journal.coffee

Often when people get drunk together, as drunks often do, someone says something nobody wants to hear or, worse, admit. They say it simply because it is true, and all true things should be said. Most brawls are started by honest men, and most fires are fuelled by a need for warmth. By saying all that, I only mean to suggest that all good intentions are just that, intentions. They have no say over the outcome, and if you are like me, and if you try to be honest and have a penchant for getting drunk, you will find yourself in situations where you have said the wrong thing, which really is the honest thing. You will learn that most camaraderie falls apart on the first honest word. So, if you cannot moderate the liquor, you must, by all means, stay your word. Of course, it is easier said than done; live even one-fourth of life, and you will see that most worthwhile things share that tendency.

Now, I do not mean for you to lie. No one who wishes any good upon someone should ever expect them to lie. If anyone has ever given you a word of advice which enables your dishonesty, firstly, you must not feel bad at being enticed by it as all people have a liar in them, and secondly, you must understand that the person is no friend. No friend should ever ask a friend to lie, and given you have read this till here, I believe you and I are friends. Perhaps, we will meet someday, or maybe, I am long gone, and you have stumbled upon what remains of these words. Whatever it may be, you must listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you.

When I say you must stay your word, I only mean that most people who get offended by the honest word will not have in them the stomach to hold their booze or their emotions, and while people like this deserve to be offended, you, on the other hand, do not deserve their vulgarity and unseemly attitude. In the end, you will feel worse, and all that alcohol will have been wasted, for you will have sobered up immediately.

If you are like me, which I believe you are, you will know how terrible the waste of a good bottle is. This, and only this, is my drinking advice to anyone.

On this foggy winter night in the first few days of December, I stand on the balcony, wondering about the ephemeral nature of things. Everything begins, and everything ends. This slow burn of time happens each year. No matter where you go, you will always land in December. Our lives fade away like the wick of an old oil lamp, flickering as if it would turn off at any instance. Then comes this wintry, blue month, and somehow, it brings with it the hope of a rewrite, the hope that we can begin this exercise of living again. I think of this, and I stare ahead at all that is waiting to happen to me, and I hope, with all my heart, that they are good. When all things end, and right before all things begin, we always wait for goodness. The coldness of December warms my heart. Life is, after all, an absurd irony.

We have made it, I proclaim silently, almost in a whisper—not all proclamations are loud. Some happen in the softest questions, some in the laughter over dinner, and some happen without words. As I sit here and take stock, I notice nothing but hope and happiness in my heart. Where did all the pain go? I wonder, and I do not have an answer, and that is why we must let time pass. We misplace things in months as they pass us by. I left it somewhere in January, but I could not remember it. So much can happen in a single year, and so much has indeed happened; who can keep track of the what and when, and why must we? The only thing I know as I stand here is this: there is a lot of life in me, in all of us. There is time just yet. We are still writing our stories.

It’s almost as if a breeze has blown by and carried me from my morbid beginnings in January to this utterly fulfilled December. I believe I now understand what they say when they say there is always a second wind.

You know winter is here when you start to see loneliness creep up on you as you sit on the couch watching TV or on a corner of the street as you walk and hear someone call out your name. Of course, no one has called out your name, and it is an illusion, as all things are; you only hear it because you wish it. However, writing about it puts you in a position that can only be best described as a misunderstanding that knows no solution.

All the people around you, since there are so many, ask you, “how is it that you’re feeling this when we are here?” Logical as you are, pragmatic as you pretend to be, you try to think of an answer, but you draw blanks, and no words seem right. Lost in this unprompted battle of wits, you tell them they’re right, but they’re not even close. It is entirely possible to feel belonging and loneliness at the same time. It is only slightly difficult to explain to those who have never felt it, like how the importance of knowing a dog growing up can only be shared by those who already know it. There is no way you can put it into words for those who have not felt it. Everyone else can feign understanding and pretend empathy, but they rarely understand it unless they’ve felt it themselves; if they have, you will not need words.

This state of mind is, by no means, debilitating and has no cause for urgency. Seasons come and go, and with them, so does what you feel in them. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that when I tell someone so much time has passed and I do not know how I got here, I rarely mean it as morbidly as they assume it to be. For what it’s worth, I am glad that the time has passed, that life has gone on, and that seasons have changed, and I’ve felt so much. In the same way, this outpour of seasonal loneliness has nothing to do with how I feel about it.

