baby walkers Follow

Before I get all lovey-dovey about the West Coast of the United States, it’s worth mentioning that the trip from the East Coast might leave dark red crease marks on your ass. I’m not kidding and more so when instead of the aisle seat, which I wanted, I got sandwiched between two warm southerners, one of whom a y’all-speaking woman, who didn’t stop using her Blackberry to take pictures of the cloud-ridden landscape outside the window, and the other a man, who was overflowing from his seat like water from an already full bucket. He buffeted me toward my female co-passenger throughout the flight without feeling any compunction about it. It didn’t tense any muscle in his body and he flew to Seattle on the furry feathers of snores. A passing-by flight attendant once mentioned his snoring to him, jokingly, I remember, but such is the world we live in, he looked at her, his mouth in a rictus, and nodded as if he had accepted an award but was not feeling up to getting out of his seat to receive it. I listened him shift weight in the seat, the tectonic plates of his bones adjusting to find the new configuration, and then after the tsunami, the silence, which was only riddled by asperated stertors. Even though it I didn’t particularly enjoy his company on the flight, I was genuinely grateful to him for not farting. He looked many times guilty of muffling one of those silent ones, but they turned out to be false alarms to my immediate relief. Before I got on the flight from Atlanta to Seattle, I had to get up and ride Marta to the airport, not rocket science I know, but it’s important to know that one thing that I hate more than the feeling that I am not tough, and that I am not performing to my full potential, and all that cry-baby blah blah, is the act of getting up early in the morning. I can do lots of things that many people might find difficult: I can bowl at 80 mph, win half the trophies at cricket tournaments, go to Arpit’s place uninvited and drink his Heineken even when he stares at me after every sip I take, tell my boss that I would have kicked his ass real bad if he hadn’t been my boss, and wear a pedometer without feeling embarrassed to count the number of steps I’m taking every day to monitor my ballooning belly, but I just cannot get up early in the morning, and when I say cannot I mean it’s not funny anymore. I remember during my IIT days, from Agra to Kanpur, there were trains—sounds like it was a novelty—that took more than eight hours to travel 150 miles (250 kilometers) except for one that took five. It was my favorite train in the world for not being retarded like others, but its arrival time at Agra Fort – primarily a single-platform train station overrun by monkeys that bite and snatch food and frisk people’s pockets when people are busy checking out Agra’s babes (that’s such a lie I cannot believe myself)—was a tad beyond my sensibly-awake hours. One time, during my sophomore or junior year (my Americanism is off the heezy), my dad after wrestling with me for almost half an hour, made me get up and sit behind him on his LML Vespa scooter. Winding through the narrows roads of Agra at five-thirty, past vegetable hawkers, milkmen, and morning walkers, we got to the station. My dad pulled his scooter on the stand and shook me hard, I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me as if I had asked him to give me five hundred rupees for beer over the two thousand he had already given me for living expenses. It took me a few seconds to realize, but it did happen, that the only thing I was holding onto, standing at the station, very early in the morning, was the feeling that I was holding onto a bag, the bag I was to take to Kanpur. I got into Seattle at slightly past noon. It was cooler than Atlanta, as I had expected, and it didn’t take me more than twenty minutes to reach my hotel in the middle of downtown. I changed into my new Calvin Klein tee, thank you, and walked a block north and five blocks east, passing as many Starbucks on the way as there are Halwais in all of Agra, to reach my waterfront office. Once I entered the building and the window-less room on the fifth floor, I didn’t get out of it, I mean I did but mostly for going back to the hotel to sleep. They would fly you to the west coast in a cigar of a plane, put you up in a hotel that costs 240 a night and overlooks the nearby building’s cooling system, and then make your work long hours; what’s up with that? A man once said, I lowered my head to increase my salary, I think he wasn’t completely wrong. Seattle is a strange city, I came to know within hours, the number of hobos it has on the roads pushing their grocery carts. Downtown is their home without doubt. Just like any other stratum of society, the hobos, or more appropriately people asking for change, or alms, I saw, ranged from teeth-less bums – one of whom was holding a poster that said ‘Bush Stole My Dentures’ and another one with Hitler’s mustache on Obama’s face—who sneaked up behind you with their sooty tin boxes and wanted to know, If you had any change, sir, any change will do, sir, would appreciate it sir, just one dollar, to this guitar-welding guy and the violin-sporting girl, with their instrument cases open to hold cash, who wore better clothes than me. I passed these failed musicians several times on my way to get a gyro or guac-tomato-cucumber-mushroom-lettuce European sandwich. It was apparently hard for these people to lead a life similar to mine, I finally decided, and what was he wearing that yellow t-shirt for, wonder where she got her sheen apricot dress from? The first two days went by in frenzy, nothing fancy. I worked and drank my beer, what else? But then the uselessness of my stay started playing on mind and I sat down on the third day to do some research on the city. At most places I know it rains occasionally or rains during a fixed season, but in Seattle it’s the opposite. Here sunrays, not rain, fall on you. Occasionally. Fifty-four average sunny days in a year. I had a hard time reading this fact. If the sun is too embarrassed to show its face every day, then why should I bother? Who am I to challenge the sun? I felt a sudden pleasure in my brilliance. I decided I wanted to relocate to Seattle. The blues, I’m always in need of some, bring the mellowness in me, and the proximity to the body of water, Mt. Rainier (see how the freaking mountain has a rainy name), The Fremont Troll, Microsoft (famous for its blue screen of death), Pike Place Market, a sweet downtown, a waterfront office, what else could ‘me’ want? Me happy, me drunk here. Hotel—office—Pike Place Market—office—hotel, the cycle continued for the remaining days. The wind picked up one day, the clouds charged in the other, it stormed for a while, the sun peeked out, and the time slipped through my hands like my monthly paycheck. Once I stood, on my lunch break, in the middle of Pike Place Market, a kick in the air, and saw people move in packs in opposite directions past me. I saw them go, talking about some movie, some show, some artist, what they wanted to buy (iPhone), what they wanted to eat, what their boss was asking them, how big that girl’s tits were, I watched them go, somewhere. Then I moved toward a little patch of sod, where many homeless people had been sitting, talking about god knows what. I sat down with them and just listened, listened to the sound of water against the air and I knew I didn’t want to go back, not to that fucking office.