This is where I was. On a bad-worded Sunday evening in a paper-boat hat off the east end of Hebbal.
It was Easter. Almost.
But the words never went. They ran ink – in the untimely April rain. Ran ink like the open wound would never heal. Ran ink as if the summer couldn’t suck it dry in its dusty incomplete swell.
But I knew it could.
I knew it had.
But the ink still ran – into little gullets in the newly laid pitch. That swelled and bubbled where the sun’s rough touch played it into sticky tar. The kind that trapped boots. And heels. And other things that feet liked to kiss.
Like the earth beneath it. And grass that disappeared every second Thursday of the month. Magicked away by April-ness. That wouldn’t be there in May.
And the little white world of ink and things that I’d thought I’d left behind eased gently out of my fingers in the tugging wind and floated away in a gust of some more April-ness to a faraway island I couldn’t reach.
The barbed wire winked at me in the sun. Something about April flashed in the clouds overhead before disappearing over a smoke-lit horizon. And a line of cool grey cement.
The flyovers swayed in the wind – sagging in the April heat…screeching at the tug – and then almost snapping – but not quite.
Where we stood still yesterday.
It is a paper-boat hat now. Running ink in non-existent rain before it floats off in a non-existent wind over a non-existent road. It is a non-existent paper-boat hat now. Drinking it’s fill of April. Over and over and over again. Till Sunday gets lost somewhere in between all the letters that hadn’t been posted yet. In between the five-rupee stamps that tasted of burnt coffee on a foggy morning. In between cigarette-coloured socks and half-remembered tomorrows.
It is Sunday. Almost.
