Rambling

Ppl!!! You must listen to this… the moment this happened I thought I should be blogging about this. Here I go.

Life was getting pretty heck-ed up and inertia was setting into me. Things were moving at a pretty fast pace but nothing moved me – I was like the coin in the inertia example in the physics text books. Machine-washed clothes piling up on my bed waiting to be moved into the wardrobe; maybe they would need another washing, if I let them lay there for long enough. All the bills that the shopkeeper gleefully gave me, in exchange for my money, his profit and the commodities, were inside the myriad small covers – the ICICI and ABN Amro bank covers. This along with the ATM slips were eagerly waiting for an entry in my expense tracker, like a child waiting for its share of second helping of the ice cream.

All the Frontline issues that were untouched were also piling up. If it had ears it would have felt so grateful to my mom – for having bought it and mentioning, “Why don’t you read Frontline instead of sitting like this”. My thumb having settled cozily in the narrow groove between the up and down buttons of the remote would not let me budge. The neatly arranged books were all covered with dirt, like those snow clad mountains.

I love cleaning and setting things right, except for I need goads at the right spot to set me into motion. I started with those lovely dirt clad shelf of mine. The last time I arranged this shelf was in early 2004, I guess. I kept piling sheets of papers and notepads on to it. And now, it has grown into being an untamed, recycled forest. One after another I picked them, dusted and kept them on a table that was a few feet away. Segregations and categories kept increasing - like how I add another column in a table in MS Word, after I decide that adding it would enhance the meaning of the table.

So, I have these categories: sheets that have an unused side, sheets that needed shredding – expired bank statements, missives that were never exchanged. Birthday cards, thanks cards, all-the-best cards all on to one side. Sheets that need careful examination – God only will know when I will take these up!!!

I was shuttling between my shelf and the table. I know. By now, if not for the mosaic on the floor, the path that I traced back and forth would have a rut. The rut the bullock cart left on soft earth – the arcane path that I always want to trace.

I spotted a small notepad that endured the weight of the stack all these days. It brought back memories of the train that I took to my hometown from Pune. I flipped through the pages one after another, with my hand tracing the semi-circular path - right to left. I see an address there – the address of a friend that I made in the train. I see her name written in both Hindi and English – it showed that she hadn’t rehearsed the English version well. She was a tenth drop-out and all she new was Hindi and a lot of Marathi. In spite of my unused Hindi, we did exchange a few words and had a good time.

And then, I see this...

“Well! Valentines Day? Phew!!! That’s the ways life is. Even the bags have a place to rest! What an irony? We were supposed to travel in the third class AC compartment. Even a second class should have been a luxury. We landed in the compartment of proles. I think ‘proles’ is an over-statement. Anyway let’s talk about the observations or interesting facts that hooked on to my mind. In fact it is like the-Madhavan-style in Anbe Sivam. But my fall was from a smaller height when compared to his.”

My hand draws another of those semi-circular figures in the air, eagerly waiting to read more from the next few pages. I had a feeling that I might relive a few of those memories again. My mind imagined all those it can, within the few seconds my hand drew the curve. I flipped. And what do I see now? - A circle with four diameters, with a square on one of those thin pies.

What the hell does this mean? It meant nothing. It meant that I apparently got interested in other interesting things that happened in the train that I forgot to write about it. It just meant that I needed a good break from the cleaning sessions. It just meant that I had to play a prank on my brother and have a light hearted laugh, when I saw him go, ‘enna di ithu? michham enga?’ - 'What is this? Where is the rest?’, after he drew a similar geometrical figure in the air. It just meant that I had to re-live a few of those moments of a day in February, 2003. It just meant that I had to leave a rambling incomplete, so that I could blog about it. And it probably meant that my train-friend could have had a few coughs when I thought about her.

And now! I just wonder, ‘how many virtual semi-circles will a library have...?’