random

Two travelling Honda salesmen. Abhijeet jumps off the train in the early morning light, running along the platform, laughing, happy. It's monsoon, and the day is dewfresh, misty, cool, green.
Heavy rain, later. S&A are in my office, working. I see a small plant on my desk. I water it.
Night. Stealing jet fuel from the camp's storage trucks. The place is flooding. Silver Hornets disappearing under the rising water, shimmering in the orange light.

Some months later
Hot, dusty sepia evening. The car's empty now, except for Inanna, uncoscious in the back seat. I'm sitting on the bumper, watching the evening fall. A small child runs up to me, waving something. It's a bunch of peacock feathers. I buy one off him - I don't really know why, right now, but it seems important.
The other children are playing by the road, but their faces... tired. Afraid. Their movements are jerky, fearful. They're always watching. Above the street, on a balcony, a young teenage prostitute stands, screaming in anger at someone inside. The clothes strung up on the lines between the houses - as dusty as the road, don't really see the point of washing them - are hanging still. Not a breath of air, just the dry heat of dusk.

I'm in water. Cold. Deep blue-black, motes of sunlight dancing off the surface, streaming down in geometric perfection until it glitters off the fishes in dancing, random chaos. The fish are brilliant - flickering about, too fast to identify, apart from the silver movement, swimming with us.

house hunt: a fitting end

Finally, it is over.

After going through n number of assorted houses, flats, apartments, 1-BHKs, 2-BHKs, societies, brokers, colonies... we finally found the perfect house.

It's cheap.
It has internet.
It has a non-interfering landlord.
It's walking distance from Andheri station.
It doesn't flood more than 3 feet.
It's quiet.
It will give us a room each.
It's big.
It's well-lit and airy.
It receives equally good, equally cheap dabba.
It has balcony.
It has nearby stores.
It's the same one we're in right now.

So we're continuing.

I feel like Veronica Lodge in a shoe shop, surrounded by mountainous piles of shoes and exhausted, broken salesmen, finally finding the Perfect Pair. The ones I came in.