I think of you as my only reader and hope that the essence of what I want to convey doesn’t get diluted or misinterpreted in the transit. I write for you because I would never speak to you. I don’t know if you are even aware that I write, but hope that serendipitously you would stumble upon my blog someday. The only drawback is the constrained range of topics that thoughts of this particular reader brings to my mind.
I write an hour before dawn, sitting cross-legged on my bed, impatiently drumming my fingers on the laptop, wondering what would I like to tell you today. Sometimes I have little to say, sometimes I have to remind myself about this lone reader’s attention span. I am unable to contain the things I’d like to tell you; it’s a chaos that I look forward to each day.
Today I woke up at four-thirty am in a familiar yet relatively new city. The sun wasn’t up yet and it was freezing outside. So, I switched on the bedside lamp and started reading the book my sister gifted me yesterday, “The Groaning Shelf” by Pradeep Sebestian. This is a book about books, about unabashed bibliomania! I think of you and wonder if you would frown in amazement that I’m just a small fry among bibliophiles.
As the grey early morning light suffused the sky, I slipped on an over-sized black pullover and walked out to the terrace. It wasn’t an impressive skyline but the familiar stillness of dawn that greeted me. A sliver of the moon still hung unsure in the sky. An aircraft flew by uncomfortably close. A scary pigeon stared at me the entire time I was on the terrace. Do you know that I’m scared of birds? Hitchcock and a pair of huge swans are responsible for it.
As I sit on the edge of the bathtub waiting for it to fill up, my thoughts drift to you again. I eat eggs for breakfast and wonder how do you like your eggs. Fried? Scrambled? Omelette? I laugh hysterically over my sister’s antics and wonder if you would find them funny too.
I’ve traded my dream of travelling to the distant hills to visit the accessible Chandigarh due to lack of travel partners. I’m somewhat disappointed. By nine in the morning we were already on NH-1. There were so many things that caught my attention. I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk and she was nearly as tall as the lamp post, 6’5” at least. I gaped like an idiot, till I realized it was making her uncomfortable. I saw acres and acres of naked fields that would be luxuriant next spring. And there were the fauna; the horses, the bullocks and even an occasional camel! I saw turbans in every possible colour; aquamarine, peach, lilac, brick-red, you just name it. Old women with pendulous breasts carried large bales of hay on their head. Liquor flowed freely on this route. And so many expensive cars that I don’t even know the names of!
I stopped for lunch at a road-side dhaba where the utensils resembled a hotbed of staphylococcal colonies but the food was mouth-watering. They got the concept of ‘fat-free‘ wrong, and freely poured dollops of desi ghee on the paranthas. I thought of you again as I stood outside the car at this unfamiliar spot on the highway.
I am in Chandigarh now. I type these words as I lay curled up on a large white sofa. Today I wear pink, a welcome addition to my wardrobe of monochromes. In a few minutes I will accompany my sister on a shopping spree. She wants to buy kurtis with embroideries and works that she had painstakingly explained to me but I didn’t understand anything. I think I’ll settle for window-shopping.
I will think of you there too. And you won’t even know.
Dialect of Heart 