song of the road

I started going to gym yesterday. Will go today as well. Mom has gone out for some fresh vegetables. Once she is in, I will go. Mom insists on buying vegetables everyday. It is impractical for someone like me, but for her it is a good excuse to walk in the fresh air for a while everyday. Also it makes her feel more useful. Though she does do all house management these days.

I went to gym after a long time yesterday. I was planning to start Monday. But mom asked me to try to go yesterday. I was reading a book then. I told her I would think about it. She came back 10 minutes after looking very scared to ask again. I felt bad and I was not so against going anyway and so went there. It wasn’t so bad. I would take some time before starting with weight trainings. First I need to try building some stamina by doing cardio. I managed to hang on various cardio machines for about an hour. Not enough sweat I am afraid but got quite tired.

I now weigh more than what I weighed when I joined the gym. I fail to feel too bad about it. Though I do realize I am again back in obese category. I worked so hard to be out of the seventies and now I am well past it. I hope since I gained all this weight rather quickly in two months, I would be able to lose it soon too. I don’t know.

I am not dieting any yet. But I am slowly cutting down. I have banished chips. Still eating cheese and chocolate. I am planning to eat any snack as long as I make it from scratch at home. That way it is healthier and a little stress busting as well. By the way, I baked a vegan chocolate cake using a recipe I saw on orkut. It came out very well. yipppeeee!!! my first chocolate cake was horrendous.

One would think staying at home would be more stress free. Well it is. But my mom can’t help but keep on reminding me again and again about all that I need to do. Like renew my passport, give my car for servicing, call the guy for servicing the computer, drop the check for the credit card. I do need to do all this. But some one continuously following up makes me nervous, irritable and guilty. I need to gently tell her that. I will tell her, I will do all the chores, just be more patient and don’t be behind me all the time. She will listen I think as she is rather walking on egg shells around me. But she will sometimes tell me to get on with my office work as well! excuse me! I don’t need that kind of monitoring.

Yesterday when I went to gym, I saw S for a second when he was leaving. He didn’t realize that I would come back so soon. He was looking good. My heart actually fluttered a bit. I was very happy to see him. Then yesterday night I called him to discuss about my re-joining the personal trainer program. From there we veered towards other topics. It’s good to talk to him. He asked me come out to meet him socially today. Now that is a problem.

You remember once how I seriously considered having a relationship with him. There is no way in heaven or earth it would work out. I am barely ready to go through that kind of nonsense again. I made another mistake yesterday in telling my mom about his asking me out. She obviously is dead against it. She doesn’t know about my feelings. She feels even though I only mean to be just “friendly”, he may read it otherwise and there will be lot of trouble in extricating myself from an uncomfortable situation. It has happened earlier.

There was another guy I met online. That was just after I had garduated and started working. This guy was a very needy kind of a person. He used to keep talking how no one understands him and his father hated and berated him and favored his sister. He was doing no good working wise. So I used to say some nice things to bolster his confidence. That backfired big time. He used to call me at any times and would actually tell he stole the money to do so. I was growing uncomfortable daily. Then one day he said these three words “I love you” to me. I was silent. Then he started to say things like “don’t you love me? say you love me.” and kept going on and on about it. I was feeling uncomfortable and guilty. I didn’t know what to do and said of course I loved him too. To this day, I rue that mistake. I should not have said that. I should not have played with the mind of an already unstable person. Then this guy was very happy and he wanted to come down to my city and expected me to let him live in my house and get him a job. He thought just because I was in IT I could get anyone jobs. I told I was barely working for six months and couldn’t believe my luck in getting a job myself, I no way could get him a job. My parents never would let me bring in a guy like that to live in our house. For that matter no guy of any kind can expect to drop in and live with us. So I panicked when I couldn’t dissuade him and cut him off cold. Again perhaps the wrong thing. But I just couldn’t make him understand the absurdity of what he was proposing. Well, he kept on sending mails, kept calling at homes, my family came to know. Thankfully my dad was surprisingly cool about it and both him and my brother said if he turned up they would break his leg. By then that comforted me as he had posted my photo and phone number in many adult sites for revenge. He used the email ids in a forwarded mail to mail all my friends to say really filthy things about me. He wrote to tell me he was not eating and making himself bleed to work a curse on me. It was all terrible nonsense. I blocked his emails. He would create a new id everyday and mail and I would block that. Apart from that I kept quite and things quitened down and tapered off after almost three years. It was a bad mess. There was no way I could take him in my life. But each time my relationships fail, I remember how badly I had hurt that guy. Maybe I am still paying off for that.

Anyway, in the light of all this, you can understand my mom’s concerns. After all is said and done, S earns like one-tenth of what I do and is from a completely different strata of society where education doesn’t prevail and women are treated like dirt. I felt so small saying this but this is very unfortunately very true. So I guess I have to create a distance in my friendship with S. He is a nice guy but some times his background peeps out in his conversations.

