A more beautiful month of May has never been. May, being the month of exams, has always ensured us incarcerated in Calcutta with textbooks and terror while the heat and the humidity shoot up to the sky. (This, too, will soon cease to be. One more year and May shall no longer be branded thus. The epoch that has been so long in coming, and yet we wish/unwish it. But at this point we digress and must retrace our thoughtsteps.) I don’t know what turbulence is bringing this but every day it rains, and the old and the squalid are — not dissipated, never entirely dissipated — but at least glossed over with new. I could do with just this much. I could do with the dawns paling violet and crisp, the quiet, heavy skies of afternoon rolling gently into evening showers. I could do with the simple (but complete, but unadulterated) ecstasy of sitting with a favourite novel in the balcony in the spluttering gray-yellow translucence of three o’clock rain; I could be left in that moment — without escapes to the past or the future — for ever and ever and not mind at all. I think of you and what you would make of these pleasures, with your reluctance to travel and your fear of thunderstorms. (This evening, there was a thunderstorm.) It is imperfect empathy, of course–I will never truly understand you. I try not to think of your days, nor think of you in your house, your customs and prohibitions, your dinner-table conversations with father mother brother sister-in-law; for that way lies madness. I think of you only in terms of metaphor: as strangeness and hope, as a landscape beyond the ones I have known to traverse.
Five years is more than one-fifth of your life when you’re still under twenty-five. Simple math, but I suppose I am one of those individuals who never quite register the temporal. To whom all the memorable moments seem like yesterday and the long stretches of nothing-much simply dissolve into unaccountability. I have one year to go but all I want to do is leave and keep moving and keep collecting a few more handfuls of those moments, for the rest will simply melt away; nothing will stick. If you ask me how I’ve grown, I won’t be able to tell you. Only grown wary, only grown restless, grown a fatal patience like a weed.
I want to do the 30 Day Song Challenge but I think I’m too late for it this time. Bye bye, blog. :)
Mimi Mondal 
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