Sad are the nights and rude are the awakenings...

I get more and more cushier as I get older. For someone who has moved around all her life; has never lived in one city for more than four years; has joined a school, and just as quickly gotten up, moved out and joined another one; to whom packing, labelling, lifting and unpacking boxes is a second occupation almost...for me, with all of that solid experience behind me, one would think I am good at this 'saying good-bye' thing. And I used to be good, a darned downright impeccable good-bye sayer, no drama, no tears, just plain and simple...until now.

I have wielded the all powerful 'good-bye' over and over again in my life--to family, to librarians, to friends, to teachers, to house-helps, to pets, to love interests, to neighbors...the list goes on. But now, the erstwhile habitual task of the good-bye saying has all of a sudden become unbearably difficult. Across-the-border friend has left to go live in her mountains, and preach the good of micro-finance to earthquaked-out peoples, and I am staring at this screen feeling every single heart wrench inside of me. A voice inside me whimpers, why them?, why not me?, tell me about savings and credit and livelihoods, me, I'm a good listener too! Yeah, yeah, relatively pathetic, I know, but the voice is still there.

Or, I should say, the voice was there. Its been a couple of months now, and the voice has been snuffed out by what I like to call the regulars--work, play and functionality. I've also started this Google Talk business with her, so it pleasantly interrupts my days of typing thesis pages on my keyboard. I've never really been one to do online chats, its somehow never caught on with me. I mean I know its great and all, and I'll do it periodically...but still, if I want to talk, I reach for the phone. Plus, chatting annoys me because every now and then you have these random people messaging you asking these stupid, mundane questions. They do this even if you're set to 'Away', and you can't block them because you don't hate them or anything, you're just not particularly too keen at that moment to answer probing questions about your life.

Case in point: What's up? Whatever was up the last week when you asked me the same question, dodo. How's school? However I want it to be. What are you doing after this semester? Sorry, don't feel like telling you. How're so-and-so? Ask them yourself, duh. And then, if you make the mistake of returning a 'What's up', be prepared for this launch of keyboard diarrhea. I'm great, doing this-and-that, one month from now I'm doing this-and-that, so-and-so is doing this-and-that. Blah. Basically, you wanted to talk about yourself. Double blah.

I'm sure many wonderful people have many more wonderful chat experiences, and not all my online buddies are meaninglessly probing. But the ones that are, are, and so, I generally avoid it all. Better to stay away, than put yourself and the other person through it all. But anyway, my point is (did I even have one?!) that I'm doing this Gtalk with my across-the-border friend, and for once, I'm glad for it. It's fun at some ungodly hour in the morning to have our usual one-liner sarcastic exchanges. She of course, is sharper than me, considering its in the afternoon for her. But nevertheless. However, I do like MSN better..they have cute smiley faces, and nice martini glasses.

Another complaint I have is generally against Gmail. I mean that tending-toward-infinity MB mailbox is great and all, but they scan your e-mails or something. I've had that account for a couple of years now, and only recently started using it. When I sent myself a note from my University account to Gmail, they had this little side-bar with a bunch of links to the University, things to do in the town, and etc. stuff like that. That bothered me. It might have utility value, but why are you looking at where I get my e-mails from?? So anyway, maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't sit so well with me.

Say hello to Skype I guess!

If only there was more love...

Just click on your news website link and you get deluded with news on the multiplicity of warring around..pretty prevelant. Wars are fought and battles are won and so on. I hate bloodshed, but who cares about what I think. All I can do is stay away from personal wars, and all forms of conflict and confrontation with other co-human-inhabitants. Life is a basket of strawberries....or so I thought.

Along came the cat.

Yes, the cat, that furry item that people love and feed and cuddle. The cat. The evil cat. The hateful cat. The vengeful cat. (Get the drift?). The cat. That wages a war with me day in and day out. That confronts me and waits sadistically for a reaction. That is so assured of its position as victor that engaging me in combat has become a playful, almost obsessive habit. Hell, the cat isnt the party with anything to lose.

Moving on to me.

I wake up every morning, ungroomed and at my height of vulnerability. And what do I find confronting me? Davy-cat from upstairs has chosen this particular AM hour to come sneak under the connecting door and position himself in the middle of my living room. I scream, but he is hardly perturbed. You see, he has been smart enough to acquire his ammunition before a face-off. A half made purple scarf, hanging off the edge of a ball of wool replete with long, pointed needles. My purple scarf, my ball of wool, my pointed needles. The prick, he dares to use my own weapons against me!

So, here I stand, fuzzy-headed from a night of dreaming, glasses askew, weaponless...and, for want of anything smarter to do, I let out another scream. Davy-cat winks at me, gets up and begins to close in. Yikes!

