The Puja Diaries

epilogue

yes, yes, i know the pujas are over. but with the inevitable sense of letdown comes the realization that life (implies parties implies fun implies life again) does not stop. living proof of this edict? 'charlie's angels' , well, just two of us, me and at-present delhiite shoili pal, are proud to present the 'Stupendously Calorific Recipe For Good/High Living' a la chocolat. - serves two.

1. first, confirm earlier in the day where you want to meet. why's and wherefore's are extraneous if the two of you are comrades in arms. city centre, saltlake, and highland park are recommended.
2. secondly, turn up. this is all that is required to make your companion(s) happy, if you're lucky.
3. then, sit, chat, catch up on good times and old friends, gossip, scandalmonger, say obscenely improbable things whenever aatel people pass by.
4. later, walk around, browse in shop of choice, like (insert name/brand ________)then make your way to the nearest confectionery.
5. buy chocolate cake. lots of it.
6. go somewhere else. buy drinks like club soda, apple juice, 7UP, and mountain spring water (last was frickin' delicious, incidentally)
7. find a nearby park. sit down on the grass, preferably barefoot. bring extra napkins.
8. mix the drinks. taste. adjust in proportion.
9. buy every kind of junk that goes by, like jhaalmuri and spiced tea, to add bangali zing to the chocolate and club soda mix.
10. do not start with the creamy cakes first. if you're like me, you could actually get punch-drunk on the chocolate and wobble and giggle and feel lightheaded when you try to start on the serious stuff like wedge sliced chocolate cake. leave that for twenty minutes before you have to leave, then have orange juice and black spiced tea to shake it off.
11. sit there till its dark, and inevitably the parents start ringing. give them ten minutes leeway, then make for home.
12. buy something nice for your mother (like purple shimmer nailpolish, for example) to make up for leaving her alone so much.
13. come home via the bypass. don't go straight home, though. make time for your neighbourhood friends who will then want you to join the mishti and aam sorbet party hosted by your favorite parar aunty, the same jayanti aunty who brought me noodles and sympathy when i was down with the flu on my birthday.
14. come home after extended chat. do something nice for your father too, to make up for not touching a textbook since the midterms ended, like making him hot, sweet tea.
15. blog about everything in detail, so that others may benefit from the precedent set by you.
16.sign off.

we, the authors, are pleased to inform you that this method of access to the good life is tried, tested, and virtually idiotproof. precautionary warning - avoid the jhaal aka the lanka in the jhaalmuri if you're like me, allergic to having a flaming fire on your tongue.
well, enjoy yourselves in moderation, and drive safely. good night, friends, indians and party people across the world. a special shout-out to pal, for making my day.......much love, buddy! ciao.

Mid year resolutions

the title is self-explanatory. and since i never keep my new year resolutions beyond two days (if that) either, i suppose it's indulging in the heights of optimism to think i might be able to keep these " puja resolutions"................

1. watch my calorie intake - fat chance, it's the festival of the celebrations of the return of the first family of gods, of course i'm gonna put on more weight

2. curb my spending habits - and throw away my last breath of freedom before the boards? i think not!

3. study more - ************blank silence************** [still depending on the power of osmosis]

4. start and finish the Great Indian Novel - eventually

5. be more oriental - learn the value and power of patience, humility and compassion. perfect the Pensive Grasshopper meditative stance while doing so.

6. try to start caring more about family (no matter how distant) beyond the immediate clan, and less about the perfect strangers who do the voices of the Simpsons.

7. set a deadline for myself to finish listening to all justin timberlake tracks since the 90's and then move on to sting (!)

8. come to a final decision regarding Life-After-The-Boards.....JNU or JU? home or hostel?

9. attempt to find the meaning of life. last date - next tuesday. (possibilities of answers - love, sorrow, magic, creativity, faith, or the number 42)

10. wean myself from the habit of either posting creepy stories, mindless verse, or cbse-formatted self-revelations in point form on this page.

it's going to be a long night tonight. sigh..........

<^_^>

Master, all is well in the state of Denmark

My exams are over. I am free.




(blubbers with joy and runs laughing hysterically around the outer wall seven sacred times)


now that that's over and done with, here is a short eulogy on freedom from oppression



food
how nourishing you are
healthier than exams you are by far
water
how cool you are
more refreshing than exams you are by far
sleep
how stupefying you are
more restful than exams you are by far
laughter
how stirring you are
more charismatic than exams you are by far
time
how short you are
speedier and crankier than an old car by far
life
how forgotten you are
lively and creative and happy no more
love
how ignored you are
more desperate and needier than ever before
exams
how despised you are
the most wearying, dreaded and hated by far

WAKING UP

my sole attempt at facing my ant-paranoia head-on and making something creatively productive out of it. first time i've had the courage to actually make it public. hope you like it.