Before a shower, we often take the temperature of the water with our bare hands to ensure we can bear it, and only then do we jump in. It is but just that. In fact, if it makes any difference, I am far too aware I can write much better when there is a smidge of turmoil in my heart. It is a beautiful gift, and like I am for all things, for this, too, I am grateful.

As the day got on today, I felt this sublime happiness cover me like a warm memory engulfs us when we catch an old song riffing through the glass door of a store or like a soft, velvety evening you spend with someone you meet for the first time. It was freeing and open, like our hearts are when we see something we have never seen before. Despite my sneezing’s persistent interruption, I could feel a joy I hadn’t felt in a bit. It could be that I was growing older and becoming whoever I was meant to be, or as it often is, it could simply be a peek into what is right and what is true. But as I sat there, working, I realised that I only felt joy when I was useful. I could experience a whole plethora of things, and that, too, has its place, but my happiness is my usefulness. There is no alternative for me, and I can keep running from it, but I will never outrun it truly, and one day, even if I run for many, I will sit and work, and it will make me realise, once again, that honest, unbiased work is where my contentment will always sit.

I write these words, and I ask: are they helpful? And sometimes, very rarely, I hear a whisper that says: yes. But then, if I do not write them, I would never know, so I must write, regardless of their usefulness. All honest work is useless right till it moves the world. All good work eventually moves the world. As for anything else that I do, my obsession stands. It is either helpful, or I cease doing it.

I am not here to only breathe and live shallow truths. I must use this time as if I am getting it again, by some magic or phenomenon I cannot explain. We are always careful with our second chances; that is how I live my life: in pretence. I shall use it to make it stand for something. There is no greater glory than helping the world spin; it takes many of us to nudge it a little. But the world does move, and the people do have a say in this. Yes, even if a little bit, they do have a say in this. Sometimes, a bit is all it takes to push something into perpetual motion.

Today, I am in bed under a warm quilt, and these words come from a cup of chamomile with honey. We must shuffle things now and then. The person I am when I sit at the desk is not the person I am when I lie in bed, cosy and tired. The person I am here in this city—the one that seems to never let go of me—is not the person I am where I was for the last three days. We are what we are around. Of course, some parts are non-negotiable, but the rest, we must disturb now and then. We must rock the boat, not to drown ourselves, but to check whether we have not died already. The simplest clinging to life, the panicked grip on the invisible gunnels of the proverbial boat, means you are still alive. The desire for your regular days, when you are entirely out of them, suggests there is a life to return to—a well-made one. Now, I am here, and I am exhausted, but you have to do what you must do, so I must sit and write, no matter how long it takes me. The trick to building a life you crave is to go out of your way to demand what it needs you to do. They have enough parables and maxims about still water already, and for me to add one more to the kitty would not make a difference. You know how they are, and you know how things go. You do not need me.

Just as I thought of the water, a cold draft seems to have blown from nowhere since all the doors and windows are shut tight, as they should be towards the end of November. But the draft is there, for I have felt it. Life is seldom the physical truth; it is often our experience. I know the yellow lamp, glowing so far away on the bookshelf, does not make the room warmer, but my mind tells me otherwise when it sees it. This is how we live—in our own fictions and stories, and that is what it is to create a life you enjoy living: to write a story. You write it one day at a time, and you write the best story you know. The rest falls into place eventually.

I woke up this morning still dazed by night; the aftertaste of everything that happened the day before was still on my tongue. It all began as if it had not ended at all, and this happens now and then. Joy is sticky like the candies from summers before work and worry when everything was much simpler. I wanted to wrap myself into the sheet and not start the day, but then, we must all get out of bed eventually, and so I did. Half the day is gone now, the daylight is still going strong, and the coffee has finally started to do its job. It is a day when nothing will happen—I know it. It is a day with simple laughter shared between friends over meals, games, and whatever you do to pass the time on days like this, which you often do not have a word for. And when a day like this is over, they ask you what you did all day, and you laugh, and you tell them “nothing” as if it is not a valid answer. I sit here, writing as we all talk about our plans for what is left of the day and our lives.

