The Little Pink Boys (2)

The distance from my place to Church Street at the dead of night is about 25 minutes, but then where do you find the dead of night in Bangalore? Crawling cabs, cops engaged in friendly banter with drunk motorcyclists they intend to extort from, metro workers settling in for a whole night of hard work, security guards cycling back to their chummeries, frenetic ambulances zigzaging their way through one-way streets, this city is in a constant state of bedlam be it night or day. 

I park my Harley opposite Sobha Mall and walk up to Empire, where Monami has ordered us a couple of shawarmas. I’m not particularly fond of the pita bread, but then, I had already had a difficult conversation today, and was willing to let go, despite the chewy bread and the undercooked chicken. Is it bird flu time, I can’t remember. Shouldn’t we be pressure cooking all kinds of meat this time of year, I wonder aloud. 

“Come on, you wimp, how long are you gonna live anyway? To think you ride a big-ass bike,” she snorted.

“What’s the bike gotta do with wanting to not have salmonella crawling into my gut?”

“Gah, that’s a bacteria, and bird flu is caused by a virus. Huge difference. Anyway, don’t worry, the oven generates enough heat to get all the fear out of the chicken. Can you enjoy your food, please? What happened to you?”

“Well it seems I kissed a guy.”

“What, when!”

“I mean long back, but he called today and the conversation got awkward.”

“Haha, I kiss my roommate every now and then, don’t you worry. I hope you aren’t turned off by me kissing Reshmi? But I guess you boys are a bit more homophobic than us, so it’s natural that you find it awkward,” she offered as way of explanation, womansplaining everything very easily, like she always does.  

I can lay out all my troubles in front of her, and she will find a way out of everything. 

A simple, straightforward way. 

I guess she could have been a great counselor, but I have no clue what she does, really. Either she’s from a rich background, suddenly run into money, or has a very well-paying job, I have no way to tell. Our encounters are kept easy and sanitized, without any probing into our backgrounds. Unlike the popular belief that women need something emotional whereas men just want their women to show up naked, Monami seems to have overcome that stereotype, and somehow managed to flip it a bit. In the sense that I have started needing her more than I would like to admit. For her to show up. Clothed even.

“Do you think our sexual orientation could be traced back to our DNA, or is it conditioning?” she asked.

“You seem to know a lot about everything, maybe you know it better than me? Plus I’ve not specialized in the Watson and Crick model of DNA,” I chuckle, feeling smug about having remembered something from my high-school biology book.

“I do know better than you, come on, like that’s anything to argue about! And I just wanted to know what you thought about it. Btw, I don’t think there’s any gay gene particularly. I must study about it. And also, F Y I, Watson and Crick stole the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin. I’m sure you didn’t know that. But then she was a woman, and that’s gonna be a long night.”

She tells me about the Matilda Effect in science, where men have taken credit for what their female colleagues have invented or discovered, and rattles off a lot of names of women wronged. By now we have walked up to the other end of Church Street and it is time to walk back to the motorcycle.

“Come home?” she offers, and I nod my head in silent approval. The last few patrons of Kling are out on the sidewalk, engaged in what appears to be cheerful badinage, the homeless are finally curling up in their blankets, the dogs are waiting for the garbage from the restaurants to be taken out, and the last metro silently leaves MG Road station above our heads. Or so I imagine. It is already past 2.00 in the morning and there are no metros plying this route now. 

At her place tonight it isn’t the usual. Clothes don’t come off, and we just light a couple of cigarettes and doze off on her rather sturdy sofa. Where is it from? Damro, she says, patting me reassuringly. Reshmi comes out of her room, waves a groggy hello in our general direction, and starts urinating with the door open. I can hear the faint trickle of her pee, and wonder if the unexpected arousal is for her or Monami. Something about it reassures me.

Monami wraps her arm around me. Am I falling in love? Losing my sangfroid in the face of an impending relationship?

But then darkness sneaks up on you when you least remember.

The Little Pink Boys (1)

It is late, and my work is about to get over. It has been a very long day staring at the draft proposal for my client, and my eyes are drier than usual. That’s when the phone purrs into life with a message. Ungodly hour, when god has gone off to sleep, or is helping himself to some live pornography, in all probability from Brazil. 

What if he has an Asian fetish, though?

I can’t understand Asian porn.

Am racist to the core.

Only blondes do it for me. 

