last part of the tales...
Chennai has changed over the last 3 years, or so my friends tell me. I don’t have much frame of reference, so I’m just going with the flow. Honestly, I don’t even want to know much about the place. I have been here two days now and I’m dying to go back home. To Bangalore, with the whispering winds. Only my friends keep me from running, screaming for the hills.
We go shopping. Spencer’s Plaza one day, and a hideous monstrosity of an architecture, called City Centre, the next. It is, perhaps appropriately, bang in front of the very odorous city fish market.
A. and I proceed to get a little crazy. After all, we have been window-shopping buddies through college, and now that have a little money to splurge, that too, in each other’s company, we really go overboard. I had been told of the wonderful leather in Chennai, and so proceed to buy 4 bags and 3 pairs of shoes. If my mom saw me shopping, I think she’d have a coronary. J
Meet up with S. and S. at the coffee shop. They bring along another friend. For guys in banking, they are still the chaotic, crazy people I have known since years. We have a blast, sitting around, talking shop, and random trivialities.
Café Coffee Day, I find, is the same everywhere. Characterized by bad service, and worse pop music blaring across hajjar speakers, it is difficult to make oneself be heard. I’m definitely a Barista aficionado, with more comfy seating, and better music, and definitely better coffee.
There is a lot of good natured “dissing” of each other, and the cities we frequent. While waiting for our dinner reservation, the guys light up. I do too, it’s a casual gesture. It’s only when I catch random people, of all ages and classes staring at me, that I realize that for all the “hep” attitudes, this is still a place steeped in conservativeness. I suppose they are amazed by the sheer audacity of a woman taking a puff, on the road. Once again, I’m thankful I’m in Bangalore and not Chennai.
The city HAS changed though, I have to grant. The city looks younger, more “spiffy” from this angle. Teenagers over the world are the same really, and Chennai is no exception. Daughters have escaped their mother’s coconut scented clutches, and are out in droves, all capri-ed and short-topped. They sit around in casual elegance, with the city coffee shops, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and wile away time with their friends. In shopping malls and coffee shops, at least, there is no longer the flower wielding, oil slicked public I had encountered, as early as 2 years ago.
All in all, its an illuminating set of experiences.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Chronicles Continued...
When I’m out walking I strut my stuff yeah I’m so strung out
I’m high as a kite I just might stop to check you out
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one
Body and beats I stain my sheets I don’t even know why
My girlfriend she’s at the end she is starting to cry
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one...
Violent Femmes › Blister in The Sun
The Chennai hits you like a two-ton truck speeding down the freeway. It blinds the eyesight, and leaves you gasping. From the time I’ve got here, I’m breathing in a furnace.
Sleep doesn’t come easy, I keep jerking awake, feeling stifled and smothered. I wake in the night, drenched. A. has flung a leg solidly across me. It kills, I swear. We have fitted ourselves into what I call a 1.5 bed.. too large for one, too small for two. I grit my teeth, and almost as abruptly she moves away. Blessed relief!
I cant imagine how she is so fast asleep. Snoring too. I guess its an acclimatization thing. I keep getting hotter and crankier, till I cant take it any more. “A. is the a/c on? Doesn’t seem like it. can I turn on the fan too, please?” A. has a cold, she has been heavy eyed through the evening. In a resigned murmur, she says yes. I put the fan on, with a sigh of thanks, and fall back into bed.
R. bless him, is awake, or at least makes sure he is, so I wile away part of the nite smsing him, till I finally fall asleep. He likes Chennai tho, and wants to relocate for a year, to learn to be serious or whatever. I tell him I can’t bear the place, so he laughingly tells me he will come to B’lore over weekends to meet me.
We get up in the morning, lazy, relaxed, slovenly.. whatever our minds make us. Opening our eyes, smiling sleeping across the bed at each other, we go back to sleep again, when I finally open my eyes, stretching lazily like a cat, its 10.30. I’m already covered in a fine sheen of sweat, droplets beading my arms and legs.
Guzzling back water, that seems to have turned hot during the night, I fall back yet awhile, while A. makes us tea, and if I whine long and loud enough, coffee for me. Indolence, rarely got, and well spent.
Almost all the clothes I got for my trip remain in my bag. All I can keep on, and that too, barely, are my shorts and spaghetti tops. The enchantment of an old relationship, I think, as I drape myself in inelegant poses over A.’s furniture, is that one can do just that.
Mis-aligned tops, hands wipe away water splashed over skin. A fly, somnambulant in the heat, is buzzing lazily around the window. It spends more time just sitting there, than making any real attempt to fly out. Its burning outside, if I close my eyes and pretend, I can almost hear the tar slowly dripping, melting down into little black puddles. I’m desperately trying to keep cool, in this blasted heat. What would I not give for a bathtub filled with ice cubes, right now.
I’m glowing, skin turns almost translucent in the heat. Skin stretched, taut over muscle. I can almost see the sinews stand out, in clear definition. Feathery green veins whisper across my skin, I become absorbed in watching them form paths along my hands and thighs. Would the heat make my skin totally lucent, I wonder.
I DO shriek in dismay, however, when I first come across them. A. brushes it away “No one asked you to be so fair. Shut up and chill! It will be fine”. I grumble, but do as she says. She’s right, the lines fade away in a day, leaving only a faint murmur behind.
I’m high as a kite I just might stop to check you out
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one
Body and beats I stain my sheets I don’t even know why
My girlfriend she’s at the end she is starting to cry
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one...
Violent Femmes › Blister in The Sun
The Chennai hits you like a two-ton truck speeding down the freeway. It blinds the eyesight, and leaves you gasping. From the time I’ve got here, I’m breathing in a furnace.