[disclaimer-if you actually do enjoy what follows, we recommend you get professional help, because man you got problems............]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


WAKING UP




There is a line of red ants climbing up the kitchen wall. They are tiny, each of them, but with a venomous intensity in the way they stay close to each other, each pair of sharp pincers reinforcing every other one, that makes her come to a standstill and watch their progress with a fascinated revulsion that curiously enough precludes her from wreaking havoc with a pesticide spray and wiping the tiny dead, red little bodies of the wall and into oblivion, or at least the dustbin.

She is not really that scared. Neither does she have an insect fetish. She is a very normal, cheerful, teenage girl, extroverted, lots of friends, hardworking but not too bright, firmly convinced that she is pretty, very optimistic most of the time. That’s why she never told anyone about the dreams.

During the day she is very – what’s the word – lively. As night draws nearer, gradually she becomes unhappily restless and starts to fidget. Her parents could never understand, why, even as a child, she had an inexplicable fear of going to sleep. Sometimes she can’t remember herself, why the little voices in the hidden, dusty corners of her mind start rustling frantically whenever her eyelids droop. That is because they fear the dreams almost as much as she does.

The dreams are very strange by anyone’s standards, but even more so from a bubbly seventeen-year-old’s point of view. In these dreams, she is lying on her bed, in the same position when she went to sleep, and now she can hear a surge of rustling from the floor of her room, and then the red ants rise in a tidal wave of tiny torture on every side of the bed, and she squeezes her eyes shut but she can still feel a rapidly thickening stream of ants scurrying up her arms, scrabbling around on her skin until they give a final little twist of their bodies before sinking their pincers into her flesh. It is a unbearably frightening pain, like a million tiny live needles piercing her, burrowing beneath the skin, trying to tunnel into her blood.

In these dreams, she tries to scream for help, but as soon she opens her mouth, the ants move towards her face and pour inside her mouth, biting at the insides of her cheeks, anchoring themselves on her tongue, piercing savagely until her head almost explodes with the pain, even advancing to the trachea, surging into her lungs, nibbling at her veins and arteries, mixing with her bloodstream, setting her insides on needles of fire.

In the end she can’t breathe, because the red ants have now moved up her nostrils and mouth, she can’t hear anything except the endless scurrying in her earlobes, she can’t see because they are swarming over her eyelids and pupils. She lies there on her bed, a human feasting-ground for the red ants that live inside our walls, under our carpets, in our gardens, and she cannot fight them, she is too weak, too frightened.

Eventually the sunlight wakes her up, and sometimes she cannot believe that her organs were not devoured in muted rustling in the night. This is why she is always so happy during the day, because she understands the value of reclaiming life and normality. She is only seventeen but inside her head is the knowledge of a thousand torturous deaths, each of which she has survived. She was frightened, but she lived. She was tortured, but she endured. She was eaten, but she is alive. She knows that life exists outside of stifled terror of the ravages of a million tiny flesh-eating red ants. When she grows up, she wants to be a lawyer.

The ants are a part of her now. The pain they inflict validates her happiness. She has never been able to bring herself to kill a single red ant, however. Possibly she has the instinctual knowledge that the day she does kill one of those red ants that infest her sleep, she will go to sleep that night and never wake up from her dream of being trapped in endless terror.



Trisha Ray
6/4/2008

Birthday Blues

17 years ago today, my mother saw me for the first time, screamed, and fainted. subsequently she warned me that i had better be worth the trouble. i wasn't.

today, i'm running a mild but weakening temperature, not helped by the thought of an economics test tomorrow (aaarrgghh) and no party until the weekend.

the good part? tons of messages and birthday wishes from all the right people, starting from midnight yesterday.

am missing one day of school (read piles of mind-numbing notes) and falling back on certain Assignments. bleh.

this stupid fever started on saturday. since then i've been having horrific half-waking dreams where killer scarab beetles eat bugs bunny.

note to self :- WHY ME?

i spent sunday night wrapped in two bedsheets and wearing one grey sock in bed (the other one is now my cousin's sock-puppet, apparently) dreaming about achieving normalcy. sobbed myself to sleep, convinced that i was going to die. woke up and resolved to start believing in divinity from Monday.