Late in the night, my mind works in staccato, in short telegraphic bursts that can be disconcertingly digressive in effect. But my work is over, the bottle of wine is out, a cheap rose bottled in 2017 from a local vineyard, and the gallivanting causes no apparent harm. 

Most of the women I interact with late in the night are muted, so who could it be?

It turns out to be Swarnava. From our Calcutta days working for The Statesman. From those dark halls lined with wooden desks and the smell of paper and silverfish.

"It's about -9 degrees today. I just dropped my mum off to the hospice. It's depressing as fuck."

"What is, the cold or the hospice? I, for myself, love the cold. I should have been there, ideally."

I am a partial redneck, dreaming of guns and owning big trucks, although what was I gonna haul in them if I didn’t like big game? A sniper I could have been. And am a pretty good shot. But was it centigrade or Fahrenheit? Somehow the idea of killing humans from a distance seemed way more acceptable than a white-tailed deer in open season. Mark Wahlberg has romanticized it for us. Us who are still here, in India.

"The whole situation, to be honest. The fact that she's not gonna make it. That am here. Oh, and I mean Fahrenheit, which should be -23 degrees back home.”

What’s home anymore, we ponder. How the definitions changed, how we grew roots and got uprooted every single time, moving from city to city, state to state, and in his case, from country to country. How’s your home looking? Not so good. Neither is mine.

The topic changes to gender identities and whether it has gone too far. I object to people identifying as feline beings, or bats. I feel they need to be thrashed with a cricket bat if the need arises. He objects to young adults changing their gender without consulting their parents. I feel that’s one’s personal choice. But testicular injuries in women’s sports have increased manifold, which has us in splits. Where do you draw the line?

“Why did you become so decidedly straight?” he asks rather bluntly.

I don’t reply for a while. The little boys weren’t pink anymore, they suddenly turned abhorrently hirsute, overnight. “I was always straight,” I offer as an explanation.

“I am bisexual, my wife knows it. You haven’t been my only dalliance with the same sex. However, despite us, you have always been very straight, which made me wonder what was it between us, Rajan?”

“You were effeminate, you reminded me of a girl, we connected, and the dark corridors of The Statesman didn’t stop us. Why overthink it?”

“I don’t, really. My mum liked you a lot. I guess she sensed it all. We wouldn’t call it love, would we?

She asked after you today. I said you’re doing well.”

“I haven’t tried to categorize it. But yes, like you said, I have been very straight since you, or even before you. Am almost homophobic now. When men kiss men on screen, I cringe.” 

I don’t have to pretend to be a likable character, saying the right things, being politically correct with every thought that comes out of my mouth. Although I like watching women on women, men turn me off, and always have had. Was it a woman’s soul trapped in Swarnava’s body? I can’t forget my first kiss with him, the suddenness of it, and how it all seemed perfect. Did I ever feel so heady kissing any of my girlfriends? We didn’t agree on many things then, and we don’t now either. Like I cannot seem to fit this episode in my otherwise linear love life. I have always liked women, and continue to like them till date. Kissing him didn’t seem off, somehow. It was as natural as reading The Telegraph every morning. Our competitor with more ad revenue. What were they doing right?

“You called me a little pink boy, remember? You said you liked how my mouth smelled.”

We weren’t little any longer. Or boys. But the overlaying of this memory with diesel trucks and guns, of shooting ranges and cowboy shirts, of deliberate shaping of facial fuzz as beards, or of doc martens, didn’t make us any less pink. 

I don’t reply to his message. 

Monami wants to meet at Empire, Church Street. Her message had arrived unannounced, as muted messages usually do, languishing there for a while before I could read it. Can I make it by 1:00 a.m.? Then perhaps to her place? I take out my trucker jacket. There’s a chill in the air tonight. My Harley is bound to wake up the neighbors at this ungodly hour, but god’s chosen to leave his house now, with the strong redolence of a little pink boy lingering in his mouth. 

An Average Life

Nothing to peddle,

nobody to pander to,

just here to serve

a restraining order 

six feet around my mind,

lest one stumbles upon

a forgotten diary

where my life is parked

in relative anonymity.

But it's an average life

as Ricky Gervais says,

in depth, length and piddly breadth. 

A benign one, with smooth edges,

and subdued affections

throttled under a pillow.

Make memories, they said.

I bought memory foam instead.

Of Protracted Deaths

And so
we discussed at length
painless options,
procuring pills; ingenious whims
laughing at euthanistic prospects,
you pooh-poohing carrying out
mine
"if at all, it should be him..."
as we laughed some more;
both wanting him gone.

