The k0k bL0k Evening News Edition

"Do you know how Patrick injured his foot?"

Me, to Li Lian

"No, how?"

Li Lian

"He leapt off Vincent's balcony. He was trying to impress you."

Shaki

"Guys are so dumb."

Li Lian

A classic Li Lian quote. I have a Word Document full of it in case I can't think of any quotes to put in my posts.

Patrick did in fact leapt off Vincent's balcony and is currently riding the Crutch Express. Don't ask me why.

And better don't ask him either.

Proof of how boring the lecture classes are in my school.

Lecture-induced boredom is reaching an all-time high in MMMC. Students are falling asleep in class like koalas with diazepam shoved up their little fluffy butts. This phenomenon is very clearly evidenced by the picture above in which a resourceful young man actually attended his afternoon lectures with his blanket.

Pillows are yet to be sighted but I remain optimistic about that.

Alien lifeforms sighted in Manipal!

Water sanitation in the town of Manipal is reaching an all-time low. All Manipalites should be wary of the eateries they frequent as cases of amebiasis, dysentery and cholera would no doubt be erupting everywhere very soon. Due to the same water problem, the ornamental fountain pool located outside of the library building is currently experiencing an overgrowth of some icky, slimy, diarrhoea-coloured thing which formed diseased-looking, air-filled sacs.

I spent a total of 5 minutes prodding the disgusting looking air-sacs with the tip of my umbrella and clapping gleefully when they popped. I am happy to report that even though the fountain pool is no longer ornamental, it had become somewhat entertaining.

"So where's your pig tattoo?"

Me, asking Li Lian during a Forensic lecture today
on identification of people using tattoos,
referencing her strange fixation on pigs

"On my butt"

Li Lian

It's always worth talking to her.

Look at how happy that security bloke seemed.

My university's administration is reaching an all-time stupid. Now, anyone who wants to enter the library must carry the "Combo Card" which the university made us pay to make. The glass doors were magnetically locked and I was denied access into the building because I did not have the said card with me. I tried sneaking in by following some people who actually brought that that dumb card with them but I was foiled by the security guard stationed there and was made to march out in a degraded and embarrassing manner. I was informed that a notice had been put up right outside the entrance earlier to warn students about the implementation of this magnetic lock system.

That warning notice would no doubt have alerted all the über nerds that frequent the library every single day. What they have neglected to take into account is people like me, who avoids the library like it's syphilis and only visits it because he needs to do some last minute preparations for a Problem-Based Learning class due right after lunch and does not own the Arora & Arora Textbook of Parasitology (which allegedly "contains all the information you need on the subject").

The representative from the administration office sent to coerce the money from our pockets for that idiot card explained that it is an ATM card which also doubles as our student ID card and library access card - that's why it's called a "Combo Card". You'll have to threaten me with syphilis to make me carry around a card with that lame a name (haha, lame a name).

Apparently, the fact that I'm Chinese have failed to convince the security guard that I'm a student here. He must have thought I travelled all the way to India to some backwater Indian town just to break into his precious library.

Fortunately, I had the bona fide certificate proving I'm an MMMC student with me. I just collected it from the International Centre of Health Sciences (the place where we keep our lecturers) for the purpose of renewing my permit of stay in India.

In your face, minimally-waged security bloke!

"You cannot pass," bellowed Gandalf the cleaning wench.

My luck is reaching an all-time crappy. Just when I was going to retrieve that Arora & Arora Textbook of Parasitology (which still allegedly "contains all the information you need on the subject") from the shelves, I found that that particular aisle at the Microbiology section was being scrubbed by two Indian cleaning ladies. One was manning (womanning, whatever) the industrial strength scrub-o-matic while the other was piloting a vacuum cleaner to suck up the suds. I had to stand and wait there for ten minutes before they were done with that part of the floor.

Then, I had to waste another 15 minutes of searching for that elusive Arora & Arora Textbook of Parasitology (which, I supposed, have not yet change its allegation that it "contains all the information you need on the subject"). I gave up finally and selected three other promising-looking textbooks which together, I hoped, "contains all the information you need on the subject" as well.

I had to skip lunch because I spent my entire lunch hour trying my best to wrestle an adequate amount of stuff from that three very non-reader-friendly textbooks.

Okay, that's all the news I have today. For the weather report and sports updates, and why veteran Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor shaved his chest hair, go switch on your TV and watch the regular news.

