Winter of '14

I guess its finally time to write about Almora. Now that its been a while since i was there, i have had time to digest and regurgitate the ideas in my mind. So it was the starting of December that i went for a kind of pilgrimage to up in the north close to nice mountains in the small town of Almora. In the train the journey was quite comfortable,although i have a thing for upper berths and i always choose them while i am reserving tickets so as far as i can remember i have been travelling in upper births and sometimes side upper(when i am travelling in sleeper) and i always have this fear of missing my station coz i have no goddamn clue about where i am and I refrain to ask. So this time it was not bad since mine was the last station and i read 'gone girl' in train and it was quite gripping so i did not feel the time passing and i was having these nice revelations all through the book that it was hard to keep down. So I completed it in train and got down in delhi to find normal cold weather,unlike what i had expected. The thing that disgusts and at the same time comforts me is the rudeness of almost everyone there,especially bus drivers. They can be pretty dangerous. But then i took a taxi to Anand vihar and took the state bus from there to Kathgodam. the bus was a big one and there were four of us there. So i had the bus to myself. I sat in different seats and read 'palace of illusions' ,it was nice but not that gripping. i heard lot of new music on the way, particularly i listened a lot to Brahms, the symphonies are quite amazing and i guess perfect when you are travelling through small curvy roads of mountains watching Kosi river flowing by your side. So Almora i reached at around 10 in night and god was it chilly. I ate like a mammoth in the kitchen of Holiday Home, where we were staying. And surprisingly we had a TV in our room in which we watched mostly Discovery channel, or NCIS on AXN. It was so chilly, that i had a blanket for my bed sheet and a blanket and a quilt for covering meself. But there were two heaters in the room which kinda were like comforting hands of god himself. There were lectures during the day till 5 pm and then night arrived and i loved it. The food was nice and the part of the meal i liked most was breakfast. I had a bread with omlette every morning with lot of tea and sometimes parathas too. The breakfast was something i looked forward to. The shitty thing about the room was that in the lavatory there was no faucet so i had to use tissues and they got over pretty fast, not because i shit a lot, but the thing they kept there was very small. So it was always a big problem to go out in the shivering morning at 8 in my night clothes(which were embarrassing) to ask the hotel keepers to get tissue roll to the room. And even if there was a gushing faucet there, i can only imagine the pain of having five degree Celsius water hitting my ass. I had a nice view of mountains from my room, i could see a lot of them, nanda devi too which comes about a kilometre short from being the tallest mountain on earth. I met a lot of people from mostly north india there, most were funny. there was vandana, rachit, vishvesh, pradeep and more. we had to walk about half a kilometre from the hotel to the CEMS ,where the lectures used to be held. Sometimes or most, maybe most, of the times lectures were boring and other times i did not care. The tea there was awesome. It is kinda like a lifeline there to me. Most of the times , i was drinking tea. And when the days were grimmer, the day it snowed, there was no power, no hot water, no heat,no lecture(bcoz roads were blocked),no roommate, it was as if i lived in my mind and the chill made me double the quilts and refrain from moving out of my cozy shelter. Snow was nice,beautiful but it brought pain with it. There was no power for many days, i missed the heat and needed it badly. People who were teetotatalers resorted to whisky to get body heat. You see, the body is kept heated from only food and hot beverage other times we are always losing heat. When it snowed,there was no heat going inside the body. Whisky was a boon. Maybe it was the romantic atmosphere there or the cold itself, i read a lot there. I read Moll flanders, great gatsby, palace of illusions, lolita, some short stories by saki, tried reading last of the mohicans, its english is very complicated and i can never get the setting correct in my head. For that matter, i discontinued lolita too because of his flamboyant english which i had difficulty comprehending. When there was power, i read at night using my bedside lamp and when there was no power, i read under light of 6 candles or maybe more. of course with lots of tea. It was kinda amazing how one could see all those snow clad mountains and feel that they were so close(well they were) that one could start on a hike and come back the same day. I bout different types of tea like Chamomile tea, Lemongrass tea and some special flavour of Uttarakhand and stuff like that. I bought a cap popularly known for being wore by people of Himachal. I went for long strolls and bought peanuts on roadside stands, which were not cheap as i thought they would be. I saw great sunsets and hope i could say ,great sunrises but i never woke up before eight and the sun rose at 6 ish. It was nice experience there, i met new faculties,some very young. it was a time of life. it really was an enlightening experience and it made me realise that travelling is something that is worth living for. When i arrived back in delhi, it was cold to death, and there was so much fog that visibility was zero. I stayed in IIT delhi hostel with one of my friends for the night and boarded the train for pune the next day. I read 'the body of a woman' on train or something like that, it was by khushwant singh. I liked it. and here i am writing this, almost a month after my journey.

