Saturday night

i have a couple of sketches I need to complete. I have a report I need to proof read. I have a campaign I need to design so fast it should have been completed a month ago. I need to order my mercahndizing material so that I don’t get raped in this strategy meeting with the sales teams.

My mother has gone psycho. She gets like this whenever the usual fathomless lake of miscommunication between us deepens to an ocean.

She did this before college. Post a-levels. We had all postponed vacations abroad because that’s where we were leaving for in two short months for a future none of us knew about. it had been a year on insane pressure of deadlines and aps and exams and rejections and acceptances. It was a time to rejoice, to heave a sigh of relief over futures secured and a sigh of nostalgia of pasts that would be forgotten. That summer was when everyone let loose. The moon shone, we met up hungrily, craving company in haunts where we knew we ruled, knowing that in the coming months the torch would be passed on and we would be gone, never to hear echoes of our superiority and ubiqitous-ness of youth again. we partied into the wee hours, desperately seeking to silent the nagging voices of nostalgia and fear, desperate to enhance that small niggling spar of excitement of futures unknowns and promises of futures to begin.

She hated it. and a small teenaged part of me still thinks she hated me. a larger part acknowledges the grey of adult decisions.

then came the ocean of sleepless, stress crazed, near suicidal wandering. a deluge of essay writing and assignment and final week after final week, drenching me in reality as i knew it, isolating me, flaying me to the bone till i whimpered and prayed for santuary.

i managed to crawl back. without a tear, head flung back with stubborn pride as always, clutching tight my cloak of denial. Then came my hermit days, and my i-love-my-suffocating-home-i-have-no-life-I-will-unhealthily-try-to-kill-myself-with-familial-bonding.

Then I told her about him. She seemed ok with it, but we were only going out with friends (because we had no where else to go) or driving around with a city to chaperone us. She still called me and had me home before midnight.

Now our lives have parted, homes shifted, priorities and mind games changed. I’m old now. I pay bills and manage bank accounts that I put my own money into. I handle billion rupee portfolios and bitchslap men older than me by decades on a daily basis. I drive to places she’s never seen or heard of, I do things she will never understand. She talks to me about boys to marry to try to trap me into admitting I love someone else, she tries to drop me to places when she thinks I’m trying to seek away to someone elses house. She’s never tried to be my friend, her stubborn rigid paindu hicktown morals trying to beat me with self righteousness over a generation gap.

It’s a time when girls’ parents are often out of town, where indifferent servants retire early and leave the front gate unguarded to indifferent eyes. It’s a time when boys’ parents move away and leave homes and brothers un-chaperoned, and girls routinely go over and bum around ignoring friends and watching tv.

It’s a time that heralds change. It’s a time when things have built to a point where there is no other place to go but shoot out breaking glass hymens of roofs that threaten to smother with protection.

Its time. Its Saturday night.