Here and now

 I had a good day today.

😀

Well... that's it, really. 

And...

 When I was growing up, there was a shop near my building called 'Funky'. I didn't go to that shop until my friends started having boyfriends and they wanted to buy something for them from there. I never quite fancied the place. But now that I think about it, I think he might have stocked good stuff because my friends would buy things for their men when things were getting serious. Funky was expensive. It's quite a cool name for a store.

A friend came over yesterday and it was nice. Very nice actually. I really needed to unwind after a hard day at work. It promises to be this way for a while now, at least a year maybe.

A little bit of toffee-type joys that I get are from the texts and messages that my close friends send me...a forward here or there, a picture of what they are eating, a bizarre tree or bug they saw in their balcony...it feels good. Together, I think, it's an atlas of delicious resilient ordinariness...our daily lives as continents.

Papa will now be staying in Vashi. His friend is visiting and he is quite excited. I would have liked both he and his friend to be where I can keep an eye but...one needs to let your parents have their own life, I guess. I feel a little sad when I see the chess board (which is not required in Vashi because said friend has brought one). 

Today one of my help asked me if I was planning on leaving. I asked where. She said that she had heard that I was leaving the house. Then a neighbour asked me that. And then 7 brokers called me up to ask me when (not if) I can give my house on rent. It's really bizarre.

But it did get me thinking...do I want to leave? Should I? On the face of it, I don't think I want to. In fact, I am planning my work life on the premise that I live here. But is there something else, some vibe, that I am giving off to the Universe and people...that I am about to go away?

It's like my suitcases and my chilly plant (that has grown taller are) are playing chess with each other. One makes its move with all this talk of me leaving. The other makes its move by digging its roots a little deeper. Who will win? 

But a line from 'Being Cyrus' comes to mind. 'After the game is over, the king and the pawn go back to the same box.' (Or some variation thereof.)

Pellet

 I just finished an assignment that has been really tough for me. By tough, I mean REALLY tough. It's the sort of assignment that I had taken up many times before and left it. Mainly because of fear of rejection, mainly because of mental and emotional blocks, and mainly a crippling lack of confidence. I cannot explain the sickening procrastination that kept coating my gut everytime I opened the document, panicked, felt sick, and closed it again. I cannot explain that fear, the extent of self-loathing...but today I finished it. 

I.finished.it.

I'll put that on my tombstone or have someone write it and tuck it with me when I lay on my funeral pyre. I am THAT peaceful now.

Monday will begin with a full day but a lot more confidence. 

Blue jay

Pliro usually slept late, after folding up the pond and cleaning out lily beds. Then he'd scrub the night, dispose stars in the alligator furnace, and dine on ravens pickled with dust from the black locust flowers. Lavender rain was his favorite beverage and he always sipped the very last drop before throwing away his cactus cup. 

No one had put Pliro in charge of anything. 

But one day, when Pliro was mindlessly wandering about the Herchken forest, his heart had rolled out of his chest, through the rocks and boulders, across the streams, and finally burst into feathers and flames. 

Pliro could not save his heart but he did feel a connection with and responsibility to everything his heart had touched. So, basically Pliro felt connected to everything. This was inconvenient but also useful. He could get the world to look out for him as much as he, now, cared for it. 

One day, in the continuum of such strange quid pro quo existence, Pliro found a little bird that trembled with a cobalt blue light. The bird looked like a reflection in twater - it seemed that fragile and lacking in dimension. Pliro made a little resting place with soft grass and leaves and placed it very gently near the bird. 

At first, there was nothing.

Then the bird slowly oozed into the resting place. Pliro was surprised. He had never seen anything like it. The bird hadn't hopped or flown. It had turned into a blue puddle with movement and slowly moved into the place through its cracks and crevices. 

Days went by and Pliro tended to it. He would get cinnamon dew from a few neighboring moons and give it to the bird. For the most part, the bird stayed in it's semi-liquid state, usually asleep. But sometimes it opened its eyes. And they were the most beautiful eyes that Pliro had seen - gorgeous pink eyes that shone with innocence and understanding.

One morning, the bird did not wake up. Pliro sat by its side watching the bird evaporate. At first it was slow and then the process sped up until it ended in a cloud of flame and feathers.

