The Dead Leaves, says the title. Pourquoi? Well they are just out there and how does one just turn her eyes away from the golden, rustling beauty of them… How fast the days fly by as I sit at the desk with my thoughts, trying to put them down into a project which seems to be taking forever, devouring the Outlander books, baking once in a while. Smidgens of self-doubt have been bogging me down. The problem with smidgen is that it tends to balloon into mammoth proportions and then you are caught right under the heaviness of it, the self-doubt that is, and you feel nothing less flat than the perfectly pressed leaf which comes out from between the pages of a book. The leaf has more leverage in all of this as you can imagine. It holds more beauty in its faded glory than anything else pressed does.
The blustery wind whipped away chunks of these thoughts with icy fingers as I ran, bathed in the golden stream of the early evening sun, the trees bare and leached, the gulls gathered in little clumps around as the waves rose and ebbed in choppy harmony. I passed by the old man who has determination in his fingertips. He must be above 80, wizened by age. It seems that a stroke has robbed him of movement on his right side, so he leans in heavily towards the right. It has become a ritual for us to acknowledge the other with a wave. The only other person who haunts the park and the river front, along with the old man and I, is a young boy of about 15. He is a beanpole, all arms and legs, possibly a soccer player.
I find persistence and hope at the sight of these two.
Towards the latter part of the evening, a couple of squirrels decided to turn playful on me. I was kneeling to shoot mounds of dried leaves when these two tubby fellows capered around, coming up close and dodging like we were at some game invented by the two of them. Catch me if you can.
Naturally, I feel like I have had free therapy. Now the lemon and verbena candle is making the room smell so cosy and citrusy and it feels doubly nice as I dig into a hot salad of chickpeas and grilled vegetables, spruced up with a handful of blackberries, caramelised pecans and roughly chopped gouda. So I shall leave you behind with this jazz number and a few photos of sunset, armies of white clouds, ducks, geese, gulls, squirrels and dead leaves.
ARUNDHATI BASU 