An evening's wait

I know not, I don't find out, I can't find out, I won't find out. Not wanting to hope, not looking out, not waiting. I sit, I get up, I stretch, I lie, then sit, then straighten, then lock my arms across my chest.

The powder puffs on my face, the liner outlines my eyes, a lipstick softens my lips and the perfume settles on my skin. A dew of excitement leaves tiny drops of hanging sweat by the temples. I let them be, I let them tease the nerve under the skin there, in preparedness for the drops to fall.

The mole I thought had gone away has returned for a summer visit, almost pushing its way through my skin. It erupts, it stings my skin and then it makes my chin its home.

I welcome it, as I welcome the familiar routine of people not keeping time. As if it were inevitable, as if I almost deserve it.

DON'T WEAR THEM CLOTHES GIRL, YOU'LL HAVE A NIGHT YOU DON'T WANNA REMEMBER

Let’s try to make this simple for those who are provoked to raise an eyebrow and let the tongue out at the slightest hint of a bare leg. Next time we go partying, we’ll wear back breaking Victorian gowns that cover till the ankle and muffle till throat. What we’ll help you do is keep your arms where they belong, below your stinking pits and your tongues inside your filthy mouths.

OK? NO?

You’ll still think we’re out to provoke you? Just because we’re NOT showing, hence, leaving so much to your imagination that you can’t wait to find out?

Then what would you suggest we wear? A robe? a burqa? a bedsheet?...we’ll wear anything if it keeps us from getting molested by 20 of you on the streets..but we don’t think even those would help.

We’re guessing you’ll draw a DUH!!! at that and say,


 “Baby whatever you wear, don’t make the effort, we’ll undress you in a second and think you’re WANTING for us to do whatever we want to do with you, so why waste so much money on skirts, coz the length don’t matter.

Because you’re partying and having a good time, we’ll define how much fun you can have, and even if you don’t want to we don’t care. Coz we’re not taking NO from you! You can drink, you can smoke, you can dance, you can laugh, you can make pouty faces and look into the camera OR you can work till late in the night, have a family to go back to, a simple happiness to live. Doesn’t matter what you do and why you do it, when we’re hungry and we want it, we SHALL NOT DISCRIMINATE.

We are proud citizens of an egalitarian society, doesn’t matter that when we were in school, we used to go quiet when the pledge came to that ‘sister’ thingie, please understand that in our hearts we felt it.  Our morally upright, socially conscious being still feels that you in your skirt have the power to ruin the image of the motherland. When the president can go to work covered from head to toe with only a bespectacled face showing, what gives you the right to bare an arm or leg or two? Doesn’t matter that she’s nearing 90, you should look up to her. Dress like her and maybe we’ll not get provoked. We’re so quick to titillate that your sartorial shortcomings can send us to heaven and back.

When your male friends have a fight at a bar we’ll quickly beat them to death or if they run away with their tails between their legs, we’ll take our anger out on you. You see, we work shitty jobs, get off to women we can never touch, are poorly paid(relative though that is), pretend to provide for a family we don’t care about and basically are just living. So when you come around, in that little skirt of yours, smelling of promise, HOW can we contain the joy of such divine generosity?

 So what we do is, we call some more such frustrated beings and we feast on your juicy self in a collective head rush of hormones, anger, lust and a knowing regret of the mortality of this moment.

And the best thing is, we have videos shot of it, so we can relive the joy over and over again, we have passersby cheering us on silently, we make a grand celebration of it. Watch while we make you a film star! The more you protest, the madder we get, the more your scream, the more we want to hit you, so flail your legs all you want, the production value just gets better.

Our communal desire knows no limits. In lust we believe, in lust we breath, in lust we shall die

We’ll get away with this, yet again, just you watch!”

Yours devouringly,
Amar Jyoti Kalita aka Bond

                                                             Don't I look AWESOME??!!

Being John Galt

Look at 'em, just lookie!!!

                                                          

Call it star craze or comfortably settling into a state of perpetual one sided love;  the incident of myself being a John Galt to two men that will never be mine, leaves a sense of a certain hopelessness that I’ve come to make peace with. It is perhaps the custom of this unrequited appeal to make me understand that it’s the idea of those men and not themselves that breaks my force of habit and keeps me mooning over them. And if that be the case, it answers the eternal question of what is more attractive- the man himself or what you think he is? And honestly, that’s an answer I’d like to push to the deepest corners of my head and forget it exists.

