The mad search for identity in the colour stained streets. Living the market life, where a quiet moment of solitude happens on the floor of a balcony, from where you can look up at the telephone lines and clothes lines. You can't see the chatter then, though you can always hear it.
A quiet moment of wonder comes when you look across a street into a lane you didn't notice before. A lane studded with its own houses, its own children taking turns on a bright green bicycle, even its own roosters clucking around and disrupting motorcycle traffic. But in the split second before you witness what lies behind the opening of the lane, you know it could be the lane leading to a seller of magic carpets, or a motherly tarot card reader who you could patronise, just to have someone to talk to.
The air is heavy with chatter all the time, the lights are always flashing, the rickshaw wallahs always beckoning. The heat is unrelenting, the life of the market palpably throbbing against it.
It's a home. You always return here tired. Often in search of some alone time to think or cry. Often not getting that moment, even one moment. Distracting yourself in a conversation with the warden of the PG, which leads to the conversation with your PG friend, and you visit her room and sit on her bed to evade the sense of loneliness that started reclaiming you when you climbed into that rickshaw back from college.
The hours melt away here. The signing in at the camera-guarded gates and the picking up of keys from the key-box and the walking up to your friend's room and then coming down to dinner in a group that has ballooned to so many girls, and then chattering loudly, laughing, and seeming like the least lonely people in the dining hall, and the final return to the room to finally turn the unused key in the lock, and collapsing into bed in a fear of losing all this tomorrow. All the moments of the quarter-day fused together by the heat of time.
The imaginary tinkling of music in a far away lane that you saw in the morning, which you imagine to be lit with soft yellow bulb-light. The image (in time it will fade away) of a girl or a boy sitting at a dull PG window, plucking away at a guitar.
I can feel, in my balcony (one of the only balconies of the congested market), the golgappas being fried at Vaishnav Chaat Bhandar, a kilometre away. I can feel the taste of the quick burger that I (exhausted after heavy efforts to draw out my innermost feelings in portrayal of a character on the carpeted stage of a dark auditorium in SRCC) bought from McDonald's in a new-found freedom to spend my money. I can feel people I know, at the coffee shops, and the juice shops, and the departmental store, that line the outer boundary of my market. I can feel the chowmein being prepared by "Maharaj ji" as his helpers wipe plates on the terrace.
Once, four of us rode back on a rickshaw singing Don McLean's Amerian Pie, and alighted just as the song ended.
Once, Shivan and I stood and just watched the owner of the egg-thela in his astonishingly meticulous cooking.
Once, I got very scared on a long walk around the campus, when I thought I got lost.
And one day, maybe around the death of July, it went away. I've never found Kamla Nagar since.
