I apologize...

As I said in my last post, all my secrets are out and I feel better already. So I have not been able to do a post a day.

And I thought I wouldn't be back here. Because I outed myself. I know the person who knows my secrets and the person knows me. Not good.

But I am back.

Because as much as I think I've purged and become happy and clear, I wonder. Is it because the pendulum of luck is swinging in my favor? Or is it because I don't want more secrets that I may or may not have revealed?

I don't know.

I thought of something else that I wanted out of my system yesterday. It's something else I've been dealing with on and off for a number of years.

As a child, I was beaten pretty bad. I wore it as a badge of pride that the more they hit me, the more I would stand my ground and not do what they wanted. Today I realize many things but mostly that my parents married young. They had me young.

Barely out of their late teens themselves, they married, had me and had a life to live and pull together. No help whatsoever came from any quarter for the most bit. And so even for the smallest offenses my sisters and I were beaten. We weren't delinquent, we lied on occasion because we learned that truth didn't get us any benefit but the cold shoulder or a really bad beating/berating. Lying was easy. Lying got us out of trouble for the moment so white lies to get out of situations became a good thing. Even today, if I find myself in a tight spot with my parents, I find myself choosing to lie first. It takes deliberate effort to stick to the truth. And I've learned, there's no triumph in it. Lying is easy.

Another fall out of all the beating that happened was this -- it taught me violence was okay. Or at least not consciously but my reaction to someone close to me saying something I didn't like was to raise my hand at them.

Many a past boyfriend has borne the brunt of it. Some of them hit me back, in a very non-brutal way. Only because their heart and their ego, not to mention whatever body part I chose to hit, hurt. Not because they wanted to hurt me I am sure. And I liked that because it immediately gave me an upper hand. I could claim I hit them only because I lost control as I am wont to do. But with them? They're men no,? How can they hit a woman? And I'd have a mind-slave for at least a month or two, till either of us saw through my manipulation. Because, as I see myself the way I was then, I realise I sub-consciously drove a man up the wall so that I could gain the upper hand in some way. And I usually did. So much so that my men would get addicted to my super-independent, hyper-dependent bastard personality and never be able to give me up.

Most my boyfriends are married and settled. How I hate that word. But I know if I give out the right vibe, they'll be happy to spend a week with me. Sex is a big draw of course but the addiction that I can be, as their attention can be to me, is the real thing.

I am tempted to test my charm on one man. He's never been a boyfriend. And we've met each other only a couple of times but it's enough for me to know what is in his heart. I can see it in the way he finds reasons to not spend time with me but texts me at night asking something inane. I can see it in the way he looks at me. I can smell it on him when I chat with him. Will I do it? I am tempted to. But I am done with games. Because if I start on this guy, I know it will be only sexual for me. And I don't want to share my body with anyone else but my current.

If I do, I'll let you know.

Stream-of-consciousness post

In one fells swoop all my secrets are out. And I am bereft of anything else to confide in. I have no crutch, so to speak, to depend on for traffic. Now it's my personality and me alone.

It's not that I am bad company. In fact I am great company. I smile in all the right places, I listen with great concentration, I ask all the right questions and I never try to beat your story with my own. Even though the cake you baked the other day is not half as exciting as my roleplay night but I will still ask you if you aged the eggs and if you used extract or essence for flavouring.

That's the thing I never understand about people. Why is your life exciting to me? Don't get me wrong. People like me get by because you have a huge voyeuristic streak and want to know every last detail of my life if it is presented to you, well, presentably. But that's when it's written down.

When you are talking I find it incredibly rude and insensitive to keep talking about yourself for more than 15 minutes. Ok so your child is doing drugs or you aren't getting any at home but tell me that much, add a little footage if you want and then move on. Tell me about some nice clothes you bought or better yet, show me so I can decide for myself.

Do anything but go on and on about something that only you can sort out. I honestly cannot help you if you are not getting the girl of your dreams (you didn't ask me when I was single and now it's too late. Hmph) or your husband's cheating on you. Short of putting an ad in The Hindu or telling your husband he's a worm for cheating on you without permission, there's very little I can do.

Cheating without permission? What does that mean, you ask? Well, see, I am not the possessive kind. Well, not to the extent of being possessive about my partner at least. I am possessive about my car, some clothes, my books and my talents. I don't like anyone else having them or doing it better than I do. But about my man? No. I love him immensely. And he me. I can safely say he is the best thing that's happened to me and I've had some pretty nice things happen. But if he were to sleep with another woman? I'd be perfectly ok. As long as he told me this was happening. I need to know that there's another woman on the scene. I don't ask for gory details. Because then maybe I'd get possessive but I'd like to know it's happening.

