Category Archives: Myself

Myself

Something That Happened

The route to my house involves a transfer at Culver City Transit Center. Usually, if I time it right, I get the second bus minutes after the first bus arrive there. The sweetest days are the ones when both buses come into the Transit Center at the same time, and I breezily hop out of the first and walk over to the second, not even looking up from the iPad, knocking the old ladies aside and elbowing the other commuters just so I can get in and take my pick of the seats. My experience in India makes me extra-aggressive in other countries.

Actually, I am sweet and totally let the old ladies get in first. Just so you know.

This happened on one of those evenings when things weren’t going right. One of those awful days at work that makes you want to pick up a baseball bat, then toss it aside and pick up a scimitar instead, wave it a few times just to hear that nice swishy sound, and then turn to the baseball bat again. And then you proceed to trash your computer into teeny-weeny pieces of glass, plastic and metal, shouting “Who’s your daddy now, huh?” over and over again. Yes, and as the clock strikes 6, you strike it right back and walk out with your head held high.

A day like this would feel a little better (and kinder to the universe at large) if I managed to catch the second bus immediately when the first bus reached the Transit Center. If only. That did not happen, and I gnashed my teeth in impotent rage when I stepped down from the first bus to see the second one turning around the corner. I took a deep breath, allowing Nature to chuckle and savor its moment in the sun. The next bus was 45 minutes away. I walked toward the bench and sat down, heaving a sigh.

Any other day, I would have sat there and people-watched to my heart’s content. Usually that time of the day would see a lot of shoppers milling around. Chubby young women and nattily dressed men waiting for other buses. A bunch of Japanese girls, dressed to kill, chattering away on their pink and white cellphones. A skateboarder or two, a few bikers, executives holding their evening lattes and briefcases. You get all kinds at the bus stop, every single day, a familiar pattern of faces and dresses. But that summer day, I was too pissed to notice anyone around me. I sat in a corner of the metal bench willing the minutes to pass by faster, Eminem spitting murder and mayhem in my ears. I probably had a very don’t-mess-with-me look on my face, because no one came and sat next to me.

And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw this little girl.

She was there with her mother, and the lady was sitting on the other end of the bench, far away from me. The little girl must have been five or six years old, and she was, like any other young lady her age, trying to extricate as much joy as she could from her surroundings. She ran after one of the skateboarders, stopped suddenly and grinned at someone, and then felt embarrassed and ran to her mother. She spent some time investigating the underside of the bench, discovered that she could crawl from one end to the other, and began playing hide-and-seek with anyone who looked at her.

I did not. I was feeling too antisocial to let the sight of something like that make me feel any better. If you know what I mean. I went back to staring at the distance and let reality fade away into the thump and growl of my earphones.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the little girl stop and stare at me.

I looked at her. I looked away from her. And then looked again.

She was still staring.

Any other day, I would have smiled at her. A nice friendly smile that would have acknowledged her presence and reassured her of her importance in the fabric of life at the bus stop. Maybe she would have smiled back, looked away and then would go  back to her playful running around. None of what followed would have happened. But I did not. I looked at her without moving a muscle on my face, and then looked away again. It was nothing personal, believe me. As far as I was concerned, all the cumulative cuteness in the universe would not have gotten me out of my blue funk that evening.

As you may imagine, this just made the girl try harder to get my attention. She began to run around me, giggle loudly, stop for a while and look at me again. Wanting me to look at her and smile, or at least acknowledge her presence. Yes, it was obvious. No, I did not relent.

After some time, she quietened down and went towards her mother, who was talking animatedly to someone else. Being a little curious, I turned slightly towards her to see what she would do. She took a bunch of papers from out of her mother’s purse, and came over and plonked down right next to me. Now, it was her turn to pretend like she had nothing to do. I watched her as she flipped through the sheets of paper in her hand, each of which was a drawing, presumably by her. They were childish scrawls done in crayon. A house and a tree. A bird. Trees on a beach. An apple. She flipped through each of them slowly, with deliberation, like she was trying to come to a decision. When time she came to the last one, the apple, she glanced up at me, and took the drawing out. And held it out to me.

I had no idea what to do.

I could sense that some of the other adults at the bus stop noticed the goings-on, some of them smiling to themselves, others just curious about what would happen next. I flicked my head towards the girl’s mother, who by then had stopped her conversation, and was staring at her daughter trying to offer a stranger a drawing. Everybody seemed eager to see what I did, how I would respond.

