Suitors’ place

She. When she first stepped into my room, her eyes were burning like a huntress’. Luckily, her gaze flitted from one dust powdered object to the other in the room, sizing everything up, save me. Perhaps I too looked like a grey furniture that she thought she would never need.  ‘The Room looks good enough’, she said to no one in particular and whipped out through the door.

Two days later, oversized suitcases, trunks, and what was that, a bed roll? grew like boulders all over the room. I felt sad for the bed capsized under piles of boxes and bags. All hers. Curled as far away as i could in one corner of the bed, I cooked my feelings behind a Tehelka. Almost hoping the general poison of its articles would make me turn green and scary. Anything to stop her from stepping all over my carpeted privacy. But her feet was digging into the miles of dust and carpet to find what she had come looking for – a home.

Over the next several months I discovered, she not only had a meat eater’s taste for my inner space. But also had the power to drag the whole Sale at Andheri Market into our room.  But I began to love those clothes she bought even though they had the style factor of a door knob. When she began to hop in and out of them for me to see how they looked on her. Not how she looked in them.  Maybe that is when the change began to happen. Now I missed her if she stayed away on nights. With her non stop chatter on how she stole bargains or quitened colleagues, she changed my equation with silence. Which had never felt so clumsy or useless as now.

To cut a long story short, we will whizz through some snap shots   – She, fiercely arranging the room, hair piled on top, with a single strand wicking the sweat off her glistening shoulder. She, crouched over her long limbs in concentration to paint her toes, that time when I took the snap above. She yacking away on the phone, lying on her baby paunch I could feel was there but never see. Her stay whizzes into one bright perfumed blur till suddenly it was her time to go.

Once more, all the cupboards and drawers and the cavernous box below the bed opened up. They frothed at the mouth with clothes. And shoes. And plastic. Junk. Beads. Colourful lengths of  dupattas that strangled my rising thoughts.

Away she went, after shoving the whole room into her suitcase. Empty wardrobes and cupboards were left staring into space. I started looking for things to stuff their shadowy holes again. And kept turning away from the burning eyes of silence.

 

 

Rainbow catcher

Change of guard

Meter fast hai! (On crossing 31 years)

Make complex toys. Simple tools.

The little lcd screen may roll out a hundred neat menus with infos and functions. But I still find squinting through the camera’s viewfinder more assuring. As if I and my camera are peeping out together on the strange world through one magic eye. We’re close to discovering some angle in which ever fusing time gets wedged and stuck. Tchchchk! Shutter falls, the fluttering time is safely in, now we can go for a breather, me and my camera.  A hunter is very close to his or her instrument. And I like to get as close as i can, all eyes and nose, mouth and cheek disfigured by pressing against the camera body.  Where is that physical proximity in a cool, bright LCD screen that anwswers back. TAKE OFF THE LENS CAP AND TRY SHOOTING AGAIN, YOU IDIOT. Well, the last two words were pithily left unsaid.

My earlier camera was a simple and mid range Nikon SLR camera. Let’s call him Nikki. Actually i never called him any name till I discovered online that my new camera, a Panasonic Super Zoom Digital ZLR, that with the talkative LCD, is much talked about and lovingly referred to as Panny. Instantly I decided my Nikon deserved to have a name, Nikki. Sorry Nikki, may be this is how I am trying to overcome my guilt of dumping you. And like all lame efforts at making dumping look better, this too exudes bad taste. Nikki, a name for a doggedly faithful co-hunter! When dumping someone, make it sharp and cruel to save the other one from your sympathy.

So, Nikki is in the back of the wardrobe, while Panny is the new toy of choice. Make complex toy. And simple tools. Nikki was simple. Panny, in its thousand digital functions will have to remain a toy, I guess. Till when I have understood it better enough to tear it down with my need, my hunter cum moment-collector and photo enthusiast instincts. Till the day when it’s simply a  lethal tool to make time comatose for my gallery.