The goodness of this life makes me feel a soft fondness for all that has happened and all that is yet to come. Maybe, if I were to live this life again, it would not be as bad as it seemed once. There will always be a day like this, with open backpacks and suitcases lying all over the floor and clothes spilling out of them like the truth that needs no hiding. I think I would be fine. Perhaps, it would all be okay. This is the middle, after all. A lot has happened already, and a lot awaits, and here we sit talking about nothing.

Before you know it, you’ll have lived some parts of life over and over again. You’ll have moments that look and feel the same, and at first, it will feel like it is all life has to offer. But then, as all things do, your cynicism will temper, too. Soon, it is all you will look forward to: repetition. The repetition of passive conversation as you sit in a sunlit room surrounded by the people you love will make you feel alive. And you will meet people for the first time again, and see things for the first time again, and the repetition you despised will become what you crave. You will want more of it because you know things don’t last as often, and if they do, it is never as long as you think they will.

I, too, was aloof about this until right about a few hours ago when I first thought, “I’ve been here before, in this exact moment.” Then, as I closed my eyes and let everything around me engulf me, it occurred to me that it was supposed to be this way. There are many things we learn through a soft suggestion of fate, and the specifics of what made what happen are rarely anyone’s concern. The important thing is that things do happen, and we do learn things now and then, and today, I learned that the nature of life is repetition. The trick, probably, is to not fight this but let it all happen and, if possible, find what’s new in it.

Things repeat simply so we can watch them again, watch them closely and pick them apart. And as it has been in my case, and in my experience, sometimes the only thing to do is accept the repetition. The scrutiny mostly happens itself.

When you return to a place after a long time, you feel this sense of belonged alienation. You see, the place has gone on without you, and there is little you could have done about it, for you have gone without it too. We are so much of where we live, and we seldom give credit to the towns and cities that shape us. Things happen, whether you exist or not, and that is something you learn over and over when you revisit places. I remember a street as I do; I know where all the places are, I know the directions, and I know the cost to travel around the neighbourhood, but it feels like all that I know and all that I think about it is now a relic of the past, even if things have changed little from when I last saw it.

We make an agreement when we leave: I will return someday, and when I do, things will be the same, but I will have lost my right to claim anything only because I left. To revisit a place is to be like a stranger to a friend, unintentionally and only by virtue of lost time. I wonder if the birds feel this, too, when it is winter and they come back home.

What happened to you since I left? We ask our cities and those we leave behind as if the answer is ever as easy as a list. Where do I begin? They reply in earnest, but they do begin and tell you stories. Before you know it, it is three in the morning, and you are talking about how different things would be if some things happened differently. You nod in agreement and say, perhaps, I would not have even left. But then, you know you would have because you know that is all you know to do: to leave things behind. And then, return and feign nostalgia as if you were not the one who chose to leave after all. To be a person is to lie, especially to yourself. There is no shame in it. It is how the world has worked for all these years, people have left, and places have gone forward without them.

I stood in the concessionaire queue at the airport. We must try and get a cup of coffee or tea when travelling, not for the caffeine but because they devour the urge to eat, which is always good when dealing with food around airports. The queue did not budge at all, however, and I started seeking ways to distract myself. I started looking around and did not have to look far to find something interesting. The man who stood and waited ahead of me had a wilted flower jammed right where the straps go in. It seemed like a rose, but it was difficult to tell. The man seemed old and tired; the grey hair indicated a life lived. I could not judge whether it was lived well or otherwise, so I moved to a different inquiry. I wondered who the flower could have been from that he kept it even after it had been reduced to a dry and dead version of its glorious colour.

As we do for things we don’t know anything about, I started making up stories about it. I hoped it was from a kid who waited for father back home and told myself things were seldom as simple. Before my cynicism entirely took hold of me, I realised one can hope. One can hope for things to be good and for them to be simple. If we hope strongly enough, things often turn out to be that way. I also thought maybe he simply forgot about it, as most people forget things, and that the flower was but a glaring display of his aloofness.

All of this was, of course, selfish of me. I only wanted to be distracted. These observations happened all day long because there was always a queue and people were always around. It was incredible just how many people were around me. When I finally got my coffee and found a seat, I decided to look at the sheer plethora of it all. I reckon there is so much at stake every second of every day. Children give their fathers a flower and wait for them to return home. Fathers often keep the flowers long after they have withered, and this happens regardless of whether we notice it or not. Most life in this world happens despite us. When I thought of this, it made me dejected for a minute, but then, like all thoughts that shake your soul, it soon gave me this incredible sense of being alive.

