Collapse.

I'm tired. In every conceivable way.

Four days of my rainbow.

It's crushing me. This pathetic distance between us - knowing that I love her so much, I cannot see her because the space that she belongs to is so far removed from mine that it becomes almost obscene to travel the distance. I remember the time when she lay her head in my lap, when I felt her breath on my thighs and already it seems that the dreaminess of the moment evades me knowingly. She dances around the edge of my consciousness, yet when I try to focus on the edges, she eludes me.

They bring fried rice.

I did not want to come back and brood here for a long time, but it seems that I cannot shy away from a habitation that is so dear to me.

I met S on the 25th. Returned with a heavy heart on the 29th. These four days have strictly been without compare. When I think about it, I usually liken it to this one image I have associated with our 'togetherness' - A blue, shifty ocean.Me adrift. Me finding a strong wooden plank that is weighed down with some flotsam. Me reaching out and grabbing it. Relieved. Finding out about the flotsam. And brushing it away. The plank becomes a woman. We do what it takes to keep us afloat.

The only way I think to keep afloat, is to jettison everything that will destroy the possibility of us being together. That, I think, is the only way.

The going-away.

It's been three years. Almost. I take my leave today, I hope I can come back. And find my little virtual space as hospitable as it once was.

Exeunt Ayan Ray.

The fire-eater.

She is exotic - she reminds me of Rome, although the woman has never been there. She is beautiful - as fragile as a geisha, as resourceful as a contortionist, as lovely as a tea-leaf-picker in harvest. She is funny, like a Bavarian with a big mug of beer. Although she has never read Camus, I find that in her, I find all the vestiges of my own domesticity. Sometimes, I feel like making slow, passionate love to her, eat away at the shreds of modesty she manages to stow away with her dry cynicism, sometimes, I feel like fucking her so hard that the whites of her eyes show and that she claws my back, desperate to draw blood. I can see that she is enchanted with my virtual self, so full of the enthusiasm I manage to espouse, she finds herself at ease with my vitality, I with hers. She corrects my bad grammar with a laugh that rings through my ears like somebody dropped me in the middle of the Appalachian Trail and left me to fend for myself. She swears by her love for me, and I find myself hesitant to accept it, to tell myself it's more than just a dream. When I tease her about her insecurities, I can feel her jaw tighten as she sulks, and I want to kiss the corner of her lips, reassure her that my love for her is without remorse. And I want to pick her up in my arms, and carry her to my bed, tell her that it is here, in my arms, that she will find the sanity life cannot give her. I have plans for her. So, I will wait.

The bouncy red.

Okay, S said yes.

Now what? I don't know.

Do you think this has a future? Probably.

Is this a bad idea? This is past a bad idea.

Do you really love her? More than I'd like to acknowledge.

Would you mind that she sleep around? Probably, no.

What is your emotional dependency on this woman? Till now, nothing significant enough to be documented.

What is her name? Dammit, computer. I'm trying to get a life here.

The little man and his quiver.

The asshole shot me in the leg. Who, you ask. Cupid the motherfucker. And I can't get out. I think I am falling for S. And I don't even know how.

SI + S = ?

A few months back, I had resorted to gallivanting across social networking sites so that I might find a small semblance of rationality in the make of these patterns. In my 'travels', I had an online encounter with a rather unique character, who I will call S here (because she decided to call herself that before revealing her true name to me). She is a SI, yes. And from what I gather, she is at least a decade older than me, or even more (who knows?). I'll add here that she is attractive, if one believes the the picture on her profile page is truly of her. What makes her an unique case is the fact that she IS like all these SI farts, in the way she proposes and/or disposes. Not far removed from the way these SIs talk/gesture/pontificate. A classic case of personality upheaval. I may go as far as to say she is as removed from a priori practical knowledge as my grandmother, yet, in her, I find a cynical battery of thoughts. From what I understand, she has a family that is a textbook-sampling of all that is SI and no, there are no Chautauquas to be learnt in that regard. Nondescript mediocrity. I may be wrong, and further away from the truth than I suspect, but this I know - the differences in culture make for a rather huge gap in understanding why these SIs act the way they do. I have never - yes, never - met a SI who distances himself/herself from this extraneous diaspora by contending that he/she will imbibe what's right and discard what is wrong. She is mildly coquettish, but I sense a deep discontent in her, like she is eager to set things right by giving them time, but has lost most of her bearings, borne down by the trappings of emotional virtuosity. I sound like a New Orleans shrink, so I will admit I am a bit frazzled by all this. We began a vigorous tour-de-force of messaging a month back, and it hasn't stopped yet. It bothers me. Like something is drawing me to this culturally-handicapped person. She can never respond to my Indie puns or my sourdough greetings, either because she does not get them or because her frame of cultural relevance collapsed with the company she chose to adorn herself with. Anyway, who am I to find meaning in all the kitsch?

