There are days when you wake up with eagerness, then do nothing with it. You sink into the cushy bean bag in the balcony, settle back with your mug of coffee frappe, throw your head up and stare at the freshly washed blue of the skies, sight a single silken thread woven by a decidedly unconventional spider who must have laid aside all notions of the customary splayed cobweb.
Nothingness is delicious. Il dolce far niente.
In a while, after I have had my fill of a botanical book that smells and looks wonderful — apart from filling my head with stories of the lives of plants, of dicotelydons and monocotelydons, of gametophytes, of sporophytes, during the course of which I quietly slip back in time to the early years in school — I start rifling through my cache of freshly gathered leaves.
You see, autumn has tiptoed in.
The air has softened, the sunbeam ripened to golden loveliness that feathers its way through the canopy of trees, the sky a freshly washed shade of blue, and as daylight fades, the sinking of the sun into a riot of flaming oranges and reds above the waters of the bay. The fallen leaves are curling with pleasure and anticipation of the days to come, it seems. Some are green. Others have begun the march towards death. In their brilliant shades of yellows, reds, purple and pinks, mottled with green and brown, they do not look like they belong in the world of the hollow men. They belong in my world of dappled sunshine, of reading books in the park, of swaying lilac weeds and clovers, of clever squirrels who hasten to stow away their booties of nuts before the advent of winter, of the wetlands where the silent evening visitors are the night heron and the blue heron who spend the hours stalking fish.
So to September, with the early bite in the air, I raise my glass of cider.
ARUNDHATI BASU 