Maredumilli

Few things in life live up to the hype when, they are in fact, hyped. I was then a bit wary to burden this holiday plan with expectations. We were waiting for it to happen. To catch a break. To have a well deserved holiday. To reboot. To finally go on a perfect tour with the best of friends to the best of places and do the best of things. Yes, so many expectations. This one lived up.

Apart from the purity of the place, it had one more advantage. There was no communication to the outside world. Paradise, it was.

‘Birds Nest’, the resort we stayed, is unique in that there is nothing on either side of the resort except wild jungles. A river stream flows through a side. There are mountains all round, covered in rich green. The nights are pitch dark, silent and you can see stars like diamonds. You can try counting them but there are too many.

We spent three days doing pretty much nothing. We stared at the greenery, the mountains all around us, the stream. There was silence, disturbed only by the never-ending rush of the stream. We laughed freely, and we smoked.

At some point after midnight

I was swinging and laughing

I was high and dancing

Music was the colour, it was the wild that was dancing

I felt the warmth of fire on my back

I saw the brightest things in pitch dark

I faced the forest and the darkness beyond

Catching hold of stars, hiding behind green leaves

The forest ate away the past and the darkness, the future

I realized, I was part of it

Die, please.

My Grandmother (Father’s mother) lived a life in which she will be remembered fondly for her reproductive functions. She will be remembered regretfully for almost anything else – if she is remembered at all. Even the reproduction was overdone. She produced six children, all of whom are burdens to earth (maybe an exception is my Dad, who is the most sensible of the lot, which is saying something about the lot). Let me not start off on my dad now, my grandmother retired from doing part-time work at about the age of 35-40 when she had a source of income in form of rents from her house and she had four daughters-in-law from four sons. Her most productive period was when she gave these in-laws the gift of hatred. She hated them so much and tortured them in so many ways that the in-laws (incl. my mom) made hating her back the purpose of their lives. After my grandfather died 12-16 years back (I don’t remember) she made some dumb decisions and started living on the mercy of the people who hated her (in-laws). She lived like that all these years. She is still living.

The reason I hate her is, she is a hindrance, and she is a bag of emotional and sentimental stupidity, gathered throughout her TV serial kind of life. She expects pity from people who hate her - like my mom, people who don’t care - like me and people who just want her dead so they can forget that she existed - like everyone. The tragedy is, she gets it. She sits on a sofa, and asks stupid--meaningless-redundant-old people like questions when I pass her by (Did you come home? Did you eat?). Thing is, she isn’t concerned whether I eat or die, it is just that she has nothing else to do the whole day. What ever comes out of her mouth is utterly pointless anyways, but her tone makes it worse. I lost my sense for pity long time back but I have to give her some response, yes? This just kills me. I can’t give stupid responses to stupid questions by stupid people. To solve this, I started acting like there is empty space on that sofa. It works but I can only act, right? I still have to bear the thought that she is there, with her stupid face and stupid thoughts. And that my mom will have to nurse her for half a month, every two months. My mom, who hates her with all the energy she can conjure, has to get sick, serving her, that’s torture. Every time our turn of half a month is over, I just hope that she will be dead in the next one and a half months so that I’ll not be required to look at her again.

My grandmother should have died long back. She claims she wants to die, but never does anything towards that direction. She almost died two months back but survived (which wasn’t so bad because it was a busy time for me and taking a leave for the celebrations would have disturbed my schedule). She somehow carries on living, like that is the achievement she will be remembered for – living on people for so long that it got to their nerves and they all started hating each other.

No, I don’t have a problem with the oldies, they should be looked after and all. I am going to be old one day and my parents too. But, ‘BUT’ they should have earned it when they had the chance. I know my parents earned it and so will I. People can’t just expect love and respect just because they are older. Being older doesn’t translate to wiser automatically.

Drunk

Here’s to hoping my parents would never find out, never cared about any others who would be interested to find out.

Exactly in the middle of two full bottles of mansion house, I decide to write about how it feels when completely drunk. Before that, I must confess that I am not totally out, so this may not be a truly accurate portrait.

 You suddenly are not afraid of consequences, you want to change wrongs and replace them with rights. You stop thinking about losing your job and think about what ifs. You don’t care what your bosses would say about the faults only they can find. You feel that you are better than them. You don’t care about the years of ambition or the lifetime of frustrations. Your mind spins, or stops spinning, and you feel the calm you haven’t felt the whole week of doing productive work. A bit of comfort, as the wait is over, the wait for the week to be over with and the break to begin. You forget about what you never remembered, but never got to push out of the borders of your mind either – the irrelevant. The Saturday and Sunday of life with your best friends and a raw peg.

The song playing on speakers ‘And nothing else matters’