I folded. I took the paper from her. Looked at it. Looked at it some more. And then I handed it back to her. She shook her head, and ran back to her mother. Looked back at me again and smiled.

I remembered something, something I had forgotten to do that morning. I took the piece of paper, unzipped my bag and put it inside. Zipped it up. I looked at my little art benefactor, looked her right in the eye. Then I turned to my bag, and stared at it. Stared at it long and hard and even frowned a little, like I was willing something to happen. She looked puzzled, and more than a little bemused at my strange behavior.

And then I unzipped my bag, took out the apple that I had packed as a snack that morning and had forgotten to eat at the office, and crunched into it.

I believe it was the expression on her face, as well as the moment in itself, that caused the spontaneous outburst of laughter and the scattered applause.

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Myself, Travel

Car-mic Complexities

Most people say that Los Angeles is a bad place to be in if you don’t have a car. That’s just people who do not live in this city. People who live here refuse to believe you when they learn you do not own one. There’s shocked silence, and a hesitant query about how you do your groceries, or go to the office. Much wonderment about your mental (and financial) state. By the time you have been here a few months, you realize that in terms of your social status, being without a car is just one step above being homeless.

But good lord, if you think not having a car causes shock and awe, you should look at reactions when I mention that I take the bus. “THE BUS!!” – people exclaim. “Aren’t they – like – unsafe?” Everyone thinks that buses are filled with weirdos and homeless people who are out to kill, rape or spray body fluids on you. I do not claim omniscience, but nearly 11 months of regular commute has made me realize that most of these assumptions are far-fetched. Most LA people who take the bus are normal. There is the occasional person that smells of pee or the religious nut that babbles about how Jesus will save all of us if we are nice. I even got an arguer this one time, a lady next to me who kept having an argument with herself, a very loud one. (She won at the end, I think. Well, one of her.)

The only problem with buses in Los Angeles is the time these lumbering, polite hulks take to travel. That, and their low frequency at non-rush-hour times, including weekends. Buses on most routes travel close to empty. I don’t have to worry about lack of seats or road rage when travelling, and I get enough read-time. There’s the occasional interesting person you meet, either at the bus-stop or in the bus. There were two different people reading The Hunger Games just a few weeks ago, and we had nice, albeit brief conversations about Peeta’s true intentions – I kept a straight face and did not reveal spoilers, for the record. I’ve also seen a lot of the parts of LA that are considered seedy and unsafe in the nights, thanks to bus transfers. Waiting for a bus at 2 AM in Downtown LA is a peculiar experience that one cannot describe in words. It felt adventurous, but was probably a little stupid. Those may have been gunshots. Or just cars backfiring, I can’t tell.

Taking the bus has also cultivated a few lifestyle tics in me. Like the need to carry a few dollar bills and quarters everywhere I go. My hand involuntarily goes inside my right pocket, when I am leaving the house – key, phone, dollar bills, change. Bus passes? Not really too helpful with the different services – Culver City Bus, Metro Transit, Santa Monica Big Blue. The iPad’s always at hand, and I attach 15 minutes to every journey. Which happens to be the time it takes to get from my apartment to the closest Metro bus stop.

“Yet”, I always remember to add. “I do not own a car yet.” “When are you getting one?”, people ask. “I should, I know,” I say. I don’t tell them that I am postponing this arcane real-life ritual as much as I can. I am not sure why. Probably I have never really been attracted to cars, or tried to figure them out. Until very recently, every car looked the same to me – the only variants my mind could decipher were ‘frog-like’ or ‘bat-mobile-like’. I owned a scooter for a few years in Hyderabad, which served the purpose of getting from point A to point B very well. Except when it rained, but everyone knows that when it rains, you are supposed to sit at home, make hot onion pakodas[ref]http://i673.photobucket.com/albums/vv91/madhuram/spring-onion-pakoda.jpg[/ref] and watch movies or read. Fact is, yes, the lack of obsession about buying a car was also  because my money was always earmarked for Other Things[ref]http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=11998[/ref]. One could make do without a car, but not a Dringenberg Sandman page. It helped that I stayed a few minutes away from the office. The only problem with everyday life was negotiating with auto-rickshaw drivers, but I stayed in Bangalore for a year. That inured me to meter manipulation and made me ruthless with scathing remarks about time and distance.

