The Forbidden Gadget

There are few sights more beautiful on a lazy morning than sleeping Girlfriend's visage. Aah who am I kidding, it's my favourite sight of all time: those few minutes of bliss before Girlfriend wakes up and becomes...well, herself, again.A vision so tranquil that I regularly douse her morning coffee with whiskey just to see those curtains come down again, however temporarily. Not that I'm some kind of compulsive coffee-spiking psychopath. Sometimes, I just pepper her pasta with finely powdered Paracetamol. One particularly lovelorn afternoon, I knocked her out with a rolling pin. Those tightly shut eyes, those gently cascading eyelashes, are the promises, the visions, all relationships are built on- the promise of calm and quiet, the hope that those sleep-gooey lips will not always chastise or criticize or order you to stop smoking during meals.

Since we started seeing each other regularly, I have always made sure I wake up a good five minutes before she does just to get a glimpse of those non-judgmental eyes. It wasn't easy in the beginning, what with my predilection for sleeping in, and Girlfriend's demanding job that requires her to don pinstripes and create PDFs or pour through Excel sheets or whatever it is real adults do for a living as early as 9 in the AM. But when you want something strongly enough, you're all sorts of resourceful. The solution to my little conundrum, I discovered, was fairly simple: I'd just have to wait for Girlfriend to fall asleep at night, and reset her alarm to a later time. Must be love.

Imagine my surprise then, when a few days ago, I woke up to find Girlfriend not just awake, but not even in  sight. I shut my eyes, telling myself it was just a dream, that I'd wake up any second now. I was jolted back to reality by the sound of the bathroom door opening, and out peeped Girlfriend's head. It banged shut again almost immediately, Girlfriend's head retreating like that of a startled turtle the moment she caught my eye.

"Girlfriend," I call out, "you ok?"
"Yes," comes her voice, cautious but steady.
"Did you forget to flush again?" I ask.
"I told you that was the cat!" she shouts back.
"I forgot. So what's wrong, baby?"

The door opens again, and out steps suddenly-nonchalant Girlfriend, clad in boxers and tee, her laptop in her hand. "Nothing" she says, defiantly. She places the laptop on the dresser, and busies herself in front of the mirror. "Baby," I say, "were you using your laptop in the loo?"

"What if I was?"
"It's a little...weird, no?"
"There's an entire stack of your magazines by the pot."
"I know, but they're paper. A dump is not traditionally a technology-friendly activity."
"A tech-friendly activity? Why is everything so complicated with you?"
"It's a slippery slope, that's all. Next thing you know, you'll be texting at the cinema, and playing fruit-chucker on your tablet."
"It's called 'Fruit Ninja'."
"Oh my god."
"What?"
"How do you know that? You don't know any sixteen year olds."

Aah, the calm before the storm. The lull before Techocalypse. That guilty-flirty look Eve gave Adam while biting into Apple.

"I got an iPad, ok?"
"What? But we're against mass-produced consumer goods."
"No, you are."
"But they cut off the poor little Chinese kids' fingers after they assemble those things."
"They build computers, not the Taj Mahal."
"But.. when did you get it?"
"Two weeks ago."

Modern life is rubbish. 

"Where is it? How have I not seen it yet?"
"Coz I knew how you'd react. I keep it at work. And in the car, sometimes."
"You've never brought it home?"
"Only..just on that night you were out with Fatboy."
"Is it bigger than me?"
"What?"
"Sorry, I anthropomorphized my fear of being displaced by technology. It's a guy thing."
"No it's not. It's a you thing."
"How would you know?"
"There's an app for it."

Icy Highs's Music Recco: Video Killed The Radio Star by Buggles, The Age of Plastic (1979)

This blogpost is part of a series called The Girlfriend Chronicles - which went on to form the crux of my second novel Mornings After (2016, Bloomsbury India). You can buy it here on Amazon. 

       

Mumbai, Meri Jaan

Turns out the Mothership was right after all. When I moved to Bombay ('Mumbai', to the pedants) last September, she had been apprehensive. "It's a big, bad city," she said. "They're calling it the 'Narcopolis'", she said, "it'll corrupt you." She had a right to be worried of course, what with History and all, however rehabilitated I maybe. But not even hyper-imaginative Mother could have predicted the ease with which a little something here, a little something there, quickly spiraled into a Habit.

I suppose I could have gotten hooked on a greater evil. I should probably be thankful I'm not hawking handjobs on street corners in exchange for a hit; that I still have my health and my (ahem) looks. But addiction, any addiction, is shameful, a burden. And I fell for the most shameful one of them all: My name is Tharun James Jimani, and I'm a benefits scrounge.  

It started off harmlessly enough, like a stray pill somebody hands you at a party. I had been in Bombay three weeks and had had enough of spending hours (and a fortune in cab fare) stuck in traffic jams. I decided to take the advice of Ramu, the office boy, who never tires of telling me that the public transport system in Bombay is "cheap and besht". Don't be fooled by the fancy job description- Ramu is a leprechaun of lifestyle conveniences, and about the size of a football field.

