Heat and dust...

I peered out of the windows large and dark at the little speckles of rain drops on the granite wetted like a monochrome dalmatian hiding in the night outside. Walking out into another Mumbai evening, I waded into the orange-lit and muggy surrounds of BKC. 
The autowallas reached out with their sonar like evocations for a ride to the Kurla and Bandra. Their cries bounced off the pools of orange swirling around the carcasses of building adding flesh in the night.


The heat just lay around languid while the the fine particulate matter swirled around the un-Mumbai-like emptyness of late night BKC. Swimming out into the evening sea of thoughts and feelings I crossed the concrete undulations to reach 812. A kick and a wheeze, and a kick one more bubbled and start. The phlegm of disused caught up the throat and the engine chortled to the silence of thoughts.


The ant-like labourers cried out to each other... Like blind ants rubbing their antennae as they teemed over the buildings they thrust out towards a rather undecided evening sky. 


The engine turned over and I moved into the night. More than a splatter and less than a drizzle, the rain threatened more than it doused. Muscle memory guided me back home and another days is scratched off the calendar. 

Godhuli...

It was the end of another Ganpati. Visarjan. Ironically, it also was the last leg of of something beautiful that lasted seven years. It rained and we walked back from the Shivaji Park Barista. Like a moebius strip now it flashes back to the long walks in Pune where it all started.


'Do you have something to tell me...?' I was asked ... and now I think of Shubhada's words when wed parted... "Perhaps you could not see what was staring at your face all the while..."


In the end I had to see my absence from the pink limo to figure out that I resided in the graveyard of the vestigials. Kali the protector is dead. Hence absent. So am I—an erstwhile. I remember the now phantom photo well... looking over my shoulder, smiling with my hair draped over my back.

In the end, it was just a non-chalant  'অনেক ভেবেচি... হবে না...' while it rained on. I stopped to queue up at the HDFC ATM while the footsteps moved into the night... 

To quote my companion of so many happy memories "Stripped naked. It feels like they have suddenly been exposed, when they were least expecting it."

I remember (and now understand) something that I read (and ignored) my years ago...

'My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense...'

The silence between the drops...

As the rain clouds gathered I remembered the days in Pune when almost the entire floor rushed up to the terrace to get drenched (or at least feel the spray on themselves). Memories of smiles and the happiness writ on those faces light up brighter and more vivid than the brightest LED screens on display in the TV shops.


The met department is allegedly terming the rain that we experienced for the last few days "pre-monsoon" showers but yesterday when I experienced the rain at Bandra Bandstand I saw the people greeting the monsoon. I saw glimpses of the past in their smiles, the energy, and the happiness.


I have been itching to write this for the last few days. Ever since I saw the first rains. Technically I heard about the rain and then saw it like a TV on mute across a glass pane. Perhaps that is why it failed to trigger something emotive like the past few experiences. 


I cannot explain why I have this urge to write everytime it rains for the first time in a season. Perhaps it opens some flood gate of the soul as well. It is a sudden explosion of a whole lot of  sensory triggers—the absence of heat after a summer, the earthy petrichor smell of the first rain as the actinomycetes aerosol their spores into our noses, just the sight of the rain clouds, the feel of the rain drops on your skin, the verdant foliage and whole lot of things that are best experienced and never expressed. 


Mumbai has stoked a certain fire in the furnace of my being. With the clangour of the furnace, it has brought a certain numbness of my being. 

Curdled at 3

Out of a curdled dream with an aching knee and a brain that remembered not remembering in a dream. The clock showed a bleary eyed three and I clearly remembered why the the cat was not there. I remembered quite clearly and that is the first thing that I remembered...


Don't usually remember dreams. Especially not vividly. Yet, woke up to a persistent alarm clock that clicked instead of ticking and ran fast and then saw the chiming wall clock running fast as well.


Remembered vividly not remembering. Had stepped out of my house after A & J came a visiting. Remembered A's face and J presence but not the face or the rest... Stepped out of a house that was mine and yet so unfamiliar. Moved out of a room and not a door. Walked to get some kind of food. Walked past cheetahs that barked at me and moved away with a an amputated front paw each. Walked through a dark and urban jungle and smelt of nothing and tasted familiar and dank. Don't remember the creature, the almost wind-up creature, that skipped ahead and bounded and skippled ahead of me on my way back... Remember picking it up and nestling it in my palm... 


