Sellophane

I saw!
Yay!
Purple Sunbird...

The knowledge of knowing that a magazine like Maxim can rate Lindsay Lohan as the hottest woman in the world and finding this book.
More than I can take.




It's more than I can take.

Let's all just get stuck in an endless traffic jam. The kind where car after car just coagulates with time. Carrying faceless, nameless cadavers like you and me. Scurrying away at ten kilometers per hour for a few seconds, like a mouse with an infected ankle.
On your left is the woman who is late and has to reach home 'cause she hasmake food for her family. She isn't tired she tells herself as she wonders whether to make Palak Paneer or Matar Paneer?
She would have been pretty, maybe she was pretty. But the cold curve to her mouth , or was it the unblinking perplexity of her eyes. It negated the prettiness that the young taut skin stretched over her cheekbones must have otherwise promised.
Maybe she wasn't thinking of Paneer at all? Maybe she was contemplating between the red pills that were on the bathroom counter or the blue ones on the kitchen? Each promised wings, broken, bleeding and feathers mercilessly plucked; but wings nonetheless...
How would one know, a drop of sweat slowly rolls down her forehead, down the bridge of her nose and dangles precariously from the tip of her nose.
Maybe it would fall down.
One looks to the right.
A man, this time. Middle-Aged, spectacled, balding. Funny tufts of hair arranged randomly on his head. His beady black eyes skirted from one corner of it's drooping socket to another? What was it looking for? The Elusive "highway stripper".
The woman with fluffed and hennaed hair and glossy makeup covering the scars, a silk flower.
The kind you would put in the living room for decoration. Pretty, ornate, purple petals with rings of fading yellow in the middle. Made to look like the real thing, but a replica nonetheless.
That's what she is a silk flower.
Fake, barely human. Forcibly made to look pretty and demure, forced to please.
Does it matter to the man with the beady eyes though, will he wonder if the silk flower ever wanted to tear itself apart. Silk Flowers can't feel, they can't bleed.
Inanimate. The same sweat induced by the Delhi heat and the unlikely allies of a faulty AC will soon afflict this man.
I look straight now, the light has turned green. Another ten meters to scurry, a few minutes closer to the destination.
I turn the AC up a notch.

(Reference to Highway Stripper, a poem by A.K. Ramanujan)

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