Double-kneed men and crippled women crawl the streets begging for change I fear giving for being followed, and yet I get home and almost cry to see that the chocolate I have saved to savor has been consumed--and the other half already stolen by a certain housemate of mine so I have suspicions upon which rested one of my most audacious of confrontations. I sit here now, breathe even, listen to Tiny Dancer to soothe my soul at this moment of such grave despondence.
All while trying to read a short story by Premchand about the salt tax, but mostly I am circling sequences of letters that are meant to mean magnanimity, generosity, buffoonery, and one, perwana, which means both moth and lover--fluttering into so much of Urdu poetry, that hopeless, helpless, hapless desire cannot keep itself from being pulled into the warm romance of a flame. Hopeless, helpless, hapless are all the Indian men I have encountered, whistling through thick mustaches and inviting only abuses that are screamed across a lake or across the street. One special case creep called me no less than 45 times in one hour because a friend used his phone to call me once--but of course had nothing at all to say when I did answer. I have began to accumulate cell phone stalkers and half the names in my contact list are "do not answer."
And I am here still trying to whittle the wax from around the wick of a smothered out candle before it hardens for good, it's most a powdery heap at its feet. Sometimes I can almost feel how far away I am, peering out at memories that rise in faint then fainter plumes of smoke against rooftops I cannot quite recall the color of.
I miss everyone I really know in a world that was really mine.
I remember feeling frightened once when I was seven or so because I couldn't remember what the front of my house looked like. I could picture it in bits, get close to the color, but never really blend it well enough, it was always blurry or bleached and I felt I couldn't belong within something I couldn't be sure that I even knew. But there are pictures of people, there are clear channels of communication, but I just hardly know what to say to anyone but here I am in the Himalayas, here I am doing homework. My parents call and I recite to them my to-do list and think that I have done my duty.
And today at 5:30 in the morning I climbed to the fourth story of this house that is my home for now and watched as the moon tucked itself between us and the sun. We stared straight into it even though we weren't supposed to, worried about going blind while and the temple behind us blared devotional music--some people here locked themselves in, pressed their palms together and prayed that the end would not come with the going of light so soon after sunrise. It did not. I have heard wives' tales about birth defects from such celestial sitings, and my own father firmly believes he was robbed of a toenail because his mother caught sight of a lunar eclipse-which stole away that crescent shaped bit of him, but who knows how these things happen, how they are verified, and though I am breathing easy now, I'm still wondering how I can find culpability for the chocolate thief. Or better, what I can do to make vengeful my revenge.
Because it really is all the little things.
And the universe will not turn in this course for over a century more, but I could've slept through it and never known.
