I can get up early in the mornings again. It has been a week. It took me eight months to get here – that’s how long the journey to recovery took.
Psychologists can’t define what resilience is. It is me. No matter how shit things get, I bounce back. The Tiger stays alive, angry and hungry. Because he has cubs to give, produce and raise, so that The Tiger can live again in the future through them. Loyalty to the dawn of time and the origins of what is now called India dictate the resilience of The Tiger. Love for The Tiger dictates the life of The Tiger. For love, you would burn in hell for the thing or the one that you love. Without a moment’s hesitation.
Do you want to know what it looks like to be sick in the disappointment of love and the suffering of death? It wrecks your body. It wrecks your mind. This is what I looked like when I had my long illness:
And yet, here I am. Full of energy and power. Because I have self-respect, love for us as a people, strength and the ability to overcome suffering and transcend death. I have been raised in the religions of power.
And there is still the mission. When he was dying, Nelson said ‘Thank God I have done my duty’. The mission is still there before me.
And? Helen is still in my life. Girl 3 is still in my life. While they are in my life, there is still the hope. I am watching and waiting. I haven’t forgotten. I don’t forget. They are women. They change their minds. They can be won over. Soft water on a hard stone, drop by drop. Patience. Carefully, carefully. There is a chink in the armour. She reads this diary every night. Her mind is open to me.
Leander swam to Hero every night across the Hellespont so that he could love her. And Leander knows that Hero is the priestess of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She worships love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thought of the Day: Can you ever escape from the clutches of sexual repression?
Picasso used to paint male sexuality as a raging and charging bull. There was a Western equation of genius with rampant male sexuality, so it was in accordance with Picasso’s profession.
But if you have a rampant male sexuality, which is on the attack all the time, you encounter a world of sexual repression. Society cuts off the horns of the bull. And imagine if you came from a society of sex segregation and sexual repression into a ‘modern’ world that you thought was post-Freudian and free from it? Reality is shocking.
What are the politics and power of sexual repression?
My Diary
I am trapped in Greenwich Palace as Henry VIII. When you are in a place haunted by the dead, sometimes they take over your body and haunt your mind. What he needed, I need. An heir to pass on everything to. What happened to him is happening to me. Six wives. I am collecting women. If they cannot give me a child, I will have to collect more. Up until a certain point. Then I will have to accept defeat. But I cannot give up on having a child. I will have to get a surrogate baby. I have sworn on my head that I will have these children. If I don’t get them, I will have to die. That is resolution. I made that oath so I couldn’t back out of it. There is no way out now.
Then, what I will have to do is something horrible. I will have to raise the children without a mother. I am going to take away their mother from them. Comfort, happiness, security and love. That is fate. Such is life. In the Mahabharata, Bhishma’s mother who was the River Ganges did not raise him. And he lived a live of absolute suffering. What can you do about things? You want to give your children everything in the world. And you can’t even give them something that almost every child in human history has had. And this is the world that the people who deny you love want you to love.
I am going to have to become the mother and the father.
The question is, when is the final decision going to be made? The heart shrinks from making it. But, one day, it will have to be done. If I am going to be by myself, I need to have enough energy and life to see it through until the end, until they are finished as people with their education and can stand up on their own two feet. So, I have said by my next birthday towards the end of this year. Time is passing away quickly. Nothing is happening. Soon it will be time.
And then, I will never try to approach another woman. Because I will have my children to look after.
If Helen wanted me, she would have done something by now. She is always meeting up with the people she wants to be around. It would have been organised. It is the same thing with Girl 2. I am dreaming when I think about them. Potential Girl is a difficulty. So you have to accept that there is nothing and you are just wishing for something to happen.
When you come from a sex segregation society without any women in your life, you hope that one day you can come out of that kind of society and you can live in a normal life. Fate is a joker.
But the belief is blood is a powerful thing, the belief in dynasty as destiny. I only count myself as a failure if I don’t have my own children. I have seen the racism of the women in this country and how they treat you if you are nice to them and honest. Any excuse to not have you because you are different. If this is what it is, how can you see yourself as a failure? I’m not going to become mean and dishonest. It is the world’s biggest douche bag that said everything is fair in love and war. I still have my pride and my integrity. I am still The Tiger. And Tiger can raise some cubs. By himself. Resolution. In some ways, it is better. They will be my children and do what I want. No one will interfere with my plan for them. My army will be pure.
So this is the photograph I took. And this is the picture I made. This is the difference between my photographer’s eye and my digital art eye. The picture I made has become about The Three. The stars around which my planet is orbiting now. Two of them might already be gone. Maybe all of them will go. Man stands alone in the world.
in the love of the world
in the desert of the world
there is an oasis
the water is cool and fragrant
the water is the kiss of a mother
it takes the thirst of the desert
and by it
grows one lone tree
which casts a shade
which cools the water
which touches the heavens
Just to hold her hand once. To kiss it. And to put my palm against hers.
I am listening to Arabic music instrumentals on Spotify as I write. The sound is melancholic.
