just did it

dr. lindsay the rabbit.

neil, baby pal

describing him is difficult. i can picture his wavy hair, for one, his small, round eyes, his lopsided smile, and one tooth that lies there, slightly larger than the others. he's tall, which doesn't say much now, but meant a lot when i first set eyes on him one cold morning in 1989.

neil had just moved to our school, and looked tall enough to swallow me and a couple of my friends whole. we didn't mind. he seemed friendly enough, even though he rarely smiled. so, all was well, until this tall, tall boy decided to get on to the athletics team. which is when his height began to be a bit of a problem. he said he was a year older than i was -- and i would dispute it to this day, but he'd beat me up – but, back then, when i was 13, competing against him for a 100-metre sprint was suicide. he would take one step, and i would have to take three to keep up.

long story short -- neil kept winning, we kept losing. neil would cross the finish line at approximately the same time we touched the 50-metre mark. i see now, with hindsight, why i wasn't that popular with the women back then. not that i am now, of course, but that’s another short story.

after we finished with school, neil went on to do a whole lot of things. he tried going to one college, was asked to get out because of his problems with attendance, and moved to another college where few people ever saw him. what he always wanted to do, however, was fly. and no, not in the metaphorical way that half-witted romantic men often whisper to half-witted romantic women (darling, if you were to marry me, all i would want to do is fly away with you in my arms to a quiet mountaintop...) neil wanted to fly, literally. he always wanted to be a pilot, for as long as i can remember. so, he left for america and came back a couple of years later with his licence to do so.

it is an achievement i’m still very proud of, even if it isn’t my own.

it's been around 15 years since we first met, neil and i. we've had our ups and downs (him on top and me down, really. he's still a violent boy). we've laughed at ridiculous things, had enough alcohol together to drown three whole villages, have been caught by cops for doing all kinds of unmentionable things like skinny-dipping (yes, have seen neil without his clothes more than a couple of times between the ages 18 and 21. not a pretty sight), crashed parties by the beach, hit discos around and outside the city, played games revolving around song titles, and managed more things in a decade than most people squeeze into a lifetime.

the thing about neil is that getting to know him takes a while. then, when you know him, you can sit at a table saying nothing, and still manage to connect in some vague manner. people i introduce him to can rarely ever understand him. my friends and i usually can, so we nod sympathetically and tell them that he's just being himself. he, in the meanwhile, continues to sit quietly at the table sipping his rum and coke and nodding to a song playing in his head alone.

there are times, every once in a while, when i love neil tremendously. like on my birthday last year, for instance, when i walked with him from a rented cottage down a long, long road to the pier at marve, at 6 am. i had slept for an hour, after finishing half a bottle of vodka. he hadn’t slept for a minute, after finishing a whole bottle of rum. we were both, strangely enough, coherent enough to manage our usual, vague topics of discussion. at times like these, when he's just being neil, i have always found him to be strangely at peace with himself, contrary to what one would assume if one were to meet him at a crowded party.

my friends and i sometimes worry that he's got a lot on his mind that we can’t help him with, which may well be true. at the same time, i sometimes think he has answers to things i don't even have questions for.

neil has put his plans of flying on hold, for the moment. he is currently a disc jockey at a popular disco in mumbai. i love what he does for a living. i love the fact that he took something we were all passionate about and made it into a viable career for himself. i love the fact that he wakes up every morning safe in the knowledge that music will definitely be a part of his day.

i don't know where neil goes from here. i do know that i really would like to tag along, even if it's three whole steps behind.

quiet riot

the first bottle of vodka lay still, empty. lindsay the rabbit awoke, rubbed his bleary, blurry eyes with bright, white paws, and looked out the window. the first blue mountain stared back. above its cloudy shoulders stretched the blue, blue sky. mr. sea lay quiet, dozing, surfacing every once in a while to giggle and gurgle about some deep, dark, sea secret. all was quiet.

the sudden sense of silence was overwhelming. it hit lindsay the rabbit with force, coming at him from all quarters and pushing him back against the wall. in the face of this sudden wall of calm and quiet, lindsay the rabbit did what any self-respecting rabbit would. he giggled.

closing his rabbit eyes, he dreamed a certain dream. the blue faded, giving way to sepia. in another time, another place, under a lighter, less blue, sky, baudelaire the rabbit set out for india. being bohemian was bad for him, his parents had decided, before thinking about sending him to a place where elephants ostensibly roamed the streets. so, on june 9, 1841 -- exactly 163 years before lindsay the rabbit dreamed his certain dream -- baudelaire left paris on the paquebot des mers du sud. months passed, with the waters flowing quickly and sometimes quietly beneath him. a violent storm forced the ship to at mauritius for repairs. and there, with grey skies above and the heaving, steaming sea below, baudelaire the rabbit decided to return to paris. for him, the destination would never arrive. the sepia faded, giving way to blue. and lindsay the rabbit stirred from his certain dream of storm-tossed seas and the coming of age of baudelaire the rabbit. he awoke.

in another time, another place, under a lighter, less blue, sky, baudelaire the rabbit died quietly in his mother's arms, on august 31, 1867, at the age of 46. lindsay the rabbit sighed. all was quiet as he picked up a book and read….”in this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love...” charles baudelaire. 1821-1867.

as the tears started to come, he reached for another bottle.

not being

rosencrantz: do you think death could possibly be a boat?

guildenstern: no, no, no... death is ‘not.’ death isn't. take my meaning? death is the ultimate negative. not-being. you can't not be on a boat.

rosencrantz: i've frequently not been on boats.

guildenstern: no, no... what you've been is not on boats.

-- tom stoppard. ‘rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead’. august, 1966.

first kiss

i was 21; she, 20. i realise, now, that it was no age for a first kiss, not in a world where friends of mine had begun boasting of more risqué accomplishments at the ripe old age of 16. still, for what it's worth, i was too busy trying to get an education to care about things like kissing. literature came first; hormones could wait. and yes, considering few of my friends can now hold a fairly interesting conversation beyond 4.5 minutes, i see how and why i made a fairly good decision.

so, to get back to that 20-year-old. we were at her place, which, come to think of it, is not necessarily such a good place to be. again, i blame my inexperience. we were chatting (this, in an era before TCP/IP accounts, meant sitting in close proximity and talking about things like life, music and what the word ‘email’ meant).

as god is my witness (i like saying that, I have no idea why), she made the first move, running her long fingers down my face. i must have turned pink, but i'm not sure. we were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, in two big, wooden, high-backed chairs, with wide arm-rests that barely separated us. running her hands down my face was easy for her. reciprocating was not as easy for me. it was one of my earliest lessons: the female of the species is more limber than the male.

and then, suddenly, she stood up, standing straight and tall before me. i must have gulped but, again, i'm not sure. kneeling, slowly, she kissed my forehead. little kisses. and then, a minute later, we kissed. there were no bells, but i remember thinking to myself, 'i could get used to this.' minutes passed. it could have been five, could have been fifteen. and still, eyes shut tight, oblivious to the possibility of her mother walking in suddenly, we kissed.

when i opened my eyes, she was crying. and crying hard. 'what did i do?' i asked, trying hard to keep the panic out of my young, 21-year-old voice. there must have been some breach of protocol, i thought. or maybe i was too gentle. or maybe there were rules that had to be followed first; rules i hadn’t the slightest clue about. she said nothing, still crying. then, with the tears still flowing down her cheeks, she whispered, 'nothing. just thought of my ex-boyfriend'.

to date, i kiss with eyes open.

farewell

“We start out as white slime and end up ashes”
-- Dom Moraes, Derelictions ('Typed With One Finger' 2003)

Dominic Francis Moraes. July 19, 1938 - June 2, 2004. R. I. P.

long hair is for girls, dude

it wasn't my fault; i was paid to do it. grow my hair way below my shoulders, that is. paid to grow it long so i could put on my make-up, don a pair of silver-tinted glasses and gyrate on stage for the amusement of little children (a whole other story), so sue me. the rest of mumbai, however, seemed to think it was incredibly funny.

first came the stares. from all quarters. at bus-stops. on the street. at grocery stores. from men, women, schoolchildren, cleaning maids, municipal workers, some of my aunts, pretty women, ugly men, guys who thought they were funny, guys on motorbikes, guys in cars, a whole lot of guys. they simply had to stare. the bold ones would comment: 'kidhar chal rahi hai?', 'aati hai kya?', 'hai hai' (all roughly translated into: i'm a barely literate indian male. i was born desperate. would you go to bed with me? would you? would you?) they assumed i was female because, let's face it, when you have a 21-inch waist and hair that almost reaches down to it (i did), most people under the sun would assume you weren’t blatantly male.

when they did turn to look, my excuse for a french beard would catch them off guard ('saala, aadmi hai'). it took me a while, but i managed to get thick-skinned enough to ignore it. the groping in trains was another story. that took me months to handle.

i remember stepping out a swimming pool, once, where i was swimming with a female cousin. me: slim, tall, with long, straight black hair. she: short, fat, and with hair cropped close to her forehead. most men sitting around almost fell into the pool that morning. the thought of a topless woman walking around 5 feet away from them was too much to handle. when they finally figured i was male (no breasts, idiot), the disappointment was acute. again, that morning, an aunt i had never met thought i was my uncle's daughter, assuming my cousin was my father's son. *sigh*

it was a fairly confusing time. i knew i was male, of course, but here i was, for six years, with access to what a woman on the streets of mumbai felt. i came away more than a little scarred by the experience. i couldn't understand how, for every waking day of their lives, women of all ages could walk down the street and get to work and go shopping and get back home, all while being at the mercy of the kind of men that groped me.

i came away with a tremendous sense of respect for the kind of strength it takes to live your life in the face of such blatant hostility (sexual advances can, after all, take on overtones of hostility in an environment of overwhelming repression). i also came away with a lot of anger, at the people who assumed it was their god-given right to behave the way they did (blame it on the manusmriti and stupid fucking pativratadharma).

i remember chanting every morning, a school, with thousands of others around the country, the national pledge: ‘... india is my country. all indians are my brothers and sisters of brothers…’ remember? I’d like to have most of the brothers of my sisters castrated.