In Defense Of Wordy Words (and People)...

I for one have never really understood the kerfuffle over inclusion of the word ‘selfie’ in the Oxford Dictionary (MS Word underlines this word marking it as a typographical error as I write). A successful language is one that is capacious and elastic to accommodate such neologisms, and English is renowned for being as such. Neologisms and borrowings have only enriched the language.

Words are organic. They do have a life of their own—and apparently lifetimes too. Words are born, evolve and die. There are words which get phased out over a period of time from the corpus, and are eventually forgotten. Some words, like some of the more flexible species of animals, adapt and assume new meanings and connotations—sometimes complete opposite of the original ones. Take for instance the word ‘timorous’: Shakespeare (in Othello) used timorous to mean fearsome/fear-inspiring; now it has come to mean fearful/trepid. Sometimes the same word has two exactly opposite meanings and both the meanings co-exist, as in case of the words cleave or dust (such words are called contranyms).  It’s through these changes and adaptations that words manage to survive for long.   

 Changes occur not only in terms of meanings but also parts of speech (so many words which were strictly nouns once are freely used as verbs now) and class-associations. The word ‘brainy’ would be scoffed at by a pedant for its slangy and lowbrow feel, fifty years ago. Can ‘Hopefully’ be used to mean ‘it is to be hoped’ or should it be used only to mean full of hope? Can ‘decimate’ be used to mean drastic reduction, or should it only be used to mean a reduction of the order of one-tenth? And other such debates have continued for many years now, and, um, hopefully, will continue evermore. 

Although usage guides thrive on such technicalities and neologisms, and ensure that the discussions around them don’t fizzle out, little sympathy is shown toward the words which are in the twilight of their lifespan or which have already met with their end. While I am all for welcoming fresh infusions in the language, I am a slightly averse to the idea of looking down upon the usage of an archaic or refined word as an instance of elitism.  

Ernest Hemmingway disapproved of Nathaniel Hawthrone's style of writing, for he found Hawthrone's usage of obsolete words or the "words that are not alive in the language" annoying. If we take the formerly used animal-analogy further: doesn't it, then, become incumbent on some of us to help the words which are becoming extinct—just as the wildlife activists do with the endangered species. You may argue that this seems like bit of a stretch. Whereas extinction of endangered species could create an ecological imbalance, disappearance of a handful of words would not have any such effect. Which is another way of saying that unless they are of utility, it is fine for words to vanish. 

But then, is the purpose of language only utilitarian. Language, and by extension literature and civilisation, would have been so drab. Is it inappropriate for writers to make an attempt to help preserve 'endangered words'? Should this kind of activism be cast off as deliberate obfuscation or undue display of verbiage? 

I remember the ‘wordy’ debate the use of word crepuscular by the Booker-prize winning author Eleanor Catton in an article had kindled last year. A reader of Paris Review had alleged that the usage of the words such as ‘crepuscular’ was an instance of exercising literary snobbery by the author. Eleanor subsequently wrote an essay to vindicate herself. 

Why can’t we open ourselves to the magic and beauty of words? Why can’t we push ourselves a little when it comes to learning new words? Why can’t we see a well placed and well used instance of a slightly uncommon word as an opportunity of enriching our vocabulary rather than as an undue display of verbiage by the writer/speaker. While we may embrace selfie and twerking freely, why can’t we also appreciate temerity or banausic? 

There is something so tempting in the crunch of crepuscular when uttered, that is missing in shadowy. There’s something so mouthful about surreptitious that is missing in secretive. It’s as though the word claims your mouth and works every muscle of your mouth before plopping out of it. Second hand can never produce the same effect as vicarious. Mixing can never be as sonorous as mingling. Sublime is not the same as beautiful (ask Edmund Burke; poor fellow wrote an entire treatise explaining the difference!)

