Let's hear it for suicide

It's a shame that suicide has such a bad name, that it's considered the cowardly way out. If women and homosexuals and transgender types can all (rightfully) fight for equality and respect, why can't the suicidal? Some people are good at life, some are not. Just like some like their wine red, others white. Why the hypocrisy in accepting people as they are? I just want to leave with my held high, with the grace of one who has made an intelligent decision. I shouldn't have to up and leave without saying goodbye, to steal away in the night. 


If people can renounce gym memberships and citizenship, they should be able to cancel their subscription to Life & Co without penalty. There should of course be some sort of franchising arrangement. A nine year-old shouldn't be able to make the decision to kill himself, I agree. How about sixteen, or eighteen? If you're old enough to drive, to buy cigarettes, to give life without judgement, you're old enough to take your own in peace. I'm twenty seven, and I want nothing more than to Exit Stage. I'd like to have my family around, email my friends and acquaintances and generally have one last goodbye. I understand some of them might miss me, or mourn me, but I should be able to inform them of my decision without being forcefully institutionalized. 


What suicide needs is a good PR campaign. Create a Facebook page, a Twitter hashtag. Get corporate cheerleaders on board, and we might just see a new dawn of respect for the circumspect. The commercial possibilities are endless. McDonalds could film my last Big Mac, and put it up on Youtube.  "One for the road," I'd cheerfully declare. Or I could take a sip of my favourite beverage, put down my can, and say "ooh, this Coke is to die for" before putting a bullet in my head. It'd be a fantastic way to create awareness that the suicidal are people too. You consume, we consume. We've just consumed enough. 


It could give rise to a whole new industry in these recession-struck times. Fun ways to die! Choose a death that says something about your personality! Get shot out of a cannon, or swim with piranhas for 500 bucks. Who hasn't wanted to do that? Go one-on-one with Mike Tyson, or fly a plane into ... no wait, that one's just morbid. Vegas could prop up it's dwindling marriage market with a line of pop culture-referencing suicide options. Elvis could chop you a line laced with Anthrax, or you could email Keyser Söze and tell him the whole thing was really quite predictable. 


I hate to say this, but the easiest way to make suicide the new Normal might be to get Zooey Deschanel involved. Some of you may already be familiar with how I feel about Zooey. But why not? It's for a good cause, and Lord knows she's done enough to make zombies out of an entire generation. These kids are never getting their individuality back; the least she could do is sing a quirky suicide ditty that will inevitably go viral and give them all a way out when they need one. 


Till I can get her to pitch in, maybe the lot of you can spread the word. Promise me you'll cash your cheques when it's obvious there's no point waiting any longer. Call it quits the moment you realize there's no grand finale, no blaze of glory, that this is about as good as it gets. Let's not hang around once the party's over, that's just sad. And till you get there, have a "No Rest For The Depressed" badge on your blogs, or wear a "Suicide FTW!" teeshirt or something. Do something, you guys, or all this apathy is just going to kill you.      

Jim Carrey sings Jumper by Third Eye Blind to prevent a guy from committing suicide in Yes Man.




    

When your shit smells like roses

I'm a man who has woken up choking on his own alcohol-and-drug-cocktail-riddled puke countless times since adulthood, got urinated on by a crazy Swedish teenager in exchange for sexual favours regularly for about three months and seriously considered taking a shit on camera for an amateur Glaswegian film-maker with good intentions whose intentions I cannot now recollect.

Despite which, I'm oddly paranoid about hygiene. I will happily cook in the nude, but my body refuses kebabs outright because somebody told me all Turkish men are compulsive nose-pickers. I'd like to think this is reflective of a common school of human hypocrisy I like to call, "my shit smells likes roses". For instance, I have slept/passed out (what's the difference really?) on pavements back home in Chennai in my smack-attack days, but even then I couldn't have a cup of tea without washing my hands fanatically if I'd partaken of public transport. Even more funnily, I went through at least two years of college without ever using public transport, because everybody knows public transport in India is cattle-class, as Shashi Tharoor (in)famously tweeted.    

So, here we are then. A detergent-happy, dirty old man and you, an undergraduate with tits most men would sell their souls for. I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes. Clearly, your first mistake was: "don't worry about taking off your shoes." In young-people-parlance, "WTF?!!" How can you not insist that people take their shoes off when they enter your Lilliputian place of residence? Who knows where they've been?

