Night Ride Home

The first guy, he said, I need to fill up some gas.
So I said ok, but then the line looked like it stretched from Jayanagar to Jabalpur, so I said,I'll take another, and he shrugged and said ok.Then he took ten rupees.
The second guy, man, he was crazy. Bulldozing his way through traffic, maintaining almost a straight line through it; we're flying over the speed-breakers and swinging around Jaguars, and it's like he's a bat out of hell, or a very determined man, and I think, maybe this is his life, full tilt, without pause, without fear of consequence,perhaps too tired to care.
Yeah, I'm sentimental like that, but that seems to be my response to fear- I could die, I think, right now, this little steel bucket could overturn, I'd be thrown on the kerb, my skull cracking open and all my stupid poetry and anger and loss oozing onto the pavement until someone cleans it up tomorrow and throws it in the trash.
I told V a story about being lost in Jayanagar, and she gave me a look and told me it was a pointless story. I love her because she listens to my pointless stories and then tells me they're pointless and forgets about them.
So anyways, that could be the highlight of the last conversation I have on this earth.
A pointless story.
Or I'll live to tell another.
Because Batman has just decided to stop outside the petrol bunk near Forum, and mumbles something about a wire and gears and basically tells me that the ride is over. 

I'm looking for another, but I'm distracted by pale pink carnations.

I'm always being thrown off course by things like that, it's stupid.

Now, this guy, this guy is young, and he twitches, but there's a hazy look in his eyes, like he might actually be someplace else. No, I don't think he was high,just young.
He drives sedately.

K wants to live in a house with a mango tree outside the kitchen.
He thinks freedom will make him happy.
I think happiness will set him free.**

There's a list of things undone in my life, but there's also this- the softness of the pink under my fingertips, and the hardness of the green. 

Across town, N is waging war, but then she always is, and sometimes she wins, and sometimes she loses, but she always fights.

I want to sit an empty movie hall and sing "mere khwabon mein jo aaye" like I believe it.

I want to be sixteen again.

But I was infinitely bored at sixteen, so it's just as well we don't get what we wish for.

He's nice, this young man with the faraway eyes, and he's very precise about the change he gives me, down to the 50 paisa, and I tell him "It's ok" but he shakes his head and insists I take it.


often a sweetness  
   has come  
and changed nothing in the world  

except the way I stumbled through it, 

- Stephen Dunn:  "Sweetness"



**Update: It's not freedom, just food at regular intervals. Clearly, I don't know everything.