Chiffonesque

I am so tired today. I feel like I’ve been wrung out. I need to come up with something, and I need to look at a million things before I can crisply deduce what I need to convey…but I may as well be star-gazing to decide how much sugar I need in my tea. What I’m trying to say here is that what I want to do and what I am doing are pretty unrelated. Gosh, where did all those days go? When I was sharp and focused and targeted and accomplished so much in one day. Oh, that was yesterday. So quickly one forgets. In any case, I just want to read pulp. Not Orman Pamuk and Saul Bellow. I have started and stopped reading ‘Snow’ and ‘Seize the Day’ a thousand times now. This, despite finding the books so riveting. I just want to read something fast and, maybe, a little trashy. I was so vocal about it in office today that a collage loaned me the novel she was reading, ‘ The Little Lady Agency’ by Hester Browne. It looks like it will be a tasty read, something to pore over with a big bag of chips. ...

Usually days roll into my life without invitation or agenda. Today, it’s a marble with blue-green-yellow swirls, with a coat that glints with flecks of river water in sunlight. It’s just a little marble..no bigger than the ebony-colored globe inset in the eyes. But it’s perfect. It’s small, and it encompasses a vision of every single comprehensible thing. It’s tinted, but it’s a colorless canvas of every single incomprehensible thing. A day of fairness, a day of beauty, a day of appreciation. My day today was my favourite Margaret Atwood novel. My day today was Cat’s Eye.

I had such a good, lip-smacking lunch today. A fat, gobi paratha with spicy filling and a glass of chilled, thick mango milkshake. Mmm! That was so good! ************************ I would really love to go book shopping today, and get my hands on a solid novel that I could flip through quickly. Instead I am stolidly engaged in some kind of an analysis exercise. I think I’ll feel more charitable towards it after a nice, hot cuppa. ************************ I just had a very nice snack. Puranpoli and cabbage sabzi . It was actually my lunch, but I was so sated with paratha and milkshake, that I put away the rest of my dabba . I like eating a little, but at regular intervals. To me, this indicates extracting a fullness from a few important things, instead of being swarmed by a mass of stuff, and not seeing any meaning in anything. There was that poem that was about this idea. Auguries of Innocence. I think I’ll read it again some time now. To see the world in a grain of sand, and….somet...

Today, as of this minute, this second, this minute flutter of the tick, I am ecstatic. I love summers. I love the spirit of vacation that floats around in the warm breeze and then ossifies on your finger tips and in the hollows of your collar bones and your ankles. Making you smile and idle awhile. Last night, I drove home from Colaba at midnight. It was, is, and will remain one of my purest experiences of joy and bliss. After I crossed Afghan Church, it felt as if I wasn't driving the car, but that it was taking me off somewhere..a place where jugs of moonlight and cups of sapphire lay waiting on a table bevelled with constellations. A distant, glittering land of magnficence. As we drove past Marine Drive and went over the Peddar Road highway, my car had become this little, weighless mote of light that seamlessly floated along some greater channel of energy. The Hanging Gardens to my left, the Porsche showroom to my right, the beautiful expanse of the road ahead of me, and a stunn...

It feels a little blue today, and a little bit of green. It feels like a silvery scarf, with something in between. The pearls are strung around a scruffy neck with diamonds in the gutter, the honeydew smells heavenly and the butterflies are all aflutter. My mind is a ton-heavy today, my spirit is a bowl of air, my heart is reshaping itself all the time, with kaleidoscopic flair. It is a poetic month, this florid, summer March. It smells of carefree days and ice cream dukes and hints at hours of parch. When the sun glares down so often, with such an angry scowl, the road beneath just hoots at it, like an avuncular owl. As an evening approaches with its soothing orange and yellow, harsh croaks of business subside to something mellow. Sugarcane juices in large mugs slake many a thirsty throats, reminiscent of Sandra Bullock’s movies – especially that one - Hope Floats. Somewhere it’s summer on a field…and it must feel blue and green. Here, it’s just a silvery scarf, with something in betw...

If time could be razed of meaning With shards of relativity gone If one didn’t think of a minute’s cessation Or the moment a moment was born If every layer of captivity Would fall off the temporal wall If pricks of stagnation and continuum Would cease to rise and fall If the time one knows stopped being the time one knew And simply became memory, running free Would one still lose it so steadily And how long would forever be?

My exultant heart gurgles forth with sprays of joy. I had the most amazing auto-rickshaw ride this morning. I missed my office bus by three minutes. Painful curses were piercing my heart at the time, but seeing three empty rickshaws outside Fine Arts gallery dissipated all of them. One auto for every minute that I had missed the bus by. Poetic justice and metaphoric moments are quite lovely! All of them were very willing to take me to Marol. I got into the first one and started bundling up my head with a dupatta , bracing for that horror of a road strip – Asalpha. But, I seemed to be traveling in a Mumbai of 1982. The air was fresh, traffic was light, and cars kept moving. We jalopied around bends of the Ghatkopar station in idyllic pace; I could actually see stringy branches swaying to some sort of breeze (there is no semblance to a natural element in this area.) The auto gamboled all through Asalpha, at a really smooth, easy comfortable hustle. I could see peaceful, sleepy cows chewi...

