Agony, Ecstasy . . . Guilt

It just sits there. Mocking me. Taunting me. I cant see it, but I know its there. Its soundless voice reaches my unwilling ears. You cant do without me, it seems to say. You can’t pass this way and not think of me. You cant keep me locked up forever! You’re gonna cave. And soon. Today’s perfect. Nobody home. Just you and me.

I reluctantly move towards the desk. I open the drawer and there it is. Red and white and inviting as ever. A book of matches lies next to it, as if by chance. I reach for it.

In the next room, a baby cries. The spell is broken. What was I thinking? I rush out of the room as quickly as possible.

….. A few hours later

I’m back. Looking at the open drawer. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Why not!

Outside, dark clouds are gathering. Its 4 pm in the afternoon but looks like 7 pm. Lightening flashes and somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbles. The skies open up in a torrent of rain. The view from the ninth floor balcony is amazing! The entire city seems hazy in the rain.

A voice, unbidden, enters my head again. Wouldn’t it feel good to have one right now? Just one. Okay, just a few drags, not even an entire one. What harm could it do?

I push all thought out of my head and reach for one. It seems to fit perfectly between my fingers…like it was born to be there. I quickly light up before second thoughts hit and take a drag. Aaaaaaaah. That did feel good. So good. After an entire year of quitting.

I take another drag and watch the falling rain. This used to be my time to think. To just let my thoughts wander. This used to be the time where I would get ideas for stories or plans for what to do with my life. My uninterrupted few minutes of smoke-filled ideas. And then, I quit smoking. Just like that. No last cigarette to commemorate quitting. No goodbye packs. Quit cold turkey.

And why? The answer comes immediately. The baby. Her health.

As if reading my thoughts, the sleeping baby begins to stir in the next room. I look down guiltily at the cigarette in my hand and watch as the smoke seeps into my clothes, my skin, my hair. This is exactly what I didn’t want happening around my baby. I would go in reeking of cigarettes. But I think the stench of guilt would be stronger.

I take my last and final drag and look at the cigarette. The soundless voice seems to be sniggering at me. I won, it claims.

Not yet, I say.

And hurl it as far as possible over the balcony.

Never again.

The red and white pack is still around but not anywhere near. It is now safe in the garbage can nine stories down.

Perfect Days

I live for days like today. . .

. . . beautiful sunny mornings,
. . . air-conditioned cars,
. . . great music to listen to in rush hour traffic,
. . . working out in the gym,
. . . playing with the baby,
. . . reading to the baby and watching her expressions,
. . . cloudy overcast skies,
. . . the first drops of rain,
. . . sitting near the balcony and enjoying the scent of the rain,
. . . enjoying the scenery from the ninth floor,
. . . getting a book by courier that I’ve been waiting for for a long time,
. . . getting an e-mail from the editor of a Psych journal saying that my article is up for review,
and
. . . sitting on the windy rain-swept balcony and smoking that much awaited well-deserved cigarette after a hiatus of one year, one month and two weeks!

………….aaaaaaah…………Bliss!

ಶದೌ

Random Crap #4?

Hi all,

Firstly, I'd like to inform everybody that this blog is NOT, contrary to popular belief and i repeat NOT defunct. . . yet. It's just been dormant for a few months. Okay okay. Make that a year. But still. It's still very much around.

Secondly, I got sick of looking at my previous post everytime i checked this page so thought i'd put up something, even if its drivel like this.

Thirdly, i do have a lot of stories/thoughts/random crap to put up .... just that i dont have the time....and when i do have the time, i use it to catch up on sleep and my usual lazing-around-type activities so......my stories/thoughts/random crap just never get solidified into writing.

Fourthly, okay, there's no fourthly. Just that as the good old Arnie said (cant spell his last name)...... I'll be back! And soon! Goodbye for now.

Diabetically Diabolic?

Okay okay....so i'm diabetic. But I still crave for yummy desserts. You know...chocolates and cakes and pastries and caramel custard and the like. I figure I can make some of these without sugar....and hallelujah! I was right!

While surfing the net for some diabetic delicacies (is that an oxymoron?), I came across the Landmark website which lists all the recipe books for diabetic patients. The list seemed pretty basic and ordinary until I came to a mouth-watering title - Diabetic Dream Desserts. I was all set to order for it until I saw the price - Rs. 666!

The number of the beast.

Positively diabetically diabolic. Sigh.

Okay, so maybe thats a sign. Maybe i shouldn't be ordering my sinful pleasures just yet. Maybe I should wait for the required three months before i can start to even think of desserts again but still . . . I WANT MY GUILTY PLEASURE!

...............................Just don't tell the hubby. Shhhhhhhhh................

(For those of you who are wondering, my one and only guilty pleasure is chocolate....just a hint... you can bring me loads after the baby comes :D)

PJ

In order to avoid morning sickness, I've started waking up later and later every day. Problem is, I now have afternoon sickness!

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Great Expectations

It’s amazing how many varied responses we get when we tell people that I’m expecting. I’m using the word “expecting” instead of “pregnant” because someone told me that it was crass to use the “p” word. Oh well, that was just one of the reactions.

Although a little sappy, I prefer the excited “Hugs and Kisses” category of reactions. Prefer it any day to the kinds of reactions I shall put under the “Prophet of Doom” category.

Imagine telling someone, “We have some news. I’m pregnant.” The obvious reaction you might expect would be something like… “Wow! Congrats! I’m so happy for you both.”

Or something to that effect. And yes, “I’m gonna be an uncle!!!!” and “Hope you’re naming the kid after me” reactions do fall under this category.

Never in a million years would you expect a reaction like, “Better take lots of folic acid or your baby will be born with half a brain.” Or, “Better eat lots of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, calcium etc or your baby will be seriously mentally deficient.” Or, “Oh, I always thought you had bad ovaries.” (Hello? How the heck would YOU know anyway!!!?) And the response I liked the best…NOT! “Has your morning sickness started yet? I was cursed with morning sickness and I think every woman should also be cursed with it. So, has it started yet? Huh? Huh?” (That was my Head of Dept.)

All these things kind of hit you like a punch to the nose and you start thinking about all the stuff you may not have done or all the stuff you are doing but could perhaps maybe somewhat slightly do a little better. And then you start doubting and worrying and obsessing about it and before you know it, you’re calling the gynecologist every other minute and showering her with questions (most of them baseless) and googling key words like “half-brain” and “cursed morning-sickness.”

To all the people who fall under the “Prophets of Doom” category, I know you all are just being concerned and you don’t mean to scare the living daylights outta me but, if you don’t have anything nice to say, PLEASE for the love of God, don’t say anything at all! Or at least say it in a less prophetic matter-of-fact way.

And for all you others, PLEASE bring on the Hugs and Kisses. And yes, the pampering too. I’M PREGNANT!

Woops!

Sorry!

I’M ‘EXPECTING’!!!

Of Life and Curve Balls

“Just when you surface, life throws you a curve ball,” he says. “It’s like playing cricket and all of a sudden you find yourself kicking a football.”

I look at him and think how true that statement is. Just a week ago, we were returning from our honeymoon and now…

Okay, just to clarify, “honeymoon” is just the technical term we used to go on a holiday. Technical because
a) we had already been on our honeymoon about a week after we got married (as opposed to seven months later)
b) it was very useful in getting leave from work
c) it was very useful in getting friends and relatives to leave us alone and not keep inviting us to their homes for mundane conversations and reminiscences.

We had an awesome time and for once, we were able to kick back and relax and throw all caution to the wind. From Snowy Mountains to fine sandy beaches, from submarine rides to helicopter rides, from rollercoasters to water slides, from real beaches to fake waves and from trekking in the Rain Forrest to Crocodile hunting, we did everything.

After a paradoxically relaxed but hectic two weeks in Eastern Australia, we come home, ready to get back into our daily schedules of home, work and family…only to be thrown a curve ball… I might be pregnant.

Hoping against hope but not daring to believe, we find ourselves in a diagnostic centre, holding hands. Both of us are confused and disoriented. On the one hand, the purely selfish but somehow realistic thoughts start seeping in, “This is too soon. We’ve only been married for seven months. I still have one more year of college. How will I manage home, college AND a baby? What about all those “honeymoons” we were planning on before we even thought of having kids?.......”

On the other hand, we were absolutely elated and again, realistic thoughts that seem intangible at the moment begin to surface. “If it’s true, then we’ll have to convert the guest bedroom into a nursery. We’ll need to shift to a house that’s on the ground floor so that we wont have to worry about a toddler falling off a 9th floor balcony. We have to think of a name for the kid. We have to get to work in finishing a bulk of my thesis before the baby arrives…..”

So many “have to’s” and “shoulds” and “need to’s” … But in the midst of all of it, I suddenly realize something. There are no “should have done’s.” No regrets whatsoever. Whichever way this takes us, both of us are in for the ride.

We look at the nurse at the front desk of the diagnostic centre in frustration. We’ve already been waiting for ten minutes and every second that ticks by brings just another modicum of self doubt. These are the few deciding minutes. The results of the test will determine which path we take – whether we heave a sigh of relief and resume our normal lives or whether we heave a sigh of relief and start planning a completely different future that involves a small addition to our family. Whatever the result, it will be a relief just to know. Just to have some certainty. Some kind of closure to the kinds of torturous questions and scenarios that our fertile minds keep coming up with. We can deal with certainty. It’s the uncertainty that’s killing.

Finally, the nurse looks up and beckons us over. We stand up and take a deep breath. “Come back tomorrow,” she says.

“What?” we stammer. Waiting for one-and-a-half hours itself had been bad enough.

“The results of your pregnancy test are inconclusive. It shows that it’s weakly positive but that could mean negative as well. Come back tomorrow and re-do the test.” She nods at us dismissively and turns back to her computer.

We stumble out of the clinic and back to the car, both of us a little stunned. One more day of nebulous torture to go through. Uncertainties to face. Am I or aren’t I? What kind of future would we be looking forward to after tomorrow’s test? Has life indeed thrown us a curve ball or is this just a little bump in an otherwise relatively smooth road?

Well, there’s nothing for it.

We’ll just need to wait it out.

City of Dreaming Books

Where shadows dim with shadows mate
in caverns deep and dark,
where old books dream of bygone days
when they were wood and bark,
where diamonds from coal are born
and no birds ever sing,
that region is the dread domain
ruled by the Shadow King.



Walter Moers

Sleepless on Kaveri Express

Before long, the train chugs into the station and slows to a halt. We labouriously manage to pull all five suitcases into it and open the door to the air conditioned compartment… only to find ourselves in pitch darkness. The AC is working alright…it’s just the lights that aren’t. The only light that filters in is the light from the station through the windows.

We somehow stumble to our berths, tripping over a few people in the process and arrange our baggage and ourselves and settle down to sleep. Before long, the ticket conductor comes and wakes us up by pulling on my toe. Groggily I show him our ticket and settle back down to sleep, but somehow, sleep evades me.

I take out my phone and start playing a game of Sky Force. In the darkness of the compartment, the light from the phone seems like a beacon in the night. I realize that my phone battery is almost out so I switch off the phone and peer out the window. I recognize some of the places we pass…East Station… the level crossing that’s been under construction for the past year… the ITC factory….the short cut that I used to take to go to college…ring road….White Field…. After that, there were only fields and no more to be seen outside. I may as well try and get some sleep.

Just as I’m drifting off, I hear a put-put-put sound. Actually, it’s more like a Harley-Davidson engine roaring to life and I wake up with a start. In the darkness, the sound seems to be omnipresent. I slowly pinpoint the source – the man sleeping on the berth opposite mine. His snoring is loud enough to wake the dead….but apparently not the rest of the passengers in close proximity, who seem to be sleeping peacefully.

Living in a hostel dormitory, I’m used to sleeping among people who snore loudly, but this was absurd! It wasn’t even a rhythmic snore which could be soothing under some circumstances. It was more like irregular machine-gun fire that dies down after sometime and starts up again when a target is in sight. In this case, the target must have been me.

I jam the pillow over my ears and turn the other way. It helps to a certain extent but just barely.

A loud BANG right next to me has me almost jumping out of my skin and the compartment begins jerking violently. It’s a wonder that nobody else wakes up to this. The compartment continues jerking and the train begins to slow down. The banging noise next to me continues with each jerk of the compartment.

I mentally picture everything that an AC compartment would have and recognize the noise as the food tray hitting against the wall of the compartment. Just ignore it and you wont notice the sound after some time, I think. But the bloody banging noise combined with the machine-gun snoring was a bit too much and I gave up any hope of sleeping.

I sit up and push the curtain aside to look out the window. We’re approaching a station – Bangarapet. Great, I think. One hour down and five more to go before we reach Chennai. I watch the people milling around on the platform. Even at 1 am, the place is bustling with life.

The train moves on and the banging noise begins again. By this time, I can feel one hell of a headache coming on. Just then, my leg hits against something which I recognize as one of our suitcases. I drag it out from under the berth and jam it up against the food tray. The noise promptly stops. Wish I could do the same thing to machine-gun man opposite me.

I somehow manage to doze off, but my sleep is highly disturbed. It’s just one of things where you’re aware of all your surroundings but you know that you’re asleep. I dream of Harley-Davidson’s and sub-machine guns and war. (To be fair, the dream about the machine guns could have been because of the game Sky Force that I had been playing earlier.) But still, suffice to it say, it was one rotten night.

I wake up a few hours later to loud voices. The machine-gun man had woken up and was having a loud discussion with someone else. I check my watch. It was 5.45 am and nearing daylight. No sense in going back to sleep so I sit up and start checking the names of stations. We’re nearing our station but we’re not too sure which station it comes after so we haul our bags out from under the seats and drag them to the door.

Standing near the open door with the early morning breeze hitting us is refreshing but it still doesn’t make up for lost sleep. My head is still throbbing and I’ve developed a crick in my neck. We stumble out of the train thankfully and head home. Once we reach home, I tumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the dead.

Honestly, I really envy people who can sleep while traveling.

Anti - Social Behaviour

“Excuse me, Sir,” I say, knocking on his door.

“Yes?” he says, arranging a pile of papers and standing up. “I have a class now so make it quick.”

“Good morning, Sir. I’m doing my Ph.D. in Psychology and I was wondering if you could help me out with something.”

“Sure,” he says, looking at his watch and then at the door. He seems like he’s in a hurry so I come straight to the point.

“Since there are not many studies done in the area of my research, I’m developing my own questionnaire and I was wondering if you could take a look at it and give me some feedback as to whether it is a valid and reliable tool for this particular study.”

He stops arranging the papers and looks at me. “Do you know the difference between a psychologist and an ordinary person?”

I shake my head. Was this a riddle?

“A psychologist has the social skills to ask a person how his health is.”

Was this the punch line? Was I supposed to laugh?

“I’ve met you three times before so you don’t have to be so formal with me. You can at least get a little personal with me.”

Huh? Did he mean “personal’ or “informal?” One usually doesn’t get “personal” with the H.O.D of Psychology of the University….let alone your future external examiner.

“Maybe you can take the time out to ask me what I’ve been up to or how I’ve been doing. You’re a very intelligent girl, but you lack the social skills that psychologists generally have.”