After days of being out of sorts, as one tends to be now and then, I woke up today with a relaxed heart. I made coffee, returned to bed and sat in it for a good hour, doing nothing. It is winter, after all, and this ritualistic slowness is part of the package you get with the slower months. Over the years, I have learned that I must keep going until I reach the moment when my body, not my mind, wants rest; the mind gives up faster than the body does on most days. We can work our way around a rebellious mind, but we cannot talk an uncooperative body into action. We must lay down our figurative swords on its first suggestion, and then, as it suggests, we must rest. To begin the day, once and for all, I got out of bed and sipped the coffee, now lukewarm. Oh, the sinful pleasure of intentional tardiness. As I sipped the coffee, the world echoed: there is still time; I believed every word.

And if for some reason, you want me to inquire about what happened, it is too late for that. We can never know what truly happens when we lose our spirits. The soul is surrounded by shaky scaffolding. It is there, in all its glory, and it is also continually being built. And a lot can happen when things are being built: a can of paint falls now and then, a ladder slips sometimes, and some ropes come loose here and there. It says little about what is being built, which is what happened here too. I could not be too sure what it was, but we should try not to worry about it. Time is an astute sculptor. We must let it do its work and shake things off when chaos arises.

“Nothing happened”, we should announce, “nothing at all. Let us resume our duties. There is a life to build.”

The first piece is an accident, and so is the second, and the third, and the tenth and the hundredth. By accident, you connect seemingly unrelated things in a way no one has before. Most leave it that, but if you keep at it, something changes. The accident becomes a habit, and from that point on, you see the world as an artist does. No one ever truly becomes an artist—it is an occupation on lease. The agreement is your consistent repetition of the accident. You must do it, and then, you must do it again. For a second, it will feel like second nature but pay heed. Do not take it for granted. The muses are your liaison to getting in, but you must honour them, for what brings you in can also kick you out. It is all about honouring the gift of the accident. All art begins and ends there.

I think of a thousand things in a day, and I record one of them. I wonder why I do this and what will happen to the rest of my thoughts. But when you do this long enough, you know all good ideas eventually return, and when they do, they are ready. Yet, it does not reduce my worry. To be an artist is equal part action and inaction. Most people fail to strike a balance altogether, and an artist, the honest kind, must not only strike it but also live alongside this struggle. And so art is equal parts accident and equal parts choice. The accident happens to most people. The first poem, the first painting shows up in their first heartbreak, in their first friendship, in the first lesson at school, in grief and in joy, in the changing of seasons and in the first drink they have in college. But the choice, the choice is rarer.

It shows rarely, and it carries a toll that is higher than most would even begin to understand. They would be too busy remembering the tale of how they got out unscathed all those years ago, conveniently leaving out how they refused to make use of the gift that landed in their lap. It will be the only thing they ever tell the world.

There are days when nothing happens, and sometimes, this is all we need, but when we are so used to putting out fires, we may just set things ablaze only so we have something to do. Now that I have written this down, I wonder if I have written this before, and if not written it, perhaps, I must have said it, and if I hadn’t said it, I might have thought it before. I know this because some thoughts cut so damn close to your soul; you know they are your own; they could not have come from the outside. We remember them, even if we forget everything else, but regardless of where this thought came from, I have written it down for good reason. Many a life has been ruined by this need alone—to have something to do when the going gets easy. People tend to forget that the whole point of dousing the flames was that things were on fire. We have an ever-unfulfilled need to feel useful, and a tendency to ask the same questions time and again.

All through the day, I have asked myself: what next? It seems the impatience in me wants time to pass faster, but we can wish for that as much as we want; it does not change that time moves at its own tempo.

Now, I sit here, in a lamplit room with golden silhouettes and golden whiskey, at the end of a day spent well. A day spent well but also in agony simply because I happened to sit in the sun for a little too long, staring at the beige sky overwhelmed by pink clouds. When one does that, one tends to ask inconsequential questions. And had I stayed there for a little longer, I would’ve gotten my answer from the get-go, but I was too impatient and had to get things done.

