Monsoon

The rain outside my window is lashing past in horizontal lines, with sporadic puffs of mist. 

Winds are banging doors and knocking articles off-balance. I can hear things crashing in other homes too.

I have never witnessed monsoon fury of this magnitude in my life.

Can this tiny, presumptuous, self-sufficient, seemingly unperturbed island really take so much rain? There are only 655 square kilometres. 


I think it too might be starting to wonder if its perfect roads and banks and offices and drainage system can really handle the wrath of this monsoon.

Baggage

I saw a kid going to school yesterday. He was about three and a half feet tall, by my best estimate. And his school bag could not have weighed less than 5 kgs. It was sagging with weight and splitting at the seams with bulkiness, and its straps pressed into his small, fragile child shoulder blades- a giant bird with claws digging into his shoulders, landing all its weight on him and trying to take him down. I suddenly realized that the sling bag I was carrying was nearly 3 kgs heavy, and pressing rather viciously into my shoulder blade too.

Ma once gave me a pearl from her treasure of wisdom. She said, have you noticed how, while travelling from one place to another on a bus or train, some people hold on to their bags in their hands or on their backs? They might as well put them down while they are on the move, and pick them up when they reach their destination, but they resolutely clutch their baggages and add weight to their bodies, and themselves.

The metaphor extended, according to her, to the concept of leaving set your troubles down when you sleep - that just before you melt into your dreams, put all your worries, troubles and hassles on a shelf, and don't let your precious sleep be disturbed with unfair blame and thoughts that it doesn't deserve to be disturbed with.

There's a reason babies sleep the way they do: they don't ponder about things they can't control.

Big Yellow Cheese Moon

It looks surreal. A big round yellow pin-up in the sky, with small imperfections on it, like blemishes on a face. 


Blemishes on perfection, just a reminder that it might always be so. I saw it last night. 


We find change and perspective in things larger than ourselves.

We don't live very long, so things have to move in bursts sometimes.

Lava Lamp

It felt like a movie.

Her lava lamp was orange. It cast an orange glow over the entire room. Globs of wax in it moved up and down, slowly, floating, hitting one wall and moving unperturbed towards the another, only to be gently self-pushed in a tangential direction again. Their lazy fluency was fascinating. Big gooey bubbles of all sizes, bumping and moving along, like lots of people slowly hitting each other and continuing to move without a complaint. Maybe she should have bought a blue one. A blue glow would have been lovely.

She continued to watch it shine and drift lazily. She wished she could go inside it and trap herself into one of the little bubbles, and watch the world from atop the bookshelf, from inside the lava lamp - and if her bubble slowly stretched and eventually performed mitosis, then she would stretch with it, stretch gracefully, arching, until she slowly got divided in the middle, and became two small replicas of herself, one in each bubble. There could be many of her floating around inside the lava lamp, just like that, watching the apartment from a corner, people coming and going.

She shook her head from side to side to clear it, and sipped her strong black tea. She could feel it slipping down her throat, like a small stream of water on the floor would slip along the surface - she could feel it flowing gently, soundlessly, into her stomach, and soothing her. It had a distinct flavour. It sent a shiver up her spine. The breeze in her hometown did that to her. It was a shiver she waited for, invited, looked forward to, anticipated - like waiting for a person with more power, with the power to pleasure her insanely for just a moment, and then take it all away and tease her from a distance.

I'm drifting again, just like the wax globs, she thought, taking another sip. She shifted her gaze from the perfect lava lamp to the scene outside her window. A mosque began it's daily call, and she watched a few birds flying into the sun. It was quiet, except for a single baby's wailing, almost haunting in its loudness and helplessness. There is no time like evening - the last hour of light before dark, the last breath of a long and tired day, the last flutter of the sun's eyelashes before they close for the night. She watched as it got darker, and the lights in the buildings came on everywhere, one by one. The city still looked beautiful. From the top floor of a building, any city looks beautiful.

The mosque finished its prayer and the silence that followed it resonated into the dusk. The baby stopped wailing and finished off its complaints with a prolonged gurgle. She continued to sip her tea, blinking slowly, seeing everything clearly from behind her glasses. She played a strain of Billy Joel on her laptop, and continued to watch the city wake up for the night. The trains must be so crowded. The clubs must be getting ready for the teenagers - college goers in their first year, waiting for a release without knowing why, doing things they didn't understand and being carefree with the excuse that these years only come once. They aren't wrong, but they will regret some things later. 

Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong that week. All the promises she could have made to herself and broken, she had made to herself, and broken. A few bright spots, like plankton in a dark shallow sea, had come along over that dark week, but they were short lived. Like fire flies. Like shooting stars. Like a bulb with a fuse. She felt like she had sunk to to bottom of something jelly-like, and was yet to begin her journey up. She knew it wouldn't be so hard. She knew she would get there, and be all she had to be - it was dark, yet there was solace in that sunset, that lava lamp, that black tea, those city lights. 


How cliché. 


How true. 


That entire surreal moment encapsulated in the evening, the fading light, the liquid, the silence.

She returned to her desk, checked her mail, rustled a few papers, and began working again.

The lava lamp continued to glow.