It doesn't make it any easier that you're my temporary flatmate. You're here because your French boyfriend is here on an internship selling Frenchy eco-friendly electrical products to companies that frankly just don't care about carbon footprints or corporate social responsibility. These things don't matter in Asia because we've been blindsided for long enough; we think the wild ugly West should pay for what they've done first. I don't.  I'll fuck you if you're technically the right mix of X and Y. That, and clean.

But you piss in the shower. I can smell it. You piss all over my toilet seat. I have to wreath the damn thing in toilet paper first thing every morning because I'm scared you'll inadvertently pass on some contagious disease. I have to actually stop breathing every time I pass by your open door because the gases that escape the barely chambered walls of your box-room existence smell of old pizza and very-worn socks.

Yet, you're hot. You're silent-movie hot. Not that you talk funny, but I wish you were in a movie so I didn't have to smell you. When you charmingly extemporize on your disdain for showering, I'm really just imagining corpses and people-in-comas. That's not sexy. When you complain about your boyfriend working on Sundays, I'm full of empathy for the poor bastard because he's forced to live with the terribly stained underwear you regularly hang on the fucking bathroom door knob.  Just so you know, those chopsticks on the flush tank were left there for a reason - so I can move your bloody underthings when I need to lock the door.

And when you're seated at the foot of my bed, your dopey eyes making eyes at my weak desperate self, all I can really tell myself is: "you're too old to excuse this kind of behavior". The morally correct course of action would be to bend you over my knees and spank some sense of hygiene into you. But I worry that would sow them wild thoughts in me ol' head. Besides, you'd probably fart in my face or something, for a laugh. If only you'd stop smelling of super-market cologne and onions. We could have been so much more.

White People Problems

The sibling and I have an off-on relationship. Sometimes we don't talk for months at a stretch. Despite which, we are completely in sync whenever we get back in touch, like it was only yesterday that we were chasing each other around our family home.

There is an unwritten understanding between us that the caller is the one who needs to vent, that the role of the receiver of the call is simply to listen and occasionally offer vaguely comforting truisms. Neither of us are  particularly averse to suffering, so it would be counter-productive to actually try to help.

Bearing this in mind, I call her and launch straight into a vicious diatribe on the pointlessness of existence, the failure of the education system,  the price of alcohol and cigarettes, the loneliness and the despair, the lack of ambition, the depression, the ghosts of childhood.

She listens with the practiced silence of one who knows the narrative all too well. Throughout my rant, I have flashes of her clipping her nails, flipping channels on the television, making faces at her eldest, steering her ridiculous Volkswagon, her phone balanced precariously between ear and shoulder at all times.

Suddenly, I'm flummoxed. The Listener has just pulled a meta, and spoken! We have not reached her scene just yet. Her's shouldn't even be a speaking part. Any leeway on this front is an act of charity, of generosity of the Sufferer. "What?" I splutter.      

"I'm just saying," she says, "seems to me you're an Indian man with white people problems. And you're living in China for fuck's sake. That can't be good. Come home, bro."

Morning after

"Do you do this often?"
"Not as much as you'd think."
"I didn't think you did."

"What gave me away?"
"What?"
"You said you didn't think...was I not very good?"
"There's no scale for this sort of thing."

"So I'll give you a call?"
"Probably best if I called you."
"Right."
"That was a joke."
"Aah. You got me."
"But you've got to stop jumping to your feet every time I walk into the room."
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"And stop apologizing."
"Yes, ma'm."

Drunk, drunk, drunk.

You know what's fantastic? I'm a cynic. But you knew that. I'm the kind of person who can be indifferent to all sorts of things. You knew that too. Everything except you. And the fact that you still have that kind of hold on me, what two years after, that's awesome, that's incredible. You're a witch, a sorceress. And I'm bewitched. And I'm clearly still in love with you. Just pretend you love me. Pretend I mean something. Lie to me. C'mon. 

The waiting game

The toughest thing about a breakup is almost always the logistics. That summer vacation you foolishly booked months in advance, the house you moved into together, the city you adopted as home, the friends you kindly shared, the phone bill, the internet connection, the Ikea shoe-rack. These things somehow take precedence over the gaping emotional abyss you're plunging headfirst into because you think the details will dull the drama. And they do, to a certain extent.

