God’s plan.
An emerald green beetle flew into my balcony to save herself from the pouring rains and landed upside down on the balcony floor — low visibility, poor landing.
I was about to help her turn back up but God had ensured she wouldn’t need any. He has a plan for everyone, for everything.
After attempting for about nine times, she turned herself up and started walking about, drying herself.
Walking with a firefly on my balcony.
On the night before my last night in Uttarkashi, as I’m walking about on the balcony of my room, I see a firefly on the ground. He is walking around here and there, walking and glowing at the same time. It’s the first time that I’m seeing a firefly walking around and glowing. His light is blinking exactly like that of a plane. It is as if I’m on the airport control tower and watching a plane walk from the terminal towards the runway for takeoff.
A little plane, warm yellow lights blinking, looking for the runway in my dark balcony.
Suddenly, the firefly takes off and flies towards the grass and flower plants outside the balcony. Takes off without the runway and without having to run on the runway. Takes off like a helicopter, with lights blinking and in complete control.
A little plane blinking and flying over knee-high flower plants.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
A beautiful coincidence happened three days after I wrote the above in my drafts. As I love coincidences and think they are one of the most beautiful and magical things in life, I will always share them here, even if they look insignificant or dull to others. So here it goes:
Three days after I wrote the above, I was talking to my dearest friend Anjali about anime and Ghibli films (she loves anime), and she asked me to watch Grave of the Fireflies, made by Studio Ghibli in 1988. I had seen two Ghibli films before (Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbour Totoro) and loved both deeply, but somehow never got around to seeing more of their films.
The very same day I finished watching Grave of the Fireflies. While watching the film, the following scene reminded me of what I had written three days ago. This is the scene where the teenager Seita and his younger sister Setsuko go for a pee and see a kamikaze plane blinking overhead.
For context, they are living in an abandoned bomb shelter near a pond surrounded by greenery and fireflies. They had been playing with and catching fireflies before this scene.
Screenshots from the Studio Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies, 1988.
Such beautiful imagination, isn’t it? I find certain affinities between Ghibli films and myself, in our ways of seeing and dreaming life. Setsuko saw a firefly in the kamikaze plane in the sky (in 1988), the way I saw a plane in the firefly walking about on my balcony before taking off (in 2022).
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
None of this would have happened without the coincidental meetings of many people and things across time. None of this would have happened—
- If I had not met Anjali, which was another wonderful coincidence that I will forever cherish.
- If I did not go to Uttarkashi, and did not walk around on the balcony on that night.
- If the firefly did not join me for a walk on the balcony.
- If Studio Ghibli did not exist.
- If Grave of the Fireflies was never made.
- If Anjali and I did not talk about anime and she did not recommend this film.
- If I did not watch the film.
- If I watched the film but wasn’t smart enough to make the connections.
All of the above, and many more things, were necessary for this one coincidence to come into existence — how marvellous! This is why I love coincidences. I believe everything in life, including life itself, is coincidental. Here is to many more.
A dog, a snow leopard, and you.
A dog barking past midnight somewhere in the mountains of the Himalaya is a sign of life, as much as a snow leopard sneaking behind the dog is a sign of life. Life is only until it is and you must find a way to live it the way you want before it comes to an end — it was.
Like how the dog lives his life by barking at the nothingness of the night before perhaps getting devoured by the snow leopard. Like how the snow leopard lives his life by stealthily sneaking around before perhaps starving to death.
Such is life and it is not forever. So you must live it fully and happily, you must make it as extraordinary as possible. You must be open to it completely and truthfully, and never turn into a rock.
As Aeschylus put it so beautifully in the 5th century BC:
Why grieve in advance? Whatever turns
up, I hope it’s happy—
— Aeschylus (from the play Agamemnon; translated by Anne Carson)
Never grieve in advance, never be frightened.
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.
I need a kiss.
My lips are swollen and blue, not from a honeybee’s sting, but from what seems to be an eternal waiting for a woman, for my one true love.
I badly want a woman to kiss me. As badly as a man in the desert needs water but sees only two things all around him: mirage and his own death.
A kiss is not merely a kiss — it’s a matter of life and death for me.
How long does it take to fall in love?
Tell me: How long does it take to fall in love with someone?
A glimpse? Three seconds of eye contact? One really good conversation? Five years of texting?
Also tell me: How much to consider your own desperation to fall in love?
And finally, once you truly know you are in love, how long does it take for them to fall in love with you? Does it take the same amount of time as it took you, or an eternity?
And one more thing: What do you do if it never happens — either for you (to them), or for them (to you), or for both of you (with no one)? How long does one keep waiting for it happen? Can you ever give up and leave this strange game?
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.
Let’s not be friends.
For any woman who now enters my life and wants to be purely friends with me, I’ll flee from her as if I saw a ghost. Or, I will ghost her.
At this point in my life, I’m only interested in love, a woman to love. And I cannot anymore give love under the guise of friendship.
I’m in the same boat as Vincent Van Gogh when he wrote to his brother Theo on December 23, 1881:
“I’d like to be with a woman, I can’t live without love, without a woman. I wouldn’t care a fig for life if there wasn’t something infinite, something deep, something real.”
A woman’s friendship is a ghost lurking on the earth for many years now. A cowardly and stupid ghost who can’t see when a real love presents itself and is scared of it. So shallow and prideful, running after all kinds of vapid things to which she assigns unnecessary importance. I want nothing to do with such women.