Mutation

I had imagined that the three weeks that I'd planned to spend at home after returning to India would be the quickest three weeks I would know. I was wrong; totally, surprisingly and horrifyingly wrong. The first week back was definitely an action packed one as it was my cousin's wedding but soon after the wedding, I had nothing to do. This is when I was fully conscious that something somewhere had quietly gone wrong with me.

In my glory days, that would have been my dream come true and I'd blissfully engage myself in the business of achieving a state of zero energy. You know that you are over the hill when you cannot seem to enjoy what you had always craved the most. Sleep was no longer attractive as there was no critical unfinished job that would have been missed out on by succumbing to its charms. Blogging or writing was an unbearable drag as the constraints of the clock were irrelevant. The same spare time that was once so fleeting and memorable was now a chewing gum stuck to the bottom of of my sole, persistent and unwanted.

So to my utter dismay, there was no option for me but to join office a whole week and a half before I had intended to. Catching up with the team I had left behind, formatting & printing my name out to plug on the wall of my cubicle, getting my system up to speed and making note of the sour faces that must necessarily be displayed at the beginning of every workday - all of this and more of such mundane unglamorous activities made me feel better somehow. At the end of it all, man needs work and work needs man. The relationship has all the hallmarks of a cranky marriage - charming in its soothing familiarity and jarring in its strangling repetitiveness. Killing time, the only thing I could claim to be a professional at was turning out to be not so easy any longer.