Now that I am free, now that I have resigned and am lying flat on my bed and staring at the ceiling, now that contentment is seeping from every pore, I find myself remembering the last six months with an air of resigned good humour. That, however, is wrong. It is a deadly trap. A dulling of the outrage with time. If I encourage it, I think...nay...I know that I run the risk of ending up back in a steel and glass corporate powerhouse, feeling helpless as Excel sheets slowly suck my lifeblood away. Therefore, for the future me - for the me I am sure is still lurking underneath there somewhere - is a list of reasons why I should never ever in my life again attempt working for gigantic MNCs in Delhi that have nothing to do with publishing. The few good friends I made in the last few months are really not worth all this.

1. Timesheets. No. I mean, no. EVerytime I had to fill one up in the last few months, detailing how exactly I had spent every minute of every day in my office, describing in painstaking detail how I stared at Excel Sheet number 346 from 3:45pm to 4:13 pm, the voice inside my head started shrieking, and did not stop till I got home.

2. Long commutes. Very good on paper. Awful in real life. Even if one has the luxury of an AC car to oneself.

3. Yo yo honey singh. It is like this. Every new person I met in the last few months was a fan of this man. They sung their songs in the washroom, they hummed along with him while working, they listened to him intently on the one hour drive back home - flipping radio channels impatiently until they located a honey singh song. I attended an out-of-station wedding of a dear colleague/friend and these were the only songs the wedding guests were dancing to. I attended an office party in Jaipur, and everyone around me was swaying to punjabi rap. It was my very own version of patriarchal, North Indian nightmare...and I couldn't get out of it. There is only so much that Beatles on the headhone can do, if the air all around is saturated with everything yo yo.

4. Corporate lingo. No, I will not revert back to you. Neither shall I streamline the deliverables by EOD. I shan't touch base with you to verbalise anything, and I shall especially not ideate while you do knowledge transfer about cross-utilization. I might throw my laptop at you for process optimization though.

5. No language stuff. I have realized that if I can't write, rewrite and play around with words, I die a little bit inside. Let's just say that there were a lot of deaths in the last few months.

6. No book stuff. I was asked whether Salman Rushdie is a cricketer, whether Chetan Bhagat is English literature's pinnacle and whether wasting one's chidlhood reading storybooks lessened one's earning potential as an adult.

7. Shiny clothes. I cannot in any which way think of a time when I shall voluntarily dress up everyday to go to work. A clean shirt, a pair of jeans and combed hair I can manage. Perfect make up and stilettos and pencil skirts, I can't. And when it is obvious that my unstraightened hair and Sarojini nagar top is directly affecting how my work is being evaluated, I have to physically restrain myself from wearing shorts and a ganjee to work the next day.

I shall add more as and when I can. However, for the time being, remember these, future self. Remember these and shudder.

Watch this space.

This blog is not dead. Like the proverbial Arnold Schwarzenegger, it'll be back. As soon as I dropkick my current soul-crushing corporate existence into oblivion.

This place has too many memories to lose out to a heartless glass-n-steel multinational behemoth.

1996

The jungle gym is, by far, the coolest thing in my school. It is red and a little rusty and sometimes, totally off-limits. But every day, particularly during recess, I perch myself on the topmost rung and gaze around like an indulgent queen, and refuse to get down.

Our classroom is at the end of a corridor, right besides the staircase. I sit near the window, and like the proverbial scatterbrained character in any book, I like to look out. Sometimes I spy some lady hanging out her washing across the street, and mutter "chhotto meye roddure day begni ronger saree..." to myself. My friends think I'm crazy.

One day, Bhaswati miss, my scary Class Four teacher, decides to read to us. It is a hot day. The shades are drawn against the Calcutta summer, and the sun makes strange patterns on the floor. The ceiling fan whirrs above. Somewhere in the distance, a Roddiwala cries his trade cry. Miss perches herself on the teacher's desk, turns her beady eyes to the class, clears her throat and turns the first page. "Darrell Rivers looked at herself in the mirror..." she starts.

