Monday, July 20, 2009

There's a chill wind blowing

This is an eerie night. It hasn't rained since evening, but it feels slightly cold. My flat mate has not switched on the front room ceiling fan as he sits there watching the television in near darkness. It feels cold, it is not supposed to feel cold here. The floor in my room is greasy. The internet was not working and the technician had walked in with his shoes on. But I had mopped up after he left. It is still greasy. I feel the tingling tiredness in my calf, like I used to when I was in school. I hadn't exerted myself much. Something is weird, it feels cold. In a way that it hasn't for a long long time here and I almost miss the winters. I haven't really experienced winter for a long long time now. My mind backtracks, it thinks about certain days when I had shuddered in cold.

Riding a bicycle in my para on a Sunday morning to the nearby grocery for a Modern bread, cool wind had thudded on to my chest. When winter was about to arrive in first semester, I had a new cotton blanket which was cosy but for the fact that it was a tad short and my feet used to get uncovered if I tossed around in the night. A particular break spent in my home after the odd semester in third year. It was enlivened by the magic of Indian batsmen in far Australia, but the days were cold enough to give chill down the spine even in afternoons. The nocturnal bus ride from Muzaffarpur to Barkakana in late December with just a windbreaker on. The night had felt like an eternity. My first week in Montevideo, the winter was not yet over and I had never witnessed cold like that.

There has been no winter since close to four years.
Tonight reminds me of such winter days. Dark real winters.

2 comments:

kaushik said...

haven't been here for a while, and you posted at a time when my google reader showed 100 unread stuff after a trip to California...

The best memory of the cool Calcutta winters (after being in Wisconsin, I wouldn't be wrong saying warm Calcutta winters) was sitting in the pleasant sunshine, late mornings, the fog slowly going away, haze in the far, a chai and soaking in the sun

(Gosh! I sound like a middle aged man!)

Cheers!
Kaushik

Anand said...

How well would this fit in then..

There's a chill wind blowing in my soul
And i think i am growing old

Give a google if you haven't heard this before. It's an obscured nugget :)