Pliro noticed something shining in the bird's resting place. 

It had laid an egg...a rowdy little heart that had rolled out of a man's chest one day. 

A long time later

 Today I begin a new chapter. So, in one sense, yesterday, some other chapter got completed.  

I had imagined this last day to be different. I had imagined flowers. Maybe a blue dress. Something in silk or pashmina. And definitely my mom. There was none of that.

It was a regular day. Same dose of panic. Same segments of joy because the weather is so luscious outside. Same pockets of relief that dad is okay.

But it was quite beautiful towards the end. V came over after nearly one hundred years. I had forgotten how irritating he could be, with his know-it-all attitude, and how much I had missed hanging out with him. I had to attend to a call and he sat by the window looking at birds. From the time I have known him, he has been quite exasperating - the way one's close friends generally become. But it is a treat to watch that man look at birds. For one thing, he is silent. And not just quiet in the sense, not giving unsolicited advice about everything. But silent the way a painter might be before adding a stroke on a canvas. He seems to map out a bird's flight and chart out it's life as the creature pecks at bread or soars across the sun. And I can't say for sure, but it seems as if the birds fly a little differently when he looks at them. There's a slight drama in the way they spread their wings or shake off rain from their feathers. 

It was such a sweet meditative half-hour when he was doing that as I finished my call.

Then we had tea and before he left for home, we went for a short rickshaw ride to Carter's. We didn't get down or anything. It was just a spin. 

And taking a ride with V in a rickshaw has become one of my most favourite things to do. You know how jelly is in that semi-liquid but almost-there firm stage before it is properly set? The lanes and little bungalows and tiny shops and palm trees in Bandra become that way during the ride. The world is in a sweet, indefinite, syrupy, cool state that will never form into anything so solid that you won't ever be able to change again. It's a precious surreal feeling. It's hope that's extra hopeful.

Anyway for the time being, all of that is to be behind me. But great chapters are often revisited soon enough. 

Something fresh begins today.

Don't know what the future holds but for now, it looks like lot of  packets of jelly crystals.

Piano music

 Rolf sat on the park bench, the way he had since the last twenty years. He saw a couple of deer gamboling about. Some children with orange-striped cotton candy made palaces with pebbles and flowers. Rolf looked at them but did not really see them. Far across the park, he saw the theater lit up with globs of marquee lights. For some reason, these lights alternately strobed between golden and ice-blue. It was a nice touch, considering the weather was chilly and it was only a matter of time before it started snowing. 

Rolf remembered the first time he entered that place. He was a child. His father had spent more time grooming Morney, the monkey, than him. But Rolf was a born performer. He could jump, dance, juggle, do the splits. The world was usually amazed by a four-year-old doing these things. For his father, it was routine, though. After all, they came from a line of Gillets - the tribe that shone with feverish energy whenever the spotlight hit them. It was, as they say, in their blood. 

But it was a long, slow, quick, dull, bright life. Rolf grew, then got older. As he got older, he spent a lot of time polishing the spotlight to fall on someone else. He didn't mind it though. There was so much to do. He taught himself cooking, embroidery, and origami. He taught himself how to do make-up on people's faces so that they looked like swans and dolphins. He taught himself the xylophone, all the time imagining it to be a piano. A piano was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was a musical and benign Loch Ness that arose, time to time, from an ocean churning with melody. 

But life was done. The theater had burned down. Rolf went on to do other things - play at weddings, do make-up for children's parties.

Then they brought the theater back up - prouder than it stood before. 

Today there was supposed to be a performance. A child prodigy who could do acrobatics across wild, untamed animals.

Rolf sat as the evening gave way to night. The stars spread like confetti across the sky. Children still played but their parents came and wrappped them up with bright scarved and mufflers, mostly with prints of cheery animals. His fingers tapped and moved across the park bench, playing an imaginary piano. 

He imagined that chubby little prodigy now running and jumping across lions in the cage across him. 

It occurred to him that his father was perhaps a better father to him than he realized. At least his father was by his side, even though he barely looked at him. 

Rolf just sat on a park bench listening to imaginary piano music as his son blinked at the crowd.