Where the streets have no names!

As I step over to the ground, the usual pushy-push welcomes me to work’billions of us (big, small, colorful) milling around, brushing past each other in a missing-the-train hurry. A verbal diarrhea of the customary hush-hush, exchange of pleasantries, an update of daily chores. The cat behind the mouse, mouse behind tinier versions anon.

Life-a careful patchwork of desires (fulfilled and unfulfilled) where joy and sorrow were the adjacent sides of a game of tic-tac-toe. The big brown crust of the maidan; under the sun cosseted the elfin like me. There I’d stand, tall, dark and beautiful in my whole magnified self, stabbing the sky like liberty’s candle; pollen like fragile- fade away with the wind. You could meet me only under candlelight after the witching hour. The whimsicality of my unbeauty confirmed by the nameless streets I’d haunt.

The rising dust off a trotting horse. Sun behind, self on sea. A chilling darkness. A shadow and that was me.

Shrinking by the hour, the exterior of course, but so much faster inside. My body being out of sync with “me”. In the pit of my stomach I carried the cold knowledge, the truth. With alcoholic deviousness and tragic charm I’d drag myself, secretly wanting to fill up like a gas balloon and fly away to the stars. But whose dreams truly hatched? I blazed my own trail and sat on the mountain of ash.

In the hullabaloo of reality and fairytales, truth and untruth, moral and immoral; my mind became a circus-desperately holding on to continuously changing ropes.Not quite used to the herd-like instincts, the ongoing maya of superior-inferior, yours and mine; the world blew into a volcano over my head and left me with countless streets of cold, insensitive molten lava that further bifurcated to another countless.

Streets with milestones, streets with people, streets without real people, streets without names.