Ginger drafts...

Apartments in winters come alive. I realised this when I was eight. The place has neither the dampness of rainy season nor the troubling lightness of air and everything around you. I enjoyed the time I spent in the lift in my apartment; it was a room, only it belonged to no one. We all shared the space sometimes alone, sometimes together, yet the room belonged to no one. It was late in the night; I pulled my hands out of the warm side pockets of my jacket and risked the exposure of cold winter air. I pressed the button and was waiting for the lift to descend, tapping my foot against the brown tiled wall. On its way down, the lift paused briefly at one of the floors, and I heard the sound of a woman (must be in her thirties) in great urgency, she banged the lift’s door shut and left, only to realise a moment later that the door was not properly lodged into the sockets. She tried vainly to force the door into the socket, after a couple of attempts (while I was rubbing my palms and pressi...

I was very conscious of the lady’s countenance; I could not get over the fact that she disdainfully spat caprice and malevolently rebuked me with a seriousness never before confronted (I have never). She must have thought me of a fool living in his own paradise, quite unwilling to share his wealth and richness with the people around. It was not that presumption that bothered me; rather it was that the intentions (of mine) haven’t really been my own of late. To put it bluntly, I wish I could clearly write down my own purposes, likes and dislikes. Little more clarity would be appreciated. It is as if talking to someone inside me, pleading the person inside me of shelling out some weeds of clarity. My laptop and me-the relationship is turning into something more than between a machine and a man. Every single time, as I open the laptop, the black keys with white letters are seducing me, and I am beckoned (grossly weak word), I must rather say I am seduced, and I type into the keys with a p...

The stench here is crawling up to me, following me. My shadow is no longer there; perhaps the rusted metallic roof has eaten it up. It is hot and suffocating, air is corrosive and the platform sordid. It is unusually calm here; my compulsive character dragged me here three hours in advance. The train is all washed up and the doors locked. The black painted rectangular blocks beside all the doors are empty (the man in white uniform would stick up long papers printed out of dot matrix printers with names of passengers on them). It is lonely; I have never felt so lonely in a railway station (the epicentres of chaos in India). It is 3 PM in the afternoon, and my train is at 6:10 PM in the evening. Now, in the comfort of my own self, I can see the world the way I have never seen before. I had a heavy lunch before getting on to the intercity bus, and I slept in the bus on the way to the railway station. So, I feel calm inside, nothing is bothering me at this moment, something very profound s...

And indeed, one assumes that one has known it all, the sun rise, the rabbit running in the fields of the fall. She has the eyes of a snake, the suddenness with which she is upon you is indescribable, and like the hood of a cobra she turns towards you and mercilessly watches your hesitant countenance. And, I must write now, I must write or I might forget, forget that the flowers bloom, that the lady was upon me, that my friend collects fish shaped pieces of wood and strings them together on the key chain’s tail. There is the constant shuffling of thoughts in my mind, one moment I am splashing water on my face and the other I am aware of the person inside me (so much so that I realise the person inside me, and see myself for the first time). Every morning I wake up with a completely different person staring at me in the mirror, and go to bed with an incomplete person who invades my dreams playfully. Every moment changes me, I am not what I had been a day before, I am not what I had been ...

What is with memories? I am besotted, almost in a sleepy state, relish in reliving the most oldest of all, the childhood days. The poetry that I read at school, the teacher who sneezed with impropriety; the play ground behind the school where I played cricket, at night, the street lamps under which I played hide and seek; the neighbours that I grew up with, the rich old man in his white flannel suit who came out every night to smoke a pipe punctually; the black and white television that I sat before, the detective sitcoms I watched; the roof that dripped wet all the walls when it rained; the auto rickshaw driver who had hair growing out his ears; the salon that I went to, accompanied with my father, and the man would sit me on a wooden plank over the arms of the chair, for I was still a boy and the mirrors weren’t particularly designed for boys of my age; the shop that I went to on the first week of every month, with my mom, my mom would but me a parleG for accompanying her; the doctor...