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Dwell

It was the blistering heat that rendered the nights sleepless. While you were in another hemisphere it was daily intoxication and the trouble " in your psyche", as Les would put it in the good old Irish places when you were the old regulars. You had been in that dust-blown place rolling on a yoga mat below the fan with its blades all covered in furs of damp settled dust and when it began to work a little longer it groaned ,as though it was not pleased at all to carry out the assigned task. You rolled over it the entire night before you woke up to put on some decent clothes in that almost inhabitable hovel room of yours, the bath with the bucket of tepid water only made you feel cleansed, but only for a while, then your were soon soaked in perspiration; the back of your clean pressed shirt stuck on your back, then you could feel the drops of sweat gliding down your back and some slipping further and rolling over the calf muscles.It wasn't like that uncomfortable place in another continent, but there you knew you wouldn't be coming back, so when the packs were picked up and the room left strewn with papers and the bed partly covered by a crumpled damp bed sheet. You didn't even want to think that you actually had lived years in that room, you didn't abhor the place, but you had forced yourself to leave the place behind and decided its association with your life to be overlooked. At times, one shouldn't allow memories to be in charge of one's conducts, and at times giving in to instinctive urges could leave one's heart gratified.

You stood at the tight security gate manned by CISF personnel, and the sun hadn't crept up. The comfortable looking chairs on which one can't sit for long were all occupied. Despite the clothes what stood out and we naturally observe was not the kind that any person would prefer to see planted upon some pressed collar. People are not just accustomed to seeing the well- chiselled face of a struggling man concealed by thick glasses and beard ,and to make it worse you kept on running the fingers through the greyish beard. You had been aware of such stares and what could possibly been playing out and the have concluded instantly. But why would you give a fuck , those stares would have mattered a great deal years back, now you were someone who was trapped in your self created well.

It couldn't be anxiety nor excitement, but it was what an unwilling person would do to himself to become suicidal just because the society which bred him was suicidal, and he had resolved to be a part of that folly for the sake of pity he had long been courting and couldn't let go. For a while you thought whether it could be like A Bend In The River or The Heart Of Darkness, it just took you a while before you had dismissed them irrelevant, for the place is yours and you couldn't be a traveller among your own kind; it could be something like Balzac's in such a case as complicated as your own life; in your own well with the rope cut off.

You feared the ritualistic life which was manoeuvred by puppeteers and nobody was willing to stand up to openly disagree. But what was most upsetting was the fact that this human folly was under the roof where you grew up. It was unpleasant for you to imagine hordes of them gathered around a makeshift canopy and everybody showing up in their best fake clothes and gold ornaments probably borrowed just for the occasion and everyone seated with faces glistened with sweat pretending to listen to some high-pitched Bengali melodies translated and yet sounding just like Bengali and all of them assuming and, worse of all, accepting it was tradition and therefore not to be abandoned.

Perhaps that short dark-skinned man with an ape's face ,as though his hadn't really transformed, all dressed in saffron outfit with his trained coquettish ladies would be in the middle; the man tapping on the drum and the ladies struggling with Bengali numbers and when their voices dwindled and all the morons had become dull or half asleep, then he would begin banging the instrument harder and accompanied by some incoherent scream. They all would wake up and someone among them would say something really usual "oh! That's something", and those who had accomplished human reproduction would express their agreement for they couldn't afford to offend the man.

A male voice cracked to issue verbal entaglment announcing passengers to board the flight. It was a line of stylish people, stylish with the obvious intention to be seen, hands clutching the latest gadgets. When seated the verbal entaglment was repeated, the lady next to you asked why you to be cynical of almost everything. You said it was an artistic form of expression which was perceived inferior in comaprison to your friends' academic language, but understood.

When the plane was above Guwahati the pilot, perhaps in a mood to throw something to dazzle, announced that the visible mountains were the "highest peaks in the world", this aroused everyone and they stood up to look through the nearest windows; to enhance the intensity he said, "to you left this and this mountain and to your right that and that mountain". Standing in the aisle they turned their heads left to right, then he asked them to go back to their seats, they didn't comply to this. The attendants were sent in to ask them to take their seats.

You had been carrying in your head so many things, and you knew only one or two would happen. When you got to your house the roads were not as soggy as it had been; the road running between the bamboo clumps was topped with tarmac. While walking with your hands clasped behind your back all alone you didn't hear any artificial noise and the warm sunshine on you , but it was only warm and besides it wasn't allowed to be strong by the shades. You did that several times undisturbed and when you got back to the big airy room you had the feeling that it was the place where one could sit and write books after books.But who would read them? Those?

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