The waiting

Now he was settled. He had found himself a small cute place on the Western line, and was not far from his office too. The process of moving in had been remarkably easy but setting up the house, if one could call a studio apartment that, was not. He got himself a 20 litre Bisleri to fit atop the water dispenser but while doing so, he dropped the big plastic bottle and it cracked, drowning his house. It took him hours to clear the water with an old T-shirt, wetting, wringing, wetting, wringing.

But it was nice too. All the work, the running around. Running to Khar station to buy the basics, a dustbin, clips to keep clothes in place, paper rolls. And now all he waited for was Internet. The Reliance people had said they would do it the day after he had registered. Today was that day. 11, they had said.

He woke up and rushed to the newspaper seller at the crossing to buy as many as he could lay his hands on. The absence of Internet meant he had to kill time reading. He realised at moments like this how much he had come to rely on the Net to spend his time. It was an experience he could lose himself in for hours.

But the Internet was also a space where he came face to face with his desires, his needs, his frustrations. Towleroad, check. PR, check. Books Inq, check. It was a battle for supremacy. He flitted between sites and webpages with remarkable speed, absorbing it all, when at the end of it, he felt satiated in a very real way, but also, he felt, worked up.

It was too easy, he saw. Everything was on tap. Porn, yes. News, yes. There was no waiting. But today he had to wait. He had to actually wait for the Net to start. He found he had to force his mind to learn to do that.

Besides, the Net's pretence of availability was at best a mirage. Everytime he opened the URL for PR, a sort of electricity ran through him -- the expectation, the possibilities. The real world, real life was always less exciting, more pedestrian.

And so he waited. Happy that he was de-addicting himself, sad that the Reliance guy wouldn't arrive sooner.