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.