When you're still in love with the person you're pushing away, when he's still your best friend and she's still your's, the equation is a little different. When neither of you can think of any rational reason to not be together anymore except "this just isn't working", when there's no definitive rhythm or reason to the pain you're inviting in, you tend to act in fits and starts. You think you can phase it out, instead of cutting loose. You use terms like 'space' and 'break' and 'time', all of which really only mean that neither of you has the courage to leave. 

We played this game for almost half a year, without ever really realizing it. We decided to separate one stormy January night, and somehow put off moving out till summer naughtily reminded us of the life outside our walls. I spent most nights on the couch, half-asleep and half-afraid of the darkness, the cold. Sometimes, we'd drink a little, get along a little and make the disillusioned trip back to what used to be our bedroom. Sometimes, we'd fight and argue and shout, and collapse all tangled up in each other on the couch, on the floor, on the kitchen counter. Doomed couplings, all. 

I'd stare hollowly into her eyes, or cling pleadingly to the past. 

She'd berate me for what was lost, or tell me she was never there. 

I'd push her off midway, or stand up and walk away.

She'd tell me sorry but can we stop? I'd ask her if she was ever there. 

Lies, all.

It was never going to be me who would leave. I can still see us there, in that very same house, years and years later, our tattered robes and disheveled selves, more acquisitions to numb the numbness - a bigger TV, a colder refrigerator, a couple of children conceived in hope, raised in despair. She saw it too. It terrified her, but she had to make sure I'd be alright. So one summer morning, on our way to the station, on our way to board trains that would take us to work and blessed, temporary escape from it all, she said she might visit her parents over the weekend. I said that'd be fine. And it was.            

  

Pimpin' pride and prejudice

Got wood? So do we!

Singapore has for some time now played host to the Eastern version of the American dream. Immigrants flock here from Vietnam, China, India, the UAE, Europe and even America; some in search of financial freedom, some for sunshine and expat tax-rates, some on the run from the law and personal demons, some to pay for new breasts.

Yup, breasts. And penises, too. While living in Glasgow, I had heard many a tall tale of the quintessential ladyboy scene in Bangkok, or drag-queens in Amsterdam. There were a couple of post-ops at work but I had never properly been introduced to the gender-bending, smutty underbelly of the hermaphrodite sex-trade.

Last Saturday then, I found myself drinking at Orchard Towers, famously home to prostitutes and pimps and lonely men willing to pay for a good old time. I'm ashamed that I feel the need to justify being there but these things cannot be helped. I was at a bar downstairs, attending a gig by a fairly popular cover-band whose name mysteriously escapes me. They do a mean Bowie.

After the gig, I headed upstairs because when you're a depressed single man, closing time is never late enough. I knew fully well that there was no chance of meeting the kind of woman I could take home to my mother, but the drinks were not unreasonably priced and besides, the mother-ship (if you'll excuse the pun) had sailed a good many years ago.

I wasn't immediately swarmed by the many 'professional' women there as I expected, but was given time to settle down, get used to the surroundings and make my move. I didn't move. I had no intention of paying for sex; I was happy enough to watch, observe. This is easier said than done. After a while, especially in the throes of a drunken stupor, you start wondering if they just don't approach you because you're not attractive enough.

Still later, you convince yourself you can pick up a 'professional', riding on your charm and looks alone, that they will somehow give up income and working hours to nurse your inner Casanova. I offered to buy a girl a drink. Beautiful, from Laos, on a tourist visa, owns a penis. Different girl, same story. As with all her colleagues. They're fairly upfront with this information. And friendly; very friendly. I'm playing my usual card of being a 21-year old traveler (I can probably pull this off for another five years, given the nuclear lack of growth on my still-cherubic 27-year old face), awed and nervous in equal measure, and they're lapping it up.

I establish that I have no interest in doing a dude. This is taken stoically, without judgement. I buy another round of drinks. We sit and talk about life, about why we're in Singapore, who or what we've left behind, what we're looking for. As it turns out, we have plenty in common. We have all tucked our penises between our legs, checked in our self-respect at Immigration and strolled through looking for breasts.

