All By Myself

What is it about living alone that amplifies everything?

In other circumstances, a cockroach in the bathroom would have been a cause for annoyance, leading to a joint witchhunt – or roach-hunt if you will – which wouldn’t rest till justice had been served on the wretched creature for shattering our idyllic existence.

Or I’d have just brushed it off, been too lazy to do anything about it, and just attempted to broach a level of peaceful coexistence with the creature.

Now?

Now, well. Late last night, as I opened the bathroom door to see that brown shelled menace, I screamed. Then I slammed the door shut. Heart pounding, I called a friend in Delhi, just to share with her the horror of being saddled with a calamity this extreme in my solitude. After discussing with some amount of exasperation the question why roaches of all creatures would survive nuclear wars, I hung up, gathered my wits, and went in for round 2. Putting on the heaviest shoes possible, armed with a newfound sense of vengeance, I opened the door – to find the damn thing had disappeared.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Of course not. The temporary physical disappearance of that vile vermin caused it to permanently lodge itself in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I paced the house, tried to read a book, watched a bit of television. It was the world coming together against me, part of a giant conspiracy designed to make me as unhappy as possible. I felt successive pangs of self-pity and rage, coupled with the urge to rail to no one in particular about the wretchedness of my life. Everyone is out to get me, I screamed.

See?

Living alone really does amplify everything.

The Perils of Dating a Theatre Person

You recount a monologue from Dorian Gray

Where a lover counts the ways

Sibyl Vane dies - night by night

And he dies with her, in vain.

You choose to end midway through,

When Dorian’s at his incredulous best,

When Dorian wonders how and why –

(And I question under what

authorial duress),

is the only thing worth loving

an actress?

Are you putting up an act -

When you show up drenched in the rain?

When you let your silences accrue?

When you deliberately avert your gaze?

Trace a finger down my face?

When –

When last night, and the night before,

I posed you a question, the simplest of all,

I asked you for affirmation, any sign would do,

And you played out, for theatrical effect,

That inevitable answer

We both knew you were coming to.

But is that answer inevitable?

Or was that look an act?

Were your words honest?

Or obscure literary extract?

To state it otherwise,

My stage man, my thespian lover,

Was it Shakespeare, Shaw or Sheikh,

Who whispered in my ear?

The Invention of Morel

The first time this slender marvel of a novel was pushed at me, I was told it stood as the inspiration for Lost. Since I have gone about telling anyone who will listen that Lost is the best thing that will ever happen to tv (along with Arrested Development and Community perhaps), this stoked my interest. It helped that this "novel of ideas" clocked in at 103 pages - you don't want your dense reading to drag on too long. It was with these preset notions that I picked up Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel.

I got some of what I bargained for, to be sure. Morel most certainly has elements which Lost would put to such atmospheric use, starting with its conception of a seemingly fantastical island to the mysterious experiment that it stands as a base for. It also satisfies the ideas criterion - the exposition heavy last third of the book throws dizzying ruminations on immortality and the nature of love at the reader.

Where it surprised me though, was on the count of it being, on the one hand, a furiously compelling ride, and on the other, a complex, devastating love story.

We start with a escaped fugitive who's found refuge in a remote island in the south seas. There exist concrete traces on the island of recent occupation: a museum, a chapel, even a swimming pool. He enters into a solitary routine, which is broken one day with the arrival of a group of people on the island - men and women who engage in dance and drink and merry chatter - whom he observes from a distance. One of these women captures his fancy, and he starts attempting to make contact with her. But nothing is what it seems ....

For any piece of science fiction to truly work (and this is a science fiction novel through and through), it needs to resonate in ways both political and emotional. That is to say, the technological aspect, the imagined creation, needs to function on some level as a commentary on some aspect of the world we inhabit. Of course, it's positively difficult for any such work to not, even unintentionally manage this task, but that's where the second level of resonance needs to take place. There needs to be weight and consequence, a sense of the characters involved, of their importance, and of our connection to them.

