Winter has arrived unheralded as a familiar guest should. Inconspicuous, as it has attempted to be, I cannot miss the rows of stalls, all hoarse with the cries of “Three for six hundred”, their originators curtained by woollen blankets being unfolded for the inspection of those passers by that might spare a sideways glance away from the irreproachably straight road ahead.

Clotheslines of jerkins swing between adjacent stalls, zipped up and strung up by their dubious familiarity of their labels. They stare at you warily as you walk past, you can almost see those invisible faces from within those upturned collars, and feel their disconsolate pleas for attention on your stubbornly unsold, uncovered back.

There is only one other place where I have acknowledged winter’s faltering albeit unmistakeable entrance.

A chetak scooter had trundled passed me, a six year old standing in front of his father, his feet between his father’s feet, straying within reach of the pedals of the scooter, perched as precariously as I once was in front of my father. Except that instead of facing the road and offering it his bundled chest to the chills of thirty kmph wind, he had his back to the road and his head against his father’s chest, sleeping like a fugitive prince being whisked away on a horse.

And this picture, incomplete as it may be, will always be winter for me.

I write of winter because it has lived incognito among us in Madras for sixteen years. I write of winter because four winters’ memories can make wearing a ragged gray sweatshirt seem as snug as carrying a pot of live coals, merely by a talismanic logo emblazoned on it atop my heart.
I write of winter because, like me, it can never have the last word in a bargain, can’t count its centigrade change twice before folding it carefully in its wallet, unlike the rest of the world that walks smugly in the sun without having been short-changed.
I write of winter because I still haven’t switched off the fan or even reined it back below that soothing speed four that sweeps away overhead noise.
I write of winter because it always leaves just when you wish it away, when you claim every day will be colder than the next and that one day it just won’t be there anymore.
I write of winter because I could do with a change of season and that there can never be songs enough for the seasons.

I pause at the last stall in line, aware that I will one day join this growing minority that is already clad in warmer clothes.

“Single blanket?” I begin.

He unwraps a blue blanket, darkening to indigo in the dusk, to its fullest extent, his arms taut and fingers tense with the effort and says, “Seven feet. Pure wool.”

It slips between the questioning tips of my fingers, softer than the lint-spangled exterior promises and yet I ask doubtfully, “Isn’t there anything thicker?” I point him out to blankets that lie snugly zipped away from the dust and smoke of the road within their plastic carry cases.

He unpacks it obligingly enough but adds in the tone of a remark intended to pass as irrelevant , “Three four people can sleep comfortably. Families buy this.”

Thrice as thick and thrice as large, it would obviously cost thrice as much. But why would I buy this, I who have never known the insides a double quilt and it represents, I who have slept and lived solitarily throughout? Mistaking my silence for a wavering will, he slips from nine hundred to six hundred. “If you want, come with your mother. I’ll remember, for you alone it will be six hundred.” The loud spiel of his vendor voice sinks to a confidential whisper.

I nod, “Yes, I’ll return with my mother.” “Remember me, Inamdar. I won’t go back on my word” he completes, a little heroically.

A lone bulb twinkles above us hanging by a makeshift tangle of wires all carrying stolen electricity. Against the polypropylene-papered wall, the blankets make tantalizing shadows that obey the pendulous motion of the bulb as perfectly as the moths above do. I walk away towards a house that no sunlight can blind, a bed that no family-size quilt can warm, a chill that no season can pierce.

Old Love

Yesterday, I turned full-throated in class, offering answers out of turn, scrambling under desks for candy that scattered past other hands unearned.

Yesterday, you were sitting at my table, not cross-legged and conversant, but with a scowl that only a stubborn splash of the last night's candle, a blob that refused to be scooped into your fingernails, can inspire.

Yesterday,you could listen to me on the phone with another, for half an hour straight without turning away or pretending to be absorbed in your own little squares of light, and then tell me without waiting for my recap, "That was a very sensible thing that you've just told her."

Yesterday, you could shut your eyes tight enough for my throat to swallow a cry and choke on the song that was already yours.

Yesterday, you could remind me of every kiss yet unclaimed, by a parted hand, a smile that couldn't beget mine, your way of falling asleep.

