Watching Ourselves Grow Old

And all of us are going old. It was inevitable, of course. But it's sad, nonetheless.

When will we realize that we are? Growing old, I mean. When will we realize that we can't continue the same lifestyles we always had? That we're no longer immortal. That Time has touched us with his black brush, that we can no longer remain arrogant, uncaring. That we can longer eat and drink and smoke and smoke up like we used to.

When others tell us? When we watch television shows in which it happens to other people, and it strikes us in a blinding epiphany? When our bellies overhang our belts by a certain number of inches (because they already do, you know)? When we wake up from restless sleep, and try to decode the unsettling dreams we struggled through? When a friend dies one day - a heart attack, a brain hemorrhage, or something more innocuous?

'Carpe Diem' is so much more poignant now. Because the number of days we have, they dwindle. They're no longer infinite, stretching ahead of us like an endless golden beach.

It's easy to waste a day, many days. Just sit still in a corner, and the day is gone. That's good in a way, because it helps us survive. But it's also bad, because you wake up one morning, and your life is spent, over, wasted. How do you make it count?

How do you manage to get up from the couch in front of the television, how do you stop your hand from stuffing your mouth, how do you stop doing what's easy and accepted and acceptable? How do you figure out what you want to do? And if it's different from what you're doing right now, how do you make that switch?

It irritates me, in a way. That people are okay to do this. That they're not even aware of their own potential, of what they're wasting. It worries me that I'm the only who's worried.

I tell myself I'm not like them, that I'm not wasting my life. But me, what am I doing? Do I know what I want, am I working towards it?

A flat on a lake-shore. A green painting on a wall. Enough money to travel and see the world. Fulfillment, the knowledge that what I'm doing makes a difference. Books, lots of books, and enough time to read them. A book of my own, but only if it's good. These are some of the things I want, things I have, things I would like more of.

And what I don't want? No TV. No car. No middle-class urban life. Trainspotting pretty much summarized it for me. Maybe I should put it up on a wall, as a reminder. Though it may be too late already.

Of Ukranians, Families and Communism

Most of us, we spend our lives trying to convert our ordinariness into extra-ordinariness. But people who have been scorched by extraordinary events, they spend their lives trying to get back to normal, to escape the pollution and the corruption of what happened to them.

Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian is one such story. On the face of it, it's the story of an 84-year-old Ukranian widower settled in the UK, who falls for a 36-year-old Ukranian woman with fake blond hair and fake boobs. The woman (Valentina) is after the passport that she can get by marrying him. The man's two daughters try to get their father to see reason, to not marry her. When that doesn't work, they try to prove the marriage false and later on to convince him to divorce her.

Lewycka uses this story to explore the complexities of family relationships. The love-hate relationship between the two sisters, the hate-hate relationship between the father and the elder daughter, the love-love relationship between the late mother and two daughters. The trauma that Valentina causes in their lives brings them closer together, helps them understand things about their family that they didn't before, causes them to work through long-held grudges and misunderstandings.

By narrating the story of how the old man and his wife landed in England, Lewycka also explores the century old struggle between communism and capitalism, the excesses of both. Communism gets the worst of her treatment - the 1932 famine that Stalin imposed upon Ukranians to integrate them better into the Soviet Union, the independence struggle that Ukranian Radicals waged against the Soviet Union. The couple also survive Nazi camps and World War II before landing up in England.

A story about a bunch of Ukranians in England could easily have been about a clash of the cultures, but Lewycka thankfully doesn't choose that easy route. The story is set very firmly amongst the Ukranians, with the outside world barely getting a peep in.

Lewycka's greatest merit is that she chooses to show, not tell. The younger daughter is the narrator, and she is just as caught up in the family politics as the rest of the crazy characters. It's up to the reader to interpret her subjective account of the entire ordeal. Maybe Valentina is not as evil as she is shown to be? Maybe the late mother, whom the daughter has always worshiped, also used their father as an escape route? Maybe there is a reason their father is as crazy as he is?

The book's cover says it's a comic novel. But I couldn't see anything comic about it. What's funny about old age, about starvation, about the struggle to survive other people's cruelty? I guess it depends on the reader, as much else does in this book. 

