Bleak

Bleak, ...... have you seen a drop of water fall on a black letter of a page, the letter gets smudged, focussed black turns into vague, all encompassing, many shaded grey. Bleak and diluted, this new year's sunshine is muddy, puddle-like for me but without the liquid that puddles possess that give them their buoyancy, instead arched out against the sky is a wallpaper of muddy, eternally spread, lacklustre, life/humus/dead-leaves-sucking, shitty pale brown!

Bleak! Sitting alone on this laptop, a freezing delhi morning, rubbing my ice-like hands on the sandpaper stubble on my chin, my nose feels swollen and my eyes a grey-gossamer like insubstantial and distant pain as though it emanated from the furthest tunnel recesses of the eye softly billowing and stretching, slowly breaking into threads in front.

Maybe I'll talk to her mother, dressed in her skirt, anglicized beyond history, mannered beyond contemporary thought, stuck in the paperback, sticky pages of a novel about the Raj, perhaps The Far Pavillions or Heat & Dust, maybe The Jewel In The Crown. A non-existent England. She sits with creamers and tea cosy's which belie and decieve her enormously Indian interests. Perhaps I shall talk to her of shesher kobita. Perhaps her daughter and I should have retained our purposeless, wondering purity, lost now in the orders for toilet rolls, clean bathrooms, tv shows, driver's timings and cleaning cupboards......

Funnily, she understood, she smiled, and her eyes empathetically brown searched mine and smiled when I exclaimed my predicament with the metaphor of the smudged letter on a page. Depression, our depression! She smiled at my way of talking almost like she was falling in love with me herself, a paramour's empathy, my wife's mother, puritanical and English, falling in love, a flutter, incestuous, crazy.

My imagination! She's pours me tea and we chat some more, sitting in her garden, it's time for me to leave, I have to drive, spend this new year's first day driving through muddy and cold Delhi.

Strange notes of isolated and crazed jazz musicians lost in sepia or black and white, brilliantined hair, smoky venues, play in my head, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, mad, staccato, autistic notes. I walk past my car and lie on the grass, stare up as dew soaks into my jacket, soaking freezing dew, my jacket, stained with the earth, above my freezing back are my eyes facing the sky, no human world in ther horizon, only sky, the eternal, grey, muddy wallpaper, the lamb fleece clouds, shimmering and bearded ones, scattered and scrambled ones.

I get lost so easily in clouds, push my head into them the way childhood was spent pushing one's head into the clouds in the enchanted wood of enid blytons. So difficult to return, so fearful of the fear of getting lost of going mad in childhood day dreams.

Bleak! I rub my harsh, alien stubble again, run a finger across my chapped lips and the arid terrain of my frozen body. Feel the freezing earth smell of my jacket. I'm lost and arid this new year's day but around the aridity are the warmth of day dreams and day long drives, of muscial snapshots and dew smelling earth, the warmth around alienation, the blue sea water around an island. I smile and feel bleak,.... smilingly bleak!