On Hermes’ feet

I am lying flat on my back in the guest bedroom, a dog on either side. The light outside my window is scant and grey. I hear the raucous shouts of children playing football in the long strip between our building and the next. The fan whirrs endlessly overhead. In the corner of the ceiling, a cobweb strand trembles. It is that indeterminate period between evening and night at the end of an indeterminate day. Productive? Wasted? I can’t tell.

There have been other evenings like this — too many for my liking. In this very room last month, probably with the same children playing downstairs. In the old house seven years ago with the sound of the TV in the hall (who was watching, I wonder?) In my Nagpur hostel room thirteen years ago with the champaca-laden branch pressed up against the window pane and the thud thud of the basketball from the court right outside. In my bedroom twenty years ago, a wall full of engineering books looming to one side and the comforting thought of the little stone Ganapati under the hibiscus bushes outside.

The other day, we were riding around the city, pointing out buildings and landmarks to my NRI nephew. And my mother-in-law remarked suddenly, “Sometimes, I feel we are just passing through.”

Or perhaps we are still and time is passing through us?

I see myself sprawled on the bed, once seventeen and then twenty four and thirty and thirty five. Like an insect pinned to an examination board. Alive, but not quite. The rooms change. The bedsheets change. The thoughts that crowd my mind change. But I?

I fear that I am still the same.

I fear that at fifty, I will lie on another bed and watch the day fade away. Like before, like now. And perhaps then, I will sit up and stretch, pull my hair back into a tight bun I will regret, walk over to a diary or a laptop, and with hesitant fingers, try to conjure up words to ward off my fears.