A Lament if you're kind, A Whine if you're not.

As a city kid, I really haven't learnt much about life. I let myself get cheated by auto-drivers and find it impossible to yell at strangers on the road when the occasion really calls for it. I can't drive. I can't operate my bank account. I can't walk across a bridge without being mortally scared that it will crumble, or crack right across the middle, a nice clean crunching sound out of nowhere, and fall down taking me with it. There are these constant reminders to be vigilant, to be attentive, to be observant. I'm not, really. I notice things I shouldn't because I'm trying very hard to zero in on an impulse I cannot locate. Sure, it's interesting. It's just that when I flip back through all the drawing books I've had as a child, there are buildings everywhere in the realistic slice-of-life drawings I did from time to time. Also cars, and people with a self-sure inclination of the head.

My grandfather used to tutor two kids in his free time in Jamshedpur, a brother and a sister. Everytime I went there I remember wanting to spend every inch of my free time with them. They seemed so much more at ease with their surroundings - a certain surety of footing on dusty roads, a certain knack of finding the right crevice to sit in on a tree branch. They could make complicated little things with rope and sticks, and they could ride bicycles and run faster than I could, and to top everything else, they could identify the things around them. Names of birds. Types of trees. Earthworms and plant-pests.

I cannot tell one car from another unless it's glaringly obvious, and I don't know petrol prices, and sometimes I catch myself staring at people who know foreign currency exchange rates, and feel this nagging bewilderment at everything. Then I go eat some fruit to stop feeling sorry for myself.

There was a canal outside the compound at the back of my grandparents' house, and there was a drumstick tree, sorry and twisted, that seemed to grudge us every swordfight we held with its fruit. There used to be cows somewhere around, and a deep-rooted smell of cowdung and dirty water that seemed a part of everything. I use the term 'small-town India' with all a city-dweller's snootiness, but somewhere beneath it lies a strange despair at the fact that I have only experienced it second-hand. When I grow up and have children, this is where they shall grow up. Maybe they won't be as savvy as their rich city counterparts, but they'll be happier, I think, and in some way more human. They can get lost in the city when they are grown; it seems a better prospect than being born already half grown up.

My neck hurts and my mother is going around muttering "Spondylitis! Unfit! Indisciplined!" and so on under her breath. I had to Google the spelling of Spondylitis just now. I sometimes hate my computer concentratedly. In Jamshedpur the jackfruits would have been ripening now, and the cicadas would have been at large. I wonder what the house has been doing since Dadu and Dadima moved. I'm not thinking very fondly of summer this year, not now at any rate. There are sometimes nothing can make you feel better. Not even gulmohars. Good morning, everyone. Today is a Monday.