I am home. Home alone. During the long weekend of Christmas. It’s not all that bad as it seems. As a matter of fact I wanted it this way. I also took the Monday off to make it a 4 day long break and packed my wife and daughter off to Kolkata for a week. And I have been planning something different and intense.
I planned switching off the phone, the cable, the internet. I planned not to step out of home and meet anyone. I made a list of things I am not allowed to do. And it included reading!!! Reading, which the second most natural activity for me; after breathing. And I planned to go on a juice fasting diet.
But as Bruce Nolan said, this is how the cookie crumbles. They said one of the side effects of the juice diet is a headache. ONE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS!! Like one of the side effects of having beta-blocker is your metabolism will be a little slow, so slow that even your little left toe will not feel it or one of the side effects of sex is that you will be a little tired. But no siree!!! This is not ‘one’ of those side effects; this was THE fucking side effect. I kept expecting it through the day and there was no hint of hit. Then in the evening there was just this bit hardening at my temples, the kind you would expect when you haven’t had a single drop of caffeine in 24 hrs. Something which would go away with a little of wishing, a crocin and some food. Food? What food? I ain’t supposed to have any. Okay dokey. So we down some 3 glasses of juices for dinner – tomato-bell pepper, carrot-spinach-celery and strawberry-black grape. And we pop an aspirin and smear the forehead with Tiger Balm, switch off the light at 10 pm and pray. What comes next is a colloidal solution of sleep and headache till 4 am when sleep gave up the battle and I am a pulp with just two live points in my entire being – the nerves on my temples. I can’t have one more pain killer in an empty stomach; so I crawl to the fridge which was 10 km away and pull out a small tetrapack of unsweetened soyamilk and reach back my bed. As the cold milk starts its journey, the head started feeling better and I was like “Okay, now I have nailed it!” But that was a deceptive move by the body like Lionel Messi does it for Real Madrid. Being deprived of the all the goodies for just 24 hours, my body was wreaking revenge on me at wee hours by unleashing nausea and burning stomach next on me. So I down few gallons of Digene and try to curl in the bed desperately trying to fall asleep, like a spurned lover in denial. Finally, I gave up, went to the bathroom, drove my arm upto the elbow in my gullet and retched out the soyamlik. My finger tips felt numb and the temples were firing at full volley. But then peace accord was signed and as the sun struggled to send its first faint rays between the grey and cragged skyline I fell in an uneasy sleep. It was the bai who woke me up with her doorbell and without any embarrassment of a defeated person I told her to cook daal-chawal-sabji before putting the milk and muesli on the breakfast table.
Wish I was as unabashed about losing in love.
Now that is a different matter.
In the evening I was making a call to one of my closest friends based in US, as I was eating my daal-chawal dinner and Abdullah Ibrahim was playing some nice jazz on his piano in my living room, I realized my strange (and painful) relationship with money and women. Seen from a different perspective, I have had a decent share of it. But it’s not as simple. I wish things were so simple.
I was just watching a chick-flick or rom-com (whatever you call it) – “27 dresses”, where a plain Jane’s aggressive and not so truthful sister was robbing her heartthrob away to the pulpit. I like rom-coms; the good and the not so good ones. Firstly it’s about love, my favorite topic. Secondly they have a lot of pastel colors, which the extra drop of estrogen in my blood can discern and appreciate. And lastly, things get alright at the end of them. So it was in this movie. Things got alright at the end. Everybody was happy in a completely pastel shaded (with an overdose of yellow, nay beige) wedding on the beach.
But in life things are not so simple. So, we are talking about my strange and painful relationship with money. From a stratospheric level, or just from the 10,000 ft level, I seem to be making enough money in a country where getting a meal a day is counted as a great fortune. It is absolutely true and untrue. Had I not been in the business of money for a decade and half, and was making this kind of money, I would have been feeling like a king or may be like an MLA. But then I have seen serious money, and I have seen and known people who have made serious money, and I have met them, rubbed my shoulders, sat on the same lunch table for days, shared the same lift and the loo, stayed in the same building and felt poor. There are plenty of blokes making more money than me (like Salman Khan and Mallika Sherawat or Mukesh Ambani), but none of them are close to me. And then there are lots of people making far less than I am doing but they stay far away. I have smelt it but it has not come to me. I am not particularly kicked by money, but not having it the way everybody around me have it, pains me a lot. But I can live with that. I mean I have been living with that with just a wee bit of heart burn.
The story with women is a little bit similar but much more complicated. After coming out of an all boys boarding school, I did not turn out to be one of those shy kinds who stammer and stutter in front of women but peep lecherously from behind the doors. I was easy and outgoing. Made quick friends with women, was always empathetic to their thoughts, causes and troubles (the extra estrogen bit), treated them as equals and got to know quite a few of them. But then whenever I fell attracted to someone, it did not work out. Had I been the shy type and the not-knowing-girls type, this wouldn’t hurt so much, perhaps. But having been known as someone who had more than his fair share of women, not having a girlfriend (or an affair) was something tough to live with. My mother was the first one to be aghast some 15-20 years back when she realized that none of the girls who I talk for hours on phone, or ferry on the back of my bike or go to movies with or have chai on a rainy day under a shack, none of them have even a micro crush on me. She took matter in her hands during my absence when I was away in B-School and right one year after graduation got me married to a girl who was 7 years younger and has a golden heart. And then life was happy ever after :-)
If life was so simple I could have written everything about it. But it is not. So even if I want to, I can’t tell everything for fear of hurting myself and hurting others.
So I won’t talk about love anymore. Just that I am not nonchalant in losing in love. I have not been. I have been quite a mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment