Adieu Chennai

It has been a year since I have officially bid a goodbye to Chennai. It still doesn't feel anything. The bits and pieces of Chennai I have been connected were always moving or always static and lifeless. Like Park Road, Marina beach, 27A and shared auto to Spencer Plaze. The connections I have formed have vaguely been lifeless, building and streets and strangely the people have been moving, just like me from place to place. Its weird that when I look back, there is not a single friend to whose house I have visited in my summer holidays. May be once or never.  It was more of a college school friendship which never stepped onto my personal space. The first time I came to Chennai, I hated my school and I hated those crowded roads where it took 10 minutes to just cross the road. I hated those early maths periods and the fact that people were somehow really rude. Once again I was finding myself out of my comfort zone and I was trying hard to fit in. It was tougher because I didn't have an elder sister beside me who went to the same school and helped me feel less alien. The girl who sat next to me in school  could be counted as my first real friend, she was from KV Andaman. I never stepped out and played because I was in 9th and thought I was too old to do all that. The ride to school in a small van where the driver will play the FM radio made me familiar to all songs again which I was out of touch after leaving Karaikal. Sundays used to be the Koyambedu day, where I would go to the vegetable market and stand in awe looking at all those fresh vegetables neatly stacked. School went on and I continued to hate it. Now that I think of it, I hated my two years at KV Annanagar and my two years at SBOA. I think I was just determined to hate anything that came my way, may be it has something to do with puberty and hormonal shit or may be it was the way I was. The long road called school road pretty much was my identity with Chennai. Even now, all those memories which are stacked up behind some vague folds of my brain would swell up if I visit that road. Creamy Inn, Maruti Lending Library, SBOA school, More supermarket, Dharma fancy.. Dharma fancy Anna was a young good looking chap who was asked out by a girl in front of me while I was buying notebooks. She said "I am writing your name in all notebooks" and he replied something like "What will you get by writing my name on it?". I have always been tempted to ask what happened to that saga but one among the million questions which been never asked and buried. Dharma Fancy has everything under the sun one could ever think of, but later the brothers split their shops and the good looking Anna kept the stationery stores. When I was in KV, I wanted to be in SBOA and when I was in SBOA, I just wanted to die. These were times when you had hundreds of peoples shoved into IIT classes, where everyone is answering questions you remotely even got time to look at and basically everyone was running. Or so I thought. Eleventh and Twelveth was specially taxing with almost everything under the sun happening at once, thoughts of why how and when taking place at one side, the Maths, Physics and Chemistry taking the other. And then there were attractions. The Satyamoorthy class van where people discussed questions and answers, the school classes where I felt terribly sleepy and in general felt disconnected with everything going on. You knew people, people knew you. You would walk on street, look at a guy from school and speed up your pace or slow it down so that you didn't have to converse. And then there was College, those four nice years at Trichy. This was the first time I was optimistic. So many smart girls with whom I can make a conversation, I was living with crazier people and finally decided I wasn't the alone. Summer holidays back home mainly consisted striking off reading lists, eating, sleeping and doing some computer science projects. If I look back at all those years, they were really impersonal. I never had any school or college gang which would meet in Chennai and had ice cream together. It was more of a joyful lonely affair with messaging friends, talking to family and travelling in public transport. I was and am still obsessed with public transport in Chennai. Given that autos were really unreasonable, the only way to travel was to figure out public transport. Sometimes I would travel back from Adyar in a totally crowded bus and walk through water clogged streets which I have written about here and here. And long walks with Dad till Bluestar and eat a dosa at Hot Chips. If I look back at it, those were really uneventful 13 long years, with not a single place to cling back to. The weather looked like a big negative, but it is a matter of time before one gets used to it. Each time someone tried to put down Chennai, I have defended and defended. No, Chennai is not dirty, no Chennai people are not narrow minded, no Chennai has a bad weather but its not too bad. How could I not defend those saree draping, independent bike driving Maami's who loved books as much as me and those innumerable faces one would see at the Library. How can you not love those mind-my-own-business sort of people who have not once bothered me. Yes, may be people spoke only in Tamizh, but then I knew the language. Weather is hot, but so are those soft steaming Idlies with Molaga Podi. I would any day rave about that plate of Idiyappam with Kurma at Saravana Bhavan which my dad and I would sneak into, while my mom and sister went on a shopping spree in TNagar. A place is not about those immovable things alone, it is also about the people you meet. I am still waiting for more memories to brim up while I sit in Marina drive and eat a Molaga Bajji greedily in my thoughts. Its a secret small affair with a place I am still trying to figure out. 

1984

There is a beautiful poem  snippet in 1984 book which goes like this:
Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you and you sold me,
There lie they, and here lie we,
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

It shows betrayal, where people sell each other under the "Big Brother" watchful eye.  Its a story of how tough you can be when you are tortured, what you give away and what you keep. The integrity of your values when everything is going against you. Do you believe in them or is it just another hoax which you sold out under the Oak tree? I sold you and you sold me, under the spreading chestnut tree.

FB Is Good.

