamesha lagta hain - abhi girega, par woh toh hamesha aasani se cross kar leta hain'. My mother would smile benignly and hand her another cup of Earl Grey, which she would slurp in great earnest. Thomas Hardy wrote extensively of his time in Dorset and the relationship he built up with the place in the space of many years. I look at my relationship with this city, and draw parallels.

Although it's late afternoon, a cool summer breeze makes its presence felt. I see the boys playing cricket at the MCC. I see the babus getting haircuts from the roadside barber (who raises his head to look at us, his customer unafraid of getting nicked by inattention). I see the street urchins laughing unguardedly as they flick marbles with their fingers. I see the fat Parsi patriarch resting his huge bulk on an armchair and feasting on akoori and pora. I see the disapproving glare of an elderly couple as they pass us. I see the paan-stains on the lamp-posts. I am back.

Avant-garde playwright.

Her skirt flaps around her knees as we stand on the top of the monument, her knuckles white as she grips the hand-railing tightly. It is a beautiful moment. I look past her pale shoulders and see the grey clouds in the distance, and let out an audible sigh. She looks over her shoulder at me, and smiles. The smile is genuine, and so is the emotion behind it. The lights of the night encapsulate her figure completely, like a cocoon, and there is such a frantic urgency with which the breeze moves about her, that it is hard to tell which is which and who is who. The dress she's wearing is so delicate it might remind one of gossamer, yet she does not show the slightest bit of discomfiture. The setting we find ourselves in mimics many of the films we have watched in the past week, but do not find this fact annoying. Yet. It looks like a natural and commonplace sight, but it is not. If I wrote a song about this moment, it would be the most sanctimonious one ever written. She is scared of falling, perhaps she has vertigo - I do not know, but watching her framed in the greyness of the landscape is titillating.

It would be a lascivious one too, if I told her I would be breaking up with her the next day, because she has the intellectual capacity of a needle.

Plainspeak in Suburbia.

The summer breeze makes my shirt billow outwards like a tent, and the soft drink I am sipping through a straw begs to acquiesce. It is one of those oh-too-lazy days where nothing really gets done, and through the maze of mildewing bath-towels and half-eaten brownies, you try to compare your life with an idyllic one and see what semblance it bears towards the latter. More often than not, you end up unearthing quite a lot on the topic of relationships and how they affect the more professional aspects of our daily life. Sometimes, when I am feeling upbeat, I like to think about myself as an Icarus who soared too high and burned out his wings of wax. Fell to my 'death', consequently.

No one likes to think of their relationships as dysfunctional. When I was young, my teachers instructed me in some of the teachings of Austrio-German social scientists, most of which basically contained the maxim - You have to provide for someone in order to be provided for yourself and have your affairs in order. Most relationships - filial, marital, sexual or otherwise - operate on a level of co-dependency. You fixate on a person's strength of character while you fill in on the points that need filling. One does this on a conscious or unconscious level. When it is done on a conscious level, the relationship is more volatile than what it would have been if the individual had not seen his cards before laying them out flat on the table.

Besides, it is easy to idealize a relationship. It is easy to 'connect the dots' and say that you have it all figured out. What I think, though, is that all relationships grow more if the individual is eager to learn. I think the mistake I make (and most of us make) is bring the baggage from the previously concluded relationship to the next one. In doing so, we wrest the fairness of the 'deal' from the hands of the other individual. So, for now, lets say that the Zen of relationships is that we must always empty the cup. Easier said than done, though. The process of constant cleansing requires that no dregs stick to the bottom. Most of us are vulnerable to emotional volatility. We might handle the stimuli themselves with varying degrees of stability, but our perception towards these events remains the same. We still know that our next response to a similar set of emotional circumstances will be quick and efficient. That forbears on my judgement of a relationship pattern. I have heard friends saying that they feel manipulated and used when a relationship takes a turn for the worse. I have no advice to offer to them - none, whatsoever. It is because one can only control the events that are directly related to oneself, you cannot bend a behavioural trait in another individual to your advantage. The least you can do, at this point, is to be honest and hope the other is honest too.

I have seen some relationships that are so spontaneous , so effervescent, so beautiful that they are almost too good to be true. These have involved little to no efforts from either of the two individuals in the relationship. Probabilistically speaking, this is indeed possible. There must exist two people with the same value-judgements and the same moral compasses, and when you bring them together you will get a relationship that works with the least friction. There is just the slightest bit of turbulence by external factor(s), which then gets eschewed into the relationship and finally is excreted because the relationship has strong roots, and hence can shake off the snow. It is resourceful to think of oneself as being constantly on the make, because there is nothing much that one can do to avoid turmoil in relational landscapes. When I say this, I speak from a direct subjective standpoint. It is easy to be objective and say that two plus two equals four, but what happens when the screen gives you five? The least we can ask of the other person is to be authentic in his claims and his desires. History, theology and philosophy have always influenced its students to one particular end - do your best to salvage what you can from the ruins of your last relationship and graft it to your new one. Because, then you are more wise, more objective. But, let us ask ourselves one thing, what does it really mean to be rooted in objectivity? All that we achieve from this one-sided objectivity is a myopic vision of where a relationship is heading. Let us now see what happens when you broach the topic subjectively. Yes, you are more vulnerable because you don't know what to expect, and you don't know how to read the writing on the wall and draw the lines that need drawing. But, you do feel a tremendous enthusiasm to look things in the eye and honestly accept the fact that you are giving what it takes to keep the relationship going strong. Feeding it, nourishing it. One might argue then the enthusiasm dulls with time, and that honesty dulls itself through and through. Contextually, that is in line with our bourgeois conformist values because whenever we feel that we are not getting our share of the relationship pie, we wear out our welcome and cease to see things as a story, as a continuous opportunity for growth. Cookie-cutter responses to day-to-day stimuli may be very well relaxing, but they do little to alleviate the pain of that constant cycle of emotional instability.

I have no stratagems to apply here. I am learning too. All I can do is grab hold of life by the horns and hope it doesn't blow its nose

Good good. So, our affairs are in order.