2.

...The next day I left the studio and got into the last bus for the wharf. The driver was drunk. Music was playing. I got a seat. They rarely play music in these things. Sweet soft saxophone sang a lullaby. Cars honked outside. People got in. People got out. Fished for seats. Fished for change. Quarreled. The driver swore. It was beautiful. I sat there, listening, thinking, isn’t this fucking beautiful? A Konkani crooner overtook the sax now. Someone hummed with. Behind me a mother told her kid to stay up for just a bit more. The bus will stop now. Then home, dinner and then sleep! The little boy looked out of the window.  

The ferry was late again. I sat at the edge of the water, waiting. The river was dark, speckled with ships. The bridge was dim, distant, wet. Huge ships renovated into casinos stood docked in front of me. Shiny multicoloured lights, moving, shimmering, hypnotizing. One of them had a big electronic billboard. Casino Pride, it advertised. Then the C in Casino turned into a roulette wheel and went round and round. Round and round until it vanished and there was a dealer wearing a red vest doing card tricks. He vanished and there was a busty woman at the table screaming with joy. Now a fat man with a goatee kissing a card before he played it. Now another fat man ordering a drink. Now a bunch of cakes. Now a brunette in a bikini, winking, pouting. Now a smiling bartender. Now two blondes clinking glasses. Now a roulette wheel going round and round and round again until it turned into the huge C of Casino Pride. Now the busty woman again. And everyone was so motherfucking happy. The fat hairy men were happy. The women were happy. The dealers were grinning like the end of the world. The doorman was fucking ecstatic. The waiter gave you an impression that he would lay his life for a twenty percent tip. The tourists behaved as if the whole world was trying to sell them something. I kept on looking at the bizarre hypnotic show, smoking. Waiting for the brunette. All the lights were there but there was no sound. Just smoke. Just a constant hum of some distant yacht. The fat man ordered another drink. Someone spat at my feet. Everyone was waiting for the brunette now. More lights. Flickering lights, shimmering lights, mad wondrous dancing lights. And no sound. The water lapped softly at my feet. The fat man won his hand. And then, as the brunette finally winked again, the tired dark rusty blue ferry came to take me and my tired rusted people home.   

1.

I was a lost young man when I found this city. It wasn’t much of a city really. More of a town. The streets were cleaner and the cops smiled at you and you could smoke anywhere you wanted. It even had a river. And a ferry boat across it. Casinos on the water. Hookers on the street. Bars everywhere you look. Bars next to schools. Bars next to petrol pumps. Welcome to Panjim, sponsored by Kingfisher. I had to catch a ferry everyday to go to the other side of town. Everyday I would pile into the blue rusty monster, like a little kid getting on a boat for the first time, amongst fifty odd people, bikes, scooters and the occasional car. Tired, sweaty and wet at the same time, inching closer towards the exit as the shore came in sights like a tired old army bound to attack a beach. Thick horizontal rain would then pour down, soaking your underwear, rocking the boat. I would pass my time imagining an accident. The monstrous boat suddenly would seem tiny. How windy must it be for a boat full of fifty people to upturn? I would look around me and wonder if the others were thinking the same things. People, clutching everything they could reach, turning their heads against the rain, holding out communal umbrellas, waiting for the little blue boat to stop moving. Waiting waiting waiting. Checks to clear, weddings to attend, offices to reach, memos to read, cigarettes to smoke, prices to haggle, bosses to kill, waiting. All that while periodically sneaking a look at that wet ass in the taut white skirt in the corner. Thank God for that ass. The incoming shore would vanish in a spray of mist and rain. And someone deep inside the heart of the suffering boat would calmly light up a joint.