Not very long ago Chetan Bhagat in one of his columns had mocked the usage of words such as dexterity and temerity, and had suggested that they are outdated and that they are not required in the job-market. Now, I am not the kind who’d crinkle their nose if I find someone reading Bhagat. For that matter, I have no bone to pick with Mr Bhagat. I don’t want to jump on to the Bhagat-Bashing bandwagon which, in some sense, is a way of asserting your intellectual superiority. Not everyone needs to, or has the tenacity, to deal with the meandering plots of Rushdie. Not everyone is disposed to appreciate, or has the patience to, endure layered and glacial narratives of the Arundhati Roys and Anita Desais. And thus it is very well for such a person to pick up a Bhagat and enjoy, well, a quickie. In spirit of disclosure, I must admit I myself had read his debut novel and even enjoyed it then. There is a need and market for all kinds.  And I think that’s the best thing about books: they are not obtrusive. You don’t like it, you don’t buy it or shut it. It’s as simple as that. Unlike Yo Yo Honey Singh’s songs (the horror, the horror!), Chetan’s books won’t haunt you from the gym to the night-club.  

What bothers me to some degree, however, is the whiff of this extremely narrow and utilitarian approach toward language that rises from the said column: Only the portions of language which are consumable in the job-market are worth retaining, while the rest is something that the literary elite can go to devil with. And again, this view would have been in some ways justified had Mr Bhagat been an investment banker that he earlier was, but coming from a writer it sounds a bit worrying. 

I hasten to add that this rant is not entirely impersonal. As a trainer who deals with host of students and working professionals on any given day, the most common and constant gripe I get to hear from my trainees is about the heaps of “new and difficult” words they have to learn. With some apprehension (I don’t wish to generalise), I also venture to add that most of them are engineers.  From what I understand they suffer from the same what’s-the-use-of-knowing-them-when-you’re-not-gonna-use-them syndrome: the same transactional approach. Everything, including words, has to have use; otherwise it will be looked at as burden. I find this approach a bit problematic. I keep explaining to them how they’re looking at the whole thing wrong; how they ought to change the way they perceive words; how they need to start liking and appreciating words if they want to be friends with words. Yes, words have feelings too. If you like them, they like you back. And if you don’t, they, too, are under no obligation to like you.

Sometimes, out of utter desperation, I have to invent and borrow reasons which could incentivise their enriched vocabulary: I tell them how good command over words can boost their dating prospects (this works in some cases, I must admit). But other times I get to face a rather tepid response from them when I am discussing new words with them. I remember once almost losing my temper in the class when the trainees wore indifferent and stony expressions on their respective faces as I discussed the so-called new and difficult words. Of course I apologised to them shortly thereafter, but when I reflected on the episode I realised that my discomfort sprung from the different ways we perceive words. Words did not animate them the way they animate me. A new word does not spark a frisson in them as it does in me. They see words as a task, an onerous one at that. They see these words as a short-term commitment and not a long-term investment. They don’t realise how the knowledge of these words can be their doorway to great deal of knowledge. Thriving on Buzzfeed the listicle culture, they might as well demand replacement of words with GIFs!

 Were I in their place, I would gobble up all those new words with utmost alacrity—as I do even now. And I am sure there are many others who have much deeper affection and admiration for words than I may ever have. Wouldn’t branding such people as literary snobs be a hasty judgement? 

(P.S. Honest confession: I wanted to use banausic instead of drab and logomachy instead of wordy debate, but I refrained lest I should be frowned upon.)

Rishikesh

I write this in Rishikesh. The holy land. The Tapasthali as it is called. The last time I was here was about twenty years ago. This trip, like the last one too, was equally capricious. This too, like the last one, was a journey by road. I must have been all of six or seven when the last one was undertaken. To my seven year old, callow mind the idea of travelling to a land so far by car had seemed so overwhelming. Cars can only be used to traverse city-length distances, I used to think. In this trip, however, I had no clue of what the destination was until we’d reached midway. It was then, upon my pesky insistence, that the destination was revealed to me. “Just pack your bag and sit in the car,” was the instruction given by this friend who planned the trip. I must admit that when finally the revelation was made, waves of excitement and surprise ran through my body. All the memories from the last trip came rushing back. 

Ganga—The Ganges!