So I gave Bombay's famed local trains a try, romanced as I have always been by their propensity to match-make if Saathiya is to be believed. Oh relax, this is not another dreary account of how dreary the daily commute is in one of the busiest cities in the world. I was ready for that. What I wasn't prepared for was how ridiculously exaggerated those accounts of travel tedium were. "Piece of cake," I thought, as I smiled enthusiastically at the gentleman with a phantom arm seated opposite me on my first foray onto the other side of the tracks- "cattle class" commute.    

"God, Mumbaikars are such whiners," I thought as I nodded in acknowledgement at the lady with the neck brace who had just entered the train. And then it struck me: the elderly blind man with the white cane, the little boy with the Forrest Gump- footwear, they were all special souls in there. I was travelling in the disabled folks' compartment. I looked frantically around to make sure nobody was standing, that I wasn't denying some poor diabetic his government-approved respite, and resolved to exit stage at the next station.

But guilt is a strange thing, and often drops in unannounced.  As the train slowed to a crawl entering Elphinstone Station, I stood up, getting ready to step out. And suddenly, out of nowhere, my right leg picked up a mannerism of its own: it went limp. Try as I might, cuss and threaten and cajole as I did, it refused to stand straight, to resume business as normal. Fuck, now my face is doing it too! For no discernible reason, my cheeks drooped in self-pity, my vocal chords emanated sighs and my right hand made a curious byline for some imagined point-of-most-pain on my leg, and stroked it sympathetically. My body put on the performance of a lifetime in a viciously satirical parody of my parasitic self, as I made the shameful trip from my seat to the door.

It happened again, and again. On a particularly busy night once; because I was exhausted and wanted a seat for certain on another inebriated night. It happened out of curiosity, out of laziness, out of a juvenile tendency to play truant, out of sheer boredom. It became a Habit. My adopted disabilities changed with my mood. I would be deaf one day, dying the next. "It's alright," I consoled myself, as my fingers felt around for words in mock-Braille on the pages of The Hotel New Hampshire   on my way to work one day, "it's not like I'm robbing them of anything, I never sit if one of them is left without a seat."

Excuses, all. Classic denial mode, as any ex-junkie will tell you. As ever, it would take an intervention to set me straight. It came in the shape of a lushly bearded Mullah, a couple of weeks ago. I was just moving in on a seat that had been recently vacated, on the handicapped section of a public bus this time (coz I like to mix things up every now and then, YOLO and what not), when suddenly, Mullah-man shoved me in the chest and fell onto my seat while I was left clutching at strangers to remain upright. I was incensed. I confronted him. "What the fuck dude," I said, "you can't just push people to get a seat."

Mullah-man went ballistic with all the indignation of the wrongfully-condemned. He let loose a volley of abuses, or gaalis as they call them in Hindi, while the whole bus looked on. I may not have caught the intricacies of which of my relatives he wanted me to fornicate with first and in which position, but I did get the gist: I couldn't speak Hindi, and that somehow made me an incestuous snob as opposed to the victim of casual physical assault on a moving bus.

I'd be lying if I said that's what turned the tide. My discomfort must have been obvious. A couple of passengers stepped in, having borne witness to Mullah-man's antics. They were true-blue Mumbaikars, standing up for the disenfranchised, discriminated-against foreigner, sticking it to the man. A few more joined in. There were calls for Mullah-man to apologize, to return to me what was rightfully mine by the order of public transport etiquette. Somebody grabbed his collar; he swatted away somebody's arm. I stood frozen, awed and frightened in equal measure by the riot I had seemingly instigated. And then somebody uttered the dreaded word. "Terrorist," he muttered, "saale terrorist."  

I got out at the next stop, shook up but strangely calm. This too, I thought, this too is Bombay, all-consuming, all-accepting Bombay. Mullah-man may have had a bad leg, or a weak kidney for all I know. But his handicap was far more real: the thick beard that screamed "Muslim", the taqiyah he donned with pride, the mark on his forehead from a thousand sujuds. He should not have pushed me. But irrespective of his indiscretion, I had set in motion a chain of events that resulted in what can only have been traumatic for him, a reminder of the stigma that I frankly wasn't aware was so widespread.

If it weren't for angsty Mullah-man, I'd probably still be cruising the town in 'special' seats, suckling contentedly at the mammaries of the welfare state. I still get the itch, sometimes. But I've learned to deal with it: to pay a little extra and get the AC bus, or wake up a little early and take a slow train. I leave you with A.R. Rahman's "Chaiyya, Chaiyya", easily the classiest item number I've seen in a Bollywood movie, and set atop (what else?) a moving train snaking its way through the Nilgiri mountains. Welcome to Bombay.  

                          Icy Highs's Music Recco: "Chaiyya Chaiyya", Dil Se (1998)