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...'