It’s as if 3 years have passed and I was asleep all this while. And once the decision was made, I just woke up from a fretful and cold slumber that had morphed me into something staid and intimidating and scary. And once more I wish to be free. Once more I need to be open and out and loud and loving and wanting. Are you ready for me? Am I?
I wasn’t really interested this time around. Not after a heart-breaking last year I had. But I watched. How could I not? Mid-Summer, blazing sun, boring Sundays. Where else could we go? What else could we watch. The lure of cool interiors, the inviting cold beer, big screen T.Vs, (a very good looking Sameer Kochhar ) and we were hooked. And we started watching IPL season 2. I hadn’t meant to, but thank god I did, for my little city won to erase the ignominy of last year.
I am a very pessimistic, superstitious person when it comes to cricket. I am such a stereotype when it comes to cricket. For the Border-Gavaskar 2000-2001 Chennai match, I stayed in my bedroom and tried to study political science. Everytime I emerged, Indian wickets fell. My sis and Mom banished me and I stayed in praying cos we were winning against Australia and it all depended on me! I still believe that.
Last Sunday the Deccan Chargers Played Royal Challengers. My sister, my friends and I hung out on 10d Bar stools and kept our fingers crossed and prayed. I prayed with my head bowed and hands clasped and looked up to see the owner of the franchisee in the same stance. The owner and the fan, were we praying for different ends? Money v/s Simple Victory? Did it matter? Weren’t we all participating in a religious ritual/warfare here? Do the advertisements reduce cricket’s sanctity? Not for me. And not for the hyderabadis at 10 d that Sunday. Or for the 4 bangaloreans.
Is it only me? Or Are you too completely swamped with nostalgia and feeling the bitter sweetness that was high school? Do you also try to cast your mind back to that age and time and you return with a handful of nothings that meant life or death a decade ago? Do you also wish you could go back and then shudder for now we know too much to go back to that? Have we left our innocence at the turn of the millennium? If you have answered yes to one or more to these troubling questions and if you are the type who enjoys a good weep at a heart touching romance, and if you are the type who likes anime, I would suggest Love com or ‘Lovely Complex’
It’s a very relatable anime I chanced upon last year this time. Me and my sister fell in with it completely. And whenever I feel down, I go back to it. It’s very brief. 1 season 24 or so episodes.
Read more about it here.
or
May be I am about to die.
I am getting these flashes of cherry blossom trees. Lakeside in the evening. Cloudy skies. Empty streets. Warm breeze. Roadside tea. And mirchibhajji.
I hoped it was the future and heaven.
But now I know.
it’s only Yercaud.
Every evening I take my now accustomed road back home and I think of you. To fill you and me with thoughts those surround me this evening. My heart chokes and I long to feel the heat engulf me and the hot air of my lonely city to parch my skin and make my eyes water, with heat and easily remembered yarns of my past life. Lonely grey-green trees stand by and suffer the summer. Every evening I make a promise to spin those yarns about my city, my childhood, and my memories. All that is now my melancholia, my nostalgia. The summer in my city has its own personality. A visitor is always surprised by the Deccan summer. The mornings are quick to blossom and sultry. I stand under the shower, eyes still shut with sleep and hot water pours down. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon slowly calms me down as I get ready to live away another day. It’s just 6:30 am. A short and silent cab ride to hell where the weather doesn’t matter and it is eternally cold, and I am cold too, not on the outside, but the inside and I breakfast on the spoils of war at the loner’s corner. It’s 9 and I have spoken not a word. Enough of that.
Every evening I take my now accustomed road back home and I think of you. To fill you and me with thoughts those surrounded me that evening. Evenings here are balmy and breezy. The people who were inside (wherever that may be) come out to feel as the sun sets. They come out to belong, we come out to share horror stories about the weather, the heat, the sweat or the lack of it and people dying of sunstroke. Was it 43’c yesterday? 45’c in Warangal? We win the weather forecast on every channel with the highest predicted temperature and we lose at the humidity.
Ineffective summer showers pitter patters on the over-worked A.C and the summer painted terrace. My poor dog with a perpetual black coat barks in delirium at the rain. And then at its short-livedness. The 15 minute rain and the accompanied 20 minute powercut both over, my room now artificially chilled. The A.C cools my hair and I forget the completely still, hot night that reigns over my poor city. Instead I dream of clouds, snow and other improbable things.
There on the window pane
Egg white ink and lilies lay
Asleep in the day
Origami doves
Came alive at your one touch
Flew away in the night
All over my grave
Orange flowers you chose lay
Lesser petals wept.
Its that kind of evening again
Nothing is safe now
Jackfruits and more burst
And more and more ripe
And the smell this evening
is maddening.
Such evenings are just not
Safe for you my little girl
Someone as young and fragile
As you my little girl
And such things stir in me
That heightens this evening
And your brown brown hands
Red full lips midnight eyes
Beckon me, they do
They do beckon me and
You dance just ahead of my eyes
And your family waits for you
Hurry home to your mamma
Little girl, my little girl
Do you see those eyes over the hedge
covet your brown brown skin
hurry hurry home hurry
home my little brown girl
your mumma waits for you
milk gets colder as a glass on the table
she waits at the door and calls
out to you, her pretty girl of just 13
and here you are dancing in front
of these dirty brown eyes
you are dancing in front of me
Over my fence under my window
you jump and skip and run
over my enticing summerfields
my sunflower fields seduce you
and you slow down as your mumma
waits at the door for her pretty girl of 13
It happened just 67 steps from home
And you were snatched and don’t cry
It was not your fault and you will go to the gods
And its all the way to hell for me
For what I did to your brown skin
And you were just a pretty girl of 13
Those 67 steps you didn’t cover
my little pretty girl of 13
now you will never come home
and your mother knew this would
happen someday to someone as
pretty as her daughter of just 13
under my fields and my soil you lie,
my little 13 yearold pay thing
and no one knows still but the
village now whispers and no young girl
take the shortcut through the sunflower fields
your bone melts from the flesh
your yellow summer dress
I have hidden somewhere where none will reach
And I burn in my own private hell
And you are now far away from all this and me
But still the sunflower fields haunt me.
