The Chasing Iamb

Go bungee jumping again before I am too scared to. The first time was glorious, I laughed and laughed while snapping through the air. R almost jumped without a rope. When we were on the ground, R's mum and aunt offered to pay for us to go a second time, as if we were five-year-olds at the merry-go-round.

Buy a red wig. Once a boy drove me from Pune to a hill station four hours away simply because I was in a bad mood. We had no money and hated the hill station. We left in 15 minutes, our cheeks burning because a dozen people had offered us rooms charged by the hour. The previous week, when I slept in his house, he had woken up before me. The huge shirt I wore had ridden up a few microns. As he passed by my bed, he tugged it down petrified of anything changing our raging, chaste relationship. On the way back from the hill station, the romance caught up with us. He looked at me and gave me his highest accolade. In those sunglasses, he said, I looked like the girl from Run Lola Run. All I needed was a red wig, he said.

Drive down the Konkan coast. Sometimes, in my fantasy, it is a battered car that Snegum is driving with neurotic efficiency. Sometimes I imagine leaping out of jeeps in old jeans. I never think of where we would go. I just imagine driving, imagine the texture of the fish I will eat, imagine swimming in the sea, imagine sand on my calves.  My oldest memory of pleasure is of standing in the shower after going to the beach. I never smell the sea on my body without remembering a beautiful Omani teenager who I decided to have a crush on one summer in Bidaya. It was a five minute crush that lasted as long as I bent over the balcony. I had washed my hair after the beach but I imagined him, looking up, navigating the dark stairs in the moonlight, holding fistfuls of it and smelling traces of salt. I understand why women fell in love with Kelpies. It's perfect that in the Jethro Tull song the kelpie says to the young girl, May I help comb your long hair? amidst threats to her person.