Lime pit is what we agreed upon.

What deliberation was it
to pick for mine
the most agonizing trick from
the stack
of protracted deaths?

"Koi?"

What brought the year to an end
came as the longest week

when the koi had forgotten to swim

upstream

to the Yellow River as is her wont,

unlocking the knotted love hung out to dry

Uncannily quiet, the week

came with motley sounds

of bikes whizzing past

dogs barking

clothes ruffling under the weight of hugs

and wafting notes from forgotten music

but not the proverbial fish

silent in its arrival

waking me up with an excess of vowels.

The year came to an end,

with the weight of the longest week in ages,

The weight of knowing she knows

What I forever feared,

but never knew.

The First Road Trip

___________________

Traveling on NICE corridor, if I roll down the windows while passing a slow truck, the steady drone of its nylon tyres on asphalt still brings back memories from childhood, of road trips all over India (by bus), baba and ma on either side. It started with Kashmir in 1975, when I was still hanging like a baby chimp from their hands, complaining of aching legs from all the walking, and went on till 1992, when we did Bandhavgarh in our uncle's Premier President (Fiat 1100). By then I was bold enough to walk with nothing but a sturdy twig in hand on to an oncoming tiger that kept roaring and approaching our huts, only to discover it was a bellowing ox returning home at twilight. Never been very fond of walking, however. That was probably the last trip with both of them. But today when I rolled down my window, I remembered my first journey by car. Not a taxi, an actual private car. 

Why roll down the window, you ask? Well, with diesel prices having touched Rs 100, I drive at 65-70 kmph on an expressway for optimal economy, without the airconditioning, worrying about my depleting reserves and how I can't afford a new petrol car anymore.  And then I see a bunch of laborers huddled together on a tractor returning home, at twilight, but not belligerent as the ox from Bandhavgarh. My worries melt, my privilege at being able to afford fuel for my car stings like a bee, as I quickly roll up the window and pretend not to see. I want to think of the lifespan of oxen. Just then the eyes of a little girl catch mine, and I roll down the window again and smile at her. She's going home too, with her laborer parents, who couldn't afford to hold her hand all day. Nestled in the lap of her mum, she smiles back, feeling as safe as I did hanging like a chimp. Nestled. Did you ever pronounce Nestlé as nestle? I didn't. I was taught not to ignore stressed vowels. The stress of remembering all that, I tell you, takes away all possible abandon from one's childhood.

That night my uncle and his friend came to take me from Durgapur to Dhanbad. Ma was already in Dhanbad, to participate in her younger brother's wedding, and I was supposed to go with baba a couple of days later. It was to be our first inter-city road trip by scooter, a distance of 130 km through non-existent roads of Bengal and Bihar (now Jharkhand). We had open helmets with goggles ready and faux leather jackets...but baba got hospitalized just a day before with acute chest pain. When my uncle and his friend came to pick me up in a black Ambassador, I was thrilled beyond belief. These men being senior cops, it was easy for them to arrange a meeting with my dad at the hospital late in the night, after which we took off. 

I couldn't believe I was traveling by car, and not a taxi. We couldn't afford taxi rides much, so even that was a luxury, but this was like a fairy tale come true. The entire rear seat was mine; I could choose to see anything on either side of the car. It was dark, the nylon on tarmac had a familiar buzz, as we crossed one truck after another. The lean, wiry uncle who was driving kept his loaded holster on the dash. 

Roll up the window, Shuvo, it's cold. 

But I never catch cold, don't you know? 

The weak halogen headlights seemed to fuse with the fog ahead in the cold night and I suddenly had the brilliant idea to ask them if they had fueled up. To this both of them laughed. Thanks for reminding, Shuvo. Eleven-year-old me felt mighty important that night, smugly looking out at the darkness and watching the even darker trees pass us by. They had acknowledged my clever idea after all! It was my first road trip, of which I have mostly olfactory memories of diesel fumes and nightly dust.

Rolling down the window and slowing down on a highway does have some benefits after all, and not all of it environmental.

Buttless

Mel Gibson has a "delicious butt," said some famous actor in a movie. It was quite brutal of her to mention it, considering she said this to Hugh Grant, who suffers from a severe emaciated derriere syndrome. Search for "Hugh Grant side profile body" and chances are you won't see his butt in any picture. That's because he doesn't have one to begin with. But who am I to mock him, for I have suffered a buttless existence for almost 50 years of my life. Rumor has it that I had a nice and shapely one while growing up, but years of cycling and motorcycling have compressed them into flatbread from buns or buttercups, with the pressure squeezing out all the yeast.

