What am I saying?

Okay, this one is terribly personal, but it feels nice to have skinned off the layer a little and admire what's underneath. I have been saying this to myself over last many days now.

So, this entry sort of marks my foray as a person baring her mind and her heart a little more easily and perhaps with an understanding there is nothing that might just surprise me in the negative.

First, it's been a longish day, having been in two cities, travelling, mid-air pondering, reading, looking out the window, et al. This ain't a story. This is, or can at worst, look like a diary entry without any frills.

For long as I've been writing, I don't believe I have stood apart from any of the emotions expressed and tested in any kind of work I've done and put on my blog.

I've been a shirker too.

So, I want to start my little story with just a bit of distraction, and nothing else. All around the world, there are writers, and people who are feverishly at it, without any labels on their form of writing. I manage to look at some, through published work or on the internet and very often, I surprise myself looking at the compressed forms of expression. It is just that. Shorter.

Someone I know of, recently remarked that writing in this time has to grab you as fast as it can because there is a continuous scroll of writings waiting to be read and appreciated. Who's got the time?

If I consider myself as a con artist, perhaps I should be indulging myself in chick lit with a dash of cheeky humor and put on a pink cover and push for publicity. If not, I better get my ass to work.

So, this is where I am at the moment. Now, the story.

Dec 30, 2010..

"Have a good Monday," I kissed her cheek and said my good bye. I don't know when I will make my next visit to see her, but I know that she and I have come closer, or at least, after a trail of visits, this one meant more.

Leaving Mumbai, is never easy. Neither is getting in, by the way. What I always ask myself when I am in this city, after leaving in late 2007 is this one question: Am I cut for a life with little physical and mental space the city gives? Unlike the sea, the actual physical space you and I occupy in the city is very less, and mostly, we are always in torrid waters. Not to sound too dismissive, my tryst with Mumbai is a jumbled up concoction of a bittersweet wine.

I didn't have the heart to tell my little sister when she put the question to me: So, did you have a bf? What happened?

I had to resort to a couple of adjectives that came along to save me. What was more important was when she asked: Do you have a bf now?

Yes, that's easy I thought. I replied in the affirmative and she obviously wanted to know a little more and was suspecting perhaps I would get into long conversations about it, but again, as lousy as I am with talking about myself, I showed her a photograph and she gawked, "oh, him!"

She's in her teens, and like you and I would know, boyfriends, books, waistline and most things we adults talk, are generally spoken in much crisper, more animated tones in this age.

And, like Facebook has taught us, most things are either disliked or liked. So, when it's boys, she was excited about the ones she didn't like, more emphatic, like it troubled her to think that expressing in milder tones about the men may just not have the desired effect, as they say.

"See his Facebook profile, he likes Akon! yuck! Look at his hair!," and like any normal teenage kid, you watch her while her face explodes into a series of expressions. It's almost as if she wants to come up with something that nails his ugliness of personality more aptly than what she actually has achieved with the word 'yuck.' I don't blame her. We all use emoticons :-)

So, staying on the subject of boys, I learnt about her crush, and didn't have the courage to ask whether she has cried over him or not. Instead, what came out was a much more lame question: How much of this do your parents know? Do you share things with them?

She breaks into a blasphemous rap on my nerves with a "whaaa!" and then chuckles saying, "Who wants to die!". Pity me, I don't.

Yawn. More later