Skip to main content

Unforgiving numbers


‘I am older now’ is my go to mantra for everything wrong that happens in my life which I don’t bother to right it. Someone stupid said one fine day age is just a number and then people started falling for it. Age is a number plus its infinite principal. Last night I was asking my husband if he remembered when my upper arm joints had started hurting regularly. And he casually mentioned it must have been two years ago. With age, some parts of my body that I didn’t even know existed have started hurting a little more from all the wrong sides. I suffer from fibromyalgia. I also used to suffer from plantar fasciitis. The names of these diseases deeply bother my husband – not sure about the pain. 

Last week was my birthday. A colleague sent a horoscope link and one of the lines read ‘cancer signs are so moody that even they don’t know when our mood changed’. Nothing to be proud here. I have also heard myself saying ‘15 years too late for social media’ and yet I hang around it like a typical loser trying to fit in and yet not fitting in. Not fitting and not being popular in social media doesn’t bother me a lot but it kind of pricks – so hollow.

I slept like a baby for four days and even the sleep started ageing. Here I am after four days of good night’s sleep tossing and turning a thousand times with my phone furiously typing away at 12am. The thought of keeping a bottle of cough syrup on the side hasn’t left my mind since and then night comes again - the sleepless knife tugging me further and further away from the la la land.

This month I went on an all girl’s getaway trip with five girlfriends. We went on a 4-day shopping trip to Delhi. Prior to my flight I booked myself for a full legs and arm wax. The beautician decided to rip a line of my eyebrows amidst the excitement. And there I was calm and serene. Age does this to you. Had I been an 18yo I would have ripped all her eyebrows but then double that and nothing seems to alarm me anymore. So, waxed and ready for the trip and I wouldn’t have the guts to wear my half pants coz I am shit scared of india (did you notice the small i). When I booked the apartment, I sent a special message saying we wanted a vetted(?) driver considering how unsafe Delhi was for girls. Never received a response. The uber and ola spoiled us and was just the answer in the sweltering Delhi heat.  AC cabs right in front of us anywhere we wanted to be picked and dropped. And then I thought about the expensive run down Maruti taxis with equally rude drivers in Kathmandu.

The other day, a senior colleague entered my room and showed me her muffin top. I found myself saying, ‘di I am getting there just wait up’. I also told her the other option - tummy tuck. It must have been all the sweets I mutter silently. Dairy milk doesn’t qualify to be in the chocolate category. As if their prices weren’t outrageous enough they decided to save a bit of sugar by creating air bubbles. Who eats chocolate with air bubbles any ways? 

I requested a dynamic young girl who used to intern in our office to intern in my home instead. My eight-year-old wanted me to help her make videos on musicly and I didn’t know how to go about it. I searched and searched for Nepali sounds to help her make her own video and I failed miserably at that. I reassure myself this has nothing to do with age. The social media is in fact evolving too fast. I am glad I asked the young girl friend to help, she just sent me three videos in which thankfully my 8yo looks happy doing what she wanted so bad.

I guess the only good thing about this age is I now know what kind of wine and chocolate to purchase. I guess these are the only two things that make difference in determining what makes me happy for the rest of my life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A letter to my future teenage daughter

My dear daughter, you are only seven today but you will soon be seventeen. And when you become 17 I know the world will no longer be the same for you and I. We will be together in the same house but we will be distant apart in our heart and head. I was once 17 you know. And like everything else nothing is constant so before you grow up too fast I am writing a letter to you and the million other 17 year olds just like you. Love life - you are going to fall in love - hard. So hard that you are often dizzy with love. A love that is insignificant but withholds you from achieving all your dreams. Dreams that you dreamt when you were barely ten. Dreams that your parents dreamt for you when they first held you in their warm loving arms. Dreams that your mother dreamt for you when you were just a tadpole in her growing tummy. You are 17 and you have just graduated high school. At the verge of becoming an adult. You think you are big enough to make decisions and that you know the best f...
14 comments
Read more

#mymetoo

The first time I saw a picture of vagina was when I was in grade three. The vaginas would always show up in our bathroom walls. Drawn with coal, often the pubic hair sprouting in every direction. I went to an all-girls boarding school and the only males we had in our school were cooks and bera dais. There was also this son of a housekeeper in charge and an unknown lunatic who would flash his nuts from the back of our dormitory which was situated right below the pine trees, occasionally. Of course, we never saw his face or the fact that he was never caught didn’t surprise me even back then. These were the kind of things I believe weren’t considered dangerous. I was too young to think about the perpetrator. I had never thought about those vaginas scrawling for almost three decades and suddenly I now realize that those drawings were in many ways the first kind of sexual assault for me or for my friends. I and my friends would stare at the scrawling quickly and never talk about it l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leave the girls alone

Recently I read an article written by an Indian woman on how she forgot to raise her son well while she paid particular attention to raising her daughter to be an equal citizen. When we talk about gender equality we often focus on girls. How we should raise them - encourage them to fight for their right; admit them to the best schools; never tell them ‘they can’t do it’ and raise their expectations rather too high. I am a mother to a six year old girl and I often cringe every time I tell her – she can do anything if she wants. While we focus too much on raising our girl’s right we forget to pay attention to our sons.  I lived all my life in a boarding school, the first ten years in an all-girls school. Life wasn’t smooth. We felt foreign to the other gender. We giggled and burst out crazy if a boy approached us. We acted nonsensical at times. We didn’t know how or what they were. They were exclusive – all we saw was the other gender – foreign - boys. We lived in our own b...
Post a Comment
Read more