Because, you see, if he wants to sleep with someone, then he's already thought about it in his mind. Which means he has already cheated in his mind. As long as I know, he'll never get as deeply involved with anyone else as with me, he can do what he pleases.

Only one fallout: How can you get a girl into bed without first giving her some of your heart?

The Meddling Mendicant

I am the kind the jumped from one relationship to the next without ending the previous one first and giving myself a breather. Does that make me needy? Perhaps. Does that mean I cannot live life without a partner? No. It just means that I fell in love or lust, as the case may be at that point, before I was finished in the previous relationship. And rather than stress myself and my time with two simultaneous relationships, I chose to end the one that had served its cosmic purpose. Because, honestly, most relationships come with an expiration date. And while it might be painful to get out of one, or booted out of one, sooner or later both parties realise that that was as far as they could have gone.

So when I was with my first serious boyfriend at 18, I slaked my lust with an old flame from school. After a super-exciting make-out session and endless conversations over phone, I was asked if I wanted to be with him. I would have said yes but I took my time over it to see if the bastard meant it. Good thing I did. Because the next thing I knew was his girlfriend (yes, girlfriend, which was not me) went through great lengths to get my number and ask me why he had changed. Why he wasn’t as loving and as communicative as he used to be. Why she asked me I will never know. I only hope she didn’t see us making out in a very public place. When I diplomatically said I had no clue. She said she was planning to run away with him, and her mother had threatened suicide if she didn’t end it.

It was just a fraction of second but in that sliver of time I knew that I would rather save an unknown girl pain and embarrassment and be risked called a meddler than keeping quiet after I shot off a foul-mouthed email to the Bastard. And since then, if I was involved in what later became a sticky situation I called a spade a spade. Whether it was the man standing next to me feeling up an obviously uncomfortable girl’s butt (I hit him) or it was a girl going behind her husband’s back using my name to cheat on him. I didn’t go outright and tell the poor man. But when I got 13 calls at 1 a.m. and was asked to truck all the way down to Versova from Worli to see if the wife was okay because she hadn't answered any of his calls after 10, I had had enough. Happily, both of them now lead happy lives in two different cities.

After that was a string of meaningful relationships where I enjoyed song, sea, smokes, seduction, food and penury. All intermingling with each other because I would always be in a relationship before I got into another. I liked that and a couple of times the men knew how it was and didn’t have issues. Were they getting a quick lay? No. So I can never explain why all those men were kind to me despite knowing I’d be flying the coop soon.

I just hope I didn’t hurt them more than it was necessary.

And in other news...

This became a comment on this wonderful space but I thought I'd make it a post all on its own, taking off from where this post left off. I am one of those long suffering, child-bearing aged women who is at the receiving end of the typical G.M. I found some seriously politically incorrect ways of dealing with situations.

Few examples.
While on my walk in the neighbourhood. G.M. Pointedly ignoring I am plugged in, which means I am discouraging conversation.
G.M.: You know what Dorkeshwar Kumar did the other day? He went on and on colouring our living room walls with beetroot sticks. I think I am going to send him to the school for the gifted.
Me: Okay. Poor baby at least something to make up for the fact that he can't walk.
G.M. Can't walk? He is running all the time.
Me: Oh! I thought he sits in that (stroller) because something's wrong with his legs or coordination.
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In the park close to home.
GM2: You know what Cranketina Cluelss did the other day? She came to my room wearing my heels. Chooooooo chweet.
Me (Gagging from too much *sigh* chweet): Oh good, she's practicing already. Don't forget to tell her when she grows up that good things come in short packages ok?
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To be fair to me, GM2 is about four feet fuck all. And her husband is a centimeter taller than her.
Needless to say, I have no friends where I live.

The first time I cheated

The first time I ever cheated was in a school exam.

I grew up like any other kid being taught that cheaters never prosper. I saw otherwise. But then I've always been the girl who couldn't see the larger picture. So when I made a friend in school who I thought was super cool -- condescending sneer in place, disrespect for every teacher in school and wrote almost as well as I did -- I didn't think twice about being urged to cheat. After all, who wants to listen Mommy, right?

The challenge, then, was to cheat on the exam in class 9. How one gets past chemistry unless they cheat is still one of life's biggest mysteries for me. So anyway, I never paid attention in chemistry classes even though I was told I was going to be seriously shafted in class 10 if I didn't. Oh, I'll manage. Overconfidence of the intelligent.

And here was exam time and I looked at the textbook only to realise I had no clue what most of it meant. Which easily lead to me the conclusion that this exam I'd cheat and get by, because you just can't fail, and just like that I moved over to the other side and compromised part of my mostly-untainted soul.

