What is it about Indian men? Why do I dislike them so? I know why. They are Hobbsian freaks of nature rendered more freakish by the colonial-neoliberal nexus. Well! What does that mean? It means that a subject masculinity under colonial rule morphed into a colonial one but more violent, hydra like than its parental version. Men in their scramble for positions vacated by colonial patriarchy forgot about the work of self. What does it mean to be men of independence? What is this independence? What does it mean? Independence from what to do what? Colonial misogyny conflagrated cultural misogyny to the extent that women in this independent India were dying in scary numbers and no one cared. Even women didn't care. And here is where we are---men decimating women as if these bodies don't matter, never matter, will never matter. And no, it is not some men doing this crime. It's all men promoting this crime in their adherence to everyday acts of misogyny. Rape and murder are extreme manifestations of a Bollywood male star embarrassing a female star on stage at an awards function, when the same star will not take her no as his answer and instead force her into stupid acts for the sake of entertainment. How or why does a male "master of ceremonies" refer to a female star by his pet name for her while refer to a male star with the "Sir" prefix? Where does he acquire such privilege for such a discrimination? And why do male stars have the privilege of squirting their testosterone around everywhere, especially at awards shows in the way they construct their jokes and tell them? Why don't women have the same privilege? Why are they always the "butt" of jokes, never its progenitors? Often than not, female stars are spoken for rather than spoken with. Male stars appropriate all discursive space with such entitlement that it makes you wonder if everyone woman in that culture is Mindy Kaling (invisible) to everyone else. I have never seen a single man through my as many years of being of this culture who engaged with a woman as a human--they engaged with "her" as if she may as well not exist and their consistently inhuman engagement with "her"--"she" became Mindy. Women were never worth a kind word, a hug, a consideration, an ear, a hand, a touch, a kiss, a look, a thought, a thank you, and never love ever. I saw my father treat my mother as less than a slave even when she was as educated as him and came from a family four times as rich as his. What does that say about a culture that would privilege a poor man as a consort for a rich woman for her womanhood renders her less than any man? Why would my mother agree to her slavery? Because her father wouldn't have her back, he wouldn't give her financial support as a way for her to have a human spine so she could stand on her own and against those who are intent on breaking it and that is why her husband would not give her any consideration. A patriarchal collusion that renders "woman" inconsequential even as her body, mind, and matter are used to build concrete houses into homes and children into the next generation of slaves. I hate Indian men. I see one in the elevator and know that he is going to say something or do something that would be rude, uncouth, and downright cringe worthy. They don't know how to dress, how to talk, how to engage, how to empathize, how to treat themselves or those around them with a degree of social grace that makes for breathable social spaces. Here is my next project---training Indian men to be humans in every way good.

Are there moments in your life when you stand in the middle of your very familiar room and have no sense of reality other than the blaring of the TV? Recently, I been feeling like that---like I have somehow lost the purpose of my life. I don't quite know how to move forward if there is something like that. I also don't know how to stand still to let the stars re-align in my favor. I feel like I have to keep doing in order to keep being. But when that doing is adding nothing to my basic instinct for survival, why am I adding, I ask myself, even though I know the answer--this is all I can do. I cannot force my stars to re-align instantly and at my angry directives. I can only do what I am able. My "best" friend who I still have the hots for recently got a job that he wanted. I expected him to invite me out for a meal to celebrate. Instead he goes out with a non-friend for a meal that was legitimately mine! I wrote a one-line email: "I guess I am not your best friend." He called me back leaving the following on my voice mail: "You just took me on an all-expense paid guilt trip--let's talk." I didn't want to tell him but I did (as to why I wrote that line). To which he said, "I didn't call you because I am weak--if we had gone out, we would have ended up in bed and that at this time is not a good idea." Ah, well! Sure, we love each other but why when you claim to have this ridiculous emotion you have to discuss the improbability of possibility. I want to love someone and be loved in a way where meeting each other is not an exercise in self-restraint. I do want to be with him but I can't in the way partners ought to be. Betrayal is still that thorn in its side. I can be a friend to him where the rules of friendship, of giving and taking are defined by this relationship--where he cannot just take but have to give in some measure. Being partners with him would mean giving him access to my resources (considerably more than his will ever be) and a place in the family that he cannot have simply because he disrespected it the last time he met them. So no there is going be no partnership here unless he does something that makes me forget that insane episode and makes me a believer in the contriteness of man aware of his moral relapses. Finally, if he never betrayed the ones he loved ever in the past then in betraying me he confirmed that his love for me is non-existent. Yet, in all this intellectualizing restraint, I miss him. His voice, his sensibility, his kindness, his passion, his sexpertise, his child-like animation, his vulnerability, his ability to say the right word for a right feeling. And even as I don't desperately seek his company and actively cry out for his presence, I think of him. I have collected my moments of him so I can go rummage in times of angst and existential loss. I still am angry but its intensity has dissipated since I know people will be people working through their own demons even as they unleash these on others they claim to protect. I know life could be worse. I have seen worse happen to people here and now and everywhere. But I cannot feel for them while I continue to feel for myself. I have to first negotiate my own embodied feelings, my life in the way I experience it before I can direct my empathy elsewhere. My empathy means zero to others if it comes from a place torn and devastated. It has to be real and real. Right now, my real is off somewhere trying to find its way back to me or at least that is what i ought to believe.

