The July update

Okay, so I hardly ever converse with my overweight, lady of the Yokozuna thighs flatmate-cum-landlady. I'm as quiet as a doormouse and mostly tip-toe around the premises. In fact, I can safely profess that I would have been the quietest flatmate that there has been till date and yet, my landlady has this weird suspicious attitude towards me.

It's amazing how you start taking people and things and situations in your stride, (atleast I do), until some small yet highly significant event comes around and you begin to have a different perspective on things. Like a painter cleansing his brush in his little bowl of water tinctures it with a hue with which he has been working. There is something sad about that act. Have you ever noticed this? Often, as a kid, when I used to sit with my large paint book and all the accessories and painstakingly attempt to create a master piece out of the Mickey Mouse, or whatever the hell I was trying to fill in with colours, the most fascinating was to wash the paint from the brush by dipping it into this clear bowl of water. There was something melancholic about the act-transience, sadness, realization, all of them together.

Well, I got this imagery fresh in my head after my landlady knocked on my door last Sunday night. This was a rare phenomenon, her knocking on my door because she has NEVER done that. After I gingerly opened, she enquired whether I had used her frying pan to "make some food". I answered in the affirmative, because I had, and then she filled me in on how she was a Muslim and only touched or consumed 'halal' food and how she was touchy about other people using her utensils. Our conversation ended abruptly as she told me that it would be better if I purchased my own set of utensils. Okay, so I was guilty of using her stuff without informing her, but can you see the coloring, the tincture so to speak that infused itself into this situation. How a seemingly idyllic state of things between you and your flatmate, that fine balance of not speaking, meeting, bumping into each other kind of familiarity can be blown to smithereens by a word, pithy with political, religious and historical currents. It got me thinking, and morose at the same time. I'm not the guy who bothers about things as meaningless as religious identity, being the pseudo bastard child of liberalism and foreplay. A Berlin wall created over a relationship that never even existed.

I used to stare out into the horizon at the mountains in Mussourie from the edge of the concrete playground at my boarding school, now I stare at the city skyline from my 13th floor verandah. A lot and nothing has changed since then.The loneliness exists and the bridge between people, misunderstood, little islands, with a gamut of isolated identities and prejudices.