And it's back to the tiredness. Suddenly I realise I have exactly two weeks to leave. This time next-to-next Wednesday I'll be in Bombay. Melting in a little puddle in the heat, by the sound of it.

I'm spending my time, watching as many brilliant movies as possible before I leave. Old classics. Old faithfuls. Must-watches. Yesterday was Domino. Heads you live, tails you die. Before that was Luck by Chance. And before that, Cruel Intentions. Sadly, a censored version. I must add that movie to my collection, it has a beyond brilliant ending. Set to well to Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve.

I've got my songs. New songs, old songs. I'm in love with Lily Allen's lyrics. People, if you haven't heard The Fear and It's Not Fair already, go, youtube, NOW. And thanks to the omniscient www.songs.pk, I have my old faithfuls from Teesri Manzil. And thanks to Limewire, I have ABBA. All I need is an iPod. Or an mp3 player with BIG memory.

And thus my life goes on. Drifting in the currents of time for another week. Then it's Dubai. Then home again. Then goodbye.

Till then, I drift.

Where the road goes, no one knows...

Dad has acquired a beautiful new pearl-white Prado. Mom was out today, so Dad and I decided to take to Prado off the beaten track, go places we haven't been in a while.
I wanted to go to Yiti beach, I'd seen this house nearby which was rather delicately decorated with shells all over the wall. The last time I'd been there, it looked like a ghost village, almost.
So we set off, on the new road. Pretty soon, all traces of the city were gone, the road seemed endless. Placed between craggy hills on either side, the only sign of civilisation being telephone poles, and the winding white lane divider.


Where the road goes, nobody knows. T'is not the destination we seek, but the journey. The road goes on, endlessly, till it seems the mountains will swallow you and you will be one with the soil of Oman...
We knew which way to go, Dad never forgets a road. But we had time on our hands. And new roads had been built. So every time we saw a turning away from Yiti, we took it. We followed it till the end, and then turned back to the Yiti road. Once we found the tarmac giving way to a steep graded road. A journey for another day. The next Detour found us at the gates of an unstarted beach resort project.
Back to the Yiti road.
We passed villages, here and there. Clusters of houses with makeshift garages of green gauze, shielding family vehicles from the blazing heat. A few boys playing, youths sitting around on steps, quietly chatting. And goats. Lots of goats. Silky goats on their hind legs stripping branches of their leaves. Thin little kids gambolling, tails waggling. Goat family crossing the road in front of our behemoth vehicle. Brown goats, beige goats, white goats, basking in the shade like lazy cats. Goats sleeping anywhere and everywhere.

Yiti was one of the first places we reached, before the many detours. The quiet vast beach we remembered had receded far away from the road, the land leveled for a resort project that had not started. It had run out of money, Dad said. They've spoilt everything, he said. I quite agreed.
I got out to take a few goat-y photos, as out of place there with my shorts and huge camera as a cat at a dog show, and I saw the sea peek at me from between houses.

Dangerous beaches these, Yiti, Qantab. They go very deep, very fast. But more beautiful beaches you'll never see in Oman. The city beaches, Shatti, Qurum, are perfect for a nice walk, yes. Walk the stretch, get some coffee. Sit on the wall. Go home. But Qantab, where we went yesterday, is almost a small bay, flanked by huge craggy hills on both sides. perfect for a trek, and the view, oh the view. Cameras are useless up there, because no camera can perfectly capture what you see, the essence of it, and I just ended up frustrated.

We did finally find the house with the shells at Yiti. It wasn't as beautiful as my mind remembered. But it was still unique. And the epiphany was in the journey, not the destination.

Oman is beautiful.

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Curiosity

"Curiosity. You're going to want to know...what it tastes like."
A line from one of her favourite movies.
Well, she did want to know what it tasted like. She'd been wondering for years. And now she was ready to find out.
It was an experiment, don't you see?
She'd researched it for weeks. Looking for the best way to get what she wanted, with the least inconvinience.
She was ready.
She hoped she'd remember what it had felt like. She guessed she would.
After all, she did believe in reincarnation.
Deep breath.
She plunged the knife into her jugular.

Love

I love love. I love what it does to people. Like him and her. Like my cynic and his girlfriend. Like V. (I even had to shorten her nickname. I really don't want an hour-long conversation about "why, why why why why must you do this to me)
I love what it does to people's faces, V with that face-splitting grin, Wheelie with that smile I once saw on her face....Sid when he talks about his girl, Rushi when he talks about Di, how their faces all light up with something beautiful and indescribable. How people refuse to see the faults in the other, how V cribs and complains when we tease her Boo.
I can see the smiles when they talk. Even if they're not in front of me. Even if it's an online chat.
I think I miss it, love.
I've been in love. I'm sure I smiled till my lips nearly tore. I know how happy I was, on the beach, singing, laughing, listening. I remember how I'd always hear "He's a jerk" and I'd always say "Of course he is!" (well, you are. still.).
I've seen...when people say "I love you", it seems to take something out of them. Like it's a big deal. Like it's a piece of their soul. It's never been like that for me. I say "I love you" a lot. To Kay, mom, Sneh, Rushi, Ani, Jan, Vagi, everyone. I throw the words around like chocolate wrappers. But I mean them. I do. I feel the love coursing though my veins. It's intense.
I was in love, yes, and I ruined it. I miss it. Being in love. Being loved. Not him, of course, I'll never miss him that way. He's always there. Always. What I miss, try to understand, is the feeling. The feeling I see on everyone's faces. The feeling that feels like the rest of this unfair world doesn't exist.
And the emptiness I sometimes feel when I see love, nothing seems to fill.