I have this lifelong weakness of not being able to speak my mind to hurt anyone’s feeling even when it is necessay to safeguard me. But perversely enough, my mom pointing all this out, bugged me a lot. I for nothing brought up her past mistakes and taunted her. She frowned and agreed that she had made mistakes and stayed on an even keel. I felt bad afterwards and apologized. She said there wasn’t any need and we sometimes do need to discuss things. She really hasn’t minded at all. But I kept on feeling bad and ate two extra unnecessary sandwiches and a small cup of ice cream. So completely unnecessary. I need to be in better control of me and my emotions. Hope things will improve a bit soon with the exercising. On the other hand, my over reacting apart, are they so bad anyway? Shouldn’t I be able to deal only with my mom who is so accomodating and nice. She manages to get on my nerves a bit but she is a thorughly nice woman and loves me more than anything.

I am feeling so much better after writing down all this. I need some friends to talk things out. I haven’t cultivated any in real life to whom I can bare my soul. You cannot begin to imagine how much you mean to me. And however much freaky I sound with so much confessions poring in, you are far away and safe from me.

On an aside, I called up my chotomasi (the aunt I talked about in my last post) and we had a pleasant chat. Then when my mom talked to her, I think my aunt somewhat peremtorily asked my mom to take better care of her health. My mom wasn’t amused. It could also have been that my mom had taken an innocent concern in a wrong way. Their sibling chemistries are deadly complicated. Anyway my mom is asking me to not screw around with my aunt promising companionship and all when it may not be practical for me to do. I thought I should reach out a bit more. But I guess sometimes it is well enough to leave alone. I don’t know. One more thing for me to obsess about.

It is a bright sunny morning today. The sky is bright blue. It looks like it is going to be a hot day. For the last few days, it has been hot during the day but been windy and rainy in the evening and everything got cooled down by night. I woke up only a half hour earlier. I just got my morning cup of tea. The radio is playing by me. It is exasperating how many ads they play. I am yet to hear one song for last ten minutes. The days are lot less hectic without the tension of going to work and the long commute.

I woke up from a nightmare this morning. That persuaded me to write this morning. I saw that the three of us – my brother, my mom and I are there in Chicago. Please don’t ask me why Chicago, I have no wish to be in US. It must be my friendship with you all that made US the backdrop : ). Anyways my brother had torn his one good formal trousers while going for an interview. He got the interview postponed with some excuse. I was saying we would go and buy a new one the next day as it was Saturday. I think the money was tight. For some reason my mom was completely against it. My brother was silent. I was trying to convince her saying I knew stores where we could buy a good one for cheap. We would take her with us so she can stop us from overspending. My mom was angry and saying that my brother shouldn’t have wasted his money on a stylish overcoat and now we could not afford to buy new trousers. Again I don’t know why anyone with one formal trouser will buy an overcoat. : ) To my mom’s defense, the overcoat seemed quite luxurious and unnecessary. I kept on getting angrier and angrier. I started yelling that she lets choto masi (our aunt who is mom’s youngest sister and a great favorite of mine) buy unnecessary things but has a problem with buying the basic necessity for us. She didn’t react much and held her ground in her infuriating way. I got in to a rage and shouted at her asking her why she doesn’t pretend to worship God and live in the Himalayas like many widows do, if she hates us so much. It is where I woke up.

The thing that I said was very bad. I am surprised with the dream. My mom will never stop us buying something we need, specially clothes. She does get mildly irritated with my brother’s overspending at times. My brother doesn’t always over spend to be fair. But he likes very good things. He will go without for some time and then buy the top of the line of whatever he wanted. He bought a very good and very expensive camera recently. The one I had bought long back for him was very expensive at that time too. Then he bought a very expensive keyboard for his fiancée. He bought that very good cell phone for me which got stolen. When I got my first job after graduation, the first thing he wanted was a good music system. We spent lots of time choosing one. Then I didn’t have enough cash to buy it. So we got dad to buy it with solemn promises from me to pay back in installments. I didn’t pay at all. : ) Dad also didn’t mention it once. I guess he was okay to buy it for us, only didn’t want to say so verbally or we might make a habit of it. That is a topic for another blog.

When my brother got his first job, he bought the best motorbike available in India. He had to pay installments for very long. Even the car he chose for me, he fell in love with it when he test drove it. For its size, it’s quite expensive though that is mainly due to the fact that automatic transmission cars are not so common in India. He is not selfish. He doesn’t have many things. But what he has and what he gives to people he loves are always a little too expensive. He bought a pen for me once as a festival gift which was again a very exclusive one. He got my mom to buy him a bicycle with sever gears which was though very good but rather unnecessarily so. He had majot trouble finding a mechanic who could repair the cycle. Then at the end he took out the gears. We made much fun of that. : ) The list goes on. Last time when he came home he blew mom away by mentioning that he wants to buy a small private airplane and learn to fly. From our economic background, people never even dream about buying a plane. Most people would aspire to a Mercedes at the maximum and a luxurious house will be there in many dreams. My mom is very scared; especially she doesn’t want him to try anything so dangerous. He wants to travel across India on his bike and I am sure will do it soon without much support from home, I might add.

