In my dreams, I run down a hill and fall in a heap.

I land in the middle of a dancing circle of people I have never met. I don’t dance with them, I can’t. I try and run away, embarrassed to be seen in my ratty night-suit. They follow me, their voices rising with every drum beat. I jog for a long time and realize that I am not tired. Thoughts of better stamina and marathon timing cross my mind even within my dream space.

When I get home, I curl up into a ball on my floor and eat watermelon pieces from a glass bowl. I watch something on television until I feel the floor crack beneath me and I start to fall.

I fall into the dancing circle again and we are back at the start.

The fan whirs in my black room. It sounds like tyres squeaking on slick ground.

It doesn’t quite distract me from my irrational fears. The ones that live under my bed and come out to play at night, like the shoemaker’s elves. Except that they aren’t as cute and instead of pretty footwear, I wake up the next morning with a headache.

In the harsh morning light, which usually comes from the yellow street lamps, the fears scuttle back to hibernate. I potter around, drinking black coffee and making annoyed faces at the world.

The rest of the day is a blur.

And repeat.

The plants died.

Their yellowing heads hung at awkward angles and their white tears stained the thin stems. The owners of the home, unaware of the death of their balcony companions, continued to paraglide and swim and shop for antiques at exotic foreign locations.

The maid came in to an empty home, still battling the remnants of the viral fever that pinned her to the bed for the past week. She looked horrified and then blamed herself for not having foreseen this. She went and touched the leaves, which crackled a little under her grip. She put a mug full of water in the pots, in a desperate attempt to resuscitate them.

The plants remained dead. The maid left feeling bad but forgot about it when she found out that her son had failed the third grade for the second time.

The owners came back a few days later, were upset,yelled at the maid and then got over it the minute the dried leaves were swept away.

They, then, sat on their sofa and looked at vacation pictures.

The Monday caught me off guard.

It happens every week. I walk into office with my head hanging with dread. Then I check the work situation and I always come out feeling even more worried, despite my pessimism.

Everyone is sneezing or coughing or trying to control runny eyes. I think we got it from each other.

We also tried to blame it on someone, just to find some entertainment and vent some morning stress. Turns out people are very defensive and competitive on Monday mornings and someone managed to get their feathers ruffled. So we dropped that and went on to pursue our private stress busters –blogs, newspapers, matrimonial sites, you know the usual.

The dreaded Monday is gearing up to tear us down. It might seem exaggerated, but trust me it isn’t.

The rain in my head.

I am listening to the sound of rain.

I also shut my eyes and imagined sitting under the awning of a defunct store, somewhere off the mud road in rural India. Sitting there with my legs drawn close to my stomach. Up ahead in the distance, there is someone walking with a steel bucket. It's only a figure from where I sit, because the white rain blurs everything. 

The sound is beautiful; the muted plop of the rain on the red soil and the faraway thunder.

 

In my head, I am sitting there alone. Writing probably, on damp paper with pencil. I don't know what I'd write. I am taking slow, calculated breaths. I am taking in the smell of the rain, in its purest form, free of smoke and garbage and other urban worries. 

When I open my eyes, the rain has stopped. I am back where I started, but I am a happier person. 

All the roads came to an end, somewhere in a clearing near a pond. From the car, we saw the stars in the pond quiver with the promise of the night. We rolled down the windows and looked out for a while. We didn't say anything.

At some point, we turned the music on and for many hours that followed we listened to the lyrics from a stranger and related to them.
I think at some point I dozed off and had a dream. A dream that we are standing at the edge of the pond, daring each other to jump in. I remember you were scared, but you said you weren't.

I woke up and the music was still on and you were asleep. I held your hand and it was warm.

In the morning, the water in the pond swallowed the stars. The sky was a golden blue. We drove away. I am not sure if we had come to the edge of the world to seek something, but either way it felt like we found what we wanted. 

There's that moment where you need someone to hold your hand. Not because you're scared or upset. Not even because you're in pain. But because sometimes you like holding hands, and don't think it's necessary that it be backed with a reason.

On Saturday mornings when you wake up and lie around in bed, you wonder what it'd be like to have someone lie with you there. You aren't lonely. You haven't had bad dreams. It's just that you want someone to lie next to you, behind you, and make small talk or share your morning silence.

You like it when people tell you that you were missed. It doesn't necessarily make you feel important. It doesn't always cheer you up magically. But on days when you are lying in bed, battling pain and larger things, you can look back on these times and find something to hold on to. 

All the confusion inside my heads spills out in ways that keep getting increasingly convoluted.

I see my energy wash away pretending to be that person –the one that laughs in the right places and says the right things.

My space keeps getting darker until my room is black again. I draw the curtains and the street lights peep in with just enough orange spots to make my head hurt.

In the room at night I find myself making endless lists of pros and cons. I find myself admitting things that I would never admit in the light and promise of a new day.

