Night

 Last night, I couldn’t sleep.

I kept thinking, pondering, brooding over all sorts of things. Eccentric. Ridiculous. Fantastical. Things that exist solely in dreams.

I was born in the year of promises and hopes.

The year in which Arundhati Roy received the Booker for her magnum opus ‘The God of Small Things’. The enigmatic masterpiece that has continued to stun hearts through years. The piece that cemented my fate overnight.

I was born in the year rejuvenation and ruination.

Just like shards of coloured glass, sunshine glistened over the glass panes of our cramped up rental house. Unwanted, unwelcome.

I was born in the year of love and war. The year of all-or-nothing.

I wailed into life. I survived.

A miracle, indeed.

Even now, I can’t help wondering what made my frail heart beat so stubbornly that moment? That moment of reckoning. The moment that made all the difference. What made me wail so idiotically into an empty world, that day? Was it determination? Was it my life force? Was it love? Was it vendetta? Or was it simply fate?

Above all, was the fight worth it?

Nights are unusually exotic in my city. They call her the ‘City of Joy’. They say joy spills over her cup every moment. I don’t think so.

To me, the city has a life of her own – life that flows through her nerve and sinew and gushes through her blood and tears. She owns herself. She has secrets of her own. I walk through the whirlpools of mud and rainbow and I can feel her sadness. I can smell her beauty in the night air, heavy with gasoline and mist. I can hear her anguish and her struggle – her cry for liberation in a world, where sky and earth stinks of blood and war.

A city that kills and resurrects you every day.

A city that welcomes life and death with open arms.

An amnesiac city where pain camouflages inveterately in laughter, where light mingles with shadow most naturally.

A city where death sips in through cracks and pores and yet life floods the gates unabated.

Nights are never quiet here but there is something in the air. If you stand by the window, you can smell the kiss of the night on your cheeks. Across the street, you can hear a few street-folk squabbling – their raucous voices rising in the shifting wind. The howling of trucks. Homeless dogs barking.

You can see some old man taking a stroll on the pavement. Steam hovers over a tea shop at some obscure corner. You recognize the familiar smell of cardamom and tea and bakery biscuits. A madman starts to sing out of nowhere. You take a deep breath and let the night take you in its arms.

You close your eyes and stay awake with your insomniac city. 

All through the dark hours.