Ginger drafts...

Last night, as I walked through the canopy of dry grass, a strange illusion came over me; the night was cold and the breeze penetrating, sort of trickling through the most sensual neurons of my body. The lady with a heap of clothes on her back went past me, with mincing steps, eyeing me for a fleeting second. I paused and so did the world around me, shut my senses off and apprehended the beauty of the moment; the lady walking heavily heaving and thrusting her right foot into the pile of mud before her, holding her sari by the folds with her naked palms, all the time indifferent to the beauty she possessed. She was not lascivious by the modernistic standards, but was effortlessly exuberant, intoxicating in the way she undid the heap off her back. Presently, she bent over and was reaching out for the folds of the heap, to unite. As she sat down, I noticed that something was bothering her. Her eyes, it was perhaps a straw of dust that found its object of beauty. From where I stood, I coul...

“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky” So proposed T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; the poetic extravaganza of the two lines have not yet suffused me with a momentous entrancement that I found two files merrily dancing about in my plate. I certainly do not recall making a glorious proposition like Eliot. Apparently, the flies thought otherwise, in their perpetual quest for food, they chanced upon me, and were presently eating out of my plate. I don’t have a healthier relationship with the files; I find their enthusiasm repulsive, their hopping around from one plate to another injects a certain hormone that contorts my face as if in agony. These are testing times, of survival feeding on what is dished in the name of food in the company of the most unpleasant species on planet earth. We were only 260, a numerically negligible number; they were in thousands, They did not seem too keen to appreciate my offering (apparently, I figure...

The old man looked at me calm and composed, his capacious paunch drew his body tighter together; neck leant towards it, arms crossed over it and legs folded against it. The rest of the body detached from him and folded itself as a second being over the rotund life, supporting it as the petals of the flower embrace the nubile stalk. His beard, thick brown, face dark, senses wide, arms flat and man serene, he assumed the posture of reckoning that seemed obvious but elusive. His eyes were searching, always scooping out images from the closeness to what he ascribed as reality. The space time continuum he shared with me suffered a backdrop. He proceeded to address me in his calmness, and I obliged, he suffered through the process and I volunteered. He leapt back blenched with the fear of compunction, mixed his emotions with a vibrant outburst of reckoning, which again looked so elusive. Now, his continuum expanded and I found myself within his grasp. He reached out and I stood transfixed, f...

As I sat there on the beach, cold at night with the breeze smoothly passing me by, a strange feeling unsettled my repose, and I lifted up all of my conscience by the folds of reveries. Then, as if with a smite, I lay the net of my conscience all over the sea floor just as a fisherman spreads his net over the waters to collect fish. I endeavored with an infantile pride to apprehend the beauty of the sea at night, the intense power of sea at creating a wave here and a wave there suffocated me. Small waves at a distance united to form a long dip in the ocean pushed forth by a force hidden behind the dip. With every passing second, the dip lowered and the force implored to surface, but by an inherent wisdom perhaps, the force pulled itself tight, forming and hiding behind the long dip. And then, as if to swallow the whole of ocean there arose from the hidden darkness, a giant sea horse with a white head frothing profusely along the length all the way up until a small receding wave beckoned...

The summers are quite hot here. When I first checked into this resort where all the pathways are strung together by the beads of coconut trees into green warps of twisted and tangled mess, which opened up into different channels leading to different cottages, I relapsed my jubilant conscience. On my way to the room, the brown tiled path with tiles neatly sloping on each other gave way to a rugged cement tiled path, then to a lawn with round marble plates perched up at regular intervals. I pulled my luggage on wheels on smooth paths, other times; I simply had to lift them up. The arduous task of lifting the luggage would have been painful if not for the smooth paths interconnecting the painful ones. One such path ran over a small pool with fishes in it. I paused for a while on the bridge over the pool which stretched equally on both the sides. It was a fairly small pond, so I began by counting the number of fishes. While I was counting the black fishes with long tails that convulsively ...

As the dust settled back on the road, some of it favored the flower tops on the roadside, some on the men walking along the roadside. some of it got caught up with the wind above and regurgitated into the ponds filled with green algae on the surface so thick and rustic that the sheet of green simply undulated along with the waves underneath it, but never broke, not even sunlight could slip through the thickness, one wondered. We travelled on and on, in the red APSRTC bus through the dusty roads along the lakeside with children pelting paper rockets made of the daily newspaper at the bus. A school boy was following the trail of a bicycle wheel with a stick in hand hitting it right on the top every time it slowed down, a woman was walking heavily with mincing steps and the men in dhotis walked past her nonchalantly not pausing to admire the beauty of her balancing the weight of water pot on her head. the bus slowed down and the man with a rug on his shoulders was whistling his way down t...

So, what is culture he pondered for a while, while the truck before him was idling? Is it the ideas that are advocated by few men of intellect that drives the civilization forward? he conjectured as the man behind the steering wheel pulled the gear levers and the truck took to the roadway. If not for the wheels, the gears, throttle, the sophisticated suspension, the immaculate joints, the crank shafts with zero tolerance, all of them would merely charge the truck into the state of ‘idling’, but could never put it into motion. But is it that simple, he struggled with skepticism; wheels are just as much an integral part in the complex machinery of the truck as any other part. Isn't that so? Besides, wheels can only take the truck as far as the engine permits, and there are a whole lot of other parameters that preclude the wheels from assuming a central authority. ‘So, is the civilization too’, he blushed pleasingly as if he chanced upon a critical theory and continued with the new...