Squeak

So this morning, there was a squirrel in my bed, nestled in between three mattresses of varying age and thickness.

Room on roof entails frequent run-ins with creātūrī non homo. The floor is littered with string and fluff that no doubt served until then as furniture in the nest of the squirrel family that exists between the blurry lines of rafter and roof. Pigeons of questionable powers of vision that fly right into windows and then sit on railing, recovering. Bats that cling to floor and mysteriously make disappear milk from saucers and then themselves. Bees that hit against lights again and again in buzzing monotone, forcing fans to be shut and windows to be slid open till they return perhaps to hive under balcony. Spiders: green gold, tiny and translucent, glittering, busy spinning, near ear. I leave out, of course, the feline and canine members of the household.

After a few hours of leaving be with multiple points of exit exposed, Bahadur Shah, courageous young son of Lady of the Sparse Tail, had not yet budged far from under the bed. Next was attempted building bridges of milk-soaked bread, almonds and raisins but this failed to inspire trust also. Bahadur Shah had meanwhile grown quite restless, moving dizzily across tabla tops, performing amateur acrobatics between computer wires, with a pit-stop in the gym bag before some rustling through newspapers.

May may well be the month of all change, it holds the key to where these feet will head next. This so planned year, surprise year, year of loss and gain, books and oscillations, shall yield some of its lessons by May. If only patience were all it took. Patience and close encounters with the curious kind.

For the attentive, Young Bahadur Shah took the long route home, the one made of towels tied on end. And all the while, five measurers of destiny, in a rare cameo appearance, glowed grimly above.

Ami Amo

There exist certain persons who are able - with nothing more than inherent light and native sweetness - to turn the heart over and around. Persons who one may meet after twelve years and yet pick up that last thread of conversation that hovered about a rusty gate, a pinching competition, or another Mario level.

One must guard against pride, cocksurety, and ignorance just as hard as against indecision, self-pity and often - what we think to be - love. But when said persons walk back into the daily scheme of things - if only long enough for some ginger tea, some levity - keeping things at bay becomes irrelevant. There is, for a while, no further need for walls, fists and scowls. Said persons remind us of who we were, where we are likely to be, and reillumine that ghost of Ithaca.

This being the right moment to ask you to remember to thank whichever god you believe in or don't, for creating said persons who bring back from obsolescence, that much abused token of

Friend. 

that which must be forgiven

All at once, I miss college terribly. Apart from the early morning visitors - ranging from the hoarding and the weaving to the ultrasonic variety - this room also comes with hyperbolic acoustics. So this song comes on, not one I have ever much wondered about or remarked upon, but it comes on and all at once, I miss it. I thought it would never come.

This oppressive revisiting. Longing for inexplicable things like bus rides at sunset, alone. Like walks in between canteens, stopping for coffee only as an excuse to keep walking, running into old faces from school, from unexpected places. The strange way how everyone seemed to own the campus and be owned by it in turn. Every junkie, every geek, every scowling politico - as if organic growths, rational fallouts of that maze of asphalt and recycled flora. That strange sense of floating through knowing that this was how I would remember it. Aware of the memories hardening, often skewed, perhaps inaccurate, but settling nonetheless for good. Those born under Revati were meant to make an art out of leaving.

The smell of rain, thin coffee, books, ammonia, mulch, cement dust and sometimes skin. Earphones seem to be the refrain in these flashbacks. Sitting on the stairs, not needing conversation but happy in the soft glow of others talking. The easy distance that had replaced the first passionate ardour. Not that I disown the love, the attachment. Never had there been such closeness, such belonging. Not that I don't remember with a shudder the equally disembowelling periods. Times of total discomfiture when people, books, this self skin seemed grossly alien and designed to kill. But keener are these times of neither love nor hate, these times of blessed contentedness spent in solitude, sometimes shared solitude, which only like minds can understand. The absence of guilt, doubt, fear, intolerance. The ballooning joy of everything from a three-and-a-half-legged dog that followed one around the lake to a sudden flower offered. How the littlest of life's touches seemed to brim over.

I had a migraine when I started this. But now the song's over and Ma's just returned with a bucket load of haleem so all maudlin writing must be ended herewith. =)

longue durée

And its ineffability. Not the absence of Foresight; merely its irrelevance. Which is to say, thank you, those who stick around when there's nothing to stop you from leaving.