The black room has come back to me. It has stood strong, resisting the sunshine attacks of the outside world. All the days that I document, on the bright mental calendar or in exasperated word documents somewhere, are all rolling into one.

The blue and white checkered bed-sheet is pulled up all the way to my chin and the thought bubbles spew out of me, out of my ears in a hot, fiery mess. In the darkness, the black room glows green. It moves in and out, pulsating, until I shut my eyes and will it to stop.

The days are here again, when I find myself hiding somewhere in the depths of my bed. In the mornings when the alarm rings, I cringe like I have been stung.

There is a delectable smell of a plot, of words that will soon consume me, of ideas that will probably influence my writing, my thinking for the days ahead. In the hall with a high ceiling and noisy fans, we take in this smell, aisle after aisle. We pick up books and take in the crammed black and white lines. In that hall, we are once again overcome by that dear feeling of mild thrill and a lot of satisfaction.

I imagine myself lying in such a place, with my eyes only half open and the tube-lights turned off. I think of the books, light up only with a small, yellow bulb somewhere, alive and breathing. I imagine the place so empty, with all the good people gone, that I can hear myself breathe. I imagine just staying that way, for hours and hours, with all the books in my reach.

You’ll be there, somewhere far away, walking around, talking to yourself. You’ll hold a book and think aloud about another book by the same author. I’ll hear your umbrella clapping against the dusty stone floor.

I’ll lie there, waiting for your footsteps to come closer, waiting for you to tell me what books you deem worthy of your collection.

In this dark hall of my imagination, I am at peace.

Bombay Acting Company.

The beggar children flocked at our car window. They pressed their foreheads on the glass; greasy heart shaped marks dotting our view. We ignored them the best we could, pretending to adjust the knobs of the music system. They kept knocking away. Tap tap tap, like horse hooves, just not as poetic.

Finally, we rolled down one window and gave the youngest one a chocolate. He shook his head. He pointed to my handbag and said, “Paisa” I began to roll the window up again but he put his hand in the way, daring me to slam it shut at the cost of hurting him. “Remove your hand!” I said in Hindi, my voice rising with irritation. He shook his head and gave a pitiable look.

His friends patted his head. A tearful sister pointed to a bandaged section of his head. The white gauze was leaking yellow gunk. I was pretty sure that it was fake but I didn’t know how to convey that. I also wondered, at some level, that if he had actually been hit by some drunk man on the streets.

The signal turned green and we began to drive. The kid with the yellow head was left behind, along with the others, looking peeved off, but nothing more. A few lanes down, another set of kids papered the outsides of the car with their hands and faces. They pulled out a baby from somewhere, showing us a tattered, bloody looking plaster covering one arm.

The baby, far too young to be trained to act, was babbling away and laughing.

The seasons are shifting around us. The umbrellas are flaring up all around, rudely woken up for their catnaps.

The people are all hidden behind their rubber masks and rain caps. Their trouser bottoms drag across the ground, clinging to the mulch. Their angry faces glisten in the rain, as they stand begging the auto drivers to take them home. They trudge home, angry and helpless, only to come back the next day.

The people, who were whining about the lack of rain, are now whining about their damp denims.

At nights, the city sleeps fitfully. It dreams of delayed trains and persistent coughs.

Ordinary.

In a world of verse, where lonely people are cycling past me, I am alone.

I am alone with my prose. I am alone with my repetitive thoughts and trite words. I have nothing new to say. I have nothing that you haven’t already heard before a hundred times. In my black room, I have circular narratives that bring me where I started. There isn’t depression or glee, there isn’t anything extreme. I am alone with my mediocre, lack-lustre plots.

In the nights, I fall asleep earlier than everyone else. I think of all the things around me. I think of all the people. I think of their stories. I think of their paint speckled hands and their whip like wit. I think of who they are, thin and long haired or small and poetic. I think of all this. Then I don’t think anymore.

In the whole place, with its wide eyed wonder and fickle drama, I am standing here by myself, watching the magic fold and unfold. And fold and unfold.