It is surprising where he got this propensity for adventure and buying the best. My dad was always practical and a person who always managed and tried to belong. I am a little like that. My mom nowadays is very scared about everything. She will ask me to cross the road carefully and get tensed about that. : ) But she used to be far braver when we all were younger. I got a few chance to travel across India organized by our schools when I was in high school in Jamshedpur. Everyone else’s mom used to go crazy with worry to let their teenage kids especially girls alone for 15 days. We used to be a gang of 50 kids of 30 boys and 20 girls with 4 teachers accompanying us. My mom was super cool. She would tell me there was no need for me to run for a telephone at every opportunity and report my safety. She knows I am an intelligent girl and I would stay safe and manage very well. I could call a few times but I was to enjoy fully without half my mind at home. I guess she wanted me to enjoy the freedom I was getting and which she couldn’t dream of having when she was may age. Though later she told she used to be very worried. But each time she sent me away with a smile and no advice. What surprises me more is that the whole family used to miss me a lot and they told me so. One would think not having a teenager at home for 15 days would be a welcome break. My dad would try to cheer up everybody by taking them to movies and he bought my brother a carrom board (a game which is a little similar to pool in a small scale). Making this kind of effort was a little uncharacteristic of him. Anyway to come back it must have been my mom and her really rebellious siblings’ genes which has made my brother so.

On the other hand it could also be that my dad could not be adventurous simply because he had to be responsible for first his very big and poor family and then us. Per my mom, he was very wild before marriage and she had it from good sources. I think he caught my brother smoking pot once but just let it go. He did love to gamble in a very small scale. I remember him playing poker or some such card games for little money and enjoying it way too much. For some reason, dad used to win a lot and so used to lose partners rapidly. He would give back the money won after the game to appease the other players. Once he started to buy lotto tickets. My brother and I made fun of it mercilessly and he stopped after a while. He used to watch the game show “who wants to be a millionaire” with such a gleam in his eyes. I guess he would have tried to go were he a little younger. He was such a lovable big bear of a guy.

I wish again and again, I had told him how much I loved him. I think he knew. He loved me especially so very very much. He was more friends with my brother. But I had his love for almost no reason. Well, you never earn your parents’ love. But my brother was more there for him but we all know I had the unconditional lion’s share of my dad’s love. Maybe it is only because I came first in to their lives. Like my mom loves my brother more. She loves me like crazy too. She sees herself in me and that is why she is so worried about me. All the pain and deprivation and loss of dreams she has gone through as a woman child and then as a woman, she fights fiercely to protect me from all of it. That is why she so zealously worked to make me financially independent. She rather wanted me to be good in studies and sports and fine arts and happily married with a kid and financially stable of course. Not all of it worked out. But I think we both can live with what I have become. On the other hand she is much relaxed about my brother. She has a confidence about him. She says they fight more because they are more alike. My brother is looking more and more an exact replica of my dad everyday. My dad had that same confidence about me and was more worried about my brother. Even though he really is more orthodox than my mom is, he was practical enough to accept my not getting married and was far more okay with it.
  
Now let me talk about the other character in my dream.  My complaining about my choto masi, that is super ridiculous. I seriously love her. I adore her. She is someone very original. She is good in academics. She did her masters in Economics. She could solve difficult mathematical problems when we were in college with amazing confidence and ease. She sings really beautifully. She paints very well. She used to dabble in pottery. She could play most musical instruments instinctively. Anything arty and she is effortlessly good. All that my mom wanted me to be, she was, without any effort on her part. Well, except the money part and we both are screwed up romantically. : )

For music, she put in lots of effort and practice. When she came to Calcutta from their village for her masters, she already had at least 20 years of learning music behind her. To get in to professional singing, she joined classes of an established professional singer of that time. That stupid lady made her sing in extraordinarily high scales in a screaming kind of a way. Her voice cracked and she fell sick. In fact she was quite unhappy with her teacher pretty early. She told my granny that she feared that her voice would go if she continues with her. But my granny who was so patient, so intelligent and so nice, didn’t pay any heed to her in this instance. The problem is that though chotomasi is phenomenally talented and is actually very nice, can have many tantrums and can be often unreasonable in a conventional sense. So my granny took this as one more of her quirkiness and asked her to stay at it. I guess even chotomasi thought that the teacher must know better and she let it go and kept singing in that stupid way. Well, she fell sick and the voice went. She can’t sing higher scales without her voice cracking up any more. Bye bye career in music. Isn’t it ironical how the person who loves us most can sometimes cause us the most grievous harm? We really can’t blame granny for it, my masi should have stood up for herself or continued the discussion with her. We all make so many mistakes ourselves that we don’t know when our mothers are right and when they are not. And then again, we all make mistakes and suffer losses, there is not much point blaming any one for it. But for a small coincidence, the mistake could have been solely my masi’s.

My masi had many interruptions during her studies. In many ways she is singularly unlucky. She studied at home for the first twelve years. Just when she was all ready for her 12th standard exam which is what you pass here before going to college for undergraduate studies, the rules suddenly changed against home study. She had to lose two years and stay with my other aunt to go to school and then give the same exam for which she has been ready for 3 years now.

