I can't change, I can't change, but I'm here in my mind, I am here in my mind, I'm a million different people from one day to the next

* Things are out to get me. I'm serious. Just now, not fifteen minutes ago, I'm talking to a friend on the phone and happen to knock my thumb lightly against the table. Okay, it's a slight knock, not the kind of thing you'd notice normally, only five minutes after that I'm aware of an acute throbbing pain in said thumb. I look down, it's scarlet in a way that only an injured limb can be and there's one spot that's blue and pulsing. Ladies and gentlemen, meet eM the only healthy, in control of bodily functions, adult woman alive who has managed to burst a blood vessel while on a perfectly normal phone conversation.

If that's not enough, there's a lift in my office that wants to eat me. You know how with most lifts if you put your hand in or stand against the wall or something, it won't close? I think that has something to do with the sensor. This one, though, each time I try to hold it, so I can get in, begins to close over whatever body part I have inserted. (Okay, that just sounds dirty. I meant, naturellement, a hand or an arm or something. Not like a boob. Or a vagina, but that would be tough) And to make matters worse, it does this with a little chuckle. And ONLY to me, everyone else stands with insouciant ease, with one finger pressed against the door. Yesterday I only managed to save my hand with great agility, but I did scrape it.

* Was out with a friend the other night, who was on assignment at Ralph's Wine Bar at Uppal's Orchid. We enter, are seated, poring over the wine list like experts when really the only thing I recognise is merlot, and this waiter brings a bowl of buttered, salted popcorn which I'm happily tucking into, when this other waiter comes up and asks for ID. Now, I haven't been asked for ID since I was 19 and shivering outside Djinns, when the bouncer looked impervious to my (goosefleshed) charms and refused to move the velvet rope. (Now that no one goes there anymore, I feel a certain glee, coz I can walk in anytime I want to, but I choose not to). Anyway, as regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I miss the legal Delhi drinking age by, oh, six months. Six. Lousy. Months. I believe the drinking age in Mumbai is eighteen? And Cal as well, right? But, noooooooo, we must discriminate against me.

So, we tried to bluff our way through it. My friend actually is legal, 26 soon, and I'm all like, "Well, while I'm flattered that you'd think I was under 25, this is just getting silly now, so why don't you run along like a good boy and get us a glass of red?" they insisted. And then, sadly I told my friend I wouldn't drink, I'd just have a coke, honest, because night outs were about the company and totally not about the alcohol. Totally. But they got even more shirty (which is a term I love but it mystifies me. So like the opposite of shirty would be trousery?) about it and said I couldn't sit in the goddamn bar if I was under 25. We did a lot of hem-hem-PRESS-hem-hem, but to no avail. So we had to leave. By the time we were at the Deck in Sahara Mall though, a Bloody Mary flowing happily through my veins, we saw the humour in the situation. But really, Uppal's Orchid dudes? Six months? On a slow Sunday night with no one at your bar? You need to rethink your managerial policies.

* Twas Leela's birthday a couple of days ago. Leela, my best friend, sitting in London turned 25, and I was just thinking of the first birthday I knew her for, I think it was her thirteenth. Her twin sisters and I decided to throw her a surprise party, only she got wind of it and promptly handed them a guest list, "just in case they were interested in knowing if she had a birthday party, who she'd be likely to invite." We played the piano, or she did, and there was a skit or something and her then-boyfriend, this boy she vowed she'd marry someday (and to be fair, they lasted from Class 8 to Class 11) was there. This was before we became the friends we are today, when we were in that first infatuated stage you have with new people you really really really like, and you're over at their place all the time and going, "Leela says" every second sentence at home and looking at old photo albums and basically living together, but you're still not in that comfort zone you have with people you love. Like a new pair of jeans that you can't bear to take off or wash, and soon they're like part of your skin, with white faded areas around your ass. I remember the two of us listening to Madonna really loudly on her parents' system (which we were forbidden to touch) and once, daringly, sneaking out Erotica from its aluminium foil cd case and listening to it quickly.


