The whispers scampered like rats on Facebook. The man is dead. RIP. Good riddance too (in a more muted tone). I expected to wake up to a identical and boldface headlines. A rather uneasy peace greeted the morning and I began to enjoy unusually peaceful and non-stifling start of a ride to office. Diwali has its good sides I thought. Till I reached Kalanagar and saw the throngs. Buzz flies and security sniffed at impending death. Neckscraned at other craned necks and khakis squinted at the traffic flowing by just so that they could ignore the ignominy of randomly parked cars and bikes bang in the middle of a busy Kalanagar junction. I flowed on towards work like a popcorn in a stream, weaving along and getting soaked in the day. By the time I reached office I'd started to feel that something was amiss. It itched somewhere like a unreachable vexation. Dramatic mails releasing the happy children from the school of the production flow saw me leave a deserted floor at an unearthly early hour and the anvil of realization hit me on the way back... The traffic police! Whoa! Where were the hectoring sentinels amiss from their vigils at the junctions? The traffic flowed serene and obedient reflecting aeons of disciplining. The stormtroopers registered increasing on the mental Geiger counter as I neared Bandra and hung like a shroud around the vultures waiting for a news of a death. Mumbai's Planet Death Star proved all of those words. For the remainder of the Diwali week the bandobast was only around Planet Death Star leaving the traffic unattended and obedient and a city on skeletal security. I stopped on the flyover on my way back. The news of a reviving heartbeat had still not withdrawn the death vigil and the dotted the night while the Diwali smog shrouded the night. A city, waiting. For Bal Thackeray's breath.
The Mumbai-Pune ride is like an old friend. The conversations are silent and filled with each other's thoughts--whispered like a track looping through the hills and the brain. The rattle bump of Mumbai gets over a little after Panvel and soon Khadala is bit too close too wait and savour. Winter in the morning air rushes by the journey, happy, crisp, uphill and soon envelopes in a welcoming uptake. The tarmac eases like fading vestiges of Mumbai and past Panvel it is placid and like a magic carpet. Like holding your breath in a pool and looking up to a total internal reflection, the azure sky cleanses the mind of stray thoughts... That's when the roar of the engine becomes one with the ride. The traffic, the lumpy way of the paver blocks and the acne marked lunar-scape of millions behind, the engine-growl is not a constant clearing of throat to get rid of the cloying pollutants of the city when you wake up. Rather it reflects the gradient and the curve that reveals foliage and the verdant mountains that waft by like a Forest Essentials advertisement. The mountain looping by is addictive and lulling. The upward gradient and the lonely temple with monkeys whooping across the road is careful designed to pause the greenery and granite and record it in the peripheral vision of the mind. Khandala is soon behind and the slow scourge of a growing concrete Pune is soon rolling in. Over too soon, the ride still croons of a little vestige of bliss. The laziness that wreathes Pune helps...