 After a stint of unsuccessful methods to keep myself from spending time on FB, I again resorted to a brief deactivation of account , a sort of mourning period when I am all in I need to be serious mode. I need to be serious is a long period of silence where I go out of my way and  not keep in touch with people.  FB deactivating has a few weird repercussions.  During my brief period of non FB phase, I usually fall back on Quora. Quora makes it look like you are not at all wasting time accumulating few random , not very useful pieces of wisdom . Quora has its limitations and all the wisdom it could offer could not keep up with my short attention span disorder.  Flipkart's book section does  hold my attention but it always boils down to not ordering a new book till I finish the  ones I have neatly stacked up in my cupboard. It's that time of the year when all the brands in the town lure you with their upto  50% sale . I have never seriously believed in the year end sale of products. And there are reasons to it. It ranges from buying a 1k cut shoe which still is bent on eating away my sole ( or soul? ) by not adjusting itself and yet so tempting as to make me wear them and suffer in agony to Jeans which get stuck in all weird places. The long queues in the lifestyle stores where you see so many clothes thrown here and there and  worn by tons of junta  makes me want to run away from the crowd and gasp for fresh air.  Hence, I have learned to live with anti sale belief  till  FB walked out of my life . I took to online shopping. Yes I did.  New avenues of shopping opened up  and new black holes of time were created. I could jump from one offer to another , from one product to another, all of them shouting voices inside my head to be bought.  Add them to short list, send them to friends to ask their opinion, bug my sister day and night if that kurta looked cute are  just small examples of what these sites did to me. Serious decisions had to be taken, all by myself,  like  If I should buy the studs along with the dress or should I wait  and check out all other websites with much better pricing and collections. I even shed my older beliefs of no discount shopping because at least these products  were not  tried by lot of people, them being online. Thus started my journey of online linux shopping, a kind of window shopping  on Ubuntu.  It's a circuitous journey usually starting from Jabong to Inkfruit to shopo. All I do is check out all the beautiful things which so existed on this planet, admire them and jump to the next site. I even go ahead and buy a few of them after they have been thoroughly rejected by all my friends as unsuitable.  Life has been costly post my FB days and my credit card charges have been piling up. There comes this phase when your roommate keeps a close check on your if you are suddenly alone and staring at the screen with the "I AM GOING TO BUY IT ALL" look. You attend therapy sessions from friends and well wishers. So next time you think of deactivating your FB, please think twice. You might be in for something much worse.

PS: This is a piece of fiction and I am not that addicted to online shopping. I just am doing a work from home to complete my UI in utter isolation after having visited Jabong and successfully placing an order,  contacting InkFruit  customer support on why my  order has still not been delivered and provoking my roomate to  buy me a beautiful black kurta for my birthday through utter innocence of constant pings on opinions.

Purely Distinct

So one day when I was whining to my mom about boredom, in my usual tantrum moods,  my mom suggested I buy plants and occupy myself. I jumped at the idea and we both headed to Lalbagh. The nursery was filled with plants, looking almost well dressed, in their bloom to  be taken away. Flowers colorfully woven into great combinations to attract the bees and reproduce. I wanted to take all of them away.  My mom popped an idea that may be the Hand loom weavers get inspiration from these flowers to get the right mix of colors for sarees. So many different patterns of leaves with all kinds of geometry. I read in a book in 12th std school's cobwebbed library that beauty is about symmetry.  The more symmetrical your face is, the more beautiful the person is perceived to be. I could see those leaves, all with random shapes , but there was a hidden symmetry in them. At the end of a long tour, I went back to the nursery and wanted a lot of plants. My mom agreed to buy me only two plants. Given  my rather infamous carelessness,  she said that if I successfully bring up two plants for six months, I am entitled to many more. Suddenly I was entrusted the responsibility of two living being. I chose two non-flowering cacti, the reason is that their fame for not dying goes longer in history than my fame for killing. Everyday one of the little conversations I had with my mom was if I had watered the plants. They survived.  Next time I went to Lalbagh with my mom, I bought a big pot, a big sack of mud and the  time to choose the next set of plants arrived. My mom wanted me to pick up a rose plant. The problem with roses is that they are suicidal, unlike the cacti. It's as if they are waiting to die. They just need a reason. Little less water or sunlight, I will kill myself seems to be their motto. I just wanted to experiment a rose for one last time. I bought a packet of tomato and ladies finger seeds. I was all set to open a new magnificent vegetable garden. I planted those seeds and voila, nothing happened. It was a nice feeling to get up everyday in the morning and go  open  my balcony for something to happen. After a week, I could see new leaves lifting their heads out of the earth, and I could not tell which one was tomato and which one was Bhindi. I see them growing everyday, all lazy, tired and shrunk when not watered and back to life all smiling when given just a hint of water. It amuses how they can just survive on mud and water.  Its still a mystery, the color, shape and kind of tomatoes the plant is going to give. The rose is doing well too. This one seems  to be more chivalrous, not minding a one or two day miss of water. A garlic which looked rather fat went into the unsuspecting pot to come out with  elegant spicy springy leaves, with the strong garlic flavor shouting " I AM A GARLIC". I was talking to  my roommate and asked her if I could use her dirty bucket and convert it  into a pot and she expressed her fear on my desire to one day convert the whole house into a garden , floors covered with mud. Well, I was hoping to one day. If only, the house was mine.  The whole beauty of growing plants is that they actually grow everyday and you can see their stages. Shakespeare went ahead and declared seven stages for a man. I wonder how many stages  are present for a plant. On a rainy day, I saw wild mushrooms in the soil, happily sharing their space with the cacti. They might be parasites but I am reading about mushrooms and soon plan to have to full fledged edible mushroom factory in my house. If I think about the plants I wish to have apart from vegetables, it would be a touch me not. It is rather a beauty, all shy with its evolution to wrinkle at the slightest touch.  One fine morning I saw the catci had another small cacti sitting next to it. I could not help but read on how cacti reproduced. Certainly there were no flowers. Certainly there were no bees.  Did you know that red spectrum edged flowers try to attract the bats, the color flowers try to attract the butterflies and the plain white colored night flowers want the moths? There are these subtle love stories of adaptations always going in parallel and all we sometimes bother is if we went late to work.  There are creepy creepers, crazy mushrooms, thorny cacti, colorful flowers, opening up a new world of excitement. A good hobby to choose and it shall haunt you, I promise.

