Base of This Beast

The other day we were at Kaichu's place..... me, Dhruva, Kaichu and Rimi....... bloggers all. Rimi sat daintily on the sofa, her legs positioned in a suitably ladylike manner, raised her left eyebrow at a pointed forty-five degree arc and declared : "How can you sit like That!!"Puzzled, I looked down at my legs. There they were, spread at a dedicated posture of going nowhere, indicating my relaxed mode. I knew it offended her inbred convent-educated manners to sit like that, but when you have spent all your life around people who have made indifference an art, the remarks are remarkably easy to ignore, though the inbred sense of always having to explain your action forces this post on me.

And then we were lying down, and talking about "Stuff".... and I was in this haze.... [dare I call it purple??] the light from outside that came after all the lights were switched off and we were immersed in a twilight zone, and Dhruva as trying to tell us horror stories. After a while Kaichu sort of threw up her hands, looked and sounded adoringly like Mamie in Tom and Jerry and we knew we got to her.

Deep in the night we had met the Peep who had been asking us to gatecrash her party in the politest manner possible, and downing Black Dogs straight up. In the process, she left her cell phone in Kaichu's hand and later on had to be reminded of it over and over again.

And barely an hour before that, the Sandman, who was with us at Sharma's Dhaba, where we were downing Chicken Tangri Masala with Garlic Naan (Ah, a slice of heaven right down here...), was telling us his story, how he has lived alone for the last few years, and we were listening and as I was thinking........ Oh, to have that life back again, the days when I was twenty one, and as impressionable as him.

And even before, we were at Princeton, listening to a bad band play, and Pablo was sitting with me and we were discussing the times that bind us now.Another year is about to pass.

I grow old, I grow old.