The Sunday evening was lost somewhere between having hot tea spilled on my foot at a coffee shop and eating food that made us instantly drowsy.

In the cab, all of us were silent. The green signal lights looked very lightening like through my half shut eyes. The jagged fluorescent lines traveled across the smoke into the trees. The people around us spoke loudly and cheerfully. I remember shutting my eyes, amidst all the chattering and car honks, wishing to fall asleep for a long, long time.

The most depressing part of the week now surrounds me, while I try and find things to distract myself. The Monday morning blues never spare me, but somehow they also keep getting more difficult to handle with every passing week.

It's beginning to rain outside. My room is dark and soon enough I will be asleep. I know I have said this before, but some days I am the happiest when I am asleep. 

Oh emote.

My emoticons are all running amok, making dashes to cover up my lack of enthusiasm and my abrupt conversations.

My colons and brackets hug each other and sometimes turn their backs, offering my generous appreciation or intense grief over something that doesn't even affect me. The semi colons giggle and  supposedly wink at something cheeky, that is almost always more crude than I'd prefer

While I have never stuck out my tongue in real life, my texts are crowded with my amusement. And I blandly fake confusion, just so that I can buy time to come with a diplomatic reply.

In the phony world of air kisses, mine comes from an asterix.

At the bottom of the bottle, we found our legs morphing into one another and the walls closing in on us. The floor was damp and the plastic glasses rolled around merrily.

The little green light in the room changed us. We became people from a different world, from a parallel reality, if only for a little while. The speakers, with angry wires snaking from there, played us songs that now laze around in my mind becoming witnesses to interesting memories.

Eleanor Rigby is one such song.

In the silence between two songs, we waited and watched the energy within the room rise and fall. I fell into a short, deep sleep only to wake up feeling like the world was mine to conquer and that nothing was unfathomable.

The sky began to turn pink, and the crows began to chatter. The room became comfortably quiet and we slept, gingerly walking into our comfort zones. 

In the morning, the room was just a room. And we went back to being ourselves. 

There was death in the house on the hill and we had covered the tears and intense grief. We did everything we could to build it up to that point, with the torrid love affair between the man and the maid. That was naturally melodramatic enough for our tastes. We pulled all sorts of cards of the man excluding his obdurate son from his will but promising the maid both the house and the rifle on the wall.

It had it all. It had the maid being overcome by greed and then using the rifle to finish the man, on a night with too much liquor. We then had her freezing where she was, realizing how money had made her a monster and then breaking down on the man’s dead body, with the bullet making little bloody marks on her face.

Then we looked at it and then we threw it in a bin where the rest of our stale ideas were making merry.

We turned off the TV and went to wash out brains with soap and diluted rum.

The wind blew us away and threw us off a little. We were thrown backwards on the street, along the sea, past all the honking cars and expensive people. We were pushed back into a time, a couple of years ago, when we were regulars here, with our evening affection and our untold stories.

The street stopped in its tracks and the people went away. The words and thoughts from all those years that occurred there came back in a flood and surrounded us. We stood there, a large umbrella above us, reaching out gingerly to watery tales that we once shared. The flood never went away.

The sea was calm and the sky was orange, an unwavering aspect of all my good memories. The objects from back then came riding along around me – a pair of slippers, a blue toy, a paper napkin with my name on it.

After a while, we walked back through the flood. The wind had died down. The people begin to appear from behind corners, walking with determination that suggested that they never went away. They didn’t notice the flood, they moved quickly, their tired faces lacking any emotion.

We had dinner and left, talking and laughing. It was then that I realized that the flood was gone. It will be back though, swelling with freshly made memories.

My room is black.

It’s black like the bottomless pit we stared into on some childhood trek. It’s dark like the ocean, in the sliver of time between sunset and the street lights coming on.

The walls are warm and dusty. The bed is full of the remnants of bad dreams. It’s all pretentious but real at the same time. The cupboards are all the same colour and the pillowcases smell of mothballs. The wooden cupboard has all my books peeking out through the glass.

