On Riding a Scooty or Reverse Engineering Adulthood

1/

The first time my swimming instructor threw me in the water, I cried murder. I was maybe twelve or thirteen and scared of water that crossed knee height. I thrashed and reached the other side and ran to my mom, telling her I ain’t going back to the hellhole that was this swimming summer camp. I did go, the next day - and the day after that. And little did I know, I’d be enjoying the water soon enough. Now when I am talking about swimming to people, I tell them how they just need to trust the water. Stop thrashing against it and before you know it, it brings you to the surface. It’s like a chicken and egg problem. To trust the water, you need to know how to swim, but you can only efficiently swim when you trust the water. It’s the trust part that’s difficult to achieve though.

2/

It is summer now. I order mangoes from Blinkit and realize how expensive they are. I look up if there are dealers who’d sell a crate in bulk. There’s one nearby, I plan on taking my scooty and buying a crate this weekend from there.

Summers were punctuated by Mangoes, these random micro-adventures like a swimming summer camp, trips with my family and a boredom that feels sort of magical when I look back. Beads of perspiration rolling down my back and wetting the computer chair as I’d play games on my PC, going to Chembur at my grandparent’s place, staying there, days that would feel like a lifetime and nights even longer, my brain thinking of so many things at the same time, running so fast yet being outrun by sleep.

Of writing. I used to write stories then. Just stories. Poetry hadn’t entered my system and metaphors seemed unnecessary. I had words for pretty much everything and for all that I didn’t - well it didn’t matter much.

I am 24 now, and I look forward to my fully developed frontal lobe in a year (I don’t care if it’s a myth I still look forward to it f u). I still write. I like poetry too now. And I like horror movies. Goddamn, I love horror movies - young Angad would ask to be told ghost stories only to shut his ears in the midst of their telling. And now, I voluntarily go to the cinemas, usually alone and watch horror movies.

I still love ghost stories too.
And I still like mangoes.

3/

A few days after moving into this new apartment, I woke up to a fan that wasn’t rotating. First guess was that maybe I switched it off at some point in the night - wrong, the switch was on. Well, it’s a power cut then, I thought to myself as I opened the window beside my bed and went to sleep again.

Turns out the road facing my window is frequented by vegetable vendors in the ungodly hours of 8 AM in the morning and so, I had to decide between the sweat and the noise. I chose sweat, woke up to close the window, and noticed a peculiar detail. The streetlights on the road were still turned on (Don’t ask me why they were shining brightly in the light of the new day that had already woken up, that’s an investigation for another day). To confirm, I went to my main door, opened it and lo and behold - the street light in front of my house was turned on too. Well, maybe it’s an issue with the building then, I thought as I took the elevator to check the power stuff on the basement and while in the elevator, I had a realization that I was in the elevator, and the elevator was moving.

Something’s wrong with my apartment, and I have to get it fixed, all alone.

My anxious ass started to rethink all my choices that led me to finalize on this apartment, wondering how to even solve it. The anxiety compounded more when I went down and everything seemed fine with the meter box (spoiler alert: it wasn’t, the BESCOM people had taken off the fuse because the last tenant hadn’t paid the electricity bills).

Not wanting to deal with all of this at the moment, I just chose to go back home, put my head in the pillow and sleep it off like a nightmare. I woke up in a sweat, called the electrician, called the owner, and got to the bottom of the curious case of the missing fuse.

Point being, most things seem insurmountable, until they aren’t. Having solved so many inconveniences across so many years, I think I should start giving myself more and my anxiety less credit.

4/

I went to watch The Drama at Nexus Koramangala recently (best movie I watched at the theatres this year btw, so so fun). I took my rental scooty out for that. It was the first time I took my scooty out for a route other than the daily to and from the office. Everything seemed new, and I was hyper-aware, kinda scared but also proud of myself as I parked the scooty in Nexus’s MLCP. I had reached the destination, non-incidentally. Going home after the movie was much more enjoyable, my nerves peaceful as I had already beaten this path once.

On consequent rides to Nexus, I have been way more comfortable. But it feels nice - how a lot of these first times feel like a micro-adventure in themselves.

I learned how to ride a scooty in Hyderabad just before leaving for Bangalore so again, I was very anxious to take it out for the first time once I received it from the rental folks. With time, I realise a lot of this stuff gets a lot easier if you’re just okay with looking like an idiot at times. A lot of people already are okay with it, and for the most part, we don’t end up judging them - so might as well extend that grace to ourselves. (how high and mighty this sounds, as if I’m not going to have the most critical, spirit-breaking self-dialogue with myself the moment I make a very minor mistake the next time too)

5/

Does the future have ghosts too? Like does the ghost of an unrealised imagined future show up on your doorstep asking you to live it once and for all? I ask because I have been haunted by the unborn future lately.

It shows up unannounced, this ghost. Like a shifting weight on your scooter on an empty, unlit road. A thought riding pillion on a million other thoughts, asking you the ‘what if’s and the ‘if only’s. It shows up when I toss around in my sleep, it shares my pillow and looks into my eyes, asking me if I’m happy. I remember the jigsaw puzzle I left in Hyderabad, the one which we meant to assemble together. It shows up when I see a jigsaw puzzle at a friend’s place, assembled on the coffee table - a marker that love has walked in these spaces.

The seed of learning to ride a scooty germinated from the image of me and a certain person riding around in Goa, her riding pillion. A thought that I’d take her out on a trip - us riding around on the scooty, having aimless evenings together.
Now I know how to ride a scooty, but the only people that have sat pillion behind me are the scooty instructor in Hyderabad, his brother, and Ishan. She most probably doesn’t know that I rented out a scooter.

How do you exorcise the ghost of an unrealised future? The much more pressing question is do you even want to? Or are you still holding on to the hope that maybe the future might still be possible, maybe sometime in the future? How do you say all of this without sounding like the guy who is still not over someone? What if you are not over them yet? What if you (or your mind) doesn’t want to be over them?

6/

There are a lot of questions. I’d be damned if someone asked me to answer all of them right now. Adulthood’s address is in an alley right between the apartments of greatness and the valleys of complete mental breakdowns. All passing moments pressed by the question of if you’re doing enough and if you’re doing it right? And if you should be doing IT in the first place or doing something else.
Riding a scooty gets easier when some parts of the mental overload gets offloaded to muscle memory. I remember that same was the case with swimming, and even cycling for that matter. I wonder if adulting becomes muscle memory at some point.

Eh. We ball until then, and maybe write a little here and there. And until all of this becomes easier, let’s just try and trust the water?

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