Bombay’s sorry excuse for an attempt at winter can be tasted in the early morning air.

It gets the back of your throat, a little at first and then all of a sudden when you aren’t expecting it. If you’re jogging, it cuts at your eyes. Your palms continue to sweat but it’s a cold sweat this time, like there’s something really bothering you. The trees drop leaves on you, shedding their old skins in the novelty of a breeze. The cars that pass you by have their windows rolled down and you hear dawn music instead of the noiseless rattle of air-conditioning. The old homeless section of people stand around wrapped in tearing sheets, rubbing their hands together. Most people are still asleep, oblivious to what the weather is like at ungodly hours like this one.

After you’ve jogged for a while, you realize that the brief period of the absence of humidity has passed. Your face feels like it’s burning and the day is beginning to break. The streaming yellow sunlight begins to peep and the breeze leaves in silence, like a shamed lover. The morning spell, like a lot of things that feel too good to be true, remains a secret of sorts.

The children look tiny, like ants in a sugar heap, from where I am standing. They appear to be faltering from what I imagine is the weight of their school bags. The children begin to walk away, behind trees and buildings.

The sky is darkening above them, and me. It might rain; a humid October shower that displeases more than it relieves.

I am still at work, inside a cold building where the coffee is foul. My fingers are icy and numb. It’s like being in a different country. My fingers are punching away at the keyboard, hoping to find some strange comfort from the warmth. The work keeps getting complicated and long winded.

It’s difficult to tell after a point what exactly it is that I am feeling. I have ruled out the obvious –hunger and sleep. The subtle ones aren’t quite sticking either, no stress or depression or disease.

It’s a negative feeling. Like how you feel when you look out of the window and the children have disappeared and the animals have slept and all you see is darkness; bottomless and thick.

The Monday has taken me apart.

It has thrown at me tasks that I was meant to do many days ago, but got buried under other tasks. Like the monster that it’s meant to me, it has blindsided me in meetings with questions that I didn’t expect. In the quiet lunch hour, I stayed back to finish work that suddenly is far more frightful than it seemed last week while I procrastinated. The table is cowering under a laptop that feels like it’s burning up and tottering piles of documents that appear to be conspiring to kill me or atleast pounce on me the next chance they get.

It isn’t ending, this Monday. It’s just stretching into the evening, oblivious to tired minds and pleading faces. The five days ahead, and I have no idea where they’ll take me, seem like a time so long that it’s hard to imagine the other side.

After you discount the drama, what remains is still pretty scary.

Pune made me happy. The roads were green and lined with quaint houses. The food was great and it was a nice warm feeling driving across dark streets while peering out of the car into the passing trees.

More than that, it makes me want to come back, flop on a bean bag and read for many hours while having apple juice.

Few feelings are as delicious as the one that comes with relaxed Sunday mornings.

There is gloom painted on the walls, but only because that’s how everyone likes it.

When the sun goes down, behind a faraway building, we don’t bother to turn the lights on. In the blue, harsh TV screen, our faces artificially light up. Our emotions are suddenly in the limelight.

The joke’s on everyone else, as they stare back at our deadpan faces.

In the night, we lie on the floor, not next to each other, but close enough. There is no order or disorder. There needn’t be. Some things come with their own, unspecified rules.

The walls smile a little in the morning despite themselves. The gloom takes a short nap in the daytime.

Friday dreams.

The man in my dream has an acquired egg. He smirks when we correct his English. “I meant an acquired egg, like acquired taste. Not that I have acquired an egg.” He tells us in a tone you use to talk to a stubborn five year old. We ask him what that means, because it sounds like a lot of fluff.

He ignores our question. He holds the egg up in the air. It is pale blue, like the clear sky. I reach out to touch it, but he doesn’t let me.

“He took a fairy tale and ran with it.” Someone tells me. He hears that and begins to run.

Run with it. Run with it. Run with it.

We run after him because if at all acquired eggs are a potential sensation, I’d like to be a part of this experience. He doesn’t stop until we reach a playground with doctors. It’s some kind of a medical camp with Ferris wheels.

My sister is there. She is wearing a coat and a straw hat. She looks at the acquired egg and says, “Please don’t touch that. There is Tuberculosis Bacillus everywhere.”