All right, fine, I agree, I make too much light of this. Of course it would be awesome to own a car. I could then go attend concerts every day. Go to Meltdown Comics every Thursday for the Nerd Melt shows. Heck, attend every fucking event I want to go to, without having to negotiate bus routes in my head. Head over to Artesia whenever I want some biryani. Do stuff. Do more stuff than what I do at the moment, at the very least. I generally give up on plans on weekends just because I would have to plan bus routes and keep some time aside for the inevitable delays. (“Not true”, Inner Voice exclaims. “You’re just lazy.” You’re right, Inner Voice, now shut up and think of what will happen in Episode 3 of Sherlock. We still have the last part of the weekend to watch it, right? “Oh, all right. Now hurry up with this tiresome self-obsessed post of yours.” Hmm, ok. Shall we? “Let’s.”)

I should have tried this last conversation with myself in a bus.

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Books, Myself

Book Meme

1. What’s your favorite time of day to read?

In the morning, when I am on my way to the office. I get about 45 minutes, and if I am reading something really interesting, I just stagger my travel-time so that I wait longer at the bus-stop. That helps set the tone for the day, really.

2. Do you read during meals?

Yes. And no. Depends on the company I keep, really. When I worked in my previous company, I treated lunchtime like it was special, would not go out with anyone, and infallibly took a book to read. I did not read during dinner because that would be rude. I used to think eating by itself is a waste of time, unless you’re doing something else along with chewing your food. My parents hated that.

Now, I only read during lunch if I am in the middle of something very interesting. Most of the time, I go out to lunch with colleagues, so reading’s out of the question. If I delay lunch sometimes because of work, I still read.

3. Do you have bad habits while reading?

When I read a book that’s exciting, time passes by faster. My eyes dart through the pages faster as well. Happens to all of us. But you know what sucks? When there’s a chapter break at a crucial moment in the narrative. What happens then is that my eyes, out of their own accord, jump to the end of the chapter and read the last few words. This drops a nice monkey-wrench into the few seconds of build-up that would have been my due. I hate this habit, and I wish I could control it, but it feels impossible. (Sad panda face)

Once upon a time, I chewed on (and swallowed) corners of pages. True story.

4. How many hours a day would you say you read?

Again, depends on the book(s) I am reading. Can vary between 2 hours to maybe 7 hours (I’ve done read-binges from 9 PM to 3 AM). I read more in the weekend, if I am not doing anything else.

5. Do you read more or less now than you did, say, 10 years ago?

I have been reading more over the last year, thanks to the iPad and the iPhone. Been doing 2-3 books every week, and way more comics/manga. Also, I read different books at different times of the day, just to keep things interesting.

6. Do you consider yourself a speed reader?

I’ve done 900-page books in a day. You do the math.

7. If you could have any superpower related to books, what would it be?

The ability to carry my physical collection with me wherever I go. Remembering lines that I like verbatim. The ability to super-sample a book before I read it, without any spoilers.

(As you must have figured out already, I think about super-powers a lot. Just in case I need to pick one on the spot.)

8. Do you carry a book with you everywhere you go?

I carry an iPad everywhere I go. Which means I carry thousands of books with me. I win.

9. What kind of book do you prefer to read?

Something unlike the one that I just finished reading. Unless it’s the first in a trilogy or a series and I need to know what happens next.

10. How old were you when you got your first library card?

Six and a half. 1986 was a long time ago, goddammit. It was at the Tezpur district library, which had a ripping children’s book collection, and I had a really cool elder-brother-figure who took me to the library once a week, on his bicycle.

11. What’s the oldest book you have in your collection? (Oldest physical copy? Longest in the collection? Oldest copyright?)

The oldest book would be an 1893 copy of Charles Reade’s The Cloister And the Hearth. It belonged to a relative, and I took it from him because one of our English readers had an excerpt from it involving a hunter and a bear. The rest of the book was pretty disappointing, if I remember correctly.

I still have a copy of Ukrainian Folk Tales from 1987, that I bought with my own money. But the oldest may be a copy of Indira Gandhi, by Swraj Paul, that my father gifted me on my sixth birthday. I have spoken about this before.

12. Do you read in bed? Do you like reading in bed?

Yes. Ouch. I read in bed in strange positions, one old favorite being lying back, lifting my legs against the wall, and laying the book against my knees.