Good Evening.



P.S. To that resourceful young man with a blanket in the first picture, please let me know if you do not want your photograph to appear in this site.

P.P.S. A lawsuit does not count as "letting me know".



Your friendly neighborhood newscaster,
k0k s3n w4i

Consider This a Public Service Announcement

"You can't eat just one... Lagi bet!"

Lay's slogan in India

No. I don't know what 'lagi' means in Hindi, or in whatever dialect it is written.

I fancy myself as a connoisseur of junk food, and every time a something new appears in the processed victual market (euphemisms; gotta love 'em), I have to try it no matter what.

Yesterday, on my nightly routine trip to the Nandini Milk Parlour Convenience Store which is practically situated right outside my house¹, I spotted this sitting on the chips' rack;

It seemed like a good idea at that time.

I'm a huge fan of Lay's potato chips, and it's a good thing that they only cost about 20 rupees (RM 1.70) per big bag here in India. At the standard Malaysian price (the last time I checked), I'd bankrupt my parents by December at the rate I'm stuffing my face with them here.

Another thing I'm really (really, really, really) fond of is mint. On countless occasions, I was warned that mint can cause impotence in males. That's a crock of poppycock. Mint is actually recommended by herbalists to treat cases of "can't-get-it-up". You know what really cause impotence? Pumpkin seeds, that's what. And smoking. And sauna.

Mint is manhood, man!

When I was in Malaysia, I always had a pack of Cloret's Optimints somewhere in my pockets and you can see me popping one (or two at a time) every minute of the day. Here in India, I feed my addiction with Altoids ("The Original Celebrated Curiously Strong Mints") but I do so at a much more sedate pace because a single teeny, pocket-size tin of it costs several nuclear bombs. Mint tea, mint-cream cakes, naan with mint sauce, mint-sauce-smothered lamb - so long as it got mint in it, it has a free pass into my gut.

But mint flavoured potato crisps? Do I dare?

I did.

As soon as I ripped the bag open, a heavenly aroma wafted up to me. I spent a few seconds with my eyes close, just basking in the fragrant, minty scent - not unlike some uppity wine taster inhaling the bouquet from a glass of Chardonnay from a particularly good year. With fastidious fingers, I selected a well-shaped piece, gave it the merest shake to discard excess salt, and popped it ceremoniously into my mouth.

I expected the chips to have nothing more than a slight hint of mint (haha, hint of mint) but they were positively soaked in minty freshness, with a soft chorus of light Indian spices in the background. It's very similar to the savoury mint sauce we usually get with some Indian dishes. Good.

But after the initial flavour glow faded, the chips betrayed an unpleasant masala aftertaste. Not good.

I'm perfectly fine with most Indian cuisines, but for some reason or other, I can never get used to the taste of masala. Once, I bought a packet of masala flavoured Lay's - it's in a blue bag with the legend Magic Masala emblazoned boldly across its front. I only ate two pieces before I dumped the whole packet onto my roommate. The only thing "Magic" about it was that it's the first snack food to ever taste bad enough for me not to finish it.

I give Lay's Mint Mischief potato chips a 5 out of 10. It's a novelty to try, but it's not something I'll buy every time.

Damn, I'm a food critic now!

Now that we're on the subject of food and breath-freshening edibles;

Some stuff they give you after your meals in India.

See those green, rice-shaped pellets in the picture above? Those are fennel seeds. You get a free dip into the communal plate after every meal in most eateries here in Manipal. The keyword here is 'communal'. Hundreds of people probably touch those seeds everyday. Half of them probably scratched their unmentionables right before they touch them.

And see that grimy piece of yellow paper there with a spot of oil in its middle? That's the bill for my meal. That's what they do with every customer's bill - they stick it into the 'communal' plate of fennel seeds and plunk it under their noses after they are done eating. Chances are, the waiter probably scratched his unmentionables too right before he handed me that plate and bill.

Fennel seeds supposedly freshens the breath when you chew on them. And it is said to have a diuretic effect as well (diuretic means "more pee", if you don't know that).

I rather take my chance with bad breath, Thank You Very Much.

Remember, only YOU can stop the next super-flu epidemic!

Or in the local vernacular;

Remember, YOU only can stop the next super-flu epidemic!²

Trying on a new shade of lame,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ Now you've discovered the reason why it's so difficult for me to pretend to stick to any diet plan
² I know it's unkind to make fun of other people's verbiage, but it still cracks me up every time one of my lecturers says that. Sorry.

