Antique Thumri
I have often seen your car expeditiousness away, especially on holidays-- shredding the diocese’s melancholic dusk… or some stifling evening. Your glitzy cars sprinkle on the passers-by the perfume of being ‘freshly bought'...
Sometimes I flourish perplexed counting your cars. So many of them… so many colours, models, shapes, sizes , curves; unlike companies, different names. Cars—royale, endorsed, personal…
If the interiors of a car is elegant like big White Chief’s drawing-room, that of another is intricate… for you at least it is. Still, you are regular to them all. If one has a classical recital playing on its radio, another has a cricket commentary. You might as well take care of some movie or a popular music video. And you are in sweet with all this …at least its better than listening to the evening dirt.
Nowhere does your demeanour betray your irritation, your unease. You might find on the seat an empty luncheon box with pictures of Tintin or Shaktimaan. On other days, you’d find Salman Rushdie, J.K.Rowling, Stephen Hawking, One Hundred Years of Isolation or ‘Darjeeling Jamjamaat’. Profits Tax, Service Tax files are also there; as are ‘Motor Run Diaries’—Che Guevera, ‘Suave’ or even recent posters of cds-films-theatres. Ramdevji’s Yoga Magazines, newspapers beaming headlines of insurgent activities or critic agitations, ‘India Today’, the unruffled cover of a versification anthology—you flip through all these. Nowhere does your countenance break faith with the slightest emotion. It is as though you do not think at all, as though you were a motionless unflickering lamp.
"Chinese supermarkets are beautiful for zen-esque bamboo kitchen utensils, wooden bowls and prettily patterned ceramic bowls. "Ikea scullery cabinets in glossy white, wall-hung in a vegetate, low as a sideboard (with your own tiled or wooden top) or high