Nilienda Safaricom Jazz. Ninaona nikirudi mwaka ujao, kama Rei, Lizzmo, M’sembi, Polly na Samoe watakuja nami tena, kwa sababu ilikuwa murua kabisa.

It’s easy to get into trouble. When the opportunity to do something comes, and you’re feeling a bit lazy, laziness wins and Bang! you’re in trouble. Laziness has put me in trouble more times than I can count. If I were Superman, cape and all, laziness would be my kryptonite.

Every time something has gone tits up, it’s been because I was too lazy to do something I really should have gotten off my desk. Like that duffel full of dirty laundry that I say I’ll take down to Wash ‘n’ Fold, which I don’t till the laundry basket overflows. Or the coriander that I say I’ll dress, which usually gets done three days after I stuffed it in the chiller.

There is a reason not to be lazy: the benefits are amazing. There’s usually a smile at the end of the day, usually not mine, but a smile nonetheless. Hers is quite important to me. It radiates from her lips to her crinkly nose to her eyes and makes her eyebrows arch just so.

Being not lazy makes Her smile and that is a very nice feeling. I don’t smoke when she does; it might give Her ideas and sometimes Her ideas require me to be even more not lazy. Not that I am complaining. Not at all.

I wonder if She knows how nice it is to make Her smile. More often than not, I sense Her smile based on the number of LOLs and emojis on Her texts, DMs and WhatsApps. But every now and then, after a particularly not lazy day, when She sips something or the other, it feels nice to finish something when it was meant to be finished the way it was supposed to be finished, because it means I don’t have to overthink the thing and just revel in Her smile. Really nice, good people.

I remember my first train journey. It was just at the tail end of the monsoon, from Delhi Central Station to Pune to Sangli. I came down with Jackson, who is quite the accountant now with an expansive waistline, a wife and daughters down in Meru, I think.

We stopped over in Bhopal, I think. We snuck through Agra around eight in the evening, so we never got to see the silhouettes of the Taj Mahal or the Red Fort. I think there was a portion of Gujarat we went through around midnight on that first night when they put armed police on the roof just in case bandits decided to attack the train. It slowed down and kinda freaked me out because the Hindi suddenly died down and the conductors put up the metal grills in the carriages.

It was a long journey, 34 hours end to end. The cjapatis and sausages we carried grew stale and the water ran out somewhere on the eastern border of Maharashtra. I can’t remember where else we stopped to restock.

I remember when the Hijras boarded, demanding alms a bit aggressively. In their bright saris and dupattas, they cut quite the feminine figures even with some of the prominent Adam’s apples on display or the hard-to get-rid-of bristles on their chins. They sang and danced in the confined spaces of the sleeper cars and made away with quite the haul when they were done.

You can’t take a shit without worrying that it will all end badly. The train rocks left and right and the heat and noise in the toilet cubice is quite disorientating. I somehow managed to hit the mark with some difficulty then discovered that the tap outside the door didn’t have water.

We sat with an army captain and his family.  He’d been billetted for a while in Mombasa and spoke passable Swahili. Generous to a fault, he let us share in the family’s roti and aloo gobi. There were no incidences of Delhi Belly, thank God!

You’d think that 34 hours cross country in a very hot chamber with strangers would have been scary, but it wasn’t. I quite enjoyed myself. Jackson was good company as were Captain Naresh and his family. At least I think his name was Naresh.

I made the journey annually till Agnes left for home. I still remember the frisson of excitement every time I booked a ticket down at Sangli Station, 300 rupees I think. Holding that cardboard ticket with the Gandhi quotation in the back was quite something. I didn’t keep mementos, sadly. I was stupid that way. But I’ll never forget that first journey.

When I was a boy I could see the future very clearly. I knew exactly what it held for me. It scared the shit out of me, knowing what the future held. It never occurred to me that the future, just like the past, is a foreign country. Something that became clearer as I matured.

The future, today, is as clear as mud, yet it doesn’t bring despair or fear like it once did. When I was a boy, all I had was the promise of things: education, skills, talents yet to be discovered. Now I know who and what I am, what I can do, what I can accomplish. I am better for the uncertainties of the future, and it brings me immeasurable peace not knowing where I will be in five years, ten years, thirty years but that I will be somewhere new and exciting.

What I have today, I did not have as a boy. Some of it I came upon by chance, others by experience, still others by education and learning. What I know and what I have are a promise of where I will go and whom I will finally become.

I do what I do, and say what I say, because I no longer fear where the future is headed. It is like learning to speak a new language. At first there’s the fear that you’ll look foolish. Then comes signs of confidence as you get the cadences right. Soon enough, though not a virtuoso, virtuosa, you can string complex sentences together and hold complete thoughts in that language. That’s how the future feels. Some confidence in your assets, an awareness of the risks, and an appreciation of the learning that got you there.

The future may be foreign, but it is no longer a threat.

Bubbles! There are bubbles. Millions of them. In a glass. A nice, tall, chilled-sweaty glass. They dance, upwards, incessantly. Over and over and over. What we do for bubbles, all day, every day.

Bubbles. We love them, but they don’t love us back. They turn us, change us, sometimes destroy us. We willingly succumb to their seduction, and watch as our worlds crumble.

