Every major event in her life had been circumstantial, spiraled into its being either by accident, incident or sheer procrastination. Many would have been inclined to call her Destiny’s Child, but umm, no one did. Thought of as brooding, melancholic, pensive and dignified (strike all that and read it as stunning), she merely wore her apathy on her sleeve.
Let me begin at the beginning. Her mother’s pregnancy was unplanned. Accident? She (The mother! Stay with me here) went into premature labor. Incident? Because they didn’t take enough time to think of some original names, went with the Gandhian way and named her Indira. Sigh. Procrastination perhaps? And thus began her journey.
India’s life was pretty charmed. Yes, India. When getting her passport made, they made an error and omitted an alphabet. She could have gotten it changed but she kept putting it off, really, was the trouble worth it? Then came driver’s license, voter’s Id and a Gmail account. She stuck with India. She meant to get it changed, I do believe that. But when she found out what the process entailed, she lost some of that steam. Something about best laid plans.
Ever played pictionary? A seemingly innocuous drawing elicited guesses right from a church steeple, slice of pizza or an alien spacecraft, when all it really was just a Halloween costume (hey, take it up with the guy who was drawing). Her life was pretty much like that, of endless possibilities, each exceedingly unreal as the first one.
She rather fancied herself as a journalist, not the hard-hitting newswoman kind but more of the researched (read relaxed, slower paced) special interest news reporter. I think she understood early on, what a deadline meant to others was a whole different time zone to her. Aware of her shortcomings, she chose to reconsider her options rather than rectify situations. Her education was as eventful as rest of her life; or rather it was the lack of any particular event that made hers so interesting. It was as if every major event was somehow circumvented by reasons unknown. Having chosen her career du jour, she walked into her first journalism class, late and short of breath, only to find it was the wrong class, the wrong time and the wrong day! But fates conspired again, because it was then that she met the short, pudgy, dark and always scowling Bengali professor, Mr. Bannerjee, and took an instant to fall in love. Driven by a newly awakened sense of romance and spurred by spontaneity, she decided to take his class, on contemporary art form. The romance of course ran out its own little course but she continued her class, driven by a curious mixture of lethargy to do anything different and marginally enjoying what she was actually doing. And then came the day when she graduated.
“It gets curiouser and curiouser.”
Procrastination had its benefits, it allowed her to keep coming back and working on her “art”. Of course, that meant a lot of half finished pieces, some nearly done and some barely begun. But thanks to a passioned publicist and the ever-hungry social set, she began to make a name for herself in the art world. The lazier she got, the deadlines she missed and dates she misplaced, made her all that more unpredictable, that much more eccentric and with every discovered idiosyncrasy, came a bigger paycheck. Who doesn’t love a crazy artist?
And so her life progressed, gallery opening to dating, from getting married to having kids, and if you thought things got any better, think again. Space and time meant nothing. Imagine being stuck at the indefinite end of the definite-indefinite continuum.
But a happy life she led. Lived every moment by stubbornly doing the exact opposite, putting it off for later..
And, so, inspired by the tale I just told you, I have decided to..umm..hmm..I’ll let you know tomorrow.
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