...I am playing Dhrupad - the idea is to assuage these portents of doom I have been experiencing in my mental landscape - the bomb blasts in Hyderabad that happened today didn't help any, given that one of the bloody infernos - Gokul Chaat - was were I used to eat desi junk food every so often when I used to live in that city.

Perhaps, I have no business brining such disasters into my brooding - re-reading Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" after a night of broken sleep didn't help any. Logically, I have no good reasons to return to India - except for family who still live there, I have no other emotional bonds - landscape laced with culture is too abstruse a thing to hold onto - even if I know that this raaga I am listening to might sound better if played as night falls after a hot summer day, as one is stretched out under a large banyan tree. Yet, I am going - on the bullock cart version of an airline, Air India - in less than 30 or so minutes - to figure out what?

Perhaps, Don Quixote (in the Edith Grossman's translation, purchased many months ago in Toronto, unopened until today) will provide a clue for a way out of this unease that I can't even exactly name.

until evening reading Bolano, when drunk on red wine he steps into a depressingly bright California summer day - the sky was so blue it hurt, and the hotel pool right under his door was inundated by a bevy of bikinis - it should have been raining; there should have been portents of war in the air; smell of fear and vomit; not this bland American cheeriness; not this simulacrum of living.

"Shit! I shouldn't have started drinking soon after breakfast, skipping lunch", he thinks to himself, as he hobbles down the stairs, and through the lobby onto the street. Poetry. He must find some poetry to read. Which he does. And finds himself becoming less melancholic for an hour or so, re-reading a Robert Frost's poem, "Unharvested" (a lovely cousin of the more famous, "After Apple-picking"):

"A scent of ripeness from over a wall. And come to leave the routine road And look for what had made me stall, There sure enough was an apple tree That had eased itself of its summer load, And of all but its trivial foliage free, Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan. For there had been an apple fall As complete as the apple had given man. The ground was one circle of solid red. May something go always unharvested! May much stay out of our stated plan, Apples or something forgotten and left, So smelling their sweetness would be no theft"

Hello World! (yes, we begin with the very basic "printf" of computer programming). We have this to report:

1. Roberto Balano is a friking genius, and one must (re-)learn how to write a novel from him

2. We are also feasting on lamb and wine (why does this choice of food sound so Hebraic?), and both complement Balano's "Savage Detectives" very well

3. This hotel room is being rocked by tourists descending upon this California wine valley

4. We are not tourists here but then maybe we are, metaphorically speaking, as we pass through others' lives, and let others pass through ours

5. Bach is making us feel very very religious but then today, in the interiors, nihilism seems to have a upper hand

6. Perhaps the latter feeling comes to fore if one reads Balano to wine and Bach,

7. which makes us want to give up these endless games we are playing (or perhaps more appropriately, "are learning to play"), and head out into...

8. oblivion, sunsets, red dust, rivers, green leaves in the rain, the dark space between a woman's breasts, the terrain of skin at one's wrists, stones, and chains of words