Bubbles. The reason why fecklessness is all around. The reason why sophistry and cant abound. The reason why fecundity is on the decline.

Bubbles? No! The Devil’s Water!

What do you do when the rock your life is founded on begins to wear away, eroded by a lifetime of strength and duty? What do you do when you realise that it is your turn to be the rock, for others to build their lives on? If you are me, you rebel, you say No! You run away. You hide.

You do what you have trained yourself to do: deny, deny, deny. Deny because that is what the lawyers say. To admit that it is now your turn is too much. It is just too much.

They say time and tide wait for no man. Time always runs out. Denial will not do. Fear will not do. Rebellion is for teenagers still looking for the melancholia and angst that they reliably note down in their “journals” or hide away from in copious puffs of the green dragon.

So you buck yourself up, accept your fate, take the reins and pray that at the very least, you will live up to his expectations, be the man he is, has been, shall forever be. You become a rock in the hopes that one day others will see you as the rock.

A good story. That’s the ticket. A genuinely good story. Even if it has bits and pieces that make sense only to the initiated, a good story is really quite the ticket.

She initiated me—tried to initiate me—in the world of wizards, magic and dark powers. I am amazed at the whole of it. I imagine the novels would have been way more entertaining, but the Films were quite the ticket.

It’s amazing how much a good story can sometimes mirror your life experiences. Not the quidditch, of course—how one sees the world sometimes really is coloured by what ones entertainment and what She gave me opened my eyes in ways that were quite surprising.

What struck me about that universe was the pathos of it all. Over a decade or so, actors turned words on paper into magic on celluloid. They delivered their lives and emoted when they needed with a maturity that made me question whether I had ignored a phenomenon because of my preconceived stupidity. I will forever be thankful for Her kindness, and generosity. Thank Her too, in my own fashion.

The story wasn’t unlike my favourites: Mario Puzo and Frederick Forsythe came readily to mind. Once you strip away the fantasy, the rest remains surprisingly the same: a human story and a frightening attention to detail. I would recommend the Harry Potter Universe to the uninitiated. Any day and twice on Sunday.

It’s easy to be an asshole. All you have to do is turn down the volume of the voice of conscience in your head and you’re good to go. You ignore it long enough, and you’re an A1 asshole. Congratulations!

To be any good at it, ignore all your responsibilities. So what if they think you’re an ungrateful shit? It’s all about you after all, isn’t it? Take what you want without so much as a by your leave and leave them in the dust. Ignore all their good deeds; after all, if they want to be suckers, who are you to stand in their way?

There’s a price to being an asshole. There’s always a price. Someone has to pay the piper, and years of not paying the full rate eventually catch up with you. When you’re staring at the balance sheet, and the ledger shows you with a mobile-phone-number length bank balance, you can bet your ass that the other side of the ledger is full of pain, disappointment and anger—and crushing loneliness.

So be the asshole all you want, but when they plant you, you can carry it to the bank that “they” will bend an elbow down at the local and thank God that you’re not among them. And for those who felt it deeply, you can rest uneasily in the knowledge that they will dance on your place of eternal un-rest. And pee on it!

I am a little under the weather. I thought familiar surroundings would be the cure. My repose remains disturbed. It must be the negative energy. That is the only explanation. Six days of bullying and shouting have taken a toll. It comes as quite a shock to discover that petty irritations have the capacity to put my back up.

Only one thing kept me from completely blowing my stack: Her. She is without a doubt the only tonic I need. She sends these random messages that in any other context would be wildly misunderstood, but to me, shine as brightly as 24k in the noonday sun and make me smile.

She offers the promise of more—sometimes She does so in very undeserving ways and I am at sea as to what to do, sometimes. She is the answer when I wake, and She is the answer when I retire, and in-between She is the North Star that leads the way to psychiatric peace. She is, in short, The One.

I heard a sad story the other day. Someone had bought an iPhone 6. It fell and was seriously damaged. Her friends had a moment of Schadenfreude at her expense. She was distraught. What was sad about it is that she couldn’t see the point of letting the device go. She has the wherewithal to buy another one, but she was moody and unfriendly all day because her phone “died.”

We love things these days, rather than what the things allow us to do or feel. Things have the capacity to sadden us, or make us happy. That is not normal.

Yet it is what we have been programmed to feel, love for things rather than people or feelings and experiences. Things have the capacity to make or ruin our day.

I’m staring at the detritus of my life. Things are scattered on my floor and I feel no attachment for them. My DVD player, with the 7.1 surround sound system, is broken, but it means nothing to me. For sure I expended valuable treasure for these things, yet they pale in comparison to that day She and I had coffee in that dingy café in town, or the first time I got Sweet Potato Project to do 110kph on the Momabasa Highway.

I have had many things in my life. Some I cared for deeply, but I never loved them, even the special ones like that brown silk shirt my mother got me before I went to India that was ruined by a dollop of oily masala sauce at the Baghdad Café in Mumbai. I loved the experience of the masala than I did the shirt.

I can’t persuade you to not get emotionally invested in your things. But I can ask you to put it all in perspective. Things will never love you back.