I Roll

Last time I almost sprained my hip because of that never ending rocking. I'm talking about my bus ride here. What's the perfect recipe for a sleepless night and a lot of sprains? Take an all night bus ride, add a crappy diesel engine that groans like it is going to die, fill it with an air conditioning that goes back and forth from sub zero to melting point of human body , place yourself beside someone from the species of Homo obese snoreicus and sprinkle some bed bugs. There! You are done.

I'll get my tickets booked in another travel company, I decided. So I walked into the Omni bus stand to look for a prospective carrier that night.
" I need a ticket to coimbatore, in a Volvo please. An air conditioned push-back seat in the front".
"Our Volvo's have only semi-sleeper seats, sir"
What's the difference I say ! Its the same thing.

I moved on.
" I need a ticket to coimbatore, in a Volvo please. An air conditioned push-back seat in the front"
"Yes sir. We can accommodate you tonight"
"Ah! Splendid. Where's the bus parked?"
I walked towards the "Volvo" with my ticket.
Standing in front of me was an air bus, nothing differentiating it from an airbus of the ordinary Indian make except for some bold stickering on the window panes that read "Volvo Volvo Volvo Volvo Volvo".

After an long argument I managed to get a refund on my ticket. I repeated the routine and finally found a carrier of my choice and managed to get accommodated there.
"Photon Travels! " . Now, that's what I'm talking about. "Speed of light ,baby !" , like Austin Powers would say. Nothing like a classy carrier , and a creative name that invokes images of Max plank and Einstein.
e = h v
e - energy in a photon
h - Planck's constant
v- frequency of the electromagnetic wave

She was painted in glorious yellow, and I walked towards her. As the distance between us closed I noticed that she wasn't as appealing as she had looked , when she was hundred metres away.

I won't judge a booked by its cover, no! But, I sincerely couldnt help noticing that this particular Volvo looked like it ran in the Brazilian grand prix , like it tumbled down the same hill -- three times in a row. I recollected that Volvo , in Latin, means "I roll". Did the manufacturer have this in mind when he named it?

I got my ticked punched, and stepped into my roller coaster. The key turned in the ignition. The exhaust note was unmistakable. Now, I'm sure that this Volvo's engine is that of a retired helicopter's , and was picked up cheap by some hippie in an army junkyard in Ladakh.

The bus began to move towards Coimbatore now. Remember the recipe for a sleepless night and a lot of sprains?
I whispered to myself in Latin , "Volvo!! I roll".

The Little Lessons of Life

I sat there chewing on the sugarcane that grandma gave me. It came right from her kitchen garden. She'd watered the few sugarcanes for ten long months. The last time I visited her, the canes were only waist high.

"A lot of people have been asking me for the sugarcanes. But I told them they were there for my grandchildren, and the canes can wait there till they come"

Kerala is a sight to behold when the monsoons roll in. The summer heat was trying harder to gut the land. As a child , whenever I visited my grandparents in the vacations, the summer evenings where invariably spent in the stream that flowed a few hundred meters from home. I will always remember that stream where I tried to learn swimming in knee deep water.

Then there was Vignesh, my childhood pal. We werent really the naughty types, except for that one time when the green mangos in Sivaraman's garden tempted us.We spent an entire afternoon standing outside the fence of Sivaraman's mango garden flinging stones at scores of green mangoes . After over an hour , maybe two, and a few hundred stone throws, my throw found its mark. And , we watched in awe as a mango got freed of the tree's hold and sliced through the air to fall on the ground bedded with dry leaves. Hitting a mango had been easy, compared to the risk involved in jumping Sivaraman's fence and collecting the trophy that lay on a bed of dry mango leaves.

That evenin I walked back home, grandpa stopped me.
"Did you hit mangoes from Sivaraman's garden?"
My pulse was racing now. I was not prepared to face the shame of gettin caught.
"Sivaraman is your uncle. He is related to us. Next time walk right in and take what u want"
This was worse. I was hoping to be a martyr , not a moron.