I'm currently having a lot of pain in my stomach. It's a dull ache at most points in time, but sometimes it shoots up my back. I don't know how or why a pain in the stomach gets transferred to the back, but maybe pain also has a vanity element to it. It probably needs to be felt in all profiles. Like when you wear a fitted dress in a dressing cubicle. Anyway, I read something from the Tao Te Ching What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job? A very soothing feeling in the tummy.

Last evening, I was browsing through Lokhandwala market with a friend. I was in the mood to eat something -and frankly, when am I not? At one place, a small eatery near a Natural ice-cream outlet seemed to be a magnet for a hungry crowd. All of them were adult shoppers. It was a dabheli store, and the cook was a magician with a knife and a spoon. He was slicing up paavs and smearing spoons of mashed masala and toasting them in butter with such seamless precision and speed that his hands were a blur. If you watched them in action long enough, you’d just keep gazing in some sort of stupor. Meanwhile a lady with a little girl happened to approach us from a distance. The lady stopped in front of the stall and looked longingly at the z sizzling on the tava . Her daughter, meanwhile, had rushed inside the Naturals ice cream parlour. My friend remarked how street food, like dabhelis or vada pavs, was now in the province of the older generation. Kids don’t take this stuff at all. She mentio...

I yelled at an autorickshaw fellow today. I’m feeling very bad about it. There were two autorickshaw fellows outside Fine Arts gallery in Chembur. I asked both of them if either would take me to Marol. Both nodded yes, and then started persuading each other to take me. The first guy told the other guy to take me, the second guy told me to sit in the first auto, and as I was getting into the first auto, the guy told me to get down and go to the second auto. I yelled very loudly. In cartoons, sometimes when a character is being yelled at, you can see his hair being brushed back because of the force of the sound. It seemed the same way with the auto guy. I shouted really hard. I stopped only when my thorax started aching. The second guy who acquiesced to take me told me to calm down. Lately, with whatever has been happening in the city, in the world, etc., it is very important to be courteous. The last few weeks, I had been trying to consciously not lose my patience with people. I failed ...

I had a very annoying auto ride from Maitreyi Park, Chembur to Marol. So, to make myself feel better, I’ll make a list of all the things that made me happy until now: 1. I realized that I like the French word for song: chanson 2. Just remembered a small poem by W.B. Yeats. Had read it long ago, but still remembered it: When to the heart of man Has it ever been less than treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, To bow and accept the end Of a love or a season Some things endure longer than memory..like poetry. That’s why they are forever. 3. Came across another poem that I loved a few years ago, but had forgotten about it. Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold, Her early leaf’s a flower But only for an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay. 4. I didn’t have to wait for the lift for very long. 5. I got a pretty cool assignment. 6. I may b...

I love Lokhandwala. It has the bizarre joie-de-vivre of a circus. It’s bustling, chaotic, and so filmi . It’s got an amazing ambience where everything looks like props. And everyone looks like extras. But happy extras, because there are no lead actors. There are guys wearing netted kurtas, giving side-long glances to imaginary cameras. I see ladies in short, pink skirts and lilac nails tapping away on chocolate coloured lap-tops. I see huge film posters and malls and wide, crowded, dug up roads. I see food stalls and clothes stalls and stalls that sell huge, gaudy belts. If ever Lokhandwala gets its own emblem, it will be a shiny see-through top. I was meeting a friend at Ginger Marie – a little tea joint near Fame Adlabs. It’s not particularly noteworthy, but I like it because it’s small and usually empty. The staff smiles when you enter…and that seems to be happening less in most eateries as time goes by. My friend, U, came by and we ordered strawberry Margaritas. I love, absolutely...

Sometimes, I get this feeling – that there’s so much to learn and absorb. Like all the parts of the brain are sitting around a canopied table by a waterfront and sipping from different glasses. It’s a lovely feeling. ******************************************* The security in my office is so annoying. I really miss the security in my Noida office – so polite and efficient. Not like these people here. They whine so much. I have to get a form signed by someone, and now, just out of spite, I haven’t got it signed. I’m not really ashamed of myself for this – although this isn’t the most mature way of ‘teaching a lesson’. Every night that I have booked the cab, I have had to do numerous rounds of follow up. They don’t even bother to call and tell me that the cab has arrived. And now, I get all these ‘ oh, but you haven’t signed…oh, but we are waiting…oh, but I’m so held up because of you…oh…’ type of calls. Well, too bad. In any case, the boss isn’t at his seat. Glee. *********************...