Yesterday, I refused to pay the price for something I had not bargained for.
It was a deal I had not seen myself getting into and, with so many people around me jumping to it, I had not quite realised that it could be something I didn't want.
But the price tag was a bit too heavy. I was being told - by countless silent whispers in my head - that I would have to give up bits - large bits - of myself. In return, I would be handed a much coveted possession - success.
I looked around me and saw remnants of people I once knew, their shadows reminders of their past selves. They are successful. They look back at their shadows and hear the songs they once sang, lines they once wrote, smiles they once had. Now they have success. They paid up.
I am not the only one though, holding out. There is a small tribe of us. Some are sure, some not so, some paid up and left their shadows behind with us. The rest, the ones that are sure, like keeping our shadows with us, within us.
I shall keep mine. Will you?

After feeling the whiff of winter in Calcutta for the first time in eight years, I realise what is so fantastic about it.
It does not get as harsh as Delhi nor is it like Bombay, where winter is just a season in school text books and clothes stores.
The winter of Calcutta makes you want to stay beneath the blanket in the morning, but makes you get out for the hot cup of tea. It makes you hate having a bath, but makes you love the hot water. It makes you want to sit in the sun, but not too long either. It makes you want to take a walk in the evenings and see if your breath smokes, but pull the shawl a bit closer. It makes you want to wear warm clothes, but does not bury you in them. It chaps your lips, but does not flake your skin.
It's what you look forward to all year round and you miss it when it's gone.

The afternoon was so still, silent, that you could hear the khunti stirring the contents of a kodhai a house away. An incessantly chirping sparrow in the kamini tree, a reluctant bark of a neighbouring dog. The hesitant knock on a gate - one boy asking another to come out and play; the other boy replying that he is sleeping. Play can wait.
Darkness soaks in, like Chelpark Royal Blue soaking through blotting paper. The street stirs with cycle bells, conversations, children's running footsteps, shrieks and laughter. Stirrings in the kitchen too - Darjeeling tea and cream crackers, patishaapta for later. The dog lifts an ear, finds no reason to lift her snout; the cat, curled like a comma, snoozes in the remnants of warmth from the sun on the window sill.
A pair of glasses, a book wrapped lovingly in the glossy weekend supplement of a newspaper, a tea cup drained of its content, the outlines in the room blurring into one another - like a smudged watercolour.
I am hibernating.