“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Apart from that, this place is really special to me. I tend to forget things; in fact, I have very few vivid memories of my past, and all of them somehow seem to be linked to this place. And all of them are beautiful, luscious and even erotic to an extent. This place is an anchor in my life. It’s special, and so are you.”

“OK. Why don’t you tell me about one of your so called vivid memories?”
He had a decision to make; he could keep on lying like the pathological liar that he was, or he could try opening up to her. This one, he really liked.

“Alright. If I remember correctly, it was an unusually cold day in the middle of monsoon. I was sitting there, right there on that bench. And out of nowhere it started pouring down, like it always does during monsoon. I loved the rain; still do. I sat there while everybody else ran for cover. After a couple of minutes, I was completely drenched and decided it’d be unwise to carry on; I had to go to work the next day. I reluctantly stood up and started walking away. I couldn’t. I turned around to take one last look at the vast blue ocean in front of me. That was when I saw it. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The turbulent ocean, angry and furious, but entrapped by one of the weakest forces in the universe. It was ashamed and hurt, but angry more than anything; waiting to lash out at you the moment you took your eyes off it. All the while, being incessantly beaten down by a rain of it’s own kind. It was a violent image, but beautiful, luscious and like I said erotic to an extent.”

He could see the fear in her eyes. Perhaps it was a wrong idea to open up, he thought. This one would be too cautious now; he had to let her go. But his piano wire had a mind of its own.

(If the muscles around the anal sphincter could talk.)

Razor blade, razor, mirror, wash basin. I’m all set. Let’s do this! You are going down you bearded monster in the mirror.

Blood! I’m losing blood! I have so little of it. Stop bleeding you nincompoop. The red looks good on me though. Red? .. White. White. Why is there no lather on my face? Damn it, where’s my thing that makes all that lather? What do you call it? I don’t know. If the guy who made it had any sense, he’d have called it shaving cream.

1, 2, 4. 4 cuts. Not bad. Now how do I stop the bleeding? May be I should just wash my face and hope it stops. I don’t think I will die of blood loss. I won’t, will I? If shaving was so lethal, there’d be a lot more bearded people in the world. I can’t see a single one around though. That’s probably because I’m the only person in the room. Let’s take a look outside. I can see 1,2, .. That’s a really nice looking dress. Do I know her?

Sitting on the beach that day, he thought about all the choices that he’d made that’d brought him to that exact point in space-time. After a minute, he realised that he didn’t remember most of the choices, and of the ones that he did remember he didn’t know which ones were course-altering. The futility of that exercise dawned on him as the sun continued its kamikaze descent into the ocean. “A few more minutes”, he thought. He had grand plans for that night. He always had grand plans for his nights, but they tended to follow the same script on most nights. That night was no different. He’d go to the same old coffee shop, order their rather acrid espresso and sit there for as long as he could staring at the only pretty waitress in that part of the town.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”, said the melic voice that he’d so often heard while she took his order. He looked around trying to ascertain the location of the voice, only to be met with the prettiest pair of legs he’d ever seen. She was standing right next to him, staring dreamily at the sun. The squash ball inside his head started bouncing around in perfect randomness. She wasn’t supposed to be there. This was not part of the plan. Unable to utter anything intelligible, he decided to stay quiet. “This is the last one”, she continued, “No more twilights for you, Mr. Vespertine”. She twirled around in her high heels, as her meat-suit disintegrated to reveal a white cylinder with a brownish-yellow bottom. Befuddled, he could do nothing but watch, as his lower jaw did its thing. “The mothership is waiting. I have to go. Also, you have to stop staring at pretty girls. Not that it matters anymore”, she giggled and shot up into the sky. He tried to keep track of her trajectory for as along as he could; he lost her after five seconds. His mind went into overdrive trying to figure out what had just happened. Hastily scanning the surroundings to see if anybody else had seen the pretty lady shoot up and disappear, he found that nobody seemed to have noticed anything strange. They were all watching intently, enchanted by the sun as it reached the final stage of its descent. He turned around just in time to catch a green flash right where the sun was. Two seconds later, the beach was strewn with dead bodies, including his. But he was still conscious; perplexed, but dead.

“Here’s your bill, Sir”, the melic voice said. “I don’t think our coffee is doing a good job of keeping you awake”. She smiled, twirled around in her high heels humming his favourite song, and walked away.

Orange sky.
The sun sits
in my tiny hand.

Lonely moon
Withering wind
My lips dry

That morning, like every other morning, the wise man was woken up by the annoying chirping of the countably infinite birds in the jungle. And that morning, like every other morning, he jumped out of his bed, stretched his arms and looked up at the thatched roof of his shabby hut. Poor soul didn’t know that that morning, unlike every other morning, was the time of day he’d been waiting for his entire life. He noticed a tiny hole in the ceiling through which the morning light was pouring in. He’d never seen it on any other morning. Vines of doubt crept around his brain, strangling it, “Is this my roof? Who switched my roof?”. He took a second look at the hole, only to be mesmerised by the dance of dust particles scattering light all over the place. He saw the split ends of the straw on the roof being gently caressed by the morning breeze. He could smell the obscene amount of bird poop that had accumulated on the roof that morning. Light, dust, straw, poop – He knew he was about to have an epiphany. A moment later his body collapsed like it had been hit on the back of the head with a teflon coated frying pan. He’d been hit on the back of his head by a teflon coated frying pan. But the teflon coated frying pan was not the culprit, for it was forcibly separated from its beloved stove and emphatically rammed into the head of an old man by a sinister looking young man.