Somewhere, under the pillows, my phone stays hidden, quivering with the suspense of an SMS from someone who remembers me but has the good sense to not call.

The black rooms moves swiftly around me. It’s like being inside a washing machine – with the swirling water and the detergent. The detergent is making my eyes water.

My room wasn’t always black. Last week, it was a lemon yellow. Black is definitely preferred. It gives me more space to think, in the make believe sleepy darkness.

Doom. Impending doom.

It's filling up spaces around me. And quicker than you can imagine. In the mornings, it presses down on me. It smothers me like a TV show murderer. In the nights, it lies down next to me and slowly begins to jab fingers into my back as I try and sleep.

It follows me around like a jilted lover and when I scream, noiselessly, on trains or elevators, it looks shocked that I have such a negative reaction.

In bus queues and cafeterias, it presents me with people I'd rather not meet. People with plans. People who have no idea for whose team they're batting, but they play well anyway. Because, you know, just in case.

My doom is a contradiction. It's shapeless yet concrete and inadvertent yet direct.
On empty days, it sits on my back - like that dreaded monkey.

Noon.

The city is napping. The roads are empty and the shops have shutters pulled half way and the sleeping feet of the owners are seen. Their blue-and-white chappals stick out of their feet, exposing muddy soles.

The auto makes a clacking sound, as it runs on the wet street. The auto driver is humming some song. I get out to buy some food, and he makes exasperated sounds on having been made to wait. When I come back, with a bag full of plastic food packets, he is gone. I sit and wait for him, while he smokes not far from where I am.

The food bag eventually gets wet, because the rains like most other unpleasant things, creep up on you at the worst possible time. Exactly when I leave the auto, it rains in a frenzy. My hair sticks to the back of my head and the bag of food cannot be protected beyond a point.

I walk into the building, dodging flyaway cricket balls, and reach where I have to, not as displeased as I thought I'd be.

De-clutter

The mind now looks like the big plastic barrels at sales, where clothes are falling out – but the good stuff is usually hidden. One has to brave through layers of ugly, frilly dresses and cast them aside to finally find something that is pretty and well fitted.

I walk through my mental bylanes for a while, with a rake in my hand and a waste paper basket under the other. I poke and prod at potential waste, collecting crumbling debris and stale things. It’s confusing in here – some parts are chaotic with loud thumping sounds, some are deathly quiet. I am not sure which is more tedious.

I am moving slowly through untouched memories that have a thin layer of dust. I am not sure whether they deserve any jabs with my rake; lest I throw open a trunk of reptilian things that coil themselves around me. I try and find ways to gauge whether the contents are pleasant or otherwise, but that can’t be concluded. Eventually, I spend an hour sitting cross legged on the quivering floor, segregating this little capsules of emotion, all while holding my breath.

I look at a paper carton which looks like a collage of people and almost instantly I take it and tape it shut. It isn’t just anger. It’s also regret. The box has met its end.

By the end of my little journey, I am dragging with me not just the rake and the garbage bin, but also the cartons and balled up remnants of the times gone by that deserve no emotional space.
I throw them all away, in a grand sweeping action, from the top of the world.

I then walk back, dusting my hands. It’s been a good day.

While everyone sleeps, you stay up. You sit with your back against the wall and with your head in your hands. The room is dark, barring the light from the computer screen.

A hundred thoughts try and sell you the idea of sleeping. The bed covers are all balled up at your feet and suddenly you feel the need to draw them close, as the temperature drops. You close your eyes and think. You think as hard as possible to come up with something interesting, something pleasantly absurd, and something brilliant to write about. You read a few things and you’re momentarily inspired, but that fizzles off with the clawing sleepy feeling that now has made some room inside of your head. The idea of working the next day, in a sleep deprived state, isn’t too pleasant either.

You contemplate writing something mediocre. Nobody cares, you think. You convince yourself that you will write something path-breaking soon enough to wipe out the memory of the second-rate piece you’re about to write.

This thought cheers you up for a minute, because this means you can write something and just turn it in, and then crawl into bed.