Sand Castles

Staying with parents is like building a sand castle along the sea side. They make you suddenly believe in so many things, like stability, relationships, kids, good investments, the horror of dying single and  the horrors of a bad marriage . As long as you are with them, somewhere you start believing them and might even want it. You start building a beautiful castle, with gates, soldiers, gardens and a house with windows. But when they are gone and you are left alone, all you  want to do is break the castle into tiny pieces and melt it with the waves and build an empty spaced fence around it. There are no predefined ideas, no expectations and no plans. The freedom to build whatever you want and not go by a plan imposed by someone seems like what one describes as freedom. 

The Precious Junks

Junks can never be precious. Or can they be? The clueless emotional mind does hang on to a few junks as memories. I was recently cleaning up my room. It first started with a corner of a cupboard and in some time, I found myself drowned in a heap of objects in which 90% of them would surpass the 'junk test'.  Junk test would pass for any object which has not been used for more than two months. A total junk is fine because it goes straight into the waste basket but the partial junks are the most dangerous. They threaten to form an emotional void if thrown and space crunch if kept.

1) A cd case - This is definitely from the dinosaur era. I have not even tried the cd player in my new laptop.

2) A helmet left by the previous tenant - This is supposedly the fallback option. It is meant for the never happening bad times when my present sexy half broken helmet is lost mysteriously or stolen. Or I meet with an accident and my helmet is broken. What happens to my head in that case has not been thought of.

3) Shikakai - This powder which could initiate series of sneezes and allergy, has been safely stored in a red coloured huge Tupperware container for three years now. The shikhakai has an emotional connection with my mom as I have seen her  drying these black tamarind shaped pieces in and out in the sun and stuff it in my room, making my room smell like menthol. This was supposedly given to be religiously applied on my hair every Sunday to have a 50 inch long koondal with thickness of Amazon rain forest.  As long as I am not immediately bald, neither shall I throw it nor shall I use it.

4) Mascara and Bangles - My friends were surprised to find it in my kit along with the other junk like face powder and lipstick. Well, strictly as a family rule, we never even applied powder to our faces. Never once has our family fallen into the trap of lovely ladies telling you that you are totally worth it . So how did it end with me? Simple. Just a moment of maaya when I accepted them after my sister's marriage. Bangles have a different story all together. This was my attempt to be all matching-girlie in my initial Oracle days. Soon I realized I was stacking up all these bangles in my office drawer because I really found them uncomfortable while typing in my computer. For once, I decided to take them home and never wear them again.

5)Hair straightener - I have despised guys and girls who have suggested hair straightening to me. My identity was my curly hair. When someone had to place me out of the many girls in college, they would rotate their index finger near their head to  describe my curly hair (nothing else). My identity has been connected with my hair.  This gadget is just present in transit, to be transferred to a cousin who was impatient enough to buy it, thus leaving me no choice but to keep it.

6) Wedding cards - These are little tricky. They are so beautiful that I never feel like throwing them away. Yes, I am very happy that two people in this world are uniting in a "together forever" but apart from aesthetic  point of view, I find these cards just occupying space.

7) Carton boxes - Given my history with transfers and leading a nomadic life,  as a thumb rule, my family never throws away carton boxes. They have been symbolic and precious to us. I still remember the fall my dad and my sister had while trying to put some precious packing material up the attic when I made them both laugh and they both fell down. From the attic. 

This is just a list of a few junks present in my room in bangalore. In Chennai, the list is endless. A key chain given by friend in 12th std, sathyamoorthy answer sheets with 0's and double digits in IIT classes, NITT answer sheets of friends, note books from school days .. These are not exactly junk but a way to bottle up memories and not let them go. But the question is, how far will you hold them?

The Loops.

This is what happens when you are on a route full of one ways.