Old love isn't love grown weary of suppers gone cold and crowded clotheslines. Old love is not love that died young and poemless, having forgotten every line read and having stabbed its own rhyme shut.

Old love tramps past broken hedges, sidles up to me in solitary streets, and steers me instead towards glittering shelves and the fatal charms of peddlers' cries.Old love shoves past the doors I shut behind it, past my ultimatums and follows me out bleary-eyed like a child that refuses to sleep alone in the dark.

Singing in lost lands

I found myself singing today, chorus-clipped songs that had stayed on long after the stage had cleared, the car radio had shut mouth half-open, and my mother’s voice disappeared into a songless senility. Nobody else heard it, in the smack of thumb and forefinger, in the limped detour from straight and fast that my feet have taken, or between drummed wall corners that my fists seek out as if to punch the song out of my being. On buses, the curtain string that cuts window views into red-lined halves trills long with the song but whether they travel backwards like sea waves on reverse gear, I don’t know.

First I merely hear the song in my head, furiously piecing together the lines in order, shunning the absurdly addictive rhyme of chorus, waiting for the music to fill up places that a bad memory and an ear thought to be tone-deaf can’t. And then I hear it – whole and at last, a more flawless version than I ever could have with the best stereo system in the world. Soon my lips play shadows to the words, just the words, because the music will have me out of breath and crying even before its starts. But lips are taking cues from a resurrected melody only to jump every gun and miss every note. And soon its is not the song I hear but my own voice groping for tune syllable for syllable, missing refrains and filling the place of words missed with hoarse helpless breaths.

Soon our conversations will wrap itself around a glossary of abbreviated endearments that we’ll both grow impatient with, until they wind themselves into a silence unbecoming of lovers. And one day, we’ll say nothing to each other that desire can’t mute and habit can’t muffle. .
And when I hear the raindrops at the windows, leaning against long-forgotten shoulders, I will sing every line (but the chorus) I have snatched from an intensely unmusical life. And you will listen, not to any reckless rendition but the song as I hear it, its stabbing sobbing senses intact.

Because you will have touched me enough to sing in spite of myself.

If you outlive me, as you probably will, you won’t give way to a grief that you can’t afford, but shake your head and hear those songs in your head just the way I had, chorus clipped and perfect.

Don't take them off.

To see you as if on the brink of a waterfall, still wet from a misfired kiss goodnight, falling off the edge of your sleep into my own, snapped shut from your dreams

To see you as if your first tear had scorned my fingers, waiting for your eyelids to trick them out of sight like a magician's cape, still as a sheet of first snow, ready to shatter when you turn away.

To see you as if your bedside table had turned its drawers over to me with a sigh, dentures and after dinner mints intact.

A sight too intimate to be unveiled by a casual flick of your arm, a sight so intimate that even I haven't earned it yet.

Past the patch of sweat grinning the wet grin of an eavesdropper, I see them waiting, dark pearls waiting to be plucked before they shrink back within tricks of light,little squares of mirages and black-framed blankness. When you take off your glasses, you don't just blink yourselves blind, but blind me too.
And I ask myself, is it another pair of eyes that I see? Another's face?

They stared at me red-eyed, peering past slits of skin that lidded them. Not a number that could betray itself to me, they bruised my fingers black-currant when I prised them out. Like the unconfessed remnants of a congealed regret, clots sobbed into my hands, bleeding us both, two-minded, solitarily and in bitter red clumps.

I swallowed them unchewed in achingly quick mouthfuls,and they are wrested down my throat each time by the yearnings of your heart that eat into mine.

Waiting for crystal balls

There are lines enough on my palm for it to have dodged this errant knife. Like an axe gone astray from sweaty arms, it struck right at the roots of my thumb.

When we were younger, we took each other's palms into our own and spun tales of a future that had not a trace of my tumultuous grays of twenty years.

That was before we knew that if a line run deeps, it doesn't foretell the coming of wealth but merely that one fist was clenched tighter than others,that long fingers didn't necessarily portend a cancerous death because pain wouldn't be saved for the end, that the right palm mirrored the left and it didn't matter which one we chose because there would come a time when the foretaste of future wouldn't taste so good and we wouldn't wait breathlessly for crystal balls nor practice the palmistry of consensus.

