LiPsTick

I started packing today. In my list of “things to pack” was my lip-balm! Glossy red and strawberry flavored!


I remembered a moment as I clutched the tiny round container in my hand before I could throw it in with the rest of the toiletries! I remembered a sepia toned snapshot.
…of tall trees, a winding road, a breathtaking sunset and snow-capped peaks looking candy flossed in the setting sun’s light or lack of it. The pinkness asserting itself amidst the sepia of the rest of the snapshot!


The sepia tone comes from the twilight of that evening…when a sumo with a family of four lumbered along a long winding road climbing higher and higher. My parents, well into 15 years of marriage, resolutely patient enough to take two young children, one grumpy (me) the other quiet (he), on a vacation!


It got colder and colder and mom helped us into our sweaters and scarves! Warm and toasty we were, but, feeling sicker with each curve and more and more tired!
Until mom did the coolest thing ever! She turned my head to face her, held my face by the chin with one hand and with the other she applied lipstick to my lips. HER lipstick! Glossy and sweet tasting! That thing I was not supposed to wear because I was not old enough. That thing I never dared to touch. She saw the utterly confused look on my face!


“Chapped lips are not good! The cream got left in the big bag. This is all I have at the moment to keep your lips soft”.

I willingly complied.


Having realized the novelty in it for me, she smiled and said, “Sometimes, small girls wear lipstick!”

The lipstick softened the rough journey ahead for a grumpy child!

The lip balm is safely in my bag!

Ladakh Looms.

Right now… this snapshot does!

ColoUr BlinDed

Blues,
Of Denims blue,
That tore without a clue!
My Denims wore away,
Adding to the monsoon grey.

Green,
Of the muddled puddles
Of my murky monsoon mind
Swimming in it is a rainy day
Adding to the monsoon grey.

Brown,
Of the ground beneath my feet
That was, that I no longer tread
Without a way to find a way
Adding to the monsoon grey.

Rainbow colors,
Of 3 nose studs.
And countless chats
Whitewashing the monsoon grey……


From thousands of miles away
Thank you Ramya.

FeAther(weight) fAll

The feather fell down
It stretched its own fall
It went round and round
And fell without a sound.

Featherweight fall.

It too came down
In a protracted fall
It went round and round
And drowned... in a sea of words!

Just like the feather.
But nothing featherweight about it.

Pi GoD

Life of Pi adeptly maintains a balance between telling of the fictitious (yet heart wrenching, inspiring, frightening and a lot more) ordeal of Pi and the factual details of the ways of various species. Every page throws up details about tigers, orangutans, hyenas and more! Details that normal people, living a city-life, exposed to the dismal zoos they are exposed to and uninterested in animals beyond the mandatory visits organized by schools to zoos would miss. Being one of those people, these are invaluable and even interesting details which wouldn’t have interested me in any other form or on any other day. However, in the form of Pi’s life in the zoo and then at sea (literally and literary ly), I am fascinated by them. Every page spews vital survival tips. The whole book is one survival guide in literary form and having a philosophical undertone to it. And as I find myself getting tired while with the book and reading the words but not taking them in, I feel I have lost out on something that would have come to my rescue were I to be stranded in the Pacific or the Sunderbans. I read it again just to be safe. I wait till survival facts register and then continue on Pi’s journey hoping the pieces of information have found their way in my long term memory. The book is educating and entertaining at the same time. Also draining with the textbook attention I am giving it! I cannot let a single sentence escape me and that becomes impossible when Martel / Pi launches on his long-drawn spatial descriptions of the life-boat, the position of his fellow survivors, his innovations and manufacturing of things in order to survive and the detailed step by step description of the processes. The reader is required to SEE it all! And I cannot. As I read how he took the rope from behind the oars and pierced holes in the mast only to pull the tarpaulin over the lid of the store box that lay towards the curving stern of the ship which had the gunnel a few inches above the water hoisted with the solar fills…. I lose myself! He ends his long drawn process description with “and my canopy was ready”!

I end the same paragraph with “Phew! However he did it, I am glad his canopy is ready!”

I continue, for the spirit of Pi and for the wonderfulness of the myriad species this book talks to me about.