I would like them against me, they would like theirs on them. Implants, enhancement, magic, the whole spectrum. They tell me a tourist visa lets them stay for three months, enough time to make money to pay for their new bodies. There are 'agencies' that specialize in this arrangement back home - they take care of everything from travel to accommodation for a cut, and put them in touch with a surgeon.

I wonder if they hope their new bodies will fail to recollect the atrocities that paid for them. They tell me their customers almost exclusively straight men. They tell me tales of being excreted on, of brutality and head-over-heels love, all in the space of one night and several indistinguishable faces. I can detect no sense of regret or shame. I decide there is no reason for any, if this is a choice they have made for themselves.

Some of them intend to pursue their studies, careers in accountancy and marketing and law after they're all-woman. I tell them I hope things work out. They laugh. They stroke my chin, tussle my hair. I'm not repulsed in the least. They tell me I have the haunted smile of one who has no hope at all, for himself.        

*Image courtesy of Warrens Singapore 

     Life on Mars - David Bowie

     

Dead Roses

I should never have called Sania. If you're going to consult your girlfriend's best friend, do it before you do anything

“You did what?”
“I put a bunch of rose petals all over the bed. I’ve wanted to do that ever since Bon Jovi sang Bed of roses. Or since American Beauty. Or since Shahrukh Khan shot that ad in that bath-tub full of petals. I don’t know, it’s all very confusing.” Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.
 She laughed. “And what’d she say?”
“Nothing, she’s still asleep.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what she’ll say. She hates flowers! Especially roses. She says she hates them on Principle.”

I disconnected the call and set the tripod up by the window and clicked away. Paloma always looked most beautiful when she was asleep. So I decided to put to good use the camera Sabuchayan gifted me before I moved to Chennai. I stared mesmerized at one particular photograph, now safely etched in Betsy’s memory. I tried adding a touch of red to the lighting but it just ended up looking ghastly. On second look though, it had a kind of gothic appeal to it. Her hair covered most of her face; her left eye was the one discernible feature on it.  There were rose petals on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. I tried to un-do the red, and gave up. I just couldn't get my head around iPhoto.

“What’re you looking at Charliebum?” I hadn’t heard her wake up. “You look unbelievable,” I said, overcome by how the photograph had suddenly taken on a life of it’s own by her presence. I wrapped a hand around her waist and nestled my head into the side of her stomach and she moved away. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She lit a cigarette and perched herself atop the computer table. “I like it,” she said, “it’s just that I look so…so dead. I’d make a beautiful corpse that’s all.” I looked up not really impressed by the incongruity of the statement. She said things like that all the time. “It’s a picture,” I said, “you can’t jump and shout in a picture. Every photograph’s dead in that sense. It’s like a leaf in a book. It’s dead, but it looks great, right?” “Touché,” she murmured and looked out the window.

I was incensed. I hadn’t expected her to agree. “What do you mean you look dead?” I asked. She turned around. “It’s all those fucking petals,” she said vaguely, as though that explained everything. I hated her then, right then and there. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked, “what’s so deathly about roses? Most people seem to think they're kinda romantic.” “Flowers, man,” she shook her head, “flowers in general just freak me out. Most unseemly witnesses to love-making, ever. Flowers and marital consummation, in every South Indian movie ever made! A boquet or a wreath on a coffin. Flowers for your mom on her birthday. What’s the fucking difference? They’re all flowers right? And they’re dead, right? Formerly beautiful living things, breathing things, cut up into disgusting little petals and spread all over a bed, so we can lie on it and fuck ourselves to glory in some kind of Garden-of-Eden, pseudo-naturalist fantasy. Fucking on a deathbed, more like.” And she climbed off the table, chucked her cigarette out the window and left. But we're still doing  flowers on Valentine's Day, right? 

           Fightclub: "Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy."

*Excerpt from Cough Syrup Surrealism 

"Exes and Sevens": excerpt (yes, lucky you!)

So here's another excerpt from that novel I'm writing, Exes and Sevens. I've been unable to do any writing these last few days because life has been fairly kind to yours truly. Isn't that silly? Writing is the only thing that makes me happy, and I can only write when I'm this close to reaching for the exit-pills. For those who didn't know, I'm writing another novel because the first one was such a roaring success. Not. You can read more excerpts here and here. Go on, you know you want to. 

