Portrait

yesterday was your stereotypical ‘bad day’. it would’ve made a perfect monday, too bad it wasn’t.

my house was completely marooned due to the heavy rains that started somewhere on monday night and didn’t cease entirely, not even momentarily, till tuesday afternoon. literally marooned. turned into a temporary island. i was told that mine wasn’t the only house, and even my cousin’s place in the center of colombo 7 went under atleast a foot of water. firstly, i woke up late. then i had to get up to concocting ways to get out of the house and atleast half way up the road, which is the only point from which the road was accessible to vehicles…and to anyone who couldn’t swim. because I HAD TO. damn it. when some days that are made for people to stay at home come along, its a curse to have to leave. i had to go because i was starting exams, and i wasn’t about to risk staying home because a) i knew the half-wit that runs my school couldn’t care less about how people get there, its easy for her, her quarters are on the premises, thus school wouldn’t have closed and exams wouldn’t have been postponed b) i knew that in case the exams hadn’t been postponed, which i was fairly sure they weren’t the complete bitches who were the senior teachers in my school weren’t going to think that the fact that i technically could not leave the house would count as an excuse, and they sure as hell weren’t going to understand enough to consider letting me sit the paper another time. my brother and i had a semi fight which i ended by telling him to ‘take whatever you know and shove it up as far as you possibly can’. i put shorts, a t shirt and rubber slippers on, stuffed my things into a bag and waded out of my house in waitst-high water. it was beyond disgusting and the mere memory of it gives me shivers.

we were on the road for 2 hours, a drive that usually takes the maximum of 45 minutes, with all the traffic thrown in. the situation was bad, everything and everywhere was under water, there was bumper to bumper traffic on even the widest roads, fallen trees and frustrated motorists creating a bigger mess. i went to my cousin’s, which had already started flooding and my aunt was having a fit, and smriti was having her own case of hysterics as she was late to work and had no way of getting there. i showered, changed and went for my exams at 10.30, still wet, cold and dishvelled, but clean. this was the kind of rain that soaked you in the 15 seconds it takes to get out of a vehicle, or the 5 second dash from the gate into the building. i got 1 hour for a 2 hour paper, and the supervising teacher practically took the paper from right under my hand. another 2 hour paper without an interval because pretty much the whole class had turned up really late and hence set the whole exam schedule off its course. by this time i was (still wet and cold) really hungry and needed to take a leak pretty badly. after that T and i had to walk down to catch a tuk tuk, and we stood in the rain for a good 10 minutes because they were all full or broken down. by this time we were so wet we really couldn’t have cared less. looking back at the morning then, standing where we were, utterly soaked and totally exhausted, it all seemed so ridiculous that we just cluthced each other and laughed. a passing car spalshed us from head to toe with all the dirty mud-water in the puddle near the pavement where we were, and the rain was still coming down in steady bucket fulls, it was time to look to the skies and say ‘yeah, fuck you too’.

the evening was better, we all sat at tracy h’s, which had also been underwater, and bitched about the weather, among other things. that class is always fun. yet in more rain, i headed to dancing with T, and realized that the ankle i had twisted the previous day (also due to the rain, thank you very much) was actually giving me more pain than i had expected. my mother yelled at me for ignoring it. maybe i shoudnt have.

anyway, my mother always says there’s no point in getting worked up on days like those. if you’re late, everything that could possibly happen to make you even more late is going to happen. your car is going to break down, you’re going to hit every single red light on the way. have you noticed that? when it rains, it pours. and when it pours, you get wet. that’s just the way it is. and then you’ve just gotta take a deep breath, sit back and say ‘you know what? screw this. you’ve gotta try harder than that to piss me off’ and mean it with every nerve you possess.

oh its a pain. they say you can’t have ‘it all’, but everyone wants it all, don’t they? its not just me? is it?

why is it impossible for two people of the opposite sex to have a perfectly normal, wonderfully trust-worthy, rock-steady, totally platonic relationship and a) not want anything more? b) not lose the grip on what they already have if they’re romantically interested in other people?

why cant people be friends and not have their emotions come into play, and not turn jealous if one likes someone else, when technically that’s allowed because you’re just ‘friends’ and why cant you just carry on the way you always did, with no pieces missing, no matter what? why does it become an effort? why does it always become different? why does it always turn into something else, the moment the dynamics shift a little? why must you always hit that point when you don’t know what to say, when you dont know how to be around each other? when you dont know which secrets you want share, and which you’d rather keep, when this was probably a person you’d never kept secrets from, ever?

