Will You Please Type My Love Letters - I

It wasn’t until I actually had to stay at home all day that I realized that vacations, if not by choice, aren’t all that enjoyable. Every morning I would wake up at seven, only to remember that I don’t have an office to go to. From there the day was a routine failed struggle.

First, I would try to oversleep and fail. Then, I would think of my increasingly getting out of shape body and wonder if I should start with ab-crunches today. But that needs warm-up. What if I cramp some muscle and have to lie in bed the entire day in pain. But I cannot possibly go jogging now; the great Bangalore office rush would have just begun.

It’s often said that the mind knows no boundaries. But I guess that dictum excludes jaded office-goers like me. Even my thoughts, my excuses to myself, everything had been ironed crisply in a routine.

The routine also included trying to think of ways to make the day useful. First the ambitious ones. Like writing a novel. Like writing a short story. Like taking artistic photographs of unsuspecting strangers from my window. Like finishing that book “Maximum City” in one day.

Later, I would tone down to less ambitious yet equally difficult tasks. Like making a nice, aesthetic bread-omelet, the way they prepare it in “V for Vendetta”. Like trying to appreciate the day’s “Business Standard”. Like trying to intimidate the unwanted callers with even more fake accent.

By 11, I would give up on the day and begin to browse inane web articles on the lives of celebrities. I would stand near the window and try to locate the big fat rat in the dump who I had initially mistaken for a black rabbit. I would wonder if a bee hive was camouflaged in the tree by my window and how much time would it take for my swollen corpse to be located. Maybe on weekends when the maid would find me not answering the bell. But then she did not turn up last weekend.

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But that is not what I want to tell you about. What I want to tell you is about how I managed to fall first in and then out of love during this lull.

On the fifth day at home ... [to be continued]