Remember the oppression on my head about not being able to recollect where I was going and especially  where to go back... The impending implosion opened my eyes to the bleary tubelights and current reality of other things that cannot be wished away... The resonance fast fading away like a bell feels the last reverberation after a toll... 

An evening of many love stories...

A drink each at TGIF and then a dinner at Phoenix Mills sounds like a lavish evening. It turned out to be something that can launch a script writer into an interesting movie with a rich plotline. After the evening yesterday, I have no clue why people insist on writing just their own life stories for books/film scripts!


I rushed through a CST routine at gym in 30min flat before Asit dragged me from the locker room to Phoenix. An investment banker (Asit), an LA based ex Wall Streeter wanna be/struggling film maker with a thespian politician as a grandfather (Mana), and a corprorate law firm partner (Yash), swapping love stories, bitching about batch mates, narrating the occasional sexcapade really made me feel inside a semi art house movie. We even had a movie start couple to (Genelia and Ritesh) to make for an aside.


The narrator (moi) contributed little to the tumultuous love stories swapped across the table. Each of my class mates from school had their own love stories, pot boilers, the satisfaction of their own been-theres, and of course stories about other batchmates. 


A couple of school mates in asylums, a suicide, a death, a priest, goons turned to boardroom tycoons, private equity analysts and... I just wish I could write one of this novels.


I loved Deven's one. Rich industrialist's son and Yale graduate wooing a middle class girl. This after a series of dating scenes in a South Mumbai Crossword. Full drama. The girl has unwilling Bunt/Shetty parents who don't like a maru guy. Deven's mother is the mother (and in-law) from everyone's dream. Of rejected shagun, whisking away from the airport, a girl hidden away with relatives to a small wedding, the girl being considered 'dead' by her family, it has all the elements of a very entertaining love story. I had moist eyes at the end. And of course I wanted to stand up and snap a salute to Deven's mom. A few drinks later I would have. Instead I just popped in an olive from the martini and tended to the lamb shank and pomegranate polenta.


The number of people I am coming across with kamikaze love stories these days is not funny. Swati, Abhilasha, Akhilesh, Preeti, Puja, Arpan, Radhika, Deepali (and well Dipali), Benu, Guru, Tamojoy, Chiro, Piu, Arjun, Rajeshwari .... Good grief.... I could go on for a few more lines at least...


I am becoming a magnet for this sort of a thing. As if I don't have enough of it in my own little dream theatre... 

Affection stirs up old memories and joys...

My rented flat in Mahim (probably) firmly cemented my reputation as a crack pot in the eyes of all my acquaintances and friends. Nobody will probably understand why I instantly liked (and rented) a flat that divests me, monthly, of most of what I earn. I saw the two cats looking inquiringly at me, a wooden staircase, and the spectre of something from a warm and fuzzy from the past and made up mind.

I am resigned to the possibility of perhaps never having a pet. For various reasons. Mahim is one place where I could walk onto the street and immediately interact with happy and 'pet-like' animals. Both dogs and cats. I am sure if the hygiene permitted, I would be petting the rats and bandicoots as well.

I have never lived in a locality where the 'stray' animals on the road and so unabashedly affectionate as in Mahim. When J had questioned how I possibly could like the little coop she lives in, one of the many factors that had grown on me was the animal factor. Of course these are things I could never articulate at those crucial moments of inquiry.

Saddled with a cranky maid who severely detests cats (and open doors and windows) along with a landlord who advised "not to send up the cats if they come to your kitchen", I was in for a treat when a feline duo adopted me.

Now, the cats come to sleep every night at my place. The white cat had a litter of five kittens. Four white and a grey and orange one. When my dad came to visit me in December he woke up one night and was startled to  see a 'house full of cats' one night... The white one had come visiting with her entire brood!

To go home back to a cat (or any other animal) is very comforting and brings back floods of memories of Pune and catty.

On a lazy Sunday

The alternating blue and green eyes gene...

The offspring