Little did the teflon coated frying pan know that the sinister looking young man was in fact its owner. The stove knew it. But it didn’t think it was an important enough piece of information to be passed on to the teflon coated frying pan. The stove wasn’t very serious about the teflon coated frying pan. In a week’s time, it was going to get its heart broken. The stove had it all meticulously planned. But the teflon coated frying pan knew how conniving an appliance the stove was.

The sinister looking young man dragged the body of the wise man to the nearest window and chucked him out. “The birds will take care of him. They must hate him.”, he thought. After gulping down a glass of water, he dragged a stool to the centre of the room, in a swift move somersaulted onto it, fell over and claimed the hut for the king of the woods – himself. He wondered who the old man was. He wondered what he’d had for dinner the other night, and if he’d had breakfast that morning. He didn’t remember. In fact, he didn’t remember anything at all before his encounter with the teflon coated frying pan. It’d been lying there on the stove, begging to be picked up and waved around. A wry smile broke across his face as he took another sip from the Vodka bottle he’d left on the kitchen table. It was his hut now. It probably was his hut before too; he didn’t remember. He wondered how the old man had found the hut. The Vodka bottle was empty. The one on the bedside table was empty too.

He knew he’d have to venture quite far to quench his thirst, for festivals hardly showed any mercy to coffee shops. Soon, he noticed that the sky wasn’t very bright, it was just colourful, very coulourful. His eyes were fixated on the fireworks, hardly blinking. Walking at a brisk pace, he knew he didn’t really have to look down. He knew the way like the back of his hand, or the palm; whichever was more familiar. The sky kept changing its skin; green a moment, yellow the next. Memerised, our man floated along on his way.

“Boss!”, he heard a voice, hardly broken, yell. But nothing in the world could turn his gaze away from the luscious vault of heaven, except bungers of course. Bloody bungers. One exploded right under him. Disoriented, he danced his way to another exploding bunger. Whistles, the bloody whistles; whistles blasted away in his ears as he trudged on to the darkest corner he could find. He realised that the little voice he’d ignored earlier was in fact trying to warn him.

He did get his coffee, after wandering around for a few more minutes. But he knew he wouldn’t look away from the ground on the way back.

Reinventing myself was the reason I had gone to Surat three months ago. I thought my personality would change or at least adapt when immersed in an unfamiliar environment. Sadly, it didn’t. I thought I’d overcome the contemptuous nonchalance with which I’ve seen my entire life play out in front of me. Sadly, I couldn’t. But now that I’m back in my jungle of a campus, I feel doped with content. I never thought I’d be so glad to see ‘familiarity’.

Malaria has taken away the few precious kilos I had over 40. Trevor Reznik would be proud. I’m no hustler; I never swim against the current (I can’t swim, in fact). But circumstances have forced me to resolve to gain weight, when everybody around me is trying to get rid of it. Eating was never my forte; but there is always Leblouh. Time to get a sex change and a Mauritanian citizenship.

So, naturally, one question arises in everybody’s mind – Why do we need to decrease the albedo of the martian surface?
Mars is too cold. That’s why.

Watched a few TED videos after settling down in my room, which made me think that I should do something in bio-mechanics, despite the fact that my heart has been stuck on naval architecture for about 2 years. I don’t know the reason behind this sudden change of plans. But I think I’ll switch back to naval architecture in a day or two. I hope so.

Also, I think I quite like the other girl in HR. I don’t know her name. I don’t know why I like her. She is very average-looking. May be it’s because I haven’t seen the ‘other’ girl in a while. I don’t know. But I think I’ll do something about this one. I need to. If I can’t get myself to have a civilised conversation with a stranger of the opposite sex after 20 frakking years of miserable existence on this blue rock, I think I deserve to be classified as a loser. I don’t want to be a loser. I’m already miserable. I don’t want to be a loser. There are so many pretty girls in this city. Every day I see at least 20 new(?) faces, pretty ones, all driving away on their scooters(Young ones here love their scooters. Everybody has one.) or riding behind the bikes/scooters of well-built, handsome, similar-aged men/boys. They are everywhere. Sometimes I think that may be beauty is a pandemic in this town, but then I think of the girls back home. They too are pretty. They just don’t dress as well. I could write pages and pages about women here, but what’s the point? Nobody is ever(?) going to read this, and it’s not helping my lack of love life. I think I’ll go cry in my coffee now, but I can’t. The frakking place doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of filter coffee. I love you Madras. I love you Madras Kappi. Frack, more than half the world drinks coffee, and all I can get in this town is machine brewed coffee or milk with a little instant coffee powder. I’m not saying that I hate the fact that people love their tea here. But I just hate tea, unless it’s black or green. There is a CCD outside, where I could go and drink coffee of various kinds to my hearts satisfaction, but I don’t have the paper/plastic power for that. I do visit the place once in a week or two, but it’s just insanely expensive. I have to pay 70 bucks to get an Irish coffee. I think there is no need to mention the fact that their service sucks; It’s an axiom. I could get an Irish coffee back home for around 30-40 bucks. Even espressos are costly. The SVNIT canteen has a coffee shop, where you get an “expresso” for 6 bucks, but how am I supposed to make them understand that they have grossly misunderstood the spelling and substance. It’s just black coffee; better than nothing, I suppose.
But inspite of all the random ways in which this city makes me feel like scheisse, I love this place. I’d settle here, if it were a little less hot. It is somehow more alive than all the other cities I’ve been to. I don’t know why. Seems like I don’t know much about a lot of things in my life these days.