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.
Nothing pairs as lovingly with the oscillating speed and intensity of falling rain as Zakir Hussain’s hands on his tabla.
Born on 13 June.
Born on the 13th of June sometime in the 1980s at about 10 in the night at my mother’s home in a village somewhere in Saurashtra, Gujarat. Thus a millennial owl was born, with a very high IQ but equally stupid, and perfect owl eyes to see the world differently.
It is my birthday today and, therefore, the actual birthday of this blog that I have been transmitting into the world since 4 November, 2021 and proud of it.
The best thing I have created thus far and I will continue to revise and sharpen it like a sword under the hot sun in the Himalaya until the sword metamorphoses into a book.
Here is a portrait at around 1.5 years old when I had recently learned to walk on this earth and gaze at everything around me.
I am sure it was extraordinary — to be able to walk — I am sure I didn’t know enough words to express it.
Words are though never enough — for I still can’t express many things ordinary and extraordinary.
I hope no one will get offended when I don’t say anything. In a world where there is nothing that someone will not find a way to get offended about, where everyone is at the other’s throat, the one who everyone wants to banish from society — even silence is offensive. For them, your existence is offensive. Only death can bring them peace and joy, such is their miserable existence. I don’t plan to remain silent to comfort idiots, so I hope at least one idiot gets offended when I say something.
I feared getting bored of the Himalaya.
This is what I had noted down in December 2021 in Vashisht — in my phone notes and never published on the blog:
What if I get bored of these mountains that are so beloved to me right now? What if I wake up tomorrow and want to leave? Quite possible as I’m naturally someone who gets bored. Sometimes I suddenly get so bored of something or someone that I like that I wish I could forget it/them immediately so that it’s no longer boring. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of living here, but what if?
If I do, I do have a plan. It is to visit my favourite places in summer when they are on fire. Like Jaisalmer and Udaipur. Or I’ll go to the roots of my beginning somewhere in Kathiawar where I was born.
Just thinking about going there in peak summer makes me nervous.
Perhaps just a week or two over there will bring my bored self to senses, and I’ll be rushing back to the Himalaya. If sitting on a hot chair will not make me want to run then being unable to sleep at night will surely do.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
When I wrote the above, I was only imagining, I wasn’t bored yet. But recently, I’ve had to come down from the higher Himalaya to the burning city of Dehradun, turning my bored, senseless dreaming into reality.
I experienced the terror of living in a hot place at the peak of its never-ending summer when it should have rather been raining. And I experienced such unbearableness in a city, exactly what I have been avoiding. Which is to say, I have been avoiding the harsh, life-less life of an Indian city. The insanity of ever wanting to live here — oh, why anyone would want to live here, why so many live here and even die here without ever really living anywhere else.
I came to Dehradun on June 6 and I already deeply regret every day of the one to two weeks I end up living here — except for one cherished memory of meeting my dear friend.
I no longer fear getting bored of the Himalaya. I must be really stupid if I ever get bored.
Interpreting the sudden sight of a shadow.
A barren grey wall hot and lit under the sun past noon. Sunlight falls in a triangle on the entire right corner of the wall. As I sip watermelon juice by the window looking at the wall (my exclusive view in the city), a kite’s shadow passes across the triangle of light swiftly. The hunter is as if on the hunt for this wall, not having found anything else to eat in the scorching heat of Dehradun in June.