Then there is darkness.

The people here are looking like Christmas trees. There are post-festival celebrations and everyone possibly got hit by a glitter gun on their way here. Our desks are lined with marigold flowers which are crumbling and making an orange-yellow mess on my clothes.

One such Christmas tree wrapped in gold brocade came by to invite me for some “fun time” in the cafeteria. I wasn’t fooled by the loose use of the word fun. I said I’d be there just to get out of any conversation but the tree kept looking at me with big, unblinking eyes. I started to smile but then it dawned on me that there were some monetary requests coming my way. “Have you made your contribution for the fun event?” The tree asked me; her tone lacked cheer all of a sudden. “No, I didn’t know it was happening today.” She said “200 rupees” as a passing remark and walked away.

I got called in for a meeting and was mercifully spared of what I hear was “lots and lots of enjoyable items” Then I spent the rest of the day telling people the specifics of the meeting, hoping to convince them that there really was one. Turns out the tree had told everyone that it was because I didn’t want to spend money. While it wasn’t completely untrue, I didn’t want to deal with any more sparkling people who are known to pursue a topic till tears run down your guilt ridden cheeks.

Her eyes are lined in silver and when she shuts them, as though contemplating something with her entire being, sparkling dust falls on to her cheeks.

She's beautiful; the colour of coffee. Her whole face smiles. Her hair falls to her waist, in a long tumbling mess. She sits cross legged and completely at ease, like this is exactly where she'd like to be.

The dark porch behind the house lights up when she tells her stories. Her hands bundled in red gloves come together and move away in animation, like a choreography that you worry will be over too quickly.

There is so much about her that remains unsaid. She holds your attention in the palm of her hand, like she's holding something precious but extremely fragile. She doesn't let it go, and probably never will.

Her presence remains even after she's left. Her smell, that of honey, lingers on the porch until daybreak.
She's beautiful, she is.

There’s wisdom at the bottom of a ceramic mug full of green tea.

Green tea, like a lot of other healthy things, isn’t particularly enjoyable. But it provides room to think about life, while you concentrate on ignoring the hot, bitter liquid.

There was some strange variant of envy surging along earlier. It was viscous and leaf coloured and unpleasant overall. I watched it come along and consume me, even though it was pretty far away. I watched it occupy the insides of my head. I grimaced and tried to shake it away but it stayed on. I tried writing about it and breaking it down into small, palatable bits. But it followed to logic and refused to abide by any rules. It just continued to gush around, getting angrier and thicker.

It was time more than a healthy beverage, but that’s too hackneyed for us to allow into our acceptance. At the end of the day, while emptying the contents of the mug into my gut, I realized that my head felt lighter and the swishing sound was gone. I had grown out of it and that too without too much specific effort.

There’s this feeling of letting things go. It’s really hard to do but the after effects are delectable.

The sliver of the sky that I can see from my bed is now full of birds.
Not just the everyday variety but some pretty colourful ones. If I was driven enough, I'd get out the set of binoculars that my parents bought a while ago but I am not.

I have been lying here long enough to have seen the lemon yellow sky turn pink. I have lost count of the number of trashy videos I have watched to milk the free Sunday download scheme. My back has fallen asleep from having slept so long.

My Sunday thoughts are disconnected.
I'll probably lie here until I doze of again, but not before I have whined about the onset of the Monday blues.

My dreams are often bathed in blue.

They involve drug lords getting attacked my paper birds. The paper birds unfold a message which very often includes death in a gruesome fashion. Sometimes, they are a whirlwind train journey through many snapshots. The faces that flash are attached to bodies that aren't their own. They tell tales with not too much sound; tales that are far more interesting than their non-dream existence. 

They ripple along with the slightest sound and melt into completely different worlds. It's like seeing something through a coloured lens. It's like watching something thrilling, something that you want to be a part of so much, that it's frightening. 

The blue light fades away in the mornings taking with it the stories and the parallel lives. The things and the people pack up in loud silence, like the actors after a heart stopping play. 