She has a dark complexion. Which came up as a reason again and again as to why she could not married in an arranged marriage scenario. Idiots after idiots rejected her. I will some time find a photo of hers and post here. She really is very pretty. Many guys were attracted to her. Friendships between opposite sex were not encouraged at that time. Still there used to be fights among guys about wooing her. But none of those suitors were good enough. Either they were uneducated or financially no good. Plus they were no match for the fire ball that my masi is. It is incredible why none of matches that our whole extended family searched for her worked out. Eventually she married very late to a person of her own choice, a cousin of ours. This guy actually was a match for her in every way and was just as crazy and as talented as she was. The guy was a brilliant young doctor who was a few years younger to her. But the brilliant doctor who we knew from our childhood and I hero worshipped liked crazy, turned to politics while doing his masters to become a neurosurgeon. He always used to help people and had a very compassionate nature. He is so very beautiful. He comes from a rich family. Like my grandfather ruined his life in religion, this guy did the same in politics. I loved his so very much.

My masi gave up the teaching job she was doing half heartedly to be with him. They got married and she had a baby son. Again bad luck struck them. The kid was not well from birth. There was some lack of oxygen for a while when he was born. He was never well and he lived only for a year and a few months. He was admitted to the hospital at the end. My masi had just gone out for a drink of water at the end of a long bad night. When she came back to the bed, he had passed away. I don’t know how she did bear it. She told about it to us normally enough. I was so stunned, I didn’t cry at all. My mom was vehemently against her marrying that cousin of ours. (As was all of her extended family and some cut her off completely too.) But when the kid was born, she felt things would work out for her and my mom was so happy. When the kid died, my mom didn’t say anything. Just a few days back, she was telling me that was one of the reasons why my mom lost her mind. I too realized that my mom’s first breakdown was very soon after that. There were many many reasons for my mom’s illness but this seemed one of the triggers.

Do you think this was the end of my masi’s grief? Wait, no. She had already joined her husband in politics. But she wasn’t as keen and I would say not as blind to the faults of the party. I think with nothing much to occupy her, she started taking too much care of her husband. This is the time we lost touch as we were too busy with my mom and my dad’s voluntary retirement and his major problems in settling down and my mom’s second attack. So I am not quite clear what happened but they separated. I even heard that her husband had hit her a few times. My hero died. I mourn him still. Eventually they got divorced. He had started to live together with someone else already and I think now is married to her. My masi after a while took another teaching job where she got promoted and was to live as a superintendent with the girls in the girls’ hostel. We thought the company of young girls would help her. Again I don’t know exactly why she gave up that job or she might have been fired too.

When we went home last time after our father’s death, she came to meet us. She must be about 47-48 but she doesn’t look any older than me. With so much gone on her life, you can’t see it at all in her face or her eyes. She was wearing jeans and a plain cheap t-shirt and she looked like a friend of mine. At a pinch she can be passed off as a college student. She now lives as a paying guest or sometimes in women’s hostels. She has no employment or wish for any, I guess. I think she has some money from her parents but I don’t know how that is going to last her. She manages in a really really small sum of money. Her life is completely barren. She was saying she nowadays loves to watch movies in a cinema hall as she loves the feel of crowd around her. I wanted to cry after hearing that. She used to sing so well. Our houses used to be full of beautifully made and painted clay vases of hers. Her room used to be full of her painting. She never got to learn painting or pottery formally. My brother who doesn’t like her particularly was awestruck by a painting she made for him long after she had stopped all that. And now she craves the companionship of an anonymous crowd of a movie hall. She doesn’t sing, doesn’t paint, and doesn’t sculpt but she smiles just as brightly. Do you now wonder why my mom wants me to marry and have a kid at any cost? She is not taken in by my masi’s smile. She understands her strike.

The dream also reminded me of another small incident back in my childhood. In my mom’s village we had an annual festival called “Durgapuja”. It is by far the Bengali community’s largest festival. It is very easily a parallel to Christmas in terms of joy. So we all used to go there during this autumn festival. Most of our cousins used to turn up too. Actually my brother and I were keener to stay home at Jamshedpur to enjoy with our friends whereas understandably mom wanted to be with her parents and her childhood companions – her sisters. So we used to fight about it and go to my mom’s village once in a while during the festival.

The festival goes on for ten days with the main event being four days long. Everyone buys new clothes for these days. Our parents did so too. My mom bought dress materials for me and my chotomasi. The first one she chose was for me and I loved it a lot. It had lovely blue printed stripes on a dark grey background and was soft cotton. I am doing a poor job describing the material. Then she chose another one for my masi which was very good too. It had a pink base with blocks of yellow, blue and other vibrant colored squares appliquéd on it. She stitched them both. I knew the grey one was for me. When we went there all my aunts were getting the clothes out after lunch in the shady sitting room while it was blindingly sunny outside. There wasn’t any jealousy or competition involved as far as I could feel. I was about 15 then. We were all admiring each others clothes. My mom brought out the two dresses she got for us and asked my masi which one she wanted. Before I realized what was happening she chose the grey one. My mom gave it to her. We were both approximately same size. I told my mom then that I thought that the grey one was for me. My mom asked me to keep quite and was a bit embarrassed I guess. My masi immediately offered to take the other one but my mom asked her to keep the one she has chosen. I was angry and ran away. I wept hidden in the terrace. My mom came and explained that it wasn’t nice to be selfish. Because my masi had a complex about being dark, we must let her have the color she is more comfortable with. But I was inconsolable. I was not much for dresses at all but had somehow got attached to the grey one. I wanted to prance about wearing that one. I kept on saying “I don’t want any thing generally. This one time I want that dress, why can’t I have it?” My mom explained for a while and then she got impatient and told me to stop crying and left. If I kept on crying chotomasi would be very embarrassed about the gift. So I shut up after a while. Chiku (my brother) was 9 then and he was worried and was uncomfortably stalking around. I remember his frowning and asking why am I bothering about a stupid dress. He was saying “you don’t care about dresses, you care about books. So why are you crying? Please don’t”. I promised to myself I will never wear the pink dress. Needless to say I did wear it a few days later when my mom asked me to and all my cousins chorused in wanting to see in the lovely pink dress. In some ways my relatives are so good. I was angry and depressed for long. It was a silly whim but it cut me deep. A few years later when I came to Calcutta for my studies, I saw that my masi has given away that dress to a cousin. They both had not maintained the dress at all and it was looking like a rag. My mom had maintained my pink one beautifully and it was still as good as new after two years. I don’t know when it happened but I fell in love with my pink dress and cherished it for very long time afterwards.

