Doing nothing is my favourite thing. I never wanted to do anything ever since I was born.
I procrastinate.
I procrastinate when I’m bored. The more bored I am, the more I procrastinate. I procrastinate until the world is about to end, until things shake up, until it starts boiling. I procrastinate until my life is in danger, until I’m walking at the edge of a savage mountain in the Himalaya.
Suddenly, everything is interesting. Suddenly, I do what I need to do and save worlds from falling apart.
All mangoes I eat make a detour through my heart. The heart wants what it wants.
I miss the cotton candy days.
Snow in the apple orchard. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. February 2022.
The last snow was a little over a month ago and I miss it already. It’s so hot here this year. Mountain faces have turned almost snowless in just one month. Old people of Vashisht say they have never seen such April heat in their entire life.
Snow in the apple orchard. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. February 2022.
Without these photographs, it’d have been difficult to imagine and revisit those magical days from memory alone. As if none of it happened, or as if I wasn’t here when it happened. As if my memory of it melted in the cruel April heat along with the snow from the mountains.
I miss snow, the lovely, cotton candy days of snow everywhere that will not arrive again until December or January, depending on the mood of the clouds.
I deeply regret ever setting foot in cities, living that despicable life, a rat in the modern gutters, an incalculable loss of several precious years.
Time on my tongue.
From the porch where the sharp midday shadow divides the earth into two: my cool mud house against the inferno outside— from this porch, I throw my left hand out, on its own into the scorching light for five minutes, and it returns red all over as if beaten with a bamboo, and wet under my mechanical watch, HMT Janata Devanagari.
I remove the watch and lick the sweat off the wrist: it is salty with a hint of steel from the watch cover.
I may well have tasted time. I may well have learned Devanagari by heart.
Spilled water in a blue city.
In this photograph, the spilled water on a street in Jodhpur is as golden as sunsets.
—and as blue as the houses surrounding it, as blue as the sky that spilled it.
Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. December 2020.
Small messages of spring ⋮ A gust of wind.
Not every gust of wind brings a shower
of tender petals—
so soft and white, resembling the moon’s light.
Nearby trees of apricot and cherry
disintegrate helplessly
all over my front garden, into my glass of chai—
like two people falling in love.
Countless small moons under the unrelenting sun
scattered
all over my front garden.
I gather a fistful and chew happily.
Small messages of spring ⋮ A little honey bee.
A little honey bee
with stripes of a Bengal tiger
climbs
on a tender apricot petal—
A little Bengal tiger of Ranthambore
feasts
on the tender flesh of a chital—
Apricot flowers in bloom. Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. March 2022.