A Love letter. Innenn matthey?

It's been a year. A passer-by on the INTERNET told me this place is empty and needed a little loving.

I agree.

Last I heard from you was a strange phone-call at an odd hour. Do you remember? I think you were at whatshisname's place. Your brain a butter-in-the-sun mess with some strange chemical that words were too thick to describe.

How are you?

I miss you.

I think of our friendship and smile. If anyone plotted the points, it really makes for a gorgeous story. I know I've told you this a million times, that you've changed so much, and so wonderfully. Like a bloom that caught the right amount of sun, and blossomed. Like a beast that draws itself to height, and opens its eyes.

Thinking of you fills me with a kind of heaviness. Of all the things I should've said all these years. Of all the things I don't have the words to say. Of the weight of the simplicity and guilelessness of us.

Looking back, maybe, at some time, I corrupted it, and you were the one upholding its intent. An unfortunate, unaware Jesus carrying a crucifix of no wrong you did.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for not understanding this earlier, or better.

I'm especially sorry for all the times I have told you to come back - not geographically, but to being the person I was far, far more comfortable with. Far more in-tune with. Far less intimidated by. A person I could understand better.

A person who has left.

I think part of that weight I feel when I think of you, is that knowledge. That you are a person who has left. Not in the desertion understanding of the word. But a person who has outgrown his odd red Champ. A person who has outgrown my memory of him.

All this while when I said I miss you, I understand now, that I have meant it as missing this memory of you, because I do not fully understand this new version of you, or this version of me that stands startling, saddening, awkward in juxtaposition. Or simply beside it, hand-in-snug-hand.

But this is growing up. This is the passage of time. This is that yawning aisle.

I hope you're revolted and terrified, as I am, by the idea of being a shadow of us, because at some time, there was an us. I am sorry I am not the sort that will settle for our settling into expressing a bygone time with platitudes and the ghost of affection. Our time is not finished. Our work is not done.

I'm sorry I have been too un-moored to reach out, and be exactly the one thing we have always been for each other: One snug hand for another. Giver and taker of insult, pain, hurt, misunderstanding. Other half of a by-two. The perfect empty lungful for a cigarette that's too much to finish.

Here, and now, I will say this with renewed meaning:
I miss you.

Of course it does, what do you think? :)

How you be? Why have you stopped writing me horrendously long-winding prose?

This exists!

Hello, Moo.

New Year Love

:) i'm just thinking how distance grows on the passage of time, like algae.

missing the monkey. come back soon.

:)

Four years :) wow, it's been a flurry, huh?
How you?

PS: Did you know Screwtape was out of circulation!? I found it on flipkart. Hurray Internet! Or where you inhabit - hurrah!

Our first post was in 2006? When I was 21, and plagued by pimples? And medical school, and pointlessness? Shockingly, not much has changed.
And what was the first surprise? I am completely blank. Was it a book? A cake? A poem?

Four years, Mooli, four. It just feels weird.

Shit, you're right.

I saw it just now.
Let's see when you see this.

I miss you. Come back. The old you, on that same park-bench in fourth block.

Born a moth

Bournemouth has to be undisputedly the most boring city on the planet. But it has Mary Shelley's body and PB's heart.
Let's see when you will see this.

Baybee!

Re: LFU - 1

What have they done to you?!
As if you weren't verbose enough.

The parenthetical asides are so reassuring.

Are you sure they aren't tapping your blog entries?
I think they might all just hate you that you know more multi-syllable words than they do.

You sound dull and bored. And ready to pick a political debate on even shoelace.
Please be more cheerful, and unboring. Just like you were here. Please. Some 40 years down the line, I must recall that obnoxiously chocolatey Bulls Eye we gobbled, as a time spent on stupid talk, and not something about the Economic Conditions of Ivory Coast, and how it has very little to do with Ivory. You must, must counter the atmosphere. And I don't mean just the weather.

I don't get it. How can a place with such a concentration of youth sound so... dead? How? You are in a college. College is meant to be full of inane, asinine, and other such things. Things that you will look back upon when you're actually employed in meaningful work, and think, "God, what were we doing back then?"

Shake yourself up. You sound like Anatomy class in first year was FAR more entertaining.

And I told you not to eat what I wouldn't. Why the hell are you eating Upma!?

Letters from Underground: 1

The first thing that strikes you when you land in England is how could these people have ruled over us for so long. Oh no, not because they feel physically incapable of doing so, far from it - they are all uniformly tall and not all look constipated, but because all around you is so bleak that it takes some imagination to assume that anybody "heroic" could rise from this bleak-infested hole.

