The Armchair Paradox

Heart-aches and realizations are wondrous murmurs. Unscheduled, variously encountered, and harbingers of change inevitable. 

Delicious and cloying is the inertia of rest. The warmth of the experience of a thousand languid mornings steeped like cats basking in the sun upon a tropical winter sunrise, seen from the cocoon of a sleep warmed duvet. 

Vicissitude by definition evokes those snooze button mashing reflexes. Memories ooze honey-esque to lull and dull every modicum, twinge, throb and instinct for inevitable, necessary transmutation.

The Bengali transcreation of আরামকেদারা (aaram kedara) for armchair and supine bliss is more apt than the English suggestion of mere support for the upper limbs in contrast. The trouble arises in getting off an aaram kedara. That it's wonderful? Undeniable!

So is slowly ripping a band-aid off, one hair pain twanging follicle at a time, from a progressing laceration.

Unarguably inevitable and essential. Maybe not so exhilarating. 

Just like shedding accumulated adipose, belongings, and task back-logs before a journey.

The first step that sparks of that journey of a million miles? Sweet chimera and delusion. It's rather unfashionable to dwell on the killing urge to sit right back. Straight after that step.

My landlord of the last eight years and I spoke of the chasm between the thought of change and the perspective of the hard deadline and it's sting of inevitability. In his acceptance into priesthood from laity he opined in wisdom, "...what if the armchair is just not there after I get off it?"

The morning palette

Another morning rolls in to drench me with the sounds, smells, and experiences of this city. The window of green leaves, cloud of sparrow twitters, and purring kitties at my belly is a contrast to the impatiently honking and hurrying torrent just across the balcony.

I will soon dive in and kayak through the rapids of petrol, diesel, CNG and God knows what fumes. I'll jostle on auto-pilot and think of work till I reach my coop for the day. To exchange life and time for baubles to continue the moebius strip.

Another morning will soon be there...

Dora Dora

Sun beams light the leaves in yellow and green
Sparrows are fluttering like leaves in a breeze
The world outside the window is a tempting one
Where pigeons await to provide a little sport
Striped like a tiger built like a cat
Doradora was christened while behaving like a brat
Largely found sleeping whether in the house or out
The appeal to play is fierce at oddest hours

Once upon a rain in Mumbai...

I noticed how I end up writing something when the rains start. I remember the electric atmosphere in Pune when the people in the office ran out and greeted the first showers on the terrace. I felt the rain, bathed in the energy, and rode back  in a cooler evening.

Rain Clouds gather over #Mumbai... #Mahim

Mumbai rains have a certain 'incessant' nature to them. It pours in sheets and lulls you in the initial moments into a certain soporific and temporary feeling of niceness. For a few moment the heat recedes. There is a cool breeze on your face and suddenly the Actinomycetes break out into a spontaneous aria flooding your senses with the aroma of a wet and joyous earth.

The grime, noxious fumes, the cavernous heat and the flurry of the Mumbai you know is suddenly different. You wake up to leaves and trees washed clean and dripping droplets of glistening freshness. You actually look at the grey and muted sky instead of nervously twitching to jump at the next fleeting local train, bus, auto rickshaw or taxi.

Clean and verdant Khargar after the first rains in Mumbai...

Mumbai has been kind to me. Especially the rains. When love turned her back and frowned it wept for me without while I did within. I have fond tactile memories of the change from walking out into murky evenings to fresh rain-cleansed-pink-light-polluted-yellow-sodium-vapour-lit journeys back to a home where rain quelled catties and kitties flowed in to greet my evenings.
If I ever write fiction, I might end up starting on a rain cleansed zephyr-like pavement before a Bandra-Kurla bus stop. Feeling the aerosol rain in my nostrils before stepping out to a squelching 62 bus ride lit all spectral and fluorescent, hurtling  through the night.

#Bandra Kurla Complex... evening at Bharatnagar bus stop during a pause in the first spell of rains

This city doesn't sleep. Nor does it let you. The quivering alertness keeps the adrenalin flowing. The first rains are perchance the only (temporary) respite to keep you from teetering off. A little release. This city is like the waves washing up brown and murky white foam on black shores and listless concrete. It roars in and gives hope, baubles, a few trinkets, hope--like heroin to a junkie, and then takes away--like the receding wave till you are left staring at the grains of your soul. Hope piled on greed, greed laced with lust, lust blinded sometimes in the dazzle eyed high beams of some form of trust, to a vertiginous and Promethean turn of liver pecks. Till one regenerates like the Promethean liver and becomes one with the cycle.  

But then--don't they say one has to be cruel to be kind? When you are done feeling good, you realize that you are now going to trudge through muck for four months, get stuck in insane traffic and perhaps drown in whiplash of a cloud burst. Really? Maybe not. Travelling to Saki Naka everyday, especially through the aftermath of some rain is training enough for Spartans. As the aeroplanes scream down overhead waggling the landing gear towards the tarmac some 30 feet away, I skid through the rain-water and oil laced concrete towards my office or grid down both my clutch plates and soul precariously thwacking trucks on either side. Ever noticed how it often rains ONLY in and around JariMari. Just out of spite. To leave you no option but to splotch your feet in the gruelly brown thing that passes for water. To inhale the fumes of a million stuck vehicles rumbling noxiousness into your being. The rain pours down in sheets, the your own little space in the helmet becomes your private little sauna and then your own little hell. Water pours in sheets and torrents from the heavens and seeps like acid through pores and cracks that never existed. The heat saps sweat in your rain coat and the fetid water sogs the crotch. Limbo. Cold, uncomfortable, resignation inducing and repeated till you submit.

The drains overflow. Brown becomes black. Black ooze becomes oil slick and chemical. The monsoon starts and continues with ferocity. The city media dusts off their standard fare of roads disintegrating and visuals of people wading through water. You are the disintegration and the wading through water. You are part of the entire Mumbai rains phenomenon now...

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