I have spent my day today in inordinate boredom. Sitting in front of my work terminal, staring at the screen, making a few calls for a story, going out for coffee, getting tempted to stuff my face and then return to resume staring at the screen.
There’s this sense that I am waiting for something. Is it what I think I am waiting for, is it something other than that I am waiting for without knowing about it or is it just that my senses have been put to sleep to the extent that they are choosing to be fanciful to shake themselves up.
Because even when I get back home and sit on my bed, settling into the comfort of my blue fat cushion and turning the pages of one of my favourite writers -- Amitava Ghosh – I feel like I need to do something else. It is unsettling.
What better time than to wrap up my Goan tales, only there’s so much to tell that I think I would be sitting up all night!
As a follow-up to the previous post, I have to start off with saying that the rest of the days there were spent in a haze of drinking and dancing and walking by the beach.
It was the hedonist’s holiday.
Sometimes I wonder how it would feel to work in a beach town. I mean after work head off to the beach and let the salty breeze of the sea ruffle the day’s worries away.
Hardly have I not received a message from friend S (he of the casino manager fame) in the middle of a boring/harried/contemplative/happy day informing me – Hey, sitting in Rudy’s Shack, sunning myself and listening to the waves, with a few bottles of Budweiser by my side, OR hey, just woke up from a nap and going to down some more beers, but tell me how does it feel to get back to the grind, my dear?
Thoughtful fellow, my friend S. It is with him that I put up in Miramar. It is his fridge that me and my friend raided in the wee hours of the morning after we had come back from a night of hectic shaking our bodies to the music at Mambo’s, where we were mostly to be found if not tanking up in Cocktails & Dreams.
And if perchance we were not at Baga, we would be sitting on Anjuna Beach in Zoori’s grabbing a quick bite of juicy mushrooms stuffed with fried blue cheese that would be quickly enough washed down with wine. Following which we would hit the dance floor at Paradiso with a vengeance.
On other nights, the party was at Butter and Shiro’s in Candolim. All was well till the night of the 31st or it might even have been the morning of the 1st. When at some point my drunken senses reeled under the discovery that I was not holding my beloved blue cell phone in my hand.
All teary hell broke loose. While on hindsight I cannot help guffawing at the thought of howling over a phone, at that moment my anguish knew no bounds. I caught hold of C and sobbed my heart out over the loss of my precious little, useless but attractive phone.
In the background all I could make out in my bleary eyed consciousness/semi-consciousness were three guys hovering around helplessly. One of them being an Aussie guy who had befriended me the first night of our binge drinking session in Baga and the other two being similar friends of my friend C. I think they were genuinely taken aback at the angst one can display one losing a mobile. The others had left by then. They lost out on the drama afforded by me and my mobile.
A few hours later as I entered S’s apartment somewhere in the early hours of the first morning of 2009, I was curiously content. Something had happened to make me let faith in. Faith in something good. That when you lose something, you also find something.
