Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Chronicles Continued...

When I’m out walking I strut my stuff yeah I’m so strung out
I’m high as a kite I just might stop to check you out
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one
Body and beats I stain my sheets I don’t even know why
My girlfriend she’s at the end she is starting to cry
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know your the one...
Violent Femmes › Blister in The Sun



The Chennai hits you like a two-ton truck speeding down the freeway. It blinds the eyesight, and leaves you gasping. From the time I’ve got here, I’m breathing in a furnace.

Sleep doesn’t come easy, I keep jerking awake, feeling stifled and smothered. I wake in the night, drenched. A. has flung a leg solidly across me. It kills, I swear. We have fitted ourselves into what I call a 1.5 bed.. too large for one, too small for two. I grit my teeth, and almost as abruptly she moves away. Blessed relief!

I cant imagine how she is so fast asleep. Snoring too. I guess its an acclimatization thing. I keep getting hotter and crankier, till I cant take it any more. “A. is the a/c on? Doesn’t seem like it. can I turn on the fan too, please?” A. has a cold, she has been heavy eyed through the evening. In a resigned murmur, she says yes. I put the fan on, with a sigh of thanks, and fall back into bed.

R. bless him, is awake, or at least makes sure he is, so I wile away part of the nite smsing him, till I finally fall asleep. He likes Chennai tho, and wants to relocate for a year, to learn to be serious or whatever. I tell him I can’t bear the place, so he laughingly tells me he will come to B’lore over weekends to meet me.

We get up in the morning, lazy, relaxed, slovenly.. whatever our minds make us. Opening our eyes, smiling sleeping across the bed at each other, we go back to sleep again, when I finally open my eyes, stretching lazily like a cat, its 10.30. I’m already covered in a fine sheen of sweat, droplets beading my arms and legs.

Guzzling back water, that seems to have turned hot during the night, I fall back yet awhile, while A. makes us tea, and if I whine long and loud enough, coffee for me. Indolence, rarely got, and well spent.

Almost all the clothes I got for my trip remain in my bag. All I can keep on, and that too, barely, are my shorts and spaghetti tops. The enchantment of an old relationship, I think, as I drape myself in inelegant poses over A.’s furniture, is that one can do just that.

Mis-aligned tops, hands wipe away water splashed over skin. A fly, somnambulant in the heat, is buzzing lazily around the window. It spends more time just sitting there, than making any real attempt to fly out. Its burning outside, if I close my eyes and pretend, I can almost hear the tar slowly dripping, melting down into little black puddles. I’m desperately trying to keep cool, in this blasted heat. What would I not give for a bathtub filled with ice cubes, right now.

I’m glowing, skin turns almost translucent in the heat. Skin stretched, taut over muscle. I can almost see the sinews stand out, in clear definition. Feathery green veins whisper across my skin, I become absorbed in watching them form paths along my hands and thighs. Would the heat make my skin totally lucent, I wonder.

I DO shriek in dismay, however, when I first come across them. A. brushes it away “No one asked you to be so fair. Shut up and chill! It will be fine”. I grumble, but do as she says. She’s right, the lines fade away in a day, leaving only a faint murmur behind.

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