Manu Joseph's Illicit Happiness

If books could be judged by their covers, then Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People would be funny, cheerful, and eminently edible - in a mango ice-cream kind of way. Well, except for the corpse hanging from the top, of course.

The book largely does live up to the promises its cover makes. It's the story of a dysfunctional Malayali Christian family living in Madras of the 1990s. The father is a failed writer, a journalist, a drunkard. The mother talks to the walls and tries to find dignity in poverty. The younger son is bad at maths, and has to tell himself to 'put fight' every day, just to find the courage to step out of the house. And the elder son, Unni, the bright one, the cartoonist, the glue that held the family together, committed suicide at the age of seventeen.

The book takes up the tale three years after the suicide, when the father, Chacko, suddenly decides to investigate why his son killed himself. He speaks to Unni's friends one by one, he pores over the cartoons that Unni left behind, he goes over each of Unni's actions that day. The mother, Mariamma, wants to know only one thing - why did her beloved Unni not leave a suicide note, to tell her why he was leaving her?

Chacko's search leads him into the shadowy world of philosophy. Unni's conviction that the fight between good and evil has already been won by evil, that the world is an illusion to make people think that the fight is still on, that he is one of the few 'mutated beings' that Nature has created, who can see through the web. (Keanu Reeves, anybody?)

Most teenagers have such illusions at some time or the other. But they leave them behind with their acne and their confidence issues and their awkwardness, when they step into adulthood. Why did Unni not survive, then? Unni, who was bright enough not to fall for the engineering frenzy, who could lead the rest of his class into mischief if he wanted to, who read psychiatric books with names nobody could understand.

Joseph uses the story to explore dysfunctionality, the struggle to fit into society's norms and expectations. Each of the characters has something that doesn't let them fit into the Tam-Brahm wannabe-engineer-children good-husband good-housewife building they live in. He also explores the theme of men's sexual violence on women - pats and prods on the street, an attack by a familiar neighbour, an attempted rape by the side of a village stream.

Yes, there is philosophy, of the teenagerish, 'why-do-I-exist' kind. There is also humour, of the wry kind. But there is also a slight tendency to judge, to lay down the anti-engineering preaching with a heavy hand.

The book meanders a bit in the middle, but finds itself a rapid denouement later on - many apparently diverse strings coming together and meshing with each other quickly to show us the real pattern. It leaves us with a sense of waste, and more than a tinge of sorrow - a natural feeling about any suicide, I suppose.

This second novel from Joseph is definitely a step up from the previous one, Serious Men, both in terms of language and its characters. Serious Men had cardboard cutout characters - the flattest (no reverse pun intended!) of whom was Oparna, who could have been so much more. But in TIHOOP,  Joseph has managed to create better rounded characters. Thoma is funny, Mariamma is heart-wrenching, Chacko is pathetic. Unni remains shadowy, which is natural, given that we only hear about him from other people. 

Little Red Riding Hood

Way back in 2004-05, just after this blog began, I was obsessed with a site called east of the web. It was  a place for wannabe writers, where people posted stories, critiqued other people's stories and had their own stories critiqued in turn. And the best part was that there were some decent quality writers there, and you could actually find some well-written stories among the blah ones.

Inspired by some of the stuff I read on the site, I wrote a couple of stories as well, one of which was particularly well-received. But then, as usually happens, I lost interest, and stopped writing.

East of the web shut down that section of its site some time ago, and I thought I had lost those two stories, since the old desktop had also crashed. Recently, it struck me that I could just go to webarchive.org and find them. It took some searching, because I couldn't remember when exactly I had posted those stories, but I found them!

The first story wasn't that great, but I realized that the second one (the one that was well-received) was actually decent. Slightly wannabe, yes - but crisp sentences, a well-paced narrative, good descriptions. Seventeen-year-old me was actually a passable writer - much better than 25-year-old me, at any rate. Though I was reading it after a gap of seven years, there were very few sentences that I would have changed. 


So here it is, with only a couple of typos corrected. 


***


"Excuse me, Mr. Wolf, could you tell me the way to Grandma's house, please?"
"Of course, little girl. Take this right fork."
"Thank you, Mr. Wolf. Have a nice day."
"You too, young lady. You too."

