August, toxic August

"I'm going to think of him as having gone fishing.. because if I think I will never hear his voice again, I won't know how to live."

Family friend, Small Devil lost her father two weeks ago. She believes the fishing line. We, the family friends, who take her out for a drink in the weeks after, raise a toast to he, who as they say, is up there somewhere. Every bit the stylish general holding a cigarette so damn loosely, in his classy clothes and languid demeanour, puffing away, making light of life, petting his fox terriers and spaniels, riding those horses, hanging about in the outdoors and being gently self deprecating.

He'd have approved of how much wheat beer went down because some fools got a little emotional about how the good ones go too soon. He might even have said it was too early to go home.

~

Howzzat, where we drank, smells of pubic hair and plays RHCP. They don't let you carry your beer mugs to the smoking room. And if you're me, some boy in tight jeans and bright sneakers will swipe your matchbox without asking. Then you have to go to his table and be deadpan-saccharine in asking for it back, if he doesn't mind, of course.

Boorish fuckers.

~

Meanwhile my boyfriend and I are having problems. We're a little bit on a break and a little bit broken up. Don't say huh, I have no idea what it means either. Hardly the thing to announce on a public platform, given that we don't want Facebook statuses to change yet. But if I can yap on about how he's the guy I want to get married to, I jolly well man up to say, uh oh, we're in trouble, right? So there you have it. Turns out I don't have the ability to compartmentalise and write about something else, without this stuff spilling over. Shame on me.

He -- and some days I say "my ex" -- has been refreshing his feed reader to see if I finally wrote about it. Knowing myself, that's enough reason for mule me to not emit a squeak. Except in keeping with knowing mule myself, sooner or later, but especially later, I would've got down to squeaking.

Look at me now, self aware, sad-eyed squeaker.

I still don't have a fix on things. I'm not sure what is wrong. The reasons are as vague as not feeling a certain way. Naturally then, when I talk about it to friends, I've been getting advice from every corner. Friends -- because well-wishers is a fuck-all phrase -- have told me to:

• Shut up and sort it out (mm hmm)
• Nobody feels the same way after a while (is this true even?!)
• A break is good (Yea...)
• Don't do anything stupid (Refer to 'g'?)
• Are you PMS-ing? (No)
• Did you have a fight with your mother? (No)
• Did you sleep with someone else? (No)
• If you're not feeling it, you're not feeling it. (Next.)
• Maybe you need a madder person; try an artist (phhrbht!)

and the scariest:

• The excitement, if that's what you're missing, always wears out; boredom is inevitable

Shoot me. And I remove the parenthesis for this one, even.

There was also a whole lot of advice about how I should listen to my heart and not my head. And what if my stomach has an opinion, I ask you.

Only a circumstantial disclaimer, but friends should be done away in times of mild personal distress. That's what we're calling it. Too many have an opinion. And yet it's what I go looking for. I have long emails and still longer phone calls and there there shoulder rubs from people who know my looking up at the 17th floor, long-exhale, misty look.

Of course, I'm fine. As fine as I am defensive. But what if I'm not fine? Will you be able to tell just because I smile every time I see a colleague yelling at incompetent IT people because the damn Internet in office never works? Or is it that I can't help love the line item yeh aam hui, darling tere liye?

What a song.

But surely all indicators aren't external. What if mauling a horribly designed plastic fork at is my version of coping?

Who's to say I'm ok? Surely not bemused dinner companions at Subway offering to feed me if that'll make me not fight with the cheap, zero-ergonomic-sense cutlery I have to deal with in this dug-up, third world, AC's-not-working, humid-as-hell city.

~

Last few weeks, in case you were wondering, every bloody chat has been about relationships, boys and other such delightful matters of the state.

I'm told if I have even the teeniest doubt about how much fun the ride will be, or how much I'm enjoying myself, I should stop and reassess my surroundings -- that's the other label I've adopted.

And so that's where we are. Using disclaimers and reassessing our surroundings, without even a therapist tossing wellness jargon at us. Every thing's changing. My people are going away. And I still have the wherewithal to make this shit up on my own.

My cousin, in her forties, mother, love marriage before 25, said to not fall into the trap of this new age 'lets give each other space' bullshit. She's probably right. I should have been a village belle, married at 18, to some taller than me idiot who just wanted 2 sons and a slim-wasted babe who could pull off a sari and three times a year, dive for his parents' feet.

Two of my friends are getting married at the end of the year. We did a girlie night spend. And they told me, across a dining table and over whiskey, Corona, with a slice of lemon wedged in, with good Marwari food -- chana chawal and geele aloo ki sabji -- that a relationship shouldn't be all hard work. That I shouldn't think foolishly that the marriage will be great, even if the relationship doesn't feel like it, "because marriage is the relationship".

To that, I nod. I listen. I agree. I zone out. And just like I have been doing the last few weeks when I could've been blogging, I sigh and say hmmmm and yeaaaa and pout.

I also do a lot of pushing it out of my mind and temporary forgetting. The we'll see what happens. The lets play it by ear. The lets talk about something else. The who's hungry? The what's the plan? Because the advantage of being someone with an attention span of an infant on acid -- and this is not my phrase but a testimonial, on what was it, Orkut? -- is that my moods tend to be to be like TV channels. Switch, drama, flick, comedy, ooh look Pussycat Dolls, news, news, music, movie, till you tune out.

I feel like an idiot for just doing the oh-look-at-me-so-happy-because-it's-been-2-years-post. But that was what I felt then -- all of what, 2 months ago, and this is what I feel now. It's been brewing. Brewing, pushing under carpet, brewing, pushing under carpet. That's how the penny's been falling.

Maybe I'm just a cow creating my own excitement knowing that if we sort this shit out, the sex will be 43 times more intense. Maybe I'm serious. Maybe I have had enough. Or that I'm bored. And that I'm too young to be thinking this is it. For Chrissake, I'm a good looking, spunky, compassionate, if slightly brattish, twit. There have to be some suckers out there. And there will be. They might love a cheap song and a good Bloody Mary, even.

But my other beef is, will any of them really deserve me or will I always only feel that about this pianist who's doing yoga because I asked him to get off his ass and tone it down?

Look at me, and I like that phrase, all modest and baring my soul, not bothering to change my Facebook status, because as we'd decided, there's no reason to jump the gun.

~

My birthday's coming. I turn 26 on September 1. For the second time in a post, shoot me. With a long barrel gun. To the skull. And make it quick. I don't feel a day older than 13. Except for a richer vocabulary, some cross referencing, phenomenal texting while driving skills and an attitude I picked up from a gutter along the way.

If you could save me the daily restlessness of, among other things, seeing my once trendy short crop grow out into the chaos it is in now, I'd like to be fed them good drugs.