The Language of Whales; The Exam Essay; Helen’s Writing

08.05.2024

It is always the same problem. You love them. They don’t love you back.

Calligraphy from four years ago. Looking back in time.

I’m sitting here looking at how Helen wrote her name on the piece of paper I saved for myself. It is a precious object. Is it not apparent that I love writing? So how could I not love the writing of someone that I love? I look at it from time to time and think about her. The first letters of her name have a simple flourish on them. The style is not simply plain and unadorned. The letters of the most interest are the ones with a loop in them. I imagine Helen rushing the letters carelessly. One letter is completely malformed, curiously oversized. Is this a habit with her, a constant in her writing of this letter? The significance, if so? One letter is almost illegible. All the letters are uneven and have different heights. I think of her golden hands as she writes and those black eyes looking at the paper. And then, below, she has drawn a smiling face. The eyes are two vertical lines. Why vertical and not horizontal? Is that how she imagines eyes? But Helen is clever – the two vertical lines look like the letter ‘i’ in the alphabet – so even in this simple three line drawing, there is a little game of language – eye/’i’. And this piece of paper was given as a gift on a certain occasion, so one thinks about it more and more, a gift of chocolate. Which is love.

I have a final course assignment which is the most important assignment. So I don’t have as much time as I have had before when I want to relax just before bedtime. It is a lot of work studying part-time on a university course and working seven days a week and doing all the overtime. But, I am The Tiger. I have been raised by the poor where we work all the time for little reward. In the ancient Greek tale, one is the lazy grasshopper that gets away with doing nothing and can’t build a future and the others are the ants that do everything, make everything, build the future and security for all. We are the ants. We are the Untouchables, the lowest caste, the workers. Today I wore my black leather jacket – I come from the Untouchable caste of leather workers. If I cannot perform, who can? Education is a privilege – the poor don’t get it in countries like India. I have every privilege. Why would I forsake it? The true Indian doesn’t live for wealth, power or sex. He lives for knowledge and Enlightenment.

Today was an amazing day for science. They have found out what we have suspected – that whales have a language. It did not make the front page of the newspapers. It got very little media attention. But now we know that we are not unique in having a language. Now we know that there is a different type of being that we can communicate with, with their own culture on this planet. It is an exciting thought. I will follow this story, just like I follow the story of the Herculaneum scrolls.

In this diary, I complain about Helen. I tease Helen. I bully Helen. I accuse Helen. I share my life with Helen. I love Helen. And her? She called me a stranger. She treats me like a stranger. Even like a dangerous enemy. She was the woman that I have been the closest to in recent times. You have to laugh at your fate. At the joke that you are in. At the joke that your life has become. Someone somewhere is laughing. But, you know what? Everyone can laugh but I always laugh the hardest at this life and how sour it is. My friends can’t believe I am single when I look the way I do and when everyone likes me and my personality. Women on the Tube stare at me every single day. But every night I go home to my desk in my bedroom and sit there by myself and then I lie in bed by myself. So if you don’t laugh, what else can you do? Laugh and laugh hard. Why not? It is a joke.

Newness

07.05.2024

I am on jury service. You are not allowed to write anything about it or tell people any details.

But there is something happening right now. I won’t go into it. So all of the energy has come flooding back. It took one moment. If you have been reading my diary, you will know me. You will understand. There is a guaranteed way of forgetting about all of your problems.

So I got myself a haircut, got myself a shave and took a shower finally. And then I took a photograph of myself to remember myself in this moment. Hope again. Trying again. Becoming new once again. The armour comes off one more time. If the sword is going to go into my chest again, then I will chance it.

In this photograph, I believe I look handsome and attractive. It doesn’t matter what other people think.

I am going to spend the evening reading. There is so much reading to be done.

I didn’t do exercise in the morning and I skipped breakfast again. I had to do exercise after jury service. But tomorrow is another day to try and get better. Tomorrow, I am going to get up early and do what I need to do. All it took was a change of scene and the stimulation.

