Establishments right from rickety Happy Hair Cutting Salon to glass-fronted McDonalds have changed their signboards to the local script overnight. Would be amusing if the brawn show wasn’t scary.

Three days to the Ganpati festival.

A completely random happiness.
Channel surfing. Find, on UTV movies- A Hard Day’s Night.
Squeal, shout, cheer, sing along; every yeah yeah yeah, every wo ooo oo oou.
Every darn word. How the lines sound.
The parent looks on, bemused.
This is the first-ever record I’d seen as a 5 year old.
Shiny cover, the fab four, memories of jumping on the bed, monkey-style.
How does the brain remember?

A bed of lush weeds, a sprinkle of silver, a few periwinkle amidst riotous green.
I'm happy for the strangest reasons.
Sometimes.

THE Mr. AB replied to a comment I'd left on his blog.

Dazzled. Awe.

You stare at the mail eyebrows raised, nostril flared and lip half-stretched in disbelief, you’re hearing from someone you’d given up on, for something you’d given up on a long time back.
Sorry- this is cryptic.
For now.

Greed, rapacious avarice, and dishonesty.
No, have never seen this magnitude before.
I watch it like a specimen on a slide.
Learning.

It’s been a good three-day break. Glimpses remain.
-Realizing how light from incandescent bulbs can put one to sleep as early as ten in the night.

-Realizing that one will never quite fathom the sacrifices so many have made for us to live on free land, breathe free air and speak out. Looked through scribbled notes from the essay, to try and understand that mettle, wondered where it all disappeared.

-Connecting with family on raksha bandhan, now the email and phone way.

- Looking spellbound at the Silk and Spice route story on Discovery. So many have come and gone, the march of ages, et al, and one day so shall we. Lovely shots, but.

-Began reading White Oleander- beautiful words, its the kind of story that you think of when you wake up first thing in the morning.

-Tons of friends, long distance calls lasting an hour or more, a vision of the flat with the distant sea view and slums next door.

- tough sub, but I did it, 400 and done.

Med chem remember? Engineering drawing? Workshop? Swotting. Writing formulae, equations on the wall. Cology, cognosy, all the stuff we learnt, arcane measures like minims? Its been a neat twenty years since we toiled away at titrations. Since we used slips of butterpaper to steady those circa sixties balances, playing it so much by the ear, all POTA numbers. And yet when I talked to you the other day it was like you’d never left. Strange how some friendships last, some don’t.

Laughter, teasing, and when that young niece and nephew discuss vintage hindi films from the sixties and the latest music do you realize how time has sped by. A loved elder’s birthday, celebrations, family ties, everyone talking at the same time, an unspoken thought like the music in the air, next year who knows. Sunday evening, bits of Om shanti om with the remote on standby you realize even a standard, run of the mill story can be given a super treatment, that is art.

Grass tousled by spray rain. A drop falters bamboo leaf edge.
A mynah trots on wet paving stones.

What is the color of closure? I don’t know. But it sure has a sweet smell. For reaching this close to insanity a year ago, for grief and for that laughable abject gratitude- let karma take its own dues. Maybe I owed, and I paid up- that too, is possible. I don’t even want to know which version is your truth.

A greeting fetches a cuss and an angry word volley, and then it hits home- what the Buddha meant by dispassionate active calm and how many trillion lifetimes you are away from it.

Without a rolldown screen or a sheet to project on, they cannot use the film. So many different Indias, from the six-screen multiplex to projection on a village wall.

Acknowledge the mess, action measures and dammit move on. The time for decision is at the beginning-not now. Done is done. My blunders are all life-size, ever lasting.
(Work related.)