What the two men share besides their first name, occupation and state of single hood is a sensibility that may not be uncommon but is certainly a rare find in their profession. They are called the thinking woman’s actor, implying that what they do and how they do it appeals to a certain class of women who cannot leave their brains at home when watching a movie. But it’s not so complicated after all, you don’t think when you are too busy catching every well pronounced word that falls out of their mouth, you are certainly not thinking when they flash a smile, or their neat hands nestle their face in a particularly brooding moment. Besides the head rush you experience, you almost walk into the scene as it were and imagine you were there for him to look at and talk to. 

The travesty of them having a name that is most overused in the Hindi film industry takes a leap when the on screen namesakes, buffoon their way through basketball hoops and wet saris to deliver a super-hit film. At those times, I wish they had a different name, because these namesakes and their ‘acts’ add a certain degree of modesty that shakes the pedestal and makes them more real; and I don’t think I’m comfortable with that. You see, I’ve come to love that state of being a ‘nobody’ to them, I absolutely gloat in the headiness of being Mr Galt. 

I rewind and replay thousands of times a particular moment in their films, I stalk their blogs/profiles/handles/interviews like the creepiest person you know, I swallow without pause a hand gesture or a casual guffaw and mostly, I make family of the hundreds out there who share my state of being.

I behave like the hopeless lover who’s too timid to establish a real contact, knowing that if it were to happen he’ll come up too short. So let them be the demigods that they are; naturally articulate, well groomed, well read, spontaneous, witty, humorous and say things like ‘misplaced intention’ or some such as often as we say ‘shit’- I can live a lifetime of looking like the backside of a pan and not care!

They can continue to grace the covers of fashion magazines, support charities, run marathons or just feed their ‘extremely- fortunate- cause- they- get- to- lie- in- the- bed- with- them’ pets  or sleep with their mouths open. They are the only two whose wet towels I’ll pick up when they forget it on the bed, the only two whose feet I’ll sit at and watch them talk, and the only two I’ll grovel for whenever, wherever.

 I’m putty, I’m John Galt, and I like being that way.

                                                  

The Caterwauling Platypus comes to town

The dichotomy of a clobbered maw making a full mouthed wail for rescue is not dead on this city’s dwellers. We shall talk about the frequent joys, unabated spirit and random freetitudes of the ‘mouth’ that opens to voice us even in desperate times when it resembles a platypus’ beak.

The wordy flatulence of my city is a nurturer’s dream- rounded up through generations of volitional myth making and gossip tendering. A word coming from a mouth travels through others on a Marco Poloesque sojourn for the spices of lost islands. For a city that is afflicted by a premonition of cultural doom from frequent PDA, the eroticism of rumour exchange is a blatant moral bender that my city shall kindly overlook.

An innocuous drop in the car becomes a whirlwind romance before the two involved even realize, when undercover script agents finish with lunch and practice their brilliant skills to postpone the damages of afternoon siesta on their love handles.

This then stretches onto late afternoons, when the ‘back from work-hence more successful-hence have sharper skills’ batch joins in. Postures are assumed on all and sundry means of parking posterior devices, the comfort of which makes for better concentration and the slimiest of inputs. An unspoken law prevents two platypuses from expounding at the same time, one speaks, while the next in line quickly thinks of an additional piece of interesting bite(frequently made up)to add when its turn comes.

As the session progresses, while others rapidly start making up for the lost siesta hours of weight watching by swallowing every edible item on the table, the ones whose turn is yet to come, sit anxiously rummaging their mind for juicier contributions and secretly wishing that the climax scene is theirs to script.

The two most resourceful platypuses of the evening is the one that started the caterwaul and the other that shrilled out the highest pitch-that being the climax. Those in between add their notes of wauler frequencies but it is upto these two to make the session better than the food on offering. And that my readers can be a serious challenge! No script agent platypus will miss the food, its taste making having to make up for plot of next session due to thinned attendance of PDA in society park during exam time.

There are no strict eligibility criteria for a greenhorn platypus to join these sessions. The only expected qualifier being a continuous dissatisfaction with platypus life- in sleep, food, sex and other less crucial departments. A 9.9/10 in any of these and you can walk right in and indulge in beak speak.

The ritual caterwauling takes a different colour when “back from work in evening- hence OBVIOUSLY more successful-sharpest tools et al” joins in. These are the ninja caterwaulers because they carry the combined frustrations of work and life. The love-handled caterwaulers suck up to the ninjas in muted tones of wide eyed appreciation, secretly not believing that their society park theme is baby talk in front of corporate domed ladder climbing.

While the caterwaulers mouth myth after myth, soaking in the subdued majesty of glorious ‘god-sip’, the session is shrouded over with the repressed exuberance of mutual lie making. The evening is over, the host bids adieu, one platypus encounters a snogging couple in the elevator.  It waits with bated beak for the next call to caterwaul for the start or the climax.

                                             The platypuses beak into a smile post session