Another reason can be that I had butt envy for Bubun'da, who had the perfect glutes, from playing all the soccer that he did. Psychologists say butt envy is a real thing, where if your neighbor has a prominent one, your brain starts forgetting about your glutes and gets everything done by your lower back and thigh muscles instead. It is called gluteal amnesia, and believe me, am not making this up. 

After leaving Durgapur at 18, I thought I will meet other flatbread men, but as luck would have it, I ran into Arup Sarkar and the butt envy continued for another painful five years. His brain hadn't forgotten his glutes, and kept them well cushioned for some unfair reason unknown to me. 

However, with my fiftieth birthday coming up in six months, I thought of gifting myself a beach bod, and work toward shedding some flab and gaining some muscle mass. Like all Indian men with beefed up bodies and skinny legs, I have the same problem. I worked out my upper body, and ignored the lower. And I have a theory for why Indian men have historically ignored their lower bodies. 

Mirrors.

Yes, mirrors. Let me tell you why.

Remember how in the fifties we had only pale North Indian heroes in Bollywood? It didn't matter if they were extremely obese or had spindly limbs, as long as they were fair and wore lipstick. That is because in India, what was perceived as male hotness evolved with the economy. In the India of the yore, a mirror was synonymous with a small shaving mirror. You could only see your face, and as long as you had access to lipstick and face powder, you were covered.  

As the economy progressed, and the cost of sticking mercury behind glass came down, Indians could afford half mirrors, and we started seeing heroes like Sunny Deol and Anil Kapoor, hirsute as fuck, who dared to come out shirtless. By now Indian men could see half of their bodies and were vigorously working on their pectorals. Had it not been for all that chest hair, some of them could have been mistaken for generously endowed Bavarian women. 

Suddenly, probably around the time when Dr Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister and opened up the economy, full-length mirrors became a thing. We could finally see how we looked under those baggy pants. And believe me, it wasn't a pleasant sight at all. We had biceps and no triceps, because heroes in films are shown to work only on their biceps with dumbbells. And we had no thighs, butts, or calves at all. All that cycling, mind you, had had NO effect at all. 

By then my butt envy had turned toward women, and I had no time to work on mine any more. If you don't have one, go after one, was the general idea. 

However, three decades later as I now want to work out my glutes and bring them back to shape, I have nobody to turn to but Arindam Mukherjee, who's not only an expert on geopolitics, but also an avid body builder. "But I'm right wing," he said, "what if I mislead you? Why don't you ask some of the comrades instead?" This butt politics was getting murky and I couldn't possibly have asked Kim Jong Un for tips on working out my lower half, could I?

The only option left was to remind my brain to have a conversation with my butt. So I started with "Hey you up there, careful with the 100 dollar bill am holding between my butt cheeks."

And the brain replied, "Eff off you miserable Indian, that's more than your entire life's savings. Have you even seen a one-dollar bill?"

There went my plan!

Now all you can do is accept me as I am when I turn 50.

The Wisdom of Wheat Flour

Ma had poured a lot of wheat flour in that round vessel. 

Usually it was Maya'di who did all the cooking, but when all the siblings came visiting their mother with their families, she alone couldn't manage in that kitchen with the huge earthen oven that ran all day long. My mother and some other aunts used to help her. The oven was about five feet in width with two outlets at the top, and you had to stoke the coal from outside. You could cook two dishes at the same time, which was a novelty for us. And it was at knee level, so all the cooking had to be done sitting.

After a hard day's work, when the huge earthen contraption was drowsy, with the embers letting out an orange glow from its bowels, Darling and Betty would want to retire in the vicinity, to catch the residual warmth. Sometimes I used to go sit with the dogs, but they didn't think much of me. 

The kitchen was at the back of the bungalow, and was an open one. The dogs roamed free all night, and had access all around the bungalow. My grandma lived alone, with Maya'di the cook, and Sundar the watchman. Out of her five children, one stayed with her, but he too was busy all day. Hence the dogs. If one died, it was usually replaced by another Alsatian pup. And when it was time for the annual meet, the bungalow bustled with a lot of activity. The Australian cousins would love to explore the village, try to speak Bengali with us, the ones from Madhya Pradesh would converse in Hindi, and some of us from Bengal would try to keep up with our broken English and absolutely pedestrian Hindi. The four brothers and the sister (Ma) were mostly reticent people, hardly communicative or expressive, but not lacking warmth. 