The Invention of Morel is a triumph in how it succeeds at both those goals - without giving too much away, I'll say that the invention in question mirrors ideas about cinema, and in extension, ideas about how we live our very lives. What does it mean for us that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space? That we will only know what someone else has already thought or felt, or the possible transpositions of those thoughts or feelings? And what kind of mortality accrues to an image that lingers on even as the subject dies and decays?

Tied into those ideas is that aforementioned love story. It's a love that may or may not be unrequited, depending on how you approach the questions above. It's a love that either destroys a perfectly lucid man, or salvages a madman and inserts him into a vision of immortality. Again, that depends on what you think about the ideas Casares places before you. Me, I'll take the easy route of ambivalence for now. Given my own issues with mortality, Morel presents an intoxicating alternative, a suggestion that the approach of looking at the body as the vessel for eternal life is a flawed one. I'd like to go with Casares' vision to the logical end-point - but there's a certain very physical reluctance holding me back.

Whatever side of the coin you choose, read this book. Whether it succeeds in pulling the veil off your eyes, or convinces you there isn't any in the first place, it's an essential piece of fiction I'm glad I had the chance to devour.

Day in, Day out

Okay, so here’s the deal with present day “mature” relationships.

Wait, let me rephrase that – here’s my deal-of-the-week with present day “mature” relationships.

They’re frustratingly conflict-free. Not for us urban lovers the immediate conflicts of parental discord or civil war or act of god separation. Not that our wonderful country doesn’t have its share of honour killings or civilian police, but you know what I mean. The specificities of the situation I find myself in – a healthy, communication-rich, reasonably pleasant, live-in relationship – sort of finds itself floating in an island of aloofness, far removed from these conflicts.

What the friggin hell, you ask, could be the problem here?

I answer: Predictability. Creeping hints of boredom. A routine. Domesticity.

When you’ve become accustomed to various permutations of failed long distance romances, when none of your relationships has been allowed to blossom into steady complacency, well, the sheer perfectness of a normal relationship isn’t easy to swallow. All those dalliances in the past came coloured with a certain thrill of not knowing; everything in today’s domestic bliss comes with a very specific script.

Out goes “will we – won’t we”. In comes “who will wash the dishes- who will make the coffee”.

And then, the boyfriend comes down with a viral, relocates to his parents’ home to recuperate, and I walk back to an empty house. I turn on the lights, I put some music on, I pour myself a glass, I sit on the now too-large bed.

The routine has been broken.

And the voice in my head, the one that’s buried under layers of singleton-bravado and idioms of personal liberty comes bursting out –

“I want predictability. Complacency is comforting. The routine makes me feel safe.”

Get well soon, you.

B.A., LL.B. (Hons.)

Convocation is an act of catharsis.

I mean, aside from it being a rite of passage, a moment of celebration, a hat throwing contest, and an occasion to buy spiffy new clothes that'll be hidden under the flowing gown. It's a time to meet the younger 'uns you left behind, and the peers who're managing the transition from the life imitating facade of college life to the realities of the modern day urban work life. It's about the moment your parents beam at you, faces bursting with pride - for, I suppose, managing the simple act of not getting expelled for drug possession over the wonder years. It's the moment where you physically hold the degree in your hand and marvel at the strangeness of having a permanent new appellation to your name.

And I reveled in each and every single one of those glorious moments, of course I did. But the real reason why the simple act of walking up to a stage and receiving a rectangular plastic encased degree had me fighting back tears was because of everything that had gone into getting to that little moment. Maddening, infuriating evenings before surprise tests; the dreariness of flopping into the library sofa and preparing to go over mind-numbing notes one last time; the helplessness of walking hungry into a dining hall to be confronted with food that at times made you lose your appetite; the innumerable, inexplicably stupid administrative decisions that had us coming up with innovative combinations of expletives; the protests that were regretted almost instantly and the ones that never took off.

You argue that the point of it all was the great people we met, the lasting friendships we made. Well, no. That wasn't the point of it - that was just a lucky accident. It was an act of chance that you managed to find atleast a handful of people in this mass of 80, and another handful in the other years. No, the point of it all was that we were here, 25 km from civilization and a hundred thousand miles from sanity, to get a stamp. A stamp of approval, a stamp of discipline, a stamp that meant we'd spent half a decade at an institution and managed to successfully jump through the hoops that it constantly placed before us, walked the line as well as we possibly could, actually elected to engage with a system that could sometimes be confused as imported from a bleak dystopian novel.