today is wednesday. i am still an atheist. so much for deathbed promises. i miss lollipops. and pal

seriously, though, why? did i commit a heinous murder in some previous reincarnation? is that why i must spend my birthday with a sniffle, a headache, stuck at home, alone except for some friendly cake in the fridge?

and i've spent so much time convincing myself i'm not sick, i almost passed out in school yesterday. today, for a change, i passed out at home instead. my mouth tastes of mint toothpaste in particular and sour bitterness towards my life in general.

to anyone who's had the patience to read this far - i haven't always been so crazy, i'm just woozy today, that's all. please leave a comment, just to make me feel better about dying. thank you.

trisha

16 minutes later

my father just called to check up on me, and 5 minutes later jayanti aunty from flat number seven turned up with quiet sympathy and noodles. i sense the beginnings of a warm fuzzy feeling in the general location of my left ribs. i wonder if this is what groveling gratitude is supposed to feel like.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Land of Lollipop Looniness

Land of Lollipop Looniness



This is something that happened today, in a parallel reality far, far removed from this grim land of Mundania.
Shoili di and I finished karate class. We walked out of school together, at the exact same time that a hazy cloud of madness swooped down upon the lamppost just outside the school gates. Consequent events bear out my (working) assumption that either some strange germ of mindfreak got rooted in our dual consciousness of happy sarcasm, or else that fatigue and a certain amount of euphoria (don't ask) got to us instead.

Anyway, we wanted to walk down a back street so we could listen to some music with the sound up and loud. So we turned left, then we turned back and turned right to get chewing gum, 'cause I can't live without. Standing in front of a tiny vendor's shop whose owner knows us from yore and is firmly convinced that we are the mad children of Satan's Cloud, I asked for a coupla bucks' worth of gum. At this point, Shoili di suddenly develops a fierce craving for lollipops and jelly and can't decide which to have. In order to compromise, I buy both. We walk a solid ten feet away from the shop before giving vent to near-hysterical sniggers of glee and hunger induced by carb-cravings.

Next thing we know, we're halfway down that lonely, badly-lit back street, and I'm propping my bags up on a car that Shoili di hit (not too hard) to make sure it doesn't have a security bleeper, fumbling for the most delicious little fingerful of litchi jelly I have ever tasted. This is after we struggled valiantly to get the wrapping off the top of the tiny cup (eventually we wound up using a pen that I extracted with great nimbleness from my pencil-box, fatally injuring the zipper of my bag in the process).

Later we also struggled to get the wrapping off the lollipop, and realized with burning shame that packaging designed and made easy to handle (I assume) for tiny children was eluding us with fiendish cunning. I think we also stopped at some point to take a picture of me giving the finger to the lollipop(!!!!!!!) in Shoili di's hand. Eventually we boarded an auto, where, for only the second time ever, we were outdone in our outrageous banter by three badly-dressed men arguing about money, who even made US go quiet for as much as five consecutive seconds. Until we realized that it took us 35 minutes to walk down a road that normally takes 5. Apparently fooling around tacks on an extra half-an-hour and some seriously memorable tastebud experiences on to that, by now legendary, walk.

Much later, on the bus home, I bought more sweets (the black, sticky, DELICIOUS kind), ate a mango candy and started on chewing gum, both of which just happened to be lying around in my bag, and mused on how having so much concentrated, fattening sugar in my body just made me feel like a better, happier, more peaceful person.

This totally makes up for the disappointment we had a couple of weeks ago, when we made up a cheeky April's Fool song and tried to gatecrash Sriparna Ma'am's elegant domicile, only to be ejected by a senile dog's wheezy "intruder" barking (I thought it would die from the vocal strain) and an alarming lady in white who told us kindly but firmly that Sriparna Ma'am' was not, in fact, at home.

In your face, Rufus Sr, your royal woofiness!!!!!!!!!


Shoili di's version:- coming soon on ________________

http://shoiliunleashinmyspirit.blogspot.com.

If this sounds crazy to you, and you would like to express your disbelief/contempt/fear/morbid curiosity/mediocrity through a comment, please refrain, you stupid !!!!@#$%^&* of a @#$%^&* whose !@#$%^&U* is nothing more than a ()*&^%$#%^&*@!#$^%&^*^, you little *(&%^$%%)^%$#Q$#..................!@#$%^&*()*&^&)_*(&$#&*!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


trisha

everybody else can leave comments, email, etc, etc.....so that's like what, three, maybe four people?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CANDY SHOP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!