Do I dare mention that he’d been in too much of a hurry for me to get “personal” with him? Come to think of it, I don’t think I would have asked him about his health or what he’d been up to even if he hadn’t been in such a hurry. Oh well. How anti-social of me.

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“Shireen, may I see you for a moment?”

Oh no, it was HER again. “HER” being the human blimp who is the senior-most Psychology lecturer in my college. In fact, she is so senior that she’s never ever been the H.O.D. or anything more than well, the senior-most. A fact that has been a sore point with her for the past thirty-odd years and has, to all appearances, caused her to have a mighty big inferiority complex. Well, actually it’s caused her to have a might big REVERSE – inferiority complex…. Considering the fact that she covers it up pretty well with her over-inflated ego.

Here’s an example. She comes to college in a chauffeur-driven car. Not a big deal by some standards, except the poor chauffeur not only has to wear a full uniform complete with hat and full sleeved suit in the Chennai heat, he also has to carry up Her Highness’ handbag from the car to the second floor staffroom – all this while Her Royal Highness ambles slowly to the teacher’s lounge, reads a newspaper and misses her first hour class EVERY DAY.

Another example would be her picking fights with everybody who crosses her path, including teachers. It’s not the fights themselves, because nobody would dare argue back with the senior-most lecturer, but the subject of the fights. She once called a teacher and yelled at her for an hour because she hadn’t told Her Royal Highness that she was pregnant. She then rang up the same teacher nine months later and yelled at her for another hour for not informing her that she had had a baby girl.

Like I said, her fights were not limited to just teachers, but extended to students as well. Some of my juniors were told off for not saying goodbye to her when they went home for the holidays. Another student was given a two hour lecture for not inviting her for her wedding. Another one was yelled at for talking to another teacher in Her Royal Highness’ presence.

Inferiority complex at its best.

Unfortunately, today wasn’t my day. I had been chatting with two MPhil research scholars when I got the summons.

“Shireen, may I see you for a moment?”

Rolling my eyes at the MPhils, I climb the steps to where she was standing. Being all of 150 kgs, she had managed to climb up to the first floor landing before she ran out of breath. Unfortunately, I had happened to be sitting right there when she was taking a breather.

“You know,” she slowly continues in her fake British-Mallu accent, “Two years ago, when you were sitting in the H.O.D’s office, I happened to pop in for a moment and you wished me…but you didn’t stand when you wished me.”

I look at her incredulously. I don’t even remember what I did (or didn’t do) last week, let alone two years ago.

“This kind of anti-social behaviour is not acceptable in a psychologist, especially a senior.”
Wow. Being called anti-social twice in two days by two different gas bags was quite something.

“This is not acceptable,” she repeats, shaking her head, all three chins wagging. She takes a step up, pausing to continue. “The last time you met me, you were inviting me for your wedding so I didn’t say anything, but you must have noticed how I’ve been ignoring you for the past two years.”

You were??? Can we try that again for the next two years?

“Every time you wished me, I’ve ignored you. You know why? It’s because you didn’t stand up and wish me two years ago.”

You were ignoring me? I don’t seem to remember you ignoring me the last time you bit my head off. Let’s see, that was about a year ago when my previous course ended. You said that I was a bad Christian and an even worse psychologist for not saying goodbye to you. I personally don’t see what our profession, religion and farewells have to do with each other, but there you go. Inferiority complex and low self esteem logic.

She continues yammering on about ill-mannered students etc but I had already tuned out. If she wants to feed her ego off students and other teachers, she could go right ahead. By that time, she had reached the second floor and was continuing on to the staff room without realizing that I wasn’t behind her.

I think I should take my guide’s advice. Just keep nodding at all the shit that’s being dished out and one day, when I’m out of college and people like these don’t have any more jurisdiction over my certificates or marks, do something that’s never been done before – tell them off.

So much for anti-social behaviour.

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