Butts mark the way

Why is it that every time I am waiting for a bus to arrive, the damn thing never comes….and when I have finally given up waiting and have rolled a perfect white cylinder of cancer …. And mind you….JUST LIT IT…that the damn thing decides to make its grand appearance, in defiance of all British standards of time keeping!!!!

I HATE HAVING TO THROW AWAY A FRESH LIT CIGARETTE…..do the Scottish bus driver’s union know that specific secret of mine and conspire against me?

And so it happens that butts mark the way….

I had started smoking way back in almost my pre-teens…..my mom still blames a far-off cousin who introduced me to the then forbidden pleasures of tobacco …….that poor fellow quit long back but the white rice paper cylinders never quit on me…..and the butts started dropping…..

Throughout my adult life, my smoking has always been a part of my life…..especially in times like this when I’d sit all alone at 3 am in the morning and just stare at the screen…….and wait for the words to tumble forth….while the ash grows longer and the coffee colder….

They say that a man has three teachers, three lovers, three enemies and three friends and he never quite knows when he meets whom and never realizes who was whom for him till its over….At the great and hollow age of my late twenties, I do believe that I have either met all the sad bastards life can throw at me or else I am possibly the greatest fraud still alive…..

This blog for me is not a mere point of existence for incoherent ramblings…..or so I tell myself and through me, the world….Unwilling and yet driven I find myself in need of articulation and expression of all that I perceive and observe and to hope to put all of that down in paper…..in the hope of someday committing to a plotline and characters, these very same desires, belief’s and thoughts…..

Like my butts, these blogs too mark a wavering, shambling route to my own self…..crusted with bitter indifference and worn over with cynical attitude, I wearily let my educated fingers wander over the keyboard of my chosen addiction……signposts of a life, hopelessly lost in the mundane truths of being, searching for the grail or even grain of truth which makes up for the rest of the idiotic rambling (both of life and blog)…..

A start…..all it requires is a start….and hopefully an end…..

You need a start to start…that much is but obvious…..and one needs an end to define the start….the rest is all adventure….and sometimes there’s a mis before the adventure and another s at the end….but then, that’s all there is to it…..

A swashbuckling, swaggering, hard-rock sound tracked filled…..at times wry, at times tragic….mostly idiotic, mostly nonsensical….to continue from the beginning and continue to the end….and as the old saying goes….a large piece of prose with something definitely wrong in it somewhere….or so I think…..but then thoughts are one thing, dreams another, nightmares again different and reality a complete new set of crockery all over….

I am presently hunting for gainful employment….of any sort….to tide me over till I can start applying for jobs in mine own field….FTS does not allow us to sign any contracts till our student visas expire….and then again there are various other incidents that happen which make our life a not so monotonous journey….and like life, a lot happens in the cracks of time and space…..

Shantanu has left and Gayatri has arrived…….its like an era is over……the Maratha has left to join his office in Derby and undergo graduate training in Rolls-Royce and yet another set of characters have arrived in these far off shores, searching for education, belief, employment and god-only-knows-what-else…….Gayatri has somehow come into the large and rather shambling debris of our lives…..a little pipsqueak of a character with a grin larger than her entire being and almost like a lost waif, she has been taken in and accepted by my rather large and extended family of urchins and claimed as one of their own……especially by khan….

Shantanu’s leaving has hit perhaps khan the worst…..for over a years they have abused and maligned each other in their own ways and now that the Maratha is gone, the Pathan is well nigh inconsolable…..there’s no one to fight with, he says….

My house has been a din and a cacophony for so long that the sudden silences sometimes worry me……pranay, rishab, asim, jayant, kartick, taimoor, umair, murli, priyanka, joydip, atty….the list is endless…..ramzan is still on and the stories are simply piling up….I wonder what to put down and what I could leave out…..this delay is caused due to this and I don’t regret it….

Of pranay and my encounter’s with keeping roza….which lasted all of 3 days….

Of the hindu’s like rishab and me feeding the muslims like jahanzeb (jazzy) and khan and so many others….

