What goes around comes around.
Earlier today. I was sitting in a chair next to flower plants shaken up by recent snow. Superb afternoon sun and cold breezes of the mountains.
A fluffy black insect climbed up on my chair and began loitering on my right arm. I usually don’t bother them but I did something this time and to this insect.
With my left index finger, I transported the insect that was on the plants — and had accidentally reached my arm through the chair, because I was sitting there — to a wall away from the plants.
And now the world has changed slightly. With a few more consequences to bear.
For the love of kite-flying.
Kite-flying on the festival of Uttarayan/Makar Sankranti: my favourite festival and sport.
Last year today, I was flying kites in Pushkar.
Kite-flying in Pushkar, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
Right now I’m in the Himalaya, dearly missing my kites and people and music on the rooftops back home in Surat (Gujarat), where life is ever so more extraordinary and fun on this day out of the entire year — even if the wind happens to be dead or sleeping on this day.
Two kites in the Pushkar sky, Rajasthan, India. January 2021.
Picking up laundry in the Himalaya.
Even a chore as mundane as picking up dried laundry from the rooftop is not mundane — if your rooftop is surrounded by snowy mountains of the Himalaya.
I thought of this today while picking up a jacket when I suddenly turned my head around to look at these mountains that (still) leave me struggling for words. I felt as if the mountains were watching me pick up the jacket. I smiled and picked up the jacket.
Flowers for a friend.
My friend, a wonderful person of pure heart and incredible mind who is very close to my heart, talked to me today after a long time — after what felt like two lifetimes. So here are the divine Burans of Uttarakhand for my friend.
These flowers are for you, dear Anjali.
Burans flowers near Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, India. February 2021.
As much as Vermeer.
I love the colour ultramarine blue as much as Johannes Vermeer did. I love it more than any other blue, more than all other colours, more than many other things that I love. I love it as much as I love not doing anything.
Those who cut down trees to make money should be forced to live, without electricity, in the hottest, most barren place on earth that has water issues.
Those who uproot trees to make money should be given a more harsh punishment. (I have yet to think of one.)
This is punishment #2 from the series Reasonable Punishments.
A fatal blue kiss.
Just a post on my favourite colour for I haven’t posted anything blue in a while — and my mind immediately went to Pangong when I was trying to think of something blue to post.
Pangong blues. Pangong lake, Ladakh, India. September 2021.
I saw these emerald-blue hues of the lake on my first day there. September 8 2021 at 16:13. Just after my arrival on the lake, just as the sun was departing behind the mountains.
The lake is plopped so neatly within the sandy, warm-coloured mountains. It dictates the boundary between itself and everything else.
But the mountains appear to be encroaching at the lake’s borders and encroaching actively. Whenever and wherever you look, it’d seem that they are really going at it. It’d seem that they are suicidal — perhaps tired of the forever dispute between two countries that claim bits and pieces of the lake that is whole in reality, but not whole in another, slightly unreal reality.
The mountains want to claim the whole lake, to make it whole in all possible realities. So they are crouching at the lake’s blue edges — ever ready to jump off into it. Every little rock rolling off the mountains is as if pushed by the mountains in an attempt to encroach, in an attempt to fill the lake with nothing but their dust.
But the lake is smarter than those rusty mountains. The lake is defiant — calm but calling the shots on who can ever touch its many colours of the colour blue.
The lake is a fatal blue kiss that turns rocks too close to it blue. Piercing glacial ice to the reckless desert sand.
Moonlight/headlights.
It’s 6 in the evening with the waxing crescent moon behind clouds that are snowing on the mountains. Fresh snow across the Manali valley while the Beas continues to flow as ever. It’s supposed to be darker but isn’t. The white cloud cover above and the snow below gives a lovely white glow to the remaining day.
There are cars coming down a mountain slope, which is near the Beas and at an angle facing it. The slope, the river, and the cars are all facing me but they are down in the valley while I’m up on a mountain, somewhere at the middle of it.
As the cars descend, their headlights give a warm-yellow reflection in the river.
Like how the rising full moon would appear on the same river 11 days later — somewhere else where there are no mountains between the river and the moon.
Ever since living in the Himalaya, buried between mountains, I miss seeing the full moon rising.
The Empire of Light II, 1955, René Magritte.
June, June, June.
June is here. June, Juney, June.
My favourite month, the month of my birth, and of monsoon’s beginning, the one that has always brought new, wonderful things in my life — always. So, it’s the spring of my life: pouring rains outside, sunny and blooming inside my head.
I love you, June.