At the end of September the capital was still warm, a few spells of untimely showers brought down temperatures and brought up mosquito numbers. I didn’t mind much. The clear skies meant that I could watch godly winged whales descend from the heavens every morning one after the other, growing in scale before disappearing into the tree-line. I could, until it all got obscured by the mustard mist. My eyes watered but this usual missing of the whales was interrupted. I found myself in the belly of the pink boa, among the rest of the fodder, undergoing the process of slow yet sure digestion. Making sure to put up a fight, I read and made sufficient marks on my books. To camouflage in here one needs checked formals ironed crisp, backpack on the shoulder, a pair of earbuds— whispering/ screaming/ vomiting news/ episodes/ music, a neck affixed at an angle fixated on the old loyal thumb not weary yet, having swiped away kilometers already.

The city breathes, it gasps, it bends under the constant stress and the strain; the more it gets stretched thin, the more it makes people claw and bite at the rim. The march goes on, with a skip on Saturdays and a drag on Mondays— the boots resonate over chatter.

Fewer times have I ever before noticed emotions change as fast as the graph of a crypto token. The other day, I was at the saloon ( what a barbershop is called in India). As I waited for my turn for a haircut, I couldn’t help but notice the customer beside me — a middle-aged guy getting the full service package on offer. The barber was done with the shave and had now taken up the role of a masseuse with a massager clamped to the back of his hand. It vivaciously vibrated like a purring cat. As the vibrating fingers walked against the customer’s head and body, his resulting orgasmic expressions kept nudging me towards absurd but funny assumptions.

It seemed like this was the first-time-in-a-long-time someone was touching him this way. His eyes almost shut in a dizzying trance when the barber put his vibrating finger inside the guy’s aural orifice. The poor barber was probably used to these reactions off the many such middle-aged men he has had to serve, but he had a neat trick up his sleeve. The massage session drew to a close and in the ultimate act, the barber took off the whirring massager, rubbed his palms, cracked his knuckles, and smacked the dozing post orgasmic customer hard on his back. In less than a second, the guy was getting smacked, shaken and shuffled around in the seat and it was pretty apparent why the barber was suddenly loving every second of his job. Ultimately, it’s safe to say the guy got the complete awakening experience. It’s safer to say, when it comes to me, I could pass on that experience for a few more years, or decades.

Gratitude for the constant upkeep of the grounds.