Don't get me wrong. Law school was brilliant.

It was also a mess.

Law school was home -

and ever so often, it could be hell.

The point I'm trying to make anyway: we deserve this degree.

We jolly fucking well earned it.

Say Goodbye to the World You Thought You Lived In

More than 2 months have passed since the last exam of my undergraduate life - and just about 2 months since it was confirmed to be the last exam of my undergraduate life. A hop, skip and flying leap and I have landed square in the middle of work life.

Can I tempt fate for just a second and tell you it's all rather wonderful?

Well, it is. I want to break this month down into anecdote size chunks, to give each bizarre incident its own space to breathe, to explain the exact feeling I get when I'm in the process of beginning to comprehend the next piece of research I've embarked on, to convey the exhilaration of living by my rules - for that matter, the exhilaration of living at all whenever I cross yet another busy Bangalorean street.

I can't though, not just yet. I'll say this though - I'm reading more than I have in years. I'm reading books I would've shuddered at just a few months ago, and I'm coming back to unfinished texts. I'm learning, and with every new minutiae of knowledge I imbibe, comes this hunger for more, and I'm trying to learn that too. I have been able to have great dazzling conversations on creativity and poetry and eros and agape and I have been able to have even more wondrous discussions on frotting. Lots of frotting discussions actually.

I (finally) saw a Jean-Luc Godard film! And liked it!

Interesting new people have come into my life on a weekly basis - and the interesting people who were already around continue to remain.

I'm single. Never has that felt more empowering or less lonely.

Did I tell you I got a full page snap in the Forbes cover story? It was a nice snap too.

Did I mention the bit where I've successfully hoodwinked a Queer Anthology to accept one of my stories for publication? And the day after that found out it was the first of two anthologies that was making this giant mistake?

Fate, I'll tempt you just one more time today. Life is beautiful.

About a boy (or two) - Francois and Francois

I sit at the Zurich airport, waiting for a connecting flight that is obviously never getting here. Huge glass windowpanes look out at the Swiss countryside - painfully unreachable thanks to an expired Schengen visa. A moment then, to brace for the jetlagged days ahead, for the upcoming intrusion of work life beyond that, and for the final spanner to be thrown into my practiced routine of daily reverie.

Canada was nice. But you probably knew that. Over the course of my travels, I met two people who happened to have the same first name - which was about the only thing they had in common. Oh that and their French Canadian roots. Here we go.

Francois 1

At first I think he's stood me up. I've been waiting on the street outside the hotel in Ottawa

for just about five minutes, but I am already certain he isnt getting here. These Canadians are obviously being over-friendly to hide darker character traits like the fact that they enjoy blowing off gullible travelers. Once again I gaze into the crowd, scan to the left, a flick to the right, back to the left again - when a figure in the distance waves at me. Well, atleast in my direction. I turn around to check if the wave was intended for someone else, but nope, this is indeed Francois my professed Ottawa guide for the next three hours, and I wave right back.

"So I need to learn how to pronounce your name".

"Ahhh. Well, okay, let's do this - Frrhhn-svaa".

"Fransaw".

"Ha, not quite. But it's fine, you can call me Frank. Or even, mmm, Roger if that works for you. So, coffee, beer, or would you like to just walk around?"

I elect to walk.

In 15 minutes I've figured the walk-talk is better left to Aaron Sorkin or Richard Linklater, and we find ourselves instead sitting by the banks of the Rideau Canal, which Francois informs me inadvertently becomes the world's largest ice skating rink, come Ottawa's minus 30 degree Celsius winters. Important nuggets of pop-culturese are exchanged, it turns out we will be able to hold a conversation or two after all, and with that, we start walking down the Canal. He doesn't seem to be too big a fan of this city, but heartily recommends Montreal. Turns out I'll be going there in a few days; turns out he will too. If our schedules manage, we feel it is important he shows me around that city as well.