My thought about Helen today. I think about her. It is not a secret. Every time I told Helen what I was doing, she wanted to do it herself. A language that I learnt. A university course. Photography. I wonder about what she was saying. Do you know, Girl 3 had all the same hobbies and interests as me? Potential Girl has the same interest as well. And despite having all of these things in common, I am not with any of these women. Despite talking to them all the time and being around them for six months plus in each case. It just goes to show you. It doesn’t matter what you do or who you are. There is always some excuse.

I Have to Get Better

06.05.2024

why do you drink
so much
what do you find
in it
if not the bones
if not the corpse
the corpse of
my grandfather
that died from a stroke
from drinking
why do you smoke so much
what do you find in it
if not the corpse
the corpse of my grandmother
who died from smoking
too much
the only drinking i do
is to look in your eyes
full of intoxication
when i am drunk
it is with those eyes
that smile
that laughter
that pain i feel
when you are so close
to me
and i don’t have you
in my arms
to drink again and again
from your eyes

Something happened today which was disappointing and very upsetting.

I was going to go straight home, but because I was distracted, I forgot a letter I needed for tomorrow in my locker. So I had to go back in. That wasted an hour.

When I got there, it was late. I didn’t feel like going home. I went and sat there in Trafalgar Square by myself for thirty minutes. I was looking at the water and thinking how beautiful it would be to go in that water and never come back out of it, like Virginia Woolf who drowned herself.

I kept on thinking about the film Collateral with Tom Cruise where he asked how long your corpse would be on the metro before someone realised that you were dead, or whether they would do anything even if they knew you were dead.

I keep on thinking that I am getting better, but everything is getting worse. The nausea came back.

There is something wrong. I used to be normal. Things didn’t affect me this much before. And I know what is wrong, but there is no cure and I can’t do anything about it.

So I sat there. And then, I remembered that I would have children at the end of this year. I have waited long enough. I’m not waiting any more. I promised myself those children on the pain of death. And straight away, I got up and got myself dinner. Because to have those children, I need to be at my most fertile. I need to be in tip top shape. I have to give them the best that my body can produce. I can’t starve and mope around wallowing in my own pity for myself and my situation.

I have to get better now.

I have to start getting up in the morning on time. I have to beat the habit of lying there moping about things and then skipping breakfast. I have to make sure I exercise every morning. I have to do my language learning and reading to keep my brain sharp because you have to exercise each part of your body.

Look at me right now. I haven’t shaved in a week. I haven’t had a shower in a week. I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to do anything outside of work. I am becoming undisciplined, the type of person I don’t like.

I have to stop caring about people that don’t love or like me back. It has always been the same problem. They never like you back if you like them or love them. Every one I have been with has asked me out or hung around me first when I wasn’t that interested in them. Every one I have ever been interested in has said no. All four of them.

You have to forgot that they don’t love you. You have to forget about them. You can’t keep on hoping that something is going to happen. With Helen and Girl 2, I have a really dysfunctional relationship with both of them at the moment. I can’t forget that they wouldn’t go out with me. And Girl 2 judges me and criticises me all the time and is obviously still angry at me. What about Helen? Helen is never going to be around and she always hangs around her white men that follow her around all the time anyway. She does not care that I love her. I want to believe that she does. I don’t want to give up.

Do you know the peculiar thing about Helen and Girl 2 which struck me today? I never think about them in bodily terms. I don’t even look at their bodies. That is not natural. I am a man with a high libido. I love women. That proves that things are dysfunctional. Because with Potential Girl, who is not white, I do think of her in bodily terms. Which is natural.

When was the last time I even had a proper conversation with Helen or Girl 2? I haven’t had one with Helen in about five months or so. It is about the same time period with Girl 2. They are both in the past.

I am writing this all down rationally. Not through feeling. In actual facts. Obviously, your mind in this area does not work rationally. Even while I am writing, I still want to be with them.

What is happening in my life at the moment? Last week some drunk woman messaged me on Tinder. She must have seen my like about a week before she got drunk and wrote to me. She is white. That is the only message I have had from a white woman after being on Tinder for five months. And because she wrote to me when she was drunk, I am not going to write back to her. Because I can put up with Helen, Girl 2 and Potential Girl drinking even though I don’t like it because I know them and I care about them. But I am not putting up with it in a stranger that I don’t even know. Today, some Afro-Carribbean woman matched with me. She is very beautiful, but, like most of these women nowadays, she is taller than me. So, again, I have another Helen – taller than me and the same age. Is she even real though? That’s the question with this dating app.

There is a quote in John Wick 4. It goes something like:

Those who cling to life cling to death

Those who cling to death cling to life

The more and more I keep on thinking about that quote, the more and more I keep on thinking that it is true. I want to cling to death. And that is why I live. And those that cling to life? What do they really know about living, if they have not been raped by death?

It is said in a Hindi song in the film Guide: Today once again I have the desire to live/Today once again I have the intention of dying.

Being told to keep my intentions secret

05.05.2024

Everyone keeps on telling me that I will scare off and offend women if I say that I want to be in a relationship to have children and start a family. And they told me not to mention that I wanted children for the bloodline and the dynasty because that makes me sound patriarchal.

What is so wrong with what I am saying? Even the animals only want to have their own children. They don’t look after the children of other animals. It is natural to want your own.

Scientifically, we have ‘the selfish gene’ which wants to clone itself through offspring. Our bodies are geared towards sex and the purpose of that is to have babies. All I am saying is what is natural.

Culturally, the family is the unit of society. Why wouldn’t I want to extend the unit for my own family and dynasty?

I don’t understand this new generation of people. Literally, in the Bible, even in Western culture, it says that you should marry to have children. How have things changed so much for these Western people that what I am saying now is literally wrong?

It is not like I literally just see women as bodies to bear children. It is not like I only see them one-dimensionally as mothers. After all, you are not attracted to anyone. You are attracted to them for their personality and who they are as individuals.

In my view, it is lying to pretend that you don’t want a family when you are getting into a relationship to have a family. That is the main reason. You can get company from women that you like everywhere. What if you want something more than that? What if you want to build a future with them?

This culture and its values and its way of talking and thinking is incomprehensible to me. All you do is lie and cheat in relationships here. What happened to honesty?

Let me tell you something. What you want is never wrong, unless you want to commit a crime. It is not a crime to want your own family for your dynasty and your bloodline. There is nothing wrong with it. So why am I being told off for wanting it, thinking it and saying it? Just because other people don’t think the same way as me? It is not a secret. It is not shameful. In my view, it is not even private information, over-sharing or inappropriate. Yet I am being told to keep it as a shameful secret. That’s this culture for you.

Do I care if people think I am sexist and patriarchal? No. Because I am not. Not only have I taught feminism in schools, but I have written and given tours about it. I have helped women with their studies and their career ambitions. I have recruited women for roles at university. If I have chosen in my personal life to find someone that will prioritise the family and give me a child, I don’t think that makes me sexist or patriarchal. And I don’t agree with what Western feminism tries to say anyway. You are a body. I am a body. The body is the basis of our being. That is what science and psychology persuasively suggest based on empirical evidence. Science tells us that nature has decided that our main role in life is to have offspring based on analysis of evolution and animal behaviour. Not to go to the restaurant and chat with someone the whole night for ‘company’ which goes nowhere and doesn’t create any results for the good of society or anyone.

If other people want to waste their time on ‘company’ which goes nowhere, that is fine. Go ahead and do it. No one is judging you. So why judge me for wanting to produce results? This new society is incomprehensible in so many ways.

Today, I kept the whole evening free. I have been feeling depressed and exhausted over the past few days. But today, I feel fine. So I am just going to do some reading.

Is this what I wanted?

04.05.2024

wheeled flower

revolves

in a different sphere

wheeled flower

loves another man

befriends another

wheeled flower

flees from my life

leaving behind

the faintest scent

My friend always tells me off. He says it is my own fault that I don’t have Helen. So I said, but she must have some interest in me because she reads my diary and my letters to her. So I must have at least caught her interest somehow (but who knows why she reads? Maybe she laughs at everything I am writing and jokes about it with her friends). And my friend said to me, ‘is that what I wanted?’

Of course it isn’t. This space is just the consolation for not having Helen. For not having Girl Number 2 who I went with to get away from Helen because of the misunderstanding. For not having Girl Number 3 because she also said no. For not being able to ask out Potential Girl because I don’t want to hear her say no because I am older than her. Because if I heard her saying that, then I wouldn’t want to talk to her again and we are friends.

What I wanted was very different with Helen.

And what I wanted from life was also very different from what I have. Where are the stimulating intellectual conversations? Where are the women? Where is the reward and recognition for hard work, talent and original thought? For creativity? But this is the world. It is disappointment, frustration, torture.

I was thinking today about why I didn’t move out of the family home when I was younger. I was going to. I guess what it comes down to is the assessment of love. From my mother, I get unrivalled love. From this society and the women in it, you get no love. They can’t love you. They are incapable of it. The way that my mother loves me is the love of the poor. Who have no possessions. So they make up for it with love. Because love is the most important thing in their lives. And this society? They have possessions and no love. I am hanging around city types when I am from the village. I am hanging around white people when I am not white. They talk about diversity and inclusion, on getting on with people from all walks of life. They try to make it sound like it is easy. It is not easy. We come from different worlds.

So my assessment was right. My mother can love me in all ways except for one. And the women here? They can’t love you at all. I was confirmed in what I thought about things. Even the Indian ones, they have Westernised them, so they can’t love you if you act like you have been brought up to be – an Indian man.

My friend wrote to me with her cracking of a puzzle today. So that was the most intellectual conversation aside from the tours I gave. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough of the languages to have been able to contribute much to that discussion. It’s why I needed her help in the first place. I was just listening and seeing how it matched what I had written about the picture in the puzzle.

I gave my friend some portraits I printed off for her for her birthday as well as a book on a subject that she wants to study. A birthday present.

Complete depression today. But I finished off my art history assignment just now and sent it off. I worked all day. Life has entered a sad phase.

The Gardens; Neasden Temple; The Splendour of India

03.05.2024

the one that climbed your face

to put the fire in your eye

was a conjurer

the one that charted the nape of your neck

to cascade the water

through your hair

was an explorer of the night

the one who shaped the golden earth

to make the skin so lovely

that one

that one was

the goddess

You can either believe in the power of love and keep on writing. You can keep on hoping that Helen will change her mind. Or you can believe in the power of hate and separation. And expect that Helen will never be with you. You can either hope that Helen is free. Or you can despair that she is with the white men that she is always hanging around and that she has become someone else’s. You can either believe that Helen reads this diary, these letters to her. Because she has some feelings for you. Or you can believe that she does not read, does not love you, never thinks about you. What choice would you make? We live in the dream. The dream of love.

Slowly, slowly, the drops of water wear away the stone over time. Her heart is stone. Her eyes are stone. The water is each word wrenched from the heart of The Tiger. Each drop falls on the stone. It seems impossible. This love is impossible. This woman is impossible. Even fate itself is against The Tiger. He never sees Helen. He never talks to her. All there is is this meeting place. The meeting place of minds and hearts. And even here, Helen is silent. Even here, Helen is invisible. What The Tiger has is his memory of her.

And the memory today? While I was eating, I was remembering how Helen told me that the Indian diet is unhealthy and the diet from her country is healthy. Those are the kinds of conversations I was having with Helen. Arguments.

But do you know something about The Tiger? The Tiger fucking loves fighting. He loves the fight. The dance with the words. A warrior loves a warrior.

When you don’t want to live, there is a reason to live. When you don’t want to go on, there is a reason to go on. You have sworn revenge. For injustice. For dishonour. For love. Revenge gives you a meaning and purpose to your life. Revenge gives you the power to go on. You are filled with anger. And for your revenge, the revenge which will change the world and everyone in it, you live the life of The Tiger. The Tiger has come alive for one reason. The eyes of The Tiger have opened for one reason. Once upon a time, The Tiger was not the Tiger. Now, there is only one purpose. The revenge of success. The revenge of transformation.

We live in the world of our enemies. They hold the seats of power. They are demons with human faces. They rule the world with hate. They lie. They live shameful lives. They oppress the people. They seduce with the love of power. They have dishonoured our mother. Yet they live lives of privilege, ease and happiness. This is not a hallucination or a story. This is the world that we are living in. The world that must be transformed so that it becomes habitable again. Sometimes I look at this world and I know why the human race has survived like it has: because of the selfishness and oppression of its people, those that take and do not give but pretend to have a benign face despite it all, despite the absolute corruption of their power. The seduction and propagation of selfish power.

I gave the tour I wrote at the Gardens. I have had to change so many things to take account of the seasonality and the planting and the new places that have opened up. Without passion, you cannot perform. Without passion, you cannot revise and relearn. All I do these days is to learn things, interpret things and share those interpretations with other people. That is what it means to have a voice and to contribute, to change this world of ignorance and apathy through education. I live the life I was expected to live – without any of the rewards.

I went to Neasden Temple today and it was the first time I ever went there. It is the most beautiful building that I have ever been inside. I am fortunate to see, fortunate to live, fortunate to be there. Fortunate that I was able to go there from volunteering in the Gardens because it is nearby. I bathed the idol in water twice, once as myself, once as my mother. My mother is Hindu. This is her religion. Inside the inner space, the carvings were astonishing. The hand of a human had created this field of worship. The hand of a human had sculpted the dream to make this place.

And then, radiant with beauty and the gift of worship, I went into the exhibition space to do with Hinduism and India. It was a celebration of our culture and our achievements, which are not given credit in the Eurocentric and hostile West. Mathematical discoveries, medicinal discoveries, astronomical discoveries, insights into the human condition, the way to live, the way to celebrate and protect life on this planet. The way of living and thinking that has been there since the dawn of time and will be there until the dying moments of the human race on earth. The longest continuous way of being in the world. I have been raised in the religions of power to be powerful. That is why I am The Tiger. It is not just a name. It is who I am. The product of thousands of years of continuing, immortal civilisation. The splendour of India.

Exhibition: The Time is Always Now – Artists Reframe the Black Figure (Some Notes)

National Portrait Gallery

02.05.2024

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now

Summary: Artwork from the African Diaspora. The website says:

”As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced”.

Notes:

– The title ‘The Time is Always Now’ comes from James Baldwin in the 1960s writing about the civil rights struggle.

My comment: So the aim of the exhibition is to combat racism and this is what it should be judged on – if it is giving dignity, equality and positivity to the black figure. Is it?

Overall impressions:

Goes through quite a lot of the current thinking about racism like ‘double consciousness’ when non-white people have to look at themselves through a white perspective as well as their own non-white perspective, etc. Educational for people that haven’t experienced racism and don’t really understand what it is like.

The art is presented as educational and as being completely resistant to racism. Can art be unambiguous and not contradictory like that? How easy is it to escape racism and to be free in terms of artistic vision and in your expression?

And how beautiful are the artworks? Were they captivating? Art does not have to be apolitical to be beautiful. But I wonder whether there were any pieces of great beauty in this exhibition.

Some Works Which Caught My Attention

As Sounds Turn to Noise (bronze sculpture)

Thomas J Price

https://www.galleriesnow.net/artwork/as-sounds-turn-to-noise

The artist says this is a composited fictional character ‘which really looks at the value systems contained within portraiture and monuments’. He was supposed to be giving power and grandeur to ‘fictional everyday people’, the under-represented black people excluded from art history and classical sculpture.

My Comment: Why closed eyes? The artist says she is embracing ‘the inner world that she’s manifesting there and trying to bring clarity perhaps, to all this noise around us’.

I wrote a book about the valuation of symbolic blindness in imperialistic, racist and misogynistic Victorian Britain. When blindness stood for power. Are the eyes closed because of this association from the past? Devaluation of sight in this system of valuation as in Western culture – when for Indians it is the queen of the senses and the motor of revolution.

The statue stands right at the front of an exhibition where we are looking – a guide to how we are supposed to see the rest of the exhibition?

Composited photographs from Victorian Britain by Galton were used to isolate supposed ‘racial features’ – how distanced is this sculpture from that process of racism and essentialisation when we are talking about race and the black figure reframed?

Ivan (painting)

Jennifer Packer

https://www.studiomuseum.org/artworks/ivan

My favourite painting in the whole exhibition. This is an intimate portrait of one of the artist’s friends and family. It is about a ‘human relationship’, not a person.