Twenty years have passed since I had seen Ganga flowing in all her magnificence and glory. From the room I was staying in, one could see Ganga flowing through the foothills of the Subhadra hill range (so I am told). One could see the hills in the backdrop—or should I say not see them. These hills remain perpetually shrouded in the clouds—their summits certainly do. One can only faintly trace their silhouettes. It feels as though they are too proud of their beauty and think the world (and people like I) to be too poor a judge of their beauty, and hence in their ancient wisdom choose to remain veiled. Or maybe they actually contain the proverbial ancient and secret wisdom which they want to conceal from prying eyes. The mystique only augments their charm though. Whatever may be the reason, the sight of these tall and bosky hills wrapped in a misty blanket is spell-casting.

At their base flows Ganga. There are some subjects about whom one can’t talk without sounding cliché, and Ganges is one such subject. She splays and meanders, after having cavorted in the difficult and mountainous terrain farther up North. The volume of water and pace with which it flows is staggering.   

As a Vaishnav one is reminded of all the epics whose past is believed to be intertwined with that of Ganges. Mahabharat, if my memory serves me well, was composed on the banks of Ganga in Badrikashram. Bhagwatam—the crest-jewel of Puranas—was narrated by Shukadev Paramhans to King Parikshit, the grandson of Pandavas on the banks of Ganga in Naimish-aaranya. Lord Ram was a descendent of King Bhagirath, who is believed to have been responsible for the descent of Ganges from the heavens. Pleased by his tough penance and upon his insistence that Lord Shiv agreed to hold Ganges in his locks so as to temper her fierce flow. 

Such is the significance of Ganges. She is linked to all these ancient tales. She’s been a witness to all of them. Originating from the toenail of Lord Narayan and washing the dense locks of Lord Rudra, she descends on this mundane world. Gurgling fervently, she carves and curves her way through the Himalyan foothills. She is so ancient and yet ever so fresh. 

You cannot help but feel at home in the vicinity of Ganga. You feel you belong here. Her swift flow and vivacity seem to suggest as if she’s replete with tales to tell, of the mountains, of the ancient past, of her current sorry state. It’s a disgrace that we’ve managed to corrupt something as pristine as her. 

But Ganga—no matter how bad things may be for her—seems to give one hope. One can still draw an uncanny solace from seeing her flowing. One feels that things are not as bad, at least till is Ganga is around. 

The one thing I thought I’d miss out on this trip was rains. The clouds were clustering overhead, hanging unusually low, but, like celibate yogis who would observe strict penance, they too seemed not to let go. 

To my pleasure though, finally, just hours before our departure, they decided to, well, break their vow of celibacy.  

                                                                   

Catharsis

To understand (and appreciate?) why Angai decided to take as grave a step as killing her brother, one has to know a little about Angai in a way that very few people do.

Angai had turned rather aloof and stoic of late—even more so than was usual for her. She realised as much the other morning when a woman came begging as Angai’s auto halted at a traffic signal, and she did not even turn her face toward the poor woman—so absorbed was she in her musings. Her usual self would have sympathised and pitied the plight of the woman. But that morning she did not feel even a smidgen of sympathy as she saw the hapless woman walk away as soon as she figured out that nothing was going to come out of this exercise.

 Angai had become peevish too. Anything and everything would excite her temper: sweepers sweeping the roads just early in the morning when she went to gym (why do they have to sweep exactly when I pass by? Why is the whole world sweeping? Isn’t there a more sophisticated way of doing this? This is insane; they just displace the mound of dust from one place to another!); people littering the roads (why can’t they be taught BASIC civic sense!); the tropical climate of the country; people parking their cars on the roads thereby blocking traffic and causing inconvenience (shouldn’t they be fined!); the infamous load shedding of Delhi; people spitting all about on the roads (God! It’s like they have hyperactive salivary glands or something!).

Angai tried to contain it all within her. And let nothing seep out. But seep out, it did. The pressure. The pressure to look good; to weigh a certain pounds; to reach work on time; to work and work well; to ace the psychology course that she had undertaken after many arguments with her family; to know things from past that she must know (why did the world-wars happen?); to know things happening at the moment she must be aware of (what's the bone of contention between Israel and Palestine?) ; to save money for a future she could not seem to know (how to save tax?); to keep unwanted hair from growing all over her body; to keep hair on the head intact as they’d been showing a tendency to behave otherwise; to find herself a suitable match despite her growing weight and age; to write, for she held the art of writing in great reverence, but then, again, there was the pressure to write well!

