Tuesday, August 15, 2006 2:32:46 AM

Dear Z

 

When I picture being married to you, I mentally zoom through the functions (GOD knows how they’ll go – but I’m secretly scared that the valima will be horribly sparse and undecorated because if you’re handling it then we’re screwed because you’re a boy and you hence don’t know anything about décor – plus where will you get time to do beautification of hideous creek club halls?). Anyway. So then we get married and the only clear thing I CAN imagine is the time period we stay back for the dinners and stuff and I get to wear my new clothes and dress up and wear my jewellery (yaay), and then we go freeze on our honeymoon (still seems unlikely we’ll go because you’re so against it) and then we’ll start the drudgery of corporate work. Basically can’t imagine anything but the family post wedding dinners.

What do you think it’ll be like?

Monday, August 14, 2006 7:01:10 PM

Dear Z

I’m furious with you. I’ve lived in constant terror for the last two weeks over you-know-what. I feel my gut clench and spasm with horror as I recall every dizzy spell, the hyperventilating I had at Dubai airport and the constant need to eat meat.

Then I’m furious with you in making your stupid inconsiderate doltish mock serious SPEECH about how “I should take this seriously and it’s not funny”. You bloody idiot, what the hell do you think I DON’T know how serious this is? Will you have to go through ANY trouble at all? Will you be compromised physically, socially, mentally in ANY way? Will you even have to miss a single day’s work or a single night’s sleep over this? Will you have trouble conceiving for the rest of your life because you were stupid adolescent and amateurish in your bloody precious sex drive?

Fuck you and fuck all men.

 

I’m done with trusting you to be the grown up and take care of things. I’m done with it. You get NOTHING done, all your promises are crap. You have failed to deliver on every single thing I have relied on you to take care of. You whine and complain about the stress and the finances, but haven’t compromised either. You don’t buy three hundred rupee phone cards yet pay fifty thousand rupees of your father’s debt. It’s like there are two boats, one with your parents and one with you. You feel the need to help them by cutting holes in your bloody boat and throwing it at them. I know you would love to be the good son, but frankly you’re not in the position to play savior. You yourself and in pathetic amounts of debt for pathetic reasons, you have no game plan to get out of it, and you proudly dig your self deeper in massive strokes while patting yourself on the back for saving three bloody hundred rupees.

Congratulations. I can’t wait to sink in your boat with you. If you can’t control your dick and your finances soon, there’s going to be trouble.

Friday, August 11, 2006 4:51:33 PM

Dear Z

You bastard. You’ve gotten me used to this absolutely unrealistic level of commitment that you made initially by calling me a million times a day and basically worshipping the ground I walk on. Where’s the worshipping now!? It’s downright cruel to do that. EVERYONE knows that the honeymoon period of relationships is unsustainable, so everyone tries to compensate by setting realistic standards. That’s a GROWNUP relationship. And there you go and disregard all these basic norms of common sense and build this up toting it to be forever and then we crash and burn and I end up feeling ignored, used and slightly resentful.

Basically you’re not calling me and I don’t like it. And when you do call, there’s this annoying tone to our conversations that’s dissatisfying and vaguely irritating. Plus its VERY rude to not say goodbye before hanging up.

Anyway. Lahore is in full insect bloom these days. Summer quarter springs unfortunately to memory, with leaving a single plate in a kitchen and having a swarm of a million ants infesting every scrap of edible substance. Of sitting on a bench next to the pond for five minutes with the dorm delivered pizza and picking it up again to find it overrun with black teeming masses from ecological hell. Yuck. All the greenery in Lahore has its downside. On that note I shall depart and carry on with my own life that is slowly strengthening here as I pull away from us.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006 11:35:43 PM

Dear Z

I grow old I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled (that’s from the love songs of J Alfred Prufrock by my fav author TS Eliot). I’ve had this giant mustache for a week now. Plus my room is overrun with ants of all shapes and sizes. Gross.

I was awake from 4:00 am to 8:00 am hunkered down in agony over the pot as I tried to pee through my recurring and now chronic urinary tract infection. Then I went woke up my mother, and just like that, it was all ok. I went back to my room, dazed and little delirious with lack of sleep, and stopped for an entire 15 minutes on aching bladder to observe a little slug that had crawled up the wall you can see from the glass at the entrance. It was so painfully slow, it probably took it the entire night to get to that height in the first place. And it refused to move forward for the fifteen minutes I watched it. It had this elaborate ritual of reach, point with feelers, retract feelers, reach out again, point with feelers again routine that was mesmerizing at the wrong side of 8:00 am.

Somewhere there are insectologists who have studied these slugs and who know their elaborate rituals. I wish I knew one who could tell me why the slug was doing that. It seemed terribly important to know at the time. Eventually I decided to go google it first thing after I woke up. When I did wake up at 11 eventually, it was gone. I still haven’t googled it.

Maybe we’re still basking in the afterglow of my visit. Our frantic urgency of talking every five minutes is gone. I’m glad we’ve (you’ve) reached the stage where we feel just as close even if we only talk three times a day and not seven or ten as previous averages stand.

I love us. I love you. I want to drown us in the chocolate that is our love. We can grow old and wear our trousers rolled and talk about how we used to hear the mermaids sing. It won’t be so bad if we don’t hear them anymore as long as we’re together ok?

As always, with all my love and my heart.

Monday, August 07, 2006 22:38:13

Dear Z

You went crazy when I was away. You did. I remember the worst night, when you called to wish me and you ended up breaking up with me. I remember believing you, feeling bereft, with no idea what I had done wrong and no idea why you were being this way. I remember feeling a stab of horror at having done the deed with you, how could I justify it to myself now? I remember feeling terrified and alone, like a hollowed out gourd, knowing I would never be whole again without you. You brought me to my knees that night, long distance via bad phone connection on the stroke of the hour I turned twenty six.

I called willing to beg, desperate to get through to you, only to find you down on the ground with me. Were you there already and I didn’t notice?

I miss you. This home of comfort and solitude is no longer my home. My heart lies next to you.

If you change after we’re married I’ll want to castrate you.