RIP 2012

One can't let go of a whole year without giving it a warm, affectionate farewell.
So many hours and heart-stopping minutes had passed with such swiftly varying emotions that Maya wonders if she is schizophrenic; a split personality who is mom, daughter, wife, grand daughter, sister-in- law, daughter-in-law, niece, sister, lover, girlfriend; completely separate of each other, none approving of each other, except her children, for whom there was no compromise. Her mom did not approve of her brother, her aunt disapproved of her grandmother and wouldn't allow her to talk with her, her sister-in-law disapproved of the mother-in-law and wouldn't allow phone calls with the mother-in-law, her brother disapproved of her community and wanted to create a new one, and her husband disapproved of everyone on the above list.
To keep afloat, Maya pretended nothing disapproving existed and everyone was loved and loving. She craved affection like the kitten whom her husband kept as a young man. "She always climbed into my lap the moment I sat down," he would say. "I would fling her away but she got right back each time. I made it a sport to push her away just to watch her come back."
Except Maya was not a kitten and didn't always come back. She understood his sport, long later, and got back in his lap only rarely to see if he had, perhaps, tired of the sport.
"Love, security, communication, happiness." Her four staple needs, outlined in a statement she made before she got married. If she did not get those, she did not eat, did not sleep, till she did.
Thus Maya spent 2012 creating her own circles of communication. She loved. She lived. She would be no kitten scared. She would be a kitten loved.
But she had to leave her strong, lively women companions behind in another country. And the new country had only cat-women to whom she purred politely and fed tea, listening to their opinions of how immoral the world around was.
She loved still. It was as natural as breathing. And 2013 beckoned, fresh-breathed and scrubbed clean, beautiful and arms wide open.

How not to be bored in clinics

Hospital routines are insufferable. 
After hours of waiting, Maya was ready to throw tantrums, stones and bricks. Did no one else in the clinic feel the same way? She watched them curiously, seeing if she could absorb a little of their patience and not stand up and scream.
Nothing worked. 
So she took out her pocket diary and stabbed at it with her pen. In loud capital letters, she wrote fast and furious.

"TURN THIS HOSPITAL ON ITS HEAD. TURN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY ON ITS HEAD. ALL YOU PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM! AM I THE ONLY ONLY ONE WILD WITH IMPATIENCE? I'M WILLING THE NIB OF THIS PEN TO BREAK SO THAT I BREAK NOTHING ELSE, BUT IT REFUSES TO BREAK. All THE PEOPLE WHOSE NAMES ARE BEING CALLED FOR THE SCAN SEEM TO HAVE GONE FOR TEA. ARE THOSE WAITING INSIDE THE ROOM THE IDIOTS? 
BIPIN PRABHAKAR! KILL ME WITH YOUR FUCKING. JEREMY, SLAUGHTER ME WITH YOUR LOVING. I NEED YOU BOTH TO SURVIVE THIS. MAYBE NAREN TOO, THOUGH I HATED IT WHEN YOU ASKED IF I LIKE HAIRY CHESTS, BUT YOU'RE CUTE AND I ALMOST KISSED YOU IN THE CORRIDOR THE FIRST TIME WE MET AT THE CONFERENCE. CHEMISTRY IS THE TRUE SCIENCE OF LUST, FOR YOU TOLD ME LATER YOU ALMOST KISSED ME  IN THE CORRIDOR. PERHAPS IT WAS THE VERY SAME CHEMICAL MOMENT. I WISH WE HAD TIMED IT, SO I COULD PROVE THAT. (now tired of all caps, and more sober). Two hormones attracted each other and swayed toward each other in the corridor while the guy who had checked me out earlier, walked by, turned around and nearly stopped to watch us, knowing the moment he had wanted with me had been appropriated by another. 
Bipin Prabhakar, fuck me crazy. I will throw my head back and and let my neck be bitten off. You will writhe in quietitude while I rip your shirt off and unbutton you, while falling on you in electric moments of tuning my every nerve to every one of yours."

Spent, Maya paused. Her mother had been waiting for her scan since dawn. She relaxed and wrote out a bucket list.

"Make love in
Punjab
Kerala
Sydney
Langkawi
Michigan"

Separate ports. Different men.

Then she graded each of the men. Her parameters were
Hotness
Availability
Tenderness
Ability to share her innermost self

Bipin topped. Jeremy was second. Her first boyfriend was third. (He lost on availability, the playboy having become a preacher). The next two were tied, so she chose to put the Punjabi last.

And then she decided she was losing her mind. But it had been more fun than murdering the clinic staff. 

Writing always helps. Especially when you are trying to get over the fact that you could not stop yourself from being attracted to every decent male who said he was attracted. Whether he was boss, husband's  friend or preacher. 

So today she decided that she would take her brother's job offer. Brotherly restraint at work could keep her from bumping into men in corridors and other ...er...romantic places. 