You write a few lines, feeling strangely liberated because you aren’t erasing them every two minutes. You don’t bother if they’re well written. You don’t bother about anything.

Then, suddenly it hits you and you are taken up with guilt. You write for yourself. Perhaps the people out there will scoff now at your bad writing and then eat their words with your masterpiece, but you’ll always know that you gave up on working your best at something because you were sleepy. You will not be able to shield yourself from yourself.

Then, you write and erase and repeat the procedure till you write something you’re pleased with. It isn’t a masterpiece perhaps, but you know you aren’t let down.

The next morning you don’t even realize that you have slept only for two hours.

Shuttling.

It's a stuffy jeep like vehicle that carts employees from one branch office to another. I am sitting in it now, with the side of my head pressed against the warm glass of the window.

The man next to me has his hands clasped together in prayer. This is confusing me because the journey isn't dangerous or anything. He then looks up at me and looks away, as though he read my thoughts and couldn't care less about my presence.

The vehicle is playing folk songs mainly about miracles and divine interventions. The rearview mirror supports a hanging, and alive looking, Buddha figurine. It sways back and forth, and jumps every now and then at a pot hole. It's ever smiling, of course, through smooth and bumpy rides.

The glass gets fogged, as it rains, and everything looks suddenly a lot less irritable on the outside. The insides, mildly devout but admittedly agreeable, fall into a comfortable lull.

I am waiting.

My mind is determined to create depressing hypothetical plots, in a grossly misguided attempt in trying to make me feel better. 

I am not sure how people without phones functioned. Did they live in an optimistic world where they assumed that everyone they knew was perfectly okay? Did they never worry that because they haven't spoken to someone they could have fallen in a ditch or eaten by a wild animal?

I am worrier. 

Often, I find myself not worrying about anything and then I get worried about that.

Free!

Tomorrow, as the country will be draped in saffron and green and little children will run around holding little paper flags, we will roll over and be grateful for the holiday. And grateful for freedom of course.

The people here have been chirpier and gleeful. They looked thrilled yesterday, even though it was a Monday. Today, the cafeteria had an Independence Day special menu which involved tri-coloured food – most of which gave me a bad throat from the artificial food colouring. The walls of the cafeteria were plastered with tiny flags which, because of the table fans and AC vents, made a harsh flapping sound. The people who served us food were wearing little badges saying “I love India.”

After lunch, when we stepped out, they handed us little fliers about the country’s independence movement. The little write up was extracted from some History text book. They said “Happy Independence Day” to us, in a practised, bored voice.

The holiday feeling is delicious, like two Sundays in a week. You know, because we don’t get Saturdays off. This is the closest we’ll come to experiencing a 5 day week.

Sunlight falls on the life size clock. A girl stands in the centre, facing the curvaceous 12, holding long stemmed roses. She is wearing a red and white dress. The hands of the clock come together in front of her, like an arrow coming out of her small bleeding heart.

The hands move around her. She feels important for a brief while but gets used to it soon enough. She looks around her, at the hands and the harsh afternoon sun, and then she waits. Her hair moves in wave like ripples. She appears to be moving with time. She looks to her right now. Her eyes fill with liquid anxiety and her hands hold on to the roses with an iron like grip.

The sun walks away, in the evening calm, without so much as a second glance at her. The anger has seeped out of her in small dark patches on her back and in streaks across her face. She has her back to the start of her day, her life has literally turned around.

The darkness covers the clock and time seems to stop, even though we know it never really does.

She’s gone, while the hands move around dutifully, working hard to draw the day to an end. The crumpled roses lie in a heap where she once stood, smelling of discarded love.

You can never win with Sundays.

If you're home, by the time evening comes around, the words and pictures on your laptop screen all blur into one depressing tangle. Then, your parents mock you about having no social life. Then you watch the evening grow darker and all the thoughts about Mondays and the future that you've ignored all day come and dance around you.

