Friday, December 21, 2012

Weverb12 #14 walk [LIVE]

Describe the path to a favorite place of yours to walk in 2012. What’s meaningful about the place or the journey?

(Cheap thrills, I have caught up with The Bride!)
(Dammit. She's got ahead of me. Sevres me right for being lazy.)

Okay I don't walk much anymore. C'est tragique but what to do. I have no reason to walk, no path to tread, nothing. Which has a lot to do with living in India, which is not a country that makes you feel good about urban walking. Even Delhi, which has pavements and trees and winter. I used to walk to the bus, till I got Tomatín, but that was barely a walk, since it involved dodging through corridors inside the complex and then walking down the road for two minutes.

I shall talk about my favourite places of 2012 instead. In no particular order.

My own balcony, especially in the winter. I used to sit here all morning on weekends, chatting with MW and listening to him on the radio. It's sunny, it's private, but it's also out in the world enough for me to hear people talking and get dive bombed by nervous birds.

The roof at work. It's only one floor up and where people go to take surreptitious calls, smoke, and sometimes drink after 6pm. It's criscrossed with a mad network of metal rails upon which sit out large collection of generators; there's are heaven knows how many a/cs ejaculating out there; there's a small tin-roofed shed with a collection of miscellaneous crap, and, most recently, a graveyard of perfectly good chairs that were replaced with posh ergonomic ones (interestingly enough, not in my department). It also has a transmission tower upon which perch flocks of kites, crows and pigeons, in that pecking (hee) order. In the monsoon you can see the clouds hanging low and grim over the lush green park downstairs. Then when the wind blows hard I worry that the tin roof is going to blow right off! In the summer you wince and try and find a tiny spot of shade. But in the winter! It gets sun all day, and there's nothing I like more than sitting there and reading manuscripts. Sometimes when works is really painful, like it has been recently, I take a book up there as a reward for sticking it out through a bad patch, and sun myself and read.

The faded red couch in MW's house. Though I haven't been there in ages, for a long time that couch to me was my safe hidey hole. I'd go over, park myself in my corner and just sort of retreat into safety. Conversation would ebb and flow--I could join or not--and I'd always go home feeling better about life.

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