I will finish off today’s long epistle with one more small memory of Durgapuja at my mom’s house. They used to sacrifice two goats on two days of the ceremony. They would tie the poor creature on a particular iron stand and cut its head with one swoop of a huge moon shaped blade. Barbaric, I know. This has stopped at most places of India now. PETA is quite active here and in general people are more towards stopping such practices. But it used to go on then and a lot goes on now too, in the name of tradition. It used to seem terribly barbaric to us. They would actually put the severed head on a clay plate and the men would dance around it. Chiku also had to dance there a few times and I know this is among the things he has not forgiven my mom for. I used to try to hide and avoid being there when the sacrifice happened. But my mom and specially my one uncle would force us to go as apparently watching this would build character. I say, f*** character but I wasn’t so confident then. We used to hate going so much. I would shut my eyes tight at the right moment or try to hide behind some adult. But my uncle or someone would push me to the front for a better look see. They would say that is the way life is and no way should we run away. It is another story how scared life has turned that uncle’s son and the uncle himself. But he used to love me lots and used to tell me the most fabulous stories. I loved his son so much. I met him last when he was about 2-3 years old and he would be clinging on my hip all the time. I hope things work out for that sweet kid. He has just finished his MBA but facing problems landing a job. Anyway it was then my cousin, my childhood hero, my masi’s future hubby who stood up for me and told it was utter nonsense. There was no need for us to witness the sacrifice. It was only his saying that validated my hatred for that violence. And that year he took all us kids with him to other places when the sacrifice was supposed to happen.

When we are young, we never do know how future is going to unfold for us. Well, we don’t know now either. In the story of my masi, I cry so much for the loss of that much potential in that doomed couple. He was such a compassionate person and used to love us younger cousings like his own siblings and take genuine interest in us.He was brave and naughty and funny. He said the bad words first among us. He slipped me pills to cure my sudden fever so I could go with him to his house which I was looking forward to from very long. Though the pill didn’t work and I had a raging fever the next day. How sweetly he kept his hand on my forehead and told me he would surely take me another time. There was another cousin who was more near my age who was to go too but she gave it up because I couldn’t go. The trip meant even more to her. She is another story waiting to be told another time. I wish I were more in touch with them all. Anyway I wanted to be like my hero cousin so much. Of course I don’t any more. But it hurts to lose you, khokon-dada. It hurts so much.

Well, my working from home is going well. I have bought lots of fruits yesterday. I am planning to make a sumptuous stir fry with lots of vegetables for lunch today. Also there is the plan to join gym again coming Monday. Hopefully I will repair my health a bit more.

Love you all my lovely friends.
 

All is not well in Iniville. : ) I am sinking and swimming. Am I like that piece of cork which won’t go down in a rocking sea? I feel like a odd shaped rusted machine which is sinking fast but something in it pushing it up again and again. Maybe there are some things to do yet.

First the bad news. I had another break down on Thursday. My mom wanted me to meet a new guy. Yeah, never ends. : ) Somehow I lost my cool big time. I told her I was not going to do it. Then she had a sad face. So I tried to explain it. She asked me to do it this one last time. True she had sort of promised she won’t look for guys any more. But this guy got referred to her without any effort on her part. She has already said yes to the guy etc etc.. By evening after a few rounds of explanations and a few hours of explanations, I lost my cool and yelled. She got very upset and scared. After both of us talking to my brother on phone alternately for two hours, we all kind of cooled down. I agreed to meet the guy.

My mom had full blown schizophrenic attacks twice. So we try not to upset her too much. This time she was very scared. It was not so much that I didn’t want to meet a guy but that I was not going to work so often and had a good chance of losing the job. She kept on saying that I was not behaving naturally. Maybe I wasn’t. So I agreed to see the doctor again. Also we discussed about taking a break for a month or two. I said I have money enough to last me a year. My brother asked me not to worry and he will chip in from his salary plus dad’s fund, if needed That’s end of drama on Thursday.

Friday I wrote to my boss that I needed to talk to him on Monday. I couldn’t do much on study front but stayed home and cooled down a lot. But still had headaches and an overwhelming anxiety. My brother called and asked me to call him as much as I needed and be as clingy and needy as I wanted to. I felt bad about being such a liability family to him. He said not to worry as he would create a spreadsheet about his electronic requirements which I can keep buying once I am fully on my feet. : )

I saw my doctor on Saturday. He increased the medication a bit which is helping. Also I need more physical activities. He says it would take a while to go away. Meanwhile I should try to negotiate or avoid stressful situations.