I miss her. I miss the two just-teenagers, who read Baby Sitter's Club and Sweet Valley High peppered with the occassional classic and went swimming and played endless board games on endless summer afternoons and had fashion shows and sleepovers where we talked and talked and talked till one am. I wonder what those two would think of us. Would they be happy with the way they turned out? Or would they crinkle their noses a little and go, "Really? That's who we become? I think we're going to stay right here, thanks."


* By the way, I'm doing a story on young single independant people in the city, basically talking about what they do, and their friends and support systems and so on and how it's okay to be alone and it would be great if you (or someone you know) would let me speak to them, pick their minds a little, talk about being single. You can be DATING someone, but not married. And preferably, for this story, living alone, and/or defying your parents and convention in some way. Please? Pretty please? Email me at thecompulsiveconfessorATgmailDOTcom

Thank you! :)

I'm a poster girl with no poster, I am 32 flavours and then some

This heat, this city, I can't handle it anymore. Sitting at a friend's house now, waiting for her to bathe so we can leave and go somewhere. MB's probably, that haven of cheap drinking in Defence Colony. But still, Saturday nights are not what they used to be. I wish something exciting would happen--- a party, perhaps, with huge moist fans sprinkling cool water over people and an open bar.

Or maybe a farmhouse party. The kind with a guest list, so you can only get in if you know someone. Like the host. If you know the host, it makes you feel super popular, as you breeze past the crowds and go up to the guard and tell him confidently, "eM plus six" and he checks and you go in and you know everybody and there's a pool, and people passed out around it and girls in short shorts and boys in too-short-for-comfort shorts making out in and around corners. Do people not throw these parties anymore? Or maybe it's just that we're getting older and we don't know so many people, or even the kind of people who used to throw those parties in the first place. Funny, that, coz you'd think the older you got, the more people you'd know.

It's funny, how when I was still in my teens I thought farmhouse parties would last forever and I'd always be invited. I thought I'd always know the it music and always be clued in about who was dating who. There used to be a website called Delhigossip.com, and the thrill was in being featured on it, because that meant you had made it. You were there. At the pinnacle of popularity.

I guess we're all still popular now, as in we have friends and a social life and all that. But adult popularity is strangely not as satisfying as teenage popularity. I mean, the number of times your phone rings doesn't inversely relate to how cool you are. I get a lot of phone calls--but they're mostly from PR people. Or Small. And when the people calling you are either work-related or your flatmate, well, you're just not all that anymore.

I do like my quiet-ish drinking evenings with friends also. But there's no excitement, no thrill in having that cute boy finally see you out of your school uniform, or going nervously to the beauty parlour to get your first pedicure.

Sigh. Saturday nights are just not what they used to be in the good ol' days.

How eM got her groove back

It's Wednesday, and almost a week since I returned from Egypt. Sigh. Holidays are so short, forgetting is so long.

But, in this one week, I must admit, several things have been happening with me. First of all, fabulous news, we have an addition to our family. No, Small and I haven't adopted the cat or the kid that we (okay, only me) want, but we do have a new flatmate, who I shall call something pretty, like, um, Lily. Yes, I like Lily, and that way I can go, "Lily, don't be silly" and several other Loin King jokes. Anyway, so we met Lily through the Editor-Poets, friends of mine who I have blogged about earlier, and she came over after we returned and liked the flat and us and so, long story short, she'll be moving in come June 1st. (Touch wood, I say superstitously).

Tonight, Small, Lily and I (already it sounds natural to type that sentence) are going to TC, and she's going to spend the night and we're doing all sorts of flatmate bonding and I am filled with good cheer and the need to sing Seasons In The Sun at the top of my lungs. Only I can't drink at TC, which leads me to Piece Of News That Has Happened To eM Part 2.

While I was in Egypt I contracted this nasty rash, which I thought was because of these little sandflies that kept biting me, but then when it refused to go away, I went to the hopsital when I returned and it turns out it's because of something I ate. So I'm now on steroids, which has cleared it up marvellously, and makes my skin look radiant, but sadly that means no alcohol for like ten days, and no smoking also (to an extent). And it's really harddddddddddddddd.

Walking in Memphis, like an Egyptian

Awww.. I've missed you guys. And blogging.