If you step out, you have to battle the whole city to even get to some place. It's like hundreds of people and hundreds of cars collaborate to make as much noise as is possible. Then while you put up a brave front with the traffic, it begins to pour and before you know it, you're covered with dark rain water and muck. Somewhere along the evening, the folks call you and ask you to come back early and yell about how you're never home, just for good measure.

Once you do get home, you realise that the Sunday is over and the next Sunday seems really far away. Then you look forward to it anyway, even though this one was just about average.

We stood there and shared a moment.

One which was perfect enough to not want to change, yet not so perfect that you'd be afraid that you'd ruin it. Perfection, here, wasn't an absolute.

I remember what you said to me and I remember the tone of your voice. 

Many years from now, the words will fade. In the scratchy taped version in my head, your lips will form soundless words. I will, even then, remember the look on your face and the funny, fluttery feeling that I felt somewhere at the bottom of my stomach.

That little patch of time was swathed in layers and layers of emotion. I knew there were all sorts of feelings - awe, unbelievable happiness and the tingling surprise.

There was also some variant of fear; that I would never ever witness something so special ever again. 

Almost-classy Friday nights.

Two eggs were cracked on the counter and the cracks were peered at.

While the delicious liquid yellow spread itself comfortably on the pan, we drank wine from paper glasses. We clinked the paper cups, without the sound of course, and said Cheers because that’s what we do.

We put in all sorts of things, because you know, we could. There was the brown onions and blue cheese. There were also leftover mushrooms from last night’s pasta. Someone said that the eggs wouldn’t be enough so we cheerfully dropped in two more, and a mass of sunshine hit the vegetables.

In the drawer next to the spoons, there were atleast a dozen packets of chilli flakes because they come free with pizzas and no one in the right mind throws away free stuff. We put that in, along with some free oregano, and cocked our heads and stuck our pinkies out, in a pretentious manner.

We argued noisily over whether the eggs were cooked or not. One of us, with little patience for loud voices and pointless suggestions, got mad and scrambled the eggs with a wooden spoon to shut the rest of us up.

They were little shreds of joy on our plates of course. We consumed them, with brown bread, all while discussing larger issues that affect our generation. It was all very grown up.

Insincere words have a lot of potential of making stomachs turn.

People die. They go away, leaving behind a bunch of sobbing people who mourn and wear black and white clothes depending on their personal preference. Some people write longwinded obituaries, about how their lives will never be the same.

Some dramatic members of the society beat their chests and scream out things about how God has been unkind to them. Some learned men repeat over and over again about a Divine Plan and how He calls his loved ones to be with him.

Insincere words reduce everything to half its worth. They make people hold their breath, like one does when walking past the garbage truck.

The dying world doesn’t need yet another fake mourner who rehearsed his grief while he put on his tie.

Then there are days when you keep your head low and work all day and when you look up, the sun is setting and the sky is glowing with the dying light.

Long days are vaguely satisfying, because  although things don’t necessarily work out but you feel like if you’ve worked all day, something is bound to come out of it. The paper cup with my tea from earlier today has gone limp, the sides are soggy and a thin, unpleasant film has formed over the liquid. It sat there all day, while I typed away furiously or ran across the floor looking for print-outs or paper clips.

Right now, I have ten minutes before something else comes up and demands a thousand word report off me. There is an interesting rhythm  of the people around me shutting their things or locking drawers. There is an amusing enthusiasm at the thought of the day coming to an end. People are looking cheerful, making small talk about small things.

The outside world, atleast from where I can see it, is dark and fierce despite its determined glow. The street lights are beginning to come on and I can imagine the elevators beginning to get crowded with people attempting to put on their raincoats or find their umbrellas.

Then they will step out, while I try and look intelligent  in some meeting, with their fancy shoes splattering water on others like them.

Writing about not being able to write.

The table is full of blank sheets of paper. They are just sitting there, looking all nonchalant, whereas in reality they would very much like me to ink them with all that I have to say. I am stuck in this situation more often than I’d like. Sometimes, it’s Word Docs. The cursor keeps blinking back at me, while I shuffle around with font and colour, only buying time until I pull myself together to write something.

