rain

Yesterday evening, it began to thunder and to rain very hard. The sky was completely overcast and silver, and for a long time charged with the idea of rain, with the thought of moisture. The light gathered into itself and settled on the contours of buildings and the leaves of trees, making everything glow in a surreal way. Finally, the rain began, all at once, horizontal from sky to earth, white and silver streaks. The light in the sky danced from shadow to glow and shapes became hazy in the gauze of rain. I was sitting on the bed inside beside you. You were lying down with your head on a curled up cushion. The rain made me cool and made me want to lie down next to you, so I did. For a long time, I lay there, looking out through half-closed eyes, through the almost invisible black lines of the screen over the doorframe, looking out at the steady streaks and sheets and lines of silver.

Sagwan

Outside my balcony, there is a sagwan tree (Tectona Grandis/ Teak). Its foliage is large and disorganized, spreading out with a unique messy happiness. The trunk of the tree is not very broad, which makes the tree's foliage appear all the more oversized and bizarre. Something about the weight and structure of the tree makes it conducive to catching and responding to breezes, even the smallest ones. The leaves, individually, are very large, the oldest measuring several feet in length and breadth, and oddly wavy along the sides. They create fantastic negative spaces. I love watching this tree at sunset.

The wood of the teak is dense and hard and so expensive. A few months ago, another teak, a younger one, that stood next to the one I just described, fell mysteriously at night. Its fallen foliage was a jungle in itself, one into which the dogs loved to disappear. But then the tree was chopped up and sold. The next morning there was a strange empty space, a portion of the sky that I hadn't seen in years.

waiting for the rain

Yesterday, I saw the most beautiful sight. A solitary cumulus cloud was drifting far above the horizon across my line of vision and the only bit of open sky left to be enjoyed from my balcony. It was lit by an internal light that grew stronger and faded at different times, as though a gigantic firefly was trapped within it. Now and then, a sharp and slender streak of lightning would course through one part of its vaporous body, then another. This cloud moved slowly along my line of vision, carrying its brilliant bolts of lightning, through a sky that was a watercolour gray-blue and deepening before my very eyes. The cool air stirred and I wondered when the rain that this cumulus was heralding, would begin.

Monumental Love

I thought of it as repairing a monument, as patching its walls section by section, standing precariously on a bamboo frame but catching the breeze nonetheless, suspended between the far ground where humans moved like clockwork toys and the very top of the monument, which in turn pierced the blue sky...

When I thought of it like this, I didn't feel so bad about you.

butterscotch

I was behind a glass door when it began to rain, in a tiny 'bakery' that seemed to be quite popular for its pastries and patties, judging by the number of young people that were streaming in. Everything was typically small and modest and, completely bizarre to my eyes then - the flaky, triangular puffs filled with yellowed potatoes, the narrow wedges of wilting cake topped with inch-thick layers of golden or green cream. The customers who came in bought only one, or at the most two, pastries, pronouncing their orders to the man behind the counter solemnly and carefully. They behaved as though they were using up the day's ration of treats. The salesman was also a young man; but he was one who looked somehow overgrown, or undergrown, or disbalanced, like a teenager in an adult's body. He moved behind the counter sliding the glass doors that protected the treats to grasp them, to pinch them, one treat and a time, between his fingertips.

The treat would be put in a flimsy cardboard box with cheaply printed letters on its lid spelling the shop's name, then put into an even flimsier plastic bag coloured some colour like neon pink or green. Then the bag would be hung carefully on the wrist of the customer and carried out into the drizzle and the crowded street. The autobiography of a treat.

Not quite over. In a small living room suspended far above the chaos - a living room marked out for that purpose by the sofa sitting there, too bulky for the space - in this living room, in the heat, now humid because of the rain, the box is opened, the plastic bag discarded, and the treat lifted out onto a plastic plate printed with fading floral patterns. The treat is divided up among the eager onlookers and consumed with a delicate casualness, the initial bite lifted slowly, then the cream and the crumbs allowed to smear sumptuously over lips and tongue...each bite washed down with a sip of saccharine fizz.

I felt I knew that one girl who came in to buy the "butterscotch." Her thin, dark arms covered faintly with fuzz. The lack of glamour in the sweep of her ponytail, strands of hair escaping and sticking to the sides of her forehead with sweat. The way her chunni slips from her shoulders because it is made of a synthetic material and the way she keeps pushing it up matter-of-factly while clutching her ten rupee note in her fist. She barely glances at me in response to my stare, making me feel invisible in this bakery among the butterscotches and the black forests, a total stranger to the layers of coded language passed deftly between the young salesman and the girl buying her treat.

the house

The house - I must write about the house.

The house is like a treehouse, a caravan or tent, or like the log cabin in 'A Little House on the Prairie.' It is very circular, and moving around in it is like moving through memory or dream, the way you keep stumbling or slipping upon something soft and worn and familiar, or the way all the time, a corner rushes towards you to enclose you in its dark arms.

Even though the house is circular, there is no single locus. You move about, searching for it, the corners rushing towards you and about it at unexpected moments. Actually, you are the one that contains that point.

Often, you look abstractly at the trees and the sky outside one of the many windows; the house holds you, and you don't want to leave the house.

The walls seem liquid, or transparent. Maybe that is why you feel a centre, constantly flowing, constantly moving. The main walls, the walls that make the house a house, are a long stream of window, a movement of foliage and cloud and sunlight...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/locus