There are Gram-Panchayats in villages with a population between 500-10,000 people said my 8th standard Civics textbook. Next to it was a photo of people sitting under a tree. When I went to my village I asked my uncle which tree the Panchayat sits under. He said it does not work that way. I once only half-read a book about animals that made me smile. I met a stranger on the train who told me I have an air that makes me seem unapproachable. I let a new friend test me on a make-believe ‘psychological’ test that proved that I am excited about death and look at marriage as a curious structural constraint. Sex, it claimed, just makes me feel peaceful and gloomy at the same time. I made a list of books I have to procure and read; I am still left with 10) All the little live things 12) The history of love 15) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead 16) Tuck Everlasting 17) What we talk about when we talk about love.
I don’t know when I started wearing silver jewelry but now if I am missing a toe ring people worry about me. In my free time, I lie on my bed, stare at the fan, and wonder if I am half the book I read or the half I didn’t. I think I am the girl “too thin to bear a child” and the one with “ass that looks great in the blue cotton pants”. I am the girl approachable enough to be told she does not seem approachable enough. I am probably also the pop song stuck in my head I don’t know the words to. I am the ‘Ganpati on a bullet bike’ idol I saw and the panchayat that I could not. I am ‘so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives, events, miracles, places, rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you will have to swallow the lot as well.’