A friend of mine used to look at objects to get her to start writing. She’d look at hats and ladles and shoes with broken heels in order to write tales about them. Someone else I knew would listen to music relentlessly until he stumbled upon a word, an emotion, a note that compelled him to spew out a masterpiece.

I try all of these. It really isn’t something that you can learn off someone. It’s not something you can hammer into shape. I try writing disconnected words hoping to weave a story. Some days, I have stories, some days I have a heap of pretentious gibberish that mean nothing to no one.
Then, when I don’t know what to say, I manipulate the conversation to a point where I am bursting with something to put forth.

The cursor then starts flailing, a seizure of sorts, trying to hold all these runaway thoughts on a leash.

The long passageways are stacked with fresh paper and toner. They smell of something queer, like ink or perhaps glue. The people who work in there wear paper caps and aprons that have long since been stained. They go up and down ladders with catlike agility, removing some things and re-arranging others.

The main photocopying machine at the far end of the passage sputters and coughs all day long. Essays and reports and everything else that someone deemed worthy of having in black and white spills out onto the tray, taking birth into a careless world. One where we fell trees so that we may able to read our horoscopes in the trains on our way home, only to discard the print once we reach home.

There are several such photocopying machines, dotting the passageway. They make lesser noise but guzzle as much ink. The men and women who handle them lose count of the number of paper reams they tear open to feed the hungry stomach of this angry looking apparatus. They sit hunched over tiny tables alongside, punching uniform holes through formidable stacks of paper, to bind them eventually, sponging off the papers the Chemistry thesis that leaks off or the novel that some kid is a little too proud of having written.

They look at the calendar hanging on the wall often and smirk knowing that come April, all this paper will be lining someone’s garbage bin or covering someone’s greasy sandwich.

Grumpy fragments.

It's raining. Everything outside seems darker than it possibly is.

I am on my bed with the laptop on my stomach, watching stuff and willing the internet speed to go up. It's a lazy afternoon - something I look forward to all week and when it actually comes around I don't know what to do with myself after a point.

There were several attempts at writing, but everything sounded either insincere or unbearably trite. I looked through old things, mails and writing pieces that could perhaps inspire me into writing something that wouldn't make me gag. Instead, I stumbled upon all the college memories that made me more wistful than I'd expect to be.

It's the monsoons. They make me gloomy.

Blueberry yogurt is delicious but that's just a blatant effort to change the subject.

Saturday glee.

There was a chocolate cage on a plate today. We broke it down, with affection and a wee bit of a destructive feeling. There was ice-cream in an edible tray that tasted of honey and cinnamon. We ate our way through it to reach the end, with a little too much determination for a dessert.

We giggled a little, and held out our chocolate smeared hands. The girl, with arms deliciously tanned from her recent adventures, told me stories that made me laugh and feel a happy warmth on the inside. Stories of camels and sprightly scarves that shone in the sun and forts that were so majestic that no photograph, however well shot, would do their grandeur justice.

The weather was very genial when we walked out; the wind turning our hair into a playful mess. We took a whirlwind cab ride and laughed and chattered about inane but deeply interesting things.

The afternoon stopped by, to look at our child-like excitement amidst the  traffic.

The picnic wasn’t going well. They made the children, all twenty nine of them; stand in a single file, their arms crossed across their chests. This was because, in the absence of this instruction, the kids would use their hands to pull hair and yank arms, none of which was acceptable. Now, even though they kept chattering, at least they weren’t causing each other any bodily harm.

The thirtieth kid was missing. They last saw him walking around by himself near the pond, possibly looking at ducks. The teachers assumed the worst. That he had stolen everyone’s cupcakes and was sitting somewhere behind a rock consuming it. He could also have drowned, but when it came to dealing with a class of five year olds that could wail as loudly as church gongs with their daily dose of sugar gone, it was shamefully confusing as to which was tougher to deal with.

