Thursday, January 05, 2006

glimpses

People I have noticed. Things I have seen.
Written about for lack of better things to do:

1.

Middle-aged and awkward, she wore an outdated suit design. Her wrinkled face anxious to get off the crawling bus, she awaited her stop.

Sitting upright at the edge of her seat as if she was being watched – twiddling thumbs, checking her lipstick.

A smear of red lipstick carelessly pinched on her cheek.

Makeshift rouge. Makeshift life.

Desperately aware of her own inadequacies.

2.

Instantly disliked.

She is fair and fat, stuffing herself with pop corn, the colour of her salwar-kameez, not stopping even for a breath.

She finishes her snack, she gulps down her drink. She crushes the cup and the packet together. They are carelessly flung outside the moving train. Perhaps this is what she does to people after she has got what she wanted from them?

Instantly judged.

3.

Thin, wry, almost emancipated. She squeezes herself into the three inches of seat left after three fat women have had their share.

Checks her sari, her bindi and in checking, displaces the latter with a hasty rub – the stickiness forsaken by the salty sweat of a long day. She buys five bars of chocolate for fifty rupees. I know she is not the recipient of these tasty treats. The bars are as thick as her arms.

She barely exists – each day traveling to work, looking after ungrateful children and a worse husband.
Doing it to support women’s liberation, knowing none of her own.

4.

From Jaipur:

Pigs eating garbage. Dogs chasing cars. An occasional calf suckling its mother under the shade of a pink parapit.

Inhale the cool morning air with a light whiff of stagnated dung and marble dust tickles your nose.

Palace ruins. Vandalism abound.
Stealing the gems from the precious walls of love.

Horse-drawn carriages and cycle rickshaws pulling along fatted pink tourists.
Camels basking, people baking in the sun.

Glorious Past.
Mindless Present.

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