Egypt was fantastic, but I have so much to say, I hardly know how to contain it into a single blog post. Travel is mind-broadening, and sorta figure broadening too, I must say, I'm a couple of kilos heavier, which sucks, but the amount of beef I ate is all worth it.

Oh, the pyramids! And the colours! Egypt is all about colours--the blue blue blue blueness of the Mediterranean Sea, the hot yellow brightness of the Sahara desert, the green reptileness of the Nile. And that's only their geography. All over the skyline there are green domes of mosques, and every hour on the hour, there's the call to prayer. People stop to pray everywhere, spreading cardboard on sidewalks, sitting with their hijab-clad dates at coffee shops, over the rattle of the train, and not at all self-concious or disturbed by the noise and the clamour around them.

And the hijab. All the women wore scarves around their heads, little sundresses with a full-sleeved bodice and jeans underneath, some even in heavy burkahs, with only their eyes visible. The Lonely Planet told us to dress modestly, and we did, modestly, in t-shirts and long skirts and still eyes followed us, men attempted to get familiar, women tittered to each other about these bold, bare-headed foreigners from the land of Amitabh Bachchan (who they adore), who looked so much like them, but were so shameless.

Are you Muslim, is another question that I was asked over and over again, that and do you have a husband? Both of which I answered in the negative, to which they looked puzzled. Hindusim is a concept not understood at all there, most people haven't even heard of it. One man asked me my name and when I told him, he said, "That is not an Egyptian name. My name is Mustafah, that's not an Indian name." "Yes it is," I said, and he started. "You have Muslims in India?" Even our guide, a strange horrible man called Mohammed said, "I bet you have no Muslim friends in India." "We do, actually," we replied, but he still looked disbelieving, even when we broke it down into figures and statistics.

The ancient Egyptians are more or less forgotten in all this, spoken of only as history lessons. No one worships Amun-Ra or Horus or anyone anymore, which is sad, especially when you see their breathtaking temples, and look at 3,000 year old heiroglyphics, still shiny and new looking. When we were making thingummies out of clay over at the Indus Valley, they were making marble statues, and coins and they had gods for every possible thing, including the god of sex, who is always depicted with a massive hard-on and whom Mohammed pointed out without fail at each temple. "That is his benis," he said (Arabic doesn't have the letter 'p' so all we heard was "bictures" and "barking" and so on), "Have you ever seen a benis?" This to me, right in front of my mother. "A lady never answers these questions," I said, as frostily as I could, but he just cackled and said, "That means you have!" Jesus.



More stories in the next post. So nice to see you all again.



8:51 pm, update: Happy Day was the name of the falluka that took us gently across the Nile. Our cruise ship was called, appropriately, I thought, Le Scribe, but fallukas are things of Cleopatra, with huge sails and two laughing men, who teased me and Small and picked me a handful of water weeds, which I then gave as an offering to the Nile, which I have fallen madly in love with.


At sunset, our falluka drifted close to the marshes and we were very still, listening to the loud opera of frogs and watching as kingfishers darted suddenly across the water. It sounds like a tourism plug, even as I'm writing this, but it was so, so magical, and witchy that I don't think I can do it justice.

As a marked contrast to that, let me offer you the story of a young man in the marketplace, selling glass bottles of coloured sand. "You know Tupac?" he asked me in this strange Brit accent, which sounded so odd in contrast to his long kurta like outfit (that they call a gabbaleya). When I nodded, he said, "Well, he my brother. And Craig David? He's my son."

(/smileyface\)


UPDATE 2:

What we saw

* The Pyramids (overwhelming)

* The coffee shops (encouraged spending)

* The food (kebabs and kushari)

* The belly dancers (almost in a sari)

* The whirling dervishes (whirly)

* Khan-el-Khalil bazaar (pearly)

* Camels called Michael (who almost smiled)

* The Philae temple (in the middle of the Nile)

* Moses' spring (where he was found)

* An old mosque (the dome was round)


What I read

The Lonely Planet Guide To Egypt (excellent for anyone making the trip, I always find the LP even more informative than the locals)

In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh (I picked up most of my Arabic from this book, my proudest point was saying Al-Hindi (for India) to farmer's kids and seeing recognition across their faces)

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk (Okay, not about Egypt, but good reading anyway)

Khul Khaal (About five Egyptian women, telling their life stories. Did you know most of them had clitordectemies?)

