I do not like

• To be misunderstood
• To be refused something I offer out of care (except when it is diary milk silk)
• When people assume things from a gesture or word without clearing it with you
• Whenever there is no coffee!
• Insults
• Lies and hypocrisies and artificiality (all somehow sounds one and the same)

Divsu

It’s been many years now (here I am tempted to wrinkle my brows like Old Rose and say ‘but I can still smell the fresh paint’).  Picture a typical hostel room. Picture girls’ only. Picture Chalakudy. That was my three-day stint at NSS. I can’t smell the paint – I doubt they used any. Neither retrace the faces. But I can remember a thin rope on top of our bed for wet clothes. And a pair of protective little hands silently lullabying my nights. Divsu.

Semester end exams were on and we sneaked in an extended-stay-over under the tag of ‘combine study’. Every night the clock would go racing from 9 and 10 to 11 on the little yellow timepiece Divsu worshipped. It’s like seconds were not seconds anymore, they became incredibly micro-er! Divsu and I would move like snails across our textbook pages, 10 words an hour, five when there’s group study. At this point – when it’s 11pm dot – Divsu springs up from the bed and rushes to the clock. She toys with it till it’s 9 again. “That way, I wont be sleepy,” she says happily, comes back to bed and falls like a log in five minutes, clutching tight her book of computer graphics. I watch and do the slow wave-of-head that I see in sitcoms.

I have a habit of using first letters in place of names in the blog but Divsu just wouldn’t be Divsu if you don’t call her Divsu. Over the years I have come to the practice of giving my own nickname to all my friends. But for Divsu, it’s just the perfect name. There’s no particular occasion that I should be talking of this wonderful little package that came to my life in those backbench days… which saw us from barely talking to each other to becoming bread and butter. Hmm is that an expression now? It should be!

I may have stressed the word little a bit here. It’s no accident, Divsu is tiny. Now I could be a little generous with my adjectives, especially when they are for me. So when I say I am way taller than her, I mean two or three inches. Divsu claims it’s lesser. I claim that’s when she jumps.

I suppose it started – this Divsu talk – when I was looking at the clock leave midnight way too early for my liking and silently whining about the injustice of time. Ok not so silent perhaps. I had to finish a couple of assignments before bed and I was nowhere close. All the time talk and the impatient hands of the living room clock brought back memories of Divsu’s tiny timepiece. I opened the document to whine about time lost, and ended up smiling at pieces I left behind to the same lost time, somewhere a little further behind. Is this what they call irony? I have never been able to get that word right. But back to my work now. Good night Divsu.

A visit to a house

So Miss CC goes to a famous person’s house to do a feature about it – the house, not the person. Mister FP is in no mood to chat. Neither is he inclined to encourage CC’s happy questions.

CC: So you like it dark in here hah?

(CC, for some reason thinks this is absolutely funny and decides to guffaw)

FP: Is it dark, you think? Isn’t this how it should be – pleasant and cool with sunlight pouring in?

CC: Err sure (trying to find out where this unfound pleasantness was)… And these paintings on the walls

FP: What about it?

CC: Is it by anyone in the family?

FP looks amused: The one you are pointing to is by Van Gogh.

Ok, so Gogh is not in the family. CC keeps quiet for a long while, hoping that silence might be confused for a bit of late intelligence. But she needs stuff to write that feature, she can’t write about a dark Van Gogh painting in 300 words.

CC (pointing at a shelf): Wow so this is where you keep all your awards

FP grunts: Those are not awards, those are mementos. I don’t exhibit my awards.

CC gives up. She will have to rely on her imagination to carve out stories about this house and its uncooperative owner. But in FP’s face, there is no trace of annoyance. He is happy to have been entertained by a visitor who had no idea how to tell wood apart from glass, let alone Gogh from Namboothiri – but that’s another story which we shall not be talking about.

I wonder

I wonder if child actors feel bad their parents let them out into the limelight without asking them first, once they grow up and learn of this word called privacy.

I wonder why only auto rickshaws come named. What is wrong in naming electric vehicles for instance?

I wonder how there is always some woman who would always find her way into the front of a queue without anyone else protesting.

I wonder how there are two-way affairs.

I wonder how people drink tea!

I wonder why I am obsessed with six.

Heavy Day

Heavy day, this.

First, I go for a long bike ride to interview Mr Johnson who runs an NGO. I forget my helmet as I pillion ride with our photographer and get sun burnt for an hour.

As I come back to office and sit to write, somehow get the ‘invisible’ feeling you sometimes do when people don’t apparently hear you or see you. Don’t wish to explain further.

And right now an external photographer I depended on the other day to get the picture of an event is mad at me. Our desk missed giving him pic credit and he has every reason to be mad. But apologies after apologies, he is not to be pacified and I am feeling awfully drained out. I offered him the suggestion of suing me and demanding compensation. Feel that shelling out a lot of money and walking out bankrupt would somehow be a good ending to this day. (Bankrupt? I could be a tad dramatic on these heavy days).