After that day, the jungle gym is abandoned. Because I discover Enid Blyton, and my life, as I know it, changes for ever.

1995

When I break my collar bone that sultry summer evening, the blinding pain, for a while, distracts me from the fact that I have come back from Benares, and that my life is going through that entire process of 'change! change! change!' again. I am playing some sort of a complicated game with Arka Mamu, who, though technically an uncle, is only three years older. In a superhuman maneuver, he picks me up and whirls me around, relying totally on his scrawny ten-year-old strength. I slip and bang my collarbone against the bed. The next day when the doctor confirms what my parents suspected immediately, I wonder why I didn't hear the 'crunch' when the bone broke.

Calcutta, after so many days of laid-back Benares, overwhelms me with its big-city-ness. This is surprising, because I lived there for five years before I went away.

I go back to my old school with my left arm in a huge white cast, and even though I am Bengali and I belong there, I don't have any friends, and cannot make any for a while. New girl with huge cast repels all.


Ushnish dada and Uly dada come visiting that summer, and we decorate a Rath together. I love how Uly dada cuts up the papers into intricate patterns, and then, when a big Rath comes trundling down the road, I perch on Ushnish dada's shoulders and we run after the procession, revelling in the festive fervour.

On the day I am supposed to get my cast removed, my mother buys me a Kwality cone. When I walk home from the doctor's chambers, my arms considerably light, my pain almost gone, I realize that freedom perhaps tastes like some rapidly melting chocolate ice cream.

1994

I arrive in Benares with a trunk full of Bengali storybooks and an all-consuming sense of loneliness. The loneliness will never really go away during my one-year stay there. I’m six years old and we live in a tiny first floor flat at the end of a small street. The patchily paved road in front of my house gets flooded and muddy every time it rains. Sometimes, while coming back from the small experimental neighbourhood school, I try to jump over the muddy parts. Later, when I’ve made friends with Shilpi didi, our landlord’s daughter who lives downstairs and owns two bad-tempered dogs, we try to jump over the muddy parts together.

 Shilpi didi is two years older than me. She is a good soul.

 I’m friends with a lot of Bengali kids around my age—they are all sons and daughters of my father’s extended group of friends. But Hindi-speaking kids generally give me a cold shoulder. The reasons are many. I have a funny accent, I cannot speak their language fluently, and I don’t bring parathe and achaar for lunch. The queen bees in my small, second grade class are Rishika and Janani. During lunch break, they go around the schoolyard with their arms around each other, whispering mysteriously among themselves. Desperately lonely, I try to follow them at a distance, trying to hear what they’re saying. One day, Rishika doesn’t turn up and I’m asked by Janani to be her partner in going around the school yard. I’m thrilled, and I give her all of my lunch for this honour. Then, the next day, she demands that I do her homework for her, and that I give her all my lunch again. I refuse—partly because I’m hungry and partly because I’m not sure I can do two sets of homework in one evening. I’m promptly dropped from the school yard companionship the next day. I’m heartbroken, and spend the five rupees that my mother gives me sometimes, on drinking a bottle of Coke for lunch. Even that young, I instinctively turn to my taste buds when confronted with a broken heart.

There’s a big party for my seventh birthday. My pishemoshai cooks mutton for the seventy-odd people attending and I get tons of books as gifts. I run around the house in a pretty red dress, but almost all the attendees are Bengalis and I don’t invite anyone from school. I don’t have any friends there.

One afternoon, when I’m playing cricket with Shilpi didi, I try to say something like ‘I was thinking’—only it comes out as ‘main bhaab rahi thi…’ I’m mortified, but cannot remember the Hindi word for ‘think’. ‘You mean, tum soch rahi thi’, she says in a normal voice, and we go back to playing cricket again. I’m indebted to her for a long time for this small act of kindness.