13. Do you write in your books?

No. HELL NO!

Though I have taken to highlighting interesting paragraphs within iBooks, nowadays. But it’s usually pointless, because I do not refer to them later on.

14. If you had one piece of advice to a new reader, what would it be?

Just one? Let me go with three.

  • You’ve wasted a lot of time being a non-reader. Make up for that lost time by reading more.
  • Read the classics first. There is a reason why they are the classics.
  • If you do not like the first 10 pages of a book, find out someone you know and whose taste you respect and ask them if it’s worth reading. If they cannot convince you, move on and read something else.

 15. What was the last book you read? What are you reading now?

The first book I read this year was I Am Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, which was a tremendously entertaining story of Google from the director of marketing and brand management. This forms a sort of companion to In the Plex that I read last year, which was sort of a from-the-outside look at the company.

I finished Killing Floor after that, the first of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. I liked it, but I am not sure if I should read any more of them because a friend tells me they are more of the same.

I am now reading The Strain by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro, which begins really well.

There’s a whole bunch of comics I am reading as well, including the Noble Causes Archives, Absolute Death and the Walter Simonson Thor Omnibus. The latter two are rereads.

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Myself, Weirdness

The Sucky Post

The vacuum cleaner at home went kaput around Christmas. For an interminable amount of time, the room-mate and I dilly-dallied about fixing it – do we spend 200-odd dollars fixing a five-year old appliance or buy a new one? And simply buying a new one wouldn’t do, it had to be a good one. Something that made us want to clean up. Well, it didn’t have to, but we talked about it all the same.

On Tuesday, ‘Drea the Awesome informed me that fixing the old one was out of the question. It was too old, the repairman said, and it couldn’t suck any harder. I know that last line sounded ridiculous, deal with it. I agreed that I should be the one to buy the vacuum cleaner, it was only fair because 80% of the items in the house belonged to her anyway. On Wednesday, ‘Drea pinged me again. “I have the perfect model”, she said. All the reviews on Amazon seemed to agree with her choice, but $500 for a vacuum cleaner? If it were possible to slowly back out towards the exit when you are in a GTalk conversation, I would have done that.  My Indian self decided to opt for Civil Disobedience instead – let’s just not bring up the topic again, I thought, until the house got really really dirty, and then maybe we would buy a cheap-ass vacuum cleaner and be done with it.

But I read some more of the reviews. And the world re-aligned itself in my head, slowly.

It helped that on Thursday, ‘Drea pinged again. “20% discount coupon at Best Buy”, she said. Say the word ‘discount’ to an Indian guy, and things become much, much clearer. “Fine”, I said. “Let’s do it.” On Friday, we realized that there was an even better deal to be had at Costco. All self-doubt vanished. I actually began to look forward to Saturday, just so that we could buy the damn thing. And we did. And came back home and finally took down the Christmas tree, and unleashed the new Dyson DC25 in my room. My heart sang along with the vroom of the motor, and I moonwalked as dust rattled into the canister, swooshing in from awkward recesses and stubborn little corners. And it even worked on wooden floors! ‘Drea and I took turns cleaning the living room, where pine needles and cat fur jostled against each other, and where, under normal circumstances, one would need herculean levels of self-control to not fling the previous vacuum cleaner against the wall. It felt…empowering. Suckadelic.

Or maybe it’s just my brain trying to calm myself down after this act of financial cold-bloodedness.

By next Wednesday, 50% of the items in the house will belong to me. That’s because 134 cubic feet of books and comics (weight: 1100 kgs) land at my doorstep. And with that, my books officially have had more adventures than me. Most of them were bought in the US, and have traveled from here to India, and now they’re back in the USA again. I occasionally freak out at the thought, because 134 cubic feet feels like a lot of space in a two-bedroom apartment, but deep, calming breaths are being taken. I will be fine. Everything will be fine. Right?

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Myself, Travel

My Big Fat Spanish Vacation: Barcelona Day 1, the second half

Remember the time we did not own cellphones and were still able to coordinate times and places at which to meet people?

I don’t, either. It’s terrifying when you are not connected to any phone network and are supposed to meet someone. Especially at an airport. Even though you know the flight number and the time of arrival, there’s always this worry that you’re standing at the wrong spot and and the people you’re waiting for have arrived already and are looking for you elsewhere and you are doomed to miss each other until one of you has the bright idea of going to an internet cafe and sending an email saying exactly where they are.