Little Deaths

Reminder to me: If I know I'm going to lose consciousness, I should pause and pull back for a moment, so I dont utter politically incorrect names. La petit mort may be heady, pleasurable, but can be lethal if completely given into.
http://emilymorse.com/french-orgasm/
Am gonna hold a hartal against the expectation of monogamy so I can scream whosoever name I please during all Little Deaths.

Minutes in a crowd

If being mildly intoxicated can get you booked while driving, it can also get you fucked. In a fantasy.
A minute of fantasising in the middle of a crowd makes your pupils dilate and your friends think you are about to say something to make them laugh, so along with fantasising, you also have to process what enlightening thing ur going to say at the end of that minute.
So most evenings now, someone in another part of the world is probably endlessly sneezing/hiccuping because I'm drinking at a farewell party, and I m taking a minute out several times during the evening to cause those sneezes or nose-twitches or whatever we like to think happen when "someone's thinking of u..." For those orgasmic minutes alone, I would have a zillion farewell parties if I didnt have to pack and tie up contracts.
If you are drinking alone with a smoking woman friend, with two single men on the next table who are telling you that our two tables are "smoking hot" ...on a graffitied Arab Street, alfresco...when u can still walk perfectly straight after the evening on 4inch heels...AND have a real-life release when your legit partner gets back from his lime-juice evening, because the combination of teetotalled man and sozzled woman is heady....

....that s when I like moving homes & countries....And my smokeheaded fantasy man.

Sari

Her friend puts silver bhutis on an aubergine chiffon, prints the pallu with pink paisleys and gives it to her, telling her to send a picture when she wears it. This is the friend of shared first intimacies...about first periods, first dates, first nights and first pregnancies.
She drapes the sari one Saturday morning to a wedding where they are ushers, seating and smiling at guests. He in blue buttoned sleeves and she in aubergine chiffon slung tight, large silver jhumkas and gem studded kitten heels.
The lunch is eaten, the oxytocin spreads, and they are alone.
He struggles laboriously to unfasten unfamiliar choli hooks and pins, unwraps all and then lays the pure chiffon back on her in a single layer to look and touch as if through a chiffon glass.
Chiffon Burn Day with towels layered under her to catch menstrual blood.

Eva Green.....

I'm watching her, amazed one can lie still when one's bare skin is being breathed upon from toe to head, lingeringly.
The Bond girl, in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, is calm with her legs together and as straight as an arrow. Beginning from her toes, Mathew tells her about the first time he saw her. He goes on to ask about her relationship with her brother as he feathers his way upward while she lies immovable yet taut. The camera captures every movement of air as he speaks. At the moment he is by her mound, his words cause her hair to flutter slightly, and he doesn't stop except to intimately insert a finger a moment and then remove it. The conversation continues.
Lessons in self control! Which I sadly lack at this moment.
Well, actually not sadly...madly.

OWS

It is more Occupy Wall Street chic than Mumbai footpath. The roads are lonely, and the night air is pleasant.
She half awoke from her dream and felt an arm comfortably wrapped around her breasts. She gently felt his fingers, taking them to her lips, to see if they were familiar. They were not any she knew, yet they were not offensive. They held her confidently, and she slept on, like she slept in her bed at home, wrapped in his and her nudity.
She woke up and he was gone, but there were large vessels cooking on outdoor fires. Whoever she was with, they ate well and had beautiful quilts which she could wrap herself with.
Barefoot she walked to the fire, but saw noone.
She had never felt so warm and safe as she was now, homeless on an unknown footpath, in a dream.

The post on Aug 15 is incomplete.
Aug was a time of fighting withdrawal symptoms from an addiction, and she had much more to say then which was best unsaid. She sought in it a lesson, like she did from all pain: the origin of pleasure.
Apr 29 is the anniversary of a calamitous accident, many years ago, that turned right. It was a miscalculation that cost reputations but brought her her dreams.
June last year saw the discovery of another angle to pleasure which she dared not calculate. As for the withdrawal after that, she learnt to leave it unsaid.
Instead, untaught and unbridled, she went online for anatomy lessons in the new year.
She had always browsed a few dozen recipes before she entertained; scoured every corner of the house thoroughly every week; left no source untapped for any article. She did it for herself now. She explored spaces she had not known. She found out what it was to be truly dominant. It was not just positioning, but precision and deliberation. It was hot, hard work which did not let her mind rest on herself. Perhaps men did want to be subjugated after all. Only here did they want to be equal.
AARGH.
She now looked for mutual submission that dissolved into nothingness, but she was reluctant to do the hot hard work, where she had to think like a man of the pure attainment of the body. She loved more the foreplays of anticipation: they drove her adequately enough into nothingness. Giving back by mastering was an undiscovered origin of pleasure that she wanted to explore.
So she moulded her breasts into her palms. Massaged her scalp with her fingers and her palms, feeling the heat spread, allowing the palms which she had kept away from herself earlier. She found that neem, papaya and honey were not just for her arms and neck..she needed it for the shadows where her thighs began. She discovered a mole on a mound...it was as big as the one on her head, yet she had never looked before.