I creep through the undergrowth to the bright light. The sunlight is warm on the two figures standing face-to-face on the wide path. They are different; yet complement each other – the tall, lean wolf in a morning coat and top hat and the small, chubby girl in her white frock and red cloak. The sight of her floods my mouth with anticipation. I can almost taste those white legs peaking out from beneath the folds of the cloak. The fair hair escapes the hood of her cloak and waves invitingly at me. It takes all of me to not jump on her that very second.

But now I have a decision to make. The wolf or the girl? Well, I've always hated the scenic route, so I choose the wolf. 

It is easier to follow the wolf than the girl. I know that as soon as he turns the first corner on the left-hand fork, he will make a straight dash for Grandma’s house. For that is how the story goes. 

I wait a few moments while she hesitates between the two forks in the road – the one dark and shaded by tall curving trees; the other sunlit and filled with flowers and butterflies and bees. Finally, the light wins her heart. She smiles suddenly and skips down the right fork. 

So. The two protagonists are on their way to their common final resting place. My face – the last thing they shall probably see in their lives – curves into a leer: the moment I have been waiting for is about to arrive. I set off along the grass flattened only a few moments before by the wolf’s greedy lope.

***

The wolf is standing by the edge of the woods. He is naked. His pretensions to sophistication have been torn away in his haste. He is staring at Grandma’s house. It rises above us on a hill; its white fencing and its green grass and its red roof and its cheerful yellow curtains are poignant gestures of defiance against the dark, unwholesome woods. 

Suddenly, he sniffs the air. I tense, wondering if he has sensed me. He turns his long snout in my direction and his yellow eyes gleam for a moment. Slowly, he pads towards me. 

Adrenalin pumps its way through me in a sudden rush. I ease the knife out of my pocket. 

The snick of the unfolding blade makes him hesitate a moment. But he still comes on, sure of his ground.

It is over in a few seconds. In a disappointingly short while, he has lunged at me, I have sliced his throat and his blood floods the grass. Like a true professional, I have sidestepped the spurt of blood and I am clean: no part of me brands me a murderer.

I look down upon his body. His rough fur is red. A gash splits his throat like a horrible leer. I feel no pity, for he would have done the same to me.

***

I have done my reconnaissance earlier and I know that approaching the house directly would be folly. Grandma, an invalid, has had her bed positioned so that she can see down the garden path. 

So, keeping well inside the woods, I circle to the back of the house. Here, the trees creep almost to the back door before being tamed. I have no trouble getting in. 

The kitchen is golden, warm and musty in the afternoon sunlight. Yellow cabinets line the whitewashed wall. Spoons and utensils hang from hooks below them. A small wooden table sits in the middle, adorned with a bowl of fruit. I pick up the carving knife placed conveniently on the sideboard.

The door to Grandma’s bedroom is open. I walk in. The knife lies casually in my hand. She is staring out the window, no doubt awaiting her little girl. 

The room, again, is warm and golden – as everything seems to be this afternoon. The overwhelming illusion is of flowers: the curtain and the bed linen and the wallpaper are patterned with white lilies; half a dozen vases full of flowers adorn every available surface; she is wearing a white nightdress with a gauze rose at the neck; an elusive scent of jasmine hangs heavy in the air. 

I clear my throat. She turns her head and sees me. Her eyes skim down to the knife in my hand. 

“Who are you?” 

Slowly and silently, I advance to the bed. 

Her eyes widen with fear and helplessness. They flutter around the room, seeking to escape this horrible reality. But they cannot escape the knife. They keep coming back to pierce themselves on its sharp edge, gleaming golden in the light. 

“Please… Take anything you want… I won’t even tell anyone… my silver is in the sideboard….”

Her voice is squeaky with terror. She is speaking to the knife: she cannot take her eyes away from it. 

Finally, my silence draws her gaze my way. She looks up at my face. What she sees there makes her eyes flee back to the comfort of the knife. 

The certainty of death makes a person less selfish. She suddenly thinks of her grandchild. I can almost see the thought being processed by her brain: the fear in her eyes is replaced by the initial shock as the thought strikes her; then cunning comes on, as she wonders how to draw this assailant away from her precious. Should she tell me about the child and hope that I have some grain of mercy left in me? Or should she strike out at me, so that I kill her quickly and take whatever I have to take and run before the child arrives?

