Yes. I officially went crazy. Guess I needed some banality to combat the cruelty I endured.

I drove a car. For the first time. Crashed it. Wrecked it. And it wasn't even mine.

But, for the record, I made a perfect turn around a pretty tricky corner.

And I realize now that I have been lamenting without a cause. Lamenting has become second nature and all this has happened so often that I have taken to lamenting each time without even thinking whether it actually deserves all the attention.

Bleh. Closure.

Cleaning Up

It came. And went. It's 2:37 am on Thursday, October 9th, and Dashami, as the proper English tea-sipper would note. As I sit in my room and type away on my keyboard, bleary-eyed, and too tired and dazed to sleep, I can hear those last half-hearted blows on the cheap trumpets balloon vendors hand out to kids, I can see tired people trooping home in twos and threes, their new clothes crumpled and sticky from the sweat. But the looks on their faces say it all. The promise my city held when she prepared for the Big Show--the make up, the rehearsals, the build up to the stage performance-- has been fulfilled. They all look deliriously happy. Another one slips by. Another little addition to the Memory Log Book. A new set of faces to mark these memories by. All dear. All along. The last blasts from the mic fitted over the Para Pujo Pandal. Strangely alliterative that. The man shouts about a lost umbrella. Does anybody really care? Really? A petty worry. Yet perversely comforting. Yes, I am home. Incomplete my home is. But I still belong.

Soon the city will be dusted clean. The hated bamboo barricades will be taken down. All kinds of people will rush to their respective work places like these five days never existed. That's the beauty of this city. No one will repent though. There's always so much to look forward to. My city of joy. Joy.

As I ponder, tottering on my swivelly chair, vaguely aware of the distant buzz the heat has given me, I arrive at the conclusion that it is always more productive to regard every experience as the last of a kind. That is only way you get to live. And that would be the closest you could get to the Upanishadic complete life. The cliched carpe diem. We all say it at least once in our lives, collectively, or individually.

You are not here. And I live my half life mechanically. But even that has fallen into a pattern.

Soon it will be dawn. Another day will begin. And like usual I shall spend it in sleeping stupor. This

too shall pass.