Now the good news. I talked with my boss today. Fortunately for me, he immediately agreed to let me work from home for one and a half month. So I should be working from home starting this Wednesday. We are still waiting on HR approval of this. But I am hoping that that won’t go wrong. The luck has to turn some where, isn’t it? So my dear R would be taking up as acting lead from me. Funnily enough, he had been to US twice from this company. Each time I was scheduled to go and didn’t go. I am again supposed to visit US this year and I am hoping to leave here before that. As we are supposed to stay for a year after a client visit or pay severe financial penalty. Looks like in many ways I am lucky for R. : ) I am not grudging this. My boss is generally not always so nice but he is letting me work from home to avoid revenue loss. But to be fair, he has been nice to me for most part. Hopefully I would be able to utilize this time to get better and study some.

Well. That’s the end of my status update. : ) I will be back soon to catch up with you all. Love you ladies.
 

PS I was supposed to meet that new guy on Sunday. Apparently he is too busy and so begged off. I loved this piece of good luck. My mom keeps saying, I will rue this later and ther won’t be anything to do. But for right now, I just need bare survival.

I am back to my favorite topic – me. Isn’t it incredibly self-centered to think all the time about one’s own self? But then what about self awareness? Isn’t that a good thing to have? It’s like there is something good in everything but how to have a perfect balance? Or even a reasonably good balance.  

I am worried about this colleague of me ratting on me. I am irritated. But I am not freaking out. I know people who would. And in every aspect of life they are ahead of me. I might be more comfortable with myself but I am not so sure about that too. My back and my heart are bleeding from this backstabbing. I am generally not much involved in office politics. I accept that people will gossip but ratting this way to the boss is very bad. Most probably I will come out of this unhurt anyway, but I am feeling low. 

After the problem with R, I was leaning a bit more towards this other guy S. Most probably it is him who has done this. Well, I may be wrong. When I had asked him yesterday, his face seriously went blank for a minute. I have never seen a face go so still. I should have waited and let him speak first and he would have perhaps tripped on it. But I was so sold on the idea of R being the villain, I didn’t wait for him to speak and said I know that R had told him but had he told the boss. He agreed that R had and he hadn’t told the boss. I think he lied on both counts. Though there is no point going on this way, as I don’t really know who it is. I am not going to take revenge. I can understand S might have done it in a weak moment to curry favor for himself and he didn’t really think that it would come back to me. Also again I don’t know anything for sure. But no more trusting blindly. Neither am I going to bend over backwards to help them grow their career. I am not going to praise them so much to my boss either. I won’t deny what they deserve but it won’t be more than what they deserve any more. I have seen S gossiping about others and should have known that it could haunt me one day. But the worst thing is I seriously didn’t confide in him. He must have guessed it somehow. Anyways enough on that. I would stay low profile for some time and this will go away on its won. As it is my boss is not so much worried, it seems. That does mean that I am not valued so much, but I guess that is to be expected. They will know once I leave. But again, whatever! I need to move on and I cannot really worry over-much about what others feel.  

I have known for long now that I can’t be too successful in my career. I am good at my job. I am more intelligent than most of my colleagues. But my head is in clouds. As my dad used to call me – sieve brains (a very loose translation of a lethal Bengali phrase). My dad would scold me and remind me and scare me to do a chore like say filling up the jug and glasses before the family sits down for dinner. I was about eight then. I don’t know how but I used to forget to do it 90% of the time. I can imagine his frustration now. I would perhaps give up and let it be if my child does so. My father gave up too but after a long time per me. It’s not that I wanted to rebel and forget. I would cringe and be sorry and scared when I would notice yet again there is no water at the table and run to fill them too late. But I would forget again and again and again. My dad used to say that I never keep things in my brain and I am never serious. I would be sorry for the moments he is scolding and would immediately forget it and start happily thinking about something else. Nothing holds in my sieve brain. Well, this series of problems remind me of my dad. He was brutally right as people often are about their kids. After I grew up a bit more, I think I started to manage to remember the more important things. Though I am a hopeless procrastinator still about doing things I don’t want to. I guess the universe is trying to teach me something by causing this series of situations but my sieve brain is refusing to hold on to it. Something happens to me and I am worried for less than a couple of days and then I am my usual stupid being. It is great for rebounding from problems but not at all great for growing up. Should I wonder that I am not moving forward in my life but just fire fighting my way through a lot of rubbish issues? 

On the other hand this is me. I can’t fight myself too much and for too long. That is why I don’t lose weight. I have to drown myself in food and movies and books and daydreaming. Very good for avoiding being hurt deeply but if I don’t see the issues, how will I solve them? I still seriously feel I can’t change myself too much. And for most days I am happy with who I am. But there is need for a stronger, more compact, more confident, more consistent, more together me. Let me try to work towards that. I need to eat right and not too much. I need to study with more discipline. I need to cut down on time spent on entertainment. I need to spend more quality time on my work. If I really sit down and concentrate and put my whole self in work, I can do wonders. Only I need to be at it more consistently. Pain is not an excuse to stop.  