It is unequivocally brown and murky, with flowers added and lawns laid almost as a hesitant (and much fought over) afterthought, as if the presence of such things even mildly alluding to the cliche of the avian and "apian" is anathema to the very precinct of academic excellence this place was supposed to be. Either that, or I am an unimaginative person with no appreciation of the fine art of landscaping and have too much time on hands, which if they were the sort, would now be shaking other such species of varying color over polite yet mindnumbingly dull conversations, tending to be political, if only to justify their presence there as a "Scholar".

If the first two paragraphs appeared grim and rather unsettling as a premise, I only have my poor skills to blame. For, I feel rather wanted and welcome in this place. The weather is a perfect foil to my own largely moorish countenance (How safely do I make such uninformed statements - at so many levels! I have - still - not read the Wuthering Heights.) The sun refuses to shine over this place, like he has today, and makes everyone pale and ghostlike, and in the spirit of Karen Walker, I can imagine at times that I see right through their skulls should they pass by a lightsource. The pallor is really rather alarming.

Of the mindnumbingly dull conversations I spoke of earlier, it has struck me as very odd (and yet oddly reassuring that despite the myth of globalization and our self-endowed importance as being a country and force to reckon with, it really is not quite like that; I could in fact be having these conversations in a paragraph in A Passage to India, me being Prof Godbole of course) that the most common topics of choice have been in (lamentable) order of preference - Slumdog Millionaire, Caste System and if I can marry out of it, Mode of transportation (Do you use elephants still? - a question I was asked. Yes, being my answer), Baaalywood dancing. Not for a moment am I suggesting that these are in anyway removed from India's reality or that being a "Scholar" one must have a view decidedly more superior about things perceived to be "higher". I just wish we had done a better job of conveying a more realistic stand on what India is all about, and not just the extreme romanticisation of poverty (pet peeve) and exporting it to an audience that is sure to lap it up, for it is a reality so far removed from their own and hence "exotic". True, the poverty is very in-your-face, you can't escape it, but I wish that weren't the only thing that got them talking about India. India is also about 400 million people like me, and you.

Talking of me and you, it only struck me now that this place is for me and you, and not some naive and unrealistic political argument. So, the next letter would be about my extreme inability to wash dirty linen, and the extreme happiness one feels after cooking (even if the process to me means, dunking a cover in boiling water).

Yo, Weltster

How are your Welts faring there?
I think it is high time you put it one update.
But knowing you, it'll be a while.

So, I will do the honours.

For one, native town remains the same.

1. It is pouring like the she-dog. I think the sky is crying types, and mood is overall grey, because you are gone.

1.5 Of course, it just might be imitating the cool weather of your newly adopted sheher.

Should I italicize the sheher, in keeping with His Englishness?

2. I am still overworked and underpaid.
And this time, uninterested. He he.

3. I made puliyogare gojju. It rocks.

4. Still haven't found Screwtape :( Dispatch it if you finds it.

5. Have your pimples reduced?

6. Went to Manipal kano. Not aaspatre, that college-infested town? Simply. Came back with kambli-hula-induced allergy. Remember how some absurd thing had kachchified my hand when I came to see you at WS? I remembered your sound advice of applying oil-based cream. Applied liberal amounts of one boy's (yes, boy) Lakme Peach Milk Moisturizer. And ate Avil. It looked like I was kajjified mongrel. Now I look more civilized. (no, you will not get away with saying, you always did.)

7. Then what ya? Stuck out your pinky finger and sipped tea, a?

8. Cut your hair in the dorm itself, ok? I heard it's needlessly expensive. Did you buy yourself a funky Burberry type hot-hot trench coat with bigass buttons? Don't waste away on beer, you alcoholic. And don't eat anything I wouldn't.

Take care.
XOXO.

Hi :)

Hello!

Nidde heg barthide andre

keyboard joll-ninda short circuit aagotte.

It's been so long. Let's see how long it takes for the other one to realize that there has been a post.
Among other things, people that follow this blog (people?!), hello you.
So Slumdog Millionaire huh!

Coo'.

Coo'.
Keep at it.

There has been a new post and I did not even realize it.
Happy new year. Here's to more frequent posts.

Let's start with how cool I am.
So.
I am very cool.

I was hoping I wouldn't be the first one.

Happy New Year, Gunda.

Correction. We are Thanda Billis

Is it just me, or can you also hear background music?

(Bunty aur Babli, Bunty aur Babli...)