No, no, I am NOT lascivious.

The girl eyes me cattily. She's wearing a leotard that looks like Jane Fonda wore it for Easter. The Four Seasons' swimming-pool is a rather sordid affair, and not many turn up to get their socks off here, because either they are getting drunk at the Esplanade or punching holes in boardroom etiquette. I'm here to represent a firm, and procure internships for them. My work almost done, the HR manager told me I could splash around, unless I wanted to go skinny-dipping in which case I should go to Amsterdam. I had laughed uncomfortably and had changed to a rather tufty pair of trunks and told the concierge I would be taking calls, if there were any, at the poolside.

So, here I was, by the pool, sipping a rather innocent-looking glass of Dom Perignon (my compliments to the firm) and tanning my rather ungainly-looking body. We are the only ones here. I am not averse to uncomfortable silences in uncomfortable places, so I take it all in my stride. After a few minutes of thinking and counter-thinking, the girl decides she wants to talk to me, so she swims towards me. I look at her from the top of my glass, noticing that she isn't a shade above twenty. The water runs off the lycra and I find it hard to look away. She observes my silent appraisal of her body, and she smiles.

Her : Hello. Not seen you around. You new here?

Me : Could say so. Why, are you?

Her : Not really. Have a ballet here in the evening. (okay, so that explains the impossibly-flat belly).

Me : Oh. Not much experience with that. My two left feet already complain of under-use and I coax them every day into feeling better about themselves, like buying them a foot-massage once a month.

Her : (laughs) Oh, I was not so much into it. Was introduced to it by my mother, she was a ballerina who had unfinished dreams, so she thought her daughter should continue the legacy.

Me : Cool. Do you like what they have done with the place?

Her : Yeah. Sort of. The bar's neat, and the maître d' was nice enough to recommend a few good mojitos.

Me : I was a fiend for mojitos too, till I found out they were the easiest drinks in the world to lace. Hard-pressed to grab a few now.

She comes to sit beside me, and she looks at me. I notice that her cleavage is dripping wet, and then she does the most unexpected thing in the world. She hooks her arm around my arm and says,'Fuck all this small-talk. Let's go and make love. Too much of expectation and broken promises'.

Then, I do the strangest thing. I free myself of her grasp, get up and downing the last sip, tell her this -

I am a man-slut. I would never forgive myself if I slept with a textbook-slut. And I walk away, her eyes on mine, or so I think.

Irony has a strong voice. Could have been a soprano were it not tied down by a dimunitive reason.

Marbellous.

Yesterday, the neighbour's kid showed up on our porch while I was sleeping in the makeshift hammock with a copy of Doctor Zhivago on my chest. He had come up to me and said he had lost his marbles and would I be so kind as to help him recover them? I had smiled at the ironic connotations of his question - Lost his marbles. Haven't we all? So, I had hitched my trousers up, ruffled his hair and told him that I most assuredly would (even though history had taught me that children found me the equivalent of a doorknob - boring and irrelevant). We had looked behind hedges, beneath cars whose bonnets needed washing, and above a rusty birdbath. Subsequently, we had found the rogue marbles perched precariously on the edge of a rather shallow gutter and he had yelled,' He will suicide'. To which I had laughed and had picked them off the edge and handed them to him. As he had held the marbles in his grubby palm, he looked at me with the most unassuming and innocuous of faces and had confided,'Agar he wants to suicide, toh he should do, na?' Before I could protest, he had thrown them away in the gutter and had walked away merrily, chirping in a singsong voice. At first, I had been annoyed at the pointlessness of my efforts, but as I walked back to the comfort of my hammock, I thought,'Maybe the kid has a point. Who are we to decide what to do with the marbles?'