On that note, I would end my self-analysis here and get to work. 

Thank you so much for your support and love. You guys love me so much. So there must be something right in me. *wink*. Lots of love and good thoughts for you. 

PS There was a survey recently at work about how may people would want to enroll in a yoga class. A big majority including me said “aye”. So hopefully there would be one here. I would love to join it. Though I don’t how much yoga will help me to lose weight. But I am sure it will help in controlling blood sugar and helping digestion. Hope it works out. 

Someone from my immediate or extended team has gone and told my boss that I am planning to quit. Looks like my woes will continue for some time yet. I hadn’t told anyone except R once long back. I was seriously pissed off. So I called up R and yelled at my lungs’ full capacity. He managed to convince me that he isn’t the one who has ratted. Maybe I am double the fool, but I am convinced it is not him. Most likely it is the other guy in my team on who I depend a lot. They might have guessed it from my studying and planning for the certification. Anyway muddying the water any more, will not help. My boss was grinning when he told me that he has heard in the grape vine that I would move to Bombay in six months or so. I was literally flabbergasted. I couldn’t lie so fast. So I told him I eventually plan to move to Bombay but not soon, not this year. I don’t know how convinced he was. I would talk once more tomorrow to not have any immediate problem. Hopefully this will not be a big problem. But what rotten luck!!!!

I am studying as much as I can. Not doing great there. I guess this new situation will prod me into a faster mode. I hope things don’t go even more downhill from here. I have just enough money in bank to pay off my car loan. After that there won’t be anything. If I do lose the job, it will be bad. The house rent in Bombay is exorbitant. It will be tough to stay there without my having a job. But I don’t think, I will lose the job yet.

Well, life goes on. I am actually able to stay quite unruffled at most of these bumps. I went to buy the 2nd season of Numb3r to console myself by retail therapy. Well, they don’t have it yet. So I bought South Park. I guess I will enjoy it much. But I feel bad that I always take an easy escape route and perhaps so live in a fool’s paradise. But there are these things about which I can’t do much and must keep cool. I am only worried that I perhaps will give up even when there will be situations about which I must do something. Maybe I am actually a coward. or maybe not. But I am now quite inclined to believe it is something in me. I must be really stupid to get in trouble in so many ways.

Love to all my wonderful friends here. I will come back and check in later.

I have been in a bit of a funk from when R came back. I don’t want to visit what I went through these few days. I again bunked work for a couple of days. Fortunately I am feeling stronger and slowly believing that things will work out for me somehow.

I almost feel like leaving my job even without a new one. I know that will be very foolish. So I am hanging on. My studies are not going so well. Because of my upset last week, I lost too much time which was rather well spent watching Boston Legal.

R and I have a truce now. The fact is that I loved him too damn much. Staying angry with him exhausts me and makes me physically sick. I actually got a bad cold because of all this. So I am going to forgive him. It is over and time to move on. No point asking why it had to be so for me. It is so and that is that.

I suddenly got in touch with some of my old girl friends from engineering college. It was good to talk to them through emails. I might be meeting one next week for lunch. She has a beautiful boy and a handsome/nice/very intelligent/well to do husband. I can’t stop feeling sad and unfulfiled when I think of my not having kids. But otherwise it will be fun meeting her. I think I will try out a new restaurant.

Reading Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eyes”. I could identify with so many things she said about childhood. Uncanny, how things are so same all over the globe.

I have a ton of work to do. And fortunately for once, in a mood to work too.

So long, lovely ladies. You are my pillars of strength.

Life is going on ordinarily enough. On the study front, things are slowly getting okay. I hardly studied during the weekend. But have done well enough on the first two week day mornings. Another guy from my work has cleared it last week. I discussed the exam with him. I am now feeling confident that I can do it. Any new disaster should not happen soon. I looked up the job opportunities in Bombay today morning. There seems to be many available if I get the certification. This is a great boost.

My brother asked me to come down to Bombay for a long weekend to take a break from here. We discussed taking mom with me. Mom is not too happy about going. But she has agreed that she would go if I feel it is becoming too much for me here. My brother lives with his girlfriend which is not so socially acceptable here. It will be awkward for my mom and T (my brother’s girlfriend). But they both agreed to do it for me. It made me feel good and loved and a bit humbled too. Isn’t it good to have people who are there for you? Anyway, I have decided that we won’t go now. To take my mom and go on a planned weekend will be too much work and quite some tension. I will focus on my studies now, so I can get a job there. Meanwhile if things get too much to bear here, I will go alone for a couple of days. There are too many flights from here to Bombay. It would be easy to get a cheap ticket and mom can manage alone for a few days. Just the knowledge that I can take a break will keep me centered. All this courage might evaporate once the idiot R comes back from his vacation tomorrow. Though I think I am feeling more detached as he is now married and so is out of bounds in every way. In a way it is good that the cut has been so final. I do not want to think about him at all except for the mind share needed for work.

I watched many episodes of Numb3rs this weekend. I also saw a few episodes from the first season of X-Files. It was looking a bit dated. I just looked up that the show started on 1993. The US of 1993 looked quite different from the US of 2000 I personally saw, which must be dated compared to the US of 2008. Also the technology wasn’t this sleek then. I am not much in to science fictions and aliens. I have read only a few well written novels in sci-fi and fantasy genre. But I found those episodes quite gripping. I don’t have a stomach for horror, so will send the whole lot to brother and may watch some episodes later. I still have Desperate Housewives 3 and Boston Legals to watch. It is so good that we get these available so easily here. Globalization helps. A lot!