One evening I was sitting with her at the kitchen, watching her knead the dough for rotis. 

“How do you know how much flour to use?” I was always curious. We needed rotis for almost 15 people, so the math always eluded me. How did she know?

“It’s always a smart guess, you can say. You can’t always be exact. Sometimes there’s extra and sometimes there’s a little short. It is much like every chance you take in life, you make an educated guess and go for it. There’s no telling how it will turn out to be. But there are always workarounds. Be it for kneading dough, or for something in life.” I wasn’t really curious about life lessons at the point in time, so I didn’t read her wan smile. “Our neighbors, Runu pishi? They used to take me to knead the dough every time they had guests over, because I am an expert in this.”

“But you don’t like to cook, do you?” I knew she hated the heat of the oven and disliked entering the kitchen. We’ve always had someone else cook for us back home in Durgapur. I hated the fact that she had to manage when the cook didn’t show up, but there was little I could do to help. I could chop vegetables, shell the peas from their pods, beat the eggs, and when we all went to our Grandmom’s place in Dhanbad, I tried my hand at drawing water from the well but never succeeded, with the weight of the laden metal bucket dragging me to the edge every time. I also loved to watch Sundar unload bags of coal into the oven’s mouth early in the morning. I offered to take the dogs out, and got dragged everywhere by the beasts, but I never let go. The metal rings of the chains would sometimes make deep marks in my palms. I went with Sundar to fetch fresh, foamy milk from the nearby buffalo shed. When Ma had to cook, I tried to help however I could, but couldn’t fathom why it is the woman who has to take up this responsibility. There were other aunts who loved to cook delicacies, and took pride in it, but I hated the fact that it was always the woman. “Why doesn’t Baba cook?”

“No, let him not try. We might have to go hungry even if he attempts to.” My dad used to vehemently insist that he too could cook, but then we knew he wasn’t any good at it. He was busy collecting accolades for his collection of books, for being able to hold lengthy discourses about world politics and history, playing the violin, solving others’ problems, helping others with their assignments, etc. To the rest of the world he was a hero. A feminist, a socialist, talking animatedly about Joan of Arc, Eisenstein, Tagore, Ray, or M.N. Roy’s radical humanism. But the woman had to cook. I often wonder how he managed for ten years after Ma passed, but when I saw him in the kitchen all by himself, he was busy with his imaginary conversations. He was never alone. Ma was. 

“You know I can manage with a roti and some boiled veggies. It is for you and your dad that we have to have elaborate food arrangements. And I don’t need more than one little cot. Have you seen the little green table fan? That was all I needed. I can’t stand the summers. Sometimes I wonder if this institution of marriage makes any sense at all.”

Then she went on to tell me how she never wanted to marry, but wanted to work at a museum after her PG in Anthropology. But opportunities were difficult to come by, and she ended up teaching. “Marriage is usually the end of the road for dreamers.” I grew up believing it, but when the time came to look for a profession, I first thought of joining St Edmund’s College for Congregation of Christian Brothers in Shillong. Ujjwal Routhe had told me how they get paid a fat sum, and all you had to do was believe. But I realized I cannot be a priest ever, because I wanted to sin. The fact that I wanted to commit it repeatedly wasn’t so clear in my mind then, but I needed the company of a woman. A Brother there couldn’t marry ever, and having grown up as an atheist, it really made no sense to suddenly turn a Christian. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a place for God in my life. Like I could never decide on which tattoo to go for, I couldn’t decide on a religion when there was a choice. "Become a Buddhist if you really need to belong. Forget it otherwise," came the bored answer.

“But then you wouldn’t have had me, if you never got married, isn’t it?” I was baffled. 

“No. But then I never wanted a child either. You’ve been a nice kid, didn’t trouble me much, and I do love you, but it is a superfluous thing to have a child. Like an appendage you don’t want. Your dad has a lot of expectations from you. But I don’t know how you will turn out to be. You seem to be doing fine, so far.” 

There were exactly 60 rotis at the end of the conversation. And when in between all this she sang mellifluous songs by Tagore, my uncles quietly got up from their living room conversations and came to sit behind us, listening. As a kid, I had already seen through the soullessness of the violin back home. But her singing never got its due.