Julia

I have never wanted many things in my life and i was content with having less. When kids my age demanded random costly stuff from their parents, i never did.Maybe it was because i saw the futility of the exercise but then most people had the What's-the-harm-in-trying attitude.I did not. And this was how i grew up. So it was reasonable for me to not to expect much from life and from others too. But i couldn't keep much of my healthy disdainful spirit that day.It was scorching month of May and there were bulbous fans and thick-glassed professors churning heat on us.As the clock hit the missionary position, we got out of ours.I was happy to be out of college and was moving fast to be out of the gates early so that the viscous crowd wouldn't get to take my spirit away,along with my speed. Safely out,i took to the lighter mood and opened my new cigarette packet, removed a cig carefully and tapped it on my wrist and took a deep one. Was it the best moment of life, i sometimes wonder. That day while i was strolling back to the dorm from college,when my eyes accidently sifted through the window panes of the newly opened garment store close to college. It was a sort of a headgear.Looked like a navy cap gone wrong.It would great skills to do that sort of a horrible job.Evil perhaps. It was a shade of red,the red which is of revengeful blood and which oozes through the lustful lips of a Janelia when she is angry and with tiny meshes and ever tiny design, i knew it was the one. and god,strike me dead if i did not had the true desire to want it.Since i have been working part-time as pizza boy and janitor too,i had my share of freedom and bit of money too. So i decided to go in and get it. I was hoping it would not make me work overtime. I had to put out my cigarette,some crazy store policy.Normally, that was too much of an offense to me but that day i was not the consumer.more like the moths flying towards the fire. Upon checking with Julia, who was also working part-time there and since we had once something going on between us,she offered me 10% discount on the price of the hat or whatever it was and i was finally going to have it. and life would go on as always. Precisely when this feeling had passed me,the store manager came in from his cabin and moved towards the mannequins when to the horror of my life he removed the hat from the plastic man and took to his cabin with my booty. I was dumbstruck for a while and gaining my sanity i interjected his path to enquire about the hat. 'Hello sir, but i would like to buy that hat you are holding',i asked in panicking hysteria. 'Oh,no.This is not for sale, it a birthday gift for my son'replied the jovial unsuspecting man in his mid-forties. 'but i already bought it, check with Julia there'. 'Julia, would you kindly return the money of gentleman here and if he pleases,show him other hats we have got in stock' 'Do you have one exactly like the one you are holding' 'Well, you know,we have lots of other brands and ...' 'Do you have one exactly like that' 'Ah...no.' It was a very stressful period for me as i could not think of what to do in this situation. i had never wanted something so badly in life and when i wouldn't get it and i did not know how to respond to such a contingent situation. I was confused.I must have been really out of my mind, when i realised that i was running towards home with the cap tucked in my armpits. I know not how the past deformed to the present but i was really glad that i had it . But Julia,my childhood friend,did recall the story for me. Our parents were bussiness partners back in golden town. 'oh,hey what are you doing' 'somebody stop him' After some moment, 'Julia,you were talking to him, you must know him.if you can get me to his home, i will make someone happy and someone very sad.' 'Julia,are you even here' 'Are you listening' 'Juliaaaa...' 'Oh yes,sir,no,i mean no, i don't know him.How could I?I have been here in this town but only a few weeks.And i am not really social' 'That so.Anyways,let's file a theft and see what the police can do.'