Yet I listened to them through Hindi dictation classes and periods of play that we could still wring out of rainy days. And a great many fortunes were told.

The how-many-children one, the one that ran the longest before falling into the tanned sea of the back of my hand, never mentioned a a foundling of disremembered dreams. The line that fell headlong through my wrists to meet swooning bloodspouts never said that I would live many lifetimes through a life that would be two middle-finger-breadths long.

They didn't see the little flecks that first flowed, then flooded through the fortuitous delta of of lifespan, love and lucre,before banishing it underwater, where like dying mermaids,it will turn into the endless foam of the sea.

Nor did they see smudged pencil marks resisting erased oblivion, Jakcson Pollock shadows, footprints of faraway crows etched already into an aging skin ,and a line of crosses awaiting crucifixion.

Nor did they look so far into the future as to see this resolutely red line that has picketed my palm, tearing down every film of skin that tries to broker a scab, refusing to leave, refusing to heal. A jagged red of scraped paint, it tells me that old schemes of colour,like old schemes for life don't ever fade.

An afternoon nap has all the enchantment of ritual and the timelessness of a dream. No sooner had I gotten into bed, vowing to read a chapter more before allowing my wandering consciousness to play out its will, had my book parted ways with its cover and my eyes had surrendered to a torpor that made them appear as intent as it was glazed.

“Kishore! Come out fast” Trring . “Vidya! Come and play” Trring. The cycle bell followed that hopeful young voice like a lagging herald, traversing the roll call of playmates over and over again, as if it were a muster to war, crying louder where the name belonged to a particularly valuable companion.

And my nap takes me back to the now-foreign territory of my childhood, when cycle bells and whistling signals that made their way to my windowsill sought out ears other than mine, where lessons were learned by a heart stung by a dancing tumult it didn’t feel, the fierce tumult of street cricket. Soon, those sounds didn’t cause me to survey the scene with that longing bred of isolation, but with a sense of growing delight at my self-sufficiency.

The doorbell buzzes with an impudence that shakes me awake. “Akka, shuttle cock.” The boy looks at me with an impatience that, surprisingly is devoid of trepidation. I smile as I lead him in. He vanishes into the kitchen without waiting for as much as a nod. As I follow him into my kitchen, still, festering with the smells of a series of capsized culinary efforts, I hear the anxious murmur of suspended play through the balcony. The rest of his time waited, not without nonchalance as the chosen scout bravely mounted the footholds of the window bars and manoeuvred my mop with the proprietorship of an armed warrior to dislodge the object. A wave of merriment broke out as play is resumed at the evry instant the cock touched ground but interrupted by the remonstrance of the rescuer, protesting ingratitude. “Wait for me.” He screamed, with a violence that made the meaning of his words as clear to me as they would have been in my own tongue.

I might have lingered longer at this scene, that had the outlines of a tagore poem and none of its music, had my phone not rung.“Happy friendship day!” she chirped. “And what are your plans for the weekend?”

After I finished an incoherent description of my weekend routines, (“Just woke up man. I’ll catch up on some reading, take a walk, relax.”) she laughed appreciatively. “That sounds like a good plan.”

Her colleagues, she explained, by way of celebrating the first paycheque had proposed a movie outing, and the group, to my struggling ears seemed large enough to drown attempts at prolonging the phone call. Hanging up, I realized that my batch too, would be in the midst of a similar revel and as usual, my disinclination for the plan had been taken for granted. And suddenly, I was back at the windowsill, again, preferring to inhabit silent worlds, either of my making or those of a book to the rough and tumble happiness of boisterous play.

I returned to the kitchen, attempting truce with disquieted utensils that have been at the centre of my kitchen misadventures for the past week. But the kadai simmers in silence as the onions I have cast into it congeal before turning black. And the milk vessel boils dark brown anger as it is transferred to the embers of the stove from its refrigerated confines without as much as a foreword. But still, I delight in turning to my own kitchen instead of venturing out for pani puri, though my meal of bread upma and coffee is only edible.

I might have passed by life’s feast uninvited but my larder isn’t empty either. The deeper my solitude buries me within myself I find that I’m less empty for choosing to be left alone. The world within us is as entrancing and as labyrinthine as the outside world that youth lusts to travel around. Or more.