Of Brevity and the Storm

"Brevity is the soul of wit."

William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

Dorothy Parker, American writer and poet

"Brevity is... wit!"

On a banner in an episode of The Simpsons

If you don't think these quotes are funny, chances are you don't know what 'brevity' means.

I took the following photographs last week at the bus stop near the Tiger Circle, the roundabout located in the centre of the town of Manipal, India;

It used to a billboard, I believe, before one of Manipal's savage monsoon storms had a go at it. The structure is made of steel, by the way.

Amazing.



P.S. I am aware that this post is awfully succinct but I thought that it would make a pleasant change from my recent exhibitions of prolixity.



Laconic,
k0k s3n w4i

Trippin' Mangalore

"Mai? Asian chick, likes to kick people? Yeah, last time I saw her she was at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV up her ass."

Bruce Willis as John McClane,
Die Hard 4.0 (2007)

The best quote evar.

Last Saturday, I've decided to get out of my lonely hermitage and join Shaki's (and his missus') day trip to Mangalore, a city situated about 2 hours away from the town of Manipal - the nearest place with a mall (albeit a really tiny one) and a cineplex.

This was my To-do List;

• Watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
• Watch Ocean's 13.
• Get myself a messenger bag.
• Buy more books (ideally, Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith and Neil Gaiman's Coraline) - I've finished reading the 19 novels¹ I bought during my last holiday in Malaysia 3 months ago. Here's a couple of links if you're interested in finding out what that 19 novels are; click HERE and HERE. That number does not include that two novels I bought here (Agatha Christie's Three Act Tragedy and Robert Harris' Imperium, which I reviewed).

To be perfectly honest with you, my reading habit scares me sometimes.

The three of us arrived in Mangalore at about 11.30 am. I was told en route by Shaki that Ocean's 13 was no longer playing at the theatre, which caused me to swear rather loudly. Mrs Shaki was pretty peeved about that too because the only reason she came along was to ogle at an enormous George Clooney splayed across a very large screen.

There's no accounting for taste, y'know.

Bharath Mall.

So we ended up paying for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which the critics ripped to shreds) and Die Hard 4.0 (which Shaki insisted would totally kick-ass). I am not a big fan of action-packed blow-'em-ups, but what the hey - it's either that or some Bollywood flick. I rather take my chances with a movie I can actually understand.

Look at the picture above carefully - they had their box office outside the mall. How rad is that?

A billboard I saw opposite the mall.

The interior of Bharath Mall.

What you'll notice immediately when you enter the mall is that they only have escalators going up, and none going down. I thought that was pretty shrewd of whoever-designed-this-place. I mean, shoppers might not bother to climb the stairs to reach the upper-floor-shops (yes, such displays of laziness is not unheard of), but once they are moved up there, they must come down sooner or later, right? Brilliant. They managed to save 50% of the cost of constructing and maintaining the escalators just like that *snaps fingers*.

Oh, in case you're wondering, there's a dingy, poorly lighted stairwell situated near the side of the building.

Bloody capitalistic skinflints.

Anyway, moving on,

In the interest of keeping this post as short and as readable as I possibly can, I shall just briefly review both the movies I watched in three sentences each, and award my personal score for them on a scale of ten;

F4: Meteor Garden

1. This is the worst superhero flick I ever have the misfortune to sit through.
2. Jessica Alba looked like an anorexic model zombie bitch, the CGI sucked semen through a straw, the plot had more holes in it than a cut-price prostitute's fishnet stocking, and the lines spoken throughout the flick were so incredibly corny that they nearly made me drown in the Pepsi I kept snorting out of my nose in disbelief that someone not living in a retards' institute wrote them.
   
3. The Silver Surfer totally wiped out, dude.

My rating: negative 2 out of 10.

Big, Bald, One-liner-spouting Machine (Live Free or Die Hard is the flick's North American title, by the way).

1. Probably the best movie I've watched this year aside from 300 and The Pursuit of Happyness (not including those oldies I've been downloading, of course).
2. This is basically a series of very loud explosions connected by a flimsy plot about some hackers-come-terrorists, and one-liners so good that the folks in the theatre actually clapped their hands out loud (is there any other kind?) when they are spoken.
3. Absolutely mindless, and that's a good thing in this case.

My rating: 7.5 out of 10.