The chic beggar has dark streaks in her hair. The exact shade is hard to ascertain but I would go with a mix between mocha and mud red. The hair is held back with a fraying red ribbon; a more laid-back version of the kind that is wrapped around cheery gifts. Her face is expressionless, but her eyes leak condescension – it runs down her face is a gummy mess.

Her skirt has little bells at the hem, but they don’t make any sounds. Her shirt is tied in a loose knot at her midriff, it’s all very casual. Silver bangles snake around her dry arms. When she raises her hand to beg, the bangles all fall to her elbow in a cowering heap. She says something under her breath but I don’t hear it. Finally, she points to her feet. Her left foot is covered in a yellowing bandage.

I don’t see the wound though and either way I am sure it’s fake. What I do see is the tattoo above the bandage. It’s a fish jumping towards her knee. It’s jumping towards another fish which is half hidden under the edge of her skirt. I look back at her and she smirks.

I remove a five rupee coin to hand to her but she walks away, brushing me off like I am a pesky kid. I sit back, still holding the damp coin, unsure what I feel about the whole thing.

My sun was purple today.

It threw some of its grape toned light on my arm making it fascinating and disturbing at once. I threw my head back and shut my eyes. I kept them shut throughout the ride, watching the things you see only when you aren’t looking.

There were concentric circles in orange with dark streaks, perhaps the berserk sun, and green spots. There were miniature versions of us, blowing soap bubbles at home and playing catch with balding tennis balls. There was a 5 year old me holding up a box of leaking paints.

When I opened my eyes, the green spots stood by me for a bit and then went away. The sun danced around the trees in a morning rush. By the time I got to work, it had snuck behind a cloud.

When I looked down at my arms, they were normal coloured again. For the smallest fraction of a second, I missed the purple.

There is static on the telephone. All the words that we didn’t say are crackling while we breathe on either side. Our stories, both from our days and from elsewhere, unfold while we stand far away from each other tapping our feet against the damp floor.

There is an urgency to narrate the small details – the curly tail of a stray and the sinking feeling at the end of a long meeting. My thoughts tumble out, rushing through a small chute like rainwater. You are making hums of acknowledgment on the other side. You tell me a few tales; ones that I lap up hungrily, so as to miss anything.

Eventually, it’s all been said. There’s the silence that creeps into most things. The silence that is both comforting and terrifying at the same time.

The phone makes a few more sounds; faraway traffic and bubbling pops. The connections threatens to die on us and we hang up. My face stretches into a small smile; even though the conversation has been commonplace.

I dropped my inspiration while walking down a warm street, getting jostled by people who seemed to do it on purpose. It just fell from between my hands and rolled around on the ground, like a bad penny. It finally went through a crack in the street, falling down into a dark endless space.

As the sun rose and hung up right above me, I stood there for a while questioning myself. People walked by, looking like nothing had changed. And it hadn’t for them. But in my head things were different. Suddenly, I felt like someone had carved out a part of my insides and what remained was a bleeding, pulsating void.

My inspiration left me, in an unceremonious fashion and left me to figure out the rest. Had I crawled around on all fours and shouted into the bottomless pit, I knew it wouldn’t come back. I knew it was gone.

I turned my back on a closed chapter and walked away. I think I must have looked normal but I felt a knot forming in my chest. It’s still there. It will continue to exist, becoming tighter and more complicated, until I find what I lost.

It's like sitting inside a tin can. Everyone around me in this bus is making exasperated sounds.

There's a backpack on my lap and a paper bag propped between my feet. The people standing in the aisle are peeping into it.

Someone spilled coffee here. It's the slushy kind that could be mistaken for something you might find in a loo. A child is poking at the mess with the tip of his yellow shoe. Everyone first laughs then groans.

We waddle along, it's like being in a rocking chair, only not as comforting.

There's a curiously deep cut on my finger from chopping a stubborn potato. When I hold it under the tap, the water turns red in silent empathy. I hold it tightly and shut my eyes, because it hurts but worse things happen to people and it seems wrong to wuss out over a cut.

I hold it with all my force, hoping to stop the trickling drops of blood. My finger turns a bright red and then a little blue. I leave it, startled. It drips onto the cutting board and the counter. Soon I go from being in pain to being fascinated by the blood in a confusing way.