We find ourselves in front of a giant glass building, flanked by a 15 foot high bronze spider.

"And that right there is Maman - there are 8 of its kind in the world".

This nugget of information comes from my side, much to Francois', consternation.

"You can't know more about my city than I do!" - but here he is also quick to point out this isn't infact his city. Montreal is the place he really identifies with, and when he goes back to speaking of it, he is rapturous.

I'm taking in bits and pieces of him too as we walk along; of his impossibly light eyes, of the way his mouth curls in a slight smirk; how his hair when caught in the sun makes me squint with its sharp inflections of gold. We've now progressed to the subject of relationships and men, but I'm trying to divulge as little as possible of my Pandora's box for a change - some other time perhaps. For now he will have to be content with knowing about my ideas regarding first marriage as a testing ground, and the second as the real deal, and the way my admittedly vague life plan dovetails around the two. He is mostly amused and mildly concerned by this; from his own talk I glean a sense of a man who is a relationship pragmatist himself. The undamaged, uncynical but guardedly cautious attitude to love. Interesting - and the more people I meet, the more I realize - rare.

Then he says the clincher.

"Well I suppose I'll settle down once I'm done with all the nationalities, you know?"

I gasp - I do in fact know. His goal is identical to mine, and we enthusiastically proceed to checklist our nation count so far, arriving at a roughly similar number. I am suitably impressed.

"You know what Francois? You'll make a good second husband".

He nods appreciatively at this most ultimate of honours.

I feel a twinge of sadness as we part ways. As I walk back towards my hotel, I'm hoping we get to meet in Montreal.

---

Francois 2

But before Montreal could - or would - happen, there was Quebec City. And in Quebec City, there was Francois 2. For him, I have 3 words:

Oh -My -God.

Okay fine, I have more than that. But, seriously.

"Okay, first you need zoo learn how zoo pronounce my name"

"I do?"

"Yes you zoo. I don't like people spoiling it - now say - Frrrhaaaan svois."

"Fransaw"

"Uh. NO. Frrrrhaaan svois."

"Frrrrransawwww?"

"Nooo, nooo, it iz Frrrhanswois say it like thaaaat."

"Farrhansaw?"

This went on for approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That is a lot of r's rolled per second, if you're counting.

It was 11 pm and we were sitting at Francois 2's home, located squarely opposite my hotel. Yeah, I know what you're thinking - hell I was thinking it too, even after that. I don't know about Francois 2 though. As we sat on his couch he looked wistfully at a table across the room.

"That was my boyfriend's"

"Ah. He doesn't own it anymore then?"

"Nooo. I mean - that iz my ex-boyfriend's".

"Ah"

"We broke up three days ago"

"Oh no - I'm sorry"

Oh no indeed - I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about where this evening was going to go. And sure enough, in another 15 minutes, Francois 2 and I were facebook stalking his ex, who it turns out Francois 2 had left due to the boy's drug problem. As we trawled through picture after picture, it was obvious that he really was the junkie Francois 2 accused him of being. There were also an alarmingly large number of pictures with him wearing a beer sipper hat and looking intensely bored.

"Ohhhh Coco ..."

"His name's Coco??"

"Nooo nooo - Coco izzz - what to say - it is like a name I give - like zoo give names to boyfriend - like - "

"Like honey?"

"Yes! like that. He was my honey. He was my Coco"

We both look mournfully at Coco sulking back at us from Facebook. I am furiously biting down the urge to gallop back to my room - and yet, this boy was obviously not doing too well, so if a sympathetic ear was what he needed, I supposed I could bear another half an hour of this.

Right?

I step up to go get some water. When I get back, he's headed off to his bedroom.

no no no.

"DAHneeesh. Come heeeere"

I walk in gingerly to find him grinning next to a tray of medicines.

"Uhhh"

"These are my diabetes medicines!"

Well, glad we were sharing.

"All subsidized - I don't have to pay!"

And glad the Canadian healthcare system's awesome.

