It's that time of the year again. It's lovely in Calcutta. The weather is beautiful: not too cold, just enough to sit in the sunny verandah and eat oranges in the afternoon, lovely to sleep in, lovely to go out. Christmas is tomorrow. It's perfect. Well, almost.
If only the mind could be put to rest. If only. It churns too much these days. It remembers a simpler time when it had accepted life as it was. But it's better to be this person than that one. That one was a big bore.

coin de ciel

It's only a one-room apartment. One bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, two toilets and a verandah. The verandah looks down on the belly of the apartment complex. A blue swimming pool stands still, swimmers sometimes sending ripples through it. The apartment is on the top floor, so a patch of sky is available. No skyline though, no horizons to see the sun appear or disappear. Guests come on weekends sometimes. On weekdays, the television is always on. She walks around the apartments. There is a path that goes all around it. She walks and feels free. The everyday comings and goings are not for her now. She gets to walk and watch only sometimes. Who knew being able to walk and watch could mean something. The taxi drivers haggled, the buses were too full, the roads dirty, her co-travellers sweaty, the lanes unsafe. Yet, they all freed her from seeing the same walls for too long every day.

come december

The days have got shorter in my city. When I come to work, my city is slowly adjusting itself for welcoming the ensuing night. Full buses take people home, or may be it's just my imagination. At home, my father comes back from office during this time. When I was a child, I would look at the streetlights coming on and know it was time to end play and go home. In winters, I detested the evenings since they didn't leave too much time for games. Now I hurry to work as evening descends.

Somehow, the descending darkness seems to tell me that time is running out. This day is over, the week is hurrying past, the season's chaging again, the year's coming to an end. It seems to ask: What have you changed today? Where has this day led you? Did you do all you set out to do, in this day and in this life?

For Him..

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

And because Love battles
Pablo Neruda

cotton tree

The place I grew up in had been built by the British sometime in the 1800s.. It was a very clean, well organized, uncluttered colony, with green fields everywhere.. Groups of children would throng these fields in the evenings, tiring themselves with a whole assortment of games. The field beside our residential quarter had a cotton tree in the middle. It shed its leaves once a year, growing cotton in one season and red, heavy, rubbery-petalled flowers in another.. This tree would often form the cynosure of most of our childish games.. There was a concrete tub underneath the cotton tree. Only God knows what its use was. It had probably meant something to our colonizers.. For us, however, this tub was of miscellaneous use.. Very frequently it would be our imagined ‘car’, in which a few of us would bunch ourselves, ‘driving’ ourselves to imaginary places.
One evening at dusk, during one of our games, it was in this tub that I had seen a chameleon for the first time. I had actually stepped on it.. had felt something bristly and rubbery underneath my feet and had looked down to find myself standing on a chameleon. I must have been five or six years old.. After almost 17 years, the memory of the incident is still fresh. It still gives me the creeps everytime I think of it.. There is no need for me to remember it particularly. It wasn’t as if I was much scared then..
I had in fact probably not yet developed my fear of reptiles then.
My life’s first and only encounter with a chameleon. Underneath that cotton tree beside that much loved house. In that place I don’t live any more.