The Dollar Store where everything costs 99 rupees. Am I the only one who found this funny?


The newest additions to my library.

The bookshop in Bharath Mall was a complete package of disappointment tied with ribbons of utter devastation. There was not a single Terry Pratchett² or Neil Gaiman novel to be found in the entire sorry establishment. Why, I was so desperate that I nearly bought Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie (which I ultimately returned to the shelf after Shaki laughed at me).

After a fair bit of rummaging, I managed to uncover Stephen King's Cell (which I've contemplated on many occasions to purchase but never did till now) and P. G. Wodehouse's Imperial Blandings, an omnibus of three shorter novels (Full Moon, Pigs Have Wings and Service with a Smile). I've always been meaning to start checking out Wodehouse's work ever since I found out that my favourite TV actor, Hugh Laurie, once acted in a series called Jeeves and Wooster based on Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. There you go; an insight into my methodology of choosing which book to buy.

If you don't already know, P. G. Wodehouse is one of the (if not 'The') most popular English comic writer in literary history. He lived between 1881 and 1975 - so yeah, he's dead.

My latest attempt at remedying my woeful lack of fashion sense.

I'm at an age when I consider schoolbags to be too childish for me, and that I should be carrying around something more appropriate for my age. I'm coming of age in less than 2 weeks. I will be able to vote for the next idiot we put in parliament, steal candy from my sister and tell her that it's for her own health, and pull faces at my father if he tells me not too stay out too late.

I digressed. The bag cost me 750 rupees, by the way (which is about RM 64) and I got this nifty guarantee card that says I can get any part of the bag replaced or repaired within a period of one year.

I'm amazingly gifted in spoiling things. I'll see what I can do.

The place where every Chinese Manipal student on a trip to Mangalore invariably ends up.

For dinner, we headed to this famous Chinese restaurant in Mangalore called Hao Ming which was openned by a genuine Chinese bloke. I asked myself; why would a Chinese guy come all the way down from China (or whatever oriental country he originally migrated from) to run an eatery in a small, out-of-the-way city in the middle of India?

That question ranked up there in the list of Life's Greatest Mysteries of the Universe along with how-the-heck-they-made-Jessica-Alba-look-ugly-in-the-Fantastic-Four-flick.

Fun with Engrish.

I saw the sign above in the stairwell leading up to Hao Ming. Now that's something I'd definitely sign up for. A guy needs all the help he can get in trying to understand women, I can tell you that.

Indian letterings on a Chinese restaurant's signboard. Now that's novelty!

The China indoors.

I've been here last year with my ex-girlfriend but it wasn't nearly as crowded as it was last Saturday. Who would have thought that Chinese food would be such a hit with the locals?

We ended up eating with the rest of the Angel's Court Apartments gang (Fu Yew, Yu Wei, etc). They did the ordering and I did the eating. I figured that it wouldn't matter since I've only tried about three dishes in that place before.

Shark Fin Soup? Riiight...

Sometime back, I swore off Shark Fin Soup because;

1. It's inhumane the way the fishers slice the fins off sharks and then dump them back into the ocean. Yada yada, and all that save our wildlife jazz and orchestra.
   
2. It's not like shark fins have any flavour anyway. Plus, they always reminded me of strips of rubber or plastic. I mean, what's the point of eating something that tastes like crap? Sheesh.

But somehow, when they were ordering the stuff, I wasn't paying attention and said "yes" when they asked me whether I wanted a bowl or not. So I was compelled to finish it (and pay for it as well, ouch!). However, I didn't feel any guilt whatsoever for participating in this cruel and ritualistic tradition of feasting on these magnificent man-eating beasts of my kinsmen. No remorse. Uh uh.

That's because there wasn't any bits of these 'magnificent man-eating beasts' in my soup! It tasted more like Chawanmushi³ actually and had the consistency of of something someone vomited. No shark fin. Nothing. What a sham.

I'd take pictures of all the other dishes too but I don't like doing that when I have company. They would think that it's a pretty ridiculous habit - the same way I did, before I started writing in this weblog. It used to really irk me too when people whip out their fancy digital cameras and start to document every mundane detail of everything that can possibly be captured in digital technicolor so they can put them up in their blogs or Friendster page.

Ah darn, I can't breath. Too much irony sitting on my back and crushing my lungs.

Anyway, dinner was concluded two hours later and we headed to the bus station to catch a ride back to Manipal. I've already described it in all its tedious, minutiae-choked glory HERE.