History in your hands

I went to the souq the other day...Sifting through the old coins in various jewelry stores. Found a 1976 Liberty Dollar, with the inscription: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I found a lot of beautiful Chinese coins, with dragons entwined around characters, with a Junk sailing the ocean. I found a coin with Hitler's profile. Many old Omani coins clinked through my hands. And then there were the really tiny coins, banded with a siver frame and made into lockets, gone green with age, faded, bearing the face of a greek youth. I'd have liked to buy one of those. I really would have.
These coins, so big, how were they carried around, I wonder, would they fit in our slim little leather wallets? Or would we need to carry moneybags, fastened to our skirts at the waist?
How may times have those coins changed hands, I wonder, and whose hands have they been in?
If we chart the route of those coins....where would they take us?

Happy Easter!

And this is one of the reasons why I bought a chocolate egg yesterday instead of a bunny.
Cadbury Creme egg, in case you're wondering.
Happy Easter!

Tired.

Yes I'm tired.
My long lazy mornings have been replaced with work.
My mom works at the Centre for Special Education located in our school campus, I've mentioned this before. When my exams ended, I'd asked her to call on me if any of the classes were short-handed.
Two weeks into my vacation, just when I was settling into the lazy morning routine, she tells me I'm needed.
So I start at Maushi's class, cluelessly teaching 3rd grade math to kids who are bout 9 or 10. But Maushi's class always has more than enough help, so I switch to Tina's class.
Tina's class has about 7 kids, 6 of whom are autistic, 1 of whom has behavioural problems.
Mornings are taken up by language classes, where everyone goes to the front and answers questions about themselves...with a lot of prompting.
Then Tina has a different lesson every day, yesterday it was fruits, the day before that it was opposites. Heavy and light, big and small.
Then is break (by the time all this is over, it's 10.30) and all the teachers and volunteers settle down to chat as the kids eat.
After that starts work for me. Functional academics. Like, English, Math and all. Really simple stuff. But with these kids, you never know. Sometimes they work fast. Sometimes it takes an eternity, They stare blankly at you while you prompt and prompt and in your head you're begging them to tell you the answer because they KNOW it and you KNOW they know it......
But it's fun work. It's better than uselessly lying around at home.
A couple of days ago, I had to use these foam shapes to teach math to someone. They were rather tempting to play with....

Meanwhile, yesterday was mom's birthday. We normally try new restaurants on birthdays, this time we landed at a place called Kargeen, very well known, but none of us had ever been there, because we thought it was mostly arabic food and sheesha.

Yeah right.

Firstly, it's a beautifully done outdoor place, almost like a fantasy at night, with glass lanterns and strings of lights, a fountain and trees. The food is OUT of this world. I ordered a Philadelphia sandwich, Mushrooms and cream and onions in a baguette, and had a tough time finishing it, it was so so so good....

I must go back there sometime...

wowie.

Also meanwhile, I'm reading Doctors by Erich Segal. Read it, it's brilliant.

Voices in my head

They have no names, after all I'm not schizophrenic.
They come out when I'm alone, in mind and body, and they talk.
Monologues, Dialogues.
A running commentary on how I look and what I'm doing.
Like parallel mirrors. On and on and on.
Sometimes they drive me crazy.
Look at her, they say. Walking along the shore with the water caressing her bare toes.
They're talking about me, the voices.
Sometimes they make my mouth move.
It looks like I'm talking to myself.
Like parallel mirrors, they reflect themselves.
Talk about themselves. Narcissist voices.
They have no names, say the voices, after all I'm not schizophrenic.
They disappear like wisps of smoke when I meet a group of friends.
And they creep back into me when I'm alone to think.
Sometimes they drive me crazy.

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This is literally what happened the other day. Sometimes my head is so full of voices, it feels like it'll burst. What I've written above...came to me almost verbatim the other day, while I was on the beach. The voices, I tell ya. Then as I got onto the road off the beach, I met a whole bunch of the ex-10th graders, and all the voices fell silent. Almost as if they were never there.

And I say to myself....

What a wonderful world.

It's been raining these past few days. We even had a cyclone warning, it never showed up. Yesterday....Was brilliant, sitting on the balcony wall of a friend, enjoying the smell of freshly rained-on mud and watching the thoughts whizz through my head while everyone else played PS ganes indoors. Splashing around in the pool, trying to remember swimming classes taken aeons ago. Movie marathon and pizza, cuddled up to myself in a sofa.
And I'm contented again. The day before yesterday seems so long ago.