NEIGHBOURHOOD TRUTHS

I have been in the silent zone for no other reason except that I am neck deep in hedonism, living my version of the perfect sybaritic life. Reading, travelling, watching films, socialising, wining, dining, appreciating good looking women and even better looking men, clubbing, pubbing, jamming…the works. You name it and Joan has been doing it.

My White Mughal showed us ‘There Will Be Blood’ and I realized the movie was from the same year that had another movie with blood in its name—‘Blood Diamond’. Wedged between Gregory and Mrs. Perth, I felt like I was watching Doordarshan with Mom and Dad on either side. The evening had rambled on and I was crestfallen. However, thankfully for me, now that I am in a different frame of mind altogether ever since I left Kolkata, Brit tragic hero and I seem to have struck up an unspoken arrangement, taking frivolous flirtation to a new level altogether. Let’s consider what happened yesterday. While returning from an absolutely gorgeous walking tour which deserves some space…but later on, Darby and I came face to face with him. I don’t exactly look dainty anymore but it takes a sensitive Englishman to appreciate beauty even in spare tyres. I had some wild flowers in my hand including a pretty yellow one that I do not know the name of. And immediately, Brit tragic hero comes up with, ‘Are they for me? Really?’ and I serenade, ‘uhmm, uhmm’, and we both gesticulate and shoo away a helpless Darby. I quite like the role reversal bit of it but there is nothing remotely intellectual about this little bit of drama played out under a huge chestnut tree. The discussions in Sarnia get more cerebral only after midnight perhaps when novelists and the advantage of their form of expression, or screenplay writing and its essential lack of latitude take over harmless and inane flirtations.

Let me give you two more examples of the inanities. English Babu tells us tales of how Polish students reel under the baggage of the English language in his class. Knowing their tendency to take down the words of the Anglo-Saxon lecturer as if they were part of the Delphic oracle, once he had chosen to flummox them with the line, ‘…and so when the Normans came they burned down the women and raped the churches’ and he succeeded! They had taken down his words and only after a couple of minutes managed to point out what turned out to be their own momentary lapse of reason. The inanities gain momentum when Irish Gregory joins us. I ask tragic hero, ‘…so tell me A, why haven’t you married?’ He shyly admits, ‘Not from a lack of trying’ and Gregory quips, ‘Why don’t you ask him why he does not have children and he’ll say the same…not from a lack of trying’. And so life goes on in Sarnia…