There’s this feeling wherein you know at the pit of your stomach that everything that you consider happy right now might unravel sooner than later. I try and hide from it, but in the darkness it finds me.

There’s the unfortunate time where your throat feels like sandpaper and your eyes begin to leak.

Then slowly, everything around you feels fuzzy and seems to move slower than it probably is. The voices of the people alternate between faint and loud and they seem to be all garbled.

Eventually, your head is too heavy to hold up and it begins to swivel around on your shoulders like a broken toy. That’s when you pack your things, trudge home and fall asleep right after having some chicken soup.

Or you can sit at your desk and labour away, trying to make intelligent sounding reports or discerning conclusions. Then you can watch yourself fail at it all, misspelling every other word because your eyes are too watery to look at the screen.

In the morning, much too early to have been woken up, the man unloaded coconuts under my window. He stood in the truck, amidst the brown spheres that could have passed off as smooth rocks, and dropped them in the hands of his colleague. The colleague was a thin man with arms like sugarcane sticks. He put the coconuts in cartons.

There was a constant plop sound; the sound that woke me up. It went from being annoying to pleasant, like a rhythm you discover around you. The trees around them rippled and there were faraway vehicle sounds. It was all comforting in a vague, distant manner.

After they unloaded what they had to, the man packed the cartons and jumped into the truck with his friend. The two just lay there on the coconut bed sharing a beedi, that seemed to be fizzling away, and making small talk. I wish I could hear what they were saying, I am sure there’d be a story in there.

The dead bird

They brought down the broken bird from the shelf.

The wings were chipped in a few places. They blew at the wounds and chalky blood remains fell before them, in a fine layer. The eye of the bird was expressionless. Its head, the colour of cherries, glinted in the white lights of the room. It a had a gaping hole below the neck. You could look in it, into the dark space within.

“Who broke it?” The man asked. His face was sweaty and tired. No one answered. The children stood behind their mother. They looked at their feet and their sickly legs trembled.

The silence was broken by the uncracked voice of the little boy. “It died.” He said and thick tears formed at the sides of his eyes. His mother patted his head but that made him sob.

“Yes, yes it did. It’s never coming back now.” The father said, the anger in his voice was unmasked. He kept the bird on the table and walked away.

The kids buried their heads in their hands and cried, the guilt and bereavement wringing their insides with a tight grip.

The Sunday has passed me by.

It's over and it didn't feel like a holiday. It felt trying. Now, the sun has set and the street lights have come on, with all the moths hovering around them. The deserted roads have a few people but they scurry around.

Tomorrow, the week will be upon us. The Monday will be as trying as today, only in a different manner. 

Everything is shuttered down.
The roads are empty. The people are inside their homes, sleeping or cursing the lack of food or entertainment.

The men on the street stand around in vigil. They throw cold glances at those driving around, wait for them to do something even remotely incriminating so that they can be yelled at. I am standing at my window watching all this and wondering if they will hold it against me that I am looking around aimlessly.

The TV channels are blacked out. When you turn them on, there is a screen full of black and white angry grains. The only thing you can watch is the news where there's only so much to watch.

The forced day of nothingness is the worst; it takes the fun out of it. 

Death is being protested.

Not untimely or cruel death. Not death that was unfair or unjustified.
But natural death after a full life.

In the darkness of mourning, there are floodlights outside to keep the bereaved company. In the unspeakable grief, there are monologues of self-glory. In the harmless life of the commoner, there is unrest and uncertainty.

These are the days when everyone walks with their heads down, questioning the city and their presence in it. 

It's too hot to be outside. It's too stuffy at home.

In the kitchen, the little patch in front of the refrigerator is cold. Someone left the fridge open. All this carelessness and I do a little dance on the cold tiles. My feet are smiling.

I hold an ice cube do an awkward juggle between one hand and another until it melts and my fingertips feel numb. Ice scraped off the roof of the freezer was better equipped for playing on hot afternoons, but they don't make fridges like that anymore.

I sit on my bed. It is lying on warm rocks but without the sense of adventure. I watch the fan churn hot air around my room. They say it's November, but I have my doubts. 

The part, right before you wake up, where your sleep coated brain tells you confusing stories.

The tree weighs down with the weight of a swing and the child sitting doesn't remain a child for too long. He becomes an old man with a rough beard and yellowing eyes. The sky comes down in a sweeping layer of mud and rain. The birds resting on the tree fly away in a frenzy. The face of the man, all papery and peeling, leaks tar coloured blood.

When it stops raining, the tree disappears. The man folds himself into a grave. Atop the grave is a plant that appears to be waking up.

Then the rains come again. 

I heard your bangles clinking behind me, although I know you aren't there. The distant sound of glass on glass was so real, that I turned around to reach out for it. I almost believed for all of a second that you were standing behind me.

