I can’t tell Kashmir and Delhi apart anymore, the days that I live here are inverted and sincerely. Not that I’ve been living here for a long time but I’m pretty sure that it has to do with the cloud both places seems to be caught up in it. There is one striking characteristic about it though and it’s the air. I don’t really feel the difference unless I’m at war with the smoke coming out cigarettes that my friend puffs on like incense. Our cities have their darkness and I think I’ll succumb to one of them someday in the inevitable future while knowing that I can outrun neither.
I wash my mouth with the salt water that issues itself from the tap to my mouth, literally and figuratively it has eaten away on the faucets and smeared the tiles with a yellow/rusty sort of stain. There’s a constant chatter in the street. Occasionally a man comes along and pulls up a cart full of these huge plastic bottles filled with water in front of our apartment building and shouts paani (water). In Kashmir that’s almost everything we have the need to sell it on the streets is thwarted by local availability of it. But as much as Kashmir seems to carry its weight around my neck, I’d still very much like to part from it and live here. I’ll prefer the noise over the quiet solitude my home offers, I’d prefer this water and occasionally imagine myself buying it from the people that have made a living out of it. It is such a traitorous character to have, an elaborate way to wish a slow death and I shall keep inhaling as I live and breathe. Quietly under my nose, the math of life subtracts a few years off of it and has me nauseously blame something else but the decision of a minuscule but an elaborate suicide.
I can’t tell Kashmir and Delhi apart anymore, the days that I live here are inverted and sincerely. Not that I’ve been living here for a long time but I’m pretty sure that it has to do with the cloud both places seems to be caught up in it. There is one striking characteristic about it though and it’s the air. I don’t really feel the difference unless I’m at war with the smoke coming out cigarettes that my friend puffs on like incense. Our cities have their darkness and I think I’ll succumb to one of them someday in the inevitable future while knowing that I can outrun neither.
I wash my mouth with the salt water that issues itself from the tap to my mouth, literally and figuratively it has eaten away on the faucets and smeared the tiles with a yellow/rusty sort of stain. There’s a constant chatter in the street. Occasionally a man comes along and pulls up a cart full of these huge plastic bottles filled with water in front of our apartment building and shouts paani (water). In Kashmir that’s almost everything we have the need to sell it on the streets is thwarted by local availability of it. But as much as Kashmir seems to carry its weight around my neck, I’d still very much like to part from it and live here. I’ll prefer the noise over the quiet solitude my home offers, I’d prefer this water and occasionally imagine myself buying it from the people that have made a living out of it. It is such a traitorous character to have, an elaborate way to wish a slow death and I shall keep inhaling as I live and breathe. Quietly under my nose, the math of life subtracts a few years off of it and has me nauseously blame something else but the decision of a minuscule but an elaborate suicide.