Chiffonesque

Today, the world is a beautiful, gossamer grey…as if one we were looking at it through a stocking. The sky is smooth and dull, in the manner of a peculiar whalebone that has been polished to perfection. It stretches comfortably over buildings, tree-tops and terraces. It stretches so very comfortably over that which we call ‘ the expanse’ . This whalebone polished sky expands over it all. The rain that escapes from this fine sky is another story altogether. Rambunctious – like kids running past the gate on the last day of school. Hurried and with no motive other than ‘ to simply get out of here ’. And although it whips upturned faces and splices through fleshy, green leaves and pierces through grills and grates and pelts away indiscriminately, people understand. They nod and sigh and occasionally smile. After all, it is their time of the year. This morning, a long car stands before mine at the toll booth. It is a beautiful shade of crimson. Like a chilli flake. When it moves again, inch...

Dawn. A meal of rice and beans. Roof of the verandah shuddering in a strong, monsoon wind. A great book. Hush. Solitude. This is why an almost Monday morning feels like a vacation…even though it isn’t.

impossible to have known it then not easier to think of now will forget about it later but would write about it somehow the hazy promises of photographs lazy lies and smudgy smirks glistening poetry of a moment montage of jolted quirks mountains dissolving in a lake ripples searing with shafts of light butterfly wings and mossy swings roads slicked by rain and ochre night clumps of snow on red-tiled roofs pile of orange leaves on a field indigo buds tumbling atop a cave clumps of snow on a windshield yellow speckles on a snake long and rough elephant grass stylized rooms of people with faded jokes and plates of brass friends guffawing in a market dinner for two on a beach beautiful shells on slothful snails and freezing stars, just out of reach these photographs trace changes, also trap some old familiarity but i usually spot a stranger in each of them and that stranger is me

It wasn’t a starry, starry night. It was, in fact, a night with cadenced breeze and shadowy clouds. It was a night that could have been the prologue to a happy story; but chose to be the dénouement of a sad one. It was a night when you couldn’t see the moon, but you could gauge its longing in a fuzzy spot of light. It was a night when plebeians entered a princess’ room in her absence. The opulence was delectable; and the thieving intrusion even more so. The sky was the colour of soot – the kind that forms the backdrop of a Dickensian novel. It was also the colour of imperiousness – a purple-violet-blue-plum squish. The sky was, at that moment, a worthy beholder of the night. We sat at the verandah – Dee, Rhett, and I. There was some chai that had the smoky secret flavour of being brewed at 2 a.m. in the drizzle. There were bright, ambitious embers on cigarettes. And stretching before us were long hours filled with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate - Edith Wharton’s description...