Ah, technology, you make frightened little gerbils of us all.

But nothing like that happened when I went to pick my friends up at Barcelona airport on Friday night. They were supposed to arrive at 9 PM, and I landed up there much earlier, had a coffee, read a bit of Hunger Games. And waited. And felt panicky when they did not come out by 9:15. Asked a lady standing next to me if she was waiting for the same flight. She was. I asked her if she was sure this was the gate. It was. I was about to ask her if she was doubly sure, but she grabbed my shoulders and asked me to relax, because she was waiting for the same flight. I did, and took a deep breath. Of course the conversation would have gone a little less surreal if we had been speaking the same language – she was speaking Spanish, then switched to Romanian, and then tried broken English. I oscillated between English and sign language.  It worked like a charm.

And then they were there, and there was much happiness and the occasional arm-punching. Thanks to my new-found knowledge of the Barcelona subway system, the four of us were considerably less agitated than I was in the day by the time we reached the hostel, also because they were travelling with sensible amounts of luggage. We rested for a bit, and then headed back toward La Rambla, debating what should be done for the night – Cristi insisted we go bunzi bunzi (a phrase that, when coupled with a flick of the wrist and the eyebrow, conveys just the right amount of eagerness to go shake a leg at the local nightclub) but Laura and Gabi wanted to get touristy, preferably near the beach. We decided to postpone the decision until after dinner.

La Rambla spoils you in terms of culinary choice. We window-shopped through the numerous restaurants looking at menus and prices, the availability of sangria being a major criteria. The place we selected had an Indian-looking waiter serving us – turned out he was from Pakistan, and he alerted me to the fact that Barcelona had a profusion of Pakistanis, compared to Indians. (Sure enough, we met a lot of them later that night on the streets, almost all of them selling beer and weed to tourists.) We ordered a bunch of tapas, a liter of sangria that came in a clay jug, with four multicolored straws and two portions of paella. By the time we were done with the tapas, it was clear that we could not finish the paella, but we persevered. Laura poked suspiciously at what appeared to be mushrooms but turned out to be calamari. (It did not help that I insisted it was mushrooms until the waiter clarified that it was indeed calamari) There were moments of hesitation at the mussels and the shrimps; but all in all, a most successful inaugural dinner.

Both Cristi and Laura had been in Barcelona before, while Gabi and I were newcomers. The two of them took the lead and suggested that we head towards the beach, which was a not-too-short not-too-long distance away from where we were. As we walked down La Rambla, the air smelled of marijuana and cigarette smoke. Every nightclub in town seemed eager to welcome us inside, delicately-painted women and swaggering men armed with flyers and discount coupons proclaiming how much fun we would have. We valiantly sidestepped them and marched ahead. And launched into intense technical discussions – haha, as if. We laughed, and talked, and made silly jokes at the expense of the peaceful bronze lions at the Monumento a Colón (literally, the Columbus monument, a tall monument that marks the place where Christopher Columbus returned after his first voyage to the Americas). There are incriminating photographs of Gabi involved, but they will not be made public.

And finally, we got to the beach, which was completely deserted, and cold as fuck. One man sat by himself, contentedly staring at the roaring waves. We walked around the sand a bit, until the other three were emboldened by the Indian guy taking off his shoes and wading into the water. We went nuts. The sea was freezing at first but it wasn’t hard to get used to the cold. Though photographic evidence proves that Cristi was especially perturbed with the state of affairs, especially when he found out that the sand was colder than the sea! Laura did her sea-maiden thing – heading out by herself into the waves, while we whooped and hollered and did what seaside-deprived individuals do.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a dip in ice-cold water, followed by a sprint across cold sand while holding your shoes in hand is bound to evoke strong feelings of homesickness, coupled with a marked distaste for long walks of any kind. We took a cab as soon as we could.

Our cab driver, as the law of averages suggested, was a talkative fellow. He got all the more loquacious once he realized that the pretty blonde girl sitting in the backseat knew Spanish and the hapless, semi-frozen Indian guy in the front did not. Oh well, at least the ride back was entertaining.

Except once we got inside the room, the ladies asked me if I had any porn comics on the iPad. Which meant that instead of going and taking a shower, I sat down and pointed out the joyful wonders contained in Lost Girls. And this was totally not a gratuitous Moore reference, I swear.

(to be continued)

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