The heat of day at variance with
The sleepy city where I wander.
I don’t know if this is boredom
Or just a peaceful clime.
Tried of high tides but
The streams are too shallow.
Old faces are comforting
But nothing stays the same,
Emotions falter like the shadows
Of leaves under the sun and breeze.
The smell of burning wax always takes me back. Somehow life isn’t the same without the weekly power cuts we had in Mangalore.
I remember conspiring about aliens with my cousins. We’d star watch but we were usually inside. In the bungalow’s indoor corridors people would walk with candles in hand, the shadows and light like slow cars on a highway. People would gather around the candles but stayed just out of its reach. Outlines and feet were all you could see. I guess every liked staying just out reach.
Everyone would stop what they were doing. I can’t say what because we all stuck to our own rooms and balcony spaces.Maybe it’s instinct when you live in huge joint family. But they were around, now and then they’d venture conversation never really leaving their bits of darkness. They’d smile when they knew their smiles were just out of sight. I’d sneak around them, behind sofas and conversations happy that’d I’d manage to sneak by unnoticed. You hear a lot you weren’t supposed to; I’d follow their lead and smile while I was out of sight, out of light.
For some reason we’d always gravitate towards the candle, no one went outside while the candles were lit. The long windows never figure in my memory; nothing of the city lights that night. A cousin would flick her fingers over the flame and say it never burned her nails.
He was an odd one, as beetles go. He buzzed a wasps buzz, upturned and kicking, his black belly exposed.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to disturb him. He buzzed along the paper, still unread. Face rested on two finger I drifted back to the days worry of monotony. I’m always lost without routine, nothing new gets done unless there’s some order about the rest of the day. But that’s when they started flying in.
Flies, the big see through wing kind that fly into wind shields. A few thumped against the window before flying in. They began buzzing around the room, five, eight, not more than eleven. I realized a video was still playing, the PC screen still glowing. They had stopped buzzing around the room and I wondered what they were doing in the city. I lent back, it was time to stop spending so much time with the PC, make a schedule perhaps.
The Beetle was gone and a lizard had sneaked down, gorging himself on the flies. One was caught in web of the resident spider who dances between the PC and the table, his wings gone. I spent the next few… minuets(?) telling myself that I should probably start writing. Nothing is new without the familiar, not even the see through wings on the floor.
Rijul Ballal 