If I had stayed a little longer, I would have watched the sky darken once again as it does, and I would have known that things come and go—especially joy. And I would have found a way to touch the grass and remember the moment as it was, and years from now, I would have told someone: in the evening, on a day when nothing was wrong, the sky was pink, and it was all okay.

There was time yet for things to go wrong. It was all okay then. It was the only thing that should have mattered.

But I was too busy asking questions, and now, here we are.

And in winter, the words automatically came to you. In summer, you had to face the blank page for a long time before the stream of words started moving. But the winter was rapids you had to tame and navigate. It was a beast of a different nature. While summer was about perseverance and writing with difficulty, winter was about curation since everything that happened in the slow months demanded to be recorded. The inner life was richer, there was always a moment of solace to sit and wonder about things only you could wonder about, and the coffee was always there. As soon as you ran out of a cup, you put the kettle to boil; all this warmth was a response to how cold it felt otherwise. It was my favourite time to write in the year, but having spent most of the year writing, I wondered if I had exhausted myself. But as I sat and wrote, I saw that the pipes were never clogged, and before I knew it, I had three good paragraphs. These were the better months.

I was reading in the sun earlier this afternoon, and then I remembered a language class from when I was still in school. We were studying a poem that talked about the beauty in the bucolic. Something that did not sit right with me then and does not sit right with me now was that the poet conveniently left out the ugliness. It made it seem unreal and larger than life, and so, curious as I was, I first raised my hand and then my concern with the teacher, who reprimanded me for asking a simple question and said: poetry is no place to talk about the ugliness of the world. I never understood why she took so much offence, almost as if she had written it herself. It is a problem with teachers and critics alike—they get too close to something they did not write.

I remind myself of this every winter since it is a time of curation, and as writers, we must always pick and choose our feelings. It is both a pleasure and a pain to do so, but we must never favour one emotion over the others, especially when doing so can make things inconvenient for those who have just begun writing and who have teachers who think there is no place for ugliness in it when pointing it out is, quite frankly, the description of the job.

Every once in a while, winter brings you days when you wake up with a runny nose and malaise for no reason but that it is winter. You have eaten right, you have hydrated and exercised, but the day begins as it does, and then you go out to brunch but leave early because you have run out of tissues and patience. The hot toddies didn’t do any good, and the sun was not in the correct position, to begin with. All in all, from the moment you get in a cab to return home, it becomes a day of rest thrust upon you. But anything imposed and stipulated feels paralysing, even rest, especially rest. The afternoon nap is blissful only because you steal it from the world. When it is a day when the world does not demand much from you and no obligation prevents you from it, and if it is a day when you must nap for you need it, the nap feels underwhelming and pointless. We call it taking a nap because if it is given to us, it fails to have its true effect and feels different. But that is how things stand today. I sit here writing, a cup of chamomile with honey on the table and the doors and windows sealed shut. The chicken soup I ordered has just arrived, and now, it has begun to feel like November.

I slept through the hours when we still had light, and when I woke up, it was dark, and the curtains were still open, but the sun that caressed me as I slept seemed to have long gone. It is already the tail-end of the day, and the conniving rebelliousness in me is still cooking up some scheme on how to spend it. But first, I must have the soup, and then, we shall think of our mutiny against time and the natural order of things.

The other night, I stood on the balcony and stared at the hills. It is what most people who live in a valley do. I believe it is a global way to watch time pass us by—to stare at whatever is larger than ourselves, lost in awe. Some people stare at the sea, some at the mountains, and some at other people. In that moment, the hills sufficed for me, and as there is no set order in how thoughts creep up on you, a thought, perhaps carried along with the breeze, slid over my nape. I could not be sure if it was the cold or the severity of the thought, but there were goosebumps when the breeze stopped blowing. I thought of how all writers—whose job is to describe others and the world around them—crave the opposite. I thought of how I stood there, and no one would ever know of this, and how beautiful it was if I, too, was described in the way I described others. Most writers crave only this—they seldom admit it, and if they do, they do it in a moment where no one but the November breeze can hear them. I would much rather be described than be the one describing, but that is not how it has turned out, and no one who describes me will do so in the way I do for other things, and in the end, it will be as it is with most things in life: unexpected and insipid.