I do some on-the-spot strategizing and shut my room door. If I can't fight, I can at least run! Problem solved, no? No...if I dont get him out of the battlefield, which until last night was still my living room, I will be forced to stay in here. So I call the folks upstairs and order them to retract squadron leader Davy-cat before he commands Doreen-cat to come join him. They comply, thinking, wow, some people are real wimps, yeah? Davy-cat is such a darling, so playful, so friendly, so curious. I cringe when these thought vibes flow to me through the shut door.

And so, finally I emerge, shaking all over...believe me, wounds can be inflicted without any form of contact. As I shower, I reflect on the morning's events. The cat wanted a good, honorable fight, but I resorted to third-party mediations. The cat now knows that I am not in a position to stand up for myself. Strike one goes to the cat. The cat now has seen me screaming and shivering. These wounds will stay with me, not him. Strike two goes to the cat. The cat now has a story to tell its cronies this afternoon, winning popularity points for humor. Strike three goes to the cat. And, speaking about humor, folks upstairs have a hearty laugh at my expense, my frantic call to Amma recounting the horrid event causes some across-the-seven-seas laughs, and let me not forget the cat laughs. Homerun to the cat!

Okay, my baseball analogy didnt make sense, but who cared! Here I was, loser once more, as has often happened in the past. Its okay, I tell myself, I can immerse myself in other things and forget about the morning's tragedy. Ha, I wish! I am wrong again. There's no escaping from the feline-infestation for me today.

Davy-lookalike-cat from next door is on this daily rounds. Apparently, his schedule involves poking his nose straight into my row of eight tall windows and cocking his head to get a better view of me. He moves from window one to window two. I sneak a peek at him, while fervently murmuring a prayer of thanks to the inventors of window-glass for making it cat-proof, and try to focus on my typing. But then I can just feel it, he's now onto window three. I bravely peek up again, yikes! He's on window three for sure, not just that, he's settled down pleasantly in the sun, right outside of window three! He faces me on the inside and winks.

How ironic, I get a wink every time my day gets turned upside down. So here I am, forced to meekly sit at my chair, while the cat is assuredly positioned across my window fortress barely five feet away. What follows is a cold-war-type impasse. He sits and waits. He closes his eyes for a nap, stretches every now and then. He is so good at presenting this picture of wondrous calm. And on the other side, I am a carpet-bag of nervous energy. I am obsessed with peeking up at him every five seconds, hoping against hope that he's dropped dead, and I've even thrown a couple of couch-cushions at the window. He merely moves onto window five. Well, this lack-of- communication ridden morning turns into afternoon, and eventually, Davy-lookalike-cat moves on to more engaging targets. And my pulse gets back to normal.

My fear of cats is, err, obviously ridiculous, and I've tried to get over it. Putting on a contrived face of bravery, I've offered to cat-sit for friends. But each time, at the last minute, I chicken out, and get another friend to do the needful. Sheesh, so I'm never going to do that again. I've also stopped telling people I visit that I'm afraid of their cats, because they rarely take it seriously. Who can be afraid of cats is the prevelant thought framework. And they ignore that their cat is trying its best to rub up against every inch of my legs, and that I am exercising immense restraint to not create a scene in public and biting every centimeter of my bottom lip to stop the scream thats dying to get out. To avoid all this misery, I lie and say I am allergic to cats: Oh yes, very allergic, my eyes puff up like balloons if I even smell one! That way, they are more respectful of me and lock their stupid pets up before I visit.

At the end of the day, this never-ending conflict really is a lot of trouble for me. Too complex for my liking. Too many resources expended without corresponding returns. I pretty much am super-pro-animal except when it comes to house-cats. And I know I have to get over this somehow. Maybe, someday, there will be more love.

My brown-eyed girl...

Twas baby sister’s birthday a little while ago. So, she turned twenty, and I know that doesn’t really qualify her into the ‘baby’ category, but I belong to that large group of individuals for whom their younger siblings will always be babies. Even when she’s eighty with yellowing dentures and I’m ninety in a squeaky wheelchair, or at some such age differential.

For her big day, I much lovingly made her a pretty card and sent it in a recycled stamped envelope across the seas, via Airmail. The attendant at the post office who weighed the envelope in for me is a regular buddy. I often send letters to folks in Ohio, and he always mentions how him and his wife got engaged in Delaware, OH. So ever since that connection was established between us, I make it a point to try to sneak into his line. He always offers me his wide toothy smile, and I offer him a chatty minute or two on the current post office traffic conditions. I really do like post offices....and stamps, pretty stamps, are my special friends. My favorite set yet that USPS has come out with are the Navajo blanket patterns in bright rectangles of orange, red, blue and yellow. Make a person’s day, any day, every day.

