Silence in motion

The silence moved with me. Pondering while I read of Ancient Evenings and of Distant Music from a slim little novel from happier times many light years away.  Kincaid and Francesca circled as moths around their flickering flames of yearning.

The Harbour line rakes whoosh in always behind the advertised time and whine away old and less shiny, stuffed with humanity as in an indifferent teddy bear. A little musty, well worn, and weary to the look, peeking from the open seams. Comforting though in a I-know-this-and-not-changing-anytime soon sort of a way. 

Reading about how "... in a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live..." makes for a strange transport on a Saturday evening. The "Why"s of a giving swirl in a cranium stilled.

Peregrine spirit musing on sliver of memory. Beatitude. Wistful. A memory that weighs the heart.  

Given along with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Experienced apart. Felt.

Planet Death Star

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. Necks craned 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.

  

Roaring landscape and a little bliss...

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...

Gently Orange Inhaled Grey

Submerged in a misty grey chill of an impending winter the morning soiled odours pulled away without a tug. Bobbing like a marker cork in a wave test pool I wafted through the obvious signs of receding industry speeding towards my karmic cycle of labour-linked sustenance.
Granite ballast shards treacled by motion paved to horizon. Unwhitened by the tooth paste promises flashed on televisions and grease spray recipients of millions of axles whirring by, the oft shat on sleepers banded by steel are keerrrruping through early morning consciousness like a comb running through teeth. The rails are the ignored travellers' yin and yang-burnished, shining, use-shined on top and rust browned laziness impaled to inexplicable perpetuity.
The sun has been holding its breath for a while as it dives gradually and relentlessly diving through, making the clouds paler with progress. The clouds clung on to the sun's progress with viscosity preserving the modesty of the mountain tops  like strategically draped limbs of a glow lit nude portrait.

The sweaty labourer smell of wild marigolds is flowing orange. Fleeting fields of wild marigolds hit the senses like an over ripened fruit with with a wrinkly squishy skin and sweet cloying ripe papaya flesh desperately holding a lot of slimy seeds--the fields of marigolds are exploding. Showering snaking blue windows and hitting the face with orangeade splashes of millions of beads of tangerine, marigolds lull to a slumber.
Surfacing from briefly from slumber is picturesque along Western Ghats falling off sharply green and the-rains-are-over-browns, pulling wool over eyes to stretch vision towards deeper greens and cloud wreathed spires of calm.
Another return...

Already...

Navigating darkness is a necessary in a 'party' skill. Semi phosphorescence filled with people who seem to 'know' each other. Skeletal fashion wonton wrapped  creatures swaying decidedly little to the thump-bump-bang-thwang emanating from the cochlea killing  boom boxen. The faithful at the bar is trying to grow a mullet (no... Really!). Wedge heels and pencils, stilettos and flip-flops alike sway and wave green pints. Short rolled up sleeves hold biceps nurtured with great effort and much chemical... And the odd happy plump. In tights.
The alcohol really helps ... Soon the music is swaying to the head. Happy people make an awesome sight. Of entertainment and of amusement to the red balloons punctuating in the darkness. DSLRs twinkle many in the nightscape... Orange biriyani punctuated with kheemaed proteins of forgotten provenance  and red wine... Jostling and losing to the Bacardis and Teachers. Still can discern that the rancid walnut on the cake... More alcohol ... Perhaps...

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

Towards tranquility...

The monsoon rains serve but to sizzle and calm the dosa griddle that is Mumbai. The vapour from the quenching still hangs around the bustle and vigour of the mornings waiting for the glowering heat to return in a big sweaty odorous embrace. Travelling towards Pune is not unlike scuba diving from the depths of the ocean. The pressure of existence and survival eases as one travels without. Both the road and train journeys have their own kinaesthetic zephyrs of their own ready for discovery along the travel.
Travelling on a train to Pune is enamouring. Doubly so when the monsoons are at the fag end of dispensing their succour and perhaps rest and look with a maker-like contentment at their own handiwork on the seventh day. The journey is an imploding dive into a gradient but like a fractual. The more one dives through it the patterns are resplendant with myriad curiosities. The metronomic clackity-clack of the Deccan Queen blurrs away the city of bustle and concrete greys towards the browns of the suburbia rapidly. Blacker sewer flows fuse in a blur of motion to browner little streams.
A compressed look at the journey is like the childhood wonder of glimpsing and running a finger along the neatly arranged colour gradients in a large box of pastels.
The dark skies blur into the grey black concrete of a hurrying city. The girders and strum-throbbing heart-strings of ever growing construction fuse as one moves towards the movement blurred unending billions of granite shards of the rail-track bosom. The grease streaked sleepers kreee-rup rattle like running comb teeth over dentures, while the glittering streak of rails lead towards the warmer rust and the browns of soil. The specks of green have started already like the ilshay-guri rain mist as one rides into impending rain. The greens of moving landscape soon start soothing like a chamomile tea kicking in. The foliage gradients take off towards the already calming verdant blur. Bright uniform rainfed swatches of the farmers' toil rush to meet the natural darker greens of nature's spontaneity towards the horizon.
Enter the Western Ghats in a crescendo lofting the experience towards the clouds covers. The olfactory senses lessening sweat grime soot and more of the seas little wild flowers dotting the greens with pinks and yellow, the moss clasping the mountainside, and the spray of the cataracts cascading like hundreds of rivulets of milk tumbling past. It's like swirling slowly into the clouds. The clouds around the mountains are drift closer and swirl as cotton candy mists softly wisping the dense flora covered gentle undulations. Through the mists glimpses of ant-like vehicles tendril and stream on ribbons of tarmac past Khandala, Lonavala and beyond.
The speed too eases soporified by the mountainous gradient towards a brief halt triggered by an unseen signal. Enough to show signs at Malavli beckoning at the forts and Buddhist caves of Karla. The sleepy eyed doggy on the plaform cranes to look briefly before quickly resuming slumber as we move towards a soporific Pune.