The face is caught in a mood of introspection. A thinking man. A reflection on thought and on the minds that give us our personality, that create our relationships with others. The restricted palette of pink is beautiful: textured, cloudlike, dreamy. Details make up the piece, there are no flat colours, many many colours. Complication. Nuance in technique. The enigmatic meaning of the feet – one clothed foot, one bare. The play between the spectacle of the body and the covering of the clothes, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’. A drip of paint falls from the black figure as it escapes into liquid from form. There is an air of insubstantiality, dissolution, as though everything is melting away.

The thoughts of this thinking man are what are highlighted by the artist in the personal relationship. So is she connected to him because he thinks? And what is the emotion here about that connection and his thinking? It is a mysterious image, a puzzle. Maybe her thoughts about him are unresolved, oscillating between definite form and the cloudiness that informs the image. An ambigious, contradictory and paradoxical image.

Seeing through Time

Titus Kaphar

Seeing Through Time, 2018

A painting I found very beautiful too.

This is supposed to ‘dismantle’ an exclusionary Western visual representation and to subvert it. The artist is replacing the white female figures from neoclassical style paintings with black women. The artist deconstructs the western representation and removes it from the picture through cutting, etc. Then, he inserts the black figure – inclusion.

In this painting, the black serving figure for the white woman then serves the black woman instead, so the racial power disappears from the image.

The white figure disappears and becomes a black face. However, there is a sophisticated point to this image: the white figure is still providing the frame for the black face. Blackness is still being seen through the frame of whiteness. If you look carefully, one of the eyes is cut off by the outlines of the white figure that has been cut out. The black eye is limited by the white outlines that have been given to us from history. There is a tired self-awareness in this image.

The black face inside the white frame looks sad. Her own body is missing – the black body. Even her hair – with all of its power and symbolism – is not being presented. We are seeing the fragment of a black woman’s body – she still hasn’t achieved full representation. The image conveys the sadness of racism and the artist’s rendition of the black figure. It is still a work in progress, still unattained. The Time is Always Now…

The Suicide Tree

02.05.2024

When I was a teenager, my grandfather told me a story about a tree in the church graveyard in the corner near his house which we used to walk past every time we went to see him and my grandmother. My grandfather used to live in London, so it was always an adventure to go and see him, because we lived in Essex. London was different, exciting.

But the problem was, that we didn’t know what London was really like. In Essex, we were protected in the Indian family. We lived secure lives. We had stability. We were raised the old-fashioned way. We expected adults to be together forever. Marriage was for life. What other people did hadn’t penetrated our lives.

We were just sitting there on the sofa. My grandfather began the story. It was a very short story. One morning, just a regular morning, they found an Indian man hanging from that tree we walked past every day. Dead.

He had married a woman from India and had called her over to England. But then, shortly after the marriage, she started hanging around white people. And then, she left her husband for a white boyfriend.

Everyone said it was a suicide. That the husband had despaired of life. But, my grandfather said, how could anyone be sure? What if it had been a murder?

A story that was forgotten at the time. A mysterious affair seen through the eyes of a teenager. Shocking because it was the first realisation that an arranged marriage was not for life for everyone, like we had been taught that it was. Shocking to think that someone could break their wedding vows like that.

When I think back on that tale from the life which my grandfather told me – a tale I keep on thinking about over and over again nowadays – I remember what happened to him. My grandfather’s father deserted his family for another woman. Which meant that my grandfather was raised in absolute poverty. He later went blind in life because of malnutrition from the formative years of his childhood.

This was the man that had told me the story about the suicide tree.

Greek Chocolate Biscuits; The Hunt, The Chase, The Trap: Reflections on the Game of Love; Volunteering; Art History Study

01.05.2024

today I want to be alone

with my dream

today I don’t want to feel

the apathy of the world

and its neglect

its lovelessness

its lack of attention

lack of observation

lack of sensitivity

this world that

can’t even see

the scar of separation

cut across my face

today I don’t want to see her

laughing and talking

with everyone except me

today I want to write to her

converse

convince

connect

the one made

out of electronic paper

the one that listens to me

the one that is

my dream

I ate some chocolate biscuits from Greece today. As I bit down on the unfamiliar taste, I wondered how the Greek palate was constructed. I was tasting a different country. A country where even their mouths have been ordered in a different way. Everything is ordered in life. These weren’t like the chocolate biscuits you get in England. A different system of beliefs and habits and learning. What do I really know about modern Greece? Nothing. I was raised in first a completely white British area and then I have lived for the past 23 years in an Asian area with almost exclusively Indian people.