She was doing everything right, and yet nothing seemed so.

 Time was rushing past. She could see her youth wither ever so gradually yet perceptibly. There were expectations. By now, she should have charted a path for herself—a path to what they call success. Everything should have been sorted by now. The execution was allowed to be pending, but the roadmap, nevertheless, should have been drawn by now. And here she was, clueless about the future. Still groping. Still hoping.

Her biological clock was ticking. She was past her “marriageable age”. She kept wondering if she could ever get to have a family of her own. And even if she did, she wondered, after having seen all that she had since such a young age, would it be worth the pain and effort that goes into sustaining one. 

As it is the wont of thoughts to hit you when you least want to be bothered by them, this thought hit Angai as she sat reading in the bus on her way to work. The reading had to pause. Uneasily, she put her book in her lap, using her thumb sandwiched between the leaves of the book to serve as a bookmark. She realised that her demeanour as a teacher had changed. What was the change exactly was difficult to point, but it could not be denied, she concluded. Her patience had dipped maybe. She would get visibly irked by an inane query made by a student. She was more patient and generous with them earlier. And more secure, which was surprising for she was quite a novice then. She did not even know her subject matter well, and yet there was certain kind of effervescence in her teaching and her presence in a class. She would breeze into a class and take it over like an actor who is extremely confident of her lines and role. She knew that the students would be as enthralled as an audience who have just witnessed prestidigitation of very fine kind. That had been missing of late. She would not take kindly to students who were tried getting into circuitous arguments only to prove a point or to test her wits.

In times such as these we look for villains—people who could be held responsible for all the mishaps of our lives. If we don’t find them, we create them to feel better about ourselves. There’s a certain kind of intoxication in victimhood; once you get used to it, it becomes impossible to part with it. She’d found her villain too. Her elder brother, Manik.

Manik had lost his right hand in a car accident while returning from a New Year party six years ago. They had lost their father at a very young age. “You were hardly two and your Manik da was ten, when baba passed away,” her mother would tell Angai in a tone infused with an uncanny sense of pride. After Manik’s handicap the entire responsibility of running the household had fallen on Angai and her mother.  From a very young age, Angai had seen her mother struggle without any help. She had begun to look too old for her age. The wrinkles on her face were imprints of all the adversities she had to bear to bring up her children. When Manik had landed up a job with a construction company, all the struggle that went into making him a civil engineer seemed to have paid off. But that state of the felicity of the Ghosh household was short-lived. On that chilly December night, Angai and Manik had gotten into a nasty squabble, for their mother disallowed Angai to attend a New Year’s bash while allowing Manik to do so. All her rhetorical plea championing gender equality had fallen on deaf ears. “Have you gone crazy, Angai? Dada’s case is different. You’re a girl. Who would be accountable, (God forbid) should something go wrong? Na baba! I can’t take such a risk. Now bother me no more, Angai, I am telling you!.”

The look that Angai shot at Manik was more chilling than that rimy, fateful night. For a moment, Manik’s face grew pale as he watched Angai slip quietly into her bed and turn in to a mound of blankets and quilts. The mound stirred in joggled and sobbed. The sobs grew fainter and fainter and finally dissolved into the darkness and quiet. 

The chilly silence that had encrusted the Ghosh household, like the frost that had adamantly settled on the glass windows, was broken by a ringing telephone at around five in the morning. The sound of the ringing telephone pierced through the darkness, alarming both the Ghosh women and forcing them to quit the comforting warmth of their respective beds. Mrs. Ghosh was the first one to make it to the phone. Angai studied her mother’s face intently; groggy as she was, she tried to gather as much as she could. She did not remember much about how her mother had reacted to the news of her brother’s accident that night, except for the yelp she had issued as she leaned on Angai for support. Next thing she remembers was waking up Mehrotra uncle from next door and rushing to the hospital in his car.