The teachers jogged in different directions calling out his name, while one young teacher, who was interning with the school, stood with the kids asking them to remain silent. They didn’t listen to her and instead starting emitting a variety of animal sounds, calling out to their lost animal friend who could have been anything from a hyena to an injured dog.

They didn’t find him near the ducks and the pond seemed tranquil, leading them to believe that there was no instance of a floating child. They didn’t see him near the animal cages and the monkeys looked too pleased to have been recently poked at by a child. They finally went over to the play area but the swings looked untouched and the see-saw had one end wedged into the mud. They walked back, patting their forehead sweat with polka-dotted handkerchiefs, wondering whether they should alert the parents or the park authorities.

The screaming of the children suddenly went up several notches and the teachers jogged over to see the lost kid appear from behind the trees, looking rather peaceful. The intern teacher ran over in anger and dragged him, holding his shoulder in a steel grip. The kid, ignoring the act of rage, walked over to the kids and stood at the end of the file, as he would have had he not been lost. The teachers shook him and tried to ask him where he was but he froze and refused to answer.

They found him many years later, sitting alone at home, his head hidden behind a laptop and his house unvisited by friends and family. He looked at ease, just as he had the day at the picnic when he snuck away from his classmates so that he could go to a place where he wasn’t constantly spoken to.

Daze.

There is a sheath of lethargy pulling over the entire day. I have stared at the computer and the open Word Doc for an hour or so, all while a distant marching band tune filled my head. Not in a determined sort of way, but more in a vague manner – as if I am standing at the window of a tall building and far away I can see the marching band.

The pins on my soft-board, in all their annoyingly bright colours, have moved themselves around to form lines and circles to amuse me. Perhaps, I moved them myself but it’s hard to tell. It’s as though my hands belong to someone else and I am watching them move with the same intrigue as you’d bestow on a talking bird. The lists on the board are precise, all written out in my unwavering handwriting. I seem to have lost the motivation towards these tasks that I possibly felt when I made those lists. I now disregard their presence with great ease.

My phone rings several times. The sound is harsh and alien. I don’t answer it because that will require speaking with people and I can’t trust my foggy mind to formulate acceptable responses. I continue to stare at the computer and write disconnected lines – Green feet at the museum, Herring and canned juice.

I skip lunch and drink lots of water instead. It makes my stomach feel like it’s floating away, like a piece of shiny plastic caught in the waves. If I close my eyes, I am sure I’ll see the ocean and the gurgling sound it makes.

The day is dark now, but hardly in a frightening way. I am pleased with this place, where there isn’t too much light but there is lots of room to mentally stretch.

The train passes everything by – the playground with enthusiastic footballers, the wall of leaves, and the temple with pink and purple tiles. The people in the buildings alongside look at the train with mildly annoyed expressions. They see hundreds of trains everyday and their sleep is disrupted by the noise. They stand there, some brushing their teeth, looking back at the train people who look at them.

The temple goers queue up in devotion, not very far away, waiting their turn to hit the gong, imagining the sound of clanging metal to be holy in some way. They carry flowers and coconuts and touch their foreheads to the marble platform where their God sits. In my head, it’s unhygienic because the temple looks unwashed and grimy, but maybe the dirt vanishes as they approach, such is their faith.

The women in the smaller houses lining the tracks bend over the charred pots, heating water or rice or some such. Muslin cloths cover their fresh washed hair. They appear oblivious to the sound and the dust the train kicks up. Some of them carry back buckets, which had been left out overnight to collect rain water. They observe the devotees and talk amongst themselves. I am unsure of what they say; whether their whispered discussions are lined with envy or disdain.

The train stops between two stations and we see a line of people, sitting with their backs to us. Plastic buckets are placed next to each of them, in some kind of a pre-planned event with props. The city is one big toilet – it opens up its spaces for those in need and it rains on them should they run out of water.

As the train moves out of yet another station, we see people with plastic baskets tied to their backs, plucking bunches of green leaves from the patches that grow wildly near the tracks. The baskets are already filled with other such bunches. It’s spinach, which we’ll buy later in the day at a nearby market for 20 rupees.