It wasn't unsettling but I did come and sit on my bed thinking about it longer than I thought I would. I wasn't spooked. I just wondered if at all you were there, somewhere. I remembered how you looked out of the window, with your elbows propped on the sill, at the lights and the crackers, this time of the year.

I thought of you yesterday when I was amidst all those people. I just wanted you to know that even though I stood expressionless when you left, I miss you more often that I let on. 

Running in meandering lines along the street, next to lit up buildings and stray firecrackers.

Laughing, sometimes genuinely and other times in a fake hollow manner, amidst family and food. Hugging and grinning and being happy. In the end, the happy times drowned out the hollow voices.

Lying on the bed and watching the lights and lamps on nearby buildings flickering, casting long and mildly pretty shadows on us.

Coming home to a building with big blue lanterns and orange lights; a staircase with oil lamps and candles at every doorstep.

Then eventually giving in to sleep, with inexplicable dreams of bats, food and second degree burns, to the background of crackers and cheer. 

Pushed along on a wooden cart are rows and rows of shimmering lanterns.

They’re made with the paper that loud gifts get wrapped in. The morning sun lights them up and they trot along, like spoilt little brats at a party. The festivities are everywhere. There are heaps of flowers lining alleys and streets and women walking by with marigold garlands wrapped in newspaper. In their homes, they tuck it away in the fridge to keep them fresh. The next day, they will hang it on their doors and cars, standing on quivering stools on their toes. A couple of days later, a few flowers will leap only to be crushed under the foot of a sprightly child returning from cricket or a disgruntled maid who has to clean up the post festival mess.

There are fairy lights covering trees. Houses have lights in their windows, blinking in their epilepsy inducing glory. They form shapes and figures and cling onto newly cleaned grills to call out to passers-by. It’s a call for joy and attention.

In the midst of plates of sweets and dry fruits, are children stuffing their faces. Their mothers pat their backs encouraging them to eat more until they can’t move for a while. Ten years later, they waddle around, still unable to move.

His hands smelled of coins.

He used bus tickets as book marks. His books were always covered with newspaper - the glossy classifieds section. His fingers were wrinkled and thin and when I held them my hands would get some of the coins smell.

In the night, he snuck into the kitchen and ate icecream; his favourite flavour was coconut. He stuffed peanuts into his pockets, and ate them with extreme relish while looking out of the window. He once told me he liked omlettes more than he liked chocolates and that was saying something.

He would take apart alarm clocks and hair dryers and irons only to put them together eventually. He should have been an engineer. He loved gadgets. His electric shaver is still sitting somewhere in my cupboard, unaware that no-one will care for it with the same intensity again.

If he was here, I'd have shown him my writing. Of all the people I know, he'd be the only one who'd have understood it just the way I'd have wanted him to. 

The backlog is weighing down on me.

The writing isn't tough, it just takes more to say things because you fear they'll come out sounding flimsy and fake. A lot of the things that swirl around in my head have started to remain there. The talking has become lesser and quieter. The thinking has becoming more complicated. In the addled state of affairs whilst sitting with friends so close that they are an extension of your being the thoughts come out in slow, calculated steps. I won't say if it's pleasant or not; mainly because I don't know.

The words feel more raw and inhibited when the spout out now. The longer you protect them, the happier you'll be. 

There’s the underwater feeling.

Where I say things but it comes out all garbled. Where my head is swimming through all the conversations and the unanswered emails. My mind is asleep, all curled up under a thick blanket.

The floor at work is all dressed up and there are paper lanterns with shimmering tails. The tails tickle the heads of the tall variety of people. Everyone is chattering, in loud dramatic voices. I can hear them but I can’t comprehend too much. It’s like looking at the fogged mirror after a bath.

Atleast the week has ended. Small, but significant, mercies.

We jumped on the suitcase to shut it and then we feel apart.

The clothes leaped out, and the shirts and the scarves hugged on a checkered mattress on my queen sized bed. We sat on either side looking around, all glum. The shoes tapped around on the floor below and tried to inch back into their shelves, but we brought them back in one swift movement. When I tried to close in the toothpaste and soap, the suitcase shut its mouth to drive me away.

The room smelled of raspberries from the perfume that we dropped and spilled, while our hands trembled in the slightest.

In the night, we sat on the suitcase one last time, subdued and quiet. The suitcase let out a whimper of resignation.

The room would miss a small suitcase and a much larger part of me.

The wind died outside the building.

The people looked at it sternly and then carried in an urn to bury because it kept rattling in a coffin and that spooked them out. They weren’t in grief because they didn’t know it too well, but they looked solemn because death is usually not a pleasant event.

The women were quiet and kept looking at their shiny feet. The men flocked around the urn bearer. They marched on with purpose.