While I was in school every vacation was invariably spent with grandad. Each day was an adventure with him , and a learning experience. He was holding my hands when I took my first underwater dip. I was hardly seven years old then. Ofcourse in a few weeks I was addicted to freely floating on the stream like a corpse, face down ,for minutes together, an addiction which I'm yet to get over. Lyin face down on water, it is ectastic to look down at the many smoothened pebbles on the river bed, and slowly drift downstream as the current drags ur limp body. It became a regular sight at the stream for my grandad then, to watch me run upstream and float like dead-wood back downstream. Each trip to the stream invariably had to end with me pleading to him that we should stay another hour. Ofcourse the sun was setting, and I did relent always.

During my last visit, he was too old to walk to the stream. I went to the stream with Vignesh. The stream wasn't deep anymore., or maybe I had grown too tall. We sat there and smoked thinking of old times. It was more than a year then, since I had visited him last , and something had nagged me to stay a few days with him. So I stayed with him for two days , which made him awefully proud. He had boasted to his neighbours how his busy grandson had taken two days out just for him.
This time we just sat and spoke. No visits to temples or streams. He had been sweet enough to buy a basket of Neelam Mangoes, and Jackfruits, something he has done during every summer visit of mine--except this one.

This time, I'll have to make do with sugarcanes from Grandmas's kitchen garden. I was thankful for the canes., and for the people who nurtured me. I am thankful for the little lessons in life that I learnt along the way with them. And, the biggest lesson that he ultimately taught me--- to let go.

The prize

It seemed unusual that she had come alone there. Not many people I know like walkin alone by the beach side. There was nothing amiss that evening. The horizon was blue as ever. Lighting the horizon were the lights of anchored ships. The breeze was cool as always, peppered with warm sand. She was alone, no one was coming to see her.

She was not beautiful in the way the world generally describes beauty. But, her' s was a face that had something new to show everytime one looked back. I was goin nowhere in particular. So I stood there, lighted cigar in hand, counting the waves as they touched my feet . She was there, not interested in the waves yet considering them.

I counted the breakers upto eleven, and then lost count, as my gaze lingered on her. What was on her mind now? Another wave broke on my feet. Of all the colours at play that evening , the rays bouncing of her moist skin were the most appealing.

As the last rays of the sun dove in the far ocean, the rest of the world blurred around us.That was when she turned towards me for the first time, and held me in her gaze. She just looked plainly, with neither interest nor intrigue. Any man would yearn for a look more loving from those eyes.

As the breeze flowed by my face, I found myself unwittingly searchin for her scent in it. Such is the power of a woman that she can melt the hardest of hearts and mellow the most raving of beasts. She was a heady mix of all things sweet. And my senses by now were drunk on her presence. My mind was already reaching across all corners to find a merry thing to say. In my thoughts, reason was at war with emotion .

Emotion had the upper hand that day, and I decided to smile at her the next time she glanced this way. Emotion might have won the battle, but the war was far from over. And it so happened that reason had the last laugh that evening as her cell phone broke into song. She spoke with a grave expression at first. Slowly, her face glowed brighter in the starlight , in a way that only love can cause. She seemed more interested in the waves . Her feet played in the sand. She was smiling more now.

She wasn't mine in the first place, yet I felt at loss. I was not the interested in the waves anymore, nor the sand , nor the breeze. Its not nice being the loser always. I looked at her one last time, and she turned towards me too. She smiled. I thought it wasn't for me. "No, she's smiling at u !". So, I walked back that night, with the consolation prize .

Final Feud

In waters,warm , still and silvery hued
as i sink to wage life's final feud,
gazing at me from the heavens above,
are stars that bleed silk and blurry now.
All of life's moments ,dark and light
play out before me this fateful night
While my eyes burn in salt, to the rife
i long to have , just a little more of life.
Like a spume of silver, my final gasp
floats up to the gods,and out of my clasp.
Through my wearying struggle to hold on
only the reaper's arm,extends in scorn.
My screams muffled ,for two minutes now,
"Does it reach your ears, fathoms above?"