This life.

Now, culpability juxtaposes itself onto fabricated identity. It will be a night to remember, even though the repercussions will be felt by all and sundry.

I'm overworked. Maybe I'm doing too much for too little.

Am I answerable to you? Perhaps not.

Orestes.

Gotta cut away, clear away, snip away and sever this umbilical residue, keeping me from killing you.
Wow.
Thank you, Karan.

Yes, the integer.

The sweat of my brow stings my eyes and failure looms large. As the hammer hits the metal, I am forced to reflect – what if I don’t get what I’m looking for? Or has it become so indefinable by the platitudes of fate that I sit beside it every evening and yet neglect its presence? Exhausted by the day’s work, I remove my greasy overalls and wash my hands in the rusty, iron basin I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. God. These laugh lines will soon wipe out any hints that I once had a mouth. I’m aging like a peanut in the sun, but I’m not complaining because I still find comfort in the presence of these lathes and toolboxes.

C'mon, A-Team.

Fuck the naysayers. Fuck criticism. Wash it away with eau-de-toilette.

This is not it. Start over. Start over.

Cultural hyperlinking.

Q. Okay, I do follow you. But, tell me this, in a land so full of psychological and cultural strife, where the odds surpass the means, and where time kills creativity and chokes morality, where do you see the world headed? Is there a Grand Plan for the world? Or will this temporality be forever erased by the Big Crunch?

A. As long as there are no methodical patterns to educational growth, the human race will survive. The moment water stops reaching the branches, and the high-heads are all for how important it is for the roots to remain turgid, we will reach an existential plateau. Where even the loftiest ministrations of our contemporary philosophers will cease to work. As for a Grand Plan or a Great Purpose, I do not think there is one intended, because when we manage to conclude with the Plan, then what? Tread on, thinking that we are alright and perfection has been achieved. That is, undoubtedly, the most wayward of thoughts.

Never classify egos.

As I make my bed in that conversational pause pregnant with implied meaning, I realise that sometimes even the most pleasant of conversations are gagged by a certain no-gooder – Failure to Communicate.

Some shooting-from-the-lip and other memorabilia.

Don’t rationalize everything you say, bubblehead. I mean, whoever thought of saving your ass when you were getting picked on by the neighbourhood bully was being pretty obtuse (or a tad insouciant). Then, you’d extricate your machismo from your ranting-hat and then with a deft flick of the wrist, demonstrate how Exhibit A was perfectly in line with Exhibit B, and how Exhibit B trumped Exhibit C’s ass although Exhibit C was busy sleeping with Exhibit A’s older brother and rattling off names of movie stars before you could say ‘I’m a harangued man with a prescription’. That’s called ‘being tough on talking’; do not prove to me that nothing defeats the male ego – the minute you get confrontational, that’s the end of the line for your hypocrisy. I do not have a hedonistic beef with you, I do not like to pick on your insecurities, it’s just that it’s always that I had a hard time getting around with people who didn’t notice that every day the world turns a little, and that if you refuse to budge from your spot under the sun, you get left behind. Or worse, you don’t get Grandma’s crab-apples for supper. Which, as it goes, is profitable optioneering.

Genuflect, Ayan.

It’s heartening to know that my friends think I’m a spin doctor, although I think I never give them any reason to think so. I’ve had a cocktail of problems come my way after I decided I’m going to quit my current job, but I’m not quite sure whether my handling of them was in any way professional, because fundamentally, the ethic behind a successful work-routine is building rapport and since I’ve failed in that respect quite visibly, I will have to address these areas from the beginning. Suddenly, I’m at that phase of my life where I’ve found myself becoming more of a saturnine character than I would have liked to - it would have been a disturbing snag if not for the fact that I’m taking hits more easily than I did earlier and I’m finding that the previously-allowed-to-run-amok kangaroo temper is more easier to control these days (what with the ‘spring-in-my-step’ and ‘post-punk rock music’ schedules). So, good for me. Till then, I hope this climate of karmic good holds up ostensibly.