The one in which it's all about loving your parents

Oct 28

I'm listening to Lou singing Walk on the Wild Side and sitting in the balcony in my brother's place in Sheffield. His voice is somehow melancholy and reassuring and kind. It puts me in some sort of lull even as the cold winds are ripping through my bones. His dying feels like something has gone far out of reach, I don't know what.

The Arctic Monkeys are playing in Sheffield on the 16th, but its already long sold out. I had many heartbreaks yesterday but I'm content to pace the balcony and sing 'Do I Wanna Know' for the time being. But Low are playing here too maybe I could go for that.

On the telly (yes telly), there's some soap my parents watch. There's a guy who just pretended to jump off a cliff in front of his fiance, then she became hysterical and started crying and he appeared saying 'this time it was just drama, next time it won't be' (they have subtitles for soaps here). Disturbing as shit.

I've been playing Ruzzle like a maniac. Currently playing with someone called fatdad1 who is kicking my ass.

Going anywhere with your parents can be a nightmare. Specially when your dad is the Most Infuriating Man On The Planet and your mum is a bit of a space cadet like yourself. Ma is wearing a jacket that makes her look like a babushka and walk like Salman Khan, she's slowly hobbling up a slope and pulling the knit hat over her silver hair. Dad is wearing a furry dog ear hat that makes him look like a Wes Anderson character (and he's dressed also like a typical Pahari gent, tweed jacket and umbrella &cetera) and walks like Charlie Chaplin, often fumbling and eating plums from his little plastic bag. I'm wearing fire engine red combat boots and a black pea coat, you can spot me as the one pulling her sleeves over her hands and looking back repeatedly, exasperated and awkward, at her parents.

Oct 30

Woke up to the sound of hooving on my head and dreams of being replaced by someone 'less naive'. Maybe i should drink less coffee and be less of a cat when i return (i hang around the office high on caffeine, dealing it to others and meowing and pawing at people.)  I guess curly haired boss was right i do have job insecurity, i just don't want be replaced by some twat named Nitin. I think i have that fear of missing out thing. Or rather like a ghost i dream of things unfinished. Jobs, exams, papers, trips with friends.

Yesterday morning i woke to the sounds of parents fighting. I hid under the covers and played Ruzzle to which i am now wholly addicted. Like Shravan Kumar i have been lugging my parents across Sheffield trying to make sure they don't get run over or push one another in front of a bus. That's an exaggeration. Neither is homicidal. My father is cantankerous with a capital C and often gives me mini rage aneurysms but then those are tempered by many pangs of guilt and years of training in growing thick skin. For those of you who have never seen me angry, you can take comfort in the fact that most of the people who are quite close to my have seldom or not at all seen me really angry. That's reserved mostly for family. When I was a kid my dad used to tell me, after a particularly bad shouting session that we only get angry at the ones we love, 'sadak pe kisi bacche pe thodi na chillaoonga, tumhare bhale ke liye hi toh keh raha hoon'. Well yeah.... whtevr dad. But yeah, it it strange sometimes when I catch myself admonishing him for something now.

So we walk on through city centers and shops and past students on bikes and students striding confidently by and students waiting at bus stops. There are a lot of students btw. I think I'd like it here if I had to be here for a while.

So I don't have a schengen visa and hence I cant go visit any of my friends because the Brits are exclusivist chuts (anyone who's reading i don't really mean it god save the queen. Rani mata ki jai please hamse dugna lagan may lena). Or just because i am bad at planning. But my one friend in Oxford is around so I might go visit him and pick up an inferiority complex or two. It'll be good because he's a desi uncle and he becomes even more of khulla saand when drunk (ref: Kotia in the Bhasadnama post). Then here's Jimmy Neutron who we could go visit and some more friends are around I think.

Oct 31

(00:12)

Everyone's asleep. I've washed the dishes, put away the pasta I cooked, cleared up the counter and am drinking whiskey and watching the making of BBC's Life. This Scottish cameraman just jumped underwater through a hole in the ice, in Antarctica.  They say it took about 4 months and 100 dives to produce the 10 minutes of footage we see in the DVD.

 

(21:19)

I'm feeling off today. I don't know why but I think each of us is succumbing to some sort of little depression since yesterday, one clinical, one physical and one just self induced. Of course Inspector Clouseau is not the least affected since his philosophy remains 'tension lene ka nahi, dene ka'.

Now everyone's retired to different rooms to recoup. I have cooked thai curry and made salad and will make strawberry wala dahi later. 

I had told myself that in this month I'll read, I'll write, I'll take photographs. In the past four days I've mostly played Ruzzle, made too many fucking trips to Tesco and bought too many groceries and grit my teeth a lot. Things aren't as psychotic as I'm making it sound. It's just the little irritants of everyday life with family that I got unused to in the past month because I hardly saw my parents all day. And at home there's enough space for all of us to sink into our own routines. But when you're forced to spend time together, the questions during movies,  during conversations that don't include you, during everything, the unwanted advice, the Clouseau-like flaps and then blaming someone else for them, the running commentary on passersby - really get on your nerves.washing

The best part (the definitive best part, obviously) is that most houses have tubs (yes, this is based on research). Tubs are a godsend. Today I listened to QOTSA's 'Like Clockwork' and took a long bath and just basked in the hot water and thought of nothing.

I must say the city is pretty dead on Halloween, at least whatever of it I can see from my window, which is not much, haha. Ma keeps saying if it was a festival in India people would be all over the place. I'm disappointed there aren't even the friendly local drunks tumbling around over each other, vomiting or fighting.

My other household zen is washing the dishes which was again interrupted by Clouseau emerging in his pajamas (courtesy Air India from 5 years ago) and peeping outside and giving comments on people returning home from Halloween parties (they weren't even that exciting, nurse and ASBO jumpsuit dude, dunno if the jumpsuit was a reference to Misfits, which would be +1 worthy). Then I finished the dishes and stood on the balcony for a while to try and catch some air since today wasn't that cold. I'm just wearing a thin sweater. There was a well dressed (navy blue pea coat with shiny metallic buttons, dark brown pants, cream coloured converse) black guy who was the only one walking by, his slim form disappeared in silhouette beyond Velocity and I returned inside to the warm bed and last few games of Ruzzle.