Summer, 2010.

I live a quiet life these days. You wouldn't guess it, looking at me running up the hill, laptop, coffee and several notebooks in hand. You wouldn't think it, seeing me screeching with laughter with a colleague at the bar after he's finished work and I've decided to break for a beer. We stand around in the sun sometimes and just roar. One beer down, and I can roar pretty damn loud. You would be forgiven, listening in on conversations with my mother, that Drama is my middle name: The Man did this today! He said that!! He bought me this! I hate this! I hate that! I love this! I want this! Ad infinitum.

But those are just the odd notes.
The spaces in between are intensely quiet, intensely peaceful, intensely alone.
I think. I write. I stare at the sun-dried grass outside the window, dotted with yellow and pink wildflowers. I listen to doves cooing on the window sill and crickets chiming away the long afternoon. I read.
The silence is golden.
The solitude is golden.
In between, there are intense flashes of memory: A piece of fieldwork. A fight I had when I was talking to the Man longdistance from a village somewhere and I had a mad idea to run away right there and then, lose myself in the middle of trackless dusty little villages. The touch of a strangers hand on my arm as he explained some vitally important point about irrigation. The point was vital enough that he touched me. The touch was vital enough that I forgot the point and still cannot remember it. The sound of neem trees and clinking glasses and Suttar drinking - no, slurping - his tea.
Inside all of these memories there is data that has to be written up, analysed and re-analysed, sharp recollections and soft ones that need to be remembered and re-remembered and a life, apparently, to be lived in the here and now. Bills, washing, laundry, insistent emails from my sister asking me if she should or should not order dinner, halfway across the world in Mumbai (No, she should save some money and cook herself.)

I've often wondered what people meant when they said that a piece of research can suck you in.
I'm not just sucked in, I'm several feet under, trying to grow a pair of gills so I can stay there longer.
But I am no mermaid, and sometimes I need to come up for air. And the beer at the bar or the Mans' mandolin, which he has taken to playing every evening, are just about as much sound and Outside as I can stand.

.

Here is a thought that I've been having again and again, almost intrusively, for the past few months:

Life. Is. Too. Short.

It's strange that the immediate catalyst for this (entirely mundane) realisation was the onset of spring. That's usually the time when I become so immersed in the annual renewal that I am positive down to the my bones.
Not this year.
This year, I've been catching glimpses of old people getting off busses, their knees creaking, their eyes dimmed, the grasp of their hands weak, their understanding of this new, fast, hard world sometimes incomplete. And it floods me with pain to think h0w quickly that happens. 70 years, 80 years, 85...
I've been thinking of all the things I want to do, want to see. All the things I want to be. All the things I don't even know I want yet. All the things to love, to hate, to know, to change, to touch, to learn. All the bigness, the vastness, the deepness of the world.
It seems impossibly crazy that we're given One life. And it's a short one. And we're given an instinctive hold on it. A desire to keep it going. How brutal.
It seems as though inside everything that is beautiful, wildly moving or worth learning there's the incessant ticking of a clock that never stops. A sadness. A knowledge that this lovely friend, our time here, is moving always further and further away, until one day she is gone.

I was on the phone to my mother today and I told her what I'd been mulling over in my head, again and again all through spring, and now summer.
She laughed, and reminded me that she'd turned 60 this year, and that I was too young to be thinking like this, I should go out and kiss the Man and enjoy the sun and forget everything else.
But I really can't. I feel a new sense of urgency, of mad attachment to this one, wild, precious life. And a breathless desire to make it stay, keep it around longer, hold on tight.

Hmm.

In all the great stories we're told, it's the calm ones who have the happiest endings. The ones who swallow their poison with a straight face. The ones who never want things for themselves and who, having been denied chances at happiness, smile sadly and shrug.

Having never been such a person, having never had the strength to do this, preferring instead to lock myself in a room for a time when things do not go my way and simply scream and cry and make no attempt at a straight face when my heart is twisting inside me, does this mean I will not have a happy ending?

Wow, I really can't shake off the maudlin-panna right now.

Note to Self

Dear Desire, dear Lust, dear Need. Dear Ambition, dear Curiosity, dear Angst, dearest Fury, dearest Rage:

Please, please come down. You're going to get me killed.

Much love,
Tara.

Sigh

This blog has always been sort of my personal diary, about me and the things I think (shoddily) or notice, but lately it has been turning into a lust-fest (cheekbones) and a corn-factory (wedding vows and teary soup).
I shall change that, though really, is there anyone reading this? If not, why not just type whatever I like!? (Come to think of it, why not just type whatever I like anyway).

Anyway the point I wanted to record was this.
M. came downstairs yesterday evening post-dinner. I was at the dining table wrestling with a bit of proofreading on the laptop.
He wore a deep red kurta that I bought for him at Westside when he came to Pune and flipflops that I bought at Koregaon Park.
When he dresses like this he looks like a social-worker-phirangi-prince.
I am approaching my 28th birthday rather rapidly, so this is perhaps a juvenile thought (hehe) but I would just like to say:

Dear M:
Wear nothing.
Alternate nothing with that kurta.
That is an order.
Love.

For the record

(FTR)
I am PROFOUNDLY Disinterested in the World Cup. I've been wanting to say that since the damn thing began.

And Also:
Not that it matters at all to anyone (as with the rest of the content on here, tee hee, but still I thought I'd scream about stuff anyway), but:
I dreamt of a kiss I had fiveish years ago now at Home. Last night. Kisser was on Facebook and chatting, so... Must've jolted the old brain cells.
But.
He told me was getting married and has become as raddled as... as... the most raddled person I've ever seen.
Why does this happen to everyone?!
I told him I was still 'just' living-in with the Man.
He said: 'Oh. haha. Grow up na. All that romance is so juvenile.'
Not what he said when he was salivating for a kiss under my mother's neem tree in the garden.
I hope he falls into the fire and burns his lungi off in front of his mother.
I wanted to say that out loud too, but I controlled myself. I have greatly improved.

From a facebook note. Beautiful bit of script.

Couple fighting, about to end it for good, realising they don't know each other, and trying, last minute, to save themselves:

Mariam, thinking to herself, after she's said the horrible break up words: "... it's not easy being in a relationship, much less to truly know the one and accept them as they are with all their flaws and baggage... It always fascinates me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all. Nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me I have a tendency to break up first to avoid having to hear it all. Here it is. One more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really loved this one. When I think that it's over, that I'll never see him again like this... Well yes, I'll bump into him, we'll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together. Then we'll slowly think of each other less and less, until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same: Breakup, breakdown. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another. Fuck around to forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness, start again to look for true love. Desperately look everywhere and after two years of loneliness, meet a new love and swear it is the one. Until that one is gone as well.

There's a moment in life when you can't recover from another breakup. And even if this person bugs you 60% of the time, well you still can't live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face, well, you love his sneezes, more than anyone elses kisses."

Cut to: Them dancing, post-fight, laughing and kissing in the street, break up forgotten, and love re-remembered, because "There's a moment in life when you can't recover from another breakup."

Beautiful piece of script.