With things like insects and bees.
It’s not with annoyance or fear,
that I wave you away.

Little winged one. I do it to send.
You, away in the direction of the
your very last flower.

On a bus journey back from his parents’ place, he comments on how lovely filter coffee is, and how they really must stop drinking the awful Red Label tea. In his eyes, she sees a deep yearning for the comfort filter coffee promises. The swirl of froth lifting anxieties, and a minor advancement in contentment. They buy a steel filter set, and have an argument about the exact proportion of chicory and coffee powder. Their argument oozes love and nostalgia, as they evoke the ghosts of grandparents, the edicts of great aunts and throw in some knowledge of basic chemistry.

They are full of love and caffeine for a week. Their days start with hot water trickling through coffee powder. Their evenings uplifted. How banal making tea from tea bags seemed. How utterly bereft of spousal affections.

And then, the tensions begin to buid. One day, he complains that the coffee smells burnt, another day it’s too watery. She blames the milk, he blames her lack of committment to good coffee. Perhaps the precision and time it takes is too much. Too much to demand from a person who doesn’t care that much about filter coffee, but is swayed by what a perfect brew brings out in their beloved. They fought. His heart nearly broke.

When she asked him why he didn’t just make it himself, perhaps he couldn’t quite tell her that he wished to experience, for five minutes everyday, what his father did.

And thus she hatches her plan. In a hidden cupboard, she stocks up on instant coffee. Easy to make, and consistently inferior. She pretends she makes fresh filter coffee everyday. He drinks it gladly, imagining himself as a man who in thirty years will sit in a rocking chair, clutching the very same tumbler. Sometimes in the middle of a fight over something else, she wants to break it to him – that he is a poser, he doesn’t really know the difference between filter and instant. But doesn’t.

He is grateful for the love and devotion it takes to make the filter coffee. When friends visit, he hands them their cups, extolling its virtues over instant coffee, and how he has to come to appreciate its fine aroma, its firm body and wholesome creaminess.

Thus it was. She saved time, and spent a bit more money. His heart didn’t break, and his tongue never really knew the difference.

PS – I can’t remember the last time I wrote a fiction fragment. If anything, I have maatuponnu to thank. Reading her little piece of fiction today, another story entered the mind. And since I haven’t written in a long time, be kind..

From the front row. The screen
eating me. No commentary.
But not silent.

Exactly how life should be perhaps.
Front row, clean, with space.
But not empty enough to be creepy.

And perhaps a warm (even if clammy)
hand. To hold. Tighter when it’s time.

And Exit signs clearly marked.
Even in the dark.

At the holy river, by the ghats,
Mother sheds her usual shame.
She wears her black petticoat.
Her numerous sins. And little else.

The little one is asked to join.
For even at six, one has aleady -
stolen, lied, kissed and cheated.

Her father guards the clothes.
Dirt sticks to her tiny feet.
But she is told that this is holy.
The river, the dip, the day.

They are done with dissolving
their sins, and their prayers.
Father bends down and fills,
a brass pot as he explains -
“This water – is sacred. Pure”

The little one wants to tell him
that it may be a bit pointless.
For in the cold water,
No longer able to hold, knowing,
there was nowhere else to go.
She peed into the holy river.

We look up, and see Shiva.
In this form, he looks different.

He is cherubic. With fatty thighs.
A belly, unrestrained. Full of milk.
And what bulges like pure butter.

(Perhaps they wanted Krishna?)

What would a child destroy?
Small things. Irrelevant things.
Broken easily. Available in plenty.

Like little glass tumblers. Or
nibs of ink pens. And random
nameless hearts, already fragile.

Slashing their souls,
on the window pane.
They slide on the glass,
a vertical dance
of droplets with tails.

I think then that they
look like sperm.
Wagging their ends
Swimming and vanishing.
The wanker up above
is, in fact,
responsible for the rain.

The city parks are infested.
With lovers. Insects. And
fat, moustached constables.

In the heat, the waves of hot air.
The heart swells, like a phulka.

The old man, a mild pervert
watches the lovers squirm.
He sighs, shaking his head.
At the foolishness of the two.

Don’t they know, that in love,
even in the foggy depth
of winter, they will melt anyway?