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.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

2004:03:21 23:00 ATL

After watching Robert Redford's masterful adaptation of a masterful memoir for the fifth time tonight, I fish these words again to the surface.

The feel of the rainbow trout, the way a river, deep in the woods, glints, as it passes over moonlight rocks. And I am haunted by Redford’s ‘A River Runs Through It’. Some movies change the perception of how one looks at the world and in that change become deeply embedded in memory of sight. And this movie set in Montana is one such shape shifter – the shapes being that of a field of tall grass with flies hovering over it like golden dust motes, the feel of a railway tunnel as it bites its way through the heart of a mountain, the rusts of a sunset that I saw this evening framed by trees and the raw power of wildness.

And I am again taken to that pine log straddling a small mossy stream, to which I go with my worn heart and sometimes a book of poems in hand, to pray and to celebrate. There my loneliness is transformed to solitude and my breath takes on the rhythm of water slapping on the rock. I see sun glinting off the lake in the distance, a posse of geese flying by honking, a cardinal calling insistently and upstream of me, the stream teasing itself out of a cleft of land, full of mystery. I don’t fly fish as the narrator in the movie does and the stream is too small to hold fish anyway. But when he ends by saying ‘I am haunted by waters’, he sets off a sympathetic vibration deep within this imperceptible and vanishing body.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see." -John Burroughs

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." -Ralph Waldo Emerson