Five years ago, it was Christmas. In London.
Five years ago, I had started this blog.

I had not thought the blog would survive these years.
I had not thought I would be going back to where this blog started. Well, not exactly the same place... not Leeds, but Oxford.

It's been a week that I left the house in Bombay, in which I have lived for four years, and am now sitting in a room of a house in which I have lived for 21 years, and have never quite left.

I realise that for the first time in a decade, this is the only home I have at a given moment. I am not spread out over multiple homes (rooms sometimes) - it's always felt like having a mother ship, with these tiny baby ships floating around. But, right now, there is just the mother ship, and I am in it. The only things floating around are a couple of mosquitoes.

Excitement in my life is usually the unwelcome and unexpected sort.

(This makes me wonder whether I kill the welcome kind of excitement simply by expecting it. But that is an entirely different issue!)

So, the unwelcome and unexpected sort...

Last night I discover that a girl -- someone I have know when she was a 13- or 14-year-old and a few years older -- has been lifting posts from my blog and glibly posting them on her Facebook page as her own. She has lifted not just phrases or lines, but entire posts. In one such copy-pasted post on her wall, she has tweaked the last paragraph to suit her own life (childhood, in this case). The original paragraph that I had written talks of a game between my brother and me as small children. She has tweaked it to read like a game between her and her brother (who I happen to have known rather well too). Her brother, oblivious of his sister's doing, has even commented on the piece of writing.

When I realised what this girl has been up to, for the past five or six months it seems, I saw red. I have rarely been so livid, about anything. I shot off stinkers to her and her brother. I took screen grabs (below) of the girl's FB profile with my writings on it. Posted those screen grabs on my FB profile. Fuming all the while.

So, why was I fuming? This is, after all, a rather insignificant blog, read by a handful of friends. Does it really matter that someone has picked up stuff from it and flaunted it as her own? (Maybe I should be flattered that my writing is liked so much?)

There is one reason really.

Something belonging to me had been taken without my knowing. If she would have asked, I would have happily given it, no matter what my current equations with her or her brother are. But behaving like a sneaky little thief is not something that I will accept from anyone.

Perhaps, there is another reason.

It is an angry sense of disappointment at learning that a kid I was once quite fond of has grown up to be that sneaky little thief.

One of the vows that I had taken, subconsciously over the years, is not to buy groceries from supermarkets on weekends.
The frequent sight of couples, children in tow, pushing carts full of groceries — and almost an equal amount of junk food — on a Saturday or Sunday evenings made me resolve that that is not how I am going to spend my weekend evenings. I am perfectly fine with sitting at home reading or doing nothing in particular, or even working in office, but not with standing in an hour-long queue in a grocery store.
But today, a Sunday, I found myself in the neighbourhood supermarket picking up things I had been planning to buy. When I walked in, there were hardly any empty baskets or carts available. The place was crawling with people. Supermarkets, like malls, have become the recreation centre for the urban middle-class. Children, for the lack of actual playgrounds, run around screaming (the very small ones also get lost and start bawling); adults consult their cellphones — “Do you want the durum wheat penne or the spaghetti?”; the aisles are as hazardous as jaywalking on the highway, you never know who or what is going to ram into your shin while you are picking up something from a shelf; you feel a human being rubbing past your rear end, and spin around furiously only to see it is a kid pushing past; and tempers are as frayed as in rush hour traffic.
And, despite all these warnings, I waded into the store, filling my basket and telling myself that it is not too bad.
And then, I had to move towards the tills.
Serpentine queues wound through aisles, around shelves and themselves. It took me a bit of time to realize that every till had equally long queues. Almost everyone had carts stacked with groceries, and for every one cart, there were four people standing around it. Supermarkets have ensured that shopping for atta and vegetables becomes a family outing, not a mundane household chore.
I squeezed past people and carts and found, what I thought, a relatively shorter queue. Someone was talking on a phone close to me and said, “It looks like this is going to take an hour.”
I looked around. It was a Sunday evening, I was in a supermarket, with a basket of things to buy, squashed amid singles, couples and children with loaded carts, with at least 45 minutes till I reached the till.

I stepped out of the queue. Kept my basket in a corner, and walked out.
Outside, I bought myself some popcorn.

It feels good to have made some vows that you know make sense to you.

It has been the good part of a year since I last wrote here. Honestly, I didn't think it made any difference to anyone. But, then, I was asked... "Why aren't you blogging?" It caught me a little by surprise. So, there are at least a few who missed it.
It felt good to be missed.
It is also the reason I am writing here, again.

It is a Sunday afternoon, I am sitting on the floor of my room, while thuds and crashes come in through the kitchen window. The chawl next to my house - one that I had thought can collapse any day - did collapse one day, and is now being pulled down. It is, perhaps, the first building that I am not sad to see being demolished. It was decaying and dangerous. The residents moved out a month or so ago.

But it is strange, to see it being pulled down. I can see parts of rooms, kitchens, bathrooms suddenly laid bare. Stripped naked. It feels like they have suddenly been exposed, when they were least expecting it. Standing at my kitchen window, I had often wondered what the rooms beyond the rotting doors and windows must look like. And now that I can see those very rooms - not quite in the way I had thought I'd see them - I am not sure I am allowed to. I see tiled walls for a few hours, before they are hammered down, I see abandoned shelves before they are ripped off, I see the opening above a courtyard before rubble is pushed thundering down it. And a large part of the sky is opening up. A sky that had only been partially visible for these years.

But that sky will, surely, be reduced to a strip, perhaps not even that, once a new, clean, expensive monstrosity comes up to replace the old, poor, decrepit one.

My only consolation is, I will not be here to see that. I will get some part of the sky till then.