“A bunch of intoxicated youth, New Year’s eve, papaji’s car! What else could you expect, madamji?” said the policeman in a rehearsed and indifferent voice. “You must thank God your son is alive. Have you even seen the state of the car? Don’t even dare to, if you take my advice. Just thank God.”

 “The right hand needs to be severed if we want the infection to stop from spreading,” the doctor had said. “Or there may be risk to his life,” he added. His tone, though, had a touch of sympathy and concern.

 From that day onward, Manik’s life was never the same. The shock was to take another two months to sink in. He had to relinquish his job, and live the life of a dependant all over again, only in more than one sense of that word. The tragedy had reorganised the roles and positions of the Ghosh household. Although circumstances had forced him to assume a more a subservient role to the women in the household, his ego precluded him from acting as such.  The women, on the other hand, could not afford to make any such choices. They were forced to take charge and step out to keep the house running.  Following the footsteps of her mother, Angai, too, had taken up teaching as her profession along with pursuing a master’s degree. Having majored in Economics as an undergrad, she could tutor 11^th and 12^th grade students.

    

After coming home after a tiring day of work when Angai would sit down to watch T.V., she would fret over the film of dust that sat on the T.V. set. A bathroom fixture that has come off would remain as such unless she or her mother would act upon it. The fruit basket that she forgot to replenish would lie as such for days at end. An empty cup of tea would continue to sit on her table, because she forgot to put it in the sink as she was running late for work. Every morning when she and her mother would be rushing through their morning routines, she would see Manik sitting in the veranda with a morning daily splayed out in front of him and a cup of tea lying next to him, served dutifully by their mother. The sight would evoke a strange revulsion in her heart.

More than the lack of his contribution in discharging the duties of the household, Angai begrudged her brother’s sense of entitlement and lack of compunction. Quite to the contrary, Manik would create nuisance every now and then by bickering with neighbours or by demanding money which he would want to “invest” in stock market or with which he could buy his daily quota of cigarettes. Because taking of care of minor household chores would make him seem less of a man in his social circle, he would not care for such activities; and because he was physically incapable of taking up the responsibilities that were traditionally considered masculine, he was exempt from them.

Seeing her mother get up so early to prepare meals and rush to work day after day would tear her heart. Yet she knew that her own salary alone would not suffice to meet the needs and demands of the family. “If only Manik da was earning. We could have asked Ma to retire and just cook us delicious food,” she would frequently say to herself.

Mrs Ghosh was a plain woman with an equally plain understanding of the world. She would read the stoicism of Angai, but could not divine the cause of it. She could not be blamed.  She was not majoring in psychology after all. But she would, very often, find herself to be at the receiving end of Angai’s conniptions.  Angai could not communicate her anxieties to her mother, even if she wanted to, for she felt that Mrs Ghosh lacked the idiom in which such problems could be expressed or explained.

Though Angai held Manik culpable in her eyes for most of their woes, if not all, she never uttered a word to that effect to Manik. She would never speak to him about any other subjects than which could not be dispensed with. She would try to maintain both a virtual and physical remoteness from him, mostly, inadvertently. She could not use words as barbed as her mother sometimes uttered in a fit of fury, lest Manik da would feel hurt. She could not be confrontational even if she wanted to. Was this awe or traces of affinity or the proverbial “pull of the blood”? she was reluctant to admit.

The grudges she held against him seemed to sting her almost every other day, nevertheless. The resentment kept simmering beneath her stoic exterior;  informed by the thick tomes on human psychology, she deeply feared that the resentment might just erupt on some unfortunate day, and that, she anticipated, would be a wretched sight.

She had picked up this fancy word from one of her Psychology classes: ‘catharsis’.

“Catharsis is what I require. It’s a must!” she resolved one night. “I will have to kill him. Yes, that is what I will have to do. I want out of this mess. I will have to kill him.”

Saying these words to herself over and over, she rose from the bed and headed to procure the weapon to be used in this ghastly scheme. She reached her desk, and, with a smoothness which the gravest of criminals are naturally endowed with, opened the drawer. She put her hand inside to search for the weapon. There, ah! There it was! A fine steel gray Pierre Cardin pen.

Yes, Angai firmly believed in the cathartic power of art.