These past 5 days have been dreadful. I feel locked in time. Like I am reliving a bad day over and over again. I pray every night to Ganesh--the elephant boy-man-God's son. I keep all the important people in my prayers. Yet, I wake up everyday--nothing changes. Is this what being a zombie means? Is this all a joke, a bad joke the butt of which is me? I am not sure if I ever saw myself as a joke. I am not sure if I even have a funny bone in my body. Maybe just the femur. I feel someone up there has decided to play around with me--a rogue angel's pet is what I think I am now. He gives me moments of joy and then moments of extreme angst. He gives and then takes all that he gives. So I could be working my heart out in something I love but angel forbid I get to keep the rewards of what I worked for with absolute integrity. I don't want to be that who gets whatever she puts her hand to quite like Mr. Midas. But like this mythical creature, my rewards are mythical, missing in real time. I feel like I am reconstructing my whole life every three years like starting from scratch. I have done it but scratching my head all the while at the turn of life, yet again. I see everything I desired and worked for just come to naught. How or why does this happen? I have been told not to analyze. It has happened for whatever reason. But this is not good enough an explanation for me. I need to know what I could have done differently in order to not repeat the situation (frankly I don't think I made mistakes that result in such disproportionate results). I can't go to someone to tell me what is wrong in my stars. How does anyone know? Yet lack of such knowledge doesn't stop a conclusion. No amount of disbelief and denial is going to remove that reality away. Now I live in the fear that any good that will come in this cycle of good and bad is going to come back with a vengeance destroying all the bad instantly. But I am desperate for the good in this moment for living this bad has destroyed the tissues in my head and my vagina. I have stored so much bad energy, angst in my guts that my head is reeling from the onslaught. What else can I do? Who do I go to plead my case? Who is listening? Who is listening to me in order to change my life for the better? I am caught in this fish net of life, wanting to break free and cutting myself over and over again in between its threads. I hope still. For there is nothing else a live person can do living in the bowels of stillness.