My mother puts turmeric on it, because that's the age old technique to stem the blood. I look at it, slightly mangled and a mess of red and yellow. That makes me the most squeamish.

In the night, there's strange pulsation under the band-aid. It's like a living thing with a beating heart, waiting to break out. When I rip the band-aid, it dies down. Then it just lies still, looking like just another commonplace finger, throwing cold blood at my new found fascination. 

Turns out there is also an inauspicious time to die. Should you die in such a time, you cast a mean little cloud of potential death on your surviving family. Nobody wants that. The surviving family then gives in to a few holy (which is just Godspeak for fraudulent) men to help them with this trying time. For a few thousand rupees and an hour an half of chaotic prayers, this cloud is warded off.

Four such brilliant men descended on my home and filled up my living room with the smell of incense sticks and the sound of chants in a language that none of us understood. We wouldn't know what they were saying to begin with, and even if we did I have my doubts about the very point of doing all this. The chants got louder and more fierce and in the end, he walked around my house with a smoking pot shooing away the bad vibes with the same gumption that you would get rid of a rat that's got into your kitchen.
In the end, he asked that we give him extra-sweet tea and food, as a token of our gratitude. You'd think the money was enough.

When I told my friend all this, he said that when his grandfather died, the priest told them that the soul for some godforsaken reason would never find peace in his after-life. But for a small sum of five thousand bucks, not only would the priest buy him peace but also given a written guarantee that he wouldn't be reborn as an insect or a toad or whatever.

There's misguided faith and then  people buying into such phony offers. A bereaved man's expense is the "God"man's income.

We hunt for runaway pieces from the jigsaw puzzle. We look under the table and in the deceptive gaps in the sofa. We looked in our pockets, even.

The dinosaur family was missing half a member. What I would like to imagine was the mother was also missing a tail. They didn't look pleased. I suggested that they would look that way even without the missing half of their offspring. But the other members of the jigsaw solving team were get antsy. We walked around the house looking for the missing cogs in the big machine, but they were remained in hiding.

In the end, we put together another puzzle, Spiderman, this time and everyone had their share of having accomplished something on a very non-productive Saturday. At the bottom of the last chip of the sky behind Spiderman, we found the murky green tail and the grotesque dinosaur feet hiding.
People cheered and sighed with relief. It was all very high strung.

We then drank some warm apple juice. Then we slept, because we had nothing else to do. 

The people from the huts came out after the loud sound. All kinds of heads appeared from behind the blue tarpaulin sheets and the yellowing canvas walls. In the distance, the rail line exploded people. Like worms from under a rock, the tiny specks moved at a dizzying speed.

One of the men from the neighbourhood, who had been squatting near the tracks, looked at where his arm used to be. His blackened face gave away no emotion. He had no emotions. Instead inside him there was just a hollow; a hollow in which he occasionally poured dry rice and country liquor.

Around him, the city bled in the darkness. The cumulative cacophony of everyone’s pain surrounded him. He tried to stand up, but his feet wouldn’t co-operate. A man who had survived the blast, and apparently his cell-phone had too, tried to call for help. He gave up when he realized the lines had jammed, and began using his cell-phone as a torch. The torch bearer walked around trying to do whatever he could, but he kept halting to take deep breaths.

Our man turned to one side and threw up his lunch. The smell of burning flesh and gunpowder was twisting his stomach into a tight, angry knot. When the torch bearer approached him, he called out for help. The torch bearer came and tried to help him stand, but in the push-and-pull of the situation, he fell down into a heap next to the man. He sat there for a bit, with his head tucked between his legs, and sobbed like a child. The man tried to pat his back, but then he realized that he had lost a limb, and hence was now physically incapable of sympathy on his left side.

The police came in, hitting their sticks on the slick ground, because they somehow believed that would help the situation. The ambulances carted people in like packing fruits in a tearing paper bag. The night stood still against the backdrop of grief and anger.

The two men sat next to each other, watching and wondering. The cell phone light died on them soon enough. By the time the police and paramedics found them, they had fallen asleep on each other, like blood brothers.

Write. Delete. Write write. Delete.

Change location. Try the inside of a car as opposed to the windy balcony.

