A day in the life

So here I am - the hooded weirdo in an empty tute room with the chairs all askew. A girl bursts open the door, sees me and retreats. Why am I sitting in an empty tute room on a Friday afternoon? Because everyone else is busy, because I have to organize the screening at 4, because I have an assignment tomorrow. So it’s just me and Sperber (whose Sperber is it you ask? Only a sex deprived history geek can tell you). I have eaten, smoked and have a bottle of Coke next to me (they didn’t have Thums Up) and I’ve still not started reading the 200 odd pages I need to do for tomorrow. Instead I’m listening to the Joneses, wondering how to make a card for my dad, daydreaming of people I don’t know, of places I’ve been, of 6am freezing our asses off smokes during tea and pee breaks in the hills.

Now a safai dude has displaced me from my comfortable disheveled room and I have to migrate to a more ordered one where the chairs are hard. Oh the suffering of a refugee. I don’t know why I’m bakchodoing, I really should study. Now I’m listening to Gogol Bordello. It’s sports day or NSO meet or some bullshit and the college is teeming with jocks in shiny shorts and girls who have come dressed up to get their attention. I had to put on my headphones and crank up Ghetto Love (my groove!) to drown out the sounds of college spirit as I went to collect my reading from Shubha (the NAUkar). Last year during sports whatever, we were eating Cocoberry and waiting to get on our bus and GTFO this place to a peaceful land of fruit wine, good food, trippy shit to buy, crazy firangs who became our extended family and oh, the Tibetan refugee community.

The hooded weirdo has been displaced by safai dude who points at me to get out, using his jhadu. I’m now forced to migrate to the sunny back lawns, in close proximity to other weirdos. There are butterflies here and trees and loudspeakers announcing ‘I love Usha’, girls shrieking. Gogol Bordello has been changed to Gliss because I kept thinking of how I want to learn Russian (I did manage to learn the alphabet last year but I kinda forgot. This is my name though - ВАНИ) I’m on the bench facing the sun and everyone and it’s too hot and I put my shades on. I keep looking contemplatively at another bench in the shade but it’s near some girls.

It was too hot so the shaded weirdo moved into the shade, the girls are still there but I’m pretty oblivious to anything. I’m sitting under the bough of the trees with the weakening sunlight filtering through and slowly rocking the bench.

The right soundtrack can turn a situation around. 60 revolutions per minute,

I’m standing in the dust storm outside college for the past half hour. I’m now groovin’ while walking up and down. Sneering at any auto which passes me by and blows dust in my face. My fingers are dancing as I call out to them. I cross over and light a cigarette and steal an auto from under the nose of the guys standing there. I haven’t studied for my assignment, haven’t bought or made anything for my dad. Sitting in a darkened room with the two blessed souls who came to watch Meghe Dhaka Tara with me was an oddly intimate experience. 3 of us depressed off our asses, eating chips. College actually looks good when it's empty and dark. The sky is orange and the metro passes by above like a glow worm, the misfit palm trees look dignified in silhouette. People on the street appear to be shadows in swirls of dust and high beam headlights from low floor buses.

Balbir Bhaiyya has seen me doing this for the past year and a half. He’s always amused and sympathetic and ignores my messages about Madhuri Dixit’s sex appeal which were meant for someone else and he tells me about his Judo champ days and his love for Satyajit Ray. The auto driver with the kajal lined eyes looks back at the hooded weirdo as she lights another cigarette. It burns out and the light is yet to turn green. But my assignment is canceled. In the film, Khukhi’s brother tells her that suffering silently is for idiots. But we all glorify and romanticize suffering, especially those of us who haven’t really suffered. Like me, like my Guru Dutt idolizing professor in his pre-prof days as a broke ass student with hair down till his back, hopping buses in the big bad city, being mistaken for a girl by lafangas. He, now do bachon ka baap, still walks into class with his shawl fluttering dramatically behind him and stoically downplays his bleeding arm when he cuts himself while trying to open windows. Mard ko dard nahi hota. Underdog world strike!

Girls in the metro are dancing to choreographed danceworx type steps as their friends sitting on the floor giggle and correct them.

I return home to find a cousin I didn’t know existed in my room fucking around with my stuff. She’s small. And a girl. All I fucking wanted to do was have a hot shower, eat something, watch Mad Men, not read for class tomorrow and pass the fuck out. And I had to listen to my cousin’s weirdly conservative and sexist husband blather on and be surveyed by the cousin herself, looking at me up and down in that judging way that those ones have and express her surprise at everything I do. My haircut, oh, my nose is pierced, oh I’m wearing banjara payals, oh so I study history, what am I going to do after that? You don’t know? Then my mother was being motherly and talking proudly about me as if I’m a renaissance woman or something. Then cousin had to agree and be all “aaj kal toh bahut options hote hain”, the husband said something to the effect that ultimately it doesn’t really matter what the girl does, I mean, of course she should have a work life of her own, but as long as it helps her get a good husband.  

Now I’m eating makkhan chawal and listening to Chet Baker, both of which are sexy.