My evenings, of late

My evenings have become more vulnerable to emptiness. Hence, I mingle in the crowd, try to retain the dying nip of the last winter breeze on my skin and in half-lit alleys find sights and smells so lost on me for many years.
She and I walked together in an evening bazaar looking for little things—nimki, gods with mountains in their hands, tungsten bulbs, stuff from a frail tailor--and I see this sweet shop in the corner. Mother and son sit together and the son dotingly gobbles kachouris. The shop is poorly lit, the walls and the staff are greased with soot, the wooden benches would creak if a fly moved on them, but people thronged it nevertheless. Once upon a time, even I looked forward to radha ballavi and chholar daal from ‘Bardhaman Mishtanno Bhandar’ when Ma and I went to get veggies from Benachity Bazaar in the evening. Dashakarma Bhandar , vegetable chops, vegetable sellers at Ghosh Market, my father’s scooter parked at Salbagan—memories rushed in Bergsonian style. I am no Eliot, I am no Pound and I write a blog with dreary irregularity. I loved it all. After many days, I felt outside the ‘here’ and the ‘now’. It was so light, the wind so sharp, the shadows so endearing.

The World Book Fair is in town. That evening she had left early and I was with my friends, two of them. They are a couple and they walked ahead. They had been friends for long, very long. I’d always wished that each of them had someone to love, someone to go back to. Now they are together—hand in hand, quiet and whispering, mature and thinking. Later we go for dinner. In the meanwhile, he smokes a cigarette and I gobble some mishit—in secrecy that lasts less than a quarter of an hour. But, I remember those days at Patparganj. Again, I am somewhere else and I feel happy as I drift.

She and I sit in a cafe. It is upmarket stuff. It is at Cafe market and we sit on the terrace overlooking yellow lights and a white Audi. The white walls wear a worn look. Cheap lights wired to a net on the terrace blink . Cigarette smoke and full-throttled political bull shit abound. The corner becomes warm and nice as I look into her eyes. The food is bad but we love the place. We take an auto after that. It is pretty cold. Cars rush on NH 24. A bespectacled greying man drives past us . He drives a badgered and much battered Maruti 800 oblivious of time and speed. He is the gentlest man I have glimpsed in this city. I see the wheels of a lorry roll ferociously and I keep looking at the wheels. It wheezes past us. A man is cuddled on the cardboard box wrapped in a blanket oblivious of time and speed. I wish I too could sleep such a sleep.