Do not read this blog.
Do not take everything I write here literally. There are meanings and layers and ways of seeing and saying something.
Not everything is as it appears to you, certainly not this blog.
If upon reading something you find yourself confused, bored, or offended, you are most likely a normie and this blog is absolutely not for you. You should neither read what I did not intend to write nor read what you expected or wanted to read.
There are on this blog poems and dreams and convoluted jokes. It’s serious and yet not. Does this make sense to you?
Do not read this blog if you don’t know how to read.
A love puzzle.
A puzzle on love: How long does it take to fall in love?
Hints:
A glimpse. / Two minutes of eye contact. / One really good conversation. / Five years of texting.
What if it never happens — for you, or for her, or both of you (with no one)?
What is love?
Is it real?
Yellow and red glows of loneliness.
It is past midnight and tonight is the ninth hot and humid night since I came to Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand. I’m loitering outside my room on the long balcony, waiting for rains and something else.
A firefly. I see a firefly on the flower plants outside the balcony, glowing a touchable, soft glow — the kind of soft spark that you would make if you were to strike a corner of the moon with a bamboo stick.
While the firefly is glowing like a little yellow star, I see the red glow of a cigarette someone is smoking on this very balcony — maybe it is me but I’m not sure. The firefly and the smoker are both glowing out their loneliness, in the hope of catching the eye of a female in the area. Each with his own luminescent love song: one yellow, another red. The lyrics are different, but they are singing in sync — it’s a love song after all and love rhymes (only) with love.
No one has come for them yet, for no one has ever come. They are waiting and waiting, waiting like the idiots who are waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Some ants and I feasted on cucumbers.
A late-June Saturday of scorching heat in Uttarkashi, after the first rains that came and went more than a week ago as if never came. Annoyed and bored by the menacing heat, I went out for a bike ride for about 25 kilometres towards Gangotri.
After two hours of roaming around and sleeping under a huge beautiful tree, I went looking for something to eat and came across a cucumber-seller on the roadside.
Cucumber seller on the Gangotri road near Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, India. June 2022.
I bought one cucumber weighing 500g, got it sliced and packed, and found a cool spot where I sat on a huge rock that was tilted down on a slope, facing the terrifying flow of the Ganga down below. I had some slices, sprinkled with salt and chilli powder, and left some on the rock for the black ants loitering around.
Cucumbers that I left for others on a rock on the Gangotri road.
They were avoiding and bypassing the cucumber slices. I didn’t even know if they liked cucumbers. A quick search online and I learned that many ants have aversion to it. So, the title of this post is misleading but I decided to keep it because it’s fun.
In any case, who wouldn’t want to eat or dream of eating cucumbers with the ants of the Himalaya? And if they don’t, someone else will. Maybe the birds I saw around there or the snakes? If snakes are also not into cucumbers, maybe there will be that one snake who is different from the crowd like me, the weird one who actually loves cucumbers. I left these delicious slices for that snake.
The colours of Matisse.
This is a painting that Henri Matisse made in 1947 and it’s called Red Interior, Still Life on a Blue Table.
One of my most favourite paintings ever — it is so very beautiful, so soothing to my soul. Very few painters know how to bring colours to life like Matisse does. Colours and shapes of things. He can make a table look like it’s a living thing, as if it’s not a table but a pet in your house.
In his own words:
“I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”
I see everything.
Rumours swirling around India about me possessing the third eye that sees through everything and everyone are completely true.
I see what others cannot or choose not to see. I see everything, I see it all, and I say it like it is. I see through the bullshit.
A firefly goes for a night drive on the rough mountain roads.
It’s night and my room, high on the mountain, has a large glass window with a view of nameless mountains and their valley down below, somewhere near Suwakholi on the way to Uttarkashi from Mussoorie in Uttarakhand. At night, while sitting on my bed, I can only see three things:
- trees outside and near to my room, faintly lit by the butter-yellow bulb in my room.
- lights of small villages scattered around in the valley down below.
- vehicles that pass on the road, which is on the mountains to my right.
Every day at around 9:30 pm, I notice a peculiar vehicle on the dark road on the right side of my window view. It’s not a vehicle but an enormous firefly, with police officers inside, one of whom is in control of the drive.
A firefly goes out for a drive every night on the rough mountain roads, looking for love.
From the distance, from my window, I can see two colors that the firefly emits: stark red (stable) and stark blue (blinking). The stable red is for his lonely heart and the blinking blue signals longing and pain. I can also see a long shaft of yellow light emitting from its eyes. I find myself mesmerised by this and keep looking until the firefly goes out of sight. I keep looking until it takes a right turn at the end of the long stretch of road.
Every day, I find myself waiting for the firefly to emerge for his drive, and I prepare myself for this small phenomena by finishing my dinner by 9:15 pm.
On witnessing a simple death.
As I’m about to take a sip, a tiny black insect flies into the glass of my hot chai and instantly dies.
For I was supposed to make chai and sit on my garden and the insect was supposed to fly into it and die.
Whether it was fate or suicide, I don’t know. What I do know is that it was death, witnessed by myself, death of a life brought on by numerous coincidences and circumstances of this mysterious planet.
A planet where all life eventually leads to death, no one is spared. Where death is more mysterious than life — even when it looks simple and logical to the witness. No death is simple here. Whether you die in your sleep or while drinking your chai, your death is mysterious and many steps ahead of logic.