Or give me a patch or something

Go
Sit quietly and listen to yourself
Why do you always need me?
Don’t you like your own company?

Go
Maybe you can read a book
Don’t get disheartened if it doesn’t
Make sense after a page or two
Persist, most books take time
In growing on you

Go
Build a few stoned walls
If you find a window, don’t crawl
Out of it to find me hidden
With my head under the sand
To escape from your shenanigans

Go
Please don’t take it otherwise
Not that I don’t like you sweetheart
You are insightful,clever and smart
But you are addictive, and it’s a vice
To get into a person and suck her life

Just go*

---

*For a song stuck in my head which keeps going encore
Now my life has a very predictable background score

The lesson

Certain girls don’t heed what they read.

A girl I know, who worships Wodehouse, who knows that whenever Bertie sleeps in his mauve pajamas he becomes the center of attention by some midnight incident involving an ex-fiancée or a burglar, will dare to dismiss these incidents as fiction. She will go out to buy curd in her bright pink shorts thinking it’s a two-minute job and that huge food store wouldn’t be crowded anyways. And soon she will be lying in a big pool of vegetable oil, flipping like a fish out of water and resembling a soap when it touch bases the wet floor and slips around for good twenty seconds. Of course, the crowd will click their tongues and shake their heads and will think twice how far they will slip before they offer a hand. And yes, in case you were wondering, those bright pink shorts change color to a dull magenta when well oiled.

Most fiction is adulterated with the potential of reality. Hope the girl heeds this lesson.

Being read to

There is a point in reading a murder mystery a second time. When you already know the end, you pay a little more attention to the details which led to the end, you see a little something more, a little better. Same goes with watching some movies twice. Like 'The Reader’. You feel Hanna’s angst more; you can see how much ashamed she feels seeing a bunch of kids giggle over their menu cards, how nervous she feels when asked to pen down a handwriting sample. You can empathize more with her one point agenda of being-read-to... whatever it takes. It is quite overwhelming to put oneself in Hanna's shoes, and even more to walk in Michael's, to witness the transformation of lust to love and something more. For it takes a lot to be a reader.

-

There is a distinct memory of childhood summers... a memory which shines through summer vacations is of Emma Bee, all of four, demanding to be read to. I did not like reading to her, or to anybody. We had the subscription of at least three children’s magazines, which were always scattered all over the house, luring her with their pictures and words. When she got tired of looking at the pictures, she would read aloud the letters of the words in a continuous monotone that sounded more Greek than English to me, and I would smack her and she would hit back and our grandmother would holler in Punjabi so loud that babies in neighborhood would start crying. Some days, in pretence of restoring peace, I would concede, and slyly pick up a ‘Misha’ (a Russian magazine, whose English editions were equally popular) and read to her the English she didn’t understand at that time. She never complained, though ultimately, I got bored of her constant expression of utter puzzlement. Then, mostly for selfish reasons and partly because my conscience weighed heavy on me, I would read a few stories from ‘Champak’ to her.

-

Reading to somebody is not easy. It is an art which requires high levels of concentration and good modulation of voice. You have to hear your voice and still create a picture of what you are reading in your mind and still transfer that picture to someone else’s mind. It is a tedious task. You cannot be too absorbed because the listener is hanging by the words you are speaking. You cannot laugh before she gets the joke too and your facial expressions have to be in sync with the listener and not with the reader who is you. That is why I don’t like reading to anyone, for that exclusiveness, that bond with the book is not there.

-

Being read to is even worse.

Pest control

It is easier to kill a roach than a tick
Back of the slipper will do the trick
Mosquitoes die in a clap of the hand
With speed their corpses crash land
Don’t spare the ants, red or white
Just crush their mud hills with delight
Swat the fly and blow on your swatter
That it took ten attempts doesn’t matter
Rats die after eating poisonous cake
Sweetness is something easy to fake
The worm that chews on your tree of wishes
Put it in a jar and feed it to the fishes
And after all this effort, they are all deceased
You sit down with the paper, feeling quite pleased
Don't fret over crashes, floods, bombs, flu, et al
We too are somebody's pest, after all

This game we play

I follow you in your footsteps
You live in my blind spot
You gobble up my admiration
You are a hyperbole fed on me
While I, the fool that I am
Just cannot see
How I deceive myself
By imitating your faults
And your virtues alike
And
When our books are balanced
At the end of our lives
We have had a parallel existence
You own up to your punishment
While I, like those cowards who
Blame their gods for their wrongs
Blame you.
You do not like bearing
The brunt of this adulation

You scream, “So, if I jump in the well, would you do the same?”
I say, “Yes! For if you escape, you will be one-up on this game.”