In a moment, I will get up and shave off this beard from my face. I want to give up. But tomorrow, I will see her again. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, the Tiger will still be the Tiger. Tomorrow, the hero in love will still be the hero. If you have loved, never fear. If you have loved, you can lose everything. But you cannot lose your courage.
phenka humne phool
i cast a flower
Uskein taraf
towards her
Us mein dil tha humara
within it was my heart
phenka humne phool
i cast a flower
jis mein chehra tha uska
within it was her face
phool ne kata humein
the flower cut me
koi shikayat nahein
there is no complaint
phenka humne phool
i cast a flower
uskein taraf
towards her
usmein jaan thi humare
within it was my life
Ukrainian women are exceedingly beautiful. I talked to one today. No one knows my type. I don’t tell people.
It was a moonlight night. I was in the country of the Arabs. I was in pain. There was the water. The stars glided across the water, the lights of the night. In the crowd, I saw a beauty from the heavens, an angel. She had forgotten her way and come to earth. She walked towards me. And then? She walked towards the boat on the water. I watched her going. My heart was breaking. In the beautiful night, the invisible rain of tears knitted themselves into the fabric of the sky. She walked away, I sighed. She walked away, I was flooded with melancholy. Across the water, I watched the boat depart. That moment is caught in my mind. It was Her. It was She. I watched my life walk away from me. And I stood there like a corpse, sighing into the windless sky.
So, it turns out I’m going to have to have surgery on my leg. The doctor was a Subcontinental woman. Did she break the news to me in a nice way? No. I had about two minutes with her. And during that time, all she did was tell me off and make it out to be my fault. When it wasn’t my fault in any way at all. That’s what they are like. I can say it because I am Subcontinental too. You don’t get any sympathy. You get blame. I’m used to it. Even in the Indian movies, all the girlfriends of the heroes do is to criticise them and tell them off.
But at least two things didn’t happen: I didn’t die and they didn’t have to cut the leg off. I knew everything was okay. It is just the pain. And I will just have to put up with that. Why? Because life is pain. The only thing that can happen now is complications with the surgery and side effects, but there is a good chance that nothing bad will happen and it should all be okay.
Do you know how I developed this problem in my leg? I loved a non-Indian woman. And she didn’t love me back. Then my grandparents died and I got sick. And then I put on a lot of weight. Which ruined my leg. So that’s where the problem in the leg developed. I am still suffering from the past. And those people that tell you to forget about the past? What other problem have me and the Indian men in this country, and the Dalits or the Untouchables in India had except for the fact that no one will love us? The people that don’t love us are telling us how to solve our problems. And to forget the past and the present where they don’t love us. When our problem is that they are not giving us love. What a fucking joke.
Do you know what guilt is? When my grandmother was dying from cancer, I was living with her. She couldn’t sleep in the nights without a man in the house. One time, I came back home and I was talking to her before I went up to study in my bedroom. I talked to her for about half an hour. Because I felt sorry for her and thought she was lonely. She told my mother afterwards that when I was talking to her, she was going through the most torturous pain. But she wouldn’t tell me. She just kept on nodding at what I was saying. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I think about that over and over again. That is what guilt is. I couldn’t even see that she was in pain.
My Instagram feed is full of dating advice. It is always the same: don’t be a nice guy. Be a complete douche bag to the woman that you care about, be aloof from her, treat her like she doesn’t even matter. What a lovely world of love this Western society has created for its women. And some of these people have the gall to call me a misogynist when that is their culture and their ‘love’. Even the women themselves are saying they want the man to be like that. What a culture. If you love women, you are a sexist pig. And if you treat them like you hate them or don’t care about them at all, then you are accepted and you aren’t sexist.
I finally told someone in that context that there is someone there that I don’t like. I don’t like to talk about people behind their backs. I wouldn’t want someone doing it to me. It was a special situation of honesty. I don’t just not like them. That is me being euphemistic. And it is very unusual for me not to like someone in this industry, so that is saying a lot.
I asked my friend from another country if she would cook something for me for that context for lunch. So she said yes and she invited me to do dinner together and she would make me something then too.
I was thinking about Shiva and his stillness – the short note I wrote yesterday. He lies down below Kali when she is in her rage and in her destructive dance. He lies below the Ganga (Ganges) when she flows down from heaven. Do you know that Shiva is represented by the phallus? The lingam. That is his body. That is what is withstanding the flood of woman. How he is able to withstand the flood of woman’s power and to become united with it, to channel it and control it, to merge with it into creation, is by being the phallus below woman, completely still. It is a sexual thing. The woman is dancing on Shiva who is the phallus, or flooding down on him: that is the essence of the act of union.
