In the broken mirror I see myself fractured.

I've fallen into one of those moods again. It's addictive—this narcotic of sadness and discontent that swims in the endless cups of espresso that keep me hovering between wakefulness and inertia. This melancholy, punctuated by shots of caffeine that have long lost their significance, adds a glow to this deceptively ordinary night. a night like the last that resembled the one before it.

I'm living a page from my journal, which, I hadn't realized until now, had too many torn-out pages. I wonder where my days have gone. And suddenly, I feel like I'm wearing my emotions too close to my skin again. So that a soft touch cuts. A gentle word slashes. A look, a breath, a whisper of air, a notion exchanged between two people who've met yet haven't, who've loved, yet......

All of them beautiful and pure and painful.

As the wait prolongs itself.....stretching itself yawningly across the storm tossed oceans of time...I realize I can wait as long as I want....a golden glint of hope can keep me alive for as long as I want to remain stubbornly stuck to my madness...the piano shall have stopped playing, the curtains will have dropped elegantly on the stage, lovers shall have quarreled, kissed and made up for it and somewhere caught in the throes of waiting for you....as the venom of your love spreads through my body tantalizingly....reminding me of a certain searing encounter of lips where poison left one body and entered another...just about a miniscule drop ...enough to paralyze my heart and force it to stop flutteringly and it is then that I shall have quit waiting…just to renew my wait again...for aint I entitled to seven more lifetimes?

There are two kinds of people --- the kind that slosh around with puddles with a song on their lips and the kind that pull their hair at the hint of rain. I belong to the second lot. A friend once told me that people like me are called the rain - dysfunctionals.
My romance with the rain starts and stops with the first drizzle; when the earth smells like a million dollars and I want to bottle up the fragrance but don’t know how. Well, that itself is frustrating and I somehow feel that it’s merely nature’s clever trick to anesthetize people by this smell and lure them into believing that monsoons are romantic.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do appreciate the rains for what they are. I know that if it weren’t for the rain I would not be sitting here in my room, all wrapped up in my blanket, having pakora and chai and writing this piece etc. etc. But then I also hope that it would rain for an hour or two and allow the clothes to dry for the rest of the day. It’s welcome to weep into our catchment areas and it’s welcome to exhaust itself on our paddy fields and turn them into emerald. And if it promises to behave then it’s welcome to stay all year long and like a good gardener keep the city green.


But rain here in the city is a non story altogether. It’s about umbrellas that won’t open when you hit the road and won’t close when you get into a car. It’s about puddles that seem to rise towards you even when you are on higher grounds. It’s about all those yucky things that wrap themselves around your ankles like filmi heroines. It’s about putting your best foot forward in a gurgling stream only to realize that there’s an open manhole waiting to drag you in.It’s about leaky cabs, flooded buses and trapped commuters. And grouchy me who could not enjoy the monsoon to the fullest because of the rain!!
And now faced with a wet day I took out my long list of things to do on a rainy day”. A list I have only added to year after year. Well one look at the last serial number tells me that I might as well have to live to be 200 to do all these rainy day things. I also learned a lot about myself. I realize that I am trivia crazy (sort out dead batteries from live cells), that I am schizophrenic (arrange old cards in order and burn them in a heap), that I have illusions of grandeur (practice the royal wave). God did I really write that? Enough of self knowledge and I take a deep breadth and tear up the list.


And then I sit down to prepare a whole new list. It goes:
1. Read {still not decided which book}(gulp!) cover to cover. Without moving my lips.
2. Do yoga and pranayam. Might as well shred a few inches. (Oops!! did I just write that?)
3. Take a geology class (Dad says it helps to live amicably with fossils!)
4. Try out that 30 size jeans which has been in the closet for more than ten months (now here I go again! Illusions!! )
5. Research the ill will of thongs. (Hooonh! now that’s interesting)
Uh! Oh! It seems this rain is getting on my nerves. Now, do you get the drift why I don’t like rainy days???