thoughts for a lark .............

She walked alone on the road as if she was searching for something .Even as she had learnt to give , she was learning fast to keep more and more to herself .
It was cold but the city was lit up in red lights like concentric circles on the doors of heaven . Then there were the added affects of crackers up in the air . They showed in all colors but then when they went out , you couldn’t see the moon or the stars . It seemed to her like the civilization , the people of her times had to make a choice between the two .
As she walked she saw two tiny children , performing on the road . The girls body twisted in loops like rubber as if she had no bones . Probably she dint have bones . The boy who was a little taller than her collected the money later from the people on the street after the random twisting of the girl . He also provided some background music with a huge drum that slung around his slender neck and she thought about how much it must have hurt him to carry it on his back all the time . But she wasn’t that correct about it . After the round pieces of metal had been collected , the face of the little girl spoke of something that she hadn’t imagined . It wasn’t miserable , there was a lingering smile . A sense of victory over the worlds harsh ways . After the initial slathering of her body on the street , she looked into the eyes of the people on the street and had smiled . She dint know what worked better. The body or the smile . But, it did not matter . She used both .

The search continued . She looked at the road , then up at the building, then at a tall man on the road who stood right next to her . Her gaze shifted from hell to heaven to the mediocrity of the earth. For a moment , she thought of where she really belonged . What did those spaces mean?. She felt a sense of vacuum as if she had been dead for a long time. The height of the sky scraper was enormous , it was fascinating but still scary . She could never have clung to those heights even though she had visited them a few times . It was painful to stay there. So , all in a puckish and innocent way she had come down . Now she stared back at it , wishing she could be there again . But life doesn’t bring back the same things . It brings new things in the same old packaging and sometimes the freshness of it is difficult to interrogate or even identify.

She moved ahead and entered one of those huge coffee shops with glass walls so you could sit alone and stare out . It was fine for women to visit such places in the middle of the night and look out of the window without fear of being taken for being there for any business in flesh. The world had begun to liberate itself after all . She ordered her favorite mocha over which the waiter made the face of a beautiful woman with hair like waves and a faint smile. It was made in dark chocolate . She dint feel like disturbing it but finally picked up the spoon. And so she wished that her tears were just like this . That they left no marks and no proof and just merged with the merciless flow of the drops of pain that kept on collecting in this world. Perhaps, she thought, that is what water really was . The oceans were really only a collection of the pain in this world. That is why there is so much water . The coffee was over but in this charming world , they wouldn’t ask a pretty lady to leave even if she had finished her coffee.

Outside the window she saw a lanky fellow arm in arm with a fat and very fair girl . She wore a hat and had green eyes, so large that they shone up and were visible from behind through the glass at the distance . They were dancing eyes . She picked up the phone and said in a confident voice that she was on her way to a class on psychology. Then she giggled with pride . An air that said that her she could not be caged . The silly arrogance of a woman who could not even identify her chains.


She came out of the coffee house and walked on, her mind flooded with thoughts that made her miserable . The way he had beaten her up last night , how she had cursed him and how she was degraded in the process . Her words that had always been so polished and fine were now only an array of hurled abuses and those words often lost their direction .They were hurled at the wrong people and the process left her like a heap of mess . Her mind was just like her hair , tangled within its own fine strands …