its a pain because i want it all. i want people to be able to remain who they are, i want relationships to remain what they were, i want time to stop and age to bugger off.

mahinda rajapakse has been elected the 5th president of the democratic socialist republic of sri lanka by a majority of the sri lankan people. this isn’t shocking, but speaking for myself, i think i, till the very last second, had a dash of hope that people might wake up to the reality of the situation and do the right thing. it looks like they didnt. ranil had the minority’s solid support, too bad that the turn out in the north and east areas, which is largely and obviously pro-ranil, was pathetic. interestingly, where ranil won, he won by a huge margin, and where he lost, he lost by not-so-much. i have a feeling that if everyone who had voted for all the other candidates, victor hettigoda and whohave you, had voted for ranil, he may have won.

those of you who voted for mahinda, go out and party, those of you who didn’t, sit at home and wallow in contemplation of the serious shit that you will soon be dealing with. anyway, for better or for worse, its done now, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. you can’t change it, you can’t fix it. let’s just hope things go a little better than us anti-mahinda (note : this doesn’t necessarily mean that the same people are also hardcore pro-ranil) people speculated. who knows? lets keep our minds broad and our hearts open. and sit tight and pray (because that’s what this has resorted to) for the best.

for more consistant updates and detailed coverage, nittewa will come in handy. be warned however, this is everything that accurate reporting should be but far from un-biased. scourge is in mourning or on strike, i can’t quite fathom it yet. either way, its with understandable reason.

the weekend was crazy. i had an absurdly good time on saturday night, despite missing the boy terribly, between the bar at bay leaf, clancy’s and glow. i guess it all boils down to the fact that i purely just happened to be with the right-est people. my brother was around, after a long time, since we spend a lot of time making very sure that we never wind up in the same places. it was good having him there, he’s generally fun, coming with the added bonus of appearing to be somewhat intimidating to anyone who tries to get ‘funny’ with me or any of the girls i’m with. it helps, makes me feel safe etc. besides him, i was with the dancing crowd and my dear, darling girlfriend S. the girls from dancing always manage to dance up a storm, and we always enjoy ourselves thoroughly. thrown into the equation, S made things nearly perfect. we lived one night in the life of the ‘cool’ kids, who probably run through this routine (commons, bay leaf, clancy’s or h20, glow) every weekend, and found it to be insanely costly. there was one of those ‘first time’ things that happened to me and S at glow, it was the wildest thing i’ve done yet. it was fun, to say the least, if not shocking, initially. for an unbiased version of my behaviour, which i’m sure was essentially atrocious, you may inquire with indi.

its election week, so there’s little to do but study. and sit around and hope that the people in this country have some sense in them, atleast enough to keep the wrong man out of the most important position of power there is. my mother is threatening to leave the country if mr M, the all smiles family man wins, and with good reason too. suddenly, for the first time, this threat, which has only been an innocent joke in the past, seems a threat, like the only option; it seems a serious decision that we may be forced to make. i ain’t going nowhere, and i mean it. when i told her this, she gave me a long and pissed-off lecture about how i have no idea what the consequences will be of mahinda coming to power and told me i’m being immature and selfish. in my head, glimpses of something that seems from the giniralla conspiracy, by nihal de silva, (there’s a decent review here) come alive, its a scary and uncertain future right now, teetering on the edge between what’s going to happen and how we’ll deal with it. maybe i’m over-reacting a little, although i’m fairly sure i’m not, but my mother’s stories combined with the frightening and realistic scenario from giniralla conspiracy makes me very afraid for the future of this country.

on a lighter note, i love gwen stefani’s ‘luxurious’. she’s the definition of cool, after madonna. she’s as close as anyone gets to madonna, me thinks. she’s so ‘hip’, and makes really good music.

its C’s birthday today. he’s an OOOOLD boy now.

despite certain misconceptions that i am mean to him, and that i think he is a drunk pain in the butt, i must at this point confess my utmost affection towards him. we haven’t been friends for long, not in terms of years anyway and i can’t say things like ‘gosh, i’ve known him forever’ like i do about other people. but C is just one of those people who make me feel like i’ve known them forever, and vice versa. he is so familiar to me now that most of him lame-o jokes are predictable, he knows me so well now that he knows exactly how i would react to something. we spend a lot of time being unforgivably evil to each other, but at the end of the day we harbour a rock-steady friendship. or atleast that’s how i feel. i think recent events have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt : that we really are the ‘no matter what’ kind of friends.

have a great great day C, and let all the good things in your life lead to others. let the happiness flow.

