Ode to Lata Read Online Free PDF Page B

are there, Ali, can you please pick up the phone?  Ali!  It’s Parin!  It’s mummy!  Ali? Ali?  Are you there?”
    This went on for a couple of expensive minutes until she resigned herself to the purpose of her call.
    I continued to lie in bed, recuperating from a terrible hangover. I didn’t feel like talking to her.  Hardly ever did these days.  She and all the rest of my family possessed the unique talent of driving me up the wall by repeating everything they had to say until I wanted to shut my ears and scream,
I heard you!  You’ve said if fifty times already!  Just stop bloody nagging me!
    Then naturally I’d hurt their feeling and they’d claimed I didn’t give a shit about them anymore and perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered to call to begin with.  Enter guilt and feeling like crap.
    Groaning, I covered my face with a pillow and turned away, trying to block her out. “Oh, just shut the fuck up already!” 
    It was as if she was able to detect this; she began to speak even more loudly so that her voice took on a surround-sound quality. I thought about yanking the telephone cord out but then she would have called back and started all over again.
    She confirmed the dates for her upcoming trip to Los Angeles.  As I listened, I wasn’t sure that I wanted her to come.  Apprehension filled me.  I just didn’t think I could deal with her.  Once that voice had meant so much to me that I had broken down crying every time we spoke.  That was when I had first come here.  How miserable it had made me feel to be away from her.  All I wanted to do was run back home and be rescued from the demons of this city.  Lay my head in her lap and be calmed by the familiar scent of her White Linen perfume.  But that was so long ago.  Before I developed this love-hate relationship with L.A.  Before I had allowed the city’s material abundance to spoil me, to let the freedom of lifestyle make me fear returning.  So I had learnt to detach myself from that need.  One tends to do that after missing someone terribly, and after all those years, I had finally extricated myself from the umbilical cord. Framed it between my own teeth and gnashed until it was cut.
    Now here she was, making plans to come and see me.  Trying, albeit in futility, to tangle me back into dependency.  How could I accommodate her in my life as it precariously stood?  Where in between Richard and drinking would she stand?
    Where was there any room, any need, for yet another to identify myself with? 

CHAPTER 6
     
    SISSY
     
    In thinking of Richard, I think about all the other men who have drifted through my life. All created from the same mold it seems.  Having successfully auditioned to be the able benefactors to a hungry dysfunction, they had somewhere along the line ceased to be individuals and had become the sludge of a distinct personality instead.
    It was different with Richard only because, in exorcising his own ghosts, he had decided to stay.  Most had been in too much of a hurry to stick around long enough to burst the bubble themselves.
    Maddeningly unstructured, it was within the pockets of such precariousness that we found the fuel for everything that attracted and eventually repelled us from each other.
    Passion thrives on many annihilating emotions.  It’s fueled by catalysts so fickle, so fleeting – the promise of lasting love is never one of them.  Richard’s affection for me bore such fugitive traits.  Unpredictable.  Capricious.  Ephemeral.  It swallowed me alive.
    Little in my life has come close to being as passionate as this indefinable relationship.
    Except perhaps my relationship to my father or his with my mother.
    Who knows what experiences in early life form the indelible scars that sear in the years to come?  Propel us into recreating the familiar scenes that have an uncanny ability to convince us that this time we would have control in manipulating the outcome? Often we start out with almost