Okay, this is it

As in, I leave Sunday morning and it's unlikely that I will have internet access tomorrow, so this is ta, essentially, till the 18th when I return and bore you horribly for a while by posting pictures and a travellogue. :)

I'm thinking of making it a series even-- The Compulsive Confessor Does Eygpt or some such. So camera and laptop are being carried, if I get good wifi signal somewhere, I might do a post from there also.

But don't go away, I'll have tons of stories when I return. Today is Small's happy to you also, so if you know her, say happy birthday quickly.

Also, technical stuff, my cell will be switched off till I return and I'm disabling comments. So if you have something you want to say to me, email please? I'm trying to set up a vacation response thingummy, but I'll catch up on correspondence once I return in supereffecient manner, god promise, mother isswear.

Au revoir!

She likes the free, fresh wind in her hair, life without care, she's broke, it's oke, that's why the lady is a tramp

So the other night, I was chilling with Small and another friend of ours and we started talking about fix-ups. Mainly for me, but my friend wanted a piece of the action too. We racked our brains for a bit, looked through our phone books, and finally Small said, "I can't help you dude, eM's the only single woman I know."


That's when it struck me. I may not be the ONLY single woman I know, because I know, um, three? other people, but on an average, like using maths and statistics and all that jazz, we're like 20: 40, where 40 is the people in relationships.


That's anecdote one, to illustrate my point. Anecdote two is when I was working the other day and we were talking about going out at night and where to go and all that, and one of my colleagues turns to me and goes, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I shook my head, smiling to show her it wasn't that bad and I wasn't weeping into my pillow every night etc etc, but she shook her head right back at me. "I find it hard to believe that someone like you is not dating anyone special."

In a previous life, I'd hate that statement, because it could be interpreted as, ohmygodtheremustbesomethingseriouslywrongwithyou, but now I've learned to take it as a compliment. Someone like me and still single? Hey, there must be something nice about not being in a relationship.

Of course, like every single woman, or almost every single woman, I want to someday meet someone nice, who'll be fabulous in every way and who will think, but naturally, that I am fabulous too. But, meh, I'm really tired of looking.

On to anecdote three. So, I'm on this date the other day, and we're sitting at home, watching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells (good movie, btw, you should see it, if you haven't already) and we're chatting and Small's not home so it's all like private and all and I'm enjoying myself, coz I'm just being me and not like trying too hard or being a different, more giggly, more flirty type person, (which is what I normally do, sadly, when I'm trying to flirt and then sit back and watch myself in horror because it is so not me) and we talk till four am and I'm quite pleased with the way things are going, because Life is not always about Sex and I am so wise and mature and the next day he tells a common friend that there's no chemistry. I ask you. Does that not suck? Although he did say I was nice and funny and all that, but what is the POINT of niceness and funniness if one is getting zero action? Zero. That is right, in this quest to preserve my integrity and my values and so on, I am not getting ANY.


Anyway. More about preserving the values and integrity (v & i). After my last, um, flingette, I decided screw this, this is not making me happy, I'm just going to stop with the random hooking up till I find someone who will worship me like a goddess and sprinkle rose petals on my body and whisper Blake to me when we are in bed. Only (and here's the catch), this Dude? The Blake-quoter? He doesn't exist. No, I'm serious. I even tried to narrow the field and make a list and so on, but really, in this day and age, romance, especially of the Blake-quoting, rose petal sprinkling, banging on your door in the middle of the night calling your name-ing, is dead. I'm going to have to either a) settle for just a random someone who makes me happy or b) take my v & i and cuddle up next to them at night.

Right now, I've picked option b. I hate to think that eventually I'm going to have to make a compromise. I've got my life planned, as far as life can be planned, and this plan DOES NOT include getting married or finding a life partner. If that happens, fabulous, I'll be super-happy, but only if it's with someone I feel I haven't settled for.