Sorry I have been away for this long. Was trying to test out the theory that the universe is indeed mocking me. So a guy on Match decided he liked me. He wrote. I wrote back. We decided to meet at a bar in the Meatpacking district on the coldest day in NYC. Each step I took that day towards the boy, I wanted to record in my mind. I wanted to watch myself react to the boy. Before the hostess and I could figure each other, I saw him walk towards me wide-eyed and dumb-struck. I asked him if he was "Rob" and he nodded, dumbly. I have enough confidence now to know that I was more than what he expected in the best way possible. This added to the trough. And then I realized that he had invited me to a Match stir event (no wonder there were so many people at 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night). I thought of turning around and running away. I felt offended. I told him so. He tried to appease me. Finally, we found ourselves in a secluded corner flirting and laughing. Somewhere in the middle of it all he said I was super-hot. And then proceeded to emphasize his mediocre sexuality as if it was only one left in the world for me to engage. I observed myself enjoy the attention while also flirting back as if on cue. But horror of horror, the boy thought he could come home with me right after a not so first date at a community event! How, why? What gall! But somewhere inside I was attracted to the thought that he really, really liked me. The warning bells had began their slow peal however. The next two days he acted like a spoilt child who couldn't get his way. I wanted to put some distance and stick to my 5-date rule. But he acted like he had found the treasure of sierra madre and wasn't going to let go. Damn, I was flattered. Anyone would be. So here I was in the PATH train heading to Grove street (NJ city) with a heavy bag of Indian food (his request or rather demand) on a Tuesday evening (when I have to be at work on Wednesday morning at 6:15 a.m.) showing the boy that I could keep my word and that I did like him. Yes, at the end of the night he kind of got what he wanted all along--access to my pussy. But for all his claims to giving fantastic orals, he wouldn't even go in the vicinity of my very delectable pussy! What is a girl to think! This is not right is what she thinks. Fraud is what comes to mind. No, I wasn't impressed, especially when in my last relationship I was living the pages of Fifty Shades! This was less than mediocre and not a good start. But then he looked so happy and sated after. And what hit me straight through the heart--"Do you even realize how beautiful our kids will be?" I froze. And then exploded internally. A man finally gives me the ultimate compliment, one that makes a woman see her future in a kaleidoscope. And the irony is that the statement comes too late in her life--when she cannot have children. It is no longer a matter of choice. Yes, what he said destroyed me. I spent a lifetime with a man hoping he could show me why we were together and he didn't. I am in bed with a man for two minutes and he is seeing his unborn children in my eyes. Yes, the universe is a sadist. I knew once again this wouldn't work. And there it is again--the truth--I am meant to be alone. The universe has been titillating me for far too long for me to not believe what is true. I am not meant for coupledom in this life. This is slowly settling in like the rock at the bottom of the lake.

I have declared war on my stars--yes, the ones in the sky directing my life without my permission. I am at a loss to understand the turn of events that have led me to be loveless, jobless, and friendless. I did everything right--by the book, more than what the book prescribed, beyond the call of duty and creative pursuit. Yet, I get up everyday alone, eat alone, get groceries alone, come back to a lifeless home. I find distractions, yes. But those I find distractions with leave to go home to someone, someone who has planned a surprise for them, or has cooked them a meal, or is there to ask you how your day or night was. I walk in to silence. I am so afraid of silence now that I sleep with the noise of a humidifier and a fan and when I get up I switch on my iRadio and my TV. Despite the superimposed sounds I can still hear myself think, strip apart the events that have led me here. And I have no answer. I don't know who does.
My mother comforts me. My brothers do too. But I cannot help but drop into a dark pit of self-pity every now and then. I don't see a light anywhere that tells me the darkness is temporary. Nothing is moving. Everything is still. I don't even know where to start excavating for what everyone convinces me is treasure except its hidden in the remotest part of the world or the underworld even.
I try everyday to be happy. But how does one do that if the circumstances are anything but happy. I'd like to think that what I am going through is nothing compared to what some others go through. But everyone I know seemingly have seamless lives--marriage, kids, jobs, vacations--everything usual that every human being should have. Maybe I am not a human being--that could be a serious possibility. I am that robot from Aliens who labors endlessly even when body less yet is a robot so will not have a human life ever. I think of all the boyfriends who found girlfriends after me only to cling on to them for a lifetime. Was I not cling-worthy? Do I repel love?
I am angry with the universe. So angry. I want to kick and scream and kick again. But who is to witness my breakdown? No one. Like no one is a witness to the life I have led so far. I think I have known for sometime that I am meant to be alone in my life. Its time to accept that. I can keep trying to make my life better and keep watching the universe turn every attempt into a joke or I can accept it is a joke and let it all go.
I am exhausted. I am not this brave to keep breaking my head against the brick wall hoping it will break before my head does. The textural dissimilarities ought to banish hope.

