Trees

Yes, Trees. The combination of green and brown that you have grown up to drawing on your A3 sheets since childhood. Always picking a separate colour for every different tree. scribbling along its borders, making sure it doesnt fall out of your perfect outline. Giving it a nice little curve around the bark and smaller curves for its head where birds may sit and small squirrels may poke out and hide again.

And then you play around them as kids, hiding behind them from enemies, climbing on top of them for safety, plucking mulberries in the summer and making it the crucial wicket which must be hit to ensure there is a change in the order of play.

And in adulthood you sit under them, for hours and wonder, you write or atleast think of writing. The lesser few bring their partners for a kiss or two and mark it as 'their tree' and the immature ones carve out their names to immortalize their presence in that span of time when they cared about nothing but each other.

As you grow older, they tend to resemble your stature for some reason. Bent, bowed and fruitless. Counting each tree as you walk across a park or jog along a track. Some of us carry ourselves to nostalgia under it and others just stare at the ants below.

They may laugh at us as we pass by standing tall and bare, witnessing our behavious and mocking us for our foolishness but they acknowledge us for the gratitude we may have given it, always giving us peace in the absence of humanity.

As silent it may be, it chose to silence us even further.

The 80s Mumbai Indian

He stared at the mirror and greeted himself to a lazy Sunday. Unshaven in his Rupa vest, he scratched his chest yawning away and moving his jaw, chewing the pan that wasn't there. The heat outside was growing by the minute, it was an afternoon in the month of June, 1983. But today he had to deal with the summer terror for today was his day at the races. Recollecting his previous memories of his days at the Mahalaxmi Race Course was a very passionate hobby of his. How the wives would always commend him on his well kept moustache and his dimpled cheeks and the husbands would make plans for lunch and dinner to come see India's cricket match at the World Cup or open a new bottle of Jack they brought from the states. It was a merry time to meet the big and the small of Bombay and increase your network.

He hadn't realised how long he had been staring at the mirror and scratching himself thinking of the races till he noticed a rash being formed. Snapping out of his daydream, he got himself ready for the day to come.

Stepping out of his seaside apartment, he looked a different person altogether. Doning his Ray Bans that had been gifted to him by his uncle on his birthday, his sidelocks perfectly trimmed to the centimetre, his bellbottoms hanging with the perfect cut and topping it all with his HMT Quartz watch. He was not a man of great wealth but his panache said otherwise. With an edition of the Times of India (After hearing G.D. Birla's untimely demise) to read through his train ride to Mahalaxmi, he stepped out into the sun ready to run wild through this concrete jungle of Bombay.