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.

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.

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.

Buy me another.

I have my hands in too many cookie jars. And whenever I extract my hands from these jars, I find there never were any cookies there in the first place.

Jupiter knows.

Sometimes, I wish I could take a gun to these foreheads. But I'm not sure whether I'll be content with them biting the bullet. I want them to swallow it, allow it to tear up their internals, and then finally watch the life drain out from these eyes. Damned SIs.

Eyesores and nosebleeds.

He removes the helmet slowly, and looks around himself tardily, like a victorious general would inspect the spoils of war. It is cold, so he wraps his riding jacket tighter around himself, and listens to the ululating roar silently, tilting his head to one side. Nine times out of ten he had thought about visiting this place, but the Timetable thought otherwise. Relentless in its pursuit of his attention, it would snap playfully at his heels and start climbing up his knees, with a dagger held between its clenched teeth, teasing him, making quiet advances on his patient gratitude. He abandons the distracting thought-motif and removes the leather riding-gloves with his teeth. They are damp, so he leaves them out to dry on the tank. He feels around in the pocket of his jacket for cigarettes and matches, finds a particularly damp cigarette, puts it between his lips and lights it. He waits.

Pathetic tunnel-vision, he tells himself. There is no limit to human de-linearity. One second you're lecturing a rather squalid boardroom about the importance of having weekly cultural debates in the seminar hall, and the next second you're donning a leather jacket and singing to the wind. That's the range of the human emotional projectile.

He checks his face in the flyblown mirror of the motorcycle, and notices that his face is grimier and more weatherbeaten than usual. He adjusts his hair, slaps his trouser pockets for a comb and doesn't find one. None of this makes sense. What kind of temporality does this buy him? None, whatsoever. He''ll ride back to his hostel and fall to his bed, in a heap, exhausted by the day's work. So much of the human emotional is a pupil to subjectivity. He could immerse himself in epistemology or ontology, and yet the next day would find him groggy and unable to pay attention. What is this all-encompassing Purpose these pundits and god-men keep talking about? It is as elusive and as abstract as finding a furry mint in his shirt pocket. Waking up the next day with another reason to pontificate, another reason to lie. In this never-ending wave of belligerence. It may look pictorial and worth dying for one day, and totally unnecessary the other. It confuses him. He looks at the clouds as they move away from him, and it leaves him in a daze.

This morning he had woken up beside a nice girl he had been dating for a month now. 'Oh, lookee, lookee', the voice in his head had told him, without humour. Not much space to roll over, he had looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and not quite known what to make of this. He had confided in no one that lately, he had been feeling strange, an approaching mental breakdown would rear its ugly head soon. Not the noisy, Prozac-fueled ones. The wordless ones, that left his limbs numb and without comfort, and then he would lose all track of time as he sat by the bedstead and looked at his reflection in the mirror, without moving a muscle. Then, his stockbroker would call him and tell him animatedly that his portfolio had outperformed the market. And he would get to his feet and start rummaging around the room for a mechanical pencil, striking off one hedge fund from his laundry-list of market strategies. He tried to find a way around the mundane, and make sure that his days danced about colourfully around the same, but he would lose all interest when some professor with a shiny bald pate would tell him that he could have done better in the mid-term exam. And then he would take to the cigarettes, berating himself for allowing the butt to settle in snugly between his fingers and take another drag.

As he smokes, he hears another Ayan tell him, in another time, in a gin-soaked evening - Uncompromised is what uncompromised was. And he smiles as this Ayan start to fade around the edges. He nods perfunctorily.

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*

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?

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.

Go, Tamerlane, go.

As the football spins in the mud, and I careen around the center-back to meet it, I realize that in this noisy moment, when my striker is telling me to pass the ball over to him, and I am working my pace gradually, threading my way through the defence, I will find my serenity.

The ball misses the goalies outstretched arms by an inch, and I'm in. I kneel and feel the hands of my teammates hoist me up onto their mud-caked shoulders. And the rain fractures my quadruple identity into a million little pieces of hope and hesitation.

La-di-da, la-di-da, la la.

Annie Hall. I never got over Woody Allen's prima facie story of Everyman's desperate attempts to find meaning in absurd, emotionally-overwhelming and beautiful relationships. I could see this any time of the year, any time of the month, any time of the day and still be satisfied with where my life is heading. Tough call, really.