Thursday 3pm, Bandra

Its a warm sunny afternoon in Mumbai. I'm about ten minutes from the sea if I were to do a lazy, see whats around, sort of saunter down the hillock. I'm in the room, lying on my belly and pretending to work. I have broken my long break from writing and everything I read seems to remind me of something I wanted to talk about but was always too lazy to. And then I read something and realise that it isn't realy that big a deal - writing to capture the mood as it is in your head. The greatest fear for me was always a fear that the reader wouldn't be able to appreciate the mood because my writing skills wouldn't do justice. But I realise that was discounting the imagination of the reader. Besides, most of us in this generation grew up with largely the same authors, writing sensibilities and story collections. Our mental bank of stories are frightfully similar and if you are one of thsoe ICSE school kid types, then I'm sure even our damn expressions would largely be the same. Anyway, I shall refrain from making further gross reductions about our 'unique individuals' and let their 'various' personalities remain as colourful and exciting as they should be.

Besides, that wasn't the point of this post. I was reading a blog post about a 13 year old girl and how she was abused by an 'older uncle'. Its rather frightful, how similar the story is, to what happened to me at the same age. I was 13. A 'math' teacher was brought home because I wasn't performing up to my tam bram family pride. And we would sit at the dining table and I would write into my long notebook, bought for this specific purpose from a shop that sold books made from recycled paper, with a fresh long natraj pencil, the eraser at arm's length. Amma would step into the kitchen to give the teacher a cup of filter coffee and that was when he would strike. Every damn time. And I didn't know what to do. How was I supposed to react? Why was I feeling that what my grandmum says about me wearing a salwar kameez with a dupatta was actually a good idea? Damn it! Its MY house... I will wear that pair of shorts at home.

And what I would end up doing is working out my sums faster and faster so that he can leave soon. Take on lots of homework, call out to my mum every 3 minutes under some excuse or the other and try to keep her beside me. I wish I could run away from that house like the girl in that blog post. But I couldn't. I even spoke to him rudely. Answered his moronic question before he finished it cos I knew what he would ask. And there was no way out. It kept getting worse. I was 13. I had never ever felt like a girl my entire life. Until I started bleeding one day. And even that pain I had made peace with. And all of a sudden here was someone who was probably looking at me as something else. Its an ugly feeling when an introvert, under confident, almost phlegmatic at times, scrawny little thing was made to become aware of body parts she didn't even know she had.

A year later, I looked at myself in the mirror for the first time. I looked at a shapely waist, widened hips and the curve of my back, the sudden appearance of my collar bone and my calf muscles tightened from obsessive cycling. But it wasn't a revelation. I had felt my waist even before I had one. And that is a sort of theft no one can replace.

There is something about 3pm on a sunny afternoon. You are living inside the yellowed pages of a hand me down book, even when you are not.

I like Billy Joel's lyrics:
The good ol' days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems...