Epithet

It threatened to rain like it had never rained before. Everyone got their umbrellas ready. And then it didn't rain. Everyone went to work as usual. No one paused to discuss it even.

Imago (Part 2)

The key to part one of Imago is lost, perhaps like Atlantis, submerged beneath a placid sea of translucence full of inky blue sea-weeds. Perhaps the lone mermaid still sings there, or perhaps there lies a wreckage of an once  glorious ship with all its maids and attendants frozen midway through their duties like the clay army of a certain Chinese emperor.

This too has to be blue and the exact color is called cerulean, the shade between gloom and bliss. And there is no tuft of grass beneath my feet, but only sand, the color of gold extending as far as the eyes can know. And a few cotton seeds with their silken hair fly like packets of light riding the music in air that only eyes can see. I wonder why dandelions wouldn't love the cotton seeds. For that matter the cotton seeds never loved the may-flies. It amazes me how the short-lived are the most stubborn.

A cotton seed descends and rolls on ground and swirls in circles. I am reminded of my black Labrador who loved to roll on new grass to scrub its back and would always chase its tail in circles before falling to ground for days retirement. I miss my Labrador - she died long back and I haven't had another dog after her. Then suddenly the cotton seed pauses, with its sticky hairs attaching itself to a corner below the rock and resists the wind. I see that protest in it strained deformed self shivering in denial as the wind tries to blow it away. But no, it would not go.

The wind gives up.

I feel a strange satisfaction rising in me like the notes of Shehnai. Would it become a big tree there, like a big family tree with loads of cousins and aunts and uncles dispersed across farther lands?

A gentle breeze and off went the cotton seed flying like it always had been. Then what worth was all that struggle against the will of the wind?

What if I don't want to title this?

"What would you like to become when you grow up?". We have all been asked this same question.

Yesterday there was a power cut after twelve. I walked out. It wasn't dark, for you could see everything. It was soft gray like the fossils and it was uniform. It was like a foggy afternoon, like partial solar eclipse. There were no odd discomforting patches of light illuminating a locality. It felt like underwater - the entwined branches of trees moved as I walked and the sky remained steady.

I want to become a ghost that walks the streets at nights, a ghost without a body, with no hunger or sleep or relations, just a ghost that sees, hears, feels, thinks and exists. Before that I have to prepare I think.

And then lights came back and I came back to my room. The shouts of cheer that had erupted the moment ago were all quietened. Everyone had returned back it seemed.