When much later in life she met my girlfriend, she told her the same thing. “Don’t get married, dear. Live in. These guys are everybody’s and never your own. The day you want, you can opt out.” By “these guys” she meant boys in our family in particular, I have a sneaky feeling. “Always be financially independent. And if possible, don’t burden yourself with a kid.”

The concept of living in was new in the nineties, and although urban Indians had already been practicing it, it wasn’t a trend that caught on with the middle-class as much. “Don’t do it in Benares. People won’t understand you there. Might even burn you at the stake, for all you know. Live in here, in Calcutta. But then Calcutta has no opportunities for you. Move to Delhi.”

Move to Delhi we did, but we couldn’t do justice to the wisdom she passed on. Today when I help at the kitchen and knead the dough, am always confident, though. Don’t worry if there will be a little extra or a little short, just take a guess and go for it. Life will sort itself out. 

"Don't Put Sugar, Please"

"Please don't put sugar, didi" I blurted out with my hand stretched, but I had used the word "cheeni" and before I could stop her, Maruti's wife had already put a spoon of "shakkar" in the lemon tea. Sugar gives me acidity and leaves a sour aftertaste. She looked at me, puzzled. Marathis call sugar "shakkar" pretty much like we do in many other Indian languages. I realized if I ask her for sugarless tea now, she would have to make it again. So I gestured that everything is fine and accepted the red tin cup with both hands. It was a tiny cup that had seen better days. But it was the best Maruti's wife had.

It was early in the morning and there was a chill in the air, and I was happy for the hot cup of beverage.

The previous evening, in a bid to find a place to stay near Panshet Dam, I had lost my way somewhere along the banks of the huge lake and circumnavigated the entire catchment in search of some GPS signal. If the motorbike had stalled, I couldn't have pushed it back to civilization, and if it fell, I didn't have the strength to pick it up.

Going back to Pune meant another sleepless night with my friends who are die-hard nocturnal beings. And I had to explore more of Maharastra after having covered Panchgani, Mahabaleswar, and Pratapgarh Fort earlier that week. I came across a signboard with Panshet Valley View Resort written on it, pointing upward into the hills, and reached the place after 30 mins of negotiating broken roads through dense jungles. The sun was going down, the cicadas were out with a commitment to make the entire place sound eerie, and the little man Maruti was standing at the gate like a spirit. He didn't look surprised to see me. "Come in," he welcomed me with a smile.

It was a sprawling resort within the jungle with a pool, tents, normal rooms, rooms on stilts, a basketball court, a dorm, and a kitchen. My spirits were lifted. Finally a place to shack up for the night, then. Where are the others, I inquired.

Nobody, sir, there's nobody. They come on the weekends from Pune. Couples, mostly, he added. Sometimes large families and groups as well. By now he had opened the lock to a room with a spectacular view of the lake. I was in two minds about staying there and going out again in search of another place in the wilderness. We settled for a price that included my dinner and breakfast, and by then the sun had slunk away behind the hills, leaving a last bit of orange and blue on the sky. I couldn't have clutched on to the colors to ward off the gremlins in my mind. They come visiting on a solitary night. The full moon cast moving shadows of trees on the glass door to the balcony, and some restless night birds joined the cicadas. Have you heard a frog calling for help as it slides into a snake's mouth? It sounds like a groan that starts off as a tenor sax, and then gets higher in pitch like a shrill cry, before suddenly going absolutely quiet. I pulled the curtains and could feel my throat going dry.

Somebody knocked on the door. Chicken sukka and salad for dinner, sir.

I don't remember when I slept. I finished a book I had been meaning to read for a long time. The epilogue talked about how the book was originally written in 69, but was revisited in 1984. Read like a pastiche, I thought as I pulled the patchwork quilt over me, trying to push away the cold, slithering snakes crawling up my legs.

The morning was at 6.25, and sunrise precisely at 7.00. I busily clicked some pics, packed my little bag, and left. On the way out, Maruti called me to his house. But you had asked for an omelet for breakfast, he asked. I tried talking to him about intermittent fasting and then realized I must sound like a joker to them. As we grow older, we should eat lesser. He nodded in silent agreement. By then a little kid with a warm smile had come out to play on the porch. I gave him my metal water bottle to play with, when Maruti's wife got me the lemon tea.

On the way to Sinhagadh Fort I could see the jawans of the army jogging up the fort road in full gear. I waved at them and they waved back. I found myself smiling as I kept rolling my tongue, waiting for the sour aftertaste of sugar to set in.

Strangely, it was sweet.