“I must write a story with a character modelled on Manik da, and then have that character killed!”

                                                                              

A Dream: re-lived

A vada paav: smuggled
A bus: Red
A sea: agitated
A God: regal and adorable. Silent yet.
A smile: purity
An old bond: revived
An old bond: buried
An encounter: with dotage: and its attendant woes

A night: wine-scented
A champi: forced. Almost.
A Cinderella: anxious to return before midnight
A stranger: so strange
A point:  the farthest end of city
A leap: of faith
A ramp: of life
A thali: orgasmic

An impromptu late night visit: Navy Nagar
A shopping spree: with dearest friend
A Pride & Prejudice: 1950, vintage and tattered edition
A dream: re-lived

A city: Bombay 

Moments...

Extra-ordinariness is over-rated

It’s your ordinariness that allures me

Perfection is intimidating

It’s your imperfections that I value

Like I value mine

Imperfections

Make us even,

Make us humane,

Make us sensitive,

And considerate,

To those of others.

Charm is over-rated

It’s your awkwardness that I am drawn to.

The way you bob your head;

The way your eyes widen

When you speak of a new gadget.

That please-forgive-me-for-the-last-time expression

You give

When I come out of the bathroom

After you’ve used it.

How everything is so simple when you do it.

How you casually fling your leg over me in your sleep.

How you laugh...like a child at that crass joke

And try to straighten your face

When I look at you.

How you don’t care whether yellow and black go together.

How you wear the first thing you find clean in your closet.

And yet look so adorable in your mismatched attire.

How you put your arm around me just when I need it the most.

How you smile when you see me after a gap of two days.

So earnest a smile that makes the wait worth.

How you ask me the silliest of questions in middle of the night

How your embrace makes everything seem just perfectly right.

Eternal love is over-rated.

It’s in these fleeting moments that I fall in love with you.

And how!

~ aviD

राग माला

मनावन आए ललित लाल, राधे अब छांडो  मान ।
देख री सजनी खिल्यो है वसंत, मदन चलावत बान।

गूंजत शुक पिक कीर वाणी, करत भ्रमर गुंजान |
बहत मारुत मंद गति, कहाँ लों करुँ  या ऋतू को बखान।

चारो  दिसा  रंग मच्यो भारी, बाजत बीन ढफ मृदंग निसान
यह औसर फिर न मिलेगो, तज दे री  जिय को अड़ान ।

नेक विचारो  कैसी  धरी निठुराई, भयो तेरो हिय पाषाण ।
वृन्दाविपिन राजेश्वरी, तो में  बसत पिय के प्राण ।

जा बंसी को नाद सुन तोड़ी,  ते  आरज पथ आन ।
राग बिराग भये सब वाके, और मौन भई  सब तान ।

कुंचित केश सिर पाग सुदेश, छवि कोटि  मैन  लजान ।
वंशी-धरण तमाल वरन,  द्वारे  ठाडो रूप को निधान।

कबहुँ राग केदारो अलापत, लेत  सरस तान बंधान ।
निज कर कोमल  हार गहि गूंथत, तोहि रिझावन हेत  सयान।

विरह वेदना या मन की निवारो, संग मिल करो मधु रस पान ।
नव यौवन तेरे अंग अंग प्रगट्यो, सुघराई कर याको मान ।

तेरे सुहाग कि कौन  कहे आली, प्रीतम पायो नागर नट  सो ।
चल बड़भागिनि बेर कर जिन, कंठ भुज मेलि ब्रजराय सों ।

सुन तिय वचन विहँसी उठी गोरी, चली देवे दरसन को दान ।
कान्ह-राधे जुगलवर-राय, अब आन बसो 'जस' के ध्यान ।




                                                                                       

(To the connoisseurs of Hindustani classical music, and Haveli sangeet in particular, the concept of raag malas must not be a new one. In such a composition each couplet or sometimes each line has a name of raag  embedded within it, and that particular couplet or line is then sung in that specific raag.  In Pushti Haveli sangeet tradition, luminaries such as Soordasji, Parmanand-dasji, and Nand-dasji et al have composed several pads on raag mala.