There is little else I can say about this; even if there was, it has been a day of much talking. I seem to have lost a part of what brings words to the page. The more I talk during the day, the less I can write about it. All writers crave a moment on the balcony at night. The breeze and the thought I talked of just now happened a few days ago. Perhaps, another quiet moment is in order. It has been a long week—and while colloquially, long means terrible, it is not how I mean it. I mean, it has been long as in how sometimes the night seems long simply because you overslept and woke up rested, and how a soft kiss that lasts only a few seconds seems long enough that you remember it for years, and how a week feels long simply because there was a lot in it worth celebrating—big and small.

That is all I mean when I say it has been a long week, and now, I must move into a quiet Saturday. There always is much to write about.

Sometimes, I sit in the silence of a track that plays on repeat, to the point that it fades into the background noise of what is the last hour of the day. I sit, and I make a mental inventory of how this life is a dream come true, and when I cannot keep up with the blessings around me, I start counting them using the partitions on my fingers, and the more I do this, the more glaring the loudest question in the otherwise mostly silent room becomes: who do I share it with? And they tell me I still have time, and I know this; I know it all too well. Who are they to tell me there is still time to be patient when I am the one who spends these days waiting patiently? It is the person who waits who bears the brunt of it. It is the person who waits who has lost the years and never made the memories they so deeply desired. Those who wait spend years watching days pass, good and bad alike; it is them, and only them, who know, who keep track of the things that did not happen, and these, too, they count on their fingers like they do their blessings. They know how blessed they are far more than others, more than anyone else can tell them for they count them over and over because there is nothing else to do, nothing else at all.

Let us be impatient for a day or two, or a week or more. It is only natural. Only the one who waits knows the silence of the good news and the loudness of the bad. Only the one who waits knows just how much time has passed. Yearning is no easy ordeal. Let us writhe and rant now and then. Winters pass, and the person who waits and sits in the same chair must get up and throw a tantrum now and then lest they forget they are waiting at all. It takes many summers to thaw a frozen soul, and souls are frozen far too often; we must stay warm, and we must limber up. Who knows how many years one has to wait to be able to talk about one’s day casually, nonchalantly, or at all?

Not all thoughts are worth wasting words on, and as a writer, it is your job to separate the grain from the chaff. There will be good ideas you sit down and start writing about, but the more words you throw at the page, the less it seems they have any chance of sticking to it. Almost all ideas are good, but not all ideas are good right now. This is my only advice for anyone who wants to sit and write because it is hard. It is tough to do it, knowing all too well you’re not writing to anyone but only the hope that someday, someone will find it all, and for them, it will change the world. We write for that, which is why we must share all thoughts, but not all of them want to be shared at all times. Writing is a lot like life in that way. When something doesn’t work, we must know to stop. We must know when to scratch things off, and begin again.

The other thing I can tell you, which seems to be something many people ask me, and the answer is so unwittingly simple, I do not know what to tell them. They ask me: what is the secret to consistency? I know they expect me to give them a list of impossible, inane rituals or a trick with undisclosed magic that makes sitting at the same goddamn desk easier. But I will take a leap of faith today. I will try.

Frankly, if you are someone who cannot hold any habit for more than a few days, you will not be able to write for more than a few days, either. You will not be able to go on for more than a couple because writing is more difficult than most things you do, if you want to do it right.

Writers are consistent because they are consistent people. Anything else is a noble exercise that helps you believe you got something done today. Most people only need that to live—the feeling of doing something worthwhile. You’d be surprised to see just how many people spend their entire lives chasing their tails. The bottom line is if you lack it in most things, you will likely lack it in writing, too. And if you are likely to roll up your sleeves for most things, you will find it incomprehensibly easy, and you will be baffled by just how many people struggle with it.

It will never make sense to you; you will be too busy doing the work.

All prose is conversation. All writing is an intimate exchange between two people—the writer and the reader. All prose should read like a close friend struggling to say what they want to say as they sit beside you and try, stuttering a bit and pausing in the most unexpected places.

I have read books which are too clean, and each sentence looks perfect and pristine. It all disgusts me. The real world is not made of flawless sentences, clear grammar rules and correct punctuation. Sure, some order is present to it all, lest life would not be life, but there is a sort of messiness to real life the purists fail to catch. There are films you watch with awe and envy, and there are films you watch and remember simply because they feel like they could happen to you. When a sentence pauses in a place where the pause does nothing but add honesty, you realise you, too, would have said it like that, even if it is a pause too many. Most people talk in broken sentences and half-said phrases, and they move from one thought to another; we grow up, sure, but how we talk suggests that we were distracted children once. No matter how much we grow up, this does not change, and writing—prose—must capture this uncommon detail.

