I stand on my balcony

I stand on my balcony on one of those languid summer afternoons. The sun is bare and bright. The city is in slumber. The house is still and the roads are quiet. From the summers spent in this city, I know that the puling taxi drivers are whining about the narrow bumpy roads and the scorching Mumbai Sun, toweling their foreheads sucking the beads of sweat with a rug. Chains of cars are lined at the zebra for the signal to turn from a red to a dotted arrow. I can hear the low hums of the engines. Men and women, cabined in cars, toss from side to side and cuss the reckless motorcycles, which careen carelessly over the giant hunch of the Opera House flyover. It stands slouched, blocking the view of the magnificent Arabian Sea, until one begins to descend the slope.

The spread of lustrous water sends a warm greeting. Ambling to its mouth, the pair of shoes is cushioned under the torrid sands. The billowing waves clothe the stretch of uneven rocks. The sunbeams penetrate the shallow rim of the sea, unveiling the sunken city grime. The shore is conspicuously clear of the trail of footprints; couples are sheathed under the trees across the road. Lovely leggy ladies dressed in lingerie fail to lure eyeballs. The billboards overcrowd this dimly trafficked Marine Drive.

My mind saunters like the unhurried wind, and even as I stand under the lee of the roof, the sun pricks my skin, and I feel the heat in my head as I let my palm plunge into the puff of my hair.

I’m done with reading crime thrillers, which otherwise occupy the most of these slow summer afternoons, when I would nestle on my bed and envelope myself with the softness of quilt, and set the air-conditioning at its high. I’m done with these incessant readings; the stories with similar layers and sub-layers of plots. I’m tired of Grisham’s courtrooms and Baldacci’s Camel Club and Brown’s codes. And I wish Jhumpa Lahiri had written one more book. I’m done with tapping fingers on the television remote, and playing with neioghbour’s kid. I’m done with watching my sister let her hand run flawlessly on a sheet of white paper and bring it to life, and I am done with wishing for more hobbies.

And so when the low tuned dhinchak radio songs have blended into the stillness of the room and when my mum has stopped hovering over the maids: washing utensils and cleaning the kitchen floor and clipping the clothes to the clothesline, and when she is done with asking for her Divya Bhaskar and Chitralekha, she recedes to her bed; and when nothing is left to be done at all, boredom creeps into my spine, and I walk unto the open of my portico and thoughts come automatically, waywardly.