I had to get creative. You could peek into the paper of the person sitting next to you but what if he or she was a total dud at chemistry. So that was out. I could carry slips of paper -- that's part of the charm of the uniform, so many places to hide things. But if one of them fell out or worse, we were frisked? So I let go of that one also. Being the kind who liked to show her shapely calves at school, my pinafore ended just above my knee or at my knee if it was start of the school year. That's how I would cheat then. Write down stuff on my pale thigh and keep hiking my skirt oh so nonchalantly and get my answers. And I did. I managed to get past chemistry that term. But I never got rid of the cheating even though I told myself that it was only that once. Next chemistry exam I was going to study and get through.

Since then I've cheated in more than chemistry at school. Think Maths (I refuse to fashionably call it Math. We CBSE students call it Maths). In more ways than just writing on my thigh. The hem of my skirt was a great hiding place for slips of paper, also were the sides of fingers, the back of my neck and as I have thick, glossy hair, that too worked. I even found a set of invisible inked papers Also, I have cheated on my parents -- lied to them about where I was for half the morning that something very important had to be done. I have cheated on almost all of my boyfriends and my current. (Strangely, I have never cheated on a girlfriend. Hmmm.) I have stolen money. I have hacked into certain people's email accounts to find out if they had lied to me. They had.

Almost all my cheating, except cheating on the boyfriends, had some justification. I felt completely convinced that I was doing no wrong. I still feel I do no wrong. Because mostly, I am just amoral.

The boyfriend cheating? Well, I have no excuse. I am a slut for exciting times. So giving in to the rush of physical attraction is something I can't resist. I love that moment when I suddenly realise that the guy I've been going to the terrace to smoke with has actual making-out potential. And mind you, that's all I ever did with all my cheatmates. Make out like mad. Only one lovely boy made it all the way and he was lousy in bed but super charming otherwise. So I just couldn't say no. Maybe the lovely wine, even better dessert and some seriously damaging pot helped him just a bit. But when he said, "Come on, give us a cuddle," at the end of a traumatic ganja trip, I just knew it had to go all the way.

Will I cheat again? I'd like to but I don't think so. I love my current wayyyyyy too much to do that. Besides, it gets boring after a while, no?

Why I am here

In my real life, where I walk, talk and eat food with real people, I am a regular girl. To most eyes, I am confident (despite being 30 pounds overweight), positive (even though I know I have contemplated suicide more than once) and balanced (in spite of very regularly losing my temper and beating someone up).

But that's just to everyone's eye. Me? I think I am insecure -- about the way I look, about my effectiveness at my work place, my talents, about the way I talk. Just about anything is fodder for my insecurity. And while the last thing I will do is admit that I am insecure to the rest of the world, I do, however, want a place where I can be completely myself without the inhibition of worrying who I am offending, whether my mother's reading my pieces, whether my partner's going to go off to have an affair with the bag lady after he reads what I write.

I just want that space to say that I realise that my once best friend is jealous of me and all she ever wants to know about my life is if I am doing better than her. That my aunt annoys the crap out of me, and most of the things that I say I am interested in, I am not. I am just pretending to be interested so you can think I am intelligent and, if you are attractive, to get you into bed with me or at least hunger for me; to say that every once in a while, my partner is such a lazy fuck that I end up doing many things he should.

I want to be able to say that I have never ever had an orgasm during sex -- not with my partner, not with my girlfriends, not with my boyfriends. But the good thing is that I honestly believe that the ride is important, the destination just an afterthought. And since I usually get there on my own, I can't complain.

I want the freedom to admit that I don't care so much about having kids and I very well may never. And since I am nowhere in my early 20s I can safely say that this isn't a juvenile oh-i-am-so-terrified-of-labour statement. It truly comes from my belief and the fact that the world has too many people already.

Anonymity has never been something I have actively sought. In fact, I love being the centre of attention -- as long as you don't put me on stage to speak. Ask me to dance, I'll wow you so that you come in your pants. But ask me to open my mouth and say something, and I'll amaze you with a disappearing act that will put ole Harry Houdini to shame.

I have few secrets but those secrets are deep, dark and dirty. I would never admit them, face to face, to a single human being as long as I live. I have, on occasion, confessed my transgressions to the grave of a dead person. But that's as far as I will go. However, on this blog, who knows.

I am shallow and for the most part, don't mind it. Only because depth is not something you can cultivate like a good manicure or a set of air-kissing friends. It's like the ability to be multi-orgasmic. You either have it or you don't.

I like dogs. I like cats. I live with one of each.

I love to bake, work with clay, write, cook. I hate to eat. But I will eat anything for survival, for experience, for bragging rights.

I hope to post once a day, every day for the rest of my interested life.