When babysis was born, I apparently called her a mouse. Right from day one of her life, I harbored notions of grandeur, both in terms of larger physical size and girl-fight winning abilities. I always stayed much taller than her....she would end up at the front of her class assembly lines, and I always toward the back. It was fun to wave to her if our lines ever chanced to pass each other as we left the morning school assembly extravaganzas. And she always had her charming smile reserved for me…she still does. She’s stayed short, and her smile has remained precious.

Our’s however wasn’t always the perfect relationship my parents thought it was. Early on, I noticed three major areas of concern in which my notions of superiority had potential to be disturbed. One, was in the world of singing:

Pre-singing session:
Music teacher: So girls did you practice the Keerthana?
Me: Oh yes, three times
Babysis: Promptly presents charming smile (always an indication that silence is better than lying)
Post-singing session:
Music teacher: Well…that was wonderful, babysis, kshamatha…and you, next time practice with your sister so that you are in the right pitch.

Two, she was a much better dancer than me. At family functions, I ended up being the choreographer, and got pushed toward the back to partner some large-sized pick from the cousin menagerie, while everyone insisted that babysis stay up front all by herself. She was the point person, and the whole troupe revolved around her, you see. Hrrrumph, who taught you dodos the moves in the first place?!

And three, she had satisfied parental units by looking exactly like Daddy. They felt truly that she was theirs, while I was, well, me. I was different, well-loved, but unlike anyone of them.

Rich aunty from USA with one too many gold rings on her ever-so-slightly chubby fingers with bright red nail paint: Ooooh, babysis looks just like her father! How darling! And (looking at me) you…you…(turning to Amma jokingly) are you sure you didn’t exchange her at the hospital, you know how horrible this country doctor’s are! Hahahaha….

This signaled the exit of us kids from this rich aunty’s presence. My sister was just plain anti-social, and for me, her laugh was just a bit too taxing on my eardrums. We were, however, smart enough to ensure we left with some Toblerone's stashed behind our angelic smiles. I must mention that there was an advantage to this type of joking about hospital-crib-exchanges. Babysis and I sat for hours and imagined up stories about how indeed I was an exchange-case, and who my ‘real’ parents were, where they lived, what their jobs were, and how we were going to find them. We, of course, relied on our A-grade knowledge of Bollywood movie child-mother reunion storylines to come up with some of our own romantic milan scenarios. So exciting I sometimes even laid up extra-late in bed staring at the fan and dreaming away. About how my ‘real’ parents would want me back very bad once they found out what a good girl I was, and I would very solemnly tell them no....that although I was happy to know them, I wanted to stay with my current family. All such stories were much fun.

Luckily for me, I was resilient enough to put these three sources of conflict safely behind me as we got older. I just stopped these music classes, I wasn’t going to get any better, and babysis became doubly interested in them, so my parents were pacified after my withdrawal. And we had gotten too cool to dance at these family functions anymore. Now we sat in our specially tailored green long skirt-blouse outfits with our hands in our laps, and honorably embraced the giggly-girl stage of our life instead. And to top it all, finally at age 12 or so, someone suddenly realized that I had my uncle’s nose. And just like that, that was that. I looked like a family member, and all things were settled, no more crib-exchange stories for me! Personally, I see no resemblance between my uncle and me, but hey, if people wanted to live in pleasurable ignorance, who was I to invade?

Having babysis around also presented me with distinct advantages. For one, since her toddler days, Daddy had sung her to sleep on Pal pal dil ke paas from Black Mail. She was soon addicted and couldn’t fall asleep unless that song was sung. And once we got our own room, Daddy always came in and sang her to bed, and I free-rided along and slept to happy Kishore Kumar melodies.

Two, when Amma came to pick me up from school every afternoon, all my teachers would drool over babysis and how cute she was. Consequently, I achieved exalted status because my babysis was super-cute. Teachers insisted on asking me about her....and do remember this was before she could string two words coherently together. And my, was I always proud to talk about her latest adventure: She crawled down two stairs all by herself today, really she did! And over the weekend Amma took us swimming, and she never cried once as the instructor floated her chubby frame around, my babysis is super brave too!

Third and most important, my babysis loves animals, of all kinds. So when I wanted to raise cockroaches in our room, she supported me 100%. She stood by my side when Amma would find our bowls filled with painstakingly collected cockroach eggs and toss them down the drain. She held my hand when I wanted to feed every stray dog we found on the street, while Amma tried to drag us to Bata for new sets of shoes. She understands when I tell her of the earthworms I throw back into the mud after a rain shower. And her support in this regard has been a definite plus through my trials and non-tribulations.

And then in all the medley of life, you get to a point when all you feel for your babysis is love and concern and a warm glow of positive feelings. And standing in this embrace of warmth, it’s nice to reflect back, look around, and look ahead. The embrace will be with you no matter where you go.