All narration should feel like you’re sitting at a cafe, with the aroma of freshly baked pastry and bread wafting and your friend talking about work. Until, before any of you notice, they are telling you how time feels as if it has slipped out of their hands and that they do not know what to do with themselves anymore. It is how all prose should feel—swift, sudden, and simultaneously soft. It is how I wish to write, and it is how I always strive to write. I write for one person sitting beside me, or across from me. To write for an audience is a sin. The audience, if there ever is one, is still a bunch of different people waiting for you to help them say things they could never say.

All waiting for the abrupt pause, for the silence before you take a sip of your coffee. All waiting to say, I know how you feel, I have felt that way too often, and I, too, did not know where to go.

It is the end of autumn, and the trees are all trying to remind us of this in different ways. Some have their flowers out right about now. While spring has a monopoly over joy and life, autumn is not too far behind. In many ways, they are siblings, each responsible for setting the mood for what comes next. Spring tells us to get ready for warmer days, to go out and live amidst all the colour. Autumn tells us the importance of staying put, of conserving our energy. The year was long, it reminds us. There is wisdom in slowing down. And slow down we do; slow down, I have.

It had rained in the evening if we consider a ten-minute drizzle to be rain. But whatever it was, it made me notice how all the roads in the city are paved once again, which, in turn, reminded me of talking to a cab driver who swore on his life that the streets would all be back to how they used to be by the time October ends—everything good is always waiting for the rains to stop. I did not know why he thought this way, but at the time, frustrated as I was, I did not believe him and said something cross about the administration. I wish I could tell him he was right, but small as this city is, there are so many people you never meet again.

Random things like these always make me curious, and for a second, I believe in something larger. A second: that is the extent and expiry of my faith. But for the faithless, even a second is enough. For those who do not believe in anything but their choices and consequences, even a second is respite. The year is slowly ending, and I want to thank someone for all the good, but there is no God in my life, and to thank oneself more than on a couple of occasions is a slippery slope to vanity. And so, like it is with all things, once again, I am suspended.

As I grapple with this specific aloneness, I hear autumn’s last whisper whistle about. I pour myself a drink and stand on the balcony grass, thoughtless, with my glass on the marble sill. It has been a most subtly eventful year, and now, it is winter again, and while I do not yet know who deserves the credit for it, standing here, I know only one thing: I have been happy, and nothing else matters.

Come Sunday afternoon, I made time to reorganise my closet. It had not seen a glimpse of order in the past month. I had thought about doing it earlier, but that is how life turns out for most things: we do them later than we planned. It does not matter how late or how early we are. The essence of life lies only in things being done. There is so much I am running late for, and as I folded old pullovers in perfect, lithe movement, I almost thought I knew why it was that way. But the clarity from learning how to do one thing well rarely trickles into the others at the moment. It is only when much time has passed that you see how everything in your life affects everything else. How you make your coffee may dictate how you handle responsibility, and how you fold your pullovers has much to say about how well you make space for things in your day. In any case, I emptied the drawers and slowly changed what I put where. The socks and the handkerchiefs moved to the drawers in the bathroom, which had been empty for a while. The casual clothes went in their place, and I spent my afternoon making these little, somewhat irrelevant decisions. When I was done, I saw that a whole shelf was empty. It is incredible how a little rearrangement can make so much space for things.

The sun was now golden, and it made the grass golden too, and it was a golden, golden day. There was so much time still. I spent the afternoon watching a film I hadn’t seen in years and drank my coffee. When the cup was empty, I got up to refill it and continued watching. The sun stayed for two hours straight, and there was no other way I could have spent the day. I was still late for some things—one seldom isn’t—but I was not running. I felt sleepy a little later, despite the four cups of coffee I had devoured one by one, and I reasoned it may have been a plot concocted by the blanket and the patch of pale sunlight falling on it through the window, but I did not give in. I had to write still, and at first, I panicked. But it was still the evening—there was still time. If you rearrange things now and then, there is always time.