french, fingerchips and fishermen

Typing out a blogpost from my cranky two year old phone. A first blog directly from the phone where the text disappears beyond the ambit of the screen’s visibility. Today I feel I’ve contracted a sample small cold, and to combat it i zipped open my medicine pouch to bring out my most favourite medicine that’s effective against all three—cold, fever and body ache—Wikoryl.


My family doctor introduced me to it some two and a half years back. When I was new to Pune, some 1500km away from home, I had rung him up from the balcony of my first office and shared symptoms with him. He had bounced this name off and told me to have it whenever the slightest of symptoms showed up. Now a few of you might feel the need to tell me that I’m a hypochondriac and that medicining ones own self isn’t the best way to go about it, but please know that I have little of no patience for that kind of advise.

So anyway, as I unzipped the pouch, I also chanced upon a single sheet of page torn off from a spiral bound notebook I had given to my niece to scribble in. I had jotted plainly some feverish thoughts on the two sides of the sheet. The date on the sheet reads may 7, and the time stamp I’ve inked on it using my ball pen is 6.00pm.

I’m guessing I wrote in the faint twilight that fills the veranda of my house back in the hometown that I dutifully hate (it has obviously been brought to my notice off late, that there are very few who dislike their hometowns so profusely as I do, again so, whatever).

towards the benefit of no one in particular, after I’m reproducing the text of my note here, and hence trying to pass this off as a fresh piece of writing to fend off any allegations thrown my way of not having written anything at all off late. I’ve been in between spaces for all these weeeks, mental and physical spaces, that’s my only defense. Though I might want to share that I have been making mental notes of things that I can include in my writing off and on, but as the thing with these things goes, all those mental notes escape my reach me at the moment. Hence, unable to fetch those out off the drawers of my mind, I perforate this page with words on the sheet that shall soon find its way back into the pouch, where it shall sit forgotten and foggy, as it was till now.


<and because love was a swear meant to be latched on to. And that mercy was also a form of love. And that tending to a lover, a lover in your head, your lover, will always be one of the grander pleasures of life. Ruskin bond and LA review of Books and blogs and articles and merriam Webster and long form on cities.

I read of cities and the dedication with which people preserve their passion for places touches me.

my handwriting is gone haywire for I have not written in months. To have been away from home, with my back turned to the entrance of the house. To deal with one problem big or small at a time.

a love so tender that I sureend r myself to it and discover love all over again after the callow depressive meadows of Kovai.

To know that and that traveling far and wide is possible.

To read and to not care about the pointed questions and/or the pontificating sermons of the everyday.

To live and relive memories trudged on daily and often hurriedly left under the debris of mundanity. To keep the fire Octanely alive. To know how powerful a word octanely is.

To stay cynical, bitter, curmudgeon, yet still to believe, to feel, to inculcate a thirst and passion clichedly for the unknown.

to know that leaving tastes the same, like slow decay, like a mould colonising the loaf of bread in your fridge overnight. To know that arrival is a slow burn, tender and in the run up to the build up it forms a childish nascent froth at the brim, a friendly froth like that of fresh water springs in the hills. Like a friendly butt pinch.

Ignorance, innocence, innocuous gestures, safety, curiosity, health, an occasional befuddlement, reading, love and writing, traveling and fruits and the best of beers. Staying true to the crude basic instinct of the singular person that one is. Staying tuned to the white noise A singular voice.>

Overcome with a sluggish churn of the fever that is to take over tonight and then to maintain calm in the face of all the bad wine to be had, I preen and mop off the night into it’s crude one am self. To the night and to the singular flailing sturdy voice