Heat

It is March and the heat is already oozing out of invisible orifices present almost everywhere. Calcutta summer and it’s very own oppressing ways have acquainted themselves with me for the past twenty years. The dull white morning heat and the sultry fumes that originate from it together devise clandestine processes to unleash such unrestrained atrocities which only ascend a steady curve as the hours of the day pass. I go to college every morning witnessing a city full of irascible sweat, pissed off, about to explode any moment. A depressing humidity distends out of everything, of the people around me as it casts an impervious sheath of wily magic, perhaps borne out of disappointment, heartfelt and integral of every being walking, talking, doing all the important chores it was meant to do.

College itself brings its own lot of miseries every day. Added to mundane lectures, approaching deadlines and over-pouring dustbins the heat there takes almost a diabolical turn. The fastidious people with intentions a gazillion-miles away from my own easygoing self disrupts the faint redolence of childhood I would try to detect with the delicate wind in the air. My fantasies and idiosyncrasies find themselves endangered being out in the heat that has now gone resplendent with the afternoon sun. Their existence results in catastrophic outcome, one which ridicules me out loud and then flies away with those once beautifully knitted fetishes for amateur desires. The menacing humidity lingers to my nude incapability like a gelatinous mixture. The moist desperation to escape to faraway lands, to my grandfather’s home up there in the hills gets dissolved in it without leaving a trace. I stills struggle to figure out the day when I tumbled forth, like a rolling stone, to a world of contrasts. Sluggishly the sun gentles itself to cut some slack in a lurid disaster that then seeks its daily conclusion.

I walk past the trees, the pebbled roads and the barren field with a football bouncing on it, every evening. I try not to read beneath the myriad faces, between the countless lines I hear. At times, when I stumble on a pebble on my way I look back, to find friends I have left behind or an unfinished poem beneath my bedside lamp.

I look high up to the empty roof as it brings back you and I seated on its precarious edge, laughing over silly despairs. I miss the crows over our heads that evening moving in circles.

Our roof had love blowing in the wind. Now I miss a blissful shelter that has desolated my heart, after evaporating with the heat.