Poo Chronicles, Contd.

I read best in the loo. It's a childhood thing, in fact when I was 10 it made my mother tear one of my Enid Blyton St. Clares in half, but then the next day I had it taped back and was sticking it in the waistband of my skirt to take to the toilet. She never asked me what that suspicious rectangular shape was, sticking out of my abdomen at an odd angle, but she waited till I thought she was cool with it and the next time I stepped out of the toilet with a book in my hand, BAM! She shredded that book to bits. But I was a stubborn child and well... what I'm trying to say is, habits like this develop over time.
Anyhow, I read good when I poop. It's my little bit of "me-time", when I can pool my pants around my ankles and stretch my legs out and relax. I bust stress that way. (Stink? What stink? My poo smells like roses.) And while I usually spend about a half-hour in the loo each time, it's been down to ten minutes ever since I started that godforsaken book I mentioned in my previous post. I hate the hellish thing to bits, but I've never started a book that I didn't finish, and painful as it is, I'll see this thing to the end. And make sure I read all of it only in the comfort room.


NOTE: Elia Kazan, great man though he is acknowledged to be, ratted on his colleagues for being Commies at a time when Communists used to be hunted down and killed, which makes him a dick, and therefore makes it okay to hate his work.

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Die, evil book-hungry vortex

Books that have been sucked into the vortex that is (clearly) operating somewhere in hostel. Near the water cooler, is where I reckon.

Transmission - Hari Kunzru

Procured at a Landmark Table-of-Perennial-Sale in Chennai, circa 2008. Reading this had taken rather longer than usual. But it was an odd sort of story, and I'd enjoyed it. More importantly, the cover art was funky.

Chocolat - Joanne Harris

My. Oh my. I loved this book. Not in a generic sense (which isn't to say I didn't like reading it. Oh well.), but this copy in particular. It had been bought with my aunt in Bangalore when we were out on a used-book-scrounge. The pages were yellowed, the spine was slightly wobbly, and it had belonged to someone called Ida, who had a lovely loopy handwriting. It had a Feel to it. It had Atmosphere. Also, it had Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche on the cover.
Looking HOT.

Mobius Dick - Andrew Crumey

This was a leaving gift from my best friend when we'd just graduated from school and were en route to our respective undergrad colleges. I'm not completely sure if the Dick in the title had anything to do with it. I'd read it thrice - the second time because I wanted to to, and the third time for lack of other reading material. Yes, excluding the blurb at the back of the box of Kellog's. This is a strange, wistful book with schizophrenic characters, parallel universes and time travel thrown in for good measure. Oh, and Schrodinger's cat.

I hate losing books. Even if I'm not overly fond of them. It is worse, even, than ripping your newest jeans at the crotch. And that is saying something.

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Wax. Strip. Ow.

Today, I waxed myself for the first time. Which isn't to say that I'd spent the years ensuing the arrival of my adolescence in hairy heaven. It's just that I'd always gotten myself waxed in parlours - those strange smelling places run mostly by women who (for some strange reason) all look like eunuchs.
I am a hairy person. I admit it. (And I urge all ye other lasses similarly afflicted to stand up and be proud. 'Tis nothing to be ashamed of. The era of waxing strips and hair-removal creams is come.) So when I looked down at my legs one day and saw Chewbacca's instead, I felt moved to pick up my (butter) knife.
If someone had told me that I would one day enjoy giving myself pain equivalent to being skinned alive, I would have found the idea snortingly amusing. But oddly enough, I didn't mind it. I even found the pain strangely therapeutic. It was almost as if with each strip of wax I pulled off, I was leaving behind all of my doubt and confusion. I am now a surer and more confident (not to mention hair-free) girl. Since this whole process took above of 2 hours, I also missed dinner, which event will ofcourse render me slimmer and more attractive in the near distant future.
This little episode got me thinking about all of those women (and fewer in number, but prettier - men) the world over who engage in this painful ritual. And I have come to the conclusion that a reasonable method of calculating how close a woman is to suicide is to determine how often she gets rid of her body hair. The hairier she is, the greater her collection of books on the afterlife. Because all of these women (and I keep forgetting - men) who choose to go through Hell (oh, the pain!) are not merely de-furring themselves, they are reaffirming their lust for life.
P.S.: Any of you reading this who think the details of bodily hair removal are gross can go wax a werewolf.

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The living

She lay curled on her side, her eyes open. The room was narrow and ill-lit, with a bulb above the dressing table giving it a sick, deathly glow. Paint was chipping off the walls, and there was a damp patch on the ceiling from a leak somewhere.
She had been awake all night, for countless nights now. Her eyes were bleary, her eyelids tired and heavy. But she continued to stare unfocussedly into the distance as she willed them open - almost as if hoping that this only contact with the real world would stop her demons from turning on themselves.
As one of her legs dangled off the edge of the bed, her toe grazed the marble floor. It was much cooler than the bed she lay on. She slid off the bed to lie on the floor, her arms spread in an unrequited embrace. A thin sliver of sunlight from a crack in a shuttered window lit up a small patch on the ground.
The noise of the fan whirring above filled her head, and it grew louder and louder till there was nothing but silence.

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