I was talking to my friend and I commented that love is like making a trap for someone. You are trying to trap someone for life. My friend looked at me. He is kind. So he didn’t say what he wanted to say. Instead, he said that’s one way of looking at it. Everyone knows I am cynical and jaded. But what are you supposed to believe about love? Is it free will and choice? No, it is not. Your partners are chosen for you by society. You are led to the ones that are supposed to be like you. Even with the interracial relationships, they have had the other cultures kicked out of them and they do whatever the partner with the most power has. They forget themselves. In love, the one in love makes a plot. I will do this and then I will get her. All you do is make plots in your head. You conspire with your friends to get the other person. And then, you try your absolute best to hold onto them so that they won’t leave you. It is all a big, complicated, stressful game. The days are long gone when you chose one person and then you stuck fast to them for the rest of your life. It is the culture of convenience, the expendability of people, the massive numbers of population everywhere, the death of the idea of eternal love.

But, then, you see people that have been together a long time. In life, you have to remember one thing: you are Indian in a white society. You are different. It is not the same for you as everyone else. For everyone else, for all these Westernised people, everything is easy for them. And for you? Everything is hard.

Do you know that there has never been anyone in my whole life to ask for advice about women and dating? I had to make it all up from watching Indian movies. I only ask my friend now for advice because he is white and this is a white society and I have known him for a long time.

In the morning I volunteered in art interpretation. Then, straight away, when I left, I went down to the Japanese art gallery which I haven’t been to in quite a while. And I wrote some social media posts and talked to one of the new volunteers who had studied languages – I also study quite a few languages myself when I get time. I caught up with one of my main friends there. It was good to see her after a while.

I banged into a friend of a friend on the way home when I was printing off some portraits I painted for a friend. He complimented me on my art and was asking me about it. It came out quite well and I was pleased with it myself. Everyday, people compliment me. Except for the people you want to hear it from the most, the people you want to impress the most. They never compliment you on anything. They are never impressed with anything you do. This is life. There is nothing that you can do about it.

The only time I forget about being sad is when I am lost in the flow of creating. When I am working. In life, you might not have anything or anyone else, but you do have work. The work was supposed to be for my family. That work was my love for my wife and children. But in this culture, if you are Indian, you cannot even give love to anyone that you love. Such is life. Except. Except for this diary. Which is my love which I give to Helen:

i write with the flames

which burn inside me

I hunger in this fire

which burns me inside out

I thirst for the intoxication

of her black eyes

and the waterfall of her hair

Holiday Day 5: Marianne North, Kew Gardens in London, Queen Mary II Concert at the ORNC Chapel

30.04.2024

‘love skull’

when my heart was of glass

i threw it at your feet

and it burst

so i picked up each shard

with my fingers

and they cut me

then my heart was of shivers

and when I threw it at your feet again

you trampled them down

now my heart is so infinitely small in atoms

and i can’t find it to throw at you again

but still i am looking and hoping

watching and waiting

waiting and watching

breaker of my heart

Yesterday, I rushed my diary so that Helen could read it at night time. I missed out a few things. One of the highlights of yesterday at Kew Gardens Wakehurst was that me and my friend started walking in the labyrinth down there. There is a concentric circle labyrinth and you journey towards the centre. My friend was telling me that it was pointless, because you could have taken a geodesic route from the outside to the inner circle. We like to argue. I was telling him that I am a meanderer. I go the long route and meander into something. It is how I have lived my life. It is what I do on long walks. I like to dilly and dally and contemplate, smell the roses. You might be reading that and wondering how do I manage to get so much stuff done then? Because a journey is an adventure. How many adventures do you get in life? Work you have to do.

