Sellophane

(This be written by Aaki
Sigh, apparently it be for me.)

Walking through IIT with him (he of the bright eyes and eighteen years' worth of dreams), I traced my fingers along cold railings that worked upon my body like some ancient balm. It was a green campus yesterday, and flowers that seemed to be hurting from an excess of colour glowered at me from every direction that I cared to look in. There was anger in the air; the flowers seemed to diffuse it.

Culprits.

My self-confessed sibling had now taken his chappals off, and was balancing them quite expertly on his right hand as we ambled alongside each other. We looked around, looking for stray peacocks or such and such signs, barely discussing anything that I would regard as particular. But then, quite as swiftly as it had been broken, the camaraderie established itself again. We started speaking to each other again. My aching need to quell a self-induced loneliness began to talk in disjointed sentences, and he sought to contribute to the melancholy with his genius when it came to knowing all kinds of strange animals ever since he was a boy of four.

And then, maybe because he requested it, or maybe because we were running out of even-lined things to say, I twirled about in the sunlight, and began to sing--a song in a quivering voice that spoke of ill-practice and little range.

Desperado.

You sound like a jazz record come to life, you know, he said dreamily, and then he made me promise to sing for a movie that he knew he would make in the future. He sounded so sure that I wanted to believe him. One could always make a documentary of sorts, I suppose. But it would be somewhere along the time I know I would have lost my voice completely. Shoulders shrugged, but consent delivered, we walked on towards any road that could take us to a place where we would find our peace for today. I would not know why we supposed any road would do that, though. Maybe sunlight disillusions the easiest of pessimists into believing that all can be translated into a dream at the end. I cannot be sure about this too, you see. I had rather speak for myself, but I believe I would be more accurate if I were to furnish an account of the man who walked with me—he of the bare feet and an open mind. Yes, perhaps I can answer for him. Then I can perhaps escape the business of filling my own questionnaires, you know.

A peacock finally crossed us, its colors sitting sedate in the shadow of a bush, and it was a lovely three in the afternoon. Ruined professors sat along lawns, in pairs or crowds of three, and possibly talked of History. How are we ever to know? I would have liked to eavesdrop and know for sure, though. One likes to be sure of such things sometimes, you see, even when it does not warrant any particular reasoning, or does not seem to be worthy of consequence, to be sure. One just likes to know sometimes.

The peacock elegantly bowed to us and vanished behind the bush whose shadow had lent him an air of darker color than the bright blue he was generally supposed to be, and Barefoot pointed to me the bower where he had his first kiss--that tree near a hostel complex that had stood by and watched as he and his lover had felt their first intimacy come to life only about a few years ago. How many more first kisses had that tree seen, I thought to myself, as we moved apart from collected encased memories of at least a hundred couples. I put an estimate at hundred. I think its safer to spell it out as a roundabout of such, because then one can always fool oneself by forgetting the number of zeros that were attached to it earlier when confronted with the real figure, I think. One can always then quote the real figure and forget that the earlier estimate had been a zero less, or zero more. Or some such thing. It is easier on the nerves that way. At least for me. I shall only speak for myself as regards the way one ought to deal with estimates.