Neha Gupta > Recent Status Updates

The thought of persistent human companionship is abhorrent to me. I have never married. The words of Gabriel Oak to Bathsheba, although meant romantically, struck me as a threat: “And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.”

would my father and mother have remained together, fitted uneasily within one domestic box, their edges rubbing against each other until worn down and smoothened over the years? That is how it appears to be with most married people I come across. Or was my parents’ destruction inevitable, a matter of time?

One jar on a high shelf fascinated me. It was filled with a clear liquid in which floated a hand with two limp extra fingers, fingernails and all, dangling from the thumb. Whose was the handless body from which it had been severed? It was the bottled essence of everything I feared and loathed yet could not keep away from. I was sure it would escape the jar some day and come for me.

“In my childhood home we have one. I see the cuckoo as a child, I think it is a real bird and I grow fond of it – and then my mother finds pieces of bread near the clock. I gave it food every day. Every single day.”

What I meant was that as watched kettles boil slower . . .Watched clocks don’t strike the hour.”

I have been watching many K- dramas and Japanese dramas, love alarm, Tokyo Alice and now Reply 1988... and amidst all this Netflix and Amazon prime... this book is again about Japanese and Chinese life somewhere far in America. It’s strange how cultures becomes a potpourri of places they traverse to... but they stay the same at the core.. so many emotions to be felt and lived!

I am reading two books, one based in USA and one in India, but the themes of immigration & world war 2 are same. How lives are disrupted and the big war impacts people, Japanese immigrants faced atrocities in USA, and back in india British struggled to keep their colonies with the pressures of world war and the Anglo community evolving in their own way as a mix of cultures .

The first task was to wean Joe off alcohol. The bait was Meryln’s masala tea. For an extra salary of five rupees, Michael’s maid would deliver a flask of the tea at Joe’s dorm every morning, before he could wake up and take a swig of his country liquor. The alcohol didn’t stand a chance against well-brewed chai.

How London is the strangest city but somehow appears in every story. First of course this book itself which I am reading, then the protagonist of ‘paper moon’ visits the London book fest and romances her Boy Darcy in the cold grey weather, then I just finished watching season 4 of ‘The Crown’