I was staying out of a small apartment which belonged to the artist I was working under. A Three rooms and a terrace with an open kitchen. Sparse old furniture. A drawer which looked like a chocolate bar. I felt lonely at night. I had some whiskey Krithika had left me, but I didn’t feel like drinking. My only friend here was an eighteen year old Nepalese kid called Vinod. He had never seen Nepal though. And yet he still had the accent. I found that funny. He worked at the coffee shop next to my place and taught me pool after dinner every night. The first night after we were done and I was picking up my jacket, a step out of the door, he said, “Goodnight, Boss.” And he said that to me every night since then. I would come back home and smoke a lot of cigarettes, try to play the guitar, try to write. I couldn’t. In the end I would just stay up smoking in the dark, looking at the godforsaken furniture around me till I was so tired that I slept. 

Mañana

.... He writes about being young and wild and free and out of your fucking mind. Out of your fucking mind jumping and talking and writing delirious poetry and smoking up and making love and getting drunk and passing out and laughing so hard and  singing wild incoherent inebriated anthems huddled around a guitar and weeping silently and never never never sleeping.

Oh I feel so INSUFFICIENT! I feel so little. Everyone around me is old and wise and grey. They’re getting jobs. Making money. But you and I? No. Let’s dream a bit more. Let’s sit and stare at the water a bit more. Cause maybe, just maybe, somewhere in there we’ll find this most brilliantmotherfucking idea! Maybe. Just maybe,  we’ll find satisfaction.  Let’s write another poem. I think I’m getting pretty good at it. I don’t hate them as much the next morning. Let’s keep writing and writing and writing till we finish all the words and then invent new ones and write some more. Let’s be maniacal for once. Y’know, kill-someone-with-your-bare-hands maniacal. Let’s rip apart furniture with frustration. No. Let’s write with frustration. Eh?  Write till we stop feeling INSUFFICIENT so much or atleast fall asleep.

Look outside your window. No. LOOK OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW. This room doesn’t even have fucking windows. But if it did I wish it would show me city lights. Look outside your window. Now tell me, what are you afraid of?

I am afraid of being..ordinary. I am afraid of not being loved. I am afraid that my dreams are wrong. I am afraid of insignificance. I am afraid of expectations. I am afraid of being poor. I am afraid of wasting my talents. Fuck. I am afraid that I might have an utterly dissatisfied booze addled worthless shitpile of a future.

We live life like we are going to live forever and we know that we might die any second now. I love that about life. She told me yesterday, you’ll end up running after the exact opposite things you’re running after today, thirty years from now. Aah. Seems so futile an exercise. I’d rather not sleep and write like this- something totally pukelike and inexplicably liberating- like this. Fuck fear, man. I am too fucking lazy to be afraid. To fear, we say mañana. Mañana. Not today. Mañana. Mañana. Mañana. Mañana...

eh, well.

They got it right man. Fuck. Dylan and Keruac and Bukowski and fucking Radiohead. They got it right. They lived the same shit a million others like them did and they fell off staircases and got into bar fights and puked their asses off and read the newspapers and cried in public washrooms and shat blood and missed breakfast and got bad trips.

And God they whined. About the politics and the corruption and that photograph of the malnourished Ethiopian kid and that head splitting hangover and the blood they shat that morning.

The waitress pours you a coffee and you light up your morning cigarette. You don’t give a fuck about the corruption. You kinda like it, infact. It’s convenient. You don’t give a fuck about the war either. It doesn't bother you. It’s like global warming. Your second cousin was on the railway station when they blew up the train but he was okay except the fact that he crapped his pants but you didn't like him much anyway. The hangover bothers you. And that’s what you end up writing about. That’s what you end up whining about. Fucking hangover. You give a fuck about getting laid and you end up writing about it. You show what you wrote that night to people and they use words like ‘honest’ and ‘passionate’ and ‘uninhibited’ and ‘I see Bukowski influence’ and some pseudo-intellectual crap like that because, well, they give a fuck about getting laid too. It’s just that they hit on chicks instead of writing about it. Or jack off. Fuck.

And deep down, at the end of the day, when you’re making apt arrangements for the next morning’s hangover, you know, in your heart of hearts that you are one sleepless night closer to your greatest fear- to wake up the next day and realize that you have nothing to write about except shitting blood.  

So..
Long time, no see.