Sleep doesn’t come easy, I keep jerking awake, feeling stifled and smothered. I wake in the night, drenched. A. has flung a leg solidly across me. It kills, I swear. We have fitted ourselves into what I call a 1.5 bed.. too large for one, too small for two. I grit my teeth, and almost as abruptly she moves away. Blessed relief!
I cant imagine how she is so fast asleep. Snoring too. I guess its an acclimatization thing. I keep getting hotter and crankier, till I cant take it any more. “A. is the a/c on? Doesn’t seem like it. can I turn on the fan too, please?” A. has a cold, she has been heavy eyed through the evening. In a resigned murmur, she says yes. I put the fan on, with a sigh of thanks, and fall back into bed.
R. bless him, is awake, or at least makes sure he is, so I wile away part of the nite smsing him, till I finally fall asleep. He likes Chennai tho, and wants to relocate for a year, to learn to be serious or whatever. I tell him I can’t bear the place, so he laughingly tells me he will come to B’lore over weekends to meet me.
We get up in the morning, lazy, relaxed, slovenly.. whatever our minds make us. Opening our eyes, smiling sleeping across the bed at each other, we go back to sleep again, when I finally open my eyes, stretching lazily like a cat, its 10.30. I’m already covered in a fine sheen of sweat, droplets beading my arms and legs.
Guzzling back water, that seems to have turned hot during the night, I fall back yet awhile, while A. makes us tea, and if I whine long and loud enough, coffee for me. Indolence, rarely got, and well spent.
Almost all the clothes I got for my trip remain in my bag. All I can keep on, and that too, barely, are my shorts and spaghetti tops. The enchantment of an old relationship, I think, as I drape myself in inelegant poses over A.’s furniture, is that one can do just that.
Mis-aligned tops, hands wipe away water splashed over skin. A fly, somnambulant in the heat, is buzzing lazily around the window. It spends more time just sitting there, than making any real attempt to fly out. Its burning outside, if I close my eyes and pretend, I can almost hear the tar slowly dripping, melting down into little black puddles. I’m desperately trying to keep cool, in this blasted heat. What would I not give for a bathtub filled with ice cubes, right now.
I’m glowing, skin turns almost translucent in the heat. Skin stretched, taut over muscle. I can almost see the sinews stand out, in clear definition. Feathery green veins whisper across my skin, I become absorbed in watching them form paths along my hands and thighs. Would the heat make my skin totally lucent, I wonder.
I DO shriek in dismay, however, when I first come across them. A. brushes it away “No one asked you to be so fair. Shut up and chill! It will be fine”. I grumble, but do as she says. She’s right, the lines fade away in a day, leaving only a faint murmur behind.
The Chennai Chronicles..
...this will happen in bits, as its too long and too "separate" to write together..
Southward Ho!!!
From the very onset, there were upraised eyebrows. And some loud guffaws. “what, ur going to CHENNAI? In this HEAT?..Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you”. And more jokes to that effect. O what we suffer for our friends..3 of them, who had been badgering me for over a year to visit them.
The trip started off, not with a bang, but a whimper. Standing at the bus stop for an hour, after which 4 of us assorted travelers were bundled up onto the bus, by a kid from the travel agency. As I sank into cushioned AC comfort, some random instinct made me ask my co-passenger what time we would be reaching Chennai (ok, so he was young and cute, and I was making conversation :-D)
To our total consternation, he looked at me wide eyed, and said “This bus goes to Hyderabad”. At which point we all scrambled down the steps, retrieved our baggage, yelled that the idiot guy, and returned en masse, on sit on the steps of some ramshackle house , and wait for the correct Volvo.
Gave way to hysterical laughter as I thought of how I was almost unknowingly carried off into the land of the famous biriyani.
Southward Ho!!!
From the very onset, there were upraised eyebrows. And some loud guffaws. “what, ur going to CHENNAI? In this HEAT?..Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you”. And more jokes to that effect. O what we suffer for our friends..3 of them, who had been badgering me for over a year to visit them.
The trip started off, not with a bang, but a whimper. Standing at the bus stop for an hour, after which 4 of us assorted travelers were bundled up onto the bus, by a kid from the travel agency. As I sank into cushioned AC comfort, some random instinct made me ask my co-passenger what time we would be reaching Chennai (ok, so he was young and cute, and I was making conversation :-D)
To our total consternation, he looked at me wide eyed, and said “This bus goes to Hyderabad”. At which point we all scrambled down the steps, retrieved our baggage, yelled that the idiot guy, and returned en masse, on sit on the steps of some ramshackle house , and wait for the correct Volvo.
Gave way to hysterical laughter as I thought of how I was almost unknowingly carried off into the land of the famous biriyani.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Purge, purge, purge
Wash out, flush out, get rid of and remove. Eliminate, eradicate, and do away with. Cleanse and purify.
My system, my thoughts, my feeling, my emotions, my soul. Air the cobwebs of my mind. They clamor, jumping over each other to be heard. Let me out. Type frantically till my fingers ache, and I’m exhausted.
Catharsis. Write, write, write, and pour it all out. My very own “Anne Frank”. My non-judgmental one. My friend, my foe, my lover.
And when it’s all over, slip into quite solitude. Deep breathes, and pools of relaxation in an imaginary Zen garden.
The voices are silenced. All is well.
My system, my thoughts, my feeling, my emotions, my soul. Air the cobwebs of my mind. They clamor, jumping over each other to be heard. Let me out. Type frantically till my fingers ache, and I’m exhausted.
Catharsis. Write, write, write, and pour it all out. My very own “Anne Frank”. My non-judgmental one. My friend, my foe, my lover.
And when it’s all over, slip into quite solitude. Deep breathes, and pools of relaxation in an imaginary Zen garden.
The voices are silenced. All is well.
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