My pishi lives in Benares too. She is part of a joint family and they all live in a crumbling house in Sonarpura, in the heart of the city. I’m fast friends with my cousins. Didibhai is three years older than me, and Roop bhai is three years younger. We spend countless Sunday afternoons lying on the red cement floors, watching the weekly Hindi movie on TV. On Dashami, my parents drop me there while they go for debi-boron to the neighbourhood pandal. We’re bored and want to go out and Chhoka (my pishemoshai’s younger brother) suggests that we go to the ghaats for bisorjon. We spend a long time walking down the narrow bylanes and backlanes of Benares, dodging cows and monkeys, trying to get to the ghaats. When I reach, the entire place is lit up and I sit on the steps with my cousins and watch Durga slowly making her way home. When the last of the ice cream has been finished, and my ears are ringing with ‘thakur thakbe kotokkhon, thakur jabe bisorjon’, I look up at the sky and I look down at the river and I look at all the excited people around me and decide that I like the city after all. 

Even if I am a little lonely.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster...

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

("The Art of Losing": Elizabeth Bishop) 

Ajke didimonir jonmodin. Bodh hoy pochashi bochhorer. Othoba chhiyashi. Ke jane. Amar mone hoy na didimoni nijeo janey bole.

Deshbhager somoye jokhon Maymansingha theke ekta chhotto suitcase ey nijer jeebontake bhore, pnaach bon, ek bhai, ebong ma-baba shuddhu paliye elo epaare, tokhon ekta jonmosaal lekha chhoto chirkut KOTHAY hariye gachhe, ke jaane. Tar songe hariye gechhilo chhotobela theke protita classey first hoye pawa somosto prize. Emon ki matriculation ey meyeder modhye prothom howar certificate tao purono 'basa' y fele ashte hoyechhilo. Porar saree nebe, na porar boi - tar modhye saree ta khub sohojei jite gechhilo. Aha, bnachte hobe toh!

Tarpor toh gonga-padma diye koto jol goralo. Didimonir biye holo. Dui chhele-meye holo. Certificate chharai, ki ekta porikkhay bheeshon bhalo kore, Bengal audit apishe kaaj peye galo. Eka haate, rnedhe-berey, chhele-meye ke poriye, bor ke apishe pathiye, shashuri ke seba-jotno kore, thik aattar modhye apish chole jeto didimoni.  Retirement er poreo, amar tero-choddo bochhor boyesh obdhi, nijei sara barir ranna-banna korto. Eke ki grihokormonipuna bole? Khub-i inadequate tahole shobdota.

Jigyesh korle, muchki heshe bolto 'amar ekhon onek boyesh'. 'Bolto' bolchhi, karon goto bochhorey jeeboner tritiyo cerebral attack tar por theke kotha bola bondho hoye gachhe ekebare. Bhetorer kolkobjagulo bigrechhe, ar baireta ekebare shirnokay hoye gachhe. Pnajrar haargulo poshto bojha jay. Haat gulo pray amar buro anguler soman. Bheeshon gorom, othoba jobbor sheet, rannaghor othoba drawing room - sob somoy, sob jaygatei jaake saree pore, chul anchre, ekebare fitfat hoye thakte dekhechhi, sey ajkal ekta nightie pore, saradin bichhanar songe ekebare mishe giye shuye thake.

Eibhabe miliyeo jabe hoytoh ekdin. Fus montore.

Manusher mon boro bichitro. Khub kothin osukh holey kichhudin sobai 'aha, uhu' kore. Kintu tarpor nijer nijer jeebone phire jay sobai. Tai didimonir songe kotha bolar ar keu thake na bishesh.

 Tai didimoni shuye thake. Shuyei thake.

Ami jokhon Kolkatay jai, tokhon adda mari niyom kore. Kintu sey toh shudhu ami. Ar se toh chhaw mashey ekbaar.

Kolkatar barir karor ajke monei nei je jonmodin.

Tai ajkeo didimoni hoytoh shuyei thakbe. Shuyei thakbe.