The look in my eyes has left her with no doubts as to the amount of mercy I have in my soul. She steals a quick look up at my face. That is her undoing. 

The acrid stench of human excreta fills the room. I curse under my breath. Her head lolls against the flowery pillow. At least, there is no blood. 

I smile to myself as I lift her feather-light body and stuff it into the closet. Look at me: I kill old wolves with knives and old women with smiles. 

I change the bedcovers, open the window wide and find the air-freshener. The things we murderers have to do. 

I slip on another nightdress and a cap and I settle down in the bed to wait.

***

She skips up the garden, showing off to her grandmother. Her path zigzags, as she runs after bees and stops to sniff flowers. She shrieks with delight as a butterfly brushes its wings against her face. She turns up her face at the sun and lets down her hood so that the wind can brush her hair.

Somehow, she finally makes it to the door.

“Grandma! I’m home!” The words echo through the house. 

She hums a nursery rhyme as, out of sight, she sheds her cloak.

“Grandma! Look what I’ve…” The childish voice stops mid sentence as she steps into the room. 

I wonder if she can smell her dead grandmother’s pee. Or did she recognize me under the cap? 

“So, you’ve finally found me,” her voice is sultry. The warmth in the room increases tenfold. 

“How… how did you recognize me?” 

My confidence has drained away and my voice is sweaty with fear. Now that the element of surprise is lost, my fate is certain. 

“That old bitch would never have bed linen that didn’t match the curtains,” she says dismissively. 

“Did He send you?”

“Who else?”

“Why?”

“Because you weren’t doing anything, you lazy old prick!”

“Well, I was sent only sixteen human years ago, you know,” I try without success to keep the wail out of my voice. 

“Sixteen years! I’ve been here only six years and look at what I’ve done!”

“So it WAS you.”

“Didn’t you recognize my style, darling? You prey on old women. I prey on young men,” she laughs a hoary laugh.

She sits on the bed and places her hand on my knee. It is strange to be in a flowery nightdress and cap and have my old partner, in a six-year-old human body, place her chubby hand on my knee. But we have been in more ridiculous situations before, far back into the millions of years we have been together. 

But that was long ages ago: back when I was hers and she was mine and we roamed the world together in elaborate disguises, wrecking havoc and spreading evil among unsuspecting animals.

Now she is His and she has more powers than me. And she is about to vanquish me like she would crush an irritating fly. 

I shudder, thinking of the pain. The pain of death is much worse than the pain of birth. Though I have experienced it many times before, it still fills me with fear. 

“You KNOW there is barely room for one here.”

Is that compassion I hear in her voice – compassion for an old fool who has outlived his usefulness and who refuses to change with the times? 

I look down at my pink nightgown and wish for a simple life. 

She too looks down at me. Contempt replaces the compassion. Her eyes give lie to the small frame and the golden hair and the pudgy cheeks and the white dress and the red shoes. She raises her hand. My eyes fill with tears.


***


Original story with all the comments here on Web Archive.

The Customer Is Always Right!

This is a very long and bad-tempered rant against telecom companies, written mostly to get a lot of frustration out of my system. 

The market economy - that great panacea for all consumer ills. Once the market was freed up, we were promised, we would never be short-changed by all-powerful companies again. Instead, the companies would be scared of us, the consumers, because we would be able to walk out and go to the nearest competitor in a jiffy.

Ha! I say to that. Double, triple, HA!

It all started at our last house in Koramangala, that most elite of all Bangalore neighbourhoods. We had just got married, and we needed the internet at our house, like all young people.  Both of us had had Airtel broadband at our previous houses, and had been happy enough with it. So we called them up, they gave us some options, and we chose our plan.

Things went fine enough initially. And then it started. Every half an hour, the net would suddenly disappear. It would come back again after ten-fifteen minutes, but that wasn't exactly what we were paying a bomb for every month, was it? It was extremely frustrating, especially if one of us was trying to work from home.

So we called up Airtel Customer Care, dumb dutiful customers that we were. They sent somebody. And of course, as generally happens when the service guy arrives, the net worked fine. The guy presumably diagnosed the problem as our joint hypochondria, and went away.

And then the problem started again. The entire Customer Care-Service Guy-No Problems cycle played out twice more before they decided that it was a hardware problem.

