10k, MNIK, Delhi-trip and books from Lux

Last week. Saturday. Singa Patel asked me if I would go for the Gandhinagar 10k the next day morning. I informed him that LoLy was coming to town the same day in the morning – so I had to be there in Ahmedabad to receive her. He assured me that he would drive down LoLy to Gandhinagar. Even if she was coming at 5 in the morning. That was sweet of him. I assured him I would run.

Sunday. Singa brought LoLy to me. And then the three of us drove to the starting point of the Gandhinagar 10k. And I ran. I ran after a long time (oh yes, all my running and gymming had been screwed up since quite some time – two months in fact). It hurt a little and I felt like puking at times. But as always, I completed the race. We woke up Ali when we returned from the dusty noisy ground to the somber guest-house. And then Singa took us all to Ahmedabad where he waved us good-bye.

LoLy. Ali. I. Himalaya Mall. War – an insti / hostel junior was in town for half a day. He joined us. We watched My Name is Khan. We liked the movie. And we were not terrorists. But we do think that there was a suspect – a big fat guy dressed in black (picture Buppy da minus his jewelery), with a black mark beneath his left eye. He kept chasing us for as long as we were in the vicinity of the mall.

Picked up Snow by Orhan Pamuk at the Ahmedabad airport later that week. Flew to Delhi. Remained there for two days. With Neelabh. And since I had work on both days, and Neelabh worked on both nights, we hardly got to spend much time with each other. Except for those fifteen minutes or so – at four in the mornings. That was when Neelabh used to return. I would be asleep on his bed. He would enter the room. I would sense his arrival and open my eyes but would not make any attempt to move out of bed to greet him. We would talk about sweet nothings and yet feel very close to each other – a tired him changing his clothes and a groggy me cozeying inside his blanket. He would offer me something Gujarati to eat that I would swallow with delight. And then he would leave his room to sleep somewhere else – wherever he could find an empty cushion – so that I could go back to sleep on his bed, inside his blanket. He would be sleeping when I would get up later in the morning, and he would still be sleeping when I would move out. That’s how the two days in Delhi were. Dusty Delhi. Didn’t quite like it. Definitely not with so little of Neelabh to have. Lonely cold evening walks around CP didn’t help much.

And when I came back to Ahmedabad, I had the following books waiting for me:

• The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• The World of Psmith Omnibus – P. G. Wodehouse
• Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
• Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
• 2 States – Chetan Bhagat
• Zero Percentile – Missed IIT Kissed Russia – Neeraj Chhibba

Lux, for whom I had designed a cover page for a journal last month, had sent these for me as a reward for my services. It would take some time for me to be able to finish them all. Thank you Lux.

PS: I am liking Uff Teri Ada these days. What are you?