In this humble attempt I have strung twenty raags  in the following order:
1) Lalit
2) Vasant
3) Kirwani
4) Maru
5) Sarang
6) Adaana
7) Charukeshi
8) Raajeshwari
9) Todi
10) Bairagi
11) Desh
12) Maalav
13)  Kedar
14) Malhaar
15) Yaman
16) Sughraai
17) Nat
18) Raayso
19) Gori
20) Kaanhra


The scene described here depicts an anguished Radha who's being appeased by another Sakhi (also called "दूती" in Brij literature, a role usually played by Lalita) on the behalf of Krishna. Krishna is himself standing at the threshold of the kunj,  and is trying to appease Radha, but won't be allowed in unless Sri Radha permits him.

The sakhi describes to Radha the heavenly bliss that has engulfed Vrindaavan in the Spring Season, and edifies her on how setting aside her differences, she should make most out of this lovely, vernal ambiance.)

Throttled

He had felt it two nights ago, underneath his skin. The worms of desire had started wiggling, and gnawing at his flesh. The desires that had been sent to a seed for the past three months or so, had suddenly started sprouting. Thoroughly unprepared, he was still coping with this sudden onslaught, trying to figure out what could have provoked it. The past three months had been so peaceful. All he had to worry about was him. Succumbing to this onslaught would mean bowing to the whims and demands of others.  Parading, anticipating, handling rejections, putting yourself out there to be consumed—it was too much work, all in all.

Rejections were a part of deal, yes. But today it had hit him hard. Parth was this uber-macho guy whom everyone had desperately wanted. He did not know what got into him, and he sent a message to Parth. To his surprise, Parth responded favourably. But the interaction had come to an abrupt and awkward end as soon as he said he won’t go fourth base. “Sorry, dude! Then I am not interested,” Parth said in his last message.

Was it about Parth? No, it was about the grounds on which he was turned down that made him feel incomplete and inadequate. He hated himself for not being able to take the plunge yet. He was about to turn twenty-six this year after all. He hated himself for craving for that specific specimen of masculinity that Parth epitomised. How demeaning it was. But then, just like so many other things in life it JUST was. Do you get to engineer your choices and desires consciously? Or do they just happen? And once they do happen, is there much that can be done about them except for yielding to them, or indulging in self-congratulatory ratiocination or intellectual masturbation to justify your not yielding to them? Both exercises seemed equally appealing and futile to him. His only coping mechanism: silence. Pregnant and loaded silence.

His disquietude could perhaps also be traced to this cousin who got married last week. She was exactly his age, so much so that there was a gap of hardly three days between their birthdays. She was one of those cousins whom your parents and family always compare you with, to your chagrin of course, because he/she is miraculously good at every thing they do. She was always better at academics, maths in particular. She always scored more than him. She got into a better college than his. She had wanted to pursue engineering; how on earth then he, being a boy, could have dared to pursue any other discipline, his relatives had insisted. His performance was always weighed against hers. His skills and penchants ...what did they matter!

And now she beat me even at getting married, he thought. There was of course a strain of jest in his thought. Despite everything he genuinely liked her. It wasn’t her fault after all. She was one of the few people from the family he was fond of. Maybe because they were age mates; maybe because she showed some respect when she talked to him and never made him feel expendable like the others in the clan did; maybe because they studied (and whined about) the same course at the same time. He wanted to attend the marriage. But he did not.

He expected her to personally invite him. Nothing grand— not even a phone call, just a message on facebook would have done the trick. No avail. Her father called up his. His father decided to go. “All of them were asking when are you getting married,” his father told him upon returning from the wedding. His reply was only a smile.  

Majestically, he sat to write, hoping to find some solace in words. But no sooner he reached the second paragraph than he realised that even the writing was throttled. He used terms such as “fourth base”. He remembered how taken aback he was when he observed how the Nobel prize winning author, Toni Morrison, used the word “fuck” ever so organically in her prose.  And he, a person of no literary worth whatsoever, could not do so. He wished he could be as unapologetic as she. Or V whose writings he admired. But inhibitions had clawed deep in his head, and he found it difficult to shake them off.