I went over to my ex's apt. to watch NFL. In the four hours I spent there, I asked him "who are you?" and he told me that he had sex with a woman in Paris for eight hours straight. "She was an animal" he said with a remembered glint in this eyes. I expected to feel a surge of pain. I felt nothing. So I asked him if he was trying to woo me again with his presents and appropriate calling on occasions like my birthday. I assumed he is not--for he doesn't quite know why he does certain things except for the fact he wants to be at the center of attention of older and newer women at all times. Even if he was wooing him, he wouldn't know how to express the thought for its done on an impulse, from a remembered time of togetherness. He denied wooing me just as I expected him to. I then told him that there are no third chances to which he gave a short smile as if he really had been wooing me but expected me to woo him back because of it--not tell him what I did. I think I took him aback with my assertion. I know this because he agreed to my proposition an hour later--to revisiting the idea of us, together when we are both 50. He didn't even hesitate. So, yes, I know. He was wooing me, even as he continues to pursue other shiny or not so shiny objects of pleasure in this city called body buffet. When he said that he pursues certain women not for the sex but because ultimately we are people who want to be liked and heard--I blew a slight gasket. No, sir. I started. You don't date women because they are people but because you want to continuously remind yourself that you are boy whose idea of self is attached to the idea of as much ass licking as is humanly possible without suffering a heart attack. It is how he thinks of himself as a young boy in heat. This is also how a brown boy from India living in NYC imagines himself white. Screwing white women makes a brown man white--at least in his own mind. But not just any white woman but a woman who professes to some celebrity status--class and race are intertwined. I told him that I don't see him dating ever a black woman from the Bronx--yes, race and class are intertwined. He agreed. Ah! the joys of knowing the ins and outs of a boy from a past. In this whole time, I observed myself the most. How I laughed and joked and appeared happy when on the inside nothing touched me in the region of my heart. I felt like I was watching myself feel nothing at all. I felt strong for it but also sad. I don't want to not feel. I want to feel everything through the depths of me but it is also my undoing. I cannot handle emotion. I feel so much that it is scary. It takes me to the edge of reason and then I fall through the gaping hole, always falling, never arriving. For now, not feeling anything is fine. I have felt enough last year. I am exhausted. I need reprieve. I also need my life to right itself right now. Enough is enough. My ex will remain an ex. For that is what he wanted. Deep down what you want is what will manifest. I manifest an alternate reality where I have what I really, really want--justice in life and love.

For the past hour or so I have been bawling. I wish I could say why. My endorphins should be kicking in after an half hour run but I am still teary-eyed and miserable. Isn't there a time in our lives when nothing makes sense anymore? There is time when you are forced to pause to ask what happened? When and how did my life become a joke? I thought I had a guardian angel looking out for me. I don't think so anymore. This angel is the joker from Batman instead. An angel would shield me from disaster rather than wrought disaster on me every time I give myself the permission to be happy. In 2013 I became the chair of my department and found a man who ostensibly was kind and liked intimacy with me. In 2014, the man betrayed me and I was denied tenure. All within two months of 2014. And the rest of the year I enrolled in a legal case against my institution, applied for every possible job to no avail, and kept postponing a surgery in the hope that I might get an interview call. My phone remained silent. I enlisted my betrayer back into my life for I desperately needed to feel that the world hadn't stopped spinning and I was in some twilight zone on an undiscovered planet. So no I don't have a guardian angel. I don't have anyone. I thought I knew the point to my life and decisions I made all along. A man said to me when I was married to another man to visit him in London, Canada and see if we are soul mates. I took more than half a year to lie my way to him. He didn't say and I didn't ask if we were soul mates. I assumed we were. I spent 10 years with the supposed soul mate hoping he will say he is. Instead he said and did everything that said the opposite. A soul mate doesn't call his other half "old" or look at her with disgust or forget her birthday or even forget to bring her medicine only to have drinks with a colleague instead. A soul mate doesn't see a crying and in pain other and shout at her to stop. He doesn't sit on his sofa with the nonchalance of a cat only to tell a pleading other that he doesn't want to continue with her after 10 years. So no I don't have a guardian angel. An angel would have seen my love and devotion to a mate and said, "ok, let's make her happy now." No, this angel just sat aside eating an apple while my life crumbled. This angel just sat aside eating a lemon this time when my life crumbled the second time--this time my livelihood was at stake. He didn't care. How dare I be happy again or attempt to be? He rather I be a joke to laugh about than be a human woman who needs a break now, who must be paid her dues now for the length of this suffering is unjustified. I need the light to shine at the end of my tunnel. I need a new angel who is not perverse but empathic. I am done with unkindness and entitlement. I need goodness in my life. I need to hope again. I need to live again. I need the universe to heed this plea. I am entitled to a good life for I have been a good "wife." I have worked my heart out to protect and nurture people in my personal and professional life. I have borne too many costs of such nurture. I need nurturing now---a lot. Calling on all good angels for the job. Like I said, only the good ones need apply.