Try looking Inspiration in the eye. Will you write about the boy with the prayer beads? Will you write a moving paragraph about the beggar with leprosy?

Delete delete.

I'll stand in the rain and shut my eyes. Then I'll talk about the surreal feeling. Or maybe the strange feeling. Or maybe some pseudo angst.

The fallen leaves and the sea breeze are both more poetic in my head. On paper, they fall flat and lifeless, like a bad hair day.

Scrap everything and wait for a brilliant idea to hit you.

If it hasn't come to you even an hour later, lather rinse repeat as needed.

Death came in the night, but stood by the door.

He watched her with heavy lidded eyes. I am sure there was a bit of callousness in the stare, but I can only imagine. She didn’t see him, while her gaze remained fixed at a point mid air. A silvery sheath had spread across her eyes over the past few months. Somewhere beneath the sheets, amidst all the layers, her tiny body was disintegrating and crumbling; all in preparation of the journey ahead with the intimidating stranger at the door.

In the early hours of the morning, he walked towards her and sat at her feet. He tapped on them, on her bony ankles, like a harried mother would wake a child. She didn’t respond. He then started to yank at her arms, slowly at first and then with an increasing sense of impatience. She began to gasp, while her children gathered around her. They cried helpless tears, while their mother who was a part of their being, start to flit away.

He took her by the elbow and they walked away. She turned around to look at her people. She saw her wizened self amidst the faces of her children, all distorted with grief.

After having walked a distance with him, she realized that she was young again. Her hair was soft and brown, and her arms felt strong and taut. She also realized, that above all else, she wasn’t scared anymore. The worst was over.

There are rumbling sounds at a distance.

The section of the building that faces the dump yard cracks and crumbles to the street. People crash with it, crying and shouting. Many others peep out and look with a curious glint in their eyes, like they are observing a rare insect or animal. That is the look we imagine, because from where we stand they are just black specks dotting the skyline.

The dying people falling in to the dump-yard, and to their deaths, with distant plops. A few survive and wail through bloody mouths and cracked bones. In a second or more, the building gets ripped in half and our lives ahead follow suit. The world is divided into the dead and the alive, the lucky and the horribly unlucky.

In the evening, we stand with roasted corn watching the debris and the disconnected limbs. We watch them powder the bricks, red grit in the face of a crisis, to reach the trapped members.

The air is sombre, but also apathetic. We walk away once the food has been consumed, tossing the gnawed remnants of the corn core on the dead stone pieces.

It's hard to create something you're completely proud of. It's hard to make something, shape it and love it, without doubting yourself every five minutes.

Everyday, I write sentences, at times long winded and some times stubby. Then, I look back and wonder if they have any substance or are just pieces of fluff. It becomes hard to tell after a point, the lines blur and my judgement fails me.

I write, reluctantly on some days even, hoping to reach a place where I can nod with some amount of satisfaction at my work, atleast more often than not.

The hiding man.

The hiding man is now behind my curtains. He is  crouching behind the rippling fabric. If he catches me watching in, he slithers away into a corner. He isn't shy per se, but he would rather I don't spy on him.

My black room has been his home for a while, but he will always remain a visitor. He doesn't walk around the room the way I do, he doesn't touch or own any of the things. Sometimes, he walks over and hides behind my books. I see him reading the titles, cocked head and grumpy face.

We never speak. I accepted his presence with more curiosity than suspicion. I nodded at him only once, the first time he ever came by. And when I went for a vacation, I saw him there too, hiding behind an unfamiliar house plant.

I did realize then, the first time since he came, that the hiding man isn't hiding from me. He is hiding with me.

Run; fast and far.

They escaped in the dark of the night. They fled, leaving behind a dysfunctional marriage and unpaid bills.

She took a cab and eventually found herself walking through scores of people. Everyone looked at her, everyone smiled. They said, “You have such lovely hair.” Or “Oh I love your dimples” One of the men in a grey blazer took her by the crook of her arm and led her to a table facing the sea. He asked her if she liked wine and when she said yes, he stood up and poured her a glass; looking her in the eye the entire time. The rest of the night was a blur; she vaguely remembered bubbling with stories. He sat opposite, his chin propped on his palm, drinking in every word that left her mouth. He told her she was beautiful and she believed him.

