13/03/2018: A Log

I woke up distant and resigned from my usual state of being, a state of pretence where I wake up not looking terrible in my face and my mother unsuspecting of anything wrong with me. Though sometimes, when it’s only us, she catches the whiff of my sadness like I am guilty of something; I blush and make something up to help her withdraw from that type of stare where she psychologically is trying to register that her son might be queer. I’m not; it is just one of those looks that are filled with unconscious care and obvious staring.

Nevertheless, yesterday they released a statement which declared our colleges shut till Wednesday and believe me I looked my mother in the eye and said my graduation is done as if it was her fault and as if she could do anything about it. 

With the way things are going, I think I’ll never make it to that time; meaning I’ll be bone tired, not like, die. They withdrew the decisions later on and kept the colleges open.

I’m an unusual person, I don’t like coffee and if offered I gulp it, rather put it on my tongue and feel the sting of caffeine. I have rather grown in my taste for our native tea— Nun-chai and to be very honest I have irritable bowel syndrome, as if my maternal uncle couldn’t have anything better in his genes. Sometimes it comes as an advantage, other times it’s just a terrible thing to have. Frankly, it awoke like a superpower in my teens and that is the single weirdest thing that has happened to me; that and except hearing a few complacent stories of my friend’s grandfather.

The air was tense today, it was damp and humid and warm. It reminds me of Delhi, the air is thick and riddled with impurities; it’s like breathing from a chimney exhaust. Although that is a drastic comparison of two: you could say living in Kashmir for twenty years would have taught me to tell the differences between the airs but I guess I have either known both the cities too less or too much.

I couldn’t tell them apart and that is either my misgiving or my misguided intuition.

I rode all the way to Srinagar with my brother, on his bike and I’d say I was rather of two minds; to get down half way or to keep feeling the wind coming at my face like it did in Delhi’s rickshaws. My brother offered to drop me in Lal Chowk and therefore I chose the latter because it’d save me a few bucks. At a few places I did regret my decision, motorcycles leave you exposed, the wind in my hair was nostalgic but I couldn’t help the smoke that kept interfering with the quality of air and I was nauseous as the women in a labor does. Of course that is a theoretical knowledge.

I was too early at college and besides a few people that I have come know by face because I see them walking the same steps every day. It is an uncharted territory for my emotional walkthrough and I have known that to be in a place where you aren’t known or considered anything worth knowing is the worst place to be. Also, my lectures started at 11:20am and I had forty minutes spare, so I went to sit on this stage that is more of a stone table like the one Aslan sacrificed himself for in exchange for Edmund. I opened my bag and took out We Need to Talk about Kevin, which talks about a fictional high school massacre as narrated by his mother through a series of letters to her estranged husband. I am currently reading it.

Anyway, about forty minutes past my other friend, waved at me from a distance but I pretended to be absorbed in the book; sometimes I feel like gathering all the attention and it is stupid and mean. Then she called my name and I looked up to her, like my Sun was rising right there, like I was witnessing a sunrise because for a while reading had taken me somewhere dark and dismal. Apparently, we talked about a few things and she did all the talking while I kept nodding in agreement mainly because as I said earlier— I felt isolated from the way I usually am.

The rest of the day was average, except that time when we were in the park of our college’s heritage building, or rather the one adjacent to it and three of us sat on a bench and one was standing because she had scraped her knees in a bad fall and it hurt her to sit. Hondo, as my friend likes to be called now, was about to tell us about his grandfather’s hot blooded adventures and we all kind of huddled in. Although, you never know when he is making things up and we just believe everything he says for our own amusement. He narrated a story where the context was that his grandfather did not like to be called bald, it is said that his baldness was the most noticeable thing that ever happened to him. One day as he was walking towards somewhere, a lady who was expectant and supposedly had her ninth month which is pretty close to the possibility of a baby gate crashing their family’s patience; laughed at his bald and shiny head. It annoyed him so much that he went out of his way and kicked her child inflated belly. The child had his delivery right there.

In another story, a barber cut his grandfather’s mustache real bad and the damage was exceptionally eye catching. The barber ran for his life in the forest, hoping that he to escape the untoward wrath; such was the malignance of his grandfather’s anger that he took a gun and mounted his horse, found the barber and shot him. It happened 120 years ago…

We were shocked, much less laugh at the irony of the situation and we just looked at each other silly while Hondo guffawed. I don’t think any of us believed all that. I was still distant, hopeless and convinced that I am depressed. I don’t know what part of me is pretending; the one where I’m convinced of my depression or the one where I am actually happy and a little amnesic.

Heard that joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But Doctor… I’m Pagliacci.”

—The Watchmen, Alan Moore.