"Okay great," we said, "Now that you've diagnosed the problem, fix it."
"Um, no ma'am," they said, "We can't."
"Eh? Why not?"
"You need to talk to our hardware supplier, Alcatel-Lucent."
"Eh? Why should I talk to them? I'm your customer, not theirs!"
"Still, ma'am. Only they can service this. This is their number."
"Okay wait," I said, unable to believe this. "Let me get this straight. I use Airtel Broadband. Airtel uses Alcatel hardware. But if there's a problem with the Alcatel hardware, I have to contact Alcatel-Lucent, even though I'm not their customer?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Brilliant. Very logical."

Anyway, I gave up, and called the Alcatel-Lucent guys. They came and did something. The problem continued.

Nikhil escalated to every single person possible, including the Airtel CEO for Karnataka. He spammed them on Twitter, he called up Customer Care every day - I guess the poor Customer Care guys became very familiar with his name, his voice and his sheer frustration with their system.

This continued for a couple of months. In September, we finally decided to give up on Airtel. Our faith in private companies irrevocably gone, we decided to switch to BSNL. People who had used BSNL Broadband said it was good.

Nikhil applied online and got two calls from their people within a day. Strangely enough, the first guy said he was from the Peenya exchange - a place so far way from Koramangala it might as well be in another city. When the second guy called up, Nikhil mentioned the first caller to him. The Koramangala guy asked us not to talk to the Peenya guy, because he wasn't authorized to deal with the Koramangala area.

But apart from that little bout of intra-organizational territory poaching, BSNL was just wonderful. We had our new connection within a week, and to have non-stop broadband was such a luxury after the Airtel experience! Everything worked fine till May, when we moved to CV Raman Nagar, about ten kilometers away from Koramangala.

We shifted on 2nd May, and Nikhil submitted an application on 5th May to have the phone transferred from Koramangala to CV Raman Nagar. Ah, that accursed date of 5th May - how many times we have referred to that date since, in frustrated phone calls to frustrating people!

Here's a rough timeline of what happened.

1. 5th May - The application for the transfer of the connection is submitted at the Koramangala customer care office in the BDA complex.
2. 9th - 11th May - We call up BSNL customer care to get the status of the application. They tell us that they can only answer technical help calls, and give us the number of the Indira Nagar exchange. We call the Indra Nagar exchange (since CV Raman Nagar apparently doesn't have a separate exchange), and are repeatedly told that the application is still pending at Koramangala. The number of the Koramangala office isn't available online, and we can't contact them. The Indira Nagar people claim, incredibly enough, that they don't have the number of the Koramangala office.
3. 12th May - Finally, a frustrated Nikhil goes to the Koramangala office. He gets there at 9:30, not realizing that government offices start working only after 10:30. He is asked to wait, and then, at 10:30, is told that the office won't be functioning that day since it's a second Saturday! #$^@^&^&!!
4. 13th May - 20th May - No following up on our part, since both of us are away from the house. On 18th, Nikhil gets a call from somebody asking if he knows a BSNL number that's close to our place. Since we've recently moved, we obviously don't know such a number.
5. 21st May - 25th May - The Indira Nagar exchange still claims that the application is pending at Koramangala. They give us the name and mobile number of the person in Koramangala who is supposed to process it, but the number is always switched off. Nikhil reaches the end of his tether and calls up higher and higher people in the BSNL hierarchy. All of them promise action, but nothing happens.
6. 26th May morning - Finally, I get tired of listening to Nikhil yelling at different people everyday, and decide to go to Koramangala myself. I get there at around 11:30, and I explain the problem. They show me a register which says the application has been processed on 8th May. Then why, I ask, are the Indira Nagar people saying that you have not processed it? They have no answer. They stop responding to my repeated questions after a while. They write the Indira Nagar exchange's phone number on a piece of paper and mutely give it to me. I already have this number, I tell them. I ask them if they can talk to the Indira Nagar people directly and sort out the confusion. They get up and walk away from the desk. True story.
7. 26th May afternoon - I am back to calling up the Indira Nagar exchange. "Ah yes, Nikhil's number, right?" they say - like the Airtel Customer Care people, the BSNL guys have also become very familiar with Nikhil. "It is still pending at Koramangala. But don't worry ma'am - the AM has taken it up. It will be sorted out soon." The AM, I assume, is one of the poor people Nikhil has called up over the last one week.
8. 27th May - 1st June - "Ma'am, it is still pending at Koramangala."  "Ma'am, it is still pending at Koramangala."  "Ma'am, it is still pending at Koramangala."  "But don't worry ma'am - the AM has taken it up. It will be sorted out soon." Oh, yay.
9. 2nd June - I finally get a kind-hearted girl on the phone. She gives me the usual reply, but says she will call up Koramangala and get this sorted out. She asks me to call back in ten minutes. I call back, and she says she has spoken to Koramangala. She gives me the Koramangala office's number, and says I can follow up with them if needed. This girl is the first (and probably last) helpful person we have interacted with in the entire duration. If only somebody had done this earlier, we could have saved four weeks of following up.
10. 4th June - I call up the number she has given me. The lady tells me that the application has been processed and is now with the Indira Nagar exchange. She even gives me our new telephone number. With tears of joy in my eyes, I listen to angels singing in heaven. It is done! Surely, we will get our phone this week!
11. 5th June - I call up the Indira Nagar exchange again. The lady says they have processed it, and she gives me the number of the CV Raman Nagar office - the people who will presumably install the phone. Things seem to be moving pretty quickly now!
12. 7th June - I call up the CV Raman Nagar office. The lady says, "Final testing is going on. You will get it by today."
13. 8th June -  I call up the CV Raman Nagar office. The lady says, "There was some problem with the wiring. We have returned it and have got the new wiring. Final testing is going on. You will get it by today."
14. 9th June - I call up the CV Raman Nagar office. The lady, presumably frustrated with me, gives me the number of some guy named Swaminathan with whom it is pending. I call up Swaminathan. His number is not accepting any calls. I leave him a message. 