He walked away into a quiet space under a tree and sat next to a couple of guys who were smoking. They offered him a cigarette and he accepted it, making rings of gratitude in the air. When he put it out, he felt strange. He felt drowsy and surreal. The guys around him were talking about a TV show and he found himself chipping in with his light-hearted opinions. They spoke for a long time, hours perhaps, without stopping to exchange names even. He remembered being rather thankful for the non-intrusive conversation. He enjoyed the span of time where he chose to speak and wasn’t forced into it.

The next day, they turned over on their sides and looked at each other through gummy morning eyes. He told her she was beautiful, but mentally shut his eyes tight as though in pain. She smiled and patted his cheek, but deep inside she knew he didn’t mean it.

Nothing.

The sky is the colour of cardboard. The trees are all still, and I may peer at them as much as I like, they aren’t going to speak. The square shaped shops that line the street are closed; their shutters drawn and their lights turned off. The road is long and empty.


The bird that passed me by stopped long enough to throw a long look of condescension. I waved my arms around my head, worried that it may either attack or poop on me. It did neither; it just flew past, looking smug.

At the station, the train chugs in and out in silence. The people who enter bury their heads into books, or their modern-day equivalents, and escape into a world outside of their own. The train crawls into the last station, and we file out with blank eyes.

At night, the only sound in my room is that of the air-conditioning. I lift the curtain to peep outside and there is soft rain dampening the streets. The bulb in the lamppost flickers and dies, right outside my window.

I fall asleep soon enough without any noteworthy thoughts crossing my mind.

After Dark.

The clouds are chattering above the building. Through the glass panes, we hear them, like garrulous women at a market. Like the past few days, the evening hides behind the thick layer of darkness and while it tries and peeks, the clouds part through the centre.

The clothes on faraway clotheslines, faceless people hanging upside down, expand and deflate with the wind. The children at the windows hold out their hands in anticipation of the October rain.

Behind us, behind our important backs, the rain does come, haltingly at first, then confidently like it’s being doing this for years. When we step out, the world is dark and inky, painted in several shades of doom.

She could smell death, she told us.

She sat on the sofa, looking old and wise. She told us she has watched many people die. She could smell it on them. It was a fruity smell and when she got a whiff, she knew it was time to bid farewell. In the warm living room, this story took on a spooky note, although I doubt that was her intention.

Her eyes appeared bigger from behind the thick spectacles. Her palms were peeling in some parts, like old walls in damp homes. When she spoke her voice had a crackling edge to it. Someone asked her to stop. They were tired and didn't need to hear all that, they said.

“I am telling you facts; not some quack tales.” She said, confused by the request for to shut up. One man with a thick beard and gold rimmed glasses said it was, at best, a co-incidence. “My mother died smelling like talcum powder and my father- he reeked of cigarette smoke. There is no rule” He said. She shook her head. “It’s true. I studied medicine for long enough to know that it’s true.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“I used to be. Now I write books.”

“Ah, that explains it. All you writers weaving your surreal tales. It’s fiction, Ma’am. It’s all in your head.”

She smiled. “I must leave. It’s getting late.”

She then leaned over to the bearded man and patted his cheek. “You know I am right.” She whispered and we all watched his eyes widen. “You… well, are you? OH..” He said, and his voice fizzled off.

She died the next day. The bearded man ate his words but never ate a fruit again. He just couldn’t bring himself to.

Oh October.

The October heat, which lasted for just under a day, dissolved into a downpour.

I took an auto home and the tyres made squeaking sounds against the slick streets. The plump, glistening raindrops splashed onto cars and tired heads. I stood under a tree, waiting to cross the street, bathing in the water that rolled off the sleeping leaves. The people around me jumped across the wet mud, hoping to not get it as little as possible on their leather shoes. Others who had perhaps decided to wear the same trousers the next day muttered angrily at the unexpected change in their plans. The sky looked confused, the blue and the black fighting it out amidst all the jagged lightning.

The monsoons which Bombay assumed were gone returned briefly to a strange combination of relief and irk.