In the graveyard, they stood next to an open grave. The urn bearer held his breath and opened the lid of the urn. There were no sounds except for a cough or sneeze from the people around. The trees stood in silence, containing their misery in silence. The people started covering the grave with damp mud at the end. The sun glared at them but it was difficult to ascertain the extent of its wrath.

Summer had arrived.

The destination is always changing.

First it’s a lamppost, then it’s a tree, then it’s the milkman who stands by his cycle. There are no sounds at that time of the day. Not even birds, or crickets or whatever else people assume can be heard in the wee morning hours. There’s only the sound of my wheezing breath; like that of a dying person. When I hold my breath, I can hear my feet hitting the ground in a clumsy fashion.

Pat and Pat and Pat.

I count backwards from hundred, then from two hundred and then from five hundred. I try singing songs in my head, like a mental radio. I sound horrible even in the privacy of my mind where there is no audience. I try shutting my eyes because perhaps the dark endless road will create some kind of an illusion and motivate me into moving further down.

In the end, we make it. The wheezing doesn’t go away for a while. It walks back with me, like a critical friend, make silent remarks on my lack of fitness.

I am making my way through the Monday, in an auto that tilts to the right on a road that looks like a smoke bomb exploded there.

The smoke I am told is to ward off mosquitoes. The auto tumbles along, and all the pests within in possibly die. On the cement divider between the street, the surviving pests of the human variety, create a racket with fireworks. The anticipated festival is more than a week away but that doesn't really hold anyone back.

The reds and greens of the signal lights blink at us, and watch us not follow a single traffic rule.

There's a tangle of blue bodies. 

The colour chips off, papery and dry at first. It then flows, all smooth and graceful, into a pool at the bottom of the bed. There are thin sounds that echo through the room and then there is the sound of rain. Rain as blue as my body; rain as fierce as the guttural voices that escape.

In the end, it all dissolves and seeps. We are reduced to thick, lucid liquid that darts off the bed into the cracks in the wall. We are now one with everyone else, we are just like everyone else.

The gurgling of the affection now recedes. The space is now back to how it was, no knotted ink coloured arms and no runaway emotions. 

There was resignation in her step and in the quiet between her words. She hadn't given up, but she was on her way there.

Her enthusiasm died a quick death somewhere between two train stations. It just went away, like the small candle flame in homes with power. They took it apart to diagnose the cause and they came back holding the remains of her work in office. They, the mind doctors, held it out like it was a dead animal. Their faces were stony and the jaw of one of the doctors quivered with holding back all the words that he wanted to say. She looked at her feet. It was her fault, they said.

They told her the treatment was expensive and tough. She thought it over while jogging along the sea. Her will to give up was the strongest when it tried to combat wet sand. In her torn thoughts of what she wanted to do with her situation, she forgot that she was tired. When she looked back, she had come a long way. That, right there, in a spark of victory she realized that while it wasn't ideal, she knew she'd fix it.

In the sand caked walk back to the start, she built back, step by step, the energy that they claimed had passed away. 

The week isn’t quite over.

The dread of a working Saturday starts to fill you up mid-week. It settles in the pit of your stomach like a bad meal and stays there until Saturday afternoon. Throw in a deadline and an early morning jog, and you’ll find yourself keeling over in bed on Friday night, and not from a hangover like the other normal people with Saturdays off.

On every Friday which precedes a working Saturday, the same thoughts cross my mind. I ask myself the same questions, run the same excuses through my head to try and get out of all the stuff I am supposed to do. It’s almost like it’s a biweekly event, where everyone here stands around with dull faces, whining like as if it’s never happened before, about this unfortunate event coming their way. It’s like a sore mass of despair lined with envy, a few hundred people’s envy all balled up in one dark cloud.

The Saturday comes and passes us by like any other day. It isn’t half bad given that people are busy making Sunday plans. The Working Saturday, like all impending doom, is never as worrying as the build-up to it.

Her eyes look pretty. The dark brown rimmed with black stands out amidst the pleasurable chaos of the grey powder on her lids. It is supposed to look like smoke, I am told. Like your eyes are emitting smoke all while holding a firm gaze. The eyelashes open and shut with a lazy air. When she smiles, the sides of her eyes crinkle. It’s quite the sight, I am telling you.

You look really nice today; people tell her when she gets to work. They ask her if it’s an occasion because on other days her eyes are caged in rimless spectacles. She says it’s nothing, but everyone continues to wonder.

Beneath the creams and the eye gloop, there’s the face that would rather just stay home. It’s pain of some kind, physically or the more difficult variety. She wakes up to puffy eyes with bags underneath. Her face feels like someone came by and filled it with air, like you do to a punctured cycle tyre. She cakes on the fake beauty because she’d rather not discuss why she looks like a bus ran over her.

The irony is, that the days she looks the prettiest are the ones when she’s been feeling completely down and out.