We took a train to Upton Park as directed by Hafiz, the landlord. We had arrived in London over a week ago and were staying at a hotel in Westminister at the time, overlooking Hyde park. The sun was out and the streets overflowed with bicyclists and tourists and cameras and mini-skirts and beautiful people. It wasn't ideal preparation for East London. It was altogether a different country, a different culture. The station was only a few metres from Boleyn Ground, home of West Ham Football Club. We could see the flags and hoardings from where we stood. The ticket-checker advised us that we would find taxis by the stadium if we didn't fancy walking the quarter-mile to what we soon come to call home.

The streets were filled with supporters of the club, but it wasn't their maroon jerseys or their alcohol-fueled outbursts that caught our attention. It was the shops. The shops were all little stand-alone stalls, selling vegetables and mobile phones and nick-knacks, all run by people of Asian or African origin. They stood outside their shopfronts, on the pavement, inviting us to go in, offering us bargains and discounts, in foreign tongues and stranger accents. The air was a mixture of smells and sounds- spices and laments, fried chicken wings and motor oil and running engines and urine. “This is like walking around in Egypt,” said well-traveled, semi-amused Leni. I thought to myself that it wasn't much unlike Anna Bazaar or Parys in Chennai.

The difference, I thought, was in the tone, the texture of poverty. The duty-free shops in Parys for instance sold pirated DVD's and contraband deodorants much like these shops. But in Chennai, there was a clear demarcation between the casual shopper and the people who lived and died on those streets, the men and women who cleaned toilets and stole from shop windows and sold their bodies. You could always make out who belonged where – the rich kids who swung by in their air-conditioned hatchbacks to rifle through stacks of ten rupee-pornography would leave as soon as it was dark. They weren't from there and they never would be. Even the locals -the poor bastards who lived there- had a tangible urgency. They weren't defeated, resigned-to-their-lot ghosts of their pasts; they believed they were fighting a class-war, one they would win by hook or by crook, if not for themselves then at least for their children. 

In Upton Park however, there was no way to make such differentiations simply because they all belonged just where they were. This was the best it would ever be for them, this was better than anything they had ever had before. It wasn't so much the dirty, unplanned outskirts of a metropolitan city as it was a township, an area and law all unto itself, much like the forsaken rural blindspots in India where everybody knew everybody and nobody had ever ventured farther than the next village or gone to college. This was not the London I had dreamed of. This, I worried, was another third world ghetto in a white man's country where my degree or intellectual pretensions  would be drowned out by the  parenthetical, unifying echo of the colour of my skin. To Them, I thought, I may as well be another political refugee or economic immigrant from Bangladesh or Ethiopia or Pakistan or Sudan, somebody who had come to their country to escape the impossible misery of where I was from. This, to Them, these streets, this jamboree of sights and smells, was their gift to me, my redemption. And I wanted so much more. 

Flexting like it's 1999

In my experience, there are only two kinds of flirty-texters (flexters?): those you're not particularly attracted to physically but encourage anyway because there's always the chance of the apocalypse leaving only the two of you to re-populate this little rock we call home, and the ones who are totally out of your league and would not acknowledge your existence in public but don't mind a little dirty chat from the other side of the great electronic divide. It's likely we've all found ourselves wedged firmly under one of these categories, but I'm yet to find somebody straddling both roles in the same relationship.

Admittedly, I'm drunker than I was when I started on this post (thank God for 'save') and you'll forgive my shortcomings on the entertainment front. This is the story of this girl I know who was born for the out-of-my-league category. I mean I think very highly of myself (or lowly; just depends on my mood, really) and I can't think of anybody who might approach her confidently, swaggeresque. We had this flexting thing going till she started seeing this Abercrombie and Fitch-type guy, and I thought, you know, "well played, fair enough". This guy had muscles where I have vices, dimples where I've got issues.  He could spell, too.


Till today morn when she texts me out of the blue saying: "I can almost smell the weekend, feels like a humpday!" What am I supposed to make out of that, really? You know. Of course you know. Turns out everybody knew except yours truly. When the hell did we start calling Wednesdays 'hump days'? I know (or I found out, rather), it's been a while, right? I don't care. I'm pissed. I'm disappointed and I'm embarrassed 'coz I may or may not have replied along the lines of: "damn right it's hump day - about time too, you big pricktease!"