Flying, floating, tumbling spirits sit on windowsills and watch the world go by. The city moves as if remote controlled, and in this vast space of bricks, love, tar and tears, stories grow like tendrils over old buildings. New names interposed with ancient emotions. Luck like errant drizzles pours over some stories, and the others remain stunted and invisible.

Marathi, like little pebbles playing noughts and crosses inside a tincan, finds itself thrown in the open streets. Do you want to buy watermelons or bangles today, Ananth? Ananth, the one who doesn’t end. Bombay moved, and he stood still. Infinitely still, in the flurry of madness all around him.

Kavya, the poem and the poet walked the same city. Neither mirrors nor movement betrayed the poem within. Small windows to her small room. The sunlight barely enters, and then the sun moves. Time has such an effect on most, they move. They change.

How much water must we pour for this tendril? How must this story grow? Green and leafy, or tangled and dry?

The infinite will be old in some years. For some time now, the wind has been playing with the lines of the palm of his hand. Lines that yawn and stretch out, lying tangled like fallen leaves from mango trees. Some that promise fortune, and some that promise unpredictability.

As one grows older lines appear all over the being. Its almost as though that God forgets that the palms are not enough to be records of every laugh laughed and every tear shed, and then the ripeness runs through and bursts like small tributaries. Everywhere.

Poems are young, so young that the ink that crafted them never dries. And they talk of the most ancient feelings. They are like precocious children who stand and roll in the mud talking of dialectical materialism.

Yesterday, Kavya bought a dozen eggs. Ramnath told her that he would sell the eggs for seventeen rupees and no less, and she fought with him. And tired of bargaining endlessly for space and justice, she resigned herself to 15 rupees instead. He growled and told her that he didn’t have change, when she flashed a pink twenty-rupee note in his face. So she took out the carrom coin like 5 rupee coin, and in return, he gave her a ten-rupee note.

Day before yesterday, Anant had been eating an omlette with onions and coriander. The omlette-bun cost him eight rupees, and he gave a ten rupee note to the omlette maker. What a curious label, an omlette maker. Book maker, Money maker, Peace maker and Omlette maker. Omlette Maker bought ten eggs at a trader’s discount, and the ten rupees landed in Ramnath’s hands, and it sat squat in his tin box. The infinite and the poem were connected through an albumin and yolk smelling ten-rupee note.