And that's where it stands. Half an hour ago, Nikhil finally called up Mr A P Bhatt, the BSNL Head for Karnataka. He was quite nice and helpful, especially considering the fact that he was called on his residence number on a second Saturday. That can't fun. He said he would get it sorted out on Monday. But BSNL Karnataka and BSNL Bangalore are apparently different entities, so I'm not sure what he can do.

Anyway, the several morals of the story are:

• The customer is always screwed - never mind if it's a public company or a private company. 
• Companies should have a single Customer Care helpline. We had to follow up on this application through three different exchanges because the BSNL Customer Care guys said they would be able to address only technical queries.
• Companies should have well-built websites. If only we had been able to get the Koramangala office's number on their site, we wouldn't have had to bug the Indira Nagar people so much.
• Moral for HR people: It's great that you have incentives for the sales guys. This will help the customers get their connections quickly, but: (a) the incentives can back-fire, given the Peenya story; (b) you're missing out minor stuff like transferring connections on time, or behaving well with customers. I wonder if there are SLAs for phone transfers.

The House

The silence, it tip-toes into the room behind the shadows. The afternoon had been yellow with the sounds of playing children. Now back to the darkness and the dustiness.

She doesn't like the harsh whiteness of tubelights - they remind her of hospitals and offices. She likes yellow light - sunshine, candles, small bulbs hidden behind creamy white paper. Yellow light makes everything shine - her blue and white china, the hundred year old wood of the table, even her cheap steel spoons. Yellow light makes life friendlier.

Her children berate her, of course. "You'll ruin your eyes, Amma," says the eldest from his first world home in Jersey. "Amma! You'll walk into something and break your bones," warns the youngest, balancing a baby in one hand and the phone in the other. The middle one stopped caring many years ago, after he got married. They want her to sell the house, to move in with them. Spend four months of the year with each of them, flitting from child to child like a lost migratory bird.

The house is shut up, the tables and chairs covered in dusty drapes. She uses just three rooms - the kitchen, the dining room, and her bedroom. She knows these rooms inside out, can find her way around in the darkness.

The afternoons are good, the children from the orphanage come to play. They are good children, they don't come anywhere near the house. Or maybe they are scared of her, she doesn't know. She supposes she must seem scary, with her mouldy eyes and the spots on her hands and her slow walk. Old age always did frighten youth, even when she was young.

She watches them from behind her curtains. Shrieking, climbing trees, daring each other, playing hide-and-seek - she is glad she allowed them to play in her yard. Children need space to run around and play, and the orphanage was too crowded for that.

