A saturday like any other...

Woke up when a second more would’ve made my brains with a low shudder expand and eke out of my ears. Sleep and dreams are tred on with Air Jordans methinks cause the first step out of bed is like lead! I trundle to the switchboard. Turning on the loo lights I step into peach land. No, really…I had just cleaned it with Pril the previous night (apart from that my bathroom is all pink!) S-tumped, T-orpid, U-nnerved, P-athetic, O-bnoxious, R-ancid and in its throes the next one hour flits as I trail on the marble getting ready for a bath. Nope, not hot water, tis mint that knocks me up the good way.

A rumble in my mid-section ushers in my dawn. A satisfied senseless grin and a spurt of a burp complete my ablutions. Sated I wind my brain for the next few hours. It tick tocks its way into last night. The torture I went through unveils page by page. There are some books which are in fact evil genies who subvert power and have the reader in their grip till the task is completed. The Circle of reason…sounds like one too doesn’t it? The utter madness with which the story unfolds has got me whining as it's got me in a half nelson. The trick is to treat it like a cramp. Wait for it to let go by itself, which in other words means finish the godamn book!

But then there’s the will, there’s the strength in us human beings to repel. But sadly in my case it isn’t any great victory but mere escapism. I decided to buy more books! And with a teeny pocket what better place than Moore Market?! Galvanized by mom’s tea I hopped on to a bus. Here’s the subplot…

Bus journeys are a world of their own. In the clamour and in the grating gearbox are stories heard and stories created, questions unfolded and answered. It growls and prowls its way around the ‘current’ museum outside the periphery of the Tate. A billboard artist’s shop with the usual cherubic, toothless, splotchy, smile plastered-baby (which does anything but to advertise ones skills) has got me crawling back through the navel. With my waist down stuck as in a bottle and neck dunked in psychedelic pink and truly inverted as I once was germinated, my bottom half sprouts ears and to the grumbling roll and out of key ‘world’ music I wonder, aren’t I actually at any given point of time 9 months older?

Having removed my red-tinted U(uterus)V glasses I go-a-belonging. I see a man panting and puffing for 20 meters to the bus stop, I see a man hunched on his haunches…waiting, and I see a woman rapping loudly on the bus to stop. The power of choice…its amazing! The feeling of empowerment to know you have an option is mind-blowing! I wonder how it is to not have the option of knowing there are other means of travel, that this 10 rupees counts different for different people, that I can afford to avoid rush hour and hail an auto, that I don’t have to walk that much more from the bus stop to home cause I can always hail an auto, that missing a stop doesn’t mean fleshing out my pocket, that walks aren’t momentary whims but the only way. Well, Sartre said choices are our bane (he probably wasn’t referring to the mundane but these are just as essential), but I’d rather have them than not knowing.

Central Station looms before me. It thwacks my blinkers away as I take in its expanse, its aura. As I get off I can’t but stop and gaze stupidly at this immense entity that has lived so many goodbyes and greetings, mirrored so many faces, eroded by so many farewells and yet it thrives and bustles non-stop. Heartless it seems but it is the closest to the cosmic heart, ever-pumping in and out. I do a rewind in chip & dale voices. I’m one of the caricatures it swallowed and chomped out for nearly 2 years. But this time I respectfully gaze away in a different direction.

As I brush past all sorts of faces all sorts of sounds all sorts of smells, the one thing that streams out like a festoon from my nostrils is the sticky sweet smell of pineapples from vendors mashed with the tang of the sea and coated with pungent urine.

I stride into the maze of the once glorious flea market of bygones of mom and dad’s times. Now it's just shambles…lil knick-knacks here and there - old dingy costumes, broken and pasted gadgets, but there is treasure in such places. And like all treasures it is to be unearthed... from dusty-musty-fish tank smelling piles...Books! Used, second-hand books…assimilated, disseminated, recycled - Phoenix! (Oh by the way there are also gramophones that work!)

But, this one time I was disappointed. The stacks have begun to echo us. We have impinged upon them. Engineering books, Mills & Boons, and popular fiction (the bleah kinds) dominate. The only ones left behind are the Classics because they are the Classics. All those brilliant inbetweeners who surpassed the title ‘Classics’ and chose their own have grown invisible and almost vanished. Or maybe it’s a good sign. There have been many who’ve beaten me to the racks.

Disgruntled, I roved through the passages, doing many shops twice as I got lost at right angles. A pacifier I needed and I got - a termite drilled, battered ‘Lord of the flies’. I usually skip around bargaining but I had to get it out on something and so I did. Did quite a successful job too. 20 bucks! Uhh the dude quoted 30…

I slithered down the subway (thanks to chipped stairs) and after scrutinizing bus boards got into one on an impulse, one I knew would take me all over the city. And it did! With nothing left to do as I saw shorter routes glide past me, I began to marvel as to how well I know the city. And before it could take me a fourth time away, I wobbled off at a signal and flexed my legs a bit.

Got home to a second round of tea and plonked down in front of my shrink – my computer. And been here ever since…almost.