"And look it iz not hurting one bit"

Okay - needles make me queasy. Not just when used on myself - though of course that's no picnic - but I'm not very good when it comes to other people subjecting themselves to this obviously inhumane form of administering medication. I once had to hold up my then 2 month old sister for a vaccine, and I almost dropped her - even as she managed to go through the procedure without a squeak of protest.

His next move of course was to gleefully offer me the injection - "I geeve you 10 dollar to say you will have NO pain when you inject. 10 dollar, on the table". To demonstrate the strength of his conviction, he plopped a 10 dollar note on the table. Meanwhile. the blood had swooped from my head down into my stomach as I found myself holding the syringe.

"Take ...gurgle ..... it ...gurgle .....back"

After a few seconds of sadistically enjoying my terror, he took the syringe from me, then gurgled in pleasure as he stabbed himself with it in the knee.

This really was my cue for running out screaming. I turned around to leave -

"It is strange sleeping alone"

Uh oh.

"You know I am having zoo leave the tv on through the night because I need constant prescence?"

I nod giving my best sympathetic look possible.

"I just wish someone could hold me through the night and be my Coco"

This was accompanied by a meaningful gaze at me. So he wanted me to curl up around him "Coco style" and lull him to sleep. Since I am not -

a) Florence Nightingale

b) completely insane

- I pointed out this was probably not a healthy idea.

"You know, I think - maybe it might be a good idea if you were trying to get over him. Not imagining other people as him"

"But we will also have sex!"

"Really not the point here".

And then I said the words I didn't think I'd ever hear myself say:

"You probably shouldn't sleep around with anyone for a bit"

Never has a cold night air chill felt more welcome.

---

You say Au Revoir - and I say Bonjour

Montreal is everything Francois promised it would be. For the first time in my trip, I feel that stab of traveler's sorrow experience from not really belonging to a place. This is a city I wish I could call my own, get into the daily grind of. I want to live here!

I can imagine Francois' good natured riff on the city as I walk its streets, and I think about how he must know the ins and outs of that lane and this, maybe frequented that spot on the Church steps across the street where a group of exhuasted tourists have collapsed upon. I'd like to say goodbye to this man, one of the best things about my time in Canada. Regretfully, turns out I have to be at the airport around the same time he reaches Montreal.

I decide I'd like to hear his voice once before I leave any which way. There are 8 coins of 25 cents left in my pockets as I walk the streets of the city one last time before heading back to my hotel. There's a payphone right up ahead. 2 coins in, the phone starts to ring, it goes to voicemail, and there go 50 cents.

With 6 coins in my pocket, I walk down another street, another pay phone. And once again, it goes to voicemail.

Okay, this isn't happening. Up on my left is a dollar store - I walk in trying to find some way to dispose off my last bit of Candian currency. I look around for a bit, but darnit I really want to make that call, so I walk right out, down another street, and another pay-phone.

He answers at the third ring. As soon as I hear his voice though, I realize I don't quite know what to say. I don't know what tone I want to use, if the inflection in my voice is allowed to be excitable or warm or faintly pleasant - and why that is even a consideration in the first place. All this flashes through my head between the two seconds it takes for him to answer:

"Francois?"

And I reply -

"Francois!"

When it is affirmed that it is indeed Francois on one side of the line, I confirm my identity. Thankfully the name Danish rings a bell, and I didn't have to resort to "oh you know, the boy who said he'd ensnare you in his second marriage 2 hours after you met".

" So - I just wanted to tell you how great I thought Montreal was."

This I truly did.

"And thanks again for being a great guide back in Ottawa"

That he was.

"And stay in touch?"

I hoped we would.

"And don't forget to marry me a decade from now"

So this last bit I didn't say. Quit when you're ahead, etc. in this case, quit before you've made a blubbering mess of yourself. To Francois' credit he responded to what must have clearly been an utterly bewildering rant with bravado. Yes it was really nice meeting me, and oh yes he was glad I had a great time and Montreal, and oh it was quite nice of me to call before I left and yes we could start discussing tentative marriage venues.

Okay fine, again not the last bit, buy hey I am an astute between the lines reader, okay?