Sometimes, after dark, she pretends she has gone blind. She doesn't light the candles. She walks around in the darkness with her hands slightly in front of her. A bit of moonlight filters in through the windows, which helps after a while - once her eyes have adjusted to the half-light.

She hopes that ghosts will talk to her in the darkness, tell her stories of long ago glory. She can tell them stories in return, stories from her own life. Her childhood was bright with yellow sunshine. She considers her marriage, and it is pink - a fresh, bright pink in the beginning, vivid and full of promise, but fading to the paleness of onion peels by the end. And after her husband died, there was grey, darkening now into black.

She walks through the rest of the house sometimes. She takes a candle along - she doesn't know the other rooms so well anymore. Furniture shrouded in sheets, an occasional rat squeaking around, a quiet that just reminds her of the excited shouts that used to ring out here many years ago.

She stands in the middle of the hall, and closes her eyes. She imagines the hall as it used to be - the black and white chequered floor, the large oval mirror on the far wall, the sunlight filtering in through the neem tree outside. A teak table with lion claws for feet, a dresser full of unused dishes. The children used to rush in after school, leave their bags and shoes in the hall, and run to the kitchen to be the first to tell her about their day.

On holidays, the house used to reverberate with their shouts. They used to play hide-and-seek on the grounds, throw stones at the mangoes on the trees. The boys' friends would come to play cricket on Saturday afternoons, and then beg her for her famous lemon juice. Her youngest was a reader, she would sometimes go off to remote corners of the house and read by herself.

The house seems to speak to her sometimes. "Can't you see what you're doing to me?" it asks her, "I am meant for a family. My staircases are meant for children to rush down, my balconies and turrets are meant for them to clamber over. My mirrors need someone to preen in front of them. You're wasting me. I could be making so many people happy right now!"

"Wait," she responds, "Be patient. I will go away soon. And then you shall have your wish."

She knows that none of her children will want to come back and settle here. They will probably sell the house and divide the money amongst themselves. She wonders who will buy, though. Who would want such a large rambling house, with its old-fashioned bathrooms, its outdated kitchen, its trees that seem to shed leaves every minute?

She knows what she has to do, of course. She feels that she is being guided by a power bigger than herself. It's too perfect a match, surely?

She wonders if her husband would have approved. He would have, she feels - he was always a kind and generous man. Her children will be livid, of course. But they won't miss the house. They'll just miss the money. 

Changes in the Air

It is baking hot in Bangalore. Old-timers reminisce about ten years ago, when the weather never went beyond "slightly warm", even at three on an April afternoon. They speak with horror of the traffic, and the pollution, and the heat, and the dust. Walking about in the hot yellow afternoon, it is quite an effort to remember that Hyderabad must be hotter, Delhi must be dustier, Chennai must be muggier.


Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day 
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. 
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way. 

Time feels strange these days. Maybe it always does during periods of change, if only one weren't too busy to notice.

Next week, after three years of corporate life, I am taking a break. Life will no more be split into five days of work and two days of relaxation. No more of hurrying to catch the 7:30 bus, no more coming home late, no more office food, no more of sitting hunched in front of a laptop.

I have to admit - it is damn scary. Life is easier when there's a set routine. And the easier the routine, the tougher it is to get out - of the rut or comfort zone or whatever you want to call it. People tell me it was a brave decision to make, but I did it without even thinking much about it.

I already know, of course, that it will require a lot of willpower. It is going to be a torturous year, where I will almost certainly be wracked by doubt, by a sneaking suspicion that I'm not doing what I actually should be doing, that I should be doing more than I currently am.

The other change is that we are moving to a new place. Not our own, though. We realized that we were doing the whole house-buying thing too hurriedly. After all, a house is a life-long investment - it's almost like deciding whom to marry. It's not something that should be decided with a deadline in mind.

So we are moving to a rented place as of now. The guy who showed us the place kept using the word 'penthouse', but all that it means is that it's on the same floor as the terrace. Which is actually good - I am looking forward to the monsoons, and to seeing black clouds massed up against the afternoon sky. People crib about having to shift houses, but I find myself excited about it. I guess mostly because I've never done it before and I don't know any better.