on her wedding day

is she not pretty?

Ugly Girl

i am back online. so yes i had stopped being online and now i am BACK!
The blog problem, i dont know what happened, but soo i was not able to go online even and all because a lil wire had come loose, and even the landline was not working. i was playing with my dog and it suddenly hit me...to check all the wires and realised that the wire had come loose. i fixed it and voila.......Am Back.....

help!!!
not able to access my blog!!

Lament of an Ugly Girl

as i watch your face
through the fire
that burns between us.
i pray i get over you
before the fire touches me,
for beauty till now did not affect me
and now that i stare at you
i am aware
i am aware
that i could have looked away
had you looked like me.

beauty??

NO FLAW IN BEAUTY IS A FLAW IN BEAUTY ITSELF, I read someone say. (Ummm…..I know it sounds weird)
And I hate to admit this but I have been thinking of beauty a lot lately. Well ever since I cut my hair that is. And my recent trip to Calcutta, accentuated for me the fact that I am stared at. Firstly I am tall. 5’ 6” is no big deal really but in a country where the average woman measures 5’ 3”, I seem huge. I board a bus and all these women are looking at me. For years I told myself that it’s just me and people are not really looking but I am just being paranoid. But I used to feel stares hit the back of my neck, and …um… other parts of my body. Nowadays especially now that I am fatter I look up and look at these people who are looking. Did you notice what I just said? What has being fat got anything to do with what I am saying? Well …along with the fact that I don’t feel like a woman (well I don’t know what that feeling is so I don’t know whether I feel it or not) and instinctively (even if wrongly) feel that I look a freak in women’s clothes. So when people look I feel that they are able to see me the imposter trying to dress up as a woman. And I feel so gauche around women as a woman. So with all the fat (sometimes unevenly distributed over my 5’6”frame) I realise I am less attractive and thus in a way exempt from the line of lust of men, and you have no idea how wonderful that feels. Its not that I don’t like men, cos I do (I think), but this dread has nothing to do with sexuality but gender. So even now women and sometimes men stare, and even laugh at me (especially on trains) is it because they realise that I am trying to be a man and laugh at my body, wholly incongruous (especially the 5-10 pounds worth of breasts) with my attitude , body language and even movements. Or is it all a fragment of my imagination?

Kunal Kapoor

this guy deserves to be worshipped for the sheer beauty that he is.
and oh! he reminds me so much of somebody else.

Kajolagainandagainandagain...

To My own sapling of love

my favourite story about me.

My grandparents have been here for about a month now. I love it when I get to sit with my dadu and dadin and my Mom and sis and talk about the past. Much of what we speak is the oft repeated past. The more number of times I hear these stories, the more I want to hear them. Of course my favourite story is about me. This incident, completely true, happened about 8 to 9 months before I was born. My great grand mom (my ttham-amma, my mom’s paternal grand mom) was staying with her younger son in Benaras (now Varanasi). One night, or may be sometime at dawn, she had a dream about her husband who had then passed away 2-3 years ago. She dreamt that her husband is asking her why she is away from home (the home in khardah) “let’s go” he said, “why are taking so much time to get dressed? We have been away for so long a time, now I can’t wait”. My ttham-amma perhaps was taking some time to dress, so he tells her that he is going to wait at the pond near the house. My ttham-amma asks which pond, to which he says the one at the end of this road, to the right.

As far as I know today the dream ended with my ttham-amma following her husband and not able to catch up with him as he walked really fast and kept saying how he wanted to go to his granddaughter (my mother).

Ttham-amma wakes up and immediately asks her son if there is a pond anywhere close to the house. My chhoto dadu (my granddad’s younger brother) says, that if one takes the road in front of the house, and turns right, there is a little pond.
My ttham-amma is now certain that her dead husband is coming back (it sounds so dramatic and scary when I say this in English but in Bengali it sounds so possible).

So within few days she comes back to Calcutta and my dadin opens the door for her and the first thing ttham-amma asks dadin is if my mother is pregnant. Dadin is shocked because my mom had missed her periods that month. Dadin says may be she is but they are not sure, they hadn’t gone to the doctor yet. My ttham-amma jubilant and all-knowingly tells my dadin that she has had a premonition, and that of course Bulu (my mom’s pet name) is pregnant and of course its going to be a daughter and of course it will be her husband reborn. Because she had been visited by him in her dreams and this was what she had interpreted of that dream.

Within a few weeks they knew for sure that my mom was pregnant, within a few months everyone in the ‘parra’ felt that it was going to be a daughter, and ttham-amma knew who was coming.

I was born on 25th July 1982, about exactly three years after my great granddad had died.

As soon as she was able to, my ttham-amma bundled me up in a white-orange towel and took me around the room which she had shared with her husband, “see everything is exactly how it is, the same bed, the same cup-board, only now I have bought a radio, you never knew how to relax, I am now going to”.

Today my mom tells me for about the 1237th time how her grand dad had always wanted to be born a woman as he had had to take care of the whole family when he was young (he meant that women always had someone to take care of them….ah..Well) and had said a lot of times how he wanted to be my mom’s kid as she really pampered him.

So karma is to be blamed for the fact that I am really lazy and that I let my mom do everything she can to ‘pamper’ me.

randomly

Rose coloured glasses make you see the world in all its glorious details, sometimes even if they, the glorious details, do not exist- Is that not how good mood works?