So long, good day and thanks for reading. Ciao.



P.S. I might have to repeat that unspeakable journey in the Bus of Terror this coming weekend if I decide to catch the Transformers flick with Shaki. Ugh.



Hates travelling with a passion,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ Except one; Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I'm trudging ve-ry slowly through it.
² I've acquired a taste for his books after reading his Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men children novels and Going Postal (which wasn't nearly as bad as I initially thought it was).
³ Japanese egg custard.

Potholes

"When you cut the lights out think of all the things you can't see"

Scissor Sisters, "Lights", Ta-Dah (2006)

The line above, I discovered, was a lot deeper than it sounded.

I boarded the last bus just a few seconds before it started rolling out of the bus station in Mangalore. A cloud of invisible noxious odours - a potent mix of dead fish, gasoline and the local unwasheds - hung thickly in the interior. I screwed up my nose from the foul assault to my delicate nostrils, tramped through the wet, muddy aisle, and joined Shaki, Sze Yin and Abby near the middle of the bus.

The bus station at Mangalore

Everyone knows that the middle seats of a bus are the best ones. Personally, I think that the front ones aren't too shabby either but those poor sods sitting there would be the first to perish (horribly, if I may add) should the vehicle choose to take a flying leap off a ledge into some gorge, or play bumper cars with an 18-wheeler truck. The backseats are the worst, of course. The least of their sins would be that they are always and invariably the grimiest and smelliest part of the bus. They would be the most heavily graffiti-ed (with atrocious spelling and criminal acts against the laws of grammar) and have the most alarming collection of potentially disgusting stains marking the cushions. The seediest looking hooligans would always congregate at the back, and every article of garbage which finds itself on the floor of the bus would magically migrate there as well to join their human counterparts. In addition, the passengers at the back would also be intimately acquainted with every speed-bump and pothole which the rear wheels strike. A collision from the back with a sufficiently massive lorry would no doubt end the lives of these doubly unfortunate folks already forced to endure the hardships of occupying these abominable seats.

The Backseats of the Bus. You can hear the capitalisation in the tone they were uttered, often with inflections of fear and an accompanying shudder.

The reason I took the effort to impress on to you the horrors of the backseat is because the four of us were reassigned there by a conductor whose face looked as if a few backhand slaps would do it a world of good. Apparently, the middle seats were reserved for some ass-wipes who miraculously managed to call dibs on them before they even board the bus. Guess who amongst the four of us won the opportunity to squeeze in with the putrescent and pungent local Indian gents in the very Last Row for the two-hour journey¹ back to Manipal? Fuck.

By the way, I'm not discriminating against other races or their religions. I'm discriminating against people who attempts to murder me with their B.O.

The bus stopped at Bharath Mall to pick up those reserved-seat-ass-wipes. The four of us were joined by Jason & Co. who were also in Mangalore for the day, but they were forced to stand because all the seats were taken. I gave up my place to Pei Min (who was with Jason's entourage) and attached myself to one of the support poles, which would be my best friend for the entire journey. Sitting while a girl has to stand always makes me feel like such a cad. Regrettably, I couldn't perform the same service for the other two femmes in Jason's gang because I had only one seat to surrender.

The belly of a nightmare.

In order for you to truly appreciate my predicament of standing in a moving Indian bus, a couple of possible deficiency in your education must be filled, namely those regarding the sorry, sorry physical state of the Indian roads and the peculiarities of an Indian driver;

The road between Mangalore and Manipal has only two-lanes and has more holes in it than Dunkin' Donuts. It was little better than a cow-path with a bit of asphalt laid on it. That did nothing to curb the speeding tendencies and neck-risking overtaking endeavors of the bus drivers. It's like a really clumsy vehicular ballet on that narrow two-lane road; weave out on the wrong lane, overtake that truck going at a placid 100 km/h, narrowly miss another bus that's coming like a freight train from the opposite direction, rinse and repeat. Theme park thrill rides got nothing on an Indian bus trip, I can tell you.

And the dark of a stormy night (and the fact that there's no lamp-posts at all along most of the 2-hour-bovine-highway) was certainly no reason for the captain of the bus I was riding to surrender his hazardous habits. So there I was, clinging to the support pole with both my hands, being swung around like a rag doll, and experiencing a bit of air-borne time now and again every time the bus hit a kink in the road. On top of all that, I was positively retching from the terrible stench of the bus which seemed to have doubled after the conductor shut both the bus' doors (remember what I told you about his face?).