this must be why i love him. when i whined to him about what a hectic life i begun having since of late, he knew exactly what i meant, how i felt, what i needed to hear. ‘breathe and stop’ he told me wisely. life has hit the ‘crazy’ button again. it has turned into an endless and tumlutous cycle of work, dancing, responsibilities and battles with the authorities that govern my life right now. my mother thinks i like being busy, that i sub consciously enjoy being stressed out, and she’s probably right. as much as i complain, and as painful as it is to not have a life of my own for lengthy periods at a stretch sometimes, this is one of the things i am going to treasure about being young and i know it. the active involvement, the non-stop stimulation my creativity gets. just when it was turning into one blur of day after day of constantly having to be somewhere at this time doing this and then going onto the next place 2 minutes later and then having to do something else, and i thought it was going to become impossibly hectic and that my life is going to turn into something that no longer belongs to me, i actually had an ok weekend. i did quite a few things i wanted to do, at the expense of ditching or postpoing other things that i had to do (too bloody bad). i got my one chance to breathe and stop till the 8th of november. just when you start to question your priorities and start panicking about whether you’ve made the right choices, there’s always something, or indeed something, that gives you a moment. something that gives you a breather to be with yourself.

here are the highlights of a weekend that will help me survive for a long time to come…

on friday, i got sick. having previously gotten wet a number of times over the days gone by, it was to be expected. there were days when i was never actually dry. where i went from being soaked in the rain indoors just long enough to get the excess of water off myself, and then back into the rain. there were too many of those days. thursday night was the beginning, where i began sneezing uncontrollably at A’s place on marine drive. friday morning i woke up with a blocked nose, itchy throat and an immensely heavy head that made me feel like i’d been knocked over by twenty foot pole. i thought ’screw it all’ and decided to stay in bed at home the whole day. i did. it was a well deserved rest for my body that was long overdue. friday night i went for dancing, and then managed to catch the last two songs of the hollowpoint halo show at h20. it was only ok, they just have very good PR. D and i stayed on at h20 after the show. we had a lot of fun, as usual. i haven’t had her to myself like that in a long time. we danced a lot and then went home. saturday afternoon was the royal thomian regatta. there were too many people who knew nothing about rowing, it was too hot and people were just generally too drunk. i didn’t have as half as much fun as i have had over the years at the rowing club, this afternoon was exceptionally irritating and boring. i was hot, bothered and tired (after 4 hours of dancing in the morning) and spent a lot of time being glum upstairs. i think i have also somehow ceased to care about thora winning as i used to. it may have something to do with me disliking most of the current crew, and the departure of the (older) boys that i do like and care about and would gladly cheer for, from the thomian crew. scourge was hilariously, roaringly drunk. if i had been someone who didnt know him, i would have been nothing short of rolling on the lawn laughing my pants off at him. as it were, in this case i spent a lot of time worrying about him and making sure that he was ok while tactfully avoiding any situations that involved him shouting my name like a bloody romeo from upstairs so all the world (and a little bit more) could hear. i was so fascinated i couldn’t be arsed being mad at him. royal and thora drew at the end, it was very nearly a royal victory and somehow, that little evil voice inside me hopes that royal will whip thora ass next year. saturday night was tim’s book launch, and after that we headed back to club. scourge continued to make an utter ass out of himself, but seemed to have been somewhat subdued by the draw. nuksh was still around club because her parents were still there, and luckily too. we had a long and very intimate conversation, the kind that time hasn’t allowed in a while. lying on the lawn right near the pier, looking at an almost clear sky reflected on the water of the beira with one of my bestest girlfriends in the world, i realized how brilliant my life actually was. we talked about a lot of things, including how much i miss the boy. sunday morning, dancing again. monday, shannon M and i made our way hesitaingly down to this party being thrown by a bunch of LCites. i’m very skeptical about LC parties. it must be an automatic defense mechanism. we were not surprised with the very apparent exclusivity of invitees, and wondered how the hell we actually wound up being on the list at all. paying no heed the usual turning of heads that followed me around (and shannon too), we got right to business and danced the whole night away with only each other. that woman can dance. she is one of those girls that i can actually dance a whole night with, without being bored. i was being checked out heavily by someone who made a lot of people jealous by doing so, so i’m relatively flattered.

it has been soulful and satisfying to have been able to breakaway for a bit, and spend time doing stuff i enjoyed and wanted to. i definitely need more breathe and stop time, and i have a feeling i’m not getting any, not anytime soon anyway…