Hola, Spring!

It's spring again, in the middle of monsoon. The one thing August in Bombay is famous for is sunlight showers. It pours and yet, all you can see is a blue sky with white cotton clouds with hardly any dark clouds (so one wonders where the rain comes from).

Today, there's a unique crispness in the air. It's cool and yet, one feels the warm sunshine on one's back as one goes on errands or just slides the window more to let the sunbeam embrace one's bedsheets. It's a day for walks (one cannot picnic on the streets of Bombay and parks dont allow food) and for just going on really long trips. I want to go to Pune. I want to do all the things I wanted to do the last and more...I want to visit the German Bakery and Manney's Bookstore. And sit in the Gazebo restaurant or some other name...dont know what. Sipping a Cosmopolitan and ordering pasta Alfredo with lots of tender chicken and mushrooms.

I just want a holiday today!

My fave weekend

I shopped over the weekend. Staying at my old place, my home, my best vacation spot since the past few months, being with my family, going for lunches at the old familiar places and doing the old familiar things like drinking tea in pegs and taking a walk through the crazy "Market" road.

This time, we ate at Sachin, a non-expensive great seafood joint. Although they've hiked the rates up a bit, it was still just over Rs. 300 for three prawn curry and rice plates, a dish heaped with fried Bombay Ducks and a fried piece of surmai, three sol kadis and two Mangolas. Very VFM. The next afternoon (Saturday) we went to Just Biryani and had the most amazing chicken kebabs and Lucknowi biryani with subtle hints of saffron and melt-in-the-mouth chicken concealed within the heap of amber rice and caramelized onions. I so want my husband to go and eat the biryani. I'm sure he'll love it.

I bought jeans, two kurtas, a Christian Dior watch (the coolest thing I own right now) and a Jeffrey Archer omnibus. Went looking for bags too but didnt find anything that I liked. Hope to strike lucky next time, mom plans to ask the place where she bought her bag for an exact replica of her bag which i liked the best.

I didnt mind leaving and coming home back to my husband but I do miss being there. Every time I go home, I unwind completely and get back to my old routine. This makes me realize how much the daily routine's changed for me. Marriage is, of course, a life altering decision. I do love going back to the old life once in a while and come back to my new one completely refreshed and rejuvenated.

Love Evening

There's something very magical about evenings, a colleague had once said. He would love taking walks as the sun set casting an orange-pink glow around the cityscape. At the time he'd made this statement, I'd thought yeah, right...can anyone love evenings? The depressing time of the day, I'd thought. This soon changed, of course, like many things in my life.

There was a time when evenings meant parties or dinners with friends, going off home from work and many more pleasant things than staying in a drab, cold office and attending useless calls or tapping away at your ol' workstation. Now, evenings mean the end of a busy working day and many accomplishments, taking up a book or chatting with my husband, dinner at the table with the family and a quiet time before bed either reading my book-of-the-week or watching Scrubs on the LCD screen. Sleep, of course, is the best part...especially when one's dog tired.

This evening's the same, the daylight staying on beyond 7 pm. It's a time to reflect and ponder. To relax those tensed muscles, to stop thinking, to just sit back and watch the world go by...

...and surf the Net. :)

Crossword Sale again...

Crossword's having a sale. I like going to the air-conditioned, arm-chaired, carpeted chain of bookstores (bigger the better) and just lose myself for a couple of hours and think of nothing but the books I've been dying to read and hoard. I'm not sure if I'll find what I'm looking for but they also have an ordering service which I've never tried yet.

I miss going to Strand sales. They had a few months back but I didnt go; simply because I didnt trust myself to go and splurge on books that I dont read for months. I've still to continue reading Voltaire and Tales of Genji bought from last year's sale. They have the best collection that beats any book sale I've ever been to. I miss Russian folktale books though. The illustrations they have and the simple yet beautifully poetic tales they relate, it's as if an old Russian granny's telling them.

Right now, I'm re-reading the Namesake and going through my favourite paragraphs slowly, devouring each word that I've fallen in love with. Having seen the movie, I imagine the characters as well. I realized that I like both equally and differently; the book and the movie. They are so separate from each other that each is respected for its own unique identity and story.

Hope to catch the sale soon. There are a lot of titles I simply must have.

It's very cold today...

Yesterday was quite a wet day, heavy rains almost throughout the day and gusts blowing and swishing through the trees, making a strange and ungodly sound. I often dont need the fan over my workstation, pushing the window slides wide apart sends the cool breezes wafting through the room and keeping it nice and cold.

The first year of married life must be the hardest on anyone, no matter how sweet your disposition might be and how caring and understanding you are. My husband is all that, and yet, my mood bursts descend like cloud bursts and take away the sunshine from our lives. And yet, he doesnt have to put up with anything or "adjust" to anything. He's at his own home, living the same life he lived before we met and got engaged and then married. I concentrate on my work and have very few things to gripe about, starting with the traditions and rituals and going on to opinions and prejudices. The prejudices part is the hardest to digest.

Living in the times we do, when we work and socially interact with anyone and everyone, we cannot afford to cling on to completely outdated prejudices. A prejudice is probably the most natural thing to have but the worst when you might influence someone like your child to already follow a set of beliefs and then go out into the global world and deal with those people whom you are prejudiced against. I can see a lot of negative influence. And in my position, I dont think I can do anything about it. I should have talked to my husband but he didnt ask me and I didnt tell him. Eventually, I stopped talking; only responding in the most minimum words. It felt like my opinion didnt matter. It wasnt like he didnt know what was going on, there have been thousands of times I've raised related matters on him and the scathing comment my MIL made really took the cake. I couldnt tell her to not say such things. Being too shocked by everything, I just shut up.

I can see myself taping my mouth even when my child will be around to hear this. How he/she takes it and goes into the wide open global world will be another matter altogether.

Missing a few things...

I really miss being one of a group. Nothing beats having one, solid best friend there for you through thick and thin. That is essential. Now that I have her, I need more.

I used to be a part of three-four groups and there used to be fun things that we would do, like go out exploring cafes or restaurants, group movies or a dance somewhere and hanging out...which was the best of the lot. I miss doing all those things with a group. All those people I used to be with have either drifted away on their own journeys or I've consciously stopped being with them to avoid some particularly poisonous friendships. Now that I'm home and can venture out whenever I want, I have no groups to go out with.

I never did miss this as much as I do when my husband does something with his friends. He belongs to 3-4 groups (i'm sure there's more) and ends up doing something with them - visiting karaoke bars or drinks after work or dinner or something - and I sit at home reading a book or watching TV. Which isnt bad but it makes me reminisce. And then I start missing the things I used to do.

Marriage is, of course, something that should tame the party-hard devil within, especially now that we're thinking of going further and starting a family together. But it's really hard when one of us is out there having fun.

I'm going to call up my best friend and make sure we do something at least once in a while. Then he can sit at home and wait for me.

Astalavista

No better way to say goodbye than knowing it in your heart that it's over. And finally, you're free. You're free of the guilt and pain that went into your taking your first step away from its source. Being emotionally high-strung, I knew I could not have lasted as a person, as an individual in its strong-hold of possession. I am free now and for the first time, I feel affirmation.

I need to thank myself for letting go of something I thought I could not live without. I can now and I have. And I will continue to. Maybe I could have changed a few things, but the step I took at the time I took it was really, really needed.

And I'm glad I did it.

All it took was to read a few lines in an e-mail. It brought a taste of pain, like when the blade of a whip hits its spot. And then, it brought relief. Because I will never put myself in a position where I feel it again and again.