I thought that things could not possibly get worse than this but like the protagonists in most badly written novels, I was dead wrong. The bus driver must have been psychic because he choose that particular moment to switch on the radio and blast a series of high-pitched, painful shrieks and screeches of what used to be a Bollywood song before it was thoroughly mangled by the crappy sound system of the bus. Yeah. Great. Thank you very much.

I wouldn't have been tossed about so much had I been supporting myself with two separate poles instead of one. There was another one just near enough for me but I did not hold onto that because Abby was already using that. Well, technically there's still room for me on that pole but I have a strange proximity complex; I refuse to voluntarily let any part of my body to get too close to another human being. It's like I imagine that the immediate air around a person is inviolable and belongs to that person alone, and my breaching of that invisible boundary would tantamount to molestation. In the same way, I dislike being touched. I felt every handshake acutely. Every hand on my shoulder, every pat I ever got on my back - I noticed them, and counted the seconds till the sensation was lifted. Girls make me feel doubly uncomfortable. It's not like they are ickier or something. It's just that the air around them seemed a lot more... sacred?

I didn't use to be that way back in secondary school. It's a curious way of growing up, huh?

When I was accused of smacking a girl's derrière with my umbrella last year, I denied it pointedly but I fancy that that girl did not really believe me. However, my girlfriend trusted me. She knew about my proximity problem and that I'd sooner chop my own toes off than 'molest' someone. The very idea of touching a girl drains the blood from my face. Once, she told me I was the safest guy to be with, and she liked the way I made her feel special because she was the one person where these invisible, private spaces did not apply. She was, quite literally, my only one.

Once. When I actually had a girlfriend, of course.

I brought two books with my to Mangalore, to make sure that my mind do not revisit the regions I've long roped off. Standing in a pitching bus, I was left with no hands free to hold a novel. It isn't fair. It isn't fair that more than half a year failed to dull the memories sufficiently for me to function. They are always there, right below that superficial sheen of composure I wear - always fucking ready to resurface at any bloody time to make me hate the life I live in.

Midway on the road, local passengers sitting in the Last Row exited the bus, freeing two spaces for Ching Chiet and I. Being sandwiched between him and one of the local men - who looked (and smelled) as if he desperately needed a shower - was an all-out siege on my sense of smell and my proximity problem, but that was an ordeal I was willing to endure so long as I could read. I needed to escape from my own mind.

But Chance was so vindictive that I could scarcely believe it; the driver turned off all the lights, instantly drowning me in shadows and denying me of my sanctuary - a flimsy sanctuary made of paper and words, but a sanctuary nonetheless.

Then, it was only me, in a position I loathed and in the company of thoughts that hurt. Ching Chiet and the Indian man flanking me soon slipped into slumber - bless them, for the refuge of sleep came so easily to those unsaddled and unfettered. It was strange how I could find so much desolation and loneliness sitting in a bus so cramped with people that I could hardly breathe.

The rest of the journey mimicked one of those ghost train rides you find in amusement parks. It was dark with the occasional glow of yellow light from unidentifiable objects outside the bus. The ghastly radio was still playing, only now the speaker was nested right above my head, and there were a lot of bumping and veering, often catching me unprepared and bowling me into my Last Row companions. But unlike a ghost train ride, I had the wretched society of the ghosts of my past instead of plastic skeletons and fibre-glass zombies. I stayed awake throughout, exhausted from my day's trip but I could find no rest.

We pulled into the town of Udupi at about midnight, and I took an auto back to Manipal from there. It was already 12.30 am by the time I was home again, smelling of dead fish, gasoline and the local unwasheds just like the bus was. I started the trip back from Mangalore in an almost cheerful mood but I ended it being more miserable than I have ever been in weeks.

I need the reassuring presence of a hand in mine. I need the comforting sensation of fingers running through the hair at the back oh my head. I need to be near someone who love me, to hold her and know that she's real and isn't make-believe.

I need a hug from someone who belongs to me alone.

These are all impossible needs, of course, in my world of strangers of unseen boundaries, and personal spaces.



My world is a world of people that aren't her.



Estranged,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ It's like taking a bus from Malacca to KL; only in a garbage-truck-and-bus hybrid instead of a comfy, air-conditioned Transnasional coach.