Speaking of work, I was telling my writer’s group where I volunteer (one of the many places) that love is work and work is love. Every night I write this diary to Helen. This diary is Helen. I am talking to her. What about Girl 3 and Potential Girl? Girl 3 used to read my diary. I don’t know if she does any more. And I’m not sure whether Potential Girl has ever read it. So why talk about them here? If I am not talking to them? I think about them. I see them much more often than Helen, who I never see at all.

My friend told me yesterday when I told him I have been writing for seven months to her and she has been reading my words every night that it was the greatest love story. If only I could get her. In practical terms, I should forget her now. I should erase her from my mind. But what does love have to do with reason and practicality? Look at her. She has a completely different perspective on life to me. She is Western. I am Indian. She comes from the city. I come from the village. We used to argue about things. But do you know the spirit of The Tiger? Romeo loves Juliet. Paris loves Helen. The Tiger loves difference. A warrior loves a warrior.

So, today, early morning travel to Kew Gardens in London to work on updating my tour script. It has to change with the planting and seasonality. There is also a new art exhibition around the grounds to incorporate into the script.

Then, there was a tour of the Marianne North Gallery – I requested it for the volunteer Tour Guides. It was amazing, from one of my best friends there. She is such a lovely woman and a lovely speaker. She answered all of the many questions that I had and took us through the life of Marianne North, the artist whose life I understand so much. And while she was talking, I noticed the theme of death running through her work which has interested me so much. Like me, she was all alone in the world. No company but the plants and her oil paintings. A solitary soul that adventured through life, that didn’t love a normal, secure life. Someone touched by death that fought to see what is living, growing, beautiful, colourful. She is without a doubt my favourite woman artist.

Afterwards I looked around. I was able to go into one of my favourite spaces which has recently opened up, the water lily house. The water lilies looked amazing against the black background of the pond – they have dyed it that colour with food dye.

We all met up for drinks (and lunches for some) in The Botanist, a swanky bar in the area. I tried one of their speciality soft drinks – raspberry, lychee and orange blossom. It was so perfumed and lovely. It was one of the most delicious drinks I have ever tasted in my life (and I have been in five star hotels, some of the best hotels and restaurants in the whole world).

I walked around Kew Gardens all day. The sun was out. I was in a place I loved. I had a nice lunch there with Harissa chicken, chips and butternut squash. But was I happy? I have started feeling sad again. I wasn’t in the mood to be in that bar. I didn’t want to be in the gardens without a woman. I am feeling the want again. But you know what, Tiger still smiles. That perpetual smile on his face is what the Buddha and Krishna always had. It is the smile of wisdom. Smile even if you don’t feel happy. No one is unhappy with you. Nobody wants to share unhappiness. So just smile instead. Psychology says if you fake an emotion, your body just feels like you are actually experiencing it.

Picked up a new uniform for volunteering there – as is often the case, I have to wear women’s clothes in these types of places. Even though I am muscular, the only size that fits me is women’s because they never have men’s in small. I had a chat with the Volunteer Managers – they are super nice and super likeable.

I picked up some plant books in the library and also managed to get some in the charity shop when I went down to the Old Royal Naval College in the evening for the concert in the chapel to celebrate Queen Mary II’s birthday. The music was sublime. As I was listening to it – the vocals always make me experience absolute pleasure – the music was evoking all the emotions of that place and everything that has happened in it. It was the composer’s birthday so we sang happy birthday to him. I wasn’t going to, but then I remembered that singing always makes you feel better about yourself. So I joined in.

Dinner was Thunderbirds Chicken in Canary Wharf. The holiday is almost over and then it will be home cooking again.

Two compliments on my clothes today. The gardener at Kew Gardens said I looked like a rock star. Every single person at the Old Royal Naval College said I looked really cool and really smart. I have my own personal sense of style – I don’t copy anyone and I wear bright colours and think about the combination of things. That’s why people like what I wear.

Even if you don’t want to carry on going, you have to think about your responsibilities and carry on going. Today I was so tired. I was walking about the world with no woman in it. No comfort. They did an experiment on monkey babies with a wire mother with food attached to it. The monkey babies suffered with the wire monkey. They preferred a stuffed toy which was soft and comforting, not the food. They spent more time with it. Comfort is missing from my life and I am suffering as a result. The man that needs a lot of love and affection is not getting it from anywhere. I am suffering from love starvation again.