It is good to watch these American TV series at one shot. I like the innovative ideas and the stories and the presentation. I don’t watch TV regularly here. As the stories they tell here are too well known to me for most part. And I don’t like reality shows most of the time. I can’t stomach the crying, the losing, and the way they stretch someone’s torment and show contestants breaking down. For one thing the breaking down of any person is intensely personal and I feel so bad to witness that and worse to think that they might be fake and staged. For another I can’t understand why someone would be so unhappy to lose in those stupid game shows. But then I guess I don’t know the kind of effort and emotional upheaval it takes. Also I don’t think one participating in a game show, can find much social support. I can understand someone feeling very bad losing in American Idol (we have Indian Idol) but in MTV Roadies! And that awful show – Big Brother! Goodness! The endless bitching and scheming! The Indian version last year had seedy celebrities and it was so awful. One can get seriously depressed if one is forced to watch Big Brother everyday for a couple of weeks. It can be a tool for torture. 

I got a few good books this time. I consulted a few good reading lists from listmania in Amazon and also the reading list in Oprah. I used to think that she is just a popular chat show host. Only after seeing you guys mentioning her here, I checked out her web site and then her magazine, and she really is so much more.

On the books, I read “Rebellion” by Nora Roberts. I am still surprised that Nora Roberts was there in the Oprah list. I had read many books by her and she is a good read. But still. That list has Wally Lamb’s “She has come undone”. No list should have such two different books at one place. By the way, the Wally Lamb book is astounding. I finished Rebellion pretty fast and it is nice but a bit shallow. Then I was reading a book called “A map of the world” by Jane Hamilton. It has major possibilities. But in the first chapter, a two year old girl drowns when the lady who was babysitting her was absent for may be five minutes and the kid walks down to the lake and drowns in the shallows where she generally paddles with adults present. I was upset that day with R’s marriage and this book freaked me out big time. I started to imagine me making such a fatal unintentional mistake and immediately decided that is not some place I needed to visit that day. It triggered the binge too. So I started the Dick Francis novel “Come to Grief” and settled down to a very good read. I will read the map another day. And I have comforted myself a bit by reading the end a little bit.

Now I am reading “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides. Again superlative! It is going slowly as I am trying to read fiction less these days. I still have Toni Morrison’s “the Bluest Eye” and “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. I am stocked up with very good books this time. It feels so good. The Oprah’s list is very good actually. Also I am discovering that many of these books are not there in my library. 

On more books, I bought the Vegetarian Times cook book when I went to buy books for my certification. I can’t believe it but I also bought Phantom comics. They were kept in a pyramid display near the entrance. I walked past at least five times and then gave in and picked one. As a policy from childhood, I never buy comics (only borrow from friends) as they are not enough reading for their price. I can buy a thick book for the same price which will last me longer. Geeky! But anyway I gave in, just to commemorate my childhood love for comics. I remember standing in a tiny kitchen and reading fast a compilation of comics at 4 am in the morning because I would have to return the book that very day. Mom didn’t even know I had that book or she would have killed me trying to finish a fat comics book on a school day. As it is she didn’t like my reading them. I finished parts of it by carrying it to the bathroom after everyone went to bed. I remember my parents yelling to ask “what the hell am I doing in bathroom for so long” and “why am I going to bathroom so many times”. Thinking now, they surely guessed what their 10 year old daughter was doing but didn’t have the heart to actually scold her nor could they officially sanction it. 

Once my mom caught me reading a “for adults” book which was a small satirical novel on pre-independent India’s farmer landlords and how they exploited villagers and widows. There was nothing explicit and I could hardly understand much of it because of the writer’s classical language. But the book was in the shape of a bottle and I was asked specifically not to read it. I was reading it below the bed one afternoon (we used to have high wooden beds which have enough space below for even an adult to hide). She caught me and got really really angry. She burnt the book. If she had hit me, I would have been okay. I was stunned. I couldn’t think of anyone burning a book. I don’t think I still have forgiven her for that. Though all four of us have known these awful black moments of terrible anger. I think she has forgotten now. She has told me many times since that her fanatical discipline about me not reading any book even mildly adult was very immature and quite useless. Whereas I now feel it was actually good of her to stop me. But then I took every single chance to thwart her. Mainly because I had more time and intention to read than I had material to read. I was not much of a rebel otherwise. But that burning still rankles. Why did she have to burn the book? But then I guess she got immensely frustrated and angry that day. It is okay, mom.

To conclude, eating is reasonably ok. No other binges so far. Not all food eaten is diet food by any measure but reasonably healthy. No exercise at all due to the break from gym. They have agreed to freeze my membership for a while. That at least will save me some money in membership fees. I am drinking lots of water and eating loads of fruits (thanks to mom). No way can I lose weight now but I hope to not go over too much and keep my blood sugar/cholesterol okay. I am a sick person!

Love to everyone trying to stay well and to conquer the urge to eat delicious food, well most of the time.