Summer

Even if you hate summer, look in the evenings, at the leaves of the trees wilting by the dust-laden roads. The leaves glow in the fading heat, finished with the day’s lust. I am a man of the monsoons. This isn’t who I am. But I find home here. I once tried to explain it to someone. It’s the rains, I said, that fill my soul with belonging. But as always, I didn’t quite say it, I didn’t quite bend and speak. I let it stay in some recess of unexpressed longing. But then we have done it again and again. Not said it enough, not said it well.

I am beginning to doubt everything I have been and everything I have thought. It’s all summer dust. It is all that little fleeting glow of the leaves.

I am listening to Girija Devi sing. She is singing of waiting in the rains for the lover. The themes are all known. It’s all about when we discover them. And then it is all about when we realize they aren’t quite there. It’s a light game. Soon we will die.