I have never told anyone something peculiar about the name my mother gave me. Some of you who have been reading know how I got my name. Sunil Dutt saved the life of Mother India in the film of the same name. He rescued her from fire. While he was recovering in the hospital, she came to take care of him and then they fell in love. He played her son in the movie. The son married the mother. That’s why I call myself Oedipus and my life has been that of Oedipus. However, there is a little peculiarity in this love story. Because in the film, the mother kills the son because he rebels against tradition and culture and morality by trying to abduct the woman he loves from her wedding ceremony. My mother didn’t just name me for the one that marries Mother India. She named me for the one that rebels against Mother India too. There is a paradox in the name that she gave me. The paradox is that she named me after the rebel, he who rebels against everything and everyone. I am the middle child. I have been named after rebellion. I live for rebellion. The rebellion of love. You can’t escape from your name and the fate that has been planned and dreamt of for you. Try to escape your fate. See what happens to you. We rebel in the name of love for love. We are the warriors of love. Inquilaab zindabaad! Inquilaab sada zindabaad! Long live the Revolution! May the Revolution live forever!
How much longer can you love someone who is not in your life for more than five minutes in a week? That doesn’t talk to you? Who has rejected you twice? Who you have only talked to for about one hour in total in about six months? But are these the wrong questions? Isn’t the question, can you stop loving someone who you love? Despite everything?
My Day Off is never a day off. It is always work stuff. Work has taken over my life. It is the only thing that I have in life really. It has always been that way. Whatever I have done, I have never met anyone to start a family with. So the only thing is to compensate with work.
Now it is the leg. It hurts in several places. Quite badly. Stinging. First the back. Then the paper cut. Now the leg. Pain follows me. It is the season of pain. Not just physical pain in the body. But also mental pain. I have made the mistake of trying to be around non-Indian women. It is my own fault. It doesn’t matter what you do with them. It is never enough. I didn’t listen.
It was the first official Kew Gardens tour in the morning, the first one after I passed the assessment. I got really good feedback, which felt good, as I wrote the thing. It was particularly pleasing because one of the customers had been quite angry about something before she came onto my tour, so I changed her mind about the Gardens. The other thing was that I had children on the tour and one of the other volunteers told me that they came back to give me some really great feedback as well. So a success on all counts.
Afterwards, I had tea with one of the other volunteers that came onto the tour with me, to catch up on some stuff. She is Indian. Therefore we are friends. We have community spirit.
It was lunch with my mentor afterwards. He is such a genuine, friendly, wonderful guy. So I treated him to a meal with me in the orangery. And he bought me a present because I had recently passed the assessment – a beautiful book about the Latin names of plants. This is the second book that he has given me. He knows my weakness – that I love books and learning. That’s the wonderful kind of guy that he is. The book is a piece of art and I will treasure it forever. It is rare in my life to be given a present.
Afterwards I travelled in the Kew Train in a compartment with a young mother and her children. The family started talking to me, especially the children. They were asking me all sorts of questions. I like being around children. They are innocent and friendly and curious. They are not boring. As the sun shone in their eyes and I watched their unfeigned actions and conversation, I thought how wonderful it would have been to have been sitting in that train with my own children.
Kew palace was open so I went inside. Every single one of the women actresses inside came up to me and talked to me. It is a fact that I am good looking. So when someone sees me for the first time, they are impressed. One of them complimented my clothes which is happening more and more recently. But it just surprises me how women are always trying to talk to me nowadays when they get a chance. One of them, I spoke to for quite a long time about conditions for young people and I gave her some advice.
On the way to the station, I bought a book of political quotations from the charity bookshop.
I travelled down to Westminster Abbey and got quite a good shot of the policemen on horseback before I met up with the volunteers for an after work visit at one of the places I am at. It was really wonderful to marvel at the magnificence and beauty of Westminster Abbey. I couldn’t believe that more people from work hadn’t come. It was an amazing experience. I was mesmerised by the Gothic vaults and the rose windows, the stained glass. The ambience of the place was awe-inspiring. I also felt companionship with the greats of English writing – Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens whose plaques were there. The guy that was in charge there gave us lots of information.
I had another surprise with the Notre Dame exhibition. It was a video game type format, a virtual immersion into the building and the past of the cathedral. It was wonderful. Real time travel. I really enjoyed the whole experience and felt special that I had been able to do it in such peace and tranquillity.
The last stop of the day was the leaving drinks at my other work place. I sat there for about an hour before I had enough. I can’t watch people drinking and getting silly over it. It puts me off. I didn’t do it when I was young and I don’t drink myself. I am not used to it. I have been taught that drinking is wrong. And then, the same thing that always happened happened. I started missing the woman at my side. The beautiful day that I had had was spoilt. So I had to rush off.
I sat in Mcdonald’s and gorged myself on some Thai sweet chilli chicken wraps and fries. And I had a Zero Cola to try and cheer myself up.
When I got on the tube back home, the trains were all delayed and I started burning up. So as soon as I managed to get home, I stripped down to my boxer shorts so I could try and cool down and write this diary.
Three contexts that I am in done in the same day. That is my life right now. Just work. Nothing else. What else is happening in my life? Yesterday, the woman I matched with on the dating app turned out most probably to be a fake and a dating fraudster. I keep on getting messages from the dating apps because I am not using them. What is the point? There are no women. That is what I am trying to realise in my life. I am only attracted to beautiful women. I can’t settle. And they won’t go with me because I am Indian. So that is the situation. And I never meet any Indian women anywhere that are attractive enough or single and that I can start a family with. Society has fucked me.
diary of a lone man 