The morning light

All it takes, sometimes, is the light to shine at the right place and in the right angles for the angular beauty of a piece to be etched in our minds forever.

Mumbai Noir, that’s where the roulette has stopped spinning for me. It had been spinning for quite a while now. It seemed unstoppable. The dice would keep jumping from one slot to another, sometimes in plurals. You wait, with bated breath, for the your winning slot to emerge, the final destination that will define you and your state of being (my favourite-est phrase). The nausea of the momentum is unbearable. It wrenches you from the inside and leaves you feeling gutless, bottomless, falling into a gaping black hole until you latch onto a pole or a tree or hope and find life again. The earth stops to spin, slowly coming to a halt and up to a point when all else is held frozen. Only you with your new state, new coordinates exist. You feel yourself, all over, the new you. And you immerse in yourself with the new revelation of you that each turn of the page of someone else’s story reveals about you. That is a book, a good read and the power of it.

Why isn’t the romantic piece, the one stuck in my throat like a choking lump not coming through? Is it the spread of time and space that is just not working out, the kind needed for a languorous, lazy, dreamy piece about you, about us? Like a velvet blanket, a white duvet shining in the light of the television playing our favourite movie, my favourite music, your favourite game and we, the two of us, entrapped and lit in its glow, together.

A phone conversation, if listened to, can work wonders to bring us together. You need to listen to the words unspoken, the pauses and the breaths in between. Your hair need to rise with the excitement and the anxiety not fully convey-able with language transmitted on a wire. You should be able to touch the palm of the other and feel the beads of sweat, the lines of time gone by and experiences endured. You should hear the softening of the eyes into a smile when you narrate a regular byte from your life, the one that has a hazy golden glow around it. You should savour the effort being put behind the picking of stories to settle into with you and the effort in not deciding on the ones that might make you cringe, even though, just a bit. This, all the good things. And then, the distance covered will depend on not missing the skip of a heartbeat when an involuntary, spontaneous expression slips through and travels on the wire. You will hear the silence, the longer one, while tip-toe-dly looking for knick-knacks to fill the gaping emptiness of a relationship, a conversation. The stifled sob that escapes when the surface of a fresh wound is dug deep. The loneliness of the eyes that want to reach to you speak a language of their own, you need to understand that too. All this, a lot of work. Like everything else that matters, it needs to be loved, nurtured and watched over…and sometimes, just listened to by muting all else.