Of the time where umair and shantanu both smoked grass and then finished off a kilo and a half of ice cream by candle light, imagining themselves as gods and the ice cream as the world, while the rest of us were asleep….

Of Joydip and how he would play “jumma chumma” for 3 hours and would have gone on further just that we put a stop to it….

Of poor Atty Rizvi, the ever enduring one, who would smile his shy smile and endure all our crazy antics and still keep his calm and all of us in line….

Of my blanket invitation aftari parties where I would cook like a demon and feed everyone in the vicinity and how they became legend….

Of the crazy antics of all the great “character’s” of Glasgow that pranay ahluwalia would take so much relish in enacting and making us laugh…..like the time nitin ran off with jajali drunk or of the time anand mishra and tikku got into a slanging match in hindi in the MBA class forgetting anyone and everyone else in the class….or of the time khan managed to lure jenny into my flat in the student halls and suddenly like a dog chasing cars, didn’t know what to do once the damn car stopped….

Of the way rishab would take everything from an economic perspective and the way atty rizvi and joydip would eye each other every so often or how shantanu would home in like a homing pigeon on the nearest pair of mammaries after two pegs or how taimoor would behave in a completely different manner with females and with us……..

Of how shantanu and taimoor would abuse each other from the minute they’d open their eyes till they closed their eyes…..and sometimes even with their eyes closed in the middle of dreams or nightmares……

Of how murli would despair of the lot of us and blast us in the kindest possible language and finally how he went into exile in desperation and in protest against all drunk hindi speaking idiots inhabiting the flat……

Of how 20 boys and sometimes more would inhabit the flat and the original owners would either sleep elsewhere or on the floor with all clothes and shoes on….

Of the number of movies murli, shantanu and myself ripped from the net, regardless of taste, language or whatever and watched as a community and the amount of arguments over the movies and anything and everything…..

Of the pakistani’s and the Indians who called my flat as no man’s land and each was the other’s brother….and yet I kicked them all out of my flat the day the india-pak twenty20 match was on….I was mad, legally not medically…..

Of the incessant job searches and the “hausla-afzai” that kept us together….not to mention my coffee grounds, milk and sugar !!!

Of the interviews and the crazy hours of waiting for a call to come through……

Of the calls that did come through and the ones that did not….

Of the celebrations and the mournings and the talks that went on and on and on….

Of youtube and youporn websites which made MTV and anything else redundant and the much abused 20 mbps net connection and the even more abused lappy’s in the house which were used beyond their capacities and were then taken apart with kitchen knives and spoons and brushed clean with toothbrushes and aftershaves…..of IC boards ripped apart and of frantic cable wiring and ebay hunts….

Of ebay hunts for weird stuff…..

Of the never ending search for cheaper and cheaper access codes to call home and near and dear ones….possibly at no cost…..

Of the tremendous amounts of energy expended for the search of trust, truth and love….and their denunciations….and yet the longing for the same…..

Of the girls chatted up to in chat forums, the advice sought, the dates planned and never fulfilled….

Of the girl who called and called and said those words I thought I will never hear again…..and how I bid her adieu and set her on her own way…..

Of the desperation of life and its responsibilities and duties…..

Of the alcohol drunk, the weed smoked, the abuses hurled, the food shared, the beds shared, the lives shared…..

In a year, I have lived 5 years of college and have changed beyond all else and yet not…..

I wonder how I can actually subscribe all these people and their every detail in words and letters. It is not enough to merely write, it is perhaps more important to feel, to know and to experience.

My novel or the large piece of prose with something wrong in it, is nearing completion….I think there’s enough wrong with me and enough in my blogs to actually sit and write about…. I have my characters and I think the plotline will take care of itself…..nothing worth doing is ever easy and each has been hard won…..

My bus comes along and I have to leave the stop or the bus will leave without me…..as does life, as does everyone else…..I have stood, been counted, weighed and hope I have been not found wanting….and sometimes, the butt has to be thrown away, even if I don’t like it, merely to mark the way I passed through….