A drop of sweat trickles down my forehead to my brow bordering the whiskers of my eyes, like a thirsty rattle-snake treading through the sands of the Thar. The weather forecasts last night were not encouraging. I think its touching 47 degrees outside. Am lying flat on my bed waiting for a whiff of air to brush my sweating forearms and face. I have been waiting for quite some time now. This silence…this blanket of stillness…there is a strange numbness that seems to have fallen upon everything around…not like the dewdrops of a white winter morning that fall on the sleeping surface of sleeping leaves rustling softly in the chill of the fog, but like a thick soot that falls from the chimney of the square-rectangle-edged factory, on the faces of the silent laborers, who, darkened with the tar, stare aimlessly into the grey oblivion of the stationary chasms of time. In the metal of the stationary fan above me, I see the reflection of the Da Vinci’s man, limbs all stretched, pinned to the bed like a ravished butterfly, staring drowsily at its reflection in the metal of the fan above it. Quiet. My room smells of rotten time. My armpits smell of rotten onions. I am sweating. Had it been some other day, I would have been restlessly trying to ease myself, but strangely enough…I am still. I can feel my eyelashes soaking in sweat, but I do not move to clean them dry. There is something inside my head that stops me. The thought of you. I hear a hazy whistling sound in the background which doesn’t seem to die. But I am not feeling uncomfortable…because, perhaps, today I am learning one of the most important lessons of my life. Just a few days before my life is to enter a new phase, I am